AionSource interviews Lani "Liv" Blazier about the upcoming 1.5.1 patch!

[Kody]

6) "Characters under Level 5 can no longer use the Search function on the Find Buddy window." With the latest patches, this means that beginning characters can no longer whisper, mail, or search. Several current players are concerned that this will make the game unfriendly for new players. What are the recommended ways for new players to communicate with each other in order to make friends before level 10?

• There still a number of ways new players can chat, in the local channel and in groups. In the first zone, there are two main points where new players tend to gather, and those are where hunting groups generally form. Hitting these areas will help new players meet folks that are doing similar quests and in turn build friends that will be around long after level 10.

Ugh. A band-aid does not heal a gunshot wound. This is totally the wrong solution to stopping gold spammers.

[VikingGamer]

Ok. This idea with the medals has disaster written all over it. And I mean epic fkin Katrina meets New Orleans type disaster.

1. The temptation to ninja for many, will be overwhelming. Given how much of the general population is spectacularly ethically challenged I can see this happening more often then many would probably think. Sure the guildies will simply quit those legions. But do we want guilds exploding several times a week? That is going to destabilize the server community big time. Talking about serious forum drama material. When a guild explodes how many of the victims will simply choose not to log on again? Most will probably move on but many who are on the edge of deciding if they even want to continue grinding out another level might choose otherwise. Especially if they now have nobody to grind with. A lot of people stick with a game because of the friendships that they formed. Setting the stage for the destruction of the foundation of their online relationships is tremendously stupid.

2. What happens if the legion general favors his officers or only those in his legion? Sure, again, he will soon have nobody coming to help defend from other legions but what makes anyone think that people are going to come in the first place just to see if this guy will be equitable? This doesn't encourage people to simply show up. The only people outside the legion who will show up will be very close allies and the legion system doesn't even have any formal tools for supporting those allied groups. People will go where the rewards are and by default there will be none here. This plan really sounds like someone didn't want to put the design effort into solving this problem. This setup sounds like a cop-out.

3. What is to keep the general from selling the medals as a way of raising cash for the legion to afford tools and consumables for the next raid.

4. Ok, lets say the General is like Mother Teresa type honest and really wants to reward everyone who came to help? How will he even know that who showed up to help. What if you are in a different alliance on the other side of the fort? Is the general going to be able to call up any reports on how long people were there or what they did? And how will I know that he just didn't know about me as opposed to him just being stingy?

5. If you are not planning to screw people over, who would want the job of passing those medals out? How on earth can you do the right thing even if you wanted to? At least a dozen or more people out there are going to feel like YOU screwed them over. Even if you had detailed reports and stats on who did what, will you have even close to enough medals to pass around? if you were to give 1 medal to everyone who showed up would you have enough? Who gets gold medals?

Scenario: Your first day as the new teacher at a grade school, you are introduced to 400 small children in the gymnasium. The principle announces to the kids that you will be giving away candy bars to all the best kids. He then hands you a small bag with 80 small candy bars and 30 large candy bars and then leaves and locks the door. Worst fkin job in the world! You have it.

I am genuinely dumbfounded. Guilds are hard enough to run in the first place, why make it even harder? I wouldn't want to run a guild now even if I was paid to do so. If the game does not have a few challenges already, this alone has the potential to ruin it by simply ruining both the legion system and the pvp defense incentive all in one swing.

I am simply amazed.

I only see one move for upper management on this. Order the feature to be axed and the drug test the game design dept.

[Even13]

Yeah, it either needs to be given to players who were there directly(game decides, no player decisions involved in the process), or nothing at all. And nothing at all would be better than leaving it up to legion leaders to decide for themselves. It's going to cause far more problems than it will ever solve. I can't believe anyone would ever think that such a system would work. You can be certain on day 1 of this patch 5 minutes after the first fort is defended that there will be complaint threads on here and many other forums by people who feel they got screwed out of medals.

[VikingGamer]

The more I think about this the more I am becoming convinced that the game designers decided that they could not figure out how to distribute the medals for defense and then someone decided to simply push the problem on to the guild leaders. Complete cop out

[Adoniel]

Originally Posted by Deezlar

he must be an Assassin... his evasion is awesome.

not exactly a productive comment, but to the point.

I am quite curious on fortress defense now too. As it seems after the patch only the brigade general of the legion with ownership of the fortress gets the medals, I don't see this getting more people to raids, in fact, maybe even less. What incentive would the brigade general have to give medals outside their legion?

Contribution overall needs to be addressed. I'm a healer, if all I do is heal I don't get anything in an assault, now I'll have to rely on hopefully a friendly allied legion to give me medals. Oh well, hopefully this gets looked at a bit more in depth.

[Amira]

Originally Posted by Adoniel

Contribution overall needs to be addressed. I'm a healer, if all I do is heal I don't get anything in an assault, now I'll have to rely on hopefully a friendly allied legion to give me medals. Oh well, hopefully this gets looked at a bit more in depth.

Yes ._. Unfortunately, I've been doing some testing. In the sieges where I spend my whole time healing like crazy, I get absolutely nothing. When I dps and res mostly, I get silvers. I hope this is addressed some time!

[Spooty]

OH NO GUYS THEY ARE FORCING PEOPLE TO BE PART OF A COMMUNITY IN THEIR OWN FACTION. CALL THE WAMBULANCE.

I don't think you guys quite understand the concept of MMOs yet. There is supposed to be drama. There are supposed to be alliances. There are supposed to be friends. It's gonna separate the jackasses from the actual guilds with some leadership skills and cause people to actually work together amongst their faction. OH NOES WHY I GOTTA TALK TO PEOPLE I JUST WANT INSTANCES.

Maybe this is your first real race vs race game but this is how it works. You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours. You stab my back and I'll stab yours. People will learn real fast.

[Tepichan]

Originally Posted by Spooty

You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours.

[Spooty]

Originally Posted by Tepichan

I also give back rubs.

[vela]

For the medals, once a fortress has been successfully defended, the Brigade General of the fortress will receive the medals via in game mail, and will be responsible for distributing accordingly. This allows the Brigade General the ability to award those who actively participated in defending the fortress, both inside and out of his/her own legion.

Just implement this first. This will take care of your game real good <lol>.
The idiot who receives these medals in the mail, will wish he/she never received that...ever.

Not only the game design is fail, the updates are also amazing.

For the medals, once a fortress has been successfully defended, we NCSoft Game Designers don't really know what the nyerk to do and so, we decided to just nyerk it all up for you...now, you all can go nyerk yourselves as well.

Corrected.

[Sardoni]

Originally Posted by Spooty

OH NO GUYS THEY ARE FORCING PEOPLE TO BE PART OF A COMMUNITY IN THEIR OWN FACTION. CALL THE WAMBULANCE.

I don't think you guys quite understand the concept of MMOs yet. There is supposed to be drama. There are supposed to be alliances. There are supposed to be friends. It's gonna separate the jackasses from the actual guilds with some leadership skills and cause people to actually work together amongst their faction. OH NOES WHY I GOTTA TALK TO PEOPLE I JUST WANT INSTANCES.

Maybe this is your first real race vs race game but this is how it works. You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours. You stab my back and I'll stab yours. People will learn real fast.

Again it's moot if people don't know HOW they are getting ownership of the fort.

Plus if you're a Brigade General spending time in the real world, you own a fort, it flips contested (sadly your blackberry fails to inform you of this so you can rush to the rescue), your faction defends it, and you log in with medals in your mailbox with no clue wtf happened. Not only that but your mailbox is probably full from people demanding a medal in some way, shape or form for being there in the defense WHILE you are also getting tell bombed by random people saying (I'll give you love long time for a gold medal).

Flaaaaaaaaaawwwed.

No reason to defend a broken mechanic that just got bustereded.

[Whendy]

Personally, I think there is an over dose of drama about the pitfalls of giving the brigade general of the holding legion the medals and then letting them distribute them based on merit and interlegion cooperation. It's disrespectful to the community of Legion leadership, it's presumptive (in a negative way), and it beckons the question of why you play this game (in it just for yourself, and don't trust anyone else I guess).

Of course it opens the door to a brigade general being an idiot about it. But then again, that sort of thing sorts itself out now doesn't it? Who is ever going to help that Legion defend a fort again if that kind of silliness happens??? Right, zip, nada.

Honestly, this stuff self-corrects quickly. If you are going to be a leading Legion in PvP you DO have a repuation to maintain if you ever want assistance from other Legions when facing a zerg ganking. And it's not like a Legion leader can run a scam, then flush his character and role and level up a new one in any short order of time, so the penalty for lost reputation is rather high in this game, IMO.

Further, this sort of mechanic is an opportunity to strengthen Legion cooperation and community assistance more so then hurt it.

You all need to quit being so self centered and self-ish in your thinking IMO, and trust Legion leadership and permit trust between legions to develop and thrive. If it doesn't, you don't need Legions and you don't need forts or PvP for that matter, because you don't have a game anyway, you have a nyerkfest where everyone is more worried about themselves then their faction and it's time to move on to your next MMO failure.

What NCSoft is doing here is allowing community to develop and evolve and let community-leadership drive the outcomes. That is actually a good thing.

[Sardoni]

I hear what you are saying Whendy. It's not about being self centered or selfish so you don't hear what I'm saying.

No matter what, if your legion is the one getting ownership of the forts (which again, rumors and myths exist as to what ACTUALLY determines ownership) I feel you SHOULD defend what you take.

Here's the problem.

Fortress Assault:
There's a random number generator that calculates lots of variables (probably many hamsters spinning around on wheels) and suddenly mailboxes have medals and money spewed into them. Based on AP accumulation during the siege I realize that, but that data is kept on the back end. That avoids "drama" but at the same time makes people walk away going "What could I do differently to improve?"

When you don't know what you need to improve it's a bad system. It's like telling an employee they are doing a bad job without telling them what they need to do differently. Eventually they quit or get fired (followed up by unemployment more than likely). It's not about being "selfish" there is a reward for doing something (attacking a fortress), but only given to people who meet the back end criteria.

I've dealt and played with the borked contribution system of Warhammer. I got COMPLETELY that it was broken, but you still got to see that little board that popped up and all the dice rolling.

Being able to have something pop up like at the end of Dregion matches would help people better understand what they need to change either as a legion or as a player to fare better in the world of contribution.

Or we can just kick rocks and never expect to ever get anything and expect people to keep playing.

---------------------------------------------

Finally, on this defense system. I agree on a higher plane of existence this could be use to better foster participation and community among the legions of your faction and we can hold hands juggling rainbow colored puppies.

But when we step into reality, there are players who are unlegioned OR are in smaller legions that fly under the radar because it's their group of friends.

Isn't it equally as selfish and egotistical to expect everyone to know me because my guild captured the fortress?

Since they do fly under the radar it's not like you'd see their legion tags in the wall of text that is Shift F12.

I don't disagree with a system to reward defense (I ENCOURAGE IT), but I don't see any reason for them to shift the way contribution is calculated... I mean... just give the medals to the Brigade General.

Why don't we just also award the medals only to the guilds that OWN the fortress. I wonder if people would be rioting for better clarify on the fortress take mechanics if the medals were only sent to the Brigade General as well.

Whendy, it's not about being positive, negative, selfish, or self centered. It's a game mechanic that is being tossed to the players to manage. Good, bad, or indifferent (which ever flavor it ends up) if people didn't take the time to voice their feedback on the change they got no room to complain when it hits.

[Amira]

Very well said, Sardoni.

Originally Posted by Sardoni

Fortress Assault:
There's a random number generator that calculates lots of variables (probably many hamsters spinning around on wheels) and suddenly mailboxes have medals and money spewed into them. Based on AP accumulation during the siege I realize that, but that data is kept on the back end. That avoids "drama" but at the same time makes people walk away going "What could I do differently to improve?" When you don't know what you need to improve it's a bad system. It's like telling an employee they are doing a bad job without telling them what they need to do differently.

I always feel like this. I want medals and I want to be good at what I do, so as a cleric, I heal my butt off and res like crazy. When I do this and the boss drops and I get nothing at all, I tend to spend a lot of time trying to figure out what I could've done better. But then, when I go to a raid another day and feel I preformed a lot less than that other night and get rewarded more, it just adds to the confusion.

Originally Posted by Sardoni

Finally, on this defense system. I agree on a higher plane of existence this could be use to better foster participation and community among the legions of your faction and we can hold hands juggling rainbow colored puppies.

But when we step into reality, there are players who are unlegioned OR are in smaller legions that fly under the radar because it's their group of friends.

I agree, and this proposed system totally ignores the unlegioned or the new player. I did not think this was a game about having a huge PvP legion, I didn't think it was ever stated that you'd need one to be involved in fortress defense. This is RvR not Legion v Legion!

Originally Posted by Sardoni

Whendy, it's not about being positive, negative, selfish, or self centered. It's a game mechanic that is being tossed to the players to manage. Good, bad, or indifferent (which ever flavor it ends up) if people didn't take the time to voice their feedback on the change they got no room to complain when it hits.

Exactly!

[Omalina]

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