There are two things I’d like to suggest for Age of War.
It sounded from the live stream that you will be implementing an Alliance mechanism for clans. That’s fine, great even. It will make managing things easier, and I appreciate anything that does that. HOWEVER, since servers can only have 40 people on at a time, if you get two 10 man clans allied, that’s half that pop! How’s anyone supposed to compete with that? I’d really like to see you guys drop the max clan size down to 8. This would allow there to be 5 full clans on an official server, which would encourage more competition IMO. You can allow current 9 and 10 man clans to keep their players, but all new clans should be maxed out at 8.
Along with that, could you increase max pop on officials to 50? I know it’s been suggested a million times, but that would allow for more competition among clans. This is mainly a problem on PVP servers. So if you left PVE-C and PVE at 40, that would be fine. But for PVP, 50 would be much appreciated.
That is a huge assumption that ALL 10 people from BOTH clans are all on at the same exact time. Considering that there are hundreds of players on a 40 player server I find that this senario is not going to present itself that likely very often. However, as Jimbo said below:
The max pop on officials is currently set at 40, but can they actually handle that many people online at any given time? I have seen plenty of threads that have stated that once you get to around 30 the official servers take a massive dive in terms of performance. Why would you want to increase the potential number of people on them? Especially on consoles that struggle at what, 20-25 people? The concept may not be bad but the G-Portal run servers would never be able to handle it.
I wouldn’t get too worried about the Alliance system. All it does is apply friendly fire damage modifiers. This is really only useful in PVE where you are fighting things with health pools that warrant multiple attackers.
Two clans of 10 attacking individuals seems a bit weird and excessive. Unless friendly fire damage setting is set to 0%, they would damage each other more by sheer mass than their intended target.
With that logic why not drop it to 1 or 2? In reality dropping clan size Hurts solo players. Solo players are solo. Clanned players are already groups. The clan size doesn’t lower the number in the group. The group was formed long before they even created their characters, some even years or decades ago.
They simply break up into multiple clans and operate autonomously in conjunction. Let me tell you, a group of 4 clans of 5 is way worse than a clan of 20. Especially if you don’t know the 4 clans are friends out of game. That’s a bigger advantage than not.
Its actually better for the solo and small group of players to have larger clan sizes for that reason. And when I say larger clan sizes I mean not only setting the limits higher (or unlimited) but also give incentives to larger clan sizes.
A legit argument could be made to set it to 20. The idea is to mitigate the chances of overloading them. It would spread out the population a bit which would reduce the overall load.
Makes me wonder, what about thralls? Would they regard the allies as friendlies, or would allied thralls still attack the other clan’s players and followers?
Since most people do not play in large clans but mostly duo or trio (very popular right now) I would even go so far to only allow 5 people in a clan. That is more then enough.
If 2 clans of 5 have an alliance with each other then you get the same number of people you would have now (10) when they where in a clan together. But it would be much harder for a clan of 5 to become the permanent alpha on a server since the alliance is only a temporary state.
Clans of 10 have it way too easy on official servers. While small clans always have a hard time beeing able to defend themselfs. Most private pvp servers have a limit that is way under official and that is for a reason.
But what prevents them from playing together while belonging to different clans, @Winthor ? I’m worried that with the alliance system you might get informal 20 ppl clans.
I used to play a game where a common tactic I used was breaking a rival clan, then turning it into a “vassal” clan. After a while, I had the whole server dominated just by the sheer power of numbers. Nobody could resist us. You were either assimilated or wiped.
I don’t want to see that happening in Conan.
Let me just tell you how I nade it work.
Taxes and intel. We all contributed to boost peak performance players and help the fallen recover from war losses. While isolated clans took a heavy delay after a battle, we managed to get our players on their feet very fast. We could also advance research much faster because of that. In the end, everyone benefited. You had no fear of going to war, because you knew your losses would be covered. We also planted spies in other clans from the start, activating them only when they least expected. Experienced players deliberately spawned in other quadrants. They were recruited for the best clans and remained loyal until we finally faced, which happened when we decided it was time to occupy another quadrant. So we knew what they were going to do. It was like shooting fish in a barrel.
I don’t know how this is not done in CE. Maybe because the clans are small. We had 40 ppl per clan. By the end game we had hundreds of players in our ranks.
Nothing prevents it, but it makes becoming the permanent alpha of a server much more difficult if they would cut down clansize to 4 or 5.
Its easier to raid a clan of 5 then a clan of 10. Even if 2 clans play together. They can not defend each other the same way as if they would be in the same clan, because they lack clan permission to open doors and vaults. To repair. And if you are clever you make an alliance too and both get raided at the same time.
Lowering clansize evens out the field a lot. And in my opionion this is greatly needed. There will always be abuse, but making it more tedious and harder for the abusers to win is always worth it.
If I understood Denis in the last livestream correctly, then yes. The alliance is more meant as making an agreement not to raiding each other or not beeing able to do so. Something like that.
I do not want to say it wrongly now. I do not exactly remember what he said. I have to rewatch the stream. But thats the way I understood it.
Every server I’ve been on starts to struggle at 20, by 30 the lag is so bad it’s practically unplayble. NPCs and thralls start misbehaving at about 20 players on.
Right now on test the servers are set to 60, at first things ran smooth even with 30 on. Nice fresh new EMPTY server. Just a few days in the the server is struggling with 25 on.
I believe you can rent servers with greater population than 40. But my experience on higher than 40/40 servers was not so good. You were going to volcano, no obsidian, you were going to the silver mine, no silver, you were going to the lake, no brimstone… Even most of the world bosses were dead already, or if you happen to find one alive to kill it, the chest was missing. A pvp server thats active 40/40 with normal spawn rates and normal gather rates is always empty from rare resources. Now that the war system comes and silver and gold will have more use than alchemical base, it will be more difficult.
About the performance on 40/40? It was difficult back then, now i don’t think an official can handle it.
So as an idea, in an ideal game, maybe it would work, but in reality, it will only make things way more devastating than it already is.
It would be nice to have servers capable to perform on 40/40 i say!
Now, of the clan limit will decrease to 8 than 10, i cannot see how this would help. After 2.4, i don’t pvp, but even when i was, the clans were really rare over 7 persons and most of the times not all of them were logged in.
10 is just a limit, nothing else.
But that’s my experience, maybe yours is different .
I have been on servers that were as high as 75 and you often had people in the queue waiting to get in. Never really had much of an issue on them as far as stability goes, though they did have very strict building limitations for number of pieces and placables and such.
On a pvp server that is just something to actually fight other players over! On a PvE server… hope no one is on when you run up there.
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