Grimfest’s Feedback for CB2

Tags

Albion Online

Lets get this game back on the tracks.

Progression
Currently people are asking for you to slow down progression because some your game design is flawed and with the current design I’d have to agree with them. I would prefer you make some changes and leave the current, easy to learn, hard to master progression philosophy in place. We all can agree that balancing is needed with your current destiny board and I feel that the time investment between gathering, crafting and gear usage unlocks is way out of whack. These three areas should take equal amounts of effort to reach the same destination. They should be balanced to where tools are now, which is a meaningful amount of effort to get to a competitive level, but not months or years.

GVG’S
GvG Design is Flawed; I and I am sure many others entered this game with aspirations of being a great GvG’ers. But over the course of my 2 years in this game I have realised that GvGing is not for me and It also comes to my realization that GvGing is a very exclusive activity for those that have the excessive amounts of time or lots of flexibility in their schedules and in most cases are fed gear and in some cases accounts that others have leveled for them to play.. I feel like there should be a disclosure to this feature in its current state with all the criteria that goes into this in game activity.

Problems

• Way to exclusive, from time restrictions, to resource demands and even limited slots and even skill restrictions.
• Promotes formation of large guilds and/or alliances aka Zergs because the more people you have the more resources you can bring in as well as farm safer.
• Promotes Communism which in most cases leads to abuse and waste. Some people mistake this as teamwork but often times they are the ones being fooled.
• At the end of the day they are pretty much meaningless fights.. Sure people(GvGers and Developers) try to build it up as if they are something amazing but again, less than 5% of your population does GvG’s and I bet over 50% would like to. In addition to this, I would bet 30% of this final beta population is only playing because they are GvGing or trying to support GvG’ers and the masses that have quit the test, quit because there really isn’t anything to do other then Gather for GvG’ers and GvG. My numbers are for perspective purposes, not factual statistics.
• Over a Half a dozen tests later and still too easy for a single guild to own vast numbers of territories? Stahp. At the time of me typing this Finstack has 25 territories themselves. How is this healthy? You got 1 guild controlling a huge area on the map, if you had say 20 different guilds in the same area the world would feel alive. Your GvG system is killing the game.
• GvG’s have a choke hold on your game.

Possible Fixes

• Limit number of territories a guild can hold through steep scaling upkeep costs(food and/or silver). This has been a problem from day 1 and you have still failed to see the issue with it or lack the Give a F to fix it.
• Make each fight more meaningful by not having so damn many of them so often. Think about how you have your city plots set up? Why not have an auction everyday? Because you want someone to get a value out of it before they can lose it. That is how Territories should be. 1 fight a week winner takes all like the resource territories. If your guild members has stuff in their bank, to the victor goes the spoils and the victorious guild can take everything out of the bank from the losing guild if they left anything inside. This also works towards combating zerg guilds. Who cares how many resources they can bring in, in their zerg/communism guild. Even a small guild can set up for a fight once a week and the better team gets the territory, not the one with more time, players, resources.
• Bring on a WoW style arena system (I’ll be putting up a post for debate here shortly, but having looked at the facts, I am ever more convinced that this system would benefit your game far more than It would hurt your game and would love to have a healthy debate on it.)

Mounts and Seed Vendor

This vendor needs to go. Things offered by this vendor need to be found and collected in the open world.
Farming and everything related In its current state sucks and it benefits the ones who can tolerate suffering more and those that have more alts/accounts. It lacks excitement, it’s dull and it’s boring.

Problems

• To available because of the vendor.
• Promotes Multi-Accounts
• Diminishes Rewards for your average player.

Possible Fixes

• Beyond T3 mounts, We could see Wild horses/oxen spawning in random locations throughout the world of all tiers depending on their zone. These horses could be killed like a Direwolf and would have a higher drop rate of dropping foals to be sold or traded to mount crafters. You already have the assets, and probably the animations. It would be a pretty easy task to add this. Even drops from NPC’s would be better, anything you can do to get people out hunting for stuff rather then handing it to them.
• Seeds need to drop off of NPC’s again. I bet many don’t even know they used to drop off of NPC’s. Bring it back.
• In addition to this, plants should once again offer a low chance of returning a seed when harvesting not a guaranteed return.

Note: This also plays into the fact that guilds wanting to control vast numbers of territories can, but will have to work a lot harder to get it and this is going to force guilds and players to get out and farm NPC’s.

Additional Thoughts for the State of the Open World…..
I want to reason to farm a dungeon or hellgates even if my gear is at max tier and I want to come back with 20 different types of things for 15 different trades, from common materials to “holy shit, if I make it back to town with this, I am RICH kind of loot!.” PvE should feel more like a Diablo series game where you are hunting for something cool and rare. You guys did an amazing job adding in new NPC’s and all that but you give us 0 reason to experience any of that cool content you created for us.