Overthinking Numbers of Nodes and Their Populations

Get well soon mate

GWS

There's supposedly 50k people on a server (at least later on in the game's life). So I find it really difficult to figure out how exactly all of those will be spread out over the game or how the game will be designed to account for all of them. Especially when it comes to citizenship and anything related to it.

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10k concurrent and 50k overall registered per server.

And population ties into conflict. If nodes are accounting for 5k people XPing in them daily, but then only 2k do so, the node will start to decay. Decay of a stage-3-5 node would influence its parent node. A weak stage-6 node would probably be easier to siege. And even w/o sieges it would lead to changes in the layout of the land. And that, in turn, would lead to conflict, cause change always leads to conflict, either due to a power void or through a shift of populace from the destroyed node onto the surrounding ones which would bring resources scarcity and new money flows with it.

But that's just a theory... A NODE THEORY!

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I don't think we'll need MORE conflict. I do believe we'll have enough of it, especially if Intrepid spread out the content correctly. Some small skirmish leading to a guild war which leads to a node war which leads to a node siege which leads to big changes in the world which might lead to more skirmishes. Even if vassal nodes can't declare wars (which I doubt), the bigshots at the top would be interested in controlling those kinds of things cause their own node depends on the health of their vassals.

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Yeah, the inability to overturn your parent node is a problem, but I think we'll just have to see whether it remains one through testing. Or if it's a problem at all, depending on Intrepid's design for the overall node gameplay.

And if you're talking about the metros' side of the situation, then we just don't know what exactly gonna be the benefits that would ensure the survival of a metro. We know that policies are a part of those benefits, but I'm not sure if it'd be enough.

In other words, we don't have any real info. And we definitely don't have info on how population sizes will influence nodes.

Ok having read this a few times I'm missing a context here @Dolyem

What do we mean when we say 'contend with'?

The only ways I can think of to 'fight' a node are VERY strong Economic pressure, and sieging it.

The only requirement to siege a node is to complete the questline required for the scroll and this can be done by a single player.

I feel like I'm missing something here. If you want a node brought down, literally any player can start that process for you, what you would need to do is get enough attackers. So I figure the concern is that 'citizens of a Node can't act against it in a Siege' and similarly for 'citizens of Vassals', but I can't find anything other than 'can't declare Node War'.

But Node War seems to only have the purpose of 'being allowed to attack the citizens' as if in a Guild War.

I can't find any indication of what this is 'for' other than the usual 'you annoyed us so we're killing you'. I can definitely see an issue here, but I'm not sure if I see the actual concern here. 'Overthrown' doesn't seem to have anything to do with Node Wars only Node Sieges .

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Yep, I have this worry for the Castle sieges. Node ones are supposedly unlimited in their participant amounts, but castles are. And I definitely see how castle sieges would be abused in the exact way you described. I asked about this a few times in the dev stream Q&As, but they didn't pick my question.

NiKr wrote: »

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Yep, I have this worry for the Castle sieges. Node ones are supposedly unlimited in their participant amounts, but castles are. And I definitely see how castle sieges would be abused in the exact way you described. I asked about this a few times in the dev stream Q&As, but they didn't pick my question.

That quote doesn't seem to apply to Castle Sieges at all, though, from the context I read it in.

This is one of those things that I WOULD ask about but is so likely to still be under discussion/fine tuning that it isn't going to be answerable.

But simply put, those are fairly connected, I think. Node Sieges aren't intended to be fair, Castle Sieges seemingly are some level of 'fair'. The former point is probably the reason why they would need to verify being able to have truly huge battles (in terms of player numbers)

Azherae wrote: »

That quote doesn't seem to apply to Castle Sieges at all, though, from the context I read it in.

This is one of those things that I WOULD ask about but is so likely to still be under discussion/fine tuning that it isn't going to be answerable.

But simply put, those are fairly connected, I think. Node Sieges aren't intended to be fair, Castle Sieges seemingly are some level of 'fair'. The former point is probably the reason why they would need to verify being able to have truly huge battles (in terms of player numbers)

I hope they fix it, but I got no clue how they would. Castle sieges are limited in participants. A big guild that holds a castle would just get one of their satellite guilds to register as attackers and block anyone else from attacking the castle. This is my worry.

Unless I read (and reread) nover's comment very wrong - they were talking about the same thing. The wiki quote in question was misused by nover for this context, because node sieges are uncapped (allegedly), but I addressed that in my comment.

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How do you prove that though? Any self-respecting hardcore guilds would just start off as 2 different guilds with one being the foe attacker and the other being the defender. Also, you don't even need those types of guilds, because you could just hire a merc guild and tell them "don't fight". Would that not be a social interaction between guilds?

You could put a ton of different limitations on sieges and/or requirements for guild's actions during a siege, but literally all of those would influence the normal guild behavior much more than that of a single megaguild's one.

L2's castle sieges were pretty much the same as AoC's node ones. Anyone could attack, anyone could defend, no caps (afaik). It was obviously unfair against all the non-huge guilds, but that in itself was a social interaction telling those smaller guilds to band together and stand up against the big bois. And people did.

So unless Intrepid decide to remove the limit on registered participants - I really don't see how they'll prevent this abuse of the system. Banning all the guilds who do this would be very counterproductive and I doubt it would even do anything, unless you were to ban all the players themselves.