An issue with Castle Sieges

A recent node discussion touched on node sieges which in turn reminded me of the current castle siege design.

Castle sieges are supposed to have a limited amount of participants. This design seems faulty to me because it would lead to absolute domination by the huge guilds. Any guild that has over 500 people (split into several sub-guilds), or alternatively can afford to hire enough mercs, can just register half of their forces to the attacking side and prevent anyone else from even attempting to siege the defenders.

And even if Intrepid manage to support 500x500 sieges, the defending guild can hire mercs to fill up the limited attacker slots. Castle taxes can be used freely by the defending guild, so anyone who holds a castle will have a ton of money and would only benefit from buying mercs.

The main question of this thread is whether you think something should be done to prevent that. We don't know if Intrepid have addressed this issue already (if they even see it as one), but I think some preliminary discussion could help them decide one way or the other, before releasing more info on the topic.

I am personally against allowing this kind of "exploit", but don't see a good enough solution, outside of making the slots unlimited. If you agree that something has to be done about this, any ideas would be appreciated.

But that is exactly my point though The 500-member guild would just have two 250-member guilds, one that holds the castle and the other that always attacks it.

Hell, I'd assume they'll just have 40-men guilds to fully benefit from the guild perks. But that in no way prevents them from being the ones to fully fill out the attacker list on the siege and prevent any proper guild from taking the castle away from them.

NiKr wrote: »

But that is exactly my point though The 500-member guild would just have two 250-member guilds, one that holds the castle and the other that always attacks it.

Hell, I'd assume they'll just have 40-men guilds to fully benefit from the guild perks. But that in no way prevents them from being the ones to fully fill out the attacker list on the siege and prevent any proper guild from taking the castle away from them.

At this point you wouldn't even have to 'throw the fight' if the two guilds were organized.

They'd just have 'Siege Combat Practice' every so often.

Azherae wrote: »

At this point you wouldn't even have to 'throw the fight' if the two guilds were organized.

They'd just have 'Siege Combat Practice' every so often.

Yeah, they could just give each other the castle and share the income between the two (or more).

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But then you are either punishing all the guilds who'd do the same or you are not punishing the defending guild, if you give back the money if the registered guild wasn't chosen.

And as for spending money on the siege. The castle will supposedly gather taxes from 1/5 of the server. That's a shitload of cash. There's obviously the possibility that some guilds might try and attack the tax caravans, but a 500+ guild would probably have enough people to defend their stuff well enough.

Also, if you go down the rng way of picking attackers, you not only defeat the whole point of "band together to topple the strong" design (that mainly comes from the small guild perks vs huge perkless guilds), but it would also just be abused in another way. The huge guild would just register a ton of smaller guilds to raise their chances of successfully getting in. Hell, if they split all of their guild into 40-mens then they will already have several spots taken up. A few merc guilds on top of that and you have yourself super high chances to be the only ones who attack.

Also also, the foe attackers wouldn't need to prepare any resources for the siege, so it'd be way cheaper for them. In theory, even the defenders wouldn't have to prepare anything, though that would obviously depend on how the issue in the OP gets addressed.

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Don't quite see how that addresses the issue presented in the OP?

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I should've been clearer in my original post. The "split into several sub-guilds" was what I was talking about.

Thx for the opinion.

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But if the issue remains unaddressed then the attackers lose literally nothing. They would only pay the registration cost. And unless that cost is equal to what a castle gets in 30 days through taxes - the defending guild stays profitable.

But if the registration cost is that damn high, I dunno how many people would even want to siege a castle.

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I looked into it a bit more and it's even direr than I thought any and all guilds will have to do quests and then cast the scroll (for 5 uninterrupted minutes). So the defending huge guild can literally just let only their own dudes cast the scroll, while killing anyone else.

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Alternatively, if the wasn't a limit on the attackers, all those smaller guilds could just register at weird times and then help each other win the siege.

Hell, in L2 some guilds registered for the siege at the very last second possible, just to keep their involvement a secret. And when this practice became widespread, the defending guilds would put PKing parties (or just killing ones for the warring guilds) around the registering npc, so that those sneaky guilds couldn't register at the end.

The sneakiness was mainly done so that the defenders didn't know how many guilds would attempt the attack and there'd be a higher chance to successfully attack. With the current system it would be the direct opposite. The defending guild would just be ready to get the scroll quest at the first possible second and would be super cooperated, so that they're the ones to be the first to fill out the slots. And even if they're a bit late - they'll just kill any scroll-casters.

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All of this is sidestepped by getting merc guilds or by just good coordination on the huge guild's part. And unless you literally track every single p2p trade interaction, every single chat interaction, every single PM and every single instance of some 2 groups of people being present in the same general location - ya ain't preventing shit.

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Unless guild alliances give some immense benefit to the allies, this wouldn't work. And if it does give that benefit, I'd assume there'd be bigger balancing issues than just castle stuff. Though maybe not.

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You're a psycho

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It doesn't have to be 2 different guilds. Could just be subguilds of the same one. And I've had a ton of cases where our ally list in L2 was full, but we had several more allies during sieges. The system-based allyship is not necessary to be allies in the game.

Also, considering the potential profits from the castle, I'd assume most guild would be completely fine with doing this thing once a month for some nice stacks of cash. Don't even have to be allies with the defenders.

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A nonsensical off-topic response that in no way relates to this entire thread. Got it. Thank you.

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And yet nothing of it addresses what I wrote in the OP.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQCU36pkH7c