An issue with Castle Sieges

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This could be somewhat of a solution, but then how would you account for the attacker guild dissolution? Do you somehow keep singular players as enemies of the defending guild? Does this then translate to any other normal guild interactions?

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My current question is about detargetting abilities. I'm more interested in that general topic, rather than minute details of other designs.

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Smaller guilds will have better perks, so I'd assume that the main part of the guild would consist of 4 60-member guilds. And the second half of the guild would be in a huge 250-member (if not full 300) guild, so that it's easier to fill out the siege slots.

If I was the GL, I'd give most money from the Castle to the second half of the guild to reimburse them for their work and loss of perks, while the main stack enjoys the perks and most of the farmed loot.

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And that's a totally viable opinion. That's why I didn't really argue with you in the first place I'm mainly trying to address any and all solutions to the issue. If you see no issue, we've got nothing to argue about.

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This is where I have an issue. Mainly because the first few questions wouldn't be feasible for a server of even 10k players and because this particular part doesn't even work in the current design. All those who would even want to siege - physically can't. And that's my main problem. I've had sieges where we had puny chances of succeeding, but we could still at least try. And in trying we'd not only train the members, but would also see our weak points, be it purely gear or lvl or coordination or skill or whatever.

And with limited siege slots you just can't do that.

And as for "there's gonna be an easier castle", I really don't think so. It'll take just one successful foe siege to show all the other guilds that it's a viable tactic to protect what you have. Then the defending guilds will either gather enough people to do it, or will try paying enough mercs to do it. 1250 people would still be only a fraction of the overall server population, so it's not like that's impossible to do. And I'm sure you know that a lot of people like to join big strong guilds that "dominate" servers. So any newbish player who hears "ay, we're recruiting players into a castle-holding guild, come join us" - would immediately agree. And that foe attacking guild doesn't even need top lvl players to do what they need to do.

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Would you then put a 90-day ban on joining a guild on every single member of a guild that has recently attacked a castle? Cause this suggestion breaks apart once the for attackers just remake their guild. Their only perk would be the size one, so it's not like any player would lose out on much. And depending on how difficult it is to level up guilds, I feel like the hardcore guilds, that would even attempt the thing I'm worried about, would easily level up a 300-member guild once a month to reap the benefits of a castle (stacking benefits too).

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This is a very nice point imo. Especially if the tax caravans have the same sink as all the others do. This way the defending guild not only loses money, but also has a lower chance to siege themselves.

Two issues I could see with this is any potential limits on caravan attack participants (don't think we've heard about anything like that) and the detriments of losing a caravan attack. If the detriments are negligible - the foe attackers would just sign up for the attack of the caravans and do nothing there, just as they would with the siege. You could maybe link the siege priority with amounts of dmg done to the tax caravan though, so there is a chance.

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How big of a cost would it have to be though? If it's too much - you're limiting any smaller guilds from banding together and trying to siege a castle as one group, while the defending guild has the castle money (on top of general profits from being as huge guild). If it's not big enough to do that - the defending guild easily covers it.

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Very good point.

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Only bad GLs would have this kind of setup imo. The working part of the guild should get benefits for working. If my guild holds a castle for a long time because half of my huge guild is in a perkless 300-member guild - I'm giving most of the money from the castle to this sub-guild. The defenders would already have their benefits and would be getting the majority of loots, while this sub-guild would have the money to buy stuff and would get some juicy loots from time to time. Outside of that, I don't remember what other tangible benefits the castle provides to the guild itself.

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While it's true that Steven has a hands off approach to big guilds, his opinion mainly stems from bosses and dungeons providing a fairly limited amount of resources. And I agree that limited loot would definitely put a big strain on a huge guild, mainly because only the top brass of the guild would benefit from said loot.

But I also think that having a castle would counteract that exact problem. Castles will provide a ton of money to the guild, which can then be used to support the second half of your huge guild. And if they're well-fed, there's fewer reasons for them to disobey or leave their guild.

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I see. I guess this would work out to prevent the issue I presented, though I'm not sure how people would react to this kind of limitation. Mainly because I'd imagine most people would want to control a castle that controls their nodes of operations. Having a castle that's on the other side of the world from where you mainly play would most likely be quite detrimental. And moving your entire force between several different nodes every single month (in case you successfully siege on castle, but then fail to defend it) would be even more detrimental, cause it would put unneeded strain on your guild members.

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True, but as I said in a different comment, if alliance benefits are big enough to justify high need of it from the players, there might be bigger balancing issues than just the castle stuff. But we'd need to know either way and we don't.

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Imo this would only come from having a shitty GL. I've seen quite a few great GLs hold together several hundred people w/o much issue. And those "second class citizens" weren't even paid as much as they would be from an AoC castle's taxes.

Now I'm not saying it wouldn't be difficult, but I'd imagine that any guild that would even attempt this kind of maneuver would already be well-kept, well-led and well-coordinated enough to be fine with this setup.

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Then I'm fine with that setup as long as the players can at least attempt the siege. And as the current design stands, imo they can't.

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You only need 1250 because for this scheme to work you just have to fill out the attacker slots and you don't care about the defenders.

As for the reliability of the scheme, like I said, the guilds that might even attempt this would be the huge ones that have a ton of money and power already. We could assume that they have at least the core stack of 120-250 people who have good gear, who have high (or at least above average) skill and who are well-coordinated enough to have gotten to a point where they hold a castle.

Even w/o hardcore defenses, that kind of group would have very high chances of defending a castle from simple attackers. I've seen it done countless times in L2 and there you didn't even have defensive siege equipment.

And even if somehow the defending guild only gets mercs to be the attackers and not half their guild, and if those mercs are somehow super high skill high gear high coordination dudes instead of plain small groups looking for ez money - only one of those merc groups would be able to get the castle onto themselves and they would only be able to hold it for a month. They wouldn't be able to sell it to anyone, because they wouldn't have the means to defend it from those who'd want it. Mainly because they'd now have bad merc reputation and they might lose future income opportunities, for backstabbing the defending guild.

And again, I've seen this kind of stuff happen in L2 too. As akabear mentioned, a few times castles would go to random groups of people, just because they managed to outsmart the defenders (though usually it was just a bad play on the defenders' part) and get the castle onto them. Those groups just benefited from having the castle for one period and that was that. But they'd have good rep purely because they won it "fair and square", rather than backstabbed their deal partners.

And those who did backstab these kinds of deals had bad rep for quite some time. Hell, I've known people who had bad rep across several private servers and several years. Some people couldn't even join voice chats, because their voice was known as that of a backstabbing rat. Though these kinds of situations were fairly rare, in the grand scheme of things.

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I added the "split into several guilds" point later, cause I forgot to do it at first, so no fault for nasty there.

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I linked Steven's comment on this later in the thread. It's pretty much first come first serve and the defending side would try and do the required quest asap. And then they can PK any other GL with the scroll, if they somehow were too slow.

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It is waaaay easier to just assist kill one scroll caster than trying to fight off hundreds of people

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There is in fact often a split between the playertype that plays the game only to 'keep winning no matter the cost' for whatever reason, and the playertype that wants to actually experience the game conflict-wise.

The latter cause opportunities for loss that the former can't tolerate (especially if they ACTUALLY LOSE a few times).

But this doesn't solve the thing described HERE exactly in ASHES I think because of the limit on amounts of sieges. If you're that good AND the game is such that the only people who could give you a fun fight are already your friends/pseudo-allies, I would expect this to happen MORESO than not.

It's almost a waste to 'get sieged by some ragtag group of randoms who think they can beat you' if they aren't fun to fight, when you could be fighting your cool pseudo-guildmates instead. This may not be true for things like politics/story where you get more 'story' out of it, we're talking about JUST the battle itself.

Basically you could 'choose not to lock down the capacity for others to do all the political stuff that is fun to experience' and then still lock down the Castle Siege, with your main 'loss' being that your opponents might just give up after a while on the political side. But that would have happened even faster the other way after you stomped them once or twice.

If anything, you might get better content for longer by 'disrupting their attempt to siege you occasionally', just often enough to keep them trying.

EDIT: This is particularly true given Ashes' system for winning the Siege. It would be SUPER difficult to 'prove' that the attacking guild 'intended to let the person who was trying to channel in the Throne room get killed all five times' without making it hard to STOP such a person from succeeding.

So you'd just 'have a full on, real battle, then every time someone 'tries to claim the castle' they 'happen to fall in combat'.

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But this isn't an exploit.

We can't even say it's unintended. Why wouldn't it be 'intended'?

Even if it was, the solutions wouldn't be based around changing the Siege mechanics really.

I don't have a problem with it, it comes down to how players 'avoid having to risk losing'. But avoidance of risk is also a strain point for guilds, as pointed out.

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Once a guild registers for the siege a scroll creation quest is initiated that guild members may participate in, and it becomes possible to lay the declaration scroll down as soon as the quest is completed.[40]
Multiple guilds may register to attack and the first to complete the scroll and lay down the declaration may begin to have their members register to attack (there will be a cap).[40]
The siege scroll deployment is a 5 min rooted cast that alerts the region at the cast initiation and names the caster that must be the guild leader.[40][41]
If the guild leader is killed, the casting is interrupted.[42] The scroll will remain until it is recast. It will disappear if it is not cast within the declaration period.[43]
The scroll may only be placed in a ring around the castle.[44] The quality of the scroll determines the proximity to the castle.[45]