Air Travel / Transport

This will be my answer to pretty much all the questions there

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Scientific nodes will go to "the most played" as well, because they either campaigned for it or have worked hard to have a ton of followers before the game (which probably means that they are still playing a ton to keep their influence).

So all nodes will be controlled by people who worked hard for it, in one way or another. And if we have literally 0 ways to influence the mayor (I hope we do) - it means that my caring about mayors or their actions doesn't matter at all. Nor do their motivations.

Like I already said, if those high and mighty "proper" mayors want to rule - they should work harder and get the mayorship. Btw, I'm gonna be aiming to become a mayor as well and I have my own goals that differ from "I want to be a prim and proper mayor that does everything perfectly". And I'm sure there'll be a ton of others that have their own motivations, flying included. And only the most powerful people will get to reach their goals.

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You already can.

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But they'll know you the most and with majority of people not really caring for what happens, they'll just vote for what they know (if they vote at all). This is probably the only way where irl experience applies. Irl people vote for the loudest and brightest candidate and not the best one, as shown by almost every damn country in the world.

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It isn't though. The only way you can directly influence someone's mayorship is to become a mayor instead of them. You could try PKing them while they're doing quests for Divine node or try siphoning money out of their guild if they're going for an Economic node, but you'd only be successful if you played more than them, at which point you might as well just become a mayor.

Mayor caring about the mayor activities or not caring about them won't have any impact on anything.

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Ok, so I could become a mayor and literally not do anything for the node and you'd be fine with it right? Because my aim would be to completely destroy the node. So now tell me, how exactly would this be in any way different from a person who just wanted to fly? The impact on players would be exact same.

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Because variety is the spice of life. The competition for mayorship would be much higher if there's more incentives to be a mayor. And competition pushes people to be better. So if those holy mayors, who want to do a good job, really want the job - they'll have to work hard for it. Harder than any flying boi.

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I'm pretty sure that all those cosmetics are for gliding mounts, that can just serve as a flying one as well, so no, you can still use those skins by just growing a proper mount.

As for guilds and stuff. We don't know how exactly the drops will be designed. There's a chance that the egg could drop completely randomly directly to someone's inventory, to "keep it fair". And then that person can do whatever they want with the egg.

But if that won't be the case then yes, big guilds will be the ones who control flying. And imo that's exactly how it should be. Those who put in a ton of work are supposed to reap the fruits of their labor.

And considering what Intrepid is going for with flying mounts, they can't just give tamers an ability to make them, because no matter how much rng you put into the process, there'll be enough tamers/breeders to have waaaaay more flying mounts than Intrepid want in the game. Limiting them to world boss rare drops and metro/castle control allows Intrepid to control the amount quite nicely.

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You do see how this would also just come down to gameplay amount and guild size, right? If you need a proper artisan to tame that flying mount, only the truly dedicated people would be able to do that. And if their respawn is random and super rare - only the people who play a ton (or huge guilds with such people) will have the most opportunities to find one. At which point they'd have enough power to control the mob's surroundings until their top tamer comes there. Except this time it wouldn't even be randomized who gets it and would always go directly to the GL.

So once again, becoming a mayor through very very hard work would be the best possible way to get a flying mount if you're not a part of a huge guild (though imo it'd still be nigh on impossible). And as I said already, an indifferent ruler wouldn't be any different from a bad one, and in some cases would even be better.

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Then you have no issue with the system, because any flybois wouldn't be elected in scientific nodes

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Then the ones who listen to others have to become mayors instead of the flybois. If their convictions are that firm, I'm sure they'd be able to get the mayorship over someone who just wants to fly.

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And to me, a bad actor who wants to destroy a node so that their own preferred node succeeded is a much bigger danger than someone who's willing to bust their ass just to fly. The flying dude might indeed disregard his duties completely and do nothing with the node, but the bad actor will actively sabotage it to ruin it in the fastest way possible. It's all about politics and not just "seeing the world burn".

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Because that's the system Intrepid have designed? Military mayors will have to be good in pvp, economic dudes will have to have a ton of money, divine ones will have to grind quests and scientific will have to campaign or just have their guild in the same node. So if you want to be any of those mayors - you gotta be the best at that election style. That's what you subscribe to when you decide to be a mayor in Ashes.

You're free to make a suggestion of a complete election methods overhaul and I might even agree with your ideas if they're good, but rn we have what we have.

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If this is how it works, I'd bet that GLs will have top lvl tamer alts that let them get the mount or maybe any GL will just main as a tamer to be able to fly at all times.

Yes, there's always some possibility of a divine providence where a completely random unguilded tamer manages to come across the rarest possible creature in the game right as they're playing the game and have everything to meet the taming requirements, but I somehow doubt that this would be the norm. Statistically speaking.

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We disagree on this point which is kinda at the core of my argument, so I don't think we'll get any further in our discussion.

As for untradeable mounts. If that's the case then we go back to what I said before. The guild has a ton of people, so they have higher chances of coming across the mount. They notify their GL (who's a flytamer) and PK anyone who approaches the mount, while they wait for him to come there. They get rewarded with whatever they want for doing this.

The world will just be way too huge for a few random flytamers to come across a once-in-a-few-months mob. It's just much more statistically unlikely than a guild/alliance of several hundred people coming across it. And this is assuming that those mounts can respawn literally anywhere on the map, cause if they have any kind of predetermined respawn location - I bet that guilds would be fighting in those rough locations all the time, just to increase their chances of coming across the mob.

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I personally want all that drama, because that's the lifeblood of a pvx game. That's the story of the game and of each server. I still remember guild drama in L2 from over a decade ago, and that shit didn't even happen in my guild. I can't even imagine how cool it'd be to hear (let alone experience) about a metropolis getting completely sabotaged by a super charismatic newcomer who turned out to be a member of a small guild that just wanted to fuck over the big guys.

Hell, that's the kind of stuff I've heard about from EVE. Months-long schemes that overthrew huge corporations or that left them bankrupt. Thousands of irl dollars lost or stolen. Hundreds of ships led to a huge trap by an officer that's been with a corporation for more than a year. If EVE didn't have the wall from Attack on Titan acting as its newbie experience I'd play the game just to be tangentially related to those events. The sheer "street cred" of "yeah, I saw that guild fall apart right before my eyes. Those were the days" would be insane.

This would also keep Ashes at least somewhat relevant and might keep attracting newbies to it. And imo even the flyboi attraction of it all would still be a benefit, because it could be a strong marketing tool. A newbie sees someone flying on a mount, asks another player how he could get that and in response gets "become a mayor of the largest node on the server". I get that you dislike this premise, but I think that this kind of thing would be great to interest people in the game and then keep them invested for months. And that means not only money for Intrepid, but deeply invested players for the veterans. In my book that's a win-win.

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I think you have some contradicting points here. If the flying mounts are ultra rare and pretty much random in their spawn (at least on the first cycle of spawns across the server), all those super top lvl tamers would never know where to even be if such a mob spawns. And if we go with your suggestion of a high limit on every other avenue of progress in favor of being able to tame a flying mob - all those tamers would've literally sacrificed their whole gameplay in hopes of hitting the very lottery you mentioned, except with even worse chances.

This is why I kinda against this. Becoming a mayor doesn't limit your other gameplay. Hell, it even encourages and encompasses the majority of ways people play the game. You either socialize like hell, make a ton of money in any way possible, do a ton of different quests or perfect your fighting. All of that covers, I'd say, 95% of players, so you have chance at being a mayor if you try real damn hard and have some luck on top of that.

But becoming a flytamer would just mean that you've given up every other high lvl artisanry and other forms of gameplay in no way bring you closer to your ultimate goal of flying. The solution to this would be to let people either breed or somehow trigger an ultra rare spawn for taming, but, as I've said before, this will get "gamed" to all hell and just lead to way too many flying mounts, even if the chances are abysmal.

p.s. I forgot to address it the last time it came up, but I personally think that we'll still be controlling our champion in the Military elections, so it'd be a pvp showdown just not with our main chars. And I think this because otherwise it'd be very dumb to just combine Divine and Economic systems for a Military node. Just makes no sense to me. Though obviously we'll have to see what Intrepid have in mind.