Albion Continuous​ Gathering/Building

One thing that I've been thinking about is the process of gathering and building. So, a quick recap!

Gathering - You click the Tree/Rock/Ore/Animal/Plant and your character goes through the animations and removes X amount of the resource from the node. For example, skinning a fox removes 2 of 10 pelts. Then you click again and repeat. And again. And again.

Building - With the resources in your inventory, you click the structure then add. You now sit here waiting for it to add 30 before you can click again.

My suggestion is thus: If it still has gatherable materials or if you still have building supplies, you just keep right on gathering/building until the node runs out of resources or you run out of supplies.

f:id:aosilver:20160620163416j:plain

I would like to see the gathering amount based on :
-skill tier vs tier of node being mined/skinned
-quality and tier of tool being used vs rarity of resource mined
-plus other modifiers like food buffs

This would mean people with only a T3 pick could potentially mine a T6 node but would have more waste when doing so and taking a really long time to get anything out of it with a high chance of failure and/or the tool breaking.

I do like the fact that it lets you gather a few at a time rather than the entire resource in one go for a few reasons
- I might not want to take all of it in one go,
- it might make me burdened,
- or I might wish to share the node with someone else that needs to gain
- or I might need to run away from a fight or something so at least I get a bit of resource every few seconds that I might (or might not) get away with Albion Online Items, and get some gather level gains for rather than it all being wrapped up in one gather motion.

Albion Online: Abolition of the Alliance System

I feel that removing the ability for Guilds to ally would greatly benefit the game. So too would limiting Guild size/membership limit to say 100 players. I personally believe that if Alliances were removed for the next Beta test it would improve the competitive integrity of the Guild system. By dividing the players up in to a smaller but still numerous groups (Guilds) it would mean there would be more Guilds fighting for the territories available. It would benefit both the "hardcore" players and the "casual" player base on Albion Online Silver. With Guilds unable to ally together Guilds wouldn't be able to group together to form an unstoppable massive force such as an alliances with many hundreds of players and own most of the map. A hardcore and skillful Guild will still do extremely well against lesser Guilds and the casual guilds/players won't be automatically at a disadvantage when coming up against larger numbers.

More Guilds would force more combat between more players as a whole across the whole game. More people/guilds fighting for the same amount of land will amount to more confrontations and more action! Which I am sure we would all love to see. It would also encourage more better recruitment tactics and methods for there would be more Guilds battling for more players and hoping to recruit the best.

f:id:aosilver:20160613153916j:plain

Can you make a list of all the pros and cons? I think this topic deserves a discussion from all sides and for that, the more detail you put into presenting the issue, the more we can try to find a sweet spot for a balanced solution.

I will gladly give you some incentive (with crossover questions):

1) What happens to pve focused guilds, when they cannot alliance with a pvp guild anymore? Aka, what solution do you see for non competitive guilds to enter the territory fray, if they have to pvp for it (although don't want to)?
--> Trader/Gatherer/Crafter/Casual - Guilds do benefit from an alliance system in my opinion.

2) If the guild size stops at a certain number, how are big real life guilds able to play together, without having an alliance?

I suppose for point 1, PvE focused Guilds may be forced in to GvGs in order to control some territory to Buy Albion Online Silver. Yellow Zone and maybe even Red Zones shouldnt be too difficult if they focus on it. A Guild probably shouldn't be full of non combatants but if they are then I guess not owning land is a consequence for going down that road. PvE and Crafting Guilds can still operate out of Guild Islands and cities pretty effectively. No Alliances shouldnt hinder them at all really.

(Pros)

+ Specialized guilds can benefit from a heavy demand driven economy
+ Alt guilds can't be used as effectively

Should we buy Albion Online gold in the game?

Just like most games with similar economic mechanics and the crossplatform approach, we are likely to see awesome opportunities during the first days of release when the mass market is going to purchase gold to convert into Albion Online Silver to get an edge, especially lots of mobile newbies used to a certain mobile spending pattern. Lots of money to be made there for the smart ones, even more if they have got time and third party tools.

Top gold farmers and experienced players will maximise the silver earned and converted into gold while the gold price will be very low create big gold amounts that will sell later at much higher silver price and not only.

Then price of gold will increase quickly and gradually will get on a sort of stable level with smaller gradual increases and oscillations here and there for people who push to play the market on a regular basis.

f:id:aosilver:20160608154706j:plain

For anyone not interested in playing the market, without big wallet or competitive edge at all costs, better off saving the gold and do not convert into silver until the market gets to a more reasonably stable point. Gold will always be more and more valuable compared to silver. In general, for anyone who likes other activities, better convert into silver only the gold that he's going to use immediately to purchase into the auction house, nothing more.

Never leave any silver in your account (or leave very little amount for small tasks) if you do not need it
- convert it to gold until you need Cheap Albion Online Silver again (potentially in a point during the day where you get the most gold for your silver)
- convert it to valuable items that have potential to grow in price (high end items and raw materials)

Following this you can minimise you risk to be ripped off in the overall market game. i suspect that at the beginning is going to be way more efficient to play the game focused on silver generation than converting gold, unless perhaps you are a whale with real deep pockets.

Albion Online: What Will Affect Bows in a Balancing Way

So the bows are some of the most interesting weapons in the game. The insane mobility and CC they can dish out makes it possible for a bow user to survive situations that no other class could survive. This is the reason why currently bows are overpowered. There is very few counters to them, and the few counters that exist are too specialized. So the game needs to have more counters to bows. But at the same time we don't want to ruin the uniqueness and very fun gameplay of the weapon. So the best way to accomplish this would be some rather indirect nerfs. These are the best suggestions and ideas that I found on the forum and came up with:

Make roots stronger by changing the way that displacement abilities work
Currently, if you have a displacement ability (Blink, Delayed Teleport, Dodge, Frost Arrow, others), you can still move despite having a root on you. The game simply ignores the root for purposes of all displacement abilities. This should not be the case.

In stead, make it a feature of certain displacement abilities that they can be used while rooted Albion Online Silver. This allows for more balance to the different displacement abilities: Displacement abilities with short range and high cooldown can be "used through roots" or even "will remove stuns or roots from the player". Displacement abilities with long range and low cooldown (Frost Shot) will be blocked by roots.
This will accomplish several things:

1) Roots will become a viable counter to bows
2) If a player wants to counter roots, he has to sacrifice something for it

Move the "CC duration vs. players" away from light armor and make it a heavy armor stat

f:id:aosilver:20160606150658j:plain

Tanks should be the ones who have strong CC. Not damage dealers. How this stat ended up being a light armor stat is beyond me. Just throw it on heavy and balance the base duration of the CC abilities after this. This isn't so much a nerf to bows. Its more of a general change that the game should have had from the start.

Increase the energy cost of Frost Shot
We want to keep bows' uniqueness. Nerfing Frost Shot into oblivion would ruin one of the most fun and interesting weapons with the help of Cheap Albion Online Gold. By just increasing the energy cost of Frost Shot, we will allow for bow users to still do their crazy dives into bigger groups of enemies. They just won't be able to do it all day like we're seing right now.

Reduce the slow time on Frost Shot
Other slowing weapons are single target. Most of them are even melee. And they are even balanced so that long slows aren't so powerful. Having a 20 second 40% slow that is ranged and hits multiple targets is clearly not balanced.

Rain of Arrows needs some looking into
I'm not sure how to change it without nerfing it into oblivion. But giving a weapon, that has all the tools available that Longbow has, one of the hardest hitting AoE abilities in the game and putting a slow on top of it, doesn't make sense.

Compared to other DPS weapons, longbow ranks top in both mobility, CC and AoE. No other weapon ranks top in so many categories at the same time. Usually, weapons are balanced so they rank top in ONE category and are average in 1 or 2 others. Being top in all categories except single target damage is clearly not balanced. Bows will still be very strong, even if you make all of these changes.

Thoughts on the Albion Online

First of all, I played AO since this beta, I am a big fan of the idea behind this game, and I am very fond of theory crafting and all.

I would like to give my main ideas about the game that would make it better. Those are not all fresh ideas, since I often discuss it with passionate mates.

Those ideas cover a good part of the game, I am not great at organising my ideas :(
GvG: I think that the actual GvG system (since the beta) sucks hard. 5v5 limits the choice of a composition guided by the meta which is guided by the patches. It is more about who have the better stuff win. Rather than good composition well played with Albion Online Silver. I would put GvG on a 8v8 format (it is not too much even for little guilds, daoc did it for 16 years), and the fight would happen on an ENTIRE map, with the same system of 3 objectives to control ( with a nice change, the one in the middle should give 150% compared to the other two). GvG would be limited to one per day per map, and should last around 15 minutes.

Castles: castles are nice, it bring an objective with a non equal start, with defenders having a positional advantage and attackers having the number advantage ( with the different enemies attacking). I would make castle map a lot bigger, the castle should be at least like hollowheart, to have the space for a real raid battle, with a similar door system. Castle should give the guild holding it a nice price like money, resources ( inside the castle yard) and a more serious buff like 10% bonus damage. This last one will create a must have situation on castles (not really a must have, but a very important objective).

f:id:aosilver:20160602155138j:plain

Should have been the first one, End game: AO has no end game atm, there are nothing that will create a global hunt. Glory is one thing with the PvP ladder(I will talk about it later). But we need to have something better, like the control of very important objectives like relics, and castles.

My big idea: the end game I just mentioned is very important I think. But the progression part of the game is very important too. From that, I think this game should be season based Albion Online Gold. Every year, the game wipe and we all do it again, something like 6 months progression, 6 months end game. At the end if the season, the guild will be ranked with point based on relics and castles holding. PvP ladder will permit to rank players based on their pvp achievements, with a GvG ladder and an open world one. That would be a great solution I think.

Bring back the death: we need a PvP ladder, personally I don't care since I won't be on it. But in this kind of game we need a glory system. People play this game to battle for glory, and PvP is certainly the most important one.

Now I reached my lesser ideas: capes are cool but they should be more important... You should not be able to track people by tracking their name on the screen (since the name has 8 times the hitbox), you should see the name upon clicking on the person except in towns.

Should not be 7th, very important one: make the UI customisable Plz
Delete the rez staff it brings nothing to the game except painful modification on the death mechanic.

I might have almost everything I guess, can't remember something else, I don't want to talk about balance on Albion Online Items, no miracle on that. I really believe on those ideas, I really think they can be implemented, those are mainly twicks of actual content, ty for reading

Albion Online: E on Sword line, Claymore Vs Broadsword

In this post, I just want to point out the differences between 2 E's in the Swordline.

Mighty Blow on tier 8.1 Broadsword with 3 Heroic Charges-

764 single target damage- Melee
An interrupt
Consumes all Heroic Charges
10 second Cool down

Mighty Swing on Tier 7.2 Claymore with 3 Heroic Charges-

871 AoE damage- 6m Radius
Consumes All Heroic Charges
15 second Cool down

Difference in damage, Mighty Swing has 107 more damage, also take into consideration that Mighty Swing is AoE,
in almost all other situations to get Albion Online Silver, the Single Target Damage is supposed to be greater than AoE. An example is
a spell found on these weapons in fact, for the Q, the single target spell now does more damage than the AoE.

f:id:aosilver:20160530153739j:plain

The cool down difference is not enough because you still have to get 3 charges of Heroic Strike ,
which usually takes about 15 seconds unless your enemy is sitting and waiting for you to get charges.
Nor does the interrupt on Mighty Blow balance the two spells. With a 6m radius, it is easy to hit 2
enemies, possibly 3, or more if they are grouped, which is much more useful than an interrupt.

I think this is something that needs to be balanced as soon as possible, or just buff the other E on Broadsword,
that spell is much more unique anyways. This is probably something you guys just over looked, and in a
recent video you asked for specific things and reasons for more Albion Online Gold, not just "this needs to be balanced".

So I hope you find this helpful.

Albion Current Fame and LP Numbers

So, I've seen several complaints about the new LP system where people are upset that players will "AFK for two months then be top tier" and I wanted to give some perspective on the current numbers in game and how long it would take IF you simply went AFK and/or only used LP to unlock the weapons. This uses Longbow as an example simply because I didn't have it unlocked and could see all the values.

From the numbers above, it would take 2 full weeks of LP to get to Tier 5.3 (Yellow zone cap). Most people in the game would agree that you could probably get to this level in a few days of grinding so let's not focus on that number. However, look at the later values where it is 58 days to hit T8.3. That's two months worth of saved LP to get there, and it goes up even steeper from there. To hit "max" level, it would take 204 days, or close to 7 months of 'AFK-ing' to hit that point. People forget one thing though ... THIS IS JUST FOR THE WEAPON.

Add on to the numbers above leveling the armor sets, unless you want to go out in the world with T2 armor and a badass weapon (that's up to your Albion Online Silver). This will also limit them to a single weapon choice, where those that are grinding/playing the game will have multiple weapons leveled up to various tiers within that same time period.

I really don't see how the LP numbers, even as they are now, are going to be super detrimental to the game. Anyone, Anyone, ANYONE who is grinding out fame by mob kills, dungeon runs, etc is going to progress way faster than any AFK player. If someone wants to AFK for 7 months to only get a single weapon to max tier I say let them ... I will have multiple weapons and armor sets at max tier by that time, no doubt about it. I just don't see the new LP system as any kind of 'major' problem that people are trying to make it out to be.