Albion Online: PvP & GvG Experience

Overall, we were quite satisfied with the GvG and PvP during the last test.
Abilities: We believe that the current weapon and armor abilities are largely placeholders and can be made much more exciting. We want to add things such as channeled spells, interruptible spells, shape-based AoE spells that you can avoid through movement, spells of which the strength depends on how many opponents are nearby or being hit, spells that charge up based on how much damage you take, shields that trigger a special effect when they break, etc.

Zerging: We believe that zerging is an issue, and will make multiple small adjustments to address this, in particular introducing more AoE spells and AoE spells that deal the more damage the more people they hit. This will be combined with more aggressive caps on AoE heals and a nerf to focus fire / focus healing in order to encourage zergs to break up into multiple smaller groups.

Territory Types: We believe that we should have different types of territories in GvG, with the current "build you base here" territory just being one of those Albion Online Gold. In particular, we want to have conquerable territories with no / almost no building space that provide the owner with another advantage such as exclusive access to a dungeon or to certain special resources or special farmland (see "Farming" below). Those territories will be much easier to conquer and re-conquer which is fine as losing them is not such a big deal either as you won't lose your entire base.

Neutral Siege Camp: We believe that the castle current does not work as an "entry point" to GvG for a guild that does not own any territories yet. Instead, we will have neutral Siege camps in PvP zones, where any guild can declare attacks to adjacent territories from. We will set the cost of attacks etc in such a way that the exploit of "attacking yourself with a fake guild so nobody else can attack you" will not be worth it. The territories that are attached to the neutral siege camp will be of the "easy to conquer" type as mentioned above.

Neutral Siege Camp 2: While we are at it, we might make the neutral siege camp a bit more meaningful by placing a bank and a neutral repair shop next to it, and add some NPC guards, so it acts like a neutral outpost (where PvP however is possible!) that can also be used by solo players who want to stay in PvP zones without having to settle for a player city.

Crime Flagging: We believe that the current "crime flagging" system does not work well. We will replace it with a system where players can self-flag as "friendly" or "hostile". People can still attack each other freely in PvP zones with the exception that friendly players cannot attack other friendly players. Instead of having the crime debuff in yellow zones, we will instead give friendly players a PvP buff in yellow zones. Of course, changing your flagging is subject to certain timers and restrictions.
Storage: We believe that storage did not really work well in the last test, which was shown by the fact that most of the guild halls that were constructed just contained chests. Considering that in the final game, people could just have an alt and abuse him as a chest, we decided that we would rather make storage far more readily available. This means that when claiming a territory, it will already contain a small bank chest that every guild member can use and that will also contain a shared guild folder. The chest can also be used as a battle vault.

Battle Vaults / Force projection: We believe that the current battle vault concept gives rise to the problem of force projection, which means that a guild that has 5 well-equipped fighters can defend an almost infinite amount of territories - no matter how far away they are. Our goal is that if a guild holds a lot of space, they will have to work hard to defend it all. Therefore, we will make the following changes: i) at the start of a GvG fight, you have to be in the region where the fight takes place ii) battle vaults will be unique to the respective region (and, as stated above, each region will automatically come with battle vaults!) A nice side effects of this is that maintaining and interrupting supply chains becomes very relevant in larger wars between guilds

Territory Upkeep: Territory upkeep will be changed from Albion Online Silver to food (see "Farming" below), which means that in order to supply a territory, you actually need to be or go there regularly. Again, this is to prevent guilds from holding territories that they do not really use. (Plot upkeep will likely stay as is for now, i.e. currency only).