Posted by Evoque 5 years ago
Hey everyone,
Towards the end of last year and the start of this one, we have been following your discussions regarding Alliances and how to best react to your feedback before Season 6.
We're aware that the current Alliance situation is dissatisfactory to many players, but we feel it's not as simple as "make every effort to completely remove alliances" either, since this has been met with a heavy resistance from the community as well.
So although we would first like to try fixing this issue on a fundamental level, we are all on the same page that something needs to be done.
Right now, the current Caerleon Realmgate allows players to get swift action and move around the map very quickly. This also creates a huge power projection, where you have a large Alliance that can be pretty much everywhere in the world on very short notice.
What also makes this even worse is that you don’t always have to be out in the world all the time to create this effect we see, since it’s theoretically possible many players may not even try to engage these large alliance battles.
Our current view is that we need to create ways to enjoy Albion's endgame without having to be in a huge Alliance, and to create room for smaller Alliances and Guilds to exist.
In our opinion, this can only be properly resolved with a geography change, but that doesn't mean we have to wait for a big rework. Our mid-term plan is to modify the way the portal system works to make it harder for alliances to be present everywhere in the Outlands within a few minutes.
What we plan to
try out and test from the end of Season 5 until the end of Season 6 at least, is to replace the portal exits in the lower and mid Outlands with portal exits that lead to the Royal Cities. Below you can find a summary of this.
Disclaimer: Proposed plans and details may still change.
Portal Changes
- Each of the Royal Cities (Fort Sterling, Thetford, Martlock, Bridgewatch, Lymehurst) gains an Outland portal of its own
- The existing portal exits in the Outlands are split between the cities in the following way (see the attached map below):
- Caerleon retains all 4 Portal exits in Mercia and the easternmost Portal exit in Cumbria (Alderwood)
- Fort Sterling gets 2 Portal exits in Cumbria (Coombe Tor, Bootsuck Fen)
- Lymehurst gets 2 Portal exits in between Cumbria and Anglia (Hotshadows Plain, Thistlecopse)
- Thetford gets 2 Portal exits in Eastern Anglia (Slickhag, Hanging Valley)
- Bridgewatch gets 2 Portal exits in between Western and Eastern Anglia (Midgebite Fen, Deepwater Fen)
- Martlock gets 3 Portal exits in Western Anglia (Roostcliff, Browngrass Meadow, Blencathra)
- Using a portal will
- lock you to those city's portals (indefinitely, exceptions see below)
- lock you to that specific portal for 20 minutes
- You will lose your current lock if you return to the Royal continent using any city portal
- You will gain a city's portal lock if you return to the Royal continent using that city's portal or when respawning there after death in the Outlands
Respawn Changes
- The ability to respawn "in nearest city" is replaced with an ability to respawn "in last visited city"
- The ability to respawn "at nearest territory" is removed, but you can set any territory tower as a home.
- You can still respawn at a home. However, when you've set a home, you will lose your home binding when you choose to respawn "in last visited city".
Special Island Move
- During a special transition period of one month, you will be able to move your personal and guild islands to a city of your choice
- Each island may only be moved a single time and the move is wasted if not used during this transition period
Connection example
Our primary goal is to test our idea of creating more physical distance between the fighting guilds to create niches in which small and medium guilds can exist without facing the largest guilds all the time. The new portal system encourages guilds to choose one out of six cities as their base, so they gain some control over who they wish to compete with.
A note on biome preservation: of course it would be great if each royal city connected directly to portals of its own biome. In the current map layout, the biomes are heavily spread, however, so each city would gain access to multiple parts of the Outlands. This contradicts the key idea we want to be testing, so we've opted to prefer locality over biome preservation. While this certainly does not create as many economic trade incentives between the cities as it could, we believe the activity of the different guilds in each section of the Outlands will create interesting business opportunities nonetheless. We would certainly be revisiting the biome connections of each royal city in future.
We look forward to receiving your thoughts and feedback, and I would like to take this opportunity to wish you the best of luck whatever your plans are for this final invasion weekend!
- Evoque & the Development Team
(p.s. more news on Oberon will arrive next week ^^)
Posted by Korn 5 years ago (Source)
Quick clarification on the proposed portal lock changes, best explained by an example:
- Say you use the Fort Sterling portal to the outlands
- You now have a "Fort Sterling portal lock" - this means you can only use the Fort Sterling portal *to* the Outlands while that lock is in place
- However, you can use any portal *from* the Outlands back to the Royals
- If you use a portal *from* the Outlands to the Royals, your portal lock is changed to whatever city this portal *from* the Outlands to the Royals takes you
- Hence, if you want to change your Fort Sterling lock to, say, a Caerleon lock, you'd have to walk to any Outland exit portal that leads to Caerleon and use it. This then instantly changes your portal lock to Caerleon
Due to the above, you cannot simply be anywhere in the Outlands instantly by using fast travel between the Royal cities. For example, if I have a Fort Sterling lock and fast travel to Martlock, I will not be able to use the Martlock portal *to* the Outlands as I am still locked to Fort Sterling. As explained above, to change my Fort Sterling lock to Martlock, I'd have to travel to the Outlands from Fort Sterling and walk to a Martlock Outland *exit* and use that, which would then change my lock to Martlock.
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