Musings on Guild Territory Wars (Beta) @ Klaipeda

[Nekorin]

Musings on Guild Territory Wars (Beta) @ Klaipeda

Here are my feedbacks on the Guild Territory Wars (GTW). As the more I partake in it, I’ll add more findings and suggestions in this thread.

Computer Specs:

• AMD Ryzen 1600
• 16GB DDR4 3200mhz ram
• 500gb SSD (ToS is running on SSD and not on my SATA drive)
• Nvidia GTX980
• Windows 10 Home

Resolution for ToS: 1920 x 1080 windowed (Monitor is 3440x1440 @ 144hz)
Internet connection speed: 1Gbps fibre, Wired to router
Country connected from: Singapore
Average game latency: 300-500ms

FPS range in game usually: 40-100ish fps
FPS range in GTW: 4 - 15 fps

Other apps running alongside the game: Chrome with 20-30tabs, Discord, OBS Studio (for youtube streaming) and other tools for my work (XAMPP, Visual Studio Code, WinSCP, Photoshop so on and forth)

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Team Name: NekorinSG (Klaipeda)
Character Name: Rimnerel
Class Build: Wiz2 | Cryo2 | Kino3 | Sage2
Level: 326

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Day 1 (17th Apr 2018) - First Impressions

If I am to describe my first impressions on GTW in 2 words, it will be Chaotically Dense. Wars are meant to be chaotic, nothing wrong about that. Dense is about the all the action being packed and condensed into one small area.

The map size is too small

This is what I feel after moving around the map over the course of an hour. The map size of Inner Wall District 8 will fit a size of around 30-40 players. With just a few guilds with 10+ players participating, the map feels really cramp and players tend to get hit by stray spells more often.

Personally, I think a much better size of a map will be a map that is 3-4x the size of Inner Wall District8, where players can bring their guilds of 20+ players to attend.

Invincibility Zone & Spawn camping

One of the worries which I have for games that feature loading screens in between maps is spawn camping. This is quite prevalent in other games such as RO, where players can spam spells in areas where players are loading in. Glad that for GTW, IMC implemented an invincibility zone where players can spawn in safely without getting killed when their character is still loading. Good job on this part.

However, this zone is prone to be abused as players can still cast offensive spells and attacks while still within the invincibility zone’s area of influence. A suggestion for this is to have a buff that is given to players the moment they log in, the buff will be the one that is giving the invincibility.

The buff will disappear the moment the player initiates an attack (deal damage) or cause a status change on another player (Crowd Control or removal of a debuff caused by an opponent). Healing an ally that doesn’t have the invincibility buff will cause the buff to disappear too. Similarly, the buff will acquire a countdown of 5 secs the moment the player decides to leave the starting spawn zone.

This buff can be reacquired when the player leaves the map and returns.

Some concerns over the “single objective” nature of GTW

For GTW, the main objective is to capture the guild turret/tower what is located on the map. Once captured the guild will have to defend it until the end of the session. Have some concerns about it but will reserve until I participate/spectate more over the test period.

Lotus is the winner for the 1st night of GTW, grats. :3

[Nekorin]

Day 2 (18th Apr 2018) - Battle of Changban…err Galeed

The map layout for Galeed Plateau really reminds me of the Battle of Changban from Three Kingdoms. It is essentially a battle where 1 chokepoint holds off the entire horde of enemies, making it skew more towards the defenders rather than attackers.

In my opinion Genar Fields has the best map layout out of the 3, the wide layout allows for more teams/players to participate in attacking/defending without getting hit by stray shots (collateral damage) from other battles nearby. The map works really well, with multiple routes to attack and defend.

This is a good map for GTW imo.

Objectives, Amplifiers and Maps

Let us look at the map layout of Galeed Plateau.

Due to the way the map is shaped and the points of entry, placing the Territory Wars capture objective on the point marked by the red swords creates a natural choke point. It makes defending much easier as players converge from all 3 routes to just 1 narrow corridor. This limits the number of strategies of conquering this map, to just brute force it down.

Before we dismiss this as a bad map for GTW, let us look at another aspect of the territory wars, the Territory Amplifiers.

IMC’s goal for amplifiers is to provide somewhat a secondary objective for players to fight for control. It is to divert attention away from the main tower area so that players can fight skirmishes throughout the map rather than just concentrate on mowing down anything and everything towards the guild tower. But as of current, these amplifiers don’t serve their intended purpose at all.

The current implementation of rewards upon capturing an amplifier are character buffs for guild members, which aren’t enticing enough for guilds to dedicate their forces to capture them. Hence most players will just ignore them altogether.

Granting timed character buffs also suffer from the issue of being useful. Players die frequently in guild wars and most buffs don’t persist through death. There is also a warp to the nearby town after death which makes timed buffs rather cumbersome to use should they persist. If the buffs are too good, players would just get them and venture to other PVE areas that can make better use of such buffs.

To make amplifiers worth the salt to make whole guilds dedicate resources to fight for control over, the rewards must be good enough the shift the tide of the fight.

Suggestion to change the rewards of amplifiers in a different way. Grants the right to use specialised insertion points for the entire guild for 4mins upon controlling/breaking the Territory amplifier crystal.

Insertion points are special warp locations where the place can choose as an option to warp to before entering the GTW maps. An example of Galeed Map with special insertion points:

What this does is it creates something of value to the player guilds. Players in control of the map will want to control these cuz it helps them bring in reinforcements easier without their reinforcements dying before reaching the tower. Players who are attacking will also want to control these cuz it gives them opportunities to flank the opponents as their blindside is opened up.

The territorial amplifiers are also placed in locations where the controlling guild will have to split up their defending force and venture out to acquire. In this case of Galeed Plateau, the amplifiers will spawn randomly near Nutanta Crossroads and Dales Empty Lot. This makes the GTW tug-of-war more dynamic and fluid with more objectives to capture.

So how do we get players to such insertion points? There are 2 ways to do it,

1. We can add the special location in in the Movement choice before entering;

2. Or, provide an npc which will warp the players to the location upon interaction. The NPC can only be used/accessed to the guild that destroys the Amplifier.

Other locations to consider to GTW

Separately, may I propose trying out the following locations for GTW, they have good terrain geography which allows for more tactics rather than a headlong face to face brute force fight.

• Letas Stream
• Septyni Glen

[Remiri]

Coming from holding Galeed, I can agree that choke is a tad unforgiving but it is easy enough to run down to it while ignoring other guilds. I think most other guilds were fighting each other away from the choke point for whatever reason.

Both TeamAqua and Lotus were able to challenge us on the capture point. TeamAqua cleverly snuck a player to the bottom left and then their templar summoned behind us, where your left hand blue circle is.

That being said, 1 point of attack is silly so they should pick a better map.

[Nekorin]

Day 3 (19th Apr 2018) - Genar Tug-of-War

There’s some hiccups during the Territory Wars trial run today, hence the wars for today is only 30mins long. The fights start at 45 mins in the video above.

Perhaps due to the late start of the event, the number of players contesting over at Genar Field feels lesser. It doesn’t feel as laggy as compared to the past 2 days.

Items buffs that persist through death are valuable for GTW

Am not sure if this is intended by the Devs, I’ll just post them here:

• 2nd ToS Anniversary Firecracker (+4 Movement Speed for whole party)
• Jumbo Dumpling / Honey Dumpling (+4 Movement Speed for whole party)
• Lv2 Settlement Potion (+2 Movement Speed)

The item buffs above will persist even when the player dies in GTW. What is valuable here is the movement speed, which gives my character a movement speed of 44. Have yet to try out Fortune Cookie as my account in Klaipeda doesn’t have any cookies to try out.

One thing to note that although such effects wouldn’t affect GTW balance too much, it might have an unintended side effect to the game. An example is the recent ToS 2nd Year Anniversary free DLC which comes packed with 5x Anniversary Firecrackers, which over in Steam ToS players can create multiple Steam Accounts just to get it and make use of this party wide +4 mspd buff.

In wars, Information is King

Being able to see the opponents a couple of seconds earlier before they spot the player can make a difference, especially in competitive events. This is what the Add-on Zoomy gives to the players who installed it, it allows players to zoom out to see a much bigger area than others without the add-on. It will be really great if the Staff and Devs can say whether this add-on is ok to use for such events.

Next is on the status of the war, besides the Guild Leader, members of the guild can’t see the progression and standing of the guild they represent. Many players make their decisions and course of action based on the current outcome of the war. Hence it will be really great if every player can see the points/stages and guild standings on the map they are contesting at all times (while they are in the map), like the one that GMs/Guid leaders see.

Should the above feature be made available to all participants, may I suggest a UI change of that panel to a more compact version. With its current size it blocks out a portion of an area on the player’s screen. Information is crucial in wars.

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Coming from holding Galeed, I can agree that choke is a tad unforgiving but it is easy enough to run down to it while ignoring other guilds. I think most other guilds were fighting each other away from the choke point for whatever reason.

Both TeamAqua and Lotus were able to challenge us on the capture point. TeamAqua cleverly snuck a player to the bottom left and then their templar summoned behind us, where your left hand blue circle is.

That being said, 1 point of attack is silly so they should pick a better map.

Yep, that map isn’t really suitable for GTW unless they do something to make it more dynamic.

[Nekorin]

Letitica Cube - Elixir of SmallHP Recovery on a CON build.

GTW is generally CON centric for better survivability, the elixir is on a 20secs cooldown. I do think some evaluation on what items can be used for GTW is needed.

[Friend]

Letitica Cube - Elixir of SmallHP Recovery on a CON build.

GTW is generally CON centric for better survivability, the elixir is on a 20secs cooldown. I do think some evaluation on what items can be used for GTW is needed.

To add to the point, full CON builds can reach over:

• 200k+ on swordsman
• 160k+ on clerics
• 130k+ on wizards
• 140+ on Archers (Nobody really plays CON-stack archer though).

This is all before Ein Sof, using a 900 CON boosting item build. This is also before added HP options, and some other additional bonus stats. You can heal to full on all of these characters with just one single potion.

[Nekorin]

After a week of testing GTW, there are a couple of things which caught my attention besides the ones mentioned in my previous posts.

1. There is a lack of an equalizer in GTW, or rather the supposed equalizer (or Strategic Element as IMC calls it) isn’t used at all. Besides the 1st couple of days where I saw it moving to the safe zone in Inner8 or a few players trying to kill it in Galeed, most of the other times it is just tucked at one corner of the map as guilds give it a low priority (just like the amplifiers)

2. For guilds who couldn’t muster up more than 10 players for the wars, joining GTW becomes a daunting task as most of the time they will get ganged up upon by the bigger guilds. Although this is a norm for most other MMOs where numbers do give a big advantage, I do believe that some things can be done to GTW so as to not leave everyone else out besides the big guilds.

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While alliances are great, personally I don’t think it will solve the number problem. In the end, guilds form alliances to have greater numbers than the opposition, and the opposition will form alliances to outnumber the former. There is the issue of the big guilds forming alliances amongst each other and also the problem of splitting rewards when the alliance wins the map.

So, what can be done to help out the smaller guilds who want to participate but yet unable to match the numerical advantages that bigger guilds have?

Suggestion: Upgrading the Strategic Element(s) of GTW

One really interesting cue which GTW can take from MOBA games is how their in map “bosses” work. Once defeated, the bosses will temporarily become the ally of the team who defeated it, and make a beeline towards the opposition’s encampment. They are strong enough to hold on their own and is a menace to whoever is their enemy.

To map it over to ToS’s GTW, such bosses can be used in place of the current bosses to aid the smaller guilds. To solve the issue of big guilds utilising such elements too, the bosses will have each of their skills cooldown directly influenced by the number of allied guild members on the map.

For example, a golem boss will have 3 skills which it can use while moving to its attack location (the territory tower)

• Ground Pound, skill which flings all enemies (not allies) away within a Meteor’s circle radius.
  Cooldown: 5 + (5 x number of allied guildmembers on map) secs

• AoE Heal, skill which heals all allied members within the golem’s range, similar to rank10 mass heal
  Cooldown: 3 + (4 x number of allied guildmembers on map) secs

• AoE dispell, a skill which removes all ground tiles within golem’s range.
  Cooldown: 5 + (6 x number of allied guildmembers on map) secs

Damage dealt by the allied Golem Boss to player opponents is also based on the number of allied guild members on the map at any time. So if a player decides to solo GTW, the allied golem is able to 1hko any enemy that it hits with its melee punch. If a 20 man guild utilizes the golem, the golem deals 1 damage per punch.

Damage dealt towards the Golem Bosses (whether they are allied or in a dormant state) is also based on the number of guild members on the map. At 1-5 members, damage dealt is at 100% of player’s power and will gradually decrease to around 5% damage dealt when the number of guild members on the map reaches > 20 players.

Up to 2 such equalizers can be deployed on the GTW maps at any time. Golem bosses will respawn 5mins after they die.

Benefits

What this does is it adds more strategic elements (or rather improve) to the GTW. Currently, GTW is “stripped down” in a sense that it concentrates only on the player vs player aspect. Having such elements gives players the option to use the map’s environment and assets in their fighting strategy, makes it more interesting and dynamic.

Each different GTW map can also feature bosses with unique abilities only available to the map itself, with stuff like aoe slow, aoe silence etc. This will help players to turn the tides or boost their fighting strength when they are outnumbered. Note here is that “bosses” need not be only 1. They can be a party of NPCs just like the NPC Revelators group in Spring Light Woods quest.

Another pro is that it gives another objective for players to go for, small guilds can count on its firepower. Big guilds can “capture” it so that the “weapon” wouldn’t fall into their opponent’s hands although it is technically useless for them.