Professional game design in action - Age of Conan and massive PvP battles.

Ever since launch, all the top guilds in Age of Conan were stuck at Tier 2 guild cities due to a bug. That bug got fixed yesterday, and it allowed guilds to finally build Tier 3 guild cities. The cities themselves don't do much (yet), as most of the city features are not yet implemented, but the reason everyone wanted a Tier 3 city was PvP - it's a prerequisite to build a Battlekeep to the borderlands PvP areas.

So, in very short order the biggest guilds built the first Battlekeeps, and once they got that out of the way, they naturally tried to participate on the "endgame" PvP by sieging another Battlekeep built by a competing guild. Just one small problem; The game mechanics in Age of Conan do not allow that.

Funcom has designed the system so that you can only attack a Battlekeep if your guild doesn't already have a keep of their own. With 9 pre-designated spots for Battlekeeps per server, anyone who has played just about any MMO with guilds can immediately see the problem; On any given server, no matter how big, the top guilds tend to "scoop up" a large percentage of the players. It's true for a lightly populated WoW server, it's true for the massive universe of EVE Online - the actual server size doesn't matter. I would venture a guess that the Battlekeep-owning guilds in any given server would consist of over 50% of the population on that server - perhaps even more.

With all the "hardcore" players concentrated into these top guilds, what's left over to attack these keeps is a number of smaller rag-tag guilds and unguilded casuals. Or, in other words, nobody. So, the "massive PvP battles" of Age of Conan are not happening due to a small, "unforeseen", design error by Funcom. You can also look the situation from another perspective - if you are interested in proactively participating in the much-promoted massive PvP battles, you can't build a Battlekeep of your own, or you are forced to defend, and only defend it.

Hopefully Funcom can rapidly devise a working fix. An obvious quick hack would be to allow other keep holders to raid and raze competing keeps without the ability to capture them, but considering the amount of materials needed to build a keep, I'm not sure how feasible that is. Another potential fix would be to dynamically adjust the number of available keep plots to ensure that there are less plots than high end guilds per server, but even that would leave the problem of forcing keep holders to a defensive posture. It might also drive guilds to merge up, and once again there would be "too many" keep spots and no PvP battles.

Only one thing is sure; Funcom's game design is once again falling a tad short of expectations set by the pre-launch PR campaign.

Update: When initially writing the story, I failed to consider the 48 vs. 48 limitation on keep sieges. Apologies. So let's take that into account.

It's true that large guilds (500+ members) might rapidly run into issues as their members can't participate in the PvP action they hoped for due to this limitation. Assuming Funcom doesn't cave in when the whining starts, the solution is to fragment these guilds into smaller PvP siege guilds. With around 50-100 members - enough to consistently field a 48-man siege team - it would mean that at least on some servers there would be enough of these guilds so that the server will eventually end up with nine battlekeeps and guilds of similar size waiting more - initiating conflict. However, the task of collecting materials to build everything up (Tier 3 city) is massive for a small guild, and in any case I doubt there will be proper sieges for a long time under the current model. Yet if the smaller guilds are independent only in name and actually allied - with or without actual game support for Alliances - it may be possible that we see the system working in some way.

Naturally this only works if we have several strong factions per server - the design breaks as soon as one big alliance has all the battlekeeps in control with nine "proxy guilds". In any case, the design has some serious issues as it doesn't scale in any way to accommodate for the different number of players and guilds each server has as the "9 battlekeep spots" is a constant. I'm still not convinced Funcom has really plotted it all out.

Comments

	valtterieranen 2008-06-17 #1 Why am I not surprised.
	Unregistered 2008-06-17 #2 Why am i not surprised that Jarno once again delivers AoC failure reports. Do you get paid by Blizzard or what's your beef? I think it is good to point out flaws, but if your coverage is so biaised as Jarnos then you start wondering...
	NukemNazi 2008-06-17 #3 That title is a tad too strong and some of the tone used in the article is a little harsh (just trying to help so don't go frying me).
	Sraz 2008-06-17 #4 I love the objectivity. Nothing wrong with being critical, but this isn't even journalistic. I might as well just listen to the general rabble on the AoC forums.
	Jarnis 2008-06-17 #5 I'm harsh for a reason. They marketed Age of Conan as offering massive PvP battles, then designed it so that there will be no PvP battles.
	Unregistered 2008-06-17 #6 and you get paid by blizzard. that helps.
	Jarnis 2008-06-17 #7 Quote: Originally Posted by Unregistered and you get paid by blizzard. that helps. Nope, I'm paid by Futuremark, the owner of this site. Don't get my reporting wrong - I'd love to see AoC as a fully-fledged MMO that is enjoyable to play. That just doesn't stop us from reporting what's wrong with it. Only way all the Funcoms of the world will get their act together and polish up their products before release is if someone stands up and says how it is when they publish unfinished stuff.
	Unregistered 2008-06-17 #8 About EvE. 50% of server pop isn't in even 50 corps if you don't take into account the noob corps
	Unregistered 2008-06-17 #9 Your journalistic skills amaze me (not)
	Jarnis 2008-06-17 #10 Quote: Originally Posted by Unregistered About EvE. 50% of server pop isn't in even 50 corps if you don't take into account the noob corps In EVE, I count alliances as "guilds" in this regard - you can't really participate in large scale warfare as a single corp - and there are very few major alliances. Haven't looked up for a while, but when I last looked, there were maybe 5-6 "major" players - large enough that no smaller entity would really threaten them.
	Jarnis 2008-06-17 #11 Continuing on the subject... I must admit I did not immediately consider the effects of the 48 player limitation for sieges. If there are very limited number of sieging windows per week, and only 48 players per guild may participate, that may help fragment the biggest guilds. They will be unhappy, there will be lots of whining, but if people split their larger guilds into PvP oriented sieging guilds, the system *might* work out better - there would definitely be more than 9 of them. Of course the task of building all the required things is massive for a 48-player guild, so in that regard there are some issues... Bigger guilds will then build alliances (whenever *that* feature is added in), and... well, I guess in the end one alliance of 9 or more sieging guilds will hold all the battlekeeps of the server, and say "We Won!", and the design is again broken. Still, blocking people from attacking other battlekeeps simply because they have one is not the most impressive design decision I've seen... edit: I've updated the original story with some additional thoughts.
	Lucius86 2008-06-17 #12 Reporting negative feedback on games is one thing, but reporting negative feedback solely on one game alone is another...
	Jarnis 2008-06-17 #13 Quote: Originally Posted by Lucius86 Reporting negative feedback on games is one thing, but reporting negative feedback solely on one game alone is another... It's tad quiet in the summer. Mind pointing out which other new MMO I have missed? Just wait and see - as soon as Blizzard has their new shiny up (WotLK), I'll be right here ready to comment on it, should it fail to deliver what is promoted and/or expected by the players.
	Lucius86 2008-06-17 #14 If your job is to solely report on MMO's, then fair enough, I hold up my hands here and apologise - but I gathered you were responsible for all games reporting in all genres. In which case you do seem to be heavily reporting negative comments on one game you have a chip on. I dunno, I originally liked your review of AoC, even though I disagreed with your overall opinion. But now this is starting to sound more and more like bashing a particular company constantly.
	Unregistered 2008-06-17 #15 Im suprised about the comments im reading on this matter. Dont people want to know anymore what new content delivered compared to what it was supposed to deliver? Im sure there are more than one way to look at the matter but to only give grief on someones opinion after looking at the content delivered is not really all that constructive either.