COMMUNITY - FORUMS - GENERAL DISCUSSION
Criticism by Andrew Ross

Hey guys, I know this articel is about 1 year old,

but what do you think about it? Let me hear your opinion.

Source: massive overpowered Author Andrew Ross.

Anyone on the MassivelyOP team will probably tell you that I won’t shut up about Chronicles of Elyria. There’s so much to like about the game Soulbound Studios wants to build! Like many of you, I backed the game, and I’ve been literally battling to keep myself from donating $500 max to the Kickstarter; so far, I’ve backed at only the $40 tier, and I’ve never gone over $35 for any Kickstarter in the past. I don’t easily part with my money, especially for a game in development. While Elyria has a lot going for it, I’ve noticed recently that the developers and some fans might have gotten a little over excited since hitting their funding goal, and I’ve seen people comment about pulling out their funds because of this. The team recently released some answers to some good questions on Reddit, but some answers still feel a bit too optimistic. Maybe it’s time we bring things back down to Earth.

My PvP preferences

A lot of people who write criticisms about FFA and PvP are often questioned about their past, so let me present my PK resume: I’m the old Massively FFA PvP test dummy and survival genre guinea pig, as well as one of our resident MOBA explorers and shooter enthusiasts. I started toying with FFA PvP on Asheron’s Call‘s Darktide server. I was a minor officer in a major alliance during Darkfall’s early World Wars (Huah Yew!) and survived a week-long civil war involving multiple, daily (morning?) sieges up till the North American server was released, and I continued to work repair duty on my clan’s buildings on the new server. I ran guilds in WoW, RIFT, SWTOR, and TERA that centered on world PvP events, ranging from RP PvP (not just debates, but pitched battles) to multi-guild coordinated efforts to maintain server balance and foster a world PvP environment. I came to the old Massively while covering ArcheAge for a prominent fansite (having played at least 10 hours of the game in three languages) and spamming the writers with updates about the game.

I say this not to show off but to demonstrate that I’m the kind of person who helps make (FFA) PvP work. I have nothing against even pure PvE games, but they tend to expire early for me. I’m not some high-ranked arena player; I’m an open-world shepherd (there’s more than sheep and wolves). I know the risks involved in high-stakes PvP games and engage with allies and enemies to grow and develop our shared communities. I’ve played nearly exclusively on PvP servers and in PvP games for well over a decade, so you’ll have to excuse me for keeping my head out of the clouds. I’ve got no time to stare up into the sky and dream about what might work when there’s plenty of plotting and ganking down here on earth.

elyria Setting realistic expectations

I’m not a prophet, but I’ve experienced enough launch days (or in modern gaming English, “early access”) to have a decent idea of what a game from a small studio looks like at release. Though the team has some big company names on its resume, they’re ultimately untested in the MMO world, and realistically, they don’t have the money or the man-power to pull off the vision they’ve been selling more since reaching their $900k goal. I do feel this team was more realistic about what it was doing at the start, and that’s the game I’m supporting.

For those having trouble managing their hype for this game, I’m here to splash some cold water in the form of history lessons from past “revolutionary” games, mostly of the PvP nature. So let’s take a look at what’s been promised, how those features have gone awry in the past, and what we’re actually likely to get. Launch

I fully expect Chronicles of Elyria to launch by 2018 as planned, but that will probably still be too early. It’s following Darkfall’s trajectory: There will be delays, there will be features cut, and it will be rough. The game will include its rough-looking combat (at least one MMO reviewer could see some promise in it). Permadeath will make it in; it’s a core feature, after all. I’m expecting spirit runs, maybe family members acting as a kind of radar and “spawn point” for newbies, limiting some of their character creation options, and possibly acting in some way to learn abilities after creation, either directly through players or family NPCs as a kind of “faction” to get rep with. Crafting

Basic crafting will probably make it, but I don’t know about any Guitar Hero style barding. That’s important because crafting helps build PvE communities and helps separate MMOs from the FPS scene. Resource supply and management that doesn’t reset each game may not always be fun, but it’s what gives MMO wars their weight and why games like EVE have so few of them. Boring crafting that’s easy to master can kill a game’s population, and it’s something I noticed a bit of in Darkfall before its 2011 crafting update, but Elyria may pull off attaching recipes to special NPCs for flavor. Players being able to teach each other recipes through some in-game UI may make it to launch if the crafting community stays vocal enough.

But none of the planned crafting has gone through the full design phase, and at least the term “minigame” is out. Reinventing crafting is not a small thing — Camelot Unchained is the perfect example for how challenging it can be. And maybe I’m too optimistic, but I don’t feel the game can use traditional WoW-style, drag-and-drop crafting without serious backlash, and the rest of the systems described early on will probably be seen as more expendable. Family

Family, for all its hype, probably will end up being a system that enables players to summon each other, share resources, “sense” each other on a simple radar, and have some kind of family chat. The soul system sounds cool, but the work involved sounds heavy. With barely a playable combat demo and nothing of the world while aiming for a December 2017 release, I can see a lot of this system being cut to push the product out the door. Tunneling will probably be cut before we have something playable, and may come out for an official “release,” but I’m expecting a long paid alpha/beta period with a cash shop needed to keep the lights on.

Historically, meaningful families have been a dream in MMOs since the DAWN of MMO vaporware. While there are MMOs that let you have a last name you can share or channels/land rights (ArcheAge), what Elyria is proposing is something I eagerly want, but I worry about its implementation. I’m sure they can get similar appearances, spawn points, and maybe inheritable classes/stats down. The technology is available in singleplayer games, but since the days of Horizons/Istaria, we’ve seen these features fail to land in MMOs till long after the singleplayer/small-scale multiplayer community is done with them.

This is important because Istaria was a game that, at the time, sounded quite similar to Elyria in many ways: families, FFA PvP, discoverable player skill options (in the form of races), an ever-changing world, and more. What we got was a PvE crafting game with dragons, flight, local banking/auctions, and some unique world building/community events. Not bad, but a far, far cry from the original promise. It’s why anything in Elyria that sounds new or that is rarely done should be suspect beyond payment models.

Unfamilied wards of the state, with or without money, will probably launch because the developers seem to love the idea. However, this is another reason why the family system may not end up as powerful as its being described, since many people will probably want to start this way and complain about feeling the sting before wandering off to a new game. Housing and land

The world will certainly have enough room for everyone to own a house, but part of that will be due to the FFA PvP nature of the game. Land controls will probably go in mostly as described, with the ability to assign ranks, tax people, and gain/lose territory. Town naming may be simplified though, as the cartography system may also be deemed as something that’s expendable. Cartography is an awesome idea, but Rust has no in-game map and people have made their own without an in-game skill. Elyria’s system sounds better, but if you were making a game and might have to choose between launching your game and cutting features, isn’t this one you’d give up? A game focusing on story and PvP can put exploration bonuses on the backburner. I’ve seen it done plenty of times. That might make backers happy though, as it makes their Kickstarter rewards permanent. Should the system make it, though, I have a feeling it won’t be utilized quite as intensely as the team would like except by the most political players. NPC AI

NPCs in an MMO with their own goals tend to be few and far in between. Again, UO had it in testing and cut it, but I believe Black Desert Online has it. We’ve heard this feature before, and it sounds possible, but I’m remaining cautious about how it may turn out. In a PvP-focused game, it may just be cut as it has been in the past.

elyria The importance of PvE in a PvP game

Many PvP games talk about doing cool PvE things, and as someone who’s experienced some of that (Darkfall’s roaming and true-flying dragons), I say it’s why this is such an interesting genre. However, the fact remains that these experiences can be rare and seem to pop up more in PvP games than PvE.

PvE, in general, will probably end up rather static. Remember, we’ve been hearing about non-static respawns since the pre-launch days of Ultima Online. Players just kill stuff. The only demo we have is PvP at the moment, and while there’s supposed to be a really cool engine capable of great things in development for 10 years or so, we probably won’t see it during the Kickstarter. Most of what’s said sounds like it relies on players to be driving action while the engine drives some kind of change. Not seeing that in demos at the time of the Kickstarter makes this a bit suspect, but again, good crafting can help alleviate this.

I think, for many people, the issue with Chronicles of Elyria is that, like many other PvP games before it (Crowfall, Revival, Embers of Caerus…), it’s boasting a unique interplay of PvE with PvP to push MMO narration in a meaningful way that has seldom been served to the MMO community since Asheron’s Call (though maybe Guild Wars 2’s Cutthroat Politics event is a more recent example). The problem is that we’re promised this a lot, but it rarely actually happens. EverQuest Next (RIP) generated so much hype because it was going to carve out space for stories based on how the playerbase would interact with it. Again, this is something GW2 aimed for its dynamic events, but as NPCs had a leash to prevent them actually making real progress, the feature only proved an acceptable alternative to yellow ! marks as a source of experience gains, and to show that PvE players need something more.

This was why ArcheAge was so appealing during beta to me as a PvP player. One thing that made PvP games like EVE and Darkfall work or fail was whether they also created an interesting experience for PvE players beyond being victims. Prior to its western launch, AA was offering meaningful crafting, non-instanced player housing, player-made factions, dynamic world building/farming, and more. It also had PvP, largely on a third continent, but if you jumped through the right hoops, you’d experience it everywhere, though with bigger consequences (sound familiar?).

I thought that if the PvE players needed to be in a PvP setting to experience something cool, like massive wars, they’d flock to the game. In some ways, I still do. Asheron’s Call 1’s Shard of the Herald event happened on a PvE server, not PvP. I was, in short, a PvE pizza delivery boy, as I was too weak to assist in the actual defense but could pass off items to stronger PvP players fighting to keep the shard alive.

This kind of system can work, but it rarely does. Part of the reason for this is that modern MMOs are more focused on giving players ways to increase their stat power. The Shard of the Herald event didn’t do this (it dropped powerful items, but they were randomly generated, and lore knowledge was needed just to find the mob’s location and consequences of killing it) and it’s still a defining moment in MMO history. ArcheAge was set to do something similar, but once the studios dropped permanent item decay and created multiple token systems, it became obvious their system would simply force PvE players into PvP zones. However, this was far into the game’s development, after multiple closed beta tests.

Ironically, this is the sort of controversy you'd probably rather face from inside a hot tub. Free-for-all PvP and griefing

This is the elephant in the room.

Considering the survival genre and its current history, I am well aware that griefers and hackers will descend on Elyria as soon as possible, probably far too late for Soulbound to properly address them. Though the studio has someone on staff with “griefer tendencies,” that’s far different from whole guilds who live and breathe it. The end result could be that, as in Darkfall, you may be able to roam the wilds without seeing a soul, and should you see one, he’ll probably be someone hardcore looking for free loot (that’s you).

Soulbound recently revealed notes about how griefers are punished, and they won’t be enough, but at least some details give me hope. Anyone who’s casually looked at EVE knows that the bad guys can win, and that’s enough to scare away a lot of players. While that’s not entirely a bad thing, this is a subgenre that’s nicher than niche. I really want to be cautiously optimistic about Elyria’s known punishments:

People who commit crimes are not safe from the game’s multi-death leniency system that helps make sure the sting of death doesn’t sting your wallet too much.
The planned punishment is to lose as much life-time as you take from other players.
Players can refuse to let you into their homes based on your reputation and need proper authority to invade lands. Living in the wilds makes the survival part of the game more difficult.

These are ideas Soulbound probably should have discussed further before outright declaring that there would be no PvE servers because that declaration has scared off a lot of potential backers. ECO, for example, started as a PvE game with indirect PvP with server-enforced laws, preventing playing from committing actions players deem illegal (i.e., if the law says you can kill only three deer, you won’t be able to even pull the trigger on deer #4) and it received government testing with the system in place, so I trust it’s doable. When ECO reached the appropriate stretch goal, the developer added the option to add PvP options, allowing the laws to be broken on designated servers.

If Elyria is doing the same thing, as hinted in with the blacklisting of players from property and needing the proper papers to commit property damage, Soulbound needs to be clear about this immediately, even if it’s just an idea they’re tossing around. The contracts system is a step in the right direction, but easy to abuse (as I’ll address later). However, if these actions are just “illegal,” then I can’t see much of a benefit.

Part of this has to do with how people have abused systems like bounty hunting in previous games, like Wizardry Online and Star Wars Galaxies. Criminals’ friends simply helped clear each others’ names, real life or in-game costs be damned. If player houses are difficult to break into, the criminal can just run to an innocent friend’s home to escape. If houses are easy to break into, the innocent player population is the one that suffers the most, while griefers will loot their stuff by the sack-full. I say all this not to say that the game will be a failure because I wouldn’t put money into it if I believed that. I say this because I want to temper people’s expectations. In sum, Chronicles of Elyria will most likely end up like the original Darkfall, gaining a core following that slowly bleeds as the company is forced to make decisions to attract an audience long after critical mistakes have been made (unless the user experience designer hired by the next stretch goal has a lot of research experience and can show the team just how many times many of these systems have been tried and ultimate failed). I say all this not to say that the game will be a failure because I wouldn’t put money into it if I believed that. I say this because I want to temper people’s expectations. The FFA PvP community has seen this same song and dance in the past and should know that any improvement we see will be incremental rather than revolutionary.

chroniclesofelyria_stretchgoals

Image edited to highlight positions needed to full develop the dream game. Original image here. The campaign, the dreamers, and the team

Let me be clear: I very much respect the current devs at Soulbound for attempting to make Chronicles of Elyria. I don’t believe they are intentionally misleading players for money. (I’ve already pledged to give them some myself.) While I can (and hopefully will be!) proven wrong in the coming days/weeks/months/years, we need to be realistic about the current information while the Kickstarter’s still open.

One thing to keep an eye on is that the team is still trying to attract talent. It’s understandable, but with so many stretch goals being based on programmers, that’s a serious concern since the team has very few, and we know from watching Camelot Unchained that good programmers are not easy to come by.

The in-development-for-10-years Soulborn/Proteus engine in theory can do cool things, but on a massive level it’s probably impractical — and that’s likely why we’ve seen no demo of a semi-persistent, playable world for Elyria, just tech features and combat. Unless the team somehow thinks showing a working alpha build of the world would scare away potential backers or investors (which is probably the scarier option), it should be shown. That means general PvE will be rather slow and based on survival gameplay like eating and finding shelter, which the current game climate has plenty of already.

The team may have experience with games, but it doesn’t have any major MMO experience. This is also its first game as a team. All of that sent up red flags when the devs began talking about their game prior to their Kickstarter campaign. Project Gorgon had an alpha build and an experienced MMO developer but still failed to get funded two times! (However, the fact that Soulbound Studios wanted to wait for more stable income and some kind of demo is part of made me take note of it, and I wasn’t disappointed.)

The KS campaign started off very well. Like Crowfall’s, Elyria’s campaign at least started well-grounded. They also both proposed something quite basic to (hopefully) shake things up, with Crowfall embracing what I’d consider a wise use of instancing and Elyria attaching a real cost (cash or game currency) to death. Though the selling of land is, in many ways, buy-to-win when talking about generational games focused on territory conquest, as someone who’s played these types of MMOs, I can tell you that without real player support, it’s usually pretty easy to take land. Having land and fame paints a target on your back that most people, including me, often don’t want to deal with every time they log in. I see it as a necessary evil for the game, perhaps more so than Crowfall’s taxless instanced land for high-paying backers.

While both games released public information and teasers before opening their campaign, soon after hitting about the halfway mark, Elyria’s team gave matter-of-fact reasoning behind why it had so few physical rewards and times when it didn’t listen to its community based on financial realities. Soulbound devs discussed cut features they’d been including in developer journals and how they might bring these back in. I know I speak for a lot of wary gamers when I say I honestly appreciated this sort of communication, and it’s one of the things that made me want to give the team more money.

The fun of getting lost, being upset, and getting annoyed. Survival games and the permadeath problem

However, inexperience has come up several times with the team. For example, permadeath is a very controversial feature and has proven to be difficult to implement correctly, but Soulbound is plunging onward. I could fill at least a paragraph with names of upcoming online games using permadeath, but it’s more illustrative to see what’s actually been done. Wizardry Online has done it, as did Star Wars Galaxies with the game-breaking Jedi. Clearly there is a market for it, and I’ll admit that, in some ways, I’m part of that market. However, Wizardry shut down for myriad reasons, and SWG did away with the system because it scared away too many mainstream gamers. In fact, Vladimir Piskunov of another niche MMO in development, Life is Feudal, has included a lot of the same features Elyria is boasting (FFA PvP, survival mechanics, players staying online when logged out, and tunneling is a big one they’re working on), but specifically said that permadeath isn’t currently part of the plan. His reason? Having players able to die while offline brings in a big temptation for not only griefing but hacking, which I’ve already hinted at. It plagues the the survival genre, and including several of these mechanics in an MMO could prove to undo all the other interesting and unique features of the game.

As someone who’s explored the survival genre for Massively from the start, I can see the problem. These games, while mostly in alpha still, are loaded with hackers, and it’s very common to wake up alone in the wilderness because your home was destroyed in the middle of the night. This is without permadeath, but still losing all your items, plus your home. Soulbound would need to address offline killings hard and fast to make a slow-burn soft permadeath like Elyria’s not only more acceptable but also less common.

While the studio keeps trying to assure fans that there are areas that are mostly safe in the game world, it’s important to remember that the current plan is for it to take just 10 minutes to make a hole in a wall with a mundane item. Anyone with experience in the survival genre can tell you that’s nothing, and anyone who played territory games like Darkfall knows that it’s pretty easy to ruin a town during a 4 a.m. raid. If attacking player structures without the proper writ is possible at all, it will be abused. elyrianotemissed

Image edited for focusing purposes. Original comment located here. Bounty systems do not work

The end result of Wizardry’s permadeath system — with flagging and bounties for murderers — was still that highbies murdered lowbies for kicks and giggles, even in newbie dungeons and spawn points. While I’m personally a fan of the concept of a bounty system in an MMORPG, the fact is that not a single one actually works to prevent griefing — not one. A cynic might say that’s because bounties aren’t actually implemented to discourage griefers but to mollify victims. I attempted several bounties in SWG, but most of my marks hid in private houses I had no access to and/or waited for a friend to come and collect a bounty against them.

So how would Elyria balance it? If a home is too easy to access, both the criminal and the innocent are at risk. Too safe, and the criminal can more easily commit crimes and avoid punishment. Permadeath may sway players from committing crimes, but potentially increase the number of players trying to trick their fellow player into making themselves vulnerable to attack. As much as I love these concepts, PvP is a hard act to juggle, and being unaware of (or being in denial about?) past failures covered by even mainstream sites like Kotaku doesn’t inspire hope.

It’s nice that the three-month Exposition phase will have PvP on for only a month or less, but how much PvP testing will there be before then? Is Soulbound inviting big PvP and anti-PvP guilds to help test the system? Will there be a public open beta so developers can see how normal players and griefers can abuse their systems before paying backers lose kingdoms because of hackers? Will Soulbound intervene at all in player affairs when a system clearly has an exploitable loophole it missed?

I’m rooting for the team to pull through, but I’ve seen a lot of failures in the “kingdom PvP MMO” genre. I need more than words at this point. I need evidence of a cohesive product and a team that understands its genre, and I don’t yet feel confident in either of these to part with a large sum of money.

chroniclesofelyria_contract History repeating

“Look around and realize that no one builds a gankbox twice. You put Shadowbane and UO guys together and they build Crowfall, not Shadowbane II.” -MOP Editor-in-Chief Bree Royce

I’ve been talking to the MOP staff about Elyria a lot lately. There’s certainly mixed feelings, but one thing we keep coming back to is that, for all the shiny stuff being promised, very little beyond the death penalty is new. Everything we’re seeing has been promised to us — PvEers and PvPers alike — multiple times, even in the early years of the genre. Look at the game’s pitch: “Epic story with aging and death.” So this is Mabinogi meets SWTOR with permadeath? (Actually, I’d play that game too.)

Let’s get down to what probably attracts most people to this game: a generational, story-based MMO. That should be the hook here, not Princess Bride online. I think being able to show that and offer it to the masses would make the project easier to believe in. Having it as the inverse of mainstream MMOs, a PvP game with an option to be PvE, would go far if it were presented to the community in the right way.

The game’s aiming for an ultra niche audience by screaming story story story while pushing for FFA PvP, when FFA survival PvP is already a super-saturated market that’s constantly being let down. By ignoring non-PvP fans and not making clear, hard statements about the purposed severity of the punishment system, the game, I worry, will struggle for funds and make design choices based on that. The devs clearly know this given their budget, and while it’s admirable that they want to do their own thing, it makes the project that much riskier. I’ve seen several people comment about not usually being into PvP but wanting to give this a shot, but I saw the same with ArcheAge, a game that seemed reasonable to me at the time but sadly has had to change direction to stay afloat. I’m hoping Elyria will avoid the same fate, and I believe it will do well enough to reach launch, but past experience is keeping my expectations rather earthbound.


6/21/2017 6:38:51 PM #1

It old bruh.

I think he brings up fair concerns as well as brought up things I failed to think about, but in the end no one can see the future and we will just have to see where the game goes.


Friend Code: 1BD8F6

6/21/2017 7:08:11 PM #2

Never read the article before until now. Good read.

He misses a few things (cash shops will never be in due to a closed finite economy) but largely i think i mirror his sentiment: cautious optimism mixed with jaded cynicism.

I believe a lot will be cut from CoE, but of the core and foundational features this game is being based around (skill based open world pvp sandbox with permadeath and consequences for actions), I would be happy with what remains after CoE tightens its belt.

There is a lot of unchecked daydreaming on this forum about features alluded to or never explicitly stated, and a cold splash of reality would do some good around here.

Much like the articles author, I want CoE to succeed and thrive, but to me, that means being realistic with scope and expectation.

6/21/2017 7:27:48 PM #3

Bit wordy isn't it, but generally well founded. The release date he was clearly wrong on - it won't release this year. In my opinion there's no doubt that both the release date and some features will slip. But I suspect it will be more the release date gets pushed back to get the features in rather than features getting cut to release sooner as the post suggests.

I do agree that the PvP/Griefing balance with the rest of the game isa big concern, probably the biggest along with whether they can ever get it all done.

I think it's fair to say that if you're trying to break the mould, there will be concerns whatever you do.


6/21/2017 10:53:40 PM #4

It's like many articles out there on the Internet, about a great many topics. People have an individual way of seeing things and they present them with varying degrees of how right they think they are (or could be), and how many people even read them. For mine, the future is quite open. People can certainly have guesses at it, but that's all they are.

My strongest recommendation to people is follow the development of the game in the present and not dwell on what someone was worried about a year or more ago.


FWIW, I was KS Backer #21 and wanted nothing but the best for this game.

6/22/2017 4:34:16 AM #5

A very dated view indeed. But let's have a go at it.

Posted By Solem article by Author Andrew Ross

Source: massive overpowered Author Andrew Ross.

[...] While Elyria has a lot going for it, I’ve noticed recently that the developers and some fans might have gotten a little over excited since hitting their funding goal, and I’ve seen people comment about pulling out their funds because of this. The team recently released some answers to some good questions on Reddit, but some answers still feel a bit too optimistic. Maybe it’s time we bring things back down to Earth.

People who've been part of the community for a longer period of time will have seen lots of different reactions to the game already:

  • Curious and excited
  • Excited and dreamy without limits
  • Sceptical and jaded
  • Toxic and ill-informed
  • and many more

And while one end of the scale can be just as destructive as the other, we've also seen people adjusting or rightout changing their opinion over time.
And as new people join the community and go through a process of getting to know the concepts of CoE similar to when we did back then, it's not surprising that we always see a mix of all of those point of views.
However, the bigger the community grows at faster paces as it becomes more popular, the more difficult it is to contain misinformation and creativity that appears to go well beyond the original idea for the game or turns it too fuzzy to identify. That seems to be where the author is coming from and I do understand that it's an element of in-development games that show a lot more to the public than what people have been used to in the past for the most part.


Posted By Solem article by Author Andrew Ross

My PvP preferences

A lot of people who write criticisms about FFA and PvP are often questioned about their past, so let me present my PK resume: [...] I’ve got no time to stare up into the sky and dream about what might work when there’s plenty of plotting and ganking down here on earth.

From those two paragraphs we can tell that the author has developed a very specific definition to what PvP is and has to be like, but I'll get back to that later.


Posted By Solem article by Author Andrew Ross

elyria Setting realistic expectations

[...] Though the team has some big company names on its resume, they’re ultimately untested in the MMO world, and realistically, they don’t have the money or the man-power to pull off the vision they’ve been selling more since reaching their $900k goal. I do feel this team was more realistic about what it was doing at the start, and that’s the game I’m supporting.

From the looks of it, this article has been written during the kickstarter campain in May 2016. At that time we've had the 17th Design Journal out. Features that have been covered abrasively were the following:

  • Soulborn Engine
  • Design pillars
  • Chat system
  • IP system
  • Soul system
  • Destiny, achievements, soulmates
  • Time passage, aging, OPCs
  • 3 variants of 'death'
  • Loot system
  • Families & Family selection
  • Character customization & Bloodlines
  • Contract system & Bounty system
  • Character roles & Skill advancement design
  • Crafting professions
  • Map system with cartography, naming and navigation
  • Equipment and inventory system
  • Identities, disguises and reputation, fame & gossip system
  • Technology & research, player defined guilds and schools
  • Land ownership, modular player house design & construction
  • Degree of management for housing
  • Bolstering & Earn-To-Play & SP

Now, I don't quite understand how at that time one would think the design plans were 'more realistic' than what we've got during kickstarter (May) which was 'Kingdom & Land Management'.
Anyway, he was mentioning that SbS wasn't up to the task having no expertise in the MMO market, when in fact they had. Right now they've got a lot more people who've joined the team and aren't all new to MMO development either.


Posted By Solem article by Author Andrew Ross

For those having trouble managing their hype for this game, I’m here to splash some cold water in the form of history lessons from past “revolutionary” games, mostly of the PvP nature. So let’s take a look at what’s been promised, how those features have gone awry in the past, and what we’re actually likely to get.

I think it's healthy to not go overboard as well, but in my opinion the outlook drove the pessimism too far.
The analytical opening at the end of this paragraph would look a lot more promising if he had not stated right away that he's very certain of how everything will turn out. Because neither has he got insider information from the company (so it isn't an announcement) nor does he clearly seperate the follwing two extreme:

  • How much potential there is if SbS pulls this off in a good way.
  • How devistatingly hard the game and developers would fail in his opinion.

This excludes any kind of middle ground from the presentation right away - a method I'm not a fan of personally. Keep this in mind when looking at the next paragraphs on how everything has to go horribly wrong:


Posted By Solem article by Author Andrew Ross

Launch

I fully expect Chronicles of Elyria to launch by 2018 as planned, but that will probably still be too early. It’s following Darkfall’s trajectory: There will be delays, there will be features cut, and it will be rough.

It's not uncommon for major titles and games in the MMO genre in general to be delayed, because they tend to demand a lot of resources. However, outright implying a logical connection to a title, naming it and furthermore concluding features will be cut - because apparently those two are that similar in so many ways without reasoning? - I've got to say this isn't even constructive criticism, but transitions into, albeit rather weird, bashing.
And from the general vibe I get from the article, the author doesn't even want to do that. The goal seems to aim at preventing major damage of disappointment within the community and for himself by dampening the hype. Though, this isn't a good way to do that in my opinion.

Setting realistic expectations is good.
Being optimistic about the future of the game is good. Stating positive criticism with ideas for solutions is good. Turning all of that into the opposite isn't.


Posted By Solem article by Author Andrew Ross

The game will include its rough-looking combat (at least one MMO reviewer could see some promise in it). Permadeath will make it in; it’s a core feature, after all. I’m expecting spirit runs, maybe family members acting as a kind of radar and “spawn point” for newbies, limiting some of their character creation options, and possibly acting in some way to learn abilities after creation, either directly through players or family NPCs as a kind of “faction” to get rep with.

Let's hold on there for a couple of minutes.
Families has always been a core feature to the game. Ever since the very early DJ that was released on it. SbS has been very clear about how integral families will be to the game. Therefore, even at that time, I wouldn't had considered it to be cutt in any way. Actually, many features are interconnected and therefore tweaking or removing one would affect the other ones greatly and require even more changes.

But as we will see with the rest of the article, while the author has got a lot of experience in playing games over many years, he doesn't have got a good grasp on which features are easy to implement and which are a lot harder to do.


Posted By Solem article by Author Andrew Ross

Crafting

Basic crafting will probably make it, but I don’t know about any Guitar Hero style barding. That’s important because crafting helps build PvE communities and helps separate MMOs from the FPS scene.

Remember when somewhere at the top of my post I've written about the author's point of view on PvP? What is more, it shows here that his point of view on what the core of CoE will be like is very much set in stone: A game that is all about PvP and harsh survival without safe zones, whereas crafting and "PvE" components look very much secondary to him.

When most features announced at that point of time have not been about combat, one could assume that it's not the main feature of the game. Especially when the business model encourages safe play crafting in cities and there's been lengthly journals on non-combat activities.
To me it looks like he's all about the PvP combat in the game and therefore - internally, maybe subconsciously - is quick to persuade people and himself of that very idea.
While we know that PvP can have many forms other than combat in CoE today, it might have been less obvious at that point of time, but not to that degree in my opinion.

I'll only highlight a certain part of the next paragraph:


Posted By Solem article by Author Andrew Ross

[...] Boring crafting that’s easy to master can kill a game’s population, and it’s something I noticed a bit of in Darkfall before its 2011 crafting update, but Elyria may pull off attaching recipes to special NPCs for flavor. Players being able to teach each other recipes through some in-game UI may make it to launch if the crafting community stays vocal enough.

Here only highlighting two aspects:

  • Apparently crafting is only important to keep the population of the PvP combat game he wants to play high.
  • The crafting community has to stay vocal not to be burried below the mass of combat oriented players.

Where the first deduction clearly shows why he's somewhat biased in what features he sees to be implemented at launch and which not, the second deduction seems to be based on yet another personal point of view.
Actually it's quite astounding that because of the level of possibilities to non-combat oriented play style (mainly due to the contract system), there might actually be a majority of the so-called "PvE players" who frankly will compete against each other in non-combat PvP.


Posted By Solem article by Author Andrew Ross

But none of the planned crafting has gone through the full design phase, and at least the term “minigame” is out. Reinventing crafting is not a small thing — Camelot Unchained is the perfect example for how challenging it can be. And maybe I’m too optimistic, but I don’t feel the game can use traditional WoW-style, drag-and-drop crafting without serious backlash, and the rest of the systems described early on will probably be seen as more expendable.

The very reason of scraping the minigame idea was to revise and improve on those player experiences.
As he seems to assume the same, his pessimistic outlook for crafting at launch would imply he either hopes combat won't suffer for crafting or that he's not confident in the developers to pull off both at a good quality.
Personally I have got a lot of faith in not only the competence of SbS but also in their diligence and standard they want to meet - especially for their first product.


Posted By Solem article by Author Andrew Ross

Family

Family, for all its hype, probably will end up being a system that enables players to summon each other, share resources, “sense” each other on a simple radar, and have some kind of family chat.

There's so much in here in conflict with the main design principles for CoE:

  • Summoning as in being trackable by family members when you've died: Yes. Summoning aka teleporting you or other family members into certain locations: Not at all, as it would be in great conflict with not only the survival system and the feel of the world, or law enforcement and other aspects of the game, but because it goes very badly with the spatial location property the SpatialOS platform uses to run the server in the cloud.
    Though, one has to be fair to say the partnership with Improbable hasn't been announced until 1 month after the kickstarter campaign.
  • Sense each other on a radar: Apart from finding where a spirit walking member of the family would be at - radars aren't part of the features for CoE. However, we might see a sensory map some day after launch - probably very much different to a radar that spans kilometers in radius.
  • Family chat was actually confirmed.

Posted By Solem article by Author Andrew Ross

The soul system sounds cool, but the work involved sounds heavy.

The implementation of a functional soul system is not a lot of work. Tweaking it to be just right however is.


Posted By Solem article by Author Andrew Ross

[...] what Elyria is proposing is something I eagerly want, but I worry about its implementation. I’m sure they [Edit: families] can get similar appearances, spawn points, and maybe inheritable classes/stats down. The technology is available in singleplayer games, but since the days of Horizons/Istaria, we’ve seen these features fail to land in MMOs till long after the singleplayer/small-scale multiplayer community is done with them.

This is important because Istaria was a game that, at the time, sounded quite similar to Elyria in many ways: families, FFA PvP, discoverable player skill options (in the form of races), an ever-changing world, and more. What we got was a PvE crafting game with dragons, flight, local banking/auctions, and some unique world building/community events. Not bad, but a far, far cry from the original promise. It’s why anything in Elyria that sounds new or that is rarely done should be suspect beyond payment models.

Now here we go again creating an interesting link between a game called 'Istaria: Chronicles of the Gifted' from 2003 with CoE in development at 2016 (at that time). With the big difference that CoE has got crowdfunding during the development phase in addition to steady income after launch, whereas Istaria is free2play with a ~$9/month subscription model which only generates funds after launch.
Then there are different developer teams on the two titles, with a technology gap of 13 years (which is significant) and yet no clue as to or solid of a reason for why this link between the two should grant us any insight on the future of CoE. Especially given that the author puts emphasis on how the goals over a decade ago and now are, according to him, supposed to be somewhat the same - not much higher.


Posted By Solem article by Author Andrew Ross

Unfamilied wards of the state, with or without money, will probably launch because the developers seem to love the idea. However, this is another reason why the family system may not end up as powerful as its being described, since many people will probably want to start this way and complain about feeling the sting before wandering off to a new game.

The way CoE will be different to many traditional MMOs we've grown used to will most certainly not make for a smooth transition. And although we should have a look at this during Alpha and Beta, I'm very optimistic about this change in the genre in the long term.
As mentioned earlier, the family system doesn't look like a feature to be cut nor reduced.


Posted By Solem article by Author Andrew Ross

Housing and land

The world will certainly have enough room for everyone to own a house, but part of that will be due to the FFA PvP nature of the game.

Funny how without the announcement of partnership with Improbable for the SpatialOS platform, to create a 256km by 128km world map with houses all over the place seems to appear very certain to the author whereas other feature mentioned before such as families and souls were very much in question.

There seems to be the pattern that anything that has been done to a lesser degree in games released at that time already is reason enough to make it completley feasible, but any innovative idea for a system - be it as small as one could choose - would be deemed impossible to pull off.


Posted By Solem article by Author Andrew Ross

[...] A game focusing on story and PvP can put exploration bonuses on the backburner. I’ve seen it done plenty of times. [...] Should the system [Edit: of naming places]make it, though, I have a feeling it won’t be utilized quite as intensely as the team would like except by the most political players.

Yet again CoE is more than the sum of it's concepts. They are to work hand in hand in order to create a rich experience that goes beyond an isolated feature.
But this makes it also more difficult to grasp and most certainly not suitable for this kind of litteral analysis which looks at the concepts as if the other were not around.


Posted By Solem article by Author Andrew Ross

NPC AI

NPCs in an MMO with their own goals tend to be few and far in between. Again, UO had it in testing and cut it, but I believe Black Desert Online has it. We’ve heard this feature before, and it sounds possible, but I’m remaining cautious about how it may turn out. In a PvP-focused game, it may just be cut as it has been in the past.

It's a good idea to be cautious about it I guess, but as for the general development, the attitude as outlined above seems to work best for me.
Yet again we see the author's focus on cutting non-combat features for the sake of combat PvP features - although I expect combat PvP in CoE to feel very different to traditional MMOs that focus on that type of combat. It's not as isolated of an activity in my opinion.


Posted By Solem article by Author Andrew Ross

elyria The importance of PvE in a PvP game

[...] PvE, in general, will probably end up rather static. Remember, we’ve been hearing about non-static respawns since the pre-launch days of Ultima Online. Players just kill stuff. The only demo we have is PvP at the moment, and while there’s supposed to be a really cool engine capable of great things in development for 10 years or so, we probably won’t see it during the Kickstarter. Most of what’s said sounds like it relies on players to be driving action while the engine drives some kind of change. Not seeing that in demos at the time of the Kickstarter makes this a bit suspect, but again, good crafting can help alleviate this.

Expanding his pessimistic point of view (cf. "PvE, in general, will probably end up rather static.") for no reason instead of having faith in the developers or encouraging them, the attitude of calling the non-existence of a Soulborn Engine demo suspicious and in the same sentence balancing that feature set with that of crafting appears to be strange to say the least.
Not to care much about crafting or story telling is alright, but aren't there other survival and PvP games out there when one isn't after the overall experience CoE wants to offer?


Posted By Solem article by Author Andrew Ross

I think, for many people, the issue with Chronicles of Elyria is that, like many other PvP games before it (Crowfall, Revival, Embers of Caerus…), it’s boasting a unique interplay of PvE with PvP to push MMO narration in a meaningful way that has seldom been served to the MMO community since Asheron’s Call (though maybe Guild Wars 2’s Cutthroat Politics event is a more recent example). The problem is that we’re promised this a lot, but it rarely actually happens. EverQuest Next (RIP) generated so much hype because it was going to carve out space for stories based on how the playerbase would interact with it. Again, this is something GW2 aimed for its dynamic events, but as NPCs had a leash to prevent them actually making real progress, the feature only proved an acceptable alternative to yellow ! marks as a source of experience gains, and to show that PvE players need something more.

This was why ArcheAge was so appealing during beta to me as a PvP player. One thing that made PvP games like EVE and Darkfall work or fail was whether they also created an interesting experience for PvE players beyond being victims. Prior to its western launch, AA was offering meaningful crafting, non-instanced player housing, player-made factions, dynamic world building/farming, and more. It also had PvP, largely on a third continent, but if you jumped through the right hoops, you’d experience it everywhere, though with bigger consequences (sound familiar?).

Another hand full of linking between games that may have similar features, but cannot be directly compared other than that. Especially not as a fundation of what is possible or impossible for CoE to achieve.


Posted By Solem article by Author Andrew Ross

I thought that if the PvE players needed to be in a PvP setting to experience something cool, like massive wars, they’d flock to the game. In some ways, I still do. Asheron’s Call 1’s Shard of the Herald event happened on a PvE server, not PvP. I was, in short, a PvE pizza delivery boy, as I was too weak to assist in the actual defense but could pass off items to stronger PvP players fighting to keep the shard alive.

This kind of system can work, but it rarely does. Part of the reason for this is that modern MMOs are more focused on giving players ways to increase their stat power. The Shard of the Herald event didn’t do this (it dropped powerful items, but they were randomly generated, and lore knowledge was needed just to find the mob’s location and consequences of killing it) and it’s still a defining moment in MMO history. ArcheAge was set to do something similar, but once the studios dropped permanent item decay and created multiple token systems, it became obvious their system would simply force PvE players into PvP zones. However, this was far into the game’s development, after multiple closed beta tests.

We know that players have got tools to manage their risk of getting killed in the game. Staying safe and having precautions will go a long way.
And while I can see certain resources becoming scarce after some time and fights breaking out over those areas, it's very much wanted by design for interesting conflict.
For "PvE explorers" and "PvE gatherers" paying escorts and guards in those areas would probably still make them generate a suffiently big amount of income, somewhat balancing against the "oh, all PvE gatherers need to be in the zones that are known to be less safe" situation.


Posted By Solem article by Author Andrew Ross

[...] Free-for-all PvP and griefing

This is the elephant in the room.

Considering the survival genre and its current history, I am well aware that griefers and hackers will descend on Elyria as soon as possible, probably far too late for Soulbound to properly address them. Though the studio has someone on staff with “griefer tendencies,” that’s far different from whole guilds who live and breathe it.

While I acknowledge the importance of detecting ways to prevent actual real griefing in the game - as developers and as a community - the lack of faith in any way is stunning. Why would the developers join in on a project that they don't believe they will be able to pull off? There has to be some sort of rational assessment within the dev team and a consensus of what can be done and what cannot. And I'm very satisfied with their skill to differentiate between the two.
Some time in the future I'll post a thread on methods vs griefing for everyone to join in on the discussion. This is one of the fields in development we as a community with lots of experience on the dealing or receiving end can share insights to improve on the robustness of defense vs actual malicious griefing.


Posted By Solem article by Author Andrew Ross

[...] Soulbound recently revealed notes about how griefers are punished, and they won’t be enough, but at least some details give me hope. Anyone who’s casually looked at EVE knows that the bad guys can win, and that’s enough to scare away a lot of players. While that’s not entirely a bad thing, this is a subgenre that’s nicher than niche. I really want to be cautiously optimistic about Elyria’s known punishments:

People who commit crimes are not safe from the game’s multi-death leniency system that helps make sure the sting of death doesn’t sting your wallet too much.
The planned punishment is to lose as much life-time as you take from other players.
Players can refuse to let you into their homes based on your reputation and need proper authority to invade lands. Living in the wilds makes the survival part of the game more difficult.

These are ideas Soulbound probably should have discussed further before outright declaring that there would be no PvE servers because that declaration has scared off a lot of potential backers.

Here the author seems to imply that he knows what the developers and creative minds behind their game as a collective "should had done better" (which is what he thinks is a good idea) and suggests that the studio hasn't thought this through - just because. Community members who have been around for some time have probably had the chance to experience just how much the devs put their work and soul into the making of CoE. They do discuss concerns that are raised and when they see issues they go about solving them in a thoughtful manner, taking into account systems and players involved. When the vision of the game is not to have PvE servers (at least not initially), then it shouldn't be called out to be a 'mistake' right away.
This has to do with the apparently orthogonal visions on what the game will be all about to the author and to the devs.


Posted By Solem article by Author Andrew Ross

ECO, for example, started as a PvE game with indirect PvP with server-enforced laws, preventing playing from committing actions players deem illegal (i.e., if the law says you can kill only three deer, you won’t be able to even pull the trigger on deer #4) and it received government testing with the system in place, so I trust it’s doable. When ECO reached the appropriate stretch goal, the developer added the option to add PvP options, allowing the laws to be broken on designated servers.

If Elyria is doing the same thing, as hinted in with the blacklisting of players from property and needing the proper papers to commit property damage, Soulbound needs to be clear about this immediately, even if it’s just an idea they’re tossing around. The contracts system is a step in the right direction, but easy to abuse (as I’ll address later). However, if these actions are just “illegal,” then I can’t see much of a benefit.

The whole point about the world is that it's ever-changing. Adding a law enforcement system that works by itself to counter griefing as well as in-game crimes is the wrong way to go.
Against both one should introduce tools to make use of in game to go about it. E.g. the bounty system.


Posted By Solem article by Author Andrew Ross

Part of this has to do with how people have abused systems like bounty hunting in previous games, like Wizardry Online and Star Wars Galaxies. Criminals’ friends simply helped clear each others’ names, real life or in-game costs be damned. If player houses are difficult to break into, the criminal can just run to an innocent friend’s home to escape. If houses are easy to break into, the innocent player population is the one that suffers the most, while griefers will loot their stuff by the sack-full.

Simply clearing ones name doesn't work that way. The reason for the spirit loss system we know of right now is to introduce actual adequate consequences to taking risks such as crimes.
I know PvP combat oriented games that allow for reducing one's "kill value" below a relevant threshold by spending currency. It won't be that easy in CoE because it would be adverse to the main design principle of risk, consequence, heroism and change.

One tool against burglary is forensic, one against friends sheltering criminals could be subsequent official hearings at court to reason why one was breaking into someone's house.
And even when one cannot follow the thief, one can still create a bounty token, retrieve the goods and make his life a whole lot more difficult due to other systems such as reputation and fame.

The innocent player only suffers as much as the criminal is willing to risk for himself. It's a tradeoff.


Posted By Solem article by Author Andrew Ross

I say all this not to say that the game will be a failure because I wouldn’t put money into it if I believed that. I say this because I want to temper people’s expectations.

As I've pointed out before: Looks to me like that was his initial intention, but it went into distrust and regression as well as dubious comparisons rather quickly, unfortunately.


Posted By Solem article by Author Andrew Ross

In sum, Chronicles of Elyria will most likely end up like the original Darkfall, gaining a core following that slowly bleeds as the company is forced to make decisions to attract an audience long after critical mistakes have been made (unless the user experience designer hired by the next stretch goal has a lot of research experience and can show the team just how many times many of these systems have been tried and ultimate failed).

Another one of those paragraphs. I'll not repeat.


Posted By Solem article by Author Andrew Ross

I say all this not to say that the game will be a failure because I wouldn’t put money into it if I believed that.

Basically a big part has been about how the author expects CoE to be a failure. On a quick note though: It was never the intention or expectation by SbS to draw litteraly all players to CoE. They're well aware of the fact that CoE has got a specific audience.


Posted By Solem article by Author Andrew Ross

I say this because I want to temper people’s expectations. The FFA PvP community has seen this same song and dance in the past and should know that any improvement we see will be incremental rather than revolutionary.

It is very sad that many people have been hurt in this way and have decided against recovering a positive attitude. All the more reason we need games like CoE to succeed.


Posted By Solem article by Author Andrew Ross

[...] The campaign, the dreamers, and the team

Let me be clear: I very much respect the current devs at Soulbound for attempting to make Chronicles of Elyria. I don’t believe they are intentionally misleading players for money. (I’ve already pledged to give them some myself.) While I can (and hopefully will be!) proven wrong in the coming days/weeks/months/years, we need to be realistic about the current information while the Kickstarter’s still open.

One thing to keep an eye on is that the team is still trying to attract talent. It’s understandable, but with so many stretch goals being based on programmers, that’s a serious concern since the team has very few, and we know from watching Camelot Unchained that good programmers are not easy to come by.

I've already covered this in a paragraph above.


Posted By Solem article by Author Andrew Ross

The in-development-for-10-years Soulborn/Proteus engine in theory can do cool things, but on a massive level it’s probably impractical — and that’s likely why we’ve seen no demo of a semi-persistent, playable world for Elyria, just tech features and combat. Unless the team somehow thinks showing a working alpha build of the world would scare away potential backers or investors (which is probably the scarier option), it should be shown. That means general PvE will be rather slow and based on survival gameplay like eating and finding shelter, which the current game climate has plenty of already.

If he had read the news on the official website about why SbS has considered a kickstarter at that time, he would've found that the big sum of personal financial investment was about to be consumed and further funding was necessary.

However, the smart choice to first work on the design concepts with a two man team on rather low wages and only after kickstarter with enough funds for a bigger team expanding on that and going into real production later on, shows just how unreasonable it would be to have any large scale demo other than the one about aging during kickstarter. Even more so as they've been reaching out to Improbable for getting the large scale running shortly after kickstarter has ended. It's much easier to convince people when you can show that there are prosepctive buyers to the idea.


Posted By Solem article by Author Andrew Ross

The team may have experience with games, but it doesn’t have any major MMO experience. This is also its first game as a team. All of that sent up red flags when the devs began talking about their game prior to their Kickstarter campaign. Project Gorgon had an alpha build and an experienced MMO developer but still failed to get funded two times! (However, the fact that Soulbound Studios wanted to wait for more stable income and some kind of demo is part of made me take note of it, and I wasn’t disappointed.)

The KS campaign started off very well. Like Crowfall’s, Elyria’s campaign at least started well-grounded. They also both proposed something quite basic to (hopefully) shake things up, with Crowfall embracing what I’d consider a wise use of instancing and Elyria attaching a real cost (cash or game currency) to death. Though the selling of land is, in many ways, buy-to-win when talking about generational games focused on territory conquest, as someone who’s played these types of MMOs, I can tell you that without real player support, it’s usually pretty easy to take land. Having land and fame paints a target on your back that most people, including me, often don’t want to deal with every time they log in. I see it as a necessary evil for the game, perhaps more so than Crowfall’s taxless instanced land for high-paying backers.

While both games released public information and teasers before opening their campaign, soon after hitting about the halfway mark, Elyria’s team gave matter-of-fact reasoning behind why it had so few physical rewards and times when it didn’t listen to its community based on financial realities. Soulbound devs discussed cut features they’d been including in developer journals and how they might bring these back in. I know I speak for a lot of wary gamers when I say I honestly appreciated this sort of communication, and it’s one of the things that made me want to give the team more money.

The developers have got enough experience in my opinion - especially being partnered with Improbable to work on the network coding together.

And I agree that many people, including I, have been convinced the forthcoming, open, passionate and reasoned demeanor of SbS.


Posted By Solem article by Author Andrew Ross

The fun of getting lost, being upset, and getting annoyed. Survival games and the permadeath problem

However, inexperience has come up several times with the team. For example, permadeath is a very controversial feature and has proven to be difficult to implement correctly, but Soulbound is plunging onward. I could fill at least a paragraph with names of upcoming online games using permadeath, but it’s more illustrative to see what’s actually been done. Wizardry Online has done it, as did Star Wars Galaxies with the game-breaking Jedi. Clearly there is a market for it, and I’ll admit that, in some ways, I’m part of that market. However, Wizardry shut down for myriad reasons, and SWG did away with the system because it scared away too many mainstream gamers. In fact, Vladimir Piskunov of another niche MMO in development, Life is Feudal, has included a lot of the same features Elyria is boasting (FFA PvP, survival mechanics, players staying online when logged out, and tunneling is a big one they’re working on), but specifically said that permadeath isn’t currently part of the plan. His reason? Having players able to die while offline brings in a big temptation for not only griefing but hacking, which I’ve already hinted at. It plagues the the survival genre, and including several of these mechanics in an MMO could prove to undo all the other interesting and unique features of the game.

As someone who’s explored the survival genre for Massively from the start, I can see the problem. These games, while mostly in alpha still, are loaded with hackers, and it’s very common to wake up alone in the wilderness because your home was destroyed in the middle of the night. This is without permadeath, but still losing all your items, plus your home. Soulbound would need to address offline killings hard and fast to make a slow-burn soft permadeath like Elyria’s not only more acceptable but also less common.

While the studio keeps trying to assure fans that there are areas that are mostly safe in the game world, it’s important to remember that the current plan is for it to take just 10 minutes to make a hole in a wall with a mundane item. Anyone with experience in the survival genre can tell you that’s nothing, and anyone who played territory games like Darkfall knows that it’s pretty easy to ruin a town during a 4 a.m. raid. If attacking player structures without the proper writ is possible at all, it will be abused.

As the author mentions here, perma death systems are for niche products. And SbS is and has been fully aware of that but changing the integral system of the game that's connected to many feature sets in the game as well as lore, just to get more money is not the goal. They want to create the game they want to be playing in the future and perma death is part of that.
It's a big difference to some larger game studios that are more focused on the order of revenue. I would assume SbS would be happy to earn more money, but to keep up the studio and keep developing the games they love with a dedicated community is a lot more value to them than earning 20-40% more money per pay check.

Regarding destroying buildings in CoE: It may not have been announced at that point in time yet, but it was changed to only siege equipment being able to destroy buildings.
The idea is to make destroying a build just about as costly in terms of effort and resources as it would take to create it.
While it's not realistic to have it this way, it's one of the important changes one has to make to shut down excessive griefing.

As for hacking attempts it will be very much more difficult to hack this game as it operates in the cloud distributed over many machines with changing workers¹ that can be woken and put to sleep as well as reassigned by the management system.

¹ An abstract in the SpatialOS platform that is used for operating objects and events within a dynamically changing area on the map using a set of resources such as e.g. CPU time.


Posted By Solem article by Author Andrew Ross

[...] Bounty systems do not work

The end result of Wizardry’s permadeath system — with flagging and bounties for murderers — was still that highbies murdered lowbies for kicks and giggles, even in newbie dungeons and spawn points. While I’m personally a fan of the concept of a bounty system in an MMORPG, the fact is that not a single one actually works to prevent griefing — not one. A cynic might say that’s because bounties aren’t actually implemented to discourage griefers but to mollify victims. I attempted several bounties in SWG, but most of my marks hid in private houses I had no access to and/or waited for a friend to come and collect a bounty against them.

So how would Elyria balance it? If a home is too easy to access, both the criminal and the innocent are at risk. Too safe, and the criminal can more easily commit crimes and avoid punishment. Permadeath may sway players from committing crimes, but potentially increase the number of players trying to trick their fellow player into making themselves vulnerable to attack. As much as I love these concepts, PvP is a hard act to juggle, and being unaware of (or being in denial about?) past failures covered by even mainstream sites like Kotaku doesn’t inspire hope.

Bounty tokens in CoE will probably allow for breaking into people's houses to retrieve at their own expenses. And since there's also spirit loss for murderers, I see the bounty system in a very different light than what I know from other games. Also note that the author disregards the possibility of SbS fleshing out and tweaking the bounty system to work at least somewhat well in practice before launch.


Posted By Solem article by Author Andrew Ross

It’s nice that the three-month Exposition phase will have PvP on for only a month or less, but how much PvP testing will there be before then? Is Soulbound inviting big PvP and anti-PvP guilds to help test the system? Will there be a public open beta so developers can see how normal players and griefers can abuse their systems before paying backers lose kingdoms because of hackers? Will Soulbound intervene at all in player affairs when a system clearly has an exploitable loophole it missed?

Truely exploitable loopholes that totally break the game will be patched, whereas exploits that are advantageous but not game breaking will probably remain, since the motto is equality but not equitability. Life in CoE isn't fair but interesting.


Posted By Solem article by Author Andrew Ross

I’m rooting for the team to pull through, but I’ve seen a lot of failures in the “kingdom PvP MMO” genre. I need more than words at this point. I need evidence of a cohesive product and a team that understands its genre, and I don’t yet feel confident in either of these to part with a large sum of money.

Personally, I've seen a lot of knowledge and expertise from the developers regarding game design. Interesting to see the author has got a different opinion.


Posted By Solem article by Author Andrew Ross

chroniclesofelyria_contract History repeating

“Look around and realize that no one builds a gankbox twice. You put Shadowbane and UO guys together and they build Crowfall, not Shadowbane II.” -MOP Editor-in-Chief Bree Royce

I’ve been talking to the MOP staff about Elyria a lot lately. There’s certainly mixed feelings, but one thing we keep coming back to is that, for all the shiny stuff being promised, very little beyond the death penalty is new. Everything we’re seeing has been promised to us — PvEers and PvPers alike — multiple times, even in the early years of the genre. Look at the game’s pitch: “Epic story with aging and death.” So this is Mabinogi meets SWTOR with permadeath? (Actually, I’d play that game too.)

Right, a lot has been promised before when

  • there was not the technology and tools to pull it off more easily
  • the companies didn't have a partner with a $2 billion+ software backed
  • those games have been in design for probably a lot shorter of a time period before going into production
  • many of those game studios decided against finishing a product in that fashion because higher revenue became more important than the vision
  • etc.

Posted By Solem article by Author Andrew Ross

Let’s get down to what probably attracts most people to this game: a generational, story-based MMO. That should be the hook here, not Princess Bride online. I think being able to show that and offer it to the masses would make the project easier to believe in. Having it as the inverse of mainstream MMOs, a PvP game with an option to be PvE, would go far if it were presented to the community in the right way.

The game’s aiming for an ultra niche audience by screaming story story story while pushing for FFA PvP, when FFA survival PvP is already a super-saturated market that’s constantly being let down. By ignoring non-PvP fans and not making clear, hard statements about the purposed severity of the punishment system, the game, I worry, will struggle for funds and make design choices based on that. The devs clearly know this given their budget, and while it’s admirable that they want to do their own thing, it makes the project that much riskier. I’ve seen several people comment about not usually being into PvP but wanting to give this a shot, but I saw the same with ArcheAge, a game that seemed reasonable to me at the time but sadly has had to change direction to stay afloat. I’m hoping Elyria will avoid the same fate, and I believe it will do well enough to reach launch, but past experience is keeping my expectations rather earthbound.

Again: Nothing wrong about being 'earthbound', but better don't fall over into the other extreme.
I agree that CoE is kind of a niche game and maybe it will become more widely popular some time, but I'm in favour of SbS not twisting their vision of the game to cater to a greater audience.

As for funds, from our point of view now over a year later, it has turned out very well. We are close to $3 million on the store ticker and I see new faces on the forums on a regular basis. People who share a longing for a game that's different than what we're offered on the market right now.

TL;DR:

Even considering that the article has been written during early kickstarter last year, I get the impression that the author is biased on how the game 'has' to be like and what 'needs' to be changed, while at the same time disregarding any possibilities for the devs to make reasonable choices.
This very lack of faith combined with strange methods to incorporate unrelated games with the discussion and not providing solid reasoning for doing so, is something I personally can understand where it comes from but do dislike and have felt the necessarity to respond to per paragraph.

That's my take on. Happy to read more opinions on this topic.


6/22/2017 10:39:40 AM #6

Thanks a lot for your opinion MoonChaser!

Im new to COE and wanted some inside opinion from someone who is here longer that me, and maybe can fade some of the articels concerns.

You did very well!! Thanks again.

I will be still Earthgrounded, but you answer gives me some more hope.

In general I have still the feeling tough, that Soulbound ist kinda overloading with functions. And iam not speaking about the bigger function like permadeath etc. I dont see to much trouble here. But they want to add a shere mass of details as an example:

-Animals will act differently depending which tripe will be in front of them -You can convince NPC to belive in you Relgion? - etc. etc. so many details...

I have the fear that they will lose thereself in this exaggerated level of detail

What do you think?


6/22/2017 11:02:32 AM #7

Posted By Solem at 06:39 AM - Thu Jun 22 2017

Thanks a lot for your opinion MoonChaser!

Im new to COE and wanted some inside opinion from someone who is here longer that me, and maybe can fade some of the articels concerns.

You did very well!! Thanks again.

I will be still Earthgrounded, but you answer gives me some more hope.

In general I have still the feeling tough, that Soulbound ist kinda overloading with functions. And iam not speaking about the bigger function like permadeath etc. I dont see to much trouble here. But they want to add a shere mass of details as an example:

-Animals will act differently depending which tripe will be in front of them -You can convince NPC to belive in you Relgion? - etc. etc. so many details...

I have the fear that they will lose thereself in this exaggerated level of detail

What do you think?

I think you're thinking about it too much and fell in a rabbit hole.

Just wait and see where the game goes if your a critic. Talking about hypotheticals when you have no control of its development is kind of a waste of time.

Faith is what gamers do or do not have in a games development today. You may have cautious faith, but you still have faith. Only facts will be revealed at expo/launch.

6/22/2017 11:47:14 AM #8

Woah... a wall of text :o

Summary and conclusions, please :)


6/22/2017 11:57:06 AM #9

As for the other 723648678448678236 topics in this forum, I would personally 'wait&see' before even guessing or presuming something about this, and only 'this' game.

Talking too much about something that nobody knows is just counterproductive and always led by a personal point of view; like people would do in Elyria about magic. So basically, yeah, magic, just talk about magic.


6/22/2017 12:20:21 PM #10

I can see his point about finding PvP exploits. Take a look at the Division's dark zone problems in that area. Players that wanted to kill another player would shot at a character, hoping they would fire back and become 'red'. Those guys usually walked in the largest group amounts possible so one guy could shot at you then another to make it fell like it was continued fired, when you turned and countered, you go 'red' and then the whole group gets to kill you and loot without ever going 'red'.

With all most all the bounties being tied what can be proven and reputation, it could make it very exploitable for trolls. Say player 1 attacks player 2, maybe hits a couple of times. Player 2 thinking player 1 is intending to kill him goes all out and slays him. What stops player 1 from saying player 2 murder them? I know some would say that is role playing, but if this event where to happen in real life it would be consider self defence. What are the game mechanics that protect players from using this to grieve others?


6/22/2017 12:34:16 PM #11

Posted By Solem at 05:39 AM - Thu Jun 22 2017

Thanks a lot for your opinion MoonChaser!

Im new to COE and wanted some inside opinion from someone who is here longer that me, and maybe can fade some of the articels concerns.

You did very well!! Thanks again.

I will be still Earthgrounded, but you answer gives me some more hope.

In general I have still the feeling tough, that Soulbound ist kinda overloading with functions. And iam not speaking about the bigger function like permadeath etc. I dont see to much trouble here. But they want to add a shere mass of details as an example:

-Animals will act differently depending which tribe is in front of them -You can convince NPC to belive in your Relgion? - etc. etc. so many details...

I have the fear that they will lose thereself in this exaggerated level of detail

What do you think?

I think that the forum posts made by us (users) are different from what the devs are actually doing. For example, the "Religion" debate. Devs have remained intentionally obtuse regarding the details of what religion will look like. Yet nearly everyone who has posted about Religion posts as if they have insider information and presents their ideas as facts instead of what they really are; Ideas. Of course, some people do post theory crafting topics and just let the ideas flow while never crossing the threshold into fact.

The facts is we don't know much about the level of detail they are adding to the core systems of the game. What we do know is that it will be fun, interesting, and a new way of playing an MMO. I think if we just take everything that's posted on the forums (even from devs) with a grain of salt, then we can hope that it will happen without expecting it to happen.

Just my two cents :)


Hope it helps...

6/22/2017 12:48:52 PM #12

Don't copy paste articles.... link them. WTF.

Also, old ass article is highly biased and opinionated. Imagine that.


6/22/2017 1:17:44 PM #13

@MoonChaser

Great job you absolute madman


6/22/2017 4:00:42 PM #14

I posted this in response to another thread, and I think it is relevant here. In fact, it may just become my standard response... ;)

My recommendation (not just to you, but to myself, and most the other backers) is to simply take a step back and chill for a bit.

I am not saying you have an unreasonable question, or that most of the questions posited in these forums aren't reasonable. It is simply that we don't have ANY real information on just about anything - because it is still early.

I have a list of about 20 questions I would like to have answered before Domain selection, and I will consider myself lucky to get maybe 5 answered.

We have all been a bit...enthusiastic...in our planning, socializing, and organizing - it is the nature of the beast with a game with this scope. However, we may have all "jumped the gun" just a bit.

Let's see what info we get before Domain selection opens up. Let's see if they give us some tools to make informed decisions.

If they open up Domain Selection, and we still have as little info as we have now, I will join you in the march. Picking the permanent location of your settlement/county/duchy/kingdom, without being able to know how, well, really anything works, is asking a LOT of the player base.

The "rage" we are getting over the tribe announcement will be a "match-on-a-flame" compared to the inferno we will get if they expect us to make that decision completely uninformed.

But I imagine they understand that, and I expect we will see a significant amount of info dumping in the weeks leading to Domain Selection (though, I am sure we will always have more questions).

Long story short, embrace the Zen, see what comes down the pipeline. At this point, barring committing our pledge, I don't believe any of us have actually had to make a final decision on ANYTHING yet - it is all fluid.

EDIT:

Yeah, I get that this may come across a bit "fanboyish". However, I would say this about any game that I would pledge to at this point in development. It is simply a matter of logic and common sense.

We pledged when we "knew" nothing other than the promise of potential. We pledged without knowing ANYTHING. Virtually every plan we have made to this point was formulated based on ideas and expectations that formed in our own mind, not as a result of any concrete information on the way the game systems worked - because that concrete information doesn't exist.

Like I said, logic and common sense. Don't hold the developers (of any game) accountable for things simply because you decided/imagined/expected/hoped it would be a certain way.

If you aren't comfortable "rolling with the punches" in regards to the changes that happen almost continuously this early in development, maybe you shouldn't pledge this early in development.

Thanks all, have a great day!


Imgur

6/22/2017 5:39:12 PM #15

I simply have a great deal of hope for this game. Most things I love. Some things I like. A few I dislike. But it's that way with every game to greater or lesser degrees. This has more potential than any game I've seen for what I'm looking for since UO.



-The largest cause of war is selfishness. The hardest thing to achieve in life is mutual selflessness.

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