[2021] Adjusting Content For Better Small Scale PvP

Summary
The game has several issues as we try to accommodate groups of players at different sizes, and the small guilds get especially outclassed by the large guilds. This can be seen as the large guilds dominate all the “bases” (keeps), and the “material suppliers for the bases” (forts) are also controlled by the large guilds. 

We would like for the forts to have some of the services of the home base and migrate the “material suppliers for the bases” aspect over to “mines” (mines/quarries/timber mill parcels). This combined with the new per zone caps on player amounts from a single alliance(defined in a separate GDD) should make the world, in general more interesting for smaller guilds.

Below is a list of current contested content and what “guild size” buckets they should exist in:

5 or less player group content 

• Small Outposts (wilderness)
• Large Outposts (Road)
• Group Boss Parcel
• Small Forts
• Caravans
• Mines

15 or less player group content

• Large Outposts
• Small Forts
• Large Forts
• Hot Zones
• Group Boss Parcel
• Daemons Parcel
• Raid Boss Parcel
• Caravans
• Mines

50 or less player group content

• Large Forts
• Small Keeps
• Large Keeps
• Hot Zones
• Daemon Parcel
• Raid Boss Parcel
• Caravans
• Mines

100 or less player group content

• Large Keeps
• Castle
• Hot Zones
• Daemon Parcel
• Raid Boss Parcel
• Caravans
• Mines

Adjusting Content

Update the Forts

• Replace Building Materials For Small Group Content
  • Remove the building materials from the forts. Place them into their stand-a-lone mine parcels. Details on the mine are listed below.
• Add a couple competitive crafting stations
• Have leveling up the stronghold provide parcel based buffs instead of additional guards (Basically don’t add 20 new guards to Forts)
• Add NPC vendors back (they were pulled because forts generated materials that could be sold)
• Crank up the conquest points to be competitive
  • Explore some methods of diminishing returns on structures like forts/keeps. (ie each one past the first owned reduces how much others owned produce, this helps prevent run away scores)
• Adjust Fort Siege Schedules To Only Last 30 Minutes And They Happen More Frequently
  • Forts should be triggering a lot more frequently. We should also reduce their duration to 30 minutes to prevent standing around issues. Forts are not customizable home bases like keeps, but with all the services they are adding, will be pretty close.
• Make Fort Them More Easy Come Easy Go
  • Cheaper wall and building costs. 
  • Make the walls a bit easier to destroy as well. (Since no siege equipment can be used against forts, players need to use class powers to damage them)
• Add Walls To The Small Fort / Maybe even remove this type of Fort
  • Add walls to the small forts or remove them. No one wants to own them. They’re not fun as it stands and will need to have some of the benefits added to them from the previous list. 
• Small Forts and Large Forts Give Different Conquest Values
  • Need to do more calculations, but basically, follow the same model all the way through.

Create Dedicated Mines and Put Them On The Siege Schedule

• Mines are 1x1 parcels that now host the building materials that were present in forts. 
• Mines are hooked up to the siege schedule so you can see when the mine is going to trigger. 
  • When the mine goes active, it starts to fill up the chests and this generates PvP activity as players fight over this.
• There are three mine types:
  • Boulder, Ingot, Timber
  • Each type activates at the same time across the entire map. For example, all timber would activate at once. 
  • Each event lasts one hour long spawning materials every 3 minutes (as it currently does). This will generate lots of PvP over that one hour as players fight over it.
  • Spread these out into the Adventure zones. (no need to keep them exclusively in Siege zones)

Small and Large Keep Costs

• It can be expensive in time/resources to build up a Keep
  • Since we want to move the “material” generators out of the siege zones we will reduce the overall costs.
  • Start with a 25% reduction. 

Rotate Hotzones More Frequently

• Hotzones are a great place to find PvP action, but sometimes it gets dominated by a group and the PvP dies off for a bit. Rotating the hotzone each hour draws different groups each time and keeps the people going to a location fresh rather than stale. 
  • Messaging
    • Investigate if we add login toasts to direct people to the current hotzone. (separate GDD coming on messaging)

Phase 2 

Breaking out outposts into 2 distinct categories of small and large

• The wilderness outposts are small outposts. 
  • These are awarded the least amount of conquest points in the game. 1, 2, 3, 4 conquest points.
  • These will keep the same chest contents as previously done. 
• The road outposts are always large double wide outposts.
  • These are awarded the most conquest points for an outpost. 3, 4, 5, 6 conquest points.
  • These should change to spawn much larger loot chests than what the wilderness outposts use.
• The God and respawn outposts will use the small outpost values. 
• Increase the range that players can see the event notifications for capturing outposts. 

Introduce Group Boss Parcels

• Small groups of players cannot compete with Daemons or Raid Bosses. Instead, let's introduce some group bosses in a similar fashion to give them some additional PvE as well as PvP moments