Anarchy Online Booster Pack with Land Control

[_____________Kodiene]

moot

[Isgrimnur]

My 2 credits:

Next time you have a HUGE announcement, please try to have more concreate answers when you hold a developer chat. It totally sounds like everything is just at the "drawing board" stages right now.

I know Funcom might think it is good for the price of their stock to announce this kind of news, however it is only short term gain. Long term players will get frustrated and quit and FC will lose money (earnings) and that will have a longterm effect on your stock price.

Please come back to us, your customers with more concreate information. Announcing something that will happen 2-4 months from now, while we are waiting on a content patch is just bad business.

I don't speak Norway's language, but I do speak English. If you need a CEO that can actually do something useful to your company, private message me.

my 2 cents

[Sean-Roach]

Well, I'm hopeful.

Maybe they'll give all existing dungeons and dyna-camps a "no-construction" radius.

Maybe they'll also do this with any insurance terminal, and that'd take care of the cities and outposts for the most part.

Maybe they'll give roads a large right-of-way. Something like, if you can see the ground from here, you can't build.

They already said that hunting areas would be off-limits.

Maybe they'll give mission areas a radius as well. Unfortunately, some of these mission areas are right in the spots that are likely choice plots to build on. Mountain caves, crater farms, crashed vehicles, ect. Of course, they could make it so a mission holder for an enclosed mission area, gets the nod from the defenses until he shoots first, and he can easily sprint to the mission area before the PVP grace period expires. And if the area RIGHT around the mission area always has the old suppression gas to boot, this'd make taking mission inside contested territory less of a problem. Of course, after the mission is DONE, (and you no longer have a key...) Perhaps every mission should give a short-term "untouchable" buff, that makes you un-attackable by anything, monsters included, until either you attack something, or 10 minutes pass, (to leave the mission area and the surrounding org controlled area.)

I'm hoping that smaller guilds will be able to formalize arrangements, and post two central towers practically on top of each other, interlacing the defenses of the two, (or three, or four, etc) guilds.

I agree that there should be some fool-proof way to determine who shot up your tower when you log back on. Having the tower itself /tell you "tower N, located at X,Y, in playfield P, has just been destroyed by player Z." would be a good way to do this, as someone suggested.

Of course, I can see a new way to fight if the towers can be placed too close to one-another.

A guildee shows up, possibly a Fixer or someone with good conceal, and scopes out the terrain, taking lots of screen shots to print out and map over later.

A dozen teams of the attacking guild shows up with the new tower already ready to go. They place the tower right at the edge of defenses, or weaken the defenses long enough to place it even closer. They then rapidly put down several guard towers apiece. These guard towers outnumber the guard towers of the defending side, at least for this quadrant, and also the attackers don't have to worry about non-defense towers yet, taking up valuable tower slots. Hence, although they only pack in 20 or so "defense" towers, this is still better than 4-1 against the pre-located towers.

Several ways to prevent this scenario. Don't allow towers to be placed too close together. This, however, means less chance of mutual defense.

Make defense towers not fire on defense towers, but then the area becomes contested, and it's down to the players to kill each other off, and the other towers. Advantage is still to the attackers.

Make defense towers come on-line after a rather lengthy waiting period. During this period You have to defend Them from attack. I think I like this idea best.

Also, IF you put a cap on the number of towers that a central tower can support, either don't count defense towers, (so the holding side can saturate the area in defense), or hold a separate limit for defense towers.

Another possibility would be to make the defense "trainable" to a limited degree. Let the towers appear fully functional at all times, but represent one "mob" that can jump to any tower, occupied or not, to defend there. If the main tower is surrounded by 20 defense towers, roughly 5 covering each quadrant, then those towers should jointly define a range that all the towers can target in and attack. So the tower that is furthest can still get into the firefight, either by firing on you from where it is, (as assisting any attacked mob, disregarding range), or its gun, or rather an invisible mob representing its firepower "jumping" to one of the towers that IS in the fight.

Small aggro range, looses aggro easily, (automatically when you leave its range, and the range of any other affaliated towers), MASSIVE weapon range. If you lay out the towers in a line, east to west, the one on the east should be able to effectively assist the one on the west.

At the same time, towers should be limited so only two or three can be involved in attacking any one player at any one time. This does two things. It means walking solo into range of one tower doesn't mean your instant death as all towers fire on you. It means that more attackers are attacked at once, instead of the towers picking off one attacker at a time until the last is gone. (Although tactically speaking...)

As for trade-skilled towers, if I can TS one at my level, I intend to keep one in my inventory at all times. Ready in case of gankers.

"Is that an engineer? Yep, look there's his bot. Okay, let's get him!. Uh, is that a tower!? RUN!"

[Nyadach]

Ok, first off...for someone who has always hated PvP and the like, I found this idea totally BRILLIENT. And a very original for this kinda thing. I have to admit my minds racing with ideas of AO meets Starcraft/Tiberian Sun kinda things at the moment

Gaute mentioned as has a few others hear the area will be designed to be more defendable than easy for the attackers. Which is all great I mentioned on the chat some other ideas for defensive structures other than just the towers (namely Fencing, Baracades and Land Mines *grin*) which Gaute didn't seem to like from the chat as they were easy to fly over with a Yalm. Yet he followed this with the bit about Yalms wont be much use due to the towers AAA shooting them down. So if Yalms won't be much use, land defenses become a much more useable idea. They also act as a smaller, lighter defensive structure for the guilds with out as much money to protect there control tower, and also brings in a whole shed load of extra strategic ideas.

The big problems I have to admit though in more buildings is lag, as the positions will need to be transmitted to the clients which no matter what, wont be the easier bit. We once made some land mines for Unreal Tourni and damn you'ld be running along and all of a sudden BOOM your blown 10ft into the air, land again to fall on another and you find yourself bouncing around like a pongo stick (ok you dont tend to live hehe). But from a defensive point of view, you can't beat them from giving away the location of incoming forces and really scuppering there plans of attack
Fences and Baracades are something though which wouldnt cause as much lag as mines though, and would also lead to some great ambush possibilities.

Another thing the towers will need is good organisations, alliances and the ability for a guild to declare a war status. Will make for alot more RP play, and in a situation like this could mean that orgs who are allied won't be able to tab each other anymore (if say a Neut and Clan alliance).

Anyhow, guess thats my two cents worth for all this for now.

[_______________Heksa]

One topic I've been a bit concerned about is Omni vs Clan. Will this further the attempt to escalate the conflict between the factions in the game? (I've decided to keep out the Neuters on this. Sure. They'll be there. One of my main characters are a Neuter. But I still wiev them as bystanders in a conflict. And not as a true faction. Sure. Flame me for this. )

Or will this end up in a great was not just between Omni and Clan. But also internaly between guild and clans. I hope not. I do hope this will make people more loyal to their alleginace.

Heksa

[Darkbrood]

As I read the boards I ask myself this question: Are these people really going to "pay" for this?

I mean come on ..how long has it been since you had a patch?


Size matters? Humm size didn't matter when folks were DL'ing the *entire* game.


You all can't really be considering paying for a "booster pack" to fund an "expansion" so you can pay for that too.

I say if you really *must* have those towers and buy the booster pack that since all you are really doing is funding the expansion, anyone who buys boosterpack gets the expansion at half price (since all you are doing is paying for it ahead of time by paying for "booster pack") Or just wait 60 days and download it for free.

[________________bleh]

Well im not in a big or rich guild, nor high level, nor want to take part in that duel based completely unbalanced nightmare gankfest that is AO pvp so i doubt i'll get much use from it.

If the booster pack added a bunch of well structured, fully populated zones and a dozen decent dungeons i'd be excited, but as it stands im sick of missions, i want some pve content to level up on. Also, seeing ive not even logged on in a while, the chances of me sticking about till November, doing the same old missions over and over again, just to buy a tower is... unlikely.

[Kuro]

Originally posted by Darkbrood
As I read the boards I ask myself this question: Are these people really going to "pay" for this?

I mean come on ..how long has it been since you had a patch?


Size matters? Humm size didn't matter when folks were DL'ing the *entire* game.


You all can't really be considering paying for a "booster pack" to fund an "expansion" so you can pay for that too.

I say if you really *must* have those towers and buy the booster pack that since all you are really doing is funding the expansion, anyone who buys boosterpack gets the expansion at half price (since all you are doing is paying for it ahead of time by paying for "booster pack") Or just wait 60 days and download it for free.

I posted this over at Bashers. But to summarize for the people that won't want to read the whole thing: Box sales of any product are only profitable for single player games or games hosted completely on the client's computer. MMORPGs have continuing overhead those types of games do not and only make profit from subscriptions

For the people that insist this is all about money, here is something you have to acknowledge:

MMORPG developers make squat on box sales.

Read this. Digest it. Yes, 200k box sales of DAoC and 400k box sales of EQ at $49.95 has the normal person making 50k a year seeing visions of people swimming in money. But that's a joke. Most MMORPG developers are *lucky* to recoup development costs off their box sales. Especially since nearly half of that $49.95 starts out *as the retailer's cash* straight at the checkout (come on...yall never wondered why your buddies at EB or Gamestop can get an employee discount like 35%). Finish paying off the manufacturing costs and the developer is lucky if they made enough money to cover things like wages, office rent, bills, ect. Known fact, almost every MMORPG has started out in the deep red and stayed there for the 1st year of release...

So where's the money? In subscriptions. That's the only thing that makes these games anywhere near profitable. And that where things like expansion packs (and this new booster idea of FC) is targetted: increasing new subscriptions by refreshing public awareness of the product by getting a new box on the shelf. And of course, retaining current subscriptions.

So those people out there thinking that FC can make any money off of the direct sales of these 'boosters': you're naive (possibly willingly) about retail sales and marketing. Of course there is the opportunity to gouge us on the prices of these 'boosters'. But has ANYONE seen anything resembling a price for these things yet? I'm willing to wait and see exactly how much they charge for the boosters. And if it's reasonable, I'll buy them simply for a chance to get a hard copy of a recent client to reduce patch time after reinstalls. Added capabilities is just gravy.

Also oddly enough this was posted in a reply. Goes off topic but who replied and what they say in the first line is of most importance:

Originally posted by jdaug ( Lazy Disgruntled Ex-GM ):
Your right, box sales aren't enough and subscriptions are where the revenue are at. Maybe the problem is they only have the "1" source of revenue. Maybe instead of continually hiting up the same community, they expand a bit and open other revenue streams. Why not make The Longest Journey 2? Would be cheap enough and I hear the first one sold several hundred thousand copies. Just a thought.

[Kuro]

To go along with my last post, here a further bit of perspective. In an article found Here on the inner workings of Sony Online Entertainment, Smedley states that the development budget for SWG is $10,000,000. Assuming a price of $49.95 for a box, SWG will have to sell 200,200 copies to recoup those cost. That's not considering the monthly overhead to continue running SWG post release (employee salaries, equipment costs, bandwidth, office rental, misc. business expenses).

[Darkbrood]

I appreciate the positon regarding online games vs. single player or home network games.


My point is just this.... Money (beyond) CD cost for anything is extra cash flow.

Do you think they hired extra programers to develop this "booster pack" or were resources which should have been creating scheduled upgrades/patchs and improvments (which are part of your subscription price) ge allocated to work on this project. You see in order to justify charging extra based on any cost those cost *Must* be incremental to normal operating expenses. I say that this "booster pack" did not have incremental cost an as such should be part of our monthly subscription services. I have *no* problem paying for Expansions, as they often require company's to purchase new software (Game engine, Rollmaster..ect..ect..) to upgrade the game. In an expansion substantial *incremental* development time and cost must be covered. In this booster pack situation I just don't see that being the case. I see things which could/should have been implemented (if patch schedule had stayed on schedule) and a simple money ploy. Now making more money is not a bad thing....but I can assure you that that *is* one of the primary driving forces behind the "Booster Pack" and I have a posting from a World Designer which says as much ......(decent honest guy so I'm not going to post a link to that here).
But here is what's said when a player says the "booster pack" should be free.

"Hey, on a personal level I agree with you. But, as neutral and social democratic as Norway brands itself FC still has to abide by the rules of the capatalist game to be a developer/publisher. We have other titles we want to make/publish and several more envisioned AO expansions. Regular patches will continue to follow (though in what form I'm not entirely sure) and AO's other meta-games will continue to develop. We've got clips of content loaded for 14.5 and beyond. Production takes aim, management has the call on when to open fire. "

Funcom World Designer

So let's not pretend that charging for this is just to *cover cost* .....again making money is good, but lets give to them with our eyes open







The work to create this was/is *NOT* incremental cost to normal business, it's *just* 3 or 4 patches rolled into one. Now, it's your money so it's all good. But lets not pretend that box sales for efforts you normally receive no incremental income from are not a positive. Bottom line, if you pay it is a great idea...if not then it was not.

Again, I have *nothing* against some good marketing, I just can't beleive folks say "it's not for the money" hehe well you might want to discuss that with the funcom employees posting diffrent

[Valoren]

I would really just like a WTA on this...

September?
October?
November?
December?

I don't need an exact date, just a month to expect it?

Val

[Sean-Roach]

Well, I have two SE AO boxes sitting here, which I bought at Hasting's Entertainment, (my employer,) (but we we're selling the game when Wal-Mart employees were going, "Huh? Anarchy Online? I've never heard of it", (and he had the longest journey nicely placed on the shelf beside where were asking, (Hasting's ran out, I had to wait to get my copy, hence I missed the backpack" deadline. I put AO on the shelf for several months as a result.))

Several things. Markup in stores like I work at is massive for some things, but software isn't really one of them. Buy a CD or a book, and you're likely paying about 2x the wholesale price. This actually helps the music-listening and book-reading communities, because we can keep titles that only a small percentage would be interested in, knowing we're likely to take a loss on those, (even sending them back, or at least the front covers, doesn't recover the full price spent on them, but it helps,) subsisting on the titles that EVERYBODY wants one of. However, if I remember my associate discount correctly, the markup on software can't be much more than about 20%, if that much.

Also, I got the electronic version of the full novel in this box, so I have an inkling of how ShadowLands is supposed to tie into the game. Any chance of FC publishing the book, and distributing it to bookstores, and bundling the game with the book? If a book, not a software product, found its way to the RPG shelves, or the Sci-Fi section, they might entice a few non-traditional computer-game players into trying this product, and maybe getting hooked.

I mean, a nice trade paperback that's about 2/3rds novel, 1/3 strategy guide, newbie guide and info-dump to get them up to speed on the current situation, and with a disk in the back, with the key on the inside of the envelope. I'd buy the book, as an existing AO player, even though I've finished reading it in electronic format, non-AO players might buy the book, and, oh what the heck, try the game.

I too would like to know about when the booster pack is supposed to ship, and I like the idea about giving a price-break on the later expansion to persons who hold the booster. Not much, maybe an extra month pre-paid game-time. But then again, any chance I can get something for less, I'm interested.

[rickenbacker]

Wow, this is really something new: making your players _pay_ for patches. Looks to me like Funcom would have run out of money before they could finish the expansion, so I guess now we're funding their last desperate attempt to survive...

I could be wrong of course, but this is NOT a good sign for the future of AO, IMO.

[______________Dysart]

You know what I would find funny. FunCom giving into everyone and making the booster free, finding out they can't afford it, going bankrupt, and cancelling the game. That would make everyone happy, yes?

[Evolutioner]

Ok. so you push up Shadowlands.. and after ages of naging releases the since longed promiced land controll patch ..
Notice the word Patch ..
And bsides the fact that it was supposed to be here ages ago .. you acuallt whnat us to pay for it .. GET REAL...
We are paying customers subscribing to this game..

I have serious doubts whtere or not AO can be called a roleplaying game.. since players can´t do the least it seems to change the outcome of the storyline.. cant evolve their characters beside how mutch damage they do over what period of time.. and hunt / mission aka killing stuff.. This makes for a game alright . but in retrospect it´s a fancy Diablo nothing more or less..

We have had a real life meeting here in a town in Sweden .. and have opend a discussion about leaving Ao .. In protest of FunComs lack of interrest towards their paying customers and apparent dissrespect towards customer realtion.

If you for one second think that you can get away with changing the name from the word patch to boosterpack and collect money for it .. geeses.. it is so disstustin that one acually wonder if it is legal to do so .. althou I sadly think you will get away with it ( and it sikens me that you do )

You on FC have given us paying curtomers some really low blows but this takes the price of them all ..

If you whant to get in toutch with me.. please feel free.. If you whant to talk to me face to face feel free to contact me and we can arrange a meeting .. But i doubth that you have the nerve to do any of it .. heck i even think so low of you that I belive you will delet or edit this post ..

Sincerely yours..
Anders Rönnqvist
Sweden ..

[_____________Kodiene]

Since we all know FC won't give us this patch for free.....

GO TO BASHER AND HIT THE POLLS ON HOW MUCH YOU WOULD PAY

CZ, Dai & Cosmik visit this site daily. Let 'em know.


http://216.74.158.89/index.php

[____________Intrepid]

I think that making it so that you have to manually reload the towers would be cool. Sorta like you reload your gun except give it a clip of like 5000 and no FA or anything special would prevent people from just putting up their towers and then just ignoring them while recieving the bonuses. I would like to think that a tower would be able to hold off a couple people or so but if it ran outta ammo even the biggest newb would be able to take it out although probably rather slowly

[Sean-Roach]

No, the biggest newbie probably wouldn't be able to deal damage fast enough to overload its natural healing rate.

Unless it didn't HAVE a recovery rate.

That'd be another way to do it. Make the things take damage, but not recover from that damage on their own. Require somebody with ANY type of heal-other nano, (or specially built patches, in this case think bicycle tire and not software,) to restore them to full functionality.

Ways I'd like to see to heal towers.

Use any existing heal-pet nano. This would probably be easiest to implement, and would give something to those classes that have pets they can heal. Engineers for example.

Use tradeskills to repair them, using existing tools, or new ones built for the purpose. This would be a quick way to give a purpose to tradeskillers in PVP settings. Sure, you're more likely to get ganked, but only you can fix our tower.

Use patches that are available in shops to restore them. Possibly allow players to tradeskill patches as well.

Any of these has an advantage over simply letting the towers heal themselves, in that yes the characters have to pay attention to them, and the more towers, or more importantly more locations, they have control over, the larger the money/gametime sink to keep them all up.

A small guild could then control as many towers as a large guild...provided they didn't actually take the time to play the game.

I'd rather have to manually repair the towers then manually reload them.

Something else that'd be nice. Towers that look different and deal different damage types in accordance with their appearance.
Projectile,
Chemical,
Energy,

Maybe towers that are there just to buff towers. No healing capability, but maintain a field effect on the other towers, (as well), that adds AC to them.

--edit--
If the towers don't recover damage on their own, there should probably be an /org command that lists out the conditions of all the towers. Just list them out by playfield and coordinates until all the towers have been reported. Maybe do so in a blob like item information.

Maybe a map upgrade that effects both the playfield map AND the world map, by showing the locations of all the towers superimposed over it, with green to indicate 90% or better condition, shading through yellow, to red. Place a skull and crossbones symbol or simply a black X on the locations of any towers of the organizations' that have fallen within the last 24 real-time hours.

[_____________DeadTed]

Wow, sounds like FC is trying to compete with SWG.

I must complain about the title of this booster pack as what is described does not sound like "Land ownership".

A player can not pick out a plot of land and say "this is mine, I'm goining to build my home here, or a little shopping outpost." It sounds more like several zones will have specific spots that Organizations can spend money to claim and then protect from other groups/people/MOBs. So in effect you can not buy a peice of land and "keep" it or do different things with it.

Basically what we have is a network of toggle switches accross the game world with 4 switch points (unused, clan, omni and possibly neutral). This changes the game drasticaly in that players can interact and alter the game world dynamicaly. By following the paterns of change we can get a fluid and precise look at who is in control of the most land and what parts of the world are in control by whom.

If done right, a well broadcasted portrayal of this scenario could finally bring about the type of storyline players were promised from the begining! I picture a map with color coded zones changing to represent the power strugle. If clans took out a large percentage of towers in an omni run zone the attack would be followed by a story. If an entire omni zone's towers were destroyed and replaced with clan towers or something equally impressive it could make it into one of the *groan* storyline cartoons.


I think this tower thing has a lot of possibility. I also think funcom wont take the idea as far as it needs to go.

ultimately, not enough to make me re subscribe.

me

[XtroXtreme]

Oh well, what i might have bone with, exept that they decided to charage us for a patch, is that some towers might be placed close to some mission areas and thereby close down the ability for someone soloing to get there.

I think this might be a very bad idea, but since I´m out of here sone I don´t care that much either way.

I don´t think FC will be able to fix the problem of the big guilds taking over the landscape without pissing iof the big guilds bygiving them less stuff in the game somehow. Blancing has not been one of Fc´s big points so far.