Camelot Unchained’s Building and Mining Systems

Camelot Unchained is getting closer to their goal, but even closer to their deadline.  I’ve pledged, and I think a lot of our readers have pledges as well.  CU’s building, and in a way part of its crafting, system was revealed recently.   Personally, I would have lead with this information.  This is huge.  In fact, this is indeed unique and revolutionary, and something that really needs a lot of attention.  I think Camelot Unchained’s building will be at the forefront, at the very core, of everything players are fighting for in RvR, and everything players are working towards.

Why fight to win in RvR? Simple: Finite Resources.  What do you do with those resources?  You build whatever you want in a system that resembles Minecract.  Watch the video below.

CU Mine OwnershipI have my concerns.  These past few days my thoughts have been centered right on the necessity of guilds, and one of my all-time biggest complaints about modern PvP games has been this elitist jackassery that we see in games like GW2. There are these big guilds who think they are God’s gift to the game and they the only ones allowed to own, do, or lead anything.  There becomes this stigma and unwritten rule about taking an area or even participating in PvP if you’re potentially taking the spot of someone else who for some reason ‘deserves’ to be there more than you or should own a keep because victory is more assured if that guild owns the area.

I’m worried that the mine locations in Camelot Unchained will be treated with this same inevitable elitism.  I’m calling it right now; if I roll up to a mine that Wart’s guild has built around and I start tapping away, I’m going to get grief for taking resources away from Wart’s guild who, for some reason, think they own the thing and have a claim to the resources inside.  Just because a mine doesn’t run out right away, that doesn’t change the nature of the typical entitled elitist.  I see on the list that mines can be claimed.  If individuals or guilds claim mines, this will be a disaster that will destroy realm pride and unity.  I still need to be convinced this isn’t destined for epic failure.

The building system sounds awesome, though.  Placing each cell individually the same way I would if I played Minecraft has me already thinking up ways I’d build a base.  Being able to roll up on an enemy’s base and break it down into raw materials introduces this entire new way of getting the crafting side involved.  If a player just wants to set up a house/shop and sell weapons, he or she can do so.  But if a crafter wants to be apart of the combat, they can roll up to a siege, or participate in the salvage operation.

My mind is racing with creative possibilities for this system, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself and start imagining things that CSE isn’t capable of doing.  So for now I’ll just take what they’ve said in the video and know that it sounds like a ton of fun.  I have my doubts about the mines and their faith in humanity, but maybe there will be a way to keep people in check.

If you haven’t already, consider pledging.  Camelot Unchained needs your help to get funded because without it we’ll just have a bunch of ideas and no game.

  • Hopefully they get that big final kickstarter push, as the last week has been terrible.

  • I am almost certain at this point that it would have been alot easier to get 2m if they had set the Goal to 1m.

    There are definitely many people at this point that arguably have serious doubts whether or not they will make it (myself included) and refuse to pledge in fear of failure (myself excluded 🙂 ).

    Anyway i really think it seems impossible to make it at this point unless they themselves pledge just to avoid being ridiculed 😀

  • There becomes this stigma and unwritten rule about taking an area or even participating in PvP if you’re potentially taking the spot of someone else who for some reason ‘deserves’ to be there more than you or should own a keep because victory is more assured if that guild owns the area.

    That’s… kinda true, is it not? Not that someone else “deserves” the slot, but that you may be consuming finite resources and/or a population-capped slot that would be better served (realm-wise) going to a stronger player, e.g. a person more likely to contribute to victory. Assuming these resources reset every so often, you can imagine a scenario in which some random guy mines from 1am-5am and your realm suddenly has a 1:1 recreation of Goldshire instead of reasonable defenses. Everyone deserves equity, but not everyone contributes to realm defense equally.

    Anyway, the only eyebrow-raising moment to me was house decay, which is a pretty clever solution to both urban blight and as a retention mechanism (don’t log in, lose your house). I’m not quite sure how “cells” are supposed to be different than a list of ingredients that make a discreet object like, say, a Spidersilk Cape though. A Minecraft-ian ability to build houses could be fun, but I wonder how long that will last when the Australian Vikings demolish it every time you go to bed.

  • Actually, you don’t “get it back” because they never took it in the first place. I pledged on day one and the charge hasn’t hit my credit card yet. It won’t unless it funds.

  • Took a look at their kickstarter page and they plan to offer priority login to founders that they can buy with their founder points.

    That sounds just wrong. I mean if the average joe buys the game in the store/website later on he gets shoved to the back of the line even if he payed money? wtf?

    I do like the option to get all future expansion packs for 30 points.

  • does kickstarter stop them from reposting their add again with a lower goal amount? Meaning, i can see them posting 1.5 mil next month if they dont get 2 and just go with that.

    as far as guild elitism goes, yes it will always be there but then again even if they didnt have a claim system people would setup unofficial claims. I was here first bs. It’s unfortunately human nature. You remember the camping of rare spawns.. I was here first arguments.. /sigh

    If done right with group bonuses to minning or even realm wide bonuses to mining it could minimize the impact with reasonable people***

    *** Reasonable people rarity in MMO, (small font text)

  • @Romble: I believe they can try again. Mark has publicly said that he will try again if there are enough backers, and if it raises almost enough. I think the numbers he said were 12,000 backers and around 1.8M (Obviously he was just eyeballing a figure).

  • I think this recent public service announcement will help pull in some money, but i thought they were in trouble after the first week and “only” 1 million was acquired. I don’t have much faith in Mark Jacob’s ability to realistically set a budget for development and be able to see it through till the end without significant changes…cough…Warhammer…..blarg.

  • I’d think the number of backers for a subscription based game would be just as important a metric as the dollar amount. Less than 9000 backers doesn’t look that positive. I know Jacobs said they can make it with 50k subs, but they haven’t even gotten 1/5 of that to back the game, wonder if that factors into their decision to go forward.

  • Imen- what factors their decision to go forward is that any amount of money they receive from kickstarter supplies them with their jobs and salaries until the game is launched. then they can rely on revenue to sustain themselves or just pack it in. In either case the kickstarter money is free money for them to have a job for at least the next 2 years.

  • It is not supposed to be equal, some people will always contribute orders of magnitude more then others. Key is to have both wanting to win as a REALM that will naturally persuade the weak to help the strong and for strong to help the weak(keep them happy in the game, you always need bodies to throw into the breach)

  • I’ve been a proponent, and a student, of realm pride since its inception. One of the biggest reasons why realm pride was so strong, and cooperation was so great, among the realm and guilds within the realm is because no guild or individual in any way benefited from holding a keep more than the collective. A guild may claim it, but the entire realm benefited.

    In that regard, it is 100% supposed to be equal. There is no wiggle room. There is no alternative. Deviate from 100% equality and 100% realm-wide shared benefit and the game will fail.

    Not every guild can ‘claim’ a location, but those who do should do so with the intent of the prestige, not the reward, afforded them. They should also do so knowing they can be in charge of monitoring that keep and calling out to the rest of the realm when it is under attack. DAoC worked so well in this regard because the guild could alert the entire realm when a guard died.

  • @Fuzzy

    Hehe, that’s a scary graph, almost suspicious really. Considering that MJ is willing to put up alot of his own money, nothing stops him from somehow funding that last hurdle himself (anonymously).

    I certainly hope CU doesn’t need $200k on the last day like that, although KickTraq is predicting they are on their way of being $200k short.

    It’s just unfortunate that MJ didn’t go for a more strategic goal with stretch goals and things. If you look at other successful campaigns, there was these bumps of pledges right when they are hitting stretch goals. People also seem to be more positive and engaging if they know the project -will- be funded. It’s just sad seeing and reading all these updates and not being sure it will happen.

    Either way, nothing stops MJ from pulling a Chris Roberts (StarCitizen) and running his own crowd funding from his website. I mean StarCitizen got $2mil from Kickstarter and is sitting at $6.5mil from his own website. So he is continiously maintaining stretchgoals and things there.

  • – I’m sure I’ve said it before, but a non-trivial part of the last-minute-peak in KS cash-wise is from people increasing their pledges. Considering the extremely high average per backer CU already has, I doubt there is much room left for most backers to go further up.

    – IMTCO (my totally clueless opinion), MJ (and we all) ought to be more concerned with headcount than cash numerics at this point in time. Applying some insanely optimistic projections here, lets say that:

    — by KS close, CU has 10K active backers (ABs)
    — for each 1 backer there is also 1 person that would-have-pledged-if. People that would have pledged but could not for whatever reason. Add them to the active backers for a total of 20K of.. duno, lets just call them KS participants (KSP)
    — all KSP would play the actual game for longer than 3 months, additionall for each 1 KSP, there is more 1 person who would play the game for longer than 3 months. makes 40K long term players (LTP)
    — for each long term player there is additionally one short term player (STP) who would play at launch, for less than 3 months.

    tldr:
    80K players at launch = 70K box sales, and 70K 3-month subs. (pretty much all KS backers get a game)
    40K players post the 3-month line. 30K subs (many/most KS backers get a discount sub)

    30K subs is probably not a good enough number.

    ==================

    Back on topic.

    I honestly couldn’t care less about “how hard IS Wart’s Guild Leader indulging in self-satisfactory behaviour that according to old Victorian tales causes hair to grow on the back of one’s hands?”. If the Goons or OTG or FoH or can claim and lock down a mine because the game lets them, I’ll find another spot. If the claiming does not lock out others, I’ll go and dig if I want to.

    I’ll also try and pick a server without the usual suspects of course, but if it isnt one its another, so that is usually a lost cause anyway.

    That said, even GW2’s had enough sense to make keep/tower bonuses realm-wide so its not really rocket engineering.*

    ==================

    *Rocket science is actually quite trivial.

  • I’m all for supporting indie gaming but crowd sourcing a AAA MMO seems like a scam to me. Ralph Koster has said so too, acknowledging that the true costs of a AAA MMO easily exceed the amount of money able to raise in crowd sourcing.

    I think people need to take all these new Kickstarters with a high level of skepticism, and not just with the gaming plans but budgetary plans, too.

  • @Keen I actually agree but.. claiming should be a prestige and benefit to the whole realm thing. But people LOVE prestige and people love to brag about what they did. In DAOC you would see it as small guilds of people who barely if ever RvRed came out to take a fort. They 1. could not upgrade 2. could not defend 3. never told anyone about guard kill spam. So after a while people would tell them in not so nice way to NOT claim. That is what I mean by things not being equal.

    It actually affected enemy realms, we would sometime take a fort with very well known guild that could maintain lvl 10 fort indefinitely near relic in one frontier.. then hit relic in another since people always assumed where our banner flew this is where the Schwerpunkt will be

  • @blargh

    Yea, it’s quite scary to see the “average pledge per backer” on CU. If you look at Torment and Project Eternity , guess what, average pledge was $56 and $54 respectively. Shroud of the Avatar was $86 .

    Now look at CU, it’s $153 . This is a very unpredictable situation and might explain the “flat lining” going on the last week, people are probably tapped out.

    I suppose it does indicate a combination of popularity and passion per pledger. Clearly there’s some serious hardcore fans wanting CU to succeed whereas something like Torment attracted alot of casual participation (i.e. people who are mildly interested and didn’t necessarily play Planescape). I still maintain, CU is missing out on the casuals 😉 .

  • @Blargh: I think you are correct that a lot of the final surges are from backers upping the pledge. However, if you look at the stats for other projects and you consider the additional backers that joined int he final days – there is still a huge surge. It may be supplemented by backers that up their pledges but new backers do join in (Star Citizen, SotA)…

    I also dont believe that only a select few will be interested in this game – it is either good and it works and it will attract a lot more than the estimated niche population or it will not achieve what it set out to achieve and it may get stuck with the niche population. My feeling is that if it ends up with a niche population – it is because it failed.

    For the topic: I don’t mind that there is the potential of asshattery in the game…that is what the game or the sandbox aspect is all about…don’t force rules on people but give people the freedom to be asshats or good guys…it may hurt realm pride…but what if there are suddenly large guilds that are the opposite…even if rare…it’s a much more positive experience. That is the point of the sandbox…there is the potential for the good or the bad to come to the surface…if you eliminate chance sof this happening you end up with the dull and emotionless experience that we have in MMOs today.

  • I think it’s ridiculous that Marc Jacobs has to go begging to fund a new project. It’s a commentary on the sad state of affairs for the mmorpg genre.

  • I would up my pledge, but I’m at the internal testing tier now and I think I would need to increase my pledge by over $500 to keep internal testing. So that’s not happening.

  • I find guilds are ruining all pvp game. Roll on server X with the mega guild or you can not pvp properly. I have seen it in numerous games over the last 5 years.

    I see the same thing happening here. Big guilds lock down all the resources for themselves. Game over/suckage for everyone else.