I pushed hard this week, and was glad to see others pushing as well, to get an answer about bases and how they will play into server politics.  My main question(s) has been who owns them, who gets to benefit from them, and how all of that will play out.  Obviously the worry here is that one guild will get to claim a base and have complete control over its benefits, thus locking out the smaller guilds or less “hardcore” from being able to benefit from a fairly substantial end-all-be-all part of the game.  Veterans of MMO’s like this will know how it feels when a zerg guild can just claim everything and spam mass recruitment messages all the while getting to experience the game to its fullest and everyone else being left out in the cold to just watch.  This leads to in-fighting amongst the realm (Faction *wink*) and people saying “well I’m not going to help that guild defend their keep”.

Obviously this question is almost pointed in such a way that the devs want to avoid it and Sanya cringes just seeing it, but it’s important enough that they at least gave me and the other viewers a nod… sorta.  I’ll lead with the answers they gave to the base stuff followed by the rest of my notes and comments to myself while I watched.  Once a youtube video is up, I’ll add that in the ‘more’ section of the post.

Bases
– Guilds can claim 1 base.  This is fine by me.  It establishes guild pride which inflates faction pride.
– Benefits of owning a base are sorta/kind/mostly faction-wide but for now we’ll have to be satisfied with “more info forthcoming”.  It’s huge and I think or hope they know how it made a difference in Warhammer Online’s feel vs. Dark Age of Camelot (or “that other 3 faction game”).  I phrased the question like six different ways to them during the stream and got an answer when I added a “‘not ready to answer that‘ is an acceptable answer”.   Took some coaxing and I’m satisfied with the info for now.

Beta Testing
– Still testing combat.  Not ready to be shown in video. Major bummer, but it is what it is and hopefully the beta testers that they are selecting, despite being avid forum-goers, are versed in the open-world faction vs faction vs faction (3 factions) pvp combat.  I’ll have to set my worries aside for now and just trust that a small group gets the job done.

PvP
– Learned schematics can be stolen off of players.  This would make well-skilled crafters huge targets.  I like this idea.  Time to go crafter hunting (or in my case hide since I’ll be crafting a great deal.)
– Kill spam is in.  Warren, Kill Spam from “That other 3 faction game” (COUGH DAOC COUGH) was a message to the zone saying “Keen killed Warren in Base X” so that you would know who you were interacting with on the other side.  DAoC had no names above player heads in the frontier.  It said “Albion Invader” when you were from Albion in say the Hibernian lands.  It helped create a sense of server-wide community.  It also let you know where people were being killed at so that you could find the action.

Healers
– Healing shouldn’t make people unkillable.  This is a huge, huge problem in games like “that one with arenas and battlegrounds” (see what I did there?).
– To keep up with combat responsiveness, healing will be equally responsive.  Obviously there’s only conjecture at this point, but a faster pace healing mechanic would be neater than having it be ‘sit back and cast’ mechanic.

A shorter stream this week but I get the feeling they’re finally settling into the thick of testing.  Doesn’t bother me at all and I hope they get lots of feedback from those testers.

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