Some of my feedback will be based on older topic I made: Feedback on Galahad
Some parts of that topic are now irrelevant as there has been major changes during Hector.

Mob Execution:


Like in my old post, the last mentions about mob execution policy was that it will be kept on red & black. After which suddenly the tables turned and the system was removed based on that it's pointless because players will always play safe and that PvE execution is not a real item sink.


The argument that players play safe is not entirely true. The more casuals / safeplay players will ofc very rarely die to PvE after they find the correct dungeons for themselves. However, anyone who is trying to stay ahead of the curve and fame farm quickly, will be taking more risks with gear. During beta3 combat fame is done with gear you don't care about and maxing the result with as small group as possible. PvE content in general is so easy that everything in game is doable at T6.X. However, by saying "doable" it doesn't mean you can't fail and get knocked down due to your questionable gear compared to PvE content you are doing.


This is basically minimising risk, maximising fame. This would be a lot more difficult if the PvE content was actually more difficult and did execute. The punishment for getting knocked down is not a punishment at all.


The argument that PvE doesn't provide an item sink: I would want to see SBI statistics on Beta1 (before instanced portals), on how much gear per player was trashed at T7-T8 veteran morganas. Also including how much extra PvP ensued after a bad pull that got 1 from the group killed. (Showed on map). During those days, going to T8 Veterans was a big group effort, there was no point in going there with under 10 guys and everytime we had revive potions with us - and they were needed.


Also on my old post I gave a link to how no mob execution policy is being abused in PvP situations. This changed slightly with an update, but the same trick is still viable. Even tho it's a skill based trick to pull off, it isn't a good or interesting mechanic for PvP encounters.

Comparing PvE experience of Beta1 to Beta3:

• In beta1 combat fame was fought over like a precious resource. The few extremely good famefarm maps were under constant fighting and players could expect to find pvp on these great hotspots.
  
• Beta1 PvE mobs were stronger (in comparison) to beta3. As in easier to solo, easier to do top fame farm content with lower amount of players.
  
• Mobs don't execute anymore: That results in making combat more of a chore like gathering than something that requires a player to stay awake.
  
• Mobs have higher variety in Beta3. Thats a great thing, but we are still at the stage that all mob mechanics are very easy to learn and counter. (Except that rare melee undead boss, which is like 100 times harder than any other mob or boss in game)
  

PvE lost all excitement after mobs became so easy to taken down and mainly because mistakes aren't punished anymore. Losing gear to a bad pull was a part of Albion and was like the devs have long time ago said "albion is a dangerous world". Well, todays Albion is just chores, not interesting gameplay.

Map design / resource balance


In my previous post I mentioned the fact that Fiber is best collected in Steppe, which isn't it's (top biome). That hasen't changed over the course of beta3, but just a while ago the changes were made for swamp mobs to be less aggro. This is a step forward in balancing the resource issue, but its far from a fix.

The overall issue with resource balance is how the nodes are distributed and how much aggressive monsters are there on the biome. Metal has been the easiest resource to gather the entire beta, Fiber second, but only because of the insane clusters that are on steppe maps. Fiber was complete pain to do on Swamp maps and at least on my notes Fiber was (before change to mobs) best farmed at: Steppe - Snow - Swamp. (This was my own notes on how much i collected fiber / h on dif biomes.)

Overall the maps are visually good looking now but tbh, the balance isnt there. One can't say that it's fair that for example Fiber can have upto 22 nodes with-in your screen on Steppe. Where as lumber you will never see more than 6 nodes on your screen, this just comes down to gathered resource amount / time used.

T8 only in watchtower, T7 spawning randomly on watchtower


Both of these im against heavily, the watchtower territories were the core source of materials even before the T8 change was done. T7 spawning on territory was a god send and no matter how players say "you can just raid it" I can say that good luck forming that group up to invade opposing watchtower territory before the node is sucked dry, oh and all this while defending your own watchtowers?


The only way we can generate true competition is by having T7 and T8 spawn on maps (not on territories). On this subject I will again remind how it worked in Beta1. The top materials were on maps that no one could have territories in. This caused massive competition over them.


Ganking in beta1 compared to beta3


Beta1 was truly a dangerous world with all the insane sprint builds that were all around. Now we don't have similar sprint builds available and on a personal note I think thats a good thing. The old system forced open world builds to rotate around on mobility only. However, after removing the sprints we got gathering gear for gatherers. Currently one can say that it is impossible to kill a T8 gatherer. There is just no means to catch them unless they are 3 zones deep in your territory and you get gankers coming from every direction. This is also something that removes a lot of the excitement from the current pvp. Small gank parties know that they can't catch and kill a t8 armor horse even if they tried, top gatherers know they can't be killed. Wheres the fun?


Beta1 was harsh on gatherers but it still wasen't an impossible feat. It just took a lot more patience and quick thinking to keep avoiding the gank squads. We need to move back towards a more exciting "dangerous" world.


Overall PvP experience


Beta1 was without a doubt the best beta for PVP. PvP was constant on red and black zones and everything from combat fame to resources was heavily contested by guilds. Back in my days in Finstack there was a moment when Vendetta kept sending a 5 man wolf rider group to gank 1-2 guys, then run, repeat after 15 mins. This was a viable and a good strat to hurt our overall economy and morale. Would this work again now? Not really, you can see them coming from a mile away with name tags and as a gatherer, they just won't take you down fast enough.


Best part about beta1 pvp was the fact you could HEAR mounts, sprints, wood chopping, fighting.. I mean everything from far away. It became an essential part of skill to quickly pinpoint source of a noise and act on it. Being in a dungeon and you heard sprints meant that opponents are in 2s on top of us. Sneaking up on that unsuspecting lumberjack.. forced radio silence in a raid group. And on top of that, the greatness of having mounts that make no sound


Now the PvP experience is lacking in that category. One could argue that "we have more hotspots now than ever" and he would be correct. But overall combat fame is so easy to get now even as a soloer that bringing a huge group with good gear to compete for dungeons isnt worth it.

Bring back tier to tier progression


The way we can wake up the pvp in openworld is by going back to the moment when you actually needed to wear T5 to progress to T6, T6 to T7 and so forth. This forced players to bring good gear out on the open to progress. This system was one of the corner stones why PvP in beta1 was kept more interesting. Your top team fame farm had to be secured, as they were carrying expensive gear everytime. You didn't take T7+ gear lightly into the open world (just so solo a few mobs for shits and giggles).


This is what almost every top guild player is saying. That we have 0 reasons to bring good gear out in the open. Combat fame is everywhere and easy -> no need to compete. PvE content is so easy that no one brings good gear -> again only shit drops in PvP. Theres so much gear compared to item sinks -> mob execution anyone?

Weapon balancing


Perhaps gets way too much focused on by the puplic opinion. Only thing I wanna say is that balancing should be done with small tweaks, not mighty nerfs and buffs. This is how it is done in games like Dota2. So to be blunt: stop over nerfing and over buffing. Rather do small tweaks every week or two until a weapon finds the correct place. Don't be afraid to keep making tweak after tweak. As an example, some years ago Dota2 Juggernaut had fallen off meta completely, only after 5 consequtive buffs (during like 2 months) that hero suddenly became top pick, after which it was toned down by a small nerf and found its good spot. Thats how you balance.

Also with balancing you need to remember that when you nerf or buff weapon A. It indirectly affects several other weapons (comp effectiveness, direct competition between 2 weapons)

Expeditions


I get the idea why we have these even tho personally I would love to see them thrown to the bin. According to dev posts the expeditions are here to cater to players who might only have 15-30 mins and just wanna hop in and kill a few mobs. Sure thats a legit reason and I can understand it. But what I don't understand is that why do these players require unlimited amount of runs in the expeditions? If you are in such a hurry and can't play, I can't see any harm in restricting amount of expeditions by char to 3?


Only reason why im bringing this up is because of botting. I know SBI has a system in place for bots, but it's just a plain fact that catching those more sophisticated bots is next to impossible. And you don't need many of those to cripple the economy.


Alts and LP


Alts in general are a forced thing on us players. Basically ask anyone "do you like having 6+ chars to be competitive?" the awnser is no. We don't wanna do it, but we are forced to by the game design. LP is the reason why this happens (and player islands).


Example Nervontuxis: Start of beta i rolled 6 chars instantly, hit 30d premium on them and let them sit. 1 of those characters only job was to craft my Frost Staves, and even he ran out of LP constantly. This gives a clear unfair advantage over the players that aren't willing to do so. Also it is painfully boring to rotate between accounts and characters, but thats the only reasonable thing to do.


Some say it won't hurt casuals in the long run, well yeah if we talk about 3-4 years from now, sure. But none of the casuals can stay relevant / ahead of the curve if they do not roll at least 3 chars to begin with to get LP all the time.


LP was anyway a system that was in Albion because of F2P model back then, why do we still have it? It only gives advantage to more hc players and forces a ton of alt crap. Just remove LP and the fame requirement you can skip with LP becomes normal fame requirement, or chop it down by 10% or whatever is necessary.


Now after writing for a long time I'm tired and I will possibly come back to add stuff on new posts here (I feel i tackled most issues but not all)

For this the solution is ofc more and more variety on mob skills. But one thing that would be easy and fast implemented, would be to have randomisation over when a mob uses a skill. Currently you can count the amount of normal attacks a mob does before he drops skill A. Perhaps make it a bit random?

That would already make a step towards a bit more difficult PvE, considering that skills like Morgana Crossbowman repeater shot skill hurts like crazy if you get hit, but you won't currently because you can just count the attacks before it happens.

In openworld PvP or in dungeons no one uses good gear, as it is never needed to defeat the content without breaking a sweat. Like I said, even if mistakes are made, it don't matter.

The fact that more people venture into Red / Black promotes low gear pvp. And low gear pvp is not what people want, people want to fight over things. To contest valuable areas, not to have meaningless skirmishes every 10 minutes with T4-6 gear.

So your item sink for top gear isn't there, its only happening in GvG.

Added with the amount of resources we now have compared to previous betas (several times faster to get sets) we are over flowing quickly with "shit" gear. Which we use to farm the top PvE content in the game. So yeah, no sink for top gear outside of GvG


Currently theres nothing ingame that isn't doable in crappy T6. So here where everything goes badly wrong.

Whats the point in ever using high gear in PvE if I can do the most difficult fame farm dungeon in T6? Why would I ever risk bringing 7.2 / 8.1 + gear to pve?

The obvious problem here is that overall the PvE content is far too easy with no risk involved. If i was forced to bring strong gear to progress fast, perhaps then there is a risk, but currently you can solo to 100/100 without breaking a sweat.


You need to understand also that Beta1 resources were scarce. Now we are over flooding with resources, it's a completely dif playfield. Currently getting T6.X is an easy job (in gear and in fame) for any casual. Back in Beta1 you didn't throw T6 gears down the drain 20 sets a day without thinking, now you can.


Your reply kinda gives me the idea that botting isn't an issue. It will always be an issue and expeditions only strenghten the possibilities of avoiding detection.

So I have to in a way disagree to this statement. Statement holds true that more people venture into Red / Black. But we lack meaningful pvp. Thats the whole point.

Amount of PvP encounters go up
But amount of meaningful PvP encounters go heavily down.

By meaningful I mean fighting with gear that isn't free anyways or fighting about something important (like T8 resources).
Chests aren't very important in general and only promote fairly small scale fighting.

On top end content (PvE) they would have to in order to do the dungeons. OR bring a ton of more players.

Generally during beta3 we did T7 blue dungeons in T6 - T6.1 with anything from 4 to 15 people. Most optimal was by far at 5-6. But with such a small group we only could have 1 healer, one mistake in pulls (extra archer) and we had people on their knees. The reason why we ran with low gear is because in case we get into pvp we can't lose anything except trash.

If we wanted to max fame with a small group, we definitely need to bring better gear if the mobs execute to make sure we don't get killed by the mobs.