[Survey] What motivates you to keep playing Albion?

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    • [Survey] What motivates you to keep playing Albion?

      Hey Guys,
      I just wanted to hear your opinion what makes you keep playing Albion, what parts of the game you want developers to focus at. This poll is very simple, and is mostly pvp-oriented. However I think all the players who focus-exclusively on the ecosystem outside of pvp, like pve, crafting and gathering are welcome to show they are here and signal, they can't be ignored, maybe demanding some more depth.
      Rules of the poll:
      1. Google login is required to provide as much as possible unique answers. Of course people with multiple google accounts will abuse that, that's why the more of you fill this form, the better.
      2. Email addresses are not stored [Settings](i.imgur.com/Ckg9xxo.png) which makes this 100% anonymous poll.
      3. Results will be shared in this topic tomorrow afternoon (25.10) around 4pm
      4. After you fill out the form, please put in the comments of this thread what is the most anticipated content shared within After Merlyn Roadmap.
      5. Additionally please share, what you think is currently the #1 problem in Albion, what devs should prioritize and resolve ASAP.
      6. The idea behind answering what keeps you playing the game, is what is the crucial part of the game, that is 0/1 condition for you to play the game, in other words - would you stay in the game if this content was abandoned/removed completely from the game? For this reason its not possible to check GvG + Open World. Choose one, the more important for you.
      7. Last but not least, poll includes only currently-available activities. Beside it's not perfect it's only to show high level overview and if succeeded, distribution of what types of player albion currently has.
      I encourage you to fill this poll, and share your thoughts, because it is very important at this point. We have around 8k active unique characters participating in PvP. I hope we get at least 100+ responses.
      Link to the poll: goo.gl/forms/WNhadq5kDyAnTDnD2

      Thanks for every answer your voice matters,
      Glokz

    • This is a great idea @glokz! This just like a Customer Satisfaction Survey (CSAT). I assume you computed the valid sample size of 100 respondents based on the conservative estimate 8000 players.

      I have a feeling that you'll need to drill down on what the Dissatifiers (DSAT) are since it's not listed and there might be a few. This way it will be easier for the Developers to pick out their Low Lying Fruits.

      Good luck on the Survey and I'm looking forward to your results!

    • The whole idea of this survey was to ask people the question:

      What is the distribution of players that love GvG over ZvZ and vice versa.

      I know there are a lot of people who love ZvZ and playing scrims, but if I allowed players to choose both there wouldn't be any value in the summarized answers. Unfortunately I am not paid to do the work, so I don't have the time to analyze each response 1by1 and create individualized profiles of players. But I encourage everyone to create their own surveys, I think it doesn't take much and the response rate so far is satisfying.



      Evas_Flarelight wrote:

      This is a great idea @glokz! This just like a Customer Satisfaction Survey (CSAT). I assume you computed the valid sample size of 100 respondents based on the conservative estimate 8000 players.

      I have a feeling that you'll need to drill down on what the Dissatifiers (DSAT) are since it's not listed and there might be a few. This way it will be easier for the Developers to pick out their Low Lying Fruits.

      Good luck on the Survey and I'm looking forward to your results!
      I will be happy to hand over the data to anyone who is interested in doing any analysis,

      I will collect the data until certain point of the time, rather than capping it at response number.


      gmatagmis wrote:

      All five.
      The only problem is time management between, when you want it all.



      The point is, you do all of this for one purpose - to have resources to play PvP. Myself I love market, making silver finding a new way how to make silver without putting any effort in that. But in the end I use all of this silver to buy XP books or play PvP in expensive gear.

    • glokz wrote:

      to have resources to play PvP
      The problem is, PvP is profitable in my guild (The Solar).
      After we were kicked from POE for "low ZvZ activity", in 3 month, out little 20 man active casual guild KDR grow up from 0.8 to 1.05, while total PvP fame passed one billion. Thanks to centralized loot sale split sum system, and overcharge feature.
      So i would answer everything now is for profit and making silver, then burring that silver into economy, to make even more silver in future. :P
      WTB skill

      The post was edited 1 time, last by gmatagmis ().

    • Hello,

      Please check results of survey: Link
      Individual responses: Link

      Facts:

      Weekly pvp data: Link
      Albion pvp population: 8,439
      Survey responses: 157
      PvP players responses: 125 = 1.5%

      Interpretation:

      First of all, I am sharing separate file with individual responses and I encourage anyone to do math or use their own knowledge to create more accurate interpretation. TBH I don't want to put much work into it, because it is the hardest part about statistic - to understand data and link it with real situation. I hope the devs can extract comments from this thread/reddit post and link it with the data and make a value out of it. I will do some basic reasoning, mostly basing on my personal experience with the game, so don't expect much. The reason behind this survey was never to make deep, accurate interpretation, but to show players distribution at a high-level overview.


      Out of 157 responses, 79.6% players are interested in PvP, and 8,9% players claimed that they play the game exclusively because of PvE aspect. I think it's way beyond my expectations and Devs should respect such a large portion of group, especially that making PvE better, we not only make game more fun for PvE-focused players, but also for PvP players that need PvE to get better in PvP. IMO this is quite important point and should be followed up by questioning, what can we do better about PvE? If it comes to crafting, well I think Albion has a huge potential to be a game that could offer players expanding their crafting empire, becoming the best manufacturer. We should enhance economy system to include more depth so we lure more players that will love to craft and it could be a exclusive reason to play the game(e.g on albion). I have some idea that I will post soon in other post.

      The most important information that we got was that 75% of people who usually follow reddit/forum so most probably play albion everyday prioritize open world activity over 5v5 gameplay. The way how the survey was created forced players to choose one, the more important game mode for them.

      Unfortunately as I see 5v5 it just sinks people into, you can't count on them with daily activities as playing 5v5 is quite absorbing and requires hours of training/running a team. They usually create their own guild within guild. It's not something you can do effectively by joining random teams once a week. In other way, I see it is a very high entry floor activity and the 25% responses came from these players. As we can imagine, the people on forum/reddit are also some kind of 'elite players', the most dedicated community. The official data, shows that there are less than 5% of characters (not players), involved in GvG. I'd say, we can clearly see over-representation of that group. On the opposite side, I'd say we had under-representation of solo/non-pvp players.

      Analyzing this data I could count only 6 people to participate hell gates / scrims exclusively (so non-gvg players).



      That's why I want to elaborate the most on Open World PvP data.




      Additional analysis

      Open world activity correlation


      As we can see, most players are interested in Party vs Party battles, so battles where there are no lags, each person can make a play that will make their party win, but requires preparation to get the right weapons in the group, so have X healers, Y tanks, this and that DPS, maybe some special roles, advanced strategies and great shotcaller. This answer was the mostly correlated with territory raiding, which is also related to guild-activity, playing with your closest friends in the game. It's quite interesting fact that Territory raiding is 2nd to last favored activity. In my opinion this means, territory raiding needs changes, it is huge opportunity to make the product better. Currently territory raiding seems irrelevant, maybe unfair for defenders and not that fun for attackers.

      Not far from that, we can see that the second most popular activities would be small group pvp and zvz. IMO the depth of objectives that would enable these groups is very shallow. There's not much to fight for, we have monthly reset that provides best zvz, but it's once a month. So should we play once a month? We have problems with blue balling, no objective that would satisfy 50/100/150 man fighting for something. All we can do is fight for warcamp which is IRRELEVANT. Also castles are scheduled out of prime time, and happen only once a day. Anyone who misses that and is only interested in this activity - doesn't really have any reason to open the game, as Albion calendar is currently full of GAPS of no content(find your own content approach, in other words ride a horse simulator).

      It is also interesting that small scale pvp and zvz are negatively correlated, but still there were people who are interested in both, but yeah we can safely assume, whatever changes we do for players interested in large scale, won't satisfy small scale players, as those are not the same people. And the numbers show, it's not that solo players are small in numbers, there are 54 people who voted for small scale pvp and are not really interested in joining big parties, they want small objectives to meet other people competing for them. So boosting chests, solo mob fame or whatever that won't lure bigger parties will make them happier.

      The least attractive activity is dungeon diving. It is because we have to travel by horse that is boring, if we find a party they will prefer to escape over fighting (pve gear vs zvz gear), it's like ganking but with bigger scale. This content would be probably ditched even more as soon as there would be more goals to participate in activity D or F.

    • Conclusion:

      The majority of players play Albion online because it is PvP game. 75% of respondents play the game because of Open World PvP. As a person who represents exclusive ZvZ guild we are unhappy with the progress on adjusting existing content, adding more depth into it like political meaning, increasing rewards and putting more pressure on the open world gameplay. In the end - playing the game everyday does not come with possibility to have fun in this type of content. We struggle to find a contact, we get most of red-zone bosses (which are closest to the city, there are no continent locks, so they always generated most pvp) in EU timezone without any fight. Many people after month of tryharding are very demotivated putting all their faith in the next content update.

      As a person who is included in the Round table I am at the point, that my group interests are ignored by most of other Round Table members (over-representation of gvg-focused players, or gvg-guilds alliances), so it's very hard to find allies that would support what many many people actually want and I can hear their bragging every day. Unfortunately not many of them speak publicly, many of those interested in open world already left leaving us with such a narrow population.

      When I look how the problems are solved bothers me a lot. Devs got played out by ally leaders who pushed people to do the slave work and complain and turn this into complete nerf (warcamps/mage changes). So everyone who is interested in dominating the game (all of them are active round table members) used that opportunity to make GvG exclusively enough to control their empires. Now with every change that requires them to ask their people to do the slave job (so actually play the game), they shows their outrage, spam with posts that it is not fair, punishing for winning (gvg) and force devs to revert the changes. So in the end we had 3 months of mages being totally dead content and it took only 7 days to nerf the change.

      That's how round table works. It is like with real-life politicians, everyone contribute to their own interest, and Round Table is under-represented by average albion player that just wants to have fun with the game, play with their friends not to ride a horse and demotivate deeper and deeper. And this part of population is least happy and most declining happening to be 75% of all 'everyday' players.

      I personally think, that if devs won't act very quick and do revolution in open world - gvg balance, punishing alliances for being passive in open world, prioritize open world content over crystal gvg the trends of pvp-population declination will continue. This is unfortunately dangerous, because the less players fight, the less attractive pvp is > making game less fun > making more people to leave until there's point of no return.

      Putting more content into 5v5 mode, like Crystal GvG that will only satisfy some of players will even make the game more centralized around GvG/5v5 mode. It is great, but imo Albion is the only game in the market that offers large scale battles in medieval theme, has great mechanics, but devs try too much create e-sport mode of the MMO game, which is complete absurd and there are titles out there that Albion will never be able to compete with (LoL, Dota, HOTS, OW).

      With this said I will conclude this demand again.

      Dear SBI, please re-think the product you want to create. Please make sure your priorities match your player base priorities, your product is a niche on the market and you should understand what makes it special, why you sold over 150k veteran packs on release day and why we are left with 8k out of this number. Your development is going in a wrong way, your way of understanding your customers (players) is very bad, you are being manipulated and your knowledge/vision about situation in the game is somehow wrong. You still don't have any opponent on the market, but the day that some other company releases similar game but with full-zvz focus you might lose 75% of current population.       Also if you expect to grow population based on 5v5 content, you must understand it will be three times less effective than growing the zvz mode of the game.


      Good luck with that,

      Hope the survey data, zalrenic's data, our comments make your job easier to understand what is right and what is wrong. I am opened to help to advocate what's good and what's wrong for the game development from mine perspective, I encourage every other player that is unsatisfied or already left the game to do the same!!


      Thanks,

    • glokz wrote:

      Conclusion:

      The majority of players play Albion online because it is PvP game. 75% of respondents play the game because of Open World PvP. As a person who represents exclusive ZvZ guild we are unhappy with the progress on adjusting existing content, adding more depth into it like political meaning, increasing rewards and putting more pressure on the open world gameplay. In the end - playing the game everyday does not come with possibility to have fun in this type of content. We struggle to find a contact, we get most of red-zone bosses (which are closest to the city, there are no continent locks, so they always generated most pvp) in EU timezone without any fight. Many people after month of tryharding are very demotivated putting all their faith in the next content update.

      As a person who is included in the Round table I am at the point, that my group interests are ignored by most of other Round Table members (over-representation of gvg-focused players, or gvg-guilds alliances), so it's very hard to find allies that would support what many many people actually want and I can hear their bragging every day. Unfortunately not many of them speak publicly, many of those interested in open world already left leaving us with such a narrow population.

      When I look how the problems are solved bothers me a lot. Devs got played out by ally leaders who pushed people to do the slave work and complain and turn this into complete nerf (warcamps/mage changes). So everyone who is interested in dominating the game (all of them are active round table members) used that opportunity to make GvG exclusively enough to control their empires. Now with every change that requires them to ask their people to do the slave job (so actually play the game), they shows their outrage, spam with posts that it is not fair, punishing for winning (gvg) and force devs to revert the changes. So in the end we had 3 months of mages being totally dead content and it took only 7 days to nerf the change.

      That's how round table works. It is like with real-life politicians, everyone contribute to their own interest, and Round Table is under-represented by average albion player that just wants to have fun with the game, play with their friends not to ride a horse and demotivate deeper and deeper. And this part of population is least happy and most declining happening to be 75% of all 'everyday' players.

      I personally think, that if devs won't act very quick and do revolution in open world - gvg balance, punishing alliances for being passive in open world, prioritize open world content over crystal gvg the trends of pvp-population declination will continue. This is unfortunately dangerous, because the less players fight, the less attractive pvp is > making game less fun > making more people to leave until there's point of no return.

      Putting more content into 5v5 mode, like Crystal GvG that will only satisfy some of players will even make the game more centralized around GvG/5v5 mode. It is great, but imo Albion is the only game in the market that offers large scale battles in medieval theme, has great mechanics, but devs try too much create e-sport mode of the MMO game, which is complete absurd and there are titles out there that Albion will never be able to compete with (LoL, Dota, HOTS, OW).

      With this said I will conclude this demand again.

      Dear SBI, please re-think the product you want to create. Please make sure your priorities match your player base priorities, your product is a niche on the market and you should understand what makes it special, why you sold over 150k veteran packs on release day and why we are left with 8k out of this number. Your development is going in a wrong way, your way of understanding your customers (players) is very bad, you are being manipulated and your knowledge/vision about situation in the game is somehow wrong. You still don't have any opponent on the market, but the day that some other company releases similar game but with full-zvz focus you might lose 75% of current population. Also if you expect to grow population based on 5v5 content, you must understand it will be three times less effective than growing the zvz mode of the game.


      Good luck with that,

      Hope the survey data, zalrenic's data, our comments make your job easier to understand what is right and what is wrong. I am opened to help to advocate what's good and what's wrong for the game development from mine perspective, I encourage every other player that is unsatisfied or already left the game to do the same!!


      Thanks,
      I have an idea for you, if your guild is in SQUAD, and other SQUAD guilds are struggling to find open world ZvZ content - why not split up SQUAD and start a new alliance that can fight over some of the existing objectives. No one is contesting SQUAD for castles right now because only POE has the numbers, but we still are disadvantaged in terms of specs, gear and ZvZ experience among our average member. No alliance including POE is going to regularly contest SQUAD for major objectives like the castles without any realistic chance of winning these engagements. There is no point in throwing away 50+ 6.1+ ZvZ sets daily just so SQUAD cant have some content. SQUAD is already applying the same logic to GvGs - they don't have any team that regularly win against POE, so they don't even bother.

      End of the day, we're both on the same side in that we want Albion thrive and offer a fun experience for all of it's players. I think we just have different perspectives of how we are approaching the game.
      AO Quick Reference Guide
      Discord: Grimhawke#9254


      The post was edited 1 time, last by Grimhawke-EB ().

    • Wadefu wrote:

      And how much did you spam this in BA discord?
      It wasn't posted on BA discord (or maybe once but I didn't even notice it)

      It's almost impossible to have a completely objective survey, but i'm pretty sure he did it the best way possible (to have the most relevant stats). The results seem pretty logical to me according to the feedback i received from players (while streaming / on videos etc)

    • Dear Grimhawke-EB,

      There are no objectives to fight for, to compete for.. If we don't take fights like 15v50 we will only kill naked bodies. That's the most fun you can have with the game. Running a horse, picking unfavorable fights or killing naked guys. Sounds cool.

      I won't repeat myself, just read history posts,
      But just for you, to repeat myself again

      Things to fix that should be done with yesterday's deadline are:

      1. Boosting Open world dungeons loot to encourage players to FF there
      2. Boosting solo mobs fame
      3. Making loot from chests in OW much better
      4. Making world bosses loot much better
      5. Fixing calendar to make more events (warcamps/castles) not 1/time zone
      6. Prioritize plans accordingly to players needs. (currently #1 priority is Crystal GvG so next big open world content will be released in 5-6 months?)

      I don't care about season ranking or who wins or who loses. In the long term I would love to play hellgates 20v20 vs my own alliance. When I wrote my post describing problems with Albion I was playing in small alliance with 70 active man. We have burnt out playing small-scale zvz (10-50 man), so we joined SQUAD to seek for more opportunity to find content. That gave us some more content but nobody wants to ride horse further.


      Anyway, I am done with putting so much effort into fight for the better product that would satisfy my group, and obviously 75% of albion's population.

      I am giving up that for now, you can call it a win or whatever. I don't want to put any more of my precious time into something that always ends up with discussion

      SHOULD BA WIN OR CIR? NO MAKE IT CIR PLS PLS.

      Also I don't find developers to see the game as a product that I initially bought and was running fine as long we had healthy population. Now the population is quite in a poor condition and the content is FORCED. I will just go back into the line and watch devs doing the job. As promised we will see more details about development plans for the next patch. Hopefully I will find something interesting there, but since Crystal GvG's are the biggest thing about it - everything I said was not worth it. I took my shot, fired all the bullets, im done.


      With this said,

      Thanks everyone
      Good luck

    • glokz wrote:

      There are no objectives to fight for, to compete for.. If we don't take fights like 15v50 we will only kill naked bodies. That's the most fun you can have with the game. Running a horse, picking unfavorable fights or killing naked guys. Sounds cool.

      "You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain."

      BA was that hero in season 1-3 and now season 4 they are what they stood against in the beginning seasons.

    • glokz wrote:

      Dear Grimhawke-EB,

      There are no objectives to fight for, to compete for.. If we don't take fights like 15v50 we will only kill naked bodies. That's the most fun you can have with the game. Running a horse, picking unfavorable fights or killing naked guys. Sounds cool.

      that's false? I can link plenty of other screenshots that squad only fights against much lesser people only if they have numbers?

    • glokz wrote:

      Out of 157 responses, 79.6% players are interested in PvP, and 8,9% players claimed that they play the game exclusively because of PvE aspect. I think it's way beyond my expectations and Devs should respect such a large portion of group, especially that making PvE better, we not only make game more fun for PvE-focused players, but also for PvP players that need PvE to get better in PvP. IMO this is quite important point and should be followed up by questioning, what can we do better about PvE? If it comes to crafting, well I think Albion has a huge potential to be a game that could offer players expanding their crafting empire, becoming the best manufacturer. We should enhance economy system to include more depth so we lure more players that will love to craft and it could be a exclusive reason to play the game(e.g on albion). I have some idea that I will post soon in other post.

      The most important information that we got was that 75% of people who usually follow reddit/forum so most probably play albion everyday prioritize open world activity over 5v5 gameplay. The way how the survey was created forced players to choose one, the more important game mode for them.

      Unfortunately as I see 5v5 it just sinks people into, you can't count on them with daily activities as playing 5v5 is quite absorbing and requires hours of training/running a team. They usually create their own guild within guild. It's not something you can do effectively by joining random teams once a week. In other way, I see it is a very high entry floor activity and the 25% responses came from these players. As we can imagine, the people on forum/reddit are also some kind of 'elite players', the most dedicated community. The official data, shows that there are less than 5% of characters (not players), involved in GvG. I'd say, we can clearly see over-representation of that group. On the opposite side, I'd say we had under-representation of solo/non-pvp players.

      Analyzing this data I could count only 6 people to participate hell gates / scrims exclusively (so non-gvg players).



      That's why I want to elaborate the most on Open World PvP data.




      Additional analysis

      Open world activity correlation


      As we can see, most players are interested in Party vs Party battles, so battles where there are no lags, each person can make a play that will make their party win, but requires preparation to get the right weapons in the group, so have X healers, Y tanks, this and that DPS, maybe some special roles, advanced strategies and great shotcaller. This answer was the mostly correlated with territory raiding, which is also related to guild-activity, playing with your closest friends in the game. It's quite interesting fact that Territory raiding is 2nd to last favored activity. In my opinion this means, territory raiding needs changes, it is huge opportunity to make the product better. Currently territory raiding seems irrelevant, maybe unfair for defenders and not that fun for attackers.

      Not far from that, we can see that the second most popular activities would be small group pvp and zvz. IMO the depth of objectives that would enable these groups is very shallow. There's not much to fight for, we have monthly reset that provides best zvz, but it's once a month. So should we play once a month? We have problems with blue balling, no objective that would satisfy 50/100/150 man fighting for something. All we can do is fight for warcamp which is IRRELEVANT. Also castles are scheduled out of prime time, and happen only once a day. Anyone who misses that and is only interested in this activity - doesn't really have any reason to open the game, as Albion calendar is currently full of GAPS of no content(find your own content approach, in other words ride a horse simulator).

      It is also interesting that small scale pvp and zvz are negatively correlated, but still there were people who are interested in both, but yeah we can safely assume, whatever changes we do for players interested in large scale, won't satisfy small scale players, as those are not the same people. And the numbers show, it's not that solo players are small in numbers, there are 54 people who voted for small scale pvp and are not really interested in joining big parties, they want small objectives to meet other people competing for them. So boosting chests, solo mob fame or whatever that won't lure bigger parties will make them happier.

      The least attractive activity is dungeon diving. It is because we have to travel by horse that is boring, if we find a party they will prefer to escape over fighting (pve gear vs zvz gear), it's like ganking but with bigger scale. This content would be probably ditched even more as soon as there would be more goals to participate in activity D or F.
      Before I dive into your post Glokz, you put a lot of effort into this and I don't want to take away from the information here however as you indicated, your post is biased and your sample-set is microscopic and biased by nature.

      Reddit contains the "younger" crowd and the posting/content is focused around a specific group. Its important to recognize the fact that Reddit is filled with trash talking over quality content. A PvP player will trash talk sooner than your PvE focused player.

      Despite the bias in your post,you do make some valid points from the data, It appears you abstracted the option of choice from your survey in hopes of eliciting a players #1 focused activity. There is a fundamental flaw here in that you can't design a game for continual engagement and growth off a single focus or gameplay aspect.

      Game Ecosystem:

      The hurdle with design is creating a engagement cycle that keeps the player engaged, challenged, 'growing' and playing. Albion Online is a MMORPG-MOBA with full loot and a player driven economy. Each players definition of "success" is different and it crosses more than one activity beyond PvP.

      Your theory on 75% of Reddit or the players being anti 5v5 is the EXACT OPPOSITE of Albion Twitch viewers. On Twitch the top viewed streams are 5v5 or small group content focused.

      The data most likely represents a player wanting/needing a FAIR/BALANCED engagement or a opportunity at a relatively fair fight. This is a full loot game no one will intentionally walk 10 in to 100.

      When SQUAD rolls 100+ or even 60+ in T8+ for OW ZvZ no one can or will fight that. The rule of thumb is when you see SQUAD Assume 20+ deblobbed flanking or Die. SQUAD Also ONLY uses 135%+ mounts. If you have no option to LEAVE the fight unless you too are at 135%+. This is called a barrier to entry for poor or new players. When the top sharks can always eat other sharks before they grow, you have player attrition and a NEGATIVE experience.

      Where does someone practice 30+ OW engagements no where..... PoE Has tried and gets ganked due to discord spies(Sandbox content and great use of spies to generate content for SQUAD)

      People can practice 5v5, there is no training ground for OW. You do not get a gear cap it is big dogs and big fish only in the open world and the top stays on top as the best leave the losers to join the TOP.

      I will now counter my own point above.

      Players CHOOSE to engage in what they are good at and their interest is available, players group with other players and similar interested. Winning is fun, losing sucks, making money is awesome, losing items and money sucks.

      SQUAD is to open world as PoE is to 5v5 and 20v20. SQUAD, SAVED and many avoid Cargera & friends and wont attack a City GvG anymore due to fear.

      You have all of the open world players drifting to SQUAD and GvG players going to PoE. There is options to learn and understand 5v5, content, there is no beginner, intermediate, experienced level to entry for open world.

      Confidence and moral are the keys to victory here. BA WONT do another city GvG for fear of loss, same way these GvG teams dodge Cargera & friends last night but play the other teams GvG sitting.

      Watch the above video: @ 1:08:04 & @00:08:00

      You know how to dodge someone open world? Log out... there is not tent or safety and 135+140% speed mounts and crappy guards mean any 5+ player group encountered = death. You can cross the entire world to defend multiple castles within the 32 min capture cycle. There is no entry level to this again, its go big or get killed.

      You can do redzone, arena, skirmish, and many more tasks to learn 5v5. There is no entry to the open world.

      This is a deadly cycle where the bottom are constantly fed upon by the upper level players.


      My Playstyle: my experince comes from many SandBox's games over the last 10 years. I have seen sandbox games rise and fall many times and wish I was still in college to play Albion more and contest SQUAD in the open world. The reality is I get 2-3 hours a night to play now that I have a career and job, I do what I can with my friends buts not enough to guide

      In my evenings I run dungeon fame farms, Skirmish nights, Castle Ops(once a week), mage Raiding, Mage defending and more. I am able to fame farm and kill mage attackers but we are to slow to catch them before they dissipated before todays patch should help with this. We enjoy the ability to be DOVE or to DEFEND when farming, PvP is #1 for me and I only PvE to be better at PvP.

      I play with 3 RL friends and we are able to run 2-3 5 man groups a night at once through our guild. We cannot and do not want to form up 40+ in 8.1+ to do a castle.... for 1.5-3 hours.... that is my ENTIRE night and WILL NEVER be what I do nightly.

    • Lemonz wrote:

      glokz wrote:

      .
      Before I dive into your post Glokz, you put a lot of effort into this and I don't want to take away from the information here however as you indicated, your post is biased and your sample-set is microscopic and biased by nature.
      Reddit contains the "younger" crowd and the posting/content is focused around a specific group. Its important to recognize the fact that Reddit is filled with trash talking over quality content. A PvP player will trash talk sooner than your PvE focused player.

      Despite the bias in your post,you do make some valid points from the data, It appears you abstracted the option of choice from your survey in hopes of eliciting a players #1 focused activity. There is a fundamental flaw here in that you can't design a game for continual engagement and growth off a single focus or gameplay aspect.

      Game Ecosystem:

      The hurdle with design is creating a engagement cycle that keeps the player engaged, challenged, 'growing' and playing. Albion Online is a MMORPG-MOBA with full loot and a player driven economy. Each players definition of "success" is different and it crosses more than one activity beyond PvP.

      Your theory on 75% of Reddit or the players being anti 5v5 is the EXACT OPPOSITE of Albion Twitch viewers. On Twitch the top viewed streams are 5v5 or small group content focused.

      The data most likely represents a player wanting/needing a FAIR/BALANCED engagement or a opportunity at a relatively fair fight. This is a full loot game no one will intentionally walk 10 in to 100.

      When SQUAD rolls 100+ or even 60+ in T8+ for OW ZvZ no one can or will fight that. The rule of thumb is when you see SQUAD Assume 20+ deblobbed flanking or Die. SQUAD Also ONLY uses 135%+ mounts. If you have no option to LEAVE the fight unless you too are at 135%+. This is called a barrier to entry for poor or new players. When the top sharks can always eat other sharks before they grow, you have player attrition and a NEGATIVE experience.

      Where does someone practice 30+ OW engagements no where..... PoE Has tried and gets ganked due to discord spies(Sandbox content and great use of spies to generate content for SQUAD)

      People can practice 5v5, there is no training ground for OW. You do not get a gear cap it is big dogs and big fish only in the open world and the top stays on top as the best leave the losers to join the TOP.

      I will now counter my own point above.

      Players CHOOSE to engage in what they are good at and their interest is available, players group with other players and similar interested. Winning is fun, losing sucks, making money is awesome, losing items and money sucks.

      SQUAD is to open world as PoE is to 5v5 and 20v20. SQUAD, SAVED and many avoid Cargera & friends and wont attack a City GvG anymore due to fear.

      You have all of the open world players drifting to SQUAD and GvG players going to PoE. There is options to learn and understand 5v5, content, there is no beginner, intermediate, experienced level to entry for open world.

      Confidence and moral are the keys to victory here. BA WONT do another city GvG for fear of loss, same way these GvG teams dodge Cargera & friends last night but play the other teams GvG sitting.

      Watch the above video: @ 1:08:04 & @00:08:00

      You know how to dodge someone open world? Log out... there is not tent or safety and 135+140% speed mounts and crappy guards mean any 5+ player group encountered = death. You can cross the entire world to defend multiple castles within the 32 min capture cycle. There is no entry level to this again, its go big or get killed.

      You can do redzone, arena, skirmish, and many more tasks to learn 5v5. There is no entry to the open world.

      This is a deadly cycle where the bottom are constantly fed upon by the upper level players.


      My Playstyle: my experince comes from many SandBox's games over the last 10 years. I have seen sandbox games rise and fall many times and wish I was still in college to play Albion more and contest SQUAD in the open world. The reality is I get 2-3 hours a night to play now that I have a career and job, I do what I can with my friends buts not enough to guide

      In my evenings I run dungeon fame farms, Skirmish nights, Castle Ops(once a week), mage Raiding, Mage defending and more. I am able to fame farm and kill mage attackers but we are to slow to catch them before they dissipated before todays patch should help with this. We enjoy the ability to be DOVE or to DEFEND when farming, PvP is #1 for me and I only PvE to be better at PvP.

      I play with 3 RL friends and we are able to run 2-3 5 man groups a night at once through our guild. We cannot and do not want to form up 40+ in 8.1+ to do a castle.... for 1.5-3 hours.... that is my ENTIRE night and WILL NEVER be what I do nightly.
      Really well thought out post @Lemonz. I hope @Korn @Retroman @PrintsKaspian @Evoque and others at SBI see this.

      The game would really flourish the most if it focused on fair and a balanced instanced content (2v2 5v5 20v20) as well as more focus on smaller scale open world activities as these are more accessible to average players to sustain.

      The current castle system does the opposite of this, as season points are so hard to come by, players have been incentivized to monopolize these points daily by massing up 80+ players in 8.0/8.1 gear that no one can contest, twice a day for 45 minutes. In past patches, SBI has reduced energy/point generation for Mercia territories because holding them was too dominant a strategy. The same applies now to the current Castle mechanics as they relate to season points and should be looked at.
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    • Lemonz wrote:

      Your theory on 75% of Reddit or the players being anti 5v5 is the EXACT OPPOSITE of Albion Twitch viewers. On Twitch the top viewed streams are 5v5 or small group content focused.
      Actually this isn't true. People go on twitch to see some action, the problem with ZvZ and OW focused streams is that you are never sure to have a fight at a given time (where for GvGs it's almost certain even if no-shows exists). You can take for example the reset day where Albion TV streams some ZvZ: it's one of the most watched streams, if it isn't the most watched.
      If you look at youtube videos, you will see easily that solo PvP and ZvZ are the most watched (the GvG coverage on youtube isn't a thing anymore because of that imo).

      Lemonz wrote:

      People can practice 5v5, there is no training ground for OW.
      Actually you can practice zerg. You can go to yellow zone and have a fight (SQUAD guilds did that 3 days ago ;) ).
      It's indeed harder to practice ZvZ, since you have to mass way more people than you have to for a GvG scrim.

      Reddit isn't much used by french players for sure, and there is a lot of communities untouched by the survey for sure, but there isn't only SQUAD looking at reddit / forum (you can easily see that by watching all the propaganda post of all sides and all the mass votes / downvotes happening there). For this survey, as I said earlier, I wasn't aware of it (even if i spend hours a day watching discord) so no mass vote was done by BA (can't say for the others).

      Problem is that you cannot see 100% unbiased stats since you can't reach a large enough / unbiased enough playerbase with a non-official power (even officials might have problems since alliances have a big influence on players)