Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Paul]

So Albion Online released yesterday (7/17/17), with a tiered release schedule. People with the Legendary packs got in yesterday, Epic packs got in today (including me), and the Veteran packs get in tomorrow at 13:00 UTC (8am CDT). Roughly 12 nows from now. There were some hiccups with the Legendary start yesterday, but my experience was flawless today. No crashes, no disconnects, no lag. Kind of crummy that the folks who paid $100 were the guinea pigs, but it all worked well for me haha.

It's a buy to play type sandbox MMO deal with a premium plan that makes life easier that can be bought with ingame money too. So far getting gold for beta is extremely easy, I got enough gold in a few hours today to pay for a month. I expect once we get further into it the price of gold will go up significantly, but will probably still remain pretty affordable. The game seems to have a lot of whales - I've met quite a few folks who spent $2000+ on gold. While I personally couldn't justify blowing $2000 on a game, if that's what they want to do it supports the game and makes it more accessible for the rest of us.

I thought it might be of interest here because of the way the game works. It's a pretty freeform sandbox. Instead of levels and classes, you simply have equipment and the skill to use the equipment. Changing you equipment changes your build. Everything in the game is crafted by players from gathered materials, even the items dropped by monsters - they have a black market system where you can sell items to be dropped in the world. Then there is pvp and gvg action which is seeming to be a lot of fun. I haven't tried the 5v5 or 20v20 GvGs yet, but I've done Hellgates (they have 2v2s and 5v5s) and had fun with them. With GvGs you can capture cities and guard towers in the black zone and build crafting stations and houses and stuff. The highest end materials are only on watchtowers, and the higher end stuff is all in pvp enabled areas. It's full loot pvp in the higher end areas, no loot in the yellow zones (you just get silver based on the repair bill you inflict on the guy you kill), and no pvp in the blue zones. It has some good PvE content as well with bosses and dungeons that are fun, as well as an instanced expedition type deal if you don't have time or interest in venturing to the open world. No quests or stuff as complex as games designed for that, but fun enough.

It's kind of like EVE in many of its systems, but fantasy with kind of MOBA style combat. The leveling is a combination of passive (daily learning points) and active (gain "fame" which is this game's experience as you do stuff). You have to get part of the fame in actual effort (30%), then can spend LP to finish it off, which is nice for casual players - can get 3.33x skill gain if you don't play enough to exhaust your LP.

Crafting/Gathering
Gathering materials involves you roaming around and extracting them from nodes scattered around, or killing things for them in some cases (hides off animals, artifacts off bosses). Crafting involves gathering materials and then using buildings to refine and craft stuff with them. All the city buildings are built and owned by players, and they can set a fee to use them. They require food which you have to grow on farms.

You can also get your own private island to farm and build crafting stations there if you don't want to deal with other players' buildings in cities, but you miss out on the bonus 15% material savings when crafting in cities. Black zone cities get 20%. There are also focus points to use on crafting, which is intended as another boost to casual players as they regen over time and help you save more resources. And laborers in your house are another time gated system that helps casual folks (they really tried to level the playing field a little between casual players and the no-life folks who play 24/7).

Classless Combat System
The ability system deserves a mention too. Every item you equip gives you abilities and bonuses, and you have to skill up the items individually. You can pick from a short list of abilities when you equip an item. You can learn how to use cloth boots, robe, and hat and they all add to your damage and make you kind of glassy. Or you can throw in a plate boot in there for a little defense increase and one of the more tanky abilities like one that charges in and throws a shield on you and any ally nearby. Or you can go full plate set and be much more survivable, but your damage won't be near as high. Then there are specialties that go even deeper to learn specifically how to better use one type - like the knight plate boot as opposed to the soldier plate boots - which gives a little more boost using them.

Weapons are varied too, and what role you end up playing largely depends on your weapon choice. Overall there are 15 different main weapon classes divided between 3 base types (warrior, ranger, caster) and divided again into 4 different specialties within those that have slightly different powers (one class is artifact, which currently has 2 totally different weapons in each category). Different weapons have different abilities. Some are damage focused with high damage abilities like fire staff or axe, others like hammer and mace are tanky focused with things like stuns and slows and pulls for crowd control, others like quarterstaves and bows offer enhanced mobility to jump around and avoid the tank types. They have done a good job with balancing, because I see all the weapon types being used by people.

For instance, I'm going with spear and leather armor with a torch in offhand. I have seen people use spears with plate armor with shields and cloth armor too. Each of those plays differently - plate has more CC bonus, so the root or stun lasts longer. Cloth has more damage, so the special attacks and auto attacks hit harder. Leather is middle ground, but also offers an optional attack speed bonus which is good for spears since they use auto attacks a lot. I have seen people with frost staves in cloth acting as DPS and in plate acting as crowd control and tank.

Similarly, I've seen people level both plate armor, arcane staves, and maces. Then, depending on how they want to play, they can grab a mace with their plate and be a tank or grab the arcane staff and play a support role.

Here's a referral link if anyone wants to check it out (if anyone buys it from that I would get a little bit of the premium currency to use on game time).

https://albiononline.com/?ref=FZ26QY8NM6

Or if you hate the possibility of me receiving anything for this, here is a link without the referral: https://albiononline.com

I'm currently in game as Cian if anyone wants to play with me. I can craft everything I wear - leather, spears, and torches. I'm currently playing with the guild Till Valhalla.

-note- Edited 7/18/17 to correct errors (I didn't know that much about the game when I first wrote this, lol) and update for launch.

[Folly]

Sounds quite interesting.
I've got too much on my plate right now to get invested in a beta...but I'll probably give it a try at launch.

[motorbitch]

sounds like some sort of medival eve.
what are the premium benefits?

[Paul]

The premium bonuses are pretty substantial for leveling, they make things much faster and let you make more money etc. Once you're leveled up it wouldn't be that big of a deal though.

You have to have premium to get the daily learning points, and you get a 50% boost to fame (experience) generated. You also get 50% more loot from PvE and materials from gathering. The crafting focus points are also part of it. They run out quickly but are a nice boost. Other than that you get doubled crop yield and animal growth on farms and halved fees for using the auction house.

Very beneficial, but not game breaking if you don't have it. The lowest purchase package comes with a month and almost enough premium currency to get a second month though, and by the end of all that you could probably make the ingame money to buy more months depending on how much you played. People are probably letting go of their premium currency cheap due to the game still being beta and them knowing they'll get it back, but I already made enough in the last few days to buy a few months of premium time. No idea how it might work out at release.

[Paul]

I'm not sure if it'll hold my interest long term, but the game definitely has me hooked thus far.

Just the variety of stuff I can do is pretty interesting. So far the activities I've done are:

1. Group PvE, dungeon raiding, etc.

2. Group PvP (only in the safe "yellow" areas so far, but it was fun).

3. Crafting gear to sell on the market.

4. Playing the market to make a profit. IE, put purchase orders for cheap ore and hides. Someone filled them. Refined them into metal and leather and sold them at a nice profit. One guy was hauling resources via an ox from one city to another because the prices were higher at the destination and he was bringing a couple friends along to scout for PKs for him (he was bringing cheap leather to an area that had no hide bearing animals).

5. Farming and raising animals. Carrots and beans and turnips and cabbage. And using the produce to feed and raise animals. Like I just put in a animal fence area and am raising a bunch of geese (feeding them beans... lol).

And somehow this is all tied in together to the game's endgame content of building up cities and controlling territory in a PvP environment. It's a full loot pvp game with content for people who don't want to pvp. I'm not sure if it's enough content, but they're definitely trying to cater to everyone. Even casual players can just log in daily to take care of their farm and go on a few quick PvE missions or craft and put stuff on the market to sell.


There are some troubling aspects that I hope don't end up killing it, though: The hand holding is kind of extreme at the lower end, then you fall off the deep end when going into "red" areas. You go from being unable to lose your gear at all for the first 5 tiers to suddenly dropping everything you own in the red areas. So I have seen people go out wearing everything they own and suddenly having nothing when a group of people kill and loot them. The first areas just don't prepare people for that. The economy also seems a bit better in the center city, I went there and crafted some boots because they sell out fast due to people losing them. One poor guy wound up buying 5 pairs of boots over 2 days, I assume he kept losing pvp battles.

[Aoi]

...Does that mean you could go hunt that guy down and sell his boots back to him, without him knowing?

[Paul]

You could, haha.

Actually, some of the boots I see selling on the auction in the center city that are competing with mine are made by me (items are tagged by crafter). So one of my customers bought a pair, lost it, and someone else is selling. And they may very well buy the exact same boots back.

[Paul]

Having tried some of the PvP, I have to say it's fun - but a group is kind of necessary. Most folks in the black zone are roaming in groups of at least 2-3 even to do stuff like gathering. I saw several groups of 8+ roaming around getting the chests that spawn. I should have went out with a quarterstaff, but I wanted to try out hammer. I kicked another quarterstaff user's behind, but his greater mobility let him get away. The rush stun ability saved me from a group of 3 while I was off my horse PvEing though - I managed to stun all 3 in one go and used the seconds from that to escape. I eventually died to a mage in t6.1 gear fighting over a world chest (I was wearing t4.1), mostly because I missed my stun and let him hit me with his 900 damage curse spell. Thinking of switching to the helmet that gives a 2 second block for stuff like that, or the assassin boots for the dodge - although the knight boots I'm using are good for groups.

The variety you see in builds is nice. They did a great job balancing different weapons and armors. I still haven't decided what play style I want to go with. Have tried quarterstaves and cloth, quarterstaves and leather, hammers and leather, hammers and plate, swords, maces, crossbows, bows, daggers. Haven't tried any of the caster stuff yet though, I guess I should unlock some of it and give it a whirl. It doesn't take long to get T4 unlocked, so it's easy enough to branch out and try things.

[Fewah]

I've heard its just a massive grind, everything about the game is a grind?

I like the artwork actually, but the game doesnt seem to have much fun in it?

[Paul]

It doesn't seem very grindy to me. Getting to tier 4 is really quick and easy. Tier 5 is pretty easy too. I guess it might become grindy above that? I haven't played enough to know. Getting gathering up to use T4 tools is pretty grindy, but I'm hoping that gets balanced a bit before release because the fame gain from gathering is just low compared to other activities. It doesn't even come close to the grind of games like WoW.

I guess it depends what you want out of the game. It's a fairly free form sandbox. It has some fun content like renting land in cities, buying private islands (to farm or make craft stations), claiming territory including cities and castles and farms in the outlands (black full pvp area), etc - but no quests or guided goals or anything. Unlocking your particular set of gear is pretty quick, but you have to specialize and learn every different piece. It would be grindy if you were trying to level up everything (which would be akin to playing a game like WoW with every single character class and trying to get them all leveled equally...). Crafting is the same way - you have to specialize. There is a crafting skill for each weapon class and each armor piece and class. So plate boot crafter is one, plate helm crafter, cloth boot crafter, etc. Trying to craft EVERYTHING would be crazy grindy too. If you specialize and use the learning points that premium gives you leveling up is really quick.

The PvE content is fairly simple - all the content I have seen can be done in small groups or solo. It's still fairly entertaining, especially in smaller groups (3-5) where the mobs can easily wipe you out if you're not on your toes. The possibility of PvP during PvE in the yellow/red/black areas keeps you on your toes too. Hellgates have the best PvE rewards and are limited to 5 man groups, but they're black (full pvp) zones and practically guarantee a PvP encounter. The game matches groups up entering them, so chances are you'll meet another 5 man group in there and have to battle it out - winner take all. Or you can do PvE expeditions which are instanced from towns, but the rewards aren't as good as open world.

Crafting content is your basic craft X to level up type deal, every craft attempt gives fame (experience) and you can also "study" items you make for more fame but it destroys them. It doesn't take any time at all to level up to tier 5, tier 6+ would probably be a bit slow but if you just craft gear for people or yourself instead of grinding it you'll get there without too much hassle.

PvP is viable at tier 4 so you can jump into things like black zone pvp and hellgates pretty early if you want, you'll just die a bit more often (but it's cheap and easy to replace t4 gear). A well coordinated group can take out people with superior gear, the main thing is to have a group that syncs well together because a lot of the powers can play really well off each other. Like a mace guy dragging the enemy group together, a hammer guy stunning them all, and the whole group unleashing AoE damage on them. Or an arcane staff user + damage beaming a dagger user before he pulls off his big hit.

[Paul]

They are working on an interesting feature. One of the complaints this beta round has been that PvE loot drops high end equipment and refined materials, which bypasses the whole gathering->crafting aspect. Especially when the rare materials for the better enchanted stuff are very rare to gather in the wild, but dropping like crazy during high end PvE. So they're instead making npcs drop player crafted equipment.aa

Hi all,

as many of you are aware, we are working on an awesome new feature that will make sure that gear dropped by mobs is player crafted. We achieve this by having a black market NPC buy said gear from players first, before allowing that gear to be dropped by mobs. Please see below for the details on how that works.

This has the following advantages:
It allows us to significantly increase overall mob drop amounts, making the PvE experience more rewarding
It supports the crafting, refining and gathering economy (instead of competing with it)
It encourages and increases trade & transportation
It allows us to introduce a new item sink to the game in the form or "corruption", that we can freely configure
It allows us to remove essences from refining as this feature already creates a link between PvE and refining/crafting, hence essence are no longer needed to fill that role
It allows us to remove enchanted resources as a reward for hell gates and chests and replace those with additional drops - player crafted, of course!


Details

Now, some of you had questions and concerns about the feature. The concerns are mostly the result of us not having specified in greater detail how the feature is going to work.

Note that the feature's "behind the scenes" mathematics and algorithms are not simple - they can't be, as then, the feature would not work as intended. However, the actual in-game implementation will be straight forward and simple.

Here are the details (all of which are still subject to change as we are working on the feature).
For each equipment item that can be dropped by mobs, we create a "virtual storage", keeping track of the current amount of items stored and the maximum amount for each item
Each mob has its drop table, and a roll is made against that table when he is killed. If an item is rolled, it will however only drop if the current storage for that item is > 0. If the item drops, current storage is of course reduced by 1.
Now, demand for player crafted items in the system is managed through a special black market place. In this market place, a smuggler NPC can buy gear from players by creating buy orders, and players can directly sell to these buy orders or place sell orders in advance that get automatically matched if a fitting NPC buy order shows up
Every time an item is rolled to be dropped by a mob, no matter whether it actually drops or not, "demand" for that item is created. What does this mean?
If demand increases, generally the smuggler NPC will create a new buy order for the respective item, at a price equal to its item value.
However, if, for that specific item, the number of buy orders + the number of items already stored is equal to the maximum amount of that item that can be kept in virtual storage, then the NPC will not create an additional buy order, but will instead increase the lowest price buy order by an amount equal to the item value.
What this means is that if an item is worth more than its item value in the player to player markets - most items are, as the item value is only slightly above the silver returned from salvage, but for salvage, you also get 25% of resources back - then the NPC will continue to increase the price in increments equal to the item value, until, eventually, the price is high enough that a player sell the item to the NPC.
For example, a T6.0 broad sword is currently sold for 50k silver in Fort Sterling, which is 33.6 times its item value. This means that the NPC would have to list the item and then increase its price 34 times before a player is going to sell the item to him. As mobs can only drop items that they actually have in virtual storage, and assuming a maximum storage of 1 for this item, it would have to get rolled for drop for 34 times before somebody would supply the NPC with the item, and it would finally drop after the 35th time it gets rolled.
It's easy to see that with the current drop chances, this is unlikely to happen much. However, in the new system the "theoretical" drop chances would be increases significantly, as the actual drop chances are self-balanced by supply, demand and the player base. Roughly speaking: Actual drop chance = (Theoretical Drop Chance) * (Item Value)/(Market Price).
When it comes balancing, keeping the above price creating mechanism in mind, we can actually calculate the amount of "Black Market Silver" that each Mob, when killed, is adding to the game. Simply take that mobs drop table and multiply the item value of each item with its drop chance, and then sum up all of these values. This is the amount of silver that the Black Market NPC will post to the market every time that mob gets killed. Now, if a certain mob right now drops 100s when killed, once we have the new feature in place, we could make that a drop of 80s plus 20s injected into the Black Market. This will keep the overall silver amount the same, but will shift a chunk of silver creation (as opposed to mere silver trading) away from PvE and towards gathering/refining/crafting.
To give you some perspective of that, when we currently calculate the average item value created by a T4 mob, for example, it roughly adds up to 0.5 (zero-point-five!) per kill - almost nothing. Hence, in the new system, we have tons of room to really buff up the theoretical item drop rates, knowing full well that the theoretical drop rates will never be reached as people are generally not willing to sell gear just at item value (as this is pretty much the same or less as you'd get for salvaging said gear, taking 75% of item value in silver and selling the 25% of resources that you get back. With this in mind, we will re-design our drop tables, and on part of it is also to decide how much "silver weight" to put on the enchantment level and quality level of gear.
Finally, we have the ability to set a "corruption" level for the black market. This means that a certain percentage of items sold to the Black Market NPC will never reach the mobs in question. Balancing-wise, this is exactly identical to these items trashing. We will be able to set the corruption % for each tier and enchantment level separately, allowing is to have genuine and powerful item sinks in particular for lower end gear, which the game is currently lacking
Conclusion

We are extremely excited about this feature. As far as we are aware, no other game has done something like this before. It's a 100% fit for Albion's DNA and will improve the game play for gatherers, refiners, crafters and PvEers alike, as their activities will no perfectly synergize with each other. As we see it, it's possibly a total game changer.

On top of that, it allows us to get rid of band aid features such as essences as a requirement for refining and dropping refined resources hell gates and chests. None of these are needed, as the link between PvE and crafting that essences are there for is now created by our player driven item drops, and the extra reward provided by dropping enchanted resources is now provided by dropping actual gear, which is no longer a problem as its player crafted!

And finally, we can drop satisfying amounts of gear, addressing one of Albion's greatest weaknesses, without upsetting the player driven economy.

In short (tldr?), players pve mobs, which generates demand for items to be dropped by mobs, which raises prices that black market npcs pay to crafters, until black market price is high enough for crafters to sell crap to them. Then mobs drop crap that people sell, which generates more demand, so more crap gets sold to be dropped. The PvE players are effectively paying for the black market out of their silver drops because they are reducing money drops to increase item drops.

So instead of PvE competing with crafters, it's just another way for crafters to sell their crap to players.

[Imofexios]

Im not really bothered to start again once the wipe gets done.
Was grindy enough 2 times a row

[Paul]

Im not really bothered to start again once the wipe gets done.
Was grindy enough 2 times a row

Does it get really grindy at higher tiers or something? Granted I'm only in T5 stuff still (other folks are already in T8, lol), but I haven't felt the need to grind at all. I find the PvE content to be enjoyable though, so maybe that's the diff.

Did you like the game? Are you planning on coming back for release in July once they're done with all the wipes for beta?

[Imofexios]

Coming back perhaps, but the extended and long beta phases was kinda let down for most people.
Fun game all in all. Basic stuff for all hack n slash fans.

[Paul]

Ah. That seems to be the case for a lot of people on many of these games where they do long betas, especially paid betas. I'm just coming into it in their final beta so I didn't experience wipe after wipe after wipe and am experiencing things the first time so not having any burnout issues.

These expeditions are kind of awful when you go in without a group. People queue up for them wearing support gear (heal staff or nature staff) then swap, or you end up with an idiot who has no idea how to heal. Just did one. First two attempts someone queued as healer and swapped so we had to abandon, third we had a guy with a nature staff that was using his AoE DoT instead of the extra heal. Then he got mad at me part way through because we were dealing with 4 npcs that he had DoT'd at once and I only managed to draw aggro from 3 of them and he died to the 4th (I died too to the 3 attacking me because he didnt heal me at all once he had one on him), so he absolutely refused to heal me despite me being the only tank. So the DPS ended up being the defacto tanks because I'd get down to 1/4 health and have to stop pulling aggro and then he would frantically heal the guys in assassin and mage gear instead of just healing me in the first place. The lumberjack miniboss on the t5 expedition kept whirlwinding and instead of me keeping him off to the side while the group took him down I had to let him go after other people and stand back because I was almost dead. So he went through and wiped the group who was frantically running around (but stupidly clumping up lol) with me finishing him off with a stun/slam after the whirlwind ended and only having 50 hp left staying alive only because of the knight boot shield. The final boss I held aggro pretty much the whole fight just by doing damage because everyone else kept getting hit by the AoE abilities, but I avoided all the big hits and still managed to live with a sliver of health.

Through the whole expedition I got more heals from the spear guy wearing assassin leather and a plate helm with the emergency heal on it than I did from the healer.

I guess it's the same deal in any game with random groups, though. Particularly egregious here because people can just completely ignore their role as healer and it only ever puts one in a group.