Placing an Importance on Alliances?

[RageMaster]

And I dont believe outfit numbers will be greatly important, as faction numbers will be equal. Outfit success will be all about being as combat effective as you can be, whether you have a 10 man or 100 man outfit.

If I have an outfit of five, who work better than your outfit of ten, sure you'd kick my ass. But if I focused my efforts with another small outfit of 5, we'd outclass you. Combat Effectiveness... seriously. Forget about large numbers.

[AztecWarrior]

I am sure that taking a base with a clan of five stealthers will work.

NOT!

I think that, for that to work, you need a distraction. So maybe six will work.

[mikkyT]

Alliances are a great idea... but I think that they will be implemented by default.

Your alligence is your alliance - eg if your NC then your alliance is NC.

Your commanders have command channels which are viewed by any NC commander regardless of what outfit they are in.

So I think the game is going to handle this without having to make artificial alliances (With IRC channels and such) its going to be handled in-game without us having to do some work to make it work (like we have to in EQ etc).

But Im going to have the alliance Northern Auraxis Treaty Organisation (NATO) for the NC as our sanctuary is based in the northern hemisphere

[mikkyT]

Level 5 commaders have lead LOTS of squadmates to LOTS of BEP, earning them enough CEP to max out their command rank. If you see a level 5 commander you can rest assured his strategy and skill is sound enough to do extremely well with a large group of people, and they have all the features that are unlocked by their command rank. So, if you do actually suck at commanding, no-one would want to form up under you, as they can quite clearly see your leadership skills are n00b.

AMEN!

Thats why its pointless forming up alliances out of game as the leaders of these alliances have never lead a planetside group and have no CEP.

Im not going to sumbit myself to a commander who may be less experienced than myself just because he has got some 1337 web skillz and has made an alliance website and spoke to some outift leaders and got them to sign up!

This is going to be done IN GAME I tell ya!

[eMaGyN]

I dont think that you fully understand the importance of an alliance organization outside of the game, i would explain myself in a more complete aspect, but i see you're NC, and i don't want to give you too much help.


eMa

[mikkyT]

I dont think that you fully understand the importance of an alliance organization outside of the game, i would explain myself in a more complete aspect, but i see you're NC, and i don't want to give you too much help.

I dont think you fully understand the importance of an alliance organization inside of the game, I would explain myself in more complete aspect, but I see you're female, and I don't want to give you any help

[mikkyT]

Look I'll put it this way, I understand perfectly what your saying. But I don't see the point. Your not here to organise mega-raids against a dragon thats going to pop up in X number of hours after the servers come up and you need to arrive at the buff point before uberguild002..

Things in this game will be moving a lot faster and the need to plan IN GAME will far outweigh the need for external planning.

I've been in, and lead, alliance organisations in previous MMOs (namely EverQuest on the Tunare server, the Tunare-Europa alliance, later became the uberguild Tide) and I perfectly understand the need to have a focal point for such alliances, where they are needed.

I just don't think Planetside is of the game where such focal points are needed.

Unless the leader of the alliance is the very same person with battle rank 20 and is teh uber commander for the TR/VS/NC then its pointless.

Raids and such will be dictated far more by the state of the nation in game than anything outside.

[mr_luc]

In DAoC, Alliances worked incredibly well on the RP servers. All told, if you added up the active players in some of the biggest alliances, you ended up with 3/4 of the players in a Realm. The Greater Albion Alliance was unstoppable. The teamwork -- especially the coordination of supplies to build seige weapons, that was my job for a couple a Relic Raids -- was stupendous; we completely held some of the most important choke points, just laid down a wall of fire that our forces could retreat past.

We're talking about an ATTACKING force of over 200 people -- at 3:00 in the morning! (Not counting those that held the retreat points with the siege weapons, there were 20 or so of us the 2 times we did that). The organization was stupendous. If your computer didn't die from the graphics lag, and if your connection held up under the beating, you got a taste of the first truly massive, really interactive warfare in an MMORPG.

It's a shame the combat was so gay. I mean, for a game with PvP combat on that scale, it dumbs down the whole thing to make the combat point-and-click. As the game evolved it became apparent that the most important factors in winning a 1 on 1 match up were your relative skill levels first, the classes you were second (some classes had no hope against other classes, it was just formulaic do this then this then this and you win), and third, stupid interface things -- can you click on them (or hit the 'select nearest enemy' button) quickly? Got them selected? Hit the hotkey for your cast! Watch it cast! Cast the correct spell to follow that spell! If you were a melee it was even worse -- the interface and player movement was designed for Everquest, and it worked fine for that type of game -- but melee was a mess, the control system was bad enough that they threw it out the window and said 'screw this -- here's lock-on, if you're close enough to the enemy you have selected you become a homing missile'.

But even those limited and counterintuitive combat dynamics weren't useful 99% of the time. 99% of the time, it was a mismatch that you couldn't do anything about. 2 out of 3 times, the levels weren't even enough to provide a fair fight, and you won (or lost) easily with no problems. The rest of the time, it was a class mismatch -- they had, say, a melee class, and you were a caster with a root spell, there was a simple procedure to follow, and if you followed it you always won, no matter what the other guy did. There was ONE way to play a given class, some classes were MORE powerful period, and the only excitement came when occasionally someone did something out of the routine -- ooh! He forgot to root me! Whee!

Heh, mad rantage here . . . I type at 65 wpm on average, but much higher when I'm ranting about DAoC.

But honestly, I see player alliances evolving VERY quickly as long as PS includes good tools like a friends list, both a clan and an alliance chat channel, etc.

[Manitou]

Well said, mr_luc!

[RageMaster]

People who have plans to stay 'the commander' in their pre-release outfit are deluded.

The chances are that they've invited someone who is better at commanding teammates than they are. When their outfit gets wind that their current leader is suxor compared to this hardcore mofo subordinate, chances are they'll change their outfit to rally under a leader who will do more for them.

Commanders will have to have something special about them, seriously. And you'll see no idiot commanders in PlanetSide, they just wont happen.

[mikkyT]

/applause RageMaster

[Zatrais]

Alliances will be important cause well when all comes to all, numbers will win the game imo.

As Stalin (99% sure it was him) said, quantity has a quality in its own.

[Donkeysmiler]

Speaking of alliances, the AGO site (not to mention the CDL site) are finally back up

http://ago.dragonwolves.com