Shattered Kingdoms

I think Cordance's suggestion wasn't to try to make the entire experience harder. It was to actually make it a easier to retrieve a relic, (particularly in the face of active defense?), while making it a tactical decision about whether you really want to go the extra mile to reverse the situation. Right now re-gaining your own relic will also have the enemy relic falling into your lap. Most groups can't resist the temptation of taking it back with them, even when they probably shouldn't.


Again, I could have been misreading it, but I don't think the original idea was about extending the duration per se. I do really like the idea of a maze though. You are right that it would be pretty easy to do.


This is just a balance tweak. If you were to make such a system change, then the inner guardian could be buffed up more at all times to compensate for not ever holding relics. The same goes for coin grinding. If you have three guardians instead of two, we can easily make the restock cost 33% less.


I agree that only making this change would not "fix" CRS.

Do you want players interacting more with each other or with code and script events when it comes to CRS?

We could talk about all kinds of crazy things like having the game implement a system to load a headquarters, populate it with random encounters, and scale the entire thing based on available defense and offense and modify the code of CRS, or we could talk about things like finding more accurate ways to describe how it is that people break CRS and what methods might exist for modifying player behavior of CRS.

I for one am still not convinced that it is broken. It seems that every complaint listed in this thread can be traced to a player's choices more easily than it can be traced to the game's mechanics.

It is wayyyy to easy to gank a flag when there is no defenders, as long as your group is properly prepared. Depending on the type/level of the defender (or a couple) it still can be a cake-walk when properly prepared.

I agree that it wasn't to try to make the entire experience harder for the "Cannots." It is what is going to result from a change of this sort, however. Again, an enforced win-lose state for cabal wars achieves the goal of ending "relic hording" far more effectively.

As to people not resisting the temptation... That's a player problem, not something the system should have built-in safeguards against. I've been in plenty of raids where it was all about recovery and not about counterganking. I'm not a fan of "nanny code" that protects people from themselves and their poor choices (at this kind of end-game stage, anyways). The rest of the game is unforgiving for poor decision making, why should this be any different?

Also, cordance specifically said the goal of the idea was to "increase the to and fro of CRS." It won't do that either. It will increase "the to, and the to, and the to" of CRS, though. If the "Cannots" can get their relic back, but can't take the enemy's with them, then the enemy (who already obviously CAN get through the three guardians) is going to just come take that stuff back and that leaves the enemy cabal with the job of taking out the "not-quite-inner" guardian again.



I disagree. I think the initial complaint is "It's too easy to do a smash and grab on a relic, and leave people with no/limited time to mount a proper defense." And then timers and whatnot are put in place to force a cooldown period so that people can be notified by email or whatever that "in ten minutes, a battle will occur." I think, also, that the following suggestion of a third guardian would, in fact, extend the duration of CRS events. It will be a marginal increase for someone like myself that doesn't find it challenging as it is, but it will be a critical increase to someone who already struggles with it.

Frankly, I think blitz attacks should be effective in CRS but only to a point. Blitzing a relic raid should be effective in getting you in the door, as it is now, but once inside it should require more...finesse? I guess that's a good word for it. Or, it should cost you something important to implement a blitz-style assault strategically. The timers idea isn't a bad one, necessarily, but a hard "invisible jello wall" at the front gate isn't the right place for it to happen. Just spit-balling, but if the maze idea was implemented there could be stages of it where you have to disable some kind of locking mechanism or extend a bridge or something, which would ultimately just be a series of rechoes with a countdown tied to it. Having X number of characters with the lockpicking skill in the attacking group could shorten the duration of the timers. That's where the tradeoff of the blitz comes in since you're giving up DPS or casters to make entry easier.

The other issue is the murder holes at the gate. As it is now, as Finney has said, with those in place a single ranged-damage capable defender can absolutely ruin full group raids, particularly if they have access to certain blinding or draining spells which I'm not allowed to name. I suggest that a better way to allow defenders a chance to work is not to give them an invincible death from above perch, but instead to provide more ground for a running battle type of scenario with a few choke points for face to face skirmishing/fighting. Have the option for ranged assaults on the attackers, yes, but don't make them blocked by impenetrable walls.



Your balance tweak suggestion once again only widens the gap between the capable and the incapable. I'm not a fan of nanny code, but I'm also not a fan of enforced futility. Buffing the inner will still not present serious challenges to the capable attacker, but it will make it even harder for the incapable to do anything effective.

The cost thing should probably be implemented now, frankly, but you're right that it's not a serious obstacle. It is, in its current state, a detractor from the idea of additional guardians though, and that's why I listed it.



I don't think a lot needs to go into "fixing" CRS so much as changing the focus of it. I think the system should be used more than it is in SK, but it shouldn't be quite so easy to blitz a raid (defended or not). There should be incentives for taking enemy relics to encourage people to participate and get better at the system in the long run, instead of just penalties for losing relics. Death from above through murder holes makes defense too easy for some classes/cabals, whereas defender-less raids make attacking too easy. The first is easier to fix than the second, but forcing cooldowns until defenders are prepared isn't the way to go about it either.

The addition of LPs for successful defense/assault was a good change, imo, but I'm not sure it went far enough towards encouraging active participation on both sides. You're also always going to have those people who are better at managing the predictability of PvE encounters over the strategy, prep time, and on-the-fly changes of PvP encounters who are going to prefer to do offline raids regardless of what changes you make, unless you just straight up block undefended relic runs.