Hello guys,

Introduction

THIS POST IS NOT ABOUT PERFORMANCE ISSUES / DDOS ATTACKS AND IT WILL BE CONSIDERED AS OFFTOPIC.

Problems, changes and possible solutions

Castles

Pre-Oberon problems with castles:

So the problem with castles was that one army, that was at the time the biggest and most quality one – SQUADs, could take castles everywhere including Anglia, just for the sake of the battle not really the objective. It was possible due to some lock-drop mechanics and using alt-characters.



EU castle timer is very bad during winter (we change our clocks, maybe the last time but still – the winter is coming), and IMO little bit better during summer time although not perfect.



Zones are capped at 300 characters which makes it too easy to zone-lock the open world objective (I am not sure if it’s not 400 though, for the sake of this post it doesn't matter, let's assume it's 300 if not just let me know)



Post-Oberon changes to address those problems:

Planned changes to Realmgate in preparation for Season 6



Time Zones adjustments were never announced nor delivered



Zone capping is probably heavily discussed on the round table, but as pre-oberon game had 1/5 th of today’s lategame population it was never such a big deal.



of today’s lategame population it was never such a big deal. Map expansion. So with the map expansion they tried to make castles less competitive allowing more guilds to have it, so another change to address



My personal opinion on the changes and current situation:

Proposed solution to make the experience better for everyone for the next season:

It’s me again and below you can find a new episode onI believe it’s perfect time to discuss how do we want developers to tune the game before the next season kicks off! This post is addressed directly to SBI, but I think it’s also important for the community to actively discuss these topics, so if you care then please read it, conclude, take the survey and leave the feedback.Most of the words below describe my feelings for the last couple of months, but only now I have the time to spend my life on writing comprehensive feedback for SBI so they can understand their players and address named problems with actions. It’s even more important to take this seriously as the performance/DDOS problems are turning everything else into non-important section, which is very harmful for the game in the longer perspective... Albion is a great game, but far from perfect, but more about that below! As usual, this text is too long to fit in one single post, so I will put it in couple postsIt's been some time since I took my shot on writing down some personal thoughts on mine / my guild experience that we've got from playing lategame Albion. I believe being a KFC member, a guild that couple months ago decided to leave their big brother BA to fight for more content in the servers as when we paired with BA there was nobody to stand against us and our members were leaving due to lack of satisfying gameplay. Fortunately or not, f2p release happened, whether it was well timed or not its not me to judge so we have forgotten about the old problems, however it seems the technical problems will be always a challenge and in my opinion leaving the game design problems unsolved will hit back when new players reach the lategame.If you are new – this post will help you understand pre and post f2p release events, making it easier to enable yourself into the discussion.If this post is too long to read for you, please just focus on the summary, however in this case don’t bother asking questions that are explained within the post which you haven’t read, thanks.and my first community survey . I still feel that alliances should be limited and communities downsized for the sake of experience and technical reasons, butSo to understand what really changed,. I will cover that in couple points that I think need a change.So the realmgate adjustments have never resolved power projection problem, thanks to randomized dungeons many lategame players own at least one alt character that is already progressed to the lategame.Even without alts, dropping the lock through black zones is as fast as previously drop locking mechanic via Caerleon portal, however requires open-world presence.The only positive change is that when you die far from your portal, you can’t respawn in the nearest city but need to travel again (usually you don’t want to switch main lock)Since F2P release our population has grown a lot, but not many players have been involved yet in the lategame objectives like castles, and, this is the reason we need to tackle it before it’s too late andnot because of performance issues, but, which has already happened like couple times since the release. It happened in my guild, and it happened in all the other ‘zvz guilds’.Yet the technical limitations do not really support unlimited players battles, whether it would be fun it’s not possible. And I feel that albion is on it’s limits to hold battles with 300 players. So zone-locking removal is not a viable option, at least now.In my opinion the castle takeover process still lasts enough to project your power to anywhere in the outlands.This should beI believe this change alone doesn’t solve everything but would increase possibility of smaller guilds to launch the attack in the last possible moment, leaving no time for the owners to respond. (Can’t wait for the hate though <3)Another significant change I would like to see is, to fit EU Winter time change, that is still a thing and making it closer to warcamps, so players can play one continuous zvz-focused session a day. However, making the castle-takeover quicker will also help the timer, currently the mass-up time is set 1.5h before the timer, this is A LOT. I will cover albion’s schedule in more details later in this post.– I will cover that in the next part of this post as this is not only related to castles, but all open-world objectives, including territory reset fights.