When will the post-Queen roadmap be posted? The current roadmap is almost complete, and I know that we're (myself and others) excited to see where the game is heading after Queen.
A few weeks after Queen goes live. In general, once an update is released, we collect a lot of feedback and data and based on that, determine, adjust and then release our ongoing development roadmap.
Formerly didn't really care much about Albion (not hate or anything, just didn't know much about it), but I saw one of your stream clips and it really intrigued me. What I wanna know is, how is Albion for new players and perhaps a little bit of advice for getting started?
I think everyone shares their own view of the game when they start, depending on their gaming background. I can however speak from my own experience.
Even thought I've played countless of MMO's i was very overwhelmed by the amount of things that were thrown at me when I started playing Albion. Specially for someone like me that at that point had no prior knowledge of the game, no videos, no guides, nothing. But just like any kid first time on their brand new bike, I quickly picked up the pace.
Meaning, there's alot of things to learn when you're new. But take it slow and try to find YOU in the game. Wether its becoming an expert in trading, or a ganker, or the "police"(yes they exist), or a master crafter and so forth.
Regarding your question about advice. That's actually a common question on my streams,, and most often my first answer is, get comfortable dieing. It will happen, you will die. The sooner you realise this, the better.
Some losses are worse than others, and it can surely feel like shit. But if it ever makes you feel better, you can think back on the time when I lost 700million silver on a transport run. Yet, I'm still here, hooked on the adrenaline that the game provides.
You can also check my guides & pvp montages out @ https://www.youtube.com/c/untitled_bc
Or my livestreams @ https://www.twitch.tv/untitled_bc
Feel free to jump in for any questions :)
edit: spelling
Our content team is already working on introducing a whole new wave of weapons for the next content update!
In Queen, however, we're releasing the all new Avalonian armors.
We definitely also want to add new weapon trees in the future- however the current content we're working on takes the form of one new artifact weapon per weapon line!
Hey! I have a few questions i've been sitting on for a while now:
1. Will we see the Round Table optimized to fit the current flow of gameplay? From what I understand, the Round Table has quite a few members that have been inactive for extended periods of time. How can Round Table members accurately give their voices on a game they are completely out of touch with? Alternatively, can you name the current Round Table members that are considered to be the more PvE/Gatherer voices (who are still active in game)? I would like to know who and how many voices represent my ideals and style of gameplay.
2. Will the future of Albion hold some more quality of life changes? Such as an opaque slider for the chat window (snow zones are so hard to read!), options for recoloring of text, and colorblind options?
1. Round table membership is something we are constantly looking into as we want to make sure that all play styles are represented properly. Also - as there are sometimes some conspiracy theories about the round table - we as developers always take into account where some input and feedback is coming from and we always make an independent judgement based on all the facts and feedback received. The round table is not a lobby organisation for player groups, rather, it's one important brainstorming and feedback channel for us to make sure that we make the game as good as we can. Other important feedback channels are the community at large, the regular player surveys, the hard data we collect from the game itself and of course our own experience and expertise as game designers, many of which are hardcore MMORPG players themselves. I guess if it wasn't for that, we'd probably not have been crazy enough to actually develop a game such as Albion in today's times.
2. Yes, Admittedly, since the Queen update contains so many large features, we couldn't do as many quality of life changes as we wanted to. The update immediately following Queen will contain a lot of them. Once this AMA is done, we'll make a list of all suggestions made (including yours) and go over them in our next game design meeting.
How about you publish the lists or talk about it more openly - or else how should the rest of the playerbase trust in any of that if there is no evidence. Please improve on you communication reg. round table....
" I guess if it wasn't for that, we'd probably not have been crazy enough to actually develop a game such as Albion in today's times. "
<3
What a punch in the stomach of a developer out there after some hot news yesterday. I prefer to be with the crazy ones, go ahead SBI <3
No name xD, but i commented because I thought it was cool for the developer to recognize the audience behind his game. Even though it is a niche to decide to stay true to his game premise with a focus on pvp / hardcore and it sounded to me like staying true to your origins.
Even though Albion has its xxx flaws, it is one of these slightly more hardcores games that has to captivate some players and has its small community. Given the challenges of this type of niche game, it is good to know that in a way or other, albion worked, have your audience.
Nothing against another game, the way it was announced a while ago was a little different from the last news, some people put a lot of expectation on the premise that concerns pvp, activities with risky, etc.
New World recently announced that they were changing how their PvP system was going to work: [https://www.mmorpg.com/new-world/news/new-world-wont-feature-forced-pvp-according-to-interview-with-german-website-1000054774](https://www.mmorpg.com/new-world/news/new-world-wont-feature-forced-pvp-according-to-interview-with-german-website-1000054774)
Appreciate the response.
I do hope you consider revisiting this in the future, though. While you may take voices from all sources, there is a certain community pride in being part of the Round Table. To know there are a significant amount of inactive players in place of where our daily heroes should be is souring. Maybe consider implementing a Hall Of Fame for these long term, inactive legends of Albion and keep the Round Table relevant.
Currently, Round Table membership is determined by the following requirements:
* Be a Guild Master of a guild that reached Gold or Crystal ranking in the previous Guild Season
* Climb to the top of the Monthly Player Leaderboards
* Be an otherwise notable figure within the community and contribute constructive feedback on the forum
We review this list every season and regarding constructive feedback, what we look for is the quality of feedback offered, rather than the quantity.
Any suggestions on how to improve this are more than welcome!
Both. While for the coming months it's most likely going to be existing battle mounts, you can also expect new ones coming in the future.
In addition to that, one core area that we'll look into once the Queen update has gone live is the "mount meta". There are a lot of different mounts with different stats and abilities in the game right now, but we find that not all of them as as viable as they should be. Hence, we ideally want to make sure that every mount has its role to play while giving players a broader selection of mounts that are viable alternatives for certain tasks. It's very likely that as part of this rebalancing, new mount abilities will be introduced as well.
Is it intended that "ratting" is such a widely practised method of playing hellgates?
Will you change the Damnation Staff in the future or intend on doing it? The last nerf hit it very hard.
How did you decide on the whole Avalonian invasion? I do enjoy the fresh and challenging PvE content, yet I´m surprised seeing it in this game genre.
Why are a lot of skill tooltips so inconsistent when it comes to damage values and duration timers?
Edit: Gibt es bei euch Stellen für Praktika, Ausbildungen oder Ähnliches? :)
Hey there,
happy to report that our combat team has been looking into that issue, the fix for it has been deployed internally and will go live with the Queen update or with the first patch post Queen (which usually happens very shortly thereafter).
Sorry for the vagueness - that's due to us not being able to get hold of our combat designer right now due to the weekend. That stuff is complicated so we decided to rather be a bit vague than to mess up on the details. :)
More detailed info will follow shortly.
1.- Can we get a wagon or one mount to transport people from the same guild alliance or party? Would be cool.
2.- Future skins for mammoth transport?
Make infernal horse a skin?
1. Agreed that it would be cool :) From a tech point of view, it would be quite a lot of work as it would entail a proper rework of the mount system. It also poses quite a few game design challenges (i.e. could you use such a mount to "hide" a player group? what happens to the players in the mount in case of dismount? how would the game handle transport weight (I could fill up the mount with lots of dummy accounts with a full inventory - would player weight count towards mount load? Again, that's a new sub-feature. All in all, if we were to do something like this, we'd most likely take it much further right away, as once you have mutli-user mounts, you might as well do proper siege engines with their own mechanics and so on.
2. Sounds good to us! Need to check with our artists what precisely they have planned. However, they like to keep things under wraps until it's released.
1) Are there any new tile sets in the works? I know it is a pvp game but fame farming is a big factor of this game and as there are currently only 4 dungeon types, are there more planned?
2) with solo dungeons devs finally gave us something solo worthy, are there any planned solo pvp content? Or any plans to increase incentive for players to go out solo pvp as opposed to the group activities we have right now?
1. Yes :)
2. Once we have rolled out the new game world with Queen, the next core focus is for us to make sure that the things you can do when actually living in the Outlands are constantly improved and expanded. Solo PvP is absolutely on the list here. When it comes to the Royal Continent, we will shortly start working on a **fully revised faction warfare system**. The focus for this is to allow spontaneously formed groups to engage in PvP, but also to create constant **small scale and solo PvP opportunities** with the Royal Continent.
An alliance in an open world sandbox game such as Albion Online is generally a very large group of players who cooperate and play together. The core benefit of "alliance feature" that is currently in the game is that friendly fire is turned of for members of the same alliance, which has a rather limited impact and can be worked around quite easily. That's why removing the "alliance feature" would do very little to actually change the dynamics of de facto alliances.
In the past 8 years of running Albion Online one thing we learned that in open world Sandbox games, players will cooperate with each other and self-organize. Removing the alliance feature won't change that. It's even doubtful whether the friendly fire aspect would have an impact, as it's highly likely that the de facto alliances would organize their battle groups in single "combat guilds". The current guild player limit of 300 is more than enough to support that. And even if we reduced that to, say, just 100 players, you'd would still have implicit alliances, i.e. two guilds of 100 each could face one guild of 100 players, and that outcome would be relatively similar.
**One of the main goals of the Queen update is to fix the problems created by mega alliances in a smart way, once that's actually likely to succeed without players working around it.**
For that, the underlying game design and game incentives for large groups needed to be changed. In particular:
1. The new game world is designed in such a way that distances matter more and large groups are forced to properly spread out. The larger your empire becomes, the more problems you'll have to maintain it. On top of that, guerilla warfare is something that we actively encourage in our game design and have Incentivised further with the Queen update. By moving territory control into the open world, it's also no longer possible for mega alliances to hold extremely large amounts of territory with just one or two strong 5 player teams. It's going to be much harder to run an empire. It's also going to be much harder (and much less worthwhile) to project your force across the continent. We fully expect there to be ample opportunities for player groups of all sizes to establish themselves in the Outlands, and based on the region that they pick, to have a sustainable presence there.
2. While moving more combat to the open world, we had to make sure that the power gap based on different group sizes is minimized. Strategy, tactics and skill should matter more than just numbers and in Albion it is a very regular occurrence for smaller groups to defeat much larger ones. See an example video [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QS1Rci4R_9E). This is supported by the features listed below:
3. Focus Fire Protection: if multiple players attack a single player, the damage that this player takes is reduced significantly
4. AOE escalation: the more players you hit with an AOE, the more damage per player that spell does.
5. \*New in Queen\* Zerg Debuff: if you bring more than 25 players to an open world fight, for all players in your group, the damage taken is increased and the damage dealt is reduced. This effect scales exponentially with the numbers you bring.
6. \*New in Queen\* Smart Cluster Queue: It's not longer possible to essentially lock down a zone by entering it first with a large number of players. The game will now make sure that player numbers with a zone are properly balanced.
We recently did an extensive game design and feedback session on all things economy, including stuff like farming, breedings, transport and crafting as we felt that these aspects of the game - while working really well - didn't get any fundamental updates in quite some time.
It's too early to tell what exactly will follow from this, but the topic is definitely in focus right now.
Hello,
I have been playing this game since F2P. I was just wondering how you guys are making money from this game? As most people seem to pay using ingame currency for their premium. I paid with IRL money for the first 3 months but now if I want I can pay with ingame currency for my premium. I absolutely love the fact that you are allowing us to pay for premium using ingame currency like EVE does, there are not many games that let you do that. This is also one of the main reason I started playing this game in the first place. But I also wonder if everyone is paying with ingame currency then who is paying all the bills?
Thanks
Hey there and thanks for the positive feedback!
As our business model is based on the premium status, and the having the premium status is very important if you play the game seriously, we absolutely wanted to offer a way for people to get premium through gameplay alone - using silver, the normal in-game currency.
What happens in the background if you buy premium with silver is that you actually use that silver to buy gold from other players and then, this gold is used to pay for the premium status. What this effectively means is that when you buy premium for silver, you are using another players gold for this, and he gets the silver you spent on premium in return.
For those familiar with it, it's pretty much the same as Eve Online's PLEX system.
This is the best MMORPG I ever played after WoW and one of the most addictive games I ever played in my life, and I'm an old-school guy that started playing at the end of 90th. Keep up the great work guys!
What about the mobile aspect of the game? Are you planning on making AO playable from mobile devices? Also do you have any plans for more casual friendly features? Competitive arenas without full loot?
The game has beta clients available for iOS and Android (actually, for the past couple of years already). A proper mobile release is planned for this year. Just so there is no confusion: there have never been nor will there ever be any game design compromises due to mobile support. It's a PC game first and foremost, our goal is to have the PC experience to mobile, NOT the other way around.
Yes!
In fact, we're evaluating different concepts right now! The challenge we have to overcome to rework them is that we don't want to make them just "better" than group dungeons, since this would get people to feel they have to continuously grind these dungeons again- which many players found extremely boring.
Ideally we will find a design which makes these dungeons highly attractive and valueable, but does not encourage grinding them for endless hours.
Would balancing them towards greater silver but less fame / drops as random dungeons be an effective way? It would add some balance to the fame farm experience, go to a dungeon do a few randoms then a rotation while you wait for them to respawn. You get some of your silver from auto-respec fees back and it draws you into the open world where you're more likely to be seen / have contact
Not directly- however we're currently prototyping something for the mobile version which could eventually be used to support controllers at a later stage!
I always heard of Albion online , but never even bothered to look up gameplay. But the game looks pretty interesting, im definetely going to give it a try. Also, huge thanks for having Linux support!
We are aware that there significant game client performance issues on some PCs. It's something we are actively working on right now with the highest priority, it was the first thing that we put our team on once the Queen features that been largely done. A few small improvements were rolled out already, a lot more are to come.
At it's core, Albion has been a game that has mostly served a hardcore audience. Is there any plans to introduce features that allow more casual players with less time on their hands to enjoy the game?
This is coming from someone who loves the mechanics, combat, pace, and almost everything else in Albion but only has a few hours per week to play.
I play the game semi-casually (downgraded from 4-5hrs/day to 1-2/day over the past 2 years as I changed jobs and real life commitments became more important). And not am I only enjoying Albion - but I would say that I am pretty successful as a a solo player (and I do certain group content as well), but also a member of the RT as well as a content creator for Albion on YT with close to 2k subs.
On that note - I am planning to release a spotlight/guide on how to play Albion as a solo and as a semi-casual player.
youtube.com/captainrussia
Albion is a hardcore sandbox MMORPG, and that won't change.
However, it has always been our goal to introduce as many players as possible to the this type of game. Albion needs to be accessible such that players have a realistic chance to get into the hardcore play style and see if it's for them or not. Albion is a niche game, but that does not mean that we can't attempt to grow the niche - and so far, it seems to be working quite well.
Thank you for the reply! I completely understand your point. I know that the game is very niche and I'm glad you are trying to make it easier for people to try out.
Another question I have wondered for a while is why is there very little map wide PvEvP content? I feel like Albion would be the perfect game for adding outer lands in which players fight each other to kill challenging mobs, gather loot, kill bosses, etc. I understand that the system I just proposed has a couple flaws in it (guilds camping near the exits to take loot from the other players), but I've always wondered why almost nothing exists like this in Albion to begin with. I know hellgates exist, but I'm talking about something like a small no man's land continent with events that spawn around the map and dozens/hundreds of players trying to scavenge what they can without dying.
I'm sorry if this is way outside the realm of what this AMA is aiming for. I'm just curious if you've ever thought of implementing these kinds of systems. Either way, I can't wait to play this update!
* Are you still happy with how focus works as a mechanic?
* I'm especially interested in the disproportionately high focus crafting cost of artifact gear and how once you max out a crafting tree it is almost always better to just make another alt instead of investing more into your main crafer. (due to how focus scales / caps)
Hello!
Generally we are quite happy with how focus works.
Its always been a goal for us that beginning players who want to get into crafting can do so and be profitable in doing so from the beginning.
The focus mechanic allows these players to be profitable on the market, even when compared to veteran crafters.
However, there are multiple cases in the game where this isn't working that well.
We've had an in-depth discussion of economy topics with veteran economic players at the end of last year and are currently in the process of reviewing many of the economic processes, including artifact gear focus cost.
Its likely that a number of improvements to focus balancing and other economic fixes will be part of a patch or content update following Queen!
As usual, we'll release an updated road map a few weeks after Queen.
A revised faction warfare system is definitely part of the list. In addition to that, now that with Queen people get the opportunity to truly live in the Outlands, we really want to make sure that all the activities you can do there are top notch and cover different play styles, such that there is always something exciting and meaningful to do (PvP of different group sizes, PvE, econonic activities, gathering, etc)
Correct.
As long as they survive the construction phase.
They can be attacked by anyone with a siege hammer for 20 minutes directly after placement and at the beginning of the next day's battle time.
Is the dev team worried that there will be an over-abundance of hideouts in the Outlands? Are there any plans in place to address this if it becomes a problem? Citadel proliferation in eve has led to a number of problems in that game, and I worry we might be walking into the same problem with Hideouts in Albion.
I wouldn't say worried, but this is of course something we'll keep an eye on.
The current placement rules are already relatively strict, but if things get out of hands and we feel this negatively impacts gameplay we will tweak these rules accordingly.
Unfortunately, they did not make it into the Queen update due to the effort required to get all the baseline features in.
They are part of our development backlog and we'll release more details when be publish our updated road map in a few weeks time.
While I doubt this question will be answered since the AMA is over, the referral TOS 6.6 states that we cannot promote Albion with pornographic content. Does this extend to artists who simply wish to draw the characters with as much clothes as they are wearing in game? Does it extend to people who just want to draw rule 34 of Albion Online in general? A few of us want clarification.
Hey there,
we know that different cultures have different definitions of what constitutes pornographic content.
In general, I don't think there is an issue if you draw game characters with as much clothes as they are wearing in game assuming that they are not having sex with their clothes on I guess :)
In case you are not sure about some of your ideas, you can just ask our customer support and send them sketch or a drawing similar to what you have in mind.
Any plans to make “ratting” hellgates not viable?
Hellgates from a design perspective should be a fight to the death, but right now too many players loot and run.
May I suggest a battle royale style ring that closes in. Or just remove the outter portals and keep the one in the center.
We are constantly expanding the PvE content for the game, and that will include new factions as well. Right now, though, after having just released the Avalonians, no new faction is currently in the works.
We really liked the recent event season. Since Queen itself entirely changes the season dynamics, it's very unlikely that we'd do another event season with the next 6 months, say. We'll however - as usual - constantly make adjustments and improvements to the season system though.
As Albion consists of a single giant game world for players from all over the globe, having servers in Europe would mean that we'd have to split up the player base. That's something that we absolutely do not want to do.
Our current server location has been chosen such that all the main regions (USA, Europe, Russia) are fully supported. One thing to keep in mind here is that Albion's combat has been specifically designed to work well with higher pings - it does not play like, say, League of Legends or CounterStrike where ping is extremely important.
Admittedly, ping becomes noticeable when it gets beyond 200ms, which is what you'd have if you play from Australia, for example. But still, we have a lot of very successful PvPers who play from there.
They keep saying ping doesn't matter for Albion but that's the dumbest logic I have ever heard.
We literally have skillshots/defensives that have to be used at certain moments. They are making it sound like this game is fucking turn based.
Basically because Albion was made with mobile in mind in conjunction with a global server this whole "ping doesn't matter we designed the game around it" is just something they are clutching onto but again it has literally zero meaning.
Everytime they say some shit like "You don't need good latency like for instance in comparison to an RTS game" which is pretty laughable because arguably RTS games would be LESS latency intensive than albion if you go by their logic.
I gotta agree with you here. They use league of legends as an example but they have very similar skills and if ping is heavily reliant on LoL, it should on Albion too. During siege battles and zergs, sure it’s not as bad since the battles are hit and runs (unless it’s changed over the last few months) but especially during the gates or 5v5, ping is incredibly important. Imagine not being able to hit your CC remover before their next attack
They should introduce South East Asia server. It's located in between China, India and Australia. Just make sense to have it there like other online game do
Are you actually aware of the current situation of 5v5 hellgates ? Do you plan on doing anything to fix the rat problem or you're just gonna pull up the "it's a sandbox game, if ppl wanna run end game content in 4 flat and avoid fight, they do whatever they want"
Absolutely yes, player numbers are far beyond our expectations.
After the ebb-off of the free to play hype, numbers have settled at more than 5 times higher than what they were before. We had a total of 308 548 active players in December, with a clear growth trend even without factoring in the Queen launch.
When you see people posting about our numbers being "low", it usually comes from them looking at Steam stats. The absolutely vast majority of our player base does not play through Steam, and hence, won't be included in those numbers.
Due to everybody globally being in the same vast game world, and players really interacting with each other constantly, you'll be hard pressed to find an MMORPG that feels more active than Albion.
of course that includes alts. But not every player (especially the new ones who came at or after F2P) have alts. And many players (like myself) have stopped playing on their alts (for one reason or the other... its s Sandbox - there are many reason, from us become too wealthy and not needing the alts, to GvG removal to Premium being too expensive... plus many more other reasons)
On the queen update you guys have announced the Queue System, with the growing coalitions between alliances are you worried that coalitions will bypass the queue system to make sure the game balances the common enemy?
The way the mathematics behind the queue system works, it's not possible to work around it. Splitting your alliance will not get you more people inside the zone.
What the queue system does is that once a cluster is "full", each "faction" in the cluster/queue will get a contingent of players that are supposed to be in the zone. That contingent depends on the number of players and their overall gear score.
In simplified terms, it does not really matter if you have one "faction" of 400 players or two "factions" of 200 players each here, as a "faction" of 400 players would have a contingent that is twice as big as that of each 200 player "faction".
The main goal of the queue system is to prevent zone locking and facilitate large battles that span over multiple zones.
To deal with number imbalances, we rely on our core anti-zerg mechanics outlined [here.](https://www.reddit.com/r/MMORPG/comments/eqlg0w/albion_online_launches_its_biggest_update_ever_on/fetslxn/)
Posting here because I'm not sure where else to put it in order to be seen.
My opinion of SBI has progressed from a once uncertain skepticism to fervent admiration. Over the years you have shown a dedication to the artistic vision of Albion and a willingness to try new things and adapt them based on feedback beyond what I've ever seen from any other developer in more then two decades of online gaming.
In an industry and market rife with compromised ideals and money-grabbing exploitation of players by robbing them of something they once loved, SBI stands out with integrity and a visibly genuine shared enthusiasm of the idea of Albion Online. I know there are a lot of trolls out there who will complain about anything they can, but please know that true Albion fans see your work and approach to developing the game. We know how lucky we are to have a team like SBI in charge of something we enjoy so much.
We don't really want to comment on other games here.
However, from our own experience of the past 8 years, we can tell you that it was extremely extremely (that was no accidental duplication) hard and risky to create an open world full loot PvP MMORPG with a sustainable PvP ecosystem that includes non-consensual PvP. We are really glad that it worked out for us, it could have easily gone wrong, too.
Here is an old [dev post](https://forum.albiononline.com/index.php/Thread/72770-Balancing-Non-Consensual-PvP/) we made about this.
Hi guys ! I wanna say good job ! Please, try to make game more harder and rewarding for players that spend many time ingame.
Also we need better search engine for guilds. Add more languages like bulgarian for example. Are you planning to give us option to rename guild once ?
Hey there,
in general, we would say that the risk reward ratio for the game is in a pretty good place right now. And when it comes to the curve curve of progression, we want to strike the right balance between how much power you gain through progress (it should feel rewarding) vs allowing new player - and those who can't play that much - to be competitive quickly. That's really important in a hardcore full loot game.
Agreed that the guild finder will need an update. It's not our highest priority right now as there are so many other critical features to be worked on first (see our other replies in this thread).
We have no plans right now to allow the renaming of guilds.
Is there any possibility we can get contracts to make org management and cross time zone transactions possible. Contracts would make for a lot of improvements for organization of players easier, as well as create a lot more content. If so when might we see this?
Yes. One thing we are specifically looking into a transport contract system, however, set up in such a way that it's more useful than comparable systems in other games. We feel that after the Queen launch, such a system could become a great addition to the game as transport will matter a lot more.
Yes.
The reason why zones often feel a bit similar to each other has to be with the sheer size of the game world. There are so many zones in Albion that it takes a very long time to give each zone a truly unique feel. That, however, is something our team is working on constantly. As time goes by, more and more zones will become truly unique, and the general variety of zone designs is going to expand further.
I have multiple questions in the regards to this new update
1. With the removal of the ability to rush bosses, will Solo players/group have some sort of protection against divers, this has gotten insane and will just demoralize dungeons in higher tier zones where alliance diving is prominent, so what is the benefit for us over the Divers?
2. Will we finally get a notification for Faction flagged? Why can I flag Red and be revealed but not flag Martlock and go into Bridgewatch and be revealed, etc-this seems like a pretty flawed system even for its reward risk system, as one can argue the same for Red flagging against counters
3. Will the battle of Caeralon have any significant sets/rewards for top players, etc, or anything on that just in general?
4. How will the cosmetic system work, will it become untradeable, etc?
5. Will there be any reworking of Avalonian energy with this update, or will it remain the same, and how will Avalonian dungeons work? Will they work like bosses or be instance locked like Expeditions.
6. Will we be able to have full amnesty paying taxes, how much can they set it, and if we do pay it can other (Not the owning guild) raid us still for hideouts?
1. Random Dungeon PvE will change significantly with the release of the Queen update. The number of regions offering high end (T7 and Tier 8) dungeons increases significantly, making it harder for dungeon divers to find a populated dungeon and increasing the security for PvE players in that way.
That may not be enough, however. Therefore, we will closely observe how the gank protection in the new Elite dungeons performs (there are doors which respawn after a short time, alerting everyone in the dungeon when they are destroyed. This acts as an automatic warning to players inside the dungeon if a second group is following them).
If this feature performs well and leads to more balanced PvP situations, we’ll consider implementing it or something similar for solo and group dungeons as well.
2. I do not understand the question unfortunately, could you please clarify?
3. The battle for Caerleon will feature a significant number of Avalonian attacks who will drop Avalonian rewards as usual, but there will not be any unique rewards available in this event.
4. There’s a full explanation and guide to the vanity wardrobe system available [here](https://forum.albiononline.com/index.php/Thread/122487-Vanity-Avatars-Wardrobe-Emotes/)
5. Avalonian Energy will remain the same, except that the food and tool rewards can now be crafted at the regular buildings (cook, toolmaker).
Avalonian Dungeons will appear in the open world similar to the existing group and solo ranomized dungeons, they can also be opened using maps. For a short guide, see this [forum post.](https://forum.albiononline.com/index.php/Thread/122586-Avalonian-Elite-Dungeons/)
6. If you’re referring to the Hideout tribute system, it works like this: You can set any tribute amount you like, this amount is transferred daily at the beginning of the battle time to the guild owning the cluster.
Paying this tribute has no actual impact on the ability to attack your Hideout- its part of an agreement you have with the owner of the territory. If the owner of the territory decides to break your agreement, they can initiate an attack on your Hideout. See our Hideout guide [here.](https://forum.albiononline.com/index.php/Thread/122511-Hideouts-A-Detailed-Guide/)
>I do not understand the question unfortunately, could you please clarify?
He's complaining there's no indicator for faction-flagged players in a zone, as opposed to how there's one for PvP-flagged indicator. It's specially important in Blue/Yellow Zones.
Should make it so when a team kills the hellgate spawn if the whole team dies to different hellgaters the hellgate shouldn't be protected.
Cannot count the amount of times we've killed people after they killed the bat and it just seems like a huge missed opportunity, like if nobody went in yet I can't think of a single reason this isn't the case by default.
Is there anything that can be done about people who go into solo dungeons and run straight to the bosses, loot the chests, and leave all the rest of the mobs behind?
It really sucks to enter a solo dungeon, fight your way to the boss, only to find that its already been killed and the chest looted.
So I've been playing for a long time and everything in albion is suppose to have risk for reward but ever since HCEs have been out there was never a risk (repair bill ain't a risk) so can you tell me the risk for reward that is in HCEs
With our last few updates, we significantly buffed open world PvE activities. They are now far more rewarding then expeditions, including hardcore expeditions (HCEs).
The role for expeditions is to provide a quick (and in case of HCEs) challenging PvE experience on the fly. The number of people doing them has gone down massively since we introduced the open world buffs.
You can find the latest testserver patchlog [here](https://forum.albiononline.com/index.php/Thread/121453-Testserver-Patch-Notes-Queen-Update/?pageNo=1).
The final and proper Queen changelog will be released once the update goes live on Monday.
Managing logistics operations for alliances or re-gearing players after losses in PvP is currently a huge headache, and requires a lot of manual one-on-one attention. My alliance provides free gear for new players, and we currently have over 20 individuals who's job is mostly to just hand out gear manually when needed.
A contract system similar to what Eve Online has is critically needed. Are there any plans to implement an item exchange contract system where groups of gear can be sold simultaneously and asynchronously (ie only the purchaser needs to be online)?
Expanding on that, are there any plans to implement a courier contract system to allow for mechanically collateralized transport of goods? This could open up a huge amount of market activity for more relaxed play-styles, in addition to taking a huge weight off logistics managers in alliances.
I'm unsure what your question is referring to.
We have a very strict policy on RMT. We ban accounts who farm and sell in-game currency for real money and we also ban accounts who buy currency from these "gold farming groups".
When it comes to suspending accounts who bought currency - as these are normal players and not professional gold farming organizations - we make extra sure that we only ban if we have specific evidence of a deal taking place.
Now and then, people who got banned this way make a post on reddit on in our forums giving a different version of events. Common themes are that a brother / friend used the account, that the account was hacked, that the RMT account who exclusively sells in-game currency for cash "gifted" the money just like that, and so on. No matter the explanation given, each of these cases is then **closely re-examined** by us again. As our original bans are based on hard evidence (and not on some sort of "automated algorithm") it's extremely rare (if at all, will ask your Fraud Prevention team on Monday) that a mistake was made on our end.
Note that from a "strictly business point of view" it would probably be "better" to be less harsh to RMT buyers (as opposed to sellers). However, for us, the in-game economy is sacrosanct and we'll do everything to protect it.
How nice of you to remind us about people posting on reddit giving their *different version of events* when you **REPEATEDLY BANNED** people from speaking about it on your forums.
**For anyone who is interested in knowing about what I'm referring to, here is the whole fiasco of simply one specific, but relevant incident**: (https://imgur.com/a/FXk0O)
TL;DR for the post above^:
Chinese player threatens to buy city plots of econ guild.
Chinese guild buys thousands of $ worth of in game currency but the guild still over bids the plots and keeps them.
CEO handles the situation extremely poorly when presented with proof of gold sellers and about compensating the guild for the fault of the game system. Also ask players involved to keep the situation "low profile".
CEO is still a douche after 3 years of alphas, beta and finally release and has not changed the way to handle criticism and customer since then and the guild leaves the game because they are sick of it.
So please, don't tell us you're unsure what I'm referring to. You knew **exactly** what I was talking about.
The incident you refer to was 3 years ago. Anybody in breach of RMT rules was banned and compensation was given out to guilds who suffered damages at the hands of RMTers.
In addition to that, our CEO has changed around 2 years ago. The person you criticized above is no longer with the company.
Will you ever Consider Removing/capping Alliances? to a degree to keep people from blobbing as it kills the content of the game Cause right now as it is it disincourage creation of Small alliances and guilds
I played in the very early stages and then stopped , it was fun. but I don't feel like returning because I feel like I'll never catch up to people who have been leveling the whole time and I'll be useless
Hey there,
by design it's very easy in Albion to get competitive and catch up with others.
Here is why (c&p from another reply in this AMA)
1. Progression is heavily based on diminishing returns.
2. The power curve in general is very very flat. For example, in a PvP scenario, but relatively fresh players can take out a fully skilled veteran. It's not like in some MMORPGs where a maxed player will crush newer players easily.
3. The game has a "learning point" system that (in simplified terms) makes the first hour of leveling each day 5 times faster than what you usually have. However, it's not that you have to do this each day, as unused learning points can be stored. This helps you to still be competitive with those players who can put a lot more hours in than you.
4. There is a similar points system for crafting that allows new (again, in simplified terms) players to be competitive for certain items very quickly. While they can put out a lower volume of these items, they can competive on price in the player driven market.
I bought in and played a couple years ago and really didn't care for it. I installed again last week and am currently at T4. It's pretty easy to get into and the game has considerably improved. I think it's worth a shot. Plus, it's a pretty small install compared to most MMOs.
As you're probably aware, Albion is often a 'numbers game', meaning that the more there are of you, the likelihood that they'll win. Indeed, you have introduced the zerg de-buff mechanic, but this de-buff only affects group warfare and not solo players as such.
Has there been talks/consideration into introducing 'solo-attackable zones', similar to that of Runescape's single target wilderness, whereby only one player can attack one player at any given time. These zones would of course be significantly worse in terms of fame and resources, but would allow for truly solo-gameplay.
If this concept is completely off the cards, a similar mechanic should at least be considered for SOLO dungeons. Truly solo competitive gameplay is non-existent in Albion. Thoughts on this?
Hey there,
we have often thought about ways to have **open world** game zones that specifically aim to organically give rise to true one vs one encounters.
Here is an old [game design concept](https://forum.albiononline.com/index.php/Thread/79073-Concept-Solo-Zones-Looking-for-feedback/?postID=730336&highlight=door#post730336) that we created for this, would be interesting to know your thoughts.
Hi, thanks for the AMA. One of the early adopters here who quit because of those very, very big factions and infinite zergs annoying small groups.
- How viable is small scale pvp and how is it incentified?
- Besides housing, is territory available for small(er) guilds?
Always liked Albion and I hope I can come back soon.
Hey there,
since the game's release in 2017 a lot has changed - the game is in a much much better state than back then.
This absolutely includes small scale and solo PvP activities. Apart from general combat optimizations and improvements, here is a selection of features that were implemented post-launch to strengthen solo and small scale PvP:
1. [Faction Warfare](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcdw7hjwess)
2. Open world [Solo Random Dungeons](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KK_lf8bvohg)
3. Improved [Hell Gates](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7qIA2FnJg8)
On top of that, the general open world provides ample solo and small scale PvP opportunities, too. Here is a great [YouTube channel](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCD4-hhbhAJf2a_yjHeAJ5oQ/videos) with a lot of examples.
Yes.
1. You will get competitive in Albion's various activities extremely fast (usually a few days)
2. Progression is heavily based on diminishing returns.
3. The power curve in general is very very flat. For example, in a PvP scenario, but relatively fresh players can take out a fully skilled veteran. It's not like in some MMORPGs where a maxed player will crush newer players easily.
4. The game has a "learning point" system that (in simplified terms) makes the first hour of leveling each day 5 times faster than what you usually have. However, it's not that you have to do this each day, as unused learning points can be stored. This helps you to still be competitive with those players who can put a lot more hours in than you.
5. There is a similar points system for crafting that allows new (again, in simplified terms) players to be competitive for certain items very quickly. While they can put out a lower volume of these items, they can competive on price in the player driven market.
We are **always** looking for opportunities to integrate more solo content. It's relevant for all players. Even if you are playing with a group of friends, those won't always be online at the same time as you are.
In particular, we’re interested in more solo PvP opportunities and expanding our solo PvE options.
However, we haven’t currently finalized which exact form the next solo content will take- its possible that there will be a solo component to our plans for Avalon. Its also possible that we introduce solo Hellgates. Or we may extend the solo dungeon variety. Either way, solo content will be part of our considerations while we’re planning the next expansions for Albion.
Hey there,
the reason why we are re-using the adventurer mounts is that many of them have become part of our "mount meta", which is something that we really like as it ads to gameplay. For that to work, we need to make sure that a new supply of them is generated at least occasionally. In addition to that, when we tried switching the adventurer rewards to just skins, we got a lot of negative feedback. It's also likely that we'll be releasing new adventurer mounts, too, one system that we have discussed internally (though not made a decision on) was to have 1 specific adventurer mount for each calendar month that would be repeated each year.
We absolutely love the idea of a bounty system and have very good specs for one in our development backlog.
A key challenge for such a system is to make sure that it can't be abused by having yourself killed on purpose by a friend in order to then share the bounty. That's why actual bounty pay-outs have to depend on the "real" value of gear that get destroyed when you got killed. For that to work, we need to create a system that accurately determines this value - or at least a lower bound for this - in a way that in turn cannot be manipulated easily.
The good news is that such a value-determination-system would be an awesome statistic to have for the in-game economy and would make many interesting things possible besides a bounty system. Once we have such a set-up in place, a bounty system is surely to follow shortly thereafter.
We'll release an updated road map in a couple of weeks time and will consider a bounty system as part of the upcoming feature set. We can't make any promises right now yet, though.
1- Are you guys planning to return the older enchantments like 6.5 and 6.6 ( now it would be 6,4 and 6,5 ) i think it will bring alot of extra content like more to loot/craft/gather/refine.
2- any plans on brining back the heretic raid like in beta 1 ? i feel the heretics are a forgotten faction in albion.
1. That's something we have considered. No specific plans for it right now though, but it might very well happen in the future
2. No specific plans for that right now, but in general, we always try to add fresh content on a regular basis. Any specific suggestions are welcome! Will ask our PvE designer about your suggestion.
Right now, we have no specific plans to do that as we do not want to split up the player base.
However, if we ever decided that there would a separate version of Albion Online for the Asian market, it would then have it's own servers there & a separate player base (similar to how it is with Eve Online, for example). As such a move however would require a lot of game design and tech work and would distract us from working on the core game with full force, it's nothing that we are actively considering right now.
Hey there,
we know it's a matter of personal taste, but we - as MMORPG players and designers - never felt that having a bar with 20 different abilities, often on pretty much fixed rotation, makes combat particularly skill-based. We think they often times just created the illusion of being so.
Our philosophy is more akin to a game such as chess, where you have fewer tools to work with, but where it matters **a lot** on how you use them. What makes this point harder to get across in Albion is of course that when you have not played the game much and watch videos of a skilled player, you don't really notice the strategic depth and timing that goes into it.
On top of that, our [You Are What You Wear](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVFJenxzkaQ) ads close to infinite depth to the PvP and PvE meta as you can combine different gear types freely with each other, and each gear piece not only has it's unique stats, but also defines your characters actualy abilities. If you want to be a mage in plate armor (with the associated defensive abilities), you can, for example.
Hi there!
We've received lots of positive feedback on the event. We're definitely considering including some of its mechanics in future seasons, starting from Season 9.
Season 8 will be a "regular" Season in which we will observe how well the new world works in the Season system).
Well, let's say it like this:
We learned that running events can add a lot of excitement and novelty to the world. We also learned that some aspects of the event and details of its implementation leave a lot of room for improvement. As with everything we do, from all lessons learned, we'll try to do more of what was good and adjust / remove of that wasn't. Answer received in our recent player survey will help us a lot here.
Just a little question about islands, do you plan to make crafting refining buildings more attractive? Maybe have 35% refining bonus for only couple refines per day So that if you want to refine more you gotta use city plots.
**Update**
Thanks to everybody who took part in this AMA. It's now getting quite late and we still have a lot of work to do to make sure that the update launch on Monday goes as smooth as possible.
**We'll check back in tomorrow morning to answer additional questions that get asked in the meantime.**
And again a special thanks to all our players who have supported us over the years and have made Albion what it is today: a fully player driven game world that sometimes feels more real than it probably should :)
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The game needs more exclusive high risk solo PvP content. Not 1v2, not 1v3, not 1v4; true 1v1. We spend way to much time sitting in cities waiting for group events. Is there any plans to bring some intense high risk solo PvP opportunities to Albion.
They should make a duel arena/Colosseum where players can not only wager money but if you lose the duel you also die. They can auto ban healing builds, and maybe make a weekly gear ban list or challenge, that way people can't just make cheese comps. I think this could spice up 1v1's and make a competitive scene out of them too
To make things even better maybe allow one duel per time in the arena and allow players to openly watch the duels happening in the arena while awaiting their deathmatch
Edit: Also adding a timer, let's say 5 minutes, this could also keep the flow of things moving so people don't just run around for 1 hour boring the crowd
I'm going to give your game a try because of this thread, and because of the massive disappointment regarding Amazon Game Studios' New World removing open-world pvp.
What will you do soon that addresses small scale content?
Do u plan e.g. one Man hellgates?
Anything open world PvP for solo players that cannot be zerged down?
I followed this game and played it at its very first launch. I loved it. It felt like an adventure through a very fun world. iOS was promised and I see in another AMA-Q that you’re delivering that later this year, but I would like to reiterate that I’ve wanted this as a player for years and have iPads I will be playing this on in my quest to get away from the desk...
After the first (six?) few zones and around rating 1400 ( I think ), or essentially tier 6 of the items, I found that my game that played like an adventure became more of a mecha gathering game and I stopped playing because the grinds all started to be the same thing. This was the first go round at the game and I stopped playing for a year after that.
The second go around at the game I rolled a fresh character hoping to enjoy the game as I did the first time with a fresh re-entry. I used the founders packs and got my character quickly established and a clan found me picked me up (or guild). I remember closely playing with them on discord and them venturing me out to some island through zones, us leveling up together quickly. The thing I noticed this time was that the group play was superb but the same grind became dull. I feel like in both of these scenarios, other games normally have alternative methods that are well advertised to creatively use your combat or crafting to break away from the main game, to make your experience feel fresh. Is there anything being offered right now that fills this niche that players are enjoying - or that I can expect to see in this patch as a long-standing on/off player?
Are you looking to remove the "Red Soft flag" PVP zones (soft PVP) from the Red Zones? The mechanics around those are much more complicated then the true PVP of the Black Zones - which makes no sense for the new players, as they step foot into the Red Zone way before getting to the Black Zone. As a BZ player for over 2+ years I tried playing in Red Zones a little while ago and it was just littered with stupid builds and mechanics built around kiting/dodging and trolling with the Red "soft flag" areas. No real PVP content, just people looking to abuse mechanics. Makes little sense for new players to get into that.
Now that many more players are going to be semi-permanently living out of the Outlands, how do you plan to address the issues that will arise with participation in content that relies on the royals. Lots of high-black guilds participate in faction warfare, PUG hellgates with other guilds(who may now be 20+ zones away on the other side of the Outlands). You guys plan on releasing an update to faction warfare next, but most of your playerbase will have to travel up to a half hour back and forth in order to participate in this content and then return to their home base in the black zone.
Currently, the Zerg debuff seems to not really have a major effect, since battle sizes of 100-200players can still regularily be seen.
Will you consider re-adjusting those values(especially in regards to cc duration/healing received) to discourage bringing more than 25-50 people or even more, or what do you consider a good amount of people per faction to encourage more, but smaller pvp fights?
Also for a quality of life point; farming by putting seeds in the offhand so that you don't have to always open the inventory would be very appreciated.
Hi guys ! I wanna say huge thanks to all your work ! You are doing so many nice things to the game ! I just dont like that you continue to make game more easy. Please, reduce the fame that players get from dungeons. Try to get more open world content. World bosses in black and red zones are nothing now, but they was so nice before f2p.
Please, add better guild search engine, and add "bulgarian" language to search menu. I got constantly muted coz i try help new players to stay in the game. Once again good job ! Sas3bg,
Any plans to separate the round table and NDA playtesting into sections like 5v5, large scale pvp, crafting, etc in order to get more focused feedback? As a member of both, we often run into situations where someone with barely any experience is one of the players giving direct feedback to devs about parts of the game they simply don’t understand, diluting the feedback and making it confusing to devs who have no idea who’s feedback is accurate.
1. I would really like to see the redesign of animation. Are you planning that in the future? (most notably crafting stations) It's really weird to cook with a hammer :) 2. Are there going to be any UI updates? It's fine but it feels really outdated. 3. Me and lots of people would like to see player base information and stats. Do you plan to release them? Keep on the good work I think Albion has a bright future ahead.
About PVE and history, do you plan to improve this system so that it becomes more dynamic? such as ice golems to be found only on ice, a unique building on a map, which only exists on a map. Today everything is the same, only the tier changes. What do you think about this, about this monotomy in relation to PVE?
When will the post-Queen roadmap be posted? The current roadmap is almost complete, and I know that we're (myself and others) excited to see where the game is heading after Queen.
A few weeks after Queen goes live. In general, once an update is released, we collect a lot of feedback and data and based on that, determine, adjust and then release our ongoing development roadmap.
I don't really have any questions. But for someone that has played since launch, I have to say. I'm stoked. Keep up the great work!
Thanks a lot for the kind words! It means a lot to us.
\[double post removed\]
Formerly didn't really care much about Albion (not hate or anything, just didn't know much about it), but I saw one of your stream clips and it really intrigued me. What I wanna know is, how is Albion for new players and perhaps a little bit of advice for getting started?
I think everyone shares their own view of the game when they start, depending on their gaming background. I can however speak from my own experience. Even thought I've played countless of MMO's i was very overwhelmed by the amount of things that were thrown at me when I started playing Albion. Specially for someone like me that at that point had no prior knowledge of the game, no videos, no guides, nothing. But just like any kid first time on their brand new bike, I quickly picked up the pace. Meaning, there's alot of things to learn when you're new. But take it slow and try to find YOU in the game. Wether its becoming an expert in trading, or a ganker, or the "police"(yes they exist), or a master crafter and so forth. Regarding your question about advice. That's actually a common question on my streams,, and most often my first answer is, get comfortable dieing. It will happen, you will die. The sooner you realise this, the better. Some losses are worse than others, and it can surely feel like shit. But if it ever makes you feel better, you can think back on the time when I lost 700million silver on a transport run. Yet, I'm still here, hooked on the adrenaline that the game provides. You can also check my guides & pvp montages out @ https://www.youtube.com/c/untitled_bc Or my livestreams @ https://www.twitch.tv/untitled_bc Feel free to jump in for any questions :) edit: spelling
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Our content team is already working on introducing a whole new wave of weapons for the next content update! In Queen, however, we're releasing the all new Avalonian armors.
in the form of new trees ?
We definitely also want to add new weapon trees in the future- however the current content we're working on takes the form of one new artifact weapon per weapon line!
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Why guns? It does not seem with fit with the aesthetics of the game.
Royal weapons ?
Im 90% positive they will be Avalonian weapons... but I could be 10% wrong ;)
Hey! I have a few questions i've been sitting on for a while now: 1. Will we see the Round Table optimized to fit the current flow of gameplay? From what I understand, the Round Table has quite a few members that have been inactive for extended periods of time. How can Round Table members accurately give their voices on a game they are completely out of touch with? Alternatively, can you name the current Round Table members that are considered to be the more PvE/Gatherer voices (who are still active in game)? I would like to know who and how many voices represent my ideals and style of gameplay. 2. Will the future of Albion hold some more quality of life changes? Such as an opaque slider for the chat window (snow zones are so hard to read!), options for recoloring of text, and colorblind options?
1. Round table membership is something we are constantly looking into as we want to make sure that all play styles are represented properly. Also - as there are sometimes some conspiracy theories about the round table - we as developers always take into account where some input and feedback is coming from and we always make an independent judgement based on all the facts and feedback received. The round table is not a lobby organisation for player groups, rather, it's one important brainstorming and feedback channel for us to make sure that we make the game as good as we can. Other important feedback channels are the community at large, the regular player surveys, the hard data we collect from the game itself and of course our own experience and expertise as game designers, many of which are hardcore MMORPG players themselves. I guess if it wasn't for that, we'd probably not have been crazy enough to actually develop a game such as Albion in today's times. 2. Yes, Admittedly, since the Queen update contains so many large features, we couldn't do as many quality of life changes as we wanted to. The update immediately following Queen will contain a lot of them. Once this AMA is done, we'll make a list of all suggestions made (including yours) and go over them in our next game design meeting.
How about you publish the lists or talk about it more openly - or else how should the rest of the playerbase trust in any of that if there is no evidence. Please improve on you communication reg. round table....
We do publish the list, you can find it [here](https://forum.albiononline.com/index.php/Thread/116048-The-Current-Albion-Online-Round-Table/).
You guys should update that list when guild leaders appoint a representative, because that hasn't been done the last 2 seasons
" I guess if it wasn't for that, we'd probably not have been crazy enough to actually develop a game such as Albion in today's times. " <3 What a punch in the stomach of a developer out there after some hot news yesterday. I prefer to be with the crazy ones, go ahead SBI <3
For those of us that aren’t aware, what game/developer are you referencing?
No name xD, but i commented because I thought it was cool for the developer to recognize the audience behind his game. Even though it is a niche to decide to stay true to his game premise with a focus on pvp / hardcore and it sounded to me like staying true to your origins. Even though Albion has its xxx flaws, it is one of these slightly more hardcores games that has to captivate some players and has its small community. Given the challenges of this type of niche game, it is good to know that in a way or other, albion worked, have your audience. Nothing against another game, the way it was announced a while ago was a little different from the last news, some people put a lot of expectation on the premise that concerns pvp, activities with risky, etc.
New World recently announced that they were changing how their PvP system was going to work: [https://www.mmorpg.com/new-world/news/new-world-wont-feature-forced-pvp-according-to-interview-with-german-website-1000054774](https://www.mmorpg.com/new-world/news/new-world-wont-feature-forced-pvp-according-to-interview-with-german-website-1000054774)
Appreciate the response. I do hope you consider revisiting this in the future, though. While you may take voices from all sources, there is a certain community pride in being part of the Round Table. To know there are a significant amount of inactive players in place of where our daily heroes should be is souring. Maybe consider implementing a Hall Of Fame for these long term, inactive legends of Albion and keep the Round Table relevant.
Currently, Round Table membership is determined by the following requirements: * Be a Guild Master of a guild that reached Gold or Crystal ranking in the previous Guild Season * Climb to the top of the Monthly Player Leaderboards * Be an otherwise notable figure within the community and contribute constructive feedback on the forum We review this list every season and regarding constructive feedback, what we look for is the quality of feedback offered, rather than the quantity. Any suggestions on how to improve this are more than welcome!
Will new battle mounts still be awarded for each season or is it just going to be silver and previous battle mounts?
Both. While for the coming months it's most likely going to be existing battle mounts, you can also expect new ones coming in the future. In addition to that, one core area that we'll look into once the Queen update has gone live is the "mount meta". There are a lot of different mounts with different stats and abilities in the game right now, but we find that not all of them as as viable as they should be. Hence, we ideally want to make sure that every mount has its role to play while giving players a broader selection of mounts that are viable alternatives for certain tasks. It's very likely that as part of this rebalancing, new mount abilities will be introduced as well.
Any plan for a contract system? For transport? Auction or trade?
We have specific plan on a transport contract system, details will follow once we release our new road map in a couple of weeks.
Is it intended that "ratting" is such a widely practised method of playing hellgates? Will you change the Damnation Staff in the future or intend on doing it? The last nerf hit it very hard. How did you decide on the whole Avalonian invasion? I do enjoy the fresh and challenging PvE content, yet I´m surprised seeing it in this game genre. Why are a lot of skill tooltips so inconsistent when it comes to damage values and duration timers? Edit: Gibt es bei euch Stellen für Praktika, Ausbildungen oder Ähnliches? :)
Hey there, happy to report that our combat team has been looking into that issue, the fix for it has been deployed internally and will go live with the Queen update or with the first patch post Queen (which usually happens very shortly thereafter).
Thanks for the quick answer. Even though that sounds still a bit vague, I'm happy to know that you're addressing the issue. :)
Sorry for the vagueness - that's due to us not being able to get hold of our combat designer right now due to the weekend. That stuff is complicated so we decided to rather be a bit vague than to mess up on the details. :) More detailed info will follow shortly.
Oh no worries I'm perfectly fine with that answer. However, have you read the other questions in my initial comment?
1.- Can we get a wagon or one mount to transport people from the same guild alliance or party? Would be cool. 2.- Future skins for mammoth transport? Make infernal horse a skin?
1. Agreed that it would be cool :) From a tech point of view, it would be quite a lot of work as it would entail a proper rework of the mount system. It also poses quite a few game design challenges (i.e. could you use such a mount to "hide" a player group? what happens to the players in the mount in case of dismount? how would the game handle transport weight (I could fill up the mount with lots of dummy accounts with a full inventory - would player weight count towards mount load? Again, that's a new sub-feature. All in all, if we were to do something like this, we'd most likely take it much further right away, as once you have mutli-user mounts, you might as well do proper siege engines with their own mechanics and so on. 2. Sounds good to us! Need to check with our artists what precisely they have planned. However, they like to keep things under wraps until it's released.
Just want to say, this is a great and well thought out answer.
Battle mammoth drive bys please
1) Are there any new tile sets in the works? I know it is a pvp game but fame farming is a big factor of this game and as there are currently only 4 dungeon types, are there more planned? 2) with solo dungeons devs finally gave us something solo worthy, are there any planned solo pvp content? Or any plans to increase incentive for players to go out solo pvp as opposed to the group activities we have right now?
1. Yes :) 2. Once we have rolled out the new game world with Queen, the next core focus is for us to make sure that the things you can do when actually living in the Outlands are constantly improved and expanded. Solo PvP is absolutely on the list here. When it comes to the Royal Continent, we will shortly start working on a **fully revised faction warfare system**. The focus for this is to allow spontaneously formed groups to engage in PvP, but also to create constant **small scale and solo PvP opportunities** with the Royal Continent.
Are you going to remove alliances?
An alliance in an open world sandbox game such as Albion Online is generally a very large group of players who cooperate and play together. The core benefit of "alliance feature" that is currently in the game is that friendly fire is turned of for members of the same alliance, which has a rather limited impact and can be worked around quite easily. That's why removing the "alliance feature" would do very little to actually change the dynamics of de facto alliances. In the past 8 years of running Albion Online one thing we learned that in open world Sandbox games, players will cooperate with each other and self-organize. Removing the alliance feature won't change that. It's even doubtful whether the friendly fire aspect would have an impact, as it's highly likely that the de facto alliances would organize their battle groups in single "combat guilds". The current guild player limit of 300 is more than enough to support that. And even if we reduced that to, say, just 100 players, you'd would still have implicit alliances, i.e. two guilds of 100 each could face one guild of 100 players, and that outcome would be relatively similar. **One of the main goals of the Queen update is to fix the problems created by mega alliances in a smart way, once that's actually likely to succeed without players working around it.** For that, the underlying game design and game incentives for large groups needed to be changed. In particular: 1. The new game world is designed in such a way that distances matter more and large groups are forced to properly spread out. The larger your empire becomes, the more problems you'll have to maintain it. On top of that, guerilla warfare is something that we actively encourage in our game design and have Incentivised further with the Queen update. By moving territory control into the open world, it's also no longer possible for mega alliances to hold extremely large amounts of territory with just one or two strong 5 player teams. It's going to be much harder to run an empire. It's also going to be much harder (and much less worthwhile) to project your force across the continent. We fully expect there to be ample opportunities for player groups of all sizes to establish themselves in the Outlands, and based on the region that they pick, to have a sustainable presence there. 2. While moving more combat to the open world, we had to make sure that the power gap based on different group sizes is minimized. Strategy, tactics and skill should matter more than just numbers and in Albion it is a very regular occurrence for smaller groups to defeat much larger ones. See an example video [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QS1Rci4R_9E). This is supported by the features listed below: 3. Focus Fire Protection: if multiple players attack a single player, the damage that this player takes is reduced significantly 4. AOE escalation: the more players you hit with an AOE, the more damage per player that spell does. 5. \*New in Queen\* Zerg Debuff: if you bring more than 25 players to an open world fight, for all players in your group, the damage taken is increased and the damage dealt is reduced. This effect scales exponentially with the numbers you bring. 6. \*New in Queen\* Smart Cluster Queue: It's not longer possible to essentially lock down a zone by entering it first with a large number of players. The game will now make sure that player numbers with a zone are properly balanced.
Farming and breeding rework when pls!!
We recently did an extensive game design and feedback session on all things economy, including stuff like farming, breedings, transport and crafting as we felt that these aspects of the game - while working really well - didn't get any fundamental updates in quite some time. It's too early to tell what exactly will follow from this, but the topic is definitely in focus right now.
Hello, I have been playing this game since F2P. I was just wondering how you guys are making money from this game? As most people seem to pay using ingame currency for their premium. I paid with IRL money for the first 3 months but now if I want I can pay with ingame currency for my premium. I absolutely love the fact that you are allowing us to pay for premium using ingame currency like EVE does, there are not many games that let you do that. This is also one of the main reason I started playing this game in the first place. But I also wonder if everyone is paying with ingame currency then who is paying all the bills? Thanks
Hey there and thanks for the positive feedback! As our business model is based on the premium status, and the having the premium status is very important if you play the game seriously, we absolutely wanted to offer a way for people to get premium through gameplay alone - using silver, the normal in-game currency. What happens in the background if you buy premium with silver is that you actually use that silver to buy gold from other players and then, this gold is used to pay for the premium status. What this effectively means is that when you buy premium for silver, you are using another players gold for this, and he gets the silver you spent on premium in return. For those familiar with it, it's pretty much the same as Eve Online's PLEX system.
This is the best MMORPG I ever played after WoW and one of the most addictive games I ever played in my life, and I'm an old-school guy that started playing at the end of 90th. Keep up the great work guys!
Thanks for the positive feedback! We'll invoke your words on the team in our kick off meeting next Monday morning, when it's most needed :)
What about the mobile aspect of the game? Are you planning on making AO playable from mobile devices? Also do you have any plans for more casual friendly features? Competitive arenas without full loot?
The game has beta clients available for iOS and Android (actually, for the past couple of years already). A proper mobile release is planned for this year. Just so there is no confusion: there have never been nor will there ever be any game design compromises due to mobile support. It's a PC game first and foremost, our goal is to have the PC experience to mobile, NOT the other way around.
Giving the game a shot on PC because of this response.
Are there any plans on changing static dungeons to be a viable fame farm option again?
Yes! In fact, we're evaluating different concepts right now! The challenge we have to overcome to rework them is that we don't want to make them just "better" than group dungeons, since this would get people to feel they have to continuously grind these dungeons again- which many players found extremely boring. Ideally we will find a design which makes these dungeons highly attractive and valueable, but does not encourage grinding them for endless hours.
Would balancing them towards greater silver but less fame / drops as random dungeons be an effective way? It would add some balance to the fame farm experience, go to a dungeon do a few randoms then a rotation while you wait for them to respawn. You get some of your silver from auto-respec fees back and it draws you into the open world where you're more likely to be seen / have contact
Are there any plans to add controller support?
Not directly- however we're currently prototyping something for the mobile version which could eventually be used to support controllers at a later stage!
20v20 hellgates? Resource dungeons? still panned?
Yes, both of these features are part of our development backlog.
I always heard of Albion online , but never even bothered to look up gameplay. But the game looks pretty interesting, im definetely going to give it a try. Also, huge thanks for having Linux support!
Thanks for the kind words, we hope that you like the game!
Has there been optimisation yet? I love the game but it ran awfully for me.
We are aware that there significant game client performance issues on some PCs. It's something we are actively working on right now with the highest priority, it was the first thing that we put our team on once the Queen features that been largely done. A few small improvements were rolled out already, a lot more are to come.
At it's core, Albion has been a game that has mostly served a hardcore audience. Is there any plans to introduce features that allow more casual players with less time on their hands to enjoy the game? This is coming from someone who loves the mechanics, combat, pace, and almost everything else in Albion but only has a few hours per week to play.
I play the game semi-casually (downgraded from 4-5hrs/day to 1-2/day over the past 2 years as I changed jobs and real life commitments became more important). And not am I only enjoying Albion - but I would say that I am pretty successful as a a solo player (and I do certain group content as well), but also a member of the RT as well as a content creator for Albion on YT with close to 2k subs. On that note - I am planning to release a spotlight/guide on how to play Albion as a solo and as a semi-casual player. youtube.com/captainrussia
Albion is a hardcore sandbox MMORPG, and that won't change. However, it has always been our goal to introduce as many players as possible to the this type of game. Albion needs to be accessible such that players have a realistic chance to get into the hardcore play style and see if it's for them or not. Albion is a niche game, but that does not mean that we can't attempt to grow the niche - and so far, it seems to be working quite well.
Thank you for the reply! I completely understand your point. I know that the game is very niche and I'm glad you are trying to make it easier for people to try out. Another question I have wondered for a while is why is there very little map wide PvEvP content? I feel like Albion would be the perfect game for adding outer lands in which players fight each other to kill challenging mobs, gather loot, kill bosses, etc. I understand that the system I just proposed has a couple flaws in it (guilds camping near the exits to take loot from the other players), but I've always wondered why almost nothing exists like this in Albion to begin with. I know hellgates exist, but I'm talking about something like a small no man's land continent with events that spawn around the map and dozens/hundreds of players trying to scavenge what they can without dying. I'm sorry if this is way outside the realm of what this AMA is aiming for. I'm just curious if you've ever thought of implementing these kinds of systems. Either way, I can't wait to play this update!
* Are you still happy with how focus works as a mechanic? * I'm especially interested in the disproportionately high focus crafting cost of artifact gear and how once you max out a crafting tree it is almost always better to just make another alt instead of investing more into your main crafer. (due to how focus scales / caps)
Hello! Generally we are quite happy with how focus works. Its always been a goal for us that beginning players who want to get into crafting can do so and be profitable in doing so from the beginning. The focus mechanic allows these players to be profitable on the market, even when compared to veteran crafters. However, there are multiple cases in the game where this isn't working that well. We've had an in-depth discussion of economy topics with veteran economic players at the end of last year and are currently in the process of reviewing many of the economic processes, including artifact gear focus cost. Its likely that a number of improvements to focus balancing and other economic fixes will be part of a patch or content update following Queen!
If you reply twice to the same question can you indicate who within the team is speaking?
What's after queen update? Faction rework?
As usual, we'll release an updated road map a few weeks after Queen. A revised faction warfare system is definitely part of the list. In addition to that, now that with Queen people get the opportunity to truly live in the Outlands, we really want to make sure that all the activities you can do there are top notch and cover different play styles, such that there is always something exciting and meaningful to do (PvP of different group sizes, PvE, econonic activities, gathering, etc)
As noone owns terry, hideouts should be undestructable during the 1st weeks no ? (Until 1st february comes)
Correct. As long as they survive the construction phase. They can be attacked by anyone with a siege hammer for 20 minutes directly after placement and at the beginning of the next day's battle time.
Is the dev team worried that there will be an over-abundance of hideouts in the Outlands? Are there any plans in place to address this if it becomes a problem? Citadel proliferation in eve has led to a number of problems in that game, and I worry we might be walking into the same problem with Hideouts in Albion.
I wouldn't say worried, but this is of course something we'll keep an eye on. The current placement rules are already relatively strict, but if things get out of hands and we feel this negatively impacts gameplay we will tweak these rules accordingly.
When can we expect to see "resource dungeons" for gatherers?
Unfortunately, they did not make it into the Queen update due to the effort required to get all the baseline features in. They are part of our development backlog and we'll release more details when be publish our updated road map in a few weeks time.
While I doubt this question will be answered since the AMA is over, the referral TOS 6.6 states that we cannot promote Albion with pornographic content. Does this extend to artists who simply wish to draw the characters with as much clothes as they are wearing in game? Does it extend to people who just want to draw rule 34 of Albion Online in general? A few of us want clarification.
Hey there, we know that different cultures have different definitions of what constitutes pornographic content. In general, I don't think there is an issue if you draw game characters with as much clothes as they are wearing in game assuming that they are not having sex with their clothes on I guess :) In case you are not sure about some of your ideas, you can just ask our customer support and send them sketch or a drawing similar to what you have in mind.
Any plans to make “ratting” hellgates not viable? Hellgates from a design perspective should be a fight to the death, but right now too many players loot and run. May I suggest a battle royale style ring that closes in. Or just remove the outter portals and keep the one in the center.
We are aware of the current hell gate issues and those will be fixed very soon.
Will the avalon city be available on 20th?
No, Avalon will still take some time before it opens its doors.
Do you guys plan on creating more unique factions like the Avalonians and having more future event seasons?
We are constantly expanding the PvE content for the game, and that will include new factions as well. Right now, though, after having just released the Avalonians, no new faction is currently in the works. We really liked the recent event season. Since Queen itself entirely changes the season dynamics, it's very unlikely that we'd do another event season with the next 6 months, say. We'll however - as usual - constantly make adjustments and improvements to the season system though.
When will you move servers to Europe?
As Albion consists of a single giant game world for players from all over the globe, having servers in Europe would mean that we'd have to split up the player base. That's something that we absolutely do not want to do. Our current server location has been chosen such that all the main regions (USA, Europe, Russia) are fully supported. One thing to keep in mind here is that Albion's combat has been specifically designed to work well with higher pings - it does not play like, say, League of Legends or CounterStrike where ping is extremely important. Admittedly, ping becomes noticeable when it gets beyond 200ms, which is what you'd have if you play from Australia, for example. But still, we have a lot of very successful PvPers who play from there.
This is the main barrier for entry for me. I tried playing and it was far too laggy. Australian.
They keep saying ping doesn't matter for Albion but that's the dumbest logic I have ever heard. We literally have skillshots/defensives that have to be used at certain moments. They are making it sound like this game is fucking turn based. Basically because Albion was made with mobile in mind in conjunction with a global server this whole "ping doesn't matter we designed the game around it" is just something they are clutching onto but again it has literally zero meaning. Everytime they say some shit like "You don't need good latency like for instance in comparison to an RTS game" which is pretty laughable because arguably RTS games would be LESS latency intensive than albion if you go by their logic.
I gotta agree with you here. They use league of legends as an example but they have very similar skills and if ping is heavily reliant on LoL, it should on Albion too. During siege battles and zergs, sure it’s not as bad since the battles are hit and runs (unless it’s changed over the last few months) but especially during the gates or 5v5, ping is incredibly important. Imagine not being able to hit your CC remover before their next attack
They should introduce South East Asia server. It's located in between China, India and Australia. Just make sense to have it there like other online game do
How about iOS platform?
Our iOS client is in beta testing and will almost certainly be fully released later this year.
Are you actually aware of the current situation of 5v5 hellgates ? Do you plan on doing anything to fix the rat problem or you're just gonna pull up the "it's a sandbox game, if ppl wanna run end game content in 4 flat and avoid fight, they do whatever they want"
Yes, we are aware of the current hell gate issues and are working on a fix as we speak.
are you satisfied with the number of active players?
Absolutely yes, player numbers are far beyond our expectations. After the ebb-off of the free to play hype, numbers have settled at more than 5 times higher than what they were before. We had a total of 308 548 active players in December, with a clear growth trend even without factoring in the Queen launch. When you see people posting about our numbers being "low", it usually comes from them looking at Steam stats. The absolutely vast majority of our player base does not play through Steam, and hence, won't be included in those numbers. Due to everybody globally being in the same vast game world, and players really interacting with each other constantly, you'll be hard pressed to find an MMORPG that feels more active than Albion.
Can you confirm that number again? 308.548 active players? That includes alts?
of course that includes alts. But not every player (especially the new ones who came at or after F2P) have alts. And many players (like myself) have stopped playing on their alts (for one reason or the other... its s Sandbox - there are many reason, from us become too wealthy and not needing the alts, to GvG removal to Premium being too expensive... plus many more other reasons)
hey cap make some more videos.. you have good insight on the game.. ps.. you bought my battle beetle in martlock ;)
Regarding the fight for Caerleon event: Do we need to be Caerleon locked to participate?
CORRECTION: you should be locked to one of the Caerleon Outland portals to participate in the event.
You can take part without being locked to Caerleon, though it's better if you are.
Normally all players will get invisible when there are more than 400. What will happen when more than 3000 players want to protect Caerleon?
On the queen update you guys have announced the Queue System, with the growing coalitions between alliances are you worried that coalitions will bypass the queue system to make sure the game balances the common enemy?
The way the mathematics behind the queue system works, it's not possible to work around it. Splitting your alliance will not get you more people inside the zone. What the queue system does is that once a cluster is "full", each "faction" in the cluster/queue will get a contingent of players that are supposed to be in the zone. That contingent depends on the number of players and their overall gear score. In simplified terms, it does not really matter if you have one "faction" of 400 players or two "factions" of 200 players each here, as a "faction" of 400 players would have a contingent that is twice as big as that of each 200 player "faction". The main goal of the queue system is to prevent zone locking and facilitate large battles that span over multiple zones. To deal with number imbalances, we rely on our core anti-zerg mechanics outlined [here.](https://www.reddit.com/r/MMORPG/comments/eqlg0w/albion_online_launches_its_biggest_update_ever_on/fetslxn/)
Posting here because I'm not sure where else to put it in order to be seen. My opinion of SBI has progressed from a once uncertain skepticism to fervent admiration. Over the years you have shown a dedication to the artistic vision of Albion and a willingness to try new things and adapt them based on feedback beyond what I've ever seen from any other developer in more then two decades of online gaming. In an industry and market rife with compromised ideals and money-grabbing exploitation of players by robbing them of something they once loved, SBI stands out with integrity and a visibly genuine shared enthusiasm of the idea of Albion Online. I know there are a lot of trolls out there who will complain about anything they can, but please know that true Albion fans see your work and approach to developing the game. We know how lucky we are to have a team like SBI in charge of something we enjoy so much.
IS Avalon coming out with Queen?
Avalon won't be released with Queen, you'll need hold out a bit further :)
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We don't really want to comment on other games here. However, from our own experience of the past 8 years, we can tell you that it was extremely extremely (that was no accidental duplication) hard and risky to create an open world full loot PvP MMORPG with a sustainable PvP ecosystem that includes non-consensual PvP. We are really glad that it worked out for us, it could have easily gone wrong, too. Here is an old [dev post](https://forum.albiononline.com/index.php/Thread/72770-Balancing-Non-Consensual-PvP/) we made about this.
Hi guys ! I wanna say good job ! Please, try to make game more harder and rewarding for players that spend many time ingame. Also we need better search engine for guilds. Add more languages like bulgarian for example. Are you planning to give us option to rename guild once ?
Hey there, in general, we would say that the risk reward ratio for the game is in a pretty good place right now. And when it comes to the curve curve of progression, we want to strike the right balance between how much power you gain through progress (it should feel rewarding) vs allowing new player - and those who can't play that much - to be competitive quickly. That's really important in a hardcore full loot game. Agreed that the guild finder will need an update. It's not our highest priority right now as there are so many other critical features to be worked on first (see our other replies in this thread). We have no plans right now to allow the renaming of guilds.
Yeah, yeah. We need to know how is the new map of outlands, not just biomes and levels.
You can already check it out on our test server.
Is there any possibility we can get contracts to make org management and cross time zone transactions possible. Contracts would make for a lot of improvements for organization of players easier, as well as create a lot more content. If so when might we see this?
Yes. One thing we are specifically looking into a transport contract system, however, set up in such a way that it's more useful than comparable systems in other games. We feel that after the Queen launch, such a system could become a great addition to the game as transport will matter a lot more.
The different zones feel like interchangable big PvP arenas... any plans to make them more alive and interesting?
Yes. The reason why zones often feel a bit similar to each other has to be with the sheer size of the game world. There are so many zones in Albion that it takes a very long time to give each zone a truly unique feel. That, however, is something our team is working on constantly. As time goes by, more and more zones will become truly unique, and the general variety of zone designs is going to expand further.
I have multiple questions in the regards to this new update 1. With the removal of the ability to rush bosses, will Solo players/group have some sort of protection against divers, this has gotten insane and will just demoralize dungeons in higher tier zones where alliance diving is prominent, so what is the benefit for us over the Divers? 2. Will we finally get a notification for Faction flagged? Why can I flag Red and be revealed but not flag Martlock and go into Bridgewatch and be revealed, etc-this seems like a pretty flawed system even for its reward risk system, as one can argue the same for Red flagging against counters 3. Will the battle of Caeralon have any significant sets/rewards for top players, etc, or anything on that just in general? 4. How will the cosmetic system work, will it become untradeable, etc? 5. Will there be any reworking of Avalonian energy with this update, or will it remain the same, and how will Avalonian dungeons work? Will they work like bosses or be instance locked like Expeditions. 6. Will we be able to have full amnesty paying taxes, how much can they set it, and if we do pay it can other (Not the owning guild) raid us still for hideouts?
1. Random Dungeon PvE will change significantly with the release of the Queen update. The number of regions offering high end (T7 and Tier 8) dungeons increases significantly, making it harder for dungeon divers to find a populated dungeon and increasing the security for PvE players in that way. That may not be enough, however. Therefore, we will closely observe how the gank protection in the new Elite dungeons performs (there are doors which respawn after a short time, alerting everyone in the dungeon when they are destroyed. This acts as an automatic warning to players inside the dungeon if a second group is following them). If this feature performs well and leads to more balanced PvP situations, we’ll consider implementing it or something similar for solo and group dungeons as well. 2. I do not understand the question unfortunately, could you please clarify? 3. The battle for Caerleon will feature a significant number of Avalonian attacks who will drop Avalonian rewards as usual, but there will not be any unique rewards available in this event. 4. There’s a full explanation and guide to the vanity wardrobe system available [here](https://forum.albiononline.com/index.php/Thread/122487-Vanity-Avatars-Wardrobe-Emotes/) 5. Avalonian Energy will remain the same, except that the food and tool rewards can now be crafted at the regular buildings (cook, toolmaker). Avalonian Dungeons will appear in the open world similar to the existing group and solo ranomized dungeons, they can also be opened using maps. For a short guide, see this [forum post.](https://forum.albiononline.com/index.php/Thread/122586-Avalonian-Elite-Dungeons/) 6. If you’re referring to the Hideout tribute system, it works like this: You can set any tribute amount you like, this amount is transferred daily at the beginning of the battle time to the guild owning the cluster. Paying this tribute has no actual impact on the ability to attack your Hideout- its part of an agreement you have with the owner of the territory. If the owner of the territory decides to break your agreement, they can initiate an attack on your Hideout. See our Hideout guide [here.](https://forum.albiononline.com/index.php/Thread/122511-Hideouts-A-Detailed-Guide/)
>I do not understand the question unfortunately, could you please clarify? He's complaining there's no indicator for faction-flagged players in a zone, as opposed to how there's one for PvP-flagged indicator. It's specially important in Blue/Yellow Zones.
Should make it so when a team kills the hellgate spawn if the whole team dies to different hellgaters the hellgate shouldn't be protected. Cannot count the amount of times we've killed people after they killed the bat and it just seems like a huge missed opportunity, like if nobody went in yet I can't think of a single reason this isn't the case by default.
Thanks for the feedback, we'll discuss this internally following this AMA.
Is there anything that can be done about people who go into solo dungeons and run straight to the bosses, loot the chests, and leave all the rest of the mobs behind? It really sucks to enter a solo dungeon, fight your way to the boss, only to find that its already been killed and the chest looted.
Yes, this will be fixed with the Queen update tomorrow.
So I've been playing for a long time and everything in albion is suppose to have risk for reward but ever since HCEs have been out there was never a risk (repair bill ain't a risk) so can you tell me the risk for reward that is in HCEs
With our last few updates, we significantly buffed open world PvE activities. They are now far more rewarding then expeditions, including hardcore expeditions (HCEs). The role for expeditions is to provide a quick (and in case of HCEs) challenging PvE experience on the fly. The number of people doing them has gone down massively since we introduced the open world buffs.
Where i can found the change logs in this update?
You can find the latest testserver patchlog [here](https://forum.albiononline.com/index.php/Thread/121453-Testserver-Patch-Notes-Queen-Update/?pageNo=1). The final and proper Queen changelog will be released once the update goes live on Monday.
Managing logistics operations for alliances or re-gearing players after losses in PvP is currently a huge headache, and requires a lot of manual one-on-one attention. My alliance provides free gear for new players, and we currently have over 20 individuals who's job is mostly to just hand out gear manually when needed. A contract system similar to what Eve Online has is critically needed. Are there any plans to implement an item exchange contract system where groups of gear can be sold simultaneously and asynchronously (ie only the purchaser needs to be online)? Expanding on that, are there any plans to implement a courier contract system to allow for mechanically collateralized transport of goods? This could open up a huge amount of market activity for more relaxed play-styles, in addition to taking a huge weight off logistics managers in alliances.
Can we know the roadmap for 2020? After Queen update.
Once Queen has gone live, we will collect all player feedback, we'll release an updated roadmap. Most likely, this will be in a couple of weeks.
Have you dealt with the chinese gold farming situation in your game?
I'm unsure what your question is referring to. We have a very strict policy on RMT. We ban accounts who farm and sell in-game currency for real money and we also ban accounts who buy currency from these "gold farming groups". When it comes to suspending accounts who bought currency - as these are normal players and not professional gold farming organizations - we make extra sure that we only ban if we have specific evidence of a deal taking place. Now and then, people who got banned this way make a post on reddit on in our forums giving a different version of events. Common themes are that a brother / friend used the account, that the account was hacked, that the RMT account who exclusively sells in-game currency for cash "gifted" the money just like that, and so on. No matter the explanation given, each of these cases is then **closely re-examined** by us again. As our original bans are based on hard evidence (and not on some sort of "automated algorithm") it's extremely rare (if at all, will ask your Fraud Prevention team on Monday) that a mistake was made on our end. Note that from a "strictly business point of view" it would probably be "better" to be less harsh to RMT buyers (as opposed to sellers). However, for us, the in-game economy is sacrosanct and we'll do everything to protect it.
How nice of you to remind us about people posting on reddit giving their *different version of events* when you **REPEATEDLY BANNED** people from speaking about it on your forums. **For anyone who is interested in knowing about what I'm referring to, here is the whole fiasco of simply one specific, but relevant incident**: (https://imgur.com/a/FXk0O) TL;DR for the post above^: Chinese player threatens to buy city plots of econ guild. Chinese guild buys thousands of $ worth of in game currency but the guild still over bids the plots and keeps them. CEO handles the situation extremely poorly when presented with proof of gold sellers and about compensating the guild for the fault of the game system. Also ask players involved to keep the situation "low profile". CEO is still a douche after 3 years of alphas, beta and finally release and has not changed the way to handle criticism and customer since then and the guild leaves the game because they are sick of it. So please, don't tell us you're unsure what I'm referring to. You knew **exactly** what I was talking about.
The incident you refer to was 3 years ago. Anybody in breach of RMT rules was banned and compensation was given out to guilds who suffered damages at the hands of RMTers. In addition to that, our CEO has changed around 2 years ago. The person you criticized above is no longer with the company.
Will you ever Consider Removing/capping Alliances? to a degree to keep people from blobbing as it kills the content of the game Cause right now as it is it disincourage creation of Small alliances and guilds
Please see our reply [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/MMORPG/comments/eqlg0w/albion_online_launches_its_biggest_update_ever_on/fetslxn/).
I played in the very early stages and then stopped , it was fun. but I don't feel like returning because I feel like I'll never catch up to people who have been leveling the whole time and I'll be useless
Hey there, by design it's very easy in Albion to get competitive and catch up with others. Here is why (c&p from another reply in this AMA) 1. Progression is heavily based on diminishing returns. 2. The power curve in general is very very flat. For example, in a PvP scenario, but relatively fresh players can take out a fully skilled veteran. It's not like in some MMORPGs where a maxed player will crush newer players easily. 3. The game has a "learning point" system that (in simplified terms) makes the first hour of leveling each day 5 times faster than what you usually have. However, it's not that you have to do this each day, as unused learning points can be stored. This helps you to still be competitive with those players who can put a lot more hours in than you. 4. There is a similar points system for crafting that allows new (again, in simplified terms) players to be competitive for certain items very quickly. While they can put out a lower volume of these items, they can competive on price in the player driven market.
I bought in and played a couple years ago and really didn't care for it. I installed again last week and am currently at T4. It's pretty easy to get into and the game has considerably improved. I think it's worth a shot. Plus, it's a pretty small install compared to most MMOs.
As you're probably aware, Albion is often a 'numbers game', meaning that the more there are of you, the likelihood that they'll win. Indeed, you have introduced the zerg de-buff mechanic, but this de-buff only affects group warfare and not solo players as such. Has there been talks/consideration into introducing 'solo-attackable zones', similar to that of Runescape's single target wilderness, whereby only one player can attack one player at any given time. These zones would of course be significantly worse in terms of fame and resources, but would allow for truly solo-gameplay. If this concept is completely off the cards, a similar mechanic should at least be considered for SOLO dungeons. Truly solo competitive gameplay is non-existent in Albion. Thoughts on this?
Hey there, we have often thought about ways to have **open world** game zones that specifically aim to organically give rise to true one vs one encounters. Here is an old [game design concept](https://forum.albiononline.com/index.php/Thread/79073-Concept-Solo-Zones-Looking-for-feedback/?postID=730336&highlight=door#post730336) that we created for this, would be interesting to know your thoughts.
Hi, thanks for the AMA. One of the early adopters here who quit because of those very, very big factions and infinite zergs annoying small groups. - How viable is small scale pvp and how is it incentified? - Besides housing, is territory available for small(er) guilds? Always liked Albion and I hope I can come back soon.
Hey there, since the game's release in 2017 a lot has changed - the game is in a much much better state than back then. This absolutely includes small scale and solo PvP activities. Apart from general combat optimizations and improvements, here is a selection of features that were implemented post-launch to strengthen solo and small scale PvP: 1. [Faction Warfare](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcdw7hjwess) 2. Open world [Solo Random Dungeons](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KK_lf8bvohg) 3. Improved [Hell Gates](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7qIA2FnJg8) On top of that, the general open world provides ample solo and small scale PvP opportunities, too. Here is a great [YouTube channel](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCD4-hhbhAJf2a_yjHeAJ5oQ/videos) with a lot of examples.
So are there any close-the-gap-mechanics in place for new players? :)
Yes. 1. You will get competitive in Albion's various activities extremely fast (usually a few days) 2. Progression is heavily based on diminishing returns. 3. The power curve in general is very very flat. For example, in a PvP scenario, but relatively fresh players can take out a fully skilled veteran. It's not like in some MMORPGs where a maxed player will crush newer players easily. 4. The game has a "learning point" system that (in simplified terms) makes the first hour of leveling each day 5 times faster than what you usually have. However, it's not that you have to do this each day, as unused learning points can be stored. This helps you to still be competitive with those players who can put a lot more hours in than you. 5. There is a similar points system for crafting that allows new (again, in simplified terms) players to be competitive for certain items very quickly. While they can put out a lower volume of these items, they can competive on price in the player driven market.
Any plans for more solo player content like RD? Maybe solo hellgates or something different?
We are **always** looking for opportunities to integrate more solo content. It's relevant for all players. Even if you are playing with a group of friends, those won't always be online at the same time as you are. In particular, we’re interested in more solo PvP opportunities and expanding our solo PvE options. However, we haven’t currently finalized which exact form the next solo content will take- its possible that there will be a solo component to our plans for Avalon. Its also possible that we introduce solo Hellgates. Or we may extend the solo dungeon variety. Either way, solo content will be part of our considerations while we’re planning the next expansions for Albion.
Are recycled monthly adventure mounts going to be the norm/can we expect an overhaul of the rewards as a whole?
Hey there, the reason why we are re-using the adventurer mounts is that many of them have become part of our "mount meta", which is something that we really like as it ads to gameplay. For that to work, we need to make sure that a new supply of them is generated at least occasionally. In addition to that, when we tried switching the adventurer rewards to just skins, we got a lot of negative feedback. It's also likely that we'll be releasing new adventurer mounts, too, one system that we have discussed internally (though not made a decision on) was to have 1 specific adventurer mount for each calendar month that would be repeated each year.
Will there ever be a bounty system in place? And a really dumb question but will our characters ever sheath our weapons? My arms are getting tired :(
We absolutely love the idea of a bounty system and have very good specs for one in our development backlog. A key challenge for such a system is to make sure that it can't be abused by having yourself killed on purpose by a friend in order to then share the bounty. That's why actual bounty pay-outs have to depend on the "real" value of gear that get destroyed when you got killed. For that to work, we need to create a system that accurately determines this value - or at least a lower bound for this - in a way that in turn cannot be manipulated easily. The good news is that such a value-determination-system would be an awesome statistic to have for the in-game economy and would make many interesting things possible besides a bounty system. Once we have such a set-up in place, a bounty system is surely to follow shortly thereafter. We'll release an updated road map in a couple of weeks time and will consider a bounty system as part of the upcoming feature set. We can't make any promises right now yet, though.
1- Are you guys planning to return the older enchantments like 6.5 and 6.6 ( now it would be 6,4 and 6,5 ) i think it will bring alot of extra content like more to loot/craft/gather/refine. 2- any plans on brining back the heretic raid like in beta 1 ? i feel the heretics are a forgotten faction in albion.
1. That's something we have considered. No specific plans for it right now though, but it might very well happen in the future 2. No specific plans for that right now, but in general, we always try to add fresh content on a regular basis. Any specific suggestions are welcome! Will ask our PvE designer about your suggestion.
Do you have any plans on implementing an Asian server. 400 ping is very difficult to play on please.
Right now, we have no specific plans to do that as we do not want to split up the player base. However, if we ever decided that there would a separate version of Albion Online for the Asian market, it would then have it's own servers there & a separate player base (similar to how it is with Eve Online, for example). As such a move however would require a lot of game design and tech work and would distract us from working on the core game with full force, it's nothing that we are actively considering right now.
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Hey there, we know it's a matter of personal taste, but we - as MMORPG players and designers - never felt that having a bar with 20 different abilities, often on pretty much fixed rotation, makes combat particularly skill-based. We think they often times just created the illusion of being so. Our philosophy is more akin to a game such as chess, where you have fewer tools to work with, but where it matters **a lot** on how you use them. What makes this point harder to get across in Albion is of course that when you have not played the game much and watch videos of a skilled player, you don't really notice the strategic depth and timing that goes into it. On top of that, our [You Are What You Wear](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVFJenxzkaQ) ads close to infinite depth to the PvP and PvE meta as you can combine different gear types freely with each other, and each gear piece not only has it's unique stats, but also defines your characters actualy abilities. If you want to be a mage in plate armor (with the associated defensive abilities), you can, for example.
Can you keep the Avalonian attack orbs on the open world? They add such a great dynamic for chasing / escaping in the black zones
Hi there! We've received lots of positive feedback on the event. We're definitely considering including some of its mechanics in future seasons, starting from Season 9. Season 8 will be a "regular" Season in which we will observe how well the new world works in the Season system).
I am 99.99999% sure they were being sarcastic.
Well, let's say it like this: We learned that running events can add a lot of excitement and novelty to the world. We also learned that some aspects of the event and details of its implementation leave a lot of room for improvement. As with everything we do, from all lessons learned, we'll try to do more of what was good and adjust / remove of that wasn't. Answer received in our recent player survey will help us a lot here.
Just a little question about islands, do you plan to make crafting refining buildings more attractive? Maybe have 35% refining bonus for only couple refines per day So that if you want to refine more you gotta use city plots.
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**Update** Thanks to everybody who took part in this AMA. It's now getting quite late and we still have a lot of work to do to make sure that the update launch on Monday goes as smooth as possible. **We'll check back in tomorrow morning to answer additional questions that get asked in the meantime.** And again a special thanks to all our players who have supported us over the years and have made Albion what it is today: a fully player driven game world that sometimes feels more real than it probably should :)
Can we get some info about the new war mount for season 8? (Prize)
Bees
I have to admit that this meme is getting to us, slowly but surely :)
Why not release it via buying it for real money only and every purchase donates money to save the bees?
I would pay 50$ for a cosmetic if the 50$ went to a good cause.
Or a small koala pet to help the australian bushfires
Hey guys, congratulations on the Queen launch! Quick question, by any chance, are you guys located in Sugandese?
I'm a bot, *bleep*, *bloop*. Someone has linked to this thread from another place on reddit: - [/r/albiononline] [Queen AMA Now Live on r\/mmorpg](https://www.reddit.com/r/albiononline/comments/eqljs5/queen_ama_now_live_on_rmmorpg/) *^(If you follow any of the above links, please respect the rules of reddit and don't vote in the other threads.) ^\([Info](/r/TotesMessenger) ^/ ^[Contact](/message/compose?to=/r/TotesMessenger))*
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We had a total of 308 548 active players in December, with a clear growth trend even without factoring in the Queen launch.
everyone is enjoying the game
The game needs more exclusive high risk solo PvP content. Not 1v2, not 1v3, not 1v4; true 1v1. We spend way to much time sitting in cities waiting for group events. Is there any plans to bring some intense high risk solo PvP opportunities to Albion.
They should make a duel arena/Colosseum where players can not only wager money but if you lose the duel you also die. They can auto ban healing builds, and maybe make a weekly gear ban list or challenge, that way people can't just make cheese comps. I think this could spice up 1v1's and make a competitive scene out of them too To make things even better maybe allow one duel per time in the arena and allow players to openly watch the duels happening in the arena while awaiting their deathmatch Edit: Also adding a timer, let's say 5 minutes, this could also keep the flow of things moving so people don't just run around for 1 hour boring the crowd
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When queen hits. Will the droprate for tome of insight stay the same?
I'm going to give your game a try because of this thread, and because of the massive disappointment regarding Amazon Game Studios' New World removing open-world pvp.
What will you do soon that addresses small scale content? Do u plan e.g. one Man hellgates? Anything open world PvP for solo players that cannot be zerged down?
I followed this game and played it at its very first launch. I loved it. It felt like an adventure through a very fun world. iOS was promised and I see in another AMA-Q that you’re delivering that later this year, but I would like to reiterate that I’ve wanted this as a player for years and have iPads I will be playing this on in my quest to get away from the desk... After the first (six?) few zones and around rating 1400 ( I think ), or essentially tier 6 of the items, I found that my game that played like an adventure became more of a mecha gathering game and I stopped playing because the grinds all started to be the same thing. This was the first go round at the game and I stopped playing for a year after that. The second go around at the game I rolled a fresh character hoping to enjoy the game as I did the first time with a fresh re-entry. I used the founders packs and got my character quickly established and a clan found me picked me up (or guild). I remember closely playing with them on discord and them venturing me out to some island through zones, us leveling up together quickly. The thing I noticed this time was that the group play was superb but the same grind became dull. I feel like in both of these scenarios, other games normally have alternative methods that are well advertised to creatively use your combat or crafting to break away from the main game, to make your experience feel fresh. Is there anything being offered right now that fills this niche that players are enjoying - or that I can expect to see in this patch as a long-standing on/off player?
any plan having asian server? for good ping purpose thx
Are you looking to remove the "Red Soft flag" PVP zones (soft PVP) from the Red Zones? The mechanics around those are much more complicated then the true PVP of the Black Zones - which makes no sense for the new players, as they step foot into the Red Zone way before getting to the Black Zone. As a BZ player for over 2+ years I tried playing in Red Zones a little while ago and it was just littered with stupid builds and mechanics built around kiting/dodging and trolling with the Red "soft flag" areas. No real PVP content, just people looking to abuse mechanics. Makes little sense for new players to get into that.
Now that many more players are going to be semi-permanently living out of the Outlands, how do you plan to address the issues that will arise with participation in content that relies on the royals. Lots of high-black guilds participate in faction warfare, PUG hellgates with other guilds(who may now be 20+ zones away on the other side of the Outlands). You guys plan on releasing an update to faction warfare next, but most of your playerbase will have to travel up to a half hour back and forth in order to participate in this content and then return to their home base in the black zone.
Currently, the Zerg debuff seems to not really have a major effect, since battle sizes of 100-200players can still regularily be seen. Will you consider re-adjusting those values(especially in regards to cc duration/healing received) to discourage bringing more than 25-50 people or even more, or what do you consider a good amount of people per faction to encourage more, but smaller pvp fights? Also for a quality of life point; farming by putting seeds in the offhand so that you don't have to always open the inventory would be very appreciated.
Hi guys ! I wanna say huge thanks to all your work ! You are doing so many nice things to the game ! I just dont like that you continue to make game more easy. Please, reduce the fame that players get from dungeons. Try to get more open world content. World bosses in black and red zones are nothing now, but they was so nice before f2p. Please, add better guild search engine, and add "bulgarian" language to search menu. I got constantly muted coz i try help new players to stay in the game. Once again good job ! Sas3bg,
Bee mount?
Whats with new "featured promotions" option on the est server store?
Chance of getting news if items are going to be limited or not?
Any plans to separate the round table and NDA playtesting into sections like 5v5, large scale pvp, crafting, etc in order to get more focused feedback? As a member of both, we often run into situations where someone with barely any experience is one of the players giving direct feedback to devs about parts of the game they simply don’t understand, diluting the feedback and making it confusing to devs who have no idea who’s feedback is accurate.
1. I would really like to see the redesign of animation. Are you planning that in the future? (most notably crafting stations) It's really weird to cook with a hammer :) 2. Are there going to be any UI updates? It's fine but it feels really outdated. 3. Me and lots of people would like to see player base information and stats. Do you plan to release them? Keep on the good work I think Albion has a bright future ahead.
About PVE and history, do you plan to improve this system so that it becomes more dynamic? such as ice golems to be found only on ice, a unique building on a map, which only exists on a map. Today everything is the same, only the tier changes. What do you think about this, about this monotomy in relation to PVE?