Albion Online Scraps Plans To Cap Alliances, Drops New Avalon Cinematic Trailer
Last week, Sandbox Interactive revealed their plans to “drastically change” how Alliance’s work in the game to shift the power away from large Alliances. The developers were planning to cap Alliances at 300 members (the maximum number of players allowed in a single guild) and were planning to test it out in the live game starting next week. Apparently, the developers got a lot of flak for their decision and have decided on an “alternative approach”.
“We deeply regret our approach to the communication and handling of this matter. We should have taken more time to evaluate the expected outcome of this test before making an announcement. For this, we would like to apologize.
The reason we're now announcing an adjustment to the test is that a hard cap on alliances size would trigger a “purge” of a lot of players from their existing guilds and alliances, cutting them off from their in-game friends and destroying their daily gameplay routines. A cap of 300 would not only have hit the top 4 power blocks, but also a very large number of more casual guilds and alliances. The resulting purge would have affected gatherers, traders and more casual players the most and would have done permanent damage to the game.
At the same time, we cannot allow large groups of players to dominate the gameplay experience of many others. Many players feel they have to join a large Alliance to be successful in Albion Online, and that there are too few opportunities for smaller groups to participate in meaningful gameplay outside of the influence of these large Alliances.”
Instead of limiting the maximum number of Alliance players, the developers will be implementing Territory Control Upkeep and income penalties that increases as an Alliance gains control of more territories. The effect of the Disarray buff will be increased for medium-sized engagements and cooldowns will be added for re-joining Guilds and Alliances. The impact of high quality gear has also been reduced in the Smart Cluster Queue.
The devs plans to roll out these changes on February 26th, before the next Invasion day. They also plan to implement additional measure to limit the dominance of large Alliances in the future. “The goal of these measures is to create more natural reasons for Alliances to reduce in size,” explains the devs. “On their own, these measures will not suffice. We will need to take an additional look at Alliances living in cities, especially the situation around portals, and into introducing more opportunities for small scale groups to succeed in Albion. We do hope, however, to already be able to measure a significant impact of these limitations during the next Invasion day.”
Sandbox Interactive has also published a new cinematic trailer that gives fans a glimpse of Avalon, the NPC faction players will be going up against in the recently-released Queen expansion. Check it out after the break.
