Aika's lead nation system kicks in without warning

by Eliot Lefebvre on Jul 12th 2010 8:00PM

Fantasy, Culture, Game mechanics, PvP, News items, Free-to-play, Aika

With all of the major updates in Aika's first free expansion, Ashes of Betrayal, it might have been easy to miss the inclusion of an underdog system designed to help the lowest-ranked nation in the game's overarching PvP system. What the development team didn't discuss at the time was the other half of the system -- a mechanic to ensure that the lead nation wouldn't have nearly as much dominance over its opponents. That system was rather forcibly demonstrated to players over the weekend, with a post going live explaining exactly what the system is and how it works.

The short version is that when a nation is determined (via automatic processes) to be in the lead, it is no longer capable of forming alliances and is kicked out of any existing alliances. This has met with some resistance from Aika's players both in the news post and in threads on the official forums, as it essentially broke an alliance without warning or any explanation at the time. Some players are viewing the penalties to an arbitrarily determined "lead nation" as crippling a nation while splitting friendly nations apart forcibly. Even if the system itself provides an interesting balance mechanic, it's still leaving a bad taste in the mouths of the game's players, especially in light of earlier incidents when information wasn't immediately available.

Tags: aika, aika-online, balance, controversy, gpotato, hanbitsoft, hidden-system, nation-vs.-nation, nation-war, player-controversy, pvp, pvp-balance, unknown-system

Reader Comments (2)

I, for one, agree with this system. Players will often complain that it removes freedom from a game, but that freedom is often that of dominating other nations by sheer number alone. I remember back when RF online(3 factions RvR) started and was P2P, certain servers would have permanent alliance between 2 factions and would simply farm the third faction turn by turn. Sometimes there would be a disagreement and war would be waged between alliances, but they never lasted for long.

Player controlled alliance are made to benefit the one who made the alliance, obviously, and in a RvR game with several factions, people will be quick to forget about balance and will seek the best way to earn reward.

I'll be happy when the devs respond to the laggy or choppy running a lot of players experience, including me .-. It makes Aika a lot less fun to play.