Current Tower Designs and their Issues
 

Towering has been the heart of Graal for over a decade, and has kept players occupied through competitive means for a long time. The NGS is still in the works, but there have been changes to keep players interested in the towering scene until the NGS arrives in its entirety. That's a different discussion, however. The real issue here is with the current tower designs; they're tremendously outdated, and I think there really needs to be a rework with the way towers are supposed to be.

As of now, there are only four towers remaining; Sardon, Destiny. Mod, and Deadwood are the only towns with towers. They all have one thing in common, however; they're compact and allow for almost no freedom of movement, which only restricts players and causes severe crowding and an extreme loss of momentum.

Towers can hold anywhere from 25 to 50 defenders, as well as any attacking team or any Pkers. At any time it's possible to have over 50 to 70 players in one tower, and the way the towers are designed makes for an extremely frustrating experience.

I tried towering again today at every tower. I haven't done so in a long time, and I remember why. Here are some pictures of the issues at hand:

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This corridor is small and super easy to cut many players off, or at least reduce 50% to 75% of their HP. Maybe even 100%. This is an issue because you're almost guarenteed to take damage if players defend it. When there are many defenders it can be impossible to reach the flag room with 3.0 HP.

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Once you reach the second area, you need to traverse through spikes. Again, if there are defenders here as well, you WILL take damage. The spikes don't help, and you'll get hit 50% of the time. I know they're part of the tower's identity, but this is a poor design.

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Once you actually reach the flag room, assuming you have 0.5 HP left, you're dead. This flag room is so small that any number of players exceeding 20 makes freedom of movement impossible, and that's just poor design. Countering opponents only gets you hit somewhere else, and that's frustrating.

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Again, small corridors and stairs. Many players will take lots of damage just from one or two defenders on the stairs, and this shuts momentum down. As defenders continue cycling, it makes pushing through extremely frustrating.

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About the same on the second floor; the stairs are usually always defended and shut momentum down. It can be impossible to get to the flag room with enough people and HP with a coordinated defending team of 20+, and that is bad. They don't even need to be all that coordinated.

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Once you reach the flag room, you have another small space to work with. You'll most likely get hit as soon as you enter if there are defenders spamming the entrance, and you can't do too much with such limited space. This is bad.

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Mod tower is not quite as bad, but there is still a crowding/corridor/stair issue. Good thing there are only the ground floor and the flag room. It's still possible to reach the flag room if your team coordinates well.

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Once you reach the flag room, there's more to work with. When activity is low, the tower can be fun and great. When it's packed like this, it's very frustrating. Every where you try to run you're going to get hit, and there isn't much you can do.

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I never liked this tower. I was happy when we finally got a new tower, but it sucks.
Right off the bat, there's action near the entrance. There are also spikes and an air vent that prevent you from advancing. You may lose up to 1.5HP against the spikes and multiple defenders. Maybe none if you're lucky.

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This is just terrible. Every little entrance is guarded by one or two defenders. What's bad about this is you have two layers to push through to get to the flag room. This is severely frustrating and very poorly designed.

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Assuming you got through that trash, you have-you guessed it- another small space to work with. There's little area to run around and attack or flank defenders, and this is just awful.

Overall, the whole tower experience is really bad. I don't remember why I liked towering four or five years ago, but this really is no fun.

Tower designs need another overall.

The Snow Town tower was great fun, because there was tons of space. Corridors leading to the flag room were wide, and the flag room itself was very large. It was an unpopular tower because of the ice methinks.

This is what I think needs to happen:

•Get rid of the small stairways: All they do is slow momentum. One or two defenders can easily stop a bigger group, and all they have to do is sit there and spam their sword...

•Widen the corridors: There's no room to actually fight. Multiple players can get hit at once, and not always by choice. There needs to actually be room to fight and maneuver around so momentum isn't so easily stopped.

•Make the flag rooms bigger: Again, this is where the biggest battles will take place. If players can't try and fight off multiple defenders at once without constantly taking damage, then it's just no fun. There's hardly any merit or skill involved in towering.

•Get rid of traps: Nobody really cares to avoid the traps, especially when there are defenders. Attackers just bee line it to the flag room without a care, and it's really just free damage for the defenders... There isn't an incentive to avoid the traps when there are too many defenders, because chances of taking damage are already too high. If they avoid the traps, then great, but most of the time people just get hit.

The tower designs are terrible. I can't seem to enjoy it any more since I can't utilize any skills that would otherwise be possible with just a little more room. Towering is just a mess, and you'll always win with more people defending. It's not good, it needs to be changed.

I want to let you be wrong. But you've hit my soft spot.

There are only two problems with towers. The respawn zone of Swamp/Babord Tower and the screen shake at Destiny Tower. Small corridors and choke points are useful, otherwise taking towers would be too easy. If a guild is positioning themselves properly, every tower should be an absolute nightmare to get through the halls with a full hp bar. Why would a tower full of killers be designed to let people easily walk to the flag?

The one-man-army play style a lot of PKers enjoy is a skill. Even the most skilled at it can't always make it up there. It does really well when a guild is not properly defending a tower (entire roster sitting in the flag room) and it does poorly when they are.

Spikes are what I would call "anti-noob" traps. When you learn the patterns of the spikes, they're easy to dodge. Regardless of defenders, I should be able to get through this room getting hit by a spike once every five deaths. They aren't hard to dodge.

Yes, entering a flag room with 0.5 HP is a death sentence. Do you expect them to not hit you? Try making your way up with more HP.

Just use your blink to walk up the stairs. I don't know why people complain about this. It isn't hard.

The only improvement that can be made for you is for players to stop whining about getting PKed outside the city. I think you would have a much better time PKing in the Overworld, but unfortunately you may not see that come back anytime soon.

I didn't say it should be easy. I think it should be possible. I think choke points are awful game design for this game's mechanics. I think the best offense against something like that would be bombs and arrows, but those go fast when you die, and over time it's inefficient. Again, Snow Town was exactly how you described it. Everyone could get to the flagroom fairly easily with 3.0HP, but the defending spawn was right in the flag room and attackers had to go through three rooms to reach the flag room again.


The spikes have a simple pattern, and yes, sometimes you just won't get hit by the spikes. I think the biggest issue here are the choke points again, as three or four players can get cozy near the spikes and stop the flow. My point is they aren't OP, but with many players in the spike room it makes it rather difficult and worthless to try and avoid the spikes, when the bigger threats are the defenders. Best to just rush to the flag room instead of ever wasting time, and that's all this design does.


That simply isn't possible with too many choke points and small spaces. It's far too easy to take damage in these towers.

Well, I hate to burst your beeble but the Deadwood choke points are 2x2 wide. Only one graalian can fit through at a time :p I can blink and avoid damage for a couple seconds, but I can't just go through someone right in front of me blocking the small staircase. It's possible to blink past the 4x4 choke point if they stay to the left or right, but if they position themselves right in the middle it's not going to work.

I'd expect a sparrer to know that a simple run and swing will knock whoever you hit back. Problem solved.

Most of your other complaints are solved by 1.5 seconds of invulnerability and realizing your are one player against 10-50.

But you forget that there are usually two or more defenders, my dood. One is usually right behind the other. They just continue to cycle in while attackers are busy trying to push through. If a defender dies, they'll be upstairs and back to defend in less than 10 seconds.

And the lag. Don't forget to mention that. Makes spar and tower laughable. If you have any latency at all it's an exercise in futility.

rip castle

Whatever happened to Box Fort and its many designs that were going to be implemented?

I don't know. Hopefully they learned some valueable info from our feedback when they let us test them out. Some of those designs were pretty nice methinks.

Magnets would have looked cool in gravity tower. Too bad the lizardons destroyed it.

Yeah, thats a ruddy good point. Box fort was meant to be for new gameplay testing but i dont think anything from it has made it into the current towers.