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Sophisticus wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

Sophisticus wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

Sophisticus wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

This doesn't work well in Ashes or similar games because it has absolutely open trade between players and the death penalties are not 'full loot'.

Those requirements are part of the already-thin veil of 'defense' the game has against people who get boosted via who they know and the resultant RMT.

I really wish Ashes had gone with the full loot concept. That solves so many problems.

Yeah, including the need to have servers capable of holding more than 500 players concurrently.

You dont like full loot?
Albion is very successful in this regard and has a well-functioning economic system (but I was never the economic player in it).

Most people don't like full loot.

In a full loot game, gear is just like consumables.

Which is why most people that want to play an MMORPG don't like it.

Ludullu wrote: »

Sophisticus wrote: »

This power scaling creates a huge gap between new players and veterans. Such a long level phase exacerbates this. Ultimately, Ashes would become a mmorpg where new players and returnees will always ask “is it still worth starting the game”. And what do you think they would say to the fact that in an open world pvp mmorpg you have to level for 225 hours before you can participate in pvp battles without being one shottet?

If Ashes doesn't have enough of a newbie inflow to create pvp situations for latecomers and returnees - it won't survive for long.

Long lvling in all aspects (artisanry, questing, explorations, etc) means that casual players can just enjoy a bit of everything on any given day, and not just boost their lvls as quickly as possible. And this then means that they won't be all that high of an adventure lvl, even several months into the game's release.

Outside of that, Ashes will never have the kind of balancing where a veteran player won't be able to kill a lowbie super quickly. Even if it's not one-shot and instead a 3- or 4-shot - that's still barely a few seconds and wouldn't change the situation all that much.

As for participating in pvp events - Steven said there'll be tasks for newbies to do during those, which won't involve going up against high lvl players directly.

One thing I will point out for Intrepid if relevant.

Please do not count kills during these events for any PvP leaderboards if you want a mixed experience.

I can go to Guild PvP events in Throne and Liberty which have PvE objectives and deliveries and such, I can disrupt, evade, sneak, and get players to chase my tail off cliffs and waste time. This is all fun to me. But I often end up being the only person not in a big group there, because it's just playing 'Manhunt'.

And even if I thought I could find good PvP there, what almost always happens is that as soon as the big PvP guilds get even a whiff that there might be literally anyone else to kill they locust-swarm the event. So it goes from being 'Evade these 3 oneshot DPS classes who are here to get their Guild some merit/prestige' to 'There are 2 sets of 2 dozen people here from the same top 2 guild, and half of them are in charge of just guarding the turn-in points'. Sometimes they don't even fight each other!

Because every newbie or 'Manhunt Target' they set their eyes on is one more chance to rise in the Kills Leaderboard for bragging rights (well, more like 'not being mocked or disregarded' rights). There's also a weekly mission for these kills! Yaay.

Plz donot.

Sophisticus wrote: »

In any case, power scaling needs to become much more horizontal. Otherwise, I don't see how most players can be encouraged to continue for 225 hours (according to Steven, to level 50) without being able to participate in PvP battles to any reasonable extent. “It gets better in the endgame” is not a motivator.

This is false btw. There's always pvp, as long as you look for it. And, if anything, slower leveling helps with it, because more people will be at gearing stages for longer. And when gear is rare and expensive (as opposed to full loot games) - people's power within a gear tier bracket is not all that different, because half of them still have items from the previous tier and half are only starting to get better ones.

Of course there'll be hardcore players who push past all of this, but they will also not be pvping lowbies, cause that's an utter waste of their time.

Sophisticus wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

Sophisticus wrote: »

I want to be able to participate proactively in PvP battles, no matter what level, no matter what gear and at least not get one shots. Anything else would simply be bad PvP Experience.

This is an uncommon view when it comes to 'live'. Most people don't want to just be able to punch up a little bit, they want to be able to actually win. And basically no long-leveling MMORPG has a real way to offer this experience on the same character you build up over time.

Yes, it’s definitely an uncommon stance. Most players do want to actually be able to win. But my idea is this: Even if I don’t win, the vertical power scaling should be limited to a point where, as a low-level player, I can feel the power difference — but at the same time, I should also feel that with enough skill, I can start to overcome that gap in the near future.

That motivates me to keep leveling up and generally making progress. But if I don't feel like I have a chance, then it's pointless.

Well, I can tell you that you're definitely not so uncommon that your opinion is new to the forums. We've had lots of people come and say very similar things, and if those people were still here, your post would probably get a lot of traction.

But, as with most things that people don't 'see a path to change' from Intrepid, many of those people seem to have stopped following the game for now, either because it isn't far enough along, or because they lost interest. You're stuck with the few regulars who often also share your views but are too jaded to repeat all the discussion on it.

If you plan to become a regular around here, welcome. If you don't, check back in 6 months to see if any of us 'regulars' has managed to convince the Devs to balance the PvP differently, or ofc if they were always going to do that and just didn't have a way to say so clearly, so they just do it instead.

I can absolutely assure you that FF14, BDO, Throne and Liberty and probably Eternal Tombs can implement seasons faster than Ashes can.

Technically Throne and Liberty already has seasons mostly-implemented and they're just taking the path of implementation that Intrepid is now learning. But what is a season in an MMORPG really?

"Trees lose their leaves, ground is snowy, spawns and economy change."

Have you ever looked into BDO's Farming system? BDO simulates the movement of rainclouds over the landscape and the topography of the runoff.

Should we assume Ashes will also implement water tables when Freeholds are released? Because BDO does.

Saabynator wrote: »

GreatPhilisopher wrote: »

Saabynator wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

Caww wrote: »

As with many things in life - there is no never-ending well of money - at some point reality rears its ugly head...

While this is indeed true, it puts Intrepid in a bit of a position.

There are already large segments of the MMORPG community that will never be interested in Ashes. Steven's comments on combat trackers (not his decision, his obvious lack of understanding as to their function) has made it so every raiding community that i know of is no longer interested. That is quite literally millions of dedicated MMORPG players that will never again look at this game.

Noaani wrote: »

Saabynator wrote: »

Its like making a good dish, you take a bunch of good food and put it together.

The issue here is that in both cases, with food and with game design, it still takes knowledge and experience to get this right on a large scale.

You could take all the best foods you like and put them in to one dish, but if you dont know how food works, there is no guarantee it will work.

I like taleggio cheese, and i like salmon. There is no world in which these two foods should ever be on the same plate. Ideally, there is no world where these two foods should even be in concurrent courses in a multi-course meal.

On the other hand, white chocolate and caviar go together incredibly well, if executed by someone that can get the balance perfect.

Same with game design, different aspects that are great in some games wont all necessarily fit together in one game and result in a good game.

Placing limitations on crafters being able to get to the top end of crafting that only organized guilds are likely to be able to achieve can be a good mechanic. Making the vast majority of items in your game be player crafted can be a good thing. Putting these two things together, however, isn't necessarily a good thing.

Ashes is full of contradictions like this.

But, Steven is just opening the restaurant, he is not making the food. He just bought the place, made a so and so menu, and now he hired a bunch of chefs, to fuck around and find out. The menu will not be the same on day 1, as it will on opening day. He has a vision ofcource, but the food will change, when the chefs chimes in, and the people taste the appetizers

but steven is the one who get to say what dish stays and what dosent , if steven likes spicy lobster and a 100 people came and ate it , 90 of them said they dont like the way its done or just hate it all together and the chefs tell steven 90 people out of a 100 didnt like it so we have to change the way its done or to something else in a way where most people like it but steven refuses to because he likes it done that way even when most people dont.

Sure, it is probably his call in the end. But Steven does not strike me as a stupid man. He knows there is a marked for his type of MMO. He has a good idea on what is fun and what is not. If a vast majority of players end up hating something, it will most likely change.

There is a very big difference between someone that is stupid, and someone that is trying to do a job they are ill equipped to do.

Unfortunately, if you put a stupid person and a smart person in a difficult position that they are both equally ill equipped for, the stupid person is probably going to do better because they are more likely to be familiar with situations where they are over their heads.

For the smart person, this may well be new territory, and they may not know how to deal with that at all.

Steven absolutely is smart. However, that isn't an advantage for him here, it is potentially a disadvantage.

As to your last comment, keep in mind that Steven has already made comments that have turned hundreds of thousands of potential players away from this game.

There aren't that many players interested in Ashes as a long term game left - how many people need to hate a thing before Steven changes it?

ieldan wrote: »

I'm Brazilian, and the price of the game for us is half the minimum wage here, it is very expensive in our currency. I'm not asking for a price reduction, just to make this option possible.

Thank you very much!

The game is not live yet.

Currently, the game is still in what is essentisllt a supporter mode - sure people get access to alpha and beta for supporting, but that isn't the game.

While I don't want to speak for Steven, I imagine he would not want financial support from people if they are having to pay via installments - he would simply suggest you hold on to that money and put it to better use.

When the game is released, not only will there not be a purchase price at all, but the subscription will be regionalized to match your local economy.

I'm sad that it took me a whole day to figure out the shorthand explanation but here it is. It's probably not worth a Splinter Topic but bear with me it's a bit of a tale. Perhaps one that will be interesting 'historical reading' for some at least.

FF11 has had the Mog House functionality as far as I know since launch. Mog Houses allow you to decorate your private instanced space (the ability to allow visitors was added much later)..

Depending on the Elemental Balances of your furniture, you got a Moghancement, which is a buff to something.

No matter what you do, some players will consider one Moghancement (or some subset group of them) to be the best ones. If those happen to be easy to attain or can be built up gradually with no significant downside, fine. Content.

The moment one of them offers what some vocal influencer (even in world chat) considers an optimal advantage, some set of players will switch from 'this is fun, slowly building up and experimenting with decorating my house, it's like leveling' to 'why is this game gatekeeping the good stuff just to inflate hours/make me RMT?'

It's not that Moghancements are bad, it's that someone hit the wrong switch in players' brains. Originally it was just them and you could only have one at a time. Could you rearrange your entire house to switch from 'Tiny chance of retaining more materials when you fail a synth with this specific crystal' to 'lose less EXP when you die' because you expected to be doing hard content? Yes. Was it worth it? Good question.

Competitive players measure against each other and that's a large part of this trigger. Well-informed players measure against 'obvious optimals' and that is another.

Moghancements had to not be particularly good on purpose to avoid the above. And even within that, it was still talked about in this way. To be clear your overall options were:
"Lose less exp on death." "Gain slightly more money from mob drops in a game where very few mobs drop money and it is a tiny amount relatively" and "gain more Conquest points (Node Exp basically)".

This system is 'not rewarding' on purpose. It is not impactful on purpose. It is tedious to min-max entirely on purpose. Because 'singular, low impact choices' are one of the few ways to keep your playerbase from becoming a toxic separatist column of people arguing over whether optimizing is right.

Ashes needs to have more spaces where Intrepid demonstrates an understanding of this, without it, it will get the usual novelty rush, then the world-chat ignorance phase, then the falloff. Ashes has, so far, made six separate decisions that fast-track it directly into the world-chat ignorance phase.

A lot of the things that make Ashes 'unique' are the equivalent of having powerful Moghancements for players to fight in world chat over. I don't think this is a positive kind of uniqueness for a game to have.

Sophisticus wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

Sophisticus wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

This doesn't work well in Ashes or similar games because it has absolutely open trade between players and the death penalties are not 'full loot'.

Those requirements are part of the already-thin veil of 'defense' the game has against people who get boosted via who they know and the resultant RMT.

I really wish Ashes had gone with the full loot concept. That solves so many problems.

Yeah, including the need to have servers capable of holding more than 500 players concurrently.

You dont like full loot?
Albion is very successful in this regard and has a well-functioning economic system (but I was never the economic player in it).

Most people don't like full loot.

Albion and EVE between them basically have the market covered in regards to people that are willing to accept a persistent world MMORPG with full loot.

There isn't space in the market for a game of the scope Ashes is trying to be.

Ludullu wrote: »

Does "full loot" imply that you just lose all your shit, instead of just dropping it? Cause I fail to see how, in any way, that prevents rmt. You just kill a dude, loot all his rmt stuff and that's it. I'd imagine that tracking these kinds of interactions would be pretty much the same as tracking all trading interactions in the game.

Full-loot is normally combined with many other aspects, but it is not about preventing RMT in the context that I brought it up.

I was referring to the idea that games clamp the best gear a character can wear to prevent level 1 characters from being given exceedingly powerful gear 'for their level' (this also applies to newbies ofc).

In a full-loot game, this practice of 'letting people give a level 1 character a full Heroic Set' is better resolved. An inexperienced player will lose that Heroic Set faster than an experienced player, and therefore wouldn't be as likely to benefit from any RMT to get such gear.

I'm still not saying that's a solution in any way, there are layers and layers that need to be put 'on top of that' for anything resembling 'fun gameplay'. Ashes is not enough like EVE to be using that, and it is built for long leveling.

I can hand off/help Day-1 Level 20s Purple Gear in TL (via guild), and they can wear it, but they also aren't going to be 'less than max level' for the next 500+ hours, and because of how it works that's only the start of the gearing process and they can't trade it, etc.

People are still selling guilds in TL world chat for related reasons.