Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two testing is currently taking place five days each week. More information about Phase II and Phase III testing schedule can be found here
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two testing is currently taking place five days each week. More information about Phase II and Phase III testing schedule can be found here
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
Best Of
Re: Iron Aura reduced from 10% reduced damage to 2% ?
I am not sure if this is intended or an error. If you mouse over the actual ability, it says 2% reduction. But if you mouse over the buff as its applied, it still says 10%. I think that damage reduction brings a huge benefit to a group for PvE and PvP. To nerf it to 2% seems a bit of an extreme swing, but its hard to say what is implemented as of this last weekend with the conflicting info sheets.
PvP Experience is a big minus - I don't understand the design goals there
PvP in these types of games is niche. It's not Fortnite or Call of Duty. When you look at very successful MMOs the PvP has very tight controls on them, generally speaking, and those that don't typically have a significantly lower share of the market/subscriber base and so forth.
It may well be that Intrepid is ok with that as that's more of a business decision, but since it's so baked in and fundamental at this point, it would be difficult to about face. I think of Wildstar's old school raiding (huge mistake/alienating of community), and EQ2s "you must have a full group to do any kind of meaningful content" prior to launch, also a huge mistake a rolled back. It will be interesting to see how this goes.
That all aside, given that PvP is very much here to stay and a core feature of the game, here are a couple of misgivings from someone who is a complete lowbie with very little game time.
I struggle to understand, on any level, the fun factor of getting continuously looted at the ripe old age of level 4,5,6 a mere few hours into the game. After the quest sends me off into the middle of nowhere with my old swayback, I found myself slowly gathering bits of glint, and other odds and ends. There wasn't really anywhere to sell it, the main city was a long, long ways off. After about 5 hours of game time I ended up with just about what I started with - close to nothing. I watched as players looted my dead body, I returned to my dead body to find it gone, and I watch as other players hovered, waiting for the mobs to finally get me, so they can loot me. Not really amazing for community building!
My question is, who is this fun for? You can say cry more newb or git gud or whatever and that's fine, but when the design sessions are occurring, is there fervent agreement, and inspiration when we talk about the newb who's just barely learning to game getting his pittance of loot snagged for the 10th time as a great design decision? This feeds back to my comment above - who is your player base? Who enjoys that? I mean, surely the looters, but when they push out the casuals... well, you have your niche market share.
If that's what you want, then ok it just needs to be understood. If not, then why is it like this?
Here's where design/dev/tiny "community" testing of PvP fails on a fundamental level. When you're having your caravan run and oh no there's some players going to try and take us out - it's a blast! But... you're playing with you peers, your co-workers, your boss and your subordinates. They are people you know and have a relationship with. That DOES sound like fun! But that is not the reality of your player base
To truly test your systems you need the trolls. The people who don't care about the consequence (if they are at all meaningful which, at the moment, they don't seem to be). The people whose game fun/experience comes from ruining yours. The people who are anonymous tea-baggers who shout cry more newb and will camp you and/or generally exploit the system as much as possible to grief you. That's who you need testing, not your friends or people you pay, but those people.
If your systems can withstand that and remain enjoyable, congratulations you figured it out! If not, expect a small niche player base and a level of success associated with that. Again, perhaps that's your goal - I'm sure Pantheon of the Fallen isn't trying to be the next WoW and that's ok.
Now pardon me while I offer my newb corpse and the pittance of loot it holds to the leets out there that actually know what they're doing!
It may well be that Intrepid is ok with that as that's more of a business decision, but since it's so baked in and fundamental at this point, it would be difficult to about face. I think of Wildstar's old school raiding (huge mistake/alienating of community), and EQ2s "you must have a full group to do any kind of meaningful content" prior to launch, also a huge mistake a rolled back. It will be interesting to see how this goes.
That all aside, given that PvP is very much here to stay and a core feature of the game, here are a couple of misgivings from someone who is a complete lowbie with very little game time.
I struggle to understand, on any level, the fun factor of getting continuously looted at the ripe old age of level 4,5,6 a mere few hours into the game. After the quest sends me off into the middle of nowhere with my old swayback, I found myself slowly gathering bits of glint, and other odds and ends. There wasn't really anywhere to sell it, the main city was a long, long ways off. After about 5 hours of game time I ended up with just about what I started with - close to nothing. I watched as players looted my dead body, I returned to my dead body to find it gone, and I watch as other players hovered, waiting for the mobs to finally get me, so they can loot me. Not really amazing for community building!
My question is, who is this fun for? You can say cry more newb or git gud or whatever and that's fine, but when the design sessions are occurring, is there fervent agreement, and inspiration when we talk about the newb who's just barely learning to game getting his pittance of loot snagged for the 10th time as a great design decision? This feeds back to my comment above - who is your player base? Who enjoys that? I mean, surely the looters, but when they push out the casuals... well, you have your niche market share.
If that's what you want, then ok it just needs to be understood. If not, then why is it like this?
Here's where design/dev/tiny "community" testing of PvP fails on a fundamental level. When you're having your caravan run and oh no there's some players going to try and take us out - it's a blast! But... you're playing with you peers, your co-workers, your boss and your subordinates. They are people you know and have a relationship with. That DOES sound like fun! But that is not the reality of your player base
To truly test your systems you need the trolls. The people who don't care about the consequence (if they are at all meaningful which, at the moment, they don't seem to be). The people whose game fun/experience comes from ruining yours. The people who are anonymous tea-baggers who shout cry more newb and will camp you and/or generally exploit the system as much as possible to grief you. That's who you need testing, not your friends or people you pay, but those people.
If your systems can withstand that and remain enjoyable, congratulations you figured it out! If not, expect a small niche player base and a level of success associated with that. Again, perhaps that's your goal - I'm sure Pantheon of the Fallen isn't trying to be the next WoW and that's ok.
Now pardon me while I offer my newb corpse and the pittance of loot it holds to the leets out there that actually know what they're doing!
kelvar
2
Re: Linux Tips, Tweaks and Troubleshooting Thread
Hi guys, I appreciate the big-brain distro war battle, but could we keep this thread on the topic of getting AOC to work on Linux and associated troubleshooting? 
We're all on the same side here.
We're all on the same side here.
Re: Resource Respawn Issue: Broken Balance and Game Economy
Yeah, static respawn locations, and static timers. This is NOTHING like what was promised in the design discussions. I would imagine this is a placeholder of a placeholder atm.
Re: No Zinc or Copper anywhere
I was able to get copper and ruby in addition to basalt as a rare chance. Not sure if this was put in place as a stop gap or actually intended.
Lack of soft and hard stat caps is killing the pvp - stat stacking, gear rarity, enchanting & buffs
Time To Kill values especially in group play are insane, even before we factor in few other broken systems. This is Phase1 rarity gear situation all over again.
There is no space for player skill expression in the game, there is no space for being an underdog player or guild if stats dominate everything else. There is no space to even start talking about class balance in the context of 1v1 or group pvp.
It's all out damage stat race, which brings up your damage output to insane levels from single ability casts. We are back to a scenario, where you are able to 1-2 shot people.
We had the rarity gear nerfs during Phase 1, those came pretty late. The current issues are equally as obvious. Why aren't those issues closely tracked? Why the math behind the stats, the damage output and defensive stats has not been done?
This should have been hot fixed weeks ago, I mean the power gap between geared and not geared players is surely not intended. I have little interest in a game which allows me to 1 shot my opponents due to stat differences. The life of underdog in Ashes has to offer a sensible access to the game content or the population will just die.
If the power gap is intentional, please can we have a statement about it, so those of us who care about balanced and fun pvp experience can direct our attention elsewhere?
Thanks
There is no space for player skill expression in the game, there is no space for being an underdog player or guild if stats dominate everything else. There is no space to even start talking about class balance in the context of 1v1 or group pvp.
It's all out damage stat race, which brings up your damage output to insane levels from single ability casts. We are back to a scenario, where you are able to 1-2 shot people.
We had the rarity gear nerfs during Phase 1, those came pretty late. The current issues are equally as obvious. Why aren't those issues closely tracked? Why the math behind the stats, the damage output and defensive stats has not been done?
This should have been hot fixed weeks ago, I mean the power gap between geared and not geared players is surely not intended. I have little interest in a game which allows me to 1 shot my opponents due to stat differences. The life of underdog in Ashes has to offer a sensible access to the game content or the population will just die.
If the power gap is intentional, please can we have a statement about it, so those of us who care about balanced and fun pvp experience can direct our attention elsewhere?
Thanks
Re: High quality AoC memes
I need a bot to autoreply this to all these threads. I'm getting so triggered by the concern-trolling. They take up so much energy just to answer fake concerns about Ashes's potential future popularity, raised by people who themselves will never like what Ashes is going to be, just to give them a pretext to suggest knocking over Ashes's pillars.Arya_Yeshe wrote: »Tired of weekly concern threads and then I go read it and I get flabbergasted about how devoid of reason and relevancy their concerns are
Re: Economy in Ashes (Solving MMORPG Inflation)
Gear should be fixable only x amount of time before it permanently breaks. Mounts should have maximum number of deaths, before they permanently die. Gatherable resource rates should be adjusted upwards to compensate. There is no MMORPG inflation problem anymore.
Re: How to fix the EXTREME server drop off we are experiencing.
It's my bad for equating the two, but that first one is what I'm talking about. Push newbies towards guilds, while guilds themselves benefit from it as well. Newbies get to learn the game in a community, while guilds want to provide that community cause it's beneficial for them as well.I would have to assume there is a system, mechanic or some such other than a mentor program that encourages guilds to hunt new players out to see if they would like to join. I don't see it as a direct result of a mentor system.
That's what I want from the mentor system.
I agree that a system that accomplishes this would be great, I just don't know what that system looks like.
To me, if EQ2 players were doing this before the game had a mentor system, and Archeage players were never doing this despite having one, it isn't the mentor system you need to look at.
Perhaps it is more to do with the over all player culture than any one system - though right now, I really don't know.
Edit; thinking on this some more, I think it comes down to basic respect - but respect that the game shows it's players.
EQ2 treated it's players with a level of respect, and it's players treated each other with a level of respect as a result. Archeage never treated it's players with any respect.
I don't see a lot of respect for players in Ashes so far.
Noaani
1
Re: How to fix the EXTREME server drop off we are experiencing.
The thing is that I'm talking about the very lowest beginner levels of social gaming skill.
"The ability to understand your role, communicate, and have enough control over your emotions to reach a small goal after a setback."
Many veterans think of those who lack these things as 'weak people who should be weeded out' (not saying you do, since your 'weed out the weak or at least don't reward them' is much more sensibly targeted), and this causes issues, or rather, it would...
If most of those players weren't out there frothing at the mouth and ragequitting over pings in Pred/SMITE/LoL.
It's a skill one has to learn (not everyone does) when under frustrating pressure, and it's a skill that is actually easier to learn in MOBAs because you don't have to deal with the fallout of 'losing your temper at your team and it making things awkward for a week for you to even log into the game'.
Sure, there's the bad side to this, that some people 'never learn and get to keep being terrible at it' if the game doesn't penalize them (i.e. the thing that serious devs are referring to when they talk about managing toxicity) but in short, yeah...
NOOB level teamwork and emotional control in groups with unknowns/strangers used to be an MMO thing, now it's a Battle Arena Shooter/MOBA thing ('tactical' shooters less so because sometimes the low TTK means that a single player can absolutely stomp an entire enemy team).
The thing is that it actually isn't that well known/understood outside of studios that make these games simply because the 'average rando' doesn't ever 'finish the Teamwork 101 course' in MMORPGs now.
"YouTube the fight to know what you should do, assume everyone else did that too, yell at/kick whoever didn't, requeue."
The most popular MMORPGs right now don't even require you to clear anything that would ask for a 'passing grade' in that 'class' to actually do most of their content. So you get this weird split of 'people who don't have those skills' and 'people who have them, but didn't get them from MMOs and therefore probably enter the MMO with a gaming friend group who they know also has them'.
It's really rough on designers right now because of this. Those who like challenge don't come to MMOs to make new friends to face challenges with, and those who 'like MMOs' don't necessarily like challenges.
"The ability to understand your role, communicate, and have enough control over your emotions to reach a small goal after a setback."
Many veterans think of those who lack these things as 'weak people who should be weeded out' (not saying you do, since your 'weed out the weak or at least don't reward them' is much more sensibly targeted), and this causes issues, or rather, it would...
If most of those players weren't out there frothing at the mouth and ragequitting over pings in Pred/SMITE/LoL.
It's a skill one has to learn (not everyone does) when under frustrating pressure, and it's a skill that is actually easier to learn in MOBAs because you don't have to deal with the fallout of 'losing your temper at your team and it making things awkward for a week for you to even log into the game'.
Sure, there's the bad side to this, that some people 'never learn and get to keep being terrible at it' if the game doesn't penalize them (i.e. the thing that serious devs are referring to when they talk about managing toxicity) but in short, yeah...
NOOB level teamwork and emotional control in groups with unknowns/strangers used to be an MMO thing, now it's a Battle Arena Shooter/MOBA thing ('tactical' shooters less so because sometimes the low TTK means that a single player can absolutely stomp an entire enemy team).
The thing is that it actually isn't that well known/understood outside of studios that make these games simply because the 'average rando' doesn't ever 'finish the Teamwork 101 course' in MMORPGs now.
"YouTube the fight to know what you should do, assume everyone else did that too, yell at/kick whoever didn't, requeue."
The most popular MMORPGs right now don't even require you to clear anything that would ask for a 'passing grade' in that 'class' to actually do most of their content. So you get this weird split of 'people who don't have those skills' and 'people who have them, but didn't get them from MMOs and therefore probably enter the MMO with a gaming friend group who they know also has them'.
It's really rough on designers right now because of this. Those who like challenge don't come to MMOs to make new friends to face challenges with, and those who 'like MMOs' don't necessarily like challenges.
Azherae
1