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: Travel
There is a planned teleportation system between certain kinds of nodes. The world just isn’t big enough to need it yet.
kerrai
2
[Issue] Griefing
The forums already have a lot of talk about his toxic behavior. It's a serious problem that seems to be ignored, so I'm directing this towards Intrepid themselves.
If you guys do not take this seriously and actively perma ban these players, then you are sending a message that this behavior is okay. This will not only deplete your testers, but it will also be a reason why many never even bother playing Ashes again. Behavior of this type only comes from the most psychology-damaged individuals who take satisfaction in harming others. So saying you're okay with it sends the message that you want your players to suffer. Who would support developers like that?
This is by far the most rampant issue in Ashes. I have been unable to do many high end groups due to all these trolls. Every forge group created gets griefed making testing that dungeon nearly impossible. No one wants to have their time wasted, so action is needed. When these players are seen day after day after multiple people report them... it just makes Intrepid look really bad. We are a month into this test and the population has already dramatically dropped.
I want to help make this game great, but my time is valuable. I'm not going to waste it dealing with toxic players who are trying to prevent testing. There should be zero tolerance for this kind of behavior. If you don't remove these players you will be losing far more actual players instead.
The ball is in your court, and we are watching for a reaction.
If you guys do not take this seriously and actively perma ban these players, then you are sending a message that this behavior is okay. This will not only deplete your testers, but it will also be a reason why many never even bother playing Ashes again. Behavior of this type only comes from the most psychology-damaged individuals who take satisfaction in harming others. So saying you're okay with it sends the message that you want your players to suffer. Who would support developers like that?
This is by far the most rampant issue in Ashes. I have been unable to do many high end groups due to all these trolls. Every forge group created gets griefed making testing that dungeon nearly impossible. No one wants to have their time wasted, so action is needed. When these players are seen day after day after multiple people report them... it just makes Intrepid look really bad. We are a month into this test and the population has already dramatically dropped.
I want to help make this game great, but my time is valuable. I'm not going to waste it dealing with toxic players who are trying to prevent testing. There should be zero tolerance for this kind of behavior. If you don't remove these players you will be losing far more actual players instead.
The ball is in your court, and we are watching for a reaction.
Re: client patcher
It could be pinning your hard drive. That used to be an issue with steam downloads as well. There was a setting in steam to limit it, but I think valve already fixed that on the backend, somehow. Just a thought.
Pham
1
Re: Forced pvp caused by war
Pvp in towns is a poor idea, node wars or otherwise. I've never understood the dev teams fascination with promoting griefing in towns where players commonly go afk, chill, are barely paying attention to their screen if at all.
I'm okay with killing in town. But the guards need to be on that person. And the person/s need to be "Wanted" by that node until some form of justice is served. As it is now you just gank loot and run. Trade your gear then die. Even if trading is turned off, just gank afk people in town with trash gear. Nothing like coming back after taking a duece see your corpse. and your mats gone because you were processing...
Some system to make that node hostile to that person/s for an X time or until they clear some condition.
This would still allow town killing, which would be a challenge for same someone from Node A to go to Node B and kill players there. I'd enjoy that either way, as the killer or the victim. Time to kill is to low in most cases, and people can ID the victims class just by selecting them. But a rogue getting hired by a player to go kill another player because someone was ganked while gathering mats would awesome. You can still do this, but the challenge of killing someone in town is basically zero.
For all the focus on PvP it does seem to be designed for gankers and griefers. With the time sink of gathering processing, gear grinding, level grinding. the risk is more so on the 'peaceful' players than the griefers. I doubt the system as it is will make it to launch, but I'm still concerned they won't 'fix' it enough to hold enough PvE focused players to entertain the PvP players for very long. It's a sinking ship, but at least it's not out to sea.
Are there even any pure PvP MMORPGs that can be considered successful? I wonder what 'success' would be for Intrepid. I wonder if anyone has done the math on that.
Volgaris
2
[Suggestion] Gold Income and Node Upgrades
Raw gold income is hard to come by. Selling glint directly feels pretty bad. The primary source, instead, is caravans. This has led to some frustration from PvE/crafting/gathering-focused players who lack a meaningful avenue to generate raw gold. This post isn’t about the caravan situation that has been discussed ad nauseam. Instead, it’s about two things: raw gold income and node upgrades.
Node upgrades are great, and it’s great that they require coordination and hard work by the community. Yet players are still hoarding resources rather than turning them in. Why? It’s a freeloader problem. This comes up often in economics. Why pay for it themselves when they can wait for others to pay and reap the reward?
There are two solutions. The first is to limit access to the good to people who contributed to it. This is a bad solution in Ashes. The second is to permit meaningful rewards for people who contribute. I think you should do that.
Let mayors use the node treasury to incentivize turn-ins directly with raw gold or, alternatively, let the mayoral tickets be exchanged directly for gold. This creates a PvE/gathering/crafting flow of raw gold creation.
Second, please increase vendor sell prices for crafted items. The low vendor prices are just silly on gear.
(Alternatively, and this probably deserves its own separate post, but has the Dev team ever asked themselves why raw gold/silver/copper is even in the game? I’m not sure it adds something meaningful instead of just making glint not a “material” and replacing the gold/silver/copper with glint and letting you buy commodities that then unpack into valuable materials once delivered.)
Node upgrades are great, and it’s great that they require coordination and hard work by the community. Yet players are still hoarding resources rather than turning them in. Why? It’s a freeloader problem. This comes up often in economics. Why pay for it themselves when they can wait for others to pay and reap the reward?
There are two solutions. The first is to limit access to the good to people who contributed to it. This is a bad solution in Ashes. The second is to permit meaningful rewards for people who contribute. I think you should do that.
Let mayors use the node treasury to incentivize turn-ins directly with raw gold or, alternatively, let the mayoral tickets be exchanged directly for gold. This creates a PvE/gathering/crafting flow of raw gold creation.
Second, please increase vendor sell prices for crafted items. The low vendor prices are just silly on gear.
(Alternatively, and this probably deserves its own separate post, but has the Dev team ever asked themselves why raw gold/silver/copper is even in the game? I’m not sure it adds something meaningful instead of just making glint not a “material” and replacing the gold/silver/copper with glint and letting you buy commodities that then unpack into valuable materials once delivered.)
kerrai
2
Re: Instanced PVP (Arena and/or Battlegrounds)
That’s not what happened in wotlk, people still had to go down to the dungeon areas, raids, daily quest area. Everyone had to go do the argent crusade to get the rep otherwise you would be cooked for PvE and or PvP, gold wasn’t easily accessible back then so 90% of the population had to do dailies and that was all running into the other faction constantly. There was so much interaction for OW PvP it’s not even funny and this is not even including the OW PvP in Wintergrasp, sitting in town definitely got you no where and also just remembered that professions were also important back then (not like current retail) so a lot of players were constantly running into each or fighting each other for mine, herb, fishing spots etc this was server based and no cross realm either so a lot of people would brawl each other due to seeing each other again after being ganked while leveling and including guilds going off at each other. Again proving that hardcore PvE and competitive ranked 3v3 Arena and open world PvP can all coexist easily and have a healthy participation of all systems in the game AS PROVEN IN WOTLK
Did you even play that lol and have you even played this Alpha at all? Or are you just guessing, if you have played this Alpha are you even max level yet? Have you gone to the new desert area yet? Still haven’t answered whether you’re even participating in this Alpha. Il also happily keep contributing to the forums as I’ve done since making The Arena Thread, as someone who has max levelled in both phase 1 & 2. I can give a lot of feedback on the current state and put forward some suggestions. If they get taken or not so be it
If your only experience is watching streamers i can guarantee it’s completely different in the game
What you say about wrath is at best stretching the truth.
What rep did you need for pve/pvp? From my remembrance you needed SoH for shoulder and one other for your helm. Both of these took a week at max to get. Also lfg dungeon finder came in 3.3 during the ICC dungeons. Wows success in wrath had little to do with it's terrible content and more to do with the cultural phenomenon that it was. For pve naxx, togc and ICC were terrible raids. For pvp season 5, 6, and 7 were faceroll dk seasons and season 8 was SM and DBW. There's a reason wrath players were referred to as wraith babies.
Your obfuscation of information should lead people to take your opinions with a grain of salt.
KingDDD
1
Re: Thoughts on Artisanship as a whole
I'm semi-confident that someone is working on this, it's not that hard to do (as always, Intrepid, please let us know if this is somehow hard to do).
The issue is often knowing how and when to release different parts of these systems, and how best to attune them to the design goals.
A lot of it is probably still in flux, and highly likely to be placeholder, considering the original plans/ideals for the game's economy.
I guess the one thing I don't agree with, in your post, given that, is the idea that Nodes need to have either Storage or any way of undertaking Artisanal activities in the Wilderness stage (I have no issues with Storage existing, I just don't think they need it).
With the existence of Lionhold, and the inability to drop crafted items on death when not Corrupted, even considering the distances that must be traveled, I still don't see an issue if more of the lower level mobs around nodes drop semi-appropriate crafting materials (e.g. I have previously made a specific single suggestion of making Copper fragments in some way available from Goblins in Nodes, i.e. outside Lionhold perhaps).
Players would go out from Lionhold in the direction of the mobs that drop the materials they want, and this would result in Nodes leveling. They could return to Lionhold to craft and repair basic gear and gathering tools and use the storage in Lionhold. They would build up even larger stockpiles in Lionhold and eventually maybe have reason to try to transport them to Encampment nodes, which might at least have a Smelter or weapon/armor crafting station. There are also already some crafting stations out in the world around Lionhold that are usable regardless of the status of Nodes.
In some previous test, I believe we did have some stations available at the Encampment stage (I haven't bothered to test early-flow this Phase since I learned that nothing much changed economically yet).
I'm looking forward to adjustments too, I'm just 100% expecting them (even if only because of the relatively consistent 'negative feedback' the current state of the Artisanship system keeps receiving). The only thing I don't know is if they are going to 'go back on' the idea of crafting being truly important in the early levels (for progression and such). I hope they don't change this aspect of the intended design, but I don't think the current state is really a reflection of anything other than 'the build that is supposed to give us actual Artisanship and Itemization' not being ready yet.
The issue is often knowing how and when to release different parts of these systems, and how best to attune them to the design goals.
A lot of it is probably still in flux, and highly likely to be placeholder, considering the original plans/ideals for the game's economy.
I guess the one thing I don't agree with, in your post, given that, is the idea that Nodes need to have either Storage or any way of undertaking Artisanal activities in the Wilderness stage (I have no issues with Storage existing, I just don't think they need it).
With the existence of Lionhold, and the inability to drop crafted items on death when not Corrupted, even considering the distances that must be traveled, I still don't see an issue if more of the lower level mobs around nodes drop semi-appropriate crafting materials (e.g. I have previously made a specific single suggestion of making Copper fragments in some way available from Goblins in Nodes, i.e. outside Lionhold perhaps).
Players would go out from Lionhold in the direction of the mobs that drop the materials they want, and this would result in Nodes leveling. They could return to Lionhold to craft and repair basic gear and gathering tools and use the storage in Lionhold. They would build up even larger stockpiles in Lionhold and eventually maybe have reason to try to transport them to Encampment nodes, which might at least have a Smelter or weapon/armor crafting station. There are also already some crafting stations out in the world around Lionhold that are usable regardless of the status of Nodes.
In some previous test, I believe we did have some stations available at the Encampment stage (I haven't bothered to test early-flow this Phase since I learned that nothing much changed economically yet).
I'm looking forward to adjustments too, I'm just 100% expecting them (even if only because of the relatively consistent 'negative feedback' the current state of the Artisanship system keeps receiving). The only thing I don't know is if they are going to 'go back on' the idea of crafting being truly important in the early levels (for progression and such). I hope they don't change this aspect of the intended design, but I don't think the current state is really a reflection of anything other than 'the build that is supposed to give us actual Artisanship and Itemization' not being ready yet.
Azherae
1