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Sophisticus wrote: »

Most of you seem to agree somehow, but you're not assuming this will be drastically changed.

I accept it because there is no solution.

One of your complaints is essentially in regards to character progression, the amount of it that exists - lets look at that.

A western MMORPG needs character progression to survive. That is what keeps players logging in, keeps players paying their subscription. As soon as players stop having a means of progression, they play something else until a means of progression is opened up for them.

However, constant character progression in a PvP MMORPG is a bad thing. The greater the disparity between two given characters in regards to progression, the less of a contest any PvP would be between them. This applies to multiple people situations as well.

So, a game like Ashes literally needs character progression, but also can't have character progression. They can't just cut back the vertical progression down, because then everyone will leave the game when they hit that point, they can't just leave it in because then PvP becomes one sided very quickly.

But then you have how this ties in to another of your issues - the grind. Eventually, players are going to hit the progression cap - or at least the cap of where they are happy to progress to. When players hit this, if there is nothing interesting for them to do (there will be interesting things for a handful of guilds to do), they will go and play a different game. So, if there is a long grind to get to that point, more people are more likely to spend more time in the game before they eventually leave for what ever they move on to afterwards.

The reason we "accept" things is because there is no correct way to do this. The games foundation is already in conflict with itself.

Most gamers are used to no more then 1-3 min between things to see or do. This is a standard game developers have learned. Ashes is so far from that loop its shooking. I really hope this giant game space does not stay the way it is and also hope Ashes does not become a cookie cutter rush to make the game see full and alive.

When i mine Ore's in the World of Worst of ever Story-written Warcraft,

i get EXP.
When i pick up Herbs in Worst of ever-Story-written Warcraft -> i get EXP.



I can't remember when this was patched in. But i liked it. I really really liked it. It was definitely one of the best Additions to the Content of the whole Game.

The Option to do something else than to senselessly slaughter countless Mobs over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.



Did You Guys ever heard something,
alone the Lines of like : " Power ... ... ... ... usually always comes with a Price. "



When i - in Phase 1 during the likes of Middle-November or so,
had killed S~OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO MANY Goblins - that i had the feeling between insane headache i had something that felt like a drop of blood maybe bleeding inside my brain or so,

you know a HOT-COLD-WET-"tingle" somewhere inside my brain. ( )



I decided the Prize is too high.
It is just too high.

I gave up around 5% of EXP after reaching LvL 11 towards LvL 12,

and i was disappointed into myself and felt bad for no longer being able to test. But that was my Limit.
Jepp.
Figured i better stop. I should admit it here right now.




In WoW Vanilla when levelling was insanely hard -> before Burning Crusade -> the ever first Expansion of Worst of Warcraft -> i managed to level THREE Characters up to LvL 60 back then - which was the Max-Level in WoW Vanilla,

and it was no biggie. It was doable. It wasn't bad. I don't know what was so different in Ashes of Creatio Phase 1 killing Mobs around Aela/the Starting Area.

But it felt different.
It felt like i am chained down. And i am struggling for every single Percent of EXP for every Level. Knowing fully well i would be set back should i die even a single time. .

I'll continue to disagree, I guess.

Firstly, you might be confusing Commissions with 'Tasks', there is an entire separate Commissions Board in the game right now that sends you off to find places, deliver things (I think), defeat specific mobs, etc.

That's at least 15m per, so they 'only' need around 600 unique ones, and yes, some number of those will be mob killing.

But that's still only like 20 per 'area' (where 'area' can mean a lot of things depending on the game, I don't think that the basis of my 'disagreement' is based on us not being able to agree on what an 'area' would be in Ashes relative to this) to get most people 'to level cap' (assuming a fixed FTUE such that you only really do a bunch of these after level 11 or so).

Anyone who is taking Ashes seriously as what it sells itself as will probably visit at least 5 nodes on their way to level cap, and if we go by the 'standards of the industry' (about 50 Commission type content pieces per Node) that's 250+ pieces of content, at around 15-20m each, easily 80h and each Commission can absolutely be 'allowed' to then give between 10% of exp in the 11-20 range all the way up to '10% of exp in the 30-40 range' for more difficult ones (or ones that open up when the nodes level).

The reason this works is simply because most people don't get bored of an area from just 3 visits, and designers can definitely get 2-3 unique things into each area, sometimes 'per visit'. When you have a lot of world-space (and Ashes certainly does) the goal of a good team is to use it. Use every bit of it you can manage to use without it being ridiculous. Recycle, reuse, refactor, retell stories. If you have an open plain doing nothing in your MMORPG in 2025 fill that with some random thought from a cool dev.

The reason people don't hear about/know about this massive source of content is that some people don't experience even half of it (me, for example, I am literally too busy in TL to consume all their side-content quickly), and those that do enjoy it, but don't have much need to talk about it because it's so personal to them.

Uncommon Sense wrote: »

either perspective I would like to assume suggests less than %25 grind

I can assure you, it will be waaay more than 25%.

And Steven's "some grind" is simply a sugarcoating of bad news that there will be a lot of grind.

The game's design does not work (as Steven wants it) if there is no grind. If people are not present in grind spots - there's no reason to fight for them. If people are not out there gathering - there's no one fighting for them.

Steven loves "soft friction", but that friction can only happen when people are out in the open world grinding locations. Everything else is either a predetermined pvp event or people living in their own little world doing quests.

Uncommon Sense wrote: »

I hope Bard's legacy holds true...

It will not, cause, since he left, Steven has already said "yeah, we'll have some grind".

I don't really see how they even CAN get the "~225h to max lvl" design w/o grind. That would be an insane amount of questing, if you tried making that path non-grindable. And both mob and artisanry leveling is just grind.

I actually just watched this last night! Loved the animation style.

Ludullu wrote: »

Githal wrote: »

These should not be that GAME CHANGING so if you lose it you will feel that you are set behind that much. But in the same time they should be rewarding. And if there are several such systems, even if you lose 1 you own, there is good chance that you are already working on getting different one, which will keep you engaged in the game

As someone who has played a game with the same castle design - Noaani is right, people will definitely leave if they lose the castle or anything remotely as valuable as that.

They lose not because of "omg, I lost and I dunno what to do", but because the loss usually means that the enemy gets to progress even further, so the gap between your powers widens. And if you already lost once to your enemy - there's now an even higher chance of losing again.

Different people have different mental thresholds for this stuff, but I've seen countless people leave the game even on their first loss.

Well i have seen players leave games for such reasons too. But AOC is filled with risks and rewards. You can lose the materials you gathered by someone killing you or destroying your caravan. Can lose a fight for a Boss. Can get exp debt when you die. Your node can become Vasal node to other that develops faster - meaning your progression is capped and you "Lost" the Node progression competition.
Even if your node gets to metropolis, it can be destroyed and you lose a lot by this.

What i want to say it is that players with the mentality to leave when they lose something wont play AOC at all.

And also those who stay, would most likely love the competitive nature of the game.

Ludullu wrote: »

Saabynator wrote: »

Sound like a lot of you alpha testers are wanting this to move along way quicker than it is. To me, it looks like an unrealistic look at what speed a game of this size is developing at. Step away, take a break for some months and come back. Your annoyance and bitterness will only grow from here.

Nope, I want it to go slower, but directed at the proper parts of the game. Instead they're working on shit like FTUI and gear balancing.

I sure hope they somehow magically developed a ton of stuff behind the scenes and there's simply 1-2 systems that are holding it all back (i.e. dynamic gridding), but for now I'm real doubtful about that being the case.

Also, I've already stepped back from the game. I had big plans for it for July, but none of those worked out because game's performance became even worse on my ancient PC and now, with yet another PTR delay, my motivation to be deeply involved became even weaker. I'll still help test big things, but I won't really have the time for much else.

None of that will stop me from voicing my opninions on the game's design direction here, on reddit or discord, because I can give that feedback even w/o directly experiencing it. Well, at least for the non-combat kinda stuff.

Ofcource you should keep expressing yourself

There team is quite big now. Stuff like gear balance have to get done eventually, and there is a team for developing that kind of stuff. I think there is going to be a decent bump in alpha 3, featurewise I mean.

Im a huge believer in the game. But I also buy into more than just a game. A indie dev, who makes a whole company from the ground up, with the exact mindset that I have on MMOs. Im sold on that idea. I have played a ton of MMOs since they came out. All the way from beta testing UO. It was so cool and creative back in the day, but like everything making money, shareholders take over. Money becomes the prime and all devouring factor. This is a chance to turn that stuff on its head. If Intrepid succeed, then they would have changes the genre, in a meaningful way. So I think there is more riding on this project, than just the game itself. We need Stevens in the game genre. In more than just MMOs to be honest, but its a good place to start