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ryujinjakka74 wrote: »

Simple and short...Is this game PvP enabled all the time as in you can get ganked out in the world just minding your own business or inside of a dungeon? We would like to know before we plop down $100 each to join the alpha.

yeah... "This game isn't for everyone...and that's OK"

perpetual development would be a costly error especially if AoC doesn't really offer anything unique within the MMO genre

ryujinjakka74 wrote: »

Simple and short...Is this game PvP enabled all the time as in you can get ganked out in the world just minding your own business or inside of a dungeon? We would like to know before we plop down $100 each to join the alpha.

The way it is set up right now, this rarely happens. If you choose not to fight back, they cant kill you without going red. If they go red, a mark appears on the map and everyone can see that someone is red. If they die red, they drop 3 items. Dropping 3 items can be losing dozens of hours of work and is almost never worth whatever you might be killing people for.

So technically you can be killed in the open world randomly, but practically it never happens outside designated open PVP regions.

Noaani wrote: »

Githal wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

Edit to add; when you factor in that enchanting isn't likely to be 50/50, meaning there will be even more "coin tosses", the numbers start looking even further from what you are saying above.

thats why we increased the number to 450 from 90 in the first place tho?

if it is 50/50 - the result from my first calculation will hold effect where from 90 rolls 1 get 60 other 30

No, there are three different things in play that affect the number of "rolls" that a player will have.

There is the number of slots a player has.

There is the number of items a player will expect to equip in those slots over time (item upgrades outside of enchanting).

There are the number of degrees to which a player wants to enchant their item (enchanting is not binary, there are multiple levels to it).

If you wanted to, you could even add in the notion of horizontal enchatment, which as a notion suggests that Intrepid intend for players to make use of more than one set of gear at a time, to have situational gear.

So, it we assume 18 slots, if we assume 5 item upgrades at level 5 for those 18 slots means a player will enchant 90 items, and if we assume an average of 5 enchant tiers per item, that means we have 450 enchant levels this top end (but somewhat average for a top end) player will want to have a success in.

If you want to work out how many attempted enchants this would take, assume a 25% success rate, even though I expect a higher success chance at lower enchant tiers and a lower success chance at higher tiers.

Then if you want you can add in an undefined number of additional, situational items in to the mix.

Compare that to an expected ten thousand players.

the 5 items in each slot that you want to enchant to lvl 5 are irrelevant. No one cares that the first item you get when you reach max lvl will be enchanted 2 times.

We talking about the item in each of the 18 slots that you will want to enchant to max lvl 5.
So you craft a Bis item, or get lucky drop from boss or whatever. and now you are enchanting this item to lvl 5. After this you get other item that you enchant and ect. Total 90.

So now if you roll 300 times. with a chance to success of each roll 25%. The chance that you will get 90 successful rolls is 2.83%

for 10'000 players its pretty big chance that someone will get all 90 rolls successfully from those 300 rolls.


Abd the opposite calculation: from 300 rolls with 25% chance to success. the chance that you will get no more than 60 successful results is 2.456%. Which with 10k players is still big chance to get.

Noaani wrote: »

Githal wrote: »

For me RNG is never good, because it creates unequal ground for players. From all players that play the game you will have results varying from someone getting multiple successful enchants in a row from the first try. and someone failing for the 50th time for the same item.

This is only true if you are talking about a handful of RNG events.

The more RNG events you have, the more equal it makes players.

As to why an amount of RNG is good, especially in an economic sense, it is because it keeps said economy shifting. If they went with your suggstion, then the market would be fairly stable on a day to day basic. Make it so that there is a good amount of randomness, and the market will shift and move on a day to day and week to week basis, even though over a longer period of time (year to year) the market is kind of stable.

This makes it more viable to play the economic game, especially the long game. It means there will be times when you don't want to buy materials, because they may be too expensive due to someone having bought up many.

This ability to influence the market was key to the economic side of Archeage (the best aspect of that game by a mile), and Ashes wants to go even further in that direction than that game did. In order to do that, a means to keep te market shifting is literally essential, and an amount of RNG to crafting is the only real way to do that.

Ok i see your idea, and it kinda makes sense. BUT...

1. The shifting of the market can be done by multiple ways, its not necessary to be RNG. For example:
There are seasons in AOC. So the idea is that in summer you will be able to get some materials, and in winter those materials will be hard to find, and there will be abundance of other type of materials.

This will shift the market by itself. You can stack summer materials and not sell them, and then when winter comes you can sell them on higher price and ect.

Also - The caravans will play big role in the market shifting. If there is shortage on some materials and then you get multiple caravans from other regions who want to sell their good in your region, since they can earn more gold this way - this will shift the market and make those rare mats cheaper. And the other way around.
You may be having regular caravan deliveries of some material so its not in shortage. But then war breaks out or some muggers or whatever stop the caravans. So now the those materials that were never in shortage are gone.

Node development will unlock or change areas, which may unlock/lock materials in a ZOI.

Building Crafting stations in Nodes can bring more crafters if the neighboring nodes dont have this building. Which will make some materials more needed than they were before

2. "The more RNG events you have, the more equal it makes players." this is only true when you look the Bigger picture. The probability that you will get bad luck on all RNG events is not 0. Multiply this by all players that will play AOC. So you will get some pretty high chance that someone will fail all RNG events multiple times, and other that will get all of those RNG events from first try. Thus - Unequal player experience.

I have played some Korean Games like Lost ARK, and call say for myself that the frustration that you feel when you fail multiple 90% success chances is far greater than the satisfaction you feel when you get some success with 30% chance. And yes i guess i was pretty average with the luck on most my characters i played there. Meaning in the long run even if you fail multiple times, after this you will get few lucky successes to compensate.

But There was 1 of the expansions where they increase the level cap of items with new raids and dungeons, where I was so unlucky with the RNG that i fell behind other players that hard that they didnt even want to take me in groups coz i was low item level because of the RNG.

So want neither someone getting ahead of other players coz of RNG, Nor someone getting behind.

I tried to visualize what I mean.

This is the original image, the UI as is currently.


These are my proposed improvements at a glance.


Here I circled areas of improvement for me to better explain and point out what I mean, or why it is done this way.


I'll refer to the numbers in the circled image.

1: Replace serif font with sans serif. Font weight is also higher. The serif font is difficult to read when scaled this small and starts to break away in my opinion. Sans serif makes smaller numbers (and text) as is here more readable - to me anyway. It is clearer.

2: Nameplates, perhaps personal preference but I feel the name text is too small when compared in size to the big health bar underneath. Additionally, as with the player bar numbers, numbers on the health bar of the target were changed from serif to sans serif and font-weight was increased.


3: Add more general UI Feedback for systems in general. Such as Level ups, numbers going up when interacting, gathering, pvping etc. It shows the player that something happened and is visual feedback to the action they just did. Example here is a level up pop-up for increasing your logging level.

4: As with the level pop-up, add more visual ui feedback for actions, like pvp, exp gain, even for things like killing someone who is purple, or gaining corruption. Few examples of onscreen numbers for EXP etc. Yes, I am aware those partially already exist and can be adjust/changed to preference.

5: It's a general thing, but I would favour getting rid of using small caps anywhere, because when text gets smaller it makes it a lot harder to read. Small sub text of quests was changed from serif to sans serif for hierarchy and readability purposes. Adds context of title=serif and sub=sansserif

6: Much as quest text, replacing small caps text for better readability (example).


Iconography: I noticed in areas such as the quest log etc iconography is sometimes square, when other things like player class icon container next to health bars or party icons etc are kept to circles. I would streamline it (which is why icon on the level up popup is also circled, not squared)

Overall Readability: Please remove small caps