Best Of
Re: Contest for Parent Node
Promises, and just basic code options.
There's no reason to have static spawns in Ashes when it's just too easy to do it the other way.
FF does it (but only a little), Elite does it (a lot), etc. When Steven talks about the dynamic world, about seasons and statuses and story arcs all affecting spawners, this is what is being referred to, I guarantee it.
As for the thing you are 'forgetting', it's part of the 'benefits' for winning the Node War, it's at the start of the Node War Video if you wanna recheck it.
There's no reason to have static spawns in Ashes when it's just too easy to do it the other way.
FF does it (but only a little), Elite does it (a lot), etc. When Steven talks about the dynamic world, about seasons and statuses and story arcs all affecting spawners, this is what is being referred to, I guarantee it.
As for the thing you are 'forgetting', it's part of the 'benefits' for winning the Node War, it's at the start of the Node War Video if you wanna recheck it.
Azherae
1
Re: [EU] Nephilim [PVX] [18+] [Semi Hardcore] [Competitive] [Close Knit Community]
I have recently joined and enjoying the group dynamic and conversations a lot. There is much fun and action to be had. But don't take my word for it, come and find out for yourself.
Malismo
1
Re: [EU] Nephilim [PVX] [18+] [Semi Hardcore] [Competitive] [Close Knit Community]
Recently joined exactly what i was looking for a very clear understanding of what their goals are and how they want to achieve them . made to feel right at home, am really looking forward to hopefully becoming a full member and working along side everyone.
Xzanobia
1
Re: Loot System Changes
All these proposed "solutions" because some people refuse to take initiative, join a guild, and leave said guild if it doesn't fit their standards.
I can see why you can't find guilds, you're extremely difficult to work with.
What about not wanting easily abused loot systems makes a person hard to work with exactly?
So far no one has had an answer as to why the ‘better’ system is one that has easy and wide reaching abuse potential that ultimately will discourage players from wanting to contest open world PvP bosses, as opposed to a system where the game determines loot allocation, where any ‘abuse’ would be minuscule in scale of affect, and ensures meaningful contributors haven’t wasted their time, effort, and gear degradation they sustained to take on difficult, highly competitive content.
That is not ‘literally every lvl1 who looked at it gets loot’ for those who are still under the warped impression that the choices are either ‘99% of players get shitall’ (because we include the raids that competed and lost) and ‘I get gold just by standing around’.
You have to motivate players to do content and the easiest, fairest way is the have the reward structure handled entirely by the game.
Anything more should not be possible to mandate, and should be something the guild comes together organically to do after the fact. Do need-greed in your group chat, bid in discord, let them swap between each other based on their needs. And for the love of everything good, give us what was promised from world bosses years ago and have the Gathering system integrated into harvesting boss materials.
If the crafting and PvX systems aren’t interconnected anymore, then that’s a big chunk of my personal appeal to Ashes gone.
An "abusive" loot system is part of the game. The relationship between guild members both internal and external is the game. For heroes to exist there must be villains.
You are difficult to work with because you refuse to accept the design of the game and insist that those social hooks are thrown away because you need to feel rewarded.
Players need to be rewarded, that’s the point. You need to have something that makes people want to do the content at risk of gear degradation, exp debt due to death in PvX, time spent, etc, and if you don’t have that carrot at the end of the stick, you’re going to end up with a game that’s lacking a population willing to do that content.
If the goal is 10k players per server, a very hefty goal for a ‘niche’ game, there has to be something keeping players invested in risking their time and resources for what will amount to most often, no reward.
If ‘abuse’ was intended, which I definitely think is a bunch of nonsense, then why aren’t combat meters permitted on the basis of players being abusive with the information?
The reward is helping your friends, your guild, and/or your node. It's a we not a me game. The social bond formed (or broken) through risk is the carrot that motivates players.
This isn't a niche game, it'll have well over a million people playing come launch and if the performance and content is there, the sky is the limit. AoC is the first 3rd person EVE with a large enough budget to actually make that game a reality.
Combat meters are not intended as they disproportionately warp class design and decision into a game of numbers. This ultimately shifts the game into a raid or die model, eliminating what AoC wants to be.
Combat meters do nothing but provide information, which is key if we’re actually going to get ‘only 1% can complete this’ PvE encounters like it was claimed.
Rewards can’t just be ‘feel good vibes’. That does not translate into progress for 90%+ of the entire population engaging in what is supposed to be very highly contested PvX.
I want Ashes to do well, which means it needs a healthy population engaged with content, which means that content needs to be rewarding.
You won’t have those ‘millions of players’ for years past launch if the consistent experience is them getting nothing from successful raids. Why would players stick with it? People play EVE and make actual money off it, it’s also a very stark example of P2W. Ashes isn’t going be like that.
"Vibes" can and do translate for players. Look at any pvp mmo and that's clearly evident. Good examples of this are EVE, Albion, or Darkfall. The gear score = everything mentality is not what this game hopes to achieve.
That doesn't mean there isn't solo content, but for group content the reward is for your group not the individual. People will stick with it because they want to see their group progress.
Once again, we’re not talking about handing out gear to everyone. We’re talking about rewarding people for their time via material drops and other crafting integrated items.
You’re pulling ‘gear scores’ out of nowhere when all that is being asked for is something that ensures actively taking part in content and fighting over it and winning actually has rewards that match all the effort put into it.
You can’t claim abusive loot systems are good for the game, then turn around and also claim players having information of their own fights is bad for the game.
I personally am in favor of high player agency and minimizing the abuse potential of game systems that don’t have a clear mechanical system to retaliate against the offending player(s).
If a guild contests my castle, I can declare a guild war on top of beating them during the siege. If a castle over taxes a node, citizens can attack the tax caravan. There are systems that are meant to cause social conflict, and those that are not.
No one could honestly say that scummy Lootmaster behavior is an intended method of casual conflict, because there is no way for the other party to ‘fight back’. Any system that has you fighting for a scrap of reward within your own allied group is a system that’s not going to last.
Material drops translate into what exactly? Unless you mean entirely cosmetic rewards, everything you have suggested at the end of the day equates to stat increases which essentially is gear.
We disagree on what constitutes an "abusive" (your word) loot system. Meters convey very specific information, giving players optimal ways to tackle scripted encounters. This is bad for the game as it makes players look at the game purely through scripted encounters. The "toxic" behavior here isn't the players linking meters pretending they are the bestest player ever, its the fact that encounters, class design, and the game world itself are now designed around players having easy access to this information.
You very much have a retaliation against other players; don't play with them. The person who takes all the loot will find themselves without people to help accomplish their goals. You aren't fighting for scraps, you are communally helping your group get better. Again this individualistic mindset isn't the intention for AoCs large group content.
KingDDD
2
Re: Boneworking
well if my family ever get a freehold then it will certainly be describable as "Ghastly"
.
while i am confident this won't be possible - i would love to have my loyal Subjects already greet my possible Guests before they even arrive at my farmstead.
Aszkalon
1
Re: General armour stat idea
I'd rather see some variation in the elemental resistence of amor types to provide some counter-play to mages and elemental damage types. Magest will have all three elements ofcurse so they will always have available means to evade these resistences but they need to be a bit more inteligent then just spamming their spells maybe selecting who to launch what at based on the armor they are wearing.
Cloth reduces frost debuffs
Leather reduces fire debuffs
Metal reduces lighting debuffs (because farady cage)
This breaks us a littlebit out of the heavy metal armor always being 'best' because of its obviously higher physical damage protection. Note these are just minimum default resistences, all the normal ability to buff, modify and enhance gear can be layered on top, but it will be enough that simple observation of armor would give a strong indicator of the highest elemental resistence the character has.
Cloth reduces frost debuffs
Leather reduces fire debuffs
Metal reduces lighting debuffs (because farady cage)
This breaks us a littlebit out of the heavy metal armor always being 'best' because of its obviously higher physical damage protection. Note these are just minimum default resistences, all the normal ability to buff, modify and enhance gear can be layered on top, but it will be enough that simple observation of armor would give a strong indicator of the highest elemental resistence the character has.
Lodrig
1
Re: Where is the progress
What attack of character?I think it's telling that you're asking to see polished quests and polished biomes - when clearly, the main reason for all the delays you're complaining is Intrepid investing too much into polish of individual aspects in order not to upset people like you.
Like, what you want more of is literally the reason why the game isn't closer to completion.
If anything I want them to focus more on general structures that we can't see. Get the mechanics solid enough to be genuinely fully thought-out and flexible.
To be clear, I don't think it's terrible that they've focused on completing individual designs/encounters/areas, or even that you're asking to see more of it. It's a useful step for practical testing to see if the modules really come together the way it's imagined, before committing to generalisation/mass-production based on potentially flawed blueprints.
But once that's confirmed, I want them to get the modular components so right that they can start implementing versatile, story-arc-adjustable quests/encounters/contested areas/node development features all over the map, and just have them work. And that requires a focus on more abstraction and perfection of the behind-the-scenes components, not a convincing, presentable delivery of individual playable segments.
its crazy that everyone seems to find a need to attack someone's character instead of just giving your opinions, however i do appreciate the time you took to reply, obviously the delays are frustrating but i have not once complained about a delay in this post, i think you have some good points, however i think at this stage 8 years in a little polish is not alot to ask, if you did take the time to read what i wrote, i am not saying i need to see an entire polished node or game, but i would like to see hints of polish being added, especially to the starting area's just to confirm that its not going to be scrapped again
i agree with you that there are more important aspects than polish but as of the time of writing, we have not really seen any of them either, so i mean if we are not going to see nodes past level 3, ( keep in mind there are 85 nodes and we have yet to see one past level 3 ), we have not seen naval content, secondaries, monster coins, systems like bounty hunting, we have seen 6/64 classes, we have not seen biomes, or races in any sort of finished state, its a long list, and seeing a dragon that is the exact same as 3 years ago with almost nothing new is not adding polish to please people like me, and i can almost guarantee that world boss that was copy and pasted from A1 contributed next to nothing to the recent delays.
And don't you think your hyperbole in "we have not seen any of the other important aspects than polish (implemented after 8 years of development)" is a bit ridiculous? You haven't seen any successful implementation of good systems in Ashes? Node Sieges? Node Wars? Events? Commissions?
"6/64" is bad math. If you're measuring in development time, each of those six is one half of 8 total classes, so we've effectively seen the successful equivalent of the time required to design 6*8/2=24 classes. Designing augments will be a hurdle, but each individual secondary archetype isn't going to take up as much time as each class.
Edit: arguably, the current archetypes aren't finished either, not even fishished without augments, so 24/64 wouldn't be good math either; but the point is 6/64 is disgenuine.
@world boss was copied from A1:
1) They didn't just show the world boss, they showed a dungeon and the world boss. And yes, the dungeon wasn't world-changing, but it's yet another thing that got made progress on.
2) You're not being serious about that copying thing. The encounter is very different. Not necessarily better, but it's essentially proof that they're working on introducing variety to fill the world.
3) The streams don't exist to assuage your worries about the progress, they exist to show what was recently done that can be shown off. They were crunching for Alpha 2, which you got a huge update on 15 days before the world boss stream.
In my opinion, the best thing you can do at this stage, since Intrepid has a lot planned for the next year, is to relax a bit and see what the first 3-6 months of Alpha 2 bring. If you still feel like nothing's new after that, yeah, it's probably time to ask for deliverables. But for now, I don't think you have a thorough enough grasp on how much development has moved forward in order to criticise it so harshly. Nor would Intrepid be able to show all of it. Nor should; it's in too volatile of a state of development to show it off now, and then get criticised even more harshly, if it all turns out to be flawed and due for reworks later on. By only showing the things that are actually presentable, they're keeping expectations realistic.
Steven's optimistic schedules aren't in line with that ideal, but I'd argue that's probably because they're closer to internal guidelines, not deadlines. I think they're optimistic because it helps the parts that are moving faster than others to have their next step already mapped out for them, even if another part of the studio needs to go back and flesh out something else that took longer than expected.
I honestly think that's why we've seen so many productive assets pumped out so consistently, in spite of the setbacks in other parts of the world design. I think other studios might make the mistake of waiting too long for everything to move at the same pace, and then in the end wind up behind on the parts that could have moved faster. In fact, I'm pretty sure that's part of why Camelot Unchained stopped making any developments and died, once problems with the engine materialised.
Re: Quantity of Abilities
I'm a 'less is more' kind of bloke. I don't particularly care for the bloated hotbars, where you have like 2-3 at the bottom, 2 more on the side, 2 more on the other side, as you fill up your screen with crap. You end up spending more time looking at the UI, rather then what is on screen.
I like more limited skill bars like that of Guild Wars, rather then that of GW2 or ESO. Where the former allows you to customize your skill set however you set fit, rather then the latter making half your choices for you, so you end up only choosing 3-4 of your skills, which sucks and tends to make combat become bland and samey after awhile.
While I do like the idea of having 'weapon skills', where you can swap between two sets of weapons for more total skills, I'm less fond of having them all be fixed and unchanging. I'd rather the weapons have their own skill bar, which you can customize using any of the skills from that weapons skill tree. So while two people using the same weapon might fight similarly, they need not fight the same. Throw in arguments, and then you have some serious customization.
As to actual numbers. I'd say about 3-5 weapon skills, for two sets of weapons. (ie main hand + offhand, or a two hander) Then about 5-8 class skills, any of which can be replaced by universal skills. Plus one ultimate.
In addition to dodge roll, sprint, block, basic weapon attack (thou this could just be a weapon skill).
In total we are looking at around 15-22 skills. Which should be ample for just about anybody to make an interesting build around, without everyone having a solution to every problem.
Of course with any limited skills system like this, you'd want to be able to save and load pre made builds.
Build crafting is really half the fun.
I like more limited skill bars like that of Guild Wars, rather then that of GW2 or ESO. Where the former allows you to customize your skill set however you set fit, rather then the latter making half your choices for you, so you end up only choosing 3-4 of your skills, which sucks and tends to make combat become bland and samey after awhile.
While I do like the idea of having 'weapon skills', where you can swap between two sets of weapons for more total skills, I'm less fond of having them all be fixed and unchanging. I'd rather the weapons have their own skill bar, which you can customize using any of the skills from that weapons skill tree. So while two people using the same weapon might fight similarly, they need not fight the same. Throw in arguments, and then you have some serious customization.
As to actual numbers. I'd say about 3-5 weapon skills, for two sets of weapons. (ie main hand + offhand, or a two hander) Then about 5-8 class skills, any of which can be replaced by universal skills. Plus one ultimate.
In addition to dodge roll, sprint, block, basic weapon attack (thou this could just be a weapon skill).
In total we are looking at around 15-22 skills. Which should be ample for just about anybody to make an interesting build around, without everyone having a solution to every problem.
Of course with any limited skills system like this, you'd want to be able to save and load pre made builds.
Build crafting is really half the fun.
Yoh
1
Re: What happens if I do this? explooooit? 😎
I imagine there's gonna be a lot of shenanigans with these mechanics. I'm defiantly gonna try cramming caravans into whatever I can find to see if I can make them glitch out and go flying. I did it with a boat in Alpha 1 and was having a blast.
Apok
2