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Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest news on Alpha Two.
Check out general Announcements here to see the latest news on Ashes of Creation & Intrepid Studios.
To get the quickest updates regarding Alpha Two, connect your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Best Of
Re: Player enemy visual Health Bar update on hit.
limitted health info about pvp oponents is a good thing. It dose 2 main things.
First it raises the risks of random ganking out in the open world, because the initial attack against an oponent provides less information to the attacker. Normally an attacker immediatly gains lots of information and has an information asemetry advantage in a fully visible HP game they can generally immediatly know if they will win the fight based on that first hit, the attacker can then press home or abort the attack before the oponent gains any usefull information. Intrepid is clearly aware of this which is why they penalize corruption with more information given to thouse attacking corrupted.
Second it raises player skill and game mechanic knowlege and attention needed in any PvP sitiation to fill in the knowlege gap. Paying attention to attacks that have landed, their type and power in combination with the chunk level on the bar should let a good player know what the situation really is. Knowlege that most games simply give out to everyone without needing to expend any attention or thought.
This is fine, but the moment a player fights back, their info is presented
Diamaht
1
Re: Player enemy visual Health Bar update on hit.
This situation would not exist and not be part of the discussion if a non-combatant cannot be attacked but only combatant ones. This kind of pk-ing would then be no issue, because both combatants want to play pvp. In this case systems like corruption are not needed, because both want to pvp by intention, by choice.The only reason you would want to see is if you are trying to wait for them to be low to kill them or feed them to mobs.
But unfortunately that will not change, so workarounds are needed and they will never solve the root cause, they will only try to limit the damage.
That sounds terrible, point isn't to stop pking from happening. If someone truly wants to pk they will, and not have the ability to find a work around by being a rat.
The only root cause that needs to be fixed his making it so you can't see a greens heath bar. Meaning if you are attacking them you are committing to kill them, or atleast taking a huge risk.
It's the only root cause you can think of right now. That's because we haven't been able play around with it. A dozen new root causes will sprung up before we are even out of alpha and those will need to be fixed under the same logic, and then a dozen more during beta. Still more after launch.
And all of them will be just this "one last thing that needs changing".
These systems are not new they have existed in games before L2, BDO most noticeably that have karma systems. There is tons of data on those games already for player interaction and issues to get around corruption. The most easy way is to get mobs to kill a player, this is akin to asking why roads would be bad with 0 street lights or stop signs.
Mag7spy
1
Re: Ashes of Creation must dodge this bullet
It is still relevant. They might add new high level mobs, POIs, dungeons, quests, story arcs, NPCs, etc, Plenty of stuff. If, let's say ~50% of player base is max level and others are in 1-49 range, it's pretty obvious what's gonna be a priority.
And they will add content of that sort. But modifying the leveling speed will not have any significant change at this point, unless it is so drastic that it will make reaching max level almost unattainable for more casual players who might play around 10-12 hours a week.
If average max level player is waiting for new patch because he is about to get bored (and there are so many other games that he hasn't played yet) and then new patch brings no new content for him, how do you guess, what happens next?
This is why I said: The game loop Intrepid designs ensures that players just don't get bored within a few weeks after reaching max level.
It doesn't matter. Take any other game - people's behavior is not the same. Any game that has vertical progression will have people rushing to max level. Whether you like it or not, that's the human nature and objective reality.
I tell you what I like: I like that Steven has clearly said that if people do not like the core principles with which the game is designed, which includes a lot of horizontal progression and game play loops, then Ashes is not for them.
I get them some people love to destroy the intent of a game design and let someone else pilot them to max level, but Intrepid and Steven show no interest to suck up to players like this who are just after "big number", the game goes beyond way vertical progression and if someone get board because the vertical progression stops... they should have been well advised to read what they bought into.
Everything or almost everything - doesn't matter, I assume you understood perfectly what I meant. Speaking of acquiring gold, why would it be harder though? It's an assumption, not a fact. Additionally, if you have any friends or just kindly ask for help in chat - getting the gear on earliy levels wouldn't be a problem at all.
Sorry I don't quite follow here. You think that people will just hand out gear to newbies for asking nicely, even though that gear will be a necessary component for higher level gear?
Why would it be harder: The more players can wear gear of a certain level, the more demand is there for everything in the production line below that, so the prices rise for those goods in higher demand, but that doesn't make gold acquisition any easier. Hence more vertical progress creates more demand for economic activity along the entire production chain - and if that demand is not satisfied, prices for goods in that chain will keep rising. Basic economics.
This is not really relevant to level progression. The world is massive and you can find a way to grind anywhere you want. PvP is avoidable in such cases and unlike Alpha 2, I wouldn't expect players randomly PKing strangers.
And this is what I meant with "base assumptions". You think you can just comfortably hide away from PvP and powergrind to max level. You assume that reaching max level is highly relevant. I would argue: Both of these assumption are false.
That's typical planning fallacy. With so many variables, a smooth start would literally be a miracle.
And a bumpy start is so relevant that leveling has to be slower?
The ordinary gear definitely will. But the artisan gear though? If no, that's an issue. If yes, then it contadicts this part of wiki: Artisan progression does not directly relate to progression in a character's adventuring class
Not even then. Because Artisan progress is not dependent on the artisan gear. The wiki clearly states what artisan gear does: "Artisan gear boosts artisans in their gathering, processing, or crafting professions while they are wearing the gear." Meaning it is entirely optional to improving your proficiency / artisan skill level.
It also doesn't say anything about EVERY artisan class being ENTIRELY independent from adventurer level. No level 1 player will be able to go increase their gathering skill level by going to the highest level open world dungeons where the highest quality materials have to be gathered.
Kilion wrote:So just so I understand your concern correctly: You worry that Intrepids current rate of experience accumulation is set in a way that the content they have been building so far can be skipped to a big degree?
Correct
Oh. Boy.
Any number I would write would be an assumption that is based on my subjective perception. Which is not quite useful.
How convenient.
Obviously, the best outcome is if game encourages player to visit all of those regions and that encouragement (not forcing) is strong enough, so that player actually does that.
I don't think that is obvious at all, in fact that sounds to me like a game that makes it a pain in the neck to create and level an Alt.
Resources - yes. Not sure about "equipment" though. Got a source?
Yeah, the Wiki. Specific and necessary crafting materials for higher tier items can only be obtained through the deconstruction of lower-tier items. This is designed to keep lower tier crafted gear relevant through progression and across expansions.
It depends on the game. If that's a monotonous grind, I wouldn't expect many players to enjoy it. If Intrepid delivers everything they promised - then I don't care if reaching level 50 would take 5000 hours as I will enjoy it on any level, be it level 12 or 27. Once again, it's not my assumption, I've seen that happening in Lineage. People played for years without even reaching the level cap. Why? Because they had fun despite the fact that Lineage 2 was extremely grindy.
If the things that make it enjoyable to reach max level are still relevant at max, why increase the time to reach max level in the first place?
Kilion
1
Re: Player enemy visual Health Bar update on hit.
limitted health info about pvp oponents is a good thing. It dose 2 main things.
First it raises the risks of random ganking out in the open world, because the initial attack against an oponent provides less information to the attacker. Normally an attacker immediatly gains lots of information and has an information asemetry advantage in a fully visible HP game they can generally immediatly know if they will win the fight based on that first hit, the attacker can then press home or abort the attack before the oponent gains any usefull information. Intrepid is clearly aware of this which is why they penalize corruption with more information given to thouse attacking corrupted.
Second it raises player skill and game mechanic knowlege and attention needed in any PvP sitiation to fill in the knowlege gap. Paying attention to attacks that have landed, their type and power in combination with the chunk level on the bar should let a good player know what the situation really is. Knowlege that most games simply give out to everyone without needing to expend any attention or thought.
First it raises the risks of random ganking out in the open world, because the initial attack against an oponent provides less information to the attacker. Normally an attacker immediatly gains lots of information and has an information asemetry advantage in a fully visible HP game they can generally immediatly know if they will win the fight based on that first hit, the attacker can then press home or abort the attack before the oponent gains any usefull information. Intrepid is clearly aware of this which is why they penalize corruption with more information given to thouse attacking corrupted.
Second it raises player skill and game mechanic knowlege and attention needed in any PvP sitiation to fill in the knowlege gap. Paying attention to attacks that have landed, their type and power in combination with the chunk level on the bar should let a good player know what the situation really is. Knowlege that most games simply give out to everyone without needing to expend any attention or thought.
Lodrig
1
Re: Ashes of Creation must dodge this bullet
Sorry, I'll stop using words that contain more than 4 letters.All your wordy nonsense doesn't change that your base premise is bs. Even your wordy bloat looks like you pulled it out of thin air.I'm aware of that, thank you. You'd be surprised to notice (if only you paid attention to what I actually wrote) that I was not appealing to this category of players. My point was that, how come we hyperfocus on those who play ~ half an hour a day (even though it's a tiny percentage) and consider this a relevant argument; yet we completely ignore 40+h players who are approximately the same percentage of population. I was not hyperfocusing on hardcore players, I the point was "Why when we talk about two player segments that are approximately equal, one matters and another doesn't?". You'd realize that if you weren't that mad.6hr/day is a bigger weekly time commitment that a full time job. Taking a month and a half of that kind of dedicated playtime focused on leveling over progression in any other gameplay system (artisan, social orgs, player markets) is potentially already too long of a leveling timeline to keep players hooked in.Correct. If you check the first post, I estimate it as ~2 months. Not because I "disagree with Intrepid and know better how long will it take", but because I think that there are non-game-design-related factors that will speed up this process.Nothing about any of this is 'because intrepid say so'. Use some common sense. The average player is putting about 21 hours a week (maybe ~30 on the high end), which is 10+ weeks for most to hit the level cap.Obviously, you're gonna skip this part and ignore my question, but - CAN YOU QUOTE MY WORDS WHERE I SAID THEY ARE COMMON? And maybe stop twisting the points I make? Thank you in advance!The no-lifing 100hours a week players you claim are common (incorrect, regardless)Oh boy, how ridiculously stubborn you are in assumptions that make no sense. Is your brain CPU capable of estimating how much time it takes for non-native English speaker to write all the comments in this thread and then compare this time spent with the potential benefit from getting 6 views?Also: Quit trying to plug your stupid video. Thats such a new-age thing to do and no one likes it. Transcript it if you want anyone to bother engaging with your monologue to the camera.
And transcript - seriously? You ignored points that I made in TL;DW yet you expect people to actually read and comprehend a 14-pages long wall of text? Makes as much sense as your accussation of my "self-promotion".
You can throw insults all you like; you're just showing your own issues. I'm not the one who's making baseless assumptions and building a whole DoA thread based on those incorrect assumptions.
Name a single active game where the design was for more than 225 hours of dedicated exp-focused game time. Not private servers–those are useless to the discussion of an active, healthy MMO–but active ones. This amount of time needed to hit the maximum adventuring level is significantly over any of those that exist, there will be things for people to do while they level and learn their characters, but the best thing for an open world PvX game is for more people to be on level parity than less.
You get more competitive fights and less steamrolling.
We already know you're prone to ganking and griefing in your time in L2, so sure for your preferred play style you'd have more fun when people are kept at low level for longer, but for everyone else, a couple months of dedicated playtime is plenty to understand their class enough that drawing out the leveling process provides no benefit to them.
Caeryl
2
Re: Is there a problem for solo players
Thanks for the link.
I'm not sure what you mean by helping.
The Mentorship Program has specific Quests that Lowbies and Veterans can do together. It's not anything like powerleveling. It's not like haphazardly traveling to a high level Dungeon or a low level Dungeon and farming mobs.
It's more like Veterans helping escort deliveries or participating together in Caravan Defense/Offense.
The XP the Lowbie gains is from completing a Mentor Program Quest; not from killing mobs while Grouped with a Veteran.
The Mentorship Program provides individual Quests that can be initiated by the Mentor based off of what Node that they are part of. So these are like Quests that are determined by either certain buildings and/or organizations or the Mayor; and there are specific ones that are available for Mentors to provide Mentees; and they can also participate in some of those Quest lines as well: Whether that be leading your Mentee through a Dungeon or providing a location for them to arrive with you at, or escort Quests for the NPC Caravans. These types of things, when done together with your Mentor, will provide benefits both for the Mentor and the Mentee as well, so you're incentivized to participate with new players.
---Steven
What I mean by helping is people will need other people to group with early on to do things like dungeons and other activities. Those people will not have access to other people due to thier late arrival. This system doesn't assist in that because of the level disparity which will be present. Which means it's not relevant to the discussion.
Yes, but the problem is this system will be used mostly by people in guilds trying to level people, alts or new players, as fast as possible so they wont teach them anything they will just tell them what to do, ultimately defeating the purpose of the system.
Re: Ashes of Creation must dodge this bullet
What a ridiculous statement, clearly shows your expertise on the matter. Makes as much sense as accusing a Rust player in griefing after he raided someone's base.We already know you're prone to ganking and griefing in your time in L2, so sure for your preferred play style you'd have more fun when people are kept at low level for longer, but for everyone else, a couple months of dedicated playtime is plenty to understand their class enough that drawing out the leveling process provides no benefit to them.
Never insulted you.You can throw insults all you like; you're just showing your own issues.
Wrong again for the 4283952th time. I never said game is DOA, it said that it might have a positive impact on game's longevity. Twisting my words and mental gymnastics is just a sign you got nothing better to say.I'm not the one who's making baseless assumptions and building a whole DoA thread based on those incorrect assumptions.
Not replying to all other stuff you wrote, because it's pointless. I'd rather talk to people who make fair counterpoints.
That fair. It was just a suggestion. If people are not OK with that, alright, so be it.One other point I would make about the solution you present.
Don't make special rule set servers. It has been suggested by folks in the past to make servers with different parameters, especially by the pvp vs no pvp crowd. However, dividing up the community before it even exists is a massive mistake.
How many special rule sets should we have? PVP servers, No pvp servers, RP servers, Regular servers, Seasonal servers, fresh start servers, fast lvl speed servers, medium lvl speed servers, slow level speed servers, hard core servers, no exp debt servers etc.
Let's have one rule set for everyone and go from there. As the years go on, maybe other server types can come up, but even then it's a mistake to divide your player base unless things are not working. Which by the way is usually when companies try new server ideas in an attempt to stop the bleeding.
Mate, I really hope so. I truly want to see that I am wrong on this and don't want to end up in "Told you" situation.I mean... you are guessing when you claim that Ashes must dodge a bullet that the devs have already designed shields for.
Flanker
1
Re: Ashes of Creation must dodge this bullet
Have you played a game with a similar PvP/PK system? If yes, could you share your experience?Ayeveegaming1 wrote: »@Flanker I do believe you make several very good points. This is a pvp game. Yes its pvx but it is pvp at its core. That being said, it should not be called griefing someone to taunt them into battle. I can see if its prolonged and obvious that the person is never going to pvp you, which is subjective in itself. But in a pvp game, you have the option to fight the person taunting you, or you can walk away. If he follows you around and keeps taunting you, takes it to the forums or discord, doxxes you, then its not good for sure. I think straight forward pvp without corruption actually is the best way to go. It's kind of a bandaid over an infected wound. Corruption leads to taunting, leads to griefing because you cannot directly pk without corruption. I will say it again, corruption facilitates taunting and griefing because it is a penalty for pvp in a pvp game.
Flanker
1
Re: Ashes of Creation must dodge this bullet
Why would I be surprised that the majority of L2 players were Casual-Time players?You'd probably be surprised to find out that the majority of L2 players were still casual players, not hardcore PvPers.The average age of L2 player is probably 30+ and at age age we normally have less free time to spend on gaming.
That has nothing to do with this topic as far as I can tell.
Why do you mention that?
20-10 years ago, MMORPGs, like EQ2 and WoW included Hell Levels to arbitrarily prolong Leveling.I'm wondering, how long did it take in WoW to reach the level cap like... 15 years ago?
When I hit a Hell Level in EQ2, I would switch to play WoW until I hit a Hell Level in WoW.
Then I would check to see if they had nerfed the Hell Levels in EQ2 and, if so, I would play EQ2 until I hit another Hell Level there.
Then I would check to see if WoW had nerfed their Hell Levels and, if so, I would play WoW.
I stopped playing WoW in 2011, after completing Cataclysm. Burnt out by the treadmill of playing until Quests run out at max Level Adventurer and then needing to wait 18+ months for new content.
I was completely burnt out from Endgame after playing Neverwinter Online in 2013. Playing NWO is when I first heard "Endgame is the real game" and saw people racing to max Level Adventurer within one month.
I thought I was done with MMORPGs for good after reaching max Level Adventurer with a couple of NWO characters, but then EQNext was announced that weekend.
EQNext's Storybricks seemed like a great solution for putting an end to the Endgame treadmill.
Ashes' Nodes system is basically a watered-down version of Storybricks - which is why I funded the Ashes Kickstarter.
I began playing WoW again with Shadowlands. Leveling felt much better the pace is quite comfortable and there are no Hell Levels. And they added some more stuff to do after reaching max Level Adventurer.
WoW: Dragonflight was tons of fun. Leveling feels awesome and there is plenty of fun stuff to do after reaching max Level Adventurer. Haven't played WoW this year only because there are too many other games I'm having fun playing. Hoping to jump back into WoW this weekend with The War Within. Although, I also want to check out Nightingale: Realms Rebuilt.
Dygz
1
Re: Ashes of Creation must dodge this bullet
One other point I would make about the solution you present.
Don't make special rule set servers. It has been suggested by folks in the past to make servers with different parameters, especially by the pvp vs no pvp crowd. However, dividing up the community before it even exists is a massive mistake.
How many special rule sets should we have? PVP servers, No pvp servers, RP servers, Regular servers, Seasonal servers, fresh start servers, fast lvl speed servers, medium lvl speed servers, slow level speed servers, hard core servers, no exp debt servers etc.
Let's have one rule set for everyone and go from there. As the years go on, maybe other server types can come up, but even then it's a mistake to divide your player base unless things are not working. Which by the way is usually when companies try new server ideas in an attempt to stop the bleeding.
Don't make special rule set servers. It has been suggested by folks in the past to make servers with different parameters, especially by the pvp vs no pvp crowd. However, dividing up the community before it even exists is a massive mistake.
How many special rule sets should we have? PVP servers, No pvp servers, RP servers, Regular servers, Seasonal servers, fresh start servers, fast lvl speed servers, medium lvl speed servers, slow level speed servers, hard core servers, no exp debt servers etc.
Let's have one rule set for everyone and go from there. As the years go on, maybe other server types can come up, but even then it's a mistake to divide your player base unless things are not working. Which by the way is usually when companies try new server ideas in an attempt to stop the bleeding.
Diamaht
2