Best Of

A few quick points.

The game has change dramatically around player feed back and there are constant example of this if you have been testing from the start. So the whole Steven is gonna do whatever he wants is clearly an invalid argument based on the history of the games development. Combat change, dwarf change, TTK rework, enchant rework, gathering rework, and on and on, and these changes have occurred based on community feedback. Part of the reason the timeline f

2nd there are core pillars that Steven and the team build around. The statement that "this game is not for everyone" is a reference to these core pillars. Steven has said repeatedly they will not deviate from the core pillars of the game. So when someone requests an environment for an open gunk fest for example, Steven is quick to say that is not going to happen and if that's what you want, Ashes is not for you. This is beneficial to both the player, who now knows to not waste their money, and to the development team who has a clear vision for mechanics.

Appealing to everyone appeases no one.

And to that, I am reminded of the other part of Narrative Design Hell, player characters don't truly fail until the player quits (unless you are playing a Hardcore game/server/ruleset.

This means that 'dangerous cool areas' that are 'nearly never explored' in lore can't exist 'in reality'. Elite can do this because Elite has a Galactic-tier exploration requirement, but for most other forms of interaction, our 'immortal locust' status does not help.

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/powerplay-2-balance-murder-rewards-far-too-low-committing-crimes-task.629066/

I'm not here to argue about the above or that players should or shouldn't murder NPCs for personal/factional gain, my only point there is that you can't actually stop this no matter how many times you kill the player. Previously I've talked about that from the perspective of competition but it's not even required, for it to be an issue.

A single player game's protagonist failing something normally can just be reloaded from save/reset until they win or if the game allows for a true fail condition, they choose to accept the failure for whatever reason and move on. Randomness can help (i.e. the thing spawns once, if you reload there's no guarantee it will again) but people are... determined.

All that is great for the player but not for the narrative designer because if they lock the state too early, then in the case of most biome related gameplay, the first group to bullrush the content enforces their narratives and the followers/less invested have almost no impact.

tl;dr if a situation like this happens in Elite and 'the murderers get there first' and 'get ahead' in the 'murder vs protection' score, then there can be a problem where 'nothing changes that from there'.

EDIT: And another encapsulation of why it's harder to believe things will work in Ashes as described...
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/trailblazers-update-3-4.638963/
(it's 'short' and doesn't require a massive amount of game familiarity to understand the core problems, though the deeper game design issues might be less visible)

A 'problem' that seems to have a simple answer yet we never get that one implemented either (rather than decay, simply raise undermining multipliers, it's not perfect, but 'never let the perfect be the enemy of the good', etc)

This is an area I'm am conflicted with. I don't think Steven is making the game he wants. The world is so large, to make it feel alive you will need 8-10k players per server. This is needed to find content and meaningful PvX everywhere. For that you will need many casuals. Without them the world will feel empty.

As it stands the moves are driving away casuels. That's breaks the need for a large world being designed. With smaller populations the world needs to be smaller to make the world alive and functioning for a live PvX game.

So punishing game needs a smaller world

More casuel friendly can support a large world

You can't have both. I don't care what Steven picks. He just needs to decide what game he wants and take everything in that direction.

This is the fact for every area of the game. Crafting, questing, gear and much more. Does all of it fit the goal of driving away casuels? Is every system designed to keep a large population playing?

In a recent thread, Margret asked how we think Ash’s can help bridge the gap between casual and hardcore players and I felt that question was worth dedicating a post to.

After some thought; I honestly think the answer, or at least a large part of the answer, is pretty straightforward:

Reevaluating what is fun risk and difficulty and what is not.

Ash’s will never be a casual game, but at least it can be a casual friendly one.

What does this mean? AoC has long & grindy leveling, a hard very in-depth crafting system, heavy emphasis on economy gameplay, heavy emphasis on group gameplay, and potentially always on PVP.

These are all considered hardcore by todays standards and are also all core pillars of AoC’s game play. What do I mean by that? AoC would not PLAY the same without these features. I do think some steps can be taken to make each one of these more appealing to casuals, but you need all of these for the game to PLAY the same. None of these are inherently unfun, as long as steps are taken to make them engaging and rewarding. In other words, you can make them fun for a casual player.

You know what’s not fun for a casual player? Overly punishing death mechanics? Why is that you may ask? Great question!

A video game is only able to truly punish you in two ways: Monetarily or Wasting your TIME!
1) Monetarily. Games like candy crush will charge you extra for more attempts, for example.

2) Wasting your TIME: this method is much more common, and can be disguised in many different ways.
You die and lose materials? Cool you have to spend more TIME getting more.
You die and gain XP debt? Cool you have to to spend more TIME to work it off.
You die and gain a stat dampening effect? Sweet so it takes more TIME to kill mobs and level
You die and have an extremely long travel time? Rad that means it’ll take more TIME to get back to the fun part of the game.

See what I did there? AoC can pretend it has 4 different death penalties, but in reality it has 1 penalty x 4.

This is pure and simple fundamentally not fun. Now I’ve brought this up before in global chat and it’s been met with the: “Who cares cry more carebear this game isn’t for people who care about that. A game can’t be fun unless it’s bending me over it’s knee and slapping my booty.”

Unfortunately, this kind of gamer is objectively in the minority. There’s decades of data on player counts and player behavior to support this, and anyone who disagrees is either misinformed or purposely ignorant.

That leaves us with AoC. A game defined by its more hardcore nature. This means AoC is a game that will have a more uphill battle retaining players simply by being the game it wants to be. AoC cannot change that without becoming a different game.

However, what it can change are these outdated time wasting mechanics.

If you lessen death penalties nothing is affected:

AoC will still have:
Long meaningful leveling experience
A deep and engaging crafting system
A heavy economy focus
A heavy group gameplay emphasis
And always on PVP

With when you remove intentional time wasters, All of these core pillars remain intact. The game play loops are unaffected and they actually become more enjoyable to engage with.

Last night I spent 2 hours trying to kill a boss in Black Myth Wukong, and when I finally did it I felt EUPHORIC. I can absolutely promise you that had that same boss given me status debuff I had to work off between each attempt, I would have given up, returned the game, and never touched it again.

Games should feel good to play as often as you can get away with. Going out of your comfort zone to try an encounter you might not be ready for should not be met with 4 versions or the same punishment; it should be met with a walk back and the feeling that this time will be the time I triumph.

I hope anyone who read this enjoyed it or at least found it insightful, especially Margret and the team If they are still takin feedback on this subject.

This also impacts PvE as well. How do you scale PvE content so it's changing when will have more then a 80% gear power increase? The example in my OP is just the jump from common to legendary. What will red con gear jump to?

Yep, been saying this for years. Gear scaling gotta be tight as hell. Otherwise pvp will be utter trash.

The level of set bonus is out of wack here. For instance on one set, at common level you get 20 sta but at legandary you get 100 sta. That's an 80% increase. Set bonus needs a genital curve. I don't play PvP games where gear gives more then 30% power curve. You no long have a skill based game.

Lowest end gear at top level to top end gear should be scaled that a low end geared character has a fighting chance. If this game keeps things where killing players is a one hit your dead, you will drive away the real PvPers and you will foster the PKers that are in games just to get on people's nerves.

If this continues we will lose more people. If it stays this way, there is only one option to keep people playing in mass. Gear needs to be common and easy to get but that would kill the crafting community.

Either way, this is a very bad move.

I've seen a lot of people mention "games wasting their time" as one of the main complaints against certain systems in Ashes. I do disagree with quite a few applications of that phrase to quite a few mechanics in the game, but I do think that one particular mechanic is the perfect example of where the game IS wasting your time, while imo it definitely shouldn't.

That mechanic is "quest mobs that do not have an instant respawn". How often were any of you trying to do a quest, came to the location indicated in the quest log, tried looking for the mob that was supposed to drop the quest item, saw no such mob around the location, waited for a few minutes and then just left frustrated? Cause I know I've done that several times, quite often thinking "could this be just bugged?" Some quest descriptions just telling you to get the item, w/o mentioning that the item needs to drop from a mob with a respawn, also did not help the situation at all.

So what I'm suggesting is a system that would give you a timer on the quest mob's respawn. This would only apply to quest mobs that don't have any other loot. It couuuuld apply to general mobs that also drop quest items, but imo in that case it should just be a "this mob spawns here" indicator rather than a full-on timer. Mostly because those mobs should respawn frequently enough for the player to see them as soon as they arrive to the location (even if it's being farmed by other players).

You could call this ability "Essence Flow Sense", tie it to the introductory questline and have it as a utility ability on every player. Alternatively this could just be a passive or, hell, even just a function of the questing system itself. Put the timer right in the quest description, so that the player could plan their gameplay accordingly.

Imo this would have 0 negative effect on the gameplay flow and, if anything, would make that flow much better, because now people would know when they should come back to a spawn location or whether the mob is just about to spawn and they can wait a bit for it.

This would still keep the competition for any quest mobs available, if that's what Intrepid wants (though I doubt that the casual questers would want that), while still making player experience much smoother.

P.S. this thread was also inspired by Chrono Odyssey, because they have an ability that helps you explore your surroundings way easier and helps you clear quests better (the first Chronometer ability).

@REHOC I do agree it would be used in pvp, but thats actually a good thing in my head. To balance it you could add 0.3 - 0.5 seconds to the channel time (depending on how long it takes to go from summon mount
---> mounting in the finished state of the game) and make it so you have to hold shift to insta-mount.

This makes it a lot harder to abuse.