Best Of
Re: Ashes Terrain Topography and Cohesion
This has all probably got something to do with the fact that filling a game world this size will take them another 8 years of asset development if they are going to create some of the scenery presented in previous posts 😂
I have been an advocate for them reducing the world size for quite a while, when I heard they were increasing the map size i shuddered at the thought.
If they decrease the map size, they will increase player density and will enable the environment team to double their efforts on existing zones to start filling them with unique and inspiring content. If the game is a success there's always expansions that can increase the size of the map.
Bring the environment teams focus onto building a world teeming with life & fantasy rather than trying to fill an absolutely gargantuan world that will likely feel devoid of that artistic flare we so desperately desire for Verra to feel unique, right now it feels like I'm running around an AI generated version of Yorkshire.
I a 100% agree with this. I've been saying the same for a while. I think increasing world size even further was a very bad idea. They already have issues filling the current zones, how on earth will they fill all the rest? Not to mention there is no real "fast" travel or anything. People will be scattered throughout and I doubt the world will feel all that populated.
I also definitely agree that right now the environment looks AI generated, like it has no heart, or soul. Which is a shame because I play MMORPG's to get lost in another world. I cannot get lost in the world of Verra at all right now.
A lot of people started to realize that the world is empty and with empty i mean no richness in the world. There is trees, bushes and flowers randomly placed within the zones, its nothing special you can feel that Verra is all the same, flat land with ALMOST exact same MOBS but with different level.
Yes the devs is aware of this but the only way i can see that working and succeed on release before 2032, and yes i said 2032 because the game is far from ready, the questing, (with questing i dont mean like other boring mmo going from kill A, B talk with C, return to D, and people don't realize how long time that takes.
Add richness into verra, (not ai generated low quality stuff) we talking real polish with heart and sweat.
What is the solution for this?
Keep the map size but on full release make half of the map only, and FOCUS on that, polish it and make it a charm that wants you to live inside that world, AND THEN release the next part of the map as an expedition when its ready.
I know intrepid wants to release the full map and i can see why and i love it, the problem with that is time and it's running out. Why? because phase 3 starts in august 4. and it should be up for "at least a year" i would say 2 years, beta 1 and beta 2 will be shorter, around 3 months each most likely so on paper maybe 2028 Q1. There is no way on earth they have that time to polish the game within that period. I wont see the game for full release until 2032 if they really want to make the game look outstanding and beautiful and we are talking about graphic and gameplay, ui, etc.
Re: Make PvP Viable
maybe i missunderstand what he was saying there, but if the intend is to have such a big detour that no one ever wants to possibly risk getting corrupt i dont think the system even needs to be in the game then. going corrupt is and should be a high risk, but also offer a big reward when used at the appropiate moments.
My point exactly, i havent checked in a while but i was in the livestream and was advocating to make corruption be viable where steven explicity said to me he doesnt want it to be but just a "scare".
This is not a good thing if you create a system that is not viable at all then that system doesnt have any reason to exist in the first place. As Magarat dismissed it with "griefer enjoy griefing people" which was a silly thing to say tbh. I played a lot of ashes and competed/pvp with the current best guilds in the world and i can tell you the absolute majority doesnt want or ever griefed people myself included I want a viable system that has drawbacks when killing someone (risk and reward one of the keypoints to this game) but losing gear to the point where you lose your gear which can take literal days to get 1 pieces (seen in 2.5) its just not doable so you could also just disable the corruption feature and you can not kill anyone anymore when you are about to go corrupt it would have the same effect. Before anyone says "its overtuned on purpose right now" I know thats not the point and the reasoning Steven gave in his livestream was just downright silly, People do indeed care for their gear over killing someone with rather no effect since they can come back in less than 5minutes.
Tldr the system is flawed and should be reworked to make a greater product in the end, which is what I want for the game to be a great game
davenb
2
Re: Quest Target Respawn Indicator
I'm sure many things are place holders but feedback is here if the staff decided they need to look for ways to address it, the way we suggest.
Re: Risk, Reward, Difficulty & FUN: What Intrepid is Missing
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?
More on this as well,driving away cauel players will also break the balance of the world's content ,with open world dungeons, world bosses and events.
If the world stays this big and we drive off casuels. More of that content would consistently let people do this content without PvX happening as often. So this content would consistently be easier as it would be tuned for PvX.
Re: Risk, Reward, Difficulty & FUN: What Intrepid is Missing
Ashes is a game that seems to need two things:
1. The concept that you should retreat when faced with certain situations
2. A direct dampener on the idea that one can throw more bodies at a problem even if they keep dying.
I don't think that either of these things by themselves is enough to justify it, in the first case you could just lose durability, and in the second case you could design the mobs somehow (assuming it was mobs) to somehow take advantage of that repeated death.
The problem comes when the person doing the dying is somehow doing it to reduce the capacity of someone else to achieve a goal or maintain their position, and Ashes is one of the few games where that can happen.
Because Resurrection only costs your Cleric some MP, but if we ever get a difficult openworld enemy, a group that can just keep throwing more bodies at it, especially if they don't need a lot of good gear to damage it, would keep doing that.
And if the mob was designed to power up or similar because of players dying around it, then without a cost, your 'enemies' might suicide into the mob to power it up, and for that they wouldn't even need to be wearing gear.
I prefer other methods too, but I don't think Resurrection Weakness nor 'expanding Resurrection/Respawn timers' suit the game as it's presented right now.
1. The concept that you should retreat when faced with certain situations
2. A direct dampener on the idea that one can throw more bodies at a problem even if they keep dying.
I don't think that either of these things by themselves is enough to justify it, in the first case you could just lose durability, and in the second case you could design the mobs somehow (assuming it was mobs) to somehow take advantage of that repeated death.
The problem comes when the person doing the dying is somehow doing it to reduce the capacity of someone else to achieve a goal or maintain their position, and Ashes is one of the few games where that can happen.
Because Resurrection only costs your Cleric some MP, but if we ever get a difficult openworld enemy, a group that can just keep throwing more bodies at it, especially if they don't need a lot of good gear to damage it, would keep doing that.
And if the mob was designed to power up or similar because of players dying around it, then without a cost, your 'enemies' might suicide into the mob to power it up, and for that they wouldn't even need to be wearing gear.
I prefer other methods too, but I don't think Resurrection Weakness nor 'expanding Resurrection/Respawn timers' suit the game as it's presented right now.
Azherae
1
Re: Risk, Reward, Difficulty & FUN: What Intrepid is Missing
Steven wants "losers to suffer", so I highly doubt the penalties will ever change. If anything, we've literally had a change to make the game HARDER, where pvp event death penalties went from "gear decay" to "lessened pvp death penalties". And this change led to a shitton of extra devwork, just to rebalance the entire game to account for those losses and for the abuse by players. All could've been avoided had Steven not loved to fuck over his players royally.
As for the other points:Not losing mats on death means that economy has to be rebalanced, because the sinks for mats are weaker.You die and lose materials?
You die and gain XP debt?
You die and gain a stat dampening effect?
You die and have an extremely long travel time?
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.
Not gaining xp debt will require rebalancing of xp and loot rewards from hardcore content, because people will be able to just hit that wall over and over again with barely any gear on them and progress faster due to higher rewards. Intrepid is already working on this by making higher lvl mobs hit you harder, while you hit them weaker. And we also have lower loot rates against higher lvl mobs already. And that approach sure makes me think that Steven doesn't want us fighting stronger foes, as opposed to your example of BMW.
If you remove stat dampen on death penalties, people will keep throwing their bodies at both bosses and pvp, which will mean that PvX just ends up being an exercise of "bring even more people than your enemies, so that you can keep their deathwaves at bay". And afaik majority of people dislike zerg being the optimal gameplay method.
Long travel times relate to my stat dampen example and also to a greater localization of players. If you can get anywhere on the map within a short period of time - there'll only be a single meta of leveling, gear progression and node progress on all realms. While Steven wants each realm to be unique, soft friction to be better than "literally entire realm is trying to fight over the same (few) spot(s)" and for the world to feel truly massive. Any amount of really fast travel would make the world feel much smaller. And putting strong restriction on that travel would just have you end up with the New World situation where everyone cried about inability to fast travel as often as they want.
Now, all of that is not to say that I agree with all of those designs or that I consider them good. But as far as I understand Steven's design - those are the rough reasoning behind these features. And changing them WOULD in fact change the core pillars in a fairly big way, especially when you consider all the other things related to them.
I would bet that no longer dropping mats wouldn’t impact the economy that much. People are gathering such massive amounts of mats at once and very few of those players are getting interrupted. I bet for every 100 mats an organized guild gathers, they maybe lose like 2.
This affects the casual player much more significantly.
I don’t understand how no XP debt requires loot rebalance? When I died and got XP debt I just kept doing exactly what I was doing before (most people do) I just had to kill more things and was annoyed.
If you really think XP debt affects the curve so much, just scale up XP required. I’d say don’t bother the curve is long enough.
Let them throw their bodies that’s simply more fun gameplay. Also major PvP is decided by objectives. You can have stat dampening in PvP events if you want.
I like long travel and think it should be the main time “waster”
RonDog98
4
Re: Risk, Reward, Difficulty & FUN: What Intrepid is Missing
My honest opinion is [placeholder], so for now that's all...
Caww
3
Re: Risk, Reward, Difficulty & FUN: What Intrepid is Missing
there is a very nice video by josh strife hayes that basically summaries all the problems of mmos similar to ashes and ngl so far ashes seems to really trying to hit all of these problems lol
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhQ_jKFnFSU
and more too
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34RPwDfLpKg&t=363s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhQ_jKFnFSUand more too
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34RPwDfLpKg&t=363s
Re: Even though I installed the game, I can't enter it.
Yet another reason why Intrepid should have their discord's news channel be available somewhere else.I can't enter because Discord is banned in Türkiye.
Ludullu
3