Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Phase III testing has begun! During this phase, our realms will be open every day, and we'll only have downtime for updates and maintenance. We'll keep everyone up-to-date about downtimes in Discord.
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Phase III testing has begun! During this phase, our realms will be open every day, and we'll only have downtime for updates and maintenance. We'll keep everyone up-to-date about downtimes in Discord.
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
Best Of
Broke the (Vyra) Lionhold server worker with a Caravan Train
We were traveling through LH with a caravan train without nearly 20 caravans and a lot of defenders (some on mounts) when we all get kicked off and cannot log back in. Characters walking into the area after are also kicked off.
Re: Intrepid... Devs.. Steven... Corruption needs to be addressed...
Dunno how it was in AA, but such stories from L2 always revolve around Guild Wars, not lawless zones or PK-based pvping.what happened to the stories of hour-long bosses with guilds fighting each other to contest that steven used to talk about? man that would be AMAZING content....
This was one of the reasons why I was surprised to learn that Steven didn't want "just kill each other" type of wars in Ashes. And now it's obvious that this approach is not really working out for the game.
And in L2 it was the guilds that would drop the war tag (cause in L2 wars weren't forced) would be the laughing stock instead. Obviously the gaming culture has shifted to being a little weakling and not even attempting to properly contest content, so I think that forced wars are the way to address that. But those should still come with a proper cost. And ideally we'd have "POI-contest" wars that would give goals, higher rewards and motivation to fight over a POI, within a certain timeframe.
Though I know that those very weaklings would either surrender immediately or just bring their 2nd or 3rd sub-guild to that spot, just to avoid the war. HAVING ONLY GEAR DECAY AS DEATH PENALTY WOULD ALSO HELP MOTIVATE PEOPLE BTW, STEEEEEVEN!
As for corruption, yes, I agree that the first couple of kills should have a really limited impact on the threat to the killer, though PK count costs should counterbalance that.
But ultimately, I say that it's still too early to ask for either of those, cause I want other parts of the game figured out and implemented first. And yes, it's probably separate teams working on any of those features, but considering the overlap of systems and the potential to just break the game - I'd imagine that implementation of broad system changes could fuck things up in a major way. So, stabilize the game first and then add/change pvp features.
I'm sure it's annoying to redo the whole "server start suffering" dance again, but we've done it twice already (and for some even more), so what's another one?
Ludullu
2
Cheaters Island
Okay so the game is being delayed. Let's take a look back at what really slowed us down over the past couple months. Was it that the development of the game? No not at all
Coming back from Christmas break Intrepid Studios spent the next several weeks dealing with all the cheaters and all that they had done going over the data. And it didn't end there either.
They've been trying to compensate for what the cheaters have done and trying to balance things out for those 90% of the players that just want to play a game.
They are literally stealing development time away from this game. And the sad thing is only a few of them maybe a few hundred from what we see from the reports from Intrepid Studios. What should we do?
The game Grand Theft Auto had a wonderful way of dealing with cheaters. It was called cheaters Island. All the cheaters were banished to cheaters Island and they were left there to do all the cheating and exploiting that they wanted to without interfering with all the regular players that just wanted to play the game.
In my opinion I believe that there should be a cheater server. If you are a cheater caught exploiting you should be transferred your character and your ability to log in only to the cheaters server. Let them exploit let them figure out all the ways that you can mess up the game. Who would they be hurting? Just the other exploiters. Let the rest of us test this game like we will be playing the game at lunch fairly working together or against each other lol.
Coming back from Christmas break Intrepid Studios spent the next several weeks dealing with all the cheaters and all that they had done going over the data. And it didn't end there either.
They've been trying to compensate for what the cheaters have done and trying to balance things out for those 90% of the players that just want to play a game.
They are literally stealing development time away from this game. And the sad thing is only a few of them maybe a few hundred from what we see from the reports from Intrepid Studios. What should we do?
The game Grand Theft Auto had a wonderful way of dealing with cheaters. It was called cheaters Island. All the cheaters were banished to cheaters Island and they were left there to do all the cheating and exploiting that they wanted to without interfering with all the regular players that just wanted to play the game.
In my opinion I believe that there should be a cheater server. If you are a cheater caught exploiting you should be transferred your character and your ability to log in only to the cheaters server. Let them exploit let them figure out all the ways that you can mess up the game. Who would they be hurting? Just the other exploiters. Let the rest of us test this game like we will be playing the game at lunch fairly working together or against each other lol.
Re: More Lawless Areas? or Just Flag/War/Red PK ?
I'm truly saddened by the fact that as time goes on, I expect we're going to see more and more push for Ashes to be more like this.
"I hate being right."
Every single datapoint I have from every single game that tries to appeal with features that aren't focused on PvP and then provides more 'Lawless Area' style gameplay is that everything goes to shit within 3... MAYBE 4 months.
PvE players constantly trying to change any game that designed for or with PvP in mind in basicly every game that comes along, god forbid a game isnt designed as them as the target audience.
Open oceans and the 3 island should be lawless zones imo there to far away from the 2 main continents for the law to police and nodes on those islands should only be policed within the city walls or very close proximity but outside of that it the wild west where players have more freedom to police/politic those regions.
PvE players should also like this because it will pull the more PvP minded player bases away from the mainland towards those islands regions which will make the area less hostile for those players. So doing so would be a win for everyone, have some unique items/resources and thing to incentive people to go into lawless zones but since everything is tradeable you will see PvP players selling those items for the peopel who dont wanna go in there to get it themselfs
Veeshan
2
Re: More Lawless Areas? or Just Flag/War/Red PK ?
STOP WITH THE FUCKING LAWLESS ZONES FFS. The fucking open sea change will become the biggest damn mistake of a design shift in AoC's history, I think. Because it has drawn all the "I want to kill everyone all the time" crowd into the game.
I played L2, that had a very similar flagging system to Ashes. I also played on servers that had "lawless zones", because private server admins thought it could be a cool addition. You know what would happen on literally every damn server? Those zones would be constantly overtaken by the strongest sweatiest players. And locked down, so that these players become even stronger.
And all of that happened in a game where death only came with negative xp penalty, which was even smaller in the lawless zones. ASHES HAS FUCKING LOOT ON DEATH. And yall want to add these zones to the most profitable locations, on top of that. It's asinine to believe that the game will have anywhere near a healthy population, with that kind design. Even those L2 servers barely survived, because even the super filtered hardcore population of L2 (who are waaaaaay more willing to suffer through endless pvp than majority of future Ashes players) still couldn't put up with that kind of design for too long.
Ashes is already built on the principle of "strong are strong and weak are weak". Yet people just keeeeep pushing it everfuther into the "endless snowball" area, where the strong will simply be gods, while the weak will simply leave. Like, the P2 situation with legendary mats was the greatest indication of exactly that. Sweaty hardcore players found the best way of becoming super strong. They then monopolized the fuck out of that way. Became literaly one-shot gods and the rest of the players left.
Lawless zones will accomplish the exact damn thing. So stop with this bullshit and just ask for proper corruption balancing and much better war design. Though either of those things should came later on in the alpha BECAUSE WE DON'T HAVE THE BASIC STUFF STILL. Where's the dynamic gridding that would help with assessing your pvp situation? Where's node growth that's meant to layer mob lvls, instead of having a fucking thmepark layout of pve strength? Where's summoner and the npc AI required for it? Where's proper crafting cycles w/o full fucking items in the mob loot lists? Where's proper loot list distribution and gear type design that allow people to NOT farm the exact same spot for all of their needs?
Once we get AT LEAST all of that basic shit in the game - then we can start talking about what kind of pvp gameplay loops we gotta have around it. And supposedly we'll be getting it before/at, now delayed, P3 - so just, please, shut the hell up about the god damn lawless zones and wait a bit more.
K, thx, bye
I played L2, that had a very similar flagging system to Ashes. I also played on servers that had "lawless zones", because private server admins thought it could be a cool addition. You know what would happen on literally every damn server? Those zones would be constantly overtaken by the strongest sweatiest players. And locked down, so that these players become even stronger.
And all of that happened in a game where death only came with negative xp penalty, which was even smaller in the lawless zones. ASHES HAS FUCKING LOOT ON DEATH. And yall want to add these zones to the most profitable locations, on top of that. It's asinine to believe that the game will have anywhere near a healthy population, with that kind design. Even those L2 servers barely survived, because even the super filtered hardcore population of L2 (who are waaaaaay more willing to suffer through endless pvp than majority of future Ashes players) still couldn't put up with that kind of design for too long.
Ashes is already built on the principle of "strong are strong and weak are weak". Yet people just keeeeep pushing it everfuther into the "endless snowball" area, where the strong will simply be gods, while the weak will simply leave. Like, the P2 situation with legendary mats was the greatest indication of exactly that. Sweaty hardcore players found the best way of becoming super strong. They then monopolized the fuck out of that way. Became literaly one-shot gods and the rest of the players left.
Lawless zones will accomplish the exact damn thing. So stop with this bullshit and just ask for proper corruption balancing and much better war design. Though either of those things should came later on in the alpha BECAUSE WE DON'T HAVE THE BASIC STUFF STILL. Where's the dynamic gridding that would help with assessing your pvp situation? Where's node growth that's meant to layer mob lvls, instead of having a fucking thmepark layout of pve strength? Where's summoner and the npc AI required for it? Where's proper crafting cycles w/o full fucking items in the mob loot lists? Where's proper loot list distribution and gear type design that allow people to NOT farm the exact same spot for all of their needs?
Once we get AT LEAST all of that basic shit in the game - then we can start talking about what kind of pvp gameplay loops we gotta have around it. And supposedly we'll be getting it before/at, now delayed, P3 - so just, please, shut the hell up about the god damn lawless zones and wait a bit more.
K, thx, bye
Ludullu
2
Re: Jumping
No, jumping is fine
Your post is pointless.
If you want to bring some value to the topic, you should explain why jumping is good as it is now. Otherwise, it's just a mindless opinion... Someone might say it's okay, someone might say it's not okay.
excmatt
1
Jumping
Could you consider tying jumping in AoC to stamina, or otherwise find a way to prevent players from jumping constantly and allow it only when necessary? It doesn't look good when characters are jumping all the time like rabbits or monkeys. I can't even imagine what it will be like when there are 100+ people on screen and everyone is jumping… I don't think it should turn into a jumping simulator. what do you think ?
excmatt
3
Re: Constant / Excessive Jumping, and Mitigation
idk whats up with people trying to force others playing the way they think looks cool... just let people jump as much as they want ffs
You might as well bring the stuffertons in, neon bright pink dyes for armors and weapons, modern cosmetics. Let ppl do whatever they want.
Re: The Problem With Ashes of Creation Biomes and More
NW comes out. People yell from the rooftops about how cool it is that every tree is choppable. They yell at Intrepid after A1 only had certain trees choppable. Intrepid make a change in their design and now we can cut down all trees.
Now you can't really have "huge trees that create massive canopies", because cutting them down would directly influence the canopy and would also be a massive hit to the performance, because now instead of a static model (like a passive rock) it's gotta be an interactable thing with falling physics.
Desert nodes don't have any uniqueness to them and no proper integration into their surroundings, because neither of those things have been developed proper yet and they're just in their basic functional states.
There's not enough grass because optimization.
There's not enough unique looks to the POIs because we only have 3 node lvls, no proper weather-based progression and no story arcs (which are now called "M O D U L E S" btw) - all of which are meant to add some visual progression to the entire POI (see Story Arcs showcase around Carphin).
From what I've seen in some videos, Tropics have some kinds of underground caverns that are either icy or full of crystal structures. If that is not both "unique different tropics" and "high phantasy" (i.e. ice in the tropics) - I dunno what is.
Mob variety comes with future development and potentially both node progress and modules.
So now I come back to the gif at the start of this comment. This is still an Alpha. Yes, we're all tired of it being one. Yes, plans were for it to not be one by this point. Yes, delays. Yes, we still got years to go. Yes, it's all bad. No, there's nothing WE can do but wait. Yes, that waiting can come in the form of taking a break from closely following the development and just chilling in some other game (god knows there's fucking thousands of them).
Yes, I know this answer is pointless, overused and annoying. No, there's no better answer for this type of OP, unless you're willing to call devs hacks and scammers (which you, OP, are obviously not).
Ludullu
3