Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Comments
That said, I think there are ways to alleviate those concerns while still allowing partial re-rolls for players who want to keep things like their character name, appearance, crafting recipes, land, etc.
If you were to lose your progress in your primary class and if there was a long cooldown to swaps, it's difficult to imagine that people would swap their primary class willy-nilly. I'm not sure how often the devs will be able to patch Ashes, but I would imagine they could do balance patches every few months. They could make the cooldown double their projected time taken to release balance patches. If the devs expect a balance patch every 3 months, the cooldown could be 6 months. Thus, you would not want to swap your primary class just for the meta because you'd be locked into it for 3 months after the meta changes with a balance patch.
Moreover, with such a system, you'd waste a lot of time if you kept losing progress in your primary class, so you would be better off making alts if you had that much time on your hands. Yet, at the same time, such as system would protect the people who only have the time for one character and who regret their initial decision.
This sounds fair to me, but I am okay with whatever direction the devs take on this one.
a) if players players can easily change class based on the "flavor" of the month, it is not good for the game
b) if players support additional monetization avenues, then providing the amounts are fair then it should help keep the game prosperous for ongoing design and development, with subscriptions being the "bread and butter" sustaining income only.
On top of that, it's also nice to be able to change your main class when you need so that you can bring different classes to group scenarios to fill any voids that might be missing from the group or needed for a specific encounter.
You would still have to invest the time it takes to level that class up to be at a level that's useful to the content. I'm hoping that AoC ends up being a game that takes serious investment to be able to level your class. I tend to lose interest in games with instant gratification, that allow you to level a class to Max in a matter of days.
What if you wanted to roll one class for solo play or PvP/Sieges/Caravan raids and then a different class for PvE Raids/Dungeons? What if you simply get bored of your class?
Wouldn't you rather have the option to be able to change your class to something different and still keep investing that time into your main character, using his/her homes or plots of lands or economic/government standing? You could still roll another character if you like.
In my opinion, making the game more versatile like that makes it more fun.
FFXI is 15 years in and still going. You can't change your class on the fly (you visit your house and change there) but you can change it as many times as you want as long as you've unlocked that class by completing a quest line.
That's a very sensible limitation that could satisfy everyone, as long as it doesn't become a slippery slope and get reduced from a 6 month cooldown.
I'm more against primary class swapping from a game balancing perspective, but I don't really have an issue with it from a RP / immersion perspective if you have to work your way up from scratch again.
It would indeed be strange if you could go from master mage to master swordsman overnight, but if you walk away from the life of magic to train in the sword under a new master, that is a valid RP decision and can be reflected by the time you re-invest in your new path. Yeah, you might've been a legendary mage and now you're just a nobody as a fighter, but that happens in real life. We walk away from jobs all the time. You might've been a legendary IT entrepreneur that was well-known in the Silicon Valley, but what's to stop you from becoming a respected tea farmer? Or, what's stopping you from being both?
From this perspective, I'm fine with the FFXIV system that has been mentioned, but I'm less in favor of it from a game balancing perspective.
Maybe a complex, time consuming quest can be a sufficient obstacle to avoid everyone constantly changing their classes as the wind blows... while not preventing a very determined player to do so. That's only my opinion, of course.