Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Comments
Damage parsers will happen. Either official or third party.
Linkable achievements can be great fun for the community, not only for this purpose. How are you gonna proof that you are indeed the best blacksmith? Achievements are great for long-term motivation, and a good way to keep track of progress for yourself.
And if your next argument is that Intrepid won't do anything about third-party program users, take a hint from Square Enix.
I bet not. So what's the problem? In this way at least you see who are elitists and can avoid them and only join group of normal people.
The only reason to strongly push against this, is if in fact you would want to get carried by elitist groups while you yourself doing very little to help out.
And link-able achievements ARE optional. You don't have to use them if you don't want to. Form your own group and invite who you want. And if someone asks you for achieve, you don't need to show him.
Also those achievements would check for bare minimum what's needed to have a chance at dungeon. If you can't even do that much then you don't deserve to join the groups, since you would only leech and drag them down making them unable to even finish the dungeon.
It would be like requesting that players level is not shown and then asking for lvl 60 groups take you to lvl 60 dungeon, while you yourself are lvl 30.
This is what you are in fact asking.
Any form on ingame tracking of output or achievements will be abused by people looking for an easy ride.
Well I can also say that the lack of gear / stats / skills visibility (everything being hidden) will be abused by undergeared people looking for an easy ride (getting carryed) to content they are not adequate for yet.
1. *Level up to max level*
2. Why would I bother doing dungeons appropriate for fresh max levels?
3. Joins up for top raid (hey no one sees my gear anyway, I'll just grab legendaries right away)
Tell me, why wouldn't most of people do it like this?
It's not always about the damage, rather have teammates that actually do what they are suppose to do for the better good of the group instead of fighting for the maximum damage.
On point.
It this really getting old with you people and your excuses to get your elitist tools. Let's look this from a different angle, again.
How do you know that dungeons and their gear won't be required to reach max level in the first place? What if open world gear doesn't cut it until you craft something better?
Why do you believe there won't be mechanics in place to automatically replace AFK-ers or let the party leader do it?
Example Achievements:
1. "Legendary Sole!" - You've got some serious sole! You found the missing Sandal of Lord Steven!
2. "Best DPS Evah" - You cleared dungeon X with a gold rating for time, you stab faster than Alluring!
The first one is fun and interesting, and worth showing your friends (and Steven!). The second one is just for flexing digital muscle, and elitism. It gives you just another way to hold things against other players that just isn't needed. If you take somebody and they don't get the job done, replace them. DPS numbers aren't the end all be all. Some people have lower dps, but are better about not needing extra healing, or help with situational utilities without being told, or having a better way to handle an issue than the raid lead might have thought of.
Ashes is about community, and learning who is in it. Go out and meet some people, learn who gets the job done, and keep in touch. This isn't a LFG random game, nor is it cross realm connected crap. You have a limited pool of players to meet. 10k players on a server may sound like a lot, but it's really not. Think of early on in most older MMOs, you saw the same people *all* the time. You learned names, personalities, and people developed reputations. Go shake a hand and make a reputation as a good raid lead that gives people a fair shake, not an elitist jerk.
The aim for achievements for me has always been to do something that I feel happy about like finish my first raid or win my first pvp match so it's personal so I don't see the point myself but that's just me.
It's not about just skills, and playing for the group.
Player can have awesome skills, avoid all aoe, doing everything right.. but, if he came in lvl 15 greens and he is doing 5 DPS he is useless (and group can't see that because they don't see his gear or actual DPS, they see just that he moves good).
So this player will seems awesome, but in fact he is doing absolutely nothing to help, because his DPS can be so low that what this player does is meaningless.
Consequentially group can keep failing the boss because bosses enrage mechanics always wipes the party, because party can't kill the boss in time.
Guy with 5 DPS is the problem here, because he (specially if he is not the only under geared player in party) prevents group from killing the boss.
Group can't see that guy has negligible DPS. Everyone in group wastes time. They don't know who is the problem, and they can only break apart and quit.
So please stop with your leacher excuses that it's all about just giving your best. It's not only about that. You gotta have some minimum gear to be viable. And if people are not inspect-able many WILL abuse it to join up for content they are not nearly geared up for.
Also, dps meters are almost always a waste of time. In the beginning of the patches when content is considered difficult, dps meters show who is technically more skilled at button mashing. However, this leads to very bad behavior. For example, the "special" mage that stands in mechanics and dies but points out his dps is highest because while everyone else was moving and "doing" mechanics, he/she was tunneling on the boss. I don't know how many times I have seen this and these players are actually considered "elite" because of high parses/dps but really bad mechanic maneuvering. Now, before the entourage comes and eats me alive for this, no it doesn't always happen but most of the time it does. DPS meters just further create a division within the community and if someone in your group/raid is playing poorly, you really don't need dps meters to point them out, you normally know without even looking at the meters.
With that said, whether intrepid studios wants to include these or not, just play with people that match your personality/play style and just ignore everyone who you view as "elitist". Problem solved.
if its optional u can still choose to go with non elitist ppl that dont care about parsers/archievments.
If its optional, it doesn't stay that way.
i had never a problem with "elitist" ppl or parsers.
Sadly, I and obviously others have, and It'd be nice to not have our concerns minimised
Could I interest you in a cookie, or perhaps a nice t-shirt that says "I'm delusional, sell me a bridge"?
If you say "it never happened to me so I am not affected, but I still want parsers and linkable achievements" you are in neutral ground and the final decision will not affect you in any way, yet you are technically spitting in everyones face that shared valid arguments why linkable achievements are a bad idea.
No hard feelings, just saying.
If someone playing an MMO these days has not encountered the kind of discrimination described here then you are either extremely lucky, not participating in dungeon/raid content, delusional, or cocooned within a guild/group of cool people. Sure there are a lot of people that will fall into that grouping but I still feel that they are in the minority.
By outright dismissing the concerns of those who have encountered this toxic behaviour, you are really marginalising a large portion of the playerbase (another triumph of individualism in the modern world). Just apply that logic to some real-world scenarios and see how far you get before the argument becomes ludicrous to you.
Ashes will be built with one of the core focuses being community. I feel that any game mechanics that are introduced that will, by their very nature, fracture this community will be ultimately counterproductive to the overall vision of what this MMO is being designed to be.
My girlfriend at the time loved to play warlock – her favourite class by far. She was a good PvE player: always turned up to raids well prepared, always participated 100%, always did her best and was well rewarded. She quickly became a mainstay of the guild’s raiding roster.
Then the leadership started using parsers to check everything that was happening in the raids – which skills were being used and how often by each player, damage output and dps meters, etc. They identified, using online min/max articles, that her build was sub-optimal and her dps could improve by 10% if she changed the build to the current FotM.She didn’t want to.
She really enjoyed the playstyle of her character. But they pushed and pushed and ultimately threatened to drop her from raids if she did not comply. She bowed under the pressure, hated the new style and ended up leaving the guild. Due to this approach 5 or so other players also left around the same time and the guild floundered after that.
Yes it was the guild’s prerogative to do this, their guild after all, but they destroyed their own community because they believed they needed to do what other guilds were doing. If these mechanics exist the temptation/pressure to utilise them becomes too great for many who have not learnt that peer pressure is pure bollocks.
I have, on many occasions, been excluded from group content because I did not have an achievement to link. I don’t care about achievements, simply not interested in this artificial timesink. I had done the instance a number of times, including tanking it.
But because I did not have the achievement for killing the final boss while also ignoring the mechanics or whatever the spurious achievement was, groups would just flat-out refuse acceptance. This was the only criteria they would accept. I returned to the game after a long hiatus and only one person I knew was still playing so I didn’t have a solid group of friends around me so it necessitated using a group-finder
These experiences are common and exist because of the two specific mechanics raised by the OP. These personal examples are why I don’t want either in Ashes. I will be hoping to surround myself with a cool group of people so I won’t have to worry if they are introduced, but I still believe that they do more harm than good to the general playerbase.
Ultimately I have no say in whether they will exist or not, but I can only express my wish that they do not.
New players can put in some effort too and form their own groups, and work towards learning the tactics and beating the content like old players did when they were new.
New players should not just sit on their asses and expect to get a free ride in already experienced and geared up groups, and then if they don't get it, cry how elitist that other groups are.
People have right to form their groups how they wish, it's their time, they can choose to spend it how they like and with whom they like.
Real player will not cry how other geared up group will not invite him so he gets his free ride. Real player will work on forming his own group and invest time in working hard towards learning the content and beating it with real effort.
Real player will feel joy and achievement when he did this, unlike the "free ride" player that got carried by geared up group.
Thanks for understanding that people are masters of their own time, and free to choose who they hang out with and spend that time with.
This is where you lose people though. When you decide to be divisive and condense the topic into two diametrically opposed stances, you attempt to assign everyone into one of these views, alienating a large portion of those involved in the discussion. No one likes being alienated and it only leads to a degradation of the quality of the discussion.
I understand the passion here, but we should be able to discuss without becoming so didactic.
Reality is never so simple as to be able to divide a group of people into only two points of view. There are literally hundreds of examples of exclusion being practiced where the assumption of a "free ride" is non-existent.
I think everyone here is well aware of how a scenario will often play out with a new player asking to be accepted into a group, or even trying to form their own group, when a playerbase is well established and there are accepted rules of judging a player's worth - whether they be in-game mechanics or third-party addons.
It's very difficult to gain acceptance if you must first prove you have been accepted to gain acceptance. It is a paradox and we even have a name for it.
People here do not go and say ok, whoever wants to use parser can use it personally but is not able to see other players parses. They go and say "noone should have it, I don't care that you want this for your own personal game play".
How will anyone have understanding for such selfish people?
I tried to argue for compromise, a personal only parsers, but selfish people still yell against even that, completely forgetting that other players have right to play as they wish as well.
Sadly the only way to combat selfishness is to push diametrically opposite side, and then hoping that developers will find a compromise somewhere in between. Something that I wanted originally (a compromise), but the only way to hope to get it is to "play same like other side is playing".
Even in classic WoW when the community was pretty good, it could still sometimes be hard for new people to get groups as many people would inspect the player once they arrived and kick them if their gear was not up to their standard. You don't have to be a world-first elitist to behave in this manner.
The number of people hugely grateful for the chance to be treated like a person and have fun was a lot larger than some here might think. These were people who usually were not able to invest the time to raid on a regular basis, or who were just starting their MMO playing.
I met a lot of friends this way, and the girl who was later to be come the lead tank for the guild. If more people were given a chance and lent a helping hand rather than discarded like scum because they don't have an achievement, the better the game is going to be.
With the introduction of the two mechanics being discussed here, the dismissal of players became rampant. The balancing factor in WoW was the introduction of the group finder and looking for raid. People literally afked throughout entire raids so anyone, no matter how terrible a player, or how badly geared or inexperienced, could get a chance to at least see the content.
People are always able to behave however they wish. It is our inalienable right to choose who we want to play with and to choose these people in a manner that suits our own needs.
What makes me sad is when these mechanics are implemented the best-use scenario is almost immediately corrupted into an artificial way to discriminate and divide. This may not be your intent but it is the intent of the majority.
Yes but that should be optional, your own choice. And not pushed upon you as mandatory, and the only way.
You yourself should have liberty to chose who you want to play with. And if you wish to mix with experienced and new players that should be up to you.
Same like other players should be able to chose for themselves also, and not be dictated with whom they have to play.