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.
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.
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
Usually, and almost always, there's a one to two month period after release where communities fall off. People migrate back to a familiar game, as if release was just the winter season, or they completely disappear. Obviously, MMO's need to keep it's players and that, to me, means keeping the community together with group/guild-focused end game.
Let's keep the best content centered around groups and guilds! I'm personally hoping that we jump in with a focus on end game, and keep it alive so we're not bleeding players. I'm so fed up with present MMO's end game going "single player".
Well they have given bits and pieces with them having discussed at one point gating the amount of players entering into a district (over people's fears of zerging) I perceived it was instanced. But I am only putting down concerns, and I think most can easily be valid as it doesn't help when Steven is claiming that and core features can be put into the game after launch. That is concerning, as even how botched Rift was in their design flaws and stability issues in alpha they still had all core features promised at release.
As for guilds he has already stated (not 100% sure), that guild leaders won't be able to take part in leadership of a metropolis (perception no wiggle room). I only know from previous experience, (from pvp centric mmo's that take group effort) that guilds are going to be leaned on for the growth/defense of the city and not one guild, but more of a coalition. I don't want to derail this thread anymore over the details over a general concerns thread though, as I think I have already done a lot
The general setting of the game and the graphics would be the second concern, but I think we have seen quite some work in that front which does not worry me much.
The third most important thing I look forward is seeing how they deal with gold spammers/bots/cheaters, that usually annoys me a lot in other games, and how we interact with other players.
2) That there will be a grind attached to achieving items. E.g. do a dungeon 50 times to get a 5% drop.
3) That the life skill economy will be static, where 1 trade route might be the go-to for everyone, much like BIS items.
But it's early days yet...these fears are unfounded right now.
Think they didn't tell yet haven't been told because they are working on it or they don't want to spoiler everything.
Both are legit reasons so no worries there.
One thing I'm 'concerned' about because they did mention it is sharing your house/property. Now they said you can give access etc. and I think that's great but I would love to see so much more. I'm really closing with my brother and even closer in MMO's we game a lot together and even have a virtual family name to show it. So I would love to see this as a mechanic i.e. beside a guild to group up, you can also start a family. No, I'm not looking for a have children mechanic, but more like we are members of the .... family and the family owns these properties.
So the concern is that we will not be able to set up something like that because of limitations. Even without that, I believe this will be the best MMO I will ever play and have full faith in the development.
Funny thing to notice, all a-0 players are really positive!
I think in the short timeframe a large amount of progress has been made.
What Im expecting to happen in 2018 though is for the combat mechanics and flow to evolve vastly. So if at the end of 2018 we are seeing the same methodical generic mechanics....THEN i will be a bit worried. This year for me in AOC speak is the year of Combat flow !
Don't flame me, it's just one of those concerns in the back of my mind with every game.
A healthy amount of skepticism is valid, and even warranted, when dealing with promises yet to be fulfilled. So, I'm not going to rebuke anyone who has honest concerns. The information we have is limited, and subject to change, seeing as how Ashes is still so early in production. But that's how these things go; especially when you engage in crowd funding.
That said, the words in your welcome post, portraying yourself as a "devil's advocate", are much prettier than naming yourself as a "counter to devotion". The former is about engaging in substantive debate, while the latter sounds like a "pisser of parades". Highly amusing, moderately confusing, yet slightly sad.
Also, from my understanding, Intrepid has stated that all CORE mechanics will be in the game by launch. The STRETCH GOALS were the ones that would be implemented later, if they could not be ready by launch. Whether they live up to their words remains to be seen. I remain hopefully optimistic, mixed with a healthy dose of inquisitive pragmatism. Nothing wrong with that.
Still kodus to the company for having the guts to be this open.
My other concern is that people are reading too much into what is being said and set themselves up for disappointment. Noone can make "your perfect MMO". Might still end up pretty good, even awesome
As for the development it self i am a little concerned about how well they will be able to tune the client, but not overly so. It is still early and there is a lot of talent out there with good understanding of the UE4 engine.
I keep a good amount of skepticism since Destiny 1 Beta
Just don't let this game be like them and I will be a happy murderous asshole ready to kill all who cross me
The lag side is not what people often think. Bandwidth speeds are now magnitude faster than they ever were. So netcode isn't anywhere near the problem it was and they will have ample network pathways through google server infrastructure. What will be the bottleneck is running code in parallel where parallel processing per player will not be the only bottleneck, but parallel access to any characters data in real time.
If you think about lag, you can often have 100s of player in town which wont often cause lag (just FPS drops) because every one is doing their own thing and not ironically interacting with each other like in combat.
In combat that story changes. AoE means not only must you access any player in parallel but as everyone hits everyone in parallel it becomes an exponential demand. If a players data must be accessed sequentially to guarantee concurrency and not corruption, you cant have parallel access. So that parallel code has to queue. Which is why lag goes to shit when mass AoE are going off all over the place with 100s of players...unlike the towns with even more people. Theres a work around that they are aware of. But basically the problem of players losing control over their avatar (lag) is down to the fact they are actually sharing control over its access with everyone else involved in the AoE that needs to update. You cant control your character because someone else has locked you out in effect.
A good example was ESO in the early days, when the bulk of the massive new PvP players on a massive battlefield were actually going 1v1 all over the place, rather than 1vX. So gameplay was epic without lag. Then came the zergballs built upon sharing the same space and using mutual AoE with no collisions (20+ players in the same radius of effect instead of driven apart by collision forced outside of that radius), heals, cleanses and anything else they could spam. It proved so effective for survival that everyone started balling up and roaming around instead of 1v1s. So the servers died. The number of player in one area being cut and cut and cut. The AoE targets being nerfed to try and claw back performance. But AoE was king and so nothing really changed.
I am hoping that AoE does not become the must use option and 1v1 across the battlefield is actually a thing. Otherwise it could pretty much go the same way. But I dont expect it to be a game killer with AoE caps used in conjunction with the work around.
That being said, I am concerned that my question about creating a purple Vek has not been addressed!
I am also curious as to how racials traits will be in this game, is it worth long term Min/Max?
Purple Vek? That was answered a long time ago. Orcs will have multiple color options like skittles.
Racials will be stat based and will have a meta. Just found this info the other day while looking for something else. So for those that absolutely must wring every single last tenth of a percentage of a stat out, there will be a "best race for this class." Found it. Timestamp 43:15.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2665&v=3UIqmWTGZ2k
Although from how it looks so far, they will be garbage tier.
As for ue4:
It's not for mmos. It will going to have heavy issues in bigger PvP battles.
This game have great graphic so far, and ue4 is strong in this, but to bad... graphic is a thirdrate parameter of a mmo. Having laggfree gameplay on budget hardware is a much more important factor.