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
Raids and dungeons are great. But, for an RPG, are best when in an open world that can be affected by and dynamically change along with player interaction.
In an RPG, we should not be killing the same NPCs and mobs over and over an over again.
Guild raids can still progress in the open world.
They can be, however, and Intrepid have said that some content will be instanced.
Not instancing raids does two things.
The first - it makes raid targets PvP targets. Even with corruption, guilds will declare war on other guilds to kill them and remove them from the picture, and if a non-guild based raid is present, many guilds will simply take the corruption hit and deal with the consequence.
Second, non-instanced raids don't have a cap on how many people can be attacking them at the same time. If your raid of 40 people are unable to handle the encounter - assuming you get the encounter without enemy PvP - you can simply add another 40 person raid and try again. If you do have people attacking you, add a third raid to defend.
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Instanced content is designed to test a raid of 40 people. It can be balanced in infinitesimal detail to challenge any aspect of a raid, and can do so at any difficulty level. This can only be done because the developer knows there is a hard limit to the number of people that will be present.
It is essentially curated content - the developers throwing down the gauntlet and challenging players to beat it if they dare.
Non-instanced raid content, on the other hand, is as much a measure of popularity as it is skill. It is a test of how many friends people have to help them, and to protect them. The developer can't really do a whole lot to challenge the attackers other than arbitrary scripted elements that players must follow or die, but due to the need to defend against PvP, the encounters as a whole can be harder.
It is essentially a contest between players rather than a contest between players and developer.
The other crucial thing with non-instanced raid encounters - if someone has enough friends, they can keep that content to themselves. We know that raid content will have flagging, and if flags exist in non-instanced raid content, people with lots of friends WILL stop non-friends from killing it, thus ever being flagged for what ever that content flags players for.
This is not possible with instanced content.
TL:DR, raids don't need to be instanced, but both instanced raids and open worlds have their place. Hopefully Intrepid use each content type wisely.
As some Intrepid staff worked on content in another game that contained some of the potential issues above, I have no doubt they won't make the same mistakes.
But, I'm really wondering why @Gorenkillchua wrote:
anyone who says raids, a coordinated effort of 20+ people don't belong in an mmorpg is ridiculous, as it is meaningful content done with other players
As if instanced raiding must be the only type of raiding.
All the forms of progression other than dungeons and raids. Where dungeons and raids are all instanced. Because Ashes includes plenty of opportunity for raids in the open world, so it makes little sense for anyone to say that raids don't belong in MMORPGs.
No one here has said anything close to "raids in MMORPGs are ridiculous" as far as I know.
People have mentioned instanced raids being less common than open world raids in the Ashes game design.
But, Gorenchilla can clarify what they meant themselves.
My only point is that I believe instanced raids do belong in mmorpgs in my opinion.
No one called them ridiculous, but people did say they are horrible and don't belong in an mmo, which I disagree with as raids are done with many players.
I also think open world dungeons and raids can be a lot of fun as well. I prefer OW content, but I also like having a guild and entering a raid instance ready to hit a wall for 3 hours.
To another point, it's hard to say how successful zerging will actually be. Death is going to bite in this game. You gain negative exp, lose resources, and take a dura hit. The amount of dura you lose is affected by how much damage you were overkilled by and If your dura hits zero, your gear breaks, and you need to use resources to repair it. Combine their anti zerg boss mechanics and player collision, the more people you have, the more people will be dying.
I worry that if we have high level instances it will further encourage people to huddle around the large nodes. If people have to compete with others in the open world for this content then players will be encourage to move to less populated areas and develop them so they have an easier time farming.
There are a lot of things that will be different in this game and it's hard to tell how everything will play out.
There may be raids and dungeons in name, but I'd fully expect them not to be anything like what you may be thinking of from theme-park games, and even less so, have them be fleshed out as key part of progression or world-first races. I don't see that kind of "raiding" here at all.
As I posted above, I really don't expect anything in Ashes to resemble raids and dungeons from previous games, including the idea that there is "progression" in them any more than any other part of the world. I also doubt gear drops will feature in the same way as other WoW-likes as well.
Hell they could do it in interesting ways, an instanced raid pops up every time a node reaches level 7 or something
Also, hi Lethality, I remember you from the Wildstar forums back in the day.
Personally, as a healer, I am always in dungeons/raids/gvg/arenas or anything group oriented.