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
Empty cities - most mmos have 10 npcs occupying their capital cities. BDO got it right. NPCs should be everywhere: in the streets, in the markets, on the road, travelling around, in the fields harvesting.
When I see the Vaelune metropolis I think about Mahadevi in Archeage, which feels completely dead, and cross my fingers Aoc will be completely different in the amount of NPC activity cities have.
I want NPCs to react to what is happening, have them run away if necessary, have them fight, have them cower; do something to show they, too, are part of the experience.
Formerly T-Elf
The problem is that (in WoW especially) there is this expectation that everyone in the group knows the dungeon like the back of their hand and you just speed run through. This is not always the case, and new players often get kicked from groups for not knowing what to do. I saw it so often while leveling alts and it legitimately angered me whenever a new player got lost and then was kicked from the group for slowing the group down.
That's the other problem with automated group finder tools, you can't control who is going to end up in your group. Let's say you were an experienced player who wanted to speed run through the dungeon, and I was a relatively new player who wanted to take things slower in order to learn my class (maybe I'm healing or tanking for the first time, etc). If you were to set up a group manually you would make it clear that you intended to speed run through and only want players who knew exactly what they were doing. I would never manually sign up to a group like that. But an automated group finder might very well match us together when we are looking for entirely different objectives.
Yes, setting up a group manually takes more time and effort, but it ensures that everyone in the group is on the same page, knows what to expect from the run and is prepared for it before you go in.
- Cash shop skins for weapons and gear that look way better or identical to rare gear. Like seriously, why would anyone bother using the default skin for a legendary sword if you can just buy a similar look from the cash shop?
The reason could also have been that Blizzard started to implement Raids in "Beta" builds, leading to guides that come out even before the raid is released....
The problem with this idea, as much as I like it, is that if it 'takes months' to figure out how to fight some of these world bosses or raid fights... If that creature is part of one of the dynamic events for a node, you can say goodbye to the node's progress every time it shows up until you learn it. A dragon can and will destroy a metro if it's not stopped.
True, but without the PTR testing bosses could be released with bugs that made the encounter nearly impossible. It's a bit of a double edged sword.
Yeah, but that way they took everything that interests you in a raid out of the raid, the exploration. You know what they will do before they do it.
Burning Crusade and WotLK didnt have Raids on the Beta servers i believe, and they did okay.
Bugs are just part of gaming. What you do hint at is something I've come to realize. PTRs are about finding out which bugs are "acceptable" bugs for players.
There may be a bug that makes a boss one shot people. Not acceptable, needs patch now.
There may be another bug that makes the boss reset if you move to far away. Somewhat acceptable, will patch soon.
A third bug makes the boss's death animation loop on occasion. Acceptable, may or may not patch, probably get around to it, maybe not.
I don't disagree. I think the PTR can serve it's purpose of uncovering bugs without giving away too much. Say any boss testing on PTR is done in a somewhat bland arena with a generic boss model as to not give away who the boss is or anything about the boss arena that would actually be used in a raid. This would allow them to test boss mechanics without giving away the raid. Alternatively if Intrepid has a large enough QA department they may not need players to assist at all. The reason PTR environment exist is to get more people playing with new features as 1000 outsiders are going to use the feature in a different way than 20 people that have inside knowledge of the feature intended use and function.
Eh I loved the Warcraft Universe since W3 was my first game, but wow recently is looking really bad, it used to be great but the new developments are headache inducing.
@poisonz I'm personally not against *some* themepark features as long as the story is good (like Witcher 3 kind of good - not rubbish MMO kind). I don't even like categorizing MMOs as 'sandbox' or 'themepark'..Obviously sandbox is what they were supposed to be in the first place..while themepark bit can be really boring if it's done in a way that has been done so far in other MMORPGs
that because early Warcraft was just copied and paste of Warhammer
Fishing minigames (only enjoy AFK fishing. It's supposed to be relaxing, I love watching netflix and checking what I caught every once in a while).
AFK travel seems inevitable at this point, and that's fine I guess, since fast travel makes distances and regional differences meaningless. But I'd rather have interesting things to do while travelling (just look at what GW2 does with its open world).
But my biggest complaints are usually about RNG drops/progression (mounts especially). If there's a specific goal that you need to grind specific content for, then it should have a hard-cap on how much you need to grind it for tokens or whatever, not just a random drop chance. I hate it when there's a cosmetic that you really want, but the dungeon you get it from is garbage, and you don't even know how long you have to suffer in that dungeon to get it.
a no-go for me: Spawning of object in the environment when i am only 10 meteres away from them.
I hope for a simple crafting path from common to legendary weapons with basic enchantments instead of weapon upgrades.There are other ways to increase a weapons streanght other than making it +15
- Easy raids and raids that demand too many players. I like challenging raids that you have to try over and over and over and over again until you finaly beat them. I dont like however raids that require you to get 50 people for a single run. Smaller guilds should be able to beat them as well
- No auto travel. Its poor game design if you have to walk for 30min straight to get from PointA to PointB. One of the major mistakes Bless made (well they made a lot of major mistakes..). More than 50% of bless's gameplay experience was walking from A to B. Autowalk was certainly needed in that case but it shouldve showed the Devs that theyre doing something wrong
- PvP zones that force you into PvP and cant be avoided. That was a thing in Cabal. Lv100+ maps were marked as war zones and players from 2 diffrent fractions could attack each other on sight. While this sounds like a fun thing to do it was annoying if youre leveling a twink in those areas and someone from the opposite fraction sees you. You either had to pray that its a nice guy who just passed by or youre dead and couldnt play the game until youre alone again
- power creep. Nuff said. This always happens in every game, never not seen it happen but one can hope
@leamese I did mention 2 things.
1- Artificial feel
2- non skill based combat.
There are of course many others but these two are the most important ones for me.
Classes gender locked
Pay 2 Win instead of micro transactions being cosmetic only
This happens pretty much every time WoW brings out a new raid or expansion, the previous raids become redundant unless you are farming transmog gear. The trick is giving higher level players a sense of progression without producing power creep.
Powercreep can never entirely be stopped, that much is clear. Powercreep on its own however doesnt necessarily need to destroy gameplay. You can increase stats as you like and release new features but its also important to never do big changes to how the game is played
I think BnS did a decent job at handling powercreep. During release you had about 10k~20k DPS with "maxed out" EQ. Before I quitted the DPS was around 500k. This wasnt only because of higher stats but NC (devs) also released a bunch of items with some pretty ridicoulus effects but they did a decent job at only "buffing" DPS and not changing the gameplay AND keeeping bosses as strong as they used to be (well they also got more complicate) so you never felt like youre too strong for high end content but also felt your DPS going up and your burst started to really hurt even the strongest bosses. Cabal did this in a simliar way. More EQ = easier high end bosses but you still werent able to do anything on your own and Cabal never really got rid of its original gameplay idea (except HFB. RiP HFB)
A bad example of powercreep would be Els. At its release you used primary a weak and a strong base attack and used skills to clear out mob groups. Even speedrunning required you to use your skills effectively as Mana was limited. Nowadays Elsword consists of spamming pots and only using skills. This is because KoG released more and more diffrent potions to encourage spamming and also made it easier to upgrade weapons (as well as increasing the upgrade cap) in addition to a lot of other stuff that increases your damage, they even invented completly new stats to further increase DPS. To compensate this powercreep they buffed all mobs and bosses to a point that the game became extremly furstrating if youre not "abusing the powercreep"
I guess powercreep is one of those things that show wether or not a Dev team understands the game theyre creating. Basically, Im kind of worried that AoC will take the same path Els did
.. I wrote too much
I mean a summary from the points made by "everyone"?
I hate casino gear upgrade systems.
You're bleeding for salvation, but you can't see that you are the damnation itself." -Norther
Modern WoW makes me lazy - I can pull multiple mobs and easily survive. Pull multiple mobs in classic and I'd better run or be a warlock that is the master of "Fear juggling".
AoC should strive for a level of challenge that makes the rewards (even Uncommon "green" level items) feel worth while.