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
In Retail WoW on the other hand, you are more limited by your skill as a player, since your character is practically a god that can kill 5-6 mobs no problem as long as you use your cooldowns properly. The result is that in Classic WoW the world is much more dangerous and you have to be a lot more careful, whereas in Retail WoW you are never really in danger unless you purposefully try to fight 10+ mobs at a time.
Formerly T-Elf
The only thing you really have to think about when creating a skillset in an MMO like WoW is in what order you want to use them but thats mostly just a one-time thing and after a few weeks of learning this once created combo there is not much skill into it
Managing cooldowns isnt exactly skillfull once you know your skills and their duration. I guess thats what a few people here also meant when they were talking about "skillfull gameplay"
In traditional HacknSlash you can put all your skill into a macro because there isnt any real skill but only a combo you loop
Classic WoW takes moer skill in that regard because you have to actually think about what you are going to do rather than how youre doing it as the how is more often than not just choosing one of a few loops to.. loop
Frostbolt -> Frostbolt -> Frostbolt until you either go oom or have too much threat, then get out your wand and shoot away.
Compare that to the Retail WoW Frost mage, which I can't be bother typing out so just refer to this guide:
https://www.wowhead.com/frost-mage-rotation-guide
There is no contest. That's why in Retail WoW you can have 2 players with the same gear using the same spec doing vastly different dps (sometimes up to 20% difference). In Classic WoW this difference is far less.And yes, knowing when to use your cooldowns is an important skill to master, particularly in mythic raiding. Using your big cooldowns at the right time and always having them synced up with you need them takes a lot of practice.
Is one harder than the other? Not really. I've said this before that comparing the difficulty of Classic WoW and Retail WoW is like comparing the difficulty between Chess and Starcraft2. Both present their own challenges to the player. Classic WoW challenges the player by giving them less tools to use and a generally weaker character, forcing you to think very carefully about each move you make. On the other hand, Retail WoW challenges the player by forcing them to learn to use a lot more tools in order to be effective.
Quests that have you helping someone build a "thing", and then not seeing that "thing" get built, even after 10 years. There is a Halfling in EQ2 that I helped find exhibits to put in his soon to be built museum way back in 2004, and 15 years later there is still no museum.
Daily quests, tasks or lockouts - or anything that makes players feel like they are missing out of they don't log in each day. I don't want the feeling of having to log in each and every day to any game, and that is all daily tasks actually seem to do. I'd be willing to accept a weekly count on things like this, as if I don't log in one or two days in a row I can easily make that up when I do get on.
The feeling of *having* to log in each day or you will fall behind leads to player burnout, so is bad for the games population in the long term.
I don't want to see any form of progression - other than PvP specific progression and contested fights - where another players actions can halt your progression for an extended period of time. This means that any contested kills needed for quests need to flag anyone involved in killing the encounter - even if they are not in the group or raid that gets loot from said encounter.
In a game like Ashes, if a group of players *can* block the progression of another group of players simply by maintaining a lock down on one rare spawn encounter, they *will* do that. The developers need to be sure that doing that isn't an option.
If we have limited ability slots, I don't want to see buffs use those slots up at all. With only 10 active abilities, I want 10 abilities to use during combat, not 3 buffs to cast pre-combat, a recovery ability for after combat, a utility ability and then only having space for 5 combat abilities.
Another thing I don't want to see are near worthless crafted consumables. Make them expensive if you have to, but make them worth using.
Having a bazillion daily quests, half of which are mundane and boring, is just an abusive way to encourage players to spend way too much time on the game.
Dailies are supposed to have the exact opposite effect. You're supposed to feel rewarded even if you only have an hour or two to play. And they're supposed to limit how much progress you can make from grinding after the daily bonus is gone, so that players with more time don't get too far ahead. And to a lesser extent, they encourage players to try different content because there's usually a daily bonus for each one.
So I think the concept of dailies is still valuable. Weeklies are probably better though, at least for players with inconsistent schedules.
Putting in a means to curb (though not halt) progression for power gamers is fine, just not at the expense of making people feel like they *need* to log in every day to keep up.
My understanding is that the servers for Ashes will go down for an hour or so each week (general maintenance and season changing iirc). To me, this would be the perfect time to reset a weekly count for lockouts and limited count quests.
I would much rather have a week to do one quest 7 times - or even 10 times - than one day to do one quest once. If I have a week, it is still limiting the power gamer, but it means that if a regular player can't (or doesn't want to) log on for a day or two, they are not penalized for it at all.
The power gamer may log in right after the server comes up and knock out all of their weekly quests in a few hours. This is fine for me, if that's what they want to do, they are welcome to it. The normal player though, the person working a 9 - 5, maybe with family commitments or such, then has the choice of doing a little bit each day, or maybe they can find one significant block of time during the week - any day that suits them - and either way they do it, they are able to keep up in terms of limited time questing. May be one night they do three or four, or may be they just do them all over the weekend, either way, it is still limiting how often these things can be done, but offers players a lot more freedom before they start missing out.
This allows players to not be penalized for taking their child to an activity, or take their significant other out for dinner and a show. Simple things like this keep players in a specific game much longer.
Sure, people that are away for a whole week will be missing out, but I personally think that's more than fair.
I haven't met a single mythic raider who said they enjoyed doing dailies, but they all do them because they have to. It turns the game into a chore where you have to log on every day with a list of things to do, not because you want to do them, but because you HAVE to do them in order to do the one thing you enjoy doing (raiding).
FFXIV has a daily dungeon finder roulette that follows the same principle. The rewards it offers you are required to remain competitive at end-game which forces you to do it every day even when the daily content itself is very boring. The problem with FFXIV's dailies is that they are necessary for the functioning of the game, since players are required to do certain dungeons in order to progress through the story. If the dungeon finder roulette didn't exist, nobody would queue for a dungeon after they had done it once, and this would stall newer players from progressing through the story.
@Joseline Just returning to this point, while looking on the wiki I found the following article for systems that are designed to combat power creep:
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Item_sinks
Dunno how effective it will be, if they do actually implement it though.
Dont forget that people mostly didnt know how to play in the first place. It was a lot of exploration of mechanics.
The legendary nerf of warriors ehich were considered garbage at the time was a great example. It needed just one guy showing how absolutly broken it was.
Hunters are another example the autoattack mechanic was a lot more skillfull then people expected. The broad mass didnt understand even way into burning crusade that you have to play around auto attacks. (Which is completely dumbed down and trivialized by now) you had to time every skill in a way that it doesnt interfer with auto attacks. Move stop attack in tact to not miss an auto attack.
Its hard to retroactively say >>in general<< wether classic was more or less skillfull then retail. People just didnt explore it fully at the time and using only frostbolt could have been one of those things that were done just because it worked.
Hunters would be one example tho that needed far more skill in classic then in retail.
I can be a life devouring nightmare. - Grisu#1819
Being honest here, I dont exactly understand how they combat power creep
When I read through the page I see a lot of "you have to invest in your weapons to keep it strong" but doesnt that just slow down the process? In the end players will have said EQ and new items will find their way into the game anyway
Is it about never allowing players to achieve acual "highest end" as they keep releasing new stuff before one gets to "highest end"? but wouldnt that be kind of frustrating too¿ Altough its an MMO there should be a point where you can say "I finished my EQ"
If anything I think FFXIV proves my point about how to do dailies correctly. They have weekly caps that prevent hard-core players from blasting through new content. And they have varied daily systems (including the weekly challenge log) that give the players options about what they want to do, without requiring you to do all of them if you didn't want to.
FFXIV lets you grind if you want, but it doesn't require you to. And it doesn't let you get way ahead if you do grind.
There (as I understand and guess from the information we have) won't be a level increase in the future. Content updates could provide new ressources to provide new stat combinations/stat weights for crafting,, without overwhelming the old items and that's basically it all you need to prevent power creep drivers.
Now that I wrote it I get the item sink link. You have to continually use materials to maintain your gear, but a long time ago it was said that those repairs will become more and more inefficent. I believe this wasn't rewoked. So at some point you will replace every piece of gear you have, even if it's with the same item, just freshly crafted. So you will never sit on the exact gear item forever. It doesn't prevent power creep, but the recycling will give you "new" gear with benefits (less repair costs) again, making it fresh and helpful without power creeping.
I can be a life devouring nightmare. - Grisu#1819
That you do better in combat with a pet, and cant choose to be stronger without pet. So if you don't like pets you are strongly disadvantaged. Or have a pet anyway and be annoyed.
Guns dont, fit in any medieval game. Cannon however can possible fit for sieges.
If I want to play with games i just play modern FPS instead.
Stress related quests,
have to do 1 quest each day for bigger reward at the end of the week, let people just do quest they haven't done or just appeared. The good if you dont have this people will associate the game with stress reliving fun instead of work, and be more enjoyable and can capture players for longer, and be more of a positive addiction. Instead of a negative one, which is detrimental to all parts of society.
Not something is annoyed but something is needed though I have no idea how to implement this, that players have to chat with each other, so the game doesn't seem dead. More fun when it is interactive, remember when I played my first MMO everyone was so talkative. Instead of dead silent.
A cosmetic skin, that makes it look better than it is, or worse for that matter.
Breaking the 4th wall.
If PvP is gonna be in a lot of areas around the world it is very annoying when you lose much of your items, or valuable items, + the travel time you got to do to get back to your location. So there need to be a balance. Or a proper balance.
1) Dailies - If there a ton of them and they are required for mainstream rewards. If they are extremely limited, do not coerce or artificially force daily logins, provide horizontal rewards, and are dynamic or varied (not the same each day) then it might be ok.
2) Holidays events - don't bring Christmas, Easter, and Halloween into a fantasy world. It's tacky.
To me, if the developers have an in game lore reason for a holiday to exist, AND the games calendar aligns with our calendar, then events like this would be fine.
If an event is supposed to be yearly, then why have 5 in game years past since it was last celebrated? If an event is supposed to take place during a given season, why is it taking place in the 3rd month this time, while last time it was the 8th month?
If I have 1 hour to play, I want to try a small dungeon, or gather some materials.
Otherwise if you have 1 hour of gameplay you just do what the game tells you to do, if you have 2, you still have to waste 1 hour doing a daily quest.
Dungeon finder > I don't enjoy it. It IS practical, but it does kill interaction. Yes, sometimes you just want to log in and do dungeons, but I hope they don't have it.
Higher levels > I don't enjoy content becoming irrelevant. Please add new content without increasing level. What is the reason to increase level? It brings nothing to the able. You can easily add new abilities without level. Or classes.
Anything that is time gated > I usually don't enjoy this. I remember GW2 having events that would last 1 week and you had to do all the achievements (if you wanted) or lose them forever. So for about a week, your GW2 experience would resume to a vicious circle of doing the same thing over and over until you got what you wanted, but without having a choice to stop doing it for a couple of days.
I would like it to be easy enough to be accessible to a large, diverse player base. But I definitely personally feel more accomplished when things actually take a little effort.
I agree that I don't want NPC dailies because we should be getting plenty of static quests from players and cities for materials to help with expanding or to help with supplies. Since we'll have "busy quests" that we can engage in from everything to help the local inn stock food to helping cities gather materials for building and upgrading I don't see NPC dailies as really having a place.
Lack of solo or small group content later in game. There should always be something to do if you can't get a full group or raid together even at high levels.
Empty cities. I know they are already planning that nodes degrade if people don't keep them up, but I hope it is fast enough that a city doesn't just hang around as a ghost town too long.
Bots
Need to have a second account to play
All the classes need to be different. In the glory days of MMO's and RPG's all the classes were different and had different rolls. Now they are all the same.
Scaling.
I didn't invest countless hours leveling and working to become a badass just to have level 1 rat in the starter zone give me a challenge.(One of the many reasons I uninstalled GW2 after a week)
Easy mode dungeons.
Time was you had to pick your path carefully. Now round everything up AOE it down and Snoopy happy dance cause everyone got a trophy epic.
Everything being tied down.
I personally would like to see a random 30% of mobs not be tied to one point. If you run past stuff and pull it some of them should follow you till someone dies. (Pick one you or them) Everything resetting takes danger out of the world. We all do it now in current games because we know there is no consequence for running through the woods.
I want either pvp or pve, to progress me, and I want it to be a fun activity you'd WANT to do anyway.
You should want to join a faction because its too fun not to.