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
GW2, I joined a guild on Tarnished Coast at launch that was big I to World v World. We loved killing us some Blackgate players. I found most often in WvW it was simply roving Zergs that moved around the map, but every so often you got some good smaller group play.
Our Zerg was engaged with their's, a mass of bodies everywhere. The fighting was taking place on a hillside path, with a bottle neck they were holding quite well. Stalemated, our raid leader pealed off a group of us. I played a thief, and he whispered me, that on his command, I was to pop my group stealth buff, so make our raid invisible. He then told us "we're going behind them" and we portal bombed them.
For those unfamiliar, in GW2, one of the classes could drop a portal gate, which then would allow your team to portal to where it was dropped. Well, out sneaker portal master got in behind them using clever parkour.
We portaled in, stealthed, right behind their back line and I have never seen such a route. 30 minutes of stalemate broken by 30 seconds of fighting. We ended up capturing the point and winning that WvW.
I felt however my favorite PvP moment of all time was in Archeage Naval combat. I went pirate faction after realizing it would double my PvP options to fight both East AND West factions. My small band of pirate scum owned a Black Pearl, the best ship at the time and we'd roll out to plunder all we saw.
We had just taken a trade ship full of loot when our radar man called out enemy galleon bee-lining it to us. As we had just loaded up our own trade ship with packs, we all jumped on the trade ship and took off. The galleon chased us, so about 12 of us jumped off the back leaving 3 to drive the trade ship to stash our booty and we all waited under water.
As the enemy galleon sailed over us, we boarded and eliminated the crew. Taking over their ship, we intended to destroy it, however another galleon was sighted and rolled up to us. It was from the same faction as the ship we'd just stolen, so to them, we looked "friendly" on radar. When they arrived, we changed their minds.
We surprised them as they got close, opening fire from, to them, a "Green" ship. As we fought them, clippers full of players from the galleon we stole started trickling in, followed by yet another galleon. It was a mess of ships, but we finally prevailed, with a small group lead by me boarding the enemy galleon, stealing it, and using it also against the third. At one pot, my stollen galleon had 4 clippers harpooned on the back, and we were towing them around, trying to pick them off until our original stollen galleon rammed into them, flipping most of them.
The sea battle must have lasted 45 minutes, and we delt with respawns for probably another 45. We literally had to have someone go back to shore, get cannonballs, and come back because we were shooting so much.
I really miss the naval combat of that game...
We started WoW in wotlk and were both clueless.
We looked up some guides and asked around and quickly learned the game. We started doing pvp on s7 and by s8 we were owning. Later we had crazy gears and just owned ppl with our own tweaked builds. We had 2.2k rating as my brother played blood and I frost dk, we had so much fun as double dps. Everyone was awestruck cuz they expected the comp to suck.
After earning some reputation we became friends with a hpal we started rolling PHD with him, hitting 2.5 in the end. The feeling of succesful cooperation and trust in each member in ur team to manage sick plays was awesome.
We were blown away when cataclysm hit and suddenly all our gears were useless and the gameplay didnt feel good anymore. We just wanted to go back in time to play wotlk and play more.
I think what made wotlk so special for me was being able to constantly alter my build and customize it for different tactics to surprise ur opponent. Unholy dk and my bros hunter were both really awesome classes as in addition to managing ur own cooldowns and resources you had to manage the pet. I also liked macroing a lot which helped us a lot in arenas but I would prefer if those were already built to the game.
You're bleeding for salvation, but you can't see that you are the damnation itself." -Norther
I always enjoy PvP more when there is an in game reason behind it or there is something at stake and you feel like you actually contributed to defending/taking something tangible.
2. dislike pvp toggling on and off like bdo.
3. WoW perfect pvp example every part of it world pvp being ambushed or killing someone and having him call his friends. Being killed my self and getting so mad I would attack them when they were attacking elite mobs so I get an advantage and kill them. PvP is fun! without it mmorpg means nothing to me.
Means alot to me open world pvp knowing nothing is safe and adventure and challenge awaits for me!
Gives me a goal to strive to become stronger! To party with my friends in dangerous zones and come across encounters with foes or npcs!
Hell yeah!!
My favorite memories are from grinding fort guards in the Abyss (gained AP which you spent for PvP gear) and getting ganked or ganking the enemy faction. I was a lvl 40 Templar and would routinely stomp lvl 55 mains. Also rifting into the enemy factions maps with friends and killing enough reds (players within 9 lvls of you) to get a hunting party to chase us around, using teamwork to split the zerg up to pick off players who would get seperated.
Finally gave up twinking lvl 40 and lvl'd up to 50. Running Dredgion (6v6 PvPvE map) with a premade, coming up with strategies to beat the other teams, whether that be through PvP or PvE.
I know Aion had its issues but the combat felt so good and PvP was so much fun.
Point is, having more content options is the better. I play BDO atm and castle sieges are great, but u still miss that quick pvp that bgs and arenas gives
Above all i hope they only have one stat for pve pvp, that pvp for ex isnt forced into using a pvp stat only aquired through pvp, again something great bdo implemented by having one stat but the skills scaled differently based on the setting, pve pvp etc
The best part is he offered to buy it back for 2x the bounty he had! We never did sell it or turn it in. My father still has it to this day. If they have not whiped the servers.
I sure hope you have a system in this game like the old UO system. Them were the days!
MOBAs have been one of my favorite experiences with pvp, (I've learned so much about teamwork as a skill from this genre) especially dumbed down mobas like heroes of the storm. I felt that having to buy and grind for equipment tedious (last hitting is a hereditary boring "skillful" thing and unfun baggage) and learning what stats and combinations of items to use in what situations, an unrewarding experience that requires you to do homework instead of playing the game and learning through play. I went from mobas back to FPS hybrids lately and play overwatch, I found that the gameplay was good but the format was bad. Randomly grouping is not a good way to have a good time, it is efficient, but its not high quality matches. It also fails to build a sense of positive community. What I want to do is see if I can relate that into what I'm hoping for from an mmo.
I've watched WoW's competitive combat arenas streamed and it seems like they're juggling a lot of cooldowns and the item and consumables have been tuned out to give a more consistent to balance experience. That's appealing. I'm interested in how to give credit to that sort of simplifying a system and one that is connected to crafting so that it feels rewarding to the crafter and necessary but not something that's going to grind the competitive to a halt and require a new system alternative that opts out of items mattering.
I equate the problem items and varied stats generate for mmos to be sorta similar to how magic the gathering has lands and rng, and players own deck building being unintuitive to learn how to optimize. Its like, if you like that, that's great, but it has baggage, and I want a game that knows how to handle that bagage well. How to handle how much mana is optimal and none of that is intuitive its all in the numbers and you can't really teach anyone, outside of giving them a tutorial on how to use an excel sheet to plot the data that they then have to grind to find the statistics to plot. I don't think that has much value to me, but I can accept that mastery is held behind that barrier to entry.
I haven't played at a high level in any MMO ever, so I understand that my feedback isn't really useful for that 1%er who's trying to perfect what I think is a system that has a lot of hereditary baggage. I feel like the flaws I get irritated by, are by design there because that's what etymologically has happened, and is limited by what players in general seem to know at the time as true and what that converts to over time. (AKA an evolving solution that has peaks, but we might be stuck on a doomed peak that doesn't allow for further growth blocking us from going back and re-adjusting the gameplay to an even more refined state)
Its a pretty self important view, but I think I'm well rounded gamer and have a good taste for gameplay, maybe not high level gameplay. So make something that's learned from other genre's and the new genre's of late, within the limitations of the mmo server-to-player-ping-reality.
I'm excited by action and tab targeting as an innovation that allow inclusivity to those who can't be as dexterous so that those who might not be can still be high level players, while including and valuing the skills that people have learned in other areas of gaming and spent valuable time perfecting.
I want an MMO where the twitchy and emotive energy n gameplay of shooters is channeled into a good balance of gameplay.
I've never been very satisfied with MMO combat gameplay. I know whats possible and whats been compromised and I've always felt the burden of that compromise. Either it being large scale combat halting and stuttering or, by making the gameplay more technical and data driven then is to my taste to want to master. Albion Online was probably as close to what I enjoy...but when higher numbers of players popped into a fight the fighting didn't scale, and imbalances plagued it for so long, I was out because of the investment I spent into an underpowered weapon (weapons give you your abilities in that game).
TL:DR items and stat tracking can get noodley like magic the gathering and deck building. Try to make it worth the bother if you're gonna do it, make sure you're getting what you want out of it when it affects pvp.
His diseases were readily dealt with and we chipped away at his HP while cross healing, fearing and HoJ stuns and AS snares to keep us alive. We eventually gained enough edge to finish him off to turn offensive. The fight seemed to last forever, but the feeling of surviving a guy that could kill you without an issue was exhilarating.
Again in WoLK, I was leveling my 71 Prot warrior when jumped by one DK then another. Killed them both in succession. Then they teamed up and killed them again. The third time I was killed when they stopped death gripping from each other.
When saying to my monitor, 'f*ck yeah' or 'get some &^@#$', good PvP certainly pumps my blood and gets my hands shaking like a mental climax.
I also recalled a 30hr+ AV, where both Lok and Ivus were seen multiple times. I was there healing on my Tauren Shaman had to sleep after 14 hours of play, but it was fun and coordinated, stale mates changing from the bridge to the path to the Drek. Good times and it was as if the raid would take shape as people came and left. Slowing the other team was just enough to get an advantage where numbers could overwhelm the front lines. Rogues taking out healers, sapping players returning to the front lines from the GY.
Can totally agree.
Best moments I had in AA was fighting for objectives like world bosses or castle sieges.
Best one is where we out numbered 3~4 raid of other faction and killed anthalon after.
Only thing I disliked was the debuff which made you get oneshot if you where close to world bosses.
But again this brought up new tactics to play around.
With that being said, my best experience was when I was druid fighting off another faction and some wanderers joined the fight to help me. I died but they killed them and rez’d me.
In every open world PvP I would be attacked maybe once a week. That's not so bad that you should feel scared.
Being in a guild that does wars is a different story.
There are penalties for killing peaceful players. Severe.
Me and my friend were leveling up 2 tauren druids named yinn and yang. When we were in our upper 30s and questing in STV, a random dwarf warrior tried to gank us (unknown level). He could almost one-shot us but could never finish us off. We started kiting him south along the road. We constantly rooted him and would moonfire him if he tried to get out of combat to mount. This went on for ~10-15 minutes until a friend in vent, hearing us constantly yelling at each other, decided to ride over and take the goon out.
It was one of those silly, little memories that we bring up from time to time when people are reminiscing about wow. Probably one of my favorite ones I have from that game.
Feel free to keep sharing your PvP stories here in the meantime
Mordhau's PvP is damn good. AoC won't have combat like it, with freely manipulated swings and the like, but the way skillful placement, footwork, and swordsmanship can absolutely trump numbers is oh so gratifying.
I miss this part about 2014 ESO, where dynamic ultimate generation let one man fight an army on equal footing if they used the terrain. They didn't have to move much, just make sure the vectors of attack were limited via choke points and rocky terrain. One Dragonknight could hold a milegate. I also held a town against 6 enemy players, once.
I don't know much about the more action combaty MMOs that've been done because they were asian and I wasn't prepared to grind for as long as those styles of games ask you.
The action combat I've seen so far reminds me more of the FPS space then of the fighting game stuff I've seen so far.
My favorite in terms of breadth: one of my fellow officers and I, and opposing faction counterparts, ran a year-long multi-guild war campaign on the Venture Co in the service of an ongoing story. Each event had specific objectives for both sides and whoever made their objective "won" the event. The story branched at each event and which path it took depended on who won, and then between events we RPed in the location that we had won or been pushed into. The story ended up taking us across all of the then-existing continents and drew in several guilds. In a few of the fights we had multiple raid groups going on each side. Many of my favorite WoW memories, not just pvp, come from that campaign.
In SWTOR, on Jung Ma, TOR-Talk ran a multi-planet event once that had hundreds of people involved. Each faction had VIPs to protect at a number of bases across both planets, so there were offense and defense groups for each faction on each planet; Seelund took control of defending one of the Republic bases. As a small guild, we stepped in and organized the primary small guild and non-guild people who showed up, and we held that base through the whole event, sometimes against overwhelming odds. It was doubly satisfying because there was a lot of trash talk that the small guilds and unguilded just shouldn't bother to show up, that we couldn't possibly have anything to contribute, but in the end we were the ones who managed to protect our VIP and our base all the way to the end.
On a smaller scale, we also ran speeder races on Tatooine that drew both factions and we considered it a neutral event (we're smugglers. I don't care what side you're on so long as we get paid). Sometimes it would draw griefers, and of course we couldn't attack Republic griefers because they were the same faction, so we hired an Empire guild as security. Because they were (rightfully) known for being BAMFs there were sometimes challengers who showed up thinking they were going to be the ones to disrupt things. Like the wild west, you get a great gunslinger in town, every idiot with a gun thinks they're going to make a name for themselves by killing the champion. It never went well for those people. And it was _hilarious_. I rarely took part in the pvp itself when that happened, because I was busy trying to keep the event going, but this is still one of my favorite pvp memories because they are just that good at pvp, and it was great to watch.
I have scores more memories that are all my favorites, but these are representative of what I'm looking forward to in Ashes pvp. Castle and city sieges are going to be AMAZING, and my biggest gripe with faction-based MMOs is that you can't camp off people on your own faction who try to grief you. If you're on a pvp/rp-pvp server you can call in friends on the other side but if they're not flagged in a sanctuary, or if you're on a pve/rp server? There's literally nothing you can do to stop them from destroying whatever you're doing (because gods know the GMs won't do anything about it). That should be less of a problem in AoC with the corruption system and with it being factionless.
I have a "special" relationship with Lady Luck. She smiles on me often...Usually, with derision.
Ran into a ranger, started to chase after him because I usually did pretty well in fights. He turned around and started shooting rainbow unicorns at me. I had never seen anything like it before. I just turned right around and ran the heck away. Later found out it was the legendary bow that made that effect, and that it wasn't really any stronger than other gear. There hadn't been much info on legendary weapons at that time because people were still just starting to discover them.
All I knew was someone was shooting unicorns at me, and that was terrifying enough to just... not.
a 5 man group defended a keep for almost 2hours against 50 players. They were organized and knew their classes. Ultimately they succumb to overwhelming numbers but it was fun to watch.
Another time as a priest in TERA my small guild of about 20 people defended ourselves against a massive guild of 200 in a gvg declaration. We used different tactics such as using different zones to our advantage and mountain climbing to get the edge on them and we managed to win that battle.
Second best experience was on SWTOR when I was friends with the best marauder of our server, and I felt myself a pretty decent marauder. One day I got big enough balls to challenge him to a 1v1 in his stronghold, and after 5 duels I ended winning 3 of them. I had beat the marauder renown as the BEST marauder and one of the best pvpers there was and I beat him on my own Marauder. This was before the most recent merges but the server was still big and I can't describe the feeling of being able to best someone who at the sight of their name alone could cause even casual players to be like "well this match is lost". Hope this game will share the same closed community feel where everyone knows everyone and players of renown are feared throughout the node.
- The large battles in Cabal Online, fighting for objectives.
I'd say my favorite specific situation was when me and 3 friends were fighting a small guild all night because we were helping one of our friends do their quests and they wanted the area for themselves. Things kept escalating until it became a 4v8 where we held our own very well because the skill difference was pretty noticeable given we were all pretty strong PvPers in every other game.
The amount of pleasure you feel when seeing that sweet title popup at the end of the season, the indescribable happiness and releaf when getting the arenamaster title 2 days before it got taken out.
These been the best things I've ever experienced and will never forget, just looking at my character and my rating in the tab filled me with insane amounts of proud and satisfaction. I wish nothing more than feeling this once more.
Way, way back in Ultima Online, I had a group of friends who met in game to adventure or to trade together. Together we were a force, separately, not so strong.
I vividly remember a time when two of where out in the wilds hunting easy mobs, or just looking for magical regents and we were set upon by a band of outlaws ('red' players, PKers). It did not take them long to dispatch us. To add insult to injury, not only did they rob us but also carved up our corpses (ew gross) so we had to spawn further away. They got away with what we had equipped (all armor and weapons) and the magical regents we had found that day; it was a tough loss. However, we did get their names.
A week or more later, one of our band managed to spot them. It seems they were headed to one of the dungeons for battling mobs and grabbing loot, in addition to PKing of course. Well, we got the drop on them this time. We got into the dungeon ahead of them and laid in wait (a few of us were invisible via the magical spell). Once their group entered our area, or lead mage unleashed the earthquake spell to severely damage most of them and we finished the rest off with bows and spells. We looted them and then carved them up...mwahahah.
We had a great time in chat after that.
Another memorable experience I had was shortly after we took our first territory, we were harassing this larger enemy guild in the PvP zone, trying to stall them out from launching an attack on our territory by preventing them from getting to the area which they could declare an attack. Now, this fight was Zerg VS Zerg, and we were outnumbered by double, maybe triple, but we were keeping them from pushing past this choke point, whenever they tried to put pressure down and push, I was using a weapon that had a massive cone and did huge damage to anyone inside of it, the catch was you couldn't move, and it had a big cooldown, I was pretty much singlehandedly stopping a force 2-3 times our size from getting into the spot that they needed to go to. The impact that I had in that fight was immense and it felt great, albeit stressful since if I made a mistake and used it too early our entire group would get wiped. Unfortanately the enemy was in the biggest alliance on the server and when it became apparent they were not getting through with 3x our number, they called their friends in and they swarmed us with maybe 10-15x our numbers.
Still, that impact that I had on the fight was amazing, I was exerting massive pressure over the enemy and enabling my teammates to excel doing their own jobs, the teamwork we had in that fight let us bully around a group that had triple our numbers for over an hour.