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
But regardless, this all feels like some paranoid conspiracy, this will not be a problem that "plagues" AoC... if people pay to power up their characters, I highly think that trying to get better loot and resources to make better gear will be a much more likely way. Remember, few items get bound to your character, we have SWG style variability in resource quality and durability is a thing (stuff breaks). Until you really get into BiS territory, I think there are tons of both legitimate and illegitimate (i.e. paying people on the interwebz) ways for people to NOT be on an even playing ground. You can be paranoid and accuse people of having ill-gotten gains orrrr you can just focus on your own shit and try to get gud-er. Just my opinion.
That's the status quo, I want an improvement on that. That's why I spent any effort at all in discussing it.
I think however that if you look at World of Warcraft you can see that gear score and other things happened because this was a problem they were trying to solve once they had the hindsight to realize how big a problem it was for their community to figure this stuff out.
I don't think any of the WoW devs are particularly happy that, that happened, or that they messed up and had to change so much of the game to fix it.
I'm in this boat, too. I REALLY miss the old days where you would play your character how you wanted. If all of the sudden you saw another guy (using a Rogue as an example) who was the same class, with the same gear as you, just beast-mode a creature that you've been hacking away at - you not only notice, but you'll probably start asking him questions!
I actually miss the old days where you would do your best to figure it out, then by your own experience, you'd actually tweak things and get better. I don't want to be forced (or feel like you're being forced) to go absolutely bonkers with data and numbers and 3rd party tools, just to figure out an extra 1% damage, just to be "allowed" to party with people.
I remember being a healer in WoW in Burning Crusade (BC), and out-performing people much more geared than I was, because I understood the class better and even picked a more personalized spec, instead of the cookie-cutter that was suggested. People might have been using crazy data-gathering stuff back then, too, but it wasn't "standard" or actually biased people away from other people based on any specific metrics.
At the end of the day... I just want to play the game and have fun. And we don't really have any data at the moment to figure out anything regarding this stuff, either. If people find a way to somehow get a 3rd party program to monitor in-game combat logs... go nuts. But at the same time, I'm hoping the game is designed in such a way where it really doesn't matter with so many different play styles, classes, abilities, weapons/gear, etc.
WoW is a very very poor example to base your theories on, for the simple reason that combat in that game is a mess. Even your most basic spec has a ton of passive procs and underlying processes that contribute to the combat, and the base UI is incapable of tracking it all efficiently. The same goes for knowing what gear you need. In WoW you NEED third-party websites and tools because it is impossible to tell at a glance what your best gear is at any one time. And no, I'm not talking about squeezing the top 1% of performance out of your class. Gearing in WoW is so ridiculous that two pieces of gear with the same ilvl can have as much as 20% difference in their dps output. IT IS INSANE!
As for gear score, that was originally brought in because of how gear was distributed. You'll notice that in Vanilla and TBC there was no gear score, because it simply wasn't needed. Back then you could tell just from looking at someone's gear how good they were at the game. That all changed in WotLK and went downhill from there.
If Ashes gets to the same level of bullshit in its combat and gearing that WoW has, then something has gone severely wrong!
I get it, but you can't dictate other people's play styles just to keep yours.
The less knowledgable people are about a game the more options they are willing to try. But there is another way to really allow for this bold creativity to exist in a game and that's through gated skills. If people have access to different skills despite playing the same class, well then it's hard to know what the best playstyle is for your personal, current assortment of skills. AoC actually has the potential to fulfill this if they do the augment thing well. Specifically, access to augments. If they move away from skill-tree based augments and more augments are locked behind reputation, religion, crafting, node-related stuff etc, then 2 players with the same class may have a different set of augments available to them at any given time. They can't really play the same style necessarily. I have always been a big fan of the idea of locking entire augments/skills behind gates.
Isn't that a much more appealing idea than talent trees? If choosing between having ice or fire augments for my skills dictated what I had to accomplish in-game, like which reputation I had to grind, what parts of the world I had to travel to etc, I'd feel much better about being an ice or fire mage than if I just slapped some points on a tree. And of course, I'd eventually want to have all the augments. On a meta note, this would give a whole new set of things to do at lvl cap potentially (maybe the top rank of skills or augments would be gated as such) and it would give me direction that I'd want the world to go to and goals that would be competing with others'. For example if I need a science metropolis to get an augment for my bard but some cleric needs a religious metropolis well then we have conflicting goals and would be each pushing the world in the direction that would benefit us most.
Downsides are people crying about unfairness and difficulty/inertia in changing your load-out of augments which may make players feel "locked-in" but I think it can be well done. Well I don't know, I feel like it's a fun idea that should be toyed around with.
And it seems that the devs want a return to the gameplay that caelron describes more than they want tons of in-game meta-data tools.
3rd party sites are already a thing and we know next to nothing about Ashes so far. Their will be sites with guides and calculators when the information is available to build such things.
Personally I prefer to theory craft a build and then try it out and then tweak it to want works best for me and my play style.
Think of any team based ball sport (which ever happens to be your favorite). An even playing field is one that is flat, both halves are the same size (wouldn't be a half if they weren't), goals/posts are the same size etc.
When this happens, you still usually get one team that beats the other, but neither team is able to blame the field.
In terms of an MMO, since both players have 100% access to the full game (subscription system of the game depending), the only thing that can cause an uneven playing field are things outside the game itself. The only thing that can really exist outside the game, and still be within the rules (EULA) is information. Therefore, the only way you can create an uneven playing field in an MMO is to have a game where there is enough going on in combat to need to gather information on it, but no system built in to the game with which to gather that information.
I think I disagree. This is true only in principle and the longer the game is out/people play it, the less this is true I think. When you throw in RNG and variable play times like I mentioned, I think people will have experienced and have access to different things. Your perception of a flat ground changes if you have people 4ft to 8ft tall running around on it... even if it's truly flat, you won't really notice and importantly, it becomes much less consequential that it's flat.
This is important in terms of P2W (or lack thereof) but not really beyond that too much I think.
Bill Gates : Business at the speed of thought
Gathering , storing and using the information provided to us by the game will give those that do the research and apply it the best a greater edge.
Those that won't do any research will always be at a disadvantage.
Sticking with sport, especially more amateur leagues - some teams practice once a week, some practice three times a week. That doesn't alter the need for an even playing field when the actual competition starts. RNG in the form of wind or other weather conditions also exist, but still don't diminish the need for an even playing field.
In terms of an MMO, the longer the game is out, the larger and harder to bridge the gap will become between those with access to information and those without it, which is why it is important to give everyone equal access to it from day 1.