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
"If there is Z-axis content, you can't simply avoid everybody, because that content is up in the air where you want to fly - and it will attack you. You may be able to fly around it, but only if there is a gap in the content - which should only be there if the developers put it there.
Also, adding Z-axis content would have required Blizzard to add in mounted combat. You can't have Z-axis content in a flying mount without mounted combat - this kind of goes without saying."
When you talked about z-axis content, my first thought was flying cities, floating lands etc.
This is just personal preferences, but I do not want to see same density of mobs in the air as we have in the ground. It just hurts my immersion. If we have less mobs, but increased speed, even just 180%, it opens the possibility to avoid them much easier than in the ground.
So if I have to chose 'no fly' or fly, but I have to face same amount of 'danger' as we have in the ground, I would chose 'no fly'.
There is no reason Z-axis mobs couldn't be fewer and farther between, but have much longer aggro and leash ranges, and have a movement speed faster than what players of that level would be expected to have.
If you combine few Z-axis mobs with a solid number of ground based mobs that have a long range dismount ability (being dismounted in the air hurts...), you don't need that many of these to at least make it so players think twice before just charging through. This is where developers put paths in the Z-axis for players to go between the various areas that the developers want players to go between.
This turns flying mounts from an easy way to just skip over content and in to a faster way for players to safely get to the hub they are wanting to get to.
The other thing to note is that if there is Z-axis content, there is no reason at all developers couldn't allow you to simply fly over that if they wanted to. Players still wouldn't be able to just land right on the content they want to take on, as they would still have a layer of Z-axis content between where they are flying and where the content they want is.
There is a LOT that could be done with Z-axis content, and with a good design team it could be used to fix literally every issue with flight in MMO's while making that MMO more interesting at the same time.
Problem is, WoW simply didn't try.
Why should 2000 hours of poorly spent time always beat 30 hours of well spent time?
Maybe I'm alone in this but I believe rewards should be skill-relative, not time-relative. If I go to the gym every day and walk slowly on the treadmill for 60 minutes, compared to my friend who ran on the treadmill for 20 minutes every day, who do you think would see the biggest benefits?
Yes, time does play a factor particularly when it comes to RNG gear drops (the more times you run an instance the higher the chance of getting a decent loot drop), but skill and effort should still count just as much, if not more, than time.
30 hours of top end raiding should be more rewarding than 2000 hours of world chat based game play, but if that 2000 hours was actually spent on content (any level appropriate content), then there will be rewards to show for it, and those rewards will pile up.
Use your same gym analogy, but make it 33.3 hours of walking (2000 minutes) vs 30 minutes of running. Then you have the same ratio that I was talking about.
Skill and effort absolutely do count, but in terms of leveling and gearing up, the only effect they have is in selecting the most rewarding content to then spend your time on.
Time is the only resource in an MMO, skill is simply making the most of that time.
You know it's funny, as someone who works at a leisure centre, I've seen people come in and do the exact same workout every single day. Guess what, no matter how many times they do that workout nothing changes. They don't get stronger, they don't lose weight, they don't improve. They just stay the same. On the other hand, the people who do get stronger, etc are the ones that push themselves higher and higher. Why shouldn't an mmorpg (or any game for that matter) work the same way?
"Time is the only resource in an MMO, skill is simply making the most of that time."
This is an interesting statement and in the context of an mmorpg I see what you mean. A player with higher skill is usually able to achieve more in the same time frame. The problem I have with the whole time vs skill though is that often an mmorpg will let your character get stronger regardless of what you are doing. A character that spends all day killing defenseless woodland creatures shouldn't be as strong as a character that kills dragons, and yet that is exactly what happens in most mmorpgs. The other thing to keep in mind here is that character strength is usually capped at some point, meaning that if rewards are time-relative the less skilled player will eventually catch up to the more skilled player.
However, if you're going to have a game with a fully player driven economy, where everything is up for sale, that means a player is able to do the most mundane of tasks and buy the best of gear - assuming that task results in profit and that player is willing to do it enough times.
Now, I dislike games that put high end gear on NPC merchants. If I see a game do this, I just don't even start with it. These are the games where I agree it is stupid if a player can perform menial tasks and get good gear.
When it's players selling the high end gear they have earned though, that's fine with me. I've been on both sides of this transaction in different games - I sold off excess raid gear for my guild in EQ2, and I bought raid dropped components to make high end gear with all my brazier and archeum profit in Archeage.
To me, this is more a question of economy than progression though.