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Alpha Two Phase II testing is currently taking place 5+ days each week. More information about testing schedule can be found here
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
Comments
In regards to servers, I'm not talking about region specific servers, I am talking about players hosting their own servers and having control over various aspects of those servers. Many MMO's have unofficial private servers - ones that the publisher of the game would shut down if they could - but that is not the same as providing support and functionality for players hosting local servers.
To me, full PvP is fine in survival games and in non-persistent games. It can't, doesn't, never has and never will work in a full AAA MMORPG. There needs to be some kind of control in place, as you yourself seem to agree.
This has always been my argument in regards to PvP in Ashes.
If you consider survival games to be their own genre, and put a clear delineation between survival games and MMORPG's, you very quickly see that pure survival games work, pure MMORPG's work, but attempting to blend them doesn't.
I agree, this will be telling.
From what I understand, players will not lose anything, ever, unless killed while corrupt or if they lose a caravan. If a Freehold is destroyed, players essentially gain a blueprint to rebuild that Freehold as it was when destroyed, all they need to do is find somewhere to build it. My understanding is that when built, you regain all customizations and stored items you had when it was destroyed - but that is just my understanding.
I am somewhat interested to see how in node storage and housing will be taken in to account if a node is de-leveled or destroyed.
Yep. i think that'll be a big one. Making it disappear, or be able to be stolen seems too far from how they're handling other systems so i don't think that'll be the case. But if everything has a physical place in the world, ie no item teleport, how do people regain access to their goodies? Maybe a blueprint like with the freeholds, that can be redeemed at another storage point to grant access there, but with a time limit to simulate in world travel time?
That is about the only way I could come up with to do it as well.
Doesn't seem ideal to me, but in the absence of anything better...
My guild left war decs up for a while when this happened so there was that.
When it comes to full loot as long as it doesn't take me hours or days to reach a fully decked out suit of armor + weapon only to die in the matter of a few seconds and lose it all I can deal with full loot.
From one of the nodes blogs:
"Destroyed Freeholds are subject to material loss, and blueprints for them are mailed to the player to utilize for future placement in order to allow the player to keep their Freehold’s layout and structure."
In a 2017 livestream they also said they wanted building a freehold to be fairly easy so if you have to relocate, it won't be a monumental task. So I'd like to think the blueprint would include storage in the spirit of making the whole process forgiving for players.
There was also something about the freehold not being destroyed if it still resides in the ZOI of a lvl 3+ node after the freehold's original node is destroyed - that was in 2017 too.
Don't take this the wrong way, but I'm going with the second one here - although coupled with poor game design in BDO.
At their best, MMO's are about cooperation, not confrontation. To be perfectly blunt, anyone that disagrees with this statement should be playing a non-persistent PvP based game or a survival game - both for the sake of their own enjoyment and the sake of the MMO they would otherwise play a small part in ruining for others.
If BDO were well designed (it wasn't), then the optimal way to deal with that specific situation would have been to invite that player to join you, if you both wanted to kill the same specific respawning mobs. The fact that BDO didn't have enough of these mobs for everyone that would want to be killing them was another issue with that games design, it encouraged players to fight for things that should not need to be fought over.
Any time an MMO makes you want to kill another player other than for political/social reasons, the game is doing something wrong.
There should never be an outright economic or progression based reason to want to kill another player. At absolute minimum, there needs to be serious consideration and apprehension of the consequences of taking such an action.
Assuming you mean gear that is close to the best in the game, I would expect that to take the best, most dedicated players months to get.
An MMO where you need only spend a few hours to get a full set of decent gear isn't one that is worth playing, as at that point there is nothing left to do other than PvP.
You should keep in mind, Ashes will have - among other things - tiered raid content (and I am hoping- tiered group content). This means high end gear will be a form of progression - which means that high end gear will take real time and effort to actually acquire.
These things can not co-exist with a full loot PvP game. You can't have a full loot game AND a tiered PvE game at the same time.
It simply doesn't work.
I disagree with this, i think MMOs are at their best when there is both. Why limit players to only being able to cooperate with each other? I'd agree that games should provide incentives for both and not all games are good at that. You should have reasons to play with people and reasons to play against.
Why do you feel the need to limit MMOs so much? Why can't games be different?
None taken. I am a competitive player and BDO, for lack of a better word, pushed players to solo grind rotations to maximize their profit. Silver(money) was the main factor in your progression. You could enhance your gear with a little luck and play the odds but at the end of the day silver kept that progression possible. It was used in everything. Inviting another player to my group would mean faster killing of the rotation and splitting the profits. If we killed too fast it would reduce the amount of XP and silver we would gain since we would be standing around waiting for the next pack to spawn. We could however increase the size of the rotation if possible but then I might overlap with another nearby player. Grinding in BDO was tricky and often led to open world PvP (which I lived for). The end game in BDO was PvP. Node wars, sieges and Arsha Arena (bragging rights) so trying to stay competitive and at the top of the food chain required you to be confrontational. Too many times I tried to be nice to players crossing my path but at the end of the day most players are just assholes as well. Luckily, players could just swap channels in hopes of finding a vacant rotation every 7 minutes or so.
Overall though, I think I disagree with mostly everything you said besides the fact I am an ass. No offense but you sound like a PvE carebear that only enjoys PvP in an agreed upon setting of the player's choice. I hate safe PvE areas where players can just kill over me, take quest mobs or named mobs I am trying to farm since they are safe from me flagging and killing them. Society has rules but those rules don't usually transfer over to games since people can be scumbags. I guess we just see polar opposites of what the ideal MMO should be.
I'm not a griefer and I don't condone spawn camping or killing lowbies for fun but mark my words this corruption system is going to get exploited. Like my example of karma bombing in BDO, exploited by players that will passively push you out of your grinding spot by dying repeatedly because they lose nothing and you lose time, your mob clearing speed, karma and drops. If you don't flag then that same player will just screw up your rotation until you either leave or he does. Sometimes players group together but there was always that chance you had to fight for your rotation.
If you discover a gold mine and while you're mining another person comes along and starts mining some for himself. You tell this newcomer you discovered it first so he should move along but he doesn't. He keeps taking your gold. You have to defend what's yours. I found BDO did a lot of things right but definitely had a lot of things wrong.
Noaani says we should all cooperate but that still doesn't stop people from exploiting the system for their own personal gain. Who am I to call when I am killing mobs in a dungeon and another player quietly follows me only to loot chests I am fighting for, or kill important mobs or even the quest mob? Nah, the GM isn't going to look out for me. That's why I'll warn that player or flag and kill him. Hopefully, things will respawn and then he'll have to work for his loot instead of stealing mine.
My opinions on PvE players doing raids, is simple. You like orchestrated fights with tactics you can memorize (or have a mod do for you) and I like chaotic, unpredictable and satisfying fights with real people that push my skill and knowledge of my class as well as all others. I find mostly nothing satisfying in PvE. It's a means to an end. Get the money or gear to beat the other PvPers. I'll be that guy in a guild that holds a node, a castle, and plans to stay on top of that PvP scene because that's what I enjoy.
Unfortunately, I don't have a perfect solution to keep players from griefing, mindlessly killing players for their own satisfaction or stopping players from taking advantage of these systems we put in place to protect them. I'm just a PvPer that sees similar systems in previous games that were taken advantage of. Sorry for the wall. I could debate this stuff all day but I've gotten off-topic.
Yeah, I vaguely remember that - other than the materials loss part.
It is systems like this though that I expect to be reassessed completely during beta. At this point in time, I would say it is (from our perspective) a roll of the dice in terms of where things will actually land.
If that new expanded area then encroaches on someone elses area, the correct thing to do would be to then include that player in your group.
A well organized group of 5 players can kill faster than 10 individual players in every game - BDO included.
Yes, I am a top end PvE player first, but that means I know how to maximize resources (players, classes) in a multi-player setting far more than PvP players do. PvP players are generally better at which class counters which other class, and how to build a class to best counter various other classes and situations, but a competent PvE player know how to get the most out of various class combinations in PvE situations, and this makes everyone involved more effective (MUCH more effective).
BDO never encouraged solo grinding, players of the game just had the confrontational mindset while playing the game, and so that is how they behaved in that grind.
The funny thing about BDO - I have never met a single BDO player that has not told me they are only playing BDO until something better comes out. No one plans in staying in that game, no one thinks it is as good an MMO as could be made. The fact that you are posting on these forums tells me that you think the same.
This may not be the same for you, but when you get in to detail with most players, the reason they don't intend on staying in BDO is because there is nothing to do at the end game. Sieges and node wars only go so far to keep players entertained, and grinding the same mobs over and over again between sieges and wars does not make for a fun time. I am a PvE player first, for sure, but far from a carebear. The two are not synonymous.
As I said earlier in this thread, I spent 3 years as the only full time pirate on my server in Archeage, and spent most of my online time farming land in Auroria. As someone that prefers PvP aspects of games, I assume you are familiar with Archeage enough to know the kind of situation that put me in, and the fact that the only way I could be in that situation is if I put myself in that situation on purpose.
I'm not at all anti-PvP, and thus can't really be called a carebear other than by someone that doesn't understand the term.
However, I do understand that in almost every MMO on the market (Ashes included) PvE is the driving force. Progression (in real terms) comes from PvE, not PvP. Even BDO is the same, you don't progress by fighting in the arena, you progress via PvE, thus PvE is the driving force of the game.
You say we just see opposite ends of what an ideal MMO should be, but I would suggest that your ideal game is a survival game, not an MMO. Survival games allow you the opportunity to kill whom ever you want, when ever you want, with virtually no hindrance.
The only thing a survival game doesn't allow you to do that a full loot, full PvP MMO would allow you to do is to kill players that are not up for PvP, as survival games don't have any such players. Everyone in a survival game is always ready and willing to engage in PvP.
This is why I am suspect about the motivations of any player that wishes to see a full loot, full PvP MMO. They clearly don't want a game where everyone is ready and willing to fight all the time, as those games already exist. On the other hand, they also clearly want to be able to fight those not ready and unwilling otherwise they would have no reason to want full PvP.
It is this kind of player that MMO's in general are better off without. They reduce the number of subscriptions the game has in an exponential fashion, whereas they can be a boon to a survival games population. It may get exploited, but in your example, I would suggest you were exploiting the war declaration system.
If you want the mobs so badly that you are unwilling to share, then yeah, take all the karma that other player is willing to bring your way. if you are not willing to take that karma hit, learn to cooperate and then you are both happy.
The problem in your example from BDO is simply that the game fails to induce cooperation between players, and provides players on both sides with ways to attempt to avoid the situation without cooperating. Most games avoid this by simply making the best mobs for grinding group based, so that cooperation is an essential part of the game, and it then becomes the first action, rather than an afterthought only years after the fact when someone on a forum points out that maybe you should have tried it.
The other major failing in BDO was the fact that those boring as all hell rotations were the pinnacle of PvE content. In a well designed game, you have layered difficulty and group size content. There would be solo, group and raid content for players of varying skill and ability. This meant that if you were working on solo mobs and someone came along and challenged your rotation, if you group up with them you then start killing that rotation faster for even more rewards, but if you then encroached on the rotation next to that one, you could group up with that player and then increase your rewards even more. But then the three of you could leave those waste of time solo mobs and go and take on small group content, getting even more rewards still - and freeing up that solo grind content for any other players that may come along.
So, in a well designed game, where players cooperate, those three of you that cooperated together get 4 or 5 times the reward by working together on harder content than you would get by soloing solo content, and you free up that solo content for other players.
I see no one here that loses.
This isn't possible in BDO because BDO is a half-game. It is the true definition of an MMO with no end game - not because that is what they want, but because they created the PvE content for players to level up on, and then just stopped making any more after that.
If it is possible for someone to come along behind you and loot chests, then you should turn to the Steven and ask him why he hired developers that got their game design degree from the back of a cereal box - as anyone that has put any thought in to game design would not develop a game in this manner.
Spoken like someone that has never participated in an end game raid.
Low end raids are like this, sure. But then low end raids are the PvE equivalent of 1v1 PvP. Both can be fun, if you are in to that sort of thing, but in the same way PvP centric players don't thrive on 1v1 PvP, raiders don't thrive on low end raid content.
High end raids though, they are more chaotic than the 200v200v50vRed Dragon evening that I was a part of in Archeage (all Archeage raids count as low end raids as far as I am concerned). There is more going on in an end game raid - from an individual players perspective - than there is in any PvP situation. They introduce variables that need to be accounted for on the fly - and in some encounters there can be dozens of these variables. This is an aspect of raiding I expect Ashes to excel in - as not only will raids at the high end have variables, but exactly what these variables may be themselves could change from play session to play session.
The reason a lot of raid guilds never make it to the top end of raiding is because they have a number of players in the guild that are capable of following directions, but incapable of thinking for themselves. Following directions gets you through easy raid content, but knowing what to do without being told is needed for end game raiding. You say you see those systems being taken advantage of, I say you have seen those systems put to use as intended.
If I kill someone in Ashes over some raw material nodes, I will expect that player to come right back to me and start harvesting them again. My expectation of the system is that I will need to kill that player - and gain corruption for each kill - for as long as I am harvesting those resources. It is not and will not be a one kill kind of situation, nor should it be. If I want to ruin that players time, I should face a very heavy penalty - and that player is the player that is in the best position to determine how heavy that penalty should be based on how many times they can be bothered coming back to me forcing me to kill them again and gain more corruption.
If you then add to that the fact that this accumulated corruption means I will then be a less effective fighter and drop more items upon death, I need to really consider right at the start of the encounter with this player if attacking them is really what I want to do, or if I should try and find some other means of resolving the situation.
This is how a well designed system should make a player think.
Seems a little overboard doesn't it?
But only on the condition that the developers of the games I play also ignore everyone else.
Well you don't pay to be listened to you pay to play it's that simple.
how so?
Clearly yes, for you are only one in a sea of people. This is not a democracy, it is a dictatorship. And i believe it to be a good dictatorship under a benelovend god.
**Fixed
Looks good to me