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
How did gear/loot distribution work with EQ2's pace of boss release? Or were they somewhat disconnected from the gear treadmill? Cause each L2 boss (at its lvl) was very valuable, due to it dropping full pieces of gear and a ton of mats for the same pieces. And when crafting a single piece could take days of mob farming - you sure as hell wanted to kill that boss and speed up the process. And when you have upwards of 400 (sometimes even more) members that all need gear, you reaaaally want to speed the process up.
People just need to figure out to synergize the abilities they've brought with the abilities of the rest of the group. And that should be fairly straight forward in a manner that does not require DPS Meters.
It's not about the deficiency of the chosen class.
And nothing in that quote indicates that "a lot of people" is restricted to MMORPG players who are not also MMORPG devs... which is what your paraphrase implies.
He only hires people who have worked on other MMORPGs and also enjoy playing MMORPGs, so... I dunno why he would be simply acting on the hearsay of rando players and ignoring the imput of his dev team.
Well, alright, I'm disappointed to hear the same thing considering that I don't like the outcome that FFXIV encounters, but I really do trust your 'inside knowledge' enough to give weight to your words in ambiguous situations especially.
As long as the people who don't want to be excluded and told it is because of something from a tracker are truly getting what they want, I have no route to complain.
Why would I want to always sit in town?
What do I need gear for, then? I want to raid.
Who cares about levels? I'm here for experiences, not for numbers.
Trackers exist to help me do what I enjoy. I'm here to play.
You couldn't just farm mobs for gear, as itemization was based primarily on mob difficulty. Aa difficult mob could drop good gear, a dead easy mob would drop vendor trash (or coin). Even if you killed 10,000 dead easy mob, the best you could hope for was 10,000 pieces of vendor trash.
This does go hand in hand with the fairly constant addition of new content.
If you are not adding content at a fairly good pace, you obviously want your players to have to run the same content for years on end. If you are going to give them something new, it's fine if they are essentially done with a piece of content in 3 months.
You couldn't really have a game where there is a need to farm the same encounters for years on end, but also add new encounters at an EQ2 speed. On the other hand, you couldn't have EQ2 speed of gear acquisition while having L2 pace of new content additions.
Add ons are not allowed. Add ons are very easy to detect and prevent.
Trackers like ACT are not add ons.
Maybe they are too scared to tell him that 90% of those on his team disagree with something he has already run his mouth on.
All I know is, I have yet to see an experienced MMO developer or CS worker that is against allowing players to use trackers.
Yeah, by "very hard mobs" I essentially mean bosses.
If it wasnt a boss, it wasnt dropping anything you would want to equip.
This applies to all levels of the game, not just raiding. Those people running group content would get their gear primarily from group bosses (maybe a little crafted or quested gear). Those that were mostly solo got their loot mostly from crafters, quests or the broker, with the occasional piece from a solo boss.
However, the best geared group only character would find upgrades to their gear on the easiest raid encounters, and solo players would find upgrades at the start of group progression.
In terms of spawn timers, solo bosses would be an hour, group would be 1 to 4 hours, and raid would be 5 days+ (some raid bosses literally never spawned on some servers).
In terms of difficulty, solo bosses basically just required tou to know your class. Grouo bosses ranged from "I'll just solo it" up to "this is actually a group boss designed for raiders on their day off", and raid bosses were mostly only worth attempting by actual raid guilds that were clearing current content.
However, there were also instances. Solo and group instances could usually be done once a day, and most raid instances were once a week.
Suddenly he thinks he is speaking for his development team and knows what they are thinking, tell me trackers are not toxic again lmao.
It's no secret that I am friends with a small number of developers at Intrepid.
The 90% was being generous. Those people at Intrepid that I know can not name any one person (other than Steven) that is actually against trackers.
You've now reminded me of partially why FFXI does not have the same itemization concept as much.
Top level bosses drop certain gear items, but the alternate way of getting them is through an instance. Whenever you kill any mob that gives exp (up to 10 levels below you at most levels, a bit more as you go higher), you get a chance for a 'Seal' to drop. That seal cannot be traded to other players. Trade some number of these 'Seals' to an NPC for an Orb to enter an instanced battlefield. Win that battlefield and get SOMETHING, always something, but certain things had 10% odds of dropping on average.
A lot of it was gear for people playing around with specialized builds, stuff you might use or give to a friend who happened to care (or for running the same sort of level-capped content), and at the higher levels of them (takes more Seals to unlock), you get chances at good items for top level crafting to make the better gear in the game.
So TECHNICALLY you could get a group together and blitz through 30 of these in a day if you saved up enough seals... but normally for my group at least they're just 'alright time for a break from regular play let's go do something interesting like die to an enemy Beastman group', if we win we make some money, if we lose we got a fight. But we had control of the when and in some ways the 'how-many', just it was balanced against the 'how-often'.
The thing is, though, because it was 'slower', a lot of people never fought these at all, and to 'have them figured out' took... well, the above. This system is entirely separate from the 3-day respawns and 1-week respawns of High Notorious Monsters (basically Raid Level at the time), but you could, with enough high level Seals, fight an instanced equivalent with similar drops with 18 people.
So while they didn't release new versions of these often, you'd get them in bulk, and over the next few weeks people would trickle out information on each one, as different people used up their 'Seals' to try the fights.
tl;dr fighting enough normal enemies opened up Instanced enemies that you could put on your own schedule, but they have a time limit and you get nothing if you lose.
And every 6 months you'd get a few new world bosses and one epic boss
This pace fit the gear progress though. Or maybe it's the other way around. Either way it seemed good to slowly progress through gear tiers and each new upgrade felt substantial and rewarding. EQ2 seems to have operated on not only high boss pace, but gear too, if all the new harder bosses provided the new better gear to farm said bosses.
However, it was fairly normal for each boss to only drop one or two items that any given class would want. In some cases, a boss may have no drops at all that you would want.
This did slow down gear progression to a reasonable pace. You could generally expect to get an upgrade to most items once every 6 months or so.
With 21 slots, upgrading most slots every 6 months meant close to an item a week.
L2 had a several bosses that could only be raided say once every month. There was certain jewelry that dropped from certain bosses that were incredibly powerful compared to regular gear..border line OP But if there was only a chance the item dropped from a once-a-month raid. So, some pvp clans kept for themselves but when they equipped all their clan then they did either private sales to friendly clans or put future drops on the open market.
So, for those that had generated sufficient wealth, they did not need to raid, just buy.. but to have that kind of wealth, was really limited to the 1% of players, possibly less.
So much discussion about the 1% raiders, not much about the 1% pvp`ers or the 1% wealth builders, 1% charismic players that run a server
For those clans that were not strong enough to pvp to gain the content, only route left was wealth
We all seek different enjoyment from MMO`s.
To me, raids are fun occasionally but bore the hell outa me if done frequently. It`s repetition.
I would much rather make some money from AFK sales so that I can buy gear on open market rather than raid it.
Much rather experience from PvP than PvE.
No idea if that is achievable in this game
Mind you, probably getting a bit long in the tooth, and probably have to limit fights to other old grumpy men!
10-12 kills of a mob and that is enough, imo. If a game is asking you for $15 a month and is also asking you to kill the same encounters for years on end, I would be complaining.
ESO - trails ok, but if no clan members, PUGs were often very toxic
BDO - just numbers game in the few I did
New World - expeditions - ok once or twice then ordinary.
Baium’s raid hard raid but to kill a hardcore boss, players need to have the best game equipment and come together in an army of 100–200 players.
Antharas was necessary to gather all the alliance members (more than 200–300) to kill this raid boss,
Valakas, The Fire Dragon - One of the main difficulties of killing this raid boss (which is common for Lineage 2) was to win a massive battle between players to attack the dragon. All the strong clans and alliances wanted to get the raid boss epic jewelry. Such battles could last for several hours. Only after that, the winning side killed the dragon in about an hour, if their mages had enough power damage and mana pool. Many veterans of the game remember this beast. A maximum of 200 players can enter the lair at once, and had to be the right combo. And maybe only one ring dropped!
For each group that won the pvp to get to the boss, there was often a similar sized group that failed.
How does that compare to other MMO raids?
Sounds similar to Archeage raids, other than the cage aspect. Many players fighting each other, until either all but one group leave out of boredom/frustration, or until more people focus on killing the dragon than each other. With Archeage specifically though, if you manage to get to it with no opposition, less than 20 people could kill 2 out of the three boss encounters that were there while I played in less than 20 minutes.
In terms of the part where players miss out - that is also very similar to open world encounters in EQ2. If the encounter was open world (as opposed to instanced), it would be fairly normal to see four or five guilds attempting to kill it. Since you could only have one raid actually engage an encounter at a time in that game, and since there was no PvP, it was a straight up PvE competition. First guild to get the kill, well, gets the kill. All the rest that are assembled simply miss out.
However, the encounters them self were challenging to the point where some encounters remained undefeated for their content cycle (some were removed at the end of the cycle, meaning some remained undefeated), and literally none of these encounters were ever killed on a PvP enabled server, as a single character of any class would be able to prevent an entire guild from killing the encounter.
To me, the thing with both L2 and Archeage raids (Archeage by experience, L2 based on comments made on these forums) was more about having numbers than having skill or ability - and those numbers were more about dealing with the PvP than the actual mob.
At least to me, in my time in Archeage, the top end encounters (Red Dragon, Kraken and Leviathan while I played) were PvP events, not PvE.
Such encounters are something I expect to see in Ashes - but if that is all we get, then the game fails at being anything more than L4.
(I am new so i may not understand thing properly concerning this game but i still have more than 20 years of MMO experience, yes i am an old fart sorry about that xd)
1/ a dps meter and a tracker is a tool to check your performance. It's not a bad thing in itself, the problem occurs when it's used the wrong way. (exemple: dynamite as a tool was invented to help in mining work, but later used as weapon )
2/ who use dps meter and tracker ? usually people who want to optimize their dps output so mostly hardcore and semi hardcore population of the game ... That means a rare minority of the player base.
So u may say it's elitist in some way. But so what? just check the guild recruitment section, there's elistism already with Hardcore guid et Casual guild so that wont change much. The problem occurs when u mixe those 2 types of player base with different view of game play in a dungeon.
But it seems like the PvE instance content will not be challenging at all, so i dont see a need for a dps meter or a tracker for that type of content. Even as an ACT and theory crafter addict i dont check my dps when i try to run a T0 dungeon in WoW as i tend to optimize my time as well.
The only challenging part should be Wolrd Boss, the challenge should the PvP part of controling the boss.
So a Zerg War, and the bigger zerg usually win (and yes tactic and strategy are involved... blabla... optimized raid that can crush zerg, let's skip that part)
If by chance the situation reach a somewhat equilibrium or a long fight at some point you may try to weaponize Green Taged Player to turn your oppoment Red and gain an adventage in the attrition war ... Beeing a "green" player running arround or mostly used as a collision block in a cluster et chain dying may be fun a few time knowing the mayhem you caused, but in the long run it will be boring to death.... Most pvp player wont agree to do such a boring thing, and pve player as well for obvious reason. ( Need confimation: are Wold Boss Zone a Battlerground ?)
So one of the option should a dedicated green PvE raid for the boss ... and the more efficient they are the more weaponized they became. Then a tracker may be useful for that group ...
-> Just focus on the tank and healer and job is done, so that whole mess of a boss fight may turn into protectiong those key green player, and then that damn tracker may still be usefull ...
So, do you need to carter for those players? They are the minory of minory .. but at the same time they may become a key strategic element for 1000 of players who fight for the world boss ...
Solution ? A very restrictive use of tracker, a hard ceiling that need lot of effort, but still doable for a dedicated guild that want to put the effort.
exemple: A guild only raid tracker unlocked at certain guild lvl or whatever requierment only usable by an select few officers, let them have it if they want to. If they cant use it elsewhere who cares ? If you are in a guild that tyranize you with such a tool just leave and join a guild who doesnt.
As for dps meter, just put a scarecrow dps meter in a training ground building, that will put the mayor in a tough spot trying to sell the idea ,can be even funnier in a democratic vote mayor system xd
My issue is if that is the only raiding on offer.
If it is the only raiding on offer, there isn't enough variety in said raids.
As I said, I fully expect to see exactly that type of encounter in Ashes. I have also said in the past that this is where I expect the best gear in the game to come from.
However, there still needs to be content that is more on the PvE side. I mean, how can Ashes claim to be a PvX game if it's PvE content is no better than what amounts to essentially a pure PvP game like L2 or Archeage?