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
Cool, to you, clearing top end PvE content isn't playing an MMO. Great, so what? To others it is. This is especially true in a game where PvE is the focus - obviously.
Step one to picking an MMO that you want to play for a decade or more with a healthy population - start with a game that has solid PvE.
While there are exceptions, if you chart PvE and PvP games next to each other, PvE games clearly (VERY clearly) have a longer life than PvP games. Not only that, but they have a larger player base in the time they are active.
This is why I have been saying for YEARS now that Ashes needs solid PvE at it's core, and leaving PvP to be an agent of change to that PvE.
If PvP is at the fore in Ashes, it will either close or go free to play within 4 years.
This is a very "PvP" reply here. It shows that you think any one piece of content could be relevant for years.
No one piece of content should be relevant for more than maybe 4 or 5 months. The game, or at least the games current development team, are absolute shit if they let this happen. Hell, I can name a dozen encounters that were only relevant for 2 hours - killed once, never looked at again.
It also doesn't matter how long you have been playing the game, a new encounter is still new - you have no idea at all what to expect.
The problem is that its been drilled into a lot of mmorpgs players that raiding is the only real endgame content for pve and that is whats killing the mmorpg genre coupled with the sp player mentality that leads to that same endgame rush, mods while good and bad are just adding fuel to the 'rush to endgame meta' at the moment.
This in itself screams lack of content long term. Unless each expansion sees a new 1%er instance come out, but, then, the level of the gear would be enhanced and the rest will no longer be 1%ers. Such is the bane of PvE expansions. Its why Method can run naked dungeons or tank only dungeons. Its why I've been able to solo some dungeons and why i continue to try to solo some dungeons.
At a certain point, there is little value to keep repeating the same content without major adaptations like soloing or duoing or running the dungeons naked. Its because, the top 1%er dungeons are trivial once the tactics are learnt. Some do keep the tactics hidden for years. I commend those guilds. Whilst, others leak the tactics and more people can complete the 1% dungeons. On top of that, WoW had to introduce Raid Finder and Group Finder modes which again trivialised the content.
From my perspective the genre is too narrow for PvP and too wide for PvE. I see many holes in the plans for Ashes of Creation. I see many flaws in the plans for Ashes of Creation. I also suspect that the longevity of the world will not be as long as some people suspect. The reason being, all the pvp expansions that could have happened have already been unlocked through the kickstarter goals. Which means, there literally is very little PvP content that can be expanded on expansion after expansion.
This is exactly it, he is trying to open the gate for everything else that is his purpose lol.
The reason games like WoW can't keep pace is because they want a unique model for every raid encounter. EQ2 is not at all concerned with upscaling some existing models to use as raid bosses - though the games bigger bosses are all unique models. They also reuse some world building assets at times.
Cutting out this need more than halves the total time needed to create raid content. For an audience that is all about the experience rather than the visuals, this works great.
The other thing WoW did is rely too heavily on scripts. Creating the occasional encounter that just lets chaos reign saves a whole lot of time.
If Blizzard took the above two concepts in hand, they could pump out a new encounter every week on top of what they are already doing - easily.
This - I agree with.
I only see one way for Ashes to survive long term.
PvP players do not need new maps or anything if they have a constant supply of rivals. Since there is no new PvP content to add to Ashes, maintaining that constant supply of rivals is literally the only hope Ashes PvP has to survive long term.
The only group of players that could supply PvP players with this constant stream of rivals are PvE players - specifically mid to top end players.
In order to get them interested in the game, the PvE needs to be better than the PvE in WoW or FFXIV (not easy, but Intrepid have staff that have accomplished this in the past).
That is it. That is the only long term hope I can see for Ashes; get PvE players to play the game, and enjoy the PvE so much that they are not at all bothered by the PvP that will happen - and may even come to enjoy it. This in turn will keep PvP players occupied for as long as is possible.
This means - as I have been saying for years - that Ashes long term survivability relies almost entirely on the quality of it's PvE content.
You're right. Creating content for tab target is not the same as for action combat.
Tab target actually takes longer to create for. Once a model and it's animations are created in an action combat game, most of the work is done. Keep in mind, most of an action combat game is the combat system, not the content. Most of a tab target game is the content, not the combat system.
Being hybrid will absolutely cause content creation to initially be slower in Ashes than in other games, but that shouldn't take them too long to work out.
LOL no, tab work or even more so EQ WORK is much easier to do you have less aspects to consider.
You have 3 steps for that kind of content, where as a game like AOC has 6.
You literarily don't understand games if you think EQ is more difficult to develop. Even more action mmorpgs can have more depth than a tab depending on how they design content difficulty.
Tell me you don't understand game development without telling me you don't understand game development.
Except it is.
Please stop lying and trying to mislead.
He is just so out of place on things as well as not a pvpers. He thinks the only new thing you need in pvp are players....Like these takes are so bad I'm sorry.
BDO had a issue for years being a pvp game but having no modes that support pvp that were fun for years and years and year, simply only relying on new players and no content.
Is imagination only comes into play when its what he wants,, else he has 0 thought or care for anything else as far as I see.
I hope that at this point, given the niche nature of this topic, we can ignore Mag to discuss it properly.
A lot of this depends way too much on the quality of game experience offered by games recently. But I don't think it is ALL nostalgia, it's staying power.
We remember the games that survive long enough to be remembered. This is a common thing in all genres. Less people remember the 20 bad ones, particularly the buggy ones. They look at what succeeded, at 'what most people experienced one way or another', and discuss those.
The MMO industry is in the almost-unique position where the better an MMO is, the less 'people' play it, probably because MMOs started to pull in gamers that don't actually like MMOs, and then tried to keep them.
That is funny.
yups that is basically what the genre has devolved into - it does make me wonder how well aoc will do because of this mentality - but one thing i am certain is that this genres 'Sp mentality' has already begun to fatigue people either out of the genre or to become rabid for a new game.
And in case you were just saying this as a new topic starter, yes, I agree that mmos have fucked themselves over by trying to appeal to the broadest audience. And the more they tried to do that, the faster the snowball rolled down the mountain, and now we have morpg that are barely even "m" at this point because the people that the patryfinder gives you don't even talk. But because people now see mmos in this light, any "true mmo" just dies immediately because the truest target audience have gone the way of the dodo.
One of the things most important here is a thread common to both PvP games that are fun and PvE games that are considered fun (let's exclude people who don't like challenge AND ALSO don't bother to understand mechanics from the 'fun' aspect, mainly because we already know that Ashes is supposed to be challenging, and there's some implication that you will need to understand actual mechanics).
Just doing the content has to be fun, somehow. Not just socially fun, and not just 'Woo I got a reward' fun. Complexity and randomness of a certain type (This Or That) is reaction-based fun for most players who enjoy challenge, and adds depth for players who want to understand mechanics.
Idk about PvE players in general but as you know, Noaani and I both react positively to 'this boss is doing random-ish things, the combination of particular random things it can do is itself an emergent challenge'.
The tracker 'measures how well you adapted to the randomness'. Why is this important? Because the 'am I having fun' part is sometimes not decided by if you win or lose the encounter or even how quickly you downed it. It is a way to measure your own goals or synchronization, in retrospect, quickly.
In a weird way, I don't see how, in a good enough game, people who want a Combat Tracker for any OTHER REASON make sense. Toxicity 'doesn't make sense' in the realm of trackers. I can absolutely believe that 'at the high end of EQ2, Noaani never encountered Tracker-based toxicity', because EQ2 top-end would probably have been raiding for fun somewhat moreso than for reward.
An example is the ZNM system in FFXI which I remember celebrating the most 'getting the item from the first tier boss to unlock the second tier boss', yet at the moment I cannot remember a single reward for any of them.
I would go over combat logs to see why we lost. I would go over them to see 'why did we win extra hard today, did we do something cool that we can learn from for others?'
I would go over logs to see why I had too MUCH MP and what we did that made it so I did not need to heal as much.
I don't remember or know the DPS of any of my teammates because FFXI DPS is complex and 'shared' anyway (Skillchains) so all I really care about is 'did my DPS time a damage burst correctly' and not necessarily 'how big was it'?
That's therefore another point on the pile. I don't so much MIND if the game somehow explicitly blocks tracking (no Combat Log for example) but the association of these tools with toxicity when in certain designs they are explicitly 'fun multipliers' is the issue I have here. When I think "I'll just write a parser" it is so I can have more fun, the fight is the reward.
If one doesn't understand this, once again, Monster Hunter. I don't think most of the 'people who play that game a lot' play it for any 'reward'. You play it because Fighting Giant Monsters In Crazy Terrain Is Fun. The 'Meter' users in that game are usually playing in the 'Time Attack' mode and raising their DPS to compete with each other for that type of fun (in contrast to the other, because the more damage you do, the less the monster gets to fight back, the more it 'stops feeling like an opponent')
If Ashes drove away every player who didn't think PvE was fun for just the sake of it, and every player who didn't think PvP was 'fun for the sake of it', it would probably be a better MMO. But if it did that, and then made the game a specific type of competitive race (PvP in most designs is inherently this) even those people will stop, I think.
Yeah sorry, see above for how this relates to Trackers.
EDIT: I don't think they have. I think they're mostly 'playing old games', 'waiting for things similar to those old games', 'playing through FFXIV expansions when they come out', and 'playing old games on private servers'.
Like an army waiting for the Call Of The Sandal Lord to rise again and return to the True World, to experience the 'Verracity' of a social breathing world again, as their worlds have lost their magic.
Sorry, waxed poetic too much there.
And I agree with the previous post that Ashes has to have each of its components be fun, first and foremost. And if the game is fun, both sides of the pvx spectrum could somewhat ignore any features they dislike from the other side, mainly because their own side is super fun. Hope it works out that way. And on that hopeful note I'm going to sleep, cause I had to reread that big post several times to properly understand it
You just described the fall of wildstar
People will complain about features or lack of, but if the game is good people will play it. I don't think this is related to any certain group of mmorpg players, it is the whole of the genre wanting something new that is good and fun my guild included.
You can already see that every time a new big mmorpg comes out it had concurrent 1m players until they find out the game is meh and leave over time. That is a pretty massive number, now if the game is good it can retrain them and potentially grow higher over time as WoW did in its golden days. I believe this mmorpg has the last chance of the before companies ruin it all together with P2W and AoC will confirm it to them depending how successful it becomes.
I only did basic analysis on the fall of Wildstar, but I encountered three 'critical fail points' pretty early in so I just assumed the rest of the design was at approximately that quality. They had good ideas but felt like lacking cohesion that was required for sustainability.
I often worry that Ashes is the same, and I see a DIFFERENT three 'critical fail points' in Ashes, but they might still be changed, and they have already been talked to death in threads (I guess the glaring ones are easy to see and the others aren't visible yet if they exist).
It can obviously be my bias, but Combat Trackers are not one of them. Combat Trackers are a 'potential issue' that can create a failpoint if a different part of the design is bad, but we don't have any information on that other than promises, and the promises are the entire basis of this thread.
All Ashes has to do to make ME personally ignore this entire 'debate' is say 'We don't plan to have challenging PvE-heavy content, we expect the challenge for bringing down bosses to be PvP with bosses being incidental, and if you can get the boss to yourself you will almost always be able to win'.
That will make me just go 'sure, fine, don't need the Tracker, I'll worry about just PvP balance/Frame Data'. I'd still expect the game to die or be very niche (considering its systems) for the other reason, but I'd expect to play my entire 11 (?) months sub from launch before the majority of people moved on and the cracks in the systems started showing up without them.
I believe Noaani has said this before, probably multiple times. If Trackers are causing toxicity in your game in a serious way, your game is designed wrong.
Trackers lead to more toxicity and give people "proof" in what they want to believe regardless if they aren't understanding the whole picture. Or people that will simply use it to remove people cause they can.
Quote from one of them.
Hmmm. Well put that way, I guess I'd say make it accessible to everyone. It'd be nice to go back to the days of no trackers, but I don't think we can really, as you already put, people will find a way. So I guess the player base will need to evolve with them. Not a bad thing, I like meters, but it would be nice to go away from them if it was possible.
Game design is absolutely key to how a combat tracker will be used.
If there are no difficult PvE encounters in the game, trackers won't be used to work them out.
If there is only one viable build per class, trackers won't be used to evaluate other builds.
If the games skill ceiling is low, trackers won't be used to help players improve.
If the game allows for quick replacement of players mid content, people have an incentive to boot others mid content.
As it just so happens, the aspects above that are considered good game design (challenging content, many viable builds, high skill ceiling) all benefit from tracker use. The aspects that are generally considered bad game design (LFG/LFR type systems) will see trackers used in a negative way.
To me, based on the above, any game developer that is saying "we don't want a tracker in our game" starts ringing bells.
The obvious question to then ask that developer is; why not? What aspects of your games design are you worried about them in?
Are you planning on not having challenging PvE content, only having one viable build per class, having a low skill ceiling, or perhaps you plan on having a means to teleport players directly to a group mid content (such as the family summons).