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Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest news on Alpha Two.
Check out general Announcements here to see the latest news on Ashes of Creation & Intrepid Studios.
To get the quickest updates regarding Alpha Two, connect your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Comments
First, this is instanced. Even if not technically instanced, it is functionally instanced. It just isn't instanced for a single raid.
Second, as an encounter, this is fine. However, a raid game that wants to attract raid players needs no less than 20 raid encounters that are current content - if it has a large number of open world encounters, you realistically want 50+. This kind of thing wouldn't be suitable for all of them, as variation is key.
This is why things like your idea should be mixed with large scale open dungeons with many bosses, open world bosses, and even a few instanced encounters thrown in.
This is a combat assistant, not a combat tracker.
A combat tracker only tells you what has already happened, not what will happen, nor what you need to do.
A combat tracker has as much use defensively as offensively.
It is, admittedly, a more advanced use for a combat tracker (most are initially set up just for DPS), but it is absolutely something they are made to also do.
Why not both?
The great thing about a tab target game is that the difficulty of an encounter is literally limited to that encounter. A hybrid game that is leaning more to tab than action (which seems to be what Ashes will be) has this same advantage.
This means the only people that need to consider the precision needed for top end encounters are the subset of players that are killing those encounters.
Keep in mind, it is Intrepids own goal that this is less than 10% of players. It is not something 90% of players need to even consider.
I agree that PvX is the way forward (at least for this game). However, PvX does not mean it has to always be PvP and PvE together - this is an argument against an arena as much as it is against raids.
What PvX means is that the game is both. Sometimes it is equal amounts of both, sometimes it is more of one or the other.
if the game fails to inform you why you died or why you failed the boss fight then people will inevitably use trackers to get that information
this is especially important since we don't really know how extensive combat log is going to be and what information you can filter in there, because if combat log is actually well implemented then there is basically no need for 3rd party tracker since all information can be filtered through ingame means
Any attempt to obfuscate objective information to "promote" nontoxic player interaction is hurting players on a fundamental level
yes with blindly trying builds without doing the math behind them can get you a decently strong build, but if you do the math and theorycraft behind it then you can get way stronger build that wasn't outright obvious
being a better player consists of many things and one of those is to work with facts - you can be a decent player without using any facts whatsoever, but nobody can deny that if you try to use facts that you wouldn't be a better player than you are now
― Plato
This is the point I Was working towards a few posts above.
And in that case, it was a player that said they were helping others. So in their case, it isn't just a case of that one person getting better by using objective data, it is a case of everyone around them getting better if they use objective data.
To me, this seems like a no-brainer.
a good analogy to those players is like making a casual race with your friends and giving them a 10 second headstart and still beating them to the finish line
For them (and I believe @NiKr is that type of player) beating anyone without objective analysis and only with what they came up with for what "seemed" good to them has more value than if they would properly theorycraft their build with facts, numbers and spreadsheets
― Plato
For sure, this type of player exists - and that;s great and such.
However, if a player wants to give them self this added dimension of gameplay where they try and beat others that have better objective data, surely that requires other players having access to that data. Such a player would then want trackers in the game as much as I do - as their presence allows them this additional gameplay challenge.
TO me, someone wanting this kind of challenge in a game where trackers don't exist would be like a casual race with your friends where you give them that head start, only you don't give them that head start.
― Plato
But that literally is saying they want to give their friend a 10 second head start, and then not giving their friend a 10 second head start.
That person is a dick, and I think we all know it.
I'm all for including people that want to give themselves an extra challenge. Great. Good for them. However, the kind of people that would fit in to the above are the kind of people any community is better off without.
While we have indeed had people in the past like that, I don't personally think any of the more recent posters in this thread fit that description.
We also shouldn't need to have combat trackers to defeat content.
Needing either of those indicates extremely poor game design.
Some playstyles might WANT those things. Sure.
As such, you have no need to either do that math, nor use a combat tracker.
This wasn't the normal L2 experience, so I guess, in a way, I was playing with a form of addon/tracker, but they were just built into the game itself. And I used all that info to make my calculations when I needed that.
I'd be fine if Ashes showed this kind of info in the game and had smth like a dps dummy in nodes just for people to train their rotations. To me it's just a "whatever the Admin/Dev decide - I'll go with it". As I stated above, I had L2 servers where I had a ton of info on stuff and I also had servers where none of it was present. In either case I just played the game and enjoyed it for what it was. And that's why I said that if Intrepid does have/allow trackers - I'd be fine with it, even if I wouldn't use them myself (though if they just had a good battle log, then I guess I would be using it
I prefer to play the game my own way and then find people who are ok with me playing like that. I'm not trying to push my own beliefs on others, but, exactly because of that, I don't like when others push their beliefs onto me, which has often been the case with addon/tracker/3rd party tools suggestions on reddit/forums in the past 2 years (not necessarily saying you're doing it here rn). And that pushing might've made me a bit more defensive on this topic.
And one more thing on the topic of PvX, how long were the raids in EQ(2)? And if short then could you run multiples of them in the same day? I know that wow/ff14 players usually run their dungeons for hours, but from what I understand it's just you repeating the exact same motions until you succeed at doing them in a very precise manner.
But in L2's "raiding" you'd usually spend from 1 to 12 hours pvping your enemies and then fight the boss for another 1-2h (longer on epic dragons), depending on your party composition. And because of the difference in pvp and pve combat, you wouldn't be repeating the same actions all that time, so by the time you'd get to fight the boss your brain would already be fried, so easier pve on said boss was justified.
And I find it hard to imagine how that kind of interaction would fit a super complex boss fight after a few grueling hours of pvp for that boss. I hope Intrepid gives us a few of their "1% beatable" bosses in the alpha2 and let us pvp for it, just as we would on release.
Now obviously some guilds would probably just have 2 separate groups of players for those kinds of raids, but we'll have to test how Intrepid's anti-zerg mechanics work out in that kind of setup.
In terms of length, anywhere from 5 minutes to 15 hours.
In some cases, you would zone in to a raid zone, have the only mob right in front of you, kill it and leave. Traveling for these took longer than killing them.
In other cases, you would zone in to an raid zone, knowing full well you weren't clearing it that day, and would spend three or four nights of the week working on that one zone.
Note that all of the above times are for if you already knew the encounters. In some cases, it takes months to get to that point.
Or there were the open world raid bosses, which on the PvP servers were literally never killed, because if you have an actual difficult raid encounter, it is simply not possible to kill if there is also PvP happening at the same time. People spent weeks on them, and failed. A single opposing player getting to you would easily be able to stop you from killing it.
EQ2 is the only game I know of that had truly hard PvE encounters designed for a setting where PvP is straight up not possible put in to a setting where open PvP was enabled. The results of that (literally zero kills, yet the servers were often in the top few to kill instanced raid content) speaks volumes for any raid content in a PvP setting.
The super obvious solution that I see is the L2's one. You have a semi-instance that has a door that only opens for some limited time once the boss has respawned. While the door is open, anyone can enter the boss room. Usually the doors would close once the boss "wakes up or is awaken by someone". Once the doors close, no one else can enter unless the boss is killed or everyone inside is dead. This type of system allowed to have pvp around the boss right up until his full farm and sometimes even after that, because the farming party might've wiped and you'd repeat the "pvp around the door, then inside, then boss farm" cycle again (the doors would close for a bit after the wipe).
But even if they decide to go with this mechanic, I can't even imagine how taxing it'll be to farm a top lvl "1% boss". You pvp for hours at the peak of your abilities and then you have to perfectly fight the boss at, potentially, even higher player ability. And if you fail, you repeat these actions all over again.
And even if you go with separate groups of people for pve and pvp, all that your enemies have to do is to PK your pve healers and pretty much stop you from farming the boss at that particular cycle (that is if there's no other ways to revive a player outside of a healer archetype).
They are designed to be taken on while there is the possibility of PvP, and indeed in many of them (all that I have ever seen, but I am not willing to say all), the encounters themselves are dead easy without that PvP (I have talked about the Red Dragon in Archeage a number of times in this regard),
Again, this idea works as an encounter, but it will not work for all encounters. Not if you plan on having a raiding scene in the game.
There are two groups of people I can see this working on - those that have nostalgia for exactly this kind of thing, and t hose that do not know any better content. Indeed, it may even work as all raiding content if you only want raiding content to be a PvP aspect of the game, and aren't at all interested in having a raiding scene at all.
However, if Intrepid take this kind of thing, but also have world bosses that are just out in the open where players are not subject to corruption at all, have some encounters that are force spawned by players, and corruption is absolutely a thing, have some encounters that are in massive open dungeons where multiple raids can happen upon each other (diplomacy would rule the day here), and also some outright instanced encounters that both allow the developers to create true raid encounters (as you would imagine I would define them), then the game has that potential to have that raiding scene.
A thing to keep in mind with instanced content - it is designed as much as anything to ensure a game has enough content for all players. Open world content can only achieve this if the majority of that content is other players.
Do some basic math here. 50,000 active accounts per server, with up to 10% of them able to kill the hardest encounters. I'm going to be generous and say only 5% are able to kill top end raid content, which would mean anywhere from 10 - 25% are trying.
Lets work on 10%, to be generous. This means there are 5,000 players attempting raid content. If we assume 50 people per raid guild (that is more than I would have), that means 100 guilds are attempting this content.
With open world content, in my experience of it, there are 2 or 3 guilds at the most on any given server that have any real shot at it.
Thus, 97 of those 100 raid guilds would have no chance at all of taking on open world raid content successfully. Keep in mind, these are players that have played anywhere from 2 to 24 other MMO's. They know what is and is not possible.
Imagine you are Steven. What content do you give them to keep them playing this game rather than some other game?
It all comes down to whether you want a raiding scene along with your PvP scene, or if you want raiding to be sub-servant to PvP. Once you make that call, the answer to the above question becomes fairly obvious - but that call does need to be made first. L2 had all PvE content sub-servant to PvP, but I personally do not see Intrepid heading that way with Ashes.
This notion has me a little concerned.
Traditionally, a game doesn't get it's best PvE content until the game has been live from 2 to 3 years. Developers don't know what is and is not possible, and players haven't fully understood the combat system to the depths that we will at that stage (yes, even using combat trackers).
Making a call on how well PvE will work years before either the players or the developers have hit their stride seems to me like a recipe for total failure.
Steven has made a ton of promises and claims, but, unless at least the base idea of those promises works on a small scale, none of them would matter if the game can't survive for a few years, to let players and devs figure out best PvE.
The main things I'll be looking at during the testing are their anti-zerg mechanics, their boss combat mechanics and the overall system of open world bosses. If the first one is great then I'll have more belief in the overall premise of their ow bosses. If the second one is good, I'll believe in their ability to develop good instanced bosses (though opinions of people like you would obviously be more important at that point). And if the third one has a few variables, I'll believe that they can make more good bosses in the future w/o running into content walls.
The first of these absolutely can be tested in alpha, and is without a doubt important.
The second one though, these are things I expect to evolve over time. I don't expect them to be good by the time the game launches, let alone in alpha.
As to preventing content walls, this kind of depends on how you define a content wall. To me, this is more a matter pertaining to itemization than to content, and in that regard is basically impossible to prevent in a primarily open world setting - regardless of PvP.
Due to the variation in content that is possible in tab target games, I have never come across this issue. After several hundred encounters in EQ2, I can't think of any that are so similar that players would get tired of them.
I'm not sure what it is you are saying here.
To my knowledge, Intrepid have never said they are trying to make the best PvP game. They have, however, said they are trying to make the best PvX game.
To me, they can't make the best PvX game if they fail at either PvP or PvE.
It's true they can fuck anything up.
However, keep in mind that even after a number of people left, there is still a large number of ex-EQ2 staff working at Intrepid.
In fact, based on what I can see, there are more ex-EQ2 developers there than there are developers that have worked on any primarily PvP game.
They have the ability to get PvE right more than they have the ability to get PvP right - it is just a matter of where they direct their efforts.
I definitely shouldn't need to install a third party add-on to play. I dislike being told that I need a bunch of add-ons to participate in raids. It was nice to read in the wiki that Steven is against such things.
The easy way around this is to not show the meter during combat - have it as a UI element that players can pull up after the fact if they wish, to go over the days (or weeks, or months) content. If they added in my suggestion from about 80 pages back, this could just be a tab in the guild window.
This is a point I have been trying to get across to many PvP focused players over the years.
In order for Ashes to have the best PvP game it can have, it needs to have the best PvE it can have. This gives PvP players both more people to PvP with, and in the context of Ashes, more and better loot to fight over.
The thing some people don't get is that in order for this to work, that PvE content needs aspects that in isolation may seem anti-PvP.
An example of this is instanced content. You can't PvP people in an instance, therefore the point of instances must be to prevent PvP.
The thing is, that isn't the point. The point of instanced content is so that everyone has some content. No one wants to stay in a game, attempting to raid, if all the content is open world and other guilds are killing it all. Instanced content keeps the people that are missing out on open world bosses interested in the game - meaning they are more targets for PvP players than if they were playing a different game. It also allows that guild to remain somewhat competitive with the guild that IS killing that open world content, even if they are still a bit behind.
This keeps players in the game, it keeps opportunities for PvP live, it adds more gear that PvP'ers will want to fight over. It is an all round good thing for PvP'ers - yet literally all of them turn their nose up at the prospect of the game having some instanced raid content.
All they seem to think about is how they want to interrupt the raid during a fight, they are more interested in that one fun time (and it will only happen once) than in the game being healthy and long lived.
It's more about the economy and the difference in risk.
Only one group can get the resources from an open world spawn. With instances, all groups get rewarded. This destroys the friction created by limited resources.
There is also less risk. Since you have less of a risk of death in an instance, there is less reason to farm anything in the open word which also destroys any reason to fight over anything in the open world.
Instances have their place but their rewards can't overshadow the rewards from the world or it throws off the risk/reward balance and incentive to care about the world.
As i side note, i like how you say we "turn our nose up" at instanced content like we don't raid in other games. How dare we want something different.
Hell, have a difficult solo instance that rewards you the item that you then need to use in order to enter the boss room. I'd assume all the PvErs would at least enjoy the extra content. And all the "true pro top lvl" PvXers can really prove their skill by being good at both pve and pvp.
You'd still have pvp around the bosses against other guilds that are trying to kill it, but the pve content itself could be completely separated from pvp. Though I guess the pve parts of those guilds would probably just stand around w/o flagging up, so that kinda kills the whole idea. You could maaaybe add some "the door requires both blood and *the item*"-type thing, so that you'd have to fight in that location and then you'd be able to use the pve-acquired items to enter the boss instance.
Either way, I think there's ways that can combine both sides to truly make the game pvx. Having instances give you good gear would usually just lead to people grinding those instances until you get all the gear you can get out of them. And if the only way to get BiS, after that, is only through open world means, then I'd assume pvers will feel fucked over because they'd now have to pvp to progress further.
Though I'm also used to people just farming both, people and mobs, so I might be really wrong with the assumption that "pvpers" would grind instances and that "pvers" wouldn't want to pvp to progress.
The problem is, that audience doesn't really exist any more.
L2 players were - generally speaking - new to the MMO genre. They would have taken what ever the game had to offer and enjoyed it, because they had nothing to compare it to - and in many cases, no alternative, comparable games to play.
Neither of these things is the case any more. When people pick up an MMO, it will instantly be compared to all other MMO's.
Again though, your suggestion here is fine for some content - it does not work for all content.
You are only taking in to account the functionality of instancing that removes other players from the situation - you are not taking in to account the functionality of it that gives each guild some content to participate in.
Let's make a bunch of assumptions. If we are to assume that the game is to offer 20 hours of raid content a week to players, we are to assume that as low as 10% of players will go after this raid content, and assume that 50,000 accounts will be active per server, and guilds will limit themselves to an average of 50 players each. Then we assume that all raid content is non-instanced (as in, there is only one version of it at a time).
This means the game needs to offer up 2,000 hours of open world raid content in total. That is unreasonable.
Even if you take a single encounter that takes perhaps an hour all up to kill, and you make it just respawn so that this one encounter can take up time from multiple guilds. You then have the issue of it not being anything to fight about (why fight over something that just respawns basically instantly?), but even then due to Intrepid being keep on keeping content to a prime time window per server, it is still only "servicing" perhaps 4 or 5 guilds a day.
This is the thing. There NEEDS to be content to fight over, but in order to be worth fighting over, that content needs to be rare. In terms of raid content, that means basically spawning weekly, at the most.
However, this isn't going to support a raid game, and so simply can not be the only type of raid content.
Without something to go after 3 or 4 nights a week, with a reasonable chance of either success or progress, raiding is not sustainable in any game. If all of those 100 potential guilds are going after only a handful of encounters, that is simply not sustainable. Even if only 10 guilds are going after it, that is not sustainable.