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
So basically increasing the offer to make it less contested?
That may work for grinding spots but how exactly would you introduce that to a boss encounter?
Or what do you exactly mean?
Basically make dungeons/raids into a maze of sorts with multiple entrances. Each entrance leads into its own mini dungeon/raid within the original dungeon. These entrances can lead to a set of 3 or so bosses, and can also intersect with another entrance's mini dungeon/raid to connect some bosses.
Why would people not make parties just to farm the bosses in that case?
In BDO you also had multiple rare mobs in an area so you could just make farm routes for them instead of actually grinding all the mobs in the area.
You can't. There's simply too many paths and they are quite far apart. So if you split your group into multiple groups, then they won't be able to do anything if they encounter a larger group.
Personally I don't want any gear coming from a mini game of any kind. Open world or not at all.
Because another game had weak PvE means this one will as well is an odd statement.
What evidence do you have that Ashes will have weak PvE? they have a solid core of devs from some solid titles that do have this kind of content.
If that is the case half of the PvE content is not PvE but PvP making it laughable if you look for a challenging PvE experience.
This is the very definition of PvX. Trying to seprate the the two into PvE and PvP only is a mistake. It isn't one OR the other it is both at the same time.
And Chuck
No that's not exactly what it means. The crafting system isn't tied to PvP. So why should the entire PvE system be tied to PvP then? A PvX game is a game that caters to players of all playstyles.
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Caravans
Transporting larger amounts of resources for crafting requires caravans which is PvX. I'll bet even mobs in the world will attack caravans.
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Crafting
Heavy note on this part. Is the 5th line down.
Anything that you want to bring into existence in the world is going to be built by players: Whether that is Ships, Siege engines, Weapons, Armor, etc.[8] – Jeffrey Bard
If 75% of difficulty came from PvP it would be a huge turnoff for PvE players, but players that mostly PvP would probably love it. Instanced raids would be the other end of the extreme 100% PvE and no PvP. It really just comes down to preference and it's not possible for a single raid to satisfy everyone.
I think the best option would be to diversify all the raids. Keep the 20% instanced but for the rest, have a diverse balance of PvP and PvE. The way you can regulate it is to change the difficulty of entry into a dungeon/raid. For example a dungeon door requires a key that takes a ton of time to grind for and is consumed on entry. This way you are less likely to run into a contesting group but not entirely PvP free. This could be about 90/10 in favor of PvE difficulty. Then another dungeon that's completely free entry which could be about 25/75 in favor of PvP difficulty
This is an interesting way to do it as well.
Crafting isn't dependent on PvP in the same way that PvE is. As it is now, PvE content relies on player contention in order for dungeons/raids to be challenging.
Please watch this from the timestamp (11:19)
Steven specifically wants to encourage endgame raids and bosses to be heavily contested, because it encourages guilds to form alliances and make political moves against other groups to secure access to raids.
I've seen this video more times than you have. So you don't have to link it to me.
If you listen carefully, at 11:35 , you can hear that Steven said "potentially". Which means that they're still working on what degree of player contention they want for end game content. He hasn't stated if he wants it to be a low, moderate or high level of contention.
So you're just incorrect when you say this:
My friend, he's clearly leaning in this direction, but because he used the word "potentially" - it therefore negates all intention?
I'm not gonna argue with you at this level, because, you know, it's that far above me.
It doesn't negate all intention. You said that he intends endgame content to be HEAVILY contested. That's just incorrect. You don't know how contested Steven wants open world content to be.
Above you? Its easy to escape being wrong in an argument by saying that you're "above all this". You ain't above shit. Grow up weeb.
If you show up to kill the boss. "Potentially" another group might show and contest you for it or they might move on or they might watch you wipe and kill it before you get back.
I've seen this video more times than you have. So you don't have to link it to me.
Interesting comment to make.
Are you sure?
You don't know what it means for sure either. You can interpret it in both ways.
Define that please.
I don’t agree with that description of the problem. The issue for me is that if you tune encounters to be achievable when contested then they intrinsically will be trivial when uncontested. That results in what others have described as bosses that are basically just trash mobs with huge hit point reserves.
Really challenging PvE bosses often require even the best players in the world to make hundreds of attempts before they can beat it even without being contested. Putting content like that into a contested environment will make it literally impossible given that every wipe will force yet another round of pvp just to get the chance to make your next pull. And even the slightest interference during the attempt has a good chance of wiping you.
I think that there might be a bigger problem that whether or not there are instances. Doing some reading and watching makes me think that gear progression in AoC is intended to be very flat. That’s a valid choice, and it makes a lit of sense in the context of open world pvp, where you would prefer inter-player encounters to be meaningful and not just one guy roflstomping the other guy due to gearing. But it goes counter to traditional raiding progression where the objective is to engage progressively more difficult content in order to achieve the gear level needed to even have a chance at the hardest instances. That gear progression grind is intrinsically part of the challenge of raid pve.
It may well be that the systems choices that are being made for AoC mean that it’s simply a PvP mmo with some cosmetic PvE decoration, not a genuine PvX game at all. Which is fine, if that is actually the intent. But then it’s just a pity that it’s being marketed as “truly PvX”.
I hope I’m wrong. We will see.
Contention depends on a lot of factors. The size of the dungeon/raid, the no. of rooms, the difficulty of the content in that dungeon/raid, and the no. of players online at that time.
You can control some of these factors to control just how contested you want a dungeon/room to be. So we don't know how contested a particular dungeon/raid is going to be. To say that its heavily contested right off the bat, without knowing what these parameters are, is just incorrect.
Doing this in a non-faction based system needs a bit more work: is it all members of guilds who participated? How many guild members have to participate to qualify? Etc. but it can probably be worked out.
Try this again.
Define what you meant here.
The potential exists for many out comes here.
I get what your saying about harder content you can do uninterrupted I just think games that have the potential for interruption are more fun then static encounters where a boss mob does XYZ at a certain time in a certain order are a lot more fun.
Why I prefer playing on PVP servers. Makes you pay more attention to your surroundings and whats going on.
GW1 had a similar setup. What ever guild was winning the PvP battles gave their region access to the raids. Waiting out side the door for the local team to win so we could go in was fun/frustrating. But mostly fun.
I don't completely understand what you are saying, but yes, PvP contention is quite fun. But so is PvE content that can wipe your whole group if you don't pay attention or if you don't position/react properly. Is it wrong to want both?
Give people a minute to respond.
Brief internet outage all of the sudden. Like it's the dark ages again.
Personally I think that should increase the drop rates and quality of items too so people don't just slow play the dungeons.
Since one of the dev teams working on this came from the EQ background it seems reasonable that they will be able to create meaningful and challenging PVE. Alpha - Beta's likely will not shed a ton of light on this however since they want to limit exposure to the end game content.
If you're goal in this thread is to avoid PvP for instanced PvE that doesn't seem to be a game model they're considering and it would defeat the purpose of the systems in place if people could simply hide in PVE instances and "gear up" in peace. Why would anyone then use the open world for it with the added risk of PVP? lol
Master Assassin
(Yes same Tyrantor from Shadowbane)
Book suggestions:
Galaxy Outlaws books 1-16.5, Metagamer Chronicles, The Land litrpg series, Ready Player One, Zen in the Martial Arts
I think it is wrong to segregate the community for any reason.
But the real trouble we are having and why we are talking past each other is NONE of us has any idea what they have created or are in the process of creating aside from a couple of low level bosses. Look at the dev bios there is a lot of talent and experience there and the COE is a player first game creator second.
This I think warrants a wait and see approach. Is super hard to give constructive feed back on stuff we can only envision / make up in our heads of how it will work.
We'll see when the game releases, yeah?
Can I offer some advice? Don't go Ad Hominem. Especially when your insults miss.
Take a step back and breathe.
I remember when GW2 / Rift came out, where open world bosses and dynamic public events were a refreshing change from the raid instance grinding of WoW. I also remember really disliking the instanced content of GW2, which brought us back to WoW. For me, I really enjoy having a balance between open systems (world content) and closed systems (instances). Open systems make the world feel alive, creates new community & contacts, and drives a broader narrative. Closed systems allow a tighter group uninterrupted access to continually refine their play (think of it like an experiment) by eliminating outside variables and focusing on their group’s dynamic in a problem.
It’ll be fun and interesting to see how AoC strikes a balance that adheres to Intrepid’s guiding principles and the predominant player base.
Contention depends on a lot of factors. The size of the dungeon/raid, the no. of rooms, the difficulty of the content in that dungeon/raid, and the no. of players online at that time.
You can control some of these factors to control just how contested you want a dungeon/room to be. So we don't know how contested a particular dungeon/raid is going to be. To say that its heavily contested right off the bat, without knowing what these parameters are, is just incorrect.
Miss? I thought you said you that you weren't going to argue with me anymore cuz you're "above" my level. Clearly something hit you somewhere to bring you down from up there.
Fair enough.
Thanks for calling it out, hard to see it when I'm doing it.