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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
Gear isn't equal to skill, however skill will lead to gear. So the soft cap system is just a system to make things more complicated and from my point of view unnecessary.
In a mmoRPG, a role playing game, you can come very far with only skill, but you also need gear since it's a part of your character. So if a high geared player enters the arena for the first time he may climb the rankes faster than a lower geard player, and to me that's fine. The rankes in a mmoRPG is all about the character AND NOT the player behind the screen.
A practice arena system would have the following pros:
1. Allows players to see what gear they should be chasing based on their individual playstyle.
2. Allows players to develop strategies that they can use in ranked PVP without the penalty to ELO
3. Can be used as a stress reliever due and a reminder of what players are grinding for.
4. addresses the power gap problem, without actually affecting ranked PVP where all aspects of player skill should be taken into account. Don't want to get stomped in ranked PVP by players who have time to grind? then pick a build in the Practice arena system and play some matches there.
5. Allows Hardcore PVPers to theory craft optimal builds.
6. the Practice Arena system can be used for Official AOC tournaments similar to WoW's tournament realms.
Thoughts on if this suggestion helps alleviate some problems?
In order to have any kind of meaningful cap or ranking system, gear has to be assigned a power level. Or a "gear score". And you know how the developers feel about gear scores, and DPS meters, and so on.
Without any way to objectively measure one piece of gear from another, I don't see how you can rank gear.
I would not have a problem if intrepid took your side of the argument. It's not the end of the world to me.
I must say that in addition to my previous post. There is a strong economic counter argument to be made against you. Unrestricted gear means that the arena will be subject to the gearing system of the rest of the game. This means that over enchanting is a big deal for the arena now. I did not get to participate in the Olympiad in L2 myself. I have fond memories of our clan pumping resources in weekly to get one more + on some over enchanted s-grade for our arena guy. He had a set of gear that was a clan effort to make. The magnum opus of our clan that kept his name at the top. We had our whole clan working to gather not only to provide gear for each other, but to take a percentage of the resources to try and get more over enchanted gear. This makes it so that clans are more likely to try and over enchant some gear for arena wins. This means that more materials across all nodes are selling. It is a way that the arena system can benefit the economy. People are going to be enchanting their gear to a certain degree for real world PvE and PVP, but the uncapped arena would give clans a reason to invest heavily into gear.
I don't think the speculative system I just described is exactly fair or perfect for potential arena players, but I do think it is better for entire servers if it makes it so that more clans are willing to try and over enchant to the limits of statistics.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
Id say the ranking system should show how good you are and to a lesser degree how geared you are. I guess at some point I selfishly want a player to reach a high point in their gear progression and not have to worry about getting the last 10% of their power that might take just as long to get to as getting the other 90%
I used to agree with you since I thought the 200+ hour grind was enough to root out players who wanna no life arena only. Kinda want the open world to matter too for those players. But not to the point where they wanna spend most of their time in the arena but actually spend most of their time grinding.
Kinda like old school runescape. Took me 1000 hours to get where I wanted to get. Doing raids 1 and 2. Now PvP in the wilderness. Was like 80% shitty grinds that I was bored in. Wanting to quit. Im ranting but thats just another point of the soft cap system. OSRS introduced LMS a pvp minigame where even level 1 free to play people can join and have equalized gear and stats. The rewards basically dont mean anything and it doesnt kill the game or anything. Its not a huge open world caravan trading castle/node sieging game though.
I agree thanks for the dopamine in my head
Hey I may have said the points of the soft cap system already in the first post. But its pretty much to keep gear from being the decisive factor in a competitive arena setting. Gear matters but theres a diminishing return.
Thats pretty clear I think. I dont want that to be the biggest driving factor when skill should be whats under the limelight in a competitive setting. Especially when the rewards dont matter.
I could totally see the whole not a roleplaying game point. If I were ugly id say if the game had instanced anything it wouldnt be a rpg. Also I would say why does my caravan just transform into a water caravan by itself. Why cant I grab components and move them to different spots to make the water caravan. When I reach that point. Kinda why I said before in a equalized gear post that you could just equip all iron armor and weapons like real people would in arena fights. Id take a morphine to fix my broken leg in dayz. Sure as shit am not gonna wait a couple months for my bones to heal. Some people do that but not the majority anyways.
Again this is a soft cap system. Gear matters but with diminishing returns. Just protects gear from getting ridiculous in a competitive setting. Its a bonus but atleast those noobz wont get smashed because of gear.
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True True. Id like that as well. Maybe I should read some stuff about gear balancing in that way. I cant wrap my head around a legendary weapon not spanking people though. Or anything close to it. I dont see anything wrong with there being a special mechanic for the arena though. I always get the vibe that people look at me with disgust just because I want this part of the game to be cool. As long as it isnt the focus of the game. I just want it to be a great game in the game ja know.
Why is he climbing faster though. Its because hes good. Because he has played the game longer. Hopefully because the gear variable is carrying him. Thats my point.
The system doesnt make anything more complicated it just makes skill variable more important.
Everything sounds great man. I guess I still want to compete and get ranking in a semi fair way though. These ideas are another topic of discussion I think. Its just a playground for arena.
I would prefer that only the STATS on the gear be normalized though and that any skill effect bonuses retain their full value regardless of bracket. This should help to avoid ruining any specific builds.
The reason you want a soft cap system, from my point of view, is that you don't want experience AlC player to join arena, for the first time, and completely destroy you. You don't like the feeling that you are in fact are not a good player, so you try and find an explanation to why you lost. And that is when gear comes in. You say that you only lost because they had better gear then you, not because they were better players.
Get you shit together, start playing the game and get gear and learn the game. This isn't an esports, this isn't a moba, this isn't a fps game, it's a mmorpg and scaling in anyway should not exist.
If it is desired, there can be a system in place for a specific PvP mode that allows this.
@rikardp98
In your point of view example you have imagined that @Altodor lost a fight and wants to hide behind the excuse of gear. That hasn't happened here. The game doesn't even exist for the fight to have occurred. Instead, @Altodor is arguing for a game mode that wouldn't even allow for a player to use the defense of "lost because they had better gear". Apparently, @Altodor purpose is the exact opposite of what you think it is since @Altodor is actually attempting to remove the exact excuse that you imagine @Altodor would use.
If an experienced PvPer fights a low skill player, that low skill player will usually (if not always) lose. The difference in relation to the thread topic is, gear will not be blamed as the reason.
And having they excuses "he just got better gear than me" is something that should exist in a mmorpg. If you want to prove it you need to play the game, farm gear and come back a overall better player.
I believe the argument against this is that ranked arena does not have the same focus as the rest of the game. It's supposed to be a competitive match between players where skill is the focus. Let's not forget that this is a soft cap, so if you go get the gear you can still do better baseline. This soft cap just increases the degree that skill matters and lessens the impact of gear.
I can see some good in the soft cap, but what I also don't really get is, why do we need a soft cap on ranked arena when there will be a ranking system which will separate based on overall player skill. Also, remember that all this is hypothetical and we don't know if there even will be a ranked arena or not
And also remember that getting better gear don't matter. If you are at the soft cap for, let's say rank 10, and you are up against another player with rank 10 that just hit the soft cap. Even if you have 100 times better gear then I'm you will still do just as much damage as him. Meaning your gear will be scaled down so you don't, for some reason, out damage/heal another player. As I have said before, if I hit a player for 2k in the open world I should hit him for 2k in arena.
This system makes gear matter up to a curtain point which will depend on your rank.
In any case I would not mind, scaling or some sort of gear equalization if it happened in a separate arena not tired to any real game server.
Guildwars 1 had a system where you could just roll a level 20 character, and earn skills on that character in a separate arena system. Maybe if AoC had a separate server for to try and foster some sort of E-Sports. That would be fine, but it in no way should be tied to real servers or characters. This would be more like a fighting game more MOBA. I would not mind APOC and AoC and a AoC arena server all existing side by side. I do mind when people advocate for systems that change the dynamics of the open world PvP sandbox and its economy.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
If however there were a system that was implement to "fix" the power cap problem that may occur in ranked arena I would suggest a gear bracket system. Basically a system similar to the weight class in boxing.
Let's say you have three different brackets, for simplicity let's call them low, medium and high. A new player with starting gear will join the low bracket and start ranking there. Lets say that this new player is starting to get new and better gear. He can now join the medium bracket and rank there if he wants to. He will still have is rank in the low bracket but can not continue to rank there with his higher ranked gear.
This system will allow hardcore arena players to really show there skills by getting the highest rank in all the different brackets. I also feel like this system would encourage pvp players to explore different setups to find the best setup for the different brackets.
It's not a perfect system, one negative is that it will in a way split up the arena players in smaller groups and possibly making the queue times longer.