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
Legendary equipment can only be equipped by level appropriate characters
Non-legendary equipment can be quipped within a range of levels, ie. If a player is within 5 levels of the equipment, then they would be able to equip that item.
This would provide players who wish to overbear an opportunity to do so with a minimal to no power imbalance.
As for if it should be included? I believe so. AoC has many content paths for a player to take in terms of playstyle, whether it PvP, PvE, lifeskilling, exploration, trading, sailing, etc. Overgearing can beneficial for some and disadvantageous for others if implemented poorly, but when done right it beneficial for those who wish to use it. Please consider the following examples.
You’re a player who specializes in gathering, you need to gather a resource but there are higher level mobs near, overgearing your armour a bit would be beneficial for more survivability allowing you to gather those resources near more dangerous areas.
You are a lower level player, the node you started at is becoming more populated and growing rapidly, higher-level players are coming by to farm the new monsters that are spawning as your node grows. You, however, are still quite squishy but may need to traverse through these areas to get to your lower level areas on the outskirts. Overgearing your armour may help you not get one shot by a stray mob getting farmed or a higher level player who may think your coming to steal their rotation on your way through.
You got a quest that needs you to travel through a contested area, over gear for survivability, your node just got dec’ed on and you’ve only been playing for a few weeks, over gear for survivability. You just joined a guild that wants to get into PvP but you’re still a little under-leveled, overgear to compensate.
For those who don’t wish to overgear they can simply choose not to. On the other hand, for those who do wish to overgear, they need an option to do so that doesn’t break the power balance. I believe overall it should be implemented, but do so carefully.
A controversial solution to the controversial subject could be a Gearscore system. It allows for lower level characters to use high level equipment but still be measured and tracked relative to the total power output of the character rather than purely by their level. There's quite a bit of merit in saying that level 10 PvP has a different feel than endgame PvP and to some I'm sure it's quite enjoyable, but matching a theoretically overgeared 1000 gearscore level 10 against a theoretical appropriately geared 200 gearscore level 12 opponent wouldn't be fair at all. Matching gearscores regardless of level would ensure that equipment is not a factor in the outcome of the fight, though there may be some edge to the higher level player due to more skill unlocks or level-restricted content available to that player.
It was mentioned previously that player health bars will give information indirectly to players as to the general threat level of the target, likely through some severity meter using different graphics ranging from benign frog to eldritch horror. Gearscore in combination with level difference, PvP kills relative to your own, corruption level, alliance status etc. should absolutely be reflected in that threat assessment in my opinion. I don't really believe there will be such things as a "level 10 area" that have hard level restrictions as to which players are allowed to be there. Knowing this, I believe it's best to allow each player the ability to understand the chance of being dunked on by their opponent in any given situation with ALL factors included rather than just a player level indicator.
Aside from PvP, there shouldn't really be any penalty to being overgeared. The high gearscore equipment had to be acquired somehow, so it's not undeserved. If you are rolling a second or third character on your account, there shouldn't be a reason to reinvent the wheel if you've already pushed through the grind a first time.
Obtaining better gear should be the highest pursuit. It is the backbone that holds a community upright. While in real life your winning personality serves to create your status in a community, in a game, it is first and foremost your gear that sets you apart. Your gear defines your place in a group just as Knights of old were defined by their glorious armor and weaponry. Your gear is what makes your main character your main character. People from the server should know you as that character. While this outlook makes it difficult for alts to be enjoyed, and some people may find an issue with that, it serves to keep a community strong by creating greater player identity.
On another note, if gear is easily gotten then the game loses mystique and replayability. Maybe there's a boss you've heard nothing but horror stories about. This is because no one has yet managed to obtain good enough gear to make it an easy encounter. You will strive to obtain gear good enough to join a group for it. Also, if there's a boss that tormented you when you were a level 35 fighter it should torment you again when you come back on your level 35 mage. If you obtain max level on your fighter and are able to deck out your mage with all of the best gear then leveling is just the same grind you're familiar with. This will cause you to get bored and look for another project that promises they're going to do things differently. *cough* *cough*
I do not want to see level 2 players wandering around in/with endgame gear. As such there should be some sort of gateway requirement. If you aren't willing to place level requirements on items, Ex. The Sword of the ancients req. being lvl 36 or higher, then there should at LEAST be stat minimums. Using the same sword, it would require a STR minimum of say 85 to wield and a 70 to even pick up and swing around. A fledgling Fighter wouldn't have any more than a 30 STR at best so they are quite a ways off. Even if they stat dumped the requirement should be high enough to prevent too low of a level from using more powerful items. This also has the side benefit of keeping non-fighters from using powerful fighter weapons as well.
It really all depends on how the system is being designed to refine how said restrictions are implemented.
TLDR:
If there’s going to be twink gear the amount available per server needs to be heavily restricted (similar to flying mounts) to make it more of an achievement rather than a duty. If it’s not, long-term crafting will be messed up creating a high barrier for new people to level/sell items. The PvP system could be messed up if there are too many twinks and it’s almost a “mandatory” thing. And finally, new players might hate their leveling experience when surrounded by a bunch of twinks and lose a lot of the original joy and fun that OG players felt before the twinks could gear.
The Long Version:
I read over some of the other comments and it seems there are two thoughts on what twinking means: equipping a character with any level gear or equipping a character with a level restricted gear but with legendary stats. I’m going to go with the latter as I have no argument in favor of being able to equip any level gear.
First off, and most important to me, because I’m a greedy lil munchkin, is the issue of long-term crafting.
-At some point it would be easier to farm for the twink gear with high level characters or the server’s population of twink gear would expand to the point that it’s almost easy to get/buy.
This creates a potential long term lose of crafting at lower levels as the demand for it would plummet due to the availability of this type of gear. This would then raise the barrier of entry into the crafting professions as the lower level gear wouldn’t sell making it more difficult to level the craft skill.
-A possible fix to this, which would still allow twinking, would be to restrict the amount that any one server could have at a time (similar to flying mounts or metropolis’s). If you want the best twink then you’ve gotta earn it or at least dish out an incredible sum of money. Could also make it incredibly expensive to repair allowing crafters to regain some of their lost position (could even make repairing that type of gear a specialization given for X,Y, or Z reasons thus increasing the desire to craft).
Second is PvP related
Outer world PvP is fair game for everyone so if someone wants to surprise someone with their twink, go for it. The sheep has fangs. Gotta be careful. However, this would work better again if the amount of twinks was limited as any new player could instantly be introduced to a terrible situation.
-In organized PvP though I know a few times a “champion” system was mentioned so if that was implemented I wouldn’t mind twinking those as the person is sacrificing the gear they could be using for their champion. Not to mention the champion most likely wouldn’t have a “de-level/exp lose” type system so the twink wouldn’t stay a twink for long.
-If the character is the one participating though the barrier of entry for PvP happens in two ways. One if “brackets” are split by level the twinking system would increase the barrier of entry for newer players to participate in PvP events. Or Two if the system is not level restricted the barrier for entry now becomes the level itself, still preventing newer players from trying it out. So if the player is the participant, twinking doesn’t exist, and it’s split by level categories that might work for those issues.
Finally the leveling experience:
-This is where I’m slightly torn because I’ve seen a lot of mentions of alts and I would be happy to use twink gear on an alt because I hate leveling multiple characters. I know it will be an expanding and evolving world, but my alts are always like Cinderella without a fairy godmother for me. I don’t care about them and would prefer to shove them in a cupboard forever. So any help to level them faster is always nice.
-However, I can’t be selfish about it because I know there will constantly be new players joining servers and their experience could be ruined by a bunch of twinks (seriously who thought this was a good name for this). Since you can’t determine who is an alt and who is on their first character in the world the newer players might feel like they’re too far behind and quit, rage about it, think certain classes are unbalanced, feel like they’re not contributing to group activities, and just generally lose a lot of fun.
Overall Opinion: Twinking is fine ONLY if each type of twink gear is severely restricted per server.
seriously hats of to you guys
to answer the question in the simplest way
i think its a stupid idea, your not just gonna instantly know how to use and wield a legendary sword
or be able to properly use a piece of high level magical equipment just by looking at it
level keeps track of your characters experience
if im level 10 im not gonna know how the hell to use a legendary sword with powerful abilities
and certainly at level 10 i wont know how to use lets say an extremely powerful legendary spell
so no i dont think overgearing would be a good feature
especially when you consider the type of game AoC is striving to be
When it comes to other player experience, however, it is a horrible mechanic. Twinking ruins most PVP systems and renders otherwise well-designed content moot with any cooperation with overgeared characters. At that point, levels become more or less meaningless as they no longer are a defining characteristic of a character's strength relative to the content. Significantly overgearing a character in these contexts is more like doing content with a character that is simply a higher level than expected and often ruins the experience for players who did not opt-in for such.
I personally would look to simply correct the fundamental issues that require such mechanics to be in place from the beginning. Design systems with alts in mind, have a clear preference of importance between character level vs gear level, and relative relationship between active skills and gameplay vs overall gearing to render it a design choice rather than required bandaid.
While I personally don't care for steamrolling I know there are groups of players who find that fun and to each their own. They should be able to steamroll all the pigs in the starting area they desire.
However, I do have to give this caution to IS. In World of Warcraft, Blizzard introduced Heirloom Gear. This was a way to entice players into making alts in a game that was very alt-unfriendly with 70,80,90,110, then 120 levels to climb. While players could jump several levels faster than they could before, it took away from the core of the game. "Back in the Day" players had to work together and mentor each other on fights and certain areas in a dungeon to accomplish a clear. When Heirloom items came, that all changed. It became a gauntlet that was very boring. Healers didn't have much to do unless the tank went crazy and pulled too much, new players felt discouraged when they saw just how little they were contributing to the group when it came to damage, and every tank rightly earned the title "Jenkins". You also ran into the problem of players not even bothering to immerse themselves in the game they were playing. They would just blow right through zones having completed a handful of quests and leaving the area without ever finding out what is going on. The developers spent months, maybe even years, working on a zone that players were in for maybe half an hour then leaving.
This could just be to my playstyle, I love the idea of starting on a fresh character and doing something different than I have done before. Maybe I started off doing farming or mining in the mountains and this time I want to hit the high seas and drink rum at a port. I don't want that experience to be muddied by the ability to have a character that can one, or even two shot everything in my path.
If the ability to overgear/twink is in Ashes, I would like it to be a personal feat that the player goes through and not something that can be obtained by farming gold and hiring a master smith at launch.
I believe this would work out fine in Ashes of Creation as there isn't really any instanced BGs to farm but would help players that wish to level up alts do it a bit more efficiently at great cost. I could also see the use of twinks to go "hunting" corrupted players as they would give increased corruption if they die. Also the corruption stat decay would bring corrupted players down closer to be more easily taken down by twinked characters.
A level 50 Non-combatant "Corruption Hunter" could be a real thing in this case and I wonder if this would be fun or break the game.
There are many economic things that go into the sort of meta that can form over gearing low-level characters, such as rare weapon drops crafting materials, ect. which can make the system feel rewarding for some players. I think one of the main things that make it feel un-fair is when you go against someone who is geared and feel as though you have no chance of winning, or you feel as though the items they have are not available to you in a reasonable way
I think it all comes down to how much power can be gained, if the power difference of two low-level players (One geared to the teeth and one with average gear) is such that the lower geared player still has a chance of winning, then I think that's what you want to aim for, but at the same time you don't want someone to feel that all the time and resources they invested in there character to go to waste, it's a tricky balance for sure.
Make the player's level and social status in their node determine the total 'value' of gear that they can wear.
If they want to go commando in order to wield a powerful sword that is technically out of their reach normally, that seems fine, as they will have reduced defenses for it. This is also fairly inline with gearing new characters in Pathfinder/D&D.
Say, gearing with thought and work put into it has to feel rewarding and that comes by feeling yourself becoming stronger the more work you put into it, how ever if the work put into say your entire gear set to the point of it overgearing end game content is something that can be done rather quick and with no thought about it or low amount of thinking done to it. Then the overgearing part is a very bad thing.
If you manage to capture the feeling players get when they first get a 'higher tiered' item and keep that feeling, then it's a great thing. If the difference in power between Low level gear and End game gear is humongous then it can also create a feeling of "Why should I bother getting this when I get something miles ahead in no time?" I think a way for that not to happen is by making sure every piece and gear dropping/acquired feels relevant and impactful on a minor degree and make sure the gap between lower gear and end game gear ain't massive. Of course gear plays an important role and end game gear has to be better, but there's a difference between a gust of wind and a hurricane if you catch my drift.
I personally feel that games that manage to make you work, put thought it, get help from other players be it for socket slots, enchantments and so on is what makes gearing perfect and impactful. Rather than simply getting a drop and calling that a day. I don't think Overgearing will be thought of as much if you know people put work in for that stuff!
A longer one and might have mentioned the same twice. Hope it helps though!
-PsychD
The only real downside is the potential for griefing new players with twinks (assuming you get less penalties for similar level PKs), but that seems fairly unlikely to be an issue given existing penalty systems, low value in killing low level players, and community support via leveling guilds and such.
New people won't come to the game if they are getting destroyed to an unfair gear advantage that they have no possible way to prepare for it. The game is going to force PvP so having this in the game may make it fail. There needs to be a fair PvP around the same level assuming the same content is done. Not this guy won cuz this is his 3rd alt and he just gifted an impossible weapon you can never achieve normally.
WoW's PvP was utterly destroyed due to this. Like the game had no future whatsoever for PvP until they completely removed it from the game and they still didn't. It's only somewhat controlled now.
I don't mind a gear difference but twinking is just too much. It's not really fun for either party to do. Like what is fun about one shotting people because of something you didn't necessarily earn, but just play longer than other people? You can argue you earned it by playing longer, but how much of an advantage that gives you I cannot call that a fair advantage.
Some parts of the game probably won't be fair, but if it's completely unfair then it will destroy any future the game will have. Twinking by nature will ruin the entire game for anyone after the first wave of players hits max level.
It might depend on what kind of difference twinking will make. In WoW you will never beat a twinked player. 0% chance to ever win. However if the gear you can twink made less of a difference so you could win without twinking then I could maybe see it not breaking the game being ok. However, I will never be ok with twinking fully implemented into the game.
I think the game should steer away from giving inherent gear advantages just because someone leveled in the game once already. If it were the same kind of MMO WoW was maybe it wouldn't matter as much, but twinking is specifically bad for the PvP aspect of the game. This game will rely on the PvP as one of it's core selling points. Any form of Twinking is just absolutely bad for what the game aspires to be.
U.S. East
With that said, I think twinking is completely fine to a certain extent. I see it sort of as a reward, where you have the opportunity to be slightly higher in power for your level by working a bit harder than the average player to acquire said gear. Obviously, there should be a level requirement for gear, especially for much more powerful pieces you would acquire at higher levels. Level requirement and stat balance should be hand-in-hand when designing gear throughout the leveling process. Of course, any power boons provided by professions should follow the same guidelines.
So say a level whatever weapon/armor has a price of x ... then if I've traded some of my resources to get to x. Then I can buy it but I've earned what I traded... someone didn't just give me the resources or the items.
In the end if an item has a baseline market value for the economy and you can't "Gift" the resources needed to get there then the economy works and the lower level player needs to aquire the resources. So do that, ya got your bad ass sword or whatever...
Not so sure about overgearing, but do like the idea of being able to gear to compliment your play style.
Giving high(er) level equipment to low(er) level characters?
Fine to pass higher level equipment if not so far off level to a lower level character BUT if your not the level for the gear, then its ability is compromised. And only a level or so different, beyond that I would disagree.
I do not like the idea that when your Level X + 99.9% then get to Level X+1 and 0.01% and suddenly your higher ability.. I would like a little overlap between gear of each level a
I want some twinking possible in terms of gear rarity, when I level my alts. Not enough to steamroll content, but enough to make the levelling more smooth and a bit faster. 10-20%? I am not quite sure what would feel right.
If I have a lvl 50 and lots of resources, yeah, I want to be able to deck out my lvl 10 in rare or epic lvl 10 set gear, even if it costs me a small fortune. Again, the devil is in the details here. I don't want a purple lvl 10 sword to completely outclass green lvl 10 sword. I don't want to steamroll, because that stops me from having to really learn how to play that character, but yes, give me an edge.
Btw, this also assumes players can't artificially halt levelling progression. I haven't seen anything about that being possible in AoC, but it's an old concept I'd rather not see in the game, so just wanted to be sure.
As for PvP, don't make sub-50 arenas be a thing where players can get anything other than experience pvp-ing with their characters. Keep any actual ingame rewards to the lvl 50 arena.
If we don't want forced bind on pickup, but also don't want too much hand-me-down stuff, we can make part of the equipment system to have gear customized to a character. This would be like reshaping plates, redistributing scales or chain sections, rebalancing weapons for the individual's and shape and grip preference, etc. When it has been customized to a character, it either cannot be customized again for another user, or the cost would be much higher for get it for the next person.
Edit: I created a new post related to this discussion. Instead of asking overgearing yes/no, I'm asking more directly what constraints we wish to apply to characters and their access to gear. While the OP here is a lively discussion, I think looking at it more on a "how should it work" level will give us more understanding of what we hope to see. https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/47301/item-use-access-limitations-dev-disc-24-reimagined
You could apply scaling to the gear, but this does still pose a few problems. If you scale it so that it performs as BiS at each level till the “level” of the gear, you run the problem of losing the feeling of gear progression for those players. Though with how repairing works, they’d need a richer friend, crafter, or be leveling an alt in order to repair the gear, which would be pricier to do, and would make overgearing more than say ~5 levels not worth the cost to the player anyways.
And if you decide to make a few gear sets aimed at leveling alts, say higher durability pieces that do scale and have cheaper comparable repairs or something, you’d end up with players using that gear primarily over others for leveling alts or guilds trying to speed up the leveling of lower level players as it’d be the most efficient route for gearing, and as such you’d see too much of the same gear, as well as making extra work for the devs since say an extra set of gear at every 5-10 levels including light, medium, heavy armours, and all the weapons, just for that would be wasteful. I think a system to speed up alt leveling more like the game Dofus would be better, increase xp gains by a percent, either increasing the % the higher level discrepancy, a straight flat % till you reach your highest level character’s level, and/or a flat % that increases per # of characters above your current character’s level.
Maybe for the RP/flavour side allow one piece of higher level gear, within reason (maybe a few levels, or scale it to be BiS). A novice with the best steel sword would perform only marginally better than that same novice with a run of the mill average sword, it’d still help in terms of the sword being balanced and having good edge retention, but they wouldn’t truly be able to bring out the potential of the weapon. That would help mitigate the problem I think, as the repair of that piece could be extremely costly anyways. The biggest (although slim chance) reason I kinda lean towards this is the fact that you want legendary one of a kind weapons to exist. If a non-max level player somehow manages to obtain one (if there are some obtained through some obscure requirements or in a right time/right place deal, at such and such altar on the first day of winter, as the the moon reaches the apogee of its flight), it’d be really cool to be able to use this amazing weapon at an advantage to other players, rather than just forcing yourself to bank it till you reach that level or sell it. However the repair costs (if repairable) would likely be extreme. Maybe if higher level weapons have a stat requirement like another comment said, but that could be difficult to make it so any class could use any weapon, unless you make it that if you’re the level of the gear that restriction is removed (which doesn’t make sense logically, but from a gameplay standpoint could work).
Overgearing works from an RPG standpoint, but not so much from the MMO side. Like in the first Borderlands, you might find an orange rarity weapon that you could still use pretty effectively for like 10-20 levels from the requirement, or find a weapon with perfect stat rolls for your preferences that you use 5-10 levels later, even if you find gear of your current level that is “statistically” better. Another good example would be Outward, where there are no “levels,” gear progression, learning/purchasing skills/abilities, what limited skills you choose, what skills you slot on your limited hotbar, consumables, and player skill are all that make up how strong your character is. Overgearing from the side of action based combat (Borderlands being an FPS, Outward being a souls-like) makes a bit more sense (imo), which is why I used weapons as my examples earlier too. Due to attack speed, resource use, and various other “stats” that affect the “feel” of a weapon itself. For tab-targeting, overgearing makes even less sense than action combat/basic attacks that take your weapon’s stats such as attack speed into account (imo).
TL;DR, as much as I like the potential flavour/RP side, I think it might end up being too difficult to make it work as a benefit to the game. The only piece I could see making sense would be for weapons, with limitations.
As for myself, I find twinking really..... boring. I despise people being my level having this ABSURDLY BROAD gap in power. If I'm on the battlefield and I run into someone who looks about my level, I should expect a close matchup, or at least stand my ground (classes depending in that matchup too). I shouldn't just be neutralized like it never mattered though, that's just pointless to me. I won't want to pvp if everyone's keeping themselves a low area and gearing up to take advantage of that... I know I could do that too but it feels scummy and then halts progression on the character.
“The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.”
― G.K. Chesterton