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.
The lack of instanced content and the long term health of the game.
Tobisway
Member, Explorer, Kickstarter
World content/PvP
So from what I've read, there is a big emphasis on world content and PvP. I don't have an issue with this to some extent. I would say it starts to get problematic if that's the only place for any relevant and challenging content(ignoring the griefing that will occur).
If the only place to get good items/gear is through these world bosses, where does it leave people that are not interested in doing what is essentially PVP for gear? How complicated will these world bosses even be? Is the only difficulty aspect of it having to fight other people in order to loot it? I don't mind pvp being a good place to get good rewards, but if it's forced content to be relevant in the game, then it becomes an issue.
Replay value of instanced Dungeons and the value of instanced raids
So, the main point of instanced content in the game is for story purposes, correct? Will there be any point in revisiting dungeons after you have been through them once? What about raids?
One of the best features Blizzard added in World of Warcraft was the Mythic+ system. For those unfamiliar, you get a key that you can put in at the start of the dungeon. The key level starts at +2 if you have never done a dungeon before and goes up indefinitely. The only way to increase the level of your key is to successfully complete the dungeon under the allocated time. So if you have 36 minutes to complete that dungeon, completing it by that time, your key level will go up by +1, or +2/+3 if you do it earlier.
There is a popular third party site/addon that tracks all of your keys that you have completed and gives you a score. It's a great way to be competitive and gives players the drive to keep pushing as high as they can. For anyone else, the increased rewards and difficulty add replay value to dungeons you initially did while leveling. Without the Mythic+ system, you would have no reason to set foot in dungeons EVER again after you finished playing through the story or finished leveling.
The raids are also competitive and there is a community run world first race for the top guilds. There are 4 difficulties for raids: Looking for raid(LFR), Normal, Heroic, and Mythic. Looking for Raid is the difficulty meant for those that only want to see the story of the game or have no care for doing more difficult raid content. Then you have normal and heroic, which is the entry point for everyone.
Mythic is where the biggest challenge comes in and not many people are able to clear it. If you manage to kill the last boss at mythic level, you are rewarded with a mount and an achievement. You also have access to the best gear in the game(which includes high rated PVP/Mythic+). I've noticed a lot of emphasis on exclusive content, but again it seems to primarily involve open world content. World content whose difficulty will probably be dealing with griefing.
Open world content that will probably eventually get monopolized by the top guild(s) in the server. I guess I'll start saving up gold in order to reserve a spot in their raids.
Everyone else.
I wouldn't call myself a casual. I can push relatively high keys in WoW and I am in a mythic guild capable of achieving cutting edge(achievement for killing the last raid boss in mythic difficulty before the tier ends). So I take part in content that about 1% of people that play the game do.
One concern I have is will I be able to get any top tier loot or any meaningful loot unless I'm lucky enough to tag a world boss that will probably be controlled by a few people? You can have difficult content in instanced dungeons/raids that only a few people are able to clear, but in those cases, everyone has a chance to go in there, try, and have a chance at going as high as you can. I am honestly disappointed about the afterthought PVE content seems to be. My friends also feel that way, people that are also competitive and love difficult PVE content.
What about casuals?
A lot of people like to think the casual player base can be neglected. They like to ignore the fact that casual people make up the larger part of the player base in a game, and if you neglect them, well..... your game isn't gonna live that long. I would say World of Warcraft does a good job with the different difficulty options for Raids and also the lower key level range for dungeons.
So if you're not that interested in getting the best loot in the game, or clearing the hardest content in the game, you still have something fun to do.
Conclusion
I'm terrible at writing conclusions. Anyways, I think for the long term health of the game, it's important to have great instanced content and not put all your eggs in one basket. Have difficult content options for PVE, PVP, World content, etc and let people choose what they want to focus on, and if they are good enough to be top players, to get great loot for it.
Not everyone can achieve a high rating in Arenas or battlegrounds. Not everyone can kill a mythic boss or push high keys. And in the case of Ashes I guess not everyone can kill a world boss.
All of those content types deserve equal treatment, in the sense that they should all provide meaningful content and rewards for the people capable of achieving the best ranks in that respective content.
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Comments
Bit of a dumb thing to say since 99% of other MMOs require you to do purely PvE content in order to get gear. Why is it ok for them to have only PvE content for gear but not PvX content for gear? I'm not interested in doing purely PvE content most of the time, yet I'm still forced to in MMOs to gear up.
I would also argue that before Mythic+ came out, people still played for YEARS where old content was still run via twink loot runs, we timed ourselves, hell I even ran solo hunter to see how far I could go in certain BRD runs.
The LFR system in wow is why most of the best players in the world quit the game. If you look at it from my perspective (the game that was delivered to us at launch and up until BC) wow is dead. Regardless of how many people are paying and playing out of pure addiction. It's just not fun.
If a game is promoting open world pvp, I would hope that casual players would understand the dangers they face. My guild will make alliances but have zero intention to zerg anything other than other zergs. My primary goal is to create content for my players and organize events consistently. AoC won't be for everyone just like WOW is not for everyone.
With all this said, you and I are very similar. I also ran into the issue of seeing the greatness that AoC will be but felt a wound deep down for the lack of instanced content. I have faith that as Alpha I and II come and go, their team will listen to us and add content as needed by all of the community to help keep the game going for years to come. We won't get what we want comparing this game to WOW. This game will literally force people to learn how to be better communicators and I LOVE THIS. Being friendly with other guilds just to reserve raid slots is going to be awesome. Having a rivalry with another guild and smashing their teeth in when they raid.......amazing. Community is what kept us playing WOW way back when and it will be a massive reason AoC stays alive.
Games like WoW and FFXIV are basically on life-support, by trying to keep their engagement numbers up through dailies, because PvP is pretty much non-existent in those games. Players will just log in, do the dailies to get some reward, then immediately log out. The focus on instanced, linear PvE content is basically killing the genre. It's fun in the beginning when you're playing through the new content the first few times, but it's not sustainable.
I do not think that Ashes should follow this model if they want real long term engagement. Look at pure PvP games. People have been playing the same maps in CS:GO for years without complaining. So Ashes should focus on creating fun PvX and PvP experiences if they want long term health.
Where did I say only pve should be relevant? The whole point I was trying to make is that gear acquisition should be possible from different forms of content. Switching it around to only pvp is not solving any issues.
It's the reason I highlighted the different content types in World of Warcraft. A high rated pvp player is capable of getting 226 ilvl gear. A guild capable of clearing mythic raid bosses will also have access to 226 ilvl gear. Groups capable of clearing a +14/15 key will also have access to 226 ilvl gear.
No particular content is forced on you, and you can do what you like.
I agree completely.
I'd like to throw another game into the mix as another example. Call of duty. People buy it every single year, 3 development teams (each one releasing their version every 3 years) and even though some of them that come out are complete garbage, people are still playing them. The only reason they release a new game every year is because.....profit. Otherwise, we would all still be playing on Nuketown lol.
Yeah no, I have to disagree. You can't compare a shooter that has no pve content to an rpg. Most shooters are fast paced, but you also have more tactical shooters like valorant and Overwatch. In the case of Valorant and Overwatch, those games eventually get stale because players expect new characters with new abilities to get released.
In the case of games like call of duty, that sort of expectation isn't there and it's pretty much the same game with a different skin every year. It's just mindless shooting fun.
Well here's the thing. I don't think you can only have one or the other. WoW has a ton of issues yes, and world content and exploration are big ones. Something that is a staple in pretty much every rpg, player housing, isn't available in WoW. "inns" are just a random NPC in the middle of the map that serve no purpose aside from setting your hearthstone.
World content and exploration are one of the reasons I'm excited for AoC and it's one of my biggest critiques in WoW. I think AoC is making a big mistake if you flip the issue around and have great world content, but awful instanced content.
We can have both.
Can we? I mean we will to some extent. But, and this is just my assumption based on exactly 0 of experience in game development just to be honest, I believe you really need to put much more work into engaging instanced dungeon than open world one. It just gets old faster even with systems like M+ affixes in place. And the quantity needs to be bigger as well. Even simple dungeons in Albion with basically one mechanic of dodging aoe indicators were pretty replayable and fun with other players inside.
Their vision is quite clear with open world being the main focus of the game. Don't get me wrong, if IS managed to do all they set themselves up to for launch and also have enough of fun instanced content, I would be super happy and I don't think it would hurt anything or anyone. I just don't think it's really possible.
Instancing is fundamentally at odds with open world. Instanced content draw players out of the open world, which detracts from the activity in the open world.
We really can't because once you start shifting the focus from open world to instances and people start spending all their time in those instances the open world starts to die off because half the world is in an instance. It's an open world game, they want people out in the open world competing for resources and with each other. The "won't somebody think of the casuals" argument doesn't really apply either because the devs have explicitly said that not everybody will wear the best gear, not everybody will kill all the bosses, etc. If people want to experience more of the game, see more bosses, get more gear, etc they are going to have to join an organized group of people and help contribute to their success. You will need to rely on other players and play all aspects of the game (PvP, Crafting, PvE) to find success in AoC.
Plenty of instanced MMOs out there for people to play if Ashes comes out and they don't enjoy it, the PvE content, or the 20% instancing the devs have confirmed.
It's not a success, it's totally polarize the population.
I will add that make so many difficulty layers in raids and dungeons is one of thing that split up communities in wow, that nearly never mix-up.
If i follow Ashe of Creation to have something different than what become Wow (now it's Lobby RPG, with very few frictions with others players outside your guild/community).
Mythic plus has ups and downs. Gear score and raider IO are horrible messes and try hards focus on all the wrong stuff.
20% instanced dungeons and 80% open world I think offers a good mix. People should be out in the world not in a mini game off on the side.
Look how dead the open world is in WOW.
This
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
You can devote time in putting the materials abd designs together and craft the item, if you want to avoid the pvx world boss scene.
But you know what? People will also PvX in areas that useful mats can be looted.
There is no "PvE only" in this game.
I wish more people took that view. Instead of changing the game to fit you maybe its not your type of game
you are either delusional or you don't understand game development if you think we can
Aren't we all sinners?
I'm a firm believer that instanced combat will always be better at showing actual player skill than world combat because it can be more finely balanced. This is true in both pvp and pve (and even potentially pvx). The reason is that when the combat is in the open world, there are factors that cannot be controlled that directly impact the difficulty. If a boss is too hard, just zerg it down. If you scale the boss based on the number of players around, then other players just stand nearby and do not engage to raise the difficulty. The presence or lack of competitors changes the difficulty, etc. Given these variables, you cannot fine tune a world event to truly challenge a player to the highest levels. You must have a more controlled environment (i.e. an instance) to be able to do this.
WoW did Instanced content very well, but the world content is 100% easymode/casual/doesn't need organization in modern WoW. In vanilla WoW they required some organization for world bosses, but it was still not rewarding enough to be true end game content.
This game doesn't have much to pick up from WoW in terms of world content. However, the instanced content has a lot of good and some bad that IS can learn from.
The Good:
1) Challenging content and variety. WoW's done a ton of different mechanics over the years. They have absolutely made content that was near impossible (and sometimes technically impossible) to beat.
2) Scaled raid size: This was such a major quality of life (and friend building) change when it came out. You got 12 people? no problem? Bob just logged in? lets get him in! It dramatically reduced the drama with having to bench people because room in the raid. It helped make the guild environments more inclusive. Sure you might still have to sit someone because they are underperforming, but that is okay.
3) Mythic+ dungeons. While I've done all types of content, I've always liked the smaller group dungeons more than the massive raids. However, before Legion they were never truly difficult and didn't have a viable progression path. They were done for a short time and then discarded for the rest of the expansion. What a waste of some of the best content! When M+ came in, it provided really good reasons to repeat that content and it was fun because it was challenging and rewarding.
4)Multiple tiers of difficulty (except LFR) - I think this is generally great as it provides more repeatability in content and more access to the content. In PvE this is done by scaling the mobs/bosses in the instance. In PvP this is done through matchmaking against players with similar levels of skill.
5) Some parts of the Groupfinder feature (NOT raidfinder or any aspects that are automatic matchmaking). In many games when you start out you might be yelling in chat looking for people to do dungeons with. This makes the chat channels filled with all sorts of annoying spam and its highly inefficient at getting people who want to do similar content connected. The later iterations of WoW's groupfinder do a pretty good job of being able to find the types of groups you want. I've found it helps grow the community over time as those matches can often lead to people adding others to their friends list. This is literally how I've built up my RBG pvp team over the past 4 years and its been more effective than guilds (and its a better tool for finding a good guild than WoW's guildfinder tool as well!).
6) Seasonal rewards/accomplishments: I think this added an extra level to the fun. Some times the seasons were a bit too long (~4-5 months is probably about right). The seasons gave you something longer-term to work towards (e.g. getting 2.4k pvp rating, clearing all of the dungeons on +15 Mythic level difficulty, or the raid on Mythic level all had rewards, usually a really cool looking mount, a title, and an achievement).
The okay:
1) Repeatable content (pve). WoW had lots of reasons to repeat the same content over and over again, but there wasn't much variety in that content. Most fights were the same scripts in pve. The M+ system was great in the sense that it got people feeling good about doing the same content over and over (even the same dungeons across multiple seasons in a single expansion). I found this to be "fun" as there was progression to work towards and good times with a 5-man group to have.
2) Raider.io (pve), drustvar.com (pvp), and other similar sites. I'm on the fence if these tools are good or bad for a game. On one hand as someone who is often leading groups, these tools are very helpful because its like a filter to screen out the bad players.... But on the other hand it screens out the newer/unproven players with the bad, which is bad for the community. I could do without these (but please do in-game meters). Perhaps there is a better tool in game to help people forming groups to know who to invite or not, but I don't know a good way to balance this as these are direct conflicting priorities (the new or bad player wants a group and the group leader wants the good players only). Perhaps some extra bonus for the group's that help out those players who are new/unproven? (could this get abused with alts though?)
The Bad:
1) the LFR raid difficulty and associated raidfinder. I think this is hands down the worst thing that Blizzard every did to WoW. Sure, creating faceroll content to show the raid story "fixed" the problem of accessibility to raid content, but it created the problem of significantly destroying the community. The Groupfinder tool overall did not do this, the automatic matching aspects of it did. This was catering too far to the casuals at the expense of destroying the need for community that ultimately ends up hurting the casuals as well. For people who didn't want to do at least normal difficultly, they could just watch the youtube videos or streamers to get the story. Raids could also be more about the challenge/rewards, and less about the actual game story to help solve these casual issues.
2) Groupfinder's automatic matchmaking for low level dungeons. While I detest the raid version of this, I think its generally acceptable that dungeons can have a easy mode and if that's the case, you might as well just lump in the automatic group making. Still, the matchmaking isn't needed as it is not too hard to manually put together a group of pugs if you have a good groupfinder tool. I'd probably recommend not doing automatic matchmaking to help promote community growth. I could live either way here (and frankly, I almost never do normal or heroic dungeons. I level up, then go directly to mythic as I can generally clear those even when undergeared).
I think the node system is an excellent example of what really good world content can/should be. I think Caravan's might be good too (but a little bit more risky to see if they are actually "fun" and rewarding).
Raider.io actually tends to be a good leading indicator of the skill of the player (not perfect of course as some people pay for carries). I'd prefer not to have it, but it isn't "the wrong stuff". Gear score I agree is the wrong thing to look at (unless someone is WAY undergeared). It doesn't measure skill, only potential (a highly skilled player can still only perform as well as his/her gear will permit). I'll often take a person 10-15 item levels lower if they have a high raider.io score.
I'm not sure if 20/80 is the right split or not. Maybe its 30/70, 40/60, or even 50/50. Right now WoW's 90/10 and that for sure is not right. I think I'll have to really play the game before I can decide for myself what the right split of my own game time is.
I don't think instances = mini-game off on the side. A mini-game is like WoW's pet battles. These instances are still your character doing content and that content can be very challenge/engaging. These instances can also be very epic battles (if you can do 100v100 in the open world, you could also do that inside an instance).
I see people in the open world in WoW all the time... but its not engaging. Just people mindlessly running around doing their world quests/farming. The occasional gank attempt. But mostly players are just solo ignoring each other. They are out there... but it might as well be solo most the time.
hmm, did I just describe zombies? I guess you're right, its dead because zombies are dead.... wait no, I'd say "open world WoW is undead"
regardless, It's not a model to aspire towards
Barring some kind of complete reversal by the devs, Ashes is not going to be what you described in your op. It goes against everything that Ashes is trying to be. It has been quoted by the devs that about 20% of dungeons will be instanced. So there's that. There are pros and cons to everything. Your arguments are not without merit. But this just aint that game. And thank god.
As LazyPeon said in his "Absolute state of the MMO genre" video, instanced content is something that fits in lobby game like PSO2 or Monster Hunter or Destiny, it doesn't lead at all into what Massively Multiplayer could be.
In my opinion, and it is my opinion so take it with a grain of salt, the best MMO experiences are conjured from free-form interactions created by the players each with their own goals. Whether they be cooperating for something or fighting over it.
That's not to say instanced content has no place or can't exist, it just needs to be a seasoning on top instead of one of the main ingredients.
I would much rather have end-game AoC be world-based than sitting in town waiting for instanced dungeon groups.
But it might not actually be that bad. People are going to want to take care of their reputation and not be constantly pissing everyone off. There will be a corruption system and apparently some pretty severe penalties for pkers. You get in a guild, that guild has alliances...for the most part, most of the time, you're gonna be surrounded by friendly people. Shits gonna happen though. You're gonna get ganked sometimes. Everyone will sometimes and that's ok.
Raider I.O. is a sham it doesn't show potential and is used as a gate to keep people out of content. If your epeen isn't this much get lost is common because of Gear Score and I.O.. Glad neither will be here.
Gear score also doesn't take into account stat stacking. I often will take something that has stats I want over something that has a higher score because it will fit my build better. (Kevin Jordan talked about this in one of his videos)
Instances are most certianlly a mini game anything that removes you from the open world for a short time is a mini game. I get the need to place some content you want scripted in a certain way to be placed in there but most of the content should be where the players are not off in a corner.
With out cross server phasing the open world population you see there would plummet. Especially when people unlock flying and never touch the ground except to harvest a node of some type.
You are dead on about the zombie thing. Good call
And are those other games still up and alive/successful like WoW? Because from my understanding, other rpgs that put more focus in things like PvP eventually died out.
Raider io only gates content for people that want to instantly jump into a +15 when their only timed key was a +3. It is a good indication of skill even if it's not perfect. It's also a good indicator of how much experience you have as I can see how many keys you timed at a certain range.
The people that complain about raider io are either not very good players or don't want to put in the work to be competent enough to actually get invited to keys.
Such a limited point of view, to think that a game would die because of being pvp focused and not because of it's p2w monetization systems, the ultimate MMORPG slayer in the west....
It really seems like you are looking after some new WoW Clone, pushing ideas to make AoC more WoW-like, kinda similar to some folks that appeared here on the forum asking for AoC PvE only servers....
Never heard of Lineage/lineage2 and Aion? Even tho not popular in the west like WoW, they are still insanely popular in the east and pretty pvp focused.
If you want an example of a popular mmorpg here in the west more pvp focused there is BDO.
Aren't we all sinners?