Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
We are in the Alpha Two Phase II testing which will take place 5+ days each week.
Alpha Two testing is scheduled to happen daily until January 13, 2025 at 10PM PT. We will have periods of downtime for hotfixes and daily restarts happening at 2 AM PT for NA realms, and 2 CET for EU realms.
Starting next week, Alpha Two realms are scheduled to be online for 5+ days a week from Thursdays at 10 AM PT to Mondays at 10 PM PT. Alpha Two realms are planned to be down on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and for daily restarts. Alpha Two realms will also be brought down as updates and fixes are ready.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
We are in the Alpha Two Phase II testing which will take place 5+ days each week.
Alpha Two testing is scheduled to happen daily until January 13, 2025 at 10PM PT. We will have periods of downtime for hotfixes and daily restarts happening at 2 AM PT for NA realms, and 2 CET for EU realms.
Starting next week, Alpha Two realms are scheduled to be online for 5+ days a week from Thursdays at 10 AM PT to Mondays at 10 PM PT. Alpha Two realms are planned to be down on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and for daily restarts. Alpha Two realms will also be brought down as updates and fixes are ready.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
Comments
^ This. I have fond memories of Tibia dungeons, bumping into other adventurers and then ending up working with them, or trying to swank the loot first, or simply watching their animosity. None of that can exist in instanced areas. Why make an M*M*O if you're taking out the M and M?
WoW dungeons were like doing any 1 player game. You won or lost. Was kinda refreshing not to be killed for no reason but I missed the unexpected and if there is even some kind of deterrent for greifing, it wont be as common as Tibia.
The possibilities of interaction and unpredictability made it thrilling, even when no one was around, because that in itself was uncommon.
Some instanced content should exist, for the times when you simply just feel like doing something only with friends/solo. And there could be logical lore reasons why some areas are separate from the open world anyway: Portals, dream realities, just a random teleported destination, etc.
Too many instances do this, for sure.
As with anything, instancing is a tool that a games developers should put to use when it makes sense, and not use when it doesn't make sense.
It makes sense for things like story telling, but also for things like highly curated encounters that are designed to test a specific number of players.
It doesn't make sense for general dungeons and the like, but those highly curated encounters could well be located in an instance that is itself located in a non-instanced dungeon.
With this, you have all the best of open dungeons, running in to others (for better or worse), competition over lesser bosses, all of that. But you also have the advantages that instanced do bring to a game, that can only be obtained via instancing.
In my mind, no instance should have any base population - or trash mobs. To me, that is defeating the point of an instance, and any situation in which base population is appropriate it is also appropriate for it to be open.
It's more about preserving the experience of a single shared world.
Basically, I'm happy for instances - so long as only 1 instance of that world can exist at a time on that server, and everyone has equal access to that instance (or equal opportunity to reserve the instance).
Each instanced dungeon/boss/objective directly reduces spontaneous player interactivity.
My thing with this is that it necessitates one of two situations.
The problem here is that as soon as one guild is finished with an instance, another guild can zone in and take on that same encounter. This will lead to guilds literally waiting to be able to do a thing another guild just did - which is no less convoluted than two guilds doing the same thing at the same time.
This also limits how many people have access to content on any given evening, and that is not a good thing.
I dont disagree that the very notion of instances breaks the perception of a single world. However - in my opinion - access to content for paying customers so that they remain paying customers trumps this fairly minor issue.
This sounds good to me for most dungeons. So you go into a dungeon with 5 bosses. Everything is open world except for the "rooms" of these 5 bosses are unique instances for each group. This solves the issue of lines forming for groups waiting for bosses to respawn (which is one of the main arguments for doing instanced dungeons), but still has groups running into each other and/or mobs between the bosses. It also allows IS to tune each boss encounter to a 8 man group without concerns about them just getting zerged down by raids.
That's kindof what I expect to happen: fighting to gain territorial rights to the instance, tracking the progress of people who are inside and all the tactics that come with trying to squeeze in before someone else notices. And only 1 winner.
I can only speak for myself, but parallel instancing is one of the major reasons I lost interest in Dragon's Nest.
Almost.
I'd rather use an example of a dungeon with 20 bosses.
In such a dungeon, there would be 5 that are in their own instances, and another 5 or so that are still fairly major bosses, but are not in instances. These bosses would only respawn every day or two.
Then there would be 10 that are lesser bosses, all still open world. These bosses would respawn between 30 and 90 minutes from when they were killed.
The idea is that the bigger open bosses are there to be fought over, the smaller bosses are there as a bonus to kill if you like - but are not valuable enough to go out hunting specifically for, and the instanced bosses are there as a constant reason for groups to use the dungeon.
This also applies to raid content.
The key to making this work is in the layout of the dungeon, and the specific location of the instanced encounters within in. There should not be a single ideal path to take to get to all of the instances, but rather three or four potential paths from any one instance to any other instance.
I would still consider this to be a small dungeon, by the way.
That depends on what the content focus is that the game is offering. My understanding has been that the content focus is pvx. Listening to Steven talk through various videos, it seems to me that he is emphasizing open world dungeons, player conflict, risk vs reward, teamwork/alliances/politics/espionage to achieve objectives. What it sounds like he's selling primarily is the content of a pvx world where sometimes you're going to do the dungeon/boss encounters EZ PZ with no interference, and sometimes you're gonna have to fight other players for it. He's selling the pvx. There's no guarantee you're going to scratch your pvp itch going to a dungeon because there might be no one there. There's no guarantee you'll scratch your pve itch because there might be pvp there.
We know that as nodes level up, new content like dungeons is added. So that metropolis that has this fancy, lucrative dungeon in it's OWN territory might not wanna share. They might defend their territory and everything inside of it. My impression has been that this would be considered a completely normal thing if it were to happen. So in that sense, the content of every dungeon is not guaranteed to everyone at any given time.
All of that said, if it became apparent sometime after launch that vast swathes of the player base simply can not access dungeons, that super predator pvp players are just obliterating them at the gates of and inside every dungeon, and there's just nothing that can be done about it...then yeah Intrepid might have a problem on their hands. Certain things might have to be reworked or rethought. All of that will be tested. But again, I've never seen Intrepid say anything about guaranteeing every group at any time will be able to do any dungeon. That wouldn't be a pvx game. That'd be more like wow.
It sounds like there will be a certain amount of things instanced and I think that's probably for the best. But the main content I see them selling is the potential fight over the dungeon, not the dungeon itself.
Do you have lookouts watching for incoming groups? Is your guilds diplomacy good enough to net you relative safety at that dungeon, or does everyone hate your guild? Do you have allies you can call for backup? Do you have a blocking force ready to peel off and stall enemy groups at bottlenecks in the dungeon to give your main group enough time to finish the boss you're engaged with?
If this were true, then it should hold that at no time can anything in Ashes be PvP only, yet the game will have an arena - which is a fairly important aspect of the military node.
If a pure PvP situation that is worth doing for it's own sake can exist in a game that is selling itself as a PvX game, then a pure PvE situation that is worth doing for it's own sake can - and arguably must - also exist in that same game.
As I have said though, just because a raid is instanced off from potential interference, that doesn't mean that the contents rewards are not subject to risk of disruption via PvP.
If the point of the game is the fight over the content, rather than the content itself, that means as soon as that fight is over, the losing side will go off to the next game - as has been the case for every PvP based MMO ever. It is access to content that keeps people in a game, not the ability to fight over access to content.
To add to this that's a feature, not a flaw.
When a guild starts to do that, they start to get a bad rep. In a persistent player interactive MMO that bad rep goes a long way. They start getting targetted more by pvper's, they lose trade deals, people move away from their territory, meaning the economy in their area plummets. If other guilds and other players band together those consequences become more frequent and more prominent. Maybe the smaller guilds band together to hire the other big guilds to take care of the problem?
It's all part of the story a game like Ashes can and will create.
Don't let yourself be limited by theme park sculpted experiences.
Edit: In theme park MMO's like retail WoW, reputation doesn't matter, ninja looters fade into the void as they return to their own home server never to be seen by their "raidfinder pick up group" ever again.
Don't make the mistake of thinking you can get away with bad behavior in a community that will know and remember you.
Back in Vanilla WoW (not classic), my server had a guy EVERYONE knew because he commandeered the auction house. You knew you could always find him standing in Org at his regular hours. Now he was smart and didn't screw people out of their trades or money or anything, but he dictated the flow of resources for the Horde on our server. If he did screw people over you bet your ass people would have started acting together to stop him. This happend because Vanilla WoW was less of a Theme Park experience and had more of the freedom of choice and interactivity that AoC is trying to be, except AoC is going all in on that aspect.
If a guild wants to lock down a dungeon for a week or two (or three, what ever), that's great. There are other dungeons in the game to run, and that guild that is obviously full of outright dicks (every server has a guild like this) won't be in those other dungeons.
What I don't get is people that think that just because this game is a PvX game - which some people seem to mistake for a PvP game - that it needs to cater solely to their childish, toxic overcompensating brand of gaming, where they are only happy if they are making others unhappy.
Could you explain to me why you are the person who gets to dictate what's fun for everybody?
I don't, and I am not trying to.
You are the one that is trying to.
Literally every single post of mine on this topic is about how top end PvE can make PvP in Ashes better.
Literally every single post of yours on this topic (this thread and many similar threads in the past) is about how PvE shouldn't exist, and how only PvP will.
How is it that you are asking me why I am dictating what is fun for everyone, when I am the one saying everyone can have the content they consider fun, and you are the one saying that only you can have the content you consider fun?
"No I didn't, YOU DID!" lol very classy. There's a lot of people on these forums who argue for keeping an open world game as open world as possible. I also don't know why you make things up, I always say cram as much PvE as possible as you can into the open world. IN THE OPEN WORLD. If you can't see the difference between advocating for keeping instances out of an open world game, and gatekeeping groups of people competing for something (Like a dungeon) I honestly don't know what to tell you here chief.
Guilds locking down dungeons isn't them being "outright dicks". It's them taking a calculated risk and saying "we are big enough, organized enough, and strong enough to handle a lot of enemies in order to further our progression as a guild quicker than we could if we didn't do this"
Welcome to arguing with Noanni lol
He uses every bad faith debate tactic in the book, I just set him to ignore and moved on.
Look at Archeage. The Kraken, dragon and Leviathan were PvP content that were killed by the top PvP guilds.
Your argument here is to say that you think Ashes should have no PvE content, because you are disguising PvP content as PvE and pointing PvE players towards it.
I am saying that literally all of that can - and both should and will - exist in Ashes, but that doesn't mean that it has to be all the content types in the game.
The fighting over the content IS the content. That's what 90%+ of the people here should be here for I would think. That's the unique draw of the game. Anyone here to avoid that fighting is probably looking at the wrong game. That's what we were sold. That's why I'm here. That's why I've spent 500 dollars. Open world, open dungeons, pvp enabled literally everywhere except for your freehold and player stall. Pvp even in cities! It's broadcasted all over their wiki, their forums, their live streams.
The dungeons are content too. And most people will probably be able to do them. Certain parts of them might be instanced off, we don't know yet, that's fine. 20% is cool. If your group gets far enough into a dungeon successfully, maybe that last, most important boss should be instanced off as a reward for making it there. We dunno how all of that's gonna work yet.
And we don't know how arenas work exactly yet either. If pvp players are allowed to sit in arenas all day and farm some kind of currency, or gear from it, or node experience...that should not happen. But just basic arenas with no tangible benefit to the larger node/political/strategic picture? That doesn't matter. Dungeons do matter though. Resources, loot, node experience, all of that affects the larger strategic game, the strength of guilds and nodes. Players should not just be allowed to farm them non stop, with no interference, unless they use their political, diplomatic and military abilities to allow them to do so.
If there was an instanced dungeon farming meta that developed, then that'd be that. The game and its entire vision would effectively be over. Certain parts may still work. But farming the instanced dungeons where no one could interfere with you would take precedence over everything else. The open world itself would be more empty and the entire game would suffer for it.
If pvp players get arenas that are inconsequential then give pve players something inconsequential too, to measure their skill by. A little arena where they have to kill X amount of mobs in X amount of time or whatever and get a rating. But nothing that can just be farmed repeatedly for important things, only for fun. There's your equality.
The issue with this is - as I said earlier, as soon as one side wins that fight, the other leaves the game.
If you want to have solid PvP long term, you need people in the game long term. If you want to keep people in the game long term, you have to give them some content to run, and then you can also give them some content to fight over.
Again, a PvX game should have both.
I'm sorry but this isn't a universally held opinion, and it's going to be a huge overwhelming majority of this game I'm willing to bet. You really need to try and start to understand that if you intend on playing this game you can't look at yourself as a PvPer, a raider, a crafter etc. You are just going to need to be a "Person who plays this game" and be ready to defend your guilds raid bosses from other players and then take your raw materials it drops to your crafters to get gear pumped out. Everything is required to find success. You can't just focus on PvP, you can't just focus on instanced raiding. All the games they draw inspiration from has this supposed "PvE content that's actually PvP content" if you don't like that style of MMORPG (PvX) then I promise you chances are you won't enjoy this game.
When they start introducing instances left and right and free gear piñatas for people to hide in you got yourself a dead open world game and a bunch of annoyed people on these forums. New players and casuals don't need instanced dungeons to play catchup, they need crafted sets that are slightly worse than raid boss crafted gear that's obtainable from farming materials in the open world.
I'm fairly sure it will be roughly 80% of the game.
Well now the true colors are coming out. Look man, I'm 39 years old. I could write a 5 page essay on my dislike of childish, toxic gamers. I don't like them any more than you. But as of right now Ashes is set to be a pvp focused game. Everyone's going to be either fighting or cooperating to achieve what they want to achieve in game. Some will be toxic. But watering down and possibly downright breaking the entire pvp/political structure of the game for pve players, by allowing pve players to farm at will in instances, when there are plenty of other pve games out there where they will never be harassed by toxic gamers? For what?
And I'm fairly sure you are wrong about how this 20% will work, but we will see.
Maybe.
But then people said I was wrong about it ever applying to raid encounters at all - that it would only be used for story content which is likely to be solo.
It doesn't bother me either way. I'm gonna give the game a chance and if it's not to my liking, not enough PvP, not enough going on in the world, not to my tastes, I will go and play something else. It's really that simple.
I hear you in general on your point of the losing side quitting the game. That can be a risk in a game type like this. I'm worried about mega guilds/alliances that artificially go beyond what the guild/alliance cap is, by making sister guilds/alliances etc.
But even in "losing", there's going to be content to do. If your node get's sieged and destroyed, level up a node in more defensible, friendly area. Join an already established node that needs help with it's own pvp problems. The game isn't just over. Pretty much everyone should expect that at some point they're gonna get fucked in this game lol. It's a pvx game with a pvp focus. That's what everyone should be here for, to get fucked, and to fuck em back. Do some pve and shit along the way. Fire. Dope. I dunno