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
hahaha Essentially I am saying that I agree with both of your statements. The gap between players is an issue, and the solution to the gap is, that everything can be bought/sold (endgame gear).
I, (and I assume the most of us) have played games where everything was directly bound after looting/crafting and the gap between players only grew faster and larger.
Little bit easier to understand?
While it isn't a silver bullet that fixes the issues outlined above, instancing as a tool is one of the most effective means to combat those issues. An open world encounter at raid level can be killed by one raid of 40 players a week - and it is only the guild that is best at PvP that has a shot. That same encounter being instanced means every guild in the game has a clear shot at it, and those guilds that are good enough *at that content* can be successful *with that content*.
I also feel the need to reiterate (since so many people love to take what I say out of context) that I am in no way saying that every encounter should be like this. Even in a game that isn't PvP focused, open world raid encounters for guilds to contest should be a thing - this only holds more true in games that have more of a PvP focus (though the more PvP, the less focus on the encounter). Ashes needs to have both to stand even a base chance of being successful.
I have no doubt this is why Intrepid have said they will use instancing where it makes sense for the content, rather than saying they will only use it for storytelling and such.
Welcome to Monday!
Most people decided to spend time - we waited for Auroria to come out.
That is why before it was opened up most players were running around in heroic gear at best, and only a few months after it opened up, celestial and divine was fairly normal.
Something is only heavy in terms of p2w if players feel they have to pay. if they don't feel a need to pay (as was the case here) then I can't for the life of me understand how you could claim it is heavy p2w.
Hell, I can give you examples of things that were more heavy p2w from before Auroria released than regrading was, let alone after.
If you want a single example though, I would say the speedboat. If you wanted to run packs on the water, that was the only viable way to do it. The only way to get hold of one was to buy it,
I disagree with almost everything you just said. You have a way lacing things I do agree with into things that I disagree with though. It's impressive heh. I propose a truce. But my nuclear weapons will be pointed at you during this peace time.
I'm curious which part you disagree with - that instances are a great tool for guaranteeing access to content (though not at guaranteeing success on content), or that games need to have content people know they can access to stand a chance to be successful.
I agree that people should have access to content that gives them a chance to be successful. And I think they should be killable while they're doing that content, unless they're in the 20% that is instanced.
I've never said I want more than 20% of content instanced, and I have specifically said I don't want any changes to the PvP systems in Ashes.
Now on instances they have their uses like Noaani mentioned and I would rather have my boss fights not include PvP griefing but that’s only fair when taking on challenging content. The dungeon can be totally open world and PvP I don’t have an issue with that.
The issue I have with instances in ashes would be they would feed too many top end materials into the market.
The balance in my opinion is having open world PvP dungeons and raids with abundant numbers of mini boss style NPCs(open world). Along with a healthy number of bosses you can isolate your party/raid to.
I haven't played since mist so the current state is beyond me and is kind of irrelevant to me because my point is
Instanced dungeon (or content for that matter) can be very long lasting.
I can't even say how often I went with a group that midway through abandoned the run through Blackrock depths simply because it was too much for them. Comparing a Black Temple raid with Firelands is like trying to measure a trained athlete against a child.
Do we NEED Instanced dungeons? I don't think so. I have little experience with the way IS wants to design their open world dungeons but I can imagine that it works just like instanced dungeons, just with some different aspects of difficulty added and ways to get to them.
I'm certainly worried about the whole griefing aspects that it obviously offers, but if their own experience isn't enough to offer up solutions for it I hope they wouldn't just push forward despite it.
I can be a life devouring nightmare. - Grisu#1819
I'm not sure our preferences for PvP/PvE are the difference here.
I want Ashes to have as good a PvP game as is possible.
I just see the basic fact that PvP has 50% winners, 50% losers. People that are losing more than they are winning will not continue to consider the game the best use of their time (or money, depending on which is more valuable to them).
If people that are loosing more than 50% of the time leave the game, that means someone that was winning more than 50% of the time will now find themselves losing more than 50% of the time, because that 50% winners/losers ratio has to remain.
This is why a game needs more than PvP to keep people logging in every day.
People do not log in to a game if they feel all they are doing is being someone else's content. They need to have content of their own first, and once that is taken care of they are much happier to be that other persons content for a while.
Essentially, if you want a good PvP game, you need to start out by creating a game that the people that are losing 50% or more of their PvP fights want to play regardless of the fact that are losing so much PvP.
That is a very one sided way to look at PvP.
If someone starts playing a game and is experiencing a 10%win:90%lose rate, they can take pride in just getting that win rate up to 50% from 10%. Which is huge. From there every 1% above 50% is going to be harder and harder to get and more and more rewarding.
Most people suck at PvP if they have never done if before. It is those that stick with it and have a drive to improve that get the most out of PvP.
The people that were going to quite because of PvP were going quit anyway. They are going to gravitate towards games where PvP is optional. I am pretty sure we can all agree that PvP is never going to be optional in Ashes.
What would be better for the health of the game is for PvP to be advertised more heavily than PvE so that when the game launches the PvE care bears don't flood the game. Creating a need for extra servers that will empty out when they realize that PvP is not avoidable.
Just my current thoughts after skimming of this thread the last few hours.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
When attacked it was more common to actually have a small pvp group come and attack the periphery of players fighting the boss.
But this was often to their miss fortune, as they were to only to find it triggered the attention of the main group which was coordinated and highly powered and that group shifted their focus for a few split seconds to them and overwhelmingly took them out and then turned around and continued the boss.
It was hard enough to organise a big enough group to do a larger boss in the first place so it was equally had to round up an equivalent force to take them out.
The only real instances where there was a more equivalent pvp was the fight to get access into some of the highest bosses that were instanced and had a known time for access with a door that shut behind once something triggered when enough or something went on inside.
I don`t see much difference happening for the bigger more important bosses, and as for the lesser bosses, well they are probably going to be on more frequent spawning timers anyhow.
Every subsequent wave of people that lose at PvP end up with about half of each group (guild, alliance, what ever) leaving the game every 2 - 3 months.
You may have different experiences, but this is what I've seen.
This I agree with fully.
You know I am a fan of people having all the information they need to make a decision. Knowing the game has unavoidable PvP is a key aspect to this game that everyone should know before purchasing a subscription. Hell, I'd be ok with a pop-up warning telling people that were implemented in to the purchase process.
It's perhaps worth pointing out that if we look at some of the game design decisions made so far and translate that over to marketing and PR, with how happy Intrepid are to obfuscate things in game and with all the talk of PvP and open worlds, we may well end up with a more instanced PvE focused game than WoW.
Has there been a complete pvp mmo in the past? I mean one in which you could only level by pvp, no mobs for xp. One in which no items drop from a pve encounter, all had to be crafted, bought or stolen? From memory, although I didn't play it, Planetside was something like that, but a first person shooter. You could level and equip yourself through pvp in Warhammer online, but there was lots of pve content too, and the first expansion didn't bring much as far as pvp was consider if I remember right.
Could it simply be that pvp has always been diluted with pve too much to retain enough interest from the pvp crowd in MMOs? You know the kind of crowd that keeps playing other genres. Are MMOs limiting themselves too people who likes a mix of both pve and pvp?
Do you have a source for your statistics or only anecdotes?
Let's look at the 4 games that Ashes draws inspiration from:
Archeage: Killed by P2W
Lineage 2: Killed by P2W
SWG: Killed by a patch that tried to turn the game into WoW
EVE: Plenty successful
I think it will be easy to avoid these mistakes.
Maybe I'm oversimplifying here, but I think people just don't want to be stuck.
They don't want to lose 90% of their PvP encounters, with no hope of improving (because of the gear gap and PvP penalties). They don't want to be physically blocked from content by PvP, which they can't win. They don't want to be locked out of content or whole systems (node politics, wars, raids), because it's being monopolized by top guilds. And similar to the real life frustration of needing experience to get a job, but needing a job to get experience, they might fear for their ability to join a good guild without gear.
When I was playing TF2 many years ago, on lobby servers with no matchmaking, it didn't matter if I was on the losing team. As long as it wasn't a complete stomp, and I could play the game, get a few kills, hold on to territory for a few minutes. I wasn't great, and half the time I would just play Medic to make myself useful, but whatever, I got stuff done anyways. Small victories mattered just as much or more than the final win or loss.
Basically, hopelessness, the inability to even make a dent towards your goals, is what drives people away from PvP when it is done wrong.
Now, to be clear, that is a very exaggerated illustration. I don't think these issues are as dire or difficult as people are suggesting. Unless the game is truly one-dimensional and stupidly punishing (it isn't), I don't think people are going to get stuck like that.
As long as Ashes has any kind of accessible PvE content (quests, dungeons, node tasks, gathering/crafting), it's fine. People will have plenty of opportunities to bounce back from the occasional PvP/PvX losses. And they won't even lose that much to begin, since it's not full-loot.
But Intrepid is trying to push the PvX envelope, so they have to be a little wary. In order to prevent the game from skewing too hard in either direction (PvE grind-fest or PvP winner-takes all), they have to keep a lot in balance. Things like mob population density, scarcity of resources, corruption/death penalties, frequency of raids/sieges, and gear caps (soft and hard).
The large open-world (enforced by limited fast-travel) helps a lot here, because different regions can have different equilibriums, and people can move between them if needed.
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...I guess none of that had to do with Instanced content, so I'll just say that I agree with the 20% thing. Instanced content can provide a unique experience (challenging OR cinematic, tightly-designed PvE). Even if you don't care for that content directly, they serve a few purposes even in a PvX sandbox: Giving groups a concrete PvE goal to work towards and build around. Immersion and story-telling (which provide purpose and meaning to sandbox).
Keep in mind, I said all of that as a PvE-biased player. My favorite game at the moment is FFXIV. But I'm happy to try something new, and Ashes seems to have a lot of dynamic and interwoven gameplay to dig into. I don't want everything to be WoW-inspired, and I'm eager to fight (PvP) for the things I want. But I will appreciate the game way more if there are some serious PvE challenges woven into the PvX.
Not really sure why you're trying to slam me with your silly point, that I actually kind of agree with. Silly because it doesn't apply to what we've been talking about in this thread. The first question most people have about a new mmo they find out about is, is it a pve or pvp game? That's just the most generic, basic question people want to know. It instantly tells you more about the character and features of the game than probably any other question. If you just say it's a community focused mmo, what the hell does that even mean? Mmos are supposed to community focused by default, that's part of the problem with modern mmos is that they're getting away from that.
The game has a pvp focus, when you're breaking it down between the basic categories of pvp and pve. And that's what has been being debated at times in this thread. NOT whether it has a community focus or not. So to come in here and slam me with that is silly.
I agree with you though that it has a community focus. So many of the game's pvp and pve systems require community for them to work. There are many things that you won't be able to accomplish solo. There are many things that your guild can accomplish np in other games, but will have to network and collaborate with the community in this game to accomplish, such as some raids.
Maybe the community focus is the umbrella focus, that the pvp or pve focus of a game resides under? I can go with that. But that's not what was being debated here. I think I ruffled your feathers with some of things I said and you were just looking for any kind of opening to slam me. No offense.
Here, for the thread in general.
80% of the content that will exist in Ashes of Creation is open-world and there's a specific reason for that. So because of the way that friendships and or enemies are forged in the game and people have the opportunity to create their own friends or foes. We want that to play out from a contesting standpoint as well. So a lot of these hunting grounds or raid bosses that people are going to have opportunities to kill, they're going to be essentially contested potentially by your your enemies that you've created in the game or you can work together to create alliances in order to defend those contested zones.[2] – Steven Sharif
You may be right. It definitely does seem like there's a fair bit of people that just have their eyes closed to what's literally right in front of their face.
Edit: Ya know on second thought, I don't know that it'd really make a difference. The game's going to be streamed for months before launch. All of the youtube videos, podcasts, forum posts developer blogs already describing the game.
There's literally a segment of the pve player base that will purposefully play pvp focused mmo's and do everything in their power to get them changed. It's a mini game in itself for them. And it will never stop.
A reading from the Encyclopedia Britannica:
Militant Pver
- A person who identifies games that have a pvp focus and invades and infiltrates the games to change them to a pve focus.
- Spends many hours forum warrioring to achieve those goals. But a millisecond of being attacked by another player in a game, the warrior instantly disappears.
- Behaves similarly to the AI bots they are accustomed to fighting when they are attacked by other human beings.
- Eagerly awaits Judgement Day, the day when Terminators will take over the world. Because at least then they will be killed by bots. Looks forward to the content.
- Not comparable to modern forms of militant religious factions. But definitely a step above militant vegans in ferocity.
The answer to this is fairly simple.
Those other games have short, bite sized pieces of content that players run, and then when it is over, players start another piece of content.
There are no real meaningful rewards that carry through from one match to the next, and so at the start of each match, all players are basically on an equal footing.
Even if you lose 100 times in a row, you are still on an equal footing that next time.
MMO's are persistent. Winners get rewards, losers dont. Lose a "match" (arena, open world, whatever) and the next time you go up against that same person, they start off ahead of you due to winning last time. This means players get to a point where some are basically always winning, and some are basically always losing.
While we will never know for sure, I would suggest that if Fortnite made it so you progressed your character as you did well in each match, the game would have died long ago.
This is why Crowfall is going to have a non-persistet world. If players lose big, they can come back at the next reset and be on that equal footing again. Civilization Online was set to have this "feature" as well.
This is why PvP MMO's (other than EvE, which has it's own very unique design) dont last. People always look at games like Archeage and L2 and think that it is the P2W that killed them - completely ignoring (willfully, it seems) that these games were already dying before that happened, and P2W gave them a final lifeline.
By their very design, persistent PvP games cannibalize their own population, which naturally causes their eventual downfall.
Spot on. This is also why you see MMO's having "seasons" (with the gear caps going up each season), "catch-up mechanics" (new easy to get gear to establish a baseline for people who missed out in the previous season), and "resets" (i.e. new level cap that everyone needs to grind and by the time you are done all of your old gear is obsolete).
Ashes is not a pvp focused game. And it's not a pve focused game. It's a "comprehensive pvx" game. I think I'll still hold to my opinion on that though. The game sounds great no matter the focus category.
While I am not going to use this as proof that my earlier assertion was right (it isn't enough in itself), I have been saying for a very long time that the reason we hear more about the PvP aspects of Ashes is because that is what Steven likes best about the game.
Since he is a gamer more than a PR person, he talks about what he wants to talk about, rather than trying to spread out talking about every aspect of the game.
Since he loves PvP, he talks more about PvP.
Since he talks more about PvP, we hear more about PvP.
Since we hear more about PvP, we assume the game is more about PvP.
This is why - even though I have never once thought the game was as PvP focused as something like L2 or Archeage - I don't blame others for thinking that it is. I can fully understand why people would think it with how the game is talked about.
Sometimes though, you have to cut through the obvious, and look at the reasons why things are as they seem.
Indeed, and I hate those mechanics as much as I hate the way Crowfall is going about it.
To me, the only answer for getting a persistent world with PvP, where the PvP rewards winners and punishes losers is to have a limit to how far the losers can fall. Have a base amount of content that they can always run.
This would not work for Ashes, but the most obvious way for this would be to have an instanced progression starting from the level cap that assumes players are wearing the cheapest crafting gear the game has to offer. From there, they can gear up in instances to a point where they are at least approaching being competitive - even if this process takes weeks complete.
From there, they are able to go back to trying open world content, and putting themself back at risk in PvP situations.
Then, if they have a massive loss and lose literally everything, they can get that basic crafted gear and start that gearing up progression again.
Even if the people in question have dozens of others that are literally hunting them down and want to ruin their game, they have that base level of content they can always run, and that content will see them geared up to at least a basic level. If the developers then increase the quality of gear available to all players, they can opt to extend that base gearing up content a little as well.
Having a base level content system like this could also mean the game can add a slightly more punishing gear loss scheme to PvP (or PvE, for that matter) than Ashes has.
The game could also have this concept for solo, group and raid players.
Again, this wouldn't work for Ashes, and I am not suggesting it for this game, but this is the kind of thing that is needed in a PvP game to keep players in the game a little longer. Most players would likely only be happy repeating this content maybe three times, but that means these players lose everything they have four times before leaving the game, which is significantly better than one time.
I would agree with you if we had confirmation of any system that did not involve PvP in some way. Even crafting requires mats that will be fought over. Every system in the game leads people into an environment that involves PvP. I think that is why we hear so much about PvP. All roads lead to PvP. I don't think it is so much that Steven is biased to PvP, but more that there is not much more to talk about.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.