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
The actual developers would come in at that point during the Alphas and test the numbers so that people with 40 man gear aren't insanely OP to the point where they are 1-2 shotting people who are in the starter farmed "open world set". This way they can eventually catch up to them with enough work but not feel like the hole is impossible to climb out of. About the whole "still being able to compete thing" that's more along the lines of a person with 8 man gear still being able to fight a person or content with 16 man gear, but would have a pretty hard time against someone with 40 man gear or 40 man content.
All of this is easily achievable through open world content, open world dungeons and very minimal instancing is required. People can still work towards progress even if they are new/casual and catch up eventually to people who have been there playing all the time at the start and you don't need to have guaranteed loot every week when you can have open world mobs, mob packs, and bosses.
Gear has approximately a 40-50% influence on a player's overall power in the game.[6]
No idea what that means in the context we're talking about lol
Edit: Listened to the interview with Asmongold where that was talked about. Sounds like he's saying someone decked out in the best gear is going to be 40-50% stronger than a fresh level 50. Not sure what fresh level 50 means, just quest gear? Looks like he is eyeing some pretty sizable gear gaps.
This argument makes no sense and I'm assuming you are referring to your "PvE content in the open world is PvP content" and that's just not a real thing. That's your opinion, and not shared by many many people.
There's PvE in the game. You still need to defeat boss mechanics after you win a PvP battle to secure the area. A boss that's inside a pseudo instance or out in the open world that people can PvP over is still a raid boss, and it's still PvE.
As I am sure you know, the TTK in this game is targeted at 30 seconds.
If we assume that is the time for people that have equal gear, we have a good starting position.
If we now assume that each increase in gear reduces your TTK by 5 seconds, then when a player goes from basic open world materials crafted gear up to 8 man group gear, that TTK goes from 30 seconds to 25 seconds. Move up to full raid gear and it goes to 20 seconds against a player in open world gear.
Each of these steps is very obviously noticeable to the player getting the gear upgrades, but even after getting fully upgraded they are not 1-2 shotting anyone - unless those attacks have 10 second cast timers.
Now, obviously this isn't a perfect example, as different classes and builds do things differently. But since Intrepid have stated that TTK as a general aim, I feel it is an appropriate metric to use to illustrate my point here.
I'm not arguing any of this, I am saying that some of this needs to be the end of a particular path that players may want to take.
If the reason to get gear in Ashes is to get better at PvP, then the game is a PvP game. Not a PvX game, a PvP game.
There need to be end goals that are PvE based - just as castles are an end goal for PvP - if the game is to be properly considered a PvX game.
This is a quote my man!
Their goal with this game seems to be that player power will be derived more from the economy than from gear. The more wealth you own, the more power or status you have. If that's the case then it wouldn't really matter as much what the quality of gear was from dungeons vs. battlegrounds etc - only that the more you participated in those different outlets the more gear you obtained to trade or sell.
Given very little gear will be BoP then someone that runs only battlegrounds will receive X amount of gear opportunity .. run battlegrounds AND dungeons, now you have 2X gear opportunity. Someone with enough time on their hands to do that plus raid, craft and play with the real estate market etc, - well, a casual might have the same gear but might not have, you know, ... A CASTLE.
With an economy based system more casual players may wind up with the same gear as a raider but they will not get there as quickly and they won't have all of the other shiny toys and opportunities that the raider was able to purchase as a result of their extra time investment.
Gear would not be the end goal in a system like this .. just a form of currency past what you wear on your body.
A raid in Ashes will take 40 people. This means that if a raid would be expected to spent 4 hours to get to a boss in a raid dungeon, fight off the opposition and then kill that raid boss, the raid needs to be generating 160 hours worth of profit.
If this were in many items of quality similar to that of other content, it wouldn't be long before the server were geared out well enough and no content was worth doing.
The only way to make getting 40 people together to spend that much time - from an economic standpoint - is for that raid to get a few items that a few people will pay that 160 hours worth of time for.
I was hoping there will be sufficient variety and volume of things to do that are agreeable and that it is neither possible nor necessary to do all but still be able to have a fulfilling time by choosing some of the content. And with such variety and volume that people can find sufficient enjoyment with a bias towards the niche they lean towards.
It would be nice if that were the way things went, but sadly, they generally don't.
If a person is a PvP focused player, if Ashes PvP is not to their liking, they are not going to look at see if the crafting or fishing will interest them. That PvP player will instead move on to a game that has PvP that they prefer. Even if the PvE is great, if that player wants PvP first and foremost, and the PvP is not to their liking, they will (and should) move on.
Same with a PvE player.
OR
Maybe the raid boss is guaranteed to drop a nice item that is only randomly lootable in other activities.
Maybe the boss is guaranteed to drop some type of blueprint or mount that is only randomly lootable in other activities.
Maybe participating in so much raid activity benefits your character in a way or has them qualify for some other benefit in the game.
Maybe there is some type of loot or raid progression status that benefits the guilds and rewards them for motivating their members to raid.
I don't want to talk about it from a purely economic standpoint because I don't think they would ever design it that way. I'm just glad that there is more potential here than some type of carrot-on-a-stick, linear gear progression slog-fest like WoW.
It's good to toss around all of these ideas and counter ideas as they develop the game, though, because it gets all of our concerns out there while there is still time to make corrections.
Fortunately, Intrepid understand this even if you dont. That is why they have said the best gear in the game is from raid dropped materials that then need to be crafted.
But in a way it's not bottlenecked. You can get it from the pvp systems. Attacking caravans, sieging nodes and looting freeholds, and corruption system pking people in open world raids and leaving instances etc. And of course by buying them at market.
I still think its bad game design to make the best mats sourced and only sourced from raids. But the genius of AoC strikes again. I'm definitely envisioning a more savage environment around dungeons/raids than I was before. And I was already envisioning a savage environment.
The entire point of Ashes is that "stuff" is created with PvE, and disrupted (or redistributed) via PvP.
If the game is to have rare items, those rare items need to come from very hard to complete PvE that take many people many hours to he successful.
That is what a raid is.
This is why I have been saying all along that for the game to have the best PvP, it needs to have the best PvE.
With a system like this then it would actually be possible for a party of pugs to defeat a guild. That kind of interaction is 1 000 000 times more valuable than a zerg invasion. You could still essentially send the entire guild into the dungeon eventually, but if you die within a dungeon you should suffer a lockout period from the dungeon.
I'm naturally for PvP and PvE content to be equal when it comes to getting gear, but I'm against gear being designed specifically for PvP. That said I don't want there to be 1 npc you go to and he just has all of the PvP gear in the game either. You should have to explore to find the npcs. Assuming it uses that system. It might use a different one. There are infinite methods they could implement.
The only battles numbers should influence the outcome of the battle should be large scale wars. Whether in open world or through the siege systems. I just have a problem with guilds automatically winning every interaction they come across with sheer numbers alone. There should be some demand on them to not be able to use their numbers in every possible interaction in the game. Giving smaller guilds and parties a chance to repel them.
Every game that didn't deal with zerg PvP ruining the game had the problem of Zerg PvP ruining the game.
U.S. East
Near 100% agreement lol.
I still think the best mats should be able to come from other content in the game. I think it's possible to make content other than raids, "hard" and worthy of dropping top tier stuff. But I think the system is still very good as is.
It isn't possible to make other content as hard as raids are able to be made, for two reasons.
The first is the numbers. Anything you can do in single group content can be required in a raid. Since a raid in Ashes is 5 groups, you could - if you wanted - take the hardest group content possible and require the raid to split up in to 5 groups and take on that same encounter 5 times, requiring the HP of all 5 versions of the encounter to be within 2% of each other, and the raid only wins if all 5 groups win.
All of a sudden, you have "raid" content that is exponentially harder than anything you could possibly make as group content, because it takes that hardest group content and multiplies it. I have come across a number of raids that box individual players and groups off in this manner.
However, raids in good games are even harder than this, as rather than boxing off the extra players and leaving each group to deal with their own mechanics, developers use the extra players present to take care of more mechanics on the one encounter. This makes it harder than group content can ever be.
The second reason raiding should always exclusively drop the best items is because of the organization involved. This is exactly the same as how getting many people together to siege a castle should offer up better rewards than getting a few people together and attacking a caravan.
There is organization, planning and commitment to the siege, as there is to raiding. These things do need to be rewarded.
A point that is worth remembering, raids are available to everyone. If that is where the best gear is, just go and get it. Complaining about it in a game that is 50/50 PvE and PvP is no different to people complaining about being attacked while out harvesting, imo.
Good to know. Have they mentioned anything about Battleground rewards anywhere? I don't see much about it on the Wiki.
Cosmetics, titles, gear enhancements.
No gear. It wouldn't be very fair if people could sit in arenas/BGs all day and farm free gear instead of participating in the open world right?
I'd much prefer a more active/sustainable open world than a bunch of people hanging out in BGs all day, so yea, ... but from what the Wiki says, Battlegrounds ARE the open world zones so it's a little confusing.
We have become accustomed to looking primarily at one gear statistic, something that can be added up piece by piece. Or maybe two stats, magic resistance and physical damage resistance, however you name them. Listening between the lines to Stephen I think we may be looking at something more complex than that in AoC.
Consider how the world changes in AoC from season to season. A specific boss may change from summer to winter in its resistances, attacks and behavior. Consider then that a boss within the dominion of a Military node may differ if the Military node falls and the same boss in then within the dominion of a Divine or other type of node...changing the boss in essential ways that we do not yet understand. Also, the boss near a level 4 node will change when the node reaches 5 and then 6. Will it also change if the level 4 node grows to 5 and brings a couple of Merchant nodes under it's influence? Will the new Merchant sub-nodes change the boss somehow? We don't know.
To get to my point (at last), the best gear in winter might not be the best gear in summer. The best gear for a boss in a lvl 5 Scientific node likely won't be the best gear for a boss in a lvl 5 Military node. And if the node is Tulnar, perhaps everything shifts and the 'best gear' shifts again!
If the 'best gear' becomes circumstantial, then some 'boss dropped crafted' set may occasionally be rather poor against a 'natural drop crafted' set, depending on the circumstances. I am assuming that this may hold true to some extent to pvp as well as raids, since the seasonal, Tulnar and perhaps other effects may apply to pvp to a lesser (or greater) extent than to bosses.
As an aside, the 'as yet unrevealed' impact of Divine nodes may give us clues here. Given the plethora of religions, each Divine node might make different enhancement 'scrolls' to impact gear in quite a variety of ways, perhaps to guard against the seasonal and other impacts I speculated about above. Each religion's 'scrolls' may differ and if a server does not have a Divine level 5 node of a particular religion, the 'scrolls' that would make a particular boss vulnerable may not exist...so no 'best gear' would be available.
I would actually agree gear for arenas 100%, but only if one of the two following were true:
1, there was no PvP avenue where players can take rewards from other players,
Or
2, there was a PvE only avenue where players can take rewards from other players.
Having PvE generate rewards and PvP redistribute them is perfectly fine. As soon as PvP starts to also generate rewards, p E needs to be able to redistribute them.
This is fair, is it not?
1) That'll never be this game though right?
2)Now this sounds interesting.
Personally I don't think people should be able to sit in an instance of any kind in an open world game and be able to grind anything gear related. Arenas, BGs, Dungeons, Raids. Doesn't matter.
I have to agree that this 100% goes against the open world game design. A good compromise would be to have gear that comes from these instances be at 80% the base power of gear that comes from the competitive open world, but this opinion might cause some people on this forum to lose their T.V. remote to their rear hole...
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
I don't see it happening, but it could actually add a really interesting layer to the game if it were added
I agree with this as well, as long as we agree that the word "grinding" is key there.
As I have said many times, I am all for single encounter instances. Players can go in and attempt to kill the encounter, but once it is killed, thats it.
Put either 3 day or one week timers on all instances (I know timers make instances feel even worse to many people - but they are a necessary mechanic).
I am also all for instances to close 60 seconds after the encounter is killed, and I am also all for encounters attacking players after around 5 minutes of non-combat in said instance. This prevents the ability to zone in to an instance and wait for rivals to leave. They know that if you are still in there 5 minutes later, the raid in there is probably going to start killing you.
I am all for instanced PvE content, we all know this. I am keen on it as it means the developers can provide players with highly curated content that is far more challenging than any content in the open world can be by itself (a PvE challenge and a PvP challenge are different things, and a game that want to be 50/50 should have both imo).
What I am not keen on, and have never been keen on, is instanced being used specifically to escape PvP for the sake of escaping PvP. They can be used to escape PvP in order to take on specific PvE, but they should not be used to escape PvP just to escape that PvP.
I am assuming this is what others don't want to see as well - or at least I assume that if instances can't be used to escape unwanted PvP without intention of taking on the PvE in said instance, many people would be happier with them.
In my mind, the best gear in Ashes should be from an encounter that spawns at a known time each week, that players need to fight over in order to have a shot at pulling, but that once a raid has won that PvP section, that raid and the encounter are then locked off in an inaccessable area. That encounter can then be tuned to be as hard a PvE encounter as any in the game, and when that raid wipes, the PvP over the chance to fight the encounter starts all over again.
It could well be that there are even some mini-bosses that raids need to fight during that PvP section, if the developers decided.
What this does is it means you need to PvP for a shot at the encounter, but you need to know what you are doing in a PvE raid in order to have a shot at being successful.
As far as I am concerned, this is what should be at the bottom of every open dungeon, in addition to about 12 or so open world bosses spread out in that dungeon, and maybe 4 instanced bosses as well.
The gear comes from victory in the open world. I am fine with adding extra challenge beyond just kicking ass in the open world. I love the idea of raid bosses being gated behind PvP. There are a number of ways to do it too. Lets hope IG is on board for this sort of thing.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
I've told you before that the (rarely used) pseudo L2 style open world single encounter instances at the back/top of a dungeon don't really bother me. They barely even count as instances in my mind. Those are subject to PvP, 1 guild every X amount of time securing them, etc. It works for these types of games.
It's multi boss instances, WoW styled dungeons, "Guaranteed" loot that people can farm/obtain in an instance (Whether it's dungeons, BGs, arenas or anything they can que over and over or even just once a week if it's a boss)
I know you believe that 1-3 guaranteed instanced single boss encounters per guild would be good for the health of the game but I hold the opposite belief. I believe that it actually cuts down on the amount of lifespan the game could have through open world interactions and by flooding the market with more gear quicker and is generally not good for the game. When the devs say that the world is dangerous and unforgiving and difficult and you need to compete with people it doesn't jive with me to have 1-3 guaranteed boss kills a week. Because that's what they are after the first few weeks and all the youtube videos start getting released and yadda yadda. We will agree to disagree with this particular issue.
Edit: As a side note how would your idea for open world PvE rewards to be contested without using PvP work out of curiosity.
It is guaranteed content, but not guaranteed rewards.
If there is no guaranteed content, that means there will only be content for 2 or 3 guilds, which means anyone wanting to actually play the PvE aspect of the game that is not in one of those guilds will have no choice but to go to another game (in much the same way as if you don't like the PvP, you will go to another game).
The only way I would say that it is ok for there to be no guaranteed content (not guaranteed rewards - content) is if there is enough open world raid content for 25 guilds to participate at the same time, and enough group content for 200 guilds to participate at the same time.
Less than that and your lack of content will see you with a lack of subscribers.
The other key aspect to having content like this - it is a stage that all guilds need to progress through in order to have a shot at the open world encounters (especially ones like I outlined above).
Remember, Steven wants Ashes to have some progression to it's raiding. He said that way back in 2018 and I have been repeating it on these forums every time raiding comes up. To me, the minimum number of steps needed to claim something has progression to it is three - and even then that is a fairly weak progression.
If we assume that this progression should be a triangle, with singular encounters like the one I outlined above right at the top. It can (should) have open world encounters in the middle, all of this is what guilds will fight over.
However, it needs to have a foundation of raids that guilds can at least participate in so that they can get ready for everything to come after. If the content that players need to use as a foundation to raid progression is able to be blocked by others, then that is what others will do.