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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Comments
What is funny is that if the source code for the server ever leaked. The community would run AA better than Trion or Gamigo ever did.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
Who are all these people that went to the second and third wave of servers? Did you know them? Were some of them maybe people that didn't know much about the game and it's faults? Were some of them maybe people that only heard the hype around the game, and little to none of the faults? Were some of them people that heard some things but just wanted to try a new mmo, and then realized how truly bad some of these problems were?
Did some come from previous servers? Did they want to take a second stab at trying to actually get land this time? How many of them got screwed again? Did guilds come from previous servers to take another shot at getting a castle? Maybe they thought there was less a chance of getting out p2w'd again? But then they got out p2w'd again?
I'd like a full report on who these people were and exactly why they quit, with footnotes, citations, power point graphs and recorded interviews. And 2 bibliographies
Straight up facts!
Aren't we all sinners?
This could also lead to pure type builds that exist in osrs. You could have a level 30 alt that u use for gathering and gear it for PvP, then people will come and hunt u with their own pure build variant.
What I find worrying is the corruption system. BDO has similar system called karma. When someone tries to steal my spot I just keep outgrinding them, if they choose to go aggressive Ill just die to them a couple times to get them red and them come back to kill them for no penalty possibly downgrading their gear. For the same reason I cant be the one to commence PvP. The opponent could just keep coming back and dying to me to get me red and preventing me from going to town for repairs/restock/bank. The grinding pace is very class dependant and a greater factor than invidual skill when deciding who gets to stay. This predetetmined choice doesnt leave me feeling like I had a meaningful interaction.
I think that the best drops should be coming from instanced content. This would mean that seeing someone with a piece of gear would mean theyre a skilled respectable player and not someone who got lucky on a zerg run. I also think that such gear should only have minor advantage over affordable gear. The best gear would be used to minmax ur stats but u could still kill bis players if u were that much better in PvP combat. Affordable gear would also give u possibility to get corrupted and dropping ur gear would be acceptable risk. I feel like then PvE and PvP focused players would stand more on equal footing.
You're bleeding for salvation, but you can't see that you are the damnation itself." -Norther
Not once did a guild that was on top (and looked like they were going to stay on top) decide they were fed up with Trions bullshit. If it was as you claim - that slowly people got more and more fed up with Trion - then the shedding of players would have happened from those winning as often as it did from those losing, or close to it.
It didn't happen like that. The guilds that were leaving were the guilds that were losing.
This was the same with the original release as it was with later servers.
People that were planting illegal tree farms to get thunderstruck trees are a great example of this. Some of them were great PvP'ers, some of them were not. When the change to TS trees made those farms unviable, many people got pissed off, bitched and moaned, and many did leave the game.
Thing is, it was the shit PvP'ers that left. The good PvP'ers - the ones that were winning fights - stayed.
This can be seen with every major issue Trion had - all the way down to that stupid fuckup with the dolphin. Many people bitched and moaned, but the only people leaving the game were those that were losing the game.
The people that were winning were more than happy to stay, as long as they were winning. The people that were losing would find any negative (of which there was always one to be found), blow it out of proportion (again, the Dolphin thing), and use it as an excuse to bow out of the game with what they thought was some respect/dignity.
Also, the curve on the original servers and the curve on the fresh start servers was very similar. The fresh start servers had constant small groups of people getting up and leaving the game (or at least the server) - but when you look at the population in comparison to the population of the game at release, those small spikes are very similar to when entire guilds were leaving the game early on.
I *WANT* to blame Trion for Archeages failings. I really do.
I can't though, as I saw too many people that were losing leave the game, and too many people go from winning to losing to leaving, to be able to think that it was Trions fault.
It is also the same in other games - it happened a lot in early BDO, and it is happening in Albion a bit.
The odd thing about your assertion that this is not the case is that it is a known phenomonon, and preventing this from happening is the reason Crowfall is being developed as a non-persistent MMO.
However, the community was more fun on the fresh start server, so I did spent a good amount of time there. Kept to a faction so I could run the various events, which I couldn't do on my main server.
90% of the population that I interacted with of the server I was on were people that came from other servers wanting to dominate the new one - the rest were people that had played the game and left previously, and wanted another shot at being on top.
I didn't meet a single person that was new to Archeage in general at all on the fresh start servers I played on.
You're looking at a person with a knife in the heart, a gunshot to the head, and a broken nail and saying it was the broken nail that killed him. The broken nail being whatever YOU think was wrong with the pvp system.
P2W is what was wrong with the pvp system. And it was insanely strong p2w. Like ridiculously, amazingly strong p2w. I'm honestly not sure I've ever played a game with stronger p2w. There were guys that were just untouchable gods. I'd be chillin in Hasla on my darkrunner pvping and picking off people farming for their Hasla weapon, then a p2w'd out of his mind dude would show up and literally start fighting and tanking 15 people at the same time. It was just like uhh. ok. That's demoralizing. And then if they somehow by some act of god managed to kill him, he'd be back in a few minutes and they'd have to do it all over again. And when there was two or more of them at the same time? like wtf
Then the housing/land. That was like 50% of the game. That was a huge draw to the game. If you didn't have it you couldn't even fully participate in parts of the game. And tons of people didn't have it. It was so bad that when a piece of land was about to expire from the owner not paying taxes, there'd be like 20, 30, 50 people or more there waiting to try to snag it when the timer counted down. Sometimes there was so many people there that they couldn't even all render. AND, people were using exploits to snag the land before any non exploiting person could. Absolute shit show. But these were people who literally couldn't even play a fundamental part of the game. And they certainly had trouble making money to be competitive in pvp, because they had no land to grow shit and make money.
So then you got people going to fresh start servers, which hurt the population of the old servers. Guilds were split between people that wanted to leave and the people that wanted to stay because they had land. So a part of the guild would go to a new server, but then they'd kinda still play on their old server some, split guilds, split friends, split populations. Absolute unmitigated disaster.
And hanging in people's minds the entire time, while dealing with all of that, was that the game was insanely p2w and just becoming even more p2w. What was even the point anymore? Cool game, cool concepts, absolutely ruined by the devs.
But you boil it down to some people lost some pvp fights so they quit. In a pvp game that really wasn't even that harsh to the losing side. It was p2w, it didn't matter who won or lost. Whoever paid more generally won. It wasn't the pvp itself.
However, as I said, it was the people losing that left.
Using your analogy, if one person has a knife in the heart, a gunshot to the head, and a broken nail and dies, and another person has exactly that same knife in the heart and gunshot to the head and doesn't die - you need to start looking closely at that broken nail.
So, what you are saying is that it is a bad thing if a game doesn't allow people to participate in the parts of the game they want to participate in.
As I'm sure you know, this is as I have been saying for a very long while.
In Archeage, a big part of the reason people didn't have land was because others beat them to it, and in many cases because of PvP. I had a lot of land - I believe I topped out at 40 plots in total at one point. Most of my land came from demos - where people used to complain about bots taking the land before real players could. I didn't see any bots at any demos, and I managed to get the land at the bulk of the demos I was able to be at.
If it is a bad thing that players can prevent others from participating in the land aspects of Ashes, it is just as bad a thing that players can prevent others from participating in PvE aspects of Ashes.
I'm assuming this is all stuff you agree with.
lol god damn man.
Are people who wind up on top of some kind of broken game or system more likely to look at everyone else and say, "hey whats wrong bros, everything seems fine from up here lol." And pretend like nothing's wrong?
Are people who wind up at the bottom of a very flawed game or system more likely to quit and reject the whole thing outright?
The game was fucked.
It's a bad thing when the game rules are unfair. The devs did not make the rules fair. The land rush in a fresh server was from people making alts and using each alt to claim a piece of land all before some people ever even logged in for the first time. It literally depended on if you were there the moment the server launched and ready to spend the next couple hours leveling a character to 10, claiming a piece of land, new alt to 10, claim land rinse and repeat. However many times you could do it, cant remember, 4, 5, 6 something like that. Anyone can see how that is textbook unfair. There should have been a cap per account, like Ashes is doing.
Preventing people from pveing is fair. The rules are set, everyone's subject to them, everyone will experience it at some point. You can prevent me from pveing, I can prevent you from pveing. There's no gimmick like make sure you're there the moment the server launches or you will never pve again. Apples and oranges, silly to even be addressing this.
But, if the game was truely fucked, would not some of the people at the top have left while still at the top?
I can agree that there would have always been more of the people at the bottom leaving than those at the top - but then this is kind of what I have been saying - people at the bottom of PvP leave the game.
They may have other reasons on top of being at the bottom of the PvP, but those other reasons need be nothing more than there being a new MMO, or an expansion coming out for a game they used to play, or any number of things.
The point is - and the point that you now seem to agree with - is that people that are losing in a PvP MMO are more likely to leave that game than people that are winning.
After that, may of those plots of land started to get abandoned as people realized they really weren't interested in maintaining two small pieces of land that were quite a distance apart.
Sure, a number of people left in this time, but this was a very, very small number of people. Almost everyone was able to see that much of that land would be freeing up over time.
The people that left were those that coldn't bare not having access to a part of the game for literally one month.
I think you're just trolling at this point. Of course some people at the top left. The game was fucked. Their guild might have split up, some people might not have wanted to compete in a p2w system anymore, who knows.
And losers are more likely to quit things, that's human nature. But there are plenty of people that have the maturity to roll with the punches as long as it's a fair game, win some lose some, enjoy the sport, enjoy the competition, know that it's not real life life or death, it's just a game. And we want THAT game.
Maybe you don't find it odd that people that are losing at PvP stomp their feet and cry about how things in the game are shit and so they are going to leave, while the few people that leave the game while on the top have family or jobs that need them - but I do find that odd.
That game isn't Ashes. It is Crowfall.
In Ashes, when you lose, say a caravan, you lose all that effort/profit/progression, and the person that beat you gains it. As such, when you meet that same person the next time, you are weaker and they are stronger.
Again, this is why people leave PvP MMO's, and why Crowfall is developing a world that resets after a period of time.
It's definitely not Crowfall and definitely is Ashes, for me. Others may see more potential in Crowfall and there's a case to be made for that. I'll probably try it and probably like it.
A game where I kill you and take some of your stuff, making me stronger and you weaker, and then we meet in the future, is inherently un-fair.
A fair game is a game where each time we meet, we are on an equal footing.
That is not Ashes.
The game will start out as fair on day one, but as people win more and more, and others lose more and more, that fairness simply won't last long.
That is kind of the point of Ashes - the point of PvP facing persistent world games. See a player, kill them and take some of their stuff so that the next time you see them you can kill them easier and take more of their stuff.
Again, that is why Crowfall will reset the game world, so that everyone goes back to day one.
You can ask Steven himself about this. He's a multimillionaire who was near the top of AA. He had no financial reason to care about P2W. He used it to his advantage.
Yet he left the game. Why? Not because he was losing in pvp, but because a large portion of his guild, along with the rest of the server, saw that the unfairness caused by P2W was ruining the game. The game design decisions in AA were based on greed, and not on keeping integrity in the game.
I don't leave games because I lose a fair PvP fight. That is something I can overcome by getting better at the game. I leave games when the integrity of the game itself is compromised, either by rampant hacking that makes it impossible for skill to have any meaning, or by P2W for exactly the same reason because it's overwhelmed by how much money you spend instead.
I can't find the source, but in one, or a couple, interviews Steven said that AA had huge potential that was destroyed by some bad game design decisions (in which he specifically identified P2W as the main issue). I doubt that he would claim that people were leaving because they were losing in fair PvP fights against non-p2w players.
That is why so much of the game was designed to be played at specific times - so groups of friends could meet at cafes and play together at set times to do the same thing.
That is why things like bridge blocking took so long to fix - XL simply couldn't believe that people would spend their in game time to just block bridges, and thought that Trion were blowing the issue out of proportion when they discussed it (hence the reason I took the thread on it to extreme lengths - so Trion could show it to XL to force them to change them game - I was basically given carte blanche to say what ever I wanted in that thread and they wouldn't close it, as long as I kept it going).
That is why land was quite limited. Korean players didn't have the time to work more than two or three patches of land at a time, and had no real way of having multiple accounts. Also, Korean players generally don't see value in holding land specifically for the purpose of denying it to others like NA/EU players do (much as they see no value in blocking bridges.
They also couldn't stay logged in all day to maximize labor gain, as they had to log out when they left the cafe they were at. The need to log out also meant that the idea of blocking a bridge for days at a time by staying logged in was simply not a thing in Korea.
If you want to get in depth about discussing Archeage design decisions, I'm more than happy to oblige - just don't bother with it if you are going to suggest that any game design decisions were based on Trions monetization.
XL didn't give a shit about Trion, and XL made all the decisions on game design.
Which is exactly what has been happening in the L2 community since that shit got leaked, I mean there is a reason why NCsoft went after private servers with the FBI. They just were superior experience to the retail version of the game.
I don't know the details in the differences between the AA Korean vs Western servers, so I'll just take your word for it.
Just out of curiosity what was the server you played that only people losing pvp were leaving and what was your method of classifing them as such taking in consideration the huge number of players each server had and that it is impossible for you to know all the conflicts won and lost by them.
Have you ever taken in consideration the possibility that the "people winning" were the people who spent the most money in the game? May it be legally or illegally(RMT)? Or maybe being Real Money Traders themselves? Making them more prone to stay in the game longer even with all the Trion's Fck ups and rest of the ridiculous problems?
Aren't we all sinners?
So unbelievably funny what you think killed AA and not the insane p2w policies that actually killed it BOTH times. I'm sure a solo player who never joined a guild and hid on an island was extremely well connected to the server. After the FIRST WEEK OF LAUNCH they started adding more to the cash shop. It was legit like 3 or 4 months into launch the thunderstruck patch happened, the entire game economy was ruined, and guilds were quitting in droves THAT day.
I just can't take anything you say seriously. It's just hilarious how you disguise your completely silly opinions as if they were facts when it's obvious you are just scared to die in a video game. Everything killed archeage except the Pay 2 win right? Lineage 2 failed after years and years of success right after the cash shop patch for no reason right?
Do you have a source for ANYTHING you say that you claim to be fact? (I already know the answer). I genuinely don't believe you have the best interests of the health of the game in mind.
What some PvPers forget is that it takes two to tango. One thing the battlegrounds in DAoC taught me was that if you didn't give your opponents the chance to win, or the illusion they could win, they would not come back. Sure, you had won, but you could no longer play. If you win by dominating or crushing everyone, no one want to dance with you anymore.
The same thing would often happen in WoW BGs when a pug faced a premade. Instead of being farmed, people preferred not to revive, waiting for the game to be over as fast as possible. No side had a good time.
I don't think people are wise enough to show some restraint on their own. The checks and balances must be part of the system, and I see some form of that in AoC: guild bonus diminishing with guild size, sieges can't happen without notice, etc.
The reason it's not worth talking about is because the games PvP is already limited and checked in many many ways with the casual PvE players in mind. Flagging/Corruption, No 24/7 clan wars, Enemy of the state mechanics for solo griefers, large world size/no teleports to help cut back zergs, and the list goes on. This isn't a full loot open world non restrictive PvP MMO like some people act like, there are already an overabundance of systems to protect people. People just need to understand that PvP is part of the game and they can't straight up avoid it the entire time they play like a very small minority of people make posts about. When is enough enough?
The guild size doesn't come into play at all because these guilds can easily break themselves down into 100 guilds of 50 people each if they needed to.
Guild A lost The Kraken to guild B.
Guild A lost a castle to guild B.
Guild A has left the game.
Not all that hard to keep track of.
I do find it amusing that everyone is trying to find other factors that could be at play still. There absolutely are many factors that contribute to it.
The thing is, it is a recognized phenomenon in PvP MMO's. Even in EvE, when there is a large fight, a larger portion of the losing side dont come back.
Developers know this to be true, which again is why Crowfall is being developed to try and mitigate it (as was Civilization Online).
All the PvP people coming here trying to say that it isn't a thing, when developers know that it is, is just too much.
Are there other factors at play? Sure, nothing is one dimensional.
Is this a major recognized issue that every PvP MMO has to deal with? Um, yes.
Are people that deny it exists deluded? Maybe, you tell me.
You're missing the point. The game is the sum of all it's parts. It's not just about the fairness of who wins each and every individual pvp fight and why they won it. Part of the competition is WHO has the most success with caravans and who is able to harness that gained wealth effectively to improve their character, their guild, their node.
So from day 1 you're competing in all the systems of the game. There will be players who really aren't the best at mechanically playing their character in pvp. But they compete in other ways, such as understanding the caravan system, when and where caravans are most likely to be found, and leading their group in effective attacks of caravans.
There will be god like mechanical pvp players who either don't have the intelligence or interest to be successful at some of the more complicated competitive systems in the game.
The game is not just a 1v1 or guild vs guild organized combat simulator. If it was it could all just be thrown into an instance.
Do people/guilds quit because of PvP losses? Yes, definitely, some people/guild are weak willed and lacks competitive desire to comeback, and no one here is denying it.
The problem is you're trying to make it look like a gigantic behemoth of a problem that far outclasses other problems to the point that it becomes the main point to cause the death of a game like archeage that simple had way worse problems! Which in my opinion is not only a selective far reach but straight up delusional.
Aren't we all sinners?
However, at the top end there are often only two guilds competing for things.
Dont get me wrong, I am not complaining about this. It is what MMO's are - PvP or not.
However, that does not make it *fair*. It makes it fun, but not fair.
High levels of success and the wealth from it should at some point start making players more comfortable than just more and more infinitely raw powerful. There is a balance that can be achieved there with the framework of the game where yes there will be more powerful people, but not overly powerful.
All people want is equality of opportunity in a game, not equality of outcome.
It's fair because everyone started on an equal footing.