Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
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.
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
The funny thing is, even in the other versions of Archeage - the ones that didnt have Trion, the ones that didnt have the same pay to win (still pay to win, but nowhere near as bad) - things still went the same way. It took a little longer, but the end result was basically the same.
To me, this says that Trion absolutely made things worse, but since all versions of the game had the same fate (all versions populations are a fraction of what they used to be), you cant blame Trion or the monetization they put in place.
Guild A loses a cargo ship to guild B
Guild A lost the Kraken to Guild B
Guild A gets tired of Guild B's crap and gets Guild C and D to help wipe out Guild B at every turn.
Guild B brings in Guild E and F to even the odds....
This game will be a gang war... The exciting times that are coming are going to be RICH!
Funny thing is - that is how people thought things would go in Archeage as well.
These things are very rarely guild vs guild, they are alliance vs alliance. Once the sides have been formed, there are usually no guilds left of size and ability enough to make a difference.
Lets make it work instead of saying it can't work.
It works fine lol.
Here's like 6~ very small guilds on my old Archeage server teaming up to fight a very large guild that was split between two sieges. This was the very first castle siege a few months into launch as well if memory serves best.
The incentive was beating up the guild.
The funny thing is, I'm not saying it cant work.
I am saying PvP by itself cant work, but Ashes is solving that issue by trying to make the game 50% PvE.
If that PvE is compelling enough, that will keep a good many players in the game, which then means those that are less interested in PvE have more people to PvP that they are likely to win more than lose with, and so those PvP players are more likely to stay.
The key thing with that though, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, is that the PvE game is key to making it all work. If that us good enough to keep people in the game, the whole game will work. If it is not good enough, the game as a whole may not work.
Pointing to one case of a good fight and claiming the whole thing works is akin to pointing to a cold snap and claiming global warming is a myth.
Come on. What do people have to do to change your mind, I post the video of it happening, I tell you my experience is 100% this type of thing happening often enough in L2 and other games. You got other people in this thread and numerous other in the past telling you that this is what people do.
You would KNOW this happens all the time if you played L2, played Archeage in a guild and not secluded as a solo pirate. I genuinely don't understand you man, actual evidence and tons of people tell you "this is how it works" not even just me, and you still refuse to believe. And this goes on throughout numerous threads on numerous topics ranging from large to completely inconsequential, countless random people telling you what their experience is in these games and the end result is always you being like THAT'S COOL BUT NOT TRUE. There's a case study here for psychology, 100%
I would almost bet they would have to... otherwise castle sieges would be done in 15 minutes or less if you have to run back from town... Hope they make the graphics on them tiny enough to hide if they do have them.
Your experience in games like this is not typical, nor is mine.
If you want to convince me that PvP games do not shed population as I have discussed, and you want to use Archeage top prove it, you have to convince me of the following.
1, why players losing PvP were leaving and players winning PvP were staying (this has been done - to an extent) .
2, why the loss of population wasn't altered much by a massive change in monetization from Trion.
3, why people on fresh start servers who came to the server with plans to dominate it left when they realized they were not going to - and went back to their old servers as much as to other games.
4, why all of these things can be seen on the Korean version, the Russian version, the Chinese version and the Japanese version of Archeage, despite these games having massively different monetization schemes.
5, why this same thing can be seen on the private server for Archeage, which had no monetization, yet still lost players at basically the same rate as Trions servers.
And finally 6, why game developers know this to be THE major flaw in persistent world PvP games to date.
What you won't do is convince me of motives and movements of tens or hundreds of thousands of people based on teh actions of two or three.
It's easy to understand.
Noanni cares more about being right and winning the argument, even more than being correct. Everything else makes sense with that in mind.
Keeping players interested enough and provide substance for them to get invested into a game and a healthy community to amplify that enjoyment then your off to a good start but the older times when there was not much competition are gone. And it is too easy to move to try the next game.
Too easy to have no intellectual knowledge in a game nowadays as if you get stuck for more than 2min you can pause and look up the solution, so not the investment like there was in past.
Not at all.
I am happy to admit I am wrong if someone has a good enough point to make. I am also happy to not engage in a specific aspect of a debate that I do not feel I have a good enough grasp on.
I don't expect anyone to be able to change my mind about Archeage, but it absolutely won't happen if people only talk about Trion specific aspects of the game when all 6 versions of the game (Trion, Russia, Korea, China, Japan, private) suffered basically the same fate.
In the long run, a game that mix PvP and PvE will shed both extreme members of these crowds until those interested in both form the majority. I don't think we've seen many games in which both aspects were essential and intertwined enough to come to that, I think AoC can be one of them. Usually, in mmos, the PvP side, however touted it is, can be ignored enough that the game can work without it. It doesn't seem to be the case this time.
All games lose population over time, PvE-centric games may endure longer because they are less dependant on the player numbers, but they whimper at some point too. New content may keep players active longer, but there comes a critical mass of players at which the spiralling down is inevitable.
What you are proposing is having quality pastures in the hope of keeping enough sheep to sustain the wolves. The sheep will ask for higher fences. If none are built, they'll get eaten and won't respawn. If some are built, the wolves will move elsewhere when they start to starve.
The core audience for this game should be people who want to PvP and PvE. Courting people interested in only one of the two can't work in the long term.
It's more about unfair situations or lack of fun, that causes players to lose hope and quit. That's bad game design. P2W is a guaranteed unfair situation. PvP, in and of itself, is not the issue here.
When Okeydoke used the excellent analogy: "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."
And Noaani countered with: "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."
Ngl i laughed really hard, and understood that no matter what, it would be impossible to change his mind because he doesn't desire to, and no matter how good or precise your argument is, it won't change it.
Aren't we all sinners?
In an MMO, when you lose in PvP, you lose time you have spent.
I'm not talking about just losing a random fight where someone attacks you for no reason, I am talking about things like losing g a caravan - of the equivalent in other games.
You lose progression, your rival gains it.
This is the major factor in the second reason this is an issue in MMO's. In losing your "stuff", you have also lost progression, and your rival has gained it. This makes you weaker and them stronger the next time you meet.
In non-MMO PvP games, things are basically matches where everyone is on an equal footing at the start of that match. If you lose to someone and come up against them again next time, you are still on an equal footing.
Basically, MMO developers wanting PvP need to either accept that PvP will see the game shed players, or find a way to remove the persistence from the PvP aspects of the game.
This is why WoW has season s as it does. Ashes seasons as we understand then will have no effect here.
This is why Crowfall is going to be non-persistent. Ashes cant be non-persistent.
A PvP player would probably enjoy Ashes, as long as they accept that PvE will be needed for economic progression and such. A PvE player should be able to enjoy Ashes as long as they accept that PvP will be needed to protect what they have.
The be fair to the MMOs PvP crowd, they have accepted to "suffer" the PvE aspects for almost all the games progression: leveling, gear, consumables, ... The PvE players have been much less tolerant of the PvP aspects and rarely required to be part of them.
Maybe it's time for persistence to change in the PvE side of MMOs. Not saying it should be reduced to simple matches or seasons, but that nothing is on an eternal growth curve. Items, no matter how epic, could degrade with use. Dungeons that grow to oppose the nodes they're close to could fall once their final boss is beaten. Metropolis that are not maintained could fall to ruins (and be overtaken by the mobs from the close by dungeon...)
Theme parks have a very static, never evolving aspect to them, persistence. Sandboxes can be more dynamic overtime. After all, sand, in addition of being coarse and getting everywhere, isn't known for making long lasting castle.
This combined with people saying players quitting after losing half of their fights is funny to me, because there was a study done once that showed that alpha rats will let the beta rats win at least 30% of the time so that they don't get discouraged/bored and stop playfighting.
If the rats lost 80% of the time they would find it not enjoyable and stop.
I know we're not rats, but the argument that all it takes is people to lose once or even only half their matches/battles for them to quit is kind of ridiculous.
Now what? Take your ball and go home like a 4 year old or work to get better? Get better or more friends and go get your ball back from them. Don't be a quitter just cause you lost a few times. Learn and fight back.
For example, to me, open world encounters in a PvP game are PvP content, as that is where most of the challenge will come from.
If you count this as PvP content, there have been many games where progression (at least gear progression at the level cap) comes mostly from PvP.
Other than that, I agree with the above. Even if PvE aspects were made less persistent, it doesn't actually affect the PvP situation here.
If the game has gear destruction of any form, it is likely to be a factor in a PvP loss. This would mean that a PvP loss is even worse in a game like this than in games without gear destruction. We can assume games wont make this a factor in a PvP loss for the purpose of discussion, but I think we all know it would be a factor.
Even without that, the competitive power of players will be basically the value of their accumulated wealth. If I kill you and take your stuff, you are still less wealthy and I am still more wealthy. This means when you lose an item you have to replace it with a lesser item than you would otherwise have been able to, while I can replace an item with a better one than I would have been able to.
The only two ways to combat this phenomenon are to remove transfer of wealth from PvP (including situations like caravans), or to reset all players to a base state periodically.
I am not a fan of either of these, and I dont think either would fit Ashes at all.
Thus, to me, the best Intrepid can do is make Ashes a compelling game to play even if you are constantly losing PvP battles.
RPG players don't like PvP in MMORPGs because they're hoping to recreate tabletop RPG experiences like we had in D&D - where PvP is exceedingly rare. I've been playing D&D for 40 years and have never experienced PvP in any game session.
My aversion to PvP has nothing to do with insecurities about my abilities. I avoid combat, in general, in RPGs because I'm a pacifist carebear who prefers to use social skills rather than combat.
There are games like KOA: Reckoning and Valheim, where I revel in the combat - but those games are rare.
PvP is fine, when I'm in the mood for PvP... but, out of an 8-hour game session, I'm typically only in the mood for PvP for about an hour and...when I'm not in the mood for PvP, I don't want some other player forcing me to participate in PvP.
I like PvP sometimes, so traditionally, I would play on PvP-optional servers in EQ and WoW. PK assholes always drove me to switch to PvE-only servers.
If you look at EQ, EQ2 and WoW... the majority of players are on PvE servers; not PvP servers.
Traditionally, most RPG players don't like PvP.
But, we have 25 years of MMORPGs now - especially if we include Ultima Online - so we have lots of MMORPG players who love PvP.
Letting players opt out of PvP is not "the problem". The problem is trying to make MMORPGs that force the spectrum of PvE/PvP players to all play on the same servers instead of having designated servers for the diverse playstyles.
We'll have to see how well Corruption solves this dilemma for Ashes.
If you're arguing that pvp shouldn't be a significant factor in a AoC because of tradition or because of past games or even because it's more preferred by a bigger population then none of your argument really applies because AoC is creating it's own kind of experience, and pvp is an important ingredient in that experience.
It's not WoW, EQ, or EQ2, it's AoC
The one thing that always bothers me though... and this goes for just about any game type out there, is that so many people want to change the games they are interested in before it even comes out.
They start making threats, they get pissed when their favorite mechanic is not in the game.... It is hard to watch sometimes. Obviously not everyone is like that, some people actually have the wait and see attitude. Which is awesome!
The vision from the very start of AoC, was to make it a PvP heavy game. Yet still so many people came here who do not like PvP because they are simply dying for a new MMO. I do not blame them for wanting something new, but something new does not mean.. made for you.
Most people know that the Flagging/corrupt system came from Lineage 2. The only thing that changes from that game to this game, is the penalty for XP loss. This is not a Korean MMO, so the grind will not be a bad to make up for lost XP due to deaths, but since the corrupt system is accumulative, every single time they go corrupt, the penalty is worse than the time before.
As far as games forcing people who only enjoy PvE, to play on PvP servers.... this does not exist. They are not forcing you to play at all. The decision to pay for the subscription to a game, where Open World PvP is a main feature, falls flat at the feet of the subscriber, not the developers.
Steven is making his dream MMO come true to the best of his abilities. It will probably not have everything he wanted, as he might have had to make sacrifices to some parts that just would not work or make sense, but the he is making his dream game. His only hope is that you like it as much as he does.
That makes the game PvP heavy in comparison to something like WoW, but makes it more PvE focused than something like L2 or Archeage.