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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
Sounds like you have an issue when people present you with points you have no argument against.
Best way to fight that is to be blatantly wrong less often.
CoD had a single player, that I played a lot (I was obsessed) ... Ravenshield had Single player and Co-op missions, that we played a lot.. Ghost Recon had Co-op missions that we played ... a lot... Not everything associated with a FPS is PvP.
My contrast between the FPS games I played and the Lineage 2, was the open world and slower paced gameplay between the fights. Again.. your assumptions are wrong. You pretend to be able to read people due to text on a wall... and what you are actually doing is throwing out general statements and hoping they stick. I can see you doing this with DPS meters as well... reading the text on a DPS meter and automatically assume you know the person you are assigning numbers to...
Is that really what you are saying?
Didn't went as far as ignoring but definitely taking his words way less serious because of his "arguments" depedendency on self-experience and pre-disposed knowledge on things he seem to barely understand(like when he talks about L2 or PvP as a main killer of MMOs) without sources to back it up even when making very bold statements.
Aren't we all sinners?
Edit; my argument in relation to Archeage is that there were so many bad systems around it's PvP, and no inherent way for people that were losing at PvP in general to catch up, that people would - and were - leaving the game when they saw they were losing.
This is why the population of the game almost halved after three months, before Trion went all in on p2w.
What I find amusing are the people that do not see the inherent nature of unchecked PvP as an issue in MMO's, when MMO developers openly talk about it. This is why PvP in almost every game out there has a check on it in some form = whether it is PvP seasons like WoW, or limited persistence like Crowfall.
Ashes doesn't have anything like that - yet. The two options above are not the only ways developers could add in these checks, they are just the most obvious ways they have been done so far.
Essentially, my argument is that if you make a game where people can take other peoples stuff, and don't give the people that had their stuff taken a way to catch up, the people that keep having their stuff taken won't be able to keep up with the people that keep taking their stuff.
This is not only intuitive, it is basic math. Yet some people argue against it.
Short version.. you do not have to believe me. You do not know the circumstances of why and how we played games back then.
If you want the long version, let me know... Ill gladly type up a wall of text to give you my FPS history that lead me to MMOs.
At the end of the day, my point about you not having any MMO experience before getting to L2 stands, and my point about you being a PvP player before then is most likely still accurate.
I'm going to add to that by saying you are arguing because no one likes being reduced to generalizations more so than because the generalization was not accurate.
I mean, the thing with a generalization is that no one that fits that generalization 100% fits it. I have no doubt you played FPS games in single player - but this isn't exactly a PvE experience anyway.
No one goes from FPS single player to MMO PvE content thinking it is familiar.
lol
You did it again...
What's the point of having someone on ignore if you are just going to read all their posts anyway?
It isn't really math, it's just a lazy, unrealistic scenario that ignores any aspects of the game that counter it. It's similar to the argument that challenging, group, pve content is bad because there might be people who can never get a group. Ignoring the chances of that happening as well as the things players can do to combat it, people will still catch up because the players in the lead will hit a power cap. Same way as someone who doesn't play as much will be able to catch up to someone who plays more.
Archeage also had pve and tab targeting, how do you know it didn't halve because of those things? Wow's a pve game with tab and lost half its player base after 3 months of the most recent expansion launch. coincidence?
Trust me, I was not going to waste my time to spell it for you anyway.. because, honestly, I already knew what your answer was going to be to that.
As for Lineage 2 being my first game... Of course you were right, I mentioned it before in one of my posts, not hard to look stuff like that up. So were you right, or did you remember what I said in another post?
And once again... reading is not your forte. Co-op... is PvE... so is single player no matter how you look at it. There is no way around it. And 2 out of the 3 games I listed were Co-op. The third (CoD) was a PvP game that I jumped into when bored of the other games I playing at the time.
Seriously man... You are not as smart as you think you are. I really think you just try to get off on being a forum therapist.
This is from my first post here...
This is what I mean by PvP players removing themselves from reality when negative aspects of PvP games are talked about.
You are arguing against me, suggesting what I am saying is made up, but the point I am making is one that game developers talk about, and design entire games around.
Now, you know full well that I am not painting any one scenario here, I am talking about generalizations. There is no point trying to paint specific scenarioes to see why people may be leaving a game, because you would have to do that for every player.
However, it is fairly easy to look at the fact that the bulk of people leaving a game are losing at a specific content type - and this is what developers have done.
Again, that is why Crowfall will not be persistent. That is why many games have PvP seasons, and rewards are tied to them. That is why all hyper-successful PvP games are match based with no persistence between matches.
These are the points you are arguing against here. Is that an argument you actually want to take on, or are you just arguing against me?
Why do these games focus on PvP? Because theres little to no reason to p2w a PvE game. Overgearing PvE only ruins the experience.
You're bleeding for salvation, but you can't see that you are the damnation itself." -Norther
There absolutely are more PvP games with p2w than PvE - that is absolutely true. As fun as it would be to use this and point to PvP MMO's as being what caused the p2w plauge to infest the genre, I simply can't do that. There are PvE games with p2w features - and these are mostly designed around removing frustration as well.
While this can be used to overgear yourself, it is more often used to speed up gearing yourself to be able to take on the content you want to take on.
I'm not sure how far back your experience with MMO's is going here, but if you go back to games like the original AoC - and just generally around that time - there were some good MMO's with fairly solid PvP that were not at all p2w.
That absolutely is generally not the case any more though.
Sorry, did you just call age of conan a good game?
Yes.
While the scenario you made up could happen, the question is how likely is it to happen. In a MMO, technically everyone on a server could team up on one person and make it so they can't play the game but how likely is that to happen?
In your scenario, the person always gets killed when they go out farm and never does anything about it. Not only is it unlikely for them to get killed everytime they go out, there are things they could do to prevent it like joining a group or moving to a quieter place. As i also mentioned, even if this scenario happened, the person would eventually catch up as the players at the top would hit the gear cap and stop progressing.
Another thing worth mentioning about your scenario is how the amount of time someone can play the game would create the same scenario. If someone can only play 3 hours a day, then how could they catch up to someone who plays 6? If your scenario is bad then this also must be bad.
I don't think "losing at a content type" has ever been a big reason people left game. Don't you want challenging pve content that you will constantly lose at until you figure it out? If that was true, i don't know if darksouls would be as popular as it is. Yes, there are people who want an easier gaming experience but there is also players who like to be challenged.
In pvp games, most people don't always lose, they win some and they lose some. In MMOs, there is also more to the game than wining a pvp fight. Even if you are losing fights, you can still be progressing in other areas of the game.
Crowfall is not persistent because the designer noticed back when they developed Dark Age of Camelot that the game became static over time as people didn't seem to have a good reason to attack each others territory. They noticed that the game picked up when they opened new servers as it became a fresh land grab for territory, so they decided to incorporate that into the game. Ashes plans on countering this with a variety of incentives to siege nodes as well as the constant siege state of castles.
If you don't feel i addressed your argument, please re-state it. I can counter your arguments but i think where this will all lead to is some that people like different things and some like difficult games with pvp. If you are going to say that those kinds of games can't exist then i'm going to ask why?
First point, I am not saying someone always loses, I am talking about people that generally lose. Look at something like a trade run in Archeage. If you run 5, but lose 1 of them, you lost 20% of your progress. Being successful on the other four doesn't bring back that 20% you lost - it is gone.
The time factor is also not really that important here, if we go to Archeage again, there were labor limiters in place, so progress wasnt about time, it was about return per labor spent. Ashes wont have labor, but there has been comments of some form of limiter.
Crowfall developers saying they want to make the world non-persistent doesn't hold up. It is a case of developers stating things that are almost true, but are good enough that players of their game would rather hear that than the truth.
If the world was being made non-persistent for land grab purpose, they could have very easily have done that and kept player progression in place.
They could have set up the game so that calamitous events happened that altered the land, leaving e everything on it in ruins. This would have had the same effect, but kept the game in a persistent world.
Or they could have just kept player progression in tact through world resets.
So sure, that is what they said, but their actions (the way they developed the game) speak louder than their words.
You may chose to not believe me here, and that's great. It's kind of the reason they say things like this. I can absolutely agree that the system they decided upon is a two bird's type situation - I mean, adding in a system to have land grabs in your game periodically is great, but you dont need to do it at the expense of player progression, unless of course you also want to curtail player progression
What I've seen is that people get frustrated when a game they think has 90% of what they would love to play has a 10% that will cause them not to play.
If you figure that out early enough, it's easy enough to simply not play.
If you don't figure that out until after you've invested a significant amount of time and money - that becomes infuriating.
Also people get pissed off when they think players with rival playstyles will cause the developers to cave to player suggestions and add that 10% they abhor.
Which isn't necessarily completely off-base considering the current direction of New World in comparison to the original design.
That's the internet for ya!!
Winning or losing a pvp battle is not as important as how much time the battles (and recovery from the battles) detract from the other stuff you really want to do in the game.
I wouldn't necessarily like to see systems like the current WoW descaling higher geared chars damage to the point that lower geared players do more damage. Some advantage needs to exist outside of class.
There is a scale that most games do completely awful. They either give players too much advantage that all add together too high or they put stuff in the game that is too extreme to help casuals too much.
An oversight to the corruption system may exist with people wanting to be corrupted for whatever reason. If lower level players are the best way to get it then they will actually be farmed for it which is probably not exactly intended. I think if there was a 20 level buffer of which you can only PvP with people in those 20 levels then it would work out better. To which in PvP instances if lower level players exist outside of this then the higher level players will win by default in the instance they kill every viable target.
You would actually have to work to get corruption and not get it by waiting outside of the starting zone for like 20 minutes. I'm against making stuff too easy just for playing more as well. As corruption isn't necessarily something you want to always have. There are advantages to getting it all instantly extremely fast to do what you want to do with it. Then immediately working it off.
I'm not against some degree of level and gear scaling if it's used to always keep PvP relevant though. Only if it's used to curve the power down a little from being too high though. I don't want it used to make noobs gods for no reason. xD
Like players inside nodes can only be the max level and gear score allowed for those nodes. Higher than that gets scaled down. Kinda like guild wars 2 does. That would eliminate higher leveled players from trolling lower leveled ones for no reason while making world PvP more realistically obtainable in the world. It would also make world PvP fun for both sides.
U.S. East
I think you're overestimating how quickly people ragequit.
People ragequit after repeated losses and after feeling like they don't stand any chance. Or after a really big quantifiable loss (which in this case would be them losing their caravan carrying all of their owned loot, essentially losing all their progress or some similar scenario).
Like the rat experiment I mentioned recently in this thread, as long as someone is "winning" a minimum amount, they will continue to try.
Now sure there will be people who will ragequit if they get ganked every time they leave the town, but is that kind of scenario really likely? I personally think it's a little ridiculous to think that's going to be the case.
Also, if that person wasn't willing to try something different other than "bashing their head against the wall" by running out of town the same way every time into the gank and expecting a different result... well you know what they say, "insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results".
As I said earlier in the thread, you have been too busy trying to prove me wrong to actually follow the conversation - and the conversation is that I believe that PvP games will always shed the players on the bottom, and that once those players on the bottom are shed, there will be new players on the bottom.
Further, my point is that the only real way to stop this is to ensure players on the bottom of that PvP pile have other reasons to keep them in the game, so that even while being at the bottom of the PvP pile, the game as a whole is still more compelling to play than other MMO's.
I am still at a loss as to which part of this people disagree with - yet many people seem to state an unspecified disagreement with it, which is usually followed up by them saying they disagree with something that is not in the above.
You misunderstood my point.
My point was that people have the wrong idea as it stands right now about how much players will be harrassed pvp-wise and how easily it will cause them to ragequit.
It's of my opinion that pvp isn't going to be as common as people are thinking because of the corruption mechanic along with people usually not trying to start fights.
Constantly harassing players is definitely not going to be as big of a deal as people are making it out to be because the more they harass a player who doesn't fight back, the more they get corrupted. Not to mention they'll only continuously be harassed if they continue to approach the scenario in the same way every time.
If the harassed player simply does something else for a time, or gathers allies, or simply doesn't fight back (so that the other player gains corruption), the problem is solved.
If the harassed player continuously runs towards the player that killed them the last 15 times then maybe it's their fault they're ragequitting and not the game or developers fault.
If people find themselves so far behind (due to losses inflicted in PvP, in this discussion), or if they lose massively one time, then yeah, they will often quit.
I don't really get your points here.
Yes, if you lose something, it's lost. I'm not sure your point. If you die on a boss after using some consumables those consumables are technically lost as you didn't get something using them.
On your comment for limiters, we don't know they will be, where those will be placed, and how they will be implemented so i'm probably shouldn't jump down a rabbit hole of what might and might not be. Another thing that might end with people have different preferences.
In regards to your crowfall argument, yes, they didn't need to do things the way they did. That is just how they choose to do it. I was just explaining what observation caused them to make their choice.
The greatest loss is going to come from losing a siege, not open pvp. You aren't going to "lose massively" if you get killed after 2 hours of farming. You know that you should bank often right? I know this is a little different than other MMOs that lack this kind of penalty but it's not that hard. You bank your resources after you are done farming or when you think the risk is too great.
You also can't lose completed items unless you are corrupted so even if you are careless with your resources, you can't aren't going backward. A gear milestone might take a little longer at times but you won't be going backwards. If you think item loss shouldn't be part of the corruption penalty then i guess we can talk about that.
There will never be a point where you can't catch up. New players should always have be able to catch up, so if they can, then anyone else can. I've never played a full loot game where you couldn't catch up so I don't know how that would become possible in a game where you only lose a portion of your resources on death.
This is clear.
I am not talking about open world loss, or caravan loss, or siege loss, or any specific type of loss.
I am talking about the fact that if a player experiences enough loss, they will leave.
Before I even bother trying to carry on with this conversation I will ask - is that a point you agree with, or do you think that players are happy to carry on losing their stuff in a game endlessly?
I 100% get what you're saying and agree in principle that losers are more likely to quit, but I don't see it as that black and white. Some people can tolerate zero losing. Any even slight sensation of losing and insta quit. These people are a lost cause, they're going to quit anything with pvp. And some people have a much higher threshold of loss they can take. It depends a lot on if they're having fun while losing and if it's at least reasonably fair and competitive, or is it completely hopeless.
All games shed some losers. Ashes will definitely lose some people that are losing and/or not having fun. But some of their systems I think will mitigate that. There's always going to be under used nodes waiting to be taken control of/leveled up. New quests, new content, new friends who may also be in the area. And there's the ability to make alliances. Two groups that have been losing a lot can team up and they'll likely lose less often. I guess what I'm saying is based on what we know now, losing is not going to be so one dimensional, where it's like "welp we lost, its over." Ashes will be an evolving world between the rise and fall of nodes, and the rise and fall of guilds and alliances. Shifting politics, losers banding together, winners biting off more than they can chew and then getting teamed up on by the exact same losers they we're beating. That's the hope at least, we'll see how it all pans out.
On most servers, we'd probably begin to see the classic 2 blob, where you have the two main opposing alliances/affiliates controlling their substantial areas. Maybe a third and a fourth much smaller blob with their own interests. And then some much much smaller free agent groups doing whatever suits them, whatever they find fun. I'm just theorizing here, who knows how each individual server will exactly turn out.
Ideally, in the interest of fun, you don't want to see that 2 blob thing develop. It's kind of static. You really want to see a 4 blob minimum to keep the gameplay and politics more dynamic. But humans tend to organize over time into two general sides. But there will always be a place for the losers. Always a node to level in more friendly areas, as long as you work your diplomacy.
Any guild banking on getting a castle or they're going to quit, dunno what to tell them. There's going to be FIVE castles. Temper your expectations. Same with guilds banking on being the dominant guild in a metropolis. There's going to be FIVE.
Long way of saying I agree in principle, but I don't think it's going to be that bad/black and white in Ashes.