Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Comments
I think the worry of his post is much like in Runescape if someone attacks someone else the attacker becomes "skulled" which then risks all the attacker's items IF they die. The person who recently got attacked can retaliate to the person who initiated. They cannot attack anyone else , even if the other person is skulled from someone else, or else they too will skull up. I hope there is a system like this. It makes me wonder about single way combat and multi way combat zones though. Maybe @Bricktop will have some insight on it?
Not wanting to be forced into unnecessary combat i think is a really important discussion that needs to be brought up to. You could in theory force people to be corrupted if the system is set up in a way to where no matter what target you engage - even if you are defending you earn corruption.
@Jiraiya Exactly, in Lineage 2 people would have untagged alts near the entrance of the dungeon to see if there was an enemy gank squad about to run through. There was an instance on my server in L2 of a alliance locking down the entrance of Antharas' lair (Massive open world dungeon) for a few weeks and charging people money to go inside until the entire server got pissed to the point where they did something about it. However, since we know for a fact that open world dungeons and PvE hunting grounds will be massive areas that can facilitate many different sized groups inside, I feel that it's also safe to assume that there is a very real possibility of having multiple entrances/exits out of a dungeon.
I personally never played runescape so I'm unsure of how that system works. In Ashes when you attack somebody your name will turn people and anybody else can involve themselves and attack you if they are around and see that you are in a purple state. The best I can do is show you a video from L2 that is basically exactly how a mass PvP fight can unfold with the flagging system.
Start it at 10:13 for the fight I will reference, it's a bit different because of L2s clan war system which is what the pink symbols denote over the names of the enemy blob. It's also kind of hard to see because this is an old old video thats been ripped and reuploaded like 20 times probably, but if you are on a PC screen you can figure it out. You can see that everybodys name turns purple fairly quickly into the fight and after they take care of everyone who is flagging or who they are at war with, they start going red on untagged buffers towards the end just to make them feel special. Clan wars in L2 bypassed the corruption system, so that's the only reason you may see people killing people with white names and not going red.
I played games with LESS restrictions for killing and people turns out to be pretty decent, in this game we even have bounty hunters tracking down the "griefers" after they get lowered stats and all that bad stuff (maybe too harsh).
The important thing here is that trust is heavily magnified when someone has the option to kill but chooses not to do it. This make relationships and loyalty very valuable between players, really knowing who you are surrounded with.
its gonna be really cool to see how trust is made and lost in the game. The idea of Bounty Hunters is also going to be a really cool aspect of the game. Will definitely shake the meta up when it comes to in game PVP. I honestly doubt its going to be a grief fest, im just basing some of the worry off of regular internet trolls i guess.
Thanks for the link. I see the name change colors - it's a bit to grainy to really see when the attack was sent but i get the general jist of what is happening. Minus the random buffalo running through but yes. Thanks dude!!
Maybe @George Black @tautau @akabear or @Recluse74 or some of the other L2 vets will have some better quality videos that show off the flagging system better.
The cool thing about the "random buffalo" is that these large fights typically broke out on random parts of the map in PvE areas after ganks would happen and people would start calling in more and more members from their alliance.
In Eve online I found out that many PvE players simply don't dare to venture into dangerous areas because it is too exhausting for them to take care of themselves and prefer to collect materials with relish. and from my point of view that is completely ok.
In archeage most PvE players prefer to stand on their farms and only use safe methods to earn gold. If these PvE players dare to enter PvP areas then only if they cannot get something safely. They support the PvP players with material for their equipment and have fun working indirectly in PvP
I have made the same experience in
Albion online, Conan exiles, Conquest blade ect.
In summary, PvE players do not want to do PvP, and if they want to do it, only instanced
PvP players can make friends with PvE.
Because of this, there aren't many "full pvp" games.
However, Ashes is different:
1. Punishing pvp through corruption. A player is taking a significant risk when spawningcamping someone, perma pk
2. Fast travel offers a certain protection against too much PvP. You will always see the same people, that gives them something personal, a reputation. This makes it harder for players with a bad reputation in their area.
3. a pvp player has to guess how much he gets by killing a pve player. he cannot look into your inventory. Its stupid when he ganks 3 people and doesn't get anything, but can lose his equipment as a result.
Players who put on weak equipment in order not to lose their valuable equipment are accordingly weaker
thats why ashes will become a good game for pve gamers in my opinion. Sure, pve players no longer have their peace , but that's how an online game works. Risk vs reward for both sides, pvp and pve
You make really good points about how PVP player's won't know what is in the victim's inventory so they truly have to weigh the risk of losing their stuff. In short, PVE players may actually benefit from this system that ashes plans to implement. I think the sore spot between both camps is that PVE people tend to think that PVP players are just a bunch of griefers and PVP players seem to think PVE players are weaker, for some reason. It'll be exciting seeing some anti pk videos and even Bounty Hunter videos that come out of this.
What you are describing is people who love PvP asking other people who love PvP to come PvP.
Here is a example of Clan War PvP system
This L2 clan war system worked as following:
1. Clan A declares war against Clan B
A) Clan B don't accept the war (Clan B member will have a single sword over their head) = if Clan A member kill a non-flagged(white and not purple) Clan B member, Clan A member will become Red and karma system will normaly apply.
B ) Clan B Accepts the war (Clan B member will have a two swords crossing over their head) = if Clan A member kill a non-flagged(white and not purple) Clan B member, Clan A member will Not become Red and karma system will not apply.
The winner of clan war is determined by the clan that killed the most people of the opposite clan or if the opposite clan surrenders the war.
Here is a video example of a quite extreme clan war where 9 players standoff against a clan of 170+
The situation is the following: This 9 player party waits in the entrance of a dungeon called Imperial Tomb
Were inside of the dungeon one of the world bosses( Frintezza - Scarlet Van Halisha) is about to spawn,
They know the enemy clan will use Clan Gate(a mass clan teleport that send all clan members inside of the castle to some specific strategic places, for example you can't normaly teleport directly to this dungeon entrance unless you're a noble or a hero) to teleport there and to get spawn kills as they are on the opposite side of the entrance the enemy clan has to make a choice:
A) Kill the 9 players party and then go inside the dungeon to fight their clan,
or B ) ignore the 9 player party lose alot of people on the way in and then get sandwiched
The clan go for the option A) and gets Baited, Kited, Zoned and funneled in the small corridor on the way to the dungeon Sparta style. The clan goes back and forth stuck in this dilema until the 9 players party clan gets the world boss.
Aren't we all sinners?
From my experience it's not so much PVErs that are seen as being insecure or lacking skill but rather a certain subset. This subset likes to play MMOs as if they are solo games. They don't play the meta and they choose their skills and gear exclusively on asthetics. The percentage of the population that is this subset varies widely by game. If you take ESO for instance 90% of the player base belongs to this category so as a generalization it is accurate for ESO.
In general this demographic is growing in the MMO community. One of the core aspects of the design of Ashes is a return to dynamics in which things aren't easy and not everybody will be able to achieve everything. This demographic will likely not enjoy this game because of this. There is nothing wrong with recognizing this and communicating this.
I am 100% against the idea of having PVP exclusive in certain zones because it takes away some of the other core elements of the design. It cheapens the experience and the reward for completing content.
As somebody who deals with the community in ESO, I can attest that the casual PVE community is just as toxic as any other. Catering to them will only draw in more toxic elements from this community too. Since there is no true way to element any toxic aspect of any of these communities this point is mute.
As for your last point. There is definitely a value or desire to be the first to achieve an achievement and there will definitely be an advantage for players that are already established. But for example in ESO there is a fairly challenging achievement to get called Emperor. It has been in the game since launch. I got it last summer which was 6 years after this point. It was just as fun and it was really challenging. Just because I was late to the party didn't make it any less enjoyable of an experience.
All in all this game is not meant for casual players. There will be content for them but there consequences for anything in ashes and there is a steep difficulty to certain content. You need to dedicate time and effort to achieve things, you won't be able to press cruise control and breeze through everything, and that is okay. This doesn't need to be the game for everybody.
That is not dead which can eternal lie. And with strange aeons even death may die.
No it was griefers griefing lowbies for the lol's. Then High level peeps came in a cleaned house. They might have even been guildies for all I know wasn't there long enough to find out.
Even back in the old days of Wrath I was leveling in the same area and and ally came to gank lowbies. was leveling an alt at the time. The guy I was grouped with and I switch to our high level geared toons and joined others the jerked had PK'd and we went and wrecked their town killed the flight path guy and ganked their peeps as they flew in for about an hour or so. The lack of cross server play will mean the community will need to look after each other. Does that mean there won't be jerks that act this way. Heavens no they are everywhere. But it is up to us the community to look after each other and stomp these jerks till they stop or just go away.
But it's typical of the way PvP gamers describe RPPvErs. It's not much different than PvErs perceiving PvPers to be PKs.
It's not growing. It's always been pretty strong.
RPPvErs aren't necessarily trying to achieve everything, anyways - especially the ones who are casual.
And, these days most MMORPG players are some form of casual: either casual time, casual challenge or both. Because most MMORPG players over the age of 25 don't have the time to play hardcore.
Did you misspell eliminate and moot? I'm not sure I'm parsing that last sentence correctly?
I guess I misunderstood the original post. My understanding of the suggestion is to have strong PvM content in PvP zones - meaning especially enticing mobs and resource in PvP zones that can't be found outside of PvP zones. The idea being that it will entice PvMers to play there - which will provide more opportunities for PvP combat. That's not catering to the PvErs, rather it's catering to the PvPers. Especially when combined with Blacktop's concept of the PvErs who want to focus on the PvM content being protected by anti-PKs.
Seems like something PvPers would love.
Ashes is for casual players as well as hardcore players.
Again, most MMORPG players are some form of casual. A lot of the people who were hardcore challenge and hardcore time 10 and 20 years ago no longer have the time to support that. A lot of those players have now become hardcore challenge/casual time players or casual challenge/casual time players.
Steven will tell you that casual players are a crucial component of the Ashes community
The way Steven envisions Ashes, it's about as designed for every playstyle as an MMORPG can possible be.
Saying that PvErs "want their peace" is, again, twisted and backwards.
Online games work just fine with plenty of risk and no PvP.
We have much different opinions of what is risk in a game setting such as this.
Dying in a video game to a scripted mob and losing a tiny amount of time in the form of exp debt isn't risky to me personally. Mobs don't remember who you are.
Killing an entire guild and stealing a world boss and forever having them try and hunt your guild down and make you quit the game is what I think of as risk in these types of games.
If I risk losing something and lose it, that is still a risk that resulted in a loss.
A person who loves eating ghost peppers may find that habanero peppers aren't spicy, subjectively.
That wouldn't mean that habanero peppers aren't spicy objectively.
And it wouldn't mean that people who eat habanero peppers naturally only want to eat mild peppers.
However, this doesn't apply to all PvE - or at least, shouldn't apply to all PvE.
While we may only lose a small amount of time for each loss in PvE, if encounters are as hard as they would need to be in order for Intrepid to have the content they have talked about in the past, we will be talking about hundreds of deaths for the raid in a night.
Even if we only assume 100 deaths and 2 minutes to make up each death, that is still a total of 133 man-hours worth of time to make up over the 40 people in a raid - and that could (should) happen several times a week, for several weeks before the content is able to be taken down.
When you then consider that the risk you are talking about is of a political nature, not inherent to PvE or PvP, your comment as a whole seems to make very little sense. It's almost like you are suggesting that PvE players won't be susceptable to guilds wanting to see them leave the server, which I think we can both agree is not necessarily true.
Put aside PvP intereference for a second. This makes for an interesting discussion.
My thinking (could be wrong) is you will only get like 10~ give or take solid attempts in for a boss in Ashes before exp debt forces you to call off attempts and work some of it off due to stat dampening. At that point you are gonna need a fresh raid to put attempts into the boss or have a raid there to prevent anyone from killing it to get the exp debt off.
This dynamic would make raiding more interesting imo.
Most games have either negligable penalty for death, or a means by which that penalty can be dealt with at a later time and no immediate issues (or few immediate issues) for the present.
Ashes will obviously be different, and I agree with your assumption that 10 deaths that have not been worked off will likely mean the end of that raid session, and a need to work off that debt.
Now, this could be a non-factor in relation to content that is in a raid dungeon, as there will be base population around that the raid can kill to work off that debt. I am not a fan of this, and have actually been thinking for a while that the game would be better off if raid content didn't offer experience at all (it gives people able to easily get raids an advantage in working off penalties, and it gives nodes that have raid dungeons spawn in their ZoI an unfair advantage over nodes that don't have this).
As to getting a second raid on it - this is more of a PvP thing. While this may have to change in Ashes, PvE guilds basically look at the raid size, and then recruit members to about 15 - 20% above that. Since raid size in Ashes is 40, PvE guild size in Ashes will be about 48.
There is one place I see this as being very interesting that you may not have considered, and that interest remains regardless of base population experience gain. That is with instanced raids.
It may well be in Ashes that guilds only get about 10 attempts at an encounter, but the thing with instances is that there is no respawning (generally). This means that the raid in that instance has nothing on hand to work that experience off on, and so have no choice but to leave that instance.
I'm sure you know I am a fan of instanced raid content, and I am sure you also know I do not want to see them as an easy-out option for guilds. This fact that you bought up does go a way to making instanced content less of an easy option - especially if that content is at the bottom of a raid dungeon, and even moreso if raid content doesn't offer experience.
So let's assume we are talking about 40 man content only here.
Well it depends on the instanced content, I don't mind the pseudo instancing like we have discussed before. I get frustrated with people suggesting the WoW styled multi-boss instances and a few other small things here and there right? I actually think that those limited amounts of L2 styled "instanced" (I struggle to call it that when it's in the open world at the end of a dungeon and subject to PvP) single boss encounters at the end of the sprawling open world dungeon should require a quest item to unlock, and give you ONE attempt at it. If your raid fails and dies you need to run back to the end of the dungeon and use another quest item to unlock the boss encounter, which is all subject to PvP and server announcements again. I think the quest item should be able to be stocked up on prior to a night of attempts on the boss for as many members of the guild who do the quest line.
You and I differ in one area I believe which is that I think one guild should be able to attempt a boss in this pseudo instance at a time, and once that boss in that instance dies it should be dead for the entire server for a random period of time in the 1-4 days range. I don't think there will be many of these 40 man pseudo instances available on the map at a time, probably 1-3 of them, and I believe the rest of the 40 man content will be all open world in PvE hunting grounds. Obviously this is all speculation, but it feels like a safe bet to me based off many different factors. I don't believe anybody should have guaranteed 40 man content available to them at any time. I think once you get to that point in a PvX game you should be fighting over it.
If this were the case, we may as well call Ashes a PvP game, not a PvX game. But we both know this is basically the main point of difference the two of us have with this game.
Going back to the notion of only having 10 kills before you need to call it on raid content - I can see some less scrupulous guilds setting up ambushes at the exit to these zones, knowing guilds really won't be in there all that long. I can see it really adding to the PvP associated with instanced content. I can also see more raids leaving the instance with experience debt and no loot than leaving with loot.
This just reinforces my point that I made in an earlier thread that instanced content may be almost guaranteed content, but it is not guaranteed rewards. That experince debt build up only adds to that lack of a guarantee of rewards.
Well we have beaten it to death so there's no point right?
I agree with a lot of your other philosophies about guilds and acting for the good of the group etc, so let's just agree to disagree about this particular issue.
Hopefully more information will come out about the dungeons and 20% instancing to put this issue to bed once and for all.
The one question I would have for you though, if your stance against instanced content one of thinking the risk isn't there, or is it purely about PvP?
As in a raid instance with several bosses inside?
A raid instance with a single boss inside - but by instance I do specifically mean instance, not psuedo-instance - ideally located deep in a raid dungeon.
This circles back to our fundamentally different definitions of a PvX game. I don't personally believe that PvE content in the open world is actually PvP content like you do. There are still mechanics of a scripted boss that need to be defeated and it's most likely good enough for most people to consider it fun. There are far to many people who are confused and believe that PvX means that they can take a PvE only or a PvP only path and this is just factually incorrect. I see it on the forums and reddit and all over the place. PvX means that every system is intertwined and dependent on each other. Every single instanced boss that you think they should put in the game, I'm of the opinion they should just put it out in the open world instead to make the game more interesting, give people even more of a reason to be out in the actual world moving around and driving the server forward.
I personally don't care about hardcore PvE content that barely any of the game's playerbase ends up killing. I don't think that's what makes these types of games interesting or healthy, I don't believe this is the playerbase they truly care about, and the pseudo instances are good enough for that. These players aren't going to leave WoW and FF to dink around in a small handful of single boss encounters so why bother. There are other ways to provide catchup options like I have outlined in other posts, and I already said I don't think anybody should be doing guaranteed 40 man content in this game that isn't subject to PvP and fighting for it. The overwhelming majority of the content in this game should be open world. Everything except for the 1-3 pseudo instances I have mentioned.
It genuinely doesn't matter if some people don't feel like PvPing in a game like this at certain times and they just want to do gathering/hang out in a tavern/whatever. People can dive you in town before the guards show up. I can assure you that I don't always feel like killing dragons, but if a rare world boss is up then we need to try and seize this opportunity to upgrade a members gear don't we? I don't think you should be able to plan around things and have tuesday and thursday raid nights. I think your group should be able to organize and mobilize and seize opportunities as they come up. I can assure you that I would prefer caravans be all over the place constantly and I get a majority of my members crafted sets through taking other peoples materials, but that's probably not feasible is it? I would much rather see 24/7 guild wars but it doesn't look like that will happen will it?
Generally speaking I don't believe instances are healthy for open world games, which is obvious. Do you see me advocating for arena and battleground gear?
I just don't agree that they need to be intertwined at literally every stage.
The "system" with a raid in Ashes is in forming the raid, moving the raid to the location, taking on the encounter, collecting the loot, moving that loot back to a location that it can be crafted, having other materials on hand to craft with it, crafting it and then using it.
That is all one system - each of the above are simply stages in that one system.
PvP needs to be involved in that system, several times. However, it doesn't need to be involved in every step.
It is already involved in the forming of the raid, the moving of the raid, moving back and having materials on hand. Hell, PvP is involved in that location even existing or not.
You can't look at that and say that PvP is not involved in that system.
In most MMOs, PvP is often a disconnect from the rest of the game. It is instanced and requires a particular build for you to survive (one example is how Versatility is the main stat in PvP in WoW, but pretty much not used elsewhere).
In instanced PvP, the fact that you don't get to play against people of your level or item level is also woefully unsatisfying, as you are essentially guaranteed to lose if the opponent is geared for PvP through various seasons and you're not.
As I have interpreted Ashes' vision for PvP, your regular gear will be the PvP gear, no particular sets necessary. That removes that worry.
PvP will inform PvE and vice versa, thus making it an organic and interesting part of the game. I think separating the two as in PvP vs Pve, is somewhat of a fallacy, as really the two are intrinsically connected and you'll a stale PvE if PvP doesn't exist.
In that sense I am excited to participate in PvP for its function to shape the world. Although I make no illusions that I will probably run into indiscriminate ganking etc, even with the corruption system in place. But I accept that as the inevitable downside of a good thing.