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 never called you a carebaer. You seem pretty insulted. I hope that is not the case.
You do make a solid point about the XP penalty in L2 vs Ashes. Which is also amusing if you read any of the threads about how the XP penalty is too harsh. I agree that the XP penalty needs to stay harsh to make PKing more risky. This can be addressed with penalty balancing once we are testing end game.
I was hoping that Ashes gear would be L2 hard to get at higher grades. Nothing is known yet about the reality of end game gear rarity. With Crafters, Gatherers, Spoilers, and Processors all trying to make profit off gear it could be quite expensive to get gear. To me, it looks like a lot of middle men taking a cut. Gear could be L2 expensive at higher grades.
The corruption system will be fine as long as the penalties match the reality of how hard it is to get gear and XP. The corruption system favors the victim a lot more than the karma system did "on paper".
You are right that if gear and XP is easy to get it will undermine the whole thing.
I still don't think people should be able to farm alone for hours with expecting someone to notice that they may have an inventory worth fighting for.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
Therein is your answer. Regardless of individual penalties, a group of player set on PvP ganking will bring groups of their friends. 10 friends passing off the PK's to each other means 1 player can get killed by each one of them, without any single one of them suffering any severe penalty. The other 9 simply stand guard, debuff, block retreats, etc.
Imagine now, being that gatherer trying to level a skill, or gather materials in a a nearby location that allows access to the equipment they need within a couple minutes walk. Now imagine how infuriating it would be to have that one location camped by whatever major guild was populating that area, trading off their murder spree on anyone who wandered into that zone. Now you have to cross the map, spend 45+ minutes making that same journey to an area less populated and having your grind multiplied exponentially as a result.
So I'd just ask that before calling people "care bears" everyone realize there is a legitimate, real world expense people invest into playing any game, period. There are bills to pay, work to do, trips to take, etc. in the real world. Playing the game is a casual escape from that, and one that means investing a person's free time in between the daily rat race. You start introducing mechanics that exponentially increase the time it will take a player to do something, and/or they risk losing hours worth of work, simply because group A of players wants to "have fun", you are going to lose the rest of players and the game will become a ghost town, filled only with the like-minded PvP/PKers. Historically speaking, no modern MMO that has promoted that system has ever done well in the long run.
I know you didn't, that response was at someone else.
I think the very best end game gear will probably L2 hard since it requires raids/world bosses parts to make. That is end game gear though, I'm sure there are super rare materials where even such a geared played might take that risk but this should be the exception and not the rule. I'm not talking about the experience of joe the end game crafter. I'm talking about joe the newbie lumberjack our cutting wood in the forest.
If you are hunting/gathering and you see a player appear, if your default reaction is being worried about getting killed because you are a loot pinata then I feel some of the other systems in the game have to be in a broken state.
I really don't have much of a preference either way to be honest, I would just accept the game for what it is.
What I am really trying to say is that you can't have a game where caravans/node wars/sieges are the main form of pvp and this is what the developers want since they have no penalties and at the same time have the everyday experience of joe the lumberjack be one where he is constantly worried about getting ganked for his loot.
Would enjoy that as much as a mercenary band system
Well I didn’t call you a carebear or PvE player either, anyway.. you’re argument seems to be that gatherers shouldn’t have to be mindful of getting ganked in the world. But that’s one of the keys points of the games open world PvP. Resources are meant to be fought over.
At least that’s how I’ve understood it.
There are plenty of reasons that may result in pk`ing.
Take the guildless individual group that repeatedly take out your node`s caravans. Sure you can pvp them during the passage of a caravan. But what if they are way too successful as a group. You can`t war them as they are clanless. Then you let your node suffer or perhaps a few pk`s here and there might be sufficient persuasion.
PvPer's tend to think it's the perfect solution, though.
This sentence show that you didn't understand the system...
If you have to block , it means that the victim fight back and you will be flagged purple and will not suffer any penalties for the kill.
If you debuff the victim or buff your Allie , you are participating in the battle so you'll get corruption for the kill...
And I hope that a group of 10 , murdering 10 others player , that each of them get as much corruption as if they did murder 10 player by them self ,to demotivate group murders.
Getting gear wont be as easy as you are used to from the recent mmos you played.
Good thing since Ashes is a open world "pvp" game , its not too concern about the "pve'ers" perspective about wanting restrict pvp in the game. Plenty of other mmorpgs that cater to those players.
I've been playing these style games for a hell of a lot longer than I'd like to admit... there's always a way to exploit the system as a not-so-innocent bystander. In UO, you could virtually trip a person by standing in front of them, which lagged them back, directly into the line of your buddy's attack. In Asheron's Call, you could pull every single mob in a dungeon over to a group of newbs and watch them get wiped in a few seconds. In MUDs I played in the 90's you could bait low level players into attacking a charmed companion and therefore, initiating an attack against you which made them fair game in a ruleset that restricted PK.
Given enough players in a closed system, bound by computer code, these cracks will always surface.
And the battlegrounds PvP combat has PvE objectives.
Ashes caters to both PvP and PvE.
We aren't now quite as naive as we were when UO launched.
But UO was a gank box. And the devs were OK with that.
The corruption system is a olive branch but pve players coming into the game will need to understand that they can be attack at anytime , corruption not going to prevent that from happening. Grouping with others for protection is a good strategy and is promotes community.
PvEers tend not to be into that and just won't play. Which is fine.
PvEers will either like it or they won't.
And, if they don't, then we see if there's a sufficient number of players to sustain the game for more than 3 years.
It's not really that big of a deal.
What do you think a sufficient number of players to sustain the game for more than three years is?
I have a number range in mind myself.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
Some of that will be how many servers/worlds they have running.
At this point it's how much Steven is able to support financially.
No telling what that will be at launch.
PvPers think this issue is about who wins and loses the battle. More PvP works great as a solution for them.
PvEers really don't want there to be a PvP battle around them in the first place. Which is why they tend to prefer for there to be PvE servers.
How many times do they have to say that the game they make isnt for everyone? They dont count on ppl running around picking flowers and buying cosmetics like in eso and ff14. Get on with the program.
Neither of us know the numbers.
The game they are making is a PvX game.
They have said that the game is made for just crafters as well as for PvPers.
There is a demand for a PvX game. That much is true.
There is a huge demand for an open-world PvP-centric game - but there's never enough support for such game to last long...hence why New World became a PvX game rather than remaining a PvP-centric game.
Nope..
I was only expecting 10-20 servers with half a million to a million players worldwide. Which should be plenty if intrepid plays its cards right.
I don't think the game works with PvE servers. It goes against the whole design of the game. I think even if they did spool up PvE servers the type of person who only wants to do PvE is going to be happier in FFXIV, WOW,ESO, or GW2. I feel like all accomplishments lose value in Open World PvE only.
I am hoping that Ashes teaches these PvE only players that PvX is something worth playing.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
Both those games ruined themselves by P2W and making themselves easier, as well as other flaws.
But if AoC is able to recreate the many of the successes of L2 and AA while also avoiding their failures (which is my hope), then we may well see a game that is sustainable over the long term. Yes, there will be an early surge of players and a decrease after a year or two, but I will predict that the levelled off player base will remain relatively healthy.
How does one convince a PvE player that PvX is worth playing? I come from fighting games, where the characters are (for the most part, recently) equal, and all that's needed is practice and knowledge. But those games have 'matchmaking'. People of similar skill (or at least winrates) get matched against each other so they can feel something other than 'crushing misery at constantly being stomped on'.
MMOs don't offer this. The person most likely to PvP you in any given situation is almost always the equivalent of a much better player at the content type. If you don't spend 'enough time training to be good in PvP', you just always lose, or travel in a group. But do PvP players really lose a 3v1 against less skilled players and internally go "That was my fault, good fight you three guys, I'll train more and come try this 3v1 again sometime."?
Cause people in fighting games don't do that more than 1% of the time and those games are 1v1 practically at all times. The salt is real. I'm not saying the game should make things easier for people who don't want to PvP, they can do that themselves, I'm only asking about what benefit it offers, as an experience, to someone who doesn't want their game time to be focused around training their PvP skills. If Player A trains for 100 hours and Player B can stand up to them after training for 10... isn't that moreso annoying for Player A?
If you haven't played MMOs, then have you played other games where you were capable of beating someone who had more experience/skill than you?
It's also not like pvp is a completely different game from pve. They use the same combat. The same skills you use in pve, you will be using in pvp.
So um... you're right in a different sense.
It's not half of your HP, it's all of it.
"Don't get CC'ed."
Yea, BDO is probably as close to as you will get to a fighting game in an MMO and it's scaling is a little out of control. Even then, would you say it requires the same amount of dedication to be competent in a fight and respond to being attacked?
"How many frames of recovery are there when your opponent swings their weapon at you and misses?"
"How much lag do I think this specific opponent has?"
"If they resisted this debuff effect of my attack, which way should I change my combo?" (hit confirming).
My point is that in a fighting game, I don't have to be a specific level of competent unless I'm going to a tournament, where I'd be facing the top 100 in the world. In BDO, with my lower skill and dedicated time, I could 'randomly be attacked by the #5 player on the server' because they're practicing their assassination skills as I ride across a bridge (this sort of thing is semi common for me and possibly many others).
I just shrug it off as 'well I had no chance there, I died before I even saw them', or 'huh, so that's how that combo works' because I'm already dead.
The same thing can happen to a lower ranked player in most fighting games, but not if they're fighting people in standard matchmaking, mostly. If there's no way to 'ensure that the #800,000th ranked player doesn't get stomped on by the #800 rank player', what's the motivation for the first player to see any value in PvP?