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
Not sure I understand what they are gaining here though?
Was their whole goal 'to stay significantly ahead of the curve'? To 'make it so that they could only be challenged by other people with lots of time to play?
What exactly is it that makes a grinder go 'well if I don't outstrip the casual player, what's the point?'
I actually have been seeing some of this in New World reddit, but those people are normally arguing either pretty disingenuously, or have some misunderstandings, i.e. 'my effort to get good gear isn't going to help', as opposed to 'my effort to get high levels isn't going to help'.
I want to assume you're talking mainly about grinding for legendary level gear, not just 'hey I am at level cap faster than you so u die now', but I can't be sure because... New World Reddit has shown me that I can't be sure.
I'm talking about grinding in every sense. Grinding towards the level cap or legendary gear. Grinding to build a large and active guild. Grinding to be the richest trader in the game or the most feared PvP player. There is an inbuilt degree of competition when grinding for any of the above things, and while the external goal might be outgunning other players, the intrinsic motivator is to feel the dopamine rush of progress. To get that sense of achievement.
But the issue with grinders is they rush through content. What a casual player gets in a year's time a grinder will have in a month. That means grinders will be superior to the casual in every way. So, a developer might decide to appease the casuals by dampening the grinder's progress to help the casuals catch up. A little of that is fine. The grinder can overcome sensible limitations with dedication and effort. However, if you place too many artificial limits on the grinder, making it impossible for them to reach that next dopamine rush, they will lose their incentive to play and end up quitting.
Ah, I can agree with that? What do you think of New World's 'PvP scaling' concept?
Assuming that a player has, let's call it 'Green gear for their level' at level 40, the scaling might lead to them losing to a skilled level 20 with 'Green gear for their level' or better.
But the higher level player has the option to work for 'better than Green gear' and thereby get enough of an advantage to win consistently despite being less skilled.
Do you perceive this would also cause the same problem?
It's a poor, one-sided solution. In this scenario, the casuals still lose to grinders, while the grinders can't flex their e-penises. They will feel disenfranchised and eventually quit because their efforts feel like they have no pay-off.
The real solution is to allow the grinder to bear the fruits of his progress, to make him feel like his time and effort has meaning, but only in certain situations.
The developers of Albion Online handled this excellently. In many places in the game, there are IP (item power) caps. No matter how high leveled you are or how good your gear is, you'll only be as strong as the IP cap of the zone you're in allows you to be. This lets casuals, whales, and grinders to be on an even playing field in these zones (barring PvP skills). However, there are also zones without IP caps. This means grinders will always have an advantage there and dominate. Everyone can win this way. The casuals can stick to zones where their disadvantage is nullified, and the grinders can hang out in the uncapped zones if they want to profit from their superiority.
But the solution is still not perfect. That's not all Albion's developers did. They were smarter than that.
They put the most lucrative gatherable resources in the uncapped PvP zones. This way, the grinder can reap the best rewards the game has to offer because of their efforts. They feel rewarded for their grind. Meanwhile, the casual can choose to risk venturing into the uncapped zones and encountering a grinder if they want a chance at the best loot, but if things get too uneven, they can always take refuge in capped PvP zones.
An amazing solution to a difficult problem. It hit every goalpost with one simple solution. Grinders have the edge in some areas, casuals even out the power gaps in other areas, and everyone has a place where they can emerge victorious.
I think he's more so just being honest with you. Maybe a little too direct about it.
We all want a game that gives all types of players the best chance to have fun in the game, feel purpose, and feel like they have an impact. Anything that Intrepid can do to make that happen, they should do. As long as it doesn't break or change the core fundamentals of the game, the fundamentals that GeorgeBlack pretty much laid out perfectly.
There are many things that some people want that would absolutely destroy and make unrecognizable the game as we know it now.
But I think ideas should be listened to. And ones that are trying to fundamentally change the game should be shot down.
I've had ideas, like a relatively accessible, kind of baseline competitive set of armor or weapon (think Grunil armor in BDO, or Hasla weapon in Archeage). Gear from a questline, or crafted in a crafting tier whose mats are relatively accessible. Not GIVEN to you, or super easy, just something that the average player can log on and work towards in a reasonable amount of time to make them at least not roflstompable by the players who play 60 hours a week and are fully decked out in the best everything.
Common sense pvp system design. Meaningful but not insanely high gear gaps/consumable gaps. The best decked out people should be able to beat the average moderately geared player with some certainty in 1v1. But when you start talking guys that can 1v3, certainly 1v5 moderately geared players of equal skill level with ease, the system is out of wack bad.
Consumables, potions, food, other things like house buffs, this buff, that buff. They all should be meaningful and have an impact. But not over the top where 60 hour a weekers who have a ton of money can just buy God status compared to people who cant play as much.
All of that said, what the hardcore players grind for should be worthwhile. They should get meaningful advantages. Noticeable advantages. Perhaps even advantageous advantages. Advantages that heavily advanta.. And some players who just really don't have much time will be left in the dust and this may not be the game for them.
Edit: I would definitely argue that those players could actually still have fun and have an impact in the game though. It's just if you're wanting to be in the top tiers of competitiveness but you have 10 hours to play a week...those players expectations are a bit off.
I think the main issue that bothers casuals is when content is rolled out too fast and they don't have time to reach the endgame before a new expansion comes out.
I don't think any casual player expects to come even remotely close to completing content as fast as hardcore gamers.
However, I also understand it when casual players don't want to be "always the last person on the server to achieve something". I myself didn't play any MMO's for a while, just because my work times were so crazy for some years and it didn't motivate me much to be running around feeling like the most noob player all the time, so I totally understand that feeling.
During that time I often thought it would make sense to have SPECIAL SERVERS for casual players, on which hard stops were imposed, like for example "you only get to gain 10% XP per week" or whatever, forcing the whole server to act in a more casual manner and making sure that even a casual player can reach the endgame together with others.
I don't know if something like that would work, but your comments reminded me of that time and I definitely can empathize. Hardcore gamers often have a hard time understanding that casuals do not wish to simply play less ALONE, they wish to play less with a group, and still feel like a hero when entering a city. And that is very hard to achieve when everyone they meet outgears them and is mounting a fire-breathing dragon xD
However, mechanics that help casuals achieve heroic status without effort have broken many games before. That is why I always thought that slower servers for slower communities could be pretty cool.
For myself, and while I still consider myself a hardcore player, my days of playing 18-hour shifts are over and it does bother me when players clear the game in less than a month.
Classic wow has been a good example, since I reached max lvl and endgame content in less than 2 weeks and was still "late to the party" compared to streamers others, even though I was playing for more than 10 hours per day. For AoC, personally, I think my game-time will be around 4-8 hours a day, 3-5 days a week, so I think I sit right in the middle between the casuals and the 100% no-life players.
I do believe that hard-stops could sometimes be a good way of solving this. For example, ON SOME SERVERS only allow the server as a whole to lvl up to a certain point (let's say lvl 10 or 20), and then hard-stopping the XP gain until 50% of the server has reached a similar lvl. This would not force players to log out, but still give everyone time to explore and have fun in the world, avoiding those situations in which guild masters will prohibit players of engaging in world-pvp since "this is not the optimal XP gain".
I hope to see AoC add some system that rewards players for exploration, so that those players upon reaching max lvl have some form of advantage over players that just grinded the top-XP methods.
Not exactly sure where I was going with all this, just wanted to say that I do understand where casual gamers are coming from, while also being EXTREMELY against having everyone reach max-status without investing in the time.
I mean, it would suck to join a game that has a node-system, and then never get to see any nodes lvling up, right? So maybe different servers for different time investments could be a cool way of balancing this?
I guess the main takeaway here is that MMO's are RPG's, and we all play them to feel like a badass hero. So let's try not to step on others for wanting the same thing out of a game that we do?
GeorgeBlack pretty much only sees PvP-related features and ignores any feature that is for casuals.
Supporting casual players is core to Ashes design.
I don't know exactly how terms have drifted in the past decade but, the whole point of the term grind is supposed to be that it takes forever and is tedious. Grinding is supposed to be just killing mobs and not doing quests. It's a grind because you're basically doing the same thing over and over and over again for very little xp. Quests are intended to provide significantly more xp, specifically to alleviate the tediousness of grinding mobs.
So, grinding to rush through content really makes no sense.
"Grinders" don't rush through content.
I suppose, hardcore raiders are probably likely to rush to max level, believing that "endgame is the real game".
MMORPGs aren't supposed to have an endgame.
You shouldn't expect to be able to complete all the content. That an endgame even exists is a design failure of MMORPGs.
In Ashes, no one will be able to complete all content because the content is dynamic rather than static.
Some content/experiences will be lost as different Nodes rise and fall.
Exploration will be rewarding to explorers simply because the world is dynamic rather than static.
But, expect Ashes to have plenty of stuff for casual players to do.
"The idea is not to be a game where somebody can essentially no life for a week and be max level. The idea is to incorporate some significant chunk of time but still respect the casual player, because, you know, the way we respect the casual player is not everything is driven in our game through the adventuring progression line. Not everything is driven through your class level per-se. There's a lot of different progression paths that are available and make you relevant within certain systems and mechanics within the game; and some of those paths are more casual friendly and some of those paths are more hardcore friendly. So with regards to the adventuring class, the idea is to make sure that investment needs to be pretty significant and that the reward then is respective of that investment."
---Steven
"There is going to be a lot of PvE content for all portions of the playerbase... Part of that risk versus reward: Your risk is your time you're putting in to having a chance at getting the reward and successfully completing; and that should feel good based on how much time you devote. Now I know that there's a spectrum of casual and hard-core players in the time there, what we can do, but that's why we have many different content paths that play towards how you affect the world around you."
I'd say he has got his priorities in order, and that's the reason he can't devote full time job-like hours to playing a game.
And 50s!
Honestly, those were days of wonder to me. UO, EverQuest, DAoC, Anarchy Online, SWG... Man, I played so many! Must be approaching 20 I've played "properly" and many more I've tested/dabbled in.
And I for one have always been a "casual". I've only ever hit max level in WoW. But like someone else in this thread has said, once I hit level 60 in WoW and the only thing left to do was raiding, I lost interest.
I didn't have the time to spend 6 hours in MC. I didn't have will to grind mats for fire resist potions.
No, for me the journey is the game. Sure, I like cool things, but I'd hope they don't only come from content that's "locked" behind 500 hours of game time. It's not that I'm opposed to spending the time to get there (I've more than 2000 hours in Overwatch for example - but that's over five years). But because the "end game" isn't my goal, the rewards along the way have to be interesting in their own right. Whether that's achievements for exploration, titles, "transmogs" or dyes etc.
I'm prepared to find out Ashes of Creation isn't the game for me. I've tried so many other MMORPGs that weren't the games for me. But this one looks cool. It's colourful like Overwatch. That really appeals to my neurodivergent brain. I can even play Lucio, kinda.
Well I don't follow GeorgeBlack's posting history very closely. If he's just straight up anti casual then that's his own deal. Being straight up anti casual just for the sake of being anti casual is essentially anti the game, anti Ashes of Creation, to me. He did lay out some of the core fundamentals of the game accurately though.
@mr n0body I'd rather see your idea of time capped progression servers just implemented as policy across all servers than to see the game split up like that with different server types. I'd rather neither though. I think Steven has been pretty clear that there will be no splitting up of the game, no different server types, as that would be bad for the game. I'd have to see if I could dig that up, but pretty sure he's indicated that.
And it would be bad for the game. People progress at different rates for various reasons, that's life. You're actually not a hero for retrieving the old man's fishing pole from the cave monster. Neither is the guy that did that quest 2 months before you. It's just a game. People worry way too much about what other people are doing and about their success. Envy, jealousy, human emotions. I've felt them, we all have.
But it's a game. I don't think the goal should be to mandate that everyone progress at the same rate because Timmy just can't handle seeing another player mounting a majestic mount in shiny armor too soon before him. There are single player games galore for that. I think the goal should be to make progression incremental and balanced in a way where the game remains reasonably fair for most of the parties involved. Not equality of outcome. But it, being a game, should encourage good competition, good sportsmanship.
In other words, (and kind of a nod to your idea) at some point the vertical progression should stop or heavily slow and horizontal progression should begin. So the 60-80 hour a week no lifers don't just continue to become infinitely stronger than everyone below them. But horizontally they still have things to work on that add utility, convenience, variation, wealth, comfort.
You will learn where those characters' houses are.
One thing I like about New World that would be interesting if Ashes could also accomplish is that I just jump in and play. There is always something to do. The UI works well enough that it always feels like I'm just one or two things away from an Achievement. I'm just living in the world and doing stuff.
I spent way too much time last night just Fishing. Still haven't finished that quest, but I did hit several Fishing Achievements (and the nice thing about NW is that just advances overall character level).
If Ashes can recreate that feeling, casual or hardcore isn't really even much of a thing.
Just play and do the stuff you like in the time you have to play.
Yeah, I can agree with what you said. And by no means do I want an MMO where everyone gets the same rewards. I just meant that I would rather see a separate server for casuals to feel satisfied, than having the hardcore server limited by them (which didn't work in other games).
And I do empathize with the casual gameplay lifestyle. And not because of what you said about wanting to be the best on the server out of envy, but rather because I know how it is to finally be able to log on after a week of work, and find that all your friends are maxed lvl while you are still lvl 10. It totally ruins the experience and makes players end up guild-hopping every 2 weeks into a newer guild to they have people to play with. Or, even worse, end up solo-lvling trying to catch up, getting farmed by PVP'ers alone in the jungle, while all friends are already doing raids.
However, when I read your response and tried to answer, I noticed that it might be WAY TOO SOON to be discussing these things since we don't know yet how most of these systems will work when the game comes out a few years from now. It would be interesting to revisit this at a later point.
Good points though.
I totally agree with that. What I miss most in MMO's is this feeling of "just chill and do something cool". If AoC can make that rewarding, it could turn even me back into a casual, since those are the days of MMO that I seem to have had the most fun.
I completely agree with you on that. I feel like those who've responded negatively to this discussion are assuming I want the game to be a casual experience, taking little effort to earn the greatest rewards. I thought I was pretty clear on my stance about that in my original post, which makes me think some jumped to conclusions, perhaps after seeing the word "casual" in the discussion title. Being a casual player doesn't necessarily equate to playing casually.
I do wish they would tamp down the time required for leveling because I love playing alts, and a long leveling process makes that difficult.
The reception to this thread prompted be to do a lot more research. Between that and the incredible references from @Heruwolf and @Dygz (thanks guys!), my preconceived notions about the casual-friendliness of this game have been assuaged. I'm no longer concerned casual players will find it difficult to enjoy AoC.
Not your fault dude, these players have been through a lot
let's hope they make the world fun, so no one feels the urge to skip the lvling to start enjoying the game
unless you want to do only raid content, of course. but I am pretty excited for world pvp, lvling up nodes, siege battles etc. I hope low lvl players will be able to enjoy those parts of the game as well.
Similar to how Ashes is a PvX game.
Hm… I was thinking more from a time investment, instead of say a hardcore raiding perspective.
Ashes supports both casual and hardcore play - both time and challenge.