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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
AoC indentions for characters are to provide quality for the path chosen.
Not quantity of paths.
Fulfilling your role as, let's say, a knight will require a lot of effort.
In order for a character to fulfill everything, then it should be more about quantity and less about the effort you put on your path.
You cant have both. There are 24h in a day.
Superman is the most boring superhero, ever. Awesome at everything, no flaws except that he's awesome at everything. Oatmeal.
People will gravitate towards what they enjoy and will play a few archetypes and mess around with others, but will only succeed with what they really love. Why does having the choice make it a problem, if a player wants to be batman he will choose it.
I do agree with your statement. He should have simply said, an mmo that doesn't help guide players towards social interactions is complete shit.
I never said it should be just quantity. But what about both? How is it bad?
If it requires effort it only makes the choice to prestige further harder, because more effort will be ahead to complete the prestige. Indeed there are only 24h in a day. You can only do so much... I don't get how it affects anything?
Nothing would stop you from playing this way?
How would a system like this deminish the help given towards social interaction?
It doesn't force me at all, because I can create an alt?
As Unkempt Foliage quite eloquently states below:
It's not me I'm worried about it's others. It's weird if I see John Tanky one day tanking it up and one day and the Same John Tanky blasting fireballs the next.
I'd rather see a new character John Blasty blasting the fireballs even if it's the same person behind both characters.
The system I suggest requires you to get to level 50 for each class. It will take more than 1 day, in fact he'll be telling you how hard a time he is having getting these fireballs to hit "while he's bleeping level 50 and the monster level 15", it won't be a surprise at all.
This why "No" was a sufficient response for this thread.
If it's about you looking at the future 3 years in when EVERYONE has everything done, then we are also at a point where all those players have chosen their prefered combinations to play. It won't be surprising to anyone when the guild leader ask anyone to please activate their 2nd archetype or ask specific people fill in for someone who normally plays a certain archetype. It just doesn't require you to hop to another character. Frankly indeed "no" would have saved some time, because rationally there isn't much you can produce that makes me think it's not a good addition... I don't really know what you contributed.
In Ashes, it's not possible to have everything done.
Also, again, Secondary Archetypes, Social Orgs and Religions already provide sufficient prestige.
We don't need a cure for a non-existent illness.
So, again...
No.
So whats wrong with 1 more system that provides more prestige?
This system is not a solution to a problem, but an additional progression that reshapes the horizon of the game.
You could
make 8 alts and level them and have access to the full archetype matrix by logging out
prestige 8 times with a -5% dmg modifier and have access to the full archetype matrix without logging out (and be prestigious)
Why not?
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Classes
A player chooses their primary archetype at the start of the game.[3][7]
A player cannot change their primary archetype.[8][1]
I agree with this choice.
I might be ok with a change IF and a really big IF they make it like 3-4 time longer to reach max level with a secondary archetype AND in order to change your primary archetype it had a 30 day wait and cost a lot of time questing and a fair amount of gold. Also at no point should you be able to do this with crafting.
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Leveling
The level cap at launch is expected to be approximately level 50.[7]
The developers anticipate max level should be attainable in approximately 45 days if you play roughly 4-6 hours per day.[8][9]
The big push back you are getting from people here is that the majority of us are tired of weak games that let people change willy nilly from tank to dps to heals at any point at anytime.
Choices should matter.
Prestige should be locked. Finish this class to level 50 to be able to use it. -5% dmg modifier. You can do the same by making an alt and leveling it, it would not give the dmg modifier. This is only harder, prestigious.
Right now you can choose between 8 archetypes through a system. Whats wrong with adding 8 archetypes for every prestige if it costs you 250 hours of playtime to achieve. The same system could just be used with a wider selection for those that earned it.
I think it's really hard to explain why this sort of thing is considered a negative, to someone who wants it. It's like laws that seem stupid because they inconvenience regular people with no negative intentions, but have to exist so that other types of people don't cause specific types of social problems.
Always some of the hardest laws to pass. Worse when the person in your position is the one that's correct about the thing in question.
Fortunately I can say with confidence that you are not correct here.
The reason it is important to never give a player this sort of ability is because it creates a character-wide function that makes other players doing their best with the same character type, have to make up a gap. It doesn't even matter if that gap isn't one that comes across the character's actual stats.
There are games where the design means that this sort of thing is at least ok. Ashes is not currently designed to be one of those games.
And just in case you think I don't understand what you are asking for or talking about, FFXI is still one of my main RPGs (since only Ashes has even started to challenge it in terms of mechanics and concepts) and literally everything you say is how that game works. I've been watching the effects of it for a long time.
What do you mean?
There's a difference, for a Guild Master, when a player has a separate character for their Tank vs Mage. It affects desirability as a whole, it affects how many 'slots' the Guild needs to spec for having, in Ashes, it affects aspects of group dynamics when compared to the other players in the Guild.
Now, you can say 'this has nothing to do with Guilds', or even that this is a good thing because that player played more, but the idea would be, that when two Mages are applying, that they are vetted based on their ability to play Mage, not 'I am a Mage but I also have a level 50 Tank'.
Your skill as a player, playing Tank, might matter to the guild, because they think it means you understand better what is happening in a raid or PvP. But the actual 'ability to switch to Tank' is not a consideration.
If he had that offspec within my system, he levelled it. He could have levelled an alt faster to have the same outcome for the guild.
I didn’t know about the FFXIV class swapping, but that system is nothing like what I am suggesting.
Are you sure? If class swapping isn't the point then what is?
You dismissed what I said without checking it.
In FFXI (11, not 14), you level each job separately. You gear them separately. They share inventory, but you go into your house and hit a button and you are 'whatever level Black Mage you are at', having just been 'Whatever level of Paladin you were just at'. The two have no relation to each other (some skills carry over, but I chose two classes with vastly divergent skills and weapon skill sets) and you had to level both.
It's not the same outcome for the guild if the guild has space for 30 people. A player and their Alt is 2 slots, not 1, in Ashes' system.
At the start of the game players may choose from eight Archetypes, which essentially defines a character's role.[2][3]
You'll have to excuse Dygz, he's... unique.
That said, I am also against this idea.
While it may be true that it doesn't allow you to do anything that you couldn't do with a number of alts, it would become expected after a while that every player has at least 4 or 5 primary classes leveled up, so that any player can perform any role in a group or raid on their character.
This expectation doesnt happen if it is in relation to alts, but many players would not look at their character as being "finished" until they have leveled all that they can level.
One of the things many players forget in relation to ideas for game systems (and so do many developers) is the effect a change would have on player behavior (WoW's LFG system being the most obvious example of this - no one thought it would have the impact on player behavior that it did).
While your suggestion may seem simple on the surface, it alters the way players will look at characters and progression in Ashes.