Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
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.
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
This was kind of applicable in Archeage early on. I would say in the first two months of its release to the west. Mainly for battles involving a ton of trade or fish packs which people cared about at that time. back then many of the trade packs would return more value the further you traveled from their crafting location so you can imagine how panicked people could get if they traveled for 20 minutes across the entire world only to get ganked one zone away from their turn in target.
There's also the annoyance you had to deal with if you got raided on your ship killing you. Then they decide to go for a joy ride before ultimately sinking it.
I hope for very punishing death mechanics. The closer we are to full loot pvp the better, but I'll take what I can get.
I don't think many people on here know what It's like to lose months worth of group effort in minutes and still love the game that did that to them.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
I missed out on early AA. Partially because my crew picked the dumb side, and partially because I was so upset with what Korean MMOs have become.
If I could turn back time, I would gladly have accepted 2 months of good edge of your seat world PvP for the shitty consumer practices that doomed the game.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
Absolutely, the first two months of Archeage was and still is my favorite game of all time. It got the closest to meaningful world pvp, housing, guilds, crafting and gathering, FISHING!!!, Naval combat and the class combination system. So many great systems and features flushed down the toilet because some F- I mean terrible person decided that the early access founder packs, premium subscription, and tons of cosmetic shop items weren't enough to tingle their greedy ball sacks.
It might be more accurate to say that if you liked the..... PvP Sieges from "Game A", the PvE Dungeons from "Game B", the crafting from "Game C", the PvP Caravans from "Game D", the naval content from "Game E", the RP content from "Game F", the housing and customization from "Game G", etc. .....then Ashes may tick a lot of boxes for you.. I think I've seen a few interviews with Steven mentioning some of these parallels ("Character creation at least on a par with BDO").
It is a good marketing approach to also list things that might be valid negatives for some people, like non-consensual PvP, or quests that require group content (some people expect to fully participate Solo in an MMO, oh how we laugh!). Then there's an opportunity to go one step further and educate prospective players on those systems and how they are intended to work.
So, back to the original question, what is Ashes of Creation's target audience?
My answer; only Steven can answer where he has set his sights, but if he were to answer then I would like to see parallels drawn to parts of games where things have been done well, as suggested above.
full loot just kills games however soft loot peaks my interest
I guess it depends. If all your equipped gear can be looted it means it has be replaceable rather easily, if not your character is kind of doomed. The side effect of this is that basic items to be functional have to be easy to craft or cheap to buy. High quality items are either for special occasions, when you have low risk of being looted/die, or when you have better ones in reserve anyway. Gear progression can be part of the end game, but it cannot be the end game.
If full loot means mostly items needed for crafting or maintaining assets such as keeps or town (resources or money for example), in that case, full loot makes more sense.
I hope to have a game where I can do non-competitive stuff, like basic gathering, while keeping an eye on a baby and still feel like I am doing something fun.
My only goal in the game is to be able to run a seaside tavern. As long as I can do that in a fun way I will be happy.
However if every server is PVP enabled mandatory(outside of things like sieges) then I am out. I have ZERO interest in PVP.
There are many games to suit your needs. Pvp will be a thing in AoC. Not optional.
Strictly speaking, this wasn't a death penalty. This was a penalty for having other players take over your vehicle.
This could be accomplished without being killed (especially with that one easily exploitable item that forced drivers to dance, thus not driving their vehicle any longer, allowing other players to take it over).
Also, you could be killed while having a vehicle and not lose it, if you had friends around that could help you deal with the situation.
Intrepid have no intention at all of having alternate ruleset servers - which means no PvP or PvE servers, no RP servers, no hardcore servers, nothing.
If that is straight up not you, then it is straight up not you.
An example of not the targeted audience. Which doesn’t mean he can’t play, but I hope in knowing who they want to play,Intrepid doesn’t try to pursue that segment of players by adding opt-out pvp.
Well now, it's still a potential result of death when interacting with the game. The process itself is less important when it comes to how players feel after they die. It's the sense that you don't know what the killer is going to do with your boat or in the case of friends and discord, knowing that they are getting away or have killed all of your friends and are about to destroy your boat that may or may not have a bunch of packs on it.
The feeling of loss is what im talking about, not the direct mechanical result of the player's character dying like an exp loss or gear loss.
If this were how we were to decide on death penalties, EQ2 has the harshest death penalty of any game I have ever played.
Potentially losing the mob in EQ2, and losing your vehicles/packs in Archeage are potential, situational consequences of death, not death penalties.
They are still factors that make you want to die less, which I believe is just as relevant as a system that directly punishes the player for death. If there's nothing of worth to fight over, death is less of an issue. A game does not require you to lose something on your character to cause a feeling of loss. A world where death means you lose out on gaining something of value is still a death penalty, it's just not one that is active at all times. Yet, the more active this sort of feature is in a game, the more important staying alive is.
They are not a death penalty.
The death penalty in Ashes is experience debt. If you die while corrupt, you potentially lose an item. That item loss is not a death penalty, it is a potential penalty from corruption.
By your definition, EQ2 does indeed have the harshest death penalty of any MMO I have ever played, as dying in that game resulted in me not getting a specific item that was the best in slot for my class for almost 5 years, and there was literally never a shot at getting that item again.
Puts EVE's death penalty to shame, tbh.
I know you are making that claim as an example of how you dislike Sathrago's definition of harsh death penalty, but unless that drop was 100% and your guild was incompetent enough to never see that boss again. The claim sounds a little out there to me.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
EQ2 had contested mobs called Avatars.
There were varying numbers of them, depending on the games lore at the time - there were 12 at the time, iirc.
These Avatars all had a shared loot table, but also had an exclusive item or two that was unique to each.
One of these Avatars would spawn a week, at random.
The Avatar in question only spawned once in that content cycle on our server. It didn't spawn at all in that cycle on some servers.
While some would argue that this is a bad game design, it causes that same reaction in players as is seen in EVE with people wanting to warp - and so if you consider this bad game design, you also need to consider all of EVE bad game design.
If that item was BiS for five years, then I would agree with you. It depends on the life of that item.
Edit: I would like to add that this only makes the death penalty harsh for a select few people who are going for that thing. Another Example would be something like the scarab lord event in WOW that only happens once per server. Dying while trying to obtain that would be just as harsh. No one is arguing that WOW's death penalty is harsh for most people.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
Edit: I point this out only to say that if you have enough outside factors that are meaningful to a certain degree, you can have that substitute as a psuedo-death penalty that has the same effect as a literal death penalty.
I think we should stop here because this is yet again an argument where "literal" and "Different source but same effect" are clashing.
Right, and we could use our imaginations to endlessly come up with scenarios where baby games have extremely harsh penalties. If you bring speed running into the mix, we could also talk about how catastrophic losing frames can feel on the perfect run.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
Any improvement to anyone in the raid is an improvement to the raid as a whole, and at the top end, individual character progression is based on the ability of the raid as a whole, not the individual within it.
As such, any improvement to any individual in a raid is an improvement in the capability to progress of each individual in that raid.
I agree that it is a penalty to the whole raid, but loss in Eve can be a penalty to the whole corp...
You can run through these examples with all sorts of games.
Instead of making this a pissing contest of "What if" scenarios, I think it's best to just talk about intended death penalties that the average user is meant to feel. Of which I would say Ashes is only medium harsh.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
To me, greater loss based on the situation are a part of the risk vs reward of that situation, rather than a death penalty.
I would place Ashes fairly near the middle as well - slightly more harsh than WoW, ESO, GW2 or FFXIV, less harsh than EVE.
Yeah, which is why I get so annoyed when people call to make it less harsh. The endless threads complaining about how harsh death and corruption is drives me nuts.
If anyone is looking at the death or corruption system and does not think it is very forgiving already. To me, that is a sign that that person might not be in the Target Audience.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
to be honest, I wonder if they considered having it where you can only be flagged as a non-combatant around your node and its zone of influence or within a certain perimeter allowance.
Not trying to change the game but just curious on it.
Not going to try and hide it, i'd prefer just no flagging haha but that's just my preference. I can understand the reasoning and design choices for having the flagging system.
Not sure what you are saying here, exactly.
You want to avoid giving people additional protection in their home node. Imagine how crazy that would be for a level-5 node (rich getting richer). Also consider that everyone in your node is not automatically your friend. You may fight together in a node siege, but that does not mean that same guild will not kill you for a raid boss.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
not quite, lol.
The node you're "part of". You can flag as a non combatant there. Once you travel a certain amount of distance from your node, you would then be flagged as a combatant. More of a stepping into the badlands situation.
Yeah, i'm aware anyone can attack you. Doesn't really matter who. The flagging systems seems more of a way to "punish" players who gank players that dont want to be flagged for PvP or for those who want to wipe a raid and steal their loot.
it's definitely not a perfect system but I understand its intent regardless of how blunt my example was.
As long as normal corruption rules applies within your home node. I don't see the issue. All this would do is make it so casuals never leave their home node. That is... if they ever make it far enough into the game to become a citizen... lol
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.