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
And he just decided to start being insulting because he knew he couldn't beat my points in debate. It's a common tactic. A tactic of the weak.
If others are reading what you have said and are coming to the same conclusion as me (that you don't really have a nuanced and considered opinion on the matter), then you can't really point at other people.
Perhaps you do indeed have a well thought out opinion on the matter, but you have not committed that to this thread at all. All I know is what you have typed - I know I have had thoughts while writing a post and forgotten to include them, realizing later of my absent minded omission (I did this just a few days ago with Beau).
Again, all we know of your opinion is what you commit to the thread and what you have committed to the thread has left both of us with the assumption that you have no nuanced, well considered opinion on the topic.
If this is not the case, if you believe you do indeed have a well considered opinion here, it is on you to communicate that to us, not the other way around.
If indeed you had posted your nuanced, well-considered opinion on the matter somewhere in this thread, every time someone asked you foe it, you would be able to either direct them to it, or quote youself - much as I was able to direct people to the first post on page two for my thoughts.
I can summarize afterwards, get your approval, and post up the info. I’d like to see if the medium makes a difference at all
If so, just shoot me a DM
Beau no I'm not hopping in discord, I'm pretty busy right now. But if you have any questions about what I said, shoot. I don't mind answering them. Just tell me what you're unclear about. Just as confused as Noaani is about what I've said, I'm confused why he's confused. Not sure if he's reading too much into what I said, or thinks I'm talking in riddles or something. But I am down with the idea of you being able to clear it up as a middle man.
1) Large, open-world, non-linear dungeons (that contain 8-man content boss content and 40-man boss-content). These bosses are easy enough to be interesting while contested but boring when uncontested.
The dungeons may also include instanced-off rooms for difficult heavily-scripted encounters like shiva extreme in FFXIV. This allows the ashes team to design complicated fights and then the players to attempt those complicated fights, but then get camped and killed when they leave for their boss mats.
The PvP in these dungeons are subject to the corruption system, so if you don't want to flag, you may lose extra mats and go into more XP debt. If you kill someone not flagged, you gain corruption, but might be able to take their hard-earned boss mats, or secure a boss kill for yourself.
2) Open-world bosses that spawn in a PvP-enabled zone. These bosses essentially act as a PvP objective like Baron Nashor in League of Legends and give something for the players to squabble over. They're easy enough to be interesting while contested but boring when uncontested. Since they spawn in a PvP zone like what happens with caravans, then everyone is flagged as a "combatant", and no one has to worry about becoming corrupt. Bonus points if the game detects when there's no PvP happening and makes the fight harder somehow to keep it interesting.
On the PvE-PvP gradient, this is similar to the bosses in type-1 content, just more PvP centric.
3) Explained here.
4) There's a PoE-style (atlas there) system where you can farm/buy items to spawn/modify bosses. (editor's node: I don't actually think this is strictly necessary, but it provides a lot of procedurally generated novelty in PoE which extends the life of the game a lot.)
Then, the critiques:
1) Worries about making sure that the number of bosses in dungeons are correct. Valid and easy enough to tune when players are actually playing in dungeons. There are also concerns about how lucrative the instanced-off rooms within the dungeons are relative to other activities. May I point you to Degenerate Economic Efficiency?
Hopefully, the notion that the instanced-off rooms are deep within the dungeon itself, and the folks leaving the instanced-off rooms will have to travel through the dungeon filled with other players will be enough to create risk and redistribute some loot. Valid concern though!
2)
I think this gets a couple of things wrong on a factual level, so I felt it was worth quoting it directly. First, even if you're a combatant, you can still steal loot! https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Corruption
So, this sort of system still creates XP debt, still creates skill and stat dampening, and folks will still lose durability and all of that stuff, it's just that the risk of accidentally killing a non-combatant and becoming corrupted is gone. No one can "karma bomb" you as they can in BDO.
3) The cage match is basically just fighting over rights to access the instance, which is better than instancing
4) The McGuffin thing could be done in the open world.
So, starting from there with that as the background here are my questions:
It took the best guild in the world at the time, Method, 638 attempts to beat Garrosh Hellscream. Take a gander at this video to get an idea of how meticulously crafted and complex this encounter is.
Would you like to see boss encounters that are remotely as complex as Garrosh in Ashes? I think it's completely reasonable if the answer is "no" here - Ashes doesn't have to be every sort of game.
If yes, do you think that an encounter like that is a reasonable thing to ask players to attempt in an open-world setting (where you become less powerful after dying) like the type-1 or type-2 content? Or do you think it would make more sense to put it in an instance or what I wrote about here?
Keep in mind that there are mechanics where if a single player does a single thing incorrectly, it wipes your whole raid. If a single rogue stuns a single player during that single moment, that would wipe your whole raid.
Next, does the clarification about how folks that are flagged as combatants still risk losing their stuff and going into debt and all that help alleviate your concerns there?
Answering "no" to this question is the only real way to support the stance that this poster has taken.
The only way their opinion could be considered is if they simply do not want the segment of the MMO population that enjoys top end encounters like this from being able to find a home in Ashes.
Even then, in order for the opinion to actually be well considered, there would need to be a reason as to why they think this - and the notion of content and/or rewards being contested in Ashes simply isn't appropriate, as the suggestions I made all specifically add in additional means to contest any content that can't be contested directly while fighting the encounter proper.
A considered opinion would then also need to account for Intrepids, statements that they want a raiding scene that is tiered, and that has encounters that are difficult to the point where only a single digit percentage of the population would be able to kill them, and also square that opinion with Stevens comment that they will instance off content for the specific purpose of limiting how many people can participate.
I am personally fine with people having an opinion and not going in to too much detail (not going in to the level of detail that I did). However, if someone wants to state they have a well considered opinion, I don't think it is too much to ask that they answer a few questions about it - which has not happened here at all, hence my not letting it go.
An opinion - whether well considered or not - that the person in question can not consolidate with what Intrepid have said about the game, is about the same as someone posting the opinion that they don't want the corruption system in the game.
As in, all they'd need to do is crank up health pools and damage, and suddenly less and less players can defeat them. If they're open world, then as you know only the controlling guilds and their allies can attempt them in the first place. If you make Tier-1 bosses spawn at the same time as Tier-2 bosses and make them spawn very far away from each other and make tier-2 bosses more difficult and drop more valuable materials then more powerful players in more powerful guilds will contest those and leave the tier-1 stuff to the mid-tier guilds. Boom, all of the goals were accomplished.
The bosses themselves are still basically a glorified Baron Nashor and are mechanically uninteresting for the folks that have been doing high-end raiding for 15 years, which I think is unfortunate
That said, I don't think Steven's list of games he's played includes games with lovingly crafted difficult raid encounters, so I don't have my hopes set too high here
Did you have any thoughts on my own proposal btw?
The idea is that you want to make sure the dungeon:
First, let me say that the way you described the dungeon is super cinematic and very exciting. If a game could reliably make players play like that somehow, they'd have my money. My general concern is that the players will take the path of least resistance / path of most economy at the expense of fun / cinema
Here are my general concerns:
That said, I think the abstractions are all really solid (if I'm understanding them correctly), and the principles can be iterated on to produce a really, really cool dungeon design. This is sick.
I think something like this could be used for the upper echelons of type-1 content: the stuff that drops the materials to make the best gear. That way it has a lot of eyes/attention on it from the upper-end players.
It being logistically difficult is technically the point. Noaani and I both arrived to the 'race' solution from different approaches and angles. But the concept is the same. In order for one to design difficult content, you need some control over those variables. I want there to be 'a risk of a race' so that way the encounter can still be fun and challenging but also have a PvX element to it that doesn't necessarily interfere with the Boss room itself (unless you weren't fast enough and the opposing team was.) It allows for the dungeon to not be instanced, but 'heavily in favor of whoever has first contact'.
As for the exclusive pardon my FFXI lingo, but EX means that 'only whoever took it out of the treasure pool is capable of having this item, it's not tradeable'. In ashes due to there being PvP drops this is slightly more difficult to execute in the above scenario. Perhaps there is some sort of effect of it losing it's 'ex' status after use on the boss door? I'm less sure about the 'contested' part. And again I don't necessarily see 'universally uncontested' as a bad thing. But 'the threat of guilds attacking other guilds' dungeons' has the potential for some real organic drama I think would make the scenario you are worried about not really happen.
I agree on the staying power factor. I would hope that the increasing player skill on a server would make this less predictable and fine tuned. But that's not a guarantee. This is partially why there is the ability to light the lantern inside the dungeon. To incentivize the race itself as it provides its own 'consolation prize'. A big enough team to 'bust the dungeon fast enough to catch the other team' would therefore by nature of minimal fast travel mean that mustering a large enough group to perform both tasks would be harder. Not impossible though as I am sure Noaani will love to point out. But it would 'always have that risk'. Which is the part I would be betting on in keeping the game moist instead of dry. I tend to view raids as content prone to drying and more about 'execution' and 'thrill of the skill' rather than 'solving unknown problems' to begin with, so I'm less worried about it 'drying out' in the sense you are talking about than you may be.
However I still think this is better than any other noninstanced design schema in terms of serving multiple game purposes. Node population and traffic levels will definitely be integral to making such a thing work as well as properly designing the various proper 'circuits' for the dungeons to encourage travel and minimize clumping. It's the ebb and flow of the availability of the available pop items that I think would make this type of content to be designable for 16-24 people rather than the 30-40 that usually gets thrown around when discussing raids and is an indirect intention of why I wrote the scenario the way I did.
Vanilla WoW shouldn't really be the aim - though it wouldn't be a bad place to start out (assuming content grows from there).
However, just adding to a mobs HP and damage output doesn't reduce the overall number of people able to kill a mob - it just means people need slightly better gear. When gear isn't directly tied to content completion (as is the case in an economic centric game as opposed to an itemization centric game), you have to always assume players can get better gear.
On the other hand, if you make an encounter actually harder, more mechanics, tighter mechanics, people can't just overhear it. This is how you have encounters thst a limited number of people are capable of killing.
Say that there's a boss that currently has 800 guilds capable of killing it. What happens if you raise the health or damage by 10%? Maybe all 800 guilds can still kill it, but maybe the guild that was just barely scraping by now is unable to, and now it's just 799.
Then raise the health and damage by another 10%. Maybe those 799 guilds are capable of still killing it, but only if they spend their money on better gear or switch to more optimal builds. Maybe the guilds that are the closest to failing are now unable to clear it. Repeat. Eventually, the lower-end players start running out of money, healing throughput, or dps.
Boom, proof by induction
Note: I don't think this is a particularly good way at all to design or balance encounters. But it's objectively true that a boss that has more HP and does more damage is more difficult and can be killed by fewer players than the same exact boss with less HP and who does less damage.
[*] low complexity Nefarian
[*] medium complexity Shiva Extreme
[*] high complexity Operator Thorgar
[*] extreme complexity Garrosh
Even with a time limit, all it means is the guild in question needs to find an additional 10% DPS. In an itemization centric game like WoW, that is a tall ask, as that encounter that the guild is trying to kill is also the encounter that drops gear better than what that guild is using now.
In an economic centric game, this isn't the case. There needs to be the assumption (at all times) that better gear is simply a matter of spending more money.
So all that guild needs to do to be able to kill that mob with 10% more HP is spend money on DPS gear. No real issue there.
Same if you just increase the damage output of the encounter - the guild just needs better hear and tank gear, problem solved.
In order to make an encounter where guilds outright stop being able to expect a kill is to tighten the mechanics of the encounter, so that it is the players that are incapable of killing the encounter, not the gear the characters in the guild are using
So of the 800 guilds capable of killing the boss, there's a bell curve, right? Some are barely capable of killing it, most are comfortable, and some are blowing it out of the water. If you make it have more health, then now the DPS need to do more damage otherwise the healers will eventually run out of mana. The groups that were barely able to kill it may now be unable. And yeah, this becomes way more obvious if there's also a hard/soft enrage.
If you make it do more damage, then now whatever mechanics it has are more dangerous. Maybe you'd wipe before if half of your raid messed up, but now you'll wipe if 1/3 of your raid messes it up. Maybe your tank needs to be more precise with whatever active mitigation cooldowns the game has.
If 10% wasn't enough to make the worst group fall off, then ratchet it up another 10%. They'll eventually run out of money, right? Yeah, more money can be farmed, but that doesn't mean that they'll have enough money to buy the better gear today.
There is a bell curve, indeed.
The thing is, increasing the HP of a mob isn't interacting with this curve in the way you think it is.while it may raise the level of who can kill it with a specific set of gear, all it takes to overcome that is better gear - which in an economic centric game does not require killing that encounter.
I'm not saying the guilds that were having trouble won't have more trouble, I am saying that all they need to do to overcome that trouble is get better gear, which is an option that is always available.
All you are doing is slowing down these guilds from killing the encounter until they get that better gear, because better gear is the appropriate counter to a mobs HP or damage output.
Player skill is a counter to a mobs script/AI.
If your goal is to require better gear to kill an encounter, increasing HP or damage output is the right thing to do. If you want to make the encounter harder so that fewer guilds are able to kill it at all (as opposed to fewer guilds able to kill it this week), then tightening the mechanics is the way to go.
If 10% wasn't enough to make the worst guild fail, then raise it by another 10% and repeat the process until some group fails
No, at the bottom of the bell curve, it is more likely to be guilds that are just starting out.
Imagine that the skill/wealth of a guild is normally distributed, and killing a boss requires that your guild has, say 1m total gold, and so 800 guilds all have 1m+ gold.
Then, you raise the HP/damage of the boss by 10%, and now you need more gear to kill the boss, so the wealth requirement to kill the boss raises to 1.05m total gold, so the guilds that had between 1.0m and 1.05m gold are unable to kill it. If there were no guilds that had this amount of wealth, then raise the HP/damage by 10% again, and this increases the wealth requirement to 1.1m total gold. If there were no guilds that had this amount of wealth, then raise...
etc
Since not all the guilds have the same amount of wealth, eventually you'll find a HP/damage value where some guilds stop being able to complete the boss but other guilds still can. Thus, you have reduced the number of players that are capable of defeating the boss.
In your example, the guilds that has between 1 and 1.05 million gold would just go out and get more gold.
Since we are talking about gear here, it isn't like that guild needs to make a million gold a week, they just need to have that wealth in gear. As such, they can go out and increase that gear wealth. It may take a week, maybe even two, but they will get there.
In a game like Ashes, guilds will sort out their income before sorting out raiding.
So again, you haven't STOPPED the guilds killing the boss, you have just delayed it a little.
Eventually, you push the HP numbers so high that they have to actually play their class correctly and having BiS gear won't save them. Now beating the enrage timer or killing the boss before the healers run out of mana comes down to playing better, which better guilds do better than worse guilds. Eventually the incoming damage gets so high that BiS gear doesn't save the noob/mediocre players, and only the better players are rotating their defensives properly and the healers are healing efficiently enough (not overlapping heals, not overhealing, etc) to make a difference.
Worse players can generally compensate for lower player skill with better equipment, and better players can compensate with worse equipment with higher player skill. If you have worse equipment, you have less margin-of-error to fail mechanics. Eventually, the incoming damage gets so high that only the most skilled players that never mess the mechanics up are able to successfully beat the boss.
Do I think this a good way to make difficult encounters? No, absolutely not. I'd much rather have complex mechanics. Increasing HP and Damage done objectively makes fights harder though. The harder the fight is, whether that's numerically or mechanically, the less percentage of the player base will be able to do it.
Yes.
The difference being - in an itemization based game, the mob in question is a gate to better items.
The developers can (and do) limit what items your guild can have when killing a given mob.
If a raid progression has 20 encounters, and you are working on encounter 8, you only have access to drops from the first 7 encounters. Developers can (and do) take this in to account when designing encounters.
In an economic centric game, this isn't really possible.
In Ashes, there is nothing at all to stop any given guild wearing items from any given raid mob the first time they kill that same mob that the items drop from, let alone any drops from further on than that.
It can totally be the case in an itemization-based game that your raid's current items are the best they can be to face the boss you're on - you've farmed all the bosses below it and there's no more upgrades.
Likewise, it can be the case in an economic game that your raid's current items are the best that can be purchased. Then, we increase the HP and damage by another 10%, and of all of the guilds that have BiS gear, now the differentiator is player skill.
I don't think it's a good design at all, but I do think that it technically does check the boxes. You have a host of bosses that are all relatively simple mechanically, and those bosses are grouped into tiers. The higher the tiers, the more punishing the mechanics are when you fail them, the more damage the boss does, the more stringent the DPS requirements are, etc.
Nothing too crazy design or mechanical complexity-wise, basically just precision and gear checks as big HP sponges.
This is untrue.
In an economic centric game, players are not hitting that ceiling.
You will never see a player in Ashes that has the best gear possible - I wouldn't be surprised if it takes several years before even one item that could be considered best in slot is created, and there is a real chance that some servers will never actually see a best in slot item at all.
lets use the two most talked about economic games that Ashes is taking some inspiration from (EVE and Archeage).
In EVE, you only fly what you can afford to lose. Even in large corporations, even the people running them, there is always something else to get. You are never finished.
In Archeage, it was three years after release before I saw a single mythical item be created - and it wasn't exactly a great item. But that was an entire server, taking three years, to make ONE mythical item. A good number of servers went in to the first (and indeed second) round of server mergers before they saw a single mythical item at all.
In an itemization based game, you may well have all the items in progression up to the encounter you are fighting.
In an economic centric game, you can have access to any items before the mob you are taking on, from the mob you are taking on, or from mobs further along in progression - and players will never, ever finish progressing in terms of gear.
Again, what you are talking about works in an itemization based game. A guild has to find a way to get the DPS or survivability they need with the items at hand. In an economic game, the items at hand are literally all the items that exist.
Tighter mechanics make an encounter harder, you can't just out gear that. DPS or survivability though, that is just a matter of spending more coin, which at most may just mean farming more coin.
I don't think there's a disconnect. What you're describing is a situation in which it takes a really long time for the players to achieve the BiS gear. Maybe even one that, in normal circumstances, would never happen in particular games. Hence "It can be the case".
Further, raising your gear level via coin in MMOs is typically non-linear. If we keep raising the DPS requirements of the boss by 10%, we don't keep raising the total wealth of the DPS by 10%. Rather, each time we raise the DPS requirements, we might be asking the guild to double or triple their total wealth. We might be asking the raid to go from A-tier items to S+ tier items, which cost an absolute fortune. In BDO, the difference between a +14 and a +15 stat-wise was pretty small, but price-wise it costs hundreds of player hours.
Eventually, facing these non-linear asks for gear increases, the group is no longer able to complete the content until they gain more player skill.
I'm not arguing that they won't be able to acquire the items eventually, and that does make this different from particular itemization-based scenarios. In most World of Warcraft Progression Raiding, the races to world first are done severely undergeared, and the bosses are killed in the first ~3 weeks of the raid being open, with the winning guild putting in hundreds of attempts at that time. This means that the raid will only have a few pieces from all of the previous bosses, which means they're severely undergeared, which is part of why those raids are so hard for the prog groups.
By the time most guilds hit the end-boss for the raid, they're doing it with far better gear than the top guilds had when they defeated it, and there will still be a ton of upgrades left to get.
In games like FFXIV, they avoid the whole issue by doing gear item level scaling.
That said, this is all mostly irrelevant to my point. We don't need to block players from defeating the content "forever" or "until they get more skilled". We just need to be able to answer the question:
"What percentage of the player base is able to defeat the Lost Tomb Raid Encounter today?" with a low, single-digit number. If that number is too high, we can raise the HP and damage until that number goes down. You are absolutely right in that that number will go up as players increase their wealth.
Mechanics-based fights also get easier if your raid takes less damage, does less damage, and heals more effectively. You push phases faster, recover from mistakes more easily, and overall have to panic less and can pay attention to the mechanics more. If the fight is designed in such a way that if a single person makes a single mistake then you wipe, then the less amount of times you have to do this (the more gear you have the more dps you do, the less you have to do this mechanic), the easier the fight is.
I think we fully agree on the sort of design we'd like to see: mechanically tight fights. I don't think raising HP/damage numbers on bosses is a fun way to create difficult encounters.
Maybe it'll help if I go really extreme: imagine a mechanically simple boss. Increase it's health by 1000x. If the fight used to take 15 minutes, now it's taking 10 days. In order to defeat the boss, the players would almost certainly need to have multiple people at their houses playing on their computers in shifts. Maybe the most hardcore of all of the hardcore guilds would be willing to attempt such a feat. Longshot.
What about 5 days?
What about 24 hours?
What about 12 hours?
Now we're getting into do-able territory. If there were 800 guilds that were able to kill the boss when it used to take 15 minutes, and there is some sort of strategy that lets the healers go infinite mana-wise, then I bet if the rewards were good enough, or the bragging rights were high enough, then there would be at least one guild willing to spend 12 hours to kill a boss. If not, decrease the HP. Eventually, you hit a point where previously, all the guilds were able to kill it, and now some guilds can, and some guilds can't. All because of HP.
Then, you can do the same thing with incoming damage, and you can tune that on an across-the-board level, and also ability-by-ability. If you make the boss to 100x its original damage. Everyone just gets 1-shot. If you make the boss do 3x its original damage, you might need your tanks and healers to have nearly BiS items to be able to survive the incoming damage. Maybe the absolute richest guilds on the server will have this, but it'll take the guilds that are just barely killing the boss as it stands 6 months to have the necessary funds to hit this benchmark.
If we increase the an encounter's health (and there is some sort of thing that makes time matter, like healers running out of mana, dps running out of mana, or an enrage timer, or folks running out of time in real life for an encounter), then this makes the encounter more difficult.
If we increase an encounter's outgoing damage, same thing.
If we add mechanical complexity to an encounter, add individual responsibility, increase the number of different mechanics, decrease the window-of-opportunity to perform the mechanics correctly, make the mechanic more punishing when failed, etc, then these all make the encounter more difficult.
Players can respond to the increased difficulty in three ways, broadly, and each is subject to diminishing returns. They can improve the quality of their builds (play closer to the meta for the encounter), they can improve the quality of their play, and they can equip better gear for their build.
We can disagree on a semantic level about what "able to defeat the content means". You might argue that it means "the players have the skill potential to defeat it eventually with enough gear from the content available and enough practice". I think that's a reasonable definition, and under that definition, then you're correct. It just isn't how I was originally defining it, if that makes sense.
I meant "how many players are able to beat the content at a particular point in time". If they need to practice more, then they can't currently beat the content. If they need to farm more gear, then they can't beat the content. Hopefully, even if you like your definition more, you at least think this is a workable / reasonable interpretation!