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
First of all we don't know if the amount of "griefers" will be different on the rp server then on any other server. (perceived) griefing will take place on any server. So grief management is something that any game has to account for. Be it manually or automatic.
I think that ultimately if all the griefers do end up going to the same server, that might actually mean less resources spend for the company. But if you want to protect a certain player group, i think a low entry fee (Say one month subscription) to create character on a heavy griefer server will prevent that.
The majority of griefers will not pay extra to be able to grief a certain group, if there are free other places to go to.
Unless there is heavy CS presence on RP servers, people will roll on RP servers to grief RP'ers.
Most would happily pay a one off $15 addition.
I mean, most griefers pay $15 a month just to grief others, so why wouldn't they pay that one more time?
Some griefers (perhaps most, but absolutely not all) would not pay $30 a month, every month, when there is the option to pay $15 and grief on a non-RP server.
Again, some still would, but some (perhaps most) would not.
Players do need to be aware that Ashes is an open world PvX game at its core.
As such, they have plenty of time to make a decision on whether risking PvP is OK for them or not (regardless of the server tag) … before they even subscribe, download, and click “play”.
I think everyone griefs someone from time to time, if he or she is aware of it or not. I also think that most griefers in there hearth are true MMORPG fans, otherwise they would do their griefing in some other game..
Do i think some people will roll on ashes just to grief? ofcourse. Will they deliberately choose an Rp server if they feel like griefing them Yes. But heres the thing. Ashes world is vast. its system is designed by froming groups. Individual grievers will only be able to grief lowbies, and the'll won't be able to grief them for long, because the sysems in place prevent that. I think that on an RP server, the amount of bounty hunting will be quite high. I know that eventually that will probably be the most time spend online for me. I like group pvp 10-30 size, and a bunch of corrupt griefers really sounds like something i wanna kill. Especially because they have a chance to drop their gear as corrupt players.
Being a full time griefer, will take a lot of time and extra effort. And while your grieving might ruin someones day, It might make more people happy because they have a corrupt player to kill.
Also i don't think that rp servers or any other server will cause more time for the GM's to sort things out. I'm assuming that the servers will be regionally linked, at least for the GM's So you can have a group of GM's that all work on their own pc, and solve tickets by the time they come in. If they need to investigate for more then what their out of server logs can tell them, they could hop onto that server if their linked, or at the worst hop into one of he GM account of that server to investigate. Regardless you'd still have X Gm's in charge of Y servers.
Just because Ashes is emulating an old school mmo, isn't going tomean that their going to use old fashioned stand alone servers on a seperate entity that has no interaction with the other servers. That would be unwise to do. Servers (the physical ones) will be able to handle multiple serves (the world in game) The'll be linked so they can swap hosting them to different (physical) servers when they need to do maintenance or patch things.. Day 1 server A will need most of the GM attention, day 2 Seerver B. It doesn't matter if Server B has a rp tag, it will just be how that day goes.
To the second point here, I am talking about guilds, not individual players. Perhaps not large guilds, but a few dozen players per.
A political game where you control resources as Ashes is going to be, the defenders will always bring asbig of a number they can muster to defend those resources. Individual players of that area might get ganked by groups. and they might even return on a daily basis to target that specific area. But thats not griefing. Thats intrensic gameplay native to political games.
In eve online we have no allies only frenemies. Meaning that whenever they show up, we fight. Often they contact us before hand to give us time to get a fleet together. Often with certain criteria like X amount of people or X amount of healers often both. Those fights are fun and engaging. If they can't handle content that they come across they invite us in and vice versa. If there under siege, we help them and vice versa.
Sure an individual player might feel griefed if its the 5th time that week he loses an expensive ship. But you know what that often means? that
1) he wasn't paying enough attention or
2) he wasn't making use of all the ingame assets.
I knew three guilds in Archeage that were nothing but griefers, that were in the game longer than I was.
Your EVE example isn't taking in to account the notion of people that get their enjoyment as a direct result of your loss of enjoyment. It is basically just a description of regular play.
Also, Ashes isn't going to play out nearly the same as EVE.
This is a sticky situation that has no clear cut answer that is cost effective.
The fact ashes is not planning to do any merges and the server pops are going to be kept together without any transfers (Understandably) makes it so once the silt of players has settled we wont be seeing much divergence since you are investing in a character that takes 200+ hours of gameplay to get to the perceived 'max level'
In my humble opinion RP scene is going to be dead on arrival unless we have the option to re-enter the gateway to a RP hub world between servers where you start 'fresh' and none of the progress you make there carries over to your actual server.
This is asking a lot for the RP scene and I can see this more or less being used for something more important than just a hub universe for the RPers to go to. If I could make a perfect world I'd suggest making a tick box where you can select RP server and it puts you in the same servers with other 'rp' aligned players randomly. This however will likely be trolled and have the same 'issue' as having a RP server in the first place.
There will always be people that want to destroy others for enjoyment and the RP scene is just not full of PVP or PVE experts. Then again ashes is not going to be balanced for 1v1s and will instead focus on group balancing. So either way the griefers will find the best PVP 1v1 class and roll that to specifically hunt RPers since they are easy marks since I am kind of worried that 4 RPers will not be able to stand up to 2 PVPers that are hellbent on focusing them.
I do not think it will be as common once the servers filter out since griefers will have to contend with killing a server and just play the game without anyone around them since all the RPers scattered. This has happened in 5 MMO's that I've played that had RP communities in a PVP game all of those servers now are either dead, shut down/merged or have 12 players (looking at you Radalia)
You also have to mind that each griefer will need to put a good month/s worth of game time (assuming they work for a living) to grief established RPers.
Overall, I want RP servers but at this point I'm going to likely not play the game until an unofficial server pops up and I can join it. That is the sad truth for RPers since there looks to be many RP mechanics they want to add to the game, but they don't want to help RPers find and collect together.
Also, I’m an RP’er and I’m also a PvP’er and will be defending/Bounty Hunting to protect the RP community in game with the guild Im in. There is a myth that RP’ers are not strong at pvp and I hope to one day dispel that myth.
I think the RP’er you’re referring to are the one’s that try to force others to bend to their standards of gameplay. Those people should behave their ego put in place.
If you place a set of rules on yourself for how you want to experience the game, the ideal approach is to find others who do the same and not spend energy on the ones that don’t.
In this scenario the GMs should be trained on how to handle this kind of thing. The old days of Vanilla WoW had really good GMs and they were able to cut through the BS of the people who needed to calm the heck down.
Ofcourse not, its a different game, and eve has been continuesly evolving for nearly 2 decades. Even Stephen has mentioned Eve multiple times, i'm certain they are looking at it from some standpoint. From the games i played though the political system / node system resembles that of Eve the most. And while there most definatly will be differences, There will be some things that will be the same. I've played eve since 2007. In that time i've seen many enemies, often fighting the same people for years. Truelly making them frenemies. I'm hoping that Ashes will give me a mix of Wow Classic and Eve in its own unique coating.
Fighting the same people day in day out isn't griefing, thats a campaign or a war. To me griefing is singling out a single player and harrassing them till they quit. With no other reason than making them quit. Attacking a group because you want to control their resources / dungeons / raids does not fall under griefing
Like eve there is a distinct player pool that loves to fight day in day out for the things they've worked for. To protect their own things. Eve has had a steady player pool for years now. Its player dropoff is extremely low for a game. Its player count small but fanatical. But its a space game, the target audiance for such a game is niche compared to the mmo market. So i'm hoping that after the initial surge and dropoff, there will be a steady and slow incline of players
I'm looking forwards to beeing immersed in the world of ashes and that immersion to me is seeing a lot of rp, no "leet speak" names and a community that is decent and selfregulating. and for me, an rp tag will most likely create that enviroment.
Most Rp ers have unwritten rrules. eg everything you say in character is said in normal, but if you want to tall ooc (Out Of Character) they use {{ This format }} If your "mouse" character would only be able to say different types of EEE's grunts and yelps youd often see " EEE {{ Translation: you are scary }}
Regardless if a ticket is made because someone claims its griefing, the GM would have to investigate. Its up to GM to determin what happens after.
This is why nodes have their own markets, and why transporting materials between nodes has some value.
The political aspect of EVE is not really how Ashes will play out though. Why would you translate for players that don't speak your language?
If someone put through a ticket for this kind of thing saying it is ruining RP, that in itself is a good reason to either not have RP servers, or to charge an additional fee for them.
That ticket is - after all - a cost to Intrepid.
You can't say that. We don't know how player behavior will be. A lot of my eve friends are looking at Ashes, because it has so many similarities, and a political system. They want to create an area that operates similarly to 0.0 / wormhole space. Alot of Eve's political landscape is designed around defending your home, and a tuck of war of expanding your home, invading other area or premeptive agression towards those that attack you.
These systems will be predominant in Ashes as well. Ofcourse there are differences, but those are primarily of the scale of the fights and the population limit. as well as tactical posibilities and compositions.
In a culture where worlds firsts and speedruns become more and more important in mmo's beeing able to control who has acces to certain raids is going to be important. Even if world first or speedrunning is not on your agenda, controlling a certain legendary crafting material is going to important. If you can safeguard the entrance of the only raid that produces crafting material x, you control the market of any item that requires crafting material x.
Why wouldn't you?
If my character speaks a different language to yours, we should not be able to communicate.
There are games where this happens on a system level, I see no reason why it should not happen in regards to RP as well.
Seems odd to me if you are going to say that you speak a different language, and then make it so that this means nothing.
I dunno. Seems like trying to find the balance between the two. It'd be pretty isolating to refuse to communicate with anyone, just cos of RP, when part of the fun of RP is involving yourself with others regardless of whether or not they're doing it too.
This is why I wouldn't opt to pick a race that speaks another language - unless the game had facility to do that, and where others could learn that language.
It's just opting in to do something mediocre, imo.
Is this in relation to the "EEEEEEE"?
the point is that rp ers (the good ones) lack tools for stuff. They don't have all the bodylanguage and phonetic information that we rely on in real life. you need to {{ help }} that. If you ever been to a foreign language of wich you don't speak the language, you'll notice how relative easy it is to convey complex information, with jus hand gestures, looks and sounds
You actually talk about this in a serious manner, ignoring the fact that AoC is a very ambitious project, and I mean ambitious tangible gameplay designs, that ping and timezones will affect the ability of players to progress and you think that the best investment would be to redisign content for RPrs ($), since you wont pvp and I be you wont have the ability required to tackle challenging content, dedicate a server for you ($), or two (na, eu to cover all bases...), and all that while the devs fight against p2w and lobby gameplay content ($).
I bet you can EEEEEE in games that alrdy have rp servers. If makebelieve is what you are after I dont get why the setting matters. Anyway, Im sure this paragraph will be your sticky point so once again:
AoC is ambitious gameplay wise. The devs said there wont be a server where rp griefers get moderated. Not gonna happen.
So, RP within the tools you do have.
If you want communication to be easy, don't RP a character that doesn't speak the same language as everyone else.
It's not like you don't have a choice in these things.
I urge you to reread the first posts where its specificly discussed that there need not be any redesign, or additional governing. but if you lack the integrity to read the entire threat i'll summarize it for you:
1) The server would only receive an RP tag to attract rp intrested players to that server instead of having them scattered, or having to search the forums to find a server that is suited.
2) No additional rules will be needed
3) No additonal resources need to be spend.on intrepid's part In fact its likely that fewer resources need to be spend. Due to most rp and rp grievers being on the same server.
Also you have a lot of misconceptions about rp ers. Rp ers like to do all the same stuff as a "regular" player, Pvp, pve, marketing, etc. However they also tend to socialize more trough rp.
@Noaani modern mmo's have sufficient tools already, and almost every game that allows addons has additional addons to make up for the shortcommings that some games have. However as it stands now, Ashes doesn't allow addons. So in that case you have to resort back to old school bracketing.
To be honest i could have just ignore the examples, and discussions. Most people would because at first glance it looks like deliberate responses to aggrevate people. However i tend to awnser such questions and topics as serious questions, since there is always the chance that the one asking the question is either uninformed or misinformed.
Old school bracketing is a tool they have.