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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
Node progression occurs regardless of what personal gear people have.
It's not easy to progress Nodes without gear, but it's technically possible to do so.
But, Nodes have to progress in order to unlock higher tiers of gear.
Your premise that core progression is node progression is a false assumption that players will choose that to be the case. Every MMO in existence with group and personal progression paths show clearly that players ALWAYS choose personal above group progression
However this doesn't mean that they don't participate in both.
If gear progression wasnt tied to node progression then you would see drastically lower participation with node progression by players.
This an undeniable observation by any player that played MMO's
Node progression is part of gear progression that other players can do instead of you.
Proclaiming that node progression is core and gear progression is not is completely contradictory, because node progression in essence is one part of gear progression that is a group effort for many players
― Plato
― Plato
It's you that is ignoring what is right in front of you.
You have your eyes closes, hands over your ears, and you are just repeating "players will pick group progression over personal progression for the first time ever, players will pick group progression over personal progression for the first time ever".
So somebody logged into your account and wrote this?
Dude node progression is tied into gear progression in order to force players into a group play - which is good btw
― Plato
Nodes can progress without gear progression - even though they won't. People will, of course, progress their gear.
Gear progression stalls without Node progression.
Node progression is not really a choice. Everything one does in the game contributes to Node progression.
Node progression is not synonymous with group progression. Nodes do not force group play. Nodes encourage group play. But, Nodes can progress even if everyone played solo.
I think everyone agrees that the more time you put in the stronger you should be and thus more likely to win encounters. However, it does not have to be all about the gear. In EVE online, even a day-old account can do something in a PvP encounter. Low-end ships can use CC and can escape from bigger, more powerful ships. They also have better "agility" thus able to dodge attacks from bigger ships.
AoC should/will make lower gear players matter in a group fight as well. I can imagine seeing the low-gear players manning the siege engines or ballista during a siege and letting the big boys do the regular fighting. Or manning the guns/repairing/steering the ship in naval combat.
Hardcore players should beat casuals no doubt, but I believe that casuals should never feel useless in a PvP encounter instead, filling some other role.
This takes place 1 year after launch.
Person A has played every day since launch has played his main to max level, and acquired all his best gear. Decides to roll an alt. He has level capped his alt, but is only tier 7/10 with his gear. (made up numbers as we don't know how this works yet)
Person B has played every other day since launch only has the one character but all his gear is tier 9/10. ( Again just made up levels)
They run into each other in the wild and fight over a rare spawn.
Should person A with more experience but worse gear win
Or
Person B the guy who has played less but has more powerful gear equipped win?
Optimally, you shouldn't be sure that either one wins. You shouldn't even care.
It's much more important to work out 'how Person B got the 9/10 gear' and 'whether or not the game should be rewarding the activity that led to that happening'.
Similarly, work out why Person A only has 7/10 gear even on the alt. All this stuff is extremely specific combat balance, and that's why the thread doesn't have MUCH meaning yet. You can't get upset at numbers, particularly the numbers cited, without understanding THOSE things.
If a player is used to games where getting BiS is a Slot Machine, then their perspective will almost obviously tilt toward 'no, let my skill matter'. If they are used to games where teamwork, focus, and efficient use of time are the path to 'BiS', then they might not respond to this sort of concept at all.
Which is mostly what this thread has been.
And player B has acquired their gear the same way player A did. Just player A can move through gear progression twice as fast because they play twice as often as player B.
I mean, we could also be asking how player A is acquiring their gear.
Exactly, I just turned level 50 today and my buddy Dygz gave me Tier 57,000 gear - so who are we crushing today?
Which ever one of the two has a friend with them will win.
A friend will always beat gear and experience.
Failing that, person B is most likely to win. Experience on one class does not necessarily make you better at a different class.
Player B has more experience on the character in question than player A, and better gear as well.
I could disagree here.
Player A has more experience with the game. B might have more hours logged in that class, but A has played more and a lot of the shul you can l gain over time is transferable to a new class. I mean we could even say player A is a weirdo and making an alt of the same class so all of his play time is transferable.
Either way you all have just dodged the purpose of the exercise. Should the higher experienced or geared player win?
Playing the same class.
Using the same crafted gear progression system to acquire the gear at the same rate/per level of effort.
Yes I know there are technically dozens of other variables, but I'm posing the question in an attempt to just focus on those two and magically pretend everything else is equal.
Should experience with the game and skill win?
Or should a higher tier level of gear win?
Hell, I'll accept win percentages for answers even...
Well, with that amount of qualifiers, I can definitely answer.
Mirror match, same crafted gear PROGRESSION.
Tier 7 vs Tier 9, Experience on the Tier 7 side...
My vote is that Tier 7 player squeaks it out most of the time. 6.5 to 3.5 matchup.
If you somehow duplicated all the conditions across an 8v8, and we extend the amount of experience and skill gained also to 'working together as a group', now it's basically no contest. For me, Tier 7s win 9 out of 10.
Subtract the 'practiced team synergy' from both sides and we're back to a 5:5. Gear advantages stack in group better than personal skill advantages.
My counterquestion then... does this actually tell us anything about the design?
While player A may have more time in game, spending years as a tank in an MMO doesnt do all that much to prepare you to be a healer when you reroll - you are starting fro scratch.
If you want to just ask the question as it is in the last paragraph, it depends on the skill depth of the game.
Very few games increase the required skill level as they age. So, if both players have hit that plateau, then one player could have years on the other, but if they either has better gear - since they are both at that plateau, the gear wins.
Keep in mind, while a game almost never adds to the required skill level of the game, literally all MMO'sadd to the gear level they offer.
In fact, it is adding gear to the equation that separates MMORPG's from other online games (along with a persistent world). Remove or lessen gear from the equation, and we may as well be playing an FPS game.
Thank you. That's an excellent answer.
Tell us anything about design? No. We're all just spit balling here. But what the topic of this thread means to me is where does that balance of power shift with regards to gear. How much weight is put behind 'I just have higher quality gear' versus I know how to play the game well. Is two tier levels of difference enough? If it was 3 levels would you lean towards gear? How big of a stat gap do you want I geared players to have over low gear players?
I don't really have an answer, just thinking out loud. I could argue both sides probably.
I guess my hope is that it never feels hopelessly one sided due to gear alone. There should always be some chance of a skilled less gear player to win or at least make the other person work for it.
To say they are on the same skill plateau would be claiming they have both achieved perfect gameplay. There's always room for improvements. But either way, I pretty much said player B hasn't hit that plateau yet by saying A has more skill.
A plateau isn't perfectly flat, it's just that the increases and decreases are near insignificant.
I've yet to see a game in which most competent players take more than a few months to reach that plateau.
There are still some gains to be made, but these are more along the lines of changes to builds and tactics (which are learned rather than practiced) rather than being an increase in personal skill.
Skill was not a factor in your original scenario - you didn't use that word at all. You said experience vs gear.
The issue I now have with your scenario though, is it is completely made up. You are trying to suggest that the game has such a high skill cap that a player that has played 180+ days has not yet reached that skill cap - yet the skill cap for each class is so low that someone that is only half way through gearing up an alt is able to hit it.
I used both the terms skill and experience... Since they SHOULD go hand in hand...
You can change the number of days to suit you, I was just throwing out random scenario to ask the question.
How much weight should gear carry when compared to skill?
Yes, I know you attempted to alter it to the above, but what you originally said was;
No mention of the word "skill" in there at all.
Since skill is unquantifiable, in your original post, we cant assume one player has more skill than the other. Sure, one has more experience, but experience is not skill. Since your orogonalnpost about this question did not mention skill, we need to assume both are equally skilled, one has more experience with the game as a whole but les with the character in question, the other has more experience with the character in question and better gear.
Who should win in that situation (if we also ignore R/P/S class factors) is fairly obvious.
Now sure, you clarified after I gave my first answer that one player had more skill than the other. But this is an alteration to the paradigm of the original question, not an addition to it. You are adding in player skill as a factor when it wasnt before. You seem to be conflating experience with skill at this point, but the two are not the same - they are even less the same when the bulk of the experience for the player in question (player A) is from a different class.
So, I stand by my answer, with the information in the original question, player B has the better gear and the more relevant experience and so should win based on the information given.
If you want to get any deeper in to it than what your first question posited, I would suggest that we need to look at where the gear came from.
In your scenario, if both players earned their gear, then player B did more and so should win. They are playing the game better than player A at that specific point.
If player B was handed their gear, then they are playing the MM aspect of the MMO genre better. If they have good enough friends to hand over top end gear, then player B deserves to beat someone that doesnt have such good friends.
If player B bought their gear from the market, they are obviously playing the economic aspect better than player A, and so deserve to win.
If player A has the option of using their well geared main to get better gear for their alts and dont, then they are not playing that alt to the best of their ability and so do not deserve to win.
The problem here is you are looking at gear in isolation.
Dont do that. Look at gear as being a accumulation of how well you are playing the game as a whole, be that successfully running content, having good friends, or playing the economic game well.
Based on all of that, the better player will ALWAYS have better gear, and so should win. Sure, player A in your scenario may be better at combat, but since they are clearly failing at other aspects of the game (hence not having good gear), they do not deserve to beat someone that is playing multiple aspects of the game well.
Gear plus character build should trump player twitch skills.
Player experience is a bit more complex than implied.
There's a whole bunch of assumptions that have been added to the conclusions.
For instance, I have 5 characters planned for Ashes at the moment. None of them are the same class.
So, just because I've got the META down for my 1st character does not mean I will know, or should know, how to play my 2nd character as well as Player B knows how to play his 1st character.
If my 2nd character is just a clone of my 1st character, then sure, my player experience might give me an edge over Player B, despite the gear disparity.
So casuals must be able to obtain viable and enjoyable roles, across all content regardless of gear disparity, in order for them to keep playing.
By 'casuals' I do not mean everyone, just the majority in the 20% to 80% band of geared-up players.
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But, yes, also... it felt like I had to wait to be Level 25 or more to make any signifcant impact on incursions.
I'm against any form of scaling. This doesn't belong to MMORPGs and it doesn't incent player to play more.
A level 60 should be able to easily kill a level 20 (corruption must play a role here to avoid massive greykill) and a fresh level 60 should have a hard time to kill a fully geared level 60. It depend how many time it take to be fully geared in AoC but this advantage could go (for me) up to 70%.
Of course skill must matter, but to a certain degree. If you want games that mainly promote skill i think MMORPGs aren't the best genre for that (especially sandbox ones like AoC).
At some point, there is always gonna be a difference between someone who play 10h a day vs 30min/day.
No matter how hard you try, the difference will exist. And, if you try to reduce it too much : the game will die because it would mean that you don't need to play because your progression will be meaningless.
what I realized is that lost ark has a interesting mechanic and that is that you can get powers that change the damage school of your class - so for example you are a warrior and you can change all of your damage to be holy damage type
it isnt the most immersive mechanic, but it allows for interesting customization and gameplay experience which should imo be always higher priority than immersion
― Plato