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
If you have the time to play more than me and grind out more gold/gear/etc, you should 100% be rewarded for that and be more powerful. This is true in real life as well. If you work more hours than me, you should make more money than me.
Just because I lack the time to play games as much as I did before does not mean that I should be on the same tier as someone who can/does play constantly. Effort = Reward
That's great but literally not what the suggestion was.
Steven says 40-50%. Why not 100%? Such games exist where your character's level barely matters and only your gear really affects anything.
Just pointing out that your reaction doesn't have anything to do with the point @VmanGman is making. Either way, it's probably Intrepid or number crunchers who could have input on the 'how much is too much', and we don't know Intrepid's 'idea' of 'how helpless they want people in Green gear to be vs people in Purple gear' or whatever.
As a number cruncher I can agree anecdotally that 40-50% is too much of a gap between 'standard' and 'near best in slot' if you actually want the 'casual' to have a chance. But maybe they don't. Some people design games for everyone, and some people design games to reward those who play the most and 'inspire' others to try to play more to catch up to those people. The real problem is usually that the latter doesn't happen much.
You can turn off invasions in Elden Ring. It’s been proven over and over again that MMORPGs are a different beast and that casuals don’t stick around if certain criteria aren’t met.
I never said that casuals shouldn’t be behind hardcore players! 20-30% power difference from gear is still significant.
My man. When did I say that hardcore players shouldn’t be rewarded for their time? Please reread the post and come back. @Swifts
That guy s the whole point of this thread.
Stopping people that have more time to play by limiting their ability to gain power.
Why should someone playing 4 hours a week be able to compete with someone playing 40?
so everyone responding to you is misunderstanding your point? cuz this entire thread is essentially you saying gear shouldnt matter... people telling you it should... and then you saying we dont get it
Shouldn't matter as much.
For instance in a 1vs1 scenario. With 50% power from gear, the higher gear score player may make up to 5 mistakes and still win vs the lower gear score. With 30% power from gear, the higher gear score player may only make 3 mistakes in order to win vs the lower gear score player. Just some random numbers but you get what am trying to say.
OP still wants the higher gear score player to have an advantage but not so much you could play like shit and still win.
In reality, we don't know how much 50% or 30% actually is. How many mistakes can you actually afford to make with these gear-power levels? I can't tell until we actually get to test the combat system.
I never said that they should stop people who have more time to play by limiting their ability to gain power. I said that they should lower the percentage of power increase that can be gained from gear. It could stay take just as much to reach BiS gear, but instead of making the power difference an insurmountable amount, it only increase it by about 20-30% which is still very significant.
A casual person should be able to compete with a hardcore person because this is a video game (please notice that I said ‘compete’ and not ‘be on equal footing’). Just because you have more free time irl, it shouldn’t mean that you can just wipe the floor with any casual. Video games don’t need to be 100% reflection of your irl status…
If casual players keep losing to hardcore players without even standing a chance in a game like AoC, they will quit. And MMORPGs the size of AoC need bigger populations and therefore casuals.
I never said that gear shouldn’t matter. 20-30% difference is still very significant. I just said that gear shouldn’t matter so much that skill becomes meaningless. Please reread the post to understand it.
Yep, agree on this. Regardless of how much time and energy went in to acquiring gear, the team still needs to field test their numbers to calibrate the overall % of power gear provides (whether that’s 30-70%).
Player skill should be a big part of the game play. And I am sure a lot of us have beaten players with better gear just through skill alone in fights we should have lost.
As Tulima said we won't know how all this will play out till after launch. Is a 40-50% power gap a lot between a fresh 50 and a full BIS 50? Only time will tell. But if you punish the no lifers and by making it so a fresh 50 has a 50/50 chance of beating them or even 40/60 then I see that as bad design. Feels like scaling to me. I didn't spend a 1000 hours working to be a master of the universe just to be challenged by a level 1 rat.
Obviously not everyone needs to reread my post. I’ve had plenty of clear conversations with others.
I never said the things that they were bringing up and arguing against me. Had you read the post you would understand. It’s very clear.
For example, I never said that gear shouldn’t matter. Yet people came here and said that gear should matter.
It’s not homogenization… if you have better gear than someone and still lose, then you suck. Hardcore good players will still be the masters of the universe. However, if gear is a smaller portion of player power, then we won’t have every no lifer that sucks at the game beat people just because their gear is better.
People that have a lot of time to play a game tend to get pretty good at that game.
However, people that lose all the time like to make the claim that those that beat them only do so due to their gear. They love to throw around the notion that those no lifers are shit players that happen to have good gear, it makes them feel better about losing.
The funny thing here is how Archeage was used as an example of a game where gear is everything. It isn't. A Daggerspell or Darkrunner (especially a Darkrunner) with shit gear was able to beat players with twice their gear score, if the player knew what they were doing - and there were other, less common builds that were better.
This is in a game where gear is widely considered to be 90% of your effectiveness.
What really needs to happen is people need to realize that those people that spend all that time getting that good gear probably also got really good at the game along the way.
Possibly. But what you’re saying only strengthens my point, if those people who are good at the game because they play it so much are also getting gear that increases their power by exorbitant amounts, then they will definitely cause many casuals to feel hopeless and quit a game like AoC that requires you to be able to stand and defend your stuff. And if your answer is “just get other hardcore players to help and defend you” then that’s not a satisfying answer. Most people don’t play games to have to beg for help and for babysitting.
Gear alone will not carry a shit player. A bad player also can’t get the best gear unless they are a filthy stinkin rich trader character. You’re making up problems that simply aren’t going to be problems. You might see one rich kid who RMT’d his way to BiS gear in every 1000 players, and he’d still struggle against a genuinely skilled player in moderately good gear. You’ve got this crazy idea that 40hr/wk no-lifing somehow happens without absorbing thorough game knowledge, and that 4hr/wk casuals are just as knowledgeable somehow as those no-lifers? That’s not what happens on any significant scale in an MMO.
Time invested directly feeds into game knowledge
There are plenty of casuals that have a very good understanding of the game. Anyway, like I said before, if hardcore players have significant advantages from playing the game more such as more skill and more resources, they don’t need another huge advantage through insane gear differences.
In Early Archeage gear disparity wasn't as insane as nowadays, and Daggerspell/Darkrunner were literally The best PvP classes, so unless you talking about early archeage or something like 1,5K-2K Gear score VS 3K-4K Gear score on current archeage. Gear Disparity gets completely insane when Lunagems kick in the Gear Score, in current Archeage its unimaginable for a 5K-6K GS player to win against a 10K-12K GS Player even if the 10K-12K GS player has a meme asfk build.
Aren't we all sinners?
My answer would be - those people need to learn to deal with it.
Players that play the game more are going to get better at playing the game. This should be obvious.
It is also obvious that the game should reward the hunt for better gear - with better gear.
While some may argue that no game can survive without casuals, it is even more true that no game can disable human nature to get better at things, and no persistent MMO would survive without an appropriate reward structure.
There is no helping people that play a game for 5 hours a week and think they are as good as someone that plays the game 30 hours a week. People love to overstate their ability at things- this can be seen in many surveys where people have to self evaluate how good at a thing they are (about 70% of drivers think they are better than average, as an example).
This isn't an issue for Intrepid to solve, or even to consider. it is just the way things are, and people need to deal with it.
People that play the game more will be able to beat you.
But that’s the thing… most of them won’t deal with it. They will quit. And a game with as much content as AoC and with servers as big as they plan to have, will not do well without many players (casuals). It’s such a small price to pay… just make gear disparity not be as great… as a matter of fact I would argue that it’s not even a price to pay. I wouldn’t enjoy just mopping through people that I outgear just because the power difference between me and them is insurmountable… that’s boring for the winner and disheartening for the loser who will eventually quit.
I’m not saying that people shouldn’t be rewarded for their time investment. I’m just saying that it should not result in insurmountable gear differences.
But that's the thing... this doesn't happen in any other game.
Sure, some casuals quit. Without a doubt. Most of them though, they find a niche in the game and they enjoy themselves.
On the other hand you might just have made the thread at the wrong 'time'.
Before anyone can see anything concrete or we even know how much 'standard' gear does relative to 'naked'.
Sure, some people have the experience of games where 50% gear would result in people getting stomped trivially, but to others, who come from games where that doesn''t happen, 50% sounds normal and 30% seems like too little, so you get some of the responses you're getting.
You've got the capacity to run the numbers and make this thread in the Alpha-2 forum when it comes up. Or wait for someone else to make it (I'm definitely gonna make it, even if it's just to congratulate Intrepid on how sweet their razor-edge balancing is).
Even if your instincts from playing in Alpha-1 told you that this number value was gonna be a problem (mine do), it probably isn't set in stone enough that trying to discuss it will lead to anything, right now.
That’s exactly how that would play out in today’s day and age for a game that has as much open world focus as AoC. Casuals that keep getting killed and have their farming spots and caravans taken without even standing a chance will quit. The vast majority of casuals won’t want to keep playing if they keep losing.
Once again, it’s not a big sacrifice… so I don’t know why you’re even arguing with me. Hardcore players will still have 20-30% of power increase from items which is still VERY significant.
But what about in 6 months when Intrepid need to add more content, then 6 months later, and 6 months later again?
The top end of any game is constantly moving up at a faster pace than casual gamers are ever able to match.
So, what you have here is an ineffective system (it is the skill of the players that play a lot that is effective more than the gear), that does nothing at all to solve the issue (casual players being easy pickings), and comes at the cost of initial top end progression as well as continued progression as the game adds new content.
Just to reiterate what you are saying, you want the game to focus more on skill rather than gear so that the people with less game time, and thus less skill, are less easy to kill.
Do you not see how increasing the skill involved in the game in relation to gear would have the opposite effect of what you are wanting? The people with more time to play would develop skill better and faster, and thus be able to better kill those with less time in the game and thus less skill.
One need only look at games like MOBA's and BR's and compare the ability of someone that plays 40 hours a week to someone that plays just a few to see that making things skill reliant is worse than making them gear reliant in that regard.
How fast content becomes outdated and how fast content is added to the game is a whole other conversation.
No. You’re totally missing the point. It would not have the opposite effect. Hardcore players will technically have more skill anyway. I’m not suggesting that the skill ceiling be increased. Im merely suggesting that skill should have a greater role which can be achieved by reducing the amount of power that can be gained from gear (limiting it to about 20-30%). It would not have the opposite effect… if hardcore players are technically better at the game because they play more, they don’t need even more advantages through gear differences adding an insurmountable power difference. Once again, by putting more focus on skill, you don’t have to increase the skill ceiling. You just have to reduce the focus on gear.
I believe it is important to have knowledge about games with ridiculously low Gear disparity like Guild Wars 2 (~10% of overall character power) Where the gear almost doesn't matter and gameswith insane gear disparity like Archeage where gear matters way too much Understanding the problems caused by both those extremes is essential.
"Once again, it’s not a big sacrifice…" Oh, it is, an insanely huge one to be honest, possible the greatest flaw in Guild Wars 2, where the essential concept of grinding for gear for character improvement in an MMORPG is completly maimed.
The "20-30% of power increase from items which is still VERY significant." argument simple doesn't stand, it falls too close to the "gear meaning very little" and very far from the "gear being very meaningful".
For those who had never experienced a game where Gear disparity is truly oppressive and Gear represents around over 90% of overall character power like Archeage currently, i would like to show you a small demonstration of what a game with that high Gear power + hella fast TTK looks like, the following video shows a ~10K Gear Score Player exploding large groups of people with 5K-8K Gear Score within like ~3 seconds.
My point is that gear being 40%-50% of overall character power like Steven is aiming for is far from being meaningless and far from being everything, sticking close to the middle is probably the best.
Aren't we all sinners?
I know you aren't suggesting to increase the skill cap, but you are suggesting an increase in the importance of skill.
Perhaps I should have mentioned specifically why this is not going to achieve the desired result you are after.
Intrepid have absolutely no control over player skill.
Intrepid do have control over how easy it is to get gear.
As such, with gear being important, Intrepid can increase the ability of players to get specific qualities of gear.
Every game I have ever played has seen developers at some point make alterations to gear and/or gear acquisition in order to assist in closing the gap between the players that spend more time in game and those that do not.
If you reduce the ability for this to be done via gear, you reduce the ability (reduce, not eliminate) for the developer to control this.
This is another case in which Archeage is a great example. They added specific gear sets to the game all the time to assist players in achieving a minimum standard of gear, and as they added new gear to the top end, they lowered the difficult in achieving gear a few tiers below. This did a great job of keeping 75% of players within 25% of each other in terms of gear - and it was only those so casual as to not understand what this gear was, or those so hardcore they were spending five figures a year on the game that were outside of that.
A fresh 50 in basic gear vs someone in full BIS should have significant difference.
Long time ago the was a story of someone that bought a WoW hunter off of Ebay for over a thousand dollars. The hunter had full BIS and was failing at everything because the buyer sucked at the class. Point is gear isn't everything. What about archetype vs archetype. Balancing 8v8 instead of 1v1 will also lead to the same concern.
People need to stop being so weak. So you lost a few fights. get better.