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
I have a friend who's beside himself because I won't play Lost Ark. "It's FREE" he says. As in, what do I have to lose? Brother you couldn't pay me to play that game. (I mean you could but.)
He's told me a bit about the gameplay. He logs in to do dailies on MULTIPLE alts. What the fuck. It's like I live on a completely different planet than some gamers. Like I'm a completely different species. I can not figure out what the draw is to these types of games. They sound like absolute hell. Like I'd have more fun just repeatedly nutchecking myself into a wall.
When you see a game like Lost Ark, in all of it's glory - endless dailies, endless p2w, endless grinding ai mobs, endless rng gear progression...the silver lining has to be that it can't get any worse right? Like this is rock bottom right? It's only up from here? The games will surely get better, this can't last forever...
Right?
A long grind in the open world to get top end items was always a niche thing.
Most games - especially if you go back to the 2000's or earlier - required you to take on raid bosses with many dozens - or even hundreds - of other players in order to get top end loot.
To a player in the original EQ, the notion of simply being able to grind out to get top end loot would be considered 'ez'. No need to coordinate masses of people and their schedules, no need to work as a part of a team on a massive scale, no respawn restrictions to one mob per week (or one mob every two weeks - as was somewhat common).
I really dislike the idea of an open world grind to get top end gear. It seems too easy, too trivial. Sure, it may take time, but taking time does not mean it is hard to do.
I'd much rather top end gear be obtained via an activity where only 10% of the people that actually put the time and effort in to it are actually successful due to said activity being actually hard - not due to people giving up due to not having the time.
I understand it is the only available option in a PvP heavy game, but that doesn't take away from it's trivial nature in comparison to what other games have players do.
Now you'll probably just say that L2's pve was so trash that I got no idea how difficult pve can be, but I can use the same argument of "you don't know how difficult it can be to overcome hundreds of players to even try the pve". And those players could potentially double, because even if you join some big guild that has the ability to farm the bosses (still through pvp), you'd have to go through the hundreds of members before you get your hands on the top lvl loot.
And with Ashes trying to go for both, you will have to go through double the players after all. And THEN you'll have to go through the pve too, because once you go up the guild ladder, you'll have to prove that you even deserve to have that loot by executing pve at the highest lvl.
And once again you missed the essence. Here ima help you see it.
I see a trend in gamers wanting the ultra item right now and ez, with an unending grind to maintain it, (dont read this part, you dont understand it---instead of a long grind in the open world (pvX) to get it.---)
That seems weird to me. Why would people prefer to make the journey short and meaningless, only to reach the end fast and then do repetitive content at the end?
I know the type of content you are talking about, I have participated in it, and lead raids to take on PvE encounters in that same PvP setting.
With that experience, I am telling you now, that it is easier than a top end raid mob in a well designed PvE game, even with instances. Killing Archeages Red Dragon or Kraken was trivial in comparison to most end game raid bosses in even WoW.
Sure, people could fight you to stop you, but the thing with that is that people that are losing tend to leave fairly quickly these days (that may not have been the case in 2003, but it absolutely was the case from 2014 to 2018).
Since the encounters in these open world settings need to be designed to be able to be killed during PvP, as soon as you remove that PvP from the picture - either by giving the opposition a beat down that they don't want to repeat, or by diplomacy - the encounters are dead easy. Myself and about 15 others killed the top end raid mob in Archeage - an encounter designed for 80 people - in around 10 minutes, simply because we had removed PvP from the picture.
Sure, with PvP, we would have had no chance at all, but we managed to just eliminate that PvP aspect. PvP - people in general - is much, much easier to just avoid than you make it sound.
As a fun fact, if you manage to get an opposing guild to talk shit about how they are going to ruin you with the next spawn of a mob, and you give them a solid beatdown, record it and post it to YouTube, you tend to break up opposing guilds to open the way to no opposition on said encounters for a few months.
Again, this may well have been different back in 2003 (the YouTube part is - it wasn't around until 2005). However, that is how it has worked on this type of content within the last decade.
Putting people up as the difficulty makes things easier than putting content up as the difficulty.
If there are 2 things i want intrepid to avoid at all cost in Ashes is Dailies and Alts Direct Advantage.
Those things are really bad in Lost Ark and were even worse in Archeage(Hiram patch dailies and onward patchs)
Dailies are one of the things i despise the most in MMORPGs, it restricts players to do chores every single day or be left behind by losing a day that most of the times can't be recovered like in Archeage, making players do the dailies intead of content they actually like and want to do.
Weeklies are acceptable if reasonably fast to be completed and not too many.
Alts Direct Advantage is also a horrible concept that maximizes Bots and RMTs potential, as well as lame funelling resources into main character type of progression.
In Archeage people would even walk around with their Buffing Alts auto-playing songs on their Mount back slot.
Aren't we all sinners?
Fortunately, the community basically told Intrepid we don't want daily quests (or daily login rewards, or anything that causes players to feel as if they need to log in when they otherwise may not want to).
That said, I do see them adding daily quests for seasonal events. My hope with that is that these events are only able to be completed once per account, and the rewards - which should all be purely cosmetic - are able to be used on any character on said account.
And maybe for that exact reason Steven says they gonna develop bosses that only 1% of people can kill. I'll believe it when I see it, but until then I'm gonna stay highly skeptical.