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Alpha Two Phase II testing is currently taking place 5+ days each week. More information about testing schedule can be found here
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
Comments
However, I understand that it would be impossible (at current time and tech) to make such a thing and RNG is a "necessary evil."
When it comes to processing and crafting, I think there should be much less RNG. I think players should be able to commit time and effort to ensure/maximize a desired outcome. By purchasing the correct raw resources, you should be able to craft the item you want. If there is to be high RNG enchanting or crafting, there should be options to commit more effort/resources to enhance the probability of a desired outcome. Give players the agency to opt out of RNG by spending more time/resources and getting lucky will feel good but you can also just bite the bullet and commit hard to achieve something without the risk of failure.
Edit: I do worry that Steven's personal experience with collecting things, loot boxes and RNG packs like MTG cards will bias him towards liking more RNG in game than most would want. Those things are only fun when you have large amounts of expendable resources to spend on said things. If you have tons of resources at your disposal, you can roll the dice as many times as you want and get the thrill of success but if you don't, it's more about anxiety of not getting it in the limited number of tries you have.
For legendary drops/mounts/cosmetics etc- I hope there are alternative methods to achieve those alongside RNG. For example the deconstruction of a legendary item has a small chance to drop a recipe. Big fan of this idea -even though it's kinda layered RNG. I'll have my coins ready to help craft haha. My RNG sucks ^^ Perhaps the mounts can be bred with few offspring/can only breed so many times. Cosmetics deconstructed for recipes too?
Choices are nice ^^
I hope they tie enchantment to professions and resources. I would LOVE to spend hours and hours, days even, to have a guaranteed power boost to my weapon or armor. That boosts economy. That boosts player experience. That gives meaning to your weapon / armor. That is the grind I like.
RNG for drops is necessary right? I can't see how else.
I think gathering rng in new world had the right idea but they never dialed it in properly, and same goes for chests found anywhere they had a decent idea but it was kind of half baked.
I think crafting rng in new world was also good but the limited stats and amount of terrible combinations made it fall short. At the same time people used to stream rolling gear because it was fun to watch and cheer for.
I think ashes should do boss drops etc like WoW with some rare items, but let a lot of good but less rare items be collected by everyone. Make crafting higher quality items similar to new world because slot machine crafting as bad as it sound is fun to the point people live stream it and cheer for it. Gathering RNG should also be like NW with having a chance to get a rare item but make it more balanced NW had some good systems with really bad balance. Intrepid I believe can make these systems good, I personally felt these systems made crafting 1. More fun and 2. Made people interact with eachother.
I don't want the game to be like New World but I will give the devil his due and admit some things were good ideas, even if the execution was rough. Same goes for WoW, it is a relic and honestly most mechanics will make it irrelevant moving forward with its nostalgia addicted players still playing it because no other game reminds them of 2006. But fighting over who can roll need, did make things contentious but that also made people interact with eachother.
Couple of examples from experience.
Armour. Destiny 2. I get boots of awesomeness. While they are good and have the look I am after, I dont give up looking including I get another set of boots of awesomeness but with a bit more of a stat that I want.
Offensive attack. In early WoW I used to play Affliction warlock. The downside was everyone expected you to have the same build (ruin) but it was a great feeling when you landed a crit and we would compare shadow bolt crit numbers or when you triggered a second auto-cast bolt. Someone else mentioned here that a range of damage is better than a fixed calculated number ( so we can avoid a fixed build that is better than another), ideally a position where several builds are valid.
I absolutely hate enhancing gear RNG, it is a lazy development/game design to stretch out progression in a very painful way. I am one of those people that consistently gets bad RNG and end up spending 10x the average amount to enhance my gear. Ruined Black Desert Online for me.
RNG for things like monster behavior, random events occurring, harvesting amounts, some combat mechanics (crit chance, dmg ranges for hits), tend to be standard and can be fun.
Again, RNG should never play a role in progression. Imagine if Experience to next level was RNG? How is enhancing gear RNG not the same thing? Both systems fundamentally dictate the strength and progression of your character, yet some people are okay with one being RNG and not the other?
No RNG Progression!
Inside of combat, I feel like any randomness is fine as long as it doesn't make the game feel worse to play. Bad luck protection can operate here (see Dota 2), but it feels far less necessary. You can also have meaningful player choices here too, where maybe you do X damage consistently with choice 1, and choice 2 has higher highs and lower lows if RNG doesn't work in your favor. In games with group content this can work out pretty great
Loot drops like Diablo or Path of Exile would be great.
Chances in crafting where you craft an item and you have a chance to get a special or rare property and RNG ranges on items.
Prior to that point RNG no issues with on any systems, even less issues & longer game life if the rare items can be sold/bought & not locked to players.
The one aspect of RNG that I've never found to be an issue is Drops from open world monsters & that is monsters you can farm solo, not "Elites" that take more than 1 player or bosses or dungeon mobs. Also going way way back in MMO history: RNG open world chest drops that generally drop the crafted item every few loots after 30min respawn.
Modern players who play MMOs also like games like elden ring, Skyrim, monster hunter world and even Hades. These are not games in the genre but these games are very well received for combat because players are responsible for their own well being not a roll of the dice. With tab target hybrid combat look at how Elden ring does it intrepid doesn't have to copy it but it feels good to use. Make a system like that with abilities bound to keys, slow down dodging and stamina, and everyone and their dog will buy the game because Fromsoft already knows what good tab target is ahses just has to.make it their own.
So rng dodge/evade mechanics are no. But RNG loot a big yes.
Damage RNG:
To have a chance to deal bonus DMG (Crit Hit), to deal reduced DMG (Block) or even no DMG at all (Dodge). Are good examples of good ways to address this.
On one hand, when this is applied to the DMG a player deals, it gives some unpredictability to the outcome of a fight that could have happened many times already (when farming for example), resulting in a more refreshing, less tedious task.
On the other hand, when on the receiving end of said DMG it can become overwhelming rather easily. It feels good to only apply this to “Big Skills” (from Mobs or other players in PvP). Being hit by many Crit Hits in a row feels infuriating, while dodging/blocking them takes away the excitement a battle can have.
On the topic of PvP, it ends up being a question of numbers, how much more or how much less DMG is dealt is the key factor. It fells both exciting and infuriating when a dmg boost hits in the perfect moment, deciding the outcome of a battle.
Mechanics RNG:
This is something I’ve seen many times, a boss unavoidable ability that has a chance to either deal dmg or CC the player. Always feels bad.
While this can be interesting on a big battlefield in most cases makes it so that the player feels worthless, like they no longer can control the outcome of a battle, to be shutdown from something because of RNG while executing everything perfectly always feels infuriating.
These sort of massacre ability should have a certain way to be nullified, either it be by interrupting the enemy, running from it, doing a quick time event (moving to a certain spot or destroying a certain structure on the right timing), etc, while being hit does not guaranty “death”, a player can feel like they have control while keeping a bit of RNG mixed in (“I was about to die but I was lucky” is a good feeling to have).
Drops RNG:
Simply put, it makes it so that a user needs and wants to repeat some event, as well as allows the prize pool for said event to be bigger, while keeping the reward for each attempt lower. Messing with the odds we mess with the value of the reward.
This is usually a good thing, in most cases necessary. The problem would be the ceiling, implementing an invisible one is often times a good idea. Make it so that if a player has not received a max rarity item after X attempts, the next time it becomes more likely or even guarantied.
Cash Shop RNG:
This is a tricky topic, in most cases is best to sell exactly what the user wants for a reasonable price, the locking it up behind RNG. Where this can be accepted would be in a situation where the value of some item could be less rigid, something like consumables or skins where the difference is entirely the color pallet used. Allowing a user to get something for cheaper is good, the problem come with the ceiling (max value), making it so someone can get an item for 1$ while other ended up needing 1000$ is plain wrong, there needs to be a system in place to prevent scenarios like these.
- in loot drops (but the loot pool needs to make sense)
- Stats like “Crit Chance” (self explanatory) or “Balance” (the range between the minimum and maximum damage I can achieve on a hit. Higher balance means your minimum and maximum potential damage are very close together) but I’m not even sure if AoC will have a Balance stat
- Overclocking. This could be pushing your limits with blacksmithing, or enchanting or enhancing your gear past the safe point. There should be some chance of failure (risk / reward) when going beyond the conventional limits. However, I must also say some games take it to an extreme and it becomes nearly impossible to max something out because there might be something like a 0.001% chance of success. That’s a bit much in my opinion.
There should always be a way to increase your chances to something tangible.
For example: perhaps when you’re trying for a high level enchantment, you have a base success rate of 5%. But then let’s say there’s an “Elixer of Enchanting” that you can add to the recipe which brings it to 15%. And perhaps you’re able to add multiple Elixers, each one adding another 10% but if you add too many you run the risk of either damaging the item, watering down the enchant effects, or resetting the success rate back to the base level, etc. There could even be better Elixers made by more experienced Alchemists which increase the success rate even more per Elixer, so you can achieve a higher success rate more easily. A system like that would create another avenue for gatherers, processors and crafters to be involved in another system and give them another way to make money.
And above all, this system would give players control over their amount of RNG in an interesting, tangible and meaningful way.
When a player gets to end game, this type of RNG makes running end game content unique and worth repeating.
I also like RNG in regards to crafting, ie how many items may be created, X bonus effects, X improved duration, etc. This does two (2) things;
1) Adds diversity to the Economy
2) Creates an additional layer of interest to the Crafting System
3) Adds situational demand for items that may be useless otherwise
To summarize my thoughts, RNG CAN be great as long as it is properly bounded (IE no arbitrary trash thrown in) and/or the RNG only adds to/improves the items.
Grinding for specific loot is tedious and
AoC could make it harder to get rare loot by making the source harder, not the difficulty at getting something from the loot roll. Rare items would be considered as such by how good you were at receiving them, and not how lucky you were. And then there is crafting... the game could do much from it! say... a lot of "dragon scales" are needed to create a given crafting component (here comes the skill impact! because, well, we also make mistakes -- and they happen often when we are just little newbies) used in other stuff like armor creation...
The basic system is RNG = Faster Rewards apposed to RNG = Rewards
I believe that after a set ammount of time (to be tested) that your rng chance of an item should increase so you are rewarded for your time put into an event/boss/drop even if you are not lucky. However if you get lucky as normal with RNG you can get it on the first go or faster then a defined end point.
For example if you are wanting a drop from a boss at 1%, if you do not recieve the loot after 10 encounters, the drop chance could increase to 5% for another 10, then 10% for another ten. All the way up to 50% chance.
This system would allow you to atleast be guarenteed the drop after a set ammount of runs so you dont feel like you may be wasting your time forever when your mate may get a drop and move on to other content. But the system also allows you to have the fun feeling of RNG to speed up your process.
First off, don't do a gacha system. I'm tired of these. They're annoying. Just don't.
My go-to when looking at RNG is tabletop RPGs like D&D. They generally use dice (the RNG), but have some system to "weight" the RNG in some way. For example, certain characters might regularly use skills such as 'slight of hand'. It would make sense for them to generally be more successful (have higher rolls). So, they get a +5 to their roll. I've played a character who had had next to no contact with others for a long time. They had a low charisma modifier because of that.
My point is that RNG should be added in places that it makes sense. However, appropriate weighting should also be used in places that it makes sense.
When it comes to video games, I prefer games that aren't hard capped by mechanics, but rather are soft capped by skill. What this means is that if the player is doing something, then they should be able to do it *within context and balance* (keeping in mind mechanics of the game, and no hacks, ect.).
If the player wants to cast the _____ spell, then they should be able to cast the ____ spell. At that point, it comes down more to skills in strategy, timing, coordination (in teams), and other similar skills. You don't end up with this "we lost the final boss fight because the system decided not to let me cast one spell." It also gives the opportunity for the "What if..." questions. "What if I tried this?" "What if I used it for this instead of the intended purpose?"
In a binary setting of you cast the spell or you didn't, my favorite weighting method is proficiency. The more you use a skill the better you are at it, and the less you fail. One interesting thought is that if you stop using a skill, it goes down in proficiency (maybe not drastically quickly though).
However, rather than a binary success/fail, my preference would be effectiveness. How effective is the skill. There's kind of two versions of this (that I can think of). One, a slider-bar scale, and two, a bullet-point (case-by-case) scale.
To illustrate this, I'll use a basic CC ability like an ice mage's freeze spell (I'm making this up on the spot. Forgive me.) In a slider-bar RNG, something like the length of the effect would be affected. You "rolled" badly and so the enemy isn't frozen for as long. In a bullet-point (case-by-case) RNG scale, the effect might change slightly. You "rolled" bad and so rather than being frozen, the enemy is slowed instead. Maybe they're only rooted and not completely frozen.
Hopefully that got the idea across.
However, like I said before, it is better to be capped by skill than mechanic. So, be careful throwing too much RNG on the player.
Rather, external factors are much more lenient with RNG. (Basically AI)
Drops are a great thing to randomize, but you have to be careful to not make certain items so unfair that even the most dedicated players have a hard time getting it. Again, the best long-term content is skill and interaction based (at least for MMOs). No one wants to spend weeks to months grinding the same thing for one item. However, there still is something really nice about having different rarities of items. It makes sense that the most dedicated players would have better gear than a casual player. However, skill cap over mechanics cap, the casual player should still have a chance (in essence the gear doesn't determine the outcome, though it might have an impact on it).
When it comes to drops, it might be interesting to have the drops "pre-determined" or RNG'd before the fight. It might be interesting to be trying to get an item from a group of bandits, you scope out the area, and are able to make a more specific attack focused towards the one bandit or chest that has the item. In a way, that makes it feel more "life-like".
tl;dr (summary)
Being capped by the player's skill is better than being told you literally can't do it because the system won't allow it or it decided that that case is the one time it doesn't work. It's ok to add RNG, but it needs to feel fair and in the appropriate contexts.
GEARING/LOOT DROPS: RNG in late game gearing also leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I'm more of a fan of "do this and that activity, collect currency/materials so that you can buy/craft the piece you actually need" over "clear this content 100 times so that you might get the piece you are looking for". Of course random loot drops during leveling are nice, but when it high end gear it's just frustrating. I feel the same way about random elite spawns. It's just annoying to wait in some extreme cases hours for a rare spawn only to have it one shot by someone before I could even tag it. It's not fun, it doesn't add anything to the game other than AFKing for days/weeks/months (if the item is rare enough). The only game that did these rare spawns/events right was Guild Wars 2. Massive events where you had the chance to actually participate, because it was not one low lvl rare mob that gets one shot by lucky people.
PROFESSIONS: The only part of an MMO where I like some RNG is gathering. Let's say, player collects xyz plant and has a chance to receive a higher tier/rare material (but of course, even in this case the player should be able to increase the chance to receive the rare materials with tools, gear properties, etc.).
Overall I'm not a fan of RNG in MMOs.
I believe one of the reasons RNG is used in MMORPGs is because these games need to time-gate some parts of the game, so RNG is a way to do it. If there were no RNG at all, the need to time-gate content would probably still exist, and the other options to make it happen might be just as bad, if not worse, as RNG to time-gate progress.
With that said, one thing I hope from Ashes is that it if a player has the unluckiest RNG in the world they won't be basically doomed in most, if not every, context that may be.
If I could choose, I'd would say:
TL;DR: RNG is inevitable but it must be used wisely. RNG can make the grind (which is 100% necessary) feel more like a chore mixed with gambling, which is a great time-gate but it's also awful design, and not feel rewarding at all.
When it comes to late game gear drops I'd rather receive currency/material over random gear. It's just disappointing when I'm grinding for a piece of gear for months and it just never drops.
When something is time gated (for example some raid boss with weekly lockout or rare mob with very huge respawn time) a small % drop chance on a cosmetic / fun item / mount / pet or even some very unique regular gear can be really frustrating. I've had a lot of cases where I had 150 tries for an item with 0 success and a random friend got that in his first 10 tries.
I'd prefer having some bad luck protection or a system that rewards time invested when a player chasing some horizontal progression related stuff, because rng can be cool but if someone needs to put in 100x the time that some other lucky guy did for the same fun item then it's frustrating and didn't motivating at all.
As for vertical progression or random mobs / crafting materials / events where you can repetitively trigger the drop - because those are not (or not as much) time gated as the above mentioned scenarios - having an rng system (even without bad luck protection) is fine in my opinion.
Rng is great but not in such a way that yiu can be farming for 5 days without 1 decent drop.
Between character stats, skills, crafting, crafted gear, stats having soft and hard caps, an actual utility ceiling on loot, etc that is all controllable variables. Leaving only the elements of luck that would be organic in an MMO environment, (drop selection,over enchantments(socketing, alchemy or whatever the system may be), the damage variance calculated etc.
RNG outside of those types of applications to me, is what prevents getting close to a true balance. As much as I dont like Mark Jacobs, he is a specialist in stat systems and balancing.
In summation, Players want freedom of choice, and having imbalance (often caused by RNG), leads to intensified meta gaming. Having a system that is inherently limited by intelligent stat design, will have a greater longevity due to allowing players to feel an impact from their choices. It also limits power creep, and takes the pressure off developers to constantly play with new sets of numbers to balance.
To the devs, i recommend analyzing those systems and finding a more modern way to reiterate on the foundation. RPG and MMO gamers want to be in control again, in my humble opinion.
This is really well put.
I'd add that drops be player based not NPC based, IE. If the npc drops a mount, it doesn't get RNG divided among the players there to kill it or worse first person to loot gets it (and may choose to distribute it among the group/raid members unless you come up with a nice DKP (pity) system to compensate for that). Instead it be RNG determined if each player gets the mount, so it could drop 0 - N number of players based on the RNG. A pity token would be nice if the drop rate is super low, as cat said that you'd have a given number of runs on the npc needed to get the item eventually anyway.
Loot systems with RNG need to have a sufficient grinding path that ends at the same or better result to anything randomly generated. Without such it screws over players who actually invest time into the game, and is one of the most distasteful elements of a game. Being “lucky” doesn’t feel compelling to the person landing a crazy loot drop very often either.
Damage systems best benefit when coupled with responsive reaction to randomly generated effects. Such responses should be more involved than just pressing a button in response, but maybe exposing a weakness that requires repositioning, aiming, and timing to benefit from such. A critical hit for example should be creating an exploitable weakness that lingers and perhaps sets up a new weakness over time. Otherwise it just becomes a boring damage amplifier.
Engagement in how a game responds in relation to random number generated effects are always important regardless of system, and never relied on as just a way to inject better rewards or worse consequences.