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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
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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
I've been on both sides of that interaction and I know for sure that L2 is way closer to being pvp-centric than most mmos (maybe outside of Shadowbane, as you mentioned).
Yeah I agree Shadowbane was pvp centric, New World was not. Those two are pretty black and white. Shadowbane had a completely unrestricted, full loot system, New World was opt-in, zero loot. Polar opposites.
Lineage II and Ashes are in a more grey area. I'd probably just call them pvx. I can see why some people would call them pvp centric or focused though, and some do. That's because for some people, pvp that you can't opt out of and partial loot loss = pvp game. And there aint any arguing or changing their mind about it either.
At the end of the day it depends on how often it happens. What the definition of "rare" is.
I'm going to pull you up here.
BDO has a daily player login of about 150k.
Archeage is under 25k.
Lineage (assuming you mean L2) is under 20k if you are not including private servers.
As these games are all free to play to an extent, daily log in figures are really the only thing to go by. So we are talking closer to 200k players, as opposed to the millions or tens of millions you are thinking.
Also, those numbers are worldwide - and a high proportion of them are Korean. Ashes isnt likely to pull a many Korean players.
While each of these games attracted a million or more subs at some stage, none of them retained that many players for all that long, and only BDO has a population that would be able to support Ashes staying live.
This has been the story for new MMOs for a while now, not just the ones you are cherry picking. There is also more to the games then this one aspect and I don't think you can say definitively this one thing is why their popularity is where it is.
On the other side of this conversation, BRs also weren't popular, then Pubg and fortnite came out and it became the most popular genre. It's almost like there is more to games then one aspect and it's the sum of a game's features that decide it's popularity.
Which means forced PvP has penalties.
Steven indicates those penalties were strong enough to make ganking rare.
In a PvP-centric game, it should be opting out of PvP that gets heavily penalized.
The official site does not promote Lineage II as being PvP focused. They switch between saying “new PvP and PvE content” and “new PvE and new PvP content” so, the devs do not appear to be emphasizing PvP over PvE, neither by design nor by promotion.
With a PvP-centric game, the devs will emphasize that the game is PvP-centric.
And the design will not include safe zones or PvP penalty systems, like Karma/Corruption.
I think it doesn’t really depend on how rare rare is because the Karma/Corruption system either works to a decent degree or there is no point in having it.
So, again, I would say that Lineage II is not a PvP-centric MMORPG by design. It might be more PvP-centric than most MMORPGs, sure.
Also, Steven decided to go from ffa pvp infinite guild wars that were based on kd ratios to something more objective based, I'd assume, due to L2's GWs being a huge gankfest (as you might've seen in a video I've posted in a recent thread). Now obviously Guilds in L2 were an "opt-in" situation, but considering that you couldn't really clear any meaningful content w/o a party/guild - I couldn't honestly call that pvp opt-in. Your guild could also not accept the war declaration from other guilds, but at that point your social status on the server would be in the shitter and you might get PKd more because of that (my own guilds have done so a few times and it has been done to me several times too).
And as the main point of this post, I'm sure you know that it's not always that the players play the game in exactly the way the devs intended. If anything, the opposite is usually the case. And as a proof to that, with almost every update from a certain point of L2's life, the pvp part of the game was dying more and more, which led to a lot of people leaving, exactly because L2 was always seen as a pvp-centric mmo and yet it was becoming just another failed wow-clone. Or at least that was the experience in my gaming bubble.
More PvP-centric than Ashes does not make Lineage II inherently PvP-centric by design.
The PvP part of Lineage II dying more and more supports my claim.
What you seem to be saying is that some PvPers perceived Lineage II to be PvP-centric. The dev updates did not support that because the devs don’t perceive the game to be PvP-centric.
And you freely admit that you are in a bubble with a heavily biased and narrow view.
And yes, it is normal for population drop offs to happen. However, the initial drop off with PvP is generally significantly higher than the drop off for PvE.
Sadly, we haven't had a recent PvE MMO to compare recent PvP drop offs.
However, I do agree with you that it is not singular aspects of games that make them popular. However, some games are indeed limited by their feature set.
My point isn't about the current player base of Lineage II, a 15 year old game. Nor is it about the current player base of Archeage, a 9 year old game that destroyed it's player base with p2w, broken promises and unchecked cheating/hacking within a few months of launch.
Nor is it about the current player base of Black Desert, a 7 year old p2w, mmo. I think you missed my point entirely.
The point is that these games prove there is a market for more...I don't even know what to call it at this point, is it pvp focused, is it pvp centric, nah bro its pvx. Ok, you know what I'm talking about though. Games with more pvp features than average. Open world pvp. They prove there's a market for it. And this is only three games, there's far more.
The market is there for a profitable game, it's undeniable. The main point of my post was that you have to make a quality game if you want to capture and maintain a sizeable part of that market. The games I listed, they all have problems. Moderate to major problems. And some of them are still running and apparently profitable. Some of them are even coming out with sequels lol. Archeage 2, the at least partially Lineage inspired Throne and Liberty.
These people must be nuts right? Why would they make these games just to lose money? What is Steven DOING, someone warn him omg
I don't know how many Korean players Ashes will pull. I know they're going to have servers in the region so they intend to pull some. Who knows how many. Kind of depends on...how good the game is.
Your BDO number of 150k you listed as a daily count, not total. Not sure if the other two are daily or total. But totals are higher. Regardless, we know the potential pool of players that Ashes can pull from is in the millions. Doesn't mean they'll get them all, or get them all immediately.
The games not even out yet, has years before it will be but there's already millions of people at least interested.
https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/47073/aoc-has-gotten-roughly-2-million-new-registered-accounts-in-2-years
We'll see how it turns out. There are no guarantees, but there is very big potential. If they make a good game.
I think they prove that there is a market for a game with a 3 month persistent PvP cycle, and nothing more.
If you can pretty much completely avoid PvP, I wouldn’t call that a PvX game.
PvP-centric MMORPGs are ones that most PvE players will refuse to play. And those games tend to be niche.
Of course, PvE players will play MMORPGs where they can completely opt out PvP.
There is certainly a large market for that.
There seems to be a large percentage of PvPers who want to play on the same servers as the PvEers. With no segregation for those two playstyles. Yes. There is market for that. Problem is, PvEers tend to be reluctant to do that.
And Steven will tell you that it’s the PvErs who are the backbones of MMORPGs.
So, we’ll have to see whether it’s possible for PvX MMORPG to become more common than the rare PvP-centric MMORPGs.
And we still have to see if Ashes will even have action combat. Though, hopefully it will.
Not sure what you mean. As in it will take 3 months on average before one side completely dominates a server, and then people start quitting?
If so, yeah I have concerns about that. Not overly concerned at this point, but some concern.
From a game publishers standpoint, any player that has a win/loss ration worse than 2/5 is at a serious risk of leaving the game. This is why things like arenas and matchmaking put players in brackets - they want as many people as possible floating around a 50/50 ratio. Get too far above that ratio, and they put you in a higher bracket. Go below it by enough, and they start giving you easier opponents.
Open world PvP takes that and throws it hard against the wall, scrapes it up with a spoon, and flushes it down the toilet. There will be anywhere from 25 - 60% of players with a ratio that low at the start of a game, and the game punishes them for it, rewards those that are already beating them, and then throws the two back together to do it all over again in the hopes of a different outcome.
If the paradigm of persistent, open world PvP were put in to a lobby/matchmaker type game, literally every player would look at it and ask the developers what the fuck they are doing.
Since we have not heard a single thing from Intrepid as to what they plan to do about this, imo it should literally be every potential Ashes players primary concern, as it will be what reduces the games population by as much as 75% in the first 6 months.
Like I said, players' preferred playstyle doesn't always match with dev's content goals. And if anything, I'd say that all the people who stopped playing L2 after certain updates voted with their wallets in the same way millions of WoW players left after WoTL. I'm sure if you ask all those millions of players whether the current WoW and the vanilla expansions that they remember are the same game, they'd probably say that it's not even close. And I'd assume that's because the devs made changes in the game's direction that those players didn't like.
And L2's changes hit its playerbase way harder exactly because it went from a pvp game to an instanced mmo. But I get that it's pointless to bring up this point because you don't value player experience as high as dev intentions, so whatever.
Love this idea
"Two Worlds 2" had something like that and that came out in 2010
I've been hoping that only the tab target skills are affected by stuff like dodge/guard/etc. Because as you said, I don't want to have to aim a skill only for "Miss" or "Blocked" to pop up over my target's head. Hopefully action skills are only affected by defense and/or resistances, and if rng stats must come into play then they'd only affect them to a lesser extent.
My player twitch skill vs your player twitch skill for action combat.
You can’t really actively dodge or block a tab-target attack.
ESO has this, but because there are no cool downs and a lot of the abilities are boring anyway it's combat mechanics are super lackluster for me angway
OP: Dragons Dogma Online is a decent example of action combat, but the service closed years ago. You can always try Dragons Dogma: Dark Arisen, as the combat is nearly 1:1. It's a PvE centric game, so the combat isn't built with PvP in mind.