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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
Ive been saying for a LOOONG time on this forum going full action combat is not the best idea.
Most people have now played New World and Lost Ark.
New World action combat is horrible and thats what scares me in every mmorpg that wants to go action combat.
Tab target combat is proven to work and while many players maybe dont love it, not many hate it.
Much fewer players can play at a high lvl in an action combat game than in a tab target game, and the last thing you want for an mmorpg is for the game to be to uneven from the top players and the worst.
The bigger the gap is, the more players will quit.
0dbea148-8cb8-4711-ba90-eb0864e93b5f
Agreed but the problem that Intrepid needs to solve if staying Hybrid is pretty simple.
"If playing Tab is competitively viable, AND using Tab allows you to bypass the skills of Action style players (let's assume I mean spacing and prediction, not twitch reactions), what will be the point of Action?"
Any 'Mixed' system in a competitive game will devolve to one side, quite possibly even in PvE.
You can say that many players don't 'hate' Tab Target combat, but you'd have to answer the question of if they consider it an actual 'game'. Most people don't 'hate' afk games or low-skill cookie-clickers either.
Note that I have zero actual concerns here, I recently read an interview from the Throne and Liberty devs and they mentioned a 'design conclusion' that is the obvious one, as their main implementation method. I would fully expect the Ashes devs to have similar conclusions, so only the nuance matters to me.
EDIT: Realized I might as well add the design conclusion itself, since it IS in fact capable of furthering the conversation.
"The larger your adventuring party, the less any given player will need to move."
Pretty elegant IMO. When you are solo or duo, you use all your mobility and counters and cool tricks, and you can choose to mostly play in that situation. When you get into a full group, now you use timing and preventative methods to control mobs so that you don't need to move. I perceive that this would allow a 'full Action' game to function (not saying that it's the best option) while still both providing good PvE and 'a meaningful challenge increase aspect for PvPvE (now you have to move because PvP is happening but the boss is not the reason for this requirement).
If you were in smaller groups, everyone would have to work more to optimize farming and mana usage and hp and everything else.
Noted.
Also for clarity I noted this primarily because it's one of the places where BDO fails (as if BDO even had group PvE content lol) because BDO doesn't have the OTHER side of it for a lot of classes.
But I could complain about BDO for weeks in depth, just adding it because that's one of the games that OP was considering trying.
No MMO has been able to satisfy my PvP needs since BNS (Blade & Soul). New World would have, if the rest of the game was playable. No genre has managed to disappoint me more than the modern MMO, but I'm very much so banking on AoC to be the one to hopefully change this trend.
When I look at an MMO, or any game for that matter, for it's combat/pvp, I want flashy, high skill ceiling, engaging combat, which most tab target games cannot offer me. Main takeaway is that the combat is high skill and very engaging. You need to know your skillset, your matchups, your timing, and have the ability to read your opponent at the same time to win. You could argue exists in ffxiv/wow, but it just doesn't feel as intense. They feel incredibly slow and boring unlike BNS. In addition, BNS also has a lot of animation canceling, which I love in games and most tab targeting games have little to none of.
You can know your combos, but if you cant pull them off, let alone vs a good player, then you'll get rolled. Some may argue to look into arena fighter style games such as MortalKombat or Street Figher, however, I need open world group combat and an objective. I need engagement that arena fighters don't offer.
Other games don't offer what an MMO with PvP offers.
The experience isn't the same
The combat isn't as engaging
There are little ways of working towards a goal
Or to clarify, little goals to work towards
I want to, for a few examples:
-Be running towards my guilds territory to check on our caravan and get ambushed by an enemy guild fighting to steal our resources
-Farm for resources to support my guild mates and find someone farming the same area, only to engage them in combat that was not orchestrated in any way
-Set up a gank squad and hunt enemies scouting for potential areas to set up farms/control zones
-Have massive, epic battles in beautiful areas with variables to change up the experience and overall feel
-Have a structured, organized unit that works together even through extremely difficult situations to come out on top or find ways to make something work that would seem nigh impossible
All while fighting with a combat system that tests your skill and ability to perform in these situations further than just knowing what's about to get off cooldown and your extremely basic rotations.
Another point of contention for me with tab targetting only games, is it's accuracy and general quickness/ability to respond to multiple engagements. Skill shots and action combat allow players to utilize their expertise and skillset to their full ability, while tab targetting is not only generally slower due to global cooldown timers for your skills, but slower because you have to tab to your target before you can really even do anything meaningful to who you want to focus on, especially in larger numbers or as a ranged dps/support class. These types of games usually devolve into people targetting only the frontline dps and attemping to circle around each other until someone can land a meaningful gank without getting shafted. It's extremely predictable and uninteresting.
TL;DR: I need my combat and PvP experience to be cracked and intense, which all tab targetting games I've played have not been able to offer compared to my experience with action (or well done hybrid) combat systems.
PvP | Hardcore | Organized & Dedicated
But you're taking an mmo as a stagnant beast that cannot adapt.
I'll bring up the most giant game in the world again, League of Legends, how is it that a PvP game, which is definetly what it is, is so widely enjoyed and goes against the "apparent" human condition of not wanting to get beaten to a pulp and scorn on by their fellow man.
LoL is essentially, the quickest and simplest game of a pvp orientated mmorpg that's limited to 10 players (or let's say, a high quality scrap vs "the best players in the 2 best guilds on server"), choose one of many preset characters to represent you, get through the lvling and gearing phase quickly and then while doing so proceed to have scraps eventually leading to epic encounters from 5v5 man pvp which includes a boss called Baron Nashor and a "castle seige" at the end.
Then ofc, after the battle, winners take their rank points and are happy to start another "fresh start server" and the losers are relieved that they can start a "fresh start server" and hope for better fortune next time.
If your theory is correct, then LoL shouldn't be popular but as MOBA's and many of the other popular genre's that have online. It's evident that people like to engage and test their limits with others, then ofc it's up to the game's quality for the majority of a casual audience to decide the entertainment value to keep going.
What takes the cake for me though is that the general mind frame of people who've enjoyed PvE/Raid/Dungeon priority mmo's is a very simple one, that PvP doesn't work and only interfere's with my experience.
Well for starters, can you truly hand on heart say that those PvE centric mmo's have done any good job in making PvP a rewarding and fun experience for the majority of players?
The answer should be something along the lines of "OFC not! The ability to attack players was just added in for the simple reason of taking a grind spot and getting a kill count" .
So ofc it's all about domination and bullying, there's nothing that pretty about it but what begs the question is why the hell are you and others flat out trying to take simple PvP and other forms of player v player competition off of the table entirely! It's nothing but selfish and stubborn behaviour at this point...unless of course, imaginations and creativity don't exist to think up of a way to allow a mass audience to welcome player contest, of which I can think up of numerous fun concepts in either an open world or dungeon enviroment.
Very good points here that also relate very well to my above comment. The mentality that PvP should be nerfed to the ground or shafted so that only PvE players are satisfied is why so many games fail to retain their PvP crowd. Most of those games end up losing their PvE population regardless, only for them to return to their RP games, like FFXIV or WoW.
PvP | Hardcore | Organized & Dedicated
Wow I think you misread my input entirely...
Noaani explained why some player types leave games, and my contribution was to remind/point out to NiKr why people might do that.
I have no opinions on whether or not PvP should be in MMOs. I have many opinions on HOW PvP should be applied in MMOs. I am unsure why 'stubborn' and 'selfish' come in, on my part, so I'll leave that there.
In L2 we'd use rangers/mages to snipe healers at the back, while melee classes would clash in the middle. Or if you were in a dagger party, you'd have support classes agro/attack the frontline of the enemy, while daggers ran through/around to pick off people at the back. And once a "Shadow Step" ability was added (it blinked daggers behind their target's back), you'd have daggers attack those back lines directly exactly because it was a tab target game. We also had blinks for mages that allowed them to move around the battlefield, which made melees' life harder.
But from all the action games I've seen, you just pile on in the middle, while ranged classes just shoot whoever's closest to them in that pile, because they can't hit over the pile (unless there's some height difference in the terrain). I've played a bit of B&S, but never got to arena fights so don't really know how difficult its pvp was, but I definitely liked its combo system. Dunno if that would work in Ashes though. But I do think that L2's overall gameplay situation would probably be close to what we'll see in Ashes, which is exactly why I'm interested in the game in the first place.
Perhaps my judgement and experience is a bit dated, as it's been quite some time since I've been end game in a tab target MMO, so these systems have probably improved. However, I still stand by my point of these games not being as intense or engaging. I'm used to every engagement being on drugs due to BNS, where I see high level gameplay of tab target MMOs and it generally lacks the excitement of games like BNS. Most of my love for BNS PvP comes from the combo system and overall fluidity/ability to change things up on the fly.
Edit: I'd also like to point out that you are not just spamming abilities or basic rotations in BNS. Everything matters if you're fighting at an equal or higher skill/gear level. As far as hitting targets in groups not directly in front of you, this is the part where I argue this is an aspect of realism I enjoy. If you can aim at the target and manage to hit them (or use a piercing/AOE attack) then you're good, where as if you have no direct LOS on a target then you either prioritize another one for the time being or work to get that LOS. IMO you shouldn't be able to tab target someone in a group and consistently have your basic attacks like arrows just fly through the frontline without colliding with them. This also adds a bit of value, no matter how small or large in your eyes, to the frontline tanks/supports. I don't agree with being able to consistently ignore a target to hit someone behind them without the use of specific skills, which I've seen in some tab target games.
PvP | Hardcore | Organized & Dedicated
It's probably moreso that Lineage is among the best PvP MMOs, and the implementation style suits it. Most of the reason I'm counting on Throne and Liberty to be good if Ashes isn't, is that it'll have the same 'base',
Also, I forget, did B&S have massive pvp? I usually saw 1v1 arena or maaaybe small group vs small group during faction quests. I totally support B&S' combat system, but I'm not sure if it would work well in the context of hundreds vs hundreds, where you can't really do your full cool combos when there's like 10 other people trying to kill you.
It wasn't really massive in too many areas, but before the game lost it's PvP crowd, there were a few areas where you'd see 50 - 100 players. Misty Woods, SSP, The Cinderlands, Moonwater Plains, and the Viridian Coast to name a few. Mostly faction areas with things to fight over Faction vs Faction. As time went on, these areas because EXTREMELY outdated, with the devs refusing to add any relevancy to them. I was massively into open world pvp. I was in Laughing Coffin for a bit, fighting The Bloodmoon Gang and other known open world pvp factions. When these areas died in terms of group fights, I still ganked people from the faction on the server that took over, the Cerulean Order, after I swapped my Destroyer to the Crimson Legion. I also played a lot of 6v6, eventually finishing top 30 a few separate occasions before the PvP died off in battleground as well. While it definitely lacked "massive" battles for the most part, there was enough of it, along with the BEST combat system I have ever had the pleasure of enjoying, that I could still play the game for many hours without boredom.
PvP | Hardcore | Organized & Dedicated
This is a good summation of what yours truly is beginning to experience, in specifically exploring games that feature Action-based combat. All personal efforts have been made in not pre-determining a bias in favoring Action or Tab-combat over the other - but thus far?
The experience of trying the different games that I've been in the last couple of months has begun to reinforce the initial suspicion that Tab > Action, for MMORPG's.
Neverwinter has been fun the last few days - the Fighter has been a really great starting class for exploring the game's Action-based combat system. However.... As well as it works, there? It doesn't feel as though it's a system I'd want repeated in AoC.
Even having followed the development of AoC as deeply as I have the last year-and-a-half+, it's hard to gauge where the dev-team is on the to-be final product of the game's combat system. If it were me? I'd scrap any concerns about Action-combat or a "hybrid-system" and just flesh the game out to be Tab-target, with the occasional ability being Action or "free-targeting", in it's execution.
Well, that certainly brings us closer to an understanding of what your preference would be relative to what you don't find important/interesting.
I haven't played Fighter in NWO, I play Rogue mostly, so I can't speak to it one way or another. How much does 'the range' of abilities or 'needing to interact with spacing consistently' factor into your enjoyment or lack thereof?
Most of it seems to not have been well documented on YouTube. I do have several gank/grief videos that I showed friends, but most of my Shadowplayed footage of larger fights has been deleted or not transferred from my old hard drive. What I do have is pretty uninteresting and short, and shows practically nothing of value due to my gear difference at the time.
PvP | Hardcore | Organized & Dedicated
Man, I am reminded how much I hate 5-digit damage in games.
BNS might as well stand for Big Number Syndrome.
(Ashes starts low and might stay lowish, but I'm not counting on it).
Exactly. We've all heard the line "but if you don't make your game with pvp protections like WoW it's gonna die!"
Here's the part they often neglect to mention. "If you don't make your game's pve content as good, expansive, and polished as WoW, we may plow through your content, or maybe not, but either way we're going back to WoW anyway lol get fucked pvpers we just ruined another game for you. Also get fucked game dev, your game's not as good as WoW see ya."
As if every start up game studio is supposed to be able to compete with a titan like WoW, with 20 years of experience making top tier pve content, and BILLIONS of dollars of profit and money to reinvest.
Steven is making a good play, attempting to meet the needs of a long neglected and underserved pvp mmo market.
Keep your powder dry folks. Don't wear yourself out getting into long drawn out, ridiculous arguments with the usual suspects around here, unless you just want to. In Alpha 2 the war will begin. There will be an organized and coordinated campaign by pve only types to try to abolish and/or neuter the pvp systems. They will use every trick in the book. Be ready to fight to keep the core principles of Ashes. I have decent faith in Steven's resolve. But people need to be ready to speak up and fight, because the other side will do so aggressively.
If that burned your eyes, don't look up what it's like with end-game gear now lmao.
PvP | Hardcore | Organized & Dedicated
Until yours truly has 100+ hours, I'll withhold judgement. One of the really neat things mentioned in multiple NWO videos is the emphasis that the more-experienced players put into stressing the point that each class's unique combat feel is uniquely different.
So far, the difference in the abilities' different spacing is somewhat negligible. As someone who grew up on the old-style D&D computer games, I'm eager to get to the point of knowing the game's feel and navigation well enough to try the Mage's abilities, or the Ranger's; Both are presumably more-based upon ranged-style DPS, and given that a lot of the enemies encountered so far tend to swarm you, it'll be interesting to come to know what off-sets exist, to counter being physically mobbed.
Very nice, and yes, all players. I have fond memories of getting a mass PK gank squad formed to inevitably lure in the cavalry and duking it out for sometimes hours with another 5-20 man group looking to protect their faction farmers.
PvP | Hardcore | Organized & Dedicated
An EQ or EQ2 expansion adds all of that as well, but they also add an entire new continent. Or a new moon.
Do you see the scale difference here? But you are still against the same player, with the same basic skill level. Sure, they may have different tools, but they have the same "AI" (or just "I", as it isn't artificial in this case).
This is literally no different to a game adding a new PvE encounter with slightly different abilities, but the same general plan for how to use them.
When you realize that you are fighting other people and not just a collection of abilities that has a specific class name, most updates and patches (unless the game is doing massive rebalancing that is inherently a bad thing for the game) don't change all that much. For you, sure. The thing is, when you are developing a game (or talking about game development), you need to consider both the individual experience, and the collective experience. And you have hit the nail on the head as to why WoW doesn't add as much content as it should.
The problem with this as an argument though, is that if any one game (EQ, EQ2) manage to create enough content, then the argument is clearly null and void.
All an argument about the disparity between time to create and time to complete content boils down to is a developers desire to have a good game.
The way SoE (EQ and EQ2's developer for the bulk of the time I played) got around this was by having multiple teams. They would have a team working on the expansion for the game, and one working on the live game, providing updates, fixes and new content. Then when the expansion launched, the team that worked on that expansion moved over to the live aspect, so they were supporting the content they created.
All of a sudden, you have enough content developers able to develop enough content for players. There were masses of complaints at the start. Then those people left.
Now the people that are left playing the game are those that want that PvP.
I never said there aren't people that want PvP in an MMO. I said there are not enough to support more than two AAA MMO's at a time, and that support is likely to be limited to a very small number of servers of the size Ashes wants to have. If we are talking about top end PvE, you don't need a reward for it. There is a penalty to it (death penalties, obviously). However, this acts as a rebalancing - as in order to even get to that top end PvE content, you need to complete the previous content and so are probably doing quite well. You are far ahead of almost all other players in terms of gear, and probably in terms of player wealth (barring crap mechanics like WoW has/had).
These many deaths on that hardest of content knocks people at the top down to allow those below a chance to catch up a little. This is opposed to PvP, that knocks those at the bottom down even further, and rewards those at the top and allows them to increase the gap.
I assume you can see what I am talking about here, and why it is an inherent issue if a PvP MMORPG wanted actual mass appeal rather than to just appeal to PvP fanatics. {disclaimer, we do not know too much about how caravans work, I am writing the following based on the idea that if your caravan is destroyed, certificates for said caravan drop. As we know that not all materials are lost, I am assuming 50% are lost and 50% are kept by the owner of the destroyed caravan - but are to be found at that same origin point}
Lets say I fight you for 100 caravans, and I win 99 of them.
That means you never get your goods to their destination, and I end up with 49.5 caravans worth of goods at your origin point, and you have that same amount.
However, you put the time and effort in to collecting all of that material, while I was out doing other things, progressing my character in other ways.
Basically, I took all the character progression you worked on for yourself, and I took half of it.
If we assume that I also completed a similar amount of character progression in the time you gathered those materials, that means between the two of us, I ended up with 75% of the character progression we both worked on, and you ended up with 25%.
Again, this is the better player (me) getting further ahead. All this means is that you have even less of a chance with your next 100 caravans, because I am getting better faster than you are.
Now sure, you can get friends and all that, but this same concept scales up to group, guild and alliance level. If my guild is constantly beating your guild in PvP and taking some of your stuff, we are better than you to start off with, and are also progressing faster than you.
It's literally kicking people when they are down.
The thing with diminishing returns in this scenario is that it is still rewarding the player that least needs the reward (the winner) and punishing the player that most needs the reward (the loser). All diminishing returns means is that the rewards get smaller - they are still going in the same direction though. No, they shouldn't aim for that later solution. L2 has private servers like that because they are not viable for the company to run - because they are all invariably (as far as I know) running older versions of the game.
If Ashes ends up as being a game where the only way you can play it in anything resembling the way it is designed is by playing on a private server, then I think we should all agree that this is the definition of a failed MMORPG.
EQ2 had many abilities like this.
As a Wizard, my biggest single spell would do damage in a 5 meter cone in front of me (keep in mind, a wizard is usually sitting back 30 - 35 meters). There was no telegraph or physical representation of the area of effect of this spell, so you needed to understand what 5 meters meant in game, but also work out what the cone radius was for it.
So, in order to use this ability, not only did we need to find a way to move in to the target without losing DPS (need to be stationary to cast almost all of our spells), but we also needed to make sure that when we got close we were not directly in front (most harder mobs dealt damage in front of them), but we needed to know
To make this even more interesting, the spell could hit three targets at once - meaning you not only needed to stay behind or beside targets, but you needed to try and get three targets within this very small cone shape for which you have no actual representation of, and need to simply work on your understanding of what the area of effect actually was.
Does this count as an action ability based on your above description?
I just feel it's against universal friendliness to bring it up, I bang on about UO a bit but I don't go into it too deeply + I'll bring up it's flaw immediately but atm everytime EQ is brought up it's like this is the perfect example of content?
I'm also trying to drive in the fact that an mmorpg doesn't even need to drive massive amounts of expansive content to maintain interest. I really do feel this is that damn PvE favoured crowd again....honestly, I am sick to death of these dinosaurs denying potential (I'd prefer the p2w Whales at this point!).
I feel be making a new thread when I can be arsed, tired of people being split and I'm going to attempt to make some people be on the same wave length because some of you are cursed by your past experiences...
And those who join guilds and/or big groups of people would probably be more hardcore than your everyday casual player. And just as the hardcore pve players, they should be ready to lose more than those casual players. And if the gear tier system is properly balanced, they should have better chances in a fight than 100:1. But even if it is 100:1, the diminishing returns should play enough of a role so that that 1 win is way bigger for the weaker side than that 100 is for the winners.
Let's take a party of super hardcore top lvl players that could win those 100 times vs a party of 2 gear tiers lower dudes that miiight win once if they play their hearts out while the top bois are slacking.
As you've said, the weak party was probably out gathering shit and not really progressing too far, because they'd hoped to sell their gatherables for some good cash and progress that way. Their gear would be in good shape and, even if it decays a bit, it's fairly cheap to repair cause the gear itself is cheap.
The super top tier strong party has been bashing their heads against uber mobs and bosses and dying in constant pvp for those mobs and bosses. They've spent a shitton of money on gear repairs and have restocked their uber costly gear several times due to its decay. They make way more money doing all that stuff rather than attacking some weak caravans. But on the off chance of them getting super bored (though I doubt that's possible), they decide to attack such a caravan.
They go to a lower leveled node to catch some weak caravan and they come across that weak party of people. They attack the caravan, fight it out with the weak bois, might not get decay on their gear cause they probably didn't really die in that fight (if the system works only on death), but they did spend a fair bit of time doing that. And all that they got from it was 50% of some mid tier resource that barely covers their wasted time.
Now there's 2 possibilities. The strong bois could say "what the fuck are we doing wasting time on this shit?" or "let's repeat this 99 more times just for the hell of it".
The weak party is a bit sad because they lost half their shit (if we assume you're right on how caravans work), but they were prepared for the loss, because if they weren't - they coulda just ran mules 1.2 times and been completely fine. They could now also choose, risk it again or go run the mules.
If strong bois decide to leave, weak bois are fine either way. If strong bois stay, weak bois will lose once more and then definitely run mules to cut their losses as short as possible in their situation. So in the end strong bois lose out in any of those setups, mainly because their level of progress requires them to do way more important stuff than attacking some random casual caravans.
And if instead of the top lvl super strong bois it was just a party of dudes whose gear is only a tier higher than the weak bois' gear - the ratio wouldn't be anywhere close to 100:1 (again, assuming that gear tier balance is good) and the stronger bois would lose out more because of gear decay, which is now way more probable, considering that the power lvls are similar. And even if the strong bois still win way more times, the weak bois can always just run mules which would mean that strongs have wasted their time not farming better places.
If Intrepid manages to have this kind of diminishing returns for the stronger players, I think pvp losses won't be as prevalent. Obviously a few casual players might try running their caravans completely solo, get ambushed and die, and then leave the game because of it, but that's just the nature of the game. And I hope Intrepid has a good tutorial that suggests running a mule before trying out a caravan. Relatively speaking, the same applies to the difficulty scaling of pve. A hardcore player has more time to spend on the game. Which leads to him being better geared, which allows him to bash his head against top lvl content for a long period of time. And he spends a ton of time doing so, meaning that the reward-to-time spent ration is most likely way smaller than what it was for all the previous gear tiers. One might call it diminishing.
The casualer player has less time so even getting the pre-top tier of gear is already a hassle. And each failed attempt, trying to get that gear, impacts the casual player more than hardcore player's attempt at top lvl content does to him. And usually, as I said before, this leads to the casual player stopping their attempts and either leaving the game or just being content with whatever they have.
If they leave, it's the same as if they left due to pvp, if they stay to enjoy other sides of the game - the corruption system should prevent anyone else from interrupting their enjoyment.
Now we obviously have the bigger pvp picture of node sieges that lead to freeholds getting raided and all that, but I think that's a discussion for another time. I think you misunderstood what I said there. I meant that Ashes should try to be the game that has years-long strong communities that stay in the game not only for the game, but for the company of themselves. I hope Ashes doesn't take several huge shitty turns that lead to people wanting classic versions of the game and/or make their own servers. I want this game to succeed because it's the only mmo I see myself playing, considering the absolute state of the genre currently.
As an example, if someone says that the issue with PvE games is that developers can't make enough content for players and point to WoW as an example of this, I simply point to both EQ games as a counter example of when and how they can.
The games are not perfect, it's just that when they are being talked about here they are having their best aspects mentioned.
This is why you won't here me talk too much about EQ2's crafting system, (or EQ's at all). There are far better out there, so why bring them up? Just because I have a lot of experience with them doesn't mean they are worth talking about. That said, EQ2's crafting content - as opposed to the crafting system - is probably the best I have seen or heard of. I do not know of any other game that has what can be accurately described as an epic quest series for crafting. An MMO doesn't in order to keep a small core group interested.
Any MMO wishing to have mass appeal does need a massive amount of content.
This is why games like EQ and EQ2 still have a fairly large number of servers (about 10 each), whereas a game like Archeage has fewer (6 right now - populations are comparable) despite being a much newer game with much more current public awareness. (ignoring WoW here as the server structure of that game is largely unimportant due to cross server content and ease of transfer).
This is also why when you search for a list of L2 servers, you are presented with private servers rather than ones that the developers/producers are operating.
Based on the objective data, it would seem that it is obvious that producers/developers of games that add large amounts of content manage to maintain more populated servers than games that add less content.
The notion of L2 having so many private servers is an argument (from Intrepids perspective) to literally not do what they did in regards to player retention - and the core factor of player retention to most players is new content (true for any genre).
That being the case, EQ2 is about 25% action combat.