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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.
Most MMOs miss on large scale PvP
Solvryn
Member, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
Most MMOs miss on large scale PvP, especially when it comes to player density in a specific area. Ball Groups and Zerging seem to be a sign that many developers are missing critical elements of large scale that dismisses strategy and tactics. The severity depends on game to game, Elder Scrolls is an example of balling and zerging,
https://youtu.be/E1bhSasngpc.
AoEs:
The coordination efforts of the players are there but with the game having very little form. It has zero collision detection (which AoC has), has little need for positioning, angle management, field awareness, formations, or the like. What the devs did do right is attempt to curb the player density in a specific area by a skill called Magicka Detonation.
Magicka Detonation
Magicka Detonation
ESO-Hub.com
Cast Time: 1000
Target: Enemy
Range: 28m
Cost: 3510
Skill description
Curse an enemy with a magical bomb that explodes after 4 seconds, dealing 434 Magic Damage to all enemies in the area. Each enemy within the bomb's radius increases the damage by 100%, including the original target.
Area of Effect abilities and their use are an incredibly integral part of large scale combat and they're almost always guaranteed to be a spammy mess rather than a tactical application in a strategy.
Keeping the AoEs an important tactical application rather than a spammy mess is something that has been discussed by a few of us in the discord.
Major ideas that came up with are:
This fundamental change in the way Area of Effect applies will lessen spam and will require these abilities to have a greater strategical and tactical acumen and will reward groups with coordinated and cohesive efforts and destroy the groups with less or without any coordinated and cohesive efforts.
Single Target Abilities and Skillshots:
Not all single target abilities have their same weight in needed application, but powerful long ranged attacks also have a very specific importance. The ability to remove individual players from the fight in large scale is an incredible asset to have. I am specifically talking about Sniping, and I do not see often in MMORPGs that often implement this style of play well and it remains unsupported in most MMORPGs.
Ashes will have missile collision, which is the counter to sniping. But will it have support for Sniping? Sniping in the hands of a precise, coordinated, and patient individual brings a layer of lethality to a big fight for many coordinated groups to utilize.
Because of how hard Snipes usually hit, a great way to implement it would be a skillshot that puts a player in an ADS (Aim Down Sight) window in a bow or crossbow that allows for massive damage, because in order to balance such a powerful ability, a player should zoom in an individual at the sacrifice of their Field of View. Screen sway is an additional layer of complexity to balance out such a powerful attack.
With missile collision is the counter, it puts the emphasis on a player hitting their shots thus making them an integral and valuable member to an organization.
There are other important aspects of mass PvP that need to be considered, such as well made maps, etc. I want to address AoE and Sniping specifically.
Add your input in terms of where games miss the mark in large scale PvP.
cheers.
Sol
https://youtu.be/E1bhSasngpc.
AoEs:
The coordination efforts of the players are there but with the game having very little form. It has zero collision detection (which AoC has), has little need for positioning, angle management, field awareness, formations, or the like. What the devs did do right is attempt to curb the player density in a specific area by a skill called Magicka Detonation.
Magicka Detonation
Magicka Detonation
ESO-Hub.com
Cast Time: 1000
Target: Enemy
Range: 28m
Cost: 3510
Skill description
Curse an enemy with a magical bomb that explodes after 4 seconds, dealing 434 Magic Damage to all enemies in the area. Each enemy within the bomb's radius increases the damage by 100%, including the original target.
Area of Effect abilities and their use are an incredibly integral part of large scale combat and they're almost always guaranteed to be a spammy mess rather than a tactical application in a strategy.
Keeping the AoEs an important tactical application rather than a spammy mess is something that has been discussed by a few of us in the discord.
Major ideas that came up with are:
- Remove any AoE caps that limit the numbers of players hit in the code. There will be an AoE cap through collision detection anyway. Albion Online also does this.
- Add scaling to AoEs, increased damage for players hit and decreased healing for players healed.
- Add cost scaling to players hit with AoEs. So theres a required recovery time for mages.
This fundamental change in the way Area of Effect applies will lessen spam and will require these abilities to have a greater strategical and tactical acumen and will reward groups with coordinated and cohesive efforts and destroy the groups with less or without any coordinated and cohesive efforts.
Single Target Abilities and Skillshots:
Not all single target abilities have their same weight in needed application, but powerful long ranged attacks also have a very specific importance. The ability to remove individual players from the fight in large scale is an incredible asset to have. I am specifically talking about Sniping, and I do not see often in MMORPGs that often implement this style of play well and it remains unsupported in most MMORPGs.
Ashes will have missile collision, which is the counter to sniping. But will it have support for Sniping? Sniping in the hands of a precise, coordinated, and patient individual brings a layer of lethality to a big fight for many coordinated groups to utilize.
Because of how hard Snipes usually hit, a great way to implement it would be a skillshot that puts a player in an ADS (Aim Down Sight) window in a bow or crossbow that allows for massive damage, because in order to balance such a powerful ability, a player should zoom in an individual at the sacrifice of their Field of View. Screen sway is an additional layer of complexity to balance out such a powerful attack.
With missile collision is the counter, it puts the emphasis on a player hitting their shots thus making them an integral and valuable member to an organization.
There are other important aspects of mass PvP that need to be considered, such as well made maps, etc. I want to address AoE and Sniping specifically.
Add your input in terms of where games miss the mark in large scale PvP.
cheers.
Sol
5
Comments
Let's say you have a thin squishy rogue running together with a fairly big group of his allies towards some place during a siege. Their enemies see the rogue and know that he's squishy, so they target him with an action ability to put a debuff on him and then try to blow him up with a targeted aoe that would do huge damage to the group because it would do a ton of dmg to the rogue (especially if the enemies throw some other debuffs onto him).
Now, the rogue should be able to mitigate or directly avoid the damage to himself and, more importantly, to the group. It could come in the form of iframe dodging or a short-timed evasion buff, or just splitting from the group, or debuff cleansing from the supports, or some detargeting and going into stealth so that he can't be hit with an aoe, or anything else that I can't come up with rn.
Rogue would have to be aware of his surroundings in order to react in time (this is where that "sniping" with the action ability could come into play) and would have to know what to do in that split second, in order to save his group. And the enemies would have to have a good action "sniper" to properly lead the target and hit the rogue in a group, instead of anyone else. And the AOEer would have to immediately cast his ability, in order to give the rogue the least amount of time to react.
We could even have the aoe be castable w/o the debuff, but if there's no debuff the aoe would do miniscule dmg or just be a single target mid dmg ability. So the aoe side would have to time their hits perfectly, to ensure no time for the rogue to react.
And you could have several such interactions to counter zergballs. it could be chained timer debuffs that then explode, so the targets hit with them would have to disperse immediately. It could be aoe debuffs that link targets together and boost single target dmg by a lot if the link is broken (by running away from other linked people), so now the targets gotta stay together for the duration of the debuff but are now huge targets for other mmos.
There's a ton of potential counter-zerg designs, on top of the body collision and just aoes existing. I hope Intrepid comes up with something interesting and skill intensive.
It's also important to design the objectives so the point type doesn't promote zerging, either. Take New World as an example of what not to do - they have traditional battleground style capture points that can only be taken if you zerg a point for a long period of time with enough players. So you cannot avoid ball zerg gameplay there. Their sieges make me want to bang my head against a wall.
But in terms of singling people out in a zerg, I do think that's important but if we have tab abilities here that should work just fine. The only concern I have is how those work in reticule mode, and if it's truly competitive to use single target abilities in reticule mode. The only action MMOs I've seen that have done single target well is mainly TERA with their lock on targeting skills. The way the skills were designed but also the camera angle and reticule position made it possible to target one person in a zerg and the ability to do that is important - whether the ability is tab or action or the targeting mode is reticule or tab. I shouldn't have to have snipe abilities for that. New World is again a good example of how not to design these. Some builds just go full AoE in sieges because of the difficulty of targeting people in zergs and that just exacerbates existing map design issues.
Interesting take, I just hope AoE scaling can make it as a whole.
I was actually writing out that New Worlds maps sucked. But I left that out for someone else to write about.
Well built maps are super important, I just have to think about metrics that make a good map.
I think Snipe should be a free aimed missile and something like “Lob Shot” could be its tab variant, with differences in trajectory and damage.
Less dmg
More cost
High cooldown
Fixed.
George's method would fix it. The other alternative is to make aoe very powerful and dangerous, and then people will learn to not ball up. If Intrepid tries to go between those two extremes of either weak or very strong aoe, the chances of ending up with a ball group aoe meta go up a lot.
But either weak or strong aoe is kind of simplistic. There's a lot more nuance to the problem than just that. Collision will help, cooldowns will help (ESO had no cooldowns), map design. Lot of ways to skin this cat.
The cat must be skinned though. It would be an absolute tragedy if Ashes turned out to be a ball group meta game, to me at least. I hope that's not Intrepid's intent.
That’s the point of introducing scaling. Weak on single target and strong on groups.
That's one way to do it. I might also add that making the size of the AoEs smaller can also help, in addition to the player collision we'll already have.
That's certainly one way to do it although I worry that doing that won't have the intended outcome in terms of player behavior and build choices. It could also affect other areas of the game in unintended ways so that's a delicate balance.
Absolutely, I appreciate your input.
Yep, I don’t want to make archetypes/classes useless.
That tank controling the frontline?
That warrior wrecking havoc?
Im not advocating for conal attacks, I am just relating to yall how beautiful battle is when you get to look around and pick a target. You can always coordinate, but if you pile up on one enemy, the rest are free to take out your important healers or whatever.
AoE sucks in PvP. No need to make them useless, but a combination of limiting factors (not all of them) will protect combat.
4:30 is a pretty good example in this video of the guild I ran with back in the day. We would pick fights with big groups on purpose.
pardon the cliche "MMO fight with wubwub music" video
I did not enjoy the WvWvW much, it too lacked a lot of form.
I want caps gone to rid the meta of stacking so hard.
Honestly same. If I am able to get many of my old guildies back into MMOs or even get some new blood into the guild with the right mentality I am going to focus on absolutely wrecking Mega Guilds who zerg.
I just think the design to large scale PvP starts with AoEs, high damage single targets, and maps.
I absolutely agree that tightly skilled and better organized guilds should always destroy mindless numbers.
I think one other thing which is important is the design of the encounter. I guess to a degree you will eventually have to have choke points, but I think that we should minimise it to a degree. It will serve to split the encounter up; lets say there is a main choke which will contain the majority of the force but you have a force breaching the walls from another point, or you could tunnel underneath to collapse a wall - maybe another objective (will use the dragon as the example but something more thematic). Making the approach of breaching the castle a bit more flexible will in part allow a more strategic approach. A decent mix of siege machines could help balancing them for specific roles rather than have an "always take this" approach.
Onto the Zergs since that is the main point here, I think there needs to also be a balance between the aoe CC that is available to put out. I like the idea of for example mages being able to put up walls, it's not loss of control but it is impediment and control. I agree with restricting the AoE, make it smaller and with the collision existing it would help to space people enough to prevent AoE exclusively being the main tactic, at least without a bit more planning.
Interested to see how other people can contribute here with some more experience!
I think Keeper will end up summoning walls.
Zerg clump meta is realy boring to play as and play against. Best large scale fight I had in a game was in crowfall were a city has the buff that made anyone standing to close to each other zap each other for dmg which forced both sides to spread out and that fight was amazing and allowed the smaller size to win that fight. Zerg cried bout it though and got removed like 2 weeks later though cause they couldn't us there zerg ball meta .........
In my opinion ESO PvP is the best there is. (When there's no lag and no insane combat changes from incompetent developers). I miss videos like this though! :')
Ew
ESOs PvP is like a high C for me.
I like the idea of a hefty scaling cost attached to hitting multiple targets but I worry, with the potential amount of mages that could be in a seige/event scenerio that this could lead to mages agency being much higher than other classes, especially in important objective winning circumstances that contain a lot of players.
Now before I continue, I'd just like to say this is a good topic for discussion, as this genre often promotes the gathering of strangers (or simply "unfriended" people), of which the majority are usually not on voice comms, for the simple and easy strategy of overwhelming and of course there are little counter stratagies+abilities, hence the purpose of the thread.
For accessibilty and ease of enjoyment purposes, which, imo need to be present if we want Ashe's to succeed away from the whales and hardcore playerbase that ends up being the conclusion of most open world PvX mmo's, I think we need to look at this a bit more caringly.
We need to look at incentivizing companionship, togetherness, whatever, of friends, guidlies and close allies but also decentivize simple and usually unorganized "collect and conquer" strategies, which I think can happen naturally rather than injecting a big pipe bomb into the mix.
For mages, quality earth magic could change up terrain, Arc Lightning spells could be bolstered to keep on bouncing. As you say, curses can come into play, relying on comms and communications to go "break away!" "Cleanse aoe!", with imo, a more unique devasting effect than simply being a very good bomb that could potentially sink a parties morale or dump them and respawn.
Archeage proved that "magic walls" (from those who opt into a physical defense spec), have a marvelous effect on breaking people away or containing them. Obviously you brought up the collision damage a charged ability from an Archer could have, which pinched in a few times can potentially disrupt, halt or break away players as a result of too much unexpected damage taken "I need to rethink about how I'm going to approach!".
I could go on, but I just want to stress, the agency of other classes skills, not just range dps, as I mentioned with magic walls which is more of a melee/defense spec thing (I could go on with other classes but don't wish to make this post too long) and also making it not so stressful for organized parties and friends, to team up, without thinking that their togetherness is more of a potential losing strategy than a boon.
Most people need it easier, they need their comforts, hardcore players can still shine in a game with less punishes, they always do, I care about AoC's long life and entertainment for a mass audience.
All good ideas. I think of all AoEs have scaling then any class with it will contribute.
Hopefully within the game the guild ui and support will be there. Not to mention good content.
Good input thanks for the response.
Hopefully intrepid are considering ways around these issues, as mass pvp is a big central piece to this game's features.
Yep. We gotta see how buffs are applied. I chose AoEs and Snipes because they’re universal.
Steering away from the ball and zerg meta is a good way to encourage organized sub groups.
I have so many fun memories in Cyrodiil the past 8 years or so. Unfortunately the developers have butchered the classes over and over since launch (Recent Update 35 is a good example).