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
If you are barbequing that means you're cooking. Just because you are cooking, that does not mean you are barbecuing.
Snow and ice are not the same thing - even though both are frozen water.
Grinding and farming are both repeatable content to some degree - but they are not synonymous.
So taking your first example it'd be like "farming = barbeque, while grinding = cooking". Any given activity can be fun (barbequing in this case), but all those activities fall under the umbrella of "cooking" where you can make them into a grind. Even the most fun mob/boss farm can be turned into a tedious grind through repetition (i.e. WoW).
Nobody said "gtfo" literally, it was intended as an exaggerated paraphrase. Regardless, your statement "Well, people can also accept..." came across as a bit condescending and not really empathizing with different views. That's why I quoted you.
Anyway, I've already lost too many brain cells on this. I've got your point of 80% open world doesn't mean 80% will always be contended. It's a valid point. It doesn't really address the potential design differences in open world vs instanced, nor the ease of scheduling that comes with instances, though. The more I think about it, I'm sure the devs will do a great job with the prior (design) regardless of instanced vs non, so the scheduling is probably the bigger concern for me personally. It's not a big deal though...again, was just interested to hear peoples thoughts.
Haha, true! I do love PvP though. I like all the things...
"tbh if anything I'd make it 90/10 - 10% of instanced just for very few specific main quest dungeons and that's it
this is an open world pvx game and people can either accept that or find another mmo to play, there's amazing mmos out there with great instanced content, such as WoW and FF14."
Ashes is a dynamic world, so instanced content does not guarantee ease of scheduling.
Again, I think the design differences for mob and boss behaviors between open world and instance won't be signifcant because Ashes is a PvX game. I think they will design them the same. We might experience them somewhat differently.
Seems to be a good topic so far.
If you don't want to continue discussing it with us... you do you.
Have Fun!
Some of the 80% open world dungeons/raids won't be repeatable.
Some of the 80% open world dungeons/raids will be repeatable but will not continue to have BiS gear because a Node or Node building will get destroyed. Especially, they will not continue to have the exact same mobs/bosses and specific gear. It's not going to be as easy to Farm in Ashes as it is in previous MMORPGs.
Grinding is not the same thing as Farming. You may be trying to say that anything can be considered to be tedious?
But, Grinding is repeating something for very little xp or other form of gain.
Farming is repeatedly killing a boss and the associated mobs in order to get rare loot, typically BiS gear. Sure, it is possible for some people to consider that to be tedious - especially if what they really want to be doing is a PvP Siege.
Steven specifically states that grind is repitition that gets you nowhere for a long period of time.
Jeffrey gives the example of grind as "killing the same mobs for 16 hours to gain 1/4 of an experience bar."
Grinding is primarily associated with an activity that provides little to no xp gain and also crappy rewards...especially crappy rewards for your level. It's about getting nowhere for a long period of time.
Farming is repeatedly killing the same boss in order to gain rare/lucrative loot - especially specific pieces of BiS gear.
If the location you wanted to Farm dynamically changes to a Grind due to the destruction of a City or city building (or a variety of other reasons), there will still be other, more stable places for you to Farm. You won't have to stay where you are and Grind. But, if you want to Grind there for some reason, you could.
I dunno. Maybe you want to Mentor someone for reason. Or maybe you're a masochist.
Maybe you're ready to bang on stuff that's not particularly challenging...you just want to kill some time.
The devs want to be sure there's always stuff in the world that's fun and rewarding, but... just as resources can be depleted and move to a different location, the same is true of open world dungeons and raids. They won't always be populated with stuff you can Farm.
Grinding and Farming both fall under the umbrella of activities that can be repeated. Both are capable of being perceived as tedious.
You can be Grinding and not Farming. Farming is more specific than Grinding.
Grinding typically provides too little rewards to be fun. Again, look at Steven and Jefferey's examples of Grinding.
Farming should be providing decent enough gains to feel like the repetition is worthwhile.
Grinding typically does not include rewards than can be constured as worthwhile - you do it because there is nothing better to do until you reach the next level (or, for some gamers, until you reach max level).
Your use of Grinding and Farming feels like those places in the US where you order a Coke and they ask you, "What kind? Pepsi, orange, ginger ale?" Where any soda can be considered Coke.
I do agree though that farming may imply a greater gain or profit than grinding depending on the context.
To me that sounds like a grind, because it'll be impossible to constantly do the most XP-optimal content, due to how nodes will work.
And then at top lvl, you'll be farming any and all mobs that give you any kind of good money/mats. And you'll be farming them a ton and as repeatedly as you can. And you'll be doing that with any mobs that gives you best currently available value for each kill. So again, that sounds like a grind to me.
And if the value of said mobs is so damn low that one boss kill equals dozens of hours of mob grinding - I'd be very interested in seeing reaction to that kind of balance. I'm personally fine with it cause I played 12 years of such balance, but I'm not sure if other people with a lot of time on their hands (who are not particularly interested in fishing or other artisan stuff) would like this kind of pace.
Also I sure hope this is not the case or, if it is, that those "dungeons" are more of a small cave than a sprawling intricate system of rooms with mobs. Cause if a huge dungeon is meant to only be visited once - to me that sounds like a waste of world resources (mainly space). I can forgive that kind of thing with instanced story dungeons, cause Intrepid just want to show the story in an uninterrupted way, but, personally, if I find a huge dungeon in the world and have literally 0 reason to visit it more than once - I'll definitely give feedback on that being the wrong design direction.
I come from the lands where spending literal weeks killing the same mobs in the same room was "farming". You'd get maybe 1/10 of a % per several hours of fighting mobs and you miiiiight drop 1-2 gear mats during the same time. That's farm/grind in my eyes. Yes it's tedious, but those mats are so valuable that it's worth it. And that farming was also diluted with some fun pvp, so it wasn't as dull as it potentially could've been.
I hope Intrepid manages to somehow keep that same fun in their game, but remove the requirement of the grind process. Though as I've stated multiple times here, I'm not sure if that is really possible, considering their current design plan.
I have some trust in their team because they've shown a ton of promising things already, but all of those things will only be as good as the core gameplay of the game is. And even if I personally can enjoy most/all things in whatever form they come, quiiite a lot of people are picky or have just been brainwashed by other games into thinking that one particular way of doing thing is the best one. And if Intrepid doesn't manage to appeal to at least some of those people (cause the game needs at least a base number of players to fill out the servers), I'm not sure how long it'll live. I definitely hope that it'll be a long life.
Arguing the exact meaning to people on grinding and farming sounds like an infinite argument. Even more so if someone only sees it in the way AoC does things and not other games and will refuse to see it or accept anything else.
So, there is a way to have Farming as a subset of Grind.
And Farming, again, is intended to be about specific boss with rare/lucrative loot. While Grinding is more generic and could be a bunch of things that are not particularly worth the effort - you just need to do it until you Level and better stuff for you to do opens up.
By 2010 some people drifted the meaning of Grinding to entail the stuff you do while Leveling to Max Level because Endgame is the real game and Leveling is just a time-synch until you hit Endgame. I've never heard anyone refer to that as Farming.
Yes.
Farming is for greater gain or profit... and typically with a specific boss and rare/lucrative drop as the goal.
With Grinding, it's typically any mob that will provide some xp. And that xp is only going to be, like Jeffrey's example, 1/4 of a bubble in 16 hours and the loot is going to be trash loot.
If you are repeatedly killing specific bosses and the mats are worth it, like BiS gear, it's Farming.
If it's low level trash mobs and only going to reward trash loot, it's Grinding.
Farming is worthwhile due to the rare/lucrative loot.
Grinding is not particularly worthwhile - it's something you are stuck doing while waiting to do the stuff you actually want to be doing. And it's typically so excrutiatingly tedious that you feel it should not be part of the game. Like "hell Levels" in vanilla EQ and vanilla WoW. Or, Leveling period, for those who believe that "Endgame is the real game."
https://www.reddit.com/r/MMORPG/comments/6uynex/farming_vs_grinding_how_do_you_define_the/
Corruption
Nodes
Hybrid Combat
Classes
Augments
etc...
Why not? tbh I wasn't going to give feedback about it since I am ok with the 80/20 but since I see you guys giving feedback...
I'd like to say that 90/10 would be my preference as well, the least instanced content the better imo
I'm chalking our conversation up to a case of miscommunication.
If you don't control farm accounts and bots, the game is doomed. Players need to earn their own loot, their own gold, their own tokens, not be able to buy them from gold hack sites.
It's easy to never return to a game, if the only way to compete is to buy from a gold site.
Address this now, or you will create an economy game of cheats, hacks and dupes and gold sellers. Games which i will refuse to police any more in the guise of being a community player.
the only way i will police this game for you is if you hire me and pay me to do so, if not, the first-time bots show up and no action taken, I'm gone never to return.
I also don't think instanced dungeons goes against the goal of facilitating player to player interaction, since you'd still need a party of other players to tackle instanced dungeons. 80/20 may end up being a really good ratio depending on how many dungeons there are in total, but I could also see it leaving many players without much dungeon content that they can realistically participate in. This will also all depend on your server, since each servers node make up can be entirely different, affecting how much of what is actually unlocked in the first place.
Yes, this game isn't for everyone. But I think Steven's larger point there is not to exclude people who don't like hardcore PVP, but to say that he is NOT going to do what Blizzard did which is make ALL content accessible to EVERYONE. We must accept that certain experiences will only be available to people willing to deal with the tradeoffs they require. If a certain open world dungeon encounter requires more planning and protection than a casual dad like me can stomach, I'm OK missing out on that.
The mitigation plan Steven has for this is that I will still have plenty of other things to do that will allow me to acquire gear on par with that from the dungeon - this is a sandbox MMO solution to the conundrum of wanting to invite many different types of gamers, but also not wanting to ruin the challenge and rewarding experiences for some just to try to appeal to everyone and give everyone participation trophies. I can work on a craft, or find another way to build up gold via the economy or other content that fits my playstyle and available game time.
Frankly, I'd rather there is a game like this out there for the time period when I will have time to experience some of that more challenging and restricted content, and have something to work toward and look forward to, and look up to those who have achieved those rewards, than to be handed it on a platter, experience it, it mean nothing, and 2 years later the game is shut down.