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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
The sad reality mate, but it isn't all gloom and doom, even having in mind the certainty of P2W it's still a new gen NCsoft F2P MMORPG that most can atleast expect to get some entertainment from, especially during the release which is often considered the peak of most MMORPGs. I would say it will have similar success as Lost Ark.
I'm still willing to give TL a shot aswell, but mostly with the intention of seem the Good and the Bad it can offer in depth. TL will certainly provide alot of useful information.
Aren't we all sinners?
The daily cycle needs to be fast ideally one hour total so that a player experiences several cycles over a play session.
Safe daytime is longer than the night by about double, so 40 minutes day 20 minutes night. The day period should be more then adequate to go from settlement to settlement and do casual resource gathering.
An adequate twilight period of 5-10 minutes or more to warn players of the upcoming night.
Settlements of sufficient size (village?) are safe at all times with larger settlements having an extensive always safe zone around them.
Buffs acquired in Taverns from food/entertainment last for the day/night cycle and provide desirable boosts for both fighters and gatherers and creates a social gathering situation in settlements at night without it feeling like pointless downtime.
Ah, I realized that the information source isn't clear.
The thing I'm taking my data from isn't really related, it's supposedly a leak of the localization file.
Not 'a data file that someone translated' as far as I understand it.
Should I have this? No. Obviously technically no one should, and you're free to believe that more will change, I also believe this. So I mostly discussed the parts that I understood to be confirmations of things we already knew or that I had other valid reasons to believe.
The equivalent of a tabloid news article that goes with a photo.
Don't get me wrong I believe you I'm sure there will be some "p2w" but to what level it will be I need to wait and see. I don't think it will be insane for our version where it is full wallet vrs wallet. Unless we are talking about gold sellers / buyers.
Yeah true things could be different in the Western version. Amazon is supposed to be announcing a global beta "soon." So that could be different too. I have some hopium.
It isn't that big a deal, bdo had the same thing as well for fishing and xp. It is something that is going to be limited to an extend (cash shop will most likely allow you to do it more)
It may be lame but isn't the end of the world and if it becomes a shop thing to help casuals progress when they aren't playing or dont have as much time, i am fine with that.
Yeah, it's a useful-ish video, but if y'all care, I actually have more information and clarity.
I will not say 'from where', and technically it's better for everyone if you all just assume and act like I'm blowing smoke and speculating and don't 'believe' a word I say, but:
Theoretically...
If a game studio were to take the BDO model of 'you can buy something on the Cash Shop and then sell it to other players' to the logical 'correct' extreme, it would look a lot like this:
Now I'm not saying that this is what is hinted at in any datamined text, but I'm not NOT saying that either, if you know what I mean.
It's still blatantly P2W because whoever has the 'Latinum' can pay other players in ways that will give them other currency and buy strong gear and similar things.
But it would mean that when someone wants gear, they give money directly to definitely-not-NCSoft, and most importantly the ability to buy Marketplace gear DIRECTLY with 'Latinum' means that a player does not need to 'go to an RMT site to get enough ingame money to make their bid' so they don't need any bots out in the world acting as a big faucet for 'Credits' so that they can 'try to get enough Credits to outspend the other person who also wants enough Credits to buy the cool boss gear the moment it drops on the Marketplace'.
All people involved in the whole 'I want the first Auctioned drop of Queen Bella-- er I mean the Borg Cube' just throw money at definitely-not-NCSoft, possibly in a huge bidding war, and then all that 'Latinum' goes to a player who put in the effort to earn the gear (or invested early before prices got insane)
But Latinum leaves the economy whenever anyone uses it to buy cosmetics...
I'm just saying that there might someday be a game out there, perhaps sometime soon, be a game out there that uses this model. It might not even be a Star Trek game.
So, for me, TL will not only be "L3", but exactly the L3 that I was playing back then (well except for the fucking autobattle, but I was just a way too stubborn dumbass who never botted, so that's more of a me issue).
This is so damn funny though.
Ah? I didn't assume that because James' reaction implied otherwise.
Basically, this is where I believe the industry has been trending over time. Greedy companies push harder (BDO) but eventually community pushback would have forced them to stop being as predatory, but they wouldn't want to give up their P2W unless they had to.
When market pressure gave Devs enough leverage to push back against the 'business people', they would naturally fix the design toward the emergent optimal one, or close. And of course, things like Private Servers which would absolutely need to do that and would want to have a game running for, y'know... fun...
Would have stronger reasons to do it better. Will NCSoft actually do it? Will the 'business people' try to sneak in some other more blatant P2W and hope they get away with it? Who knows.
But Amazon says this game is gonna be F2P in the West. And Amazon is 'lazy' and just 'absorbs working ideas from other people's research/experience'. They don't have an incentive to do anything else (I'm glossing over the fact that I've crunched the whole datamine and there's also no INDICATION they will do anything else).
An extension of that is simply that if you do this just right, you also get players who use the autobattle but don't get enough benefit from it to spend more money. Autobattle in certain NCSoft games as it has been explained to me by a different source is a bandaid put onto their poor PvE experience and relatively lower/inconsistent population. Basically shoved into their 'focused PvP' style games to fix the innate problem of that game type. BDO by contrast solves the problem by class releases, Seasons, and throwing free stuff at you for logging in.
Guild Wars 2 gets away from this by giving a reasonable illusion of PvE until they get you to the level where they can start using real PvE or redirecting you elsewhere (look up their group content mechanics, particularly 'tanking', if you're not familiar)
I'm just saying that the datamine is 'missing' a few references to the types of item people normally consider P2W advantages. There's suspiciously little obvious 'Pay For Convenience' here other than the new Korean standard of 'It seems you suck at this game, would you like to buy a truckload of healing items so you actually survive, or perhaps an item to keep restoring all this exp you keep losing? You're not a loser, you're just an economically disadvantaged future winner!'
Then pretty much the majority of servers just adopted the "low cost sub" of "your rates are higher than the standard ones", with some low-mid tier gear in the shop for the donation currency and general consumables on top of that.
There's a shitton of range of that approach, depending on the rates of the server (pretty much determines how fast you level up and farm stuff). Some just sold enchantment scrolls, so that people could OE their stuff more easily. Some sold just fucking everything in the game. Some only used it for cosmetics, with that "sub" bringing the most money.
My main point is that I'm super used to this p2w style (and it's P2W AS FUCK), so even if Amazon does in fact not change a single thing from that supposed design - I'll be totally ok and might even like the game. If anything, I hope there's no lootboxes associated with that p2w, cause that's the path older versions of the game went down and ooooh boy it was horrible (and afaik official servers started that shit on their own and some private servers even made that better by just selling the stuff from the boxes outright).
Based on my source there is no way to sell or convert p2w currency atm.
In this case then, I don't understand (or might be making an assumption) so clarify to me quickly please.
You didn't play on 'No P2W' servers? (maybe those didn't exist?)
Is it that you don't consider this type of it a big enough problem for L2 private servers but would consider it 'a P2W problem' for a new release game? Or the final option that you're just 'mostly ok with it' and I misunderstood something else you said much earlier in this thread?
Now, I can't absolutely say that those servers didn't do some shifty shit behind the scenes, but I at least never heard of that stuff back when I played there (while there's been big drama related to that on some other servers).
And while this might be a coping approach, but I don't think that L2 was ever fully fair, cause it had bots, rmt, then their own shop issues. I feel like that's just a default problem for most "kr>west" mmos, cause kr don't have all that shit due to your personal info being linked to the game.
If I said smth that goes against this logic, point it out, cause that might've been one of my contradictions I mentioned in one of other threads.
P2W in the official (Post-GoD) L2 servers was a never ending upwards trend till this very day, mostly not "directly selling gear in the cash shop" but "various forms of P2W events with different 'pseudo-lootboxes' that could give gear and gear improvement items" alonside any possible form of convenience + premium.
I believe the monetization formula presented by Azherae wasn't implemented in L2 due to it simple not being as profitable as the one already stablished(accepted by those who stayed) thought the years, but the most recent NCSoft Mobile games (LW, LM and L2M) follow reasonably similar monetization models as the one Azherae "speculated".
BTW, i only stayed at the official servers till ~2011~2012, shortly after the post GoD updates, i went to private servers and as you know monetization on those varied wildly, but i most stayed at servers with fair monetization models such as premiumsub + cosmetics, even tho we all know is many servers there was items going under the table through corrupted server staffs, and bots/RMTs never stopped being an issue.
Currently, i would say there is only a single non-P2W L2 private server that actually hunts bots and RMTs and its on for many years.
Aren't we all sinners?
that server's gm are corrupt af
Maybe yes, who knows, it's hard to tell, i've yet to see proof for that one(considering we have the same server in mind) so if you got some i would love to see it on the inbox to not deter the thread too much.
Aren't we all sinners?
@NiKr What do you think of the game, how close is it to L2?
All the auto-battle stuff is a bit annoying to me, but it'll just allow me to keep up with the "botters" that I would've been way behind if the game didn't have auto-battling. Otherwise it's such a fucking nostalgic game for me.
Auto battles is a red flag now hat im more aware of it. I'm unsure how it will be more towards end game and the benefits. But allowing everyone to become a botter is not a answer to botters in a game.
When im watching a stream and they say why would you play manual to kill 25 goblins I'm sensing a much deeper issue. People don't play games to auto play as you are right on your computer. It seems convenient but eventually the sensation will kick in that you aren't playing the game.
It also raises a question to the difficult in the game, if you can auto battle most content in the game, is the only group stuff that matters not limited to dungeons and bosses. And what is the amount of quantity of those types of content.
Idk my leadership in my guild is getting depressed..
As for botters, they'll always exist and they'll always be ahead of everyone else on the server. Autobattling gives the casual players a chance to at least stay a few steps behind them instead of months-worth of grinding.
But yes, the content will be pure grindfest. The mobs will just stand in one place. The bosses will do the same. I said this literally back when we first saw videos of TL. Yall were puffing Copium like there was no tomorrow
I just want a good modern mmorpg, i don't want to play a mobile game -hides in a corner-.
Maybe in end game with pvp there will be more movement, but im expecting the pve content to be dead easy and gear checks. But i guess we will see.
That's pretty much exactly how L2 was, so I definitely hope that TL can repeat that.
Ya that is what im saying, early game doesn't represent how things will be later on, let alone fighting dead easy mobs. Same way BDO early game combat is trash and clunky, if you don't have a kit you can't do nearly as much.
Can't frustrate the whales right out the gate.
That wouldn't be very cash money of them.