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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
And even if I did, some small fraction of their resources will be nothing for me, because I'll have time to just farm those resources myself on an alt. And that is why, to me, their death would be of low value. Risking losing my gear over some 10 wood or some shit like that is nothing, when I could just go to my alt and get the same amount of wood in a few minutes.
And if that low lvl player was farming some deep high lvl location - they're most likely protected by high lvl players, so I wouldn't even try attacking them if I was alone.
Well, bear in mind that the 'you can drop gear at any level of Corruption' was only clarified/added recently, and while it does definitely change the dynamic, Node centric behavior is different.
You often note that you don't have the same perspective on PvP and econ behaviour as I do and I should share it, so...
Taking other people's stuff, particularly people who rely on the income for that stuff, is far more effective 'Economic PvP' than gathering your own stuff. The effects on the market are multiplied very quickly, you have not just taken control of some supply, you have reduced supply entirely.
At the end of the day, Gatherer A wants or needs to make money (they still lose durability and such when the attacker kills them if said attacker succeeds afaik), if you take their money, they must find a new way to make money, siphon money from someone else, or do the same activity again and take the risk again.
Material Advantage. This is a chess game to me, not a race. Making the chosen opponent lose is technically much more valuable than winning, because whereas the Corrupted player incurs losses, everyone else in their 'supported market' potentially makes gains.
tl;dr kill unsanctioned fisherfolk near your coastal node! Support your local fishers!
Outside of that, pvp for me is usually purely fighting. In L2 that pure fighting mainly happened around farming spots just because you spent the most time there, so most pvp could be seen as a "fighting for you spot" action, and it definitely was that sometimes, but to me it was just "I'm farming. Someone came to farm and decided to fight me for it. I fight back."
So the economy part of pvping in Ashes won't matter to me that much. Though I guess I should clarify further. OWPVP won't be economical. I will obviously attack caravans/node enemies/other nodes mainly because that's an economical attack. But all the other random pvp encounters will mainly be just "fight for fight's sake".
Though all of this, for me, is in my biased context of "I spend 10+h a day in one location farming mobs". Intrepid allege that this won't be a thing in Ashes, so there's a chance that most of my pvp will be economical just because I'll be fighting wars and caravans.
As It stands now, it is open world PVP. Aka forced PVP. There are several aspects of game design not explained fully nor do we know how PVP will tie in with some of those systems. We just have to wait and see how attacking free player housing, in city areas, safe zones (if any) and numerous other mechanics will be at final release.
Also the systems we see at launch will change over time. It will depend on what the game designers deem acceptable and if they care how many people quit the game over those PVP mechanics. You have to consider the people vocalizing on this form are usually parrots of their favorite streamer or content creator right now. Ever notice how everyone is magically a 15 year veteran of nothing but "hardcore" dead MMO games? That's the feedback you are going to receive right now given the current state of development and how groups of people are receiving their information right now. Regardless of peoples feelings, MMO players have changed over the years. This game will change over time to reflect those changes or it will ultimately be a very very very small MMO.
So when it comes to pre-ordering or whatever you are trying to decide, you must realize what the current game designer has stated his ideology to be for this game. You have to accept they may never sway away from those principals. They might be 100% perfectly fine with a sub 200k player base. Or they might give and take on some of their ideology to retain millions of players.
Nobody has all the answers you are looking for right now.
I think this may be the biggest difference between L2 and Ashes, from research I did a while back when theorycrafting a playstyle.
'Drop up to half your gathered resources and certificates on death' is a BIG incentive for me. In a game without this, where the player suffers something else or is slightly inconvenienced, I would play more like you because the 'benefit to PvP' would be the fight itself or 'getting to keep the farm', and there would be no calculation to do.
"Territory Control" on the scale added by economically driven OWPvP is a different beast.
"A New Incentive Has Appeared!"
Fishing is an interesting point, but it could be broken up.
I could picture something like this
Low level fishing in lakes and rivers
Mid level in coastal areas
High level being deep sea needing a boat
I don't know any MMO where low levels hold things that are valued so highly that you would risk losing your gear, 100% of the mats you hold, several hours of making up negative exp or several hours of getting rid of the corruption.
Do you @SirChancelot ?
From an economic standpoint, i do not see any reason for a high level player to gank a normal low level player since the high level player can usually do something else that awards 10x the mats with 1/5 of the hassle attached to it.
No idea, I'm sure it will be subject to testing. It was half in Alpha-1, so.
I will assume that in Alpha-2 they will set it to their intended value, since it won't be a valid test if not (I'd also expect them to test many different numbers).
They were not testing Corruption or PvP behavioural incentives of this type in Alpha-1, so there's no reason to assume 50% is the default, but it IS a weird value to set it to, to start with, if your 'design space' is all the way at 20%, even if you are doing max-effect testing.
@NiKr there is none. This was never said. I think he confuses it with losing half when being purple.
With this being said, I'd be all for:
To be clear we're actually not necessarily talking about 'low level players' which is the real point here.
Skill gaps between gamers are often very large.
So 'equal level but without PvP skill' is still a 'weaker player'.
I should have clarified that to begin with. For me, (Fighting Gamer), there is no such thing as a 'lower level' player since characters are approximately equal. Player skill is the only factor worth considering. If you are level 30 and I am level 33 and my PvP skills are at 'normal gamer gap' above yours, I expect to succeed in killing you to take your stuff 8 out of 10 times.
There's definitely a possibility this will be the case in Ashes. Maybe that's even why BHs exist, because the game will kinda push people to PKing gatherers because they're piñatas. But as I said, that'd put the game into a dangerous place, cause casuals would utterly hate that setup.
We don't know how the crafting system will work
So I have no idea how material requirements will work. You might still need some amount of "lower" tier mats to make higher tier gear.
So if I high level player needs a little bit of wood to go with his other high level mats to build something and some low level player is getting in his way, yeah... That's inviting a scenario where a very one sided fight is about to take place.
All of this is purely hypothetical though. Maybe the crafting will be like wow and when you get to titanium ore the copper ore is useless to you so who knows.
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Crafting#Gathering
I don't think we have anything concrete. I think Alpha 1 was 50% when you died, not even sure about that. But that was just Alpha 1, not necessarily an indicator.
But the issue is, if for instance it's 20% that a non combatant loses upon death, then a combatant only loses 10%, because combatants lose half as much as non combatants.
So a 10% difference there between the two. The goal of the combatant/noncombatant mechanics are to encourage people to fight back. Is 10% really enough to encourage people to fight back? Probably not. 10% extra loss, in general, seems worth it to give someone else corruption.
Then you add in, by flagging up to fight back, not only do you have to win the fight, but you're flagged up, ANYONE else can attack you too, because you flagged up. Why go through all of that for just the CHANCE of saving an additional 10% of your loot?
There would need to be a bigger delineation between the two in my opinion.
I'm actually counting on people to take the offered incentive and fight back, because in that case if we win, there's no Corruption for any of us anyway.
(I kept saying 'I' before, but it will nearly never be just me, so I figured I should stop doing that).
This is also a thing I often consider. It's easy to control who gets Corruption when the opponent isn't fighting back, so 'designated Red' is simple enough that the player might just go 'this isn't gonna work anyway, that red doesn't care, might as well fight back'.
The main thing to stop this is if your 'Designated Red' is red already, any players that are also in small-group can kill them off first without ever opening themselves up to 'dying without giving Corruption'. But that just makes the 'Designated Red' an interesting tank.
If you are of sound enough mind when jumped in a 3v2 or 3v3 to consider all this, and also decide 'am I going purple to defend an extra 10% of my materials if I lose?', then you are exactly the opponent type I want.
And then there's the "is it all gatherables or only one stack that drops" issue. If it's all of them that drop a portion - 10% is still quite a lot. If it's only a stack - 25% ain't much, relatively speaking.
In other words, the balancing will be very tight and the main determinant will be the end goal of Intrepid. Do they want to have high risk/reward on each death (would push away a lot of casuals) or do they want the penalty not be as big (might remove owpvp, because it'll be better to just give corruption).
I personally wouldn't care, because I don't care for the economic side of pvp, but both the casual and the Azherae's side of this issue would definitely have more things to say about it whichever way it goes.
For clarity I don't actually care if Intrepid balances hard toward 'discouraging OWPvP' from the perspective of economic incentives. I would probably prefer if they did, because I like med-population dynamism in games in my areas.
I may be a more useful test case in some situationsbecause my structure is 'respond to incentives'. Intrepid can get a lot of systems data from someone who is constantly calculating 'the margins' of going Red, rather than RP-ers, PermaReds, or pacifists.
Which is why there's no real downside to me blabbing about perceptions beforehand. Also, I don't mind if this thread floats because I bet you that it is 'suppressing' a bunch of other similar threads just by its title, but we'll see in the coming weekend.
EDIT: Shoutouts to OP for having such a good title and first post, on that note.
I have never had long queues for WvW, Arenas, or Battlegrounds so I never understand why developers are willing to lose such a large amount of revenue from players who do not want pvp, or only want to pvp on their terms.[/quote]
Go play WoW or New world, those two have togglable PvP
Time to kill all the lowbies ^_^
That is what alts are for lol,
But if there's no glass cannon, there's a much higher chance that your victims will either fight back or have enough time to just run away. A ton of such cases happened back in L2 if you didn't use a mage/dagger to try and PK lowbies at their own lvl.
If you care more about keeping your mats and gear durability than you do about participating in PvP - flag as a Combatant. If you lose it's only half the normal penalties, so that is a Win/Win situation.
That's what we're talking about. We don't know quantitatively what the normal death penalties are. I had kind of a hard time understanding Nikr's and Azherae's replies to me. You just beat them out haha. I like you Dygz. Even when we disagree, like I legitimately like you. No idea why.
Normal death penalties are fine - because they are normal.
And, yeah, I like you, too.
It should be OK to disagree.
That's part of the fun of the forums - we don't all have the exact same opinions.
Because serving niche, or minority markets can be extremely lucrative. There are usually less barriers to entry compared to dominant or majority markets. The competition is not as stiff, and in some cases is nonexistent.
It's easier to secure customer loyalty because niche markets are usually underserved or not served at all. They have nowhere else to turn to, used to being ignored and thus are more appreciative, supportive and loyal.
Certainly if you can capture 50%+ of the dominant market in an industry, you are maximizing the amount of money you can make in that industry. But capturing 50-90% total of a niche market can be more lucrative than 10-30% of the majority market.
There's money to be made in niche markets. Lots of it. But you have to execute and capture that market with a good product all the same.
It's not always strictly about maximizing profit for every business owner though. In the case of Steven Sharif, he played pvp mmos with other pvp players. He had fun in those games and with those players, allies and enemies alike. He became a part of that community. And now he wants to serve that community with a product. I can guarantee you he wants to make a profit, but he also just wants to serve a long neglected community that he is a part of.
That is my estimation as of now at least. Source - the common sense of a bygone era + personal opinion.
All of that said, I don't know him. And I am pretty much expecting him to sell out his early backers at some point, "go Hollywood," and radically change the game to accommodate whiners. Can't help it, just my cynical nature.