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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.
"World Instances"
Ludullu
Member, Alpha Two
I want to discuss the currently planned 80/20 (open world/instanced) content split and the statement that instanced content will be non-repeatable.
I mainly separate bosses into open world and instanced. There's several mechanics to how you fight them or how you get to fight them, but at their core it's binary. Open world bosses obviously have to be easier than instanced ones, mainly due to the pvp potential. There's obviously gotta be way more of them in the world and they should obviously have several different mechanics of their appearance and encounters.
I come from L2 and its instanced bosses had a "world instance" kind of mechanic. Something that could only be beat once per its respawn cycle for the entire server and has instanced mechanics. Those instances also had 2 types: they either let in only one raid or had an open to anyone access to the instanced room but only for a short time window. Obviously there was a shitton of pvp for these bosses, because they were rarer than open world bosses (don't necessarily have to be the case in Ashes) and only one group of people gets to kill them, while the rest of the server had to wait for that boss to respawn again.
In that second case, if the people inside all died, the boss would "fall asleep" for several minutes (might've been up to 30min-1h, don't remember exactly) and then the door would open again.
Now here's why I made this post. There's the "instanced content is only 20% of all the content and is non-repeatable" statement (in the context of dungeons of course). To me personally, the instanced bosses from L2 still felt like open world ones, because your right to their loot comes directly from open world. That is, if you didn't win in open world pvp (could be some pvp-including puzzle/mechanic in Ashes) - you didn't get to even try and fight the boss. So I'd be completely fine if top lvl bosses in Ashes had this "world instance" mechanic (and the volcano dragon from alpha1 kinda already did, though I think the "doors" didn't close). It would let Intrepid design the boss encounters with all kinds of intricacies and difficulties w/o sacrificing open worldness (again, imo). And considering Steven's statement of "we'll have bosses that only <10% of the playerbase can defeat", I'd assume that high difficulty pve is one of the goals for the game.
What do you think though? Especially those who consider themselves purist of Intrepid's design and sticklers of definitions. Would this "world instance" mechanic break the "80/20, no repeatable instances" promise for you? Do you think that the promise itself is silly in the first place, because you can't make super difficult open world pve and expect people to clear it while literally anyone is free to interrupt their farm? Would love to hear your opinions.
I mainly separate bosses into open world and instanced. There's several mechanics to how you fight them or how you get to fight them, but at their core it's binary. Open world bosses obviously have to be easier than instanced ones, mainly due to the pvp potential. There's obviously gotta be way more of them in the world and they should obviously have several different mechanics of their appearance and encounters.
I come from L2 and its instanced bosses had a "world instance" kind of mechanic. Something that could only be beat once per its respawn cycle for the entire server and has instanced mechanics. Those instances also had 2 types: they either let in only one raid or had an open to anyone access to the instanced room but only for a short time window. Obviously there was a shitton of pvp for these bosses, because they were rarer than open world bosses (don't necessarily have to be the case in Ashes) and only one group of people gets to kill them, while the rest of the server had to wait for that boss to respawn again.
- here's an example of a "pure" instanced fight. There's a ton of pvp happening around the npc that let's you into the instance and the video's poster is the first one to enter (mainly due to server settings, cause iirc you shouldn't be able to enter with dead raid members, but that's beside the point)
- here's an example of "open door for a while". The video is inside boss' room, there's pvp between different people (the purple icon above people's heads means "one-sided war declaration") and anyone who missed the time window stayed outside and can't come into this room until the boss dies or everyone inside wipes.
In that second case, if the people inside all died, the boss would "fall asleep" for several minutes (might've been up to 30min-1h, don't remember exactly) and then the door would open again.
Now here's why I made this post. There's the "instanced content is only 20% of all the content and is non-repeatable" statement (in the context of dungeons of course). To me personally, the instanced bosses from L2 still felt like open world ones, because your right to their loot comes directly from open world. That is, if you didn't win in open world pvp (could be some pvp-including puzzle/mechanic in Ashes) - you didn't get to even try and fight the boss. So I'd be completely fine if top lvl bosses in Ashes had this "world instance" mechanic (and the volcano dragon from alpha1 kinda already did, though I think the "doors" didn't close). It would let Intrepid design the boss encounters with all kinds of intricacies and difficulties w/o sacrificing open worldness (again, imo). And considering Steven's statement of "we'll have bosses that only <10% of the playerbase can defeat", I'd assume that high difficulty pve is one of the goals for the game.
What do you think though? Especially those who consider themselves purist of Intrepid's design and sticklers of definitions. Would this "world instance" mechanic break the "80/20, no repeatable instances" promise for you? Do you think that the promise itself is silly in the first place, because you can't make super difficult open world pve and expect people to clear it while literally anyone is free to interrupt their farm? Would love to hear your opinions.
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I'm from L2 as well so I understand the tradition of it being that way. But why not have some (or the best) Open World bosses be just as hard as the hardest instanced boss? Sure, it would be quite an accomplishment to both hold off the opposition and take down the boss. But it Would be quite an accomplishment.
I'd love for Intrepid to somehow succeed where everyone else failed (hell, that's the reason I'm here in the first place), but I'm not sure if this is the place where they even can.
As for mechanics I can see having a few simple one ands some straight up lethal ones to keep things interesting for all players.
I only know of one game that has bosses intended to be taken on without PvP, but in a situation where PvP exists.
This is EQ2's PvP servers.
This ended up being how it is because the developers simply were not going to alter any aspect of the game itself, other than the PvP aspects. They didn't want to redesign the encounters, or instance them, or even remove them.
As such, when they would spawn, there would be fights over them.
However, of the top tier of open world raid encounters, literally none were ever killed in the years I played that game.
If an encounter is actually top end, a single player using a single ability on a single member of the raid taking on the encounter will be able to wipe the raid. Sure, you can attempt to get a second (or third, or fourth) raid to act as defense, but if they are occupied with fighting back some rivals - a single rogue type with invisibility will always be able to get through - and that puts an end to the attempt on the encounter.
From there, it you look at any game with PvP and open world bosses, it is very easy to notice that they are all essentially getting their challenge from PvP that happens around them.
This isn't a bad thing at all - to be very clear. However, it is a different form of challenge to a PvE encounter where the challenge is from that encounter, and that encounter alone.
Essentially, you can not have both PvE and PvP challenge at the same time without one of them being sub-par.
And this is mainly why I made this thread. Yes, there'll be a ton of world bosses with varying loot, difficulty and distance from any given high player concentration place. But those Legendaries will be the main goal of all pve (and pvp too, tbh) groups of players, so there'll be a ton of fighting around them.
And no matter how Intrepid sets up their respawns (purely prime-time or a floating one), there's always gonna be some hardcore nerd that's ready to mess up his enemy's raid. L2 dealt with this through the "world instances" that I described. But if Ashes decides to leave those Legendaries in the open world, while giving them insanely complex and difficult mechanics - I'd assume they'll never be defeated.
Now it'd be cool to say "Ashes has bosses that were never defeated", but I'm not sure if it'd be as cool for all the people who've spent months/years trying to beat said bosses, but always failed because they were super difficult and there always was a rogue that backstabbed their healer at just the right moment. And this is why I think that making them "world instanced" could still provide the open world pvp for the rights to even try the boss, while still keeping the boss mechanics at peak quality.
Hell, you could even give the ones who manage to enter the room 3 attempts (2 wipes) at the boss before you through them out of the room. This way people will at least have a chance to try and figure out boss mechanics, cause if the boss just wipes a group of people in the first 3 minutes of the fight and then that same group can't enter the room again because it's getting killed in pvp - we're gonna have a loooong time full of pvping on our hands before anyone figures out how to beat the boss. Though that could be a challenge in itself - who figures out the mechanics and manages to wipe the enemy guilds first
For those encounters, what was your sense of how either large guilds or guild alliances approached the boss? Did any guilds work together to manage the perimeter while another guild took on the boss directly?
If you were involved in any of those raids how well were they planned & managed?
Yeah - hence the questions to Noaani about EQ2. I get the feel there is a scaled ‘us’ approach to these encounters that will require multiple guilds to successfully bring the boss down. It would take a broader perspective so that three guilds would have to rotate who gets the kill over time. But that would just be enough bodies and gear to lock the area down.
We all know Steven has Archeage as potentially the single biggest influence on Ashes.
In that game, the small number of instances can essentially be repeated ad nauseum. There is a quest where one instance has to be repeated 100 times, and people would do this in a weekend.
When he said content isn't repeatable, I personally didn't take that to mean you do it once and can't do it ever again, I took it to mean you couldn't do it, leave the instance and then go right back in.
This may not be the correct take on his intention at the time, but I think it is fairly close to how the game will end up going live.
The big draw for instanced content - from a developer perspective - is that it gives far more players content to run than open world content does.
An open world boss may spawn once a week, and have perhaps 3 raids go after it. This is content for 120 people per server.
An instanced raid may allow guilds to run it once a week, but it could easily have 20 guilds run it every week - on their own time.
This is content for 800 people.
Expand that to group content, where a single group boss may be content for 8 players once a day - so 56 players a week (perhaps some double ups in that, but not important). That same group boss, if in an instance, could easily see 100 groups go after it a day, making it content for 5,600 people per week (again, some double ups).
The basic economics of development should be obvious there.
The reason open world content is even a thing is because it offers up a different experience. It is arguably a better experience (that is a debate - not a fact - it is a much worse experience for those that miss out).
Some of the guilds in question were among the best in the game, they were getting a number of world firsts on instanced raids.
I recall one particular situation over a year in where it was about 300 people vs around 25. The 25 still "won" as there was just no real chance of even 10/1 odds of being able to prevent it from happening. It is worth pointing out that the faction that only had 25 or so people present were only intended to stop the other faction getting the kill, if they needed more people, they could have had them there in a few minutes.
The thing is, more people just weren't needed. They had more than enough to outright prevent the kill from happening.
After a year or two, it got to the point where each faction was only concerned with making sure that the other faction didn't get the kill on one of these encounters - people stopped even bothering trying to kill them as it was deemed impossible.
The only way a kill would be possible at all on one of these servers is if both factions agreed to some form of rotation system, with no PvP. Even then though, you would need players from both factions standing guard as a single unaffiliated player could still prevent the kill otherwise. Needless to say, this didn't happen in the entire time I played the game.
And while you might enjoy the mere experience of beating that boss, I'm not sure how many people would be happy with receiving 1 material piece per 10 farms of the boss (at least 10 days if we put him on a daily respawn).
I of course doubt that this is the rate of gear acquisition Intrepid wants to have, considering that we'll have 10k people on a server, but still, the math equation remains the same. You'd have to downtune the drop rates in the instances to such an extent that normal people might not enjoy running those instances with those rates.
I'll be honest, I am not sure what it is you are saying here.
It seems to me you are not grasping something that I consider so basic as to not even need to verbalize.
No doubt this is due to our differing MMO histories. L2 has a concept of raiding that doesn't really match up to any game I have played, and it's gearing is antiquated by todays standards.
I'm going to go over two specific things in an attempt to find this disconnect. Feel free to ignore either or both of the following that you already know - I am simply trying to find where that disconnect actually is.
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The first thing to note is that you seem to just think all raid gear is equal.
It is not.
I think we are all fairly much agreed that literally anyone that wants it in Ashes will be able to get a set of crafted gear. We probably all agree that this is a good thing.
From there, we probably all agree that any player that wants to put the time and effort in to it would be able to get some gear upgrades from group dungeons.
None of this diminishes the value of open world raid drops.
Instanced raids are just another step here. They come between dungeons and open world raid boss drops. As such, their existence has no negative impact players desire to get open world boss drops. That aspect of the game is kept in tact as long as those drops are the best in the game.
Literally everyone in the game could have instanced raid gear, and the demand for open world raid gear would still be sky high.
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You talk about gear acquisition speed with instanced raid encounters. If we work on the assumption that a server has 4 active at a time, and each drops 1 item per kill (an actual item, a materials that is used to make an item, or a number of material fragments that are needed to make an item, with the number dropping being equal to the number of fragments needed to make an item - it is all the same).
Since a guild is using 40 players to kill this mob, and those players then have 640 item slots between them, this means it would take 3 years to gear that raid out with items from these instances. Note that this is assuming 4 kills every week for the same 40 players, which due to a number of factors isn't actually reasonable to assume at all.
That is not too fast by any means. However, it is a pace that players would be generally ok with - even if on the slower side of things.
Your example of 3 years to equip 40 people only considers the 4 instances. It doesn't take into account open world farming and trading. I'm trying to calculate a slowish pace of gearing that includes any possible sources.
If we assume that these 4 instances are the peak difficulty at their time, that would mean that the ones who can farm them already have best gear of a lower tier. If they have that, this means they should be able to fight off the general masses in ow dungeon pvp. Which means they can farm those dungeons. And would obviously be able to farm open world bosses that give you the same gear that the instances do (with, say, legendary bosses giving you legendary version of this tier, that's a step above).
If we assume that the 40 people can somewhat comfortably farm all of those things, the 4 instances equaling a rough 1/3 of the overall number of items seems fair to me. Which would put the overall pace of gearing at under a year for the whole raid (cause most likely you'll get more items in the non-instanced places). I'm not counting trade here purely because any other guild that's farming the same stuff would need it for themselves and wouldn't trade it.
To me, as someone who likes that old pace of gearing, this seems good. The frontier top lvl players gearing themselves with best gear (legendary stuff would be farmed, but you'd barely be able to get a full set together or upkeep it, so I'm not considering it rn) throughout a year. And then each year you add a new tier, while giving more ways to get the previous one, so that the overall mass of players could take a step upwards in their power.
This was in context of top lvl gear instances dropping a full item to the very limited amount of players that can clear said instance. If you build out a pyramid of gear tiers downwards, roughly doubling the amount of players and instances (still raid-sized and once a week) for each tier of gear - you'll have what I imagine as a good gearing pace.
The lowest stage gets t1 gear through quests/story instances. Then you have low lvl dungeons and instances that are really easy and provide ~80% of the playerbase with t2 within a few days. t3 for ~40% within few weeks. t4 for the 15-20% in a few months. t5 for the ~5% in under a year. The % are of people who put in time to do these things, from the overall server playerbase (considering rising difficulty of instances and competition in the open world). And the time - for how much you need to invest to get to the tier. The skill lvl of any given group would make this process somewhat faster, just because you'd be at the very top of the pyramid at each stage w/o any real competition in your region.
I hope that made sense
I don't quite agree with this point. They do not have to be easier, they just require pacts, coordination, people that are only there to defend the attempt from others players rather than fight the boss itself.
Just look at the fire dragon boss we have seen in A2:
Why? Because this boss' sub zone has a single point of entrance through a portal which makes the bossfight easily defend-able from rivaling groups.
Will you need more people to defend said portal entrance? Sure. But that's just part of it being an OW-MMO with OW-Raidbosses.
Raidgroups, that let a rivaling player in to disturb the bossfight can fail the bossfight and that's okay because they already failed by letting said player into the boss location in the first place.
Look at the brood queen we have seen way back in 2020:
Making the boss as hard as any other Top Tier PvE Encounter is also possible. Why? because, same as before, players who attempt the boss have the ability to station Allies preventing others from interrupting the bossfight.
Which essentially is the whole purpose of a PvX Game. You have PvEers to kill the boss, PvPers to defend the boss attempt and Crafters to use the materials obtained for the good of the guild.
It who rends the sky & It who sunders the land
If we are talking about pacing of gear acquisition in relation to instanced raids, we shouldn't be looking at the top possible gear in L2 - we should be looking at the second best possible tier - because that is the tier of gear instanced raids would offer.
For top end gear, you still want to look at open world content.
Even a year is fine - arguably too long.
After a year, I would expect a new tier of content to be out. Not just one new step of top end content and shifting everything up from there - but a new tier of everything. More of this in a bit.
This difference in expectation of content delivery speed may well be the root cause of the disconnect.
Extend that by a few tiers, 5 isn't really that many (Archeage had about 30 tiers at launch, and by the time I left there were well over 100 distinct tiers of gear that a level capped player could wear where people wouldn't question what the hell they were doing - this is modern itemization).
However, taking that same tier structure and flip the tier numbers around, as this makes it easier to explain.
Now, tier 1 gear is the best, and tier 2 gear is the second best.
Instanced raids drop tier 2 gear. By your own admission, 15-20% of players should be able to get tier 2 gear. 15-20% of players won't be capable of killing instanced raids if they are implemented properly - so this fits your vision literally perfectly.
For my next point, we have to play mental gymnastics with tier numbers again to make it make sense.
In your example of gear tiers 1 through 5, lets extend that some.
Lets say tier 1 is still quest based, tier 2 is group based, and tier 3 is raid based. So far so good (we have shorted it, but bear with me).
Now, within each of these tiers, we have entry level, mid point and end point. Thus, we have raiding tier 3.1, 3.2 and 3.3. Tier 3.3 is the open world boss loot.
What should be happening in a game like Ashes is that rather than simply adding a new tier 3.4 to the game, they should be adding tier 4 - which would come with tier 4.1, 4.2 and 4.3 all at the same time - content and gear. Thus, they could then bring group content up to give gear of tier 3 quality (not the same gear, just gear of the same quality).
If they don't do this, they are leaving people in a position where the same content is viable as a means of gear acquisition for three or more years - and that literally should not happen in a modern MMO.
Hell, it shouldn't have happened in 2003.
This kind of thing absolutely will see players leave the game. A tier of content should not remain viable for any one group of players for more than a year in Ashes. For most games, that would be no more than 6 months - but fortunately Ashes has the node system that will see content change at least somewhat, which imo would double the amount of time a guild would accept being on one tier.
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Fun fact, as I pointed out in another thread, most PvP players do not have what it takes to participate in top end PvE. If they were, they would have had enough of them get sick of people like me making claims like this, and they would have formed a guild in WoW and started getting world wide firsts.
Now, there are all kinds of reasons as to why this could be (and I am sure you are getting ready to type some out). However, keep in mind that any reason given as to why this hasn't happened (we find PvE monotonous, it isn't our thing, what ever) is simply a description as to what it is that PvP players generally don't have that is required to participate in top end PvE content.
As a balance to this, the same is generally true of PvE players. Most of us are just not good at PvP.
Note that this is a generalization rather than a rule - I can think of perhaps a handful of players that break this generalization - but not enough to actually alter my perception of the following.
As such, I would suggest that a game that had instanced PvE raids, and also had open world raids where PvP was the focus, would likely see guilds succeed at one of these, while failing at the other. It would be extremely rare for a guild to succeed at both.
You can take this as an insult or a compliment - either is fine with me. Here we go...
This is very much *PvP thinking*.
If you station people outside the portal (or even inside, it doesn't matter), your only hope of stopping 200 of us coming at you is if we want to fight those you have stationed. The PvP thinker would think that those attacking would have to fight you all to get to the portal.
The PvE thinking would be somewhat different.
If we all understand that our job is to get past those stationed, not to fight or kill them, and we all just rush the portal, you can't really stop that many.
Now, if the fights inside are indeed tuned to PvE levels of difficulty, if any one of us get through that portal, your attempt is over.
Although, I just double checked and L2 gave out new gear tiers every 1.5 years, with a particular set of updates that went on for 2 years with the same maximum gear tier, but a ton of new and easier ways to get the penultimate one. Funny thing is - everyone still loves and cherishes the update period of those 2 years, because that was when the gear balance was at its peak. Yeah, it's quite possible that pve and pvp players have different skillsets so they prefer different content. Though I definitely wish for that to change and for everyone to really become PvXers, where they can do both
Ashes, potentially, might be the game that pushes people towards that, with the class and gear design. The main factor will be, yet again, the pve that Intrepid develops. Cause obviously L2 and AA had the "PvX" ideology, but with a subpar pve part. So Intrepid has a chance to really build on top of that and make pvpers do hardcore pve and the vice versa for pvers.
There's a tiny chance that TL might try doing the same too, but from that single trailer we saw - it doesn't quite seem that their pve is all that complex.
From there, what L2 would do is add in tier 6 gear, and shift all previous tiers a little to make them easier to obtain.
What should happen now is that tier 6, tier 7 and tier 8 gear should all be released at the same time, along with new entry level content for tier 6, new instanced content for tier 7 and new open world bosses for tier 8.
This should happen every year, on average.
The problem with the L2 version of gear acquisition is that (using your example) players would still be going after tier 5 gear for three years. It is what people strive to get for the first year (even those that aren't quite there are striving to get it), then it is what is kind of expected for a year, and then people will still be getting it to catch up for a further year (especially those that were attempting but missing out in that first year).
This is the part that should be avoided. Players should not be desiring a tier of gear for more than a year in Ashes. Ashes may well do that - but it sure as hell won't do that out of the box.
The first thing it needs to do is hook both of those types of players. Only once they are hooked can Intrepid then reel them in.
This would be a 4 - 5 year process.
That depends on the implementation of it all. Inability to join the boss arena when in combat or the requirement of a damage interrupted 3 second channel would essentially stop suicide bombing attempts for bosses, that have top-end pve requirement (which i still don't believe we'll get many of just as a side-note).
"Detect Stealth" spells and auras are a staple in MMOs that have stealth.
Your first point would be turning the encounters in to an actual instance. If this happens, they may as well just go actual fully instanced with it.
The second would be easily dealt with by any form of protection barrier ability any class may have. That said, unless they make the area a battleground, you would need to attack each player individually - AoE's won't work. Best of luck with that.
If we don't have many encounters that would be considered top end PvE, the game can no longer be called PvX - imo.
Since Steven has made many comments about there being top end encounters in Ashes (not that I am convinced he actually knows what a top end encounter even is), as far as I am concerned, it should be the primary assumption.
As to stealth, the ability to detect stealth doesn't have a particularly great history of being effective in large scale conflict. If you can easily see 300 characters near you, you are not likely to focus on the one character you can barely see.
pretty much my assumption as well.
The thing about comparing EQ2 bosses to our hypothetical in Ashes is the inherently different structure. In EQ2 you had 2 factions and therefore half the server was your enemy and therefore you always had a plethora of options for either side to show up to stop the other faction. In Ashes with open world content there is a chance that if you are getting shut down every time by another guild, your diplomacy is sub par, not your fighting, maybe you can argue there will always be another rival guild, but there is a level somewhere that can reached to complete the content, through diplomacy with other guilds, number of players at the raid for defense and number of players available for the raid itself.
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Alpha-2#Persistent_alpha
"Bosses and mobs will not auto-scale based on group size."
Since this is the case I see no reason a world boss designed for 40 players can't be taken down somehow. More players, less enemies etc. I don't believe the L2 system is necessary to compliment the bosses.
I mean in Aion what we did in situations like that is you'd have a second raid(s) on PvP/Guard duty and they'd be the ones out there killing that ranger in the hills and patrolling to keep you safe. Obviously that doesn't mean people won't die, but if successful they could keep away the majority of fighters while the PvE raid(s) works on killing the boss (and I assume if a person here or there dies at the boss fight they can be rezzed mid fight).
This but there's also the fact that one stealther isn't going to take down a raid. He might not even be able to take down one person because as soon as he pops out of stealth to attack someone people will target him. And that person is already being actively healed by more than one healer at that point as well. Honestly it just sounds like a death sentence - why would any stealther do that? Especially in a game where even without the 39 extra friends and several healers to back him up, the TTK would still be 30s-1 min.
Especially if we can place a Stealth/Invis augment on Hallowed Ground.
You are basically saying that in order to kill open world mobs that are designed to actually be hard, all factions on the server need to come to an agreement.
This isn't an agreement with every guild that could kill the boss, keep in mind - it is an agreement with every player that could prevent you from killing the boss (basically with every level capped player on the server).
My experience of these things tells me that you are unlikely yo ever get even 50% of the top end players on a server to agree to something that doesn't directly benefit them.
However, I'm happy to ignore this oversight of yours. This leaves us with the fact that if your above hypothetical situation was to ever actually happen, it actually proves the point I made.
The point was that you couldn't have an encounter with both good PvP and good PvE, the point stands - the thing is, your solution to it is to remove the PvP element via diplomacy.
Regardless of whether it is players doing this or developers doing it, the end result is the same - no PvP.
Aion bosses weren't on par with raid bosses in other games though.
It'd probably make more sense to consult Noaani directly if you care about the derail.
Or go play Monster Hunter, particularly if you can find any friends to play it with, certain things about this are much easier to grasp intuitively after doing so.