Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
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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
It can all be turned and twisted in any way we want it to. This is why, as much of a marketing ploy as it is, "pvx" works for me. It's just an easier way of saying "a game with mobs that has owpvp in it".
Also, even purely pve games would have economic pvp, as long as there's at least some sort of rarity on the game's resources. There's only 5 particular plants in a region? If you take all of them - you've "won the economic pvp fight against another gatherer". There's some exploratory system that rewards only frontier-lvl pioneers? You'll win the exploration pvp by being that pioneer.
Pretty much all games exist on a pvx spectrum, some are just closer to one side or the other. Ashes is definitely moving in the pvp direction, I admit that.
What I care about is what type of server I'm playing on..
PvE-Only server = PvP rating 0
PvE-Optional server = PvP rating 1
PvP server = PvP rating 2
I consider Ashes to have a PvP rating of 1.5 and still moving closer to 2.
On a PvP server, you still have to do PvE stuff.
So, for Ashes to be PvE-centric... we would need a ruleset where the majority of the map is PvE-Only.
And there probably wouldn't be Node Sieges. There probably wouldn't be Castle Sieges.
PvE-centric with a .5 PvP rating might have the Open Seas manual flag battlegrounds. And might still have Caravan raid/defense. And Arenas, of course.
PvE-centric games might have some economic competition - but if it's at the level of "economic warfare" vs other players... that is inherently player vs player. It's just not PvP combat, specifically.
Exactly! Which is why the PvX term is mostly meaningless.
The lack of experience is something everybody has at their first attempt in anything.
You say he's not relying on advice from his dev team.
What I see is that every month players can give feedback in pinned threads and he cares enough to post an updated article to to give a better overview when a strong reaction happens.
A time will come, during Alpha 2, when seeing how players play (or stop playing) might put an even bigger pressure on him, to balance the game, especially with influencers streaming how they play.
But let's not worry about that. Why should we?
I'm pretty sure what I said is:
"But, he doesn't really understand how to support casuals, PvEers, RPers and solo players.
And he's not relying on advice from his dev team to adequately support those playstyles."
Rather, he's saying, "Hey! Let's add more PvP concepts and more Hardcore Challenge concepts to the design." And his dev team is doing that. During the two years that IS did not have a Lead Game Designer.
(Also... after watching this past year's Extra Life stream... Steven tends to hire devs who are hardcore challenge/PvPers with MMORPG work experience.)
We agree.
Again - Steven seems to be designing Ashes for the gamers who love EvE Online, ArcheAge and Lineage II.
I have no worries at all that Steven will feel a need to cave to pressure from players outside of that fanbase.
He's going to make a game that is a love letter to that fanbase - and that fanbase will, indeed, love it.
(Assuming combat feels great, etc...)
So... it's all good.
When is Alpha 2? It's already been 2 years since Alpha 1.
At this point, Steven needs to stay on the course he's chosen and tweak some stuff for the gamers who like those basic concepts.
I don't want Steven wasting time trying to change his current vision by making the Open Seas comfortable for me to play the game. If he tries to please everyone, the game will never launch.
Ashes is not made for everyone. That is OK.
"Oh! Dygz no longer wants to play because we added the Open Seas, so let's undo all the work we've put in until he says he will play again."
That would be absurd and disastrous. There are plenty of gamers who will love The Open Seas ruleset.
Steven doesn't need me to play Ashes.
What hardcore PVE MMO is thriving? I hope you are not thinking ARPGs like diablo or thinking community challenges like iron-man/hardcore wow because that would make as much sense as most of the things you say...
"hardcore" is a niche, doesn't matter if its pvp or pve, most popular games are not even close to being hardcore
and that's why Ashes is not even close to being hardcore, they want a large enough playerbase
But probably Steven has just a bias toward PvP and can understand PvE-ers too.
And it makes sense to hire similar mined developers.
Else they will discuss game direction like people on this forum, each pulling to what he likes more.
I'll quote this just in case it happens later
Edit:
Because Steven also said at the end of The Ashen Forge: Episode 100 that everything is subject to change.
I do not deny change because I can do nothing against it anyway.
A dead old game click to move tab target, and a game to hardcore that was not refine or finished at launch and people could view it as being bad. Legit out here trying to manipulate information and not caring the reason why they are not doing well, but pushing to push it off as to people don't like pvp lmao.
Closest i can get to that if you vie twitch this game is pretty active with an extraction shooter
I think that if Jeffrey Bard or Bill Trost and been Lead Game Designer, they each would have enough experience and clout that we likely would not have seen this signifcant amount of drift towards more Hardcore Challenge and more PvP-centric features and mechanics. Casual, PvEer, and RP playstyles would be better supported. (Also, there probably would not have been so much scope creep.)
Bill Trost would likely advocate for a more balanced approach, but it's kinda too late to undo stuff the team has already been working on for the past two years.
You won't need the quote - because if he does that, I will be the first to call it out as stupid and disastrous.
I would like Ashes to launch before 2030. At some point, you have to take a stand and stop changing stuff.
I'm confidant the current direction is excellent for the gamers who love EvE Online, ArcheAge and Lineage II.
I don't think he needs to do anything to accomodate the MMORPG players who don't enjoy those games - we just want to be clear of what the direction actually is.
Ashes is not made for everyone. OK, so, how about clearly stating who the game is made for and who it's not made for - besides being made for people who hate P2W and not for people who are OK with P2W.
I hate neither PvP nor PvE and I will play AoC more or less, depending how much I like it compared to other games which will compete for my time. I own a freehold skin and I hope somebody will sell me freehold right before a siege, so that I can make a screenshot with it. Maybe it survives ^^
Just as I don't think anyone should care if I don't play Ashes.
It's great that you plan to play Ashes. Sounds like you will have tons of fun.
That's a good thing.
But it's way easier for the masses to fall into "black and white" mentality instead of a greyscale. And games like wow obviously didn't help with their separation of pvp and pve servers.
You enjoy PvP and I don't enjoy it very much.
You are OK with non-consensual PvP and I am not.
And... I would say this disagreement in mindset is really why we can't play on the same servers.
What is the "PvX scale"? (I'm pretty sure the people who find PvX to be meaningful are gamers who typically play MMORPGs on PvP servers.)
Even the former Lineage II devs working on T&L are leaning more towards PvE play:
"Throne and Liberty will be a PVE-First Title
Great PvP experiences are always welcome but it looks like NCSoft will be putting most of its eggs in the PvE basket. The developers revealed that the vast majority of players prefer PvE content and the game will focus on creating challenging content that hardcore players enjoy in the endgame.
The developers have reiterated multiple times that Throne and Liberty is meant for players who want to make it their lifestyle game. Skill expression is also something the developers are trying to focus on. Raids, dungeons, and other PVE content will focus heavily on allowing players to show off their PvE skills through well-timed abilities, coordination, and build crafting."
https://www.mmorpg.com/editorials/throne-and-liberty-could-be-2023s-big-next-gen-mmo-launch-2000126568
If WoW had no separate PvE-Only servers - I simply would have rage-quit the game entirely, rather than rage-quitting the PvP-Optional server and moving to a PvE-Only server.
This.
Now pretty much all current pve mmos have gone way, way too far in the hand holding, which is why most of are here.
Smth like PUBG would probably be at the pvp end, cause iirc they have no "pve" part.
And they do that because that's where the money is.
Do you really think they're "leaning towards pve", when they have auto-battling and a pretty small skillset? And the bosses we saw in the test barely had any cool mechanic, so I wouldn't really call that a "lean" towards pve.
I hope they show and have much better pve in the rest of the game's world, just for the game's sake, even if I don't get to experience it (fuck amazon btw
The simple problem with the scale is... I don't know a game type where this comes up other than Fighting games actually because no other set of players is masochistic/foolish enough to put up with it...
The fighting game genre is full of what we who partake in it like to call 'One Touch' or "Touch of Death" games. You may have heard of the term.
Basically a sufficiently skilled opponent lands one hit and then uses their combo skill to kill you from there, the entirety of the round is 'avoiding that one hit'. Games can be ranked on a scale of how 'interactive' they are based on this.
But there's also some other terms that I won't get into that rely on that not being true. This is the way in which some things are similar. BDO for example is terrible because technically, it has very little PvP AND very little PvE until a very specific point in endgame/Node Wars.
Your PvP opponent touches you and if they have enough skill, whether or not you die is random. Your PvE opponents, if you have enough skill, could theoretically never touch you.
You can say 'well it has PvE and it has PvP so it's on the scale' but it really isn't either except for a very small subset of situations, and those are the situations in which we judge it, right?
I don't know what PvP games (not just MMOs) you've played seriously other than Lineage, but for some people, trying to explain what I just did above ends up sounding like a black and white thing. The PvX term is meaningless because it tries to explain a thing that theoretically exists but that requires a bunch of assumptions to describe.
PvX can absolutely exist, but the way the term is used as we experience Ashes now is about as meaningful as someone saying that DragonBall FighterZ is a 'Strategic Fighting Game'. You can't say it isn't because there is a Strategy (for most people it is 'choose a team with a Touch of Death combo and practice it and then use it when your opponent makes a mistake', preferably learn more than one) but then another entire subset of people that play a different 'part' of the genre will absolutely not accept 'Strategic Fighting Game' as a term and would end up arguing about it the same way we do.
PvX only has meaning in the context of being able to define both the PvP general situation and the PvE general situation. If either is underdefined, some people are going to say 'the game doesn't have that'. And since PvX is supposed to be the blend, the same thing happens. If either is underdefined, the game 'is the other one'.
I'm just saying that it might actually be that 'the masses' actually have enough experience to say 'Ashes is PvP' or 'Ashes isn't PvX' not because they're dismissing the concept, but because the concept doesn't resonate with the word used as yet. So every time we say 'this game is PvX' it just rings hollow.
Diablo isnt an MMORPG, it is - as you very rightly say - an ARPG.
While the term "hardcore PvE" may have thrown you off, what I was talking about were MMO's that people played for the PvE experience.
That said, the suggestion of iron man as being what you think hardcore PvE is, kind of shows you dont get PvE.
Hardcore in PvE isnt about not dying. If anything that is the opposite of hardcore. You tend to take fewer risks when that is the paradigm. While iron man may make PvP more hardcore, this is mostly due to the lack of control over the level of risk you find yourself in.
To me, and to my guild, hardcore PvE is about more risk, not less.
- I have to do both PvP and PvE or somebody should take over my PvP duties.
- I would have game sessions free of PvP: some days would be free of PvP, some wouldn't
How many days free of PvP I have in 100 days would give me the scale, if is 50% or not.
So if you'd somehow scale PvP and PvE on a scale of 1 to 10 rating how much that playstyle is focused on and important for progress and gameplay. You find the difference between the 2 totals, and if it's a total of 0-3, you have a a true PvX game as they would both have a fairly equal focus and importance. And higher difference, and whichever greater total of the scores there is, is the type of MMO you are playing.
I'm sure I could put more thought into this scale, but for now I'm just leaving it at this. And the goal of AoC should be a difference of 0.
Call of Duty is an FPS.
Those are irrelevant since the context is playing in MMORPGs.
I don't play Battle Royales. I don't play First Person Shooters.
I also don't really care about other forms of MMOs - like Survival games.
I like playing MMORPGs. And, while, I can enjoy PvP combat in MMORPGs sometimes, it's rare.
And, while I traditionally start on PvP-Optional servers, I always move to PvE-Only servers.
So... first thing I need to know is what type of servers are available by PvP-type - or, as is the case, with NW, can I play with PvP turned off.
Yeah, I think that's my point.
Yeah. Compared to what Ashes is offering.
I don't know if it will be GOOD PvE!!
My other biggest pvp game would be dota2. A 1.5k hours there. I haven't played LoL, but from what I've heard/seen of it, it seems like a way more "pve" game than dota. So on the scale it would be closer to that. And on the dome it would also take up less space cause afaik dota has more gameplay features.
I used those other games as an example because there's no "true pvp" mmo out there afaik. Which imo is already a sign of the whole genre's lean towards pve, as a whole.
But I get your point.
There are plenty of MMORPG fans craving a game like that. It would be awesome for Ashes fill that niche.
I wholeheartedly support that.
It's not the kind of game I'm interested in playing.
Looks like there will be plenty of other MMORPGs out there for me to enjoy - and even WoW: Dragonflight is one of them.
I care, Dygz. Not sure why exactly .. but, i do.
I want to see you live long enough to become a villain on AoC
Lets commit to forming a guild which will surround Dygz at nearly all times protecting him from unwanted PVP. We will need to get many time zones involved, as Dygz is a prolific gamer, plays all hours of the day. We could call it "Secret Service" or something.
Dygz? you in?
I heard a rumor he might not be playing this game. I am not sure but if you look hard you might be able to find a statement from him on it.
This is that typical PvPer solution of:
"Hey, we know you don't like it when people try to shove cake down your throat, so we will surround you and if anyone tries to shove cake down your throat, we will shove cake down THEIR throat.
Are you in??"
No. No. I'm out.
I don't wanna be anywhere near that.
Y'all can have fun with that. But, I'm gonna be elsewhere.
this is the first time I have ever felt that I agree with your decision to not play the game. Now, if you will just stop trying to convince others the game is bad, we will be on the same page.
Other people can decide for themselves if they want to play the game.