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
You said servers should only be up during primetime, what about the people who can't play during primetime? They just aren't allowed to play?
This doesn't limit hardcore players, they'll always be available during primetime.
This limits casual players who can't play whenever they want.
And the answer to the question would be "tough luck, don't play the game or play on a server that fits your time". And yeah, you could have different servers in one region have staggered primetimes, so it wouldn't be that big of a problem, especially considering that you'd probably only need a few of those due to how few people play in those times.
I do not want this kind of mechanic for Ashes because I'm gonna live in Ashes.
I can't imagine anyone would want that system for an MMO. That sounds extremely niche at best and game killing at worst.
1000 players a day can get a drop? damn thats a lot compared to only 9 a day per barakiel
why dont the samll guilds join a big guild or ally with them? if someone can organize and manage 2000 players and get the boss, why they dont deserve it? why are the small guilds entitled to get the drop and no tthe guys who managed to organize and get numbers? why is 1 group more special than the other? not everybody will be a winner in this game. the decisive factor will be your ability to win the fights that matter.
and if someone plays all day, why is it wrong that they get more rewards than someone who plays 1 or 2 hours a day?
I think there is some confusion here.
Are we talking about group dungeons and their bosses, or raid dungeons and their bosses?
If you have a dungeon designed for 8 players, then all bosses in the zone should be for 8 players.
if you have a dungeon designed for 40 players, then all bosses in the zone should be for 40 players.
Additionally, there should be at least a half dozen actual bosses, and several dozen mini-bosses per dungeon. EQ2 has dungeons with several hundred bosses/mini-bosses, and Ashes should be aiming to at least hit 10% of a 20 year old game.
Guilds would have to fight for those rooms, while having an opportunity to have a temporary truce or an alliance. Several groups will have to pull into the same room to fight a boss that just spawned and if they were too far from that room, other people in room between the boss and that group will see a lot of movement and might assume that there's a boss (or just a fight) going on.
Corruption can happen within rooms and any neighboring players can immediately go punish the red if the victim shouted in chat about it.
Rooms with bosses could have mechanics that lead to closing of the entrances to the room, so that pve could be designed to be very hard. Hell, you could even add boss mechanics that might open the doors and players would have to counter them in order to prevent any outsiders from interrupting the farm.
Bosses could mark their killers with kill timers and have interdependent links between those timers and boss mechanics, so that if a 24-man raid has 3 groups that all killed 8-man bosses in super short times - the 24-man boss now has harsher mechanics and better loot.
Imo this would be the best possible dungeon design for Ashes. If Intrepid have come up with something even better - I'll only be glad.
I really don't think most dungeons will have that "set in stone" amount of players designation, open world dungeons in Lineage 2 were quite diverse in terms of "which amounts of players is required to deal with each room" a single dungeon could have very small rooms that could be dealt with 2~3 players, small rooms for single parties and huge rooms for multiple parties, aswell as Strong Elite monsters/Mini Bosses to be dealt with a single party and actual Bosses that requires multiple parties.
Still, who knows how AOC dungeons will be designed, we will have to see it.
Aren't we all sinners?
Nope.
Guilds would gather together 40 players (or 80), charge to the end of the dungeon, kill everyone and every thing, kill the boss and then leave.
if you put 40 person content at the end of a dungeon in an open world game, expect raids of twice that to obliterate everything on their way to that content.
This is exactly what I would do, and what most of the other raid leaders I know would do.
Now I don't think we've gotten any detailed info on mob drops (especially in dungeons) and I don't know how it was designed in AA, but when Steven talked about his favorite dungeons in mmo the first one he mentioned was Lair of Antharas from L2. And there you'd have mobs that had valuable loot, you had several bosses that had good loot (iirc they were on a 24+-h respawn) and you had one of the biggest epic bosses in the game at the end of the dungeon with a week respawn (or maybe even bigger, I forget).
And guilds would take up a few rooms to farm those mobs, they would check for bosses when their timers were coming up and they'd fight amongst themselves for the right to farm all of that.
Unless there's gonna be some repeatable quest that provides you with the same kind of mats that mobs in AoC's dungeons drop - you'll most likely be farming those mobs to get those drops. Well, not necessarily YOU you, but the general you that is players who want said drop and have the time and capabilities to farm it instead of just buying it from others.
That is what an open world dungeon means to me. If you guild is ok with visiting this kind of dungeon only once a week when an epic boss respawns at the end - that's totally fine. And if you manage to somehow farm several bosses on your way to the epic boss, even though their respawn timers will most likely be staggered by the other guilds who're contesting them - that's also cool.
But imo, if Steven wants to have real open world pvp and "soft friction" between people - that's the kind of dungeon he'd need to have in his game, and I'm pretty sure he knows that. Because if all the open world dungeons are just a "go through it once and forget about it for a day or several" - the only friction between guilds would happen on caravan runs and maaaybe from killing innocent gatherers that were just minding their business.
So, there is a disconnect here somewhere.
We aren't just going in to the dungeon once, we are going in to the dungeon with the specific goal of killing the boss once.
If there is a reason to be in that a dungeon other than said boss, then players in the guild will farm it as and when needed. However, when the boss is set to spawn, it is all hands working on killing it. I;m not going to waste the time of 40 people to farm content that only needs 8.
You seem to be suggesting that friction is reliant on there being groups and raids of different sizes in a dungeon. I would suggest that if there is a reason for people to want to be in said dungeon (such as there being drops that people want), then there will be friction.
But that's only going to happen once every ~6-20hrs depending on what the raid bosses respawn would be at.
That is exactly what I outlined.
Sorry for the delayed response. My lights went out
Before you get too carried away, @Vyril, remember that PvE dungeon bosses are only one type of content in Ashes.
Dungeon bosses won't be the sole source for a node's resource needs ... nor will they be dropping legendary equipment (that's reserved for world bosses and crafting).
Are dungeon bosses going to be worth grinding over and over?
That's subject to testing.
But as it reads in the Wiki right now probably not.
Longest Respawn time back then was the Valakas respawn ~264 Hours(+/- 8Hours)(~11 days)
Aren't we all sinners?
It didn't seemed so but alright.
Lets hope those other bosses categories gets confirmed and we get reasonable respawn timers.
Aren't we all sinners?
What is the L2 map size compared to AoC?
It's hard to tell, we don't have something like an official number, but Lineage 2 map was certainly one of the biggest ones out there, for example, it is bigger than WoW's map which is supposed to be around ~207km² but i believe Archeage(~600 km²) to be bigger than lineage 2 Map, so L2 Map is probably around ~400 km²?
AOC is expected to be 1,200 km² so ~2x Archeage size and ~3x Lineage 2 size.
Aren't we all sinners?
Just curious with since i wouldn't really count water to much, and the ratio of 10,00 players to land, with the game having enough content for their amount of players that will be on the server on average. Which means it will have design effects on bosses and their frequency and amount around the world.
I see what you mean, in my opinion in such a big map it will certainly depend on how they are spread out across the world, in the end as said before the main aspects to properly balance bosses respawn timers will be the amount of players required to take them down and and how many of them exists.
Aren't we all sinners?
Personally, I think places like this should drop key fragments. Collect enough, make key, get access to boss for your group only. This becomes an instanced fight. But...key fragments drop on death according to the same rules as gatherables.
DAoC was great for open world dungeon. Darkness Falls is basically the baseline expectation for AoC dungeons. More of them though.
i suspect aoc will be similar for raid content. you can be in the dungeon farming etc, but once the boss spawns, only a certain number of people will be able to go in, aka the 8, 16, 40 men groups or raid. so whoever gets in there first locks everybody out, even their own guildmembers, once the palyer limit has been reached
No need to apologize, not to anyone here that knows where you are.
So, we have the situation where if 40 player content is at the end of a dungeon, guilds will rush through that dungeon en masse in order to kill that content, and this would be somewhat disruptive in an 8 player dungeon.
So, this is why my suggestion is to make dungeons with 40 player content at the end also have 40 player content all the way through.
This way, when those masses of players gather together, the only PvP they are likely to come across are other masses of players.
Additionally, those groups of 8 players running content designed for 8 players are likely to only run in to other groups of 8 players.
While I'm all for overwhelming an enemy with numbers, that should be something a guild has to actively do, not something they do by accident while going after a different goal.