Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Comments
The notion that people consider this to be content baffles me.
This should not be the standard by which Ashes dungeons are measured. They should far surpass this at a bare minimum.
If you are in a dungeon, you should be moving between bosses at all times. The only situation in which it is acceptable to consider base population as content is while solo. As soon as you are in even a small group, bosses and mini-bosses should be the only thing you are going after, with base population there simply as a time sink.
See, this is a point I have been making for a long time.
To me it is a little further than this though, players need to have some actual PvE experiences mixed in with their PvP experiences in order to not feel like the game is a PvP game.
The problem with fast boss respawning is that it necessitates a downward adjustment in the drops offered per kill. If a mob reopens every hour, the developers need to assume it will be killed 120+ times a week, and set the drops for it accordingly.
Each room (or two) is pretty much 9-man party content, depending on character strength. The teleport to the dragon himself is shown on this map as hall of flames (the video runs past that point).
And this is the hall of flame map after the tp.
And I'm pretty sure this video is from one of the rooms in the hall of flame. This is how your guild would be welcomed if your war enemies knew you were planning to come to the boss (so in theory an hour or two before his minimal respawn).
Alternatively some rooms on the way would just be farmed by the clueless war enemies and your guild would run over them on your way to the boss. Which would trigger a response from those enemies and it would be you who're the welcoming side from that video.
Imo making a full dungeon purely for 40-man raids would be a waste of space because 40-man raids should be rare and epic times rather than something mundane, and, as far as I see it, open world dungeons are somewhat mundane because you spend most of your time there (unless you're a hardcore gatherer/quester).
If you have repeatable (or grindable) 40-man dungeons that have best quality mob drops (they'd have to due to their requirements) - you're dooming any smaller guild on never having the chance to farm them by themselves. While a big guild could easily have several groups that could constantly farm it throughout the day. Obviously small guilds can collaborate on it, but it'd be very difficult to keep having 40 people all online at the same time who also have nothing else to do.
Maybe we're just talking about different types of content again. I see open world dungeons as something that can be grindable, which allows for friction and all that. Do you see them as more of a "we go kill a boss or two in the dungeon and leave" kind of content or smth else?
I was thinking of Baium, the boss that was needed to visit to complete a class quest or something.
The reality of the 5 days +/- 1-8 hrs was it had to fall on a day off AND also spawn when my own clan was online! Correlating the three too 3 months!
I would fully expect there to be one or two.spawn cycles with a turnout like you posted, and that is likely to end in a stalemate.
However, those people wont turn out in those numbers every spawn - people just dont care that much any more. This is basically saying any existing, organized guild shouldn't consider Ashes.
Yes.
You are talking about filler for a PvP game, I am talking about PvE content.
You said that you think it should just be bosses on top of bosses on top of bosses, but that doesn't really work in an open world game. Well, unless there's hundreds of 40-man bosses with short respawns. And while I could maybe see Ashes getting up to that number after a while, I'm not sure if it would be feasible to make that many bosses for release.
We would be in 24 person raids for 12 to 20 hours per week taking on content.
If Ashes wants to attract PvE players, that is the expectation. If they want to make the raid cap 40 people, then they should be providing that amount of content for that size raid.
Or, you know, just make a PvP game.
EQ was more about the pve side, so I think it'd be fair to have 1/2, or at least 1/3, of that time be spent on pvp. Depending on how Intrepid sets up respawn timers around dungeons, a well-coordinated 40-man raid should be able to wipe their enemies once, maybe twice, and start the pve fight. Dungeon (or boss room to be exact) design would have to account for that battle and give either mana regen or hp/mana regen once the "door closes" and before the fight itself, so that the group that stayed alive during the closing of the door would have a proper go at the boss.
If we're talking super hardcore bosses (which I'm sure you are), I'd personally prefer a mechanic that lets the other raid get to the boss immediately if the first raid wipes. Imo this would give the more pve-inclined people a chance to prove their superiority, so even if they lose the pvp for the first rights they still have a chance to fight the boss in case their enemies fail.
Have 10-15 raid bosses with weekly respawns and you'll have yourself around 2h a day of pvx content (which includes the pve content you'd deem good). Another hour would be required for travel, but with some good planning and good coordination, I think that can be cut down somewhat.
There'd also be a ton of bosses for smaller groups and general mobs (if varying difficulty) for prolonged grinding. Obviously the drops would have to be properly balanced across these all versions of pve content, and considering that it all can involve pvp in some way - it'd be PvXey.
There'd be all the other primetime and offtime activities that might let smaller guilds farm some stuff (or at least try), because the bigger guilds would see those activities as more important at the time.
Or, well, I'd see this as a good setup for day-to-day gameplay and an overall gameplay loop. I'd imagine you disagree with this though
The players dig the dungeons themselves, minecraftesque!.. Deeper you go, the hidden veins of trouble or fortune! One day!
The former.
As to a game like Ashes having half the content of a PvE game, doing that would again make Ashes a PvP game.
If the goal is to attract people that prefer PvE but are happy to accept some PvP, then the only thing you have to attract them to the game is PvE. If you have half the PvE of other games, why would they come here?
Having half the content means you are only going to attract those who mostly want PvP but would accept some PvE. If the bulk of your population is only willing to accept PvE, rather than it being a driving force for them, why even have it?
Let's work with this for a minute, and I'll say cool, that's my guild sorted.
With 50k players per server, is it Intrepids intention to only attract 50 PvE players per 50k total players? A total of 0.1%?
If they want more PvE players, where is their content?
This is the second function instancing provides that world instances do not. Making people PvP for all content makes your game PvP.
Given that none of us, not one single person here, has even played the game for a second... No one has seen the game, right?
Why are you so insistent there is not content? How do you know anything about what pve content there will be?
I can understand if you are concerned there wont be enough, but you somehow have convinced yourself (and are working really really hard to convince the rest of us) there IS NO PVE CONTENT.
Why?
I never said there wont be any PvE content.
I have said that what many people are calling PvE content (base population) is in fact just filler and not content at all.
However, I have also talked at length about the bosses in Ashes, which are PvE content (or - should be).
If I am trying to say there is no PvE content as you claim, how do you explain all the times I have talked about the PvE content Ashes will have?
My concern in the portion of the post that you quoted is in relation to there being ENOUGH PvE content, not there being no PvE content.
If the game has a half dozen or so raid boss mobs that are weekly spawns, that will keep my guild half way satisfied. However, it wont d anything at all for any other guild that wants to play Ashes and enjoys PvE as much as we do.
I know you'll say that we are supposed to fight over it, because you do t have an original thought at all in your head. The thing is, that then turns that PvE content that my guild was half way satisfied with in to PvP content, leaving both guilds looking for PvE content with none, but with some PvP.
This is why I have long stated that the way Ashes looks to be going, it is a PvP game, not a PvX game.
Since this piece of communication does not do a great job of conveying your thoughts, I'm going to make an assumption. If my assumption is wrong, feel free to disregard the post and perhaps then communicate a little better.
The assumption I am making is as follows -you think my above post is missing the point of PvX in that players should be fighting for content. To you, I would assume, that is the point.
To that I say (for the several dozenth time), that makes Ashes a PvP MMO, not a PvX one.
L2, Archeage, Albion, Tera, BDO et al are PvP MMO's.
Now, if Intrepid want that for Ashes, that's fine. I spent years playing Archeage, it was an ok game.
However, IF that is what Intrepid want for Ashes, they need to stop calling the game PvX and start calling it PvP.
If they want to call the game PvX, they need to do significantly better at providing players with PvE than the above PvP games do.
My example of 10-15 weekly bosses accounts for 5-6 full raids that fight for the right at the boss at the same time each day, especially if it's 14 bosses a week. Each continent has 1 top lvl top difficulty boss a day every day. Raids will most likely split between them, depending on their composition and knowledge of the boss. If the boss fight takes ~20-30 minutes (with pure wipe mechanics later on in the fight) and the pvp before the boss takes roughly the same amount of time, you'll have several hours of gameplay if the boss is as hard as you say EQ2 top ones were (meaning that after the initial pvp for the first rights, the guilds would pretty much just switch between each other until either one side beats the boss or quits for the day).
And that'll be happening on both continents every day between, potentially, several raids. But even if we keep it to the minimum and say that it's just 2 raids per continent. That's 160 people who literally have their hands full with hardcore content each and every day. Especially if bosses have some rng variety to them so that the ones who've beaten it already can't just do it on repeat w/o any issues.
And that's assuming that those raids don't have guildies that might have to help the raid win the first rights in pvp, so in theory it's even more than 160, but let's just keep it with the minimal numbers.
That would be the content for the best of the best on the server. Outside of that you'd have several bosses for smaller groups (ideally a few dozen), a ton of locations for singular groups (elite mobs or group mobs or small bosses), all the overworld locations for solo players and obviously all the artisan stuff.
All of that content would be either contested or just fully packed, depending on the mob population design and balancing Intrepid goes with. And this would be purely the content that's linked to the pve side of the game in any way - that being mobs and environment in artisans' case. On top of this there'd be caravans and any potential wars/sieges going on, so the more pvp-leaning players will be taken up by that content too (on top of the pvx content).
Imo that seems like enough content for everyone, with said content being exactly the thing that those players would want while also being pvx. And I feel like I might be forgetting something too, so that's maybe not even everything in the game.
I can see why anyone would be curious on the PvE side though if that is their main draw to play the game and wanting enough content to keep them happy and challenged.
It is just one of those wait and see things though as you won't know until alpha 2 how the content density will be perhaps.
I mean, a small fraction of people take on top end raids - but a lot of people take on mid and low tier raid content.
At one point in EQ2, almost 75% of all active accounts had at least attempted a raid bi-weekly or more frequently. While top end raiding can be considered to be somewhat elite, raiding in general in PvE MMO's is mainstream - arguably more mainstream than crafting in MMO's is (in some MMO's this isn't an argument).
I have perhaps not done as good a job as I could have at illustrating that top end raiding is a thing, but so is mid tier raiding, and also low end raiding. All three of these should have content available for the games maximum raid size.
While other sizes are fine, it should be the goal for developers to allow players to form a raiding unit and stick with that unit from entry level raiding up to end game raiding. If a game wishes to provide content for any given number of players (solo, small group, full group, 16 players, 24 players, 40 players) it should strive to offer content across the spectrum for that number of players.
It is essentially unacceptable for a guild to set themselves up for raiding with 16 players because that is the number of people needed for entry level content, only to find that they then need to find 8 more players to progress because content shifted to 24 players, and then needing to find another 16 players because there was a second jump to 40 players.
That is unacceptable. Completely unacceptable.
However, it is perfectly acceptable for a guild to start out raiding with 40 players, and 16 or 24 of those players decide to also run 16 or 24 player content on the side - just as it is acceptable for people that raid 40 player content to also run group content or solo content.
As such, content needs to be built around this. Either support a player count with full content, or don't support that player count.
Or - the other option obviously is that the developer could just add piecemeal content with no coherency to it that players only ever participate in at random, with significantly less organization put in. This is Archeages content, and I have to assume (based on everything I have heard) is also L2's content.
Yeah, I expect this kind of thing to be in the game, but it is PvP content.
If my guild is significantly better at PvE than your guild, but your guild is significantly better at PvP than my guild, who is going to get every kill?
A lot of people say things like "PvX means both at the same time, they shouldn't be segregated", which is absolute bullshit.
If you and I are going to get in to a fight over something, we are probably going to have said fight in a location where there are no mobs to get in the way. Us doing that is the same level of segregating PvP and PvE as instancing is. Comments like the above are an argument to have PvP by itself but not PvE by itself, and nothing more.
My arguments in the past with this have always been that players from games like that don't necessarily need to have WoW style content.
What they DO need, in order to even consider this game, is the knowledge that there will be some content they can run, and then also some content they can fight over.
Give players this, and you will be taking masses (well, tens of thousands) of players from games where all content access is guaranteed, and having them enjoying a game where some content access is guaranteed, and the rest requires you to fight for it.
If you just make people fight for all of it, you simply will not attract those players.
It really is that simple.
I was just giving the example of endgame gameplay loops, because if people are playing the game for a long time, their low lvl encounters will be only a fraction of their overall gametime.
But yes, I agree that there should be raid content at several lvl steps (usually coinciding with gear tiers). Yours. Because as I said, the pvp would only give you the right to attempt the boss first. If you fail, the other group gets to try. And this would be done until someone wins or leaves. Well, that is I'd want it to be that way to keep raiding leaning towards the pve side, while not completely removing pvp from it.
And if my pvp guild can't pve for shit, we ain't ever successfully farming that boss. Which would mean that we'd either team up with a guild who can farm it (might even be yours), and defend that ally against any other guild that might want to do attempts and could potentially be another successful raid team, or we'd just look for another 40 people who'd be better than us at pve and recruit them.
And I'd expect your guild to do the opposite of that. Which would mean that both of our guilds had to look outside of our preestablished groups to achieve a PvX victory. Which, in my eyes, would make both these guilds PvX ones, rather than purely one or the other. And in an ideal world I'd want to have a group of 40 people who can do both, at which point they'd be true PvXers. But my point is exactly opposite. I want the majority of owpvp happening around or for mobs. I don't want gatherers to get ganked (but they obviously will, which is why they need protectors) and imo the only meaningful owpvp is one that happens to determine who has the right to farm high value mobs/boss.
I'd assume that the same locations would also have high value gathering, so in a way it'd be a part of the meaningful owpvp, but it'd happen to prevent someone from gathering rather than purely for looting the gatherer (well, I want it to be that way, obviously it'll probably not be).
And I already gave potential designs of how you could have a strategic pvp fight around hardcore mobs w/o turning it into "defenders always lose because the mob will always only be attacking them".
I want Ashes to meet higher standards of what a pvx game can be. I completely agree that all the pvx game up till now have had trash pve, but that's exactly why Ashes could completely fill that niche of the mmo genre if they succeed at combining the two sides of the spectrum.
Now I don't quite believe that they'll succeed, purely because my own standards are way too damn high, but I'd like them to at least try. And so far Steven seems to want to try, judging by his promises. We just gotta see what exactly he has in mind.
Imagine Ashes level cap is 50.
The game should have raids for characters of level 30 and level 40, then at level 50 there should be easy entry level raids, slightly harder mid tier raids, and then top tier raids.
While it is less important for the lower level raids to support all versions of player count (I would support only 16 or 24 player raids for lower levels, to be honest), the raids at the level cap all need to provide content for all supported player counts.
As a general rule, I am only ever talking about level cap content. While other content is important, it is it's own thing and has it's own reason for existing, and those reasons are informed by the games level cap content (your leveling content should lead in to your end game content).
The only way this would work in practice is if a guild attempts an encounter and fails, they are unable to fight for a second shot at it that spawn cycle.
If a guild is able to come right back and try again, PvP guilds are the only ones that would have a shot.
The issue with this remains one of PvE content for players. If you are fighting other players for a single shot at a mob, that is PvP content.
Yeah, around for sure, but most people (including anyone you are fighting) is likely to want to make sure the fight is happening out of aggro range of mobs.
I'd wager that if you and I are fighting around a raid mob, you would make every effort to not aggro it. Probably even the same if you and I are fighting around group mobs, or densely populated solo mobs.
If you are out of aggro range of mobs, you have segregated PvP and PvE. That PvE might literally be inches off to the side, but due to how computer code works, it may as well be a million miles away.
The only way to do that with PvE content is instances, because players don't exactly respect aggro ranges.
And you can remove the pvp part after the first encounter by having a "full wipe" limitation on player respawn within the boss room. So players in the raid can only respawn once the whole raid is dead. And either have a separate respawn locations that they respawn to or just have the default location be some way outside of the dungeon. And as soon as the first raid wipes, the second can enter the room.
This way you'll have the raiding groups just switching places until someone manages to beat the boss. And any potential "we won't let you get close to the room" pvp part can be still shifted to the pvp part of the guild or mercs or allied guilds. And the enemy would have to PK the whole damn raid if they wanted to stop them. There's a "guild war" alternative to that PKing, but they could've declared a war onto your guild either way, so that part would be present no matter what type of boss it is. This is why I suggested the reagro/dump agro/direct agro mechanics back when we talked about this kind of stuff last time. Again, I want true PvX, so imo there should be player tools that not only allow you to fight around mobs, but even use those mobs to your advantage, while your enemy has potential counters to your actions. So the whole encounter would turn into a much more strategic event that would require a ton of coordination and forethought.
My assumption is that the game will launch with (or will have soon after launch) a system where players need to get that lower tier gear, and are able to upgrade it to a higher tier using drops from the next tier of raid content.
In fact, I would expect there to be several upgrade available to it - though I also don't expect that to be the only top end gear.
In fact - as a bit of a tangent - this is how I'd like to see this specific type of gear set work...
You start off creating the gear using raw materials that are fairly common. This gives you tier A gear.
From there, you can use drops obtained from solo boss mobs to transition that gear set to tier B.
Then you can use drops from easier group bosses to transition to tier C, harder group boss mobs to transition to tier D.
Then you get low tier raid drops and can transition to tier E, then mid range raid drops for tier F and top end raid drops for tier G.
However, for each tier, you can upgrade within in using multiple of the drops used to upgrade it. So, you could get you tier C set by transitioning your tier B set using easier group boss drops, and if you are not up to taking on the harder group bosses yet, you can keep farming those same bosses (there should be many that are appropriate) and instead upgrade your gear to tier C.1. Then get even more and upgrade to tier C.2, , then C.3 and C.4. They could even give the numbered upgrades options of effects on the gear, so that players can somewhat customize their gear past just the stats that the crafting system allows for.
If this is available at all tier, it means all players need to run all content in order to get to the top end gear using this system (which should NOT be the only means of gearing yourself), and when you get to the hardest content you are able to take on, you are able to farm it for eventual upgrades.
To me, if this content is somewhat segregated, it would naturally mean players of differing skill levels segregate themselves in to areas where they are mostly contesting content against others of the same skill level (almost like an organic arena ladder system).
As content, this should exist, and will exist.
However, it is simply not the content type to provide a remedy to any of the issues I have bought up. That content type is the cause of the issues I am bringing up, and so a remedy to those issues would by necessity require a different content type.
Your suggestion from other threads about world instances could solve one of the issues I have bought up, but it does not solve the issue of players actually having content (not PvP - content. Players are not content.) to run.
Yeah, but in a game where these tools exist, a part of being a good PvP'er will be to not get in to PvP in an area where a player could use mobs to kill you.
This is no different to how being a good PvP'er in a game where players can push you off a cliff is to not be in a position where players can push you off a cliff.
I think the problem is with my words usage (which is ironic, considering the discussion we recently had). I shouldn't be using "open world" as much as I do when referencing bosses. I guess "semi-instanced" should work? Maybe world-instanced?
Either way, imo the raid bosses (mainly the 40-man ones) should be in the world instances that I described before.
- There's only 1 boss for the whole world to farm
- only one entrance to his room
- that entrance opens up when the boss respawns and will close after a short period of time if any player enters the room (could be changed to "if a full raid is in the room")
- Until the entrance closes, anyone can enter the room.
- Once the door closes, you can exit through a teleporter/npc (sends you to a preset respawn point outside of the dungeon)
- Before the fight starts there's some mechanic that lets you regen back up to full
- If you die, you can either be resurrected or you must lie on the floor until the full raid wipes, at which point you all respawn in the same place where the teleporter sends you
The boss fight itself could be (and imo should be) as hard as you say EQ2's fights were, because in function the fight is happening in an instance, so everything can be controlled by the devs.So, after that explanation, would you still consider that kind of encounter as not enough pve content (in the context of what I said before, that if you wipe - you just have to wait for the other raid to wipe until you retry)?
And if yes then why? Again, this is where our views are just different. I expect the design of the game to allow me to counter those situations or make them work for my own benefit.
There's mobs around? Fucking use them to your advantage because you have the tools to do so.
Someone's pushing your character off a cliff? There's gotta be either a gliding mechanic or a sliding mechanic or a gripping mechanic or climbing mechanic or anything of the sort to prevent that kind of situation.
Yes, some will obviously try to avoid being in those situations in the first place, but I think that the game should allow you to get out of any situation that is possible within the game (well, to some extent that is). I understand that this might be an unrealistic request, but like I said - my standards for an amazing mmo are high. I can definitely play a good or a normal mmo, but if we're talking what I'd prefer - it's that.
The PvP associated with this encounter does not count towards what a guild moving from WoW or FFXIV would consider when they are deciding if the game has enough content for them to make the jump.
The only thing that matters is how many raid encounters they are able to kill each week.
The assumption should be that each guild should have a dozen or so appropriately difficult encounters per week in order to entice them from a PvE centric game (this is less than those games provide, by a significant margin).
If we assume a server would want 4 guilds killing top end content, 12 further guilds killing mid tier content, and 24 more guilds killing lower tier content (again, all very low numbers - you could potentially add a zero on the end of the last number), that means we want to have 456 encounter kills per server, per week.
Your encounter above makes up one of those kills. It leaves 455 more raid encounters between low end, mid tier and top end to be found somewhere.
It is simply a matter of scale. If we are wanting players from PvE games to come to Ashes, they need that content. Not offering them that content is like trying to get you to play a game labeled as PvX but where you are only allowed to attack one player per week.
You simply wouldn't play that game, it straight up doesn't meet your requirements for what you want in a game.
Put another way, would you play a PvX game if you had to kill 10k mobs in order to have a shot at fighting a player? Would you even consider that a PvX game at that point?
if not, why would we expect that of PvE players?
In most games, if you are in combat you are not able to fly or glide. Pushing people off cliffs was a valid thing to do in Archeage, and so people simply didn't get close to cliffs.
I see no reason at all why this wouldn't be the case if you were playing a game where mobs were able to be used in a similar manner.
A few thousands of those were "purely pve" because those mobs lived in fortresses that your guild had to siege and most of the time (well, on the servers that I played) my guild would be the only one sieging the same fortress at any given time(there were several and I'd usually look for those that were never sieged by other guilds). And this was the best way to upgrade your abilities so I'd be doing this for a few weeks usually (1-2 1-hour sieges every 4 hours). No players in sight.
And all the other mobs had some pvp with players, but I'd call that filler, just as you call literally any non-raid content filler. And so after dozens of thousands of mobs I'd be finally able to have a good chance at fighting in the arena, so I'd go pvp there and it would have the highest quality 1v1 pvp in the game.
And to me L2 is still a pvx game. It's just that, be it just you or your circle of people (or potentially all pvers), I don't differentiate content like that. Anything in the game is content for me. Farming easy mobs, farming hard mobs, farming bosses of any difficulties - all of that is just pve for me. And I'm used to the system where even the easy mobs are valuable to some extent, so it's not like I'm wasting time farming them. And if on top of that pve content I also have pvp encounters (also of any difficulty) - that makes it pvx content.
If literally all mob pvers have the same opinion as you - I'm 99% sure they'll dislike Ashes, because I'm almost as strongly sure that Ashes will not have that amount of that type of content. Hell, I doubt it'll have that even in 2-3 years after release, even if it's super successful. Now, I could be wrong of course, but I somehow doubt that.
I doubt it will have that content either.
Which means it should not consider itself a PvX game, as PvP is CLEARLY the favourite child. It isnt even a close run thing.
Calling a game like that PvX is only a single step short of calling a capture the flag FPS match PvX - because the flag is part of the environment and thus PvX. I mean, you will encounter both PvP and PvE in capture the flag, and it is unlikely you (or your team) will win without participating in both PvP and PvE - since that is all we have heard about Intrepids concept for PvX with Ashes, we have to say that the above FPS CTF match is PvX by Intrepids standards.