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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.
Power Progression (To Infinity and Beyond?)
Craiken
Member
How do you want your character's power level to increase as you play an RPG? This post is intended to explore different options.
I've always considered increasing my character's power (i.e., experiencing vertical power progression) an important and rewarding part of the genre. I might start outside my home city with a rusty sword and a couple of basic skills, but I don't want to stay that way forever. I want to explore the world and fight monsters, gaining new skills and better gear along the way. Eventually, tasks that were impossible at the beginning become doable. By gaining power, I unlock more opportunities in the game.
But how fast should a character gain power? And should the rate of improvement change as time goes on? Here are some options I've seen...
Option #1 - Linear with Cap
With this method, character power increases steadily until progress stops. This is usually achieved by means of a level cap. Characters might still be able to improve in some ways (e.g., learning how to do different types of damage) but their absolute power level is limited. Guild Wars 2 is famous for this style of progression (though I can't say I've played it).
Option #2 - Linear Forever
With this method, character power increases steadily forever. Games like this do actually exist, but the method doesn't lend itself well to an MMO because new players will be hopelessly behind. However, this could be remedied via level boosts or other catch-up mechanisms. Content creation would have to be very fast (probably automated) to continue providing players with challenges.
Option #3 - Exponential
This method starts with slow power gains that gradually ramp up. This is generally considered un-fun and reserved for real-life investment banking.
Option #4 - Asymptotic
This method provides strong growth in character power early on. Improvements are fast at first, but then they slow way down. Character power approaches a limit that it can never exceed. This is like EVE's system for faction standings. Note: You could modify this method slightly to produce logarithmic growth instead. That gives a similar graph but doesn't have a hard limit.
Option #5 - Stop and Go
Any of the previous methods can be combined together. This is how WoW's expansions worked for a long time (at least until I stopped paying attention). Each expansion opened up a new level of power that greatly exceeded the previous expansion's. Old content becomes trivial and often obsolete.
So what do you think? Which system would you like to see in Ashes of Creation?
I've always considered increasing my character's power (i.e., experiencing vertical power progression) an important and rewarding part of the genre. I might start outside my home city with a rusty sword and a couple of basic skills, but I don't want to stay that way forever. I want to explore the world and fight monsters, gaining new skills and better gear along the way. Eventually, tasks that were impossible at the beginning become doable. By gaining power, I unlock more opportunities in the game.
But how fast should a character gain power? And should the rate of improvement change as time goes on? Here are some options I've seen...
Option #1 - Linear with Cap
With this method, character power increases steadily until progress stops. This is usually achieved by means of a level cap. Characters might still be able to improve in some ways (e.g., learning how to do different types of damage) but their absolute power level is limited. Guild Wars 2 is famous for this style of progression (though I can't say I've played it).
Option #2 - Linear Forever
With this method, character power increases steadily forever. Games like this do actually exist, but the method doesn't lend itself well to an MMO because new players will be hopelessly behind. However, this could be remedied via level boosts or other catch-up mechanisms. Content creation would have to be very fast (probably automated) to continue providing players with challenges.
Option #3 - Exponential
This method starts with slow power gains that gradually ramp up. This is generally considered un-fun and reserved for real-life investment banking.
Option #4 - Asymptotic
This method provides strong growth in character power early on. Improvements are fast at first, but then they slow way down. Character power approaches a limit that it can never exceed. This is like EVE's system for faction standings. Note: You could modify this method slightly to produce logarithmic growth instead. That gives a similar graph but doesn't have a hard limit.
Option #5 - Stop and Go
Any of the previous methods can be combined together. This is how WoW's expansions worked for a long time (at least until I stopped paying attention). Each expansion opened up a new level of power that greatly exceeded the previous expansion's. Old content becomes trivial and often obsolete.
So what do you think? Which system would you like to see in Ashes of Creation?
2
Comments
Each expansion would give an alternative way to get to the 90th percentile of power, while also pushing the ceiling of power by ~10%. And those alternative ways will be faster than the previous versions, but staggered by 1 tier, so if the max tier in Update 1 is 5 then in Update 2 all gear up to tier 4 will get an faster alternative way of acquisition and Upd2 would add a tier 6.
With overenchantment the previous top tier would be more powerful than the basic max tier of the next expansion, but OE would obviously take huge amounts of money/resources and would require constant heavy upkeep.
Imo, this way all the previous top content would still remain valuable, because in time people would just start OEing older gear (because more and more people would be able to clear it, due to higher tiers of gear), which would be on par with newest shit, but would be more available than the stuff that comes from the hardest most contested bosses around. It worked this way in L2 and I liked it quite a bit
edit: oh, also, you can keep adding and removing loot tiers from previous bosses to keep them even more relevant, if you want. I'm sure the pve side of the playerbase would complain so I doubt Intrepid would do it, but I'd be fine with that.
I'm trying to understand the proposal. Do individual characters decrease in power when a new expansion comes out? Or do they keep their current power and increase up to the new, 10% higher limit?
I'll take 'role based tradeoffs' whenever I can.
Since I always view power as directly relative to whatever it is you're supposed to be fighting at that 'level' and never have a reason to 'go back to things below that level to fight them with more power', only 'new cooler abilities'...
I CAN accept a game where I am just making tradeoffs the whole time. For some games, this IS what you do as soon as the leveling phase is over anyway, and many such games, once the game is decently understood, just let you speedrun or even skip leveling up entirely.
There's a tendency in those games to simply treat any part of leveling as just 'the tutorial', or almost to the end of that process, anyway. If the game is telling me a story in which my character is growing in strength, then I appreciate it. Otherwise I sort of agree with this assessment.
This isn't to say that I don't like the idea of leveling up, but I view it as 'experiencing a game', as in, 'real experience'. I don't want to fight the same 3 mob types for 50 levels because it's the fastest way to get to the 50th level to then 'do real stuff'.
I want 'fighting each mob' to be a different experience, and each time I learn to fight a new one I get stronger as a player overall, or I refine my understanding of my role or something I like to do.
Therefore based on all that rambling...
I'll take asymptotic, I think. Unsurprising given the sorts of games I play/build. But I don't care, and I think that whatever most MMO players value the most, or whatever makes the game most healthy for the style of playerbase it has, should be the one used.
As for what I actually EXPECT from Ashes... peaks and valleys. You get good gear, you eventually have to stop using it because it's too hard to repair because the Metro that unlocked the dungeon that let you have that gear got razed and now the dungeon and hence the drop for repairing the gear is gone and you earn new gear.
But havng rebirth!
Each rebirth would not make you powerful, but it should expand other stuff like:
So the quality of life should be better if you are reborn and I would not like seeing people more powerful in any way, power should be capped
What I meant by the 90th percentile is that any new player would be able to farm up to the previous top tier of gear faster because there would now be a different way to do it.
Here's an example.
- In update 1 there's 5 tiers of gear representing 20% of "power" each
- there's however many ways to get any given tier. Let's say there's 3 for each one except the top one (the legendaries)
- in update 2 there's now 6 tiers of gear, with the first 5 tiers representing 18% and the 6th representing 20%, adding up to "110%" as compared to the first update
- tiers 1-4 now have 5 ways to acquire them, with the 2 new ones being a bit faster
- repeat these steps in each expansion
By "tiers" I mean "whatever you can wear at particular stages of the leveling process". So, say, in update 1 at lvl30 you had a quest that would give you gear, a few bosses that would drop it directly and mats for crafting, and several mob locations who would drop mats at low chances.In update 2 you'd have those 3 previous ways to get gear and would now, not only have more gear choice overall at your level, but also 2 new ways of getting it. One could be tied to your profession and another to religion or some other social organization. Time-wise these would take a bit less effort than the first 3 methods.
With proper balancing (maybe even mid-expansion one), you could change those acquisition timers around. The mobs that drop mats could become more plentiful for a while or the bosses could drop more full items, or the quest could get an additional reward to entice its completion.
Ah, I see now. From an individual character's perspective, their power is capped for a while, but then it can grow again when a new expansion comes out. I agree that increasing the power cap by a relatively small amount would be nice. It felt wrong for people to be able to solo WoW's raid bosses from previous expansions.
That won’t matter much, @NiKr … remember the best loot is only tied to crafting and legendary world bosses.
But, we do know Intrepid intends a Stop & Go leveling system with expansion content.
Will we be able to test level power after the initial cap?
Probably … but that won’t happen until the first expansion is released (on the test server) after launch.
You can be level 70, but if you go to an area that is for levels 8-12 your stats will go down temporarily to the same as a level 12, but still having the skills of a level 70
GW2 is has done many things right, we gotta always remember that
Cause, if we assume that best (or at least great) gear requires a few weeks (if not months) of farming and then needs constant upkeep to sustain itself - you'd be on a constant treadmill of farming any and all versions of best gear that's in the game. Mainly because you never know when what you said might happen.
If you lived in a metro and managed to farm its dungeon and some other related bosses to get a full set of great gear - when the metro falls your gear will be fucked. And knowing that, you'd have to either stock up on repair mats for your previous (not so great) gear set or just go to another metro and start farming shit there, in hopes of that metro not falling if yours does.
And that would also take you several weeks. And you'd now be dependent on 2 metros. Well, that is if you even can farm that metro, cause it obviously has its own top bois who're farming its locations.
All of this is definitely up my alley, mainly because I'm used to farming the same stuff over and over, but, if I understood you correctly, you'd dislike this kind of system because it might make you fight the same or even lower lvl mobs again and again.
L2 had boss drops in later updates that were exact same as they had been at game's release (at least afaik). And the bosses themselves didn't change all that much either. And as Azherae pointed out, some people wouldn't want to keep fighting the same old mobs time and time again just to farm some piece of gear.
I think my point didn't come across correctly if this is what it sounds like.
So let's see if that's true.
1. I don't mind fighting the same mobs, I mind 'the game making me overleveled so that the fun and challenge of fighting them is gone' (this applies only to PvE games with real challenges)
2. I would expect that I would simply do what I do in BDO. I don't actually keep my progression in that game with any seriousness. I farm some area for a while and when I want to go back to a lower level one, I attempt to enhance gear. It invariably fails and weakens me until I feel like enchanting it up again.
Except that in this form, I wouldn't lose the gear, I would still have it IF something hard appeared that required it. I would just never use it outside of that situation.
I just EXPECT that Ashes' design will FORCE some people to play more like I do now, which will make it 'more acceptable', which will also mean more people are willing to do it and the balance of the game won't be based around 'top level players with their perpetually rising strength'.
You might ask 'why don't I just fight things with less gear on'. In some games, your abilities/muscle memory/cooldowns are tied to gear buffs and those things are part of specialization moreso than 'raw power'. But in some cases that IS what I do. My Rathalos/Rathian Hunting sets in MHW are both downgrades. One for when there's another actually dangerous Monster around just in case, and another that is just gauntlets and no other armor (the expansion made this unnecessary by giving me stronger versions of them to fight so I just use the other set all the time now).
tl;dr if I have to go back to a previous farming spot but I also have to use roughly the same gear that I used then, then I'm happy, not sad.
Then I hope the masses are ok with regrinding the same spots. Though considering the entirety of the mmo genre, I don't think there's been a single game that didn't have you do that. Maybe EQ2 is close, but from what I understood from Noaani's posts, there you just grinded the failed attempts at bosses rather than just beat the boss again and again.
In other words, as long as the content itself is fun, people will most likely not mind.
But the head below the hair is missing.
People will be tempted to chose what they liked before.
The question should be "Which system can work better for AoC?"
And that means to identify the main target audience and "the others"
Truly a concept that reflects Lineage 2's Gear/power progression, always maintaining older gear relevant through overenchanting, sadly this concept was broken during The Kamael version where only S Grade and S80 Dynasty gear could have element stones applied to them(then Masterwork gear and PvP improvement for those in Gracia Part 1), heavily nerfing gear A-Grade and lower grade gear, a terrible move from NCsoft.
Aren't we all sinners?
It's a game with PvP. Characters need to reach a power level where they're not meaningless relatively fast. Not equal, but strong enough to defend themselves and able to participate in things like caravans, node and castle sieges, and other activities against players.
RPGs concentrate too much on numerical increase of power. Maybe it's my tabletop pen and paper RPGs influence butting in, but another kind of power is the reputation of your character. Soft power. There was more than a few gold coins and potential loot for defeating the band of goblins threatening the village: you'd get the villagers gratitude, special treatments and privileges. Do something for the king and many doors would open. Some implementations of this concept have been tried in MMORPGs. EverQuest's huge factions system allowed you to change how mobs would react to your character. Kill enough Gnolls and the guards would tolerate you, kill some more and the merchants would allow you to buy their wares. Star Wars Galaxies' imperial rank allowed you to have a stormtroopers squad, even an AT-ST! So far, we know that social organizations in AoC will provide that sort of progression. I just wish it was considered, by the players and devs, as important as the numbers in the excel sheets and so implemented in as many ways as possible.
In a way, players have implemented this through guilds interactions, politics and alliances. But it's usually disconnected from the game environment (NPCs) and although it's fine for the social oriented players, for the less social ones, this kind of influence is, if technically not out of reach, very annoying to meddle with. Personally, guild drama turns me off so much I'd rather go without.
Yet, as far as power is concerned, I would go so far as to say that at some point, there should be no personal progression, all gains should be through the benefits of your node's progression. Collective rewards if you will. And this kind of global reward was somewhat done in the past! Dark Age of Camelot had relics which granted a bonus to all members of the realm. Gaining access to Darkness Fall (dungeon) was also a realm effort. Node progression will do that, and more. Gear will need repairs, nodes will need both progression and maintenance if not rebuild due to sieges and world events. So there will always be a need to do the usual content. I know I know, maintenance is not sexy. Everyone prefer to talk about new projects than the maintenance of the roads or sewer system. Is there a place for adulting in games?