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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.
Comments
The thing is, that starts coming down to interpretation, depending on how many material are required to remove the "disabled" "destroyed" status of the weapon and if the "disabling" "destruction" of the weapon resets its enchant, or lowers it back to the safe enchant, or goes back by a single digit, does it retain it's enchanting level?.
Without those informations it's really hard to predict how harsh Ashes OE destruction will be, for example i would consider Ashes' OE Destruction harsher than Lineage 2's OE Destruction if it resets the weapon to +0 and costs more than ~10% of the original materials required to craft it to repair it because Lineage 2's destruction basically gives you a full refund of the weapon destroyed in expensive crystals most of the time.
In the end it doesn't matter to me, as long as it's RNG factor remains, my gambling desires will be met.
Aren't we all sinners?
Not comparing apples with apples.. referring to early L2 where there was subscription only.
Considering on a server with a population of 2-3k, there was only 1 or maybe 2 glowing red weapons.. I think the difficulty to obtain was well balanced.
Weapon never gets destroyed takes away risk and everyone eventually capable of getting one defeats having rarity.
well sure, getting crystals back at least was something. but we also don't know If we will get something back in ashes, probably not. also, you would use some of the same crystals to craft the weapon again, but you needed to get all the other materials. the parts and the recipe could be hard to get, plus u also had to get the gemstones, which were expensive. plus your crafting could fail.
i expect aoc system to not be as harsh, but we are just speculating
yeah but in kr lots of people had lightsabers :P and there has always been rmt in l2
while i agree with you, that if the weapon doesn't get destroyed, everybody will eventually reach max enchant level...it depends how the game is made. you can say the same thing about l2, if you make enough weapons, you will eventually get 1 to +16. however, we have to look at the difficulty in obtaining those weapons or gear.
what if its so difficult to get to max enchant in ashes that you need 100-200 weapons because you only have 0.5% - 1% chance to get to max enchant? and what if making a weapon takes you 1 week or 1 month of farming? we don't know yet. in such a system most people won't make it to max enchant anyways.
also, if you are lucky (and ballsy) enough to over enchant and get your weapon to a high enchant, you should be rewarded for that. however, there are things to consider when it comes to player power. it feels really shitty to die to someone and there's nothing you can really do about it, just because that person "won the lottery" even if you are the better player, your superior tactics get destroyed by f1 spam in a tab targetted game if you don't have gear. if it was a pure action game, things would be different. while you only need to get lucky once with your weapon, i need to get lucky on all 8 pieces of armor and 5 pieces of jewelry to mitigate your damage.
unfortunately, people will quit when a few people get a super high over enchanted weapon, because most people prefer to give up, rather than put in the effort and improve. if you make over enchanting somewhat time and material consuming, but not super rng difficult, people will still get rewarded with power on pve, without screwing up pvp and will have content and things to do in the game.
also consider that people will have to make different gear and weapons for different encounters and different. it wont be like l2 where 1 weapon fits every encounter.
also consider that in l2, while crafting in retail was hard and time consuming, you could always get the best gear by killing bosses, and if you were EXTREMELY lucky lucky (like maybe 1/100000 chance) you could get gear killing mobs as well (and you had hundreds - thousands of people killing thousands of mobs every day).
the only way to get the best gear in ashes is by crafting, and as said by steven, it will be difficult and time consuming. imagine spending 3-4 months getting your gear, then losing it forever in 5 minutes overenchanting. what are you going to do next? probably log off for 2 months and wait for the next patch since gear will become obsolete anyways.
so we have to look at all the systems and how they te up together. its not as simple as saying "completely destroying the gear is better har har"
Its difficult to know right now where the pendulum falls on resource abundance and over enchanting parameters in Ashes.
So yes, it is about how the game itself is made, but tab targetness doesn't have as much of an impact as you might think. Your enemy might have a +16 bow, but you have ultimate evasion and he literally can't hit you. Or your enemy might have a +16 magic mace, but you're a tank with a magic mirror and no jewelry, so the mage dies before you just from hitting you. There are ways of winning against someone who has better gear, even in tab games. People will always quit. Some people would quit just on principle of a single mechanic that they don't like (Dygz probably being the brightest example of that on this forum). Even if you tell people "yes, there's rng in OEing, but the entire OE path at max lvl will only give 5% power to the player so you REALLY DON'T NEED IT" - people will still be complaining about "muh rng" and "waaaah, those people got lucky and they're now stronger than me".
And if you tie OE progression purely to time - you're literally cutting thousands of people out of that progression path. And if it's not only time, but boss/mob farming as well - you're cutting out probably around 98-99% of players, because only the strongest ones will be able to kill bosses enough times to loot what they need and they'll also have the money to buy out any other item.
I doubt that a super lucky casual player who manages to loot some super rare item would care to keep it if a big rich boi from the strongest guild gives the casual player months-worth of hardcore grinding for that item.
And just as you pointed out, Ashes won't have a single viable weapon or a single set, so if a casual tank loots some mega rare spellbook - I doubt he'd go "oh damn, I'd better rebuild my entire character just to fit this spellbook's gameplay".
TL;DR the rich will always be more powerful. Someone will always leave because of that. It all comes down to how Intrepid design their powerlvl scaling.
Just figured you should know for general conversations.
The rule: "As an outside observer/reading a decision from BDO Devs before 2020, no matter how bad/dumb it SOUNDS, it's always worse."
If the decision doesn't come straight from Je-seok Hang himself, don't trust it.
And as always, I'll remind that the issue people seem to have with OE RNG is 'losing progress', not 'RNG'. Maybe that's me interpreting the data poorly/with bias, but I still haven't actually full-parsed that thread yet.
Part of your example doesn't make full sense though...
Sure this is still power scaling/design related, but basically, if you have a +16 weapon and it doesn't hit 'Ultimate Evasion' sets, and those are NOT 'full sets of +15 evasion gear', I doubt that situation would last long.
My point is that you shouldn't consider that part of 'skill', that's part of balance. The Devs are directly controlling who wins there, the player who chooses to make the Evasion build is demonstrating only the skill of 'figuring out which way the Devs made them win' and the complaint will just be on the other side.
Source: BDO. Again.
But you've said before that you, theoretically, can outdodge super high lvl mobs even if you don't have the gear. Doesn't that make it action? Or is pvp way different from pve and there's always at least one ability that will always hit? Maybe that is the case, but as James pointed out, L2 returned a pretty big chunk of your progress to you. If OE methods are super expensive and a failed OE just removes all the enchant stages - you've lost progress. And I sure as hell hope Ashes doesn't have a "you failed OE? Oh, don't worry little baby nothing has changed, so just keep OEing". This is more about L2's very particular design. I wasn't talking about builds cause L2's gear didn't really have "builds". A few sets of gear gave you a tiiiiny bit of evasion but that's not enough to overcome the accuracy of an archer.
I was talking about this UE
Most of the time, at full buff, archers wouldn't have enough space for accuracy buffs, but their default one would be roughly enough to hit dagger classes. But with this, pretty much 99% of their attacks would miss. I've played on a private server with a shitton of whales with +50 weapons (private server "feature") and quite often dagger classes would be the ones to defeat those kinds of players even w/o a super OEd weapon.
Obviously this wasn't a skill that was available to everyone, but I was just saying that even tab target games have ways of defeating people who appear to be too powerful.
And yes, if we're talking skill-wise, action games would provide even more ways of defeating those players, but if even BDO isn't action enough to prevent this - I dunno what kind of game would. Maybe NW allows lvl1 players to kill max lvl ones (same difference in power lvls)?
Oh you meant the actual ability Ultimate Evasion (the FFXI term is no better, 'Perfect Dodge', so I guess it's funny both ways).
Anyways, quick versions...
BDO has melee class abilities that hit a 180+ degree cone 10-15 units in front of them while granting Super Armor. You've probably seen certain posters mention things like this. You can outrange these, but it's almost always an active retreating dodge ability to do so.
Or you could build high Evasion and hope their Accuracy was bad and their giant wave slash just missed you because, y'know. Evasion stat. (note that I personally have no problems with this situation in a lower TTK game, but I'd prefer 'less damage' instead of 'miss' for Abilities).
Seriously, how hard is it to make Evasion and block stats result in 'glancing blows and reduced damage instead', and tie 'cone position' to that? (I'm whining, I know how hard this actually is, it's almost entirely dependent on their Networking solution)
Binary hit/miss in a high speed no-knockdowns game is no fun either. Down with binary RNG of all forms!
Probably those who would lose fights and not able to secure high tier resources will have to swap to lower tier armor.
I like that winers will win something beside just the fights.
yeah you know how people beat daggers with UE? they just use stuns, which land on you even if the damage doesn't, and they just stop attacking you to not remove the stun and then stun you again until UE is over, unless a mage hits u, which is fine because the stun doesn't get removed (which sucks but hey its l2)..then its on 10 mins cd and you get 1 shotted. also remember ue is 40% chance of dodging skills..not 100%
I don't remember if tanks reflect was 100%, but hey it was still a high chance for the mage to kill himself...or, they would just run and not attack you for 10 seconds? a mage with a +10 weapon beats a tank with a +0 weapon. a tank with a +10 weapon beats a mage with a +10 weapon
have u ever seen that video of a gladi called Giccobe murdering an entire guild during a siege by pressing only 1 button over and over to cast sonic storm because he had a +16 duals with 300 element? and his TSS doing 16k damage, that's as much as a dagger critstab without the downsides of being a dagger
that beats the skill element of the game. he clicks you and you die, nothing you can do. your guild would need to make +16 armor for everybody to beat 1 person with a +16 weapon. and you cant focus him down because he had 20k hp and 10k cp plus ol + bp plus other people are attacking you or your healers so you have to deal with them as well.
in tab targeting games, aside from a few ultimate skills, your strategy gets beaten down by f1 spam. I'm not saying OE in AOC should be easy and people shouldn't be rewarded for it, but not to the point of removing every element of strategy just because you got lucky on a dice roll.
balance time and RNG duh
Even so, there's still a big difference.
Yesterday in BDO (probably subconsciously spurred by this forum) I just enchanted everything I have on my Kuno on a whim with minimal backups.
Nuked it all for no real reward, ofc, because that's how I roll. So now I'm at like... 60% of the power level from before, and most of that is from 'stuff they gave me for doing Season stuff' and my PEN Shoes.
But the point is, I could 'on a whim' do that BECAUSE I don't lose the whole item. I 'downgrade'. It wasn't necessarily SMART to do this without backups, but if I wanted to do it WITH backups... I'd need to make the backups. Who has time for that?
My point is (mostly @NiKr), technically I'm contributing MORE to the degrading of gear supply on the server (or would be, but this is BDO, so I'm actually working around that with barely any effort) because the 'just delevel' makes me MORE WILLING to just go 'eh I can go without 40% of my power for a while, that might even be a little challenging, but if I SUCCEED wow that will be nice, GO DICE ROLL!
But I didn't do it for the Accessories.
Because I can lose those. And they'll just be gone.
That's the psych profile you're dealing with. I'll randomly tap even my mainhand from TET back down to PRI on a whim, but my BELT? Nah, I might LOSE that.
But yes, there was definitely a period where glads could do quite a bit of damage, especially if they had superior OE and superior elemental enchantments. But irrc that was maybe an update or two out of several years of absolute gimpness, and even then the power mainly came from OE, so "normal" glads were still kinda weak.
And I do also hope that Intrepid doesn't let class balance (OEs included) to get quite to those kinds of lvls. This is where our views probably differ a bit. I want most people to not try and OE their stuff. I want them to think "nah, that's way too risky for me". Because I know that there'll be a few crazy people that go "fuck it, I'm all-in until I get to the max limit".
The majority of players not OEing their stuff would mean more gear at a certain tier. But unless Intrepid decide to counteract that with a heightened mob spawn or rates on needed gatherables - having more people on the same tier of progress means a ton of pressure on the repair requirements of that tier.
The game will have gear decay even outside of OEs, so the server overall will always need mat churn. It's just that you can have it through purely repairs or through "OE your stuff and keep feeding it mats until you reach your goal".
L2 had the "decay churn" in the form of 60% recipes, while BDO has it in the form of endless OEing on weapons/armor. And in this context I'm curious as to how many people in BDO have PEN accessories. Is it only uberwhales? Is it the crazies? Is there even anyone? Cause BDO has a younger generation of players, this would tell me whether the majority's attitude towards L2-like OE mechanics is the same or not.
"The game keeps adding guaranteed methods of getting such gear, even for gear that is definitely not necessary to do this for which could be left alone."
I do have a semi-anecdotal datapoint though, related to the Belgium thing I mentioned prior.
There was a discussion on an official BDO stream that was the culmination of a community issue.
EU Players don't Enchant Accessories. They also enchant gear much less.
To the point where they were going to make some modifications to the EU server (instead they released an easier source of accessories through actual content, and improved the number of Free Logins that just give you gear).
The reason for this is that EU players are 'trained' by their culture, etc, apparently, to calculate odds on things like that in games. It's 'well known enough' how predatory lootboxes are, that it makes people look harder at even RNG systems that don't involve RL cash (or only involve it indirectly).
Basically, Western Europeans apparently didn't like the odds of Enchanting so they didn't do it. The result was that the server supply of high-enchant gear for other people to buy dried up almost entirely.
Note, this has NOTHING to do with the supply of 'stuff you can enchant with'. In fact, it turned out (as explained/alluded to on a later stream) that most of the people who wanted this 'fixed' didn't actually want an increase in supply of accessories at all. They just wanted OTHER people to do the enchanting so they could buy the items, because they didn't want to take the risk of doing it themselves.
Everyone knows that Enchanting is just playing the lottery for someone else, once you have your pieces, so EU apparently just didn't do it. This also changed their farming habits, because they wouldn't farm in areas where the money would come from Accessories dropped.
Their server culture was apparently entirely different because they have such a different response to RNG enchanting, and I can't say with certainty how different OTHER than 'the fact that the Community Leads acknowledged the issue and said that the Devs were seriously looking into solutions' and then AGAIN when the 'solutions' were implemented, basically saying 'ok we realize that your issue was not supply, it's just the culture, we'll look into different solutions'.
Since THEN the changes have been 'just give people more free accessories and put the best ones in only the top level areas' and 'make them drops from instanced bosses that spawn per Family'.
You can decide what that 'means' to you. I found it interesting back then. Their trajectory hasn't changed much since.
Latest update to the game?
"Cloud Accessories". New, free Almost-BiS accessories with easy enhancement options.
Accessories in BDO are almost 50% of your character power, depending on how you calculate a certain thing.
I can't find the data on 'number of players with PEN accessories' apparently. I feel like another official stream had this data a year or more ago but I unfortunately have the 'benefit' of most people I talked to about this stuff before Ashes 'also tracking it' or 'just trusting me and not asking for source' so I would just remember the trends.
Honestly I'm going right back to that as soon as TL drops. No offense to you (especially since you ALSO don't generally 'ask for the receipts') but that sort of thing just ends up feeling silly when you're as arrogant as I am.
A good 'hubris check' I suppose.
Archeage had an over enchant type system (regrading) that had item loss as a potential result as you got to higher tiers.
What this resulted in was that most people would regrade items up to the point where item loss started to be possible, and then simply stop there.
However, this meant that those of us with the will to push on past this point were able to achieve some reasonable gains that others simply weren't willing to achieve.
Those of us that would degrade past that point of potential item loss would almost invariably simply play the odds. We would make dozens of the item we wanted to regrade/over enchant, and we would then regrade them all in one go. It may be that you would spend a month acquiring the items to do all of this, and then end up with nothing at the end, but it also may be that you would end up with an item that was 15% better than any item 90% of the player base would ever own.
To me, the key thing with the system in that game was that the top level regrade had about a 10% chance of success, meaning that it would take literally thousands of items (statistically speaking) to get to that point. This meant that the notion of going for this was simply not entertained by players, and instead players would just go for the risk they were comfortable with.
Because the game had potential for both loss and fairly large downgrading of items via various upgrading mechanics it had, people very quickly learned you dont attempt these things on gear you are using. As such, I dont think I ever saw anyone complaining about losing progress via the many item upgrade systems the game had, even though there was a real loss factor involved.
To me, it's when there is less of a loss factor that these complaints become an issue. Sure, in BDO you may not stand to lose some items due to failed OE, but that leads people to attempt it more, and complain about loss of progress when it happens. It leads to greater expectation that they have to OE, where as with a more punishing system, there is no expectation at all past the point where item loss becomes a factor (some people didnt even get that far in Archeage, to be clear, as even that had a fairly high cost associated with it).
The funny thing about Archeage was that ship components could also use the regrading system. However, instead of there being a grace period where it is easier and faster then increasing in difficulty and potential for loss as with other gear, ship components had a flat 50% success/destruction ratio. This quickly lead to the expectation for ships being that everything was maxed out.
Basically, different versions of the same system lead to vastly different player expectations. I personally would rather a system where players are free to decide their own level of risk, and those around them be generally accepting of that without peer pressuring them in to going higher.
To me, the way to achieve that is to have an increasing difficulty so that achieving the cap is not only unreasonable, it is unimaginable. When people cant even imagine hitting the cap, they have no option other than to make their own decision on how much they want to risk.
So w/o any concrete info it does seem that general trends haven't changed all that much. And the recent popularity of gacha games and lootboxes (within general masses that is) does seem to imply that majority isn't necessarily super opposed to RNG, and it's mainly the hardcore gamers who see through all that bullshit (and apparently EU is full of those people
As I said, no way to know. I currently believe personally that the culture matters. I didn't read Neurath's post before now, but it checks with the data and trends I have from the years of tracking Console BDO.
The EU thing, I'm almost certain is literally just culture. The Community Leads themselves basically said so.
To the effect of:
"The Devs can't do anything about EU stuff because it's just the way EU players are, if you want stuff just enchant it yourself."
Also, to be clear, and the reason I am suspicious of your conclusion, is that they don't usually add new stuff that is 'harder to get'. They add Easier or 'Just given to you'. Sometimes this is 'baseline' for the usual reason, but quite often, it's not (or it is establishing a new baseline).
I'm not really concerned if Ashes does this, since this stuff is always, in some way, beneficial to the rich/ahead players anyway. Even if you give me 'free stuff', if I'm ahead, I figure out a way to profit off it, since it means that at SOME point I can do less work in one place.
The issue, if anything, is churn/nicheness. If RNG OE is important to the feeling of a game and 'having it become more niche' is worth doing that, then great, go for it. I'll definitely be happy to watch and track the outcomes.
One of the main draws that BDO has, though, which matters a lot and honestly I often forget about... is that FOR a PvE player, it's a VERY PvE game. You just ignore PvP situations 90% of the time. I think Dygz was noting that he basically never got attacked.
I get attacked about... once or twice a month now, if that. Depending on where I am, I ignore it. OWPvP in BDO is 'not a thing' for most people.
I think that's what I'm trying to get at here? The 'hey just don't OE too high, it's fine' people are ALSO likely to 'just not interact with some of the core principles of Ashes', in my opinion, if the subset of people who ARE interacting with it and succeeding are also 'winning'. Resulting in a gameplay type, combined with the Corruption rules and ability to attack people while they are doing their PvE, that seems unhelpful. That's what people often bring up in these threads when they are complaining about 'just losing to someone because they got better RNG'. It's not even that it is demotivating, it's that it can, for some, make the experience itself 'empty'.
tl;dr Ashes sounds to me like it is trying to be too overall competitive to be compatible with RNG OE Item Destruction and not be an even more niche game.
But recent decisions seem to be funneling the 'competitive' parts of it into particular spaces, so maybe not.
And with the majority of people hating rng, especially on the context of lost progress - I'm almost sure that Intrepid will go down a gentler route of OEing.
I'm also fairly sure that this majority will only become bigger with time, because once Alpha2 comes online there's gonna be a shitton of new people seeing the game, hearing people like Asmon pushing the "comfortable" design, and will definitely start yelling at Intrepid to change things for the easier/more-pve-friendly. And at this point my pessimism is just hoping that owpvp won't become fully opt-in
It's moreso that BDO shifted to a style of obtaining gear that suits PvE players and has a more limited Enhancement Item.
The best way to explain it is that almost all gear is now easier to get by playing the game more in a natural way instead of OE, and BDO is such a 'give people free stuff for logging in' game that I literally can't keep up with all the stuff I get, playing as a casual observer.
I get more loot for logging into that game than I have ever got in ANY game.
There's loot for logging in, more loot for logging in 30 minutes later (you can also PLAY for 30 minutes but I'm on Console so why do that?) and more for another 30 minutes later but that's literally 'playing an RNG dice roll board game for no reason to see if you get cool stuff'.
Which brings us back to the reminder of 'BDO is PROBABLY not the main reason people hate RNG OE'/'if it's the reason, people are going to be quite upset if Item Destruction OE is added'.
OE RNG causes feelings of 'emptiness' for me, idk what it is like for other people. It is an 'empty' part of the game. I'd have joined that 'no Enhance' army on EU servers, especially if everyone 'collectively agreed to just not do it'.
But then people eventually ask for more alternate fun content with guaranteed rewards so they can have progression (that majority you speak of). The thing is, games seem to be able to provide this. So I end up going 'hey can we just have proper content instead of the Destruction part of OE?'
MMOs these days are WEIRD. The main thing is that right now, I see Ashes as not 'the savior of the Genre' but 'just another weird mishmash of conflicting ideas'. I'm sure TL will be too and the only reason I don't know that yet is that they didn't reveal it all.
I'm kinda interested in Palia, purely because it's trying to go directly opposite of where most mmos go. I guess the latest WoW update kinda went there too, judging by Dygz' comments, but from what I've heard the update itself wasn't that popular (though there's like 10 different reasons for that).
And I'm definitely waiting to see what Riot will do, cause they're known to "perfect" a genre, on top of being the most fair to their players.