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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.
Is there enough 24/7 structured PvP available?
Uboon
Member, Alpha Two
The only structured PvP that is not time restricted, not limited to server prime-time (castle & node sieges & related fights) and not occasional (caravans,) is Node Wars and Guild Wars. From the wiki: "These can be declared at any time, but the quest objectives will only spawn during server prime-time, but players can kill each other at any time during the war (not only during server prime-time)."
So to always have PvP available a player will need to be part of a constantly waring node and/or guild.
I have not mentioned Naval PvP because that is 'between ships' according to the wiki, although players can use ranged skills. Nor am I considering corruption as that is likely small scale roamers at best.
So to get as much of an open-world PvP fix as I do on the GW2 WvW maps, I need to join a constantly waring node and/or guild. Right/Wrong/Good/Bad?
So to always have PvP available a player will need to be part of a constantly waring node and/or guild.
I have not mentioned Naval PvP because that is 'between ships' according to the wiki, although players can use ranged skills. Nor am I considering corruption as that is likely small scale roamers at best.
So to get as much of an open-world PvP fix as I do on the GW2 WvW maps, I need to join a constantly waring node and/or guild. Right/Wrong/Good/Bad?
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For sure the arena will suck, just like all arenas in all other games, I played as much arena as I could in every game I played.
When you finally learn about the meta game in every arena, then you come to the realization that the arenas are bad. Plus, if there are participation prizes this will be the doom of it.
I am not so sure. Consider just Castle Sieges. There are 5 castles each with 3 castle nodes. One of the 3 castle nodes is sieged each week then the main castle on week 4. Sieges have a max 1000 players (ie 500v500) and last for 2 hours (wiki says only 1.5h but I am being generous). So that is 5,000 players per week or 10,000 hours of available server wide PvP time per week. If each server only has an absolute population of 10,000 (and there would be more to allow the server to fill up the 10,000 concurrent slots), then Castle Sieges alone would provide an average of 1 hour of PvP per week per player. How could it be more based on the figures in the wiki and my maths!? And in practice this would be less for many players as the defending guilds would be repeat attendees.
Even allowing for the Castle Siege NPC generated caravans carrying tax at weekends to one of each castle's nodes and the small, short duration objective-based battles around the main siege, the average hours per week of PvP would rise to only around 2.0h (this extra hour is guesswork sorry).
So 2 hours per week on average, gated by prime-time and weekends, and that is if I signup and attend every Castle Siege and related event.
Is there enough 24/7 structured PvP available?
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It's an owpvp nmo, with real conflict of interests due to farming and leveling.
It doesnt need to provide you with an outlet for safe pvp.
What you call structuted, I call boring, predictable, pointless, lobbied team v team match.
The very point of having structured PvP (or, one of them, at least) is so that it happens when people are likely to be online.
If you log on to your server at 3am server time, you simply should not be expecting any structured PvP at all.
Yeah I tried to run the maths on Node Sieges to get the hours of available server wide PvP time per week. But there are quite a few unknowns. Probably a lot more than Castle Sieges, but still time restricted, limited to server prime-time and occasional.
I agree and hope that Node and Guild Wars will be frequent, but that's up to us right! So to always have PvP available a player will need to be part of a constantly waring node and/or guild.
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Objectives will only spawn during prime time.
Yes true, my use of the word 'structured' is misleading. I think I meant objective based PvP. My perspective is from open-world PvP as I experience on the GW2 WvW maps. There is always a camp, keep or castle to fight over, except at 3am perhaps. I am not referring to BGs (sorry to @George_Black for the confusion) as I do not like those much either.
So where do I find some 'objective based fights' when the structured Castle/Node Sieges are not ongoing? Not Caravans, but something always open for the casual or nonprime-time roamer / skirmisher?
Think of my question as, 'what will all the lovers of GW2 WvW do when they try AoC?' There is going to be a lot of down time as they search for objective based PvP groups to fight, compared to what they are used to.
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You're probably right. I think I can adjust to that. But having roamed GW2 WvW these last few years it may take some adjustment on my side. I'd like there to be a bunch of towers or little forts in AoC that anyone can fight over any time really, as a distraction or for that PvP skirmishy fix.
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Again, in Ashes, you dont.
Objective based PvP in most games (including GW2) doesnt actually matter. The rest of the game will carry on without it just fine.
In Ashes, objective based PvP matters (this is the actual point of it). Players stand to lose homes cities and castles from it.
As such, developers dont want to leave the window open for one guild to organize beforehand to log in at some specific non-prime time point and decimate a rival node or guild.
As such, all objective based PvP happens in the prime time window.
Players can kill each other at any time during the war (not only during server prime-time).[3]
There will be decimation - it will just be unofficial lol.
You wish
But you know, I am still left desiring some towers or little forts to mindlessly squabble over, any time of the day or night.
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Why are you after something very limiting such as 24/7, non consequence pvp?
Why does AoC has to have what eso and GW2 have, when its own PvP is a million times more fulfilling.
Have you ever experienced unplanned pvp?
Have you ever decided to attack some other player because they are in your way of your interests?
Have you ever had to keep looking behind you for people that might come to attack you, while in fact you just want to farm or lv up?
I would never again play an mmo where it says "for pvp go line up over there. That's the only place you can pvp. It's safe, with lots of 'objectives' ".
AoC doesnt need a plane with opt-in pvp. It would dilute the real reason to pvp.
As someone who mostly PvP'd in ESO for a couple of years (stopped several years ago), I'd say it had as much of a point as any other part of the game. Note, I crafted enough to craft all the gear and consumables I needed. I farmed all the dungeons I needed to for PvP and even PvE gear. And doing that PvE content was fun for a bit. Leveled alts to try gameplay on them, etc.
A person logs in, gets their friends together (or solo I guess), and wants to PvP. What does that person do? This is an important question to people who like PvP. In ESO/GW2 the answer was Cyrodiil/WvW/battlegrounds. While this didn't work out all the time, everyone knew where to go and it brought like-minded people together to fight each other.
Here are some bad answers to that question:
Ashes is planning on having travel time be a meaningful restriction. So it's going to be tough to "look around" for PvP.
I'd very much like to have a large open force-flag area with 24/7 objectives to fight over. The mechanics of making this inclusive without preset sides is tough and can take up another whole post.
I completely agree with the initial idea of your comment.
I think it would be ideal to have a neutral node with constantly active PvP mode and full resource drop from inventory but without death penalty, where you could find some resources for crafting with greater benefit, but also with greater risk.
I think that would fully correspond to the philosophy of the game - "risk vs reward".
It would provide motivation for activity and PvP battles in that territory.
It would be a very lively place where both solo players and groups could find a place for themselves.
Both in the search for PvP activity, as well as in the search for resources.
To be honest, I even had an idea to create a topic about the concept of such a node for general discussion.
If AoC's itemization design goes down the oldschool path, gear will be rare and good gear will be even rarer. There's gonna be no separation between pve and pvp gear, so both sides of the player spectrum will have to fight over the same mobs. Everyone can wear any weapon/armor so this strengthens the previous sentence even more. There's gonna be no good gear from instances, so everyone will have to fight everyone else in the open. All of that with tangible death penalties and loss of high value things through node sieges and caravan raids.
That whole paragraph pushes people to fight each other in the open world for the super limited pve, which in turn will give the winners better gear to pvp for even better pve. If you're looking for a game where you just quickly get some gear and go fight pointless fights 24/7 - this game might not be for you. If you're willing to have some pvp in your pve and some pve in your pvp - welcome.
There was nothing to win at ESO, spare me the opposition. Why should I play ESO cyrodiil when I can go and play MOBA, forhonor and all the other pure pvp game?
Why should I do the boring raids of ESO when I can play DS3 and the likes, for coop adventure?
There was nothing to win in ESO. Eso is for people that play small sessions mmo. "Let's win 1-2 bgs with our organized party vs randoms". Big deal...
"Let's farm the randoms zerg and spam heal heal heal. Dps dps dps".
No wonder people cant see the value of owpvp. No wonder you are still looking for "objectives".
You cant see that mmos are, or were originally, seamless worlds (not refering to dungeons or other instances), seamless worlds in which you:
Level
Quest
Loot
Craft/sell/buy
Specialize
and deal with players and the environment.
You win nothing at eso or gw2. You are pary of the red blue yellow zerg and you fight the smurfs and the bananas.
Good luck in ESO and its real guilds, real goals ("objectives") and real pvp.
Nothing will be optional.
You have the wrong mindset.
Nice try putting words in my mouth, but that's not what I said
The timeframe doesn't matter. People will cap out (or "softcap" where there's no doable events today that will improve the character's gear), or before that happens people will want to take a break from grinding mobs/quests/dungeons and want to PvP.
You can paint a great picture about resource contention driving conflict, but I don't see it happening. Yes, there will be fights over boss kills. But then the boss will die. Now there's no reason to go back and fight some more assuming you lost (aside from revenge), and no reason to hang around, assuming you won. The PvP is over.
But specifically, if we want to find some PvP why did we go to an overland dungeon and PvE our way to the boss so we can fight someone? And did that team really want a PvP fight or are we just there to gank a group of PvE'rs, or drive them out and take over their farm. Again, only a short burst of PvP and then back to PvE.
Area "owning" doesn't really work when people can be green. How are you going to stop a green group from getting their resources? The first guy to go red is going to get piled on and risk dropping equipped gear.
Gathering is going to be an all green affair, so that's worthless for PvP
It might be that the oceans will be the place where most PvP happens. I probably answered my own question here. It would not be hard to setup objectives (pirate islands) in the ocean that can be taken over and or held for cosmetic rewards/titles/leaderboard rank/etc. These could function similar to keeps in other games.
But even if you do reach a self-imposed soft cap, that'd mean that you're free to go anywhere. So you might join any node siege that might be happening soon. You can go to any super active node and look for caravans. There's always the seas. And if you're in a guild who likes to pvp, there's a high chance that you'll have enemies that you can fight as much as you want. All of those can fill up your break time.
I dunno about AA, but L2 wasn't just about boss farming and was way more about farming mobs that provided the mats for crafting. AoC's crafting will provide the best gear, so there's a high chance that mobs will be as valuable as L2's were.
Ashes copied L2's flagging system and majority of groups there flagged up against their attackers because they didn't want to lose their spot and didn't want to waste time getting back to that spot or look for other spots, in case the attackers just go for the mobs and ruin the farm.
Also, in a group vs group situation, the attackers would just need to PK the victim's healer and then protect their own PKer, while the victims can either die to mobs w/o a healer or leave the room. And while there's a chance that the gamer population has completely changed and would absolutely never flag up in no case - I somehow doubt that those kind of people would even play Ashes in the first place. And considering that dungeons will be some ways from nodes, people would be even less inclined to waste time running around instead of proving they're strong enough to hold a location.
Except dying as a green would lose you more of the stuff you were working on, especially in the case of rare and valuable resources. We still don't know how the corruption will be balanced, so there's a chance that people would be more scared of getting PKed, which would ensure that they lose more resources.
1. how often will people be running trade ships through the ocean to the other continents or islands
2. How war like ur node ur a citizen of is, they could war dec constantly and so on
3. how often caravans get run which depends alot on how localised resources are and how many u can carry solo on a mount and so on.
From all I've read, you will probably have to move around for constant PvP content, just like one will have to do for PvE. You can contest dungeons as well and I wouldn't be surprised if we would get as part of corrupted areas open world PvP without corruption at some stage of their progression. There also could be other events that lead to more PvP, such as treasure hunts and stuff.
My assumption for now is that for PvP players there are two main ways to play Ashes. One is to dedicate themselves to a Military Node or choose a nomadic lifestyle where you move around between more densely populated areas where PvP events are taking place.