Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
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Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
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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
Honestly if they removed flying mounts from the game entirely and just left it to gliding mounts, I'd be fine with that too. I think it either needs to be slightly less rare than 15/10,000, and/or at least not offered as an incentive to take on leadership positions, or removed from the game.
You already can.
Just because you campaign harder doesn't mean the majority of the other people in the node will like you or want you to be mayor. If I campaigned really hard for the presidency of the US based on a highly conservative agenda, but most of the people in the country at the time were more liberal or down the middle, the time I spend campaigning doesn't matter. I'll lose. Yes, a good degree of time investment is required to get some name recognition and put yourself out there. But out of all the people who get to that base level, their goals will matter most in the end. So no, you will not win democratic mayorships in scientific nodes just by putting in more time than anyone else.
Guess what. Your chances of influencing the mayor without added systems are a lot higher if the mayor actually cares about you and how they govern their node. You argue that if you can't influence them post-election, then caring about their intentions or actions doesn't matter at all. That doesn't make any sense at all. If you actually aren't able to influence them after they're elected, then getting the right people for the job with what are more likely to be decent intentions is literally the most important part of the process. You offer the right incentives for people to actually care about governing so that you don't have to worry as much about people doing it for any other reasons.
You don't have to be "proper" or even "for the people" to be an intentional and impactful mayor. I'm totally fine with people having devious intentions and acting on them. What I'm against is people becoming mayor who literally don't care at all. All I want is for the system to not offer largely unrelated incentives to take on the position. I want people who care about achieving certain goals through the mayoral system - for what purpose, I don't care. But I want becoming the mayor and governing the node to be the only incentive that the game explicitly offers you. If you have ulterior motives that occur due to your own player activities in the game, that's fine too, because at the very least, you became mayor with the primary intention of making an intentional pathway of leadership decisions.
Why are you so bent on incentivizing the game's most impactful role on the player experience to people who literally don't care about utilizing that role to impact anyone else's player experience? If becoming mayor is the only incentive, then you will almost only end up with mayors who care about making use of the role. What's so horribly wrong about that?
Two nodes can establish policies for creating a public route by land, sea, or air between them. If both nodes are connected by water, they can use a ferry with no distance limit. If both nodes are connected by land, they can use public stage wagons. However, if one of the nodes is a scientific metropolis, they may use a blimp with no distance limit
The upkeep cost increases with the distance and the number of daily transports. If there is only one round trip per day for a short distance, the cost is the lowest. However, if there are transports every 20 minutes and the distance is very long, then the cost becomes very high.
Let players can decide whom they want to collaborate with and how much they are willing to spend
It is up to the players to decide who will pay the upkeep cost, they can pay any quantity they want, if the upkeep is not paid in full then the route is dismantled. Having such route between them must be a mutual agreement tough, let them pay as they please, if the rich node wants to pay at full let it happen.
Oh, fair enough. I would still argue that there's likely no way the group you downed the world boss with would let anyone other than the guild leader who led the fight or perhaps a high ranking member with a battle commander role walk away with it though. And let's be honest, who's going to be taking down those bosses other than organized guilds, when at least one will be there virtually every time? Allowing people to buy them is nice, at the very least. But it still feels a little silly that there are things like pegasus flying mount skins being sold in the cosmetic packs, but apparently finding one of those or anything similar in the game and ever being able to tame it is totally impossible no matter how much effort you put in as a tamer? Seems a bit odd.
It isn't though. The only way you can directly influence someone's mayorship is to become a mayor instead of them. You could try PKing them while they're doing quests for Divine node or try siphoning money out of their guild if they're going for an Economic node, but you'd only be successful if you played more than them, at which point you might as well just become a mayor.
Mayor caring about the mayor activities or not caring about them won't have any impact on anything.
Ok, so I could become a mayor and literally not do anything for the node and you'd be fine with it right? Because my aim would be to completely destroy the node. So now tell me, how exactly would this be in any way different from a person who just wanted to fly? The impact on players would be exact same.
Because variety is the spice of life. The competition for mayorship would be much higher if there's more incentives to be a mayor. And competition pushes people to be better. So if those holy mayors, who want to do a good job, really want the job - they'll have to work hard for it. Harder than any flying boi.
As for guilds and stuff. We don't know how exactly the drops will be designed. There's a chance that the egg could drop completely randomly directly to someone's inventory, to "keep it fair". And then that person can do whatever they want with the egg.
But if that won't be the case then yes, big guilds will be the ones who control flying. And imo that's exactly how it should be. Those who put in a ton of work are supposed to reap the fruits of their labor.
And considering what Intrepid is going for with flying mounts, they can't just give tamers an ability to make them, because no matter how much rng you put into the process, there'll be enough tamers/breeders to have waaaaay more flying mounts than Intrepid want in the game. Limiting them to world boss rare drops and metro/castle control allows Intrepid to control the amount quite nicely.
Yeah, I don't really have a problem with guild leaders / their high ranking officers having a good chunk of the flying mounts. In the end, the leaders of successful guilds are more or less democratically "elected" anyway the people who agree to stay in the guild and work hard to accomplish their leader's goals.
I don't necessarily think having an excess of flying mounts is unavoidable if you make them tamable with very rare opportunities to try and very low chances of success. That's what tweaking the numbers is there for, and that's why devs do it. Because it changes the probability of outcomes. You just tweak them a little more. Finding one, to begin with, should be incredibly rare. Sort of like a random event. You're a hunter out exploring the world, and you see one walking around. You have an incredibly low chance of taming it, and if you fail, it flies off and disappears. To solve the duplication problem, you could make it so the timer for the respawner doesn't start until the last one dies. So there's never more than one of each species flying on a server at once, if at all. There could maybe be half a dozen of these that have separate spawning cycles. Each one is an incredibly rare or mythical creature that needs a flying or perhaps gliding specialized tamer to ever have a hope of being captured. As for spawn times, I'm imagining something like 1-3 months, randomly assigned each time the timer resets.
So once again, becoming a mayor through very very hard work would be the best possible way to get a flying mount if you're not a part of a huge guild (though imo it'd still be nigh on impossible). And as I said already, an indifferent ruler wouldn't be any different from a bad one, and in some cases would even be better.
I will concede that there are a large number of people around the world who vote for the one person they know the most in order to defeat the one person they hate the most, or something similar. But a lot of that indifference is due to the high levels of complexity that muddle the direct impacts of those leaders' actions on people's everyday lives. It's hard to say exactly what the sitting President of the US does every day that directly impacts my life unless I take a lot of time to think about it and work out all the little bureaucratic connections. In Ashes, the citizen to mayor ratio will be much lower than that of real world countries, and I'd hope the mayor will gain access to abilities and choices that noticeably shift the player experience. If players know that their gameplay experience will be impacted by the mayor, whether they do this, that, or nothing at all, then I think they'll care more about voting based on plans rather than name recognition alone.
Well, if someone has firm enough intentions, then no, nothing you say or do will change the decisions they'll make. But at the very least, if the person in charge of the node cares how their actions impact other people, then maybe they'll seek some public opinion on certain things or listen to advisors who help them test on the waters on certain prospective leadership decisions. So not a guarantee, but it's possible to occur. In contrast, someone who gets the mayorship solely to get a fly boi will never care about what you want them to do at all.
I mean if you really want to troll yourself and everyone around you that hard, I guess that's fine. But I'm not concerned about someone screwing themselves and everyone else around them that often. It would take a special kind of person to bust their butt harder than anyone else just to do nothing and watch everything burn around them / not engage with any other nodes or players / not care about progressing the gameplay or story. Not a big obstacle on my radar. But people going after the mayorship so they can get a flying mount and then leave everything else in the dust? Yeah, that sounds a lot more likely.
"I want unpredictable chaos because." As for pushing people to be better, the actual competition to become mayor won't push anyone to be a better mayor, it will just push them to be a better campaigner or resource/quest grinder. Which has little to do with actually governing. Why force people who already want to be mayor more than anything, who will have to work hard to win no matter what the incentives are, work even harder just so they can get ahead of people who literally don't care about it at all? That's just cruel.
It's like offering the opportunity to win a sit-down with Steven and design a world boss as well as $10,000 through a competition totally unrelated to proving your proficiency in character / world / mechanic design in video games. Now all the people who would've already had to compete to win the opportunity to meet Steven and get involved in the game's design, probably a dream for a decent handful of people, are going to have to work even harder doing things totally unrelated to designing video game bosses just to beat all the other competitors who only care about the $10,000.
No, it's not the same as the egg from the world boss situation. In this scenario, sure, it's entirely possible that someone who's not a tamer comes across it, and calls their guild's tamer over. But at least that tamer can be grateful to have such a supportive network of guildies. Maybe someone has a friend who's not in their guild nearby, and calls them over first? That's not possible to deal with in the world boss scenario. And no matter how unlikely it is, there's always the potential for a tamer to be the first one to find it and capture it themselves. That's not possible with the world boss scenario either.
I'm not sure where you get the impression that the GL would end up with it. The way I imagine this addition to the flying mount pool, it would be an avenue to make it more likely for the players who want to fly the most to actually get one at some point, because no matter what guild you're in, or no matter how much you play, you'd need to be a tamer in order to use these mounts. I'm imagining that these creatures are not the type of creature any old Jack or Jill could hop onto. They're wild, mythical creatures. You can't just crack a whip once and then they're magically tame. It would take one of the most experienced tamers on the server to not only "tame" it initially, but keep it tame every time it's ridden. They would belong to the tamer and the tamer alone.
So yes, playing more and having a supportive network to call you over if they spotted one would make you more likely to get one. I'm fine with that. But at least the only requirement for you to get it is to choose a profession (that doesn't impact anyone other than yourself) and bust your butt leveling it up and doing whatever rare / difficult quests or earning whatever rare resources would be required to even have a chance of being successful at taming one of these creatures if they ever came along. It opens an avenue for dedicated players to have a chance at getting a flying mount, even if they aren't able to be a guild leader or a mayor / don't want to take on that responsibility.
Not sure about all the little details you mentioned, but different types of automated transport can already be established between nodes. Driven via road on your own mount, or ferried via airship between metropolises. Ferries on water would be a cool idea as well! But perhaps only in shallow water where corruption is still valid so that it doesn't compete with the risk/reward of the open ocean.
I do like the complexity you mention about the fee for the upkeep of the "stables" you'd have to visit in order to start/end the route. However, this does get back to the issue of the mayor not having any backup leadership. If they fall out of the game for whatever reason and the routes need to be paid for again, their citizens could be left without those services for up to a month. So we either need to be very careful with how we incentivize the mayorship to avoid issues like people dropping out or ignoring upkeep duties as much as possible, or we need to simplify some of the mechanics that drastically affect the citizens' gameplay experience, like automatically opening up and maintaining faster travel networks between nodes of appropriate levels who have the building constructed.
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Public_transportation
Then the ones who listen to others have to become mayors instead of the flybois. If their convictions are that firm, I'm sure they'd be able to get the mayorship over someone who just wants to fly.
And to me, a bad actor who wants to destroy a node so that their own preferred node succeeded is a much bigger danger than someone who's willing to bust their ass just to fly. The flying dude might indeed disregard his duties completely and do nothing with the node, but the bad actor will actively sabotage it to ruin it in the fastest way possible. It's all about politics and not just "seeing the world burn".
Because that's the system Intrepid have designed? Military mayors will have to be good in pvp, economic dudes will have to have a ton of money, divine ones will have to grind quests and scientific will have to campaign or just have their guild in the same node. So if you want to be any of those mayors - you gotta be the best at that election style. That's what you subscribe to when you decide to be a mayor in Ashes.
You're free to make a suggestion of a complete election methods overhaul and I might even agree with your ideas if they're good, but rn we have what we have.
If this is how it works, I'd bet that GLs will have top lvl tamer alts that let them get the mount or maybe any GL will just main as a tamer to be able to fly at all times.
Yes, there's always some possibility of a divine providence where a completely random unguilded tamer manages to come across the rarest possible creature in the game right as they're playing the game and have everything to meet the taming requirements, but I somehow doubt that this would be the norm. Statistically speaking.
I mean to be honest, in a way, yes, I'll be less likely experience this issue than those in other nodes, since I do intend on being a citizen of scientific nodes. But what about everyone else? Besides, even in a scientific node, people can always lie about their intentions. A flyboi (I like this term we've coined) could easily say they'll do this or that, but not actually care in the end. And yes, anyone can lie about anything whenever they want, but at the very least, removing that incentive to lie from the equation would inarguably reduce the chances of dishonest campaigning.
This is more or less responded to in my following point in that post about how it's pointless and cruel to force people to work harder doing non-governing related tasks so that they can achieve something they're passionate about, which they'd already have to work hard for without the added competition.
I mean yes, someone who intentionally wants to destroy their node is worse than someone who doesn't do anything, but my point isn't that they're better, it's that it's less likely to occur. Imagine how much effort it would take to become mayor of any node. Now you burn it all down so another node can move in. Why on earth would you do that unless you're also going to be the leader of the new node? In which case you'd be doing all the work of becoming mayor twice over. How often is that likely to occur? Someone could be hired to do it for money, I guess, but at least all that political drama sounds interesting to be a part of, and would still not be a very frequent issue. In any case, the whole equivalence argument isn't relevant. Just because all of that is possible, doesn't mean we shouldn't try to limit how similar outcomes occur in different ways if some of those different ways are preventable.
Currently, Intrepid is leaning towards a champion system to elect the mayor because 1v1 PvP isn't going to be balanced. Those champions will be outfitted through gold/material acquisition and quests. Hardly related to PvP prowess. Questing for divine nodes is hardly related to governing any node. The one that does actually make some sense is the economic node. Economic node leaders should know how to make money. Still, people can make money and bid for the mayorship for different reasons. I'd rather not have someone bidding to be the mayor just so they can get a flying mount. Which, let's be honest, are the most likely sorts to do it for that reason.
I mean if the GL is also a max level tamer with a ton of time and effort put into getting the items, doing the quests, and choosing the profession skill points that lower their proficiency in other areas all so that they can have a decent chance of successfully taming the creature, than yeah, I'm fine with it. But you wouldn't be able to trade it, even between tamers. It becomes imprinted. So there'd be no point in having a tamer alt just for that purpose. The point is that your social role isn't a mandatory requirement to get it through this system. If you put the effort into your profession, you are able to theoretically tame and ride that small pool of rare mounts if you come across one, however it happens.
Perhaps these mythical creatures exude some sort of energy that can be picked up by a very expensive and hard to obtain / craft device that gives you an alert whenever you're within so many hundreds of meters from one. Sort of like a hot/cold mini game that could drive several people to find it first without leaving up to the one random person who it happens to spawn right in front of. Who's most likely to put in the time and effort to get one of these devices? Tamers who can actually ride the creatures that they help track down.
Simplified version would be: mayors set the policies, full payment in advance for 30 or 60 or 90 days and click the auto renewal checkbox. If the mayors pay 90 days in advance, they will only have to check if the node has funds 4 times a year. It's fair. If it is a 90 auto renewal route and the node has gold, it will never cause problems
In EVE you find a station, player or NPC, have a look at the price and decide if you want to rent it, then just set to auto renewal. Every location has a different price based on player use, so if you go to a quiet system you can find corporate offices for free or almost free.
Having said that, would be amazing seeing nodes working together and stabilishing routes between them, a node that is really far away and surrounded by hostile nodes could find ways of traveling around by using diplomacy with neutral nodes around the world. Could also benefit allies by transporting troops to each other
As for untradeable mounts. If that's the case then we go back to what I said before. The guild has a ton of people, so they have higher chances of coming across the mount. They notify their GL (who's a flytamer) and PK anyone who approaches the mount, while they wait for him to come there. They get rewarded with whatever they want for doing this.
The world will just be way too huge for a few random flytamers to come across a once-in-a-few-months mob. It's just much more statistically unlikely than a guild/alliance of several hundred people coming across it. And this is assuming that those mounts can respawn literally anywhere on the map, cause if they have any kind of predetermined respawn location - I bet that guilds would be fighting in those rough locations all the time, just to increase their chances of coming across the mob.
I don't think people will take too kindly to being randomly strapped with previous mayors' baggage for 2-3 cycles at a time. Imagine finally winning the election by whatever means are required by your node, and a sizable portion of your resources have already been spent by past mayors. Granted, something like faster travel between nodes is something that I don't think anyone would choose not to upkeep, but that's also the core problem with bothering to offer the choice in the first place. I can't imagine almost anyone would choose to tear down such a building or not fund it if they had the option. So I think simplifying the things that are almost no brainers is better to reduce responsibility / decision bloat.
103 nodes per server, I don't think they'll all be streamers. Guild leaders, yes, likely, but I don't see a problem with that. That's just a form of organized social interaction within the game. I think we should keep these issues in mind with the consideration of the potential for actual competition from random players. Especially in economic, divine, and military nodes where it's not chosen by popular vote.
Fair enough, it's impossible to say for sure how often people will do x y or z until we see it ourselves. I want to trust that people won't neglect the system often, since succeeding in this game will likely take a certain degree of social skill and require a sizable amount dedication to working in a team with other people (a guild, or a few individuals at least).
I am curious to know what you think of the mayoral system as a whole in this case, as you seem to be under the impression that a sizable number of mayors will turn the entire thing into a political hellscape where people are no-life-ing the election cycle to burn shit down in order to earn favor or money from competing guilds / nodes, or to seize the territory themselves on an alt. Obviously that all sounds very dramatic, and games do require drama to be interesting. I guess we'll just have to see what sort of balance the game strikes between players who want peace and predictable progression vs players who want a bit of chaos, or at the very least are willing to impose their will over others in more aggressive ways to get the gameplay they want. Too much chaos and I fear individual investment in the system could become compromised. Everything changes too often, you can hardly ever trust a mayor, and citizenship in a node means nothing. Too much peace and predictability / too difficult to successfully siege a node, and there's not enough change in the system to keep things interesting. I hope A2 will give us a good idea of what personality types will compose the more dedicated folks in the player base.
Hell, that's the kind of stuff I've heard about from EVE. Months-long schemes that overthrew huge corporations or that left them bankrupt. Thousands of irl dollars lost or stolen. Hundreds of ships led to a huge trap by an officer that's been with a corporation for more than a year. If EVE didn't have the wall from Attack on Titan acting as its newbie experience I'd play the game just to be tangentially related to those events. The sheer "street cred" of "yeah, I saw that guild fall apart right before my eyes. Those were the days" would be insane.
This would also keep Ashes at least somewhat relevant and might keep attracting newbies to it. And imo even the flyboi attraction of it all would still be a benefit, because it could be a strong marketing tool. A newbie sees someone flying on a mount, asks another player how he could get that and in response gets "become a mayor of the largest node on the server". I get that you dislike this premise, but I think that this kind of thing would be great to interest people in the game and then keep them invested for months. And that means not only money for Intrepid, but deeply invested players for the veterans. In my book that's a win-win.
I think I understand where you're coming from a bit better now. I definitely want to see that kind of action as well. That being said, I still think there could be other ways of making flying mounts linked to long-term achievements that you need to fight really hard over that don't require involvement in the mayoral system. Even if they most often end up in the hands of large guilds, that's fine. Large, well coordinated guilds should be able to reap more rewards than people who try to fly solo in a game like Ashes seems to be. But as it stands now, it's literally impossible for a random person who's not a high-ranking member of a guild to get a flying mount without impacting the gameplay experience of other people. Either the high ranking guild members from the groups who kill all the world bosses get first say on whether or not to keep the mount egg before selling it, so it's more of a secondary shot as a non-high-ranking guild member at nabbing one, or you have to make the decision to either govern or abandon hundreds of other players.
Even if it was offered in addition to royal mounts for metro mayors and castle kings/queens, with the plan I proposed, even if guilds got the majority of them, at least it would put a gleam in the eye of thousands of players who aren't guild leaders or high ranking officers, and would provide an avenue separate from becoming mayor or a guild leader to potentially get one without having it be as lame and anticlimactic as buying one at a market auction. Similarly to how you framed the mayorship and its perks as being an attractor and a means of investment, only a handful of people on every server will be metro mayor at a time. Sure, it's a hook to get people interested and some of them invested, but it's sort of like chasing the lottery. So I don't see what's different about the plan I proposed apart from the fact that it provides a theoretical avenue for tamers to reap some sort of awesome benefit for their investment in flight/gliding based mount taming.
I think it makes sense that tamers should be the ones to have awesome mounts a slight percentage more often than the average player. They make it their specialty to tame wild animals, max level tamers with a load of post-max-level time investment should have something to strive and hope for, however slim the chances of their success. Same should be designed for every profession, I'd say. It's the ultra-rare pokemon hiding in the grass somewhere that you might never see, the legendary weapon that has such a low drop rate, it's practically not even in the game. It's something fun that gives people wonder and hope. A sense that something incredible could be around the corner.
As for how these mythical creatures would spawn, I'd say give them a large spawn area in several different places around the world. If you have a dozen or more potential spawn locations, and they each only spawn 4-6 times a year, The likelihood of people camping the zones and overcrowding certain areas will be pretty low. It would take multiple years for people to actually learn all the areas where they all spawn, and at that point, if they prove to be a fun addition to the game, Intrepid could just go and change all the spawn locations after a couple years. Seems like a decent payoff for a cool time-investment hook to me.
This is why I kinda against this. Becoming a mayor doesn't limit your other gameplay. Hell, it even encourages and encompasses the majority of ways people play the game. You either socialize like hell, make a ton of money in any way possible, do a ton of different quests or perfect your fighting. All of that covers, I'd say, 95% of players, so you have chance at being a mayor if you try real damn hard and have some luck on top of that.
But becoming a flytamer would just mean that you've given up every other high lvl artisanry and other forms of gameplay in no way bring you closer to your ultimate goal of flying. The solution to this would be to let people either breed or somehow trigger an ultra rare spawn for taming, but, as I've said before, this will get "gamed" to all hell and just lead to way too many flying mounts, even if the chances are abysmal.
p.s. I forgot to address it the last time it came up, but I personally think that we'll still be controlling our champion in the Military elections, so it'd be a pvp showdown just not with our main chars. And I think this because otherwise it'd be very dumb to just combine Divine and Economic systems for a Military node. Just makes no sense to me. Though obviously we'll have to see what Intrepid have in mind.
You do make a great point there about the difference in outcome of time investment if you don't "win the lottery" as a high level flying/gliding tamer, opposed to just being a player busting your ass doing useful things in hopes of becoming mayor. Still, those tamers would get all the benefits of taming and selling gliding mounts all while hoping they'll find a mythical beast or be called to one by a guildie. I'm not suggesting they sacrifice the benefits granted to other gliding tamers. Obviously, each specialization pathway will have its own perks, and maybe the perks of land and sea mount specialists can include a chance at taming their own mythical beasts.
Intrepid is coming out with so many awesome mount concepts, seemingly at least another one every month. I don't think it would be out of line to consider making a few of each of the three mount types to add in as rare spawns with randomized spawn locations / timers for max level tamers in each specialization. Maybe the mythical land / sea mounts can run/swim a bit faster or jump higher than others, or give you increased underwater breathing or something to make up for the fact that they can't fly like the gliding specialists' mythical mounts.
Or you could just lump "mythical taming" into one specialization and give those players exclusive access to any mythical level mount of any type that they find. After that, if they want to sacrifice further specialization points from other areas, they could maybe choose one type of mythical mount to have an affinity to and receive some sort of alert whenever one enters the world, or maybe whenever they get within a few kilometers of one. Like a spider-sense for mythical beasts with an affinity for certain levels of the biosphere. This could be an option for players who don't care as much about making money and just like collecting as many mounts / pets as possible.
You could even have the mythical mounts dissolve to ashes when they finally expend themselves and leave you behind with a unique, non-tradeable, collectible item that you can display in your home for bragging rights!
With that being said - and I have to disclose at this point that I have purchased one of the flying mount skins - I think would COULD be done in later stages of the game, meaning past level 40 and maybe in combination with a specific Node type reaching Tier 5 or higher, that we could unlock "gliding points" in the ZOI maybe as a special relic we can obtain by killing a flying world boss or so. These are points of naturally occurring high elevations from which we could glide down with a "flying" mount. Obviously this is just me trying to have an opportunity to at least for a brief moment show off the skin of my mount but since it is a one-way and distance limited feature, it could add an interesting dimension to player transportation options (by paying a price of course) in the vicinity of mountains or cliffs and the like.
Upon further thought, I realized the "personal" airship, even if owned and only able to be operated by at least half a group of people, would be a bit pointless. The reason I asked about it was logic, "Why not downscale?" but logical came back around and made me realize you likely wouldn't have a great time trying to land one of those things just anywhere. You'd have to "land" it at a building specifically designed to manage airships. Which... will already exist in the form of public transport. Between those buildings, your activities would be limited to just about nothing, so it doesn't really make much sense in the end if there's no content up in the sky.
That being said, if there was some content up in the sky (huge mythical flying creature that never comes down to the ground needs to be taken out) then it would be sick to have a few airships up there while attacking the boss with ranged attacks and mounted cannons, just like how a sea monster boss fight would go on the ocean. It could be something where the leader of each party in the "raid" could go to the tower, rent a ship for a fee, take it up there specifically for that purpose, but not do anything else except return to where they came from. Gives players a chance to pilot one for a bit of fun now and then without actually giving people any more convenient travel than what would already exist in the game through public transit.
As for the gliding point suggestion, I guess I just assume there will be enough elevation shifts throughout the terrain for us to do this naturally as we navigate the world with a gliding mount. You may also use your gliding mount at any time and just have it walk whenever it's not gliding, I think. Or would these gliding points offer some special bonus, like to your flight speed / endurance?
Blending run times that take a moderate but not a lot of time, boats that come at regular intervals and teleportation allowed the world to feel huge but not over burden the player with having to spend half of their session running somewhere. A side effect was a very lucrative business if you were a druid.
Yes, I think there should be an equal process of teleportation in Ashes. And I would 100% take that over personal flying mounts.
- I'd say they could be the only spot where one could learn to glide.
- When you glide from such a spot you gain a speed boost or lose a bit less altitude (so you can glide further)
- offer quest to find and tame gliding & flying mounts
- Get flying related crafting options (e.g. an options for helmet that makes updrafts visible to increase altitude during gliding)
- Be points just high enough to enter a special area like the secluded crater of an inactive volcano or a (seemingly) abandoned cave atop a steep cliff out on a small island.
I think there are some simple but very fun elements that could be linked to enabling gliding points/towers/platforms.
Easy way to beat the jumping puzzles.