Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Comments
“Flaws in its design” is a pretty big reach, @Niem Lumel … the game is looking solid for only being in Alpha 2.
You can be sure there will be players without a life playing many hours of AoC.
So, if you’re not going to be testing Alpha 2 and not going to be playing the game … what are you doing here in the Forums?
Other than spreading doom and gloom because your version of “player feedback” isn’t same as the generally accepted version of player feedback?
spoken like a true solo player. the game is designed around grouping, including pvp. how do you know other classes cant protect you or remove cc?
also, abilities arent balanced yet. they keep saying that on every class stream...plus abilities that remove cc havent been added yet. they talked about it.
you are only looking at one single thing, not the whole picture (or at least the potential since no one knows the whole picture yet)
I mean the whole point of Alpha 2 is to respond to tester feedback. They did that a bunch during Alpha 1.
They also make some changes based on feedback from their demos.
But... it's perfectly reasonable to wait for release to be sure Ashes is a game you would want to play.
i repeat, spoken like a true solo player. you want every class to dps, cc, break cc, buff, debuff, heal, tank.
what do you even mean by zero agency over your character? so you cant press your buttons and play XD
Also, looks like Judgment does not take as long to cast/charge as Deliverence (when using it to heal.)
And depends on how many Active Skills you want on your toolbar.
see you took the bait, and you ended up with the answer yourself. thats the point of cc...
because the game is balanced around party play, not solo play like those solo mmorpg, it makes sense that your teammates help you when you get cc'ed.
if the game was balanced around solo play, then every class could cc, break cc, heal, buff, debuff, dps, etc etc. but this isnt the case.
if you could break any cc by yourself at any time, whats the point of cc? even if you had a cc break, you most likely wont be able to spam it and break every single cc...which means you wont have agency of your character anyways.
next you are going to argue that your character should be able to heal himself, and its not fair that other people damage you and you need to rely on someone else to heal you or you cant participate in combat.
I don't think the intent was to show us how the Ashes Cleric can focus more on damage than previous MMORPG Clerics.
what is the point of cc?
100% Truth. Every game, business, sports team, etc needs new blood coming in. Without new blood your product or organization eventually dies. This is where innovation is important and learning what the community is looking for in a game for them to stick around. Intrepid's game plan will likely change 2 years in and then 3 years, as the numbers of players change.
Initially they will probably get a few million players. Then something new comes out and the player base starts to free fall. What will intrepid do to keep the new players entering AOC? You need to retain players but you need that new blood as well!
Intrepid I believe will be able to figure it out. But it will be an uphill battle until the last server is shut down. Hopefully AOC can be around a good decade after launch though!
Why would the new players join longer time after release and not immediately at release?
Maybe rested EXP isn't the right way. Maybe throttled servers aren't the right way. But it would be nice if there was some way that the game helped to bridge the gap in power level between the 60 hr/week player and the 20 hr/week player. I'm not saying that they should be equal, just closer.
I just played classic wow recently and started a char with a friend. By the time the next week rolled around we can't really play with each other anymore because our character levels are too far apart.
This isn't like guild wars where you can just make a max level character with BIS gear and start pvping on an equal playing field from day 1. One of the more frustrating aspects of MMOs is the unbalanced nature of PVP. Dood is on here talking about CC and player agency, well what about getting 1 shot? Doesn't do a lot for player agency does it.
The most rewarding PVP games thrive on being balanced. When you die it was because of a skill issue, not a gear or power level issue. This is why I was a Starcraft gamer for many years. You start a match and you know it is your skill vs their skill. This is why I like Dragonflight changes to PVP, I had max gear and was doing arenas/BGs on an equal playing field in less than a week after hitting max level. I could still play "60 hours a week" and have fun without any increase to character power level, because the gameplay itself is fun. In Shadowlands, I hit max level, and then found out that there were like 4 other systems i had to grind before I could do arenas, like WTF?!?
Ashes will undoubtedly have many unbalanced PVP scenarios for sure. They are trying to combat the level disparity with the corruption system, which is a fine approach. The topic of zerg guilds also plays into this, a 10v2 (or worse) in the open world is going to be unbalanced and not very fun. It sounds like they may have systems that increase the power level of smaller guilds to combat this as well. Hopefully there are a few more mechanics that can help.
It sounded like there might be systems where we can "take control of NPCs" in some scenarios which would also have the same effect as level scaling during that event, which is an awesome idea for sure.
At the end of the day, in an open world PVP game we just want systems that help bring some kind of balance to the player base so that we can play with our friends (and enemies) and not be completely useless even though they may have more time than us. Is that really too much to ask?
Maybe true, but also one of the main reasons why so many mmorpg players prefer to stay away from open world PvP.
Depends on the reason you are playing the game in the first place.... If you are playing a game to have fun, it is much more fun to have a fair PVP battle than to get completely destroyed/destroy them without a chance, unless you have a personality disorder...
I mean yeah if you are doing it for the components, maybe... Or if it is to slow down a rival guild, sure... But at the end of the day I would rather have a great fight that was evenly matched. That way it doesn't matter if you win or lose because the fight itself was the fun part.
Having dedicated, committed players is going to make the game stronger with a longer lifespan. If I miss out on stuff here and there is worth it.
Intrepid intends to give players with fewer hours per week of game time their own ways to have influence in Verra, but from all I have read they do not intend to give them the ability to compete with people who commit more hours to the game.
It comes down to how you define "balance".
I can have immediate balance by eliminating all external factors that could differentiate two players engaging in combat, this is what games do where there is no gear and no qualities to characters (like level, skill proficiency, talent points etc). That is "immediate balance".
But a designer can also choose interconnected balancing, by giving players the ability to punish their enemies outside of combat (in which they have already proven to be superior). And in my opinion that is the correct approach when making a game that seeks to have PvE and PvP organically connect again instead of putting everything in separate minigames and have the world be reduced to a lobby that you hop in and out of between minigames (looking at you, WoW).
I think what might be worth remembering that it is not always about matching direct powerlevels - especially not in a multi-facetted MMORPG! - but about having agency in one of the various power structures that the game offers. And with MMORPS there should always be at least as social power component to the game, where you can lock your opponents out of your social network, especially when they are superior in combat power. Just like in a real siege where the attacker cannot overcome the walls of the defender, they might still be able to dry up their resources until the defender will run low on food. These alternative win strategies in a conflict are what aligns with open world gaming - having options on how to solve a problem. Just clinging onto combat power is not realy doing the genre justice.
It can be when someone asks the game dev to abandon the core idea of the game and demanding that ultimately combat power is the final judge of everything and therefore wanting systems for anyone to dominate in that regard would be exactly such a request for Ashes.