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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
In other words, the content not being static (and travelling being relatively slow), it'll be harder to completely dominate a server.
i agree with your first paragraph, but not with your second one. how long would it take for a guild of 1000 to get every member with the best possible gear? afaik, bosses wont drop the best gear, they will drop some gear and crafting materials to craft the best gear. how many times does one person have to kill a boss (or bosses) to get the best gear? Gearin' up a guild of 1000+ with the best possible gear could take years...
its possible that most people wont have the best gear before the next patch hits and we get a higher max level, better gear, etc. then its basically a reset for everyone in terms of gear.
also, whats the difference in power from the best gear and 2nd best gear? or the gear that most people will be able to obtain. you might be able to beat people with the best gear if you are better or more coordinated. steven said that gear provides 30%-40% of character power, so you get 60%-70% from other sources
you might get a few bosses early on if your guild leveled first, but other guilds might beat you for the next one, even if you have better gear, since they might have numbers, and not everybody in your guild has the best gear.
I believe Ashes will be far more organized and fair. It's definitely towards the more PVE or softer/fair side of Sieges if you know what I mean. No multiple guilds attacking, no other territory to defend. Basically just. 100v100 or 250 vs 250, it's not confirmed but it sounds like it will most likely be instanced.
You will need either a super massive guild or what I think will happen a main guild with alliances with smaller guilds. Guilds have a 300 cap limit and I am sure they will just creates branches but the guilds with Alliances are the ones that fair better. Easier to manage. You will need to be agile to defend Caravans and manage and quest to upgrade the Castle nodes too. It's not just siege day and then see you later. It will require multiple groups working together.
I know you are familiar with Crowfall so I'll just say even Winterblades needed to ally with Hax and others to get the numbers they needed. I think this game promotes alliances more so because of buffs and guild perks too.
And at that point people quit playing monopoly... Doesn't sound like a great idea for player retention.
Would you start playing a game of monopoly with someone when they have already been playing it and own everything on the board? No, you would start a new game where you both start as equals.
It's why people enjoy starting fresh wipes on Rust, and very few people enjoy showing up as a solo a day late into a 700 pop vanilla server where everyone has guns and kills you instantly.
Ashes is going to be a persistent world. The "restart" mechanic is around Nodes, which is why they are so important to get right. Snowballing is still a problem that needs to be addressed by in game systems. If the Nodes can't reasonably be "reset" then the game fails, straight up.
if you play ashes to its conclusion, all the resources will accumulate in the hands of a few. thats also what happens in monopoly. people dont quit btw, they just lose and start a new game xDDD
mmorpg are different because there is never a conclusion.the game is permanent, so you just help new players catch up faster, you add new gear or levels, which is basically your "reset", open new server, etc. many things you can do that dont require taking away permanent thigns from people who made the effort to earn those permanent things.
Typically MMORPGs have an endgame. That is a conclusion.
Tons of people stop playing at Endgame and wait for an expansion.
That's what Nodes needs to rectify.
By design, Ashes does not have a conclusion.
Nodes continue to rise and fall...always changing the content available in the world.
Also, in addition to Adventurer progression, Ashes has Artisan, Social Org, Religion, Racial and Naval progression.
As well as the Events systerm.
This is my point. There are things that are permanent; character level, character artisan skill progress, questline progress, equipped items (unless lost as corrupt pvper). Then there are things that are not permanent; freeholds, node citizenship, node progress, components, consumables, territory dominance, etc.
Ashes should not rely on server resets/new servers, expansions, etc., for new players to join and for slow players to still be able to rise to the top at some point, so the non-permanent features must be reasonably dynamic. If the game goes full monopoly and those that rushed the game at the start end up controlling the non-permanent aspects such that they become static, the core game play loop fails.
This is why the OP is discussing the topic, and why it is vitally important to get right. Snowballs into monopoly end game will kill the game and player base. People still play monopoly, but no one is still playing the same monopoly game, and no one is "joining in" on an existing monopoly game where one dood owns half the stuff and they get starter cash.
i see no issue if someone no life's in a game, or has good knowledge and can progress legit and effectively.
If this is what your point boils down to you are effectively just saying you don't want people to be ahead of you because they play. Stop trying to compare and be competitive with people that play more / better than you and be competitive with people around your own skill and time frame.
This makes 0 sense you are literally trying to manipulate their pilar and change their meaning. Effective you are making a argument that if someone has more money they need to lose it just because they gained it....if someone takes risk and enhances and gets a rare high enhancement. They now need extra risk because they have more power than others so bad things happen to them now....
Like what are you even talking about.
One day these solo players are going to have to realize you need to work in a group, you can't be like their group or few people played more so i want an advantage sot hey can't beat me. I am getting the vibe a lot of these people don't know what these types of mmorpgs are like and want a participation reward...
You are disregarding the whole Risk vs Reward aspects and the social aspect of the game. You may think it is fine for a small group of player becoming so strong that there is no meaning for anyone to participate in wars or sieges anymore because one of them might show up, but that's bad game design, you want people who commit to this game to feel meaning and be relevant. It doesnt mean equalize, it's just about finding the nuance and finding the in game mechanics to allow nuances.
They need more risks because they attained a new ladder, they are reaching another game loop, like end game loops. Example, when you play some raiding games, you try to get better items so you can then reach the gear score that allows you to be able to fight a stronger boss. Were you punshied by the game dev? No, they simply gave you a new challenge to work for. It's the same here, the mechanics for preventing snowballing are not to punish, they are there to keep the game challenging and keep giving game loops within a world that is PvX, meaning PvP included.
whats the motivation to get ahead or be the best then?
In an mmo it should be promoting you to utilize more and more people if you wish to become stronger.
Playing for 12 hours, taking advantage of many easy gold/lvling systems, doesn't make you "the best", all it does is make you a slave to the system and merely provides an illusion of you being "the best" (best at grinding...."woop woop"!).
Being the best is the motivation. The best will be a recurring theme. I just don't want them to be the only theme. The people who are the best will be acknowledged as such by the servers history and the long-term players on it,even if they aren't currently in power.
In addition, node system will provide mentioned social cost to it - when node needs to be built or restored after destruction - those with most power will have highest interest, and will invest the most into restoration, since their personal development depends the most on advanced node structures.
Also, i am not sure about this, but i get the feeling that a single group in this game would never be self-sufficient either.
In the NW alpha towards the end they handed out keys to specifically invite a mega guild of thousands in all at once(I don't know how many keys).
To the surprise of no one the game was instantly destroyed in every conceivable way.
Every member went out and bought multiple keys from the black market. The ones that didn't get a key also bought a key from the black market. they then used the alts to camp the important resources around the map to the point there were zero of these resources available anywhere on the map at any given time day or night. Other geared alts were placed all over the map to assault anyone trying to move in on their resource territory.
people who couldn't afford multiple keys or didn't want to buy them were given access to community accounts.
Within a month or two they owned the entire landmass in three ways. Their main guild owns the majority of the landmass so they have essentially 'won' the game. Their alt guilds own a couple to keep things appearing organic and a few territories are gifted to cooperating guilds as long as they help towards the goals of the mega guild.
The cooperating guilds were tasked with forming PK partys where they roamed around the map and killed anyone trying access high tier resources that wasn't an ally to the mega guild. Because there was no barrier to creating alt accounts there was no way to penalize people from just pking everyone 24/7 to keep them from progressing.
This is the point where amazon gave up threw in the towel and removed pvp, rather than addressing issues. For example, people paying money to have multiple characters strewn across the map at any given time in any area.
So far I don't see any system explained that can combat this issue in aoc.
And I'll definitely keep giving Intrepid feedback about making PK count account-wide, to prevent this exact thing from happening. Obviously super rich people will be able to buy who new accounts and circumvent it that way, but the cost at scale would get real high, as long as the PK count is account-wide.
Also, NW has a tiny world and tiny servers, so the impact of such guilds are much much bigger in comparison. Depending on how Intrepid plans on designing their resource/mob locations these guilds could potentially have a way harder time abusing the system in the same way.
You take is so bad and makes 0 sense because you are trying to wrap it. If you personally are a bad player, in a trash guild are not competitive you deserve to be wrecked by better guilds that is just a fact. Where you get wrecked with the guild you are in other guilds will step up and fight them that are more competitive and skilled or grow going it.
If you aren't a competitive player and are trying to be in a node with competitive players simply join that node and work with them. Nodes have multiple guilds, that doesn't mean you will be fighting as a gearlet though. Else join a node that is around your level of players and with their ability to do politics.
You need to get this feeling out of your head you are going to be doing high end pvp on the top of the ladder, you won't. And in terms it won't effect you, leave that challenge to the other competitive guilds and players working towards getting their gear.
If you want capped progression play tower fantasy where you can get 2 levels per day lol.
His post seems very weird btw part of me wants to think that post is 100% made up. That did not happen in NW nor could it. Unless he is leaking things from the development alpha that was going on for ages ad I've never heard of tons of mega guilds playing the game or being able to buy a key as if it were open like that.
Gives me weird vibes, like anti pvp in any game.
by alts you mean a guy with 2 accounts? you could only have 1 character per server. also, i played alpha, didnt see that. although the map became purple i think during the last month or so. but sieges got bugged and people couldnt declare.
also camping important resources is the most stupid thing you could do in nw. i once went to get orichalcum and spent 30 mins at one spot and only got 3 nodes (just to see how much i could get). such a waste of time, there were 935745 ppl waiting for the orichalcum ore. i went back to my usual activities where i could farm 15k gold per hour in a spot where i was alone (tier 1 resources, so very abundant) farmed my gold, bought more orichalcum than i needed and could farm in one hour, while still keeping leftover money from that 1 hour farm. profit everywhere. i leveled up all my refining professions from 50 to 200 in like 5~ hours each doing this. didnt chop trees, didnt farm ores, didnt pick herbs. waste of time. dont blame the game (or mega guilds) blame people for not knowing how to play.
corruption.
Camping resources/areas makes perfect sense when you have a guild of thousands of people and many of them running multiple accounts or working off community accounts. It was extremely effective in New world to the point they changed most of the looting mechanics to be dumbed down so everyone got a turn. It sounds to me like you joined in after it was dumbed down and most of us left.
Having 5 accounts will cost 75/month in ashes. That in no way can be perceived as any kind of barrier. That is an average bar tab for a single person to go out and have a couple drinks with dinner. Ashes has also stated there won't be any enforcement of IP checks.
With multiple accounts I don't see corruption making much of any difference at all. A similar system was implemented in early NW days and it failed miserably because people just hopped accounts to do dirty deeds.
LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL
I love when people say really stupid nonsense and completely ignore the gameplay of Ashes of creation and the features and say it is the same as NW.
You need to actually do some research on the game so you know what you are talking about.
If someone is going to spend thousands of hours to level up multiple accounts they have put to the work in to do that. If someone i going to place them at random spots around the world and run around as the resources as not generated at the same spot, that is up to them.
I could go on but you need to stop trying to compare NW to AoC without talking about the features and differences between both games. You are just showing you literarily don't understand how AoC is being designed.
I love how you are trying to say multibox in a sneaky way after being told you can't multibox. Legit just wasting typing space at this point.
Even just controlling that kind of beast is difficult, let alone have them all work in unison towards a singular goal w/o getting into each other's way, all while using shared accounts and controlling hundreds of POIs on the map.
I did this with a few dozen people in L2 and it was already quite difficult to prevent the classic "god damn it, I got logged out of my second window, did some dumbass tried to log into that char? WHO WAS THAT?!".
Same could be done for castles if they have monster attack events, guilds that have held the castle for a long period will find it more and more difficult to have the resources to deal with with monsters and player attacks.
Sorry this is off topic for this thread, BUT WHY IS YOUR DINNER SO EXPENSIVE!?!? 75 dollars for a single dinner and some drinks? That's way too much