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
What's memorable is likely going to depend on playstyle.
I watched the podcast and it was very interesting.
I've always interpreted risk vs reward in ashes as a game with systems in place to do just about anything you can do in the real world, but with the ability for the other party to retaliate. Sure, you can pk someone, but at what price? Is it worth potentially losing gear over?
You can fight another guild at a world boss and wipe them out, but at what cost? What if they're 10x bigger than you and lock you out of any content from then on?
You can go and buy all of the wood in the area and artificially raise the price of it 10x its original value...but what's the risk of doing that?
You can decide to not trade your area specific isolated resource to a node because you don't like them, but what's the risk when they don't get what they want peacefully?
That's why I wanted to know what your definition was, because to me this seems to have always been the case. I see where you're coming from now though so thank you.
I just really don't see it. I know it exists for sure. I've been in high end PvE guilds from EQ1 to now. Some DKP arguments, one guy thinks he needs to be main tank or the other tank isn't good enough. Maybe he quits the guild so he can be a main tank. So I've seen it but it's never that meaningful.
In PVP I've enjoyed the conflict. A group of players betray you, kill you and your team and take your stuff that strikes a month long(or longer) guild war. They join one of your other enemies and makes that worse. It's when you really get the worth of politics. There's just more to lose typically.
In Open world with only PvE enabled you can go take a mob someone wants. In PVP I can kill you and take.your stuff. I just don't think you can compete with that level of conflict creation.
Yeah, PVP just adds the "I can also kill you and take it if I want to" to every conflict lol
Yeah for sure
Dygz came up with a different answer than me.
He talked about his experiences (conflict with PvE encounters), I talked about mine (conflict with players on PvE games).
As to you saying I am getting competition and conflict confused - I have to assume someone on the internet understands what internet conflict between people is - I shouldn't need to explain that, and so haven't, and won't.
Unlike some people I actually play games, there will be times where I'm not active since I'm playing other games, enjoying and understanding them. Gives a broader view point on a lot of things lol.
But ill lurk during those times, hard to not do a meme comment when I see the same patterns though and people having the same complaints lol.
Do better
Look at the conflict myself and Mag have, or myself and Dygz, or myself and Liniker, or myself and George, or myself and...
There should be no need to give examples of what conflict is.
And if you're just saying "by not having pvp players are REQUIRED to solve their issues in some other way (whichever it is)", then just say that directly. I would at least understand that position, because I'm all for player limitations. I'd still disagree that pvp games can't do/have this, but that would be beside the point.
From the previous examples you alluded to it sounded as if people in EQ2 were so damn vexed about their conflicts that they had to take out-of-the-game actions in order to stop their opponent. To me that sounds like a pretty bad game-based conflict. Its resolution also has literally nothing to do with pve or pvp or even the damn game itself. This is the part I fail to understant.
I gave up. Said it before, it's just mental gymnastics. Dancing around the subject and strawmanning. At this point I feel like logic and reason is just offensive.
PvE = Pve focused design in development tacks on PvP as an afterthought (WoW, FF14, new world and 98% of every MMO since WoW :P basicly there PvE games with a PvP server tacked on a an option)
PvX = Both PvE and pvp in mind when developming (Dont see this as often cause it more work intwining both pve and pvp elements together
The amount of times posters here (specifically Liniker) has said he'd kill me all the time if we were on the same server - take away that ability and he has to come up with something more creative.
That is the point I am making here.
But if those conflicts weren't solved through pve and you don't consider pvp a good solution for them, is the meta-resolution of "I'm gonna fuck you over through outside-of-the-game means" the only way you see those conflicts resolving?
Stopping someone's ow boss fight would be considered pve resolution, right? So that doesn't count. And there's literally no way to influence someone's instanced farm either, so that's kinda out of the window.
Though L2 did have "a way" to do that directly through pve. I'm curious to know if EQ had something similar. In one of the later updates there was an instanced boss that dropped the best gear of that update. Once that boss was killed a certain amount of times, his location would change to an open world (well, semi-instanced cause you had to tp inside, but there was no limit on people) location where you could farm best enhancement items in the game.
And once people figured out optimal ways of farming said boss, they'd start decreasing the amount of members per raid, so that they could farm the boss as many times as possible before the location changed to the ow version. This would in turn remove the amount of farms their opponents could do. The boss could be farmed 2 times a week, so if someone had 4 farms instead of 2 they'd prevent their opponents from having a chance to drop some juicy stuff (as well as level up a very important enhancement item for the top tier gear).
In other words, L2 had a pve resolution for inter-guild conflict. Obviously there was some pvp around the NPC that would bring you into the instance, but there were some tricky ways of avoiding the pvp, though they were usually quite difficult to pull off.
Here's a rough playthrough of the dungeon
Like literally every single thing to do with human behavior, there are different situations, different shades of grey. This is why it just isn't worth going in to this in detail with people that don't actually understand.
Lets just talk about stopping open world boss fights. Just that one thing.
If I am getting ready to pull an encounter, and you pull it first because you were ready first, that is a thing.
If I am getting ready to pull an encounter, and you pull it first even though you weren't ready, that is a different thing.
If I am getting ready to pull an encounter, and you pull it first by getting help from others, that is a more different thing.
If I am getting ready to pull an encounter, and you organize a series of groups to pull it in a manner where they have no hope of killing it but just preventing us from doing so, that is an even more different thing
If I have just pulled an encounter, and you interfere with that encounter in some way (not supposed to be possible in EQ2), that is a fifth thing.
If I have just pulled an encounter and you crash the server, that is a sixth thing.
If I have just pulled an encounter and you get members of my guild suspended or banned, that is a seventh thing.
All seven of these situations are "stopping someones open world boss fight", yet each of them would elicit a different response.
None of them are resolutions though. If I don't like your guild because of the way your guild behaves on the server or some such, you killing a boss isn't going to change that - just as me killing you in PvP isn't going to change that.
Pvp games not only have more trees, but they also have way more branches due to having all the pvp ones on top of the pve ones.
My friend likes to tell a story of when he was super sick, but a world boss respawned and he just so happened to be the first one to learn about that. This was at 3 am. It was one of the bosses that has a cage that closes if the boss wakes up and won't open until he either dies or all the players in the cage do.
So my friend wakes up the boss solo and just kites it for a good 3-4h until the guild can wake up and gather, and then defend the NPC, that tps you into the boss' cage, from the warring guild. And that defense alone could have like 10 different branches ranging from "friend's guild just says fuck it and doesn't come" to "half the server gets involved in the conflict and my friend has to stay up for god knows how long".
And I think this is why Fiddlez keeps saying that he considers pvp to be a much more meaningful source of conflict and resolution of it. Which also brings me to the next point.
Is there even a resolution to that kind of thing? I've seen such disagreements resolved through pvp purely because both sides were equal in power and just grinded each other down through countless encounters and ended up respecting each other in the end. And quite a lot of players from both guilds remained friends on other servers.
And I guess that's doable through pve approaches as well, but the confrontation is not as direct, so it's not as simple to really figure out who's stronger who's weaker and who from either side cares about that. First/fastest clears would be the obvious answer, but you keep saying that it's not about that.
Which is why I don't see any difference between the reasons for conflict between the two sides of the pvx spectrum, and if there's no true resolution on either side then what is even the point of saying that one's side conflict interactions are somehow better or worse than the other's.
I think the only reasonable thing is to just agree that both sides can create conflict between the players and the players can then approach said conflict in a manner of ways. Obviously people will prefer one ways over the others, but that's not really a comparable thing to discuss (not like that has ever stopped this forum from spending several pages discussing exactly that kind of thing though
I can accept that from developer point of view.
But from player point of view remains to be seen how it feels.
For now it can mean that is bad at both compared with the pure specialized variants.
What are some PvX MMORPGs?
I don't include them. I don't give a shit if you and your guild are better or worse at the game than me and my guild. That is literally meaningless.
Yet in most PvP games, players have to give it meaning otherwise PvP has no meaning, and the game has no goal other than PvP (I've yet to see a PvP game that has a top end goal other than getting better at PvP, Ashes included - and that is how it should be). Thus, without essentially manufacturing meaning to PvP, the game as a whole would have no meaning. I'm not even complaining that PvP games have this manufactured conflict - they would be pointless without them. All I am saying is that this manufactured conflict is meaningless.
The funny thing is, PvP games have all these other resolutions - the same that PvE games have, yet people always (or almost always) fall back on PvP. This is why conflict resolution in PvP games is shit.
Even your example is of people falling back on to the lowest form of conflict resolution - which is what I am saying makes PvP games worse at this.
Basically, you are kind of making my point for me here.
How exactly are they manufactured though? They are just additional options that the devs give you to resolve your self-created conflicts.
Just as having open world bosses would create more conflict trees than purely having instanced ones.
And in both cases it's the devs that decide to which extent the variety of trees goes.
Oh, and once again, I'm not talking about faction-based shit here, because that kind of conflict is obviously manufactured as fuck. It literally tells you who your opponent is, unlike freeform owpvp mmos.
The meaning comes from the same source as the meaning in pve games. From player-to-player interactions. The only thing that changes is the medium through which the players can participate in that interaction.
Pvp is just a tool to use. Say there is a world boss in a pve game. But, for whatever reason, tanks don't have direct aggro abilities (or simply not interaction with the aggro list at all), so the only way to somehow change the boss' actions, if you're late to the farm, would be to bring way more people so that the boss starts paying attention to your bigger damage and disrupts the initial group's flow. Obviously this is a super simplistic boss, but just go with it for the sake of the example.
And then the devs add aggro list interactions to the boss in the next expansion. Would this not create more trees of conflict interactions to the game? Would you now call those interactions meaningless just because people would obviously start using them after their implementation?
Oh, and on the topic of "no goal" in pvp mmos. What would be the goal of a pve one? Would that not be "kill every boss and/or get every item by killing said bosses, until the game stops existing"? Because I don't quite see how that's in any way different from overcoming your opponents in pvp, until the game stops existing.
Ok, then give an example of conflict resolution in a pve game. You've given examples of potential reasons to have conflict and ways to interact with said conflict. And you previously gave examples of resolutions, but, unless I forget, those were mainly out-of-game ones, and you even omitted worse ones, which I would assume went even harder into the meta-solution territory.
Give an example from your own history. Or did none of your conflicts ever end, and that is the exact reason for why you consider them super meaningful? Cause I guess I could understand that point. I'd consider it kinda silly and would say that endless conflict just means that there was no resolution to begin with, but maybe we just disagree on the core principle of what constitutes a meaningful conflict.
Yeah, but these things aren't creating conflict.
Again, this is my point.
If it is over a thing in the game, and if the intent of the thing in the game is to create "conflict", it isn't actual conflict, it is just "playing the game".
Got it.
When you have people in a game, playing it together, conflict between those people isn't "meta", it is just conflict between people playing the game.
And yes, we are discussing different things, that is why I have been trying to steer you away from the thing you are talking about, since you were the one asking questions.
Most of the time, when I am trying to steer someone in a direction other than where they think the discussion should go, that is the reason behind it.
We are on directly opposed ends of the spectrum on this topic. To me, anything that happens outside of the game is utterly meaningless (maaaybe outside of the game's forums, but more often than not even that is a stretch).
To you, it seems, that if the conflict doesn't overspill from the game - it's meaningless.
There's no point in steering me, cause I won't notice it. I don't pick up on that stuff. Just tell me directly "you're talking about a completely different topic".
Mental... gymnastics. Not trying to steer anything. Just doesn't even have a point 😂. Might think there is one but if you can't or refuse to explain it for any reason then what's the point.
Everytime Conflict in PVE is brought up it's through designs outside Developer intent. In other words it's through griefing. That might be a bit harsh for your buddy but my point is they certainly didn't intend for that to be part of the game, they probably didn't think anyone would do it. Either way it's finding loopholes in development and to me that's far different then meaningful.
In AoC because Steven is putting so much into Risk Vs Reward it's creating an environment where things have A LOT of Reward. Castles/Guilds can take taxes from multiple nodes and put it in their own account and reduce the effectiveness of the Node. The higher the reward the bigger the conflict, the more I can take the more pissed off you will be. It's part of the game.
The thing that Noanni is missing is his version of conflict always seems to involve cheating/greifing the system and his argument is because you find loop holes(outside Developer design), that is more meaningful. They make the point by saying that developers need to create systems for PVP but PVE players don't. To be fair I am not sure Noanni knows that's the point they are making. Essentially it's an extremely strange point to make because you are playing a game, the developers made everything. There's literally 0 anything, including conflict unless they made it. Possibly why they are intent on beating around the bush.
PVP doesn't require loopholes and can use the game as intended. All they need is the stage and they will create the play. So we need a stage? Of course. You need the Big reward to fight over like a castle and the actual ability to fight over it and take it. Its far closer to real life conflict and how it develops. It's the players that create it though. They are the ones who betray alliances through various human behavior like greed or simply dis liking management or just bored or they did something you didn't like, just a few examples.
People will be people but they need a stage. In WOW I don't even need to chat with my dungeon party,my biggest complaint of railroad PVE games so far is they completely undermine all social behavior and this meaningful conflict.
When WoW made everything cross server they destroyed every community on every server. Through the years they have continued to take reasons away from players to interact in a game that was MEANT to be social. They stream lined everything and no one recognized each other anymore. It's all instances with a million different players.
I have a point. In AoC the design is to add ALL.of that back and way more. Conflict is social, you need.the community. Pretty obvious but if there's no meaning clearly no one cares. You need skin in the game. Like the poker example, with out money Poker sucks. By allowing players to take the reward directly through fighting.
In PVP I can not only kill it first and prevent you, I can come kill you after, I can kill you while you are on it. Either way I end up with the loot and the loot from you. Bigger reward, bigger the loss, bigger conflict.
In OW PvE you can tag a mob before me or kill a low level boss over and over(griefing). In PVP I can kill you and take it back. The thing is because it exists it essentially forces players to engage and be social because otherwise unless you grief the system you cannot impact me in a meaningful way. It creates competition sure but the opposite still applies in PVP but I also have the option of taking it. Not to mention but simply being beaten sucks too.
Yes you can have conflict in PVE but as far as I can tell there's simply just less and less meaning behind it. It's the important part why PvP is needed in AoC. PVP supplements the game. The design is to spark meaningful conflict. AoC could go full PVE and it would still be an exciting title. They could throw in 100% consensual PVP in GvG and Arenas, Caravans and be a booming success. So why even add it then? What's the value? They are intertwining it because Steven has been there, the same places I have been. Simply put the conflict and content that comes from PVP is insane and creates stories.
I'm not saying this is everyone and i have seen you streaming. I am on vacation right now though, then an extended one because of the writer strike going X.X.
The amount of hours I've been playing games i don't even want to say lmao. 40 hours is a tiny drop in the water for me right now.
Ya it isn't gameplay when you are talking about out of game actions, exploits , etc. Nature of pve is cooperative, people that are overly competitive will add more toxic elements.
Also you being a pvper should know (well depending on if you are evil or good) that simply just pvping and winning is only part of the battle. There is the mental games where you don't fight people and use words, etc to effect them, cause distrust between their own guild, spies for some people, up towards more toxic elements i don't' condone which are disgusting to simply win.
I've had pvp fights and at the same time talking to some guy in game chat and on stream breaking him down to freak out during the fight. I could tell he was getting trigger when i was saying his girl could have my numbers, i knew exactly what to say to get to him. It was perfect and the pvp fight was kind of the background at that point.
End of the day this call comes down to someone thinking pve content is better and will argue any element pvp is better and have a incorrect bias view of things in order to keep their own standpoint.
Long story short there is not a world where you don't get more from pvp. Any element players are doing in pure pve content can be done in pvp. If you need to be more creative in pve so you can get world first and to pay someone off to mess up a raid that is already done in pvp. You could also argue at that point that pve content is really just taking pvp elements and focusing pvp into their game. Which breaks since pve isn't' designed for that and is simply being ruined by a tiny amount of individuals trying to be overly competitive. That tiny amount doesn't speak for almost all players that play the game and is a tiny outlier not really worth mentioning as something players actually do. You are simply getting the toxic view point of a small group talking a bout it like it is common ground which is pretty much just being a half truth with no honestly. Don't expect a straight answer.
- Gets banned because of mass report and you are a lead for a war
- Severs crash from ddos attacks during a siege and you can't reconnect and log back on and your castle is destroyed.
- getting crushed by another guild and losing wars, your guild breaks apart in game
- Spy loots your guild bank, ruins guild in game.
- Off game actions causing drama in guilds to ruin guild or leadership and pull people away
- Paying people off to throw fights or recruit them.
PvP mmorpgs been there done that crap, also anyone feeling this is "content" or takes advantage of these things in full and enjoys it honestly are not gamers and are just pathetic. Arguing these meta bs makes a game better is an actual joke and you should be embarrassed for saying this is a reason why a certain kind of content is better for it.
Again complete and actual embarrassment no one deserves to deal with anything like this it isn't good content is it just toxic level elements because your lack of ability to actually win in the content.
back to gaming.