If you rush end-game (level cap) all the things you mention and I mentioned go away, and the population of the server focuses on less activities/map areas.
I said before about mmos offering in some servers low xp rate and others offering high xp rate.
Same game, vastly different populations.
Got no answer there...
If you rush end-game (level cap) all the things you mention and I mentioned go away, and the population of the server focuses on less activities/map areas.
What games do you have in mind here?
While you are correct about this from a map perspective (doesn't matter, will explain why soon), most good MMO's offer players at the level cap far more activities to do than they offer while leveling up.
Look at Ashes, even though Steven says lower level players will have things to do in sieges and such, do you really think a lower level player is going to ever be preferred over a player at the level cap?
As to some parts of the world being less used as the population levels up, games of the past have needed this to be the case.
The way basically all games were designed before about 2012 (and most since), is that the game world would be assigned specific hardware to run. Servers would be made up of shards, and each zone would be assigned to a specific shard. All mobs, NPC's and players in that zone would be handled by that shard.
Then, as players leveled up, they would assign more hardware to the zones where the bulk of the population was, and fewer hardware to zones where people weren't at yet.
In some games I have played, if you managed to zone in to a top level zone on release day, you could crash the server because they didn't assign any hardware to it, nit expecting it to be used for weeks.
What all this means is that as the bulk of players finish with a zone, developers assign less and less hardware to it, while assigning more and more hardware to the top level zones. It isn't unusual in some games for one top level zone on a given server to be assigned 2 or 3 shards, while the lowest 10 zones are all sharing one shard.
Thus, the notion of some zones being dead isn't necessarily a bad thing, and is in fact necessary in many games in order for the game to remain stable with the hardware available.
This won't be the case for Ashes, to be clear (despite knowing more people on the Ashes team than any other MMO, i actually know.less about how the servers are structured than any other game i have played)
If you rush end-game (level cap) all the things you mention and I mentioned go away, and the population of the server focuses on less activities/map areas.
I said before about mmos offering in some servers low xp rate and others offering high xp rate.
Same game, vastly different populations.
Got no answer there...
Rushing to end game makes people use less of the map simply because zones are designed for leveling. No one wants to go to a level 20 zone when at level cap. If the zone is always relevant this doesn't happen.
Private/public server population differences are effected by XP rates the same way the volume of the ocean is effected by a rainstorm. Financial reasons, friendship, additional content, p2w, patch cycles, ease of use, etc all play a much larger role in the size of populations compared to XP rates.
If you rush end-game (level cap) all the things you mention and I mentioned go away, and the population of the server focuses on less activities/map areas.
I said before about mmos offering in some servers low xp rate and others offering high xp rate.
Same game, vastly different populations.
Got no answer there...
Rushing to end game makes people use less of the map simply because zones are designed for leveling. No one wants to go to a level 20 zone when at level cap. If the zone is always relevant this doesn't happen.
Private/public server population differences are effected by XP rates the same way the volume of the ocean is effected by a rainstorm. Financial reasons, friendship, additional content, p2w, patch cycles, ease of use, etc all play a much larger role in the size of populations compared to XP rates.
First you, because the answer is simple.
I played my first 3 years of L2 on a privately owned server, set up by a chain of internet cafes across my country and then I played on the official NcSoft servers.
Both of them low rate, both of them massively populated. In the private there were rumors of GMs playing with boosted toons. As a matter of fact after the story in which my best mate PKed 15 ppl and we rode into the sunset, soon after the leader of the strongest clan came, found us and killed us all.
He kept dealing steady 1374 magic dmg to us and when our tank was the last one standing, he used ultimate defence boosting physical and magical defence. To no effect our tank kept receiving 1374 dmg.
On the official servers the gold selling was a known fact. The cheaters were few in between and most of the times we wouldnt even notice. The game was massive, the maps were massive, and 1 cheater couldnt affect change in the server. The strong guilds did.
On the high xp servers the populations were always a couple hundred ppl.
Now I will answer noanni and in there you will find an explanation regarding your concern about lv 20s, zone relevance replayability and what not.
If you rush end-game (level cap) all the things you mention and I mentioned go away, and the population of the server focuses on less activities/map areas.
I said before about mmos offering in some servers low xp rate and others offering high xp rate.
Same game, vastly different populations.
Got no answer there...
Rushing to end game makes people use less of the map simply because zones are designed for leveling. No one wants to go to a level 20 zone when at level cap. If the zone is always relevant this doesn't happen.
Private/public server population differences are effected by XP rates the same way the volume of the ocean is effected by a rainstorm. Financial reasons, friendship, additional content, p2w, patch cycles, ease of use, etc all play a much larger role in the size of populations compared to XP rates.
First you, because the answer is simple.
I played my first 3 years of L2 on a privately owned server, set up by a chain of internet cafes across my country and then I played on the official NcSoft servers.
Both of them low rate, both of them massively populated. In the private there were rumors of GMs playing with boosted toons. As a matter of fact after the story in which my best mate PKed 15 ppl and we rode into the sunset, soon after the leader of the strongest clan came, found us and killed us all.
He kept dealing steady 1374 magic dmg to us and when our tank was the last one standing, he used ultimate defence boosting physical and magical defence. To no effect our tank kept receiving 1374 dmg.
On the official servers the gold selling was a known fact. The cheaters were few in between and most of the times we wouldnt even notice. The game was massive, the maps were massive, and 1 cheater couldnt affect change in the server. The strong guilds did.
On the high xp servers the populations were always a couple hundred ppl.
Now I will answer noanni and in there you will find an explanation regarding your concern about lv 20s, zone relevance replayability and what not.
What country is this Internet cafe in? The popularity of grind games in non Western countries is undisputed. I believe ashes is releasing in the West, is that not the target audience for the game?
Terrible, leveling is easily the worst part of any MMO. Id rather not spend 120 days to get to the part of the game i want to play.
I shouldn't be surprised to read this, but I am haha
To me, the leveling experience is one of core aspects of a MMORPG. A slow-paced leveling so you can actually have a sense of progression, feel the difference between each level, truly experience each zone to the fullest, meeting and uniting with people along the way in the open world. Games like classic WoW, classic Aion, LotRO, etc, those are games that I actually miss the leveling experience.
Vanilla wow took the avg player 10-15 days of played time to hit cap a far cry from this proposed increase. Experiencing no name useless mobs and doing irrelevant quests completely negated by vertical progression isn't really immersive for me.
There's a reason major figures in the MMO community were massively against this kind of profession system circa the late 00s and into the 10s. Frankly it's rather boring.
And there is a reason why steven based AoC in L2 and AA, not in wow and its clones.
It's that simple.
I doubt anyone that played archeage can name more than 5% of the quest givers encountered during the leveling process. The leveling process for archeage had nothing to do with the systems that excited players to play and immersive themselves in the world.
Leveling is effectively a revisitable evergreen tutorial that anyone with a pulse can complete.Some people may enjoy it and while it adds variety in gameplay many many people currently and historically hate it.
The question is why do I need to participate in a 6 month mandatory tutorial?
I dont remember any of the quest givers of L2. Not important. Players make the stories, the grind sets the time and place.
You don't remember them because it's super boring and questing itself loses importance as you complete more quests. Your alternative, grinding mobs, is about as interesting at facilitating story as watching paint dry.
Your allowed to like whatever you want, but forcing everyone else to participate in your preferred content isn't good game design.
This may not be a popular opinion but here I go lol.
I think that there needs to be time investment to level. Certainly would like it to take 3 or 4 months on average to reach max level. What I would also love is that leveling is based off of ability to play and perfect one's rotation/trade/crafting abilities/etc.. Have quests or training moments that a player needs to perfect, in order to gain xp faster, or even level to the next level! As opposed to it just being a grinding slog of kill 6,000 boars.
Leveling to me, needs to be more than just sitting hours in a zone grinding out trash mobs gaining small amounts of xp.
I also do not like the long tedious grind just to learn spells. Again maybe stressing more on perfecting the use of those spells to level them up. I liken it to a chess game. Imagine playing chess and you have the king.... then you get a pawn, then another, and another. Eventually you get the castle and a knight. That is not a rewarding system at all. It takes a person 6 months to get all their chess pieces just to play chess.... all the while competing against people who just started and maybe just have a king and pawns. Then trying to pretend that somehow they are the superior gamer, when in reality they just spent countless hours grinding a mob that was not hard to grind, it was just tedious and time consuming. Saw it oh to often in wow. Bad gamer started game before another player and grinded to reach max. They then act superior to everyone else. But the moment you caught up on all your spells you slapped them around because you had all your "chess pieces". And actually perfected how your class, spec, and rotation functioned.
Some people see it as "sitting hours to clear trash mobs in a spot".
But it is more than that.
1) You prepare your consumables in town (craft/economy/trade with friends/guild).
2) You assemble your group with good supports, good healers, good tanks, good dps, and good PVPrs because it's an open world pvp mmo.
3) You make your way to the destination that may combine:
Good xp per hour
Good profit outlook
Relevant mats that can be found
Related quest
4) as you make your way there you may encounter caravans, rivals, friends or just play /zone chat drama
5) once you get there you compromise with other friendly groups and you deal with enemies
6) during the grind you catch up with friends, you talk socially. Not just "heal!", "aggro!", "minions!". This is NOT, unfortunatly the case in eso, ff14, w0w, instanced treadmil.
7) there is a time and a place for organized friends/guildies to take on challenging content and act out a mechanical scenario. Instanced dumgeons with lore and hard mechanics and OW raiding and the pvp threat from rival raiders.
8) during the grind you may fight enemies or you may duel with friends
And again... all of the above could be cancelled if:
You encounter enemies,
Spot a caravan
Being asked for help by a guild member (not a stranger in a zerg guild, for which you dont care).
NONE of the above happens in end-game mentality mmos. You just queue at the groupfinder with randoms or guildies, you shout "aggro" "heal" "minions" rinse repeat over and over and over.
NONE of the above happens in games driven by npc quest givers.
You treat NPCs as ppl and ppl as NPCs, ignoring them completelly since:
They cant pvp you
Overland content isnt challenging in order to request/offer help.
The /zone chat is just a memefest without any ingame/gameplay implications or drama.
Rewarding exploration says hi.
Everything you want is easily solved by making interesting things in the world players want to explore and have rewarding progression components tied to them. Make a specific forge found in the an abandoned city the only way you can smelt iron ore into special iron ore. The abandoned city is haunted by fire spectres rewarding the acquisition of fire protection pots/auras/gear.
Grinding is all about seeing a number get bigger, exploration is about having a damn adventure.
i can say the same thing about you. Your allowed to like whatever you want, but forcing everyone else to participate in your preferred content isn't good game design. i dont like questing or exploring (not too much). why do you want to force that on me because you think its better? thats bad design. (according to you).
every time im questing or exploring, running from a to b, im not playing my character. i dont want to log into the game to play running simulator. i dont want to log in to not play my character. the only time i dont want to play my character is if im talking to people.
running from a to b isnt solving a challenge or a puzzle. you arent using your skills or anything. just holding w or clicking or pressing num lock, or just auto path on the map... what a great adventure!
grinding mobs is fun for me. optimizing my farm, fighting other people, all the things george mentioned, etc
also fyi l2 has great quests. you have these long chain quests that make travel all over the map, different areas, talking ot different npc, doing different tasks, sometimes solving small puzzles, etc.
you will never have so much fun questing in other games like you can have doing noblese or baium quest in l2.
Also not my preference. L2 and AA are Stevens preference.
In addition the class, +class, nobility, olympiad, epic raid quests of L2, even though I dont remember the npcs or the damn background story, had real gameplay rewards and increase the power factor of the organized players that stood head above shoulders amongst the rest in a server, not to mention unique previledges/skills/gear for the best 34 or the strongest 4000 players in a server.
Compare that to mount skins char skins and titles you get from wow eso ff14......
So you remember none of the lore or any world immersion garnered by completing the quests, but you fondly remember the number value increase associated with the reward?
Skinner boxes aren't really all that fun to me, but you do you!
I remember all the 60-90 member guilds, their flags, the alliances and the enemies. I remember the strong players the famous players and the encounters.
I remember my inrl smallscale group, one of my friends playing his dark elven knight like a piano, taking out 5 players and 10 mobs all at once (same gearscore etc), another friend PKing 15 ppl when I gave tje signal
I remember the raid runs and the pvp, the castle ownerships and betrayals.
I remember my inrl being introduced to a 50yo guild ldr inrl and the course we took to revive his once legendary guild.
I remember the crafts the over enchants the gifts and so much more.
You want story? Go play
Dragon age
Witcher
Batman
Assassins creed
Rdr
Gow
Soulslike
Etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc.
I played world of warcrafr 3 + frozen throne, the original dota and the likes, but I never touched wow and it's themepark content, forced faction pvp blue v red.
Why? It wasnt an mmo.
You can have fond memories of players, server social structures, pvp battles, etc, but none of that is created by leveling itself.
see you are only saying that because you never leveled in l2. all those things start as soon as level 1.
it goes from people being dicks in execution grounds, to cp and guilds going to the cemetery to fight near the spawn, to people fighting over farming spots, creating wars and alliances. everything starts during the leveling process. it doesnt start after you are max level.
If you rush end-game (level cap) all the things you mention and I mentioned go away, and the population of the server focuses on less activities/map areas.
What games do you have in mind here?
While you are correct about this from a map perspective (doesn't matter, will explain why soon), most good MMO's offer players at the level cap far more activities to do than they offer while leveling up.
Look at Ashes, even though Steven says lower level players will have things to do in sieges and such, do you really think a lower level player is going to ever be preferred over a player at the level cap?
As to some parts of the world being less used as the population levels up, games of the past have needed this to be the case.
The way basically all games were designed before about 2012 (and most since), is that the game world would be assigned specific hardware to run. Servers would be made up of shards, and each zone would be assigned to a specific shard. All mobs, NPC's and players in that zone would be handled by that shard.
Then, as players leveled up, they would assign more hardware to the zones where the bulk of the population was, and fewer hardware to zones where people weren't at yet.
In some games I have played, if you managed to zone in to a top level zone on release day, you could crash the server because they didn't assign any hardware to it, nit expecting it to be used for weeks.
What all this means is that as the bulk of players finish with a zone, developers assign less and less hardware to it, while assigning more and more hardware to the top level zones. It isn't unusual in some games for one top level zone on a given server to be assigned 2 or 3 shards, while the lowest 10 zones are all sharing one shard.
Thus, the notion of some zones being dead isn't necessarily a bad thing, and is in fact necessary in many games in order for the game to remain stable with the hardware available.
This won't be the case for Ashes, to be clear (despite knowing more people on the Ashes team than any other MMO, i actually know.less about how the servers are structured than any other game i have played)
thats not how it works. also there is automatic scaling...servers crash for a different reason
Terrible, leveling is easily the worst part of any MMO. Id rather not spend 120 days to get to the part of the game i want to play.
I shouldn't be surprised to read this, but I am haha
To me, the leveling experience is one of core aspects of a MMORPG. A slow-paced leveling so you can actually have a sense of progression, feel the difference between each level, truly experience each zone to the fullest, meeting and uniting with people along the way in the open world. Games like classic WoW, classic Aion, LotRO, etc, those are games that I actually miss the leveling experience.
Vanilla wow took the avg player 10-15 days of played time to hit cap a far cry from this proposed increase. Experiencing no name useless mobs and doing irrelevant quests completely negated by vertical progression isn't really immersive for me.
There's a reason major figures in the MMO community were massively against this kind of profession system circa the late 00s and into the 10s. Frankly it's rather boring.
And there is a reason why steven based AoC in L2 and AA, not in wow and its clones.
It's that simple.
I doubt anyone that played archeage can name more than 5% of the quest givers encountered during the leveling process. The leveling process for archeage had nothing to do with the systems that excited players to play and immersive themselves in the world.
Leveling is effectively a revisitable evergreen tutorial that anyone with a pulse can complete.Some people may enjoy it and while it adds variety in gameplay many many people currently and historically hate it.
The question is why do I need to participate in a 6 month mandatory tutorial?
I dont remember any of the quest givers of L2. Not important. Players make the stories, the grind sets the time and place.
You don't remember them because it's super boring and questing itself loses importance as you complete more quests. Your alternative, grinding mobs, is about as interesting at facilitating story as watching paint dry.
Your allowed to like whatever you want, but forcing everyone else to participate in your preferred content isn't good game design.
This may not be a popular opinion but here I go lol.
I think that there needs to be time investment to level. Certainly would like it to take 3 or 4 months on average to reach max level. What I would also love is that leveling is based off of ability to play and perfect one's rotation/trade/crafting abilities/etc.. Have quests or training moments that a player needs to perfect, in order to gain xp faster, or even level to the next level! As opposed to it just being a grinding slog of kill 6,000 boars.
Leveling to me, needs to be more than just sitting hours in a zone grinding out trash mobs gaining small amounts of xp.
I also do not like the long tedious grind just to learn spells. Again maybe stressing more on perfecting the use of those spells to level them up. I liken it to a chess game. Imagine playing chess and you have the king.... then you get a pawn, then another, and another. Eventually you get the castle and a knight. That is not a rewarding system at all. It takes a person 6 months to get all their chess pieces just to play chess.... all the while competing against people who just started and maybe just have a king and pawns. Then trying to pretend that somehow they are the superior gamer, when in reality they just spent countless hours grinding a mob that was not hard to grind, it was just tedious and time consuming. Saw it oh to often in wow. Bad gamer started game before another player and grinded to reach max. They then act superior to everyone else. But the moment you caught up on all your spells you slapped them around because you had all your "chess pieces". And actually perfected how your class, spec, and rotation functioned.
Some people see it as "sitting hours to clear trash mobs in a spot".
But it is more than that.
1) You prepare your consumables in town (craft/economy/trade with friends/guild).
2) You assemble your group with good supports, good healers, good tanks, good dps, and good PVPrs because it's an open world pvp mmo.
3) You make your way to the destination that may combine:
Good xp per hour
Good profit outlook
Relevant mats that can be found
Related quest
4) as you make your way there you may encounter caravans, rivals, friends or just play /zone chat drama
5) once you get there you compromise with other friendly groups and you deal with enemies
6) during the grind you catch up with friends, you talk socially. Not just "heal!", "aggro!", "minions!". This is NOT, unfortunatly the case in eso, ff14, w0w, instanced treadmil.
7) there is a time and a place for organized friends/guildies to take on challenging content and act out a mechanical scenario. Instanced dumgeons with lore and hard mechanics and OW raiding and the pvp threat from rival raiders.
8) during the grind you may fight enemies or you may duel with friends
And again... all of the above could be cancelled if:
You encounter enemies,
Spot a caravan
Being asked for help by a guild member (not a stranger in a zerg guild, for which you dont care).
NONE of the above happens in end-game mentality mmos. You just queue at the groupfinder with randoms or guildies, you shout "aggro" "heal" "minions" rinse repeat over and over and over.
NONE of the above happens in games driven by npc quest givers.
You treat NPCs as ppl and ppl as NPCs, ignoring them completelly since:
They cant pvp you
Overland content isnt challenging in order to request/offer help.
The /zone chat is just a memefest without any ingame/gameplay implications or drama.
Rewarding exploration says hi.
Everything you want is easily solved by making interesting things in the world players want to explore and have rewarding progression components tied to them. Make a specific forge found in the an abandoned city the only way you can smelt iron ore into special iron ore. The abandoned city is haunted by fire spectres rewarding the acquisition of fire protection pots/auras/gear.
Grinding is all about seeing a number get bigger, exploration is about having a damn adventure.
i can say the same thing about you. Your allowed to like whatever you want, but forcing everyone else to participate in your preferred content isn't good game design. i dont like questing or exploring (not too much). why do you want to force that on me because you think its better? thats bad design. (according to you).
every time im questing or exploring, running from a to b, im not playing my character. i dont want to log into the game to play running simulator. i dont want to log in to not play my character. the only time i dont want to play my character is if im talking to people.
running from a to b isnt solving a challenge or a puzzle. you arent using your skills or anything. just holding w or clicking or pressing num lock, or just auto path on the map... what a great adventure!
grinding mobs is fun for me. optimizing my farm, fighting other people, all the things george mentioned, etc
also fyi l2 has great quests. you have these long chain quests that make travel all over the map, different areas, talking ot different npc, doing different tasks, sometimes solving small puzzles, etc.
you will never have so much fun questing in other games like you can have doing noblese or baium quest in l2.
I never said you have to explore or quest. I said exploration facilitates the same things George described as benefits of leveling. See the example of a unique forge. If you want to sit in a spot farming the same pixels, have at it.
The difference is a leveling system forces me to complete it first before I can get to the game I want to play. Imagine if you had to explore the whole map before you could go to any grind spot.
see you are only saying that because you never leveled in l2. all those things start as soon as level 1.
it goes from people being dicks in execution grounds, to cp and guilds going to the cemetery to fight near the spawn, to people fighting over farming spots, creating wars and alliances. everything starts during the leveling process. it doesnt start after you are max level.
*cough* *cough*
I played Lineage II at the NA launch, levelled up to 27. Don't remember anyone beside my offline friends also playing. No idea what the "server social structures" were (or what they're supposed to be exactly). Never witnessed any PvP on my server, just heard my friend tells what happened when he shot at a Chinese gold farmer (the PKPKPK in the chat and the other farmers getting out of their holes to chase him).
Also not my preference. L2 and AA are Stevens preference.
In addition the class, +class, nobility, olympiad, epic raid quests of L2, even though I dont remember the npcs or the damn background story, had real gameplay rewards and increase the power factor of the organized players that stood head above shoulders amongst the rest in a server, not to mention unique previledges/skills/gear for the best 34 or the strongest 4000 players in a server.
Compare that to mount skins char skins and titles you get from wow eso ff14......
So you remember none of the lore or any world immersion garnered by completing the quests, but you fondly remember the number value increase associated with the reward?
Skinner boxes aren't really all that fun to me, but you do you!
I remember all the 60-90 member guilds, their flags, the alliances and the enemies. I remember the strong players the famous players and the encounters.
I remember my inrl smallscale group, one of my friends playing his dark elven knight like a piano, taking out 5 players and 10 mobs all at once (same gearscore etc), another friend PKing 15 ppl when I gave tje signal
I remember the raid runs and the pvp, the castle ownerships and betrayals.
I remember my inrl being introduced to a 50yo guild ldr inrl and the course we took to revive his once legendary guild.
I remember the crafts the over enchants the gifts and so much more.
You want story? Go play
Dragon age
Witcher
Batman
Assassins creed
Rdr
Gow
Soulslike
Etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc.
I played world of warcrafr 3 + frozen throne, the original dota and the likes, but I never touched wow and it's themepark content, forced faction pvp blue v red.
Why? It wasnt an mmo.
You can have fond memories of players, server social structures, pvp battles, etc, but none of that is created by leveling itself.
see you are only saying that because you never leveled in l2. all those things start as soon as level 1.
it goes from people being dicks in execution grounds, to cp and guilds going to the cemetery to fight near the spawn, to people fighting over farming spots, creating wars and alliances. everything starts during the leveling process. it doesnt start after you are max level.
Darkfall had a skill use system and had the exact same thing. Point being that leveling doesn't create those experiences, players do. Systems get them into the world, and a timesink leveling system is the most archaic and boring system for this.
If you rush end-game (level cap) all the things you mention and I mentioned go away, and the population of the server focuses on less activities/map areas.
What games do you have in mind here?
While you are correct about this from a map perspective (doesn't matter, will explain why soon), most good MMO's offer players at the level cap far more activities to do than they offer while leveling up.
Look at Ashes, even though Steven says lower level players will have things to do in sieges and such, do you really think a lower level player is going to ever be preferred over a player at the level cap?
As to some parts of the world being less used as the population levels up, games of the past have needed this to be the case.
The way basically all games were designed before about 2012 (and most since), is that the game world would be assigned specific hardware to run. Servers would be made up of shards, and each zone would be assigned to a specific shard. All mobs, NPC's and players in that zone would be handled by that shard.
Then, as players leveled up, they would assign more hardware to the zones where the bulk of the population was, and fewer hardware to zones where people weren't at yet.
In some games I have played, if you managed to zone in to a top level zone on release day, you could crash the server because they didn't assign any hardware to it, nit expecting it to be used for weeks.
What all this means is that as the bulk of players finish with a zone, developers assign less and less hardware to it, while assigning more and more hardware to the top level zones. It isn't unusual in some games for one top level zone on a given server to be assigned 2 or 3 shards, while the lowest 10 zones are all sharing one shard.
Thus, the notion of some zones being dead isn't necessarily a bad thing, and is in fact necessary in many games in order for the game to remain stable with the hardware available.
This won't be the case for Ashes, to be clear (despite knowing more people on the Ashes team than any other MMO, i actually know.less about how the servers are structured than any other game i have played)
Now you noaani.
Let's begin without suprises or re-inventing the wheel; I will simply tell you off:
Stop the wall texts of unecessary info.
Why do you flex you knowledge about zone hardware since it's proof of bad mmo structure, and then again irrelevant to AoC.
Secondly, L2 didnt had server shards and Steven based AoC on it.
So all that wall text does t contribute to the discussion of: content for all levels.
L2 is always the mmo I have in mind.
I dont think that low level players will play any other role other than cannon fodder or using some wall guns in sieges.
Yet when we were playing L2, we could not wait for the siege hours every two weeks, no matter our level difference with other players. That's a historicsl fact. It is what it is. People will love it even if they are weak.
Many times I have chosen to ignore Stevens sugar coating of certain uncomfortable facts for two reasons: I am an adult with life experience and I know not to get offended by little flexibility, especially in promotions.
Secondly this is the best mmo that will ever be for a while and if you poke holes on useless things like jahlon, dygz and others, ridiculously demanding a milionaire to comply to your online whims about HIS game, people may not call you an animal abuser but will definatly laugh at you.
I dont care if low lv people are effective or not at castle sieges. I was low lv once on L2 with my friends but we never missed a good siege.
Now let's talk about level disparity, gameplay content and end-game.
Weapons armor ships caravans etc must matter. If mmos allow players to find green blue items every ten minutes you might as well be another wow clone, speed to endgame and treadmil on the dungeons for gear score.
Items should last you for at least 15 levels in the current AoC standards and the crafting of a complete set until lv 40 should take a few weeks for a 3-4 member group and 1-2 for an 8man group that equips weapons in dps, armor in tank and healer (looking to speed up leveling at the risk of losing when contesting xp spots).
Items should slow you down, you shouldnt be able to deal with better mobs/zones/queats without stopping to gear up properly.
You should craft at every tier. This means that you need to travel around at every level, in every corner that you can CURRENTLY survive the PvE.
This means that you spend time in low lv zones, have rich gameplay and you create friends and foes.
And in AoC not only you need boats bags and caravans. You need to improve your node and what comes with it.
People will enjoy low level areas during the xp. People should return to mine or harvest if the Devs are smart. It's simple as that.
You dont need to mix player levels.
Low levels will al ways lose to high. New players need new servers.
High end players need expansions every year. 5 new levels to reach, new items to GAMEPLAY OVER FOR in the owpvp, a couple of new skills to unlock and some stuff gated behind long and hard (yes..) quests.
Now L2 did one more thing well.
Players that reached lv 76 could become nobility, fight 1v1 in tournaments to become the elite 34 amongst 10,000.
It required epic quests and it required players to start over with subclasses in the same way ff14 does it but harder.
So a famous Lv76 archer would become again a lv40 mage and play with lower level players in the good old zones.
The competitive players would sacrifice fun options due to subclass bonuses attached to the first class.
An archer shouldnt choose a mage (as a change of gameplay). He should choose a rogue for a small crit rate or crit dmg boost to his main archer class.
It's the same simple replayability that alts based mmos offer, (like eso) only that it is solidified to the first class, plus opened the way for epic quests and legendary 1v1 arenas with humongous rewards.
And those that want to rp as a different race different class new name... new char? Well fuck them, mmos are competitive get over it.
High lv players will never play alongside low lv plsyers and that's just fine.
"What about my friends that just started?" Find smarter friends.
AoC will have player actions affect the games coded files. High end players will return to slay the dragon and make the noobs wet in their pants, or reclaim corrupted areas.
So I am asking again. Why do we need to reach level cap in 45 days?
We can build small boats at lv 15 or whatever and pvp at level 15.
The hardcore will always reach lv cap far quicker than casuals. Why 45 instead of 120?
I never said you have to explore or quest. I said exploration facilitates the same things George described as benefits of leveling. See the example of a unique forge. If you want to sit in a spot farming the same pixels, have at it.
So mmos should be single-use games? Why would I return to the same location twice, if the entire game is built around exploration? And if it's not a single-use feature - how exactly is it different from leveling taking you to different locations and making you find the best ways of progressing through it?
And depending on the questing/leveling system you'd probably have to come back to previous locations as well.
The difference is a leveling system forces me to complete it first before I can get to the game I want to play. Imagine if you had to explore the whole map before you could go to any grind spot.
The difference is that for us that IS the game. As people here have been saying. Leveling has you PLAY the game from step 1. Well, good games do, that is. I'm sure there's been a ton of mmos that make you slog through dumb mechanics and/or boring quests that you don't care about, until you hit max lvl and "finally start the game".
Sandboxy games just give you a general direction and let you enjoy the path in your own way. Leveling just makes that path easier to notice and follow.
If you rush end-game (level cap) all the things you mention and I mentioned go away, and the population of the server focuses on less activities/map areas.
I said before about mmos offering in some servers low xp rate and others offering high xp rate.
Same game, vastly different populations.
Got no answer there...
Rushing to end game makes people use less of the map simply because zones are designed for leveling. No one wants to go to a level 20 zone when at level cap. If the zone is always relevant this doesn't happen.
Private/public server population differences are effected by XP rates the same way the volume of the ocean is effected by a rainstorm. Financial reasons, friendship, additional content, p2w, patch cycles, ease of use, etc all play a much larger role in the size of populations compared to XP rates.
First you, because the answer is simple.
I played my first 3 years of L2 on a privately owned server, set up by a chain of internet cafes across my country and then I played on the official NcSoft servers.
Both of them low rate, both of them massively populated. In the private there were rumors of GMs playing with boosted toons. As a matter of fact after the story in which my best mate PKed 15 ppl and we rode into the sunset, soon after the leader of the strongest clan came, found us and killed us all.
He kept dealing steady 1374 magic dmg to us and when our tank was the last one standing, he used ultimate defence boosting physical and magical defence. To no effect our tank kept receiving 1374 dmg.
On the official servers the gold selling was a known fact. The cheaters were few in between and most of the times we wouldnt even notice. The game was massive, the maps were massive, and 1 cheater couldnt affect change in the server. The strong guilds did.
On the high xp servers the populations were always a couple hundred ppl.
Now I will answer noanni and in there you will find an explanation regarding your concern about lv 20s, zone relevance replayability and what not.
What country is this Internet cafe in? The popularity of grind games in non Western countries is undisputed. I believe ashes is releasing in the West, is that not the target audience for the game?
L2, besides asia and NA was played in EU, mostly the balkans and eastern EU. Fair bit of polish players. Also Lsatin America.
These countries had internet cafes and people would meet up to play mmos and even punch up from one suburb to the next, as well as different cities in smaller nations.
see you are only saying that because you never leveled in l2. all those things start as soon as level 1.
it goes from people being dicks in execution grounds, to cp and guilds going to the cemetery to fight near the spawn, to people fighting over farming spots, creating wars and alliances. everything starts during the leveling process. it doesnt start after you are max level.
*cough* *cough*
I played Lineage II at the NA launch, levelled up to 27. Don't remember anyone beside my offline friends also playing. No idea what the "server social structures" were (or what they're supposed to be exactly). Never witnessed any PvP on my server, just heard my friend tells what happened when he shot at a Chinese gold farmer (the PKPKPK in the chat and the other farmers getting out of their holes to chase him).
So, experience may vary depending on the user.
well, u got your answer...level 27. but yeah experiences may vary, but people will eventually go to the same areas and the conflict will start.
Also not my preference. L2 and AA are Stevens preference.
In addition the class, +class, nobility, olympiad, epic raid quests of L2, even though I dont remember the npcs or the damn background story, had real gameplay rewards and increase the power factor of the organized players that stood head above shoulders amongst the rest in a server, not to mention unique previledges/skills/gear for the best 34 or the strongest 4000 players in a server.
Compare that to mount skins char skins and titles you get from wow eso ff14......
So you remember none of the lore or any world immersion garnered by completing the quests, but you fondly remember the number value increase associated with the reward?
Skinner boxes aren't really all that fun to me, but you do you!
I remember all the 60-90 member guilds, their flags, the alliances and the enemies. I remember the strong players the famous players and the encounters.
I remember my inrl smallscale group, one of my friends playing his dark elven knight like a piano, taking out 5 players and 10 mobs all at once (same gearscore etc), another friend PKing 15 ppl when I gave tje signal
I remember the raid runs and the pvp, the castle ownerships and betrayals.
I remember my inrl being introduced to a 50yo guild ldr inrl and the course we took to revive his once legendary guild.
I remember the crafts the over enchants the gifts and so much more.
You want story? Go play
Dragon age
Witcher
Batman
Assassins creed
Rdr
Gow
Soulslike
Etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc.
I played world of warcrafr 3 + frozen throne, the original dota and the likes, but I never touched wow and it's themepark content, forced faction pvp blue v red.
Why? It wasnt an mmo.
You can have fond memories of players, server social structures, pvp battles, etc, but none of that is created by leveling itself.
see you are only saying that because you never leveled in l2. all those things start as soon as level 1.
it goes from people being dicks in execution grounds, to cp and guilds going to the cemetery to fight near the spawn, to people fighting over farming spots, creating wars and alliances. everything starts during the leveling process. it doesnt start after you are max level.
Darkfall had a skill use system and had the exact same thing. Point being that leveling doesn't create those experiences, players do. Systems get them into the world, and a timesink leveling system is the most archaic and boring system for this.
oh you mean like eso? hated it. spent several days collecting the stupid books to get the meteor skill, literally just running from a to b, doing nothing but running...and then the skill got nerfed xDDD but thats a diff issue.
also, i dont really care about exploring the whole map. again, running simulator. some people care and thats fine, i dont. but dont say it is a better gameplay...when you are just running around and mentally jerking off thinking about what npc dialogue you gonna encounter next.
some games will have a leveling system that is basically a tutorial until you reach max level and then the game starts. not all games are like that. your issue is that you have only played games with the same formula.
to me, leveling feels really good, especially in those games where the game doesn't start at max level
see you are only saying that because you never leveled in l2. all those things start as soon as level 1.
it goes from people being dicks in execution grounds, to cp and guilds going to the cemetery to fight near the spawn, to people fighting over farming spots, creating wars and alliances. everything starts during the leveling process. it doesnt start after you are max level.
*cough* *cough*
I played Lineage II at the NA launch, levelled up to 27. Don't remember anyone beside my offline friends also playing. No idea what the "server social structures" were (or what they're supposed to be exactly). Never witnessed any PvP on my server, just heard my friend tells what happened when he shot at a Chinese gold farmer (the PKPKPK in the chat and the other farmers getting out of their holes to chase him).
So, experience may vary depending on the user.
well, u got your answer...level 27. but yeah experiences may vary, but people will eventually go to the same areas and the conflict will start.
NA L2 sucks then?
I was pvping from Lv1 in the human starting village gates and got pked by dark elves there that had no business or money to travel that far, if they wanted to hide the fact that they were lv10 or so.
Pvp past the kelpies where the orcs were. Pvp in the elven ruins.
Pvp on every step of the game.
I think in my country we didnt have concepts of "PvE", "griefing", etc.
We had memory and a long list of names...
I never said you have to explore or quest. I said exploration facilitates the same things George described as benefits of leveling. See the example of a unique forge. If you want to sit in a spot farming the same pixels, have at it.
So mmos should be single-use games? Why would I return to the same location twice, if the entire game is built around exploration? And if it's not a single-use feature - how exactly is it different from leveling taking you to different locations and making you find the best ways of progressing through it?
And depending on the questing/leveling system you'd probably have to come back to previous locations as well.
The difference is a leveling system forces me to complete it first before I can get to the game I want to play. Imagine if you had to explore the whole map before you could go to any grind spot.
The difference is that for us that IS the game. As people here have been saying. Leveling has you PLAY the game from step 1. Well, good games do, that is. I'm sure there's been a ton of mmos that make you slog through dumb mechanics and/or boring quests that you don't care about, until you hit max lvl and "finally start the game".
Sandboxy games just give you a general direction and let you enjoy the path in your own way. Leveling just makes that path easier to notice and follow.
I never said you have to explore or quest. I said exploration facilitates the same things George described as benefits of leveling. See the example of a unique forge. If you want to sit in a spot farming the same pixels, have at it.
So mmos should be single-use games? Why would I return to the same location twice, if the entire game is built around exploration? And if it's not a single-use feature - how exactly is it different from leveling taking you to different locations and making you find the best ways of progressing through it?
And depending on the questing/leveling system you'd probably have to come back to previous locations as well.
The difference is a leveling system forces me to complete it first before I can get to the game I want to play. Imagine if you had to explore the whole map before you could go to any grind spot.
The difference is that for us that IS the game. As people here have been saying. Leveling has you PLAY the game from step 1. Well, good games do, that is. I'm sure there's been a ton of mmos that make you slog through dumb mechanics and/or boring quests that you don't care about, until you hit max lvl and "finally start the game".
Sandboxy games just give you a general direction and let you enjoy the path in your own way. Leveling just makes that path easier to notice and follow.
Because you want to craft a sword using that specific iron? You aren't going there once, it's a place many people will visit multiple times whether their merchants, crafters, pkers, or even mob killers . It's different than leveling as there is no vertical power progression based strictly on something as arbitrary as time investment locking players out of participation. If a zone is made up of 80% level 20 content and 20% level capped content, the design for that zone is going to be drastically inefficient from both a dev design (environmental layout) and from a players moment to moment gameplay.
Leveling has you play the leveling game from the first moment. Leveling is the antithesis of a sandbox game.
see you are only saying that because you never leveled in l2. all those things start as soon as level 1.
it goes from people being dicks in execution grounds, to cp and guilds going to the cemetery to fight near the spawn, to people fighting over farming spots, creating wars and alliances. everything starts during the leveling process. it doesnt start after you are max level.
*cough* *cough*
I played Lineage II at the NA launch, levelled up to 27. Don't remember anyone beside my offline friends also playing. No idea what the "server social structures" were (or what they're supposed to be exactly). Never witnessed any PvP on my server, just heard my friend tells what happened when he shot at a Chinese gold farmer (the PKPKPK in the chat and the other farmers getting out of their holes to chase him).
So, experience may vary depending on the user.
well, u got your answer...level 27. but yeah experiences may vary, but people will eventually go to the same areas and the conflict will start.
NA L2 sucks then?
I was pvping from Lv1 in the human starting village gates and got pked by dark elves there that had no business or money to travel that far, if they wanted to hide the fact that they were lv10 or so.
Pvp past the kelpies where the orcs were. Pvp in the elven ruins.
Pvp on every step of the game.
I think in my country we didnt have concepts of "PvE", "griefing", etc.
We had memory and a long list of names...
ive played in na and eu offi (innova) as well, although not from the very beginning, and also in private servers, and there was lots of pvp lvling up in the offi, at least when i played. however, i have to say that people in private servers are usually more aggressive, maybe cuz servers die fast lol.
If you rush end-game (level cap) all the things you mention and I mentioned go away, and the population of the server focuses on less activities/map areas.
I said before about mmos offering in some servers low xp rate and others offering high xp rate.
Same game, vastly different populations.
Got no answer there...
Rushing to end game makes people use less of the map simply because zones are designed for leveling. No one wants to go to a level 20 zone when at level cap. If the zone is always relevant this doesn't happen.
Private/public server population differences are effected by XP rates the same way the volume of the ocean is effected by a rainstorm. Financial reasons, friendship, additional content, p2w, patch cycles, ease of use, etc all play a much larger role in the size of populations compared to XP rates.
First you, because the answer is simple.
I played my first 3 years of L2 on a privately owned server, set up by a chain of internet cafes across my country and then I played on the official NcSoft servers.
Both of them low rate, both of them massively populated. In the private there were rumors of GMs playing with boosted toons. As a matter of fact after the story in which my best mate PKed 15 ppl and we rode into the sunset, soon after the leader of the strongest clan came, found us and killed us all.
He kept dealing steady 1374 magic dmg to us and when our tank was the last one standing, he used ultimate defence boosting physical and magical defence. To no effect our tank kept receiving 1374 dmg.
On the official servers the gold selling was a known fact. The cheaters were few in between and most of the times we wouldnt even notice. The game was massive, the maps were massive, and 1 cheater couldnt affect change in the server. The strong guilds did.
On the high xp servers the populations were always a couple hundred ppl.
Now I will answer noanni and in there you will find an explanation regarding your concern about lv 20s, zone relevance replayability and what not.
What country is this Internet cafe in? The popularity of grind games in non Western countries is undisputed. I believe ashes is releasing in the West, is that not the target audience for the game?
L2, besides asia and NA was played in EU, mostly the balkans and eastern EU. Fair bit of polish players. Also Lsatin America.
These countries had internet cafes and people would meet up to play mmos and even punch up from one suburb to the next, as well as different cities in smaller nations.
Yes I know these countries have internet cafes. I'm asking you what country. You used a personal anecdote, it's hard to respond when I don't know the country to which I can address the socio economic conditions. As Im sure you are aware the balkans have a very different socio economic relationship with the internet compared to say Singapore.
Also not my preference. L2 and AA are Stevens preference.
In addition the class, +class, nobility, olympiad, epic raid quests of L2, even though I dont remember the npcs or the damn background story, had real gameplay rewards and increase the power factor of the organized players that stood head above shoulders amongst the rest in a server, not to mention unique previledges/skills/gear for the best 34 or the strongest 4000 players in a server.
Compare that to mount skins char skins and titles you get from wow eso ff14......
So you remember none of the lore or any world immersion garnered by completing the quests, but you fondly remember the number value increase associated with the reward?
Skinner boxes aren't really all that fun to me, but you do you!
I remember all the 60-90 member guilds, their flags, the alliances and the enemies. I remember the strong players the famous players and the encounters.
I remember my inrl smallscale group, one of my friends playing his dark elven knight like a piano, taking out 5 players and 10 mobs all at once (same gearscore etc), another friend PKing 15 ppl when I gave tje signal
I remember the raid runs and the pvp, the castle ownerships and betrayals.
I remember my inrl being introduced to a 50yo guild ldr inrl and the course we took to revive his once legendary guild.
I remember the crafts the over enchants the gifts and so much more.
You want story? Go play
Dragon age
Witcher
Batman
Assassins creed
Rdr
Gow
Soulslike
Etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc.
I played world of warcrafr 3 + frozen throne, the original dota and the likes, but I never touched wow and it's themepark content, forced faction pvp blue v red.
Why? It wasnt an mmo.
You can have fond memories of players, server social structures, pvp battles, etc, but none of that is created by leveling itself.
see you are only saying that because you never leveled in l2. all those things start as soon as level 1.
it goes from people being dicks in execution grounds, to cp and guilds going to the cemetery to fight near the spawn, to people fighting over farming spots, creating wars and alliances. everything starts during the leveling process. it doesnt start after you are max level.
Darkfall had a skill use system and had the exact same thing. Point being that leveling doesn't create those experiences, players do. Systems get them into the world, and a timesink leveling system is the most archaic and boring system for this.
oh you mean like eso? hated it. spent several days collecting the stupid books to get the meteor skill, literally just running from a to b, doing nothing but running...and then the skill got nerfed xDDD but thats a diff issue.
also, i dont really care about exploring the whole map. again, running simulator. some people care and thats fine, i dont. but dont say it is a better gameplay...when you are just running around and mentally jerking off thinking about what npc dialogue you gonna encounter next.
some games will have a leveling system that is basically a tutorial until you reach max level and then the game starts. not all games are like that. your issue is that you have only played games with the same formula.
to me, leveling feels really good, especially in those games where the game doesn't start at max level
Yes you don't care about exploration, that's the point. Like I said imagine if you had to explore the entire map before you could do anything else. How long would you stick with that game?
If you rush end-game (level cap) all the things you mention and I mentioned go away, and the population of the server focuses on less activities/map areas.
I said before about mmos offering in some servers low xp rate and others offering high xp rate.
Same game, vastly different populations.
Got no answer there...
Rushing to end game makes people use less of the map simply because zones are designed for leveling. No one wants to go to a level 20 zone when at level cap. If the zone is always relevant this doesn't happen.
Private/public server population differences are effected by XP rates the same way the volume of the ocean is effected by a rainstorm. Financial reasons, friendship, additional content, p2w, patch cycles, ease of use, etc all play a much larger role in the size of populations compared to XP rates.
First you, because the answer is simple.
I played my first 3 years of L2 on a privately owned server, set up by a chain of internet cafes across my country and then I played on the official NcSoft servers.
Both of them low rate, both of them massively populated. In the private there were rumors of GMs playing with boosted toons. As a matter of fact after the story in which my best mate PKed 15 ppl and we rode into the sunset, soon after the leader of the strongest clan came, found us and killed us all.
He kept dealing steady 1374 magic dmg to us and when our tank was the last one standing, he used ultimate defence boosting physical and magical defence. To no effect our tank kept receiving 1374 dmg.
On the official servers the gold selling was a known fact. The cheaters were few in between and most of the times we wouldnt even notice. The game was massive, the maps were massive, and 1 cheater couldnt affect change in the server. The strong guilds did.
On the high xp servers the populations were always a couple hundred ppl.
Now I will answer noanni and in there you will find an explanation regarding your concern about lv 20s, zone relevance replayability and what not.
What country is this Internet cafe in? The popularity of grind games in non Western countries is undisputed. I believe ashes is releasing in the West, is that not the target audience for the game?
L2, besides asia and NA was played in EU, mostly the balkans and eastern EU. Fair bit of polish players. Also Lsatin America.
These countries had internet cafes and people would meet up to play mmos and even punch up from one suburb to the next, as well as different cities in smaller nations.
Yes I know these countries have internet cafes. I'm asking you what country. You used a personal anecdote, it's hard to respond when I don't know the country to which I can address the socio economic conditions. As Im sure you are aware the balkans have a very different socio economic relationship with the internet compared to say Singapore.
My country is sacred and I dont talk about her online.
Because you want to craft a sword using that specific iron? You aren't going there once, it's a place many people will visit multiple times whether their merchants, crafters, pkers, or even mob killers . It's different than leveling as there is no vertical power progression based around strictly on something as arbitrary as time investment locking players out of participation. If a zone is made up of 80% level 20 content and 20% level capped content, the design for that zone is going to be drastically inefficient from both a dev design (environmental layout) and from a players moment to moment gameplay.
Ok, say there's literally no levels in the game. Is there a mob difficulty difference though? Or is that also gone? Cause if there's a difficulty difference it would mean that you'll have to return to the same place over and over again until you can move onto the next place.
The "you return there to craft a sword" means that you need that sword to change the place you'll be returning to, right? And w/o that sword you can't do that, right? So how in the hell is this any different from leveling? It's literally the same thing but viewed from a different angle.
The same applies to questing as well. Quests always have a chain of sorts, so you have to do first quests in the chain before you can do the last one. I guess you have stuff like latest Zelda games where it's literally just an open world with barely any quests, but endless freedom. But I've seen quite a few people complain that games like that have no direction, so people just get choice paralysis and can't enjoy the gameplay to the fullest.
I also don't quite see how that would work in an mmo. Everyone is just at a completely same lvl of power with no verticality at all? Iirc even GW2 requires you to do a chain of quests before you can get to the horizontal plateau of power. Well, they also have the equalized arena stuff that just gives you everything immediately, but at that point I'd rather go play a proper pvp game.
Leveling has you play the leveling game from the first moment. Leveling is the antithesis of a sandbox game.
Only in games that design themselves into that corner. Steven has already said that we'll be able to start artisanry at low adventure lvl, so that is not stopped by leveling.
L2 was generally limited in the scope of its features, but pretty much all of those features were available since day one of your gameplay. Want to go to a siege as a lvl1? You can. Hell, people did exactly this in order to spy on other sieges. Want to pvp? You can and a lot did (as others have said here). Want to farm mobs? You do. Want to craft stuff? You can.
Though L2's crafting was related to your lvl (cause it was gear tier based and those were lvl gated), but Steven has already solved that issue. But you could still craft mats from the lowest lvls and then sell those to high lvl players, which was one of the best ways of making money in the game.
thats not how it works. also there is automatic scaling...servers crash for a different reason
I didn't say it is how it works now, I said it is how it used to work.
And it absolutely is how it used to work.
Most games didn't have the crashing due to being in a high level zone issue, but more than one game did - I know because I crashed those games using it, and since my character was technically "in" the zone in question the server would crash again when I logged in.
Why do you flex you knowledge about zone hardware since it's proof of bad mmo structure, and then again irrelevant to AoC.
Secondly, L2 didnt had server shards and Steven based AoC on it.
So all that wall text does t contribute to the discussion of: content for all levels.
L2 is always the mmo I have in mind.
Ashes backend/server structure is literally nothing at all like L2's. Not even close.
I don't know a lot about how Ashes will run - but I KNOW enough about it to say that for a fact.
For a start, L2 was run on dedicated servers, where as Ashes will be run on AWS hardware. This in itself eliminates anything at all that L2 used as being even remotely viable at all in Ashes - and that is without getting in to the vastly different worlds that each game will have due to Ashes node system (which in itself determines a massive amount of the requirements for back end).
This isn't me "flexing knowledge" about anything, it is me calling your constant bullshit out.
Perhaps if you stop bullshitting, people will stop calling you out on it.
Stuff
There was a whole lot of stuff in here that I haven't really commented on, I assume most of this was aimed at someone other than me.
Yeah, players should need to get gear. I would say gear should last around 10 levels though, not 15. Sure, in some games, some people will go back to lower level areas for nostalgia reasons - though since those areas are going to be constantly changing in Ashes it is doubtful that this will happen here - you can't be nostalgic for something that never used to exist.
You are absolutely right that you don't need to mix players of different levels, and in fact you should try to avoid it in a game like Ashes.
So I am asking again. Why do we need to reach level cap in 45 days?
We can build small boats at lv 15 or whatever and pvp at level 15.
The hardcore will always reach lv cap far quicker than casuals. Why 45 instead of 120?
For the reason I already said - more people within the same level range (ideally the exact same level) means more people to run the content of that level with, and more people to fight in PvP with.
Basically, more people at a given level means more game to play.
The longer the leveling process, the more spread out people will be over that level range. That is the opposite to having more people at the same level range.
It would be something different from many other MMORPGS, it would be something you should really STRIVE for, it would feel like a REALLY INCREDIBLE ACHIEVEMENT TO REACH MAX LEVEL, it would be something beautiful to walk a path where you know you are really facing the difficulties, joys, feelings, things that make a MMORPG a MMORPG.
I really hope what you suggest can be achieved, the world of AoC and its future players deserve it.
Lvl 1 Human Mystic (1 step of Sorceror) - wind strike, wind strike, wind strike, wind strike, wind strike, wind strike.
Lvl 2-39 - Summon Kat the Cat, Sleep, some dmg spells
Lvl 40-58 - Curse Fear, Prominence, Blazing Circle, Cancellation, Aura Flash, Rain of Fire
Lvl 72 - Elemental Assault
The very basic mage' gameplay starts after lvl 58. And if we are factoring the gear diff, then game starts only at A grade - after lvl 61. Gear before that grade is not competitive. And if we are factoring the chronicles after interlude, then the cap is way higher. Same for other classes.
The deep and fun combat gameplay starts after some cap is reached. That cap is generally written in mid+ guild recruitment topics. The path from 1 to that cap is borring. I'd be happier to skip it.
Does the Ashes differ in this aspect?
Then the item NiKr was talking about isn't one of hte best items in the game.
I haven't known a single dagger that didn't want to have that ring. Now, maybe your definition of a "one of the best items in the game" is something that's super universal, but to me an item that's BiS for a whole class type is definitely "ONE of the best items".
And as Depraved said other phys classes appreciated it too, so it was always highly sought after (especially considering a 30% chance to drop it from a 36h respawn boss).
Older updates make it way less valuable, but those updates also made the game less valuable so fuck 'em
I missed this post.
I'm not really commenting on whether this was or was not how L2 was designed - we both know I don't know enough about the game to have any opinion on that.
What I am saying though, is if there was a lower level item that was desired by players at a higher level, and there wasn't a direct upgrade to that item at later levels, that is bad game design.
I don't really need to comment more on that point I don't think. If that was the case in L2, then it was bad game design. If that was not the case in L2, then that wasn't bad game design. I'll leave it up to the two of you to work out if it was a low level item that was desired by higher level players or not - and by extension whether it was bad game design or not.
I agree with the OP. I wish they went for at least 400 to 500 hours of game time for max level.
what do you prefer and why?
100 hours to hit max level, but after 1 hour of farming xp you cant really level up anymore because you have to wait for new content(nodes leveling up), so you just go do other stuff in the game and you will need 3 months to hit max level.
or
500 hours to hit max level but no limit on how much exp you can get per day, so someone who plays 10 hours a day will reach max level in less than 2 months and someone who plays 15 hours a day will hit max level in 1 month, and then you can go do other stuff in the game.
Here is the thing...
People complain that grinding is cumbersome, but AoC has so many things to do that our time will be more like 25% leveling up and exploring (looking for more effective xp/loot), 25% questing and improving our build (look up correct gear and farm mats towards that), 25% partaking in the economy and 25% unique AoC content never seen in other mmos. And all that with the constant danger of pvp.
Why would people like to rush to the max lv? Why would they want in 45D to have reached level cap? It would upset the balance. Take the 25% of leveling and seeking fertile grounds and you are left with 75% of gameplay without the prospect of new character power goals.
Why rush? And I dont give credit to the arguement of "why prolong it when I could be leveling the next alt or exleriment with a different build?"
In true mmos people did not make alts so easily. It would be a surprise to learn that JoeRogue Lv25 is actually the alt of KnownWarrior Lv45. "Where did you find the time?"
Shallow mmos allow people to churn out alts every other week. Like eso.
As for the people saying "high level can play with the lower lv friends" it's just a case of "I want everything, now!".
Mmos need fresh start servers for new players and yearly additions for older players.
Not content that high and low repeat over and over and over.
I doubt that there will be waves of new players coming to AoC after release.
I think all interested players will join the first weeks when the game is released.
I agree with the last statement, that the content should not be repeated over and over.
But then, that content must also be consumed slowly because developers cannot produce new content as fast as players consume it.
Now let's talk about level disparity, gameplay content and end-game.
Weapons armor ships caravans etc must matter.
This would indeed help players with different levels play together. Guilds would provide the gear to new members and get them into the action faster.
That would also help integrate new players into existing servers easier and new servers would not be needed.
Regarding: In true mmos people did not make alts so easily.
Steven might want players to create multiple alts. The content might be different for each alt you level, unless you chose the same node, same race. same class... It also feels good to be able to level a 2nd and a 3rd alt with the help from the main character which sends resources and gear to them.
But you could still craft mats from the lowest lvls and then sell those to high lvl players, which was one of the best ways of making money in the game.
Now new players will gather node currency in low level nodes. They'll not be able to get it otherwise.
Comments
I said before about mmos offering in some servers low xp rate and others offering high xp rate.
Same game, vastly different populations.
Got no answer there...
What games do you have in mind here?
While you are correct about this from a map perspective (doesn't matter, will explain why soon), most good MMO's offer players at the level cap far more activities to do than they offer while leveling up.
Look at Ashes, even though Steven says lower level players will have things to do in sieges and such, do you really think a lower level player is going to ever be preferred over a player at the level cap?
As to some parts of the world being less used as the population levels up, games of the past have needed this to be the case.
The way basically all games were designed before about 2012 (and most since), is that the game world would be assigned specific hardware to run. Servers would be made up of shards, and each zone would be assigned to a specific shard. All mobs, NPC's and players in that zone would be handled by that shard.
Then, as players leveled up, they would assign more hardware to the zones where the bulk of the population was, and fewer hardware to zones where people weren't at yet.
In some games I have played, if you managed to zone in to a top level zone on release day, you could crash the server because they didn't assign any hardware to it, nit expecting it to be used for weeks.
What all this means is that as the bulk of players finish with a zone, developers assign less and less hardware to it, while assigning more and more hardware to the top level zones. It isn't unusual in some games for one top level zone on a given server to be assigned 2 or 3 shards, while the lowest 10 zones are all sharing one shard.
Thus, the notion of some zones being dead isn't necessarily a bad thing, and is in fact necessary in many games in order for the game to remain stable with the hardware available.
This won't be the case for Ashes, to be clear (despite knowing more people on the Ashes team than any other MMO, i actually know.less about how the servers are structured than any other game i have played)
Rushing to end game makes people use less of the map simply because zones are designed for leveling. No one wants to go to a level 20 zone when at level cap. If the zone is always relevant this doesn't happen.
Private/public server population differences are effected by XP rates the same way the volume of the ocean is effected by a rainstorm. Financial reasons, friendship, additional content, p2w, patch cycles, ease of use, etc all play a much larger role in the size of populations compared to XP rates.
First you, because the answer is simple.
I played my first 3 years of L2 on a privately owned server, set up by a chain of internet cafes across my country and then I played on the official NcSoft servers.
Both of them low rate, both of them massively populated. In the private there were rumors of GMs playing with boosted toons. As a matter of fact after the story in which my best mate PKed 15 ppl and we rode into the sunset, soon after the leader of the strongest clan came, found us and killed us all.
He kept dealing steady 1374 magic dmg to us and when our tank was the last one standing, he used ultimate defence boosting physical and magical defence. To no effect our tank kept receiving 1374 dmg.
On the official servers the gold selling was a known fact. The cheaters were few in between and most of the times we wouldnt even notice. The game was massive, the maps were massive, and 1 cheater couldnt affect change in the server. The strong guilds did.
On the high xp servers the populations were always a couple hundred ppl.
Now I will answer noanni and in there you will find an explanation regarding your concern about lv 20s, zone relevance replayability and what not.
What country is this Internet cafe in? The popularity of grind games in non Western countries is undisputed. I believe ashes is releasing in the West, is that not the target audience for the game?
i can say the same thing about you. Your allowed to like whatever you want, but forcing everyone else to participate in your preferred content isn't good game design. i dont like questing or exploring (not too much). why do you want to force that on me because you think its better? thats bad design. (according to you).
every time im questing or exploring, running from a to b, im not playing my character. i dont want to log into the game to play running simulator. i dont want to log in to not play my character. the only time i dont want to play my character is if im talking to people.
running from a to b isnt solving a challenge or a puzzle. you arent using your skills or anything. just holding w or clicking or pressing num lock, or just auto path on the map... what a great adventure!
grinding mobs is fun for me. optimizing my farm, fighting other people, all the things george mentioned, etc
also fyi l2 has great quests. you have these long chain quests that make travel all over the map, different areas, talking ot different npc, doing different tasks, sometimes solving small puzzles, etc.
you will never have so much fun questing in other games like you can have doing noblese or baium quest in l2.
see you are only saying that because you never leveled in l2. all those things start as soon as level 1.
it goes from people being dicks in execution grounds, to cp and guilds going to the cemetery to fight near the spawn, to people fighting over farming spots, creating wars and alliances. everything starts during the leveling process. it doesnt start after you are max level.
thats not how it works. also there is automatic scaling...servers crash for a different reason
I never said you have to explore or quest. I said exploration facilitates the same things George described as benefits of leveling. See the example of a unique forge. If you want to sit in a spot farming the same pixels, have at it.
The difference is a leveling system forces me to complete it first before I can get to the game I want to play. Imagine if you had to explore the whole map before you could go to any grind spot.
*cough* *cough*
I played Lineage II at the NA launch, levelled up to 27. Don't remember anyone beside my offline friends also playing. No idea what the "server social structures" were (or what they're supposed to be exactly). Never witnessed any PvP on my server, just heard my friend tells what happened when he shot at a Chinese gold farmer (the PKPKPK in the chat and the other farmers getting out of their holes to chase him).
So, experience may vary depending on the user.
Darkfall had a skill use system and had the exact same thing. Point being that leveling doesn't create those experiences, players do. Systems get them into the world, and a timesink leveling system is the most archaic and boring system for this.
Now you noaani.
Let's begin without suprises or re-inventing the wheel; I will simply tell you off:
Stop the wall texts of unecessary info.
Why do you flex you knowledge about zone hardware since it's proof of bad mmo structure, and then again irrelevant to AoC.
Secondly, L2 didnt had server shards and Steven based AoC on it.
So all that wall text does t contribute to the discussion of: content for all levels.
L2 is always the mmo I have in mind.
I dont think that low level players will play any other role other than cannon fodder or using some wall guns in sieges.
Yet when we were playing L2, we could not wait for the siege hours every two weeks, no matter our level difference with other players. That's a historicsl fact. It is what it is. People will love it even if they are weak.
Many times I have chosen to ignore Stevens sugar coating of certain uncomfortable facts for two reasons: I am an adult with life experience and I know not to get offended by little flexibility, especially in promotions.
Secondly this is the best mmo that will ever be for a while and if you poke holes on useless things like jahlon, dygz and others, ridiculously demanding a milionaire to comply to your online whims about HIS game, people may not call you an animal abuser but will definatly laugh at you.
I dont care if low lv people are effective or not at castle sieges. I was low lv once on L2 with my friends but we never missed a good siege.
Now let's talk about level disparity, gameplay content and end-game.
Weapons armor ships caravans etc must matter. If mmos allow players to find green blue items every ten minutes you might as well be another wow clone, speed to endgame and treadmil on the dungeons for gear score.
Items should last you for at least 15 levels in the current AoC standards and the crafting of a complete set until lv 40 should take a few weeks for a 3-4 member group and 1-2 for an 8man group that equips weapons in dps, armor in tank and healer (looking to speed up leveling at the risk of losing when contesting xp spots).
Items should slow you down, you shouldnt be able to deal with better mobs/zones/queats without stopping to gear up properly.
You should craft at every tier. This means that you need to travel around at every level, in every corner that you can CURRENTLY survive the PvE.
This means that you spend time in low lv zones, have rich gameplay and you create friends and foes.
And in AoC not only you need boats bags and caravans. You need to improve your node and what comes with it.
People will enjoy low level areas during the xp. People should return to mine or harvest if the Devs are smart. It's simple as that.
You dont need to mix player levels.
Low levels will al ways lose to high. New players need new servers.
High end players need expansions every year. 5 new levels to reach, new items to GAMEPLAY OVER FOR in the owpvp, a couple of new skills to unlock and some stuff gated behind long and hard (yes..) quests.
Now L2 did one more thing well.
Players that reached lv 76 could become nobility, fight 1v1 in tournaments to become the elite 34 amongst 10,000.
It required epic quests and it required players to start over with subclasses in the same way ff14 does it but harder.
So a famous Lv76 archer would become again a lv40 mage and play with lower level players in the good old zones.
The competitive players would sacrifice fun options due to subclass bonuses attached to the first class.
An archer shouldnt choose a mage (as a change of gameplay). He should choose a rogue for a small crit rate or crit dmg boost to his main archer class.
It's the same simple replayability that alts based mmos offer, (like eso) only that it is solidified to the first class, plus opened the way for epic quests and legendary 1v1 arenas with humongous rewards.
And those that want to rp as a different race different class new name... new char? Well fuck them, mmos are competitive get over it.
High lv players will never play alongside low lv plsyers and that's just fine.
"What about my friends that just started?" Find smarter friends.
AoC will have player actions affect the games coded files. High end players will return to slay the dragon and make the noobs wet in their pants, or reclaim corrupted areas.
So I am asking again. Why do we need to reach level cap in 45 days?
We can build small boats at lv 15 or whatever and pvp at level 15.
The hardcore will always reach lv cap far quicker than casuals. Why 45 instead of 120?
And depending on the questing/leveling system you'd probably have to come back to previous locations as well.
The difference is that for us that IS the game. As people here have been saying. Leveling has you PLAY the game from step 1. Well, good games do, that is. I'm sure there's been a ton of mmos that make you slog through dumb mechanics and/or boring quests that you don't care about, until you hit max lvl and "finally start the game".
Sandboxy games just give you a general direction and let you enjoy the path in your own way. Leveling just makes that path easier to notice and follow.
L2, besides asia and NA was played in EU, mostly the balkans and eastern EU. Fair bit of polish players. Also Lsatin America.
These countries had internet cafes and people would meet up to play mmos and even punch up from one suburb to the next, as well as different cities in smaller nations.
well, u got your answer...level 27. but yeah experiences may vary, but people will eventually go to the same areas and the conflict will start.
oh you mean like eso? hated it. spent several days collecting the stupid books to get the meteor skill, literally just running from a to b, doing nothing but running...and then the skill got nerfed xDDD but thats a diff issue.
also, i dont really care about exploring the whole map. again, running simulator. some people care and thats fine, i dont. but dont say it is a better gameplay...when you are just running around and mentally jerking off thinking about what npc dialogue you gonna encounter next.
some games will have a leveling system that is basically a tutorial until you reach max level and then the game starts. not all games are like that. your issue is that you have only played games with the same formula.
to me, leveling feels really good, especially in those games where the game doesn't start at max level
NA L2 sucks then?
I was pvping from Lv1 in the human starting village gates and got pked by dark elves there that had no business or money to travel that far, if they wanted to hide the fact that they were lv10 or so.
Pvp past the kelpies where the orcs were. Pvp in the elven ruins.
Pvp on every step of the game.
I think in my country we didnt have concepts of "PvE", "griefing", etc.
We had memory and a long list of names...
Because you want to craft a sword using that specific iron? You aren't going there once, it's a place many people will visit multiple times whether their merchants, crafters, pkers, or even mob killers . It's different than leveling as there is no vertical power progression based strictly on something as arbitrary as time investment locking players out of participation. If a zone is made up of 80% level 20 content and 20% level capped content, the design for that zone is going to be drastically inefficient from both a dev design (environmental layout) and from a players moment to moment gameplay.
Leveling has you play the leveling game from the first moment. Leveling is the antithesis of a sandbox game.
ive played in na and eu offi (innova) as well, although not from the very beginning, and also in private servers, and there was lots of pvp lvling up in the offi, at least when i played. however, i have to say that people in private servers are usually more aggressive, maybe cuz servers die fast lol.
still better than running simulators xD
Yes I know these countries have internet cafes. I'm asking you what country. You used a personal anecdote, it's hard to respond when I don't know the country to which I can address the socio economic conditions. As Im sure you are aware the balkans have a very different socio economic relationship with the internet compared to say Singapore.
Yes you don't care about exploration, that's the point. Like I said imagine if you had to explore the entire map before you could do anything else. How long would you stick with that game?
My country is sacred and I dont talk about her online.
The "you return there to craft a sword" means that you need that sword to change the place you'll be returning to, right? And w/o that sword you can't do that, right? So how in the hell is this any different from leveling? It's literally the same thing but viewed from a different angle.
The same applies to questing as well. Quests always have a chain of sorts, so you have to do first quests in the chain before you can do the last one. I guess you have stuff like latest Zelda games where it's literally just an open world with barely any quests, but endless freedom. But I've seen quite a few people complain that games like that have no direction, so people just get choice paralysis and can't enjoy the gameplay to the fullest.
I also don't quite see how that would work in an mmo. Everyone is just at a completely same lvl of power with no verticality at all? Iirc even GW2 requires you to do a chain of quests before you can get to the horizontal plateau of power. Well, they also have the equalized arena stuff that just gives you everything immediately, but at that point I'd rather go play a proper pvp game.
Only in games that design themselves into that corner. Steven has already said that we'll be able to start artisanry at low adventure lvl, so that is not stopped by leveling.
L2 was generally limited in the scope of its features, but pretty much all of those features were available since day one of your gameplay. Want to go to a siege as a lvl1? You can. Hell, people did exactly this in order to spy on other sieges. Want to pvp? You can and a lot did (as others have said here). Want to farm mobs? You do. Want to craft stuff? You can.
Though L2's crafting was related to your lvl (cause it was gear tier based and those were lvl gated), but Steven has already solved that issue. But you could still craft mats from the lowest lvls and then sell those to high lvl players, which was one of the best ways of making money in the game.
I didn't say it is how it works now, I said it is how it used to work.
And it absolutely is how it used to work.
Most games didn't have the crashing due to being in a high level zone issue, but more than one game did - I know because I crashed those games using it, and since my character was technically "in" the zone in question the server would crash again when I logged in.
I don't know a lot about how Ashes will run - but I KNOW enough about it to say that for a fact.
For a start, L2 was run on dedicated servers, where as Ashes will be run on AWS hardware. This in itself eliminates anything at all that L2 used as being even remotely viable at all in Ashes - and that is without getting in to the vastly different worlds that each game will have due to Ashes node system (which in itself determines a massive amount of the requirements for back end).
This isn't me "flexing knowledge" about anything, it is me calling your constant bullshit out.
Perhaps if you stop bullshitting, people will stop calling you out on it.
There was a whole lot of stuff in here that I haven't really commented on, I assume most of this was aimed at someone other than me.
Yeah, players should need to get gear. I would say gear should last around 10 levels though, not 15. Sure, in some games, some people will go back to lower level areas for nostalgia reasons - though since those areas are going to be constantly changing in Ashes it is doubtful that this will happen here - you can't be nostalgic for something that never used to exist.
You are absolutely right that you don't need to mix players of different levels, and in fact you should try to avoid it in a game like Ashes.
For the reason I already said - more people within the same level range (ideally the exact same level) means more people to run the content of that level with, and more people to fight in PvP with.
Basically, more people at a given level means more game to play.
The longer the leveling process, the more spread out people will be over that level range. That is the opposite to having more people at the same level range.
It would be something different from many other MMORPGS, it would be something you should really STRIVE for, it would feel like a REALLY INCREDIBLE ACHIEVEMENT TO REACH MAX LEVEL, it would be something beautiful to walk a path where you know you are really facing the difficulties, joys, feelings, things that make a MMORPG a MMORPG.
I really hope what you suggest can be achieved, the world of AoC and its future players deserve it.
Lvl 2-39 - Summon Kat the Cat, Sleep, some dmg spells
Lvl 40-58 - Curse Fear, Prominence, Blazing Circle, Cancellation, Aura Flash, Rain of Fire
Lvl 72 - Elemental Assault
The very basic mage' gameplay starts after lvl 58. And if we are factoring the gear diff, then game starts only at A grade - after lvl 61. Gear before that grade is not competitive. And if we are factoring the chronicles after interlude, then the cap is way higher. Same for other classes.
The deep and fun combat gameplay starts after some cap is reached. That cap is generally written in mid+ guild recruitment topics. The path from 1 to that cap is borring. I'd be happier to skip it.
Does the Ashes differ in this aspect?
I missed this post.
I'm not really commenting on whether this was or was not how L2 was designed - we both know I don't know enough about the game to have any opinion on that.
What I am saying though, is if there was a lower level item that was desired by players at a higher level, and there wasn't a direct upgrade to that item at later levels, that is bad game design.
I don't really need to comment more on that point I don't think. If that was the case in L2, then it was bad game design. If that was not the case in L2, then that wasn't bad game design. I'll leave it up to the two of you to work out if it was a low level item that was desired by higher level players or not - and by extension whether it was bad game design or not.
I doubt that there will be waves of new players coming to AoC after release.
I think all interested players will join the first weeks when the game is released.
I agree with the last statement, that the content should not be repeated over and over.
But then, that content must also be consumed slowly because developers cannot produce new content as fast as players consume it.
This would indeed help players with different levels play together. Guilds would provide the gear to new members and get them into the action faster.
That would also help integrate new players into existing servers easier and new servers would not be needed.
Regarding: In true mmos people did not make alts so easily.
Steven might want players to create multiple alts. The content might be different for each alt you level, unless you chose the same node, same race. same class... It also feels good to be able to level a 2nd and a 3rd alt with the help from the main character which sends resources and gear to them.
Now new players will gather node currency in low level nodes. They'll not be able to get it otherwise.