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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Comments
Yes, it does seem unlikely that critical thinking would bring multiple people to the same conclusion and yet that conclusion disagree with your own.
Since you don't consider bad designs when thinking about how to make MMOs.
It must be everyone else that does that.
Loadouts are required for modern mmos.
We need to make sure it works well with other systems. People that can use their brain must detect flaws and provide feedback.
People that let others do the thinking for them may as well keep their mouths closed with their petty attempts to bait.
You cant say that you have critical thinking, one sentense right after you said that someone else handles pvp for you.
Get out of here, you have nothing to contribute. You just try to annoy me.
Yeah sure. NiKr, you got this, right?
That way we can keep our mouths closed.
It is known that I dont like you for selfpatting yourself on the back, overflowing topics with irrelevant technobubble, making grandiose clsims of a whole army of ppl that "feed you data" or that you break dont vsluable info, your few uncalled insults to me, based on your inrl political views.
There is nothing you can say that would hide the fact that you are looking for conflict now, and present it as thoughts on the topic. Just stop....
Let's try this a little differently.
Your idea is so obviously flawed that if everyone posted, they would all independently just post to point out the same flaw.
It's a thing that, if one personally considers it a flaw, it smacks you in the face immediately, it's the literal first thing you think of as wrong. See mcstackerson response, for example. So why have 7 people all post the same thing NiKr is going to say and then you just complain about the same thing you're complaining about now?
I only bother with this because I hope someday to make you understand that I'm not trying to actually annoy you, I'm venting because you're annoying, and I do it in response to you doing the same.
If you don't want me to 'try to annoy you', cut the one word 'post criticism' crap. If you don't care what I say anyway. I'm pretty sure that's just 'A Fighter using Taunt', whether you're thinking about it or not, but I don't even want to respond to your stuff, you've been told why I do it.
So let's just both save our time.
Hey, you start it, you get it, because if you don't get it with me, people with less tolerance for letting your shit slide, will appear because you seemed to want to start something.
I've done the bare minimum to have those people be less 'provoked'. We can, in fact, let it go, I'll just pat myself on the back for a job well done.
I said there is no room for trash gear in this tetris inventory.
Answer this. You cant.
Which is why I asked if NiKr has it handled. You haven't turned on him yet, so the conversation can actually happen.
"Proceed, Governor."
Which design option do you chose?
As for "we won't have enough space for gear", Steven said that full item slots will have a "healthy number", which kinda implies that we'll just have enough inventory space for additional gear pieces, cause, just as you say, design is holistic so one thing influences the other. Steven knows it and will give us enough stuff to work with.
I'm going to bed pretty soon here, so considering how angy George seems to be I'm not sure if "having this" is at all possible
Dammit Jim, I'm a Cleric, not a Tank!
I'll just hope the below is enough.
^ This.
What I would find the sillies though is if you write your response now, but I'll go to sleep and you'll have to steep in your anginess until I wake up. That would definitely be the silliest turn of events.
1) you played L2 so you have an idea of what an mmo can and should be. That makes you a bit relevant.
2) you put the work in discussions (but it needs more if you truly want to get to the bottom of things -dev level precision-, even though sometimes you get sucked into the social aspect of the forums and you derail
3)Yet you don't let it tie you in a camp. It was evident when you put up with Dygz in that interview in which he couldn't see the possible reason of a guy killing him for picking flowers, because maybe he was after the same flowers, or deny him the possibility of making strong potions that could be used in a potential rival node siege, yet he found refuge in his logic of "people just wanna grief other players". You can tolerate them for now because you are in your 20s, and you feel the need to mend relations so you are patient. Or perhaps simply because you value an online community that is here for more than just feedback for AoC development.
But it's important to always remember where AoC is heading, spot problems and find solutions, realize the differences of now and then, as well as how all systems tie together, and stay focused instead of caring for approval.
I would assume the gear drop chance only applies to the gear you have equipped. But that gear that you have equipped can not be unequipped until you work off the corruption. That's just what I'd assume, but no telling what they'll do with it.
Tetris inventory system is only for material items not completed gear pieces, material items are just items meant for caravaning aka material/mob bounty items which acts as the gold drop from mobs.
It does however help in curving meta build to a degree though if everyone uses slashing weapons cause it better you see people make more slashing resistance gear over the other resistances since it will help more often.
long story short quick gear realy helps gankers more than anything however having resistances also help with curbing meta to a degree since if everyone using it then everyone most likly using the reistsance towards it too
That's why i suggest to not let players swap gear while red as a fix.
Are you saying this was a good thing? Because his suggestion would fix that.
What point are you trying to bring up here? What difference this makes? Each player decides for themself. It's like you are trying to pretend that not going with this change would protect non-violent players somehow. It makes no difference on that. If anything, they would be more likely to stay alive with the change, since the kill would take longer (you make the assumption that killer takes off gear), and there would be a bigger window for other players to intervene.
Just imagine this player interaction as a whole for a second, it's ridiculous.
Please do, you are only de-railing the conversation. Yes, there is an obvious flaw, that is easily fixed, in an otherwise good suggestion. You disregard the benefit, only focusing on what was wrong, instead of finding the solution that would fix it. I'm not even sure you understand the benefit, do you?
Idk why you went there. OP does not suggest to remove loadouts. He sees a problem with the loadout system, when interacting with other systems, and suggests a potential change to fix it. Arguably it's maybe too niche of an issue (i don't see it directly affecting me, for example), and can be left alone, but that's besides the point.
Again, my whole argument is directed towards those who'd want to abuse the system in the first place, not the random people who might get a PK once in a blue moon.
No I am not, which is why I also suggested a solution that would solve both potential abuses.
The point of "everyone enjoys open world pvp so they all fight back when attacked". We all have our preferred vision for what Ashes could be and that is mine. I know it's unrealistic, which is why I worded that comment how I did.
Imo it would decrease the amount of high lvl PKers who attack same-lvl passive players. Obviously the "lowbie PK with shit gear killing people with a spoon" is still a viable approach, but, as you said, there'd be a higher chance that someone else just kills them.
To me it seemed that George has a problem with a big variety of item builds, which would require you to have several items on you. Which is why I gave him the third option.
If that is not his problem, then I have already addressed the other problem of "we won't have enough inventory space". So which is it @George_Black ? Cause I'm still waiting on that answer.
As I said, what you are saying here spills into a different topic I want to bring out.
Instead of people having to play around with passive stats and gear bonuses, I'd like to see large skillbars with active skills with which the classes can respond to the world and its challenges.
Active skills should do the combat, counter the CCs or deal with mages and what not.
Not a conveyor of garments to swap back and forth.
I do have a problem with it, but I did not raise this issue to speak against it.
I raised this issue separately and being evident because I havent called for the removal of gear load-outs. Btw I realised I got the tetris inventory wrong, my bad and sorry for the confusion. But since we dont know how much space we will have for multiple gear sets, loot items and trash gear for abusers I wont make claims for now regarding this.
The fact remains that L2 and its karma system did not have gear load-outs and people did not carry lots of sets.
Modern mmos have gear load-outs but no owpvp/corruption drops.
Now, in AoC, these two features need to work together.
The penalties for going red are severe already. Losing multiple items based on how much meta players need to carry with them (to tackle different dmg types and situations) shouldnt be an added burden.
If this oversight increases the drop table of a red player to many more full items, other than the equipped ones, going red will not happen.
In most mmos you can't swap gear during combat. L2 wasn't like this btw, but that can be changed. There are other abuses regarding gear swapping mid fight regarding HP/MP etc etc and we could tackled these in one go.
If with the TKK of AoC, a player sits there and gets killed by another player that is wearing trash gear, without realizing how low the dmg is and chose not to fight back, that guy deserves to be killed and that Red deserves to get away with it. We are not going to further punish the Reds (by not considering that gear load-outs turn potential reds into pinatas) based on this scenario. It's stupid.
However the other scenario mentioned by Morph, the one in which the potential PKer swaps onto trash gear right after the kill, in order to abuse my suggestion is simply resolved by having reds unable to swap armor* sets. So far we have heard that Reds won't be able to /trade (which I was against at first) or deposit items, so this addition to prevent abuse won't make a difference in their lives.
So what we have are potential Reds that cannot abuse the system because they will either get killed due to weak stats, or won't be able to swap to trash gear after the kill.
So here we have yet another suggestion, on top of the usage tracking idea by you Nikr, which I think is too much coding for, since people will be using multiple items anyways so why bother, and perhaps more to come from people that can connect the dots.
*I dislike swapping armor sets mid combat in games because it creates a meta revolved around passive stats, instead of active combat abilities, plus it's immersion breaking.
I dont think that weapons should follow that rule. I am actually all for changing weapons mid combat because that is the true variety in builds I would like to see in mmos. Real active combat usage, not passives, stats and armors.
You can put on bad gear and have nothing to lose regardless of this, so what's your point?
As would his suggestion*, which you don't seem to argue against, but proceed to offer a strictly worse solution, for some reason. What he proposed would be more reliable and much easier to implement. With your suggestion players could wear bad gear when not playing the game, for example.
*with the obvious issue being fixed
Ok, go on. What difference it makes in this argument? It is assumed that person will not fight back, otherwise it's not PK, as you pointed out. What does this have to do with what gear attacker is wearing? I don't understand. George made a bad argument, and you followed? He could've said: "it's attackers choice to take the risk of wearing low gear".
Elaborate, this seems backwards. Lowbies would still die to a "spoon" just fine.
George did make a few poor arguments, one of which was misinformed in regards to material bags - maybe that gave you such impression, i didn't take it that way, but he can speak for himself.
The fact that the chance to drop a full item depends on the amount of corruption you have means that there's already a range of drop probabilities on items, that's linked to a specific in-game value.
Afaik pretty much all games have at least some kind of "timed" items that would either disappear or get destroyed after a while. I'd assume Ashes will have this as well (either for quests or for whatever other reason).
So with all of those things in the game, I'd assume it'd be somewhat easy to combine them all into the system that I suggested. Maybe I'm completely wrong though, and if we have any game dev coders here I'd be glad to hear their opinion.
As for all the other points, I have another question: what is the basis of your assumption that we'll lose a ton of full items on red death? I don't think I've heard any indication of that being the case.
Also, I was making sure I remembered things correctly just now and found the most obvious, yet I think missed, point on the wiki. And I checked some other quotes and Steven says "items you're wearing". In other words, right now I really think that your suggestion is literally what the current plan is
Ashes being PvX and not another wow, eso mmo, in which there are pure pve sets and pure pvp sets, my mind did not go to gear load-outs, since you would have to spec your char to be able to tackle any content, in the open pvp world. Until I watched the Enveus intervierw. The first thing that went to my head was that should players start loading up on gear sets, (for the reasons you mentioned before) the occasional PK will be a re-enactment of my time going red in full B grade arsenal.
And people won't be able to PK unless provisions are made.
Either way, this line of thinking is pointless right now, because of what I pointed out in my previous comment here. Or at least until Steven clears up what he means by "equipped items".
The difference is that if everyone in the game just fights back then there's no PKing, which means that the whole "omg reds might lose more shit now" doesn't apply at all.
I meant lowbie PKers with shit gear killing passive players. Dick PKers could just make lowbie alts and go around in shitty gear just trying to PK anyone they see. That's literally their preferred gameplay so they would've be wasting time doing this.
Sooner or later they'd find victims that don't fight back and ruin their gameplay. But as I said, this is kinda inevitable unless we get account-wide PK counts.
Sounds like a great question for the monthly Q&A