Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Comments
You shouldn't feel the desire to be running the same content after 6 months, let alone getting excited by the rewards from 4 year old content. Why are you even paying a subscription at that point? Well, yeah - except the P2W part.
Why should content be kept relavent? Developers should be making new content for us to play to have new experiences and new mechanics to play.
That is why we pay a subscription.
A game that isn't doing that shouldn't cost more than $2.50 a month in subscription. If it does, it is ripping you off.
This sounds like the dating game at the top level lol.
Quality vs Quantity clash incoming...
Even if you were gonna 'win' it, morph, do you actually WANT to?
Developers can add fancy names to patches all they want, the fact that they never put in items to replace those that people were using is what actually speaks here.
A proper content cycle should see a vaiable upgrade to every item on every concievable build on every class in the game happen at least three times - in raid content alone. There should be no need or desire to go back to previous content once new content is out - assuming you killed it at least one time.
I mean, I really don't care about that list. All that tells me in conjunction with you also telling me that a single ring is valued four years after it was released to live servers is that those additional content drops are either really poorly itemized, or are very small.
My assumption based on what I've read online about them (mostly from here ) is that they were about the average size of an EQ/EQ2 patch - not expansion, patch.
There are different ways to add new powercreep to chase, new systems and content that uses old as a base, or even something that simply goes in parallel to it. For example: L2 had Life Stones that would let you augment your old gear with new stats.
Slightly off-topic: This made me consider another very cool aspect of balancing around group play. For example: entire party working together for a while to get a new armor set for a healer - felt good and rewarding for everyone involved, not just the healer, since party was acting as baseline singular unit (at high-end, at least). And if your healer stays alive - so do you. Content made for one class/character was shared among everyone involved in the group. Group of 8 players will have so much more content they will want to do, compared to single player. It definitely made it feel like there was more and faster progression, than there actually was.
Your last paragraph makes no sense to me, but i don't know how to better explain it to you, specially if you did not experience a game with good content patches.
I can say that you don't need to change entire gear set(even once) to feel character progression and motivation to continue playing. You just don't. New content could even be entirely horizontal progression, but it is good still to have at least some power to chase sprinkled in.
This part feels very much like "AoC should increase the time it takes to reach lv cap" topic we had. Similar idea here. If gear is boring and meaningless, and there is nothing else to look for - naturally you would want to change it often to feel like it's going anywhere. And when you leave old content behind - it greatly reduces the feeling of progression, because you don't go to re-experience as much of it again, now that you got stronger. Pumping out new content, to feel like there is a lot of progression - ends up having opposite effect, if old content is made irrelevant in the process. Not saying that new content is bad, just that it should try to not make old content obsolete. Otherwise it's just a hamster wheel.
You seem to be considering this only from a character progression perspective.
The number of times I've seen people like George on these forums complain about how stale PvE is in MMO's and after further digging finding out that they are used to having to go after the same encounter for years on end. That is due to this lack of game design that L2 has (and literally everyone that has had this argument has come from L2).
The reason content should only be viable for 6 months at the most is so that players don't feel a need to run the same encounters for that long. Basically, all other factors aside, if you are running that same content for that long, you have bad game design.
I include Archeage in this as even though they do add new encounters to the game, so far (more than 10 years for the KR version) they have added fewer raid encounters to the game than EQ2 added to the game just in patches between it's launch and it's first expansion (it's first expansion added 49 new raid encounters - and was only top tier content for 9 months).
This paradigm of always having new content to take on doesn't make the game a hamster wheel - if anything doing the same encounter for 4 years is a hamster wheel.
The point of it is that in such games, the encounters are literally the point of playing. You aren't playing new encounters to get better gear, you are getting better gear in order to be able to take on harder encounters.
What would be a reason not to come back?
its true that the reward doesnt change, the thing is when you are pvping for the boss, you arent pvping for the reward. you might kill other players but who says that you can kill the boss?
woever kills the boss gets the full reward. you pvp to gain the opportunity to kill the boss, thats the reward
different game, different design. there isnt one size fits all. there shouldnt be 3 gear upgrades per raid progression or whatevver. thats a magic number. again, one size doesnt fit all.
people still wanted the ring because you could overupgrade it++ also not everybody had a chance to get it. you had to fight for it. only 365 rings would drop in a year (actually less because of the spawn window) so people were still fighting for those things years later. there was new content, but you would still want to go and get one.
eventually, the ring became irrelevant.
also players: we need vertical progression and old items and areas should become irrelevant. no reason to do that anymore
Then there is the notion that you shouldn't have time. Four years after an encounter is released, I expect the game to have no less than 200 new raid encounters - ideally closer to 250.
Players having a reason to go back to four year old content is developers showing a total lack of respect for players time.
L2 was a bit too slow to get through the content, i won't argue that. AoC will be much faster, and will not only improve on many systems taken from L2 and other games, but also will have a very ambitious node system on top of it all. AoC seems a bit too fast even (George made a post about that).
Showing players that something they did even 4 years ago still has a meaning to this day - very much shows respect for players time, what are you on about?
We should be returning to old regions that have new content. And with new content, we should expect new rewards.
We don't necessarily have to have PvP for that. Of course, PvP is always quicker and easier to implement than PvE content.
Life Stones were horizontal progression?
Also sounds like Life Stones could be PvE rather than "PvX".
Also seems like those updates could have been just PvE rather than including PvP.
PvE-only MMORPG players probably would not leave a game with significant new PvE content dropping every 6 months.
Seems to me that including PvE-Only gameplay would have made L2 even more successful than it already is.
Though this particular discussion did light up a bulb over my head, that I don't think I pointed out before.
Raid jewelry is horizontal progression. Mages are always strong in pretty much all games. In L2 your jewelry was the main way to defend against them. Pretty much every patch on that list added new vertically stronger jewelry, but only epic boss stuff had additional horizontal stats (crit dmg, cd reduction, stun chance+, etc).
So even though you could always get vertically better jewelry - you'd more often than not go for the epic ones, if you had access to them. And as Depraved mentioned, there'd only be a few dozen pieces of said jewelry a year (~28h respawn, ~36, ~36, ~48, 48, 5days, 8days, 11days - all except for the one of the 36 were super valuable, and the 28 one had 30% chance drop). So if you wanted to get it you'd need to go back and fight for those bosses again.
The issue of this entire discussion though is that Noaani doesn't care about the pvp part of the encounters. He just wants new pve content. While all L2 players cared about the pvp meaning behind the content. All those epic bosses had week-long drama swirling around them. Guilds rose and fell because of them. Sometimes even castle ownership was traded for them.
So it's simply a difference in what people find meaningful: the content itself or all the things that are related to it. This is also why this discussion will always be silly. Yall will never convince Noaani that having old content be meaningful is a good thing, while he will never convince yall that 200 bosses is cool cause it gives you gear to kill another 100 bosses.
@Dygz Life Stones were vertical. They were part of Augment System
This goes back to what I said before about pve mind set, that bias is in all his messages pretty much. Meaning injecting pve and not pvx into suggestions, which would lead to a worse game.
The players that would have enjoyed this type of content had probably already left. The ones remaining weren't interest in it in the first place.
It's rather hard to change the orientation of a MMO. Once people have tried it and decided it wasn't for them, they rarely look back at it. They simply move on.
I think Steven has realized this, which is why he keeps on saying "this game is not for everyone" and keeps mentioning how a ton of mechanics tie back, or are based on, pvp, so I do think we're on the right track here.
I think the best advertising will come later, in the 2nd half of Alpha 2.
See, no.
You run content because you enjoy it, not for the rewards.
The meaning content has is that enjoyment, not the ring you get from it.
Thus, respecting players time is about making it so players don't need to go back to the same old content after 4 years.
L2 developers treat PvE content as a means to an end. It is something players will suffer through in order to get gear to be better at PvP. That is why they don't care if you still want something from a four year old encounter.
Good developers treat content as the goal, and gear as the means.
Now, one could argue that this is a PvE mindset - I'm nit really even going to argue against that. All I will say to it is that if a games only end goal is to be better at PvP, you have a PvP game.
Alpha2 will most likely be streamed by Asmon and all the other huge gaming streamers/YTers. So if Intrepid don't manage to properly present their final vision for what the game is supposed to be at the start of A2 - I'm not sure how many people will be willing to change their minds about it at release.
Obviously the release itself will capture a more casual gamer audience (not skill-casual, but news awareness casual), so there'll be a chance that we'll see a ton of players at that point, but the game is designed to be quite niche, so majority of those newcomers would simply leave after first month or two.
What Intrepid want is a super stable number of hardcore players who'll stick with the game because they like the core premise/vision. And then Ashes can garner new players through positive word of mouth (obviously given that the game is indeed good).
But if we see one version of the game at the start of A2 and then there's a whole different version of it by the end - this will not only anger those who've invested their money/time into the product, but could potentially lose anyone who was not interested in the early-A2 version on streams, but might've liked end-A2 version. Which is a double-edged sword of a mess on its own.
Either way, as always it all ties back to messaging and presentation. And imo that hasn't been the best quality of Intrepid so far (or at least of Steven as the face of Intrepid).
But if Ashes has the most difficult content in instances, while BiS is only available from ow bosses, wouldn't that mean that you'll need to beat non-instanced content to clear instanced content? Does this then mean that you won't play Ashes, even if its instanced content is incredible?
And I'm assuming here that the hardest pve content requires BiS gear, otherwise it's not the hardest, right?
Using EQ2 as an example.
Instanced content had a full and proper progression. EQ2 also had open world contested encounters that provided the best rewards in the game.
The instanced content was tuned to not need contested gear to be able to beat it. It helped, but wasn't needed.
There were also occasional instanced raids added that were considered separate from the progression - kind of like additional content or side quests.
Doesn't this kinda destroy the whole point of "beating the hardest boss in the game"? Because it's only that hard cause you're underpowered.
If that is the case, then your argument against my "pvpers could just bring fewer people to the fight to make it harder" is absolutely moot. If you weren't farming the hardest bosses in the best gear - you were literally doing the same thing that elite pvpers do against zergs. Fighting against smth powerful, while you're not at full power yourself.
This is getting sillier and sillier