Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
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.
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
If that is not the case, then I'm definitely curious what the rewards were. If only instanced stuff gave gear, because instanced stuff was the only thing that required said gear - ok. I'm just trying to clear up a potential misunderstanding here.
This depends on how you look at it.
For the most part, when people in EQ2 talked abotu best in slot items (which was almost never, as the best item available was usually build dependent, and different builds were 100% viable), items from contested content were excluded.
The reason for this is simple - not all contested encounters were guaranteed to ever spawn - let alone drop the item you wanted.
In the time I played, there were contested encounters that we all knew to exist, had data mined the rewards from, but didn't spawn a single time on any server in the game.
There were other encounters that spawned but were never killed. You couldn't just go back to these encounters at the next content cycle, as these encounters were redesigned completely (and reitemized) for each expansion (well, for 3 or 4 expansions before they were retired)
Thus, there were many, many items made that players never actually saw.
The developers couldn't actually design content around players having this gear because it was perfectly viable that literally no one would have it.
As to the effect it would have on making content easier (which seems to be the point you are making) - not really. I mean, a little, but not really.
The items in question were perhaps 2 or 3 percent better over all (I'll get to this "over all" point in a bit) than instanced dropped items. There was one of these specific items dropped per contested encounter kill (there were also other items, but they were on par with instanced raid loot). They spawned about once a week, but weren't able to be killed every week.
As such, a guild wouldn't be expected to have more than 10 of these items at any given time even if they had their server on lockdown (the one guild killed every contested encounter that was killed).
So, 2 or 3 percent better over 10 slots, with players having 22 gear slots each, and 24 players in a raid. This means that a raid with 10 of these items would be about 0.059% better geared. Then when you factor in that only about 80% of a characters potential is from gear, the remaining 20% being from ability/spell upgrades, this means that a guild with 10 of these items is about 0.0472% better off.
Now, the way EQ2 did raids, they didn't usually get harder as time went on or anything like some other games. The only increased difficulty as an encounter got more drawn out was in relation to basic general chaos (this always devolve as time goes on). For the most part, killing an encounter 0.0472% earlier isn't going to make the difference between killing it or not killing it.
Now for the "over all" part that I said I'd get back to. Gear from contested encounters was often a lot more offensively focused than gear from instances. While it's easy to think "hah, so you kill it even faster than you say!", the thing to keep in mind is that you probably want survivability/duration more than outright offensive power on most top end encounters. As such, it wasn't unusual for people with these items to use them on trash mobs, on lesser boss encounters, and outside of raids, but then switch to a better suited item for boss encounters - whether that is an item that increases their heals, assists in mana replenishment, increases buff duration or just increases defensive stats.
I'm also going to focus on this specific point of your post for a second; Think about this for a second.
If the best gear in the game comes from the hardest encounters in the game, how can the hardest encounters require the best gear?
These things are far more complex than you are probably assuming.
Edit to add - it is worth noting that after I left the game (several years after, from what I can tell), they altered the spawn on these mobs (note again that they were updated with completely new mechanics each content cycle). The altered spawn made it so that for the most part, 6 of them would spawn in any given week, rather than 1. They also made it so that they would usually spawn either 2 or 3 at a time - and within a 12 hour window - though the window itself was somewhat random. I can't really speak to this spawn mechanism, as I didn't play the game with it in place.
Yes and no.
Contested gear is any item that drops from contested encounters.
However, while some gear that drops from contested encounters is best in slot, not all of it is.
Contested typically means PvP. (Other players can prevent you from completing/acquiring that content.)
Yes.
Most of my MMO experience has been in running top end raid guilds, though i did spend a few years playing Archeage as well (a game with effectively no raid content).
The main reason is rarity.
Even if PvP is not involved, a contested encounter can only be killed once per spawn cye on any given server, meaning only one roll on the loot table.
An instanced encounter can be killed many times on a given server by different guilds.
Thus, if the encounters are the same difficulty, it stands to reason that the contested encounter have better drops.
In which games? Give some examples of hardest raids you've done.
I would call such person a "reddit expert" in a different community. Idk if it's true, but that's how i feel.
So will you still play that kind of game?
This sounds like the dumbest design ever to me. Why create content that NO ONE will see.
So, pretty much, L2 just wanted its players to experience all the content they made, so even with updates quite a bit of older content was still accessible and even valuable. While EQ2 just said "fuck you" to all the devs who worked on those super rare mobs (well, until the time when they didn't, as you point out at the end).
You pretty much described L2's epic jewelry
Ok, I assume the stuff that boss gave would be the stuff that you need for the next expansion, right?
So the question remains, would you play a game where the next iteration of instanced content requires you to have contested gear to clear, because it's tuned for it instead of instanced stuff?
I believe you kinda said no to this, when I suggested that hardcore instanced content should only give cosmetics as rewards. But before that you said you're fine with ow bosses in Ashes giving BiS stuff. This is what I'm trying to clear up.
I choose to believe Noaani and just discuss his opinions on stuff and his preferences. Even if he's bullshiting the absolute hell out of this entire forum - I'd still learn more about pve variety from his bullshit (or, say, potential Azherae bullshit) than I would've on my own. I ain't about to go play two 20y.o. games for more than a year just to figure out if either of them are bullshitting or not.
Is this me from the past?
I'll believe he played EQ2 seriously that is fine, but exaggerates things.
You can see he said he played archeage for a few years as he said, that is not a long time to be on a mmorpg and his most recent experience with them imo. He mentioned he played BDO but you don't se that in this post, as i questioned him on things about it and there were some red flags. He most likely played it for a few months if anything, and did not really do the pvp or enjoy the game overall.
@NiKr You can't just believe everyone online cause they say something. It is fully in your power to do so and give them the benefit of the doubt. But if there is doubt or weirdness you can't just say everything they are saying is true. It is up to them to prove it though experience be it sharing content and talking about it and their overall knowledge.
If you are a elitist type you never want to be wrong, you want to see like the best player or super important. Though as time passes without really playing current games you start to dull yet you want to feel as important as you were back in the day and do what you can to make it seem like it.
Saying you were doing top end raiding in EQ2 like 15 years ago does not mean much to the present. Unless you are in some well known guild that has been doing such things from then and still does those things now.
Again, if this mattered then all my posts would be meaningless, because they're built on a 20y.o. game that I played over 7 years ago for the last time, all while majority of my posts reference the game how it was over 15 years ago, just as Noaani seems to do with EQ2.
The entire point of Ashes is to return back to the time where EQ2 and L2 and games from that time were the best. So having opinions from that time seems fine to me, cause lord fucking knows we'll have a SHITTON of current opinions once the game reaches the masses.
It isn't black or white or George or not George. There is definitely an inbetween even more so since this is the internet. And from discussions you can see inconsistences many of which have shown up.
Are you telling people you are a top tier raider, dismissing others points, putting people down, refusing to understand other peoples takes, etc?
It isn't exactly being a old game but more so the person in question having less experience with modern games, and was only serious about the genre so many years ago. Its like akin to saying you were a pro in Call of duty 1, but playing any current call of duty you aren't relevant in the competitive element against any current players
I don't think so you are the same in any kid of closeness as you are open to listening to people, having a discussion be it you agree or not. There is a giant difference. Your frustrations come from passion. You don't try to say you were a top tier raider as a means of dismissing a point on someone that plays modern games. But more so use your experience and knowledge to push your point. And you have a vibe to want to actually understand other people.
That's what I make other think, because it's beneficial for me to come off that way. Noaani just doesn't care about how he comes off to others. He's like George in that regard.
There's no point in taking any of the forum people seriously. Whatever we write here most likely has barely any influence on Intrepid's decisions, because there's, like what, a dozen or so of frequent posters? Any dev discussion or q&a gets several times that in unique posters.
I use this theory when talking to other posters on the internet. Each and every poster has something "wrong" with them. And the more they post - the more that's true. I'm one of the biggest examples of that and Noaani is definitely up there as well, as are majority of usual posters on here.
And with that in mind - why would I care what crazy people say
I see, it is the they are crazy and the internet. You don't have anything to lose or gain from thinking they are telling the truth since it doesn't matter in the grand scale of things. so it is wasted energy to to prove anyone wrong and just go with the flow generally.
Is what i gather from that.
So why should I waste my nerves on random internet discussions when I have enough on my plate irl? I'd rather just see it all as silly, because that's what it is.
The "craziness" is an exaggeration, as the OP from that reddit post says. But the quirkiness of what the "crazy" implies still remains. Every poster here has their own quirk that they usually repeat in their discussions/arguments. It's not a bad or a good thing, it just is.
A more positive outlook on that pov could be "yall are all MCs of the story, while everyone else is literally an npc". Though it's obviously only positive if you're the MC in this context
Lol. Must everything boil down to toxicity? I don't think its healthy to reduce the issues to toxicity. I certainly wouldn't call the other people NPCs. I'm not sure about Monsters though. I think naming and shaming is a bad policy. I try to take issues at face value, though, my own troll posts happen a lot too. I think its a natural disposition of a mischievous bugger who has spent too many years arguing with some closed society or other. Happens in every MMO and will happen in Ashes. At least, at present, I don't have to challenge people to duels to shut the people up.
And I don't call others npcs, I just think they are (though again, pretty much no one on this forum is, cause yall crazy). And me not calling everyone npcs is exactly why Mag thinks that my general vibe is "trying to understand others".
In other words, one must be smart about the way he presents himself. Which ties us back to Steven's poor presentation of his game! Boom! Full circle, this was not a spam chain of messages
You know, I don't think I've met a regular who thinks the game is good right now...I might be mistaken but I think the core excitement is people who don't follow the game close enough to care. Anyway, what will be will be and I think everyone's entitled to an opinion. I also feel the newcomers will replace the old guard eventually but we'll see how long that takes.
You said you read "the long post".
That post was me talking about a specific game. The name of that game was mentioned a few times in that specific post, and dozens of times in this thread.
I see no reason to go in to any more detail than that.
Instanced content being slightly easier to those that have killed contested content seems fine to me - if the gear system isn't complex enough to prevent that. This comment echoes some comments people made at the time.
I'm not saying every decision they made for EQ2 was perfect, im just telling you how things were in that game. I'm fairly sure the developers of that content still got their salary, which I have to assume is the reason they created the content in question.
Cut content is a fact of life as a game developer (as are games that never launch). I would think that in a game that is already launching where you have made dozen of hours of other content that everyone will play, creating a specific piece of content designed to be rare, that passes QA and so is known to be good but doesnt get seen by players is probably not as bad as other experiences in the industry.
It wasn't needed for the next expansion. There should never be a situation where you need to clear contested content in order to run instanced content.
Every expansion should provide players that have never raided before with a clear path to get started, not require them to go back and run content that guilds need to contest in order for them to start raiding the new expansion.
Remember, the point of instances is to get more people running content, the point of contested content is to get fewer. Requiring contested in order to run instanced is counter productive.
If that's the case then I'm definitely against that kind of design simply because it's the most treadmill kind of design out there.
And if it's not the case, then how exactly was the old content forgotten, if people still needed to farm smth to progress. Was it smth like "2 expansions completely negate your progress from before, instead of 1"?
But even if it's 2-3 expansions per obsoletion, I'd still be against that cause I prefer a tighter gear balancing, so that newcomers don't have to jump previous gear tiers w/o experiencing them at all. And that jump would be required, if Intrepid wanted newcomers to at least be able to survive for more than a second in pvp against older players.
You really do have a heathy mind set haha
I hope we have more than one possible gearing option. To pull top end numbers. There will always be one best, but would be cool if a one-big-hit build could swap gear around to play death-from-thousand-double-strike-small-cuts kinda build.
Its so boring if only stat numbers go higher and we never see any evolution or variety.