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
Now while I don't think a measly 5 level gap between two identical rarity swords should make all the difference, if it was a lv35 character with full lv35 gearset against a lv40 character with full lv40 gearset, the lv40 one should have significant advantages, otherwise the character progression will feel underwhelming.
I'd however prefer if the discussion was based on lv50 cheap gear vs lv50 rare gear. Single piece? Not that much of a difference. Full set? Should really be felt.
The meta of under-equiping because you're still viable in your cheap gear is silly and should not be available as a workaround to corruption penalties. In fact I'd consider other ways to punish corruption rather than gear drop RNG, which (given one didn't work around it) is regequit-inducing (certainly not healthy for the game) and as is evident, can be cheesed/workedaround. I like my full-loot in games where it belongs, not in a game where I spend thousands of hours acquiring gear only to permanently lose it because I didn't work around a game system.
There will always be a workaround. The only thing Intrepid can control is how effective that workaround is, while keeping all the related gameplay features from crumbling to pieces (which imo pvp would do if this kind of scaling was in the game).
Right, cool, heard that before, will never accept it as a sort of argument. Being able to not do something doesn't justify the system being badly designed. Plus you're biased because L2 had it so your opinion means little to me.
What other solution would you suggest that would be as punishing as the potential of losing gear? Or are you just fine with other people PKing everyone left and right?
Read again what you just typed here.
If gear contributes only 50% of the power people will equip insignificant gear and PK you left and right.
I told you people will equip cheaper gear to get the dirty tasks done.
Stop acting like a smartass, going around in circles talking fluff, arguing semantics.
You will get pked left and right if people can get enough atk output from cheap gear.
And spare use those fake : ) smiles
I said that not avoiding the current punishment would be a low skill move, because it is. And I'm waiting for hleV to provide a strong enough unavoidable punishment, considering that they dislike both the current punishment and its avoidance.
With proper gear equiped, people will think twice about PKing.
No there isn't a 20% difference between level 1 and level 2. That is why there is often a 5 level gap on mobs both higher and lower for maximum experience gain. Because the power difference is not 20% per level.
If gear was near-100% of player power people would simply not PK, because they'd know that they'd lose it for sure (cause corruption balancing seems harsh currently).
Except the other effect of that gear balancing would be complete destruction of pvp, because now no one can punch up ever. Which will inevitably lead to player drain, because only the 1% at the top will be winning and keep winning forever.
Since when is "more than 50%" equal to 100%?
I also had enough of you. Going to sleep, not going to engage you any more.
And I'm assuming you'd want T2 (or at the very least T3) to never lose again T1 as well, right? Cause I'm sure that T1 lvl50 gear will be cheap (relatively speaking), so people will simply use that for their PKing.
If gear is a lower contributor of power, it's already been said that people will just exploit the system and equip crappy gear and go on a PK spree. Though keep in mind there will be severe penalties based on your corruption. Ashes' goal is to make you not want to go red, right? You won't want to be fighting when red, you do less damage to players, etc.
Of course all of this will need testing in A2, etc. But I'm not really sure what else could be put in place rather than the fear of losing very important gear. Said person who gets (insert strong sword) from your corpse could potentially be hunted down. Maybe a revenge system if you want to go that route to get your gear back. Of course you'd still be red, go further red...and now have a greater disadvantage due to losing your very good sword plus all the debuffs of being red. But maybe certain gear that takes ages to farm is protected from being dropped in PVP? Who knows.
Though think about it in terms of rpgs, anime, etc. When a character loses a sword, they have to go get a new one. So you'd probably just have to spend your resources beforehand to have backup gear of equal quality. The better quality, the more expensive. Ummm..but overall I think it's fine as is with how the game is supposed to function based off of it's core philosophies? The game is supposed to be based around risk vs reward, and while you may not enjoy losing gear if you PK and go red, it was your choice to go red in the first place. So you should understand what you're getting into. Again, the goal of the Ashes team is to make people NOT want to go red due to the plethora of disadvantages it gives you.
So you shouldn't be trying to make red player's lives easier, the goal of all the corruption system, etc is so that people DON'T just go around doing nothing but PK'ing. You probably need a healthy balance of PVE and PVP.. Besides, you're not supposed to be going around targeting green names, after the first fight you become purple, and then if a purple targets a green they become corrupted and go red. then it's all downhill from there. You balance that out I assume by halting in PVP after the first scuffle or two. If you're purple you're only free to attack other purples without consequence. So it's keeping a watchful eye and being very careful. Obviously defending yourself and fighting back against a red while purple is good for you since you stay purple.
Even if gear is 90% of what controls your power, you'd still be dealing non-outregenable dmg to people if you're max lvl, so people would still simply use the cheapest gear they can find.
So you would not stop PKing, but you would stop good pvp
That would be up to IS, but one solution off the top of my head: Exile (with still some activities to be had). A player gets a timeout, which prevents further PKing but doesn't potentially have IS lose a player because the RNG just lost them thousands of hours. Now nobody would have to meta underequip before PKing with no repercussions.
And determined PKers wouldn't be stopped by this, because they're already expecting some grind to get back up to fighting strength from penalty-based stat dampening. Except now they're encouraged to use their best gear to PK way easier and for potentially longer, because they're sure that they won't lose it.
So this would not only not change the current influence on the players, but would potentially make things worse.
And if Intrepid haven't come up with a different solution that means that they either don't want one or haven't found a better one.
It literally prevents you from further PKing if you die and get exiled. Right now you use cheap gear, if you die you don't care, and continue PKing with cheap gear. And PKing with your best gear is the exact thing I want in AoC -- go for the win, not for a chance where you don't really care if you lose.
Or didn't bother thinking about it because corruption is yet to be tested.
Either that or you do and you're just arguing for the sake of arguing. Neurath is making the most short and simple work of this topic and the fact it's not hitting is just so strange man.
why do you want to limit it? if someone pk and wants to keep pking, let them do so. the carebears who are more likely to quit wont go on a pking rampage, ever.
i like how you say the system is bad when you havent played the game or even the closest game to it xD
I didn't say 20% per level, I said 20% from level 1 to level 2. In some games, the jump between these two levels is more than 100%.
The reason I pointed this out is because you said you thought a 20% increase from level 1 to level 10 was reasonable in germs of stats (which isn't a valid point of discussion here), so I pointed out how quickly a 0% over all increase in power usually happens at low levels.
The reason this happens so quickly is because most games see players start out with either one or two abilities - almost always only one attack. The jump to level 2 almost always doubles the number of attacks a player has st his disposal, and this equates to a massive jump in character power.
A person equally skilled that has a level 40 sword should not lose to someone with a level 35 sword. However simply having a high level weapon or piece of gear does not mean they are a superior player. What rotation are they using? How do they utilize their potions? etc. Gear should matter but it is not the only piece to the puzzle.
However, the fact that I ever even looked at those figures is from when I first heard about Lanchester's Law.
The figures I saw in MMO's in general lead to a much higher rate of victory based on being more powerful than what Lanchester's Law suggests, but I put that down to the law in question being based off of military matters, where both sides are usually exceedingly well trained and prepared, where as in an MMO it is not unusual for the more powerful character to also be the more experienced (especially true in a game where your characters power is at least a result of previous victories).
There is, of course, the detail of how you calcualte a 12.5% difference in power between characters. In terms of pure DPS characters it is really easy - a character that deals 12.5% more damage than another is 12.5% more powerful. The problem is that this doesn't equate to tanks, healers or non-pre DPS specs.
This isn't a safe assumption to make.
We have no reason to assume that we will have access to all primary class abilities by level 25, but we also know that there will be an increase in stats up to the level cap, and that we will gain skill points up to the level cap. This means that progression is solidly vertical all the way to that level cap. There may be some horizontal progression within that, but most players will work on the low hanging fruit of vertical progression as long as levels are available to them to get before working on vertical progression (95% of players will do this, as it is what has proven most effective in basically every other MMO ever, and so is what people know, expect and for the most part want to do).
A few points here.
First, the longer a games TTK, the less viable it is for RNG to play a factor in the outcome in a fight at all. This is because with a long TTK, one or two locky rolls in your favor don't matter too much - you need many more. Since Ashes is intending to have a fairly long TTK, that means luck will just matter less as a basic point of statistics.
Second, your scenario is also dependent on what a luckly RNG spree would look like. In many games (including a number that the Ashes develoeprs have worked on) a crit is a 1.3 modifier to damage. There are often modifiers to this crit modifier, but not on gear at the levels you are talking about here (generally speaking). This would mean that a lucky spree of crits for that level 40 player in your scenario would still only see them dealing 49.4 damage to the level 50's 52. So, even with that insanely good run of RNG compared to the level 50 player having the worst run in history, the level 40 player would still be falling behind in this fight.
You also seem to have not taken in to account that the level 40 would have lower defense than the level 50 - though I may have missed something there. The increase in stats the players have due to just getting them for leveling as well as the added progression via more skill points to spend also don't seem to be something you have factored in at all.
And that was with you assuming this level 50 player had essentially the worst gear available to him - which is something that is debatable in terms of whether it is an appropriate assumption as you are now talking about someone that has skipped the low hanging fruit of levels in regards to vertical progression, has opted for far more expensive vertical progression and has gone up against someone that has literally stopped dead in their tracks in terms of progression once they hit the level cap, and seemingly didn't have T3 or better gear in the level 40 range.
Basically, you are lining all the ducks up in a row in order to make your point, but even then the math doesn't quite support it.
I'm talking about the actual game, where those ducks aren't going to line up that perfectly. The game where players basically always take the easier path first (leveling), and follow that up with the harder progression paths (gear, enchanting etc).
In that game, the 90% figure I've talked about is probably understating the matter, it will be more like 95%.
8 archetypes, 64 classes being trumped by gear is going to bode well for the nature of the game, since nothing in BoE and can be readily traded.
A player should be rewarded by power bonuses because they can make active use of the bonuses of a weapon, not because the weapon makes the player.
You say this as if it is a BAD thing? No one should want to PK in their GOOD gear, just like no one wants to loose their GOOD gear. If the top tier gear only adds 10% to your power, vs the lowest then everyone will be constantly fighting in the lowest tier gear and there will constant wars between smaller and larger guilds. The way YOU put it "whoever gets to the top gear first should be able to prevent anyone else from getting gear ever!" Ya, no, gear should only account for maybe 30% IMHO and your proposal would break the game. Also it is the reason OTHER PvP oriented games have gone the way of the dodo.
Agreed, most people who put time, effort, and thought into the game are never going to PK in good gear anyway. It’ll almost always be exclusively on a second hand set.
1/3 of player power is a good mark, people should worry about their mechanical aptitude before their able to make use of the best gear in the game.
This is getting dangerously low to gear doesn't matter nor obtaining it. Or the effort to do all the hard challenges are a waste of time for gear increases that mean nothing, including enhancement.
Gear at 1/3 sounds pretty silly based on the layers of progression and enhancing leaving 0 room for hard grinding. And feeling more like a survival game than a mmorpg.
Being relative to the skill level of the player using it, it would still matter.
Just like all other things that matter.
The point is gains would not feel impactful or interesting, it starts to just feel like a survival game and not a mmorpg. You have like 15 pieces of gear, you have rarity and some form of enhancement system (when they show it). so each piece of gear is not even more going to be a 2% power increase based on that. Everything will just be extremely minimal. Like legit will be trying to work your ass off for a really rare item and its just like +2 stat gain.
I'm in the boat of gear feeling meaningful and people that work for it should feel excited. There should be differences of people that have top gear between others, and not for it to feel less impactful because they only have a small increase of power over you with all the hard work they put in to obtaining the gear.
The other side of things is player skill should be impactful for combat, people should be able to miss or have a disadvantage if they are full tab target and choose to aim 0 of anything. That skill curve should be important and impact gameplay allow some element of gear to be overcome with skill.
But as I said there, I base this on nothing else than my experience of fighting people in better gear and winning from time to time (but more often than 5% of times).
If no lower powered player can win pvp against a higher powered player - I'll be sad, but I'll survive it. Dunno if the game will though.
One or two tiers of gear in and of itself won't make a massive difference - the power differential there would be perhaps 3 or 4%, making the statistical ratio only about 55 - 60% towards the person with better gear.
It is when you start adding levels to the situation that we get the numbers I've talked about above.
I mean, this is why corruption for killing lower level non-combatants is exponentially higher.
The game will not only survive with it being the case, but it won't survive if this is not the case. Generally speaking, MMO players want to see power gain as they level, they want to both be and feel stronger, and wont accept a game where this is not the case.
This is the case because as I have said, character progression is the actual core of MMORPG's as a genre. Always has been.