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.
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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
RPG players want character progression, and they get that by levels which advance stats and abilities, and gear.
Assuming equivalent player skill.
Two players close in gear score, should be able to fight on fairly even footing.
Two players far apart on gear score, should have no contest, the one with massive gearscore advantage should win. If the advantage is significant enough.
The question should be, how much is that gear gap to be reasonable for max level characters. At what point does being more skilled not make enough of a difference because you simply cant do enough damage to the higher geared player anymore.
Aoc wont have gear score treadmills so the gaps cant be that big.
It's more at the sub 50, say the 40 v35 example from earlier. There is going to be lots of content where players will be contesting it against other players, if it's the case that the L35 won't be able to beat the L40 due to being carried by gear, then if you see a caravan or boss or something like that, why would you go and contest it if you can't win.
I hope I'm way off but I just worry that PvP encounters like that would become scarce as people wouldn't bother if they have no chance in competing for it.
If you are so far off the pace that you can just look at the situation and see that you have no chance of winning, that isn't a bad thing, that is the game telling you that you are a mile off the pace.
Your argument here is no different to someone saying numbers shouldn't matter, because if you can see that I have so many more people present than you do, why would you even bother attacking?
If someone is in a situation where they are outnumbered, my answer to them is to get more friends.
If someone is in a situation where they are outgeared, my answer to them is to get better gear.
If someone is in a situation where they are outleveled, my answer to them is to get more levels.
These things are really basic. People need to stop complaining about them. You absolutely should need gear and levels and friends to be competitive.
Also I think I should make it clear I'm talking about when there is a small level gap, I'm realistic in that if it's an ordinary L5 v a L40 unless they are afk the L40 should be winning that 99.99% of the time.
There absolutely needs to be a balance between gear and skill but I'm always going to lean towards skill being the larger determining factor.
If a player has better gear or is a higher level I want there to be at least a chance I can compete if I'm good enough at the game, I should have to work a lot harder in that fight to win but if they are a bad player then they shouldn't automatically win. If you're skill is roughly similar then the better gear or more players will have a slight advantage and that's alright.
If my group see a larger group but we back our skill we're absolutely taking that fight on. The group we face might be terrible and we roll them or they are similar and it's a great fight.
Like I say I'm concerned that heavy gear dependency will the vast majority of players want to rush to 50 because if they're not a max level lots of contested content will be pointless to contest.
actually george made a comment that finalyl made e understand what he means, and he makes sense. its just, he explaind it poorly i guess.
if gear contributes to most of your character power, this means that other sources of stats doesnt, and your skills doesnt (they get amplied by your gear) so people will actually have to use their best gear, otherwise they get steam rolled. this prevents people from skipping tiers or pking using low tier, cheap and easy replaceable gear.
if your gear contributes a small amount of your character power then this means other sources of stats and your character toolkit contribute more. so basically things that you cant lose when you pk. for example if gear is only 30% of your power or less, you are doing most of your damage with your class skills, therefore, allowing people to pk with trash gear, because it doesnt add a lot of power anyways.
so after finally understanding what he means, its not a bad thing that gear provides high power, since this will prevent people from pking in trash gear, otherwise anyone could just turn on them and steamroll them.
but, there are tradeoffs. if gear provides too much power, people can snowball really hard and others wont have a chance to fight back. no matter what you do, you lose to f1 spam, unless you have equal gear.
so its up to intrepid to find the right balance. do they want more pk or less pk? more risk or less risk? more gear oriented pvp or less gear oriented pvp?
right now it seems to be at a happy middle.
edit: also, those talking about gear should be 30% or less and skill matters more, you arent considering that the game has a rock, paper, scissor balance. so the more your strength comes fro your class, your skills will matter less. i could simply just play the FOTM or the op class and kill you. you could try to outplay all you want, tis a tab targetted game. i press 12345 and you die simply because im using the OP class and you arent, or because my class beats yours. i am scissors and you are paper, simple as that...but then ill lose to rock.
If someone has better gear than you, they are better at that game than you.
Gear to you means you've cleared X raid or Y dungeon or whatever so you're good at the game, I don't see it that way.
To me gear doesn't mean you're good, you need know how to use it to be a good player.
I absolutely see the arguments people are presenting, it's been a really interesting read, I'm not sure how to resolve Ops concerns around PKs, I was just raising it from contested PvP encounters.
Gear to me means you have completed a specific piece of content, which could be a raid, a dungeon, killed a boss, completed a quest or other objective, and could be PvP or PvE oriented, or even both.
These are all parts of the game as a whole. If you want to be good at the game as a whole, you need to complete all of these parts of the whole game.
You have as much of the game in front of you as someone like myself has. If I have successfully completed more of it than you (which gear is an indicator of), I am quite comfortable in saying I am better at the game than you are.
Now, people also sometimes buy gear from the market. The thing is, in order to do that, you need to be really good at the economic aspects of the game. This is also a part of the game, and so being successful at this is another sign of someone that is just better at the game.
People are sometimes also given gear from friends. This means these people are playing the social aspects of the game incredibly well, and so are better at those aspects of the game.
No matter how you look at it, someone with better gear than you is better at the game as a whole than you. If you were better at the game, you would get better gear.
Now, you may want to say that you are better at one small aspect of the game (PvP), and you only want that aspect to be a factor in PvP. The problem there is that if this is the case, that needs to be the case for other aspects. If PvE success isn't to be a factor at all in PvP, then PvP success shouldn't be a factor at all in PvE.
also in other games like call of duty, starcraft or mortal kombat, i agree that skill should be the primary factor that determines the winner in pvp. but rpg are different. your power mostly come from your character (stats, skills, build, synergies, etc) while skills should matter, but in a tab targetted rpg they shouldnt be the primary determiner of victory, since it is an outside factor related to the person playing the game, not the character.
you could argue that it isnt fair that a 15-20 eyars old can consitently beat a 45-50 years old simply because he was born 30 years later, something that no one can control. fighting game? sure, shooter? sure, tab targetted mmorpg..hold on. if you make the case for outside factors that arent related to the game and what you do in game to be the primary determiner of the battle, then you should be ok with p2w as well. you cant have one but not the other.
Same with MMOs player skills shouldn't be the only factor but you automatically shouldn't win because you have better gear than me.
I mean p2w is bullshit and is no way skill in any form.
Just because someone is good in a raid and gets gear shouldn't mean they beat me in PvP. Someone who has played the market and bought the gear shouldn't now be better than me in all other parts of the game be it PvP or PvE, which is what gear dependency mostly means, which is why the balance is needed but really tricky to achieve.
I'm saying that from a competitive PvP view your skill should be the larger determining factor in success. Skills are more about my irl skill they are also lots of game skill as well.
Like I said it's been really interesting seeing the difference in perspective here and think it's going to be something hotly discussed throughout the games life span.
If the different parts of a game don't interact in this manner, why have them all?
I understand your sentiments here.
Gear means a bird could have shit it out of the sky or someone is well liked on OF when it’s not BoE.
Anyone can buy a tool or machine, doesn’t mean they’re proficient with it.
And Mjolnir and Gungnir need to stay in the hands of the Thor and Odin respectively.
To broaded it back out and allow people to return to OPs original intention. I think the balance is going to be difficult in Ashes.
In PvE centric games, they make gear the most important, fine, the game is balanced around it. In a PvP centric game gear matters less.
But in a PvX game you have to be able to make gear worth while, whilst not making it OP, so you don't just no skill steam roll people. And you can't make it redundant because that impacts the economy, artisan paths and makes it so people won't care about losing gear so they PK away.
Really interested to see how it plays out in A2 and beyond.
Definitely won’t be easy, being an mmorpg protein sandwiched between strategy and survival balancing is gonna require a lot for sure.
Though I did kinda mention it in terms of skillest/usage/HP, because those could be bigger/broader at a higher lvl, but I didn't represent that in the numbers.
Again though, corruption got nothing to do with this unless gear is near 100% of player power.
I'm talking about two willing pvpers. Except if higher lvl and better gear always mean you win - lower lvled players will never experience pvp, because it'll always be near-impossible for them to properly catch up to the vets.
The only way for them to pvp would be to hope that the game gets a sudden HUGE influx of newbies. Expansions miiiight have that, but that's doubtful. And even if they did, that entire new playerbase would get spread out over hours of the day, methods of leveling and connections to other players. So even if there is an influx - it doesn't guarantee that a newbie can enjoy pvp.
It's easy to say "just lvl/gear up/get friends bro", but all of those things imply complete removal of a huge part of the game. At that point the game becomes pve, rather then continuing to be pvx.
And this is at the core of my issue with George's suggestion or your calculations. I want lower powered people to still have chances against higher powered people. The only ones getting "fucked over" are the hardcores who outmatch everyone, but even then they just get good content because the game is not as boring as it will be if higher power always = win.
And I think that this is the difference in our experiences and/or preferences. You view gear progression (and the player power that stems from that) as an absolute constant necessity, while I just see it as something that happens on the side of an already interesting game.
That's the thing though. It won't. It never will, unless gear is smth like 90% of your power (though even this is not for sure).
I keep saying this but everyone ignores this. Bad PKing will always be done in shittiest gear possible, because the entire point of PKing is to find someone who will not fight back and fuck them over. And not fighting back means that you simply need to outdamage their regen (be it healing or potions). And even if you're not outdamaging their potions - you're wasting them, which is still "fucking over the victim" so you win.
This is why I keep asking people to remove PKing from this entire discussion, because it's silly to have it here.
To the extent that the weapon should not make that big of a difference vs a full set of armor.
If it's fullset Level 40 armor + Level 40 weapon vs fullset Level 40 armor + Level 35 weapon
That Level 40 weapon should not be a 100% automatic win.
At some point, it will be clear that gear is ineffective for the current Adventurer Level and it will behoove the player to upgrade accordingly.
Steven (and Bill) will have to decide if 5 Levels under is the appropriate threshold, but that's going to be full set of gear; not just due to one piece of gear, like a weapon.
It's somehow completely fine for a lower level player to get trashed by mobs that a higher level kills with ease, but got forbid that higher level player kills the lower level player with ease. When it comes to PvP, people don't want any RPG to it, yikes. (Speaking in general about level/abilities/gear here.)
He didn't explain it poorly. Glad you eventually understood, but it could indicate an issue with these forums in general, people fail to understand each other therefore wrongfully oppose each other's ideas.
Mayyyyybe in the game as a whole? Good luck completing all the game's content, then going for a naked duel against someone who hasn't completed shit, then after you get trashed, telling them that you're better at the game ;D
I'd expect mobs to still require skill to kill and if you have enough of it - you can kill mobs higher than you in lvl.
Also playing the game more does not mean you are by default better than another player. Though if you used your time well you could have more gear than them and have / may clear more content. This is why I say it is important to have skill in the game as it adds more of a gap in player ability (action combat wise). The more layers of skill the more gap in player ability.
High end example would be ie* Shroud playing a shooter less then you but still 1000* better
Plenty of people play games a ton and are trash at it. It is a very PvE tab target mentality to think playing more and having more gear means you are better. Sounds like a complete lack of adversity.
Nah. I don’t want years of development on classes and respective systems diminished, I think they should be balanced accordingly.
A novice needs to work on their personal aptitude, not run around with power gains and beat people and giving them a false sense of performance.
Players who start playing the game later will be able to feel useful in a reasonable time (of 2 months) even without having to accept donations from guilds.
If someone willing engages in PvP with someone that is higher level than they are and loses, that is simply that players fault. It isn't an issue with the game - the player made a bad decision.
Keep in mind, it has always been the case that progression in all forms is created in PvE and redistributed via PvP.
That has literally been the goal since day 1.
That progression gained via PvE actually mattering isn't removing any part of the game, it is making sure that both the PvE aspect creating progression and the PvP aspect redistributing progression actually have an effect.
If gear doesn't matter, then PvE doesn't matter, because gear acquisition is the major focus of PvE. If PvE doesn't matter, PvP doesn't matter, because PvP is just redistributing gains from PvE.
Yeah, but no one is really talking about unreasonable or unrealistic situations.
scenario 2: forget about raids. what if the gear needed for pvp can be acquired soloing pve? should i automatically win against someone who didnt put the effort on getting the gear or should they beat me? if they should beat me, why have gear in the first place then? they can go get the gear soloing the game like i did and we can fight with the same gear.
plenty of games where u dont need to do a raid to get the gear you need. also aoc doesnt separate pvp and pve, so the same defense you use for pve its used for pvp, and the same attack you use for pve is used for pvp. go get the gear and stop crying then we can fight on equal gear.
watch this:
is the cleric player better or more skilled than the tank or is the class busted? this is what many players dont get, most of the time you arent winning because you are better (or you think you are better) than the opponent, then you make the argument for being skilled lol. even pro players play the op characters in tournaments, why is that?
if the cleric was better, shouldnt he have won the third duel with no weapon as well?
but if the tank was better, shouldnt he have won all duels?
also dont forget that tanks were one shotting people at some point. were they good players?
Because I've learned enough about you that you're not going to be an ignoramous on the game and do your due diligence and never be caught in the situation.
and we know 1 duel means nothing.
An example would be, going for few big slow hits, or death by a thousand little fast cuts.
Skill alone cannot be what carries a player, otherwise we will have no sense of progression as we get 'better' stuff.
I agree that we need a sense of progression to get better gear.
But we should also be aware that gear has durability loss which causes the performance of the gear to decrease each time the player dies.
So there is a lot of oscillation up and down in this game.