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.
From the Ashes - PvP Challenges (KPS)
ChaosFactor
Member, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
This discussion is part of the Master article "From the Ashes - Difficulty Philosophy Discussion". Please visit that forum post (Also by me) before reading this one! Or don't, it's your life, read what you'd like.
This is one of the three discussion posts talking about the individual reward and challenge structures associated with the different aspects of the upcoming game!
These posts will be specific to the mechanics that we are familiar with in Ashes of Creation! If there are any gaps in this information relevant to the concepts of KPS, I will simply fill in those gaps with some theory crafting. If there are any corrections on factual information that need to be made, please point them out to me!
This KPS discussion will be on PvP, that being specifically Nodes Sieges, Castle Sieges, Guild Wars, Arena Combat, Open World Combat.
As a reminder: KPS is an Acronym that stands for Knowledge, Persistence, Skill. These are the different potential approaches to resolving a difficult challenge!
ALL OF THE FOLLOWING ITEMS ARE PURELY THEORY CRAFTED, ANY SIMILARITIES TO REAL IN GAME ITEMS IS A COINCIDENCE, OR THEY LIKED MY IDEAS!
Knowledge surround PvP is certainly synonymous with understanding the individual kits of other classes, and how they interact with your own. The better understanding of augmentations, cooldowns, and counters.. will allow you to take the win in more PvP interactions.
Defeat a player of each primary archetype for the first time - Knowledge of Blood - 50g
Encounter every primary archetype in combat -
During a Node Siege, defeat 10 players on siege weapons, on foot -
Defeat 1,000 players while on a siege weapon -
PvP Persistence is a little more unusual. Some may argue that killing many players would imply a level of skill, some may assume that it just implies that you play PvP enough that you slowly erode away the challenge through persistence. With the "Rock, Paper, Scissors" approach on PvP in Ashes, even players with less skill can put in the effort to find their best PvP scenario, then consistently perform within that. (Which may be considered some extent of Knowledge)
Defeat 5 players near a Point of Interest on the map - Bowl of Blood - 50g
Participate in defeating 100 players -
Gather 1,000 resources from slain players -
Deal, Mitigate, or Heal players for 1,000,000 total HP during PvP combat -
Skill as a term is most often thrown around in MMORPGs while discussing PvP encounters. Although skill doesn't have a clear definition, this is often the place that we find ourselves claiming it's most important. Of course this is because of our competitive nature, and why intervene with that? Skill in PvP admittedly usually implies the application of Knowledge and Persistence in order to fulfil the experience, as unlike PvW or PvE encounters, people are constantly evolving every day. Skill in the application of PvP would imply all of these challenges mentioned above, but for the sake of balancing and a diverse world, should include the same level of gear as reward.
Defeat a player that has at least a 5 level advantage against you - Against All Odds - 50g
Reign victorious in a 2 versus 1 player versus player combat encounter -
Participate in wiping a group currently clearing a World Boss (60% Kill participation) -
Defeat 100 players with more than 80% of your hp remaining -
Defeat 800 players of each primary Archetype -
These are obviously just a large amount of item concepts that I enjoyed making! Please let me know if you think that the concepts, or interpretations of the challenges, are off base or not! The items are far less important with such minimal information on the balance and technical stats of the true in-game items.. I'm really just BS'ing. I'm more curious if you think that the challenges to earn them apply to KPS properly! Please feel free to offer alternatives.
Thanks for your time!
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Comments
And I agree with Depraved that there shouldn't be full separation of rewards.
Please keep in mind the redundancy of this message. "No" isn't very productive and I own all of these threads so clearly I will get to your PvE response..
I'm curious to see your example of why they're all persistency, because the mechanics of these achievements don't read this to me what-so-ever. Just because there is a commodity attached to the majority of achievements doesn't mean that it's persistency. It's just a method of proving that it's not a fluke and that you're deserving of the skill associated achievement.
In your perspective, is there some way that the game is checking if the wins in the Skill section are 'valid'?
'Kill Trading' is very common, among other things.
Also, things related to killing other players, as a generality, tend to lead to bad concepts. But I have relatively strong opinions on this and generally focus on the Economy of games. The ideas you present don't, in themselves, bother me, though I prefer games without this type of reward structure, it's that the rewards themselves are adding lots of work to the designers.
There are some fundamental 'rules' I (again, with my Econ bias) see as being absolutely necessary for games to not be terrible, and converting them to the KPS perspective we get:
"Players should never be able to save money simply by having above average knowledge."
Basically anything that the Devs wanted you to know and not discover, shouldn't be a way to save your coin, because this is what leads to the sort of frustrations that drive the views on things like YouTube content. Low views -> less of that content type.
"Players should never be rewarded with greater efficiency because of sheer persistence."
Any situation where Reward A from Persistence Activity A helps with the permanent addition of efficiency to any other activity, is a bad thing in my mind. I think this applies to the entire game. Yes, even the 'I can do persistent actions to make money to buy gear' is a thing I consider a technical flaw (it's more complex than that, but more accurate to say that if everyone can achieve a gear piece that raises efficiency through persistence alone, it's not good - that's a whole essay though)
"Players should never be rewarded with greater knowledge just through skill."
This one is hard to explain because it most games it literally cannot come up, so I don't have to say much about it. If your skill at something gives you an informational advantage over others, it's going to have similar outcomes to the above.
So as a most basic example, 'You can apply Bleed to Structures' is a massive Efficiency boost, in some games that would be gamebreaking. It is tied to 'killing players who are on Structures'. I have trouble even understanding how this is in your 'Knowledge' section but if I imagine the design in which this is so, then I'd absolutely be waiting for the YouTube video on 'how to maximize your kills on Siege Weapon users'.
Or, depending on how 'kill credit' is awarded, the group would just make sure their spear user always gets those kills.
Once again, my economy bias is showing, but remembering that Ashes is generally quite a competitive game, and the PvP part is highly so, we'd probably have what we normally get. A bunch of people who realize they can get ahead by 'setting up Kill Trading' or 'agreeing to punch down on the weaker groups until all the top groups have their stuff and then they seriously fight each other'. I just automatically think of how to solve this with Economy Design, so I can't offer 'alternative reward gear', I'm too biased to just not have it.
I'm in agreeance with most of what you say, perhaps I'm being held back by hopium, but I'm fairly certain with the team IS has available, and the amount of testing we will go through, hopefully there being abusive gameplay mechanics will be generally avoided. I believe that at some point I mentioned the issues with having a lot of these achievements rewarding gear due to the issue of abusive technicalities, zerging, and trading. The hope is that these things can be addressed and properly pushed away. At least in my opinion (obviously) having a diverse and deep reward system associated with player achievement is most certainly worth the time it would take to deal with these things.
I'm interested in your point of being against long term persistence not being balanced in accordance to a generally skillful/hard game. Is it fundamentally a problem in your eyes? Or is it under the assumption that whatever goal of persistence is set, that it would not be lofty enough to be fair? Because I believe it's the latter, and in that case I think that once again, if done properly and evaluated through testing.. can feel completely balanced due to the EXTREME persistence required.
I think that all of your worries about the situation are totally realistic, my hope with the side articles and other forms of clarification throughout the discussion, was that I believe we have the ability and expertise to subvert those issues. Lets me know is you think otherwise!
Persistence already has a reward in a game with a designed economy. You get richer than other people and can buy the best stuff. It's extremely difficult for a game to stop you from doing this entirely.
Also I play and study a lot of fighting games, so I'm in that circle of people who are constantly exposed to the lack of motivation and falloff of players based on them having to put in 10x the work of their opponent.
Or to put it another way. An equivalent achievement of 'beat a top ranked player in a match' is not unachievable at all, but the 'good feeling' of 'fighting them 30 times and then getting your achievement because they happened to miss an input' is not one that lasts, in my circles. People recognize the disparities of all kinds.
It's hard to get many 'extreme true persistence' challenges in PvP because the thing you are persisting against is too much effort for the devs to make sure you didn't 'cheese' in some way. When your entire chance of victory is based on 'having someone else make a suboptimal decision', there's nearly no way for the developers to 'detect' when a person 'threw the match by making that decision poorly on purpose'. Worse yet, you can be punished for making a choice that you believed in, but didn't work out, i.e. "Reported the Hanzo Main."
So basically I don't think it can ever be balanced and still feel even remotely like actual persistence, but I guess it's true that some people will do the same thing over and over the hard way while progressing much slower. I question the addition of a system like that to an MMO, though.
You're thinking of Mortal Kombat, I'm talking about a Meme from Overwatch.
We are not the same.
or it could be hanzo from samurai showdown
I mean, you're right, but I'm trying to keep my posts short, so I used the easier-to-google meme. My bad though, yes.
No knowledge required, because you just kill your party mates once and then ask one to make an alt of your archetype. This barely takes any time, so I guess it's not quite persistence, but it's definitely not knowledge. And is also insanely abusable, because your entire party just does this and all get 50g each. Then the guild does this on all of their alts and you have yourself a money dupe.
Literally same as above.
No knowledge required to go up the stairs and kill some dudes. But you will need time, because some of those dudes will exist their siege weapons.
Oh, also, the same applies to the attacker side's siege stuff as well, except in this case it's going down the stairs
Once again, simple repetition is the definition of persistence, not knowledge.
Yet another money dupe.
All three of these are item dupes, unless all items in your suggestions are bind on pick up. All of these are abusable at scale within the span of a few days at most.
Yet another guild-based money dupe. Like, holy hell all the alts each getting 50g within 0 time. My god the moneyyyy.
Item dupe. Though I'm not sure how you're supposed to even track this, cause I'd imagine majority of parties won't have 2 players in them.
I guess you could go by "one dude hits 2 people, while those 2 only hit HIM back"? Then we're just back to item duping.
Depending on how hard the bosses are (I hope they're hard) this would just lead to PKing bad actors, because now you're literally rewarding bad behavior in the game. Iirc Steven doesn't want this.
But this is still simply persistence because there's no skill required in PKing a healer who's already under immense strain of keeping his party alive. I know this because I've done this and I have 0 skill.
Yet another item dupe for your entire guild. Done within a day. Still no skill required.
Literally just persistence. And not only that, but you'd also make people go for different targets instead of following their leader's commands.
Though realistically, this is just yet another item dupe of Apex proportions.
In other words, majority of these suggestions are just ways to dupe money/items which require no knowledge (outside of the knowledge of these achievement's existence) and no skill - simply time, which is persistence.
I was doing stuff like this for my guild in L2 back in late 00s, because it also had benefits for repetitive tasks that can be cheesed to no end.