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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
The main point of this flag would be to encourage PvP oriented players to attack. It isn't about the cost of declaring war, it is about the consequences.
If you declare war on my guild, you hand us a whole pile of objectives based on your guilds assets and activities. Also, the way guild wars are described so far, it seems they will last days rather than hours.
Point is, while guild wars in other games may have been able to be used to block content, it seems quite unlikely that Intrepid have this plan for them in Ashes.
Thing is, one if the objectives of a guild war could be to steal the drop from a raid mob, if the guild in question recently killed it. So, if you want to use guild wars against my guild in the context of raid encounters, you are best served by leaving us with access to that encounter and then trying to take the rewards afterwards via that war objective. If by PvEers you mean people not willing or able to PvP, then I agree, and I am not trying to get them to play this game. They don't belong here.
However, the way you attract PvE players that are willing and able to PvP is to get rid of the notion of there being a "farm", or at least of there having to be one. It is such poor game design.
Give most players the choice between the optimum way to play a game being to sit in the same few rooms for an hour (or several) killing the same mobs over and over again, or running around the entire game world killing many different kinds of mobs, each offering up unique combat, and I would wager that most players would say they would rather the second be made optimal - probably stating that the first sounds horrid.
The notion of "farms" just needs to die. It's great to give the few that want it the option - but it should not be the optimal way to play.
Also, I hope you're not implying that boss would give every raider a piece of their own personal loot and I hope you're not implying that the "valuable" loot would be whatever the raiders took with them to the raid, cause both of those things are unrealistic to me.
This works against your own desire for instances though. I guild wars do have this mechanic, then it's way more convenient for the pvp guild to let the pvers farm the boss (even in the cage design) and then not only kill them for fun afterwards, but also get their entire loot through the war.
I know that AoC's war is more goal-based, but Steven said that pvp will be free throughout the entire war, so to me it's super obvious that he still wants us to fight our enemies at all times. Of course your guild can go for the deccer's goals, but the deccers would've already accounted for that, because that's part of the risk/reward equation in this situation. And if they still decced you - they're sure they can handle you.
And to me "running" being the biggest part of my gameplay is horrid. I want gameplay to come to me, while I'm constantly busy with the other part of gameplay.
Which is why I proposed the growing difficulty rooms idea, combined with "this spot is for this gear mats, so whoever wants them gotta fight for them".
Steven seems to be closer to my preference, so we'll see whether the other devs you keep talking about can convince him that his preference is ass.
Which is why the focus of PvP options is really on Caravans, Castle Sieges, Node Sieges and The Open Seas.
And why those PvP modes have no Corruption.
But, really...
I think this part of the debate is supposed to be about a Dungeon with comparatively few rooms vs a Tower with many floors/stories that each have many rooms.
Rather than about a Dungeon vs the entire open world map.
And I think most people would prefer a Tower over one instanced room in a Dungeon.
Obviously, Steven is going to prefer a ton of "Risk of PvP" even during a "PvE Raid" and a minimum of instanced rooms.
Ashes is a dynamic game rather than a static game, so the design intent is for the Dungeon to not have the exact same content and challenges when you return to the same Dungeon.
Unless every damn mob respawn changes their loot/money, but then I don't really know who'd like that kind of design, cause it's unstable as fuck.
And if the entire tower provides the same loot - I guess that's fine, but then we have econ issues of "there's several hundreds people filling the market with these items", so we'd either need suuuuper low drop rates or suuuuper high mat requirements in crafting. And I'm sure people would hate either approach.
---Steven
BCG 100 Episodes Sep 29, 2021
But you do realize that this means that rooms won't be as dynamic as you want. So my assumption that high lvl players will be grinding the same room or two deep in the dungeon still stands (again, unless drops change every spawn or at least hour).
One of the design elements that we're implementing into our raids is that the raid will not be exactly the same every single time. You're going to have variables that can't necessarily be pre-planned out for. You can pre-plan out for a lot of the raid like how many DPS do you need and healers and support; where the key position and all that stuff; but I think the compelling aspect of Ashes raiding will be the difficulty in achieving this content and having that content change from session to session as well. We want there to be variables that get manifested by what type of node got developed elsewhere. Is he going to have acolytes or cultists? What will the acolytes have skills [available] to them? What kit is the boss gonna have? What available skill repertoire will the boss be able to [wield]? ... A lot of those systems are influenced obviously by world development. So the raid takes into account at what stage has the world developed: Are there two metropolises now available in the world? Okay well let's activate this skill in this skill. Now you have five metropolises, well now all these skills have been activated. Are there are they all economic nodes? Are they all military nodes? That we can change things based on that stuff. And it really is a threat assessment from the environment against the players.
---Steven
Ashes of Creation Livestream, Nov 17, 2017
Yeah, but you put over 200 hours in to Starfield.
Also, moving around the world killing things won't see running as the biggest part of your gameplay - bigger than if you stayed in one room, but that is a good thing.
Cause moving within one dungeon might have less running time than farming time, but then we go back to the discussion of "should every point have its own instance or should it be boss/named mobs in open world"? Cause the former is against what Steven wants and the latter doesn't work in a full server, because those rooms will be farmed already and you won't have your content (in the way you want).
And moving across the entire world will be taking up way more time than the, supposed, ~10min per boss-like encounter in one place. Though again, this still requires an instance in each place, which then is also repeatable, so that you have this kind of content every day. And we're once again back to "barely any instances in the game" not matching to this approach.
The point is that most players would prefer to be somewhat mobile over sitting in the same room for hours on end.
If the developers want the game to be about movement, then that is what they would do and they would make that engaging. If they want it to be about fighting the that is what they would do.
This is why it doesn't matter.
Specifically in Ashes, if you are moving around the world you could well be spending as much time PvP'ing as you would moving, or you could be literally afk on a mount someone else is controlling, or you could find yourself wanting to glide to your destination as much as possible (if anything like gliding in Archeage, this is a lot of fun - more fun than Archeage combat).
Again, the point I am making is that players wouldn't want to be left in that one room to grind if they had the choice - how a game majes gameplay where this is not the case is as varied as games in general are - but there is no reason nor excuse to make such grinding the most optimal activity unless that is what the developer specifically wants players spending their time doing.
L2 had some general open world bosses (Named mobs by your standards) who had relatively ok drops. Their respawns were known by several guilds and controlled to their best ability by them as well. So if you tried to just run around between those bosses, even if you did know their respawn - you might've at best gotten a single one per day (they were on a daily respawn), because everyone one else was already killed by people who chose to farm those first or were simply there just a few minutes before you. And don't forget that L2 had teleportation.
And that was true even on barely filled servers. AoC's full servers would kill such bosses even quicker. So you'd ultimately just come back to the "people don't have content to do all the time because they gotta fight over it first" (and that's if they are in the right place at the right time in the first time).
My point is, running around doesn't work in an open world game, because most of the time someone will have already been there before you. If bosses respawn so quick that anyone at any point can come and farm one - why would others even move, if they already have a boss with their preferred loot table in one place respawning constantly.
And if it's instances for every damn boss, just so that people have content every day (and for any gear) - that's a different game.
Again, lottery pops.
Respawn times don't matter in that case except for the minimums.
Competition, clashing, drama, all happen. Works fine.
You are talking about respawn timers again, we have been over how poor a mechanic that is for lower end. It's fine for top tier encounters that you would expect to take half an hour or more to kill without interruption, but for fights that will take a minute or two at the most, respawn timers are absolutely not the way to go.
Imagine how different L2 would have been (well, first of all, if there was something else that was worth doing) if those bosses had a percent chance to respawn every 30 minutes rather than a guaranteed respawn every day. Those people that know the respawns may well run up to where the boss is and find basic trash there instead. Do they kill it and move on? kill it and wait for the respawn? leave it and move on to the next boss?
Immediately, this one change to how bosses spawn literally kills off that kind of gameplay in an instant. You simply can not pre-empt boss spawns in this paradigm. It means people that are in the area killing the spawns and moving between rooms are the most likely to get the bosses.
This means that rather than killing other players for that one spawn, you are better off moving on to the next potential boss spawn - and since it is a somewhat random spawn, people aren't as protective of a single spawn as they are in a paradigm where that spawn time is set and known.
With this, fighting will only really break out if the dungeon is too full - aka Intrepid didn't make enough content for their players. Obviously it will still break out between rivals and such, but that is to be expected. To me, that is how a dungeon should be - you to to a dungeon for the encounters in the dungeon, and only get in to fighting other players if they are actual rivals, or if the dungeon is too crowded. If you have mobs to kill (the reason you are there), just focus on that.
AoC is doing a lot of exploration i feel there is going to be plenty of reason to move around the map and not sit at one point the entire time. Sitting in one area is more older style gameplay do to lack of content + 0 dynamic content.
And this is where we come to the Steven's "every reward gotta have risk in it". If every person has their own piece of content - there's 0 risk. There's no point in fighting someone else, when you have your own stuff to farm.
And on top of that I gotta come back to loot table distribution. Do you expect all bosses within a dungeon to have the same loot table or do you expect them to vary?
Because if these respawning bosses are randomized (with different loot tables) across all top lvl rooms in a dungeon - the only viable way of getting exactly what you want is to have your party members ONLY run around the dungeon looking for the boss your party wants to get. There's no point in farming random useless bosses. I guess if an entire guild takes over part of the dungeon it'd be fine, but then why even run around, cause your guild is already farming any potential spawn spot.
I'm also discussing this from yet another L2 experience. Some L2 servers had "Champion" mobs. It was literally just the same mob but with x10 or x50 drop rates and stat values (atk was a bit lower so as to not oneshot people). You know what was the optimal thing to do, if the dungeon had any people in it? Running around and waiting for someone else to spawn it.
So we're back again to "my optimal gameplay is running around". And if there's not that many people in the dungeon (or it just so happens to have so many damn rooms that even a full server can't fill them up) - then I have a question.
In this pop lottery, do rooms have their own separate chances to spawn a boss or is the the dungeon overall that has a chance to spawn a boss in any given room when a mob dies (let's say that chance applies separately to room lvls, so early room with lvl45 mobs would have their own chance, and rooms with lvl50 mobs theirs)?
Cause if it's a dungeon-wide thing - would it not be more optimal to just farm as many mobs in your own room as possible, because that increases your chances of popping a boss? This also brings up a question of "what is your expected plain mob respawn value", cause it seems to me that you expect them to have smth like 5min respawns, at which point it'd be indeed better to run around, but then the dungeon will definitely not have enough content.
If the spawn chance is room-specific, then does it go down or up when you kill a mob, or is it always neutral? What happens when the boss does spawn. Does the room go on cooldown and you have to move? Cause if that's the case then it is still more optimal to sit in one room and kill until a boss spawns and move after that, but with randomized spawns you might be farming that room for hours.
Though again, none of this addresses the loot tables. So to me this just seems like "run around, farm random mobs in hopes that you'll be able to sell/trade their loot for the thing that you want" instead of just "I have a plan to get this and I'm gonna work towards it". And I find THAT kind of design horrid as fuck. I don't want to have random gameplay. I'm more than fine with randomized stats on bosses or environmental effects or whatever, but playing w/o a plan is the shittiest kind of gameplay to me.
So if there's any kind of feedback Intrepid would get from this wall of text it's this: PLEASE DON'T GIVE US RANDOM GAMEPLAY.
Risk =/= PvP.
If Steven consider PvP to be the only risk, then he shouldn't use the blanket term "risk", he should specify PvP based risk.
Even in games with literally no PvP, such dungeons offer risk. So does instanced content.
I will also say, you are over thinking the spawn mechanic. Kill a mob, it respawns, when it does it rolls to see if the boss for that location spawns or not. Keeping it this simple means players can't game the system - the more complicated you make it, the more intertwined you make it, the more ways players have of gaming it.
Indeed.
The drop from the mobs should be a crafting material - one that is common among many smaller bosses. This is then used to craft the specific item you want.
With this, there is no need for encounter specific loot tables until you hit a hgligher tier of content (if even then).
Your mind moved from thinking about options to thinking about optimals. But good design doesn't work like that. You design things so that they are optimal for different people. The lottery pop works because the people who want X item, go there for that.
The people who want CONTENT, wander around. When they get to the room with the person who wants the ITEM, they have a social interaction of some kind, to benefit everyone (hopefully). Their goals are not the same. But some systems don't support more options.
This is the largest flaw I've always noted from anything you told me from L2 and I see it creeping into Ashes at every turn. As Dygz says, Steven's design philosophy of 'Risk vs Reward', which relies heavily on the risk existing because of conflict, unnecessarily opposes options.
The Lottery Pop doesn't result in entlrely random gameplay. You're just patmat optimizing subconsciously. The social dynamics around these systems are complex and 'deep', and rather fun, for different mentalities of people. Even the 'I want my thing and I'm gonna push for hours and hours for it and kill whoever comes!' people still get to experience what they want if they know how to have certain social interactions.
So then if we have a non-randomized boss spawner together with mob spawns - I can just farm one spot and get what I want sooner or later, while Noaani runs around doing his running around. So the only thing that's gotta be added to Ashes is a chance to spawn a Boss/Named Mob and we seemingly satisfy everyone
Still got no damn clue why people would need to run around in that design, but I guess that's beside the point already.
p.s. Spent 10h playing AC6. Got to the Convergence boss and spent 3.5 hours on it, but fucking beat it with that build (same type of weapons but of higher tier)
Should weapons have any specific mob mats or just "random bone fits any weapon that requires a bone, and any mob drops a bone (except slime or smth)"?
Cause both of those quotes imply to me that you don't want specific mats (unless they come from epic bosses or smth). I feel like this would play a pretty big part in how much pvxness there is in the game.
That's a funny way to put it, but I can confirm it is a regular thing when a few people get into an argument and then spam pages
I like mixed timers, the spawn has a fixed timer of 3 hours plus a random amount of 1-3 hours, that's an example.
To kill more spawns that could result in bosses.
Basic math would suggest that if every group in a dungeon sat at one boss and just killed it, there would be fewer bosses spawn than if every group ran around killing multiple of those spawns.
If there is no need to kill a specific boss (there should be no need to kill a specific one of these bosses, that should ONLY ever happen on the next tier up of bosses), then each individual group is best served by trying to encounter as many of these bosses as possible.
That means moving. Requiring specific components from specific mobs for specific items should only be a factor with top tier gear.
Access to components should start off fairly easy, and get harder/more contested as you increase in tiers.
It's basic math.
It doesn't even need to be an overly big dungeon - if you move and see multiple spawn locations in the time it takes base population to respawn, you WILL see more bosses than if you stay still.
This movement could be just around in a circle, from one end of the dungeon to the other, what ever. All that matters - assuming a roughly even spread of boss mobs - is that you are never in an area that doesn't have mobs up.
What this means is that since there is no need to camp a specific mob here, everyone will soon realize that moving is the best method. They may not start out that way, because some people may not realize it. However, when people see that standing still gives you an average of two or three of these bosses over a two hour period, and moving gives you an average of 8 to 10, people will quickly realize that moving is key.
Again though, you are arguing the point from what you have seen in a game that didn't have what I am talking about, while I am talking about what ACTUALLY happens in games with it.
Because again, what you're saying only works if there's more mobs than people. Which is why I said that I'm gonna wait till Intrepid shows us so many damn dungeon rooms that even a full server wouldn't be able to fill them up. Right now I simply do not believe they will accomplish that.
I will speak even further, i don't think Intrepid will come with a good solution to all these, it doesn't look to me that the idea guys within Intrepid are idea wizards at all
There is no point in answering it, because as with any game, EQ2 built content suited to its server player count.
If your player count is higher, that is a developer choice and it is then on said developer to produce content for that higher player count. You don't get to say it is unreasonable for Intrepid to provide content for the number of players on their servers when they dictate how many players are on their servers.
That is not an acceptable argument.
If they can not manage to provide content on their servers for 10k concurrent players, they should not allow 10k concurrent players per server.