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
Just cut out or diminish all that unnecessary PvE and 'lifeskilling' when you're just gonna get killed or fall under the economic control of some megaguild anyway. Go straight to 'Guild V Guild fighting for castles for no real in-world reason'. Or all the way to a MOBA or Team Deathmatch game. Or EVE, that one works.
Halfassed worldsim with immortal monstrosities (that's us) killing each other over bear skins isn't even immersive.
Again I'm not sure I'm following here.
"Everyone has bias" aside for a second, I'm not anti PvEers at all.
None of my posts have been remotely anti PvE. I've specifically said it's about trying to accommodate a variety of playstyles, several times. Which is clearly what the corruption system is intended to do.
But any kind of 'middle ground' by definition won't please anyone on the extremes.
And biased or not, I think expecting to sit fishing in the middle of an busy biome in an MMO, with total PvP immunity, is a bit of an extreme expectation, personally.
Meaning? To me it sounds like approval of the corruption system, or at least the intent behind it?
If so, agreed! I like what they're trying to do.
Game Theory its simple in a game like ashes, IS is going to have to find a way to have the player base wanting to cooperate more than to take the easy/fastest route to MORE gold higher levels. and ways that if guild and larger groups dont want to cooperate, that there is a way from the rest of the player base to even that out....
"The prisoners dilemma" shows that if we assume everyone is selfish then there is only one course of action but breaking that assumption leads to the understanding that cooperation leads to better outcomes every time...
so yes you can think that if your fishing and you see a group of 8 walking your way that is a very bad thing but when there get there you might find out that they are from the same node and are interested in finding people to help craft foods for there guilds instead...
And yes at times it could get a bit filthy.
But honestly most of the time I could very easily fish or whatever without interuption.
Also, it being an MMO and TTK is a bit longer (no headshots involved).. with a tiny bit of skill & awareness it really wasn't all that hard to avoid or escape pvp threats.
The map was also plenty big to just move on and find another spot. I believe the Ashes map is quite a bit larger.
I'd be interested in others experience of "PvX" games though, using @Azherae's "I just want to do some fishing" example.
This is because you view MMOs as a game, and a very specific type of game.
Let's not even talk about PvE vs PvP enjoyers. Let's talk about people who like to progress and live in worldsim and people who moreso want to play games.
Ashes of Creation is supposed to be somewhat like a living world. That is a large part of the appeal of this game to some people.
In a living world, what would happen if a random fisherperson from a village went out to a coastline to fish and was murdered or even just knocked out (the equivalent of death for us immortals) is that their community now doesn't have fish, and they're mad about it. This part might happen.
But in a 'realer world' after the 2nd or 3rd time that person should reasonably go 'I'm not going to do that again until someone does something about the thing hurting me'. This is, assuming their focus in life is on fishing. So the villagers get their pitchforks and they go out looking for 'the thing that is hurting the fisherman' and they kill it. In a 'realer world' that ends there. The fisher is safe for now, they go back to fishing.
In Ashes, the thing that is hurting the fisherman just revives. You can easily argue this is what happens in PvE too, but in PvE, you generally know 'I have to get X strong to go there'. In Ashes, the threat comes to you. I'll skip the long ecology explanation. This is just another 'why PvE-enjoyers don't like living worlds that play too much like games'.
Not only does the thing hurting the fisherman just revive, it can randomly appear with zero warning right next to that fisherman at any time. It does not NEED to eat or sleep. It can randomly appear and disappear on demand, at the will of another totally innocent person standing there.
Even if the attacker did need to eat, it could simply 'wait for an accomplice to buy fried fish in the village, and bring it out, appear for long enough to receive the fish, eat it, and disappear again'.
Literally none of the premises of a 'living world' make sense in most MMORPGs, so some simulate the idea that you might not just randomly take people's stuff due to being immortal, by making it impossible to take their stuff.
Ashes doesn't. Potential immortal predators everywhere. This is the premise of most horror movies.
Maybe Intrepid DID remake MineCraft.
This isn't a prisoners dilemma though. You don't have a reason to respond with hostility, you'd just get obliterated. They might in fact be friendly. The problem is that not every such group will be friendly, so you don't need to 'get scared', but you will still experience the situation where your PvE activity is taken away from you by a pure-PvP competition that you cannot defend through PvE means.
And once again, please all remember:
This is fine.
Just don't ask Dygz to play 'because he might like it' or go 'well maybe you should make some PvP friends'.
7PvP+Dygz vs 8PvP.
Obviously Dygz wins in this case because Dygz is probably more powerful than half the 8-team, but the average person is not at Dygz' level.
All those people who meme about griefing PvE enjoyers, I find unbearably coddled by easy mode games and in my experience they just tend to run away when things get serious. There's too many of them on the forums. By all means, please attack whoever you want, but there's this conflation running around that for some mysterious reason PvE enjoyers aren't also hardcore PvP players. So let me introduce myself, I am a PvE enjoyer whose ambitions for Ashes are to own a shop where I sell all the jewelry I craft and to act as my group's enforcer/bodyguard by being so elite at PvP no one can touch my gatherers. Get that conflation out of here.
The second reason is that I strongly dislike Steven's design as presented so far, because Corruption as a system completely misses the point for a certain category of players in MMOs. The maniacs. Those people who get their jewelry shop looted once and then completely dedicate their entire remaining existence in that game to single mindedly chasing the offender wherever they go, with the purpose of griefing them until they quit playing. We all enjoy winning, but for these maniacs winning is secondary to the purer goal of making sure the only content their target gets is 'being chased'. The goal is seizing their target's time. I feel like Steven and people on these forums don't even believe those people exist. I know they do, because I am that maniac.
The third reason is because I dislike the way Steven presents himself relative to his vision. I feel like someone who appears to have always been in a position of great privilege as the rich guild leader of big guilds cannot possibly empathize with or even understand half the things I am worried about with game systems like these, because it's never been a problem for them. Of course it hasn't. This is the problem with privilege. No one gets close enough to disrupt the guild leader fishing.
And finally, the 4th reason is that I am the enforcer/bodyguard for my group. I will rotate my sleep schedule just to derive enjoyment out of killing whoever messes with my friends (I've done this before). I take pleasure in knowing people assume Corruption will have an impact on my motivation. It has never meant nor will ever mean anything to me because it makes me feel good to perform this role for my group so the others don't have to get Corruption. I don't feel like people spend enough time considering the existence of people like me in games like Ashes.
Well I got the impression that people were mostly saying: don't be so quick to rule it out completely. Maybe just Dygz's style, but the statements sounded very definite, like it's a done deal.
Also some of those statements were kinda taken to the extreme and could easily put off other PvEers who don't share Dygz's fairly extreme position. (IE: "It'll be just like a WoW pvp server." It definitely won't).
Ha well I'm not sure a professional Care Bear is going to be the biggest help here. Unless they're debating semantics in which case it'll be *crit* *crit* *crit*
I pity the person who assumes that Carebears can't fight. But you do you.
And to roll on this a bit more...
Did you know that as a Farmer in Ashes on your own Freehold you can potentially be killed and looted for your crops?
This is very realistic.
You can even hire NPC guards that might be competent.
What you can't do is poison the thieves, dig sinkholes, or go set their apartment on fire so it never happens again.
So they have to succeed at raiding you once per harvest (it requires at least two of them, one to kill you and the other to pick up the loot, doesn't matter which is which).
Do you have a solution for this part? Unlike fishing, your crops and animals don't move. You have to defend them at that time.
Well you should post more because it's clear and well put.
I don't believe I've seen any/much of the "griefing PvE enjoyers" here, but I am new.
All I've observed so far is people attempting to make the case for "PvX". But definitions/expectations vary, so here we are, discussing it : )
Fair point. This tbh is why I'm here, constructive debate on the mechanics.
I'm not here to meme anyone, I'm just genuinely interested in the massive scope of the game and how it's all gonna work. And the chronic levels of copium, of course.
Lol come on man. Alright I'm sure Dygz is pro. We good?
Yea, if someone wants to play a fishing simulator and loads up ashes, they might not have the best time (because ashes isn't a fishing simulator) but that doesn't mean people won't enjoy it.
Also, If fishing tournaments become a thing the devs want to support, they could find ways to prevent pvp from interrupting them.
I only speak of flaws relative to 'combining the concept of a living world with similar social rules/appeal to cooperative players' and 'owPvP'.
As Dygz would say, 'people who don't perceive this as an issue will very likely enjoy Ashes, these are likely to be people who enjoyed L2, EVE, and ArcheAge'.
Now from my own perspective I can add this for any devs.
"Your world of Nodes is not appealing enough to me while it contains this flaw."
I don't necessarily think you (the devs) CARE about that, but this is still mostly a thread about 'why PvE players/worldsim enjoyers/microcompetition fans' might have opinions about Ashes that should get a little more respect than they sometimes do.
I feel like you are starting to play Dygz's semantics game of taking what they have said and deciding it's meaning to fit your purposes. The game can do both, giving you reasons to cooperate with and fight against players. Those aren't mutually exclusive things or contradicting.
I don't think it's right to say they don't care, it's more people who have low to no tolerance for pvp aren't the target audience for Ashes. As the Helldivers devs said, "A game for everyone is a game for no one." Maybe future intrepid games will be designed to appeal to those players.
I have a feeling Stevens philosophy on this is the social interaction aspect, "if you want to have a pve only fishing competition, then get the community to make it happen", or some other equivalent scenario; which he probably views that happening through the pvpers in the community taking control of that body of water to pave the way for the pvers to host their competition, or something like that, because I just don't see Intrepid making instanced content for every possible mini-system in the game for those who want to focus on that, though it probably would be feasible and immersive still to have in-game structures like coloseums and what not to fullfill the role of these types of specific instanced content, but we will have to wait and see. I have a feeling from the esports dev discussion they might consider exploring potential solutions similar to this.
You can feel whatever you like, it's why I don't talk to you.
We can go back to that. I engaged for clarification, if you don't wanna accept it because of your feelings, don't.
I don't think anyone wants Intrepid to do that.
I think things are fine as they are.
If you want to have a fishing competition, first you need to have a PvP competition. And then maybe you need to keep having a PvP competition. And if you're not quite perfect enough at your PvP competition, your fishing competition is ruined, so you better be good at PvP.
PvX.
Yeah but.. it's not a fishing game. Fishing is one small part of the big bad world.
I want a PvP competition but I keep aggroing mobs.
I want potions for PvP without having to earn them first. I want I want I want.
(I actually enjoy all the gameplay crossover, but you get me).
I really think we're all underestimating how much space there'll be. And then add to that the corruption mechanics (I know I know).
But take me as example:
I play for PvP. But I don't fancy those corruption penalties too often. So it's already working.
Yes, I definitely expect it to work on you.
You are not the person that PvE-enjoyers don't want to share servers with. They don't want a 'big bad world'. What benefit is it, to them, to join it?
You're right, it's not a fishing game. Based on your 'big bad world' comment, one might say it is a PvP game.
I personally think having instanced content or "safe zones" for specialized playstyles and systems (micro-competitions) is a good thing. It would just live alongside the open world pvx game, and those that want to tackle the more emergent and complex gameplay are free to do so, and those that find their niche are also free to experience that as well. Its no different than arenas, or the philosophy behind the idea explored in the other thread about preserving (to a degree) a pve purist experience for the portion of the game through corruption. The worry for some people is that this type of stuff can "take away from the open world/pvx design", but people who don't want to participate in pvx will play a different game anyway, so it might as well be another system in Ashes they can go to. Yes, you can have the whole "who is this game for" discussion, but one answer to that question is "everyone" or at least most people in theory (providing you stick to the design pillars). On one hand that's when the scope creep becomes a major factor, but on the other hand, thats also the beauty of MMOS, the many games within a game, even if the game as a whole isn't built around one specific audience, providing each audience is properly satisfied, of course (hense my comments in the other thread about some people just being upset that there is any content not specifically designed around them, regardless of how much content exists in the game that actually is for them.)
How would you prefer me to express my interpretation of what you said?
It sounded like you were making an argument based off semantics. They have called the game a living world, you decided to define what a living world is and claim what they are making is not one. Yes, I could have given my own definition or made some death is part of life argument but at the end of the day, living world doesn't seem like a phrase that should be taken too seriously, and arguing about it seems pedantic.
Some of these are very cryptic!
So I take that to mean, you're talking v specifically about the relentless ganker types, who'll just harass people all day for the lulz?
Rather than most pvpers.
I PvP constantly but I cannot stand a) outnumbering people or b) killing lowbies.
But yeah many others don't seem to mind.
This is a good point, has made me rethink a little.
I just wonder though, some people are never happy (I'm not referring to this convo btw, just generally).
So the Devs concede some "open world/PvX design" ground to create safe spaces for the PvEers... would they be happy? Or would they then just complain about the occasional death en route to their happy place?
I'd be up for it, in small doses, if it would genuinely solve the problem for a broad range of people.
I don't care how you express it. The fact that your mind goes in that direction at all is the reason I don't interact with you. That's why the best course of action here is for me to not do that.
I'm talking about my Rogue, who will forego sleep to hunt you, and stand like a Scarecrow on your Freehold so you don't know if it is safe to farm your crops, yes.
You have his explanation already. Remember what this thread is about.
People sometimes want their efforts in 'competition' or even cooperation to not 'become PvP competition whenever SunScript appears'.
But SunScript can appear and disappear whenever he likes. And getting more people to kill him to make him go away... won't make him go away. His goal is to change your behaviour.
We tend to be a bit nicer because we will clearly tell you what we want you to change, and then 'honorably' stop hunting you if you change it. There are people worse than us. Is there anything you care about 'forcing someone else to change' enough to hunt them for 2 weeks?
Oh mate you're talking to the right person then. Hunt me all day (nohomo yeah).
Deliver those juicy PKs straight to my door.
Seriously this is what it's about eh? PvEer gets the rage and goes on a murderous rampage. Yes.
I don't believe there should be anything in Ashes in a Safe Zone that has any economic impact. I don't perceive that to be a solution either, because you will get the other side, where optimizers abuse that fiat protection from PvP.
All I want is for people to understand why we should leave the PvP-averse-PvE-enjoyers who say they don't want to play because they don't want to get ganked, 'alone'. They have a valid reason. The game doesn't need to change for them. Tuning corruption to make it acceptable to them would be insufficient. We know this from Elite (another long story to tell).
I believe that any approach taken by Ashes to 'make content for those players' will negatively impact the game, except maybe the usual suggested 'PvE boss locked behind PvP chokepoint' and 'Your Freehold is a safer zone but you can't make any finished items on the Freehold'.
My 'farmer' would actually prefer that your crops could be stolen right off your Freehold, as long as the thief got Corruption for it. Because that would balance the game better in her eyes. I understand that adding safe zones would resolve the issue in a certain way though.
I'm personally saying that people don't care 'that there is no content designed around them'. Technically there is a lot of content designed around 'them'. They just lose access to that content sometimes to anyone who likes that content and is also better at them in PvP. If by 'content designed around them' you mean 'content that others can't interrupt', that's a whole different way of looking at it, from what I'm trying to address, hence the shift to splinter topic.
What's wrong with the direction my mind went?
I no longer know what you're talking about, and that's probably fine.
I'll try not to assume anything, though. If you feel like answering my question sometime, I'll be looking out for that.