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
As usual, you have solved the problem in the same way that Developers of a game I play did.
You've basically now described how this works in Elite:
So, as for 'what we think of it', usual answer:
"This is my normal."
You gotta understand that ArcheAge is huge.
Like, 600km^2.
Only like three games beat it, if you don't count MineCraft (MMOs, that is).
It's one of those things people like to make videos and articles about, so you can look it up more whenever you like.
Archeage is big enough that killing someone might remove them from your space, if they didn't 'already live there', if that makes sense.
This is also a harshness question, for example, in FFXI you have one respawn point. You can choose where it is, but if you move it, and you die, you will respawn there if no one raises you, and can even get caught in death loops as a result.
So if you took an FFXI equivalent, I'd be 'taking a risk' by setting my 'Home Point' off in enemy territory, and I might prefer to take the risk of 'not being able to easily continue gathering if I lose in a contest over the gathering spot'.
If Ashes had this...
In this situation, farming those materials required a farm vehicle.
Killing the player would destroy that vehicle - and that had a repair cost and reuse time.
If you killed someone while they had their vehicle out, they likely wouldn't attempt to harvest again until you had finished. if you just chase them off, they would just be chased off and go somewhere else.
I omitted these details because they weren't relavent to the point that sometimes people will chase you down and kill you, because that is what the content requires. Those details really don't matter - all that matters is the point I made right back in the beginning.
The game fishing example I gave absolutely is like this. It could sometimes take people an hour or more to get back to you if you killed them.
Killing someone in the open ocean usually took them out of the fight for good.
I mostly included this to avoid any obvious abuses of "this node has immortal guards with huge attack, so let me use them to farm some hardcore mobs". Obviously this also comes down to mob leashes and mob distribution, but I thought that completely removing this as an option is just a simpler way to address this.
And this is exactly why I've been bringing up respawn points in pvp/pk discussions for years now. I really think that a good system of respawning could alleviate some of the PKing fears. We already have no corpserunning in Ashes, so camping that is not an option, and I believe that having at least 2 options for respawns would be a nice way to make things even better for players.
Obviously those options would need to have some limitations of penalties on them, so that they get abused in the most obvious of ways, but that's more of a balancing issue rather than purely a design one (or at least I'd think so).
But on the topic at hand, unless we have player-set respawn points as the only option - I doubt what Noaani said would apply (as I understand it at least). If the desired content is distributed across a huge dungeon and a killed player from that dungeon respawns within a 1-3min distance of said dungeon - killing them does nothing.
If that content is distributed across half a continent - first of all ya ain't farming it yourself either way, but even if you somehow did, killing the player still doesn't matter cause, if anything, death might respawn them closer to the next respawn of this content.
This was mostly why I had issues understanding Noaani's point. Even with longer travel times, I don't see how killing a person changes the situation of "I don't want to have a competitor at the next part of my content". And this is also why I kept bringing up content respawn timers in relation to player movements, because then killing a player might be the opposite of the preferred option. If you have a perfectly optimized sync, interacting with a competitor is detrimental to your farming, unless you're worse than that competitor in pve. But if you are, then you're probably weaker in pvp as well and if the competitor doesn't pvp you - then you've simply lost the content (cause you either PK or move onto other content).
I mean - all of Verra is a PvP zone.
I'll only say that in the hypothetical FFXI+L2, I would absolutely always expect the game to be balanced such that if you were relatively deep in an area gathering or fighting mobs, and a competitor appeared, and you straight up PK'ed that competitor once, to get them to leave, you would (if in an area challenging for your level) be able to work off the Corruption JUST before that specific person got back if your PvE skills were up to par.
You could then potentially kill them again, and maybe even repeat that by changing your location a bit so that they didn't find you before you cleared it again.
This is because such a game would have a map size at least ArcheAge size to work, which is what Ashes intends. Everything I know about L2 indicates that its map was slightly too small to work for this while still incorporating certain gathering options.
I was discussing with my group that this is currently a flaw in TL, actually. The experience they seem to be going for, doesn't match the current sizes of their sub-areas (there's a lot here about how exactly gatherables and terrain features are distributed, too, so it might just be an issue of early areas, with any luck I'll know more in two weeks, but supposedly won't be able to talk about it if it's different than Korean Live server state now).
But as of Alpha-1, Ashes definitely had respawn points that seemed more focused on 'getting people back into it', which fits some of their design parts, but not others, imo, so I wouldn't even be able to guess which direction they intend to go with it.
If you, by chance, remember some of my posts from 2-3 years back - this is precisely the respawn balancing I was asking for
Me coming mostly from private L2 servers, that usually had higher rates (meaning more xp, etc), the timing of corruption removal would roughly match the time it would take for the victim to come back to your spot, as long as that spot was relatively deep in a dungeon (cause overland had more TP options for it).
And that's exactly the kind of timing I was asking for in Ashes. The "standard" respawn point for a death in any given location should be calculated by the speed of corruption removal at the deepest point of that location, given an optimal speed of mob kills and 0 PK count before the PK.
Everything else would simply be a variable in the risk/reward equation both sides of the PK do in their head.
And this is exactly why I've been giving this feedback for a long time. Because the sooner we can test if my theory is correct - the easier it'll be for Intrepid to implement any balancing tools (if there'll be a need for any).
I'd assume that moving the respawn point is somewhat easy code-wise, so I hope we get to test this once Intrepid decides it's time to test corruption-related gameplay.
And therefore, obviously, since this is how I believe MMO design works, you and I could therefore 'sit down for a week and work out the balance of every single aspect of that game on the whiteboard because we know exactly how each piece is supposed to feel when the game is done'.
But big studios don't have that luxury. They have to have roundtables, concepts of their audience, etc. In fact, nearly every larger MMO lately has been built from three or more competing perspectives, then had to be retooled (or just faltered due to not unifying).
Save us, Jake Song!
I just hope he keeps sticking to whichever guns he has chosen to stick to.
I admire Steven's passion deeply but by his own admission, he is not directly a designer, he barely even has time for that anymore.
Steven wouldn't even necessarily have time to read through the better threads we have, and the forum is basically just us at this point, in that regard.
My point is that I don't think you can ask Steven 'hey do you want this or this?' and get an answer, because Steven wants to make the best game he can and for any part he doesn't deeply care about personally, it's best left to someone else.
What you're discussing here, though, is 'perspective'. Steven would need someone to translate every single thing on the whiteboard into every other thing on the whiteboard to make any granular decision. That's why the whiteboard exists.
Technically that's why this thread exists. Ashes has to decide 'Is it worth the effort to implement something to preserve micro-competition for PvE-focused players, at the cost of (giant list of other things) and to what extent?'
All you need for 'trouble' to stir up in a big studio is for the Devs to act like we do sometimes, both sides arguing about why it 'could work' or 'would be more fun' for hours instead of working out exactly what to 'put on the whiteboard'.
tl;dr Steven doesn't have enough guns anyway.
Blackjack and hookers?! Screw the Fighter Preview, I wanna watch that livestream!
"The distance of respawn points and the number of respawn point options, in Ashes, is directly connected to the macro vs micro-competition 'enforcement' slider for the game's design, which ties into combat balance moderately and economic balance slightly, before we even consider overall fun factor. Steven, where would you like that slider to be set?"
Imagine a world in which Steven is not like you or me and can't answer this question in a single phonecall/e-mail. Now what?
Obviously, given that changing the respawn point does not require huge gamebreaking changes every time you implement the change.
So to answer this directly, it'd be smth like "let's leave this entire whiteboard for later" kinda thing. I understand that the overall design process might not even allow to "just leave it be", but I'd assume there's several things that require broader testing than just the in-house can provide, so it would have to be added to that list.
Ah, no, because as I sorta said before, these things really matter.
TL has a flaw built into it now because the zones 'need to be bigger'. Since they cannot redesign the entire world map, they have to now work around that flaw every time.
The longer an MMORPG goes without this sort of thing done, the more entrenched the design becomes just because things like 'world map design space' is changing.
Like, if I wanted to do the econ design for Ashes, I would need to see their entire world map and every node and road location, or the algorithm that generated it. Then, since I wouldn't have been the person to write that algorithm, I have to work within what it produces.
It is possible to have built a world where it is not possible to properly place the respawn points for specific values of the slider, just by 'telling your world design team to just keep going for now'. And then we all get into Alpha-2, and no amount of testing seems to help, and...
We Riot.
Obviously adding it now would probably get too many complaints from players, but if the map was what it is right now and a theoretical you came into the development just a few months from release and tried to find a fix. How much would what I said influence other parts of the game?
I am REALLY interested in what they come up with. Simply to see what a "new approach to mmos" would even mean.
The 'problem' in TL isn't related to TP-ing, it's about player incentives and behaviors while in the zone itself, and how it affects how they feel about the game. I think removing Teleports would make it worse. Also, for clarity, the TL one isn't related to respawns after death, but to some specific things about how the game feels overall during the leveling process. Long story.
As for what would change if 'I' was to try to fix it (note that I literally can't come up with a way so far, but I have only been thinking about it on and off for 8 hours), I'd love to speculate on it (well, only sorta) but it's Market Open, so time to go make some $$.
The current broad stock market trend, partially fueled by some algorithms, is that most mid-to-low impact businesses will rise in the 3-4 days before their earnings. The algorithms can't find anything to profit from 'at earnings time' lately, so they 'bet' and feed into each other.
(Ashes equivalent, players not being able to find ways to make money and more or less guessing and distributing themselves randomly)
If you can guess what the algorithms (and other people who realize this) are doing, you can get gains from 5-20%.
(Ashes equivalent would be buying the cheapest item that you think will be expensive later if you hoard it now)
The outcome has nothing to do with how good the earnings are, in fact, optimally you should always sell just before them. This is an entire emergent 'structure' that 'built itself' out of a huge number of factors.
(Ashes equivalent would be getting the gains just before people start competing over the resource and the supply dries up).
The challenge for me (and the equivalent, Ashes designers) is to work out the exact inflection point for each stock (resource) based on player feelings about how difficult it will be to collect it if they try to.
Moving just two respawn points near certain PoI could be the equivalent of 'something boosting a single economic sector so that their earnings actually go up, giving the algorithms something to focus on other than this (quite frankly frustrating) period model.
Except that Ashes has to consider respawn point locations for every possible configuration of the nodes around the PoI as well, and if we go so far as to have different respawn points lock or unlock based on changes to the node or PoI, it then relies on testing that would take about a week, equivalently
This is borderline insane to do even if you had a simulation, because the simulation type most people have available has to collect targeted data first to get a large enough predictive model, for something as unique as Ashes. Even mine, which are more like 'support sims for my own intuition' still have to collect the data and sometimes the model changes before they even get enough to be helpful to me.
Game developers' lives are hard, as I said, I don't envy them when the goal of a system is this level of depth.
tl;dr Changing two respawn points is the equivalent of 'having to remember the metric' that I forgot today. I don't wanna talk about the amount of potential money I just missed, but it be a lot.
what his point seems to be is that the servers are watching the data at all time, in real time so that if they move a respawn its done with the latest data. this is what I meant when I say that ashes devs better have worked out the wheel. and why I believe ashes to be a new breed of MMO. but we have yet to see any of it play out in a game setting.... Alpha 2 has a lot of expectation riding on it.
No, I didn't watch it, but that's because I'm used to this already.
FFXI servers watch data of players at all times too, they need it for the Conquest and Campaign systems.
I'm used to how this works in games, but the problem with these types of worldsim is that they are tuned to watch 'what people are doing' and usually not tuned to watch 'what people are not doing' (which is close to impossible).
As in the example I was venting at NiKr, the important data in this investment period, is 'what the algorithms are NOT doing', and what stocks are NOT succeeding. You can't build a predictive model at all, right now, out of 'what is actually happening'.
And generally, especially for an MMO with the depth of Ashes, you can't claim to 'know' what a player has chosen not to do. The respawn thing would be a particularly difficult thing to solve, because players don't read patch notes in detail.
There would be players who would 'not even notice that the respawn point changed', because they went to the area, never died, got their loot, etc. You wouldn't be able to predict the impact of the change on those players, because to them, 'nothing changed'.
It's a real problem.
The "entrance" point would be the main one to balance around, cause majority of people would want to get back asap. The "geo center" would be for those who're afraid to spawn too close (either cause of potential enemies at the entrance or maybe if friends are coming from that direction). And other poi would be for those who're trying to escape a chaser.
I'd imagine the algorithm would have an easier way of tracking "how fast can a person remove corruption vs how fast can a person run from a point to the PKer".
Also, the geo center would most likely be the town itself, so that choice would have to have the highest limits/penalties on it, so as to avoid the most obvious abuse of "fast travel with loot". My kneejerk limit/penalty would be "can't use if flagged" and "death penalty gets doubled". Obviously wouldn't directly prevent TPing with loot, but would deter majority of players I think (given that the base death penalty is non-negligible).
There's still the obvious party abuse of "we put all loot on one person, feed them to mobs and our loot is safely in town, and we can boost them back up easily afterwards", but I'm not sure if this kind of action is truly avoidable even if the only respawn option is "location entrance". 1-2 extra minutes of travel (and even less if mounted) would still be nothing in the grand scheme of things.
This abuse would also be somewhat curbed by bags, though it could be inversely enabled by them if a person can have a ton of bags on them.
In other words, this kind of option would probably be the hardest to properly address, if it were in fact an option.
It's... slightly naive to do it that way, based on what I explained to Ethanh37 above.
It's not that it wouldn't work, or that it wouldn't be worth at least applying that, it's better than nothing. Significantly better than guessing probably.
But you had a negative-space variable in there.
"How fast can a person move from a point to the PKer."
This not only should differ by class/archetype, it will be autobiased in data collection because people who do not think they can will not try.
This comes up in Predecessor balancing a lot because, in order for the devs to know how to tune a specific character's durability, they need players to dive into potentially losing situations and 'see if they survive them'. So they then need 'a subset of players who does this consistently', because you can't gather any data from an 'overly cautious Tank'. They don't dive or they only dive when they're almost certain they'll live, so you can't get enough information on how to tune their defenses/health values.
I think I may have become too abstract, but remember my point (at this point of this particular subpart of the convo) is only to point out that this is super hard to tune properly and takes long.
I'd definitely support 'having mob values relative to Corruption removal shift relative to this', but just thinking about building the system for that makes me shiver. I would not want to put that on any Dev's shoulders, though it might become necessary.
To me, every other variable is simply a part of the risk/reward equation for the players, rather than a balancing act for the devs. Of course some classes will be faster, but that's just a part of what the players will need to consider when becoming a PKer in any given point of the dungeon or letting the attacker become a PKer in hopes of returning there in time.
And median time could be tracked by simply telling testers to run till the end of the dungeon w/o touching mobs. Any aggro mob-related effects could also be ignored, because the dungeon is either full of people and the mobs wouldn't aggro onto the runner or the burden of calculation would be once again on the player.
Of course I'm putting a ton of burden on the player here, but considering the context (a PKer and a player who's willing to enact revenge themselves) - I'd imagine the players who'd participate in this activity would be more inclined to consider these things by default, due to how the game will work overall.
That's an okay way to do it, my point is that using a median time is like 'setting median durability values on Pred Tanks'.
The actual outcome for players could end up feeling really bad because it just always turns out a certain way in any real situation.
But remember you were talking about tuning Mob Corruption removal values based on that, which means that if it miscalculates at all, you won't even be able to tell, you can't take the realtime data you get and change anything. Which is my whole point actually.
You can guess some stuff, you can extrapolate other stuff, but just like Corruption, your test environment won't be a real test. You might as well 'not iterate at all based on data'. You do your absolute best to get it right the first time, because it'll be like a year before you have enough data to even do a proper review.
Anyway this is another divergence sort of from the TL 'flaw' which is actually that their zones are too small for player-recognized Micro-PoI, which makes the world feel slightly 'flat', in combination with their limited crafting and gatherables.
Their mob choices are also fairly stagnant in most zones relative to this, so you don't end up with the nicer feelings of 'I have walked for X time and now here is a new interesting waypoint', they're often too visible, too close together, or 'would be interesting if there was something there other than a slight geographical difference' (but there isn't).
This might only be the level >30 areas, though, as noted.
So, for most people, this isn't really important at all, y'know? But it means there are quite possibly a lot of players out there who 'feel like TL's world is slightly too flat/boring' without knowing exactly why, and it diminished their perception of the game.
BDO has the opposite problem, with entire stretches of land with no meaningful anything. Because the world designer was told to make a world that someone was going to populate with mobs, but then the other design requirements didn't come up with any reason to put anything in that space, or did a shoddy job.
And that would have come out of this.
"How much micro-competition do we want?"
"About this much."
"Oh we made the world WAY too big for that... damn..."
"It's fine, we'll use it as a travel timesink."
"Oh, uh... we can't... I didn't put all the extra space between stuff, I put it over on these peripheral areas."
"Oh, no one's ever gonna go there... I guess we'll just write it off..."
By common, I mean it's typical that there are gankers who do this in MMORPGs that allow it. In every MMORPG that I've played that allow that behavior. Not that it commonly occurs every week or every gaming session.
I mean I'm out in what should be a secluded area, but discovered by someone who was visiting in order to kill the NPCs of a nearby town. I've left the town after PvPing for an hour. I'm gathering flowers in a secluded area while I'm waiting for the toggle to cool down.
That's the specific example of the moment I rage-quit the PvP-Optional servers on WoW - to play exclusively on PvE-Only servers.
But... it's common enough that there are PvPers who will attack just because they can.
That became moot the moment The Open Seas was added.
I'm probably not going to be interested in playing an MMORPG that has "highly-contested" PvP areas.
Which is why I don't play ArcheAge or EvE.
I mean... you literally suggest a system that highlights NPC guards, but...
An RPG should not be tracking account-wide PK count because an RPG is about the diverse behaviors of each individual character, rather than focusing on the player. My alts should not be held responsible for what my main or any other alt has done.
All-in-all, what I read has too much emphasis on PvP, so... that mostly acted as negative hype. The more I read, the less interested I became in even playing a game with that ruleset.
I'd rather leave the PvPers to go play however it is that they like to play and just play some other game that is not so PvP-centric.
You seem to be trying to come up with a PvE solution to a problem that exists because the game is too PvP-centric.
I mean... I am non-competitive so... I have no interest in the economic macro-competition... of course.
I think the tracking of PK counts is superfluous. It should just be that a Mayor and Mayor's council can increase the number of NPC guards because they want to use NPC guards to make their Node a safer place. From PvPers or from mobs.
That should be an option in any case.
I cannot weigh in because I don't know whether Corruption as Steven envisions it would promote a comfortable play environment for me.
"Casual PKing as a last resort" is a PvPer concept that I, of course, am not a fan of. It's something I might be able to tolerate, but I would have to test it.
But, again, that becomes moot once The Open Seas is added to the game.
My suspicion is that I would probably say the implementation of PvP into MMORPGs is what feels too gamey.
And I probably would be more receptive to TL's PvP restrictions than you are.
Dygz often explains the stuff PvE-focused players are thinking, clearly, but as has been noted, is a fairly extreme case. Not the case we're looking for here.
In a way, the point of the thread is to somewhat illustrate that. The thing I hope for is for people to stop lumping Dygz (true non-competitive) with PvE-fisher (prefers structured competitive, but might be very competitive).
A person who is very competitive about things other than PvP can still very much want to play an MMO, even a PvX MMO, but even though the amount required to mess with them is different, their core reason is similar to Dygz but for the 'opposite reason'. Dygz wants to 'roleplay an experience similar to the Hero's Journey', as stated, which is not competitive, attacking without too much setback isn't even getting in the way.
The fisher who 'wants to become the best fisher' and is competitive about it, but is then forced into PvP competition the entire way and never actually 'competing with another fisher in fishing', is just not getting that 'hardcore competition' they desire within the fishing space.
(for anyone who has not played a game with heavy competition in the fishing space, just know that they exist)
I know this is a futile exercise, but it's these attempts that lead me to design thoughts that have been already implemented in the games you play (while I myself haven't played or even properly researched them)
Yeah that hits hard. Thats kind of one problem with building a huge complex project and aiming for perfectionism. You kind of need to know the minor details from the very beginning as far as knowing what is or isn't possible in theory, and what will and won't work in practice- but its hard to really do that especially if you are exploring uncharted territory, so by the time you realize where your pitfalls happen (if you ever do), you've already invested way to much to be able to make the neccessary adjustments and things become less than ideal.