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.
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.
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
You actually made a very good Point. 🫡 👍
✓ Occasional Roleplayer
✓ Guild is " Balderag's Garde " for now. (German)
This isn't a change. Back in 2017 we have quotes that sieging a castle for the first time would be extremely difficult and would take as many resources as comparable to leveling a metro. By the time metros would appear, there would be 50s in game.
Look to reference 19. I remember even earlier conversations on it beyond that podcast, but am not going to go diving that deep to prove the point.
Fast level progression = more accounts/alts. More alts on secondary accounts = more freeholds claimed, more characters with trade skills, more alts for scouting/camping high level areas and so on.
When you try to offer a solution for a problem, make sure that solution doesn't create new issues. Otherwise, you may accidentally create more problems than you solved
I've seen all those references, which is why I asked you for a deeper one. If there is one, guess Lex fucked up somewhere.
If the leveling would be like 6 months then having castle sieges at lvl 25-30 would be ok.
But then those middle level characters would play just support roles in those sieges.
I would rather add other special content reserved just for middle level characters, so we have reasons to have alts and take a break from leveling them when we reach those middle levels.
I'd prefer if that wasn't the case.
I'm sure we'll have that, due to how nodes work, but first sieges are a one-time thing, so it wouldn't really fall under that definition.
Having them available 4 weeks sooner is not important.
People who decide to start paying subscription will know what they start playing. Is not like only we know and the rest who have no alpha keys will be unaware.
Also getting the castles first will not guarantee holding them easier. Depends on player base support. Trying to remove the greedy owners will be fun so better they get hold of it first than having nice rullers.
And if the game is visibly alive on its second month - it means that it's not DOA for all the normies out there who only follow their Asmons streamers to know this kind of stuff.
This would also decrease the general snowball of "this game is kinda boring, so some of my friends are leaving and I'll probably leave with them", which then grows into "I see a ton of people saying they're leaving. Is the game dying already?"
It's a really dumb thing, but we've seen several games that have this happen already at their release. Earlier sieges would show peak quality content of Ashes. Majority of people wouldn't be anywhere near max lvl at that point, so seeing something cool would tell them "there's something to play for here".
I'd argue that the first 2-3 months and its presumed playerbase numbers are the most important parts of the mmo's life. Of course releasing new content and holding up quality across a long period of time is important, but it's way more difficult to get new players into the game if the majority's impression of the release was "well you just had to grind lvls and it took sooo long, and there was no real content outside of quests and mobs".
And right now that's how the game will look at release. Sieges are lvl50, freeholds are lvl50, caravans will almost definitely be a way higher lvl content, majority of people would be too scared to participate in pvp (cause they're not max lvl/progress) so that's also "lvl50" - and that lvl50 takes 200+h in the gaming climate of "anything good only happens at max lvl so I want that max lvl asap".
I truly believe that earlier sieges would be a massive boon to the game in the long run.
I've seen countless people buy games and have ZERO FUCKING CLUE what those games are about, let alone what the later stages of the game have. New World had shitty post-lvl30 gameplay, and this was known back in beta, but millions of people still bought into the game and then started complaining that the game got boring at around lvl30
And that's exactly my point. Only the hardcores will be able to beat the bosses and get the castles. Which means that each server will establish "the ruling class" of the 5 regions. And then throughout the month those servers can decide how to deal with this ruling class. Politicking and planning can start early, and if some castles are lost during the first pvp siege - that's a huge indicator that the ruling class can be taken down.
If the castle isn't taken and the node progresses to S4 then so do the guards and so on?
Not really sure about it to be honest but trying to think of a way to spread the castle sieges out throughout the leveling process instead of it just being L50.
Doubt it would do anything to stop the hardcore levellers but then again I don't really think you can.
Making castles dependent on the nodes would flip the monarchy logic of the system and make it kinda illogical.
Well disregard that then haha
The end game is when the credits roll
AAAIIIN'T THAT the Truth ... ...
Programming is one Hell of a Challenge. And the bigger the Product you aim for, the more colossal it gets.
✓ Occasional Roleplayer
✓ Guild is " Balderag's Garde " for now. (German)
You seem invested to sell the game to Asmon followers and players with short tank-fish attention span.
It's not that simple.
You always should assess 'can I get more of those people without compromising anything', because they're not all the same.
I don't think that is fair. Just because there are some systems in the game that activate at max level doesn't mean that is the only activity worth doing. And it also doesn't mean that lower levels can't contribute in some way.
We still need gathering, processing and crafting. We still need players travelling with caravans to bring goods for node sieges and defence. How many resources do we need to initiate a siege anyways? A group of level 30s can still bring a load of resources to a node to help out, even if they aren't one of the participants in the 250-500 person team, yet. It may even inspire them to keep grinding to 50 so they can join in.
If the only thing they care about is controlling a castle in Verra then yeah maybe they need to join a sweaty guild, but is that really such a big deal? They may not be able to be a mayor of a node either. Or own a freehold, or even a house in a popular node. There are many systems that most players won't be able to do, or have the time to do.
Also, I don't think that castle sieges are the only thing that is going to draw players to Ashes a couple months in. There are so many systems that people will be overloaded with content in the first few months.
If anything, I would be more concerned about the 6 month mark because that's when all of the alpha people's time expires and will have to start paying a monthly fee. Having the castle sieges really get banging around then is a great way to keep people invested who have already explored most of Verra and have max level characters.
Freeholds are all about processing, which is directly linked to gathering and crafting. They're also linked to taverns, which is RPing. And castles will have their own nodes that will need a ton of different shit to build them up, with potentially some links to surrounding nodes for help. And obviously there's more direct links between castles and the nodes under their control, which influences how people interact with each other.
And my main issue with them being locked behind lvl50 is that both of these features are directly linked to making a ton of money and getting a ton of social power on the server. And the only ones who'll be getting these things are super hardcores who push for that max lvl.
And I already explained why I think that lower lvl sieges would be beneficial in an attempt to slowdown the power snowball of those groups. I could honestly say the same about FHs as well. If FHs could be bought sooner, all the hardcore guilds' time/resources would go towards trying to acquire them. And with that acquisition being linked to node points and pure money - it'd mean that these hardcore guilds have to spend their hardcore time on things that are not directly related to fast vertical growth.
This isn't really fair. The sieges are supposed to be a "once a month" kind of thing. Hardly "The end game", unless you consider logging on once a month as the end game.
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Sieges
"A guild that captures a castle will own that castle for a month before it is sieged again.[22][23]"
The main game play of gathering->processing-> crafting doesn't change. We still need to build resources and prepare for the sieges. That is the majority of the time played in a month, and will be similar regardless of level. Higher level just means higher tier resources, but it may be that we need a good mix of all tiers, so even low levels are helping out.
Again, the "preparation for siege" is what the vast majority of game play will be, and they can design it in such a way that all levels can contribute to that.
I don't see a reason why characters of all level can't participate in regular node sieges, so its not like the siege game play itself is gated behind max level, just the castle siege in particular. That's fine.
Well, rather than saying what Intrepid should or shouldn't do, I'll just say why I wouldn't do it this way.
My goal would be to court the sort of player who likes world building and change through simulated contests. These players, by nature, don't always have a lot of time to play, but if I want a game where people are incentivized to play the game to have this interaction type, with conflict, and so on, I need those people to feel as if they have a chance to actually engage in this and not just watch it happen when other players do it.
I would expect that if I couldn't provide this experience, they would do what they do with EVE. Play a bit, enough to learn how the game works, be able to relate, and then if they don't find themselves doing well, sit back and watch whatever news site reports on it.
I'd also expect some subset of those players to look for a different MMO because all of the things they can reasonably do in Ashes in terms of personal playloops are done just as well, better, or less 'painfully' in those games (while still thinking Ashes is cool, but not cool enough to play).
Then I would be concerned about the funneling of all skill toward highly competitive top guilds in a game where the experience you get if you are not in such a guild is somehow less than you can get in another game, even if you would want to have it.
Therefore, in my mind, if any company had the option to make a game very similar to Ashes (only somewhat hard) and then make that game more accessible to people with less drive or time, then they would take all of the market for such games.
I thought initially that Intrepid also 'saw this and tried to make it clear' because why bother reassuring MMO players about things like 'early contribution' or 'Freeholds via hard work' or 'Corruption protection' if you didn't feel that people would 'look at your game and think it was going to be unpleasant in some way'? It's essentially an expanded Castles game, you should expect your target audience (L2 players apparently) to not care about any of that, and in general, they don't seem to.
I'm in no way saying this game should be made to tailor to me or people like me, but it keeps possibly adding things that drive me away, with no large direct design benefit that I can see. That said, I'm looking forward to the data quite a lot.
Yes but that is developer's responsibility.
We do not know yet every detail, what they plan for the leveling phase, what each biome will have...
They decided to answer a question: what mob level defends the castles and people now jump to the typical behavior of crying that some known content is not immediately available. They play in their mind the true release of the game before we even seen the release of alpha 2 which will bring us half or even quarter of features.
Everything is subject to change. It can even happen that AoC will not be the next L2 even if that served as an inspiration.
I really can't follow your logic here.
This isn't a situation where I feel that (other than what we already noted about not necessarily needing to be 50 to defeat those enemies) there's a lot of confusion.
I don't see how leveling phases or biomes affect this. The enemies are level 50. Your best chance of beating them is to be as high a level as possible before anyone else.
I don't really believe that the concept of 'well we don't know every detail' means that when you do get data with really strong implications you should just ignore it. But that's probably because of the number of decent games I've seen ruined by this.
e.g. I don't think New World would have been as bad as it was, if their devs and fanbase weren't foolish enough to stick to the 'hardcore full loot PvP' for as long as they did. That wasn't a design failure, either, that was an expectations failure. New World just had a lot of OTHER design failures, that may or may not have been related.
OK, well that is fair. If they say "There is no point rushing to max level", and then they make some systems that only occur at max level it would seem like there is a point to rushing to max level.
That is, unless the other requirements of activating the level 50 systems take more time and effort to do after reaching max level than it takes to do while obtaining max level.
For example:
Person A rushes to max level by grinding mobs around the world in some crazy efficient grind. They get there in 150 hours, but have barely any story line development and aren't developed enough in any particular node. In order to acquire the freehold, they need to do another 125 hours of various content and quests etc. to unlock, pushing their total time required to 275 hours.
Person B does storyline quests and node mechanics on their route to 50. They pick a node and stick to it to gain the most rep. Maybe it takes them 225 hours to get to level 50, but they have also completed the freehold requirements along the way.
I'm pretty sure that this was the original design intent, or at least something along those lines. And it would still fit in with things locked to level 50.
This would require a design where a level 50 character is not more effective at doing any of the other preparation than a level 30 character.
I'd love to see it, but I don't see the point of putting that much design pressure on your team?
I personally don't expect any lvl3 nodes to get sieged anywhere near release, because the nodes that do lvl up will either be the starting ones or the ones pushed by guilds for their own reason. The starting nodes won't get sieged because guilds don't care about them and the normal players don't care enough about the minute details of mob distribution to purposefully go our of their way to destroy their usual farming spaces.
And obviously any higher lvl nodes would require months to siege, and that's even if guilds DO decide to spend their resources on that.
In other words, unless I'm completely mistaken in my assumption - we'll have a few castle sieges before we see a node one.
And that is exactly why this thread was created. I voiced my personal dissatisfaction with this current design and gave reasons for why I have that opinion. I also asked others to give their opinions and reasonings on the matter.
In other words, Intrepid have gotten feedback on the design and on our view on said design. Now it's gonna be up to them to measure up our tiny pool of data against their own data and see if any of our reasoning resonates with their planned designs.