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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.
Gameplay Enhancement Idea for Ashes of Creation
Krysis
Member
Hello Ashes of Creation community and developers,
I have an idea to enhance the gameplay experience in Ashes of Creation, making it more challenging and immersive. This concept focuses on adjusting the time mechanics, death penalties, item rarity, and incentives for solo players.
Concept Overview:
Accelerated Time: The game time runs at 4.8 times the speed of real life. This means:
5 in-game days = 1 real-life day.
Crafting times reflect real-world durations (e.g., a 1-day crafting task takes 24 real-life hours).
Death Mechanics:
Death Timer: Upon death, players face a penalty timer lasting one in-game day (approximately 4.8 real-life hours).
Player Character Status: When a player dies, their character is removed from the game temporarily. The player can either return to the lobby screen or spectate their party until it disbands.
Monster Difficulty:
Increased Challenge: Monsters are significantly tougher, increasing the overall game difficulty and extending the gameplay experience.
Item Rarity:
Rank F Items: Common
Rank D Items: Uncommon
Rank C Items: Rare
Rank B Items: Epic
Rank A Items: Legendary
Rank S Items: Unique (1/1)
Rank SS Items: Mythical
This item hierarchy ensures that high-ranking items are genuinely rare, making them highly desirable and exciting to find.
Solo Play Incentives:
Bonus Luck and XP: Solo players receive increased luck and experience points to balance the difficulty of fighting tough monsters alone and to mitigate the harsh death penalties.
Key Goals:
Encouraging Group Play: The increased difficulty and meaningful death penalties are designed to foster a cooperative gaming experience.
True Item Rarity: Ensuring that high-ranking items are rare and valuable, enhancing the excitement of acquiring and discovering them.
Solo Play Viability: Providing solo players with incentives to make their experience rewarding despite the challenges.
Conclusion:
I believe these adjustments can make Ashes of Creation a more engaging and dynamic game, offering a balanced and challenging experience for both group and solo players. I would love to hear the community's thoughts on this idea.
Thank you for considering my suggestion!
Best regards,
Krysis
I have an idea to enhance the gameplay experience in Ashes of Creation, making it more challenging and immersive. This concept focuses on adjusting the time mechanics, death penalties, item rarity, and incentives for solo players.
Concept Overview:
Accelerated Time: The game time runs at 4.8 times the speed of real life. This means:
5 in-game days = 1 real-life day.
Crafting times reflect real-world durations (e.g., a 1-day crafting task takes 24 real-life hours).
Death Mechanics:
Death Timer: Upon death, players face a penalty timer lasting one in-game day (approximately 4.8 real-life hours).
Player Character Status: When a player dies, their character is removed from the game temporarily. The player can either return to the lobby screen or spectate their party until it disbands.
Monster Difficulty:
Increased Challenge: Monsters are significantly tougher, increasing the overall game difficulty and extending the gameplay experience.
Item Rarity:
Rank F Items: Common
Rank D Items: Uncommon
Rank C Items: Rare
Rank B Items: Epic
Rank A Items: Legendary
Rank S Items: Unique (1/1)
Rank SS Items: Mythical
This item hierarchy ensures that high-ranking items are genuinely rare, making them highly desirable and exciting to find.
Solo Play Incentives:
Bonus Luck and XP: Solo players receive increased luck and experience points to balance the difficulty of fighting tough monsters alone and to mitigate the harsh death penalties.
Key Goals:
Encouraging Group Play: The increased difficulty and meaningful death penalties are designed to foster a cooperative gaming experience.
True Item Rarity: Ensuring that high-ranking items are rare and valuable, enhancing the excitement of acquiring and discovering them.
Solo Play Viability: Providing solo players with incentives to make their experience rewarding despite the challenges.
Conclusion:
I believe these adjustments can make Ashes of Creation a more engaging and dynamic game, offering a balanced and challenging experience for both group and solo players. I would love to hear the community's thoughts on this idea.
Thank you for considering my suggestion!
Best regards,
Krysis
0
Comments
but solo players are already rewarded...what makes you think they arent?
what would be the incentive to group up then if you get worse exp or items?
and not playing your char for almost 5 hours if you die? wth
I appreciate your feedback. Let me clarify a few points:
Solo Player Rewards:
Solo players do receive rewards, but my proposal aims to further balance the increased difficulty solo players would face with tougher monsters. The additional luck and XP bonuses are meant to keep solo play viable, not necessarily make it more rewarding than group play.
Incentive for Group Play:
Group play would still be incentivized by the increased difficulty of monsters, making it more practical to defeat them with a team. The idea is not to give worse XP or items to groups but to ensure that solo players can also progress without feeling overly punished by the higher difficulty.
Death Penalty Duration:
The death penalty is designed to add meaningful consequences to dying, encouraging more strategic play. However, the 4.8-hour timer is open for adjustment based on community feedback. The goal is to strike a balance between challenge and playability.
Thanks for raising these points. Your input helps refine the idea!
hold on.
you want to increase mobs difficulty for solo players, but you don't want solo players to feel punished by fighting more difficult monsters? solo the solution is to give more xp to solo players?
why not simply lower the difficulty of solo monsters... but what prevents people from duoing solo monsters then? you would most likely get more xp per hour anyway than soloing with bonus exp...
Thanks for the feedback. Let me clarify further:
Increased Monster Difficulty:
The idea is to make the game more challenging overall by increasing monster difficulty. This change would apply to both solo and group play, aiming to extend the game's longevity and encourage strategic gameplay.
Solo Player Balance:
The increased difficulty means solo players face tougher challenges, so the proposed XP and luck bonuses are to ensure they can still make meaningful progress without feeling overly punished. It's not about making solo play easier, but about making it fairer given the increased difficulty.
XP Distribution:
XP will be determined by the number of players in the area and the damage done to the monster. This system ensures that solo players can still earn a fair amount of XP without feeling disadvantaged compared to groups.
Boss Fights:
For boss fights, players will have the option to go in solo for boosted rewards. This provides an additional incentive for solo play while maintaining the challenge and balance of the game.
The goal is to ensure both solo and group play are rewarding and challenging in their own ways. Your points are valid, and finding the right balance will be key to ensuring a fair and enjoyable experience for all players. Thanks for the discussion—it's really helping to refine the idea!
Yeah, this seems unnecessarily punishing, doesn't it.
I do feel that I need to point out that "S" and "SS" don't come before "A" in the alphabet.
And yes, I realise that far-east game developers who didn't realise this have gone and done this in their games, but no that doesn't mean that it should become the norm.
"S" and "SS" don't come before "A".
Item Rarity:
Common Items: Common
Uncommon Items: Uncommon
Rare Items: Rare
Epic Items: Epic
Unique Items: Unique
Legendary Items: Legendary
Mythical Items: Mythical
This seems like a much better option to me.
Could you help me understand who benefits from this idea? 🫨
Thanks.
And lastly it ignores that people just do not have unlimited time. Most probably have 1-3 characters in mind as well a specific playstyle and are free to do so during 2-3 hours in the aternoon or evening. If these characters all are on "cooldown", that basically results in these players being locked out of playing the game.
Discussion
OP: "Encouraging Group Play: The increased difficulty and meaningful death penalties are designed to foster a cooperative gaming experience."
> This is completely countered by the fact that it makes group gameplay utterly unstable. One death breaks the group gameplay for hours; which also makes a "cooperative gaming experience" impossible as any attempt to learn new tactics to fight a new type of enemy will lead to inevitable hour long gameplay disrutptions. Also "meaningful death" is not only measured by the how hard the death penalty hits, it is always relevant to account for an enjoyable gaming experience. Going back to the group gameplay and facing a new type of enemy: Being kicked out of playing your main character for hours when the real person playing has only limited amount of time means in many cases groups have 1 try per day, upon failure, the objective for everyone who somehow survived is gone for that day as the group they rely upon is completely destroyed.
OP: "True Item Rarity: Ensuring that high-ranking items are rare and valuable, enhancing the excitement of acquiring and discovering them."
> This assumes that this cannot be the case for the current game design. It also ignores that the proposed loop makes the game itself not fun for anyone with any attachment to their characters, so there is no reason to aim for a "highly prestigeous" piece of gear, when nobody is invested in the game that piece of gear is part of in the first place.
OP: "Solo Play Viability: Providing solo players with incentives to make their experience rewarding despite the challenges."
> I don't see that at all, it seems more like a mindless character grind similar to these mobile games where you have a 1/1 Energy bar at the top of the screen and cannot continue to play when your Energy is down to 0.
My Conclusion
I honestly don't see any upside to this at all. This runs counter to anything immersion, engaging and creates uncanny similarities to trash mobile games that limit progress through locking people out of the game upon some arbitrary metric.
Such a shit idea.
1- ok, thank you for clarifying. i understand what yu mean now. however, why increase the difficulty if we don't know how difficult the game alreadyis? (steven already had said it will be on the harder side). it could be that increasing the difficulty any more will make the game impossible...
2- well, what matters is xp per hour and fun. killing 10 difficult monsters per hour at 100 xp each is the same as killing 100 easier mobs per hour at 10 xp each. but which one is more fun?
also, the game tries to encourage you to group up. why offer incentives for not grouping up? solo players will always be at a disadvantage. consider there is also open world PVP.
3- same thing, why encourage players to not group up? also no one is gonna solo bosses because you will die in PVP. seems to me you want to play solo and progress as fast as a party...just play in a party .-.
I wonder what I will do...?
Not only no but Hell NO! But I appreciate your efforts to think things up! ; )
Lol, I don't want 5 hours of my Saturday to be spent waiting to play again because some dipshit mass-pulled in a dungeon or someone's kid distracted them and they missed a heal.
I think your item rarity scheme is a good one but it doesn't have inherent value. You're not giving an actual rarity schematic. You're just listing words you like associated with the rareness of items.
I think this one is best left in the devs hands. This is where we're dependent on the intent of the world the creators want to create where items should be as rare as they need to be in order to create the environment these guys want to build.
I don't think solo play vs. group play should change anything. If you go wrestle a bear in the wild you're going to be confronted with the same amount of resistance as if you had a group. The benefit of the group is that you personally have to manage a smaller portion of the pie. I think this naturally encourages people to make in-game connections.
Also, there are always some bad mofos who actually solo badass bosses and it's super cool to be that person or see someone do that.
I want to add that having more names for rarity does not inherently mean they are better managed. Those ratios are something that have to be thoroughly tested and manipulated and it hardly matters what you call them or how many tiers or brackets there are.
You don't have to shut down someone's ability to play for 5 hours in order to give them a penalty worth avoiding enough to make death have meaning in a game. But many people don't have days of availability to play and I think it would suck if they lagged out and got killed doing something mundane and then the rest of their available game time based on real-world availability is just down the drain.
This is like a game concept you could take to Neverwinter and make a fun world where you could have these rules but be able to server/host hop to a different environment once you shit the bed.
FOMO
Significantly tougher than what... we have not even fought a monster.
I prefer something more like Limbus in FFXI, to enter each person needed 2 key items, 1 bought and 1 farmed. enter with a time limit and kill certain mobs to up your time limit, clear an area to open a new one and so on. you could go in as a duo or small party to farm items or prep for an all out raid, and you were locked out for 72 hours after