Farm the Crafters

Pawkets

Lately, I have heard an overwhelming opinion that Ashes will be catering to the PvP crowd or this is a PvP game, despite the constant reminder that this is a PvX game.

While we won't truly know if this opinion is accurate or not until we feel it in Alpha 2 there is something I want to state for those who have this view on the game.

1. I have heard the argument that PvP players can sit at the arenas all day without threat or need to participate in PvE content. For anyone striving for competition in PvP they will need to chase their BIS set of gear. In WoW arenas (talking about early TBC arenas as I am not a retail Andy) the best armor for PvP was from arenas, however, the best weapons for arena were the same BIS weapons from high end PvE raids. So while the arena trolls just wanted to PvP most of the high competitive arena boys went out into those raids and earned their DKP in order to get those weapons.

2. I've also heard there is no threat of PvE for people in the open world/open seas. For this, I would again hope for something like what we can see in Sea of Thieves (see my "Everyone's thinking it, I'm just saying it Pirates!" post for more details /smile) However, I think even our PvP Pirates out in the open seas who are only looking to raid, pillage, and plunder without any corruption might run into a kraken like can happen in Sea of Thieves, when this tentacle ______ stops your ship in the middle of no where you got to fight it. I would hope that in Ashes just as there is a risk of PvP at most turns there is a risk of PvE for everyone as well. Thus why they call their game a PvX game.

3. Which leads me to my 3rd point which is: I think is a good solution and balance for this debate. While PvP people seemingly have a protected space to "only PvP all day with no threat of PvE" and the big thing that PvE people want is a place so they can gauge their progression and weekly performance and see they are improving their game play the same as what a PvPer can do in arenas. I suggest there is about a 50% instanced raid content. A place where on a weekly lock out, something that is needing to be group completed content.


All 3 of these points leave out the entire thing that brings them all together and makes these arguments sort of mute in the first place. Even if Ashes has this content that is seemingly geared more towards PvP or PvE -- All players striving to obtain their best in slot gear won't do any of this content for it. They will have to farm the crafters-- They will need to go into the open world and fight both NPC and player to obtain their materials, they will have to move their materials via caravan (watching the caravan showcase the amount of PvE involved in a caravan run between 2 close nodes included:

Parts Purchasing
Tumok Avoidance
Wolf Clearing
Spider Clearing
Rabid Avoidance (No rabids were harmed in the making of this livestream that I noticed)
Bear Killing
Chopped Trees
Terrain Maneuvering
PvE Elite Spawn event
And Route Planning -- plus probably more that I missed

After they've obtained both materials and gold or moved materials where they are needed they will need to get into the good graces of the crafters who if they have previously murdered while said crafter was trying to gather their PvE goods, they will probably get told to pound sand. -- In short, I want this game to stop being referred to as a PvP oriented game, it is not.

We will all need to farm the crafters, and this requires a large handful of PvX.

Ludullu

1. Has no factual information behind it, in terms of "sitting in the arena all day", and is factually incorrect on the "they don't need to touch pve".

This is not wow, with its instances. This is closer to L2 which had its arena only during prime-time, so top lvl pvpers had to decide - do they want to get better gear, which always required them to pve, or do they want to sit in the arena in their currently shitty gear. Constantly sitting in the arena would also decrease their chances of being the one who DOES get the gear from pve, because GLs would not appreciate a pvper who's not present at pve. This will be doubly important in Ashes, where all the cool L2's rewards are completely absent, so sitting in the arena brings nothing to the player's guild.

2. The "threat" of pve is that everyone needs to do it. And the only activity that doesn't have pve is the instanced arena. And as I said above, arenas might be limited in their duration, so the overall ratio of any given player's pvp activities might be close to 80:20 open world to instanced, which is the same as pve, except the 80 of pvp will include pve in most cases, so, if anything, pvers are getting more content than pvpers.

3. We don't know how exactly the instanced pve will be designed. It's meant to not be "farmed repeatedly", but if the rewards are cosmetics or titles then you're not really "farming" anything, cause that shit doesn't have direct impact on gameplay. If we don't have repeatable instances with such rewards - I do support their development, but they should be limited in duration/attempts the same way the arenas should be (my example from above is also my preference btw).