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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.
Comments
Because pvers don't want to interrupt anyone. The want to overcome a boss fight challenge. Not act like dog trainers leashing some dumb boss around.
A boss that can be leashed around like that isn't going to be a challenging fight and again, refer to point 1.
Perfect.
I want something better than what we've had for the past 20+ years, yet every fucking one is completely fine with settling for the usual mundane shit...
I'll be very glad to hear this "perfect" when you can't get a single boss attempt, because all mobs are overtaken by pvpers
Indeed.
This kind of thing would be good PvX content, but not very good PvE content.
Ashes needs content like this, without a doubt.
It also needs some PvP content, and some PvE content.
In theory, sure.
I have no real reason to assume Intrepid are willing to do what they need to do to make either of these really work though.
For each to "work", you would need to be able to spend 6 - 8 hours a week feeling like that time is well spent. You would need to be able to do this by yourself, in a small group, or in a large group. There would need to be a sense of progression in each, but that progression also needs to not be guaranteed.
As you and I both know, Intrepid have given no indication at all that they intend either instanced PvP or instanced PvE to have that much support.
You're not going to get "complex, hardcore pve design" when pvp can interfere with it. It's actually really simple. If you have a boss with mechanics, and then add a layer of hostile players to it, guess what the biggest threat becomes: the enemy players. Which mean, the boss is secondary. In every single scenario game that has anything like this, that's the case.
The boss locks/keys idea solves this but still preserves risk vs reward.
Ashes dungeons and areas will be significantly larger than L2. Some areas will likely have better/stronger mobs that will certainly be farmed by pvpers while the non-pvpers will have to farm lower tier areas. That's not an issue. We WANT risk vs reward but we also want PvErs to have that chance for challenging PvE content that doesn't involve PvP overriding it (boss fights) constantly. They should have to RISK for the chance at that.
So if farming mobs for boss summon keys is contested, great. That's the risk. They'll have to reach out to others in the community for help if gankers are preventing that. Literally perfect. The balance of PvX is preserved.
And what prevents those people from reaching out to others for help in holding the pvpers back in the current design?
It would probably be even easier to defend against a singular boss location than trying to overwhelm an entire location of pvpers that are outfarming the summoning items.
This remains to be seen. So far the biggest dungeon we've seen is the volcano one and it was roughly the size of some dungeons in L2, except seemingly with fewer rooms and waaay sparser population of mobs (though obviously A1, so pop might go up).
What they found is that if there is a raid boss that scales to the number of people, all you need to do to make it unkillable is add more people to it that are not pulling their weight. There isn't really a way to factor in the notion that not everyone present may be actually trying to kill the encounter, while still making the encounter difficult.
I mean, what do you do if there are 80 people working on an encounter but only 40 of them are trying, but the next spawn all 80 are trying? How can you scale for that?
Even worse, PvE encounters need fail conditions to be anything more than HP bags - how do you stop people triggering these fail conditions on purpose?
Basically, scaling encounters are a trolls best friend.
Hazard surroundings, adds, ability randomization and/or volume increase, change of aggro and movement patterns, proper tracking of "pulling weight" of players - all on top of said players having abilities that could influence all of the above in some way.
Was that what Rift tried doing? Or was it simply scaling?
Lets go through these, one at a time - assuming I am a troll.
Hazard surroundings is childs play. It's what PvP players think makes for good PvE.
Adds - all I need to do here is ignore them. They can kill someone that is not me.
Ability randomization - this is standard to top end encounters.
Ability volume increase is how I kill other players.
Change of aggro - I get a tank with a few great healers, and wait for aggro to move to me. Then I run through the other players there. Assuming this encounter is worth anything at all, there will be some form of either proximity or frontal cone attack, and so pulling the mob through the bulk of players will kill almost everyone.
Movement patters are nothing dangerous - some mobs move, that's about it.
I'm not sure what you mean by the last one of proper tracking of pulling weight. My assumption is that you mean assessing people present and how much effort they are putting in better. The thing is, all I would do then is start off the encounter by doing my best, and then just stopping, or scaling down.
As to what Rift tried, honestly not a lot while I was there. They realized that there was no way to achieve what they wanted, and so put less of a focus on the rift mechanic that gave the game it's name, and more focus on instanced content (group, large and small raids, some solo) that are what sustained it for at least the next two years of it's life (I stopped paying it any attention after that).
They had enough faith in the Rift mechanic to rename the game from Heroes of Telara to Rift, based on that one game mechanic. The fact that it only really lasted a few weeks of live before they realized that actually all it does is enable trolls was a fairly brave realization to make. All they needed to do is what I did above, someone would come up with ideas, but then someone else would simply explain how they would continue to troll if it were implemented.
What they realized is that the troll enabling had nothing to do with the implementation of the system, it was the simple fact that it put control of the difficulty of the encounter in the hands of players, and some players will always be able to take advantage of that fact. There is no way to put control of something in players hands without there being someone that takes advantage of it - so you only put things in players hands that you want them to be able to take advantage of.
Ah, we're back here again.
Anyways just remember that this is part of 'any game where the mob isn't tagged to the first group that aggros it' so technically any challenging PvE content in any game where the Devs don't want it to just be zerged for whatever reason, needs to have those things (and even a few where the tagging actually happens, for various reasons).
And therefore nearly all MMOs from the era where instancing wasn't as heavily used, have been using many of these things for decades.
I know very little about Rift PvE in the scenario being described and I'd still bet on it having been exhaustively tried.
Like, if there's pve encounters that are so damn difficult that it takes a group of players hundreds of attempts to solve - why can't that same difficulty and lvl of design be applied to a situation where a part of that group of players is going after the other players or just stands around or smth?
The tracker discussion has led me to believe that games can (and seemingly do) track all the possible stats and actions of players: where they stand, where they move, how quickly they move, what ability/gear they use, etc etc etc.
How/why can a game not track those things and react accordingly? Is mob AI simply not there yet or is designing mob AI to be able to do this is so damn hard that it edges on pointlessness?
Cause if it's the latter - I'd simply say "UE5 is supposedly a single-thread engine, but Intrepid decided to go against that, so why not go against AI trends as well?" I'm 98% sure Steven is not interested in even attempting to do what I'm suggesting, but from everything I've seen about the possibility of another pvx game coming out - Ashes is the only one that could even remotely try designing a great pve AI.
And if it's the former - oh well. Ashes will simply be a copy of L2, will be even nicher than I think and will potentially die or drastically change in its design sooner or later.
It's not because there cannot be an extremely powerful PvE AI.
It's because most players do not want to fight an extremely powerful PvE AI.
The challenge of the AI is not how to respond so as to equalize a situation, in that case, it's how to lose in the most interesting way possible.
If this is not the goal of your AI, then the high randomness used by FF/EQ/TL is better anyway. I made threads on this moreso to point out how relatively easy it is to make PvE encounters that fit this, the problem is variety.
Instanced content is there to increase variety for PvE-focused/only players.
The discussion currently is about what happens when you add things where the design is based on more players showing up or certain actions being taken by the mob in response to certain things happening by players. This is not the way to design PvX bosses that are fun. The way to design such bosses is limited, but Ashes can already do it. It will just have less variety in bosses than games that are more dedicated to it, which is fine.
The other issue that Ashes has with this is the obvious one though, PvP isn't just about adding more people nearby.
tl;dr you generally cannot count on the BOSS to push back the PvP so that the PvE players can continue to fight the boss without triggering all of the problems. This is not a PvE AI problem. This is a problem where two competing groups have 'control' over that AI, but the AI's job is to barely lose.
I wanted to ask if that job could be more fluid, but the answer would most likely distill into the same thing as the first part of the quote in this comment. Majority on both sides of the pvx spectrum would hate the kind of design I want.
Nicheness it is. Or Steven will simply cave in and give pvers their instanced stuff.
No, I don't think so.
I still think Ashes has a path to success that bucks a trend without giving anyone instanced stuff.
The problem being that we haven't seen a combat design that would imply that, in a while. But you only need to wait another two weeks or so, and then we might know more.
See you in Solisium?
As I said before, Amazon hates ukraine, so no, I won't be able to play TL.
And I don't trust neither current NCsoft nor Amazon to make a game good enough to make me create a whole different account just to play it
Oh ffs Amazon...
Probably for the best though, since judging by your positive reaction to Ashes' combat being almost exactly equal to my negative reaction to it, everything is going as it should.
Crossing my fingers for both teams.
And to contribute to the thread overall...
My group doesn't mind this one, nor do they mind the idea of being locked out of content in this way, in a game with a proper economy.
Our experiences so far with this are ofc, FF, which has an economy and a mob difficulty/specialization curve where this approach absolutely works...
And two other games where the PvP was rare because PvP games just generally have lower playercounts and it becomes entirely random whether you can farm it or not, so it depends on whose interest in the game has waned that day (we don't seem to enjoy this much).
Anyways, just pointing out that 'being prevented from doing content by needing to win PvP to farm it or wait for the PvP group to either get bored or negotiate' works fine longterm, as compared to either 'being ganked midway through a hard fight' or 'having easy fights when no one shows up'.
EDIT: As for OW boss respawn timers, design should fit the game type. Fine with 'set delay+random time from last death' in economic/flow based games, 'random time within a window' for high flux games with heavy progression focus and less crafting interdependency, and 'absolute set times' for pseudo-lobbies like BDO.
I really don't feel that this would contribute too much to a healthy game with regards to specifically OW Raid-tier Bosses.
As part of a more 'detailed' shift in the game's design overall, it could work, but Ashes has never seemingly been built or intended to be played in the style that would result, I believe the L2 supporter-side that much, for certain.
The inability to CC greens + good boss design should probably mitigate most of the 'disruption for fun' part of 'Raid' PvE.
I also asked awhile back about whether or not things like 'Mana Drain' count in 'things you can't do to Greens' and the answer was yes, at the time. This also implies to me (but only implies) that you can't use things like 'buff removal' on nonCombatants either.
I believe that disrupting a Tank or Cleric in Ashes without committing to a fight will probably be hard enough that Intrepid wouldn't need to change to a system where contributors get Corruption, even if I'd like to see some variations on that myself.
With proper respawn timers, random disruptors will be just that... random. With good design, 'random disruptor' isn't enough to steal OW bosses due to the lack of fast travel.
Zergs are something Ashes either has to 'deal with another way' or 'leave as they are because the enduring playerbase likes them', and I don't think that changing the corruption system will disincentivize zerging unless you also add a PK count to anyone mildly involved (nor would most definitions of 'involved' be difficult for most groups to get around).
And this doubly doesn't work in the current context, because if the victims came to a boss - they can't just run away from it to avoid being PKed.
And as I also keep repeating, PKing is not difficult. It requires 0 skill. In absolute majority of cases it barely even requires gear. As long as you can outdo the healing from consumables - you can PK your target sooner or later. And in a boss contesting situation, the chances are, you won't even get corruption, because the boss will finish off your victim for you.
Also, depending on guild war design, I don't expect to even see PKers around any boss farm that requires more than 3-4 people. If the wars are designed poorly - sure, there'll be PKers 100%, but I'll try my best to give feedback for all the points that would lead us away from such a situation.
The idea is simply to punish group gankers more. I think the one-kill one-flag system won't do much to discourage group ganking or zerging, and it will be basically impossible to get flagged as a healer or support as it is right now.
Yes, it would add a PK count.
A valid anti-zerg strategy in my system would be to just run in as a tanky green and flag as many players as possible. Then, everyone else can attack the reds without becoming combatants and if the zerg keeps zerging the corruption just propagates from there.
You'd have to sacrifice a green to get the process started.
They realy dont, its only realy the newer games where they used pretty much one type of spawn method for mobs/bosses older games had a bit more variety with spawn methods.
- Old games used placeholder system basicly where a Named mob spawns a normal mob would spawn (would have slightly different lower and upper case in their name i think this was a tech limitation) where mob x would spawn there and everytime he respawn he had a % chance to respawn as the named/boss mob, this became a dynamic spawn time so you never know if he would spawn or not could be back to back or could be 12 hours between spawns and even 4hour who knows
- Another method is the counter option, name/boss mob spawns when X amount of mobs have been killed tied to the boss spawn (doesnt even need to be close by if you wanted so killing mobs in X area might start the counter to spawn the boss in y area)
- Bosses can also be trigger via action aka player doing something or world event happen in certain ways and so on
The worst type of spawn you can go with in an MMO for bosses is a Spawns 12 hours after it been killed and so on, a slightly better option ios spawns randomly between 6 and 24 hours from when it was killed and imo any of the suggestion above is even better than that personally. Triggering boss spawns based on players activities imo are the best be it killing mobs in x area (promotes people playing in an area instead of running through checking on bosses up then running to next area doing circles looking for bosss spawns) , gaining node XP, or even when x amount of items have been crafted from a node spawns x mobs somewhere in the node influence.
The other two options you have also have a window associated with them if it is an actual boss, otherwise the most productive thing any player can do in the game is to further that counter along.
What is usually done when there is an actual boss that is spawned via these methods (or a ring event as a spawning method, assuming you know EQ vernacular), is that the spawn is essentially turned off for a set period of time after each kill.
An argument could be made that the window in these situations is a window where the mob can't spawn rather than when it will spawn, but that is a semantic argument that doesn't really alter the general point htat I was making.
There is just no way to scale a mob based on player interaction with that mob without leaving it open to trolls.
While it is indeed true that everything can be tracked, that doesn't mean mobs can compensate for it, and it doesn't mean players won't just change what they are doing.
I'm going to once again bring it back to the simplest point I can for this discussion. In order for an encounter to not be considered dead easy, it needs to have a fail mechanic that can wipe the attempt. Thus, any open world mob needs to either not have this system in place and thus be easy, or needs to have a system in place where one player can simply opt to end the attempt of everyone present.
I can't really explain it any simpler than that. it is either an easy encounter, or you are giving players the ability to end the attempt.
if you give players from multiple guilds the ability to end an attempt, I see no reason why you wouldn't simply end the attempt if you weren't winning.