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
This is extremely silly. Next you are going to say remove crafting or make things not tradeable so pve players can't avoid pvp and just do crafting most the time to force them to have to pvp as well.
I will trust the devs to do arena and not make the game so niche it dies. They seem to be going along the direction i expected anyway so far.
If it were up to me and because they are already working with multiple currencies anyways, I would give the arena it's own currency and make it so you can't take any consumables in with you, the currency is used for arena consumables and the devs can throw in various skins to purchase with arena currency and use outside the arena.
Also I like doing PvP just for the sake of PvP, NW I still log in and do OPR and my gear is outdated as hell because I don't bother with the new content, if you're good enough you can kill people naked. But i only play it like once a week and just a few matches cause all you're doing is zerging the same 3 forts over and over.
I've seen WoW and RO do gear that you had to grind out PvP arenas to get, and FFXIV goes hard on FOMO tactics. that's why I asked about L2s design cause I don't mind incentivizing arena play I just think companies over incentivize arena play as a bandaid to fix the problem of it getting to boring and repetitive.
Well, there's a lot to unpack here, but my point is 2 fold.
1. Even if all is equal, I think it is equally bad. 2 wrongs don't make a right, if that is the only reason to make a decision to not include arena pvp of which is a bad decision from a "game design best practices" perspective, then I don't think that is a good reason.
2. I kinda disagree on things being equal. With my perception of the corruption system there will be plenty of "pve only" content for pvers to enjoy at their heart's content. And who even knows about the instanced pve content, maybe that will be accessible at any time as well, so all is not equal from that standpoint. If pvers have the corruption enabled parts of the open world to frolick around in at their disgression then pvpers should have 24/7 arena pvp available if the only reason against adding it is that "things should be equal and fair".
If you've paid attention to what those pvers are saying - the mobs are not pve, the open world bosses can never even come close to what a real pve boss should be (cause they gotta be easier due to the pvp potential) and everything else in the game is not even pve.
All the while arena pvp is considered by the majority to be the peak small scale pvp content, and, as evident by Mag's insistence, people want to have it at any time of the day and in any amount they want. There's nothing fair there.
There's definitely a chance that the 20% of instanced stuff will be repeatable, with potentially higher difficulty as an option, but we have heard 0 info about that, so it's hard to compare the two.
I mean, I don't really agree with that, but thats not really a point about the existence of "pve only" content thats more about the quality of the content itself. Regardless, my understanding of the vision and my understanding of the different design tools and gameplay options that are available and possible, is that the pve content is intended to be high quality and that it is doable regardless of the pvp aspect coexisting alongside it. I would say the
1. existence of dynamic A.I./behavior trees
2. the intended focus on strategy/skill/positioning in the encounter designs
3. Overall hybrid combat design
4. the intended difficulty
5. Etc.
I would say these at least set the bar above a lot of mmos on the market to where you can't really reasonably say the quality of the open world encounters are so low of quality that they can't be considered to be sufficient pve content, which is crucial in order to hold that opinion.
So based on that I think there would be more than enough content to satisfy the majority of pve players in the open world, supported by my perception of the corruption system to preserve the "pve only (for the most part)" aspect, which would mean that purely from a "fairness/equality" standoint, between that and the potential instanced pve content, then at that point unhindered arena pvp access should be justified.
Yeah it is subjective, but ultimately it just comes back around to the "how niche do you want this game to be" point, which in this case I think it is objectively better to appeal to more people if you are able to do so without negatively impacting the rest of the audience, which kind of brings this discussion full circle if we are on the same page with everything else that lead up to this point (the fairness/equality, the mood swings of players, and etc., and subsequently the judgement call that it would likely be a good game design decision to branch out a bit, regardless of the existence of other "bad" decisions.). Its not relevant to my point but, I don't think the owpvp is necessarily a bad game design decision btw, it depends on many other factors.
And even outside of purely mob design discussions, pvers are always scared shitless that there's even just a tiny sliver of chance of someone attacking them in the ow, so to them non-instanced pve will never be good enough. But they're still being fucked over by AoC's design.
And both you and Mag say that arena pvpers are a tiny fraction of the overall population, so their presence on the server wouldn't even be felt. So how exactly is my suggestion worse (or even as bad as) than the open worldness of pve? There's waaaaaaaaaay more pvers in the genre than arena grinders, so me saying that arenas should be as limited as instanced pve is impacting a much smaller number of people than the owpve itself.
If we're talking about "how niche do you want the game to be", my suggestion doesn't even make a dent when compared to owpve design. So imo it's simply the arena fighters feeling a bit too entitled. OwPvX will, and should, rule in Ashes, so fuck anyone instanced
I figured things would come down to the interpretation of the corruption system. Its a solid point if you are right, but imo even if pve only players are annoyed with the chance of pvp happening in the open world and it turns a lot of pvers away, I think that when all is said and done pvp will have the potential to happen in the open world but likely wont happen much, meaning it is still possible and common for you players experience pve only fights in the open world, regardless of whether pve players are turned off by the risk of pvp happening or not. I think that is still sufficiently appealing to a pve only fantasy, even if pvp does happen a small percentage of the time and hyper purist pve players are turned away from the game. I think it is sufficient to the extent of which a pvp arena experience would be justified from the standpoint of "a fair/equal pvx experience" imo. Again, its a matter of degrees to me, not a black and white thing.
Regardless, like I said earlier, 2 wrongs don't make a right, if it was best for the game to have both more instanced pve content and permanent pvp arenas, then its best, regardless of what other "bad decisions" that they choose to make. At that point we should be happy with each small victory, even if that makes things "unequal".
I think what you want is super niche and would do more harm to the game at this point (not just on this point). My guild that loves owpvp, thinks the idea of limited arena is pretty silly. Even more so if you are doing that to target a small amount of players.
Supplementing downtime on owpvp with arenas or using it to test things in a more consistent way is important for PvP. People on on different times and different goals, they have their own responsibility during prime time to help with owpvp. So you are screwing over tons of people on different times on being able to do it and progress on the pvp ladder as well.
All for just cause feelings of not liking it. And attempting to try to say too many people did L2 while people got gear from i, and their own owpvp was most likely lacking at times. And if you idea is someone hould be fine with getting corruption and to pvp that is also a joke but I'm sure you aren't suggesting that. but more so more pvp events or making it easier for nodes / guilds to dec very consistently which i feel is also a negative to the game making it more niche. Breathing room and rules are important as its pvx and not pvp.
I already said, the only ones who'd get any gear from it are the literal top ONE player of every class. It was only in the later updates of the game where they added more gear pieces to it.
Absolute majority of people would only get enhancement items, literally same as Ashes plans to. And if you think that people will not grind the absolute fuck out of arena to get as many of those as they can - you're delusional. And if they're untradeable - the number of people grinding arena will increase exponentially.
Then if arena can be done at any point of the day w/o any restriction, guilds will start abusing that by grinding it in off-hours and exchanging points between each other in certain ways, which will make them snowball even harder.
I've lived through all of this and, as you keep saying, nowadays players (especially in huge guilds) are even more exploitative and abusive towards the game's systems, so it's gonna be even worse. You can keep coping that this will magically won't be the case, but I'd rather keep yelling at Intrepid to limit arena, because I'm 100% sure this will happen otherwise.
THere is OWpvp and then there is the extreme where to get to mortal online levels. Effective you are trying to push it towards more extreme niche, where AoC seems to going in the opposite direction while trying to create meaningful pvp for people actively enough. Which i expect rules and such to be added to limit things even more so as they are going for PvX, where in L2 was pvp.
You don't know anything about the rewards for arena, and you aren't even arguing against them you are just arguing to hugely limit arena in the worse way that doesn't make sense based on their plans.
You are also making up an argument about exploiting rewards on arena, all you are indicating in L2 had like no population playing that game, and they designed it badly. Which doesn't surprise me its a old game, old mmorpgs had tons of issues, even more so pvp focused mmorpgs since i played tons of them.
Queing arena isn't exploiting, if you need to win that is peoples goals. ITs pretty clear AoC isn't going to do a design where you can just do arena and make tons of progression, You are fearmongering this point as far as I see it.
At the end of the day this isn't about rewards or owPVP this is just you not liking arena and wanting everyone forced to have to play the game how you want in that limited amount. Else you just say you cap the rewards, or remove rewards all together.
Both caravans and GWs are open world, so it'd be way harder to optimize their seasonal points, while arenas are instanced, and if they're available during any time of the day - guilds will abuse that to earn the maximum amount of seasonal points.
You argued before that 50 people should be completely disregarded, cause they don't matter in the grand scheme of things. Now you're saying that L2's arenas were exploited cause it didn't have enough population.
Those 2 things contradict each other. Either 50 arena sitters is nowhere near enough to prevent the exploits (which means there's EVEN MORE people sitting in arenas all the time), or even a single 40-man guild can exploit the system completely to their own advantage, let alone megaguilds of hundreds doing it.
Idk why to trust to twist parts of a conversation to change the meaning. No i don't agree with you in the slightest. I shouldnt need to type this....
I don't know why you are posting the image after i just talked about this in the last post. Arenas are not guild based they are player based, guilds are not abusing anything to earn points. You are trying to make up issues that don't exist.
All these points you are bringing up are you warping the disccusion no one talked about 50 people anything. L2 clearly had some bad design its a older mmorpg and a lot of them suffered from issues mainly being pvp mmorpgs.
This issue with this disccusion is again you are going based off feelings so you are trying to paint anything that is said in some sort of negative narrative you can convince yourself with.
So I think I'm done with this conversation now, cause I see that it's not going anywhere, for you are not even trying to address my statements, even though all you've said in the past only makes them even stronger.
I've already address them int he fact you aren't actually raising a point and more so going about your feelings on just not liking arena. On top of L2 not being a comparable example to AoC with owpvp and how things work and are interconnected together ie Nodes, on top of not having a realistic expectation of peoples interactions with arena thinking that they won't be doing owpvp because of it, on top of the fact you need to balance out pvp + corruption to not push it more towards a niche game and forcing too much owpvp (as the game already will have plenty enough of it to begin with), ON TOP OF you trying to talk about there is limited pve instanced content and trying to compare arenas in the same light which it really is not.
Implementing a matchmaking system where players can form private teams or join public ones adds depth to team dynamics and strategy. The suggestion to utilize server technology for seamless cross-server play and instance management also enhances accessibility and player interaction.
The inclusion of performance-based rewards and a separate in-game currency system for arena-specific items and cosmetics seems well-thought-out, encouraging engagement and competitiveness without disrupting the broader game economy.
Overall, this mode not only diversifies PvP experiences beyond traditional arena combat but also fosters community engagement through large-scale cooperative and competitive play. It would be exciting to see how such a mode could integrate with Ashes of Creation’s overarching gameplay mechanics.
Yes, this might make it slightly harder to exploit arenas, but the impact on the server's population is a literal order of magnitude bigger than what I had thought
why is that a bad thing, I usually tackle all aspects of an MMO like raids, crafting, pvp, gathering, etc. over population at peak times can be a pain in the ass. and games that handle open world pvp like ashes, with it's flagging system. You're not gonna see much pvp in the open world because people usually just want to get stuff done. And with things like discord where each server will have it's own public channel, no reds will stand a chance against the zergs that will be moving around at peak times.
most things that require large groups which would be the wars and sieges will have set time when that goes down so people know not to be in an arena when it comes time to do what's important so I don't feel like it takes away from the game at all.
if what I'm suggesting works it will be something that keeps people playing the game and will probably lead to better turnouts during events like wars and sieges.
I absolutely loved new worlds active combat and would be getting into wars and sieges on that game still if it wasn't for one issue, and that's out post rush the same game mode they have always had which is a 20v20 zergfest. it becomes so mundane and repetitive and no one really flags for open world pvp. I have to run around for a few hours at peak times just to get into a natural in the wild fight with someone.
Arena (or especially what you suggested) is not limited only to the strongest players on the server, so it'll always be filled by random solos or people from smaller guilds who wouldn't even think of going to sieges. But they would be directly blocking others from doing that, if they entered the game earlier. And if arena can be accessed at any time - those people would be sitting in arena all the time.
This is a problem with toggleable flag, not with an owpvp system.
Also, guild/node wars let you PK your enemy for free 24/7, as long as the war is active. NW is a very bad example for any of these mechanics.
p.s. calling 20v20 a "zergfest" is the funniest shit I've ever seen
can you explain, like what do you mean a game like nw, and how many people make something a zergfest 20 isn't but 200 is?
200 would be a good start. And that is 200 on each side, not 200 overall.
Anything below a 100 per side is not a zerg imo.