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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
Ughh... People...
It is a long standing discussion I have had with NiKr.
Pull your head in.
L2 vets want HP to be hidden completely. That will be a hard sell to the majority of the MMO community I think.
It will be countered with something similar to: It's a terrible way to play a video game. It incentivizes memorizing spread sheets to gain the advantage over an opponent, instead of having information you can use right in front of you. No lifers will thrive since they've memorized enough info.
The next part of the thread focuses on one possible grief method due to corruption as a justification for hiding info. It will then be asked if it's possible to find another solution to this singular issue, and it will be explained that such a thing is simply impossible and information must be hidden at all costs.
Pages 70 or 80 and beyond are hard to predict so I can't help there.
I swear, the quality of discussions, the logic behind the arguments and the number of manipulation attempts... it is just terrible.
Are you able to take in an arguement not aligned with yours without taking it personally?
I'm actually fine with bars being hidden outside of combat, with the caveat that enough info IS there so I can look at a player and have some idea of strength. Once combat starts, I want information. No guessing, no dependence on no lifeing.
And what other solutions are there that don't involve hiding information? Because the list of things people can exploit due to lack of information only grows as time goes on. All while the exploit you are trying to solve by hiding information stays singular.
It absolutely is not nonsense, and I will tell you why.
L2 was specifically designed in a way where players will fight over base tier farming spots - the kinds of locations a solo player or a small group of three or four would farm for hours on end.
You seem to have played L2, so I am going to assume you agree with this very basic fact about that games design that everyone I have talked to that played it agrees with.
Archeage never had a need to fight over this base tier of content. This was in part due to there being a lot of it, but also in part due to the limiting factor for how long people could farm was actually their labor pool, not how much time they had. Farming provided you with purses, purses cost labor to open, you had a set amount of labor to spend per day. There was never a need to farm more purses than you could open, and there were always plenty of farming spots for them, so there was never a need to fight over a farming spot.
Now, you are saying that L2 saw players keeping rivals HP low so they were unable to farm that spot. The notion being that this is to convince them to move on to another location. Archeage had none of that behavior, because there was never a need to get someone to move on to another farming location.
So, the obvious, no nonsense conclusion here is that this kind of behavior happened in L2 because the developers did not provide it's players with enough valued content, and didn't happen in Archeage because it's developers did. This isn't a failure by L2's developers, it was a concious decision to not provide enough of that valued content so that players woudl fight over it. It is a design decision I disagree with, but it is still the direction they decided to take that game.
If you want to call that nonsense, feel free to point to which part you disagree with.
To me, what is utter nonsense is people from L2 coming here saying that showing full player character health leads to the above kind of behavior, when they all know full well that it happened in L2 without showing that information. These people should know without any hesitation that health information is simply not a factor at all in whether someone will do this or not, and that there MUST be other factors at play.
Someone from L2 not realising this to be the case is truely someone that is full on nonsense. It makes non sense at all that someone that played that game could truely think that health bar display is the issue that causes that kind of thing.
Yeah buddy all that is griefing. Just kill them if you want the spot so badly
And this doesn't even take into account the loot specializations, cause I expect certain mobs/gathering spots to have precise loot, which would not be replicated in many other spots (if any).
But we'll have to see, as always.
My main concern has always been the ease with which people can abuse the system w/o getting punished. I do believe I admitted in the past that this will happen no matter what (well, as long as what I said above is true of course), and so having visible hp will make it super easy.
And this also helps out true dicks that don't care about the location or its loot and want just to harass people. And I got no clue how exactly Intrepid will determine what's harassment and what's "fighting over a location". People will 100% complain about both cases, cause they'll feel unfair to anyone who's not used to this interaction, but it's on Intrepid to filter these complaints and be as fair as possible to the people that ARE using this to contest a spot.
I am still of the belief that corruption will change purely because people will complain way too much that they can be attacked for free. I'll do my best to prevent that with my feedback, but there's maybe 3 or 4 similar-minded people on these forums (if even that, considering my specific set of preferences for the system), so our feedback would be drowned out instantly.
Not sure if you need me to write this for you but, it is unreasonable to argue with noaani when it comes to Lineage 2, he did not play the game and is clueless about many specific information of the game and he tries to reason using whatever he assumes to be a fact about the game through said flawed reasoning.".
Having played both Lineage 2 and Archeage, I will tell you why it was meaningless to "constatly low someones HP to prevent them from PvEing in a spot you desire" in Archeage
The main reason is certainly, Meaningless death penalties and PK penalties: Max LvL was easily reachable in AA in a single day, the amount of xp lost on death was miniscule and instantly reacquirable, players dropped nothing on death(unless in very specific circunstances). It was a faction game alot of the times you would simple straight up freely kill the spot contender, Pking a same faction member was also almost free as the PKing penalties of AA were a pathetic joke, so just PK whoever tries to take the spot you desire.
It's easy to understand why such thing has nothing to do with being able or not to see the enemy's HP in AA.
Aren't we all sinners?
The only thing he's not ok with is repetitve application of this mechanic.
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Definition:Griefing
No, that means he brought in a corruption system in a way that can be bypassed to not work as intended.
If it's not worth the corruption to fight for a farming area, then clearly you can share it with other people without devolving into griefing.
Getting corruption is meant as the last resort action, so before resorting to that you try and do everything else to remove your competitor. And yes, those who believe they're strong enough to weather the corruption will just PK immediately.
Again, these are all interactions that happened in L2 countless times.
L2 just sounds like a worse game the more it comes up. Anti-social MMO with poor reward structures which apparently means there was nothing better for players to do than grief each other over farm spots.
No wonder it died
I think it largely depends.
If Intrepid make it so that you can craft, gather, run caravans, and farm mobs all for profit in a single day, then perhaps. However, if that is the case, the games economy is going to be the bigger issue.
On the other hand, if they provide some sort of throttle on economic activity as Archeage did with Labor (Steven has said Ashes will not have labor, but he has in the past said they may add a means of controlling economic activity.
If this is the case, then the size of the world will be more than big enough.
Since we are talking the two games that are most impacting Ashes, it literally just comes down to the end result Steven wants - because each method - from my perspective - leads directly to each outcome.
I know we have had this discussion before, but lets just go over it again.
You see people engaging in PvP and almost killing them in order to take that player out of the content, but not actually killing the player in question in order to avoid PvP penalties to be the issue at hand.
I agree that this is an issue.
To me, the solution is simple, when a player does this, give them those PvP penalties they are trying to avoid regardless of their efforts to avoid them.
To the above issue, this is a complete and total solution.
In the past, your issue with this has been that players could then run for mobs to kill them when attacked, meaning the attacking player that may not have been willing to go through with the kill then gains corruption that they may not have intended.
To me, this is actually a fix to a second issue - that of people attacking others without being willing to follow through. It shouldn't be considered normal to attack a player in open PvP unless you are willing to gain corruption for killing them. If you aren't willing to gain that corruption, you shouldn't bother that player by attacking them in the first place - you obviously don't really care that much, you would be willing to gain that corruption if you did.
Checking to see if someone is up for PvP can be done via a simple message, rather than going around bothering everyone while they are just going about their in game day.
So, to me, this solution to the initial issue actually solves two issues, and so to me it seems like an easy decision.
That's basically my take too.
It died because of a change in focus towards a more profitable business model (it was NCsoft after all), that torn down the in-game systems, which were ahead of its time in many ways.
For people on the opposite side it was the most social mmo, with the most rewarding content because you clawed your way to it through countless competitors.
I'm too biased against any limitations on playtime value, so I dearly hope there's none of that in Ashes.
If they somehow manage to limit overfarming w/o that AND w/o pvp competition over content - I'd need to see how they accomplish that to have an opinion on the design.
And I don't see how corruption could be balanced to still have some of it in the game, while also not have too much of it for those who're afraid of it.
If you always get corruption in case a person you attacked dies (within a certain window of time of course) - that would mean that the corruption-related penalties can't be too big, otherwise we'll get corruption-bombing like BDO had (allegedly, cause I didn't play enough of it to speak from experience).
And if those penalties are not big enough then there'll be too much PKing and all those who might still be on the fence about the system, waiting to see it in action, would just say "nah, this is too much forced pvp for me - I'm out".
So, imo, Azherae's suggestion of "green hp invisible, every other state visible" is the best possible compromise. Harassers are still crippled by green hp, so it's difficult to do the abuse I'm worried about, the pvpers see each other's hp, and not only that but the green that's being attacked also sees the hp of their attacker, so any pvper, who thinks he's strong enough to hit others while he's on low hp, could get fucked.
This way corruption penalties can still be kept relatively high, w/o making it too harsh so as to not remove it completely as an option.
Nah, it's better to just believe in the words of people who never played it but have big opinions about it.
Aren't we all sinners?
Amazing how that refers to literally no one in this thread or in any thread that's appeared on the forums thus far. Really is incredible how thoroughly you've chosen to misconstrue people who don't agree with you while your comments have fallen into personal insults over any premise of caring about the health of Ashes as a game.
Also very odd to me that you're claiming that your issue with people having any health info about players they're in active combat with is that people will use that info to grief in a particular unintended way, but in the next breath you claim that method of griefing isn't actually griefing and actually is intended as part of the game, and also the game where you and Flanker here did that type of griefing didn't have any healthbar info and you still harassed players over grind spots without being willing to actually commit to the consequences of the fighting.
However, after seeing how it worked, after seeing how it made people consider what was the most important to them in the game, after seeing how it made more people important in the games economy, after seeing how it gave people actual important decisions to make (as important a decision as which guild you join), my opinion of this kind of limitation has completely changed.
While Archeages labor system does have something of a bad reputation, that is only due to the ability to purchase an amount of labor for money. Get rid of that, and in my opinion, any game that wants to take it's economy seriously needs to implement a similar system.
I am using the word "need" above in it's actual, true definition. A games economy can never be at it's best without some kind of system like this to limit economic activity.
I do.
All you really need to do is increase the amount of corruption needed to drop actual items, and make sure players know how many equal level kills they are from that point. The chance to drop equipment is the only penalty that is an unknown, and it is that unknown that is what people are afraid of.
Without equipment dropping (or, until it) the decision to gain corruption or not is purely a mathematical one.
People are far more willing to take a penalty that they know and understand than they are to take a penalty that has an element of randomness to it.
There's been at least one poster who wants even solo players that just came to the boss to hit it and "help others" to get loot as well. That's great and amazing for a cooperative mmo where everyone's singing kumbaya, but Ashes will be a competitive mmo with friction, so just showing up is not meant to be rewarded.
And there's been several threads, just in the past few weeks, about how solo players should be respected and rewarded with "meaningful" content, which is also against AoC's goal of bringing back the socialness of mmos.
And I've seen at least a dozen more threads on either of those topics in the past.
As I keep saying, it's an intended way, otherwise it wouldn't be in the game's design.
I already gave a link on what Steven believes to be griefing. And I already brought up the question of how much "repetitiveness" will be considered griefing and what won't be.
And as I just restated to Noaani, my concern is not with the abuse of the system itself, but with the ease of that action. I want it to be difficult to achieve, but not impossible, exactly because I don't see the mechanic itself as griefing.
Also, it's you who have been calling this griefing, not me or Flanker.
Who said we never went corrupted? As I keep saying, going corrupt is the last resort, so players will usually do everything in their power to avoid doing that. And then if all those approaches fail - you go corrupt, if the location is valuable enough.
And in Ashes corruption will have even harsher balancing, so it'll truly be the lastest of resorts, especially for anyone who's not playing on their PK alt or an alternative of one.
To me, that's shit design. Again, purely because I'm biased against it due to having a ton of free time.
Gear loss doesn't work against anyone who's going out with a planned PK session in mind though.
And if you remove the fear, or put it in precise limits, then PKing would increase up to that exact limit. Keeping it nebulous decreases the general amount of PKing done by normal players (which will be the majority of PKing statistically speaking), while proper balancing of punishments for repetitive PKing would minimize the amount of "career PKers" (or at least successful ones).
And in the context of potential corruption bombs, you'd be giving the control of the encounter to the victim, which imo is too much control, cause they already have the CC protection which allows them to fight back on their own terms. And this would just go back to the potential issue of "no one is even flagging up, cause they're too scared of getting corrupted".
Because these are different things. EQ2 had great PvE design, but it was not design that is well suited to how you want to play.
The reason you wouldn't like it is because it is a design concept that is specifically designed to slow down the economic activity of players with too much time. So, you saying you don't like it because you have too much time is kind of like someone that wants to grief others via PvP saying they don't like the corruption system.
Both are systems designed to curtail specific players in order to improve the game for everyone.
That is because I was not targeting them.
Rather than the few dozen that will go out specifically looking for open PvP on any given server, my suggestion was targetted specifically at the thousands of others that will happen upon situaitons many times a day where they will consider attacking another player, even if it means gaining corruption.
Since the question was in regards to enough people gaining enough corruption, that larger group seems to me to be the obvious one that needs to be targetted. Yes, you would.
That is the point.
That increases the over all amount of corruption on the server, and gives Intrepid a very solid means of adjusting it, should they want more or less corruption.
I still do not see this being an issue.
If you are attempting to control an area via PvP, and that area happens to be close to a respawn point, then that is poor gameplay on your part and you deserve the corruption bomb should the attacked player wish to also sacrifice their time.
Again though, this is only something that could possibly happen if Intrepid do not provide enough content for players, which is still an assumption I am not willing to make.
And I feel like rare drops work in games design around group play, cause groups can go through mobs quicker, so they'll get the rare drop sooner, while a "limit per person" system would simply mean that each of 8 party members all have their rewards from their important actions.
The rare drop thing also allows people to do important stuff if they have free time outside of party play, because their actions are not limited. While in a limited system they'd need to choose "do I spend my important actions on party activities and then do nothing else or do I play solo and then can't really contribute in the party".
Maybe AA addressed that somehow or maybe their design was so different that this kind of thing didn't even matter, but I'd definitely prefer if Ashes didn't have action limitations.
Even without directly buying labor with irl money , in the "non-p2w" version of AA(AA unchained) people simply subsidized their actions to Labor Alts, restricting peoples actions through a system like that was and is unreasonable and players will always find a meta to play around it, like it always happened and like it will always happen.
Thankfully we do have a Steven statement about there being no labor or energy system in Ashes.
Aren't we all sinners?
The game also had some fairly rare item drops.
The thing with a complex economy is that it is actually a seperate thing to gearing - the two are related, but not the same thing. In a game with a simple economy (EQ, EQ2, L2, WoW, Rift, ESO, basically every MMORPG ever other than EvE and Archeage), the economy and gearing up are basically the same thing.
In Ashes, the economy needs to be it's own thing, and gearing up needs to be it's own thing. They are again related, but still each their own thing.