Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Comments
In a game with vertical progression it's inevitable. While you wrote is true, casual level 50 player would still be at significant disadvantage against a hardcore level 50 player. So I wouldn't say leveling speed is really a huge factor.
Right, but the point is that it can't be used as an argument against longer leveling. And if it's the case with Ashes, why would it matter how long does leveling take?
Well... technically... probably.. Idk to be honest, never thought about it. But maybe it might apply to some players who don't care about leveling for whatever reason.
Right, once again, they are there because they can't be used as arguments against longer leveling.
P.S. Let's try to keep it short and informative. I don't really want to write 2000 word essays when replying and I'd assume you're not a big fan of it too
I'm already aware that your stance is moreso 'why can't it be longer?' while effectively dismissing or not caring about the primary reason why one wouldn't want it to be longer, i.e. that it separates players from each other and prolongs a part of the experience that does not innately have a benefit to being longer.
So, there's no need to engage or reply to me, and I can't provide what you asked because 250 hours is already long and my only perspective is that there is no need to make it longer.
There is no issue with long leveling in Ashes of Creation, in my mind, the intended time for leveling is right about where it needs to be.
At best, the replies you have here are that it doesn't matter if the leveling is short or long for any of these.
That doesn't mean you then just make leveling longer, it means you look for other reasons.
The big reason that I first said to you very early on in this discussion, and Azherae reiterated above, is that it is in the games, the players and the developers best interests for players to all be closer together in level, rather than further apart.
There is no advantage to a longer leveling time, and in Ashes primary market a longer leveling time hurts games.
Where are you getting those numbers from?
You can't even do that for the expansions??? Which are only 5 Levels.
Yeah, sure, some of those have P2W Level Boosts to the before-Expansion max Level, so that people can be focused into the new zones and quickly experience the new gameplay.
Expansions are typically going to be around 60-80 hours.
225 hours to reach max Class Level is long Leveling.
And Ashes has several other Progression paths to level besides just the Adventurer progression.
Progression in Ashes is designed to be way longer than 225 hours.
The problem with slow leveling is not time to reach max Level.
The problem with slow leveling is the hours of gameplay between acquisition of new Class abilities - when you start with very few. Because in an RPG, they whole point is the Hero's Journey of starting as a peon and eventually becoming a demigod, like Gandalf.
The significant dopamine hits are within each progression path specifically.
Dopamine hit for dancing is not going to satisfy my dopamine hit for eating a tasty and satisfying meal.
Dopamine hit for Artisan progression is not going to satisfy my desire for a dopamine hit for acquiring new abilities and skills in my Class - especially during the periods where we have few abilities and skills.
Just with MMORPGs, the devs could only create around 60-80 hours of meaningful content but they wanted people to play for closer to 200. So they included Hell Levels which would arbitrarily extend the time it would take to complete some Levels. (Back then, I would quit playing until whichever game it was nerfed the Hell Levels to feel more reasonable)
Once MMORPG devs began nerfing all the Hell Levels, they needed some other way to retain players after most had reach max Level and the end of dev-curated content, so the began to focus on Heroic DUngeons and Raids and the send the players repeating content ad nauseum in search of BiS gear.
Players can typically race through an expansion in about 3 weeks. But it typically takes the devs 18-24+ months to release an Expansion. So, we eventually got to a point where players spend 3 weeks Leveling and then more than a year stuck in the Endgame while waiting for an Expansion. Which makes the Endgame feel like the real game.
Time to reach max Level doesn't necessarily matter, but reaching max Level is not all there is to Leveling.
The primary aspect of Leveling in an RPG is supposed to be the Acquisition of new Class abilities and new Skills (+ more HP, etc).
After 25 years of MMORPGs, yes, we have gamers who consider all the fun to be Raiding and Leveling to be mostly just an annoying and archaic feature that is minimally OK to help people learn how to Raid effectively, but is truly (for them) just an unecessary time-sink.
Whether max Level is 25 or 50 or higher in an MMORPG is really mostly a dev thing, rather than a player thing.
But, it's not really about the number. And it's not really about hitting max Level from a player perspective.
Rather, it's about acquiring new abilities and skills (sure, learning how and when to use them effectively) and then still having stuff to do after completing all the dev-curated content. Without artificially slowing players down, players can race through dev-curated content faster than devs can complete an Expansion.
Although, within the past 5 years, a major new way to overcome that dilemma is to implement new content (smaller than Expansions) every 3-4 months, rather than every 18-24 months.
Here is the original quote
It's funny how you are ready to attack literally anything I say, just because I said it or you think I said it
Didn't want to mention it, but I find it extremely weird that on discord you talk like a normal person, but on forum you are much more emotional and aggressive. Such a strange transformation, feels like I'm talking to two completely different people
You see, here is the difference in our opinions. You think it is bad, I think it's not a problem at all, based on my past experience.
Again, you might not consider my reasons/conserns valid and it's fine. But I do and that's the reason why I shared. It's not a problem if we have different opinions on something and assign different weight factors to the arguments and counterpoint.
It's alright, I'm replying to this not because I desperately want you to engage, but to clarify my vision of this.
Peace
I mention these bullet points as they are one of the most common arguments against it.
It's also interesting that you share the same opinion with @Azherae and @Dygz - that it's better when all or vast majority of players are around the same level. Personally, I would never even think about it because I always thought that there is absolutely nothing wrong with it and it kinda goes without saying (based on my past experience)
P.S. Wouldn't it be too much to ask, if we continue our debates the way we handle them now? Somehow we manage to keep it civil for now and stay on topic without jumping from one subject to another
I don't know what you mean by "voting". Also, "garbage in; garbage out". Especially when in regard to polls.
Depends on what is meant by "long leveling". And opinions about that are going to be for games that do not have the Ashes design - which has a bunch of features that specifically addresses racing to Endgame.
Also, again --- these days, game devs are also able to combat that with Seasonal Updates.
I play 8 hours per day and I can't play all the games I want to play...
I haven't finished the latest NMS update because I wanted to play through the new Marvel Season for Fortnite so a I can get a bunch of Marvel Lego Fortnite Skins and Backgrounds.
Two days after I got all the stuff I wanted there, WoW had a new Expansion (I haven't had time to play WoW since Nov 2023). I installed that but...
Nightingale also had a major new update I'm excited to explore. I played maybe 16 hours of Nightingale: Realms Rebuilt.
And then LEGO Fortnite released a MAJOR new update - new zones and new Tilesets. I'm currently 2/3 through the Tropical Treasures BP that dropped 9/16. Hopefully, once I complete that, I can hop back into Nightingale and then explore the new stuff in WoW. I dunno when I will make it back to WoW. And I also want to check out the new NW at some point - after it releases in Oct.
These days... Endgame isn't really much of a concern at all. New content and new stuff to do drops every 3-4 months - even in MMOS and RPGs that are not Ashes.
Sure. Time to Max Level doesn't necessarily matter in an RPG. But that doesn't mean that Leveling to max Class Level should be arbitrarily slow - because that really means that the acquisition of new abilities and skills is arbitrarily slow... which is not a good thing for an RPG.
I did not get mad at all.
I just expressed my shock at those outrageous numbers.
You answered my question perfectly. You got those absurd numbers from Noaani.
I don't think I attack everything you say.
I disagree with many of the opinions you promote on this specific topic.
African Americans code switch. Yes.
And it is not unusual for people outside of African American culture to play the "Angry Black Man" card...
I'm not any more emotional or aggressive here than I am on The Ashen Forge.
Just, there, you can see and hear my actual emotions, rather than (mis)interpreting what I've written.
Disagreement is OK in a discussion. Nothing for me to be emotional or aggressive about.
Which is actually significantly different than slow progression/leveling - because the problems with slow progression/leveling and player retention are really going to be about the time between each Level, rather than the time it takes to reach max Adventurer Level.
Nope. I don't really care about what Levels other player characters are.
I don't agree that majority of players being around the same Level matters.
It was him who wrote "those absurd numbers" and I just quoted him.
Look at the previous page
So if you want to disagree with them - talk to him, not to me.
Just as I said before, I never played those games and I have no idea whether what he wrote is accurate or not.
EXACTLY. I spoke to a guy in a voice chat in AoC discord around a month ago or so. We were talking about Ashes at first, but then switched to discussing IRL topics. Our opinions were different probably in 80% of cases, but it didn't matter because the conversation was civil, well-structured and properly handled; which, as a result, made it enjoyable and interesting, despite the fact that we disagreed about many things.
I am not familiar with this. I live ~5000 miles away in a country that doesn't have many Africans, Americans or African Americans
I never said anything like, "Flanker is so stupid he thinks it takes 10 hours to reach max Level in WoW."
I asked you, "Where are you getting those numbers from?"
Where, you said... "Alright, let's start with those. If I understand it correctly, those numbers represent the current state of affairs, right?"
And, you answered perfectly, "I got them from Noanni".
And now I understand why those numbers are so absurd.
Thanks. That's exactly the way discussions are supposed to work.
Yep. It seems that way. That's OK.
That's why I asked you where you got the numbers from.
And that's why I said your answer that you got them from Noanni is perfect.
Yep. And that means there will likely be some cultural differences with regard to what is "civil, well-structured and properly handled" discourse. And that's OK.
However, we are talking about how long it takes people to get to max level - people that have made that their priority.
This is literally a different world to what you know. You would have no idea at all about any of this - but the above times are real world, actually achieved times.
Some of them are even conservative - after a bit of digging I've seen people claim max level is ESO in under 2 hours.
In a game with 16 gear slots and new potential items for those slots every 5-8 levels, even if you do what I like and have the very conservative 'player does something for 60 minutes and gets 1 reward', you still 'need' to give out twice as many gear pieces as you give out levels, to keep pace. If this seems irrelevant, gimme a moment.
What people have mentioned wanting is a natural progression, not skipping swaths of gear, etc. But for this to make sense, the gear would have to be a meaningful upgrade, probably not quite 'on pace' with the leveling. Modern games don't do this because the leveling is too fast, but many have less gear slots, etc.
We also want crafting to matter, so 'just handing people gear' might not be as good as 'handing them money to buy gear'. This isn't an issue for crafters if the game makes sense, because what is likely to happen is that a weaponsmith will do 2 hours of work and make 3-4 weapons, use one, give away one, sell the remaining and buy something from someone else who did the same. Good enough.
The absolute lowest levels can skip some accessories. This is good design, in fact, I won't go into why, I doubt it's necessary.
So the game already has a pretty simple, low-level-thought way of measuring 'how many rewards it can give out without it just being a shower of them', and it could theoretically make the upgrades important enough that you could afford to skip, say, 3 out of every 8, just ballparking. That would mean that every level or so, the game will somehow 'give' you 1-2 gearpieces. This is, again, going by the wish to have gearing up and 'the journey' matter. Assume I'm mostly talking about mid levels.
If each gearpiece takes around an hour of play to earn by whatever means, even considering the skipped ones and the way it changes nearer to endgame, that's still about 25 levels like this. Probably 4-5 'gear tiers' and therefore 80 gearworth and probably 100 hours.
Games that don't care about getting people into the concepts of builds or stuff before endgame can provide the basics and focus on learning mechanics. Games with deeper interaction between builds and mechanics should probably do the above.
Slow games can still feel good when they take long even for less 'grind oriented' players and avoid invalidating the economy/gear/interaction when they 'know' that when they finish a session of whatever, they will be 'one gearpiece stronger'.
Want a faster-to-level game? Reduce either the build complexity options or number of gear slots, or both, and then just proceed from there. Another option that we see used a lot more is to push things to endgame and hope players stick with it, and make the leveling very fast because the economy isn't as relevant, or to make much fewer rungs on the gear ladder before endgame.
When considering games, looking at which of these things they did, will tell you why it works for them even if you personally don't like it. Because many people don't like 'logging on and not achieving anything' too often.
Getting a single gear piece or level every other day when you play for 90m a day is around the point where people have told me it starts to bother them, but they're perfectly content otherwise. At maximum stretch you can do about 80 sessions of 'hey here's your earnings' and another 30-40 of 'rejoice, you got a level' and maybe 30-50 'some other cool thing happened'. If they came to Ashes for what Ashes is, I figure this much will work even if they don't care about artisanship at all.
So 160-ish sessions of play leading to achievement. If you stretch that to 90 minutes per, you get 240 hours. And everyone 'does what they came to an MMO to do'. Those who want to gather more gear take longer, those who want to skip gear, maybe they make it through based on the skills of their group.
All this is to say, we kinda already know how to please 'everyone' that would be interested in this type of game, and there's no need to upset anyone unnecessarily by shortening or extending this. Even the people who love to feel superior to others because they are better at the game overall, can just 'play better' by either 'being able to skip gearing up certain slots' or the opposite, by having the skill/connections to gear up every slot. Everyone feels rewarded if they put in the work, and you can just not worry about the people who 'want it to be faster just because they don't consider lower levels to have real meaning'. Those people were warned.
EDIT: Schema colors, because who doesn't like schema colors?
Or, perhaps more to the point, it holds no weight if you play it, and will usually go unrecognized.
For a lot of people (experienced MMORPG players probably mostly fit in here) it is as much about over all progression as it is specifically level.
However, hitting the level cap is still the first "major" goal that.most MMORPG players have when starting a new game. These lesser goals can all temporarily appease, but there is a limit to how long people are willing to spend on achieving that major goal.
One thing Intrepid could do to even further stretch out how long people are willing to spend, is to provide players with a means to achieving some other major goal while leveling up.
The ability to get a glider or boat that isn't something to replace later on is one such goal Ashes could opt for. If people leveling up can take a detour for a while and get themselves a small boat that is upgradable but not replaceable, that could be considered by many to be a fairly major achievement.
I disagree on that. I will not waste time to find gear with such a fast levelling. I'll wear the strict minimum shit stuff till max level. By minimum I mean enough to resist in PvE only. Low level PvP will exist only at the launch of the servers, then no one will PvP before max level so no need to find PvP gear.
We don't currently know this, but it is highly probable that your experience gain rate will drastically drop if you don't maintain a decent standard of gear.
If they do that, it means they want to artificially lenghten the levelling by forcing you to wear good gear from low level that you will anyway throw away after few days/weeks because the levelling is fast.
It's so much simpler to slow down the levelling and players will naturally invest time/gold to wear better gear if they know they gonna use it a long time.
Since we know that gear in Ashes is going to make up around 50% of your over all power, not paying attention to upgrading your gear is literally only interacting with half of your characters power progression.
Not paying any attention to gear from level 1 to level 20 would mean you are walking in to level 20 mobs with the power of a level 10 (or perhaps 11) character.
Even if you were only going to use an item for half an hour, with that kind of impact, you are going to want to upgrade each slot every 10 or so levels.
Of course, it is entirely possible those level 20 mobs are perfectly killable by the level 20 in level 1 gear - but it is a guarantee that they will be easier (and thus killed faster) with level 15 - 20 gear.
Haha a true chess lady with strategic thinking. Your post would definitely draw more attention because it stands out and there is a higher chance that a random person will actually read it, thanks to those colorful highlights.
Also a fair point. If I choose to rush to level 50, I wouldn't care about "the best gear" - I'd make sure that my gear is just "good enough" and "is enough" to reach my goal.
Mmm I'd say yes and no? If you are a solo player - then yeah, you will probably have to pay more attention to your gear. If you play in static group, for example - it becomes less crucial.
And this is true as well. I'm gonna hear "Flanker has a Lineage 2 brain rot" again, but it's exactly what was happening there.
Gear in Lineage had different grades:
No-Grade: 0 - 19 level
D-grade: 20-39 level
C-grade: 40-51 level
B-grade: 52-60 level
A-grade: 61-75 level
S-grade: 76-79 level
S-80 grade: 80-83 level
S-84 grade: 84-85 level.
So solely depending on server rates, people will start crafting gear (and farming key materials, recipes and resources for them) on different stages. For example,
On server cluster where I played, the most common rates were x7 (x14 with premium account that everyone used). People were mostly crafting S-grade and above with rare exceptions for certain B-grade and A-grade items (for alt characters, specific pieces of gear for Olympiad etc.).
On official Lineage 2 classic servers (that were extremely hardcore) - people were crafting literally everything, starting from No-Grade armor/weapons. Why? Because leveling from 0-19 could take up to a week and leveling 20-39 could take several weeks or even a month. Not a few hours.
P.S. I haven't really thought about it much yet, but just out of curiousity: what do you guys think about Post-Leveling Progression in general?
Or, well, that's how I see it going down.
I meant in terms of XP after you hit the max level. So basically, instead of your XP just going into the void after that, you could still actually accumulate it. Basically, if 49-50 level up requires 100k XP, for example, upon reaching level 50, you keep getting that XP. There can be a counter showing how many times a player has gained that amount of XP and maybe some minor rewards, like titles, cosmetics or a piece of furniture (like a small statue you can put on your freehold that is a sign you've done that 49-50 path, for example, 20 times).
Maybe it's just me, I don't know, but I don't like it when in MMOs you reach the max level and then all XP you get after that is basically useless. I don't think it'd hurt anyone if there was an option like that (as it wouldn't actually make your character stronger or anything)
Yeah... I guess also once we get to the point where Leveling takes 4 weeks and then we have 18 months stuck in Endgame in search of BiS gear for Dungeons and Raids... Gear also becomes a giant carrot in comparison to Class abilities and skills.
I play Fantasy RPGs to have my characters become like Gandalf; not to have them become like Iron Man.
But, after 20 years of Endgame - there will be people who perceive MMORPGs to be all about the Endgame... in a variety of ways.
I dunno how you could not have really thought much about that since I've been talking about that this entire time.
In addition to Artisan, Social Org, Racial and Religion progression - which are all separate and can be either during or after the journey to max Adventurer Level, depending on the whims of each individual player... there will always be Node progression as Nodes continue to rise and Fall... and as Castle owners build up defenses for Castle Sieges each month.
And, again, expect Ashes to implement new Gear and stuff to Craft every 3-4 months, with Seasonal updates.
Which will also include some more horizontal progression despite not having more vertical progression in Adventurer Levels.
I'll be killing mobs and doing quests for their rewards alone, rather than for ALSO their xp reward. And the stuff you mentioned should simply be linked to said mob/quest rewards.
And if you have the skill for this, that's fine. As long as this isn't the response of the average-skill player.
There just doesn't need to be any outcome where the player with only a basic understanding of builds and gear is successful without working to gain that understanding. There's nothing wrong with 'you being able to skip some gear levels'.
Your skill (or the people carrying you, if you lacked skill) would be the thing making up for the fact that you were wearing the bare minimum to go through leveling.
Now, I do think that it's peak content for the toolset you have at that point (as long as it's designed well enough), but I do think that getting all skills by lvl25 (which would probably be 20-30h of direct lvling?) would be a nice way to introduce people to their chosen archetype's role and then let them learn how they want/can apply that role in a variety of situations - all of which could be, at that point, of peak quality cause the designers would know that players now have their full skillsets.