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
It's hard to explain why this isn't necessarily true, but in Ashes, it practically must be, simply because Ashes almost by design must 'let me choose not to use any of the Active Skills that are unlocked past level 25' even if they exist.
It's quite possible to 'have every skill unlock by level 25, but I never use anything past level 18 (actually this is sorta how I play TL now). This is more common in the sorts of game I normally play than it is in MMOs, but my point is simply that 'peak content' is almost entirely based on the challenge-space, not the solution-space.
As I see it, let's say a boss (either lvl25 or lvl50) "requires" 50 invested skillpoints on a certain build. If players have 50 points by lvl25 - they can beat that boss (or at least have the potential for it). But if you only have 25 points - it'd be waaaaaay harder to do.
So I feel like players having 50 points by lvl25 would be great, cause devs can start giving players encounters that require 50 points that early.
Does that make sense? I got no clue if it does outside of my head
Im not sure I understood you clearly. You mean that wearing shit stuff till max lelvel requires specific skill that not everyone has ?
Yes there is a skill issue but I don't think it's a major point for two reasons :
1. Usually, in my experience, lengendary items gives some crucial advantages in PvP thanks to the perks but in PvE it doesn't change much the XP speed. It can be wrong in some XP area where you need very high magic resistance that you can get only on legendary. But in most MMOs, there are some spots with physical damage only.
2. Devs will try to find good balance between acceptable gear and level of involvement of different profiles of players. So in any case it should be possible to reach max level with trash gear and care about legendary only after reaching max level.
If I find few excellent gear on the road or selling cheap somewhere, I'll take it of course but I'll start to set gear targets for gear at max level or at very last levels.
In case @Noaani is right about the (potential) need of good quality gear to be able to xp at proper speed, then will see how it's done by the devs.
If the PvE is easy and the game doesn't really care about builds, your gear won't matter, but Ashes is supposedly not that type of game.
To add to this, part of the reason in some games the above specifically are true is that healers odten don't get attacked at all - especially if you are always in a group. If you are not expecting to be attacked, and since leveling content usually doesn't have much in the way of AoE's that pose a real threat, healers can get away with not bothering upgrading purely defensive items for many dozens of levels.
In some games as well, tanks deal very little damage, and their taunts are in no way tied to their weapons. This means that in these games, a tank can perfectly well do the job of tanking content with a level 1 weapon. They can hold the mobs attention, grab adds, keep everything still and facing the right way - because in these games none of that is tied to their weapon at all.
However, a tank still needs to have decent armor and shield items.
The reason this is "some" games and not all is because these games have very specific roles that each slot fulfils in terms of stats. Armor gives you defense, and nothing else, your melee weapon is just a multiplier for your melee attacks - that kind of thing.
As soon as a game starts to do things like make the power of your heals based on your over all wisdom stat, and wisdom can be found on all armor pieces, then suddenly healers need to keep their armor upgraded.
I don't think Ashes is going to be a game where armor only provides de fensive stats. We don't know this for sure, but I don't think it will go that way. I think we will find that a healer in Ashes that hasn't upgraded their gear in 15 levels is going to be falling behind in their ability to keep a group up on level appropriate content.
I'm not a fan of this type of thing at all.
I'm all for cosmetics, titles and furnature as rewards, but I would rather they be rewarded for specific actions, not mindless grinding.
Hitting the level cap in an MMORPG is a milestone - the notion that this means experience is now of no use to you is a valid and valuable thing to have in place. There absolutely should be more progression after this major milestone, but it shouldn't be experience based until there is a level cap increase.
I tried to warn you. Do you recall your nasty little retort? It's cool, I take solace in knowing you have spent 20+ hours at the bottom of this hole. Something tells me you'll spend 20 more.
Maybe you can just consider this experience as part of the leveling process, and chalk it up as a victory.
Yeah I agree with all this, but it implies majority of the levelling will be done in group. But in reality, I think 90% of your levelling will be solo. Groups will be for bosses and for PvP. Imagine, you need to find a healer + tank + dps each time you want to level up a bit...
Oh, I'm only saying that these are reasons why you may not need to maintain your gears quality as you level.
If you are leveling solo, you have no choice - you need to keep it upgraded. I've yet to see a game where this wasn't the case - though a lot of games do just hand you the gear you need along the way (I don't expect Ashes to do much of this, though there will likely be some).
Keep in mind though, in a game like Ashes, many people will already (as in, by now, let alone when the game releases) have a set group of players with similar play times that they intend to level with.
So in this case, to return to the main subject :
1. We will reach Max level in "45 days if playing 4-6 hours per day" (Intrepid) including time to find decent gear which implies that leveling will be much faster for players starting the game few months after the launch with gold and gear from their guild.
OR
2. "45 days if playing 4-6 hours per day" means pure farming and does not include the time you spent doing something else than farming. It implies also that you have the minimum decent gear to XP. In this second case, it seems more reasonable and the leveling would be enough long according to me.
In other words : 45 days - 4-6hours/day of just playing the game = Fast VS 45 days - 4-6hours/day of pure XP farming = Long
We have no idea.
We have no idea how much of that stated time to level is expected to be spent actually gaining experience, how much is to be spent leveling our chosen node, how much is to be spent building out services for our node, how much is to be spent getting gear, how much is to be spent earning coin, how much is to be spent defending what we have built.
We have no idea of any of that. All we have is a vague estimate of how long Intrepid (Steven, specifically) thinks it will take people to hit max level.
What I will say is that the game needs players that start the game later to be able to level up faster - as both myself and Azherae have said, the game needs it's population to be somewhat close together in level. New players to the game need to be able to catch up to existing players in a reasonable amount of time - in both level and gear.
What is the point in picking up the game if you can't?
The solution is simple to answer the issue of competitivity of new players : Make the xp curve exponential
That way, a new player can quickly become competitive. Extremely long last 5 to 10 levels would keep a small level gap between old and new players.
And it's always more motivating to seek out your gear and kill bosses and mobs when you know you've still got a few levels to gain. Killing bosses over and over again when you're at max level is frustrating when you don't have the loots you're looking for.
By gaining xp, you're at least happy to be approaching max level (even if you didn't yet find the loot you are looking for).
I can imagine this kind of curve. Or even a curve that rises even faster at the end :
5 levels is still huge. In a game like Ashes, you aren't with the existing people playing the game until you are the same level, and have gear that is at least half as good as theirs.
If the games bosses are worthy of being called a boss, being even one level below the cap will mean you are simply not surviving a fight.
I agree, and there are ways to design around this if the developer has the ability to create content fast enough.
Keep in mind, the speed at which players render content redundent in a game is 100% based on the speed at which the developers are creating new content. The drop rate isn't there as some random limiter in regards to how long players need to run the content, it is set up by the developers to keep players running the content for as long as the developer want. If they have new content they want people to move on to (or are about to drop new content), they speed up the drops of the more desired items on the older content so that people get what they want and move on.
It really us just a matter of how long the developers take to make content. There are no other factors involved.
So I wouldn't expect the difference to be significant.
Where is it - specifically - you have seen this?
Because Intrepid have been fairly firm for many years now about there not being any scaling at all based on level.
There won't be any damage dampening due to differences in levels in either PvP or PvE.
If I have a skill that does a thousand damage to a target of equal level I don't want my skill to do zero damage to a target that's five levels above me. - Steven Sharif
Source:
1:34:57 - 1:37:02 - he talks about his vision when it comes to leveling and specifically about the point I mentioned in previous comment
That dampening is present in a number of games I've played, but not all. It is not what I was referring to.
As a simple thought experiment - if Steven claims that "with adventuring, time investment should reap an equitable reward" (in the video above), how can that be true if there is a minimal difference in power between a level 45 and a level 50?
Only one of those two concepts can be true in any one given game - either the power between that 5 level gap is small OR there is an equitable reward for leveling.
Ashes is a dynamic game. Zones are not static. By design, there will be a diversity of Levels playing together with plenty of stuff to do. Sure. Individual Groups won't have players beyond an 8 Level gap.
I guess that might be true for MMORPG players who love hunting BiS gear in Endgame Dungeons/Raids.
Killing the same bosses and mobs over and over and over again, ad nauseum, is frustrating in any case.
Which is why Ashes is designed to introduce different mobs and different bosses as Nodes rise and fall - regardless of Adventurer Levels. And we can expect the devs to introduce new mobs and bosses with Seasonal Updates.
Also, by design, upgrading Gear will be important for combat, sure.
Approaching max Level should be mostly irrelevant.
Acquiring a wide variety of abilities and skills is what should be making players happy.
XP is really just a way to measure how quickly a player can attain the next batch of abilities and skills.
Ideally, that would never end - but devs can't develop and implement new abilities and skills at the same rate that players can churn through content.
The time it takes to reach a new level increases gradually, so 47-48 would obviously take more time than 33-34. While 45-50 will give you the same amount of skill points than 35-40 (as far as we know), it will require more time, but that reward is still pretty decent as you eventually max out your skill points.
Meanwhile, while the difference may not be that significant, it still exisits. However, it's not like in other games where, for example, level 50 would have a 98% win rate against level 43. Their advantage wouldn't be that huge and it may end up being somewhere around 65-80% win rate, so the player with lower level would still have a chance not only to fight back, but to actually win if he plays his hand right.
Let's leave it here and then come back in 1-2-3 months. Interesting to see what happens next...
In other words, listening to feedback is always a mistake, cause someone will always complain.
Also, on a related note. That post is downvoted cause people are saying that it's closer to 10 than 5 and even then you gotta literally skip all the story, do everything according to a guide AND just know what you're doing in the game, while completely ignoring everything else.
So, just as Steven said, even in Ashes some people will be max lvl before most nodes even reach lvl3. And the ones doing it will be those who skip all dialogue, do not care about any horizontal progression, have played the testing phases so they know what they're doing and are in a group of like-minded people.
So, as one person in that thread said - it's about you, not the game. If you decide to skip the entire damn game just to be able to say "d-duh, this game is trash cause I rushed and got to max lvl in record time" - that's a you problem.
And yeah, when it comes to feedback, specifically to a huge sample of subjective opinions - it makes as much sense as ... [insert anything that doesn't make much sense, cuz I'm tired to think of an example atm]
But still, I'm really curious to see what happens next and I decided to post it in advance without knowing the outcome.
Leveling in TL is fast, at the moment, because Amazon insisted, I guess. They said they slowed it back down but JustVine reports this isn't true on the Early Access server, and doesn't yet seem to be true on the standard servers.
That said, 'Fast' is still 11-22 hours if you are not rushing it. MMOs literally can't win anymore. Their longevity depends on people not leaving, but people leave if they don't get what they want fast enough, yet they cannot define 'what they want'.
My advice is 'TL;DR', where 'DR' is 'don't reference'. Don't know why it was even brought up, but since I'm definitely one to admit to playing and liking it, even on these forums, my advice is to ignore it because it will not be a support to anyone's points unless that person is very shallow.
Frankly, I'm more interested in playing WoW: The War Within than I am in playing T&L. And that has nothing to do with leveling speed.
Also, I pointed out that there are people who already complain about fast leveling. Obviously, if the game dies or loses a significant portion of player base it will not be for a sole reason that "leveling was too fast". I would expect more reasons and leveling wouldn't be the main one. However, I would still make a note that another "modern MMO that listened to what players want" suffered the same fate.
In any case, I wish that T&L lives a long and happy life. I'm not gonna play it as I personally don't really like it, but if other people fun there - I'm genuinely happy for them, because finding a decent MMO these days is no easy task.
People go into games with their own (sometimes very bizarre) wishes and expectations, and they often interact with only:
1: That thing
2: Whatever they perceive is in the way of that thing (and in this case they often complain)
That's a problem Ashes actually 'needs to solve', because people who log into Ashes to have big GvG fights at max level are going to ignore almost everything else and my experience is that the only thing 'in their way' is character level.
Basically 'single-interest' players will complain about 'literally everything in the game other than that', and the way I know of, to resolve this, is to figure out if they are that type, and if so, ignore them.
Amazon has upgraded from METAD (Mash Enter Through Dialogue) to DAP (Dialogue Auto Progress, it's a toggle in New World and now in TL). I expect to see some equivalent in Ashes too, soon enough.
Agree with this as well. Should I have phrased it properly from the first attempt, we'd probably say the same or almost the same thing