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
Will there be a power difference between level 47 and level 39? Absolutely. How serious would that be? Average to a degree, according to Steven who also said that "50% of your power is your level, 50% of your power is your gear" I would assume that 25 level difference will be significant, but it wouldn't mean that level 25 is gonna deal 0 damage to level 50. Correct. Something tells me that back in 200something it wasn't their original design. Totally agree again. 10/10 comment
Don't make special rule set servers. It has been suggested by folks in the past to make servers with different parameters, especially by the pvp vs no pvp crowd. However, dividing up the community before it even exists is a massive mistake.
How many special rule sets should we have? PVP servers, No pvp servers, RP servers, Regular servers, Seasonal servers, fresh start servers, fast lvl speed servers, medium lvl speed servers, slow level speed servers, hard core servers, no exp debt servers etc.
Let's have one rule set for everyone and go from there. As the years go on, maybe other server types can come up, but even then it's a mistake to divide your player base unless things are not working. Which by the way is usually when companies try new server ideas in an attempt to stop the bleeding.
You can throw insults all you like; you're just showing your own issues. I'm not the one who's making baseless assumptions and building a whole DoA thread based on those incorrect assumptions.
Name a single active game where the design was for more than 225 hours of dedicated exp-focused game time. Not private servers–those are useless to the discussion of an active, healthy MMO–but active ones. This amount of time needed to hit the maximum adventuring level is significantly over any of those that exist, there will be things for people to do while they level and learn their characters, but the best thing for an open world PvX game is for more people to be on level parity than less.
You get more competitive fights and less steamrolling.
We already know you're prone to ganking and griefing in your time in L2, so sure for your preferred play style you'd have more fun when people are kept at low level for longer, but for everyone else, a couple months of dedicated playtime is plenty to understand their class enough that drawing out the leveling process provides no benefit to them.
That has nothing to do with this topic as far as I can tell.
Why do you mention that?
20-10 years ago, MMORPGs, like EQ2 and WoW included Hell Levels to arbitrarily prolong Leveling.
When I hit a Hell Level in EQ2, I would switch to play WoW until I hit a Hell Level in WoW.
Then I would check to see if they had nerfed the Hell Levels in EQ2 and, if so, I would play EQ2 until I hit another Hell Level there.
Then I would check to see if WoW had nerfed their Hell Levels and, if so, I would play WoW.
I stopped playing WoW in 2011, after completing Cataclysm. Burnt out by the treadmill of playing until Quests run out at max Level Adventurer and then needing to wait 18+ months for new content.
I was completely burnt out from Endgame after playing Neverwinter Online in 2013. Playing NWO is when I first heard "Endgame is the real game" and saw people racing to max Level Adventurer within one month.
I thought I was done with MMORPGs for good after reaching max Level Adventurer with a couple of NWO characters, but then EQNext was announced that weekend.
EQNext's Storybricks seemed like a great solution for putting an end to the Endgame treadmill.
Ashes' Nodes system is basically a watered-down version of Storybricks - which is why I funded the Ashes Kickstarter.
I began playing WoW again with Shadowlands. Leveling felt much better the pace is quite comfortable and there are no Hell Levels. And they added some more stuff to do after reaching max Level Adventurer.
WoW: Dragonflight was tons of fun. Leveling feels awesome and there is plenty of fun stuff to do after reaching max Level Adventurer. Haven't played WoW this year only because there are too many other games I'm having fun playing. Hoping to jump back into WoW this weekend with The War Within. Although, I also want to check out Nightingale: Realms Rebuilt.
Not replying to all other stuff you wrote, because it's pointless. I'd rather talk to people who make fair counterpoints. That fair. It was just a suggestion. If people are not OK with that, alright, so be it. Mate, I really hope so. I truly want to see that I am wrong on this and don't want to end up in "Told you" situation.
I really have not been able to play as many games as lots of you guys have. Work has pretty much taken up my whole life, but now I find myself in a position where I have more time.
Yes I have played a few pvp/pk games, but they generally are dated. UO was the main game I played. It had all the elements of what is described in this thread however. In the beginning UO only had one facet, a pvp facet called Felucca. It was no holds barred, full loot. This game developed the term "Care Bear" because later on the facet split into 2 facets. One facet was no pvp (Trammel), the other facet was full loot pvp (Felucca). They where mirror images of each other except Felucca had more of a graveyard dead tree look. It also had Champ spawns, which where open world Bosses that had waves of spawn you had to fight in order to defeat. These bosses had Scrolls that dropped that made it that you could advance your char higher above the skill cap. The game had evolved after the Trammel was there and many non pvp players where in the game now, and they cried that they had to go do pvp to get the scrolls. Hence the "care bear" term came into effect.
I had to reference all of this because when you start watering down pvp to cater to pve players in a pvp world, it never goes the way of the pvp. It only goes the way of the -pve and pretty soon the pvp dries up, people start leaving and you have a dead game except for a few.
Anyways, when they split the facets, the Felucca facet dried up, and everyone lived in Trammel. they hunted in Trammel, they did all the crafting in Trammel. The "good vs evil" guilds dried up and went away. People only placed houses in the pve areas for the most part. The pvp people did place houses in Felucca however, but it was hard to find people to fight because everyone was in pve areas.
My point being is that you will never reconcile pvp with pve, they are just a different play style gamer. Not bad, just different. The best thing we could do would to discourage pve from playing Ashes because it really is not for them if they cannot handle pvp. And yes PK'ing is a form of PVP, its not griefing. I think an excellent point was that if you consider pk'ing griefing, then people camping out outside bosses would be griefing as well, as it is gatekeeping, but that's why you can fight them. You do not want the game to impose invisible barriers to give pve a foothold, it only goes downhill from there.
It's honestly pitiful that you either think the boldface lying is at all convincing, or you genuinely don't understand what's wrong with your behavior.
What do you think happens if someone doesn't 'dodge the bullet', given that colloquialism means they'd narrowly escape disaster. There's nothing disastrous about leveling taking a dedicated daily player a couple months.
Most will take a bit longer. A small handful will try to bum rush the entire process like a cat after a laser pointer.
Ashes's leveling process (for just adventuring class) is already planning to take longer than any other active MMO on the market. You haven't even name a single one that takes longer at its default.
You've just insulted people's intelligence and yapped on as if your unproven premise is fact while providing no evidence of it being insufficient.
I guess I have not seen this from Flanker, maybe there is a language barrier but I understand his points. I do not think he was trying to belittle anyone.
Not everyone understands that there is a major difference between actual griefing and fighting for contesting areas/spots/bosses, you name it. Basically, if actions of another player do not let you achieve your goal, it doesn't automatically qualifies as griefing.
@Ayeveegaming1 The overall tone is similarly derogatory toward people who don't agree with him, but those are the most blatant direct insults.
Even in his post in which he threw those insults around, he's claiming the design is catering to 30min/day players, or that people are focusing on that population, which no one is.
His one and only correct statement is that too-short leveling process can lead to a worse game experience if the time to level is insufficient to actually understanding their class and the game's other systems.
What he hasn't done is give any support for how a month and a half of giving Ashes a larger time commitment than a full time job wouldn't be sufficient for learning your class and the game's systems.
I do not think anyone here is innocent of ribbing each other. I do think that sometimes people misread the context of what others are trying to convey. But needless to say, its never good to keep the negativity going. We should be able to just keep on topic instead of attacking each other. What you might find insulting might be just the normal lingo in the country he is from. Imagine if you where talking to Australians or English when they call people C**ts. Its just normal talk over there, but you would take offense here. Just roll with it and move on really.
Caeryl wrote: »
His one and only correct statement is that too-short leveling process can lead to a worse game experience if the time to level is insufficient to actually understanding their class and the game's other systems.
What he hasn't done is give any support for how a month and a half of giving Ashes a larger time commitment than a full time job wouldn't be sufficient for learning your class and the game's systems.[/quote]
Ya, I have to read closer on his idea here. I might disagree with it some. But I will put that in another post
I'd like to see actual data of the claims he makes, but as you can see above, he's not interested.
Thankfully, I can say with certainty Intrepid isn't going to arbitrarily bloat their leveling timeline any further. There would be no point to it, as much as Flanker rants otherwise.
Maybe he can go over it again in another video, to clarify. He really does quality videos, even if one does not agree with the topic.
Call me old school, but video format taking the place of written discussion has been a massive downgrade in communication. I have zero interest in content creators.
The target market of a private server are people that played the commercial game and were not happy with some aspect of the direction it went.
Thus, the markets for these two games are VASTLY different.
The market for a private L2 server for the last 10 years has been all but limited to people wanting to relive the past. It is worth noting that you didn't quote the thing you claim I said.
It is also worth pointing out two forum features.
The first are the arrows next to a posters name when you quote them. These arrows navigate a reader to the quoted post, so they can read it for themselves.
The second thing to note is that the forums have a timestamp for when a post was last edited. As such, if someone edits a post after it has been quoted, it will be obvious that it was edited after the fact. This means you can't really go back and change what you posted if you were quoted.
This is why the quote function is important to use - and yes, you can quote multiple other posts in one single post of your own.
So, feel free to quote where you think I said what you claimed I said. You won't find it, because it was @Kilion that said it, not me. WoW is at the point in its life where it doesn't anticipate new players to come in without having an existing in game friend network.
So yeah, this isn't a problem.
As I said earlier, it is a horrible state because there is no meaningful interaction between players with vastly different levels. You don't group with then, you don't have meaningful fights with them, you don't share aspects of the economy with them.
Thus, if a game only has 200 people around your level range, it only has 200 people you can meaningfully interact with, regardless of how many people are actually on the server.
This means that the closer everyone is in level (and in general character and economic power), the more people everyone has to meaningfully interact with.
Can't say the same about the rest of your message. I could break down and explain every single point, but I don't it would matter, so I'd prefer to wrap up our personal debate on this topic, as it clearly goes to nowhere.
Any private servers are irrelevant to the discussion.
If Classic was the publicly launched MMO server people played on, then by all means give us a general population estimate and we can use that information.
No, they're entirely irrelevant as they're not open to the entire MMO player base. They literally cannot be reflective of overall community trends because it already starts as a niche demographic.
Alright, we're getting somewhere with this one then. That official publicly launched servers had what level cap and how much time did it take to reach it for the average player? What was the population size in a general estimate?
Screenshot displaying a peak at 17,461 CCU on a single server:
Source:
Text: "Мировой Рекорд, за все существования л2 и фри и офф серверов"
Translation: "All times world record for Lineage 2 across all private and official servers"
Also found this.
General online across all official servers combined over time, 2010-2022:
Official server longevity example, throughout 2010-2017. Then, apparently it got merged.
Hope it somewhat helps to understand what I'm talking about.
It depends on the patch, because max level changed. IIRC level 80 was a cap on classic when I looked it up. There was a website with statisctics that I don't remember and not sure whether it still exists, but it provided the data about each player, and ofc you could sort it by top players. If I recall correctly, it was 2-2,5 years post-launch and there were several characters of level 79. I remember dividing their overall playtime and it showed that one of those lvl 79 basically played for about ~11-12 hours a day and another one played it for ~9 hours/day. Hope that helps to understand how hardcore they were.
Edits: typos
Also remember that a lot of MMO players want alts. I personally want to try each of the classes at some point. However, if it's taking 5 to 6 months to level a single character there is simply no way. That issue compounds as the game adds expansion.
On the topic of expansions: Having a longer, but not crazy leveling time to start, leaves them room to expand the level cap without having to dramatically redesign the leveling curve to make it faster. It also won't encourage people to purchase level skips.