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
Their existence alone disproves the statement that there is little to no content that is gated behind level.
If you also want to talk about how things will realistically go, you can include naval content as well.
Then there are level 50 mobs and dungeons - the notion that "PvE is one piece of content" as I have seen others suggest is as factually incorrect as the statement above.
All up, there is an entire new game worth of content at the level cap that you have no realistic access to until you get there. Just hitting the level cap doesn't guarantee you access to that content, but not hitting the level cap guarantees a lack of access.
He says "no need to make leveling longer because there is plenty of other content and multiple different progression paths"
You say: And I agree more with his point of view. If you can't comprehend and/or admit that hardcore players will still beat a casual player at any type of content, no matter how long leveling takes, then this debate is pointless. I mentioned an example about New World wars - idk if you played it, but there will be plenty of people who could confirm that.
1. https://www.reddit.com/r/newworldgame/comments/qb1re5/why_are_invasions_and_wars_locked_out_to_most/
- They obviously only let people in there guild into wars
- The other factions do the same so invasions are pretty much inaccessible as well.
- Why create content only available to a select few?
- Wars and invasions are for only Top Companys
2. https://www.reddit.com/r/newworldgame/comments/1aw3nny/hows_war_these_days_in_new_world_asking_as_an_old/
- Is Wars still available to only a few? Are war alts still a commonplace thing?
- War scene is pretty dead. Every server in every region is filled with alts. Either you’re in the club and fight the same players over and over or you aren’t and get farmed over and over.
- Just because it’s the same players participating doesn’t mean it’s “dead.”I think what you mean to say is it’s still “gatekept” or “exclusive”. For those players in the elite war companies, they’re running influence races and decking wars daily.
Should I even continue? It's pretty obvious, yet you again somehow try to argue with obvious things and deny facts.
This doesn't make any sense.
The discussion here is "content gated behind the level cap".
Sure, freeholds may be a privilage as opposed to a right, but they are still gated behind the level cap. There is no more discussion to be had on freeholds in regards to the scope of this discussion - they are gated behind the level cap.
Same if a large guild prevents you from running high level content - be that PvE encounters, naval content, what ever. Them preventing you from running the content essentially just means that content is also locked behind the level cap, and so is the "content' of fighting them for access to that other content.
Saying that even if you hit the level cap it doesn't mean you get access to a given piece of content does not alter whether that piece of content is gated behind the level cap or not, all it means is that there may be further gates you also need to open.
This is an MMO with open world PvP, Risk vs Reward, certain parts of the content being a privilege, not a right, according to Steven himself. Period. If you can't comprehend the basics and argue with factual statements, whatever, it's pointless. If you don't like it - this game is not for you.
I'm not sure where you think I'm doing this.
Right now we are talking about content that is gated behind the level cap. For some reason, you started talking about players gatekeeping content instead.
That is a different thing - I am trying to stick to talking about content that is gated behind the level cap, of which Ashes has a fairly good amount.
Yeah, we aren't talking about any of that though, we are talking about content that is gated behind the level cap.
That means any content that you can't reasonable access until you hit the level cap - even if that content has other requirements.
Right/privilege is - much as players gatekeeping content - a different topic. It is one I am trying to avoid, yet this is the second post of yours in a row that has bought it up, while claiming I am the one jumping to another topic.
If 10k people on release get to max lvl within that release day - the amount of content in the game would need to meet their numbers. So you either make it all instanced, because that is literally infinte content, or you pretty much ONLY make lvl50 content and simply do not make any content for lower lvls.
And so if you create a long leveling process, you can know for sure that the majority of your players won't get to the top before you release an update for that content, while the hardcores who do get there will be preoccupied with contesting each other, but that's good cause for the hardcore players - that's the game (well, atleast those who came to the game for some pvx content).
Only if you never go into any content where you can die and accumulate xp debt.
Eventually, even people at cap have to go out and regain exp, unless Intrepid is making the mistake of giving serious amounts of exp for PvP activities.
What you're talking about is using the carrot to get people somewhere, but I, at least, am telling you that you need lots of smaller carrots.
If you want leveling to take longer in Ashes and actually believe that Ashes will attract the type of people for whom just the level number going up, matters, then what we need is for Ashes to change nothing except make the level cap 100 and only give a skill point every-other level.
In D&D, Level Cap is 20.
What matters is having a decent array of abilities and skills to make the player feel that they have reached the pinacle of their Class.
The issue with player retention in MMORPGs is that Quests and other new content dries up at Level 50.
That's because the devs are human and have a finte amount of content they can develop in a certain amount of time. And, without Hell Levels, players will typically be able to race through that content faster than the devs can introduce new content in an Expansion.
Class milestones don't have to be vertical progression by the time we have the abilities we have at Level 45/50.
In D&D, Level 20 is basically god-like. Level 20 D&D characters are at least as powerful as Gandalf, if not more powerful.
What's important at that point is having new Quests and new content where we can use the abilities we've acquired by Level 45... and continuing to have new Quests/Tasks and new mobs and new rewards for months and months after that.
Class progression ends at Level Cap (50), but we're still basically doing the same activities we were doing at Level 40 and at Level 50. The difference is at Level 50, we have 50 Skills to choose from instead of 45 Skills.
Typically, the issue is that shortly after reaching Level 50, we also run out of new Quests and new Tasks and new mobs. And the only thing left to do is repeat the same Dungeons/Raids over and over and over again in search of BiS Gear.
That's great for MMO gamers.
It's not compelling or captivating for RPG players.
The Ashes game design solves that issue with Nodes, wide variety of progression paths besides just Adventurer & Artisan and with new content being introduce in Seasonal updates, rather than requiring players to wait 18+ months for an Expansion.
New Quests and new mobs and new Dungeons/Raids and new Cities/Metros continue to appear with the rise and fall of Nodes, regardless of who is at Adventurer Level Cap. And there are new encounter opportunities and new horizontal abilities available for players as they pursue Augments from Social Org, Religion, Racial and Node progression paths.
There is no reason to arbitrarily increase Adventurer Level progression past 225 hours.
Because new content does not end after the 225 hours it takes to reach Adventurer Level Cap (50).
WTF? That is the most absurd conjectue I've ever read.
There is no dopamine hit for an abitrarily extending the time to the next Class milestone.
Which is why most players leave an MMORPG at Endgame.
I think bored is not quite the same thing as an activity feeling tedious. Worse when it feels unecessarily tedious. There's a sweet spot for acceptable length of time and obvious bullshit amount time.
Completing a Hell Level does not provide a higher dopamine hit. Which is why Hell Levels would get nerfed... and ultimately were removed from MMORPGs.
New World does not even have Adventurer progression, so it makes no sense to say that the Leveling is fast.
In New World Adventurer progression is non-existent.
They currently market it on console as an Action RPG.
No 'MMO' involved. (it didn't remove the elements of everyone playing at once, it's just also irrelevant until endgame, where it plays like a Battle Arena lobby).
OG New World was an MMO. Not an RPG.
And the original design was primarily an OWPvP MMO Survival game.
There’s no Classes to Level in NW.
There’s no Character Level in NW.
So I dunno why NW is being used to address the speed of reaching Class Level Cap in Ashes.
Yeah, but... who cares what it was? The original New World, the one that was launched in 2021 was MMORPG (not what it was intended to be)
It was MMO and it was RPG, which means it was MMORPG
Specifically for you, here is the definition of RPG part from Cambridge Dictionary: "abbreviation for role-playing game: a computer game in which players control the actions of characters in an imaginary world."
I feel like you guys are arguing just to argue and this becomes ridiculous. That kind of explains the number of 10-15k forum comments
IRL I don't really have this kind of conversations, because such behavior immediately leads to "okay, bye", but at least I can have them here
Call Of Duty is not an RPG, but fits that Cambridge definition. Street Fighter also is not an RPG.
Nope. It was an OWPvP MMO Survival game with some RPG elements crammed into it at the end of Beta.
The point is that it doesn't have Class progression, so it makes no sense for you to compare the time it takes to reach max Level of anything in NW with the time it takes to reach max Class Level in an MMORPG.
It's interesting how you keep trying to talk about NW in pre Beta phase when it is absolutely obvious that nobody has ever referred to the initial intentions behind NW.
They didn't have classes, yet there were various other ways of character progression. It's interesting that you pick a single criteria and totally ignore everything else. As a local definition expert, I hope you know the definitions of terms "cherry picking", "confirmation bias" and "lying by omission". If not, I'd recommend you to look it up.
Apparently, literally anything that directly or indirectly disproves your point "makes no sense" for one reason or another. When there are literally people who confirm that certain points I make in this thread are factually true.
Waiting for the next one
It seems to me that you are saying it's worth lowering meaningful player interaction so that level cap content can wait until after launch.
Put that additional content in before launch, and let people interact more. I completely fail to see how this isn't the better choice in every aspect.
Depending on how quick gearing up is (and what sources that gear has), those additional 6 months will offset the race and contests for spots, because the hardcores will move onto the newest content, while the waves of people that had just gotten to lvl50 would only start farming stuff for lvl50.
And player interaction wouldn't be lowered, cause the game will have layers of lvls. It's not like any given person can meaningfully interact with hundreds of people at the same time (let alone thousands). Well, at least outside of wars and sieges, but those will supposedly have activities that lowbies can do.
Obviously this opinion is subject to huge changes once we have more info about gearing cycles and processes.
I would disagree with a few aspects of this
First of all, if adding that content would take 6 months pre-launch, it would take a year or more post launch.
Second, this comes down to "the game will release when it's ready". Since we are talking about the most important aspect of an MMORPG - the very thing that defines the genre and sets it apart from other genres (meaningful player interaction), if the game isn't ready to release in a way that maximizes this interaction, it isn't ready to release yet.
So, it in fact is better to hold the game off until it is ready, and then release it. This is a concept I am fairly sure you already agree with.
I can see bacteria - I have a tool to do exactly that.