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.
Exp grind
Githal
Member
My thoughts are that a Raid group should be formed to do world boss, or some hard dungeon or some other similar content.
Doing quests, farming mobs, gathering and stuff like this should be for party groups (8 players max).
As such, I think while you are in Raid groups - all players in the raid group should be UNABLE to earn any experience from mobs, and killing mobs for quests should not count toward the quest completion while in raid group (except some raid specific quests).
A lot of games have this implemented. WOW is included in this count. And i think AOC should implement this also.
Doing quests, farming mobs, gathering and stuff like this should be for party groups (8 players max).
As such, I think while you are in Raid groups - all players in the raid group should be UNABLE to earn any experience from mobs, and killing mobs for quests should not count toward the quest completion while in raid group (except some raid specific quests).
A lot of games have this implemented. WOW is included in this count. And i think AOC should implement this also.
7
Comments
That said, I just don't like 'Raid Exp' either, but it doesn't exactly make much difference if the game intends to share the exp for a given kill based on contribution to that kill.
Not being in the Raid Frame doesn't make a lot of difference at that point other than for... heals and buffs and those depend on implementation anyway.
That said, if this is implemented in WoW, then I'd expect/want it as the default design direction for Ashes, transitive property and whatnot.
(speaking for only myself here, not group)
With more people the gameplay and social interaction starts being very different, mobs die extremely fast to the point you don't learn your class well, etc. This kind of sizes should be reserved for large scale PvP, world bosses, etc.
I don't know if I would go so far as totally disabling exp gain but I would make sure it's definitely to the best way to level.
So instead of "raids don't get xp" it was a "raid simply can't get enough mobs to earn that much xp from a location".
This would make the raids just split up into separate groups and at that point it's no different from just several groups trying to farm a location and this would also be the solution to your suggestion too, so nothing would be different in this regard.
The designs do not allow such dev intervention. It would mean the combined Dungeons would be empty most of the time and those who are spread out could be wiped out by whoever has come to contest the area. Furthermore, I do not want or ask for an easy experience - the raid mobs should be numerous, difficult and another risk factor in a pvx engagement. Not cheesable by a 40 man raid split into groups of 8 in different tactical areas. If the raid content is doable by an 8 man it is not an actual raid.
Also, judging by this, my suggestion is already kinda planned.
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/World_manager#Population_based_scaling
Dynamic world populations and reward tables allow the spawn tables and loot tables of mobs to dynamically adapt to changes in player activity and world state.[8][9]
Dynamic World populations and reward tables is those monster settings within the playable space changing based off of those world state predicates, so keeping in mind that that system being up and running is a very important part to feeling like the world is different.[9] – Steven Sharif
I might just be thinking of a shorter reaction timeframe than what Steven was talking about here.
I do agree with the OP (and you) that raids should come together for their own type of content. But I can also see how raids could just sweep through locations back and forth and clear it out while gaining normal party xp for it, even though they're x5 parties instead of one.
The World Manager will already be tracking player xp acquisition, so I think the thing I suggested could be applied if the WM sees the raid gaining repetitive xp (say, 3 respawn cycles?) within a certain location. Slowing down respawn would directly affect the raid itself, but not really affect anyone else, because everyone else would've already been either gone from the location cause a raid has taken it over or they'd be pvping for the location against the raid, so the pve side wouldn't matter to them at that particular moment.
Well i can see some pros in your suggestion, but it has a lot flaws also.
If raid group can deplete spawn locations, The raid will move to another location after. This may lead to no available spawn locations for normal groups to farm.
Other flaw is that with such numbers the devs cant make any hard content. If they make it too hard, it wont be balanced for party groups and ect.
A solution that would not involve complete exp removal for raid groups may be:
To cap the exp you can get from a single mob per level. So For example if you are lvl 10, and killing other lvl 10 mob gives 100 exp, Killing lvl 11 mob gives 120 exp, the cap would be for example killing lvl 15 mob for 300 exp. And if you kill lvl 16 mob its still 300 exp. But when you lvl up to 11 lvl, then lvl 16 mobs will give 400 exp.
This will allow party groups to farm the optimal lvl difference mobs. and raid groups will be unincentivized to be made for farming since they wont be able to go for too high lvl mobs in order to get great gear together with fast leveling at the same time.
If the raid is just farming mobs in said dungeon - the spawns will slow down. Once the raid leaves that dungeon - the spawns will speed back up again.
And if that raid is willing to spend their time going in and out of a dungeon just to kill some plain mobs - there's gotta be some deeper issue with reward structure balancing.
The harder content is the stuff with waaay longer respawns (I'd prefer 24+-1h), because that's what raids should be farming, instead of plain mobs.
From the look of it in the current alpha testing, you could see many streamers form raid groups to farm high level mobs. Leveling fast + better loot drops. This is big advantage.
And while yes they will split the loot to more players, but they will also be killing mobs a lot faster, so more loot.
And if as a party group you are getting some lower level gear, that you will change to better once you get some more levels. The raid group will be farming the higher level gears from the same low level.
Nothing would change.
This is just a result of old school MMORPG design being put up against new school MMORPG player mentality.
Nothing that can be done about it other than not using old school MMORPG design, or pretending it isn't an issue.
The whole thing.
Old school MMORPG players would happily form groups to farm content, but not on the scale they do now.
in the early 2000's, a guild of players would be maybe a few hundred people, but would often only be a few dozen online at a time - but they would often split in to groups running content in different areas. Now, a guild is often a few thousand people, with a few hundred people online at once, and they are far more happy to all run the same thing at the same time.
It was extremely unusual in any of the games I played in the 2000s and 2010s for players to form up in a mass group like this for basic content, but it is kind of common now. As far as I can see, this started with people doing this around streamers, but now happens without them being present at all.
So, the old school way of developing an MMO was for this kind of content to be based around individual players, or perhaps small groups, but with an eye to full groups being present. The new school mentality of players is to throw a hundred players at it.
And due to pvxness of the world (and same grindability of normal mobs as in Ashes), there'd be huge groups of people running around fighting each other for spots, which would usually start from 2 full parties of 9 people fighting each other at those spots.
So far Ashes is a near 1-to-1 copy of that gameplay imo. Maybe with slightly better overall organization of guilds, cause organizing people over discord is way easier than doing it over TS or Vent.
Like, hell, I remember in 2005 where half of my local pc cafe (around 20 machines) would all roll around together on an L2 server. And we'd all come together at the same times of day, cause pretty much all of us were just school kids of different ages. Fun times.
The thing is, there is a difference between a party/group and a raid.
L2 started off with 2 parties of 9 - Ashes will start out with 4 raids of 40.
That is the difference in mindset - there is no difference (no major difference) in content to accomodate this. The content in alpha kind of breaks with a single group - let alone getting 160 people together.
This wont be as simple as you describe it.
1. People in 5 different party groups x8 players wont be able to help each other as a raid group.
2. The kill matters for the exp. this means that from those 5 groups you may get 1 of the groups not getting any exp. And if they become lower levels due to this, then they will never catch up since they will do less dmg and even lower chance to kill something. This also means some of the groups will have worse gear. This will be enough reason for them to split and farm their own location and splitting the raid group.
3. if a raid group come to contest the spot (even tho they wont get exp as raid group, they can still pvp) they will have advantage. Which would be true for 5 small groups farming in different spots also, but then only 1 of those groups may face the raid group, while the other 4 get ahead with exp and gear.
4. Completing quests will take 5 times more time
5. You dont see where your team mates are in the map if you get separated, which also makes coordination much harder
6. If my other anti zerg suggestion is implemented where everyone outside your party/raid group is threated as enemy- then they wont be able to farm at 1 place at all as 5 groups x8
Is it better to get to 50 and grind there?
Seems like you miss understand how the leveling process will work in AOC.
If you had to guess how much time it would take to level from 1 to 50 lvl, how much would you guess?
Cos the answer is around 250 hours. If the average person plays 4 hours per day, You will get around 2 months play time till you reach max level.
So yes, you will see raid parties that are not max level ALL THE TIME.
This also means that if you want to develop 2 classes, then you will need 500 hours. (since i doubt there will be leveling pass once you level your first character)
i think they will change this to some degree. Since Steven said that quest leveling will be the bigger part of leveling up. You still need to grind, but like 60% of the exp will be from quests.
heavily against this idea. a raid is just a bigger party. take into consideration you get less exp the more members you have, and past some points adding more members wont really help you kill faster. there are also exp and loot penalties already related to the levels of the group members.
There are no penalties tho. Just coz the exp split among all party members doesnt mean this is penalty.
Intrepid cant balance the world of Verra if there are both 8 man parties and 40 man raid groups in the same time.
You dont "raid" a quest or a goblin
there are penalties though