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Alpha Two Phase II testing is currently taking place 5+ days each week. More information about testing schedule can be found here
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
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And L2 had a ton of owpvp. If Ashes manages to design its wars well enough - it'll have a ton of owpvp as well. And it'll potentially have even more event-less pvp, due to lowered penalties for being flagged.
I have no doubt that L2 used to be like this, with players from 20 years ago, with the mindset from 20 years ago, with the other options people had 20 years ago.
Read the room though - that isn't how things are today.
All these points above will be something Intrepid team will end up changing. Once the game releases they will have clear data this is not working out for them and a big turnoff for any new player coming in. XP debt and material loss should be in PvP only like New World. Travel time, Intrepid team will realize over time this is going to cause certain areas to be completely dead.
I'm foggy on how something like this would work but maybe if a non-flagged player was attacked they could either chose to not fight and the attacker gets the corruption but the pacifist doesn't lose anything except a bloodport. If the "unflagged" pacifist decides to give PvP a shot and fights and loses there is still no penalty except the bloodport but the player has gained some insight into how to defend and attack another player so that given enough risk-free practice they may in the future flag up for consequences knowing they have already had many previous fight using their gear/skills. It's a much softer system idea but could lead to more players getting acclimated to the PvP environment. The flag upped player attacker only gets rewards (whatever that would be) if the other player is flagged also. Again, it's a bit of a carebear system but may draw more casual players to the game (or not, just spitballing, which is not my usual thing on matters I don't know anything about).
And this is what I meant by "there can be no risk free pvp". Except under your suggestion, the current situation in A2 would be even worse, cause we already have people "PK baiting" by simply not fighting back, cause they know that corruption is harsh as hell, but now the victim wouldn't even lose anything and if the respawn points stay as close to POIs as they are right now - the victim wouldn't even really lose time. Which would increase the mob train exploits and if those somehow get fixed, we'll see the exploit that I and a few others talked about in the discussions about visible hp values.
And if respawns do change, then the victims lose a good chunk of their time, so there's still loss. Imo this would still be a better design, as long as Intrepid manage to get their loot system in order, cause it's obvious that the current one is shit. When there's only on reasonable place to grind - of course people will hate dying and losing time. In L2 I had, on average, 3-4 choices of spots to farm at any given lvl (obviously with varrying benefits, but nothing like the HH vs literally anything else at its lvl in Ashes).
And so, when someone super strong came to my current spot and absolutely demolished me in pvp, I still had other places to go any farm, so the loss didn't feel as big. But when there's only one spot to farm, and it takes you good 10-15 min just to get there, and someone strong takes it over - you're obviously fucked and feel like shit.
Let's say you had eggs hidden everywhere on this map and your goal was to collect them and turn them in somewhere, and that this event definitely had options for FFA PvP for the entire duration.
Here's some equivalents of the terrible ideas I've heard over the years from certain types of players and people:
A lot of the time, Ashes design is all this, plus 'you get more powerful the more eggs you are carrying'.
All us 'weak' and 'soft' and 'PvE' players aren't going to play that. But it's not because that can't be fun if you like PvP, it's that we know that there are too many ways and too many people who will set out to make it as frustrating as possible.
Preserving the fun of this hypothetical event for everyone is impossible because for some, 'being able to impose their will completely on others using the tactics allowed by the above' is the fun, and those are the people you have to watch out for if you want something like 'a fun Easter Event'. Because it has to be fun for losers, and for that to happen it has to disincentivize certain optimal tactics from 'winners'.
Suggest any of the obvious ones though, and you'll get the natural reaction from the type I'm talking about. Because the game is less fun for them if there are 3-5 turn-in points and only one is at the top of the tower. They don't want to have to deal with stealth players, or 'PvE skill' players, or 'having to collect their own eggs', so they complain if you make it so that you can't take eggs from the defeated.
Some don't even care about the event and just want the PvP and will ignore all the eggs and the point of the event so even if you take the 'best' approach and just have 'both sides' get half their eggs broken just for engaging in PvP at all (to have a proper incentive for how you move around in the event space), there will absolutely be people who just run around without eggs looking for people to attack.
If you make them 'require at least one egg to initiate PvP' you will get whiners about how it's a Carebear event and how games need to stop catering to the PvE crowd.
Tell me what would have happened in L2 in this hypothetical event, because that community must be/have been truly amazing in some way. Unfortunately I still can't find any evidence of it, all I find is the same behaviour and approximate ratios of perspectives that I've always seen and still see now, where games with overall good PvP setups get warped by one extreme side of the playerbase.
Assume I closed this with a 'eggs in one basket' joke of your choosing.
Flag purple, you'll lose less. It seems a lot of people forget this or ignore it because they want to avoid PvP. If Ashes just becomes another WoW clone (Your challenging games comment about individual mechanics) than I'm out for sure, and I think a lot of other will be too. It's a PvX game that leans completely on PvP for endgame content. That loss you feel is intended ( i think ) to make you flag and participate in PvP. I state I would PvP more if the exp dept was removed if I died from a player and was flagged for PvP. In the most cases I'm gathering and grinding exp, so I generally don't want to risk dept. That'd be my only tweak to the current penalty system. I do have other concerns with PvP overall with Ashes though not mentioned here.
Everything else was usually answered by the same action I've suggested others do - find a guild. There's been quests that only had one place to return the items and people would camp that spot. There's been quests/loot that was only available in a certain location and there were endless fights over it. There's been an npc that moved randomly through the depth of a popular dungeon and you needed that npc if you wanted to get a better reward from a quest (kind of a combo of "return deep in a tower" and "several locations of interest in one spot" points). And majority of all of those situations were, at their core, "the one who gets this stuff becomes stronger".
The answer has always been - get friends/guildies to help you. If your guild alone cannot fight the stronger enemy - get other guilds' help. Use as many tactics as you can to achieve victory (splitting forces, hunting players in off times to reduce morale, playing in off hours, etc).
And my suggestions for the "you can loot dead players" part (I thiiiink I posted it here before) is the "stolen goods bags" system, which would be tied to the highwaymen system, which is in turn tied to an upgraded BH system. All culminating in the victims getting their items back more often than not. And yes, this has been called "a carebear" suggestion by some of the trueproXxXpvpXxXprotrue people on here.
Edit: I see something similar was already posted in its own thread...
The combination of snowballing, 'griefing', and item drops, is what makes this untenable for people.
Because if griefing doesn't let you snowball to victory, you can 'change your fun to making your enemy waste time'. And if you don't drop items on death, then the definition of 'griefing' is greatly reduced and much clearer in many situations (obv not all, tactically speaking you could make some arguments for spawn camping either way).
And without meaningful snowballing, then the 'get a guild or friends' becomes easier because the sort of person like you who would probably pull together all the randoms and smaller groups, wouldn't be stuck in the situation of knowing that 'while you are doing that, your enemy is outpacing you and crushing morale'.
There will always be people who have the extreme, borderline ridiculous view, that even in this hypothetical event, they shouldn't be targets of PvP, even though the only remaining challenge in such an event would be 'run to egg spot, get egg'.
Those people just get lumped in with the people who are thinking 'well I can't win at PvP in this situation and I can't outsmart an opponent who isn't even playing with the same intent/rules'.
Those people 'don't bother' with PvP games because the games don't work hard enough at giving them anything to actually do. The devs of those games (especially early in development) are often content to just leave things to the PvP purists, especially since those people are super whiny if you 'force them to play by the same rules as anyone who doesn't want to engage them in PvP'.
The sort of people who whine 'you couldn't beat us so you just brought more people' and the sort of people who whine 'I can't force this person to PvP me and I get punished for killing them anyway' have a lot of overlap.
Anyways I brought all that up to remind everyone that Caravan Content is terrible.
The reason open world PvP in MMORPG's is niche and always will be is due to the worlds persistence. In something like a BR, you (generally) reset everything after a half hour or or what ever. The given match is over. This prevents snowballing.
This is what Crowfall was trying to address, at least originally.
In a persistent world game, it snowballs. I PvP you and win, I get some of your stuff meaning I get a little stronger and you get a little weaker.
The argument of "get a guild" also doesn't work, because if it happens on an individual player level, it happens on a guild level. A group of me and my guild see a group with you and your guild, we PvP, we win, we all take some of your stuff making all of us stronger, and all of you weaker.
There needs to be absolutely zero transfer of character power in open world PvP in order for the game to function in a persistent world.
Most of the really cool ideas of this game, the rise and fall of empires, and ever changing landscape, are end game loops.
The leveling process should be difficult to make the journey meaningful, but punishment like XP debt is just not fun.
I think removing XP Debt and making it so you only drop 25% of materials that can all be recovered if you’re quick enough is a good exchange.
Just giving players the hope that if they get back up and keep pushing on they can mitigate loss would be a great impact.
I really don’t see any arguments to how this would change the core pillars of the game.
Travel time I'm sure will be better as well once all the mounts and travel things are implemented. I'm sure they will have their form of Zeppelin/Boat system like it is in OG WoW.
Interesting. I think the inverse is true, if folks didn't drop anything upon death there would be a TON more ow pvp. I just don't think people need a ton of motivation to kill each other in a game.
I just don't want EXP loss if I die to another character while I'm flagged. If that was the case I'd stay flagged basically all the time. But I'm just one opinion. Some people will never flag no matter what, and if you make it worse than it is for them they'll probably walk.
Who would have thought corruption alone wouldn't solve this...? hmmmmm...
I'm totally on the fence myself this time.
BDO, drop nothing, only worth fighting over spot, actually turns out quite cooperative when the two sides aren't 'going looking for a fight', until saturation point where it actually matters...
TL, drop nothing but you can use the combat to push the enemy out of the area (sometimes explicitly, sometimes temporarily), murder-death-kill almost every night in every PoI dungeon.
In the end, I think it's just the expectation. If the game makes you expect that other people will kill you as soon as you turn your back, you're more likely to attack. Interestingly the thing that I think makes BDO turn out that way is that whoever attacks first tends to win anyway, or, if attacking first wasn't going to give you the W, you stood no chance no matter what.
So since the 'PvP' is sometimes moreso 'decided by who gets the drop on the other' (back when I played anyway) and therefore the 'content' is 'finding the moment to kill your opponent or realize you can't', two players who are aware of each other and overall not fighting over a spot, don't see 'just fighting' as super important.
Hence 'duel for spot' in BDO, but 'I'mma just casually 1v4 these people who won't move after I warning shot them' in Shadowed Crypt in TL at night.
The only thing that corruption and amount/type of drops is actually changing is 'the feeling that you need to protect what you have', so given the two above (and some stuff from much older games) I'd have to say I don't think it matters at all if we drop stuff or not, I don't consider that the decider of how much owPvP we get after about 2 months, that part is only affecting the overall 'feeling' of the server-game-politics.
I think one of the other "feeling" major factors is the perception of ttk. If you say that BDO's pvp is usually reliant on who gets the first hit, then I can definitely see why people would avoid even attempting to flag up or fight for their farm.
Here's a video of 2 parties in warring guilds fighting each other twice. Mages (the video's POV) are sliiightly stronger in terms of gear, have more people with them, and get a bigger jump on the rangers in the second fight. In the first fight, even with the stronger gear and beneficial positioting (rangers usually want to be the initiators from a far in a more open location) the mages still lost some of their dpsers in the fight and the fight itself took a fair bit of time. And at the end the rangers say "good fight".
Oh, and at this point in the game's life mages were considered insanely OP as well.
This is my usual experience with owpvp in dungeons in L2. I've had this both with groups like this and in solo encounters on servers where soloabiltiy was way more viable when farming. Ttk is not near-instant, nor is it super obvious who's gonna win the fight just from the first strike. Battle rez is super viable, supports are needed (half the party is supports here), actions and timing matters (rangers coulda done more here for sure).
This is exactly why I've been a proponent of tighter gear scaling, slower ttk, bigger reliance on party composition (is already the case, so at least that's good) and IDEALLY abilities that involve mobs in the fight. You can see that the mobs didn't really react in either fight, and I believe that adding abilities that would control mobs (to an extent) would truly make these kinds of fights PvX.
I've been in countless fights like this, and as the running shows, this dungeon is super deep into a location, so running to it is the true loss of losing a fight, so you ideally want to take any fight you can, because any chance at winning is better than losing all that time on running back. And that is why I've also been saying that the current respawn points in Ashes are real damn bad. And it kinda ties back to what will matter in people's heads when a potential pvp fight is on the horizon.
If your immediate thought process is "well, I'm gonna gain some xp debt, lose a fraction of my loot (if you've even been in the spot for long enough to have said loot), but I can quickly come back and get something from the corrupted attackers" - why would anyone ever flag up.
But if the first thought is "it took me 20 minutes to get here, this spot is great for farm and these mobs are not easy to fight, so I can use that to my advantage" - I think there'd be a higher chance of people fighting back.
Not to mention there are a few people that would find a good paddling as not punishing at all.
I watched his video and agree with him to some extent. However Ashes design requires a bunch of these features to work properly. These aren't just added as an afterthought "it would be cool if". These elements are part of the overall game experience in ways you might not realize.
EXP debt and stat dampening is an inherent soft cap on retries when it comes to both PVP and PVE situations. We WANT soft recaps and things to shut you out of content BECAUSE there are only so many spots in the game to grind, and only so many spots that you want to grind TONIGHT. Then when other teams have the same conflict, things like EXP debt, stat dampening and gear repair costs are the things that separate which teams get the spots and which teams don't.
Josh Strife Hayes is correctly pointing out an issue with tedious difficulty for no reason, and how that frustrates gamers. However, this is not in the context of Ashes design. There are very good reasons for these systems, and they affect the open world PVX dynamic.
Go ahead and try to get spots from other teams, you will find that the game design is very fun and engaging. These little things like exp debt and stuff are just incentives to move in different directions in the game, no need to get frustrated about it. Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. This is fine, its not like we have to have a "perfect playthrough" or something. Just have fun =D
But even so it depends on the genre, and some genres require the player to set their own personal goals.
Those genres remain fun for the type of player they attract in spite of, and sometimes even because of the penalties they face.
The issue with MMOs is that the penalties are relative and semi-permanent, but MMOs can be designed better without removing the punishments/penalties that are there/needed for there to even be anything approaching 'gameplay' of the type they are supposed to deliver.
Competitive games such as Ashes, even if not in the same genre, have 'punish' as just part of their normal way of talking about scenarios. As long as you either had the necessary information and made the wrong decision, or 'could have had that information if you knew to look for it and therefore can improve by learning to look for it in future', then it's 'normal'.
Especially since the 'punish' is often your opponent's 'reward'.
All I wanted is the removal of XPdebt and the dampening of material loss. I think it’s too frustrating
That’s my biggest think. Like XPdebt just feels bad. Like In real life if I fail at something I don’t get worse at that thing I don’t go backwards. The act of losing ground does not feel good
I agree, and for me I’ll play ash’s regardless. I’m just trying to give feedback that XPdebt does not feel good psychologically and that ash’s would be better off as a whole if it was gone. For most people the act of dyinf and having to run back and contest a spot repeadly is more than enough to accomplish that goal.
Sorry for shedding some light into this.
First off material loss can be circumvented by not having materials on your character, which means removing XP debt would leave only the run back as punishment, most of the time.
Stop walking around with materials on your character, one thing I would argue, is that the game should remove the run back time.
That's ultimately what were talking about is time spent reacquiring things you lost on death. How that time is spent depends on the Devs, some make you run for 10 minutes, others make you reaquire some of the stuff you already had.
Personally id rather add 15 mins of gameplay then 5 mins of a boring run.
I think you’re in the minority unfortunately. I we took a poll I’d bet money most players would prefer travel time to XPdebt