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Alpha Two testing is currently taking place five days each week. More information about Phase II and Phase III 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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Lawless Zone Alternative
Ludullu
Member, Alpha Two
I crashed out after the stream due to my vehement hate of lawless zones, but that is obviously not constructive, so instead, here's a suggestion for an alternative.
I'm still suggesting that majority of the pvp for content should be delivered through guild wars, because majority of people will be in guilds, but this suggestion would allow for others to participate too, cause guilded people would be running around flagged up.
I suggest designing the wars inside out. Instead of their target being just another guild, make the war related to the content. POIs will have quests and NPCs related to them. Make those NPCs know the respawn window of the biggest thing in the POI and/or have a quest related to the POI as a whole. The big target would require a higher wardec cost, while the general POI contest wardec could be cheaper, but with a more limited potential list of targets.
The guild that's present at the POI within the respawn window can declare war on several other guilds right on the spot, by using an item they get from npc/quest. Those items are limited in use by power differences between warring guilds, by POI's value, lvl of content, etc etc. They also have prerequisite costs related to them, either by doing something for the POI's node or by going through a guild-quest.
Using those items creates several "monuments", around the POI, that can be activated by the wardec targets. These monuments enable certain mechanics on the boss or around the POI in the vicinity of the wardeccing guild. These could range from environmental hazards to full boss buffs with adds and stuff.
If a single guild becomes a target of several such wardecs, they get the right to use secret passages through the POI (these could be tunnels, invisible paths on top of walls, secret doors that only they could open, etc).
If the game registers massive acitivity of players, with several warring guilds active in the POI - the entire place becomes a last man standing arena, with all monuments activated and external entrances only being open one-way and single-use, so anyone who dies within the POI can resurrect outside and re-enter the location once (could be several times, but that's up to testing).
Once only one guild remains - the boss' spawn timer could be shortened or the spawn itself started, but with the place on lockdown, this boss would now be stronger (+the monument activation effects).
To me THIS sounds like a PvX encounter, where people on all sides agree to participate, where random people who're still inside the dungeon could still remain there, but would be in great danger because high player activity has "awakened the eeeeevil". And hell, you could even have extra rewards related to monument activation, so that everyone in the POI gets the appropriate lvls of risk/reward balancing.
The guilds could also pre-load on those items, for the POIs of their interest, on their own time and then use them at proper and opportune moments. No randomness, no genocide, just goal-based cost-paid player-driven activities.
And this is just a random idea that I came up with right on the spot. Obviously it's not ideal and it's nowhere near balanced. But it's also obviously way more complex than just "duhhh, pvp zone, duuuhhh", so it'd require a ton of coding, quest/event hooks, environment design/layout, mob AI and pathing, proper anti-zerg mechanics, proper boss design - all with, ideally, ONLY GEAR DECAY AS DEATH PENALTIES. People would have already paid to participate in the war and there'd be a lock out, so there's no damn reason to make players lose even more stuff!!
I bet there's like 10 other equally as in-depth and interesting (and more) ideas out there - all infinitely better than fucking lawless zones.
I'm still suggesting that majority of the pvp for content should be delivered through guild wars, because majority of people will be in guilds, but this suggestion would allow for others to participate too, cause guilded people would be running around flagged up.
I suggest designing the wars inside out. Instead of their target being just another guild, make the war related to the content. POIs will have quests and NPCs related to them. Make those NPCs know the respawn window of the biggest thing in the POI and/or have a quest related to the POI as a whole. The big target would require a higher wardec cost, while the general POI contest wardec could be cheaper, but with a more limited potential list of targets.
The guild that's present at the POI within the respawn window can declare war on several other guilds right on the spot, by using an item they get from npc/quest. Those items are limited in use by power differences between warring guilds, by POI's value, lvl of content, etc etc. They also have prerequisite costs related to them, either by doing something for the POI's node or by going through a guild-quest.
Using those items creates several "monuments", around the POI, that can be activated by the wardec targets. These monuments enable certain mechanics on the boss or around the POI in the vicinity of the wardeccing guild. These could range from environmental hazards to full boss buffs with adds and stuff.
If a single guild becomes a target of several such wardecs, they get the right to use secret passages through the POI (these could be tunnels, invisible paths on top of walls, secret doors that only they could open, etc).
If the game registers massive acitivity of players, with several warring guilds active in the POI - the entire place becomes a last man standing arena, with all monuments activated and external entrances only being open one-way and single-use, so anyone who dies within the POI can resurrect outside and re-enter the location once (could be several times, but that's up to testing).
Once only one guild remains - the boss' spawn timer could be shortened or the spawn itself started, but with the place on lockdown, this boss would now be stronger (+the monument activation effects).
To me THIS sounds like a PvX encounter, where people on all sides agree to participate, where random people who're still inside the dungeon could still remain there, but would be in great danger because high player activity has "awakened the eeeeevil". And hell, you could even have extra rewards related to monument activation, so that everyone in the POI gets the appropriate lvls of risk/reward balancing.
The guilds could also pre-load on those items, for the POIs of their interest, on their own time and then use them at proper and opportune moments. No randomness, no genocide, just goal-based cost-paid player-driven activities.
And this is just a random idea that I came up with right on the spot. Obviously it's not ideal and it's nowhere near balanced. But it's also obviously way more complex than just "duhhh, pvp zone, duuuhhh", so it'd require a ton of coding, quest/event hooks, environment design/layout, mob AI and pathing, proper anti-zerg mechanics, proper boss design - all with, ideally, ONLY GEAR DECAY AS DEATH PENALTIES. People would have already paid to participate in the war and there'd be a lock out, so there's no damn reason to make players lose even more stuff!!
I bet there's like 10 other equally as in-depth and interesting (and more) ideas out there - all infinitely better than fucking lawless zones.
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Comments
So, how do lawless zones fit into that? There's suddenly and randomly an area of land that falls outside the created world?
Can anyone explain this?
Not impossible by any means, just has to be considered. For instance: how does this system resolve players dipping into and out of the POI zone rapidly? Specifically, how does players rapidly entering/exiting the POI area count towards player activity at said POI? How does activating ranged abilities on players inside the zone from outside the zone work? What if one guild member is present inside the POI, but the rest remain just outside (but within targeting range)? How would the system respond to that to avoid poor experiences or possible exploitative behavior?
Thinking on these can help refine/expand the system, too.
Activity is counted by mob aggro and player on player interactions. If you got aggroed on or interacted with another player (hitting/healing them or being hit/healed counts) - you go towards the overall count. This effect would have a grace period of the flag state duration, so even if you exit the circle completely - you still have 2min (or is it 90s now?) of you being counted as part of the interaction.
Answered above.
Only the active counted members will be allowed to enter the locked POI, so if that guild remained on the outside the entire time - they ain't entering.
This does bring up a point that I forgot to mention. Preferrably there'd be a few respawn locations around the POI. Probably the easiest way for that would be the monuments. Guilds that have access to them (i.e. wardecced ones) would be able to spawn there, instead of just the emberspring, in order to avoid spawncamping. And a highly wardecced guild should have a respawn in one of the secret passageways.
Ideally once a single monument activates (meaning that guilds started fighting each other), the unguilded (uninvolved guilds) people should have an option to respawn on the opposite side of the emberspring, cause they can also get spawncamped by a potential zerg.
And again, those are just basic answers and would need to be tested. But I sure bet that lawless stuff hasn't been tested in Ashes either. At least at the proper scale of what a real game would be. And all the other games that have a system like this has already shown that "it's just zerg".
In AOC this could be an option for attaining Guild points, PVP gear etc. You use the points gained toward purchasing pvp gear.
I'm not sure how the lawless zones are going to work. I would guess that a larger majority in AOC will be PVE players. I think it could be disruptive to gameplay for PVE players who suddenly have to leave the zone and wait.
Except no gear for it, cause Steven doesn't want to reward people for just pvping. Disregard the fact that he's literally doing that with these lawless systems.
Lawless zones will push out the PvErs out of the game, because they'll make them feel like 3rd rate citizens, all while the zones themselves will barely have any pvp in them, because they'll be overtaken by zergs that don't fight themselves or each other.
Glad to expand on it but probably only if there's a lot of discussion.
Forgive me, can't overcome the bias/discourage easily today, especially for something that is likely to change even more (for better or worse) Intrepid side. I can tell you that the reasoning follows from the last few years:
"Considering L2 PvP structures applied to an older PvE game's worldspace, the outcomes I expect were accurately represented in TL."
Basically all the stuff we've discussed and my usual reasons for disagreeing from back then, I count as 'now with evidence' since Jan 2024.
And I think that pretty much any of my ideas will get the same answer from you for the exact reasons we both know
I recently started playing EQ2 again on a server with an older ruleset, and considering rolling kne on the old ruleset PvP server.
Most fun I've had in an MMO for years. More fun than Ashes looks like it could ever be.
And L2 is even having a fan-made port to UE4, which is garnering a ton of hype in the community. But they're not changing anything functionally, so it's still the good ol' L2, just prettier.
I've been trying to actively erase L2 knowledge from my mind for years now, to free it up for something else, so going back to it would just destroy years of work, even if the smallest bit I played back when I was making "Ashes through the lense of L2" videos and doing some stuff for discussions here - it was the funnest fucking thing
I still remember going to some random small private server to test something and while I was leveling a new char, on an already established server of top lvl people - I still met another person of my lvl, who immediately flagged on me (on a location TP, not even yet at the farming spot itself) and I won the fight by a tiny marging.
Fucking imagine that in Ashes. I could never...
Nah, this is exactly the kind of thing that starts to happen when you outsource your game design to Discord.
i would just like the flagging system to be utilized. give players incentives to defend themselves.
afaik there is currently no difference in material loss between green and purple players. the wiki says around 30-40% for green deaths and only half for purple deaths (correct me when im wrong). i dont think that would be enough since the gain of killing the then corrupted player will always be higher than 40% of your materials.
pls intrepid spend time on your well discussed flagging system. i know you wont touch red for now but make green and purple be a distinguishable player state. risk vs reward needs to be there. give players reasons to defend their life
The only way to promote fighting back is to make it unknown whether the attacker will get punished for their actions. Because that way the target of the attack will have to think about their own losses more than the potential losses of the attacker.
I'll offer the other possibly weird perspective actually.
I don't care if my attackers get punished, I just want my attackers to make sense.
Corruption is one path to that, but if they can find another, I'll take it regardless of what Corruption is like.
One 'clear'(?) issue with your original suggestion is that it doesn't do much to make the attackers make any sense. If anything, it's a system that 'only works when large numbers of players are involved', but also kinda 'requires' those players to not be 'outside the guild system'.
You're dreaming high. Not impossibly high, but 'higher than Ashes is probably built for'. I can tell you 'how I know this', and it's related to the daily 'powers' you can activate in TL.
The Eclipse can be treated as a War Declaration to 'everyone in a Dungeon'. Not the same, but that's the main thing. It can also be used to close off access to specific other ones in particular ways.
The Rain can be used as 'we are now taking control of this dungeon that you can only enter when it rains', but automatically allows entry for everyone.
The Wind can be used to change a specific Archboss battlefield, determining whether players in flight mode have enough tailwind to use a bypass on the chokepoints.
These 'work' because of a bunch of even more important things added on top of them moreso than because they change functions/chokepoints or war conditions.
So, to go back to the main point, the thing that makes players 'move to defend their position' is not 'whether or not it will be contested', but a change in condition relative to that contest. A weaker guild who loses whenever they get a Dec on them at X boss are still in a binary situation. If the stronger group shows up that day, they get pushed off (and if they expect them to, economically speaking they shouldn't go), and if they don't, they 'get no contest'.
Your suggestion definitely pushes hard enough on the 'changes to the PvE aspect' to imply that this could be the thing that is achieved, but that's why I say you're dreaming 'high' rather than 'this is impossible/not gonna work'. Original Vision Ashes PvE probably would/could do this, but...
And I'd imagine that it's mostly about the dev time and monetary limitations on production, rather than dev skill or even Steven desire for a particular design. Majority of my suggestions would probably take months of hardcore development, month of hardcore balancing and then maaaybe be 10-15% better than a "eh, this might work" approach, so why spend all that time-money on something hard when you can achieve almost the same goal with something insanely basic.
And yeah, I do want majority of the pvp to happen between organized groups, because harder content will already be mostly happening around them and I've always said that I wanna push all the other people into guilds as well, because I believe that socially that's a better structure for the game.
Though we do have nodes and I do think that for all the guildless node citizens node wars that concentrate on the local POI could be a great thing as well. But I'd imagine that it'll be much harder to realize those in such a way where a bad mayor can't just abuse the hell out of them or where a good mayor will never get them off the ground cause majority of node's pvers would not work towards that kind of node goal.
No, it's not that either. It's simply that Ashes is hitting the PvE wall.
You can't design certain types of good open world PvE without highly curated world/location design, or players will exploit the boss' mechanics, and catching every edge case when you don't have control over it all is a long back-and-forth between the world-design/artist teams and the encounter design teams.
The same applies to PvP, to a point, but in the context of your suggestion, it adds a massive amount of testing time. Combine this with the fact that AoC allows players to form 40 man raids like WoW and it just raises the difficulty curve massively.
There are bosses in Throne and Liberty that I would definitely bet got prototyped, were found to be super cool and fun in small group/solo, and then realized 'there's no way this works in a 6 person encounter, far less as an open world boss'. They found uses for that content in various ways and places, but Ashes doesn't often have the same options, and since the option in question is 'put it as a solo instance for players to do a few times a week at discretion for fun and a bit of progression', it doesn't gel with your original suggestion.
The inability to put a boss in a well-bounded arena, or prevent 100 players from ranged attacking it, is a big limiter on AoC. Not even the original A1 Twins would fare that well against a raid-worth of people with minimal res penalties, and it isn't exactly Dev time that limits them from solving this problem.
I don't understand this perspective exactly?
That's the entire reason you'd want to have a lot of good anti-zerg mechanics. I feel like we still don't know the specifics of what the open PvP battlegrounds will bring, being able to section off parts of the world around PoIs and bosses doesn't automatically lead to an overall higher reward, to me.
40 people guarding one boss that drops 2 items isn't exactly efficient if having those 40 people there makes the boss considerably harder in some way. Sure, 'other people aren't getting those 2 items', but the concept still stands. If anything I'd think one could be 'willing to add the option for battlegrounds around bosses' moreso because you have faith in the anti-zerg design elements.
Also, I'm viewing the lawless POI reward boost through my usual lense. POIs have mobs. Mobs drop full gear. Even with supposedly lower drop rates, I still dropped several fairly good items in just 2h of my farming a POI with a pug (nowhere near optimal or best mobs in said POI btw). So when a lawless zone makes those rewards even higher - all I hear is "you'll be showered in the best shit for several hours at a time".
And for bosses it'd just be an increased chance of dropping the good stuff. And there's also the supposed great gatherables that might spawn due to lawlessness.
So in all of those situations a zerg that can simply remove anyone from the lawless premises will win out big. And in my crashout attitude towards it all, I don't even see the point in adding proper anti-zerg mechanics to bosses, cause none of that will even matter in the greater scheme of things.
I still want them, I still hope they're great, still hope I'm wrong on all of my assumptions - but the chances of any of that are still kinda slim.