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Alpha Two Phase III testing has begun! During this phase, our realms will be open every day, and we'll only have downtime for updates and maintenance. We'll keep everyone up-to-date about downtimes in Discord.
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.
Ashes is starting to have a big problem
onewingedangelo1
Member, Alpha Two
With the world expanding more and more it's being more and more apparent that travel is turning into the biggest issue that needs to be addressed while there is still time to do so.
If there are only plans for certain regions to be starter regions and many other regions expected to be places the players expand out into, there is going to be a lot of travel back and forth between said starter regions and the expanded out regions before any sort of meaningful foot hold can be made in those places. In doing so players are going to be expected to spend most of their time traveling back and forth between locations.
The average player has about 2 hours to play a day, and as it stands to get from Kaltorhum to Korrin, or Windstead to Korrin, it takes about a half hour of just travel. Similar time to get from Winstead to Djinna, or Joeva to anywhere in the Jundark. This is with having mounts that have more than 150% movement speed. If you don't have one of those, it can take even longer.
This is going to be extremely unappealing to a lot of people. I understand at release, many players will not have a reason to expand farther than there starter region before they have the means of a faster mount or before other players can establish those foot holds, but for us testers, spending half an hour to over an hour just searching for a party, only to wait another half hour to get everyone gathered, then to find out that the camp is contested or taken or to have someone key like a cleric bard or tank DC.... The majority of our time is wasted due to the time it takes to get around the map.
So how can we solve this issue?
I propose a few options....
Airships: When a settlement becomes Town, they may build a structure that can connect to other Towns with said structure. Airships run on a schedule and while they ship is enroute, the whole ship is PvP Lawless ( To allow for sky pirates ), but as soon as the ship comes into the town limits PvP Lawless turns off immediately, without warning (you can use your mini map if you want a heads up) so there is a chance said pirates end up corrupt if they don't time their shenanigans properly. (Customs only allows what you can fit in your pockets so any materials and crates must be left behind) This would encourage people going out and trying to establish more settlement expansions. Because as it stands people are just sticking to the Riverlands for the most part leaving all the other areas to be occasionally visited.
Ancient Ruins: In every region there lies a single ancient ruin. Scholars are unsure as to what their intended purpose was but after some time and research ( a building being made at any settlement ) part of their use can be discovered. By utilizing the ancient glyphs found in the ruin a link can be opened connecting the glyphs on the site with the replica created at the settlement allowing for passage for a player to move from the replica to the ruins (not the other way around) but only if a player has encoded their essence (blood) into the Ancient site, requiring a player to have to travel to the Ancient Ruins and encode their essence to the device before the replica may be used (This is to promote exploration while also rewarding said exploration at the same time). Only one such building of this kind can be made per region ( so node sieges will likely be planned around this structure often ). Like other services this is a taxable service. For added 'fun' while the ruins themselves are not lawless, the areas around them could be. (This would also only work for Ancient Ruins on the same continent, you can't travel to the other side of the world with this. The ocean disturbs that magical connection or some shit)
If you are trying to make an MMO, for the modern day MMO player and aren't going to include a way to help facilitate their ability to play and enjoy your game, this is going to be the only nail in the coffin that will keep the lid shut.
If there are only plans for certain regions to be starter regions and many other regions expected to be places the players expand out into, there is going to be a lot of travel back and forth between said starter regions and the expanded out regions before any sort of meaningful foot hold can be made in those places. In doing so players are going to be expected to spend most of their time traveling back and forth between locations.
The average player has about 2 hours to play a day, and as it stands to get from Kaltorhum to Korrin, or Windstead to Korrin, it takes about a half hour of just travel. Similar time to get from Winstead to Djinna, or Joeva to anywhere in the Jundark. This is with having mounts that have more than 150% movement speed. If you don't have one of those, it can take even longer.
This is going to be extremely unappealing to a lot of people. I understand at release, many players will not have a reason to expand farther than there starter region before they have the means of a faster mount or before other players can establish those foot holds, but for us testers, spending half an hour to over an hour just searching for a party, only to wait another half hour to get everyone gathered, then to find out that the camp is contested or taken or to have someone key like a cleric bard or tank DC.... The majority of our time is wasted due to the time it takes to get around the map.
So how can we solve this issue?
I propose a few options....
Airships: When a settlement becomes Town, they may build a structure that can connect to other Towns with said structure. Airships run on a schedule and while they ship is enroute, the whole ship is PvP Lawless ( To allow for sky pirates ), but as soon as the ship comes into the town limits PvP Lawless turns off immediately, without warning (you can use your mini map if you want a heads up) so there is a chance said pirates end up corrupt if they don't time their shenanigans properly. (Customs only allows what you can fit in your pockets so any materials and crates must be left behind) This would encourage people going out and trying to establish more settlement expansions. Because as it stands people are just sticking to the Riverlands for the most part leaving all the other areas to be occasionally visited.
Ancient Ruins: In every region there lies a single ancient ruin. Scholars are unsure as to what their intended purpose was but after some time and research ( a building being made at any settlement ) part of their use can be discovered. By utilizing the ancient glyphs found in the ruin a link can be opened connecting the glyphs on the site with the replica created at the settlement allowing for passage for a player to move from the replica to the ruins (not the other way around) but only if a player has encoded their essence (blood) into the Ancient site, requiring a player to have to travel to the Ancient Ruins and encode their essence to the device before the replica may be used (This is to promote exploration while also rewarding said exploration at the same time). Only one such building of this kind can be made per region ( so node sieges will likely be planned around this structure often ). Like other services this is a taxable service. For added 'fun' while the ruins themselves are not lawless, the areas around them could be. (This would also only work for Ancient Ruins on the same continent, you can't travel to the other side of the world with this. The ocean disturbs that magical connection or some shit)
If you are trying to make an MMO, for the modern day MMO player and aren't going to include a way to help facilitate their ability to play and enjoy your game, this is going to be the only nail in the coffin that will keep the lid shut.
0
Comments
https://ashesofcreation.wiki
Scientific cities offer teleportation within their vassal network, which can extend across seas, and also include islands.[1][4][3]
Flight paths between coastal settlements or settlements within specific regions.[1][5][6][7]
Airships between cities.[1] This was previously stated to be between scientific cities.[5][8][9]
Family summoning.[10]
vvvvvv
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Fast_travel
Fast travel should be extremely limited. I say no to Family summoning because exploitability. But you shouldn't have to be running the four corners of the world everyday to do basic stuff. That'll just turn it into a walk sim snore fest. Which is kind of the feeling I get at this point in alpha.
This is the whole reason for my post. It's getting, and will be getting worse, to he point where it's going to not feel worth testing if you are spending most of your time just walking around. New World had this problem and their world was much smaller. They added mounts and made fast travel easier and ever sense they have been having more and more people return to the game.
I'm not saying people should be able to teleport everywhere... and even in my teleport idea... it was one way travel.
I'm also super against family summoning. I get the intention of it... but it won't be used that way and will be extremely exploited.
They could put a lot of limits on it but it could lead to some interesting wartime gameplay.
40 minutes of doing nothing due to travel to do barely 20 minutes of content.
This issue needs to be addressed
TBH, this is all standard to open world MMORPG's. It isnt an issue with this game at all.
It's not going to get worse, it'll get better, there will be options for quicker travel options. I'm not a fan of teleportation. That's only rarely okay to me. Even if you only teleport one way that will massively break things, they already turned off the emberspring death teleport and you suggest an easier one.
This all depends on the feel of the game. Is it fast pace where you want people to be on for 30 minutes and run a dungeon or join a session style pvp match? Or do you want a dynamic open world that requires more of a commitment? Ashes seems to be split right now. They say they want the slow burn commitment, but currently have a feel of a fast burn session play with the slow burn tedium. NW is a fast pace session game. Nothing wrong with that, but that that's NW. It looks good but is shallow in everything else.
You should look up some L2 game play, I think there's even a private server out there you can join in on. That'll give you a much better look into what Ashes is trying to be, at least from what I can tell. Also AA of course if you didn't play that. L2 is a bit older so many gamers now might not have even heard of it.
You spent an hour trying to party and it fail. That's not unheard of even in games like WoW. I don't see the problem with spending 20minutes on travel to get to an area I want to be to do a thing I want to do. Even if it fails. I do see a problem having to run 20 minutes to get to a place to pick up a thing then run 20 times to drop off said thing or turn it into another thing, just to run 10 minutes to get to another place to do shit with said things then repeat 5,000 times... But traveling an hour to get to a area/zone/dungeon/raid to do content is fine, even if I have to wait when I'm there.
And if most of the time we spend when we do get to play is just traveling to place to place. ESPECIALLY if there are people in the game who's entire playstyle is ganking/griefing others, which this kind of game attracts, it's not going to last.
Cause imo the issue you described is solved by having a range of content within and around the dungeon/POI. Solo players should be able to farm outside the dungeon. Small groups should be able to farm the first few rooms. Weak full parties should farm midrooms and proper fully-geared parties should farm deeep in the dungeon.
That's roughly how L2's open world dungeon design worked and those dungeons would fill up quite nicely. If you were waiting for someone in your party - you'd just do the easier content and move deeper once you had your full stack.
And if rooms were taken - there's you pvx. And this pvx was stratified by group power by default, because a full party would veeeery rarely farm a weak room, cause that'd be a waste of their time.
You are literally nit picking specifics to a general problem like you are fixing the issue...
You also didn't answer the main question. Are there even places around Carphin that would support that kind of gameplay approach?
Cause if there are none - that is the issue.
Highwaymen Hills are a good example of what I was talking about. You can solo mobs outside of the core spot of the location. Then you have some 1-3* mobs in the courtyard that are easily fought by a smaller group, quite often even w/o a healer. And then there's proper 3* bois deeper in the buildings and behind them.
I went through this exact process back in P1. I solo farmed mobs on the outside. A dude invited me into a party of 2 and we started killing more mobs around us. We picked up a few solos that were coming up to the entrance of the courtyard. This allowed us to go inside and start contesting the starred mobs bit by bit. We then filled out our party and were confidently stealing mobs from other parties in the courtyard by simply outdpsing them.
We didn't go inside the buildings cause we were kinda underlvled and with only one cleric, but this is about the example of what I'm talking about.
This design works great, as long as it's implemented correctly and in each POI.
But besides all of that. Forget about Carphin. Say we were out in Korrin. Waiting for people to get there... because there are no settlements so no one is just hanging out there. When you find a group for that ... it's either half a group already there filling members or people who need to travel there.
And since there are no settlements anywhere within 20 minutes of that location.... you have to wait for them. The game is more waiting for people to travel and traveling at the moment than it is actually playing the game.
I'm personally against normal mobs even dropping full gear, but that's a whole separate discussion. And, at worst, the location should still support a range of gameplay styles with the same type of reward, but just at different pace of gaining it.
And this is an overall region/biome issue, that miiiight be solved with better questing/gatherables/mob placement updates later. Locations shouldn't be attracting people with only a single POI. It should be a collection of things that creates foot traffic.
Even better if the nearest nodes get commissions that would send people there, if the foot traffic has been real slow in the past few hours.
In other words, there are other solutions to these problems than just a bandaid of "fast travel/fast grouping/fast gearing".
It literally never crosses my mind that content stratification/ecology-drops-design could be so bad/early-implementation that you literally can't fall back to less powerful targets.
Which is ridiculous because it's not even like I didn't play a game where this exact thing would happen to weaker parties all the time, but even then it's not that there weren't fallbacks, it was just 'ok we'll take a break while waiting for the replacement instead of moving to the other camp'.
Anyways as Ludullu said, this is an area/ecology design issue. I may hate Glint, but it's not like the fallback mobs won't drop any of it.
You can just ignore me, I guess.
I'm coming from a different place, experience wise, and I'm not disagreeing with you.
If Ashes isn't providing multiple options for strength of content within an area, that's on them.
IF you were totally focused on only farming one enemy type/strength because you don't value the drops from other mobs, it would only be 'on you' if those drops were equivalent. Since presumably they're not, your feedback is 100.
I'm sorry.. I was replying to Ludullu. I think we both posted at the same time >_< I didn't see your post until now
Well... when you don't use it at all, that is.
And if I'm sitting on the page writing a reply to you, I don't see when posts are added to the page. Quoting back and forth just adds extra bloat to the replies and more junk people have to scroll though... which wasn't needed until this point >_>
It's even worse if there's several people in the discussion, as is often the case on these forums.
You are just derailing the topic at this point. It was a problem of travel time. 2 hours... with only 20 minutes of doing anything because we had to wait for HEALERS AND TANKS to travel to the group so we could fight mobs. Again.. you are looking for fixes to a specific gripe to explain away the actual problem. Finding replacements weren't an issue.. it was the waiting on them to get there. "Well you could have glint farmed while waiting" Doesn't explain away the issue. Risking death due to key members of the party doesn't help anyone. If I want glint... I get on my low level glint farming character and AoE lvl 1-6 mobs and make more than enough glint when I need it. I'm not looking to just farm glint and buy what I want. I'm looking to TEST THE CONTENT so I can provide feedback and find bugs. But when people have to spend most of their time WAITING for their group to do the group content.. it's an issue that needs to be solved before the game is released or it's going to join the graveyards of so many other games like this.
Not to mention they are starting marketing next month. If the game is like this people less invested are not going to want to continue and give the game so much bad rep it will be Crowfall and other similar MMOs all over again.
That was my entire point.
TPs will not save this design, because then people will complain about something else, cause the underlying design is trash.
L2 had teleports to locations. It did not stop the situations where you had to sit on your ass and wait for people to come to you, if you didn't want to farm slightly different mobs.
I'd fucking bet that if we got TPs to locations, the next thing people would ask is for TPs DEEP INTO locations, because now even if their partymates/replacements quickly TP to the dungeon - they still gotta get to the end of the dungeon, where the good content is. And your party can't just go outside and meet them cause then you'll lose your spot.
Cause that is exactly what happened in L2 as well, with later updates adding TP options deep into dungeons
I bring up L2 design because it's literally what Steven is going for. He wants grind spots with parties farming them. That is L2 in a nutshell.
Of course you're free to say that this design is trash and that Steven should redesign the entire premise of his pve, but I doubt that'll ever happen. And that doubt is exactly why I always try to frame my feedback within the confines of the vision.
The PoI is a place where you teleport to. NOTHING IS THERE. The area around the PoI could be lawless to promote open world content. The location of the PoI would be some place not directly next to any content PoI but make a means of travel to locations far away. It's a ONE WAY trip. So people aren't teleporting wherever they need to go. YOU CAN'T BRING MATERIALS OR CRATES/CARAVANS. This doesn't eliminate open world travel, it just eases the burden that no fast travel exist in the game outside of death to a home point.
If you don't get it after this... please just bow out of the conversation.