A Long Time MMO Player's Fears About Ashes

A little about myself, I have been playing WoW since vanilla and have played many MMOs during my time playing WoW. Some examples are Wildstar, Old Republic, Runescape, BDO, Rift, Archage, Guild Wars 2, Blade and soul, Albion online, Age of Conan, Lost Ark (Through a VPN), Firefall, Maplestory 1 and 2, and Midwinter.

I also have done some of the harder content in these games i have listed, in most of them i have atleast reached End game to a extent. In WoW i have ran about 5 top 100 US guilds and at one time ran 2 at a time with alts i also was in the world first race in early MoP with a guild called TM, in Runescape i attempted to get one of the first quest capes when old school came out and i managed to get one of the first ones, in BDO managed to level multiple characters to soft cap and got most of my boss gear and was able to put the grind in to have a decent about of money in the game and dabbled in its pvp.

Safe to say i probably have left some out, but in general i have tried a lot of MMOs and have been let down many times or have experienced MMOs that play really great and have many great core systems but completely miss the mark on what i enjoy the most in a MMO and why i always go back to WoW over anything else.

For the sake of trying to make this not to long formed ill list my fears first.

Fear 1: The PvE its going to end up being very watered down.

Fear 2: The sacrifice for having pvp in pve content is going to encourage a lot of gate keeping play style over world bosses

Fear 3: By not having meaningful dungeons or raids that can be logged or kept track of through dps meters or other addons the replay value will go away quickly after obtaining whatever item you are looking for.

So ill go over my first fear, that the pve will be watered down. Reason i say this is because from most of what i have heard so far about ashes it is is going to be 40 man content for the harder bosses. On paper more people has always made ppl say its harder content but i have always experienced that the hardest bosses come from well tuned fights and with 40 ppl you start getting into the realm of hyper class stacking and almost always the fights are super easy or just really long bc the Devs in hopes of having a harder fight just add on more HP instead of having meaningful mechanics. A good Example of 40 mans failing would be current classic wow where now that ppl went into it class stacking the content falls over quickly and really anyone could kill all of BWL on a fresh toon with blues bc the bosses are designed for 40 and lack any real mechanics, btw in BDO almost all of the open world bosses are like this too if you go and just tag the boss and no nothing you are still very likely to get loot and the boss itself is a joke and un-fun.

So with that being said what do i consider a meaningful and hard boss to kill, almost always i gravitate to WoW for these meaningful boss encounters and a few examples i have to give are, KJ in legion, Helya in legion, LK in ICC, Unaut in BFA, Mekka in BFA, and Black Hand in WoD. there is many more bosses but for sake of trying to keep this short will go over these.

KJ, Helya, LK, Unaut all require you to keep all 20 of your raiders alive throughout the fight or it is most likely a wipe because of how well tuned these bosses were, and all of them were Extremely satisfying to defeat because of this challenge. And really this challenge only comes from how well tuned the bosses are and i dont see 40mans doing that because in a 20man raid if you mess up your usually really important to the fight no matter what class you are playing, but in a 40man it has to be tuned in a sense that a guild can even get 40 ppl together and because of that the skill requirement has to be lower and therefore on the design side the boss has to be more one dimensional. And its important to add that in 40man raids in Classic or open worlds bosses in almost any game i have played it really feels like a i do not matter at all and what i do will not change the outcome of the fight, which means i could go afk and i probably will still get the same reward that the ppl that stayed trying got.

Its easy to say that the loot master wont give you a item if your afk or not trying on the boss BUT if there is no dps meter or no logs to tell how well i was performing during the fight while others were focused on what they were doing how will anyone really know i was not trying on the kill?

Fear 2: pvp and pve together will force pve to take massive sacrifices for gameplay and encourage gatekeeping.

Important that i explain what i mean by gate keeping, what i mean by it is that people that started out the game grinding first or did there research on the game and leveled faster and geared faster than others can then use there guild to lock down important spawns of bosses and keep others from getting these items and can inflate prices on items that they took control of and either force a player base to join them or be at a permanent dis advantage.

A bad example of this would be devilsuar mafia in WoW classic, which most would say would line up with exactly what i am talking about but it does not because at the end of the day the pants and gloves were only 2 slots of gear and did not matter that much because there was better gear in the game from MC already or gear very close to as good.

But in ashes from what i have seen these bosses will drop complete legendaries or components to legendaries that will not be obtained through other means and with just a little bit of data mining and having ppl take shifts camping spawns and a big enough guild you can make it so that you will get 90% of the kills and have a gear lead to muscle out anyone else that trys to beat your guild on the spawn camp.

Which the most likely outcome like in most others MMOs that have a tag able world boss the 2 or 3 best guilds on the server will have a agreement that they will not kill each other to maintain complete control over the spawns not allowing for any other guild to really catch up.

IMO this game play is considered gate keeping and for a lot of people they want to feel like they are reaching a goal and for many that goal is to make your character as strong as possible but want to achieve that goal playing with there friends or else the game will feel un-fun and sadly this style of world boss design encourages the idea of having to join whatever is the strongest guild on your server just to get tags and that guild is not always likely to take all your friends with you.

Fear 3: By not having meaningful dungeons or raids that can be logged or kept track of through dps meters or other addons the replay value will go away quickly after obtaining whatever item you are looking for.

So in WoW one of the biggest things that have made it a massive success for many years is there raids, and part of that is the competition within the boss itself as you compete in dps against others in your guild to show that you deserve your raid spot or to show others around you that you are improving you also use Logs to compete on a much larger scale.

For example lets say i have all of my BiS gear on my character but i dont enjoy PVP and crafting and gold is not a big thing i care about, so what content do i do besides the same raid bosses the answer is simple i just do those bosses again and again. But as a dps player i dont know how much dmg my gear is really giving me i dont know how much im improving i dont know how well i did this kill of the boss vs my last because both times i lived and death is the only metric to judge how well i am doing. At this point i have no reason to continue to play this game after i got the best gear for my character until more content comes out and if the answer is that the content will just come out fast enough that the player wont out pace the content, i will just say that i have yet to see any MMO out pace the player.

Best part is that this problem has a VERY simple solution, just let the players compete against eachother in PvE, because to a lot of players we love PvE in games way more than PVP and really enjoy the sense of mastering a boss fight and mastering a class on that fight and trying to beat the other people playing your class in other guilds that in some cases are on the other side of the world. ANY MMO can give a sandbox pvp experience with some Bosses to kill but only a FEW can make those bosses meaningful outside of the loot that drops on them and PVE competition is a completely unique experience to MMOs, PVP is not.

I will say this i do look forward to what Ashes has and i just hope that the game comes with some instanced content that is tuned to a very difficult level that rewards the correct gear for its level of difficulty and that there is a system that allows players to compete with other players in a pve setting.

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BlackBrony

hansen22 wrote: »

@BlackBrony You quote me too fast - I need to edit my content since my english is not my original language.

Anyway legendary mounts could be rare or legendary, fine, but flying mounts should most have access to which was my point earlier, because like base jumps in Trollveggen here in Norway, many enjoy that feeling of flying especially in an mmo.

It's basic economics. Scarcity increases value, even if it cannot be bought.
If everyone has a flying mount, then mounts aren't special.
If 10 players have it, when you see a player flying with that mount, you're struck. You look up and say "there's my mayor!" or "there's my guild leader".

Also, AoC it's open world pvp. 3 dimensions make it a lot harder to gank and create conflict.
Also traveling. Just hit autorun, fly, avoid any issues and get to the other side of the map.

Aardvark

Keep in mind there are 2 types of pvpers
1) the ones that love arenas and castle sieges and are ok with a fair fight
2) the ones that only want an unfair fight to annoy someone they never should have been fighting in the 1st place.

Tons of open world pvpers but not all fall into group 2. If given the chance most of them would much rather camp a nonpvper than fight someone who has a chance to win

hansen22

They will have limited or very few teleport/gate transport systems in Ashes, @BlackBrony . I believe that flying mounts will have a key role how to visit new Nodes. And when I look at the world map it is a huge occean, and we have ship building. So flying mounts should be consider important and more common in this world, and it`s not the only method how to approach a new continent. Items like mounts will probably be different in rarity though from common green to uncommon blue, rare purple, orange legendary.
My point is I don`t see an issue that most have access to an uncommon or common flying mount. I know that Dragon are legendary or rare, but we won`t see a dragon army by air anytime soon since legendary mounts were unique and very difficult to acquire.

Lafi

hansen22 wrote: »

They will have limited or very few teleport/gate transport systems in Ashes, @BlackBrony

this is because distance is meant to matter. especially considering PvE trash loot.
the further you travel to sell them the more money you make.
teleport and fast travel reduce the value of many of the games' systems.

hansen22 wrote: »

I believe that flying mounts will have a key role how to visit new Nodes.

nope

hansen22 wrote: »

And when I look at the world map it is a huge occean, and we have ship building. So flying mounts should be consider important and more common in this world

this is justification as to why flying mounts are not required to exist on a mass scale.
there are other forms of travel that are designed to work hand in hand with other core systems.

Aardvark

Well I still have a fear about flying mounts... I want that flying raccoon butterfly thing and fear I won’t be one the 10 people with access to one

Songcaller

When I was twelve and playing my first MMO I said 'I want to be the best Raider and get the best stuff.'
The Guild Leader replied: 'You will never be the Best Raider or get the Best Stuff by wanting it, you must become it.'
Thus, throughout all my MMOs since, I knuckle down and do the best I can. Whatever comes, comes.

Aardvark

Neurath wrote: »

When I was twelve and playing my first MMO I said 'I want to be the best Raider and get the best stuff.'
The Guild Leader replied: 'You will never be the Best Raider or get the Best Stuff by wanting it, you must become it.'
Thus, throughout all my MMOs since, I knuckle down and do the best I can. Whatever comes, comes.

Except the way you get these isn’t though effort or skill it’s through politics

BlackBrony

Aardvark wrote: »

Neurath wrote: »

When I was twelve and playing my first MMO I said 'I want to be the best Raider and get the best stuff.'
The Guild Leader replied: 'You will never be the Best Raider or get the Best Stuff by wanting it, you must become it.'
Thus, throughout all my MMOs since, I knuckle down and do the best I can. Whatever comes, comes.

Except the way you get these isn’t though effort or skill it’s through politics

NO. Misinformation.
If you have the most quests done in a religion node, you get higher chances of being elected mayor.
If you have tons of gold, you can bid to become mayor. > economic node
Military node is an Last Man Standing fight, you win, you get to be mayor.

So, the only node that it's about politics/fame/reputation is Scientific, which is democratic.

The other ones you can buy your way in, fight your way in or grind your way in.

Also, 1 month cycle for mayors.

Songcaller

I reckon you can win big with the Masses in a Scientific Node if you grind to become Economic Mayor, pack up, move on, quest to become Religious Mayor, pack up, move on, fight to become Military Mayor, pack up, move on and prove you have the biggest brains, the biggest pockets and the biggest balls in the election campaign for Scientific Mayor. Mwuhahahaha.

Aardvark

In the video they said you vote for mayor. Are you saying that is only true for 25% of the nodes ? On the topic can you be a citizen of more than 1 node at a time? Like one of each type? As I suppose last man standing would be earning it. As for buying it I sure hope you can’t become maybe just by hiring a gold farmer.

Songcaller

Nah you can't be a citizen of more than 1 node at a time. You'd have to pack up and move on. There will be cooldowns too.

You definitely fight for Military Mayor. Most of my knowledge is around Bounty Hunter and Military Nodes.

I was joshin' with the whole plan above but it could be possible. I do not know the prerequisites for the other nodes. I've only considered Military Node since I learnt Bounty Hunter requires Military Node, but I've branched out a little since Steven said they may allow Bounty Hunters from emissaries sent from a Military Metropolis. Yet I feel every man willing to help level a Military Node would be inside the Metropolis anyway.

Seethrowwar

had to go handle stuff IRL but just wanted to point out something real quick that alot are kinda saying which is not my point at all, First i am not against pvp and i encourage it as a game play feature and dont mind it my issue with pvp is just the zerg guild mentality that actually plagued games like archage early on with the streamer guilds, which with a 10k server cap and you can almost say for certain a few servers will be almost owned by streamers.

Also just because i did a lot in WoW does not mean i have never played other games and to the BDO stuff its safe to say bc of a lack of good PvE progression system the game has been dying out in the west for years, bc pvp players tend to change games very fast and for a lot of PvE focused players there is nothing to do besides grind mobs that are a joke to kill. Sadly with a lot of great MMOs over the years the end game PvE has been lacking and the PvE player base just goes back to WoW and to say WoW does not have good game design is naive at best, and its also safe to say that Final Fantasy is doing great with a huge focus on good raid encounters and boss design.

If all MMO players wanted was PVP, we would all be playing BDO or Blade and Soul or any other pvp focused MMO the thing is a fully PVP focused MMO has died time and time again or lost most of its players in a month after release. Dont get me wrong though i do think a MMO dies when its only PvE focused like wildstar did but its really important when labeling a game with PvX aka saying its both you need to make sure its challenging on both ends or else its just another PVP focused MMO and i personally have seen like 10 of those fail, and in the case of BDO its almost all PVP at end game, and because of that i know a lot of ppl that get BIS gear in all slots and just quit the game because what is the point of playing it after you finish progression of your character when you dont care about PVP, and BDO is a great game but its completely lacking what a lot of players enjoy doing in MMOs.

Its important to consider why WoW has been big for so long and not just focus on its short comings in the recent years and also pay attention to games like final fantasy that is the most successful MMO in recent years, and at the end of the day they are the complete package. why cant ashes be a complete package too, is it that we dont trust the Devs to be able to do it?

Seethrowwar

Lafi wrote: »

lemme break this down cos this is a loaded message

Seethrowwar wrote: »

Lafi to the last thing you said i have raided before logs were big and such and tbh content is easy its really who you are playing against, to assume that i rely on logs to see how to play is just odd. I look at logs so i can beat others and compare its more of a collaborative effort to challenge yourself to do better. For anyone that looks a logs to get a cheat sheet on how to play a game they are already behind the curve in theorycrafting and parsing always..

100% fair point, however at the end of the day logs and parsers are not ONLY used for this purpose.
i PERSONALLY support the concept of meters for your own performance, or some in-game way to check dps and rotations etc.
however tools that literally hold your hand through fights are just a 'no' from me. i'm a human, let me mess up like a human!

Seethrowwar wrote: »

To the first note you said thats dungeon content and not raid content that just sounds like a redesign of mythic + its not exactly new content or ground breaking.

please understand i never meant that there is NO raid content.
content is being designed for teams of 8, 16 and up to 40 (yes four, zero) players!
there is 100% raids.
i didn't play WoW, i hated the dated graphics, the horrific use of addons and its afk-like content from a non-wow player's point of view.

Seethrowwar wrote: »

And to the gatekeeping thing most games that have heavy gate keeping on world content dont promote good play it only promotes good control of logistics and recruiting it becomes a battle of numbers and not of skill, the ideal world is that all guilds will run really cool and interesting tactics but even in wow classic that has millions of ppl playing there is only 1 or 2 guilds that even try world pvp tactics on a massive scale and all the others just zerg pvp with numbers and remove all sense of skill .

every time i hear about WoW's PvP its negative and dead. memes about how WoW struggles to pull of 10v10 are in my ears near weekly from friends.
i hope that you respect when i say, this isnt WoW.
this is Ashes of Creation and i am more than willing to asusme that there will be more blood spilled daily than in a week of WoW battlegrounds simply because the game incentivises and in certain ways rewards it.
you've touched BDO you said. it's best content is GvGs. the 'BDO golden age' was guilds SLAUGHTERING eachother at guild bosses to gamble better gear advantages for the next siege.

you note Zerg pvp. players cannot stack together, 250-300 people is going to be a huge target and you wont be able to keep them all tight and alive. people will be picked off and spiked. tactics will be VERY real. the posistion of your front line will be huge. your rogue's target selection decisions will be huge. where your mages throw their AOEs will be huge.
simply because there isnt going to be enough room to avoid everything.

i do recall that within a lot of largescale combat there are also sub-objectvies that not only promote splitting of forces but may also require it!

no source on that i just recall it !

i say again though, this isn't WoW !

Umm call it not wow all you want its a target based MMO with abilities that have been shared over many other MMOs it plays almost exactly the same as WoW or 20 other MMOs in combat the only thing different is the systems on how to engage in combat, but even in wow like in classic there is 300 on 300 all the time on the high pop servers for fighting over world buffs but the issue with this is that only a few guilds give a shit about tactics like APEs and tbh its not very complicated stuff same for golden age of BDO it really was not super complicated it was just zerging and end of the day yeah a 250 player group could beat a 300 player group if playing better but a 100 player group cant beat a 300 player group and this has been the case in most MMOs including BDO golden age or archage, really to referance just battleground in wow shows your lack of understanding of the pvp in wow. Stop using the argument all i know is WoW its just one of the many game i stated and is very annoying, just because wow has a good pve element Ashes should not because that would be bad, why would it be bad?

Noaani

Seethrowwar wrote: »

A little about myself, I have been playing WoW since vanilla and have played many MMOs during my time playing WoW. Some examples are Wildstar, Old Republic, Runescape, BDO, Rift, Archage, Guild Wars 2, Blade and soul, Albion online, Age of Conan, Lost Ark (Through a VPN), Firefall, Maplestory 1 and 2, and Midwinter.

I am very suspect of posters that preface a post by giving what essentially amounts to an MMO gameplay resume.

I find it odd that with all of this experience, the only game you are able to go in to in any depth is WoW.

To your three points from the OP.
Point 1, the way WoW handled things does not make it the only way to handle things.

Yeah, WoW 40 player raids were kind of shit, but that is because WoW content was kind of shit. You say you played both Rift and Age of Conan - each of these games had more in depth raid content than WoW. While they didn't have 40 player raid content, the raid content they did have should be able to tell you that the way WoW did things was almost never the best way to do things.

I could understand your issue if you phrased it "I fear that Intrepid would make the same mistakes with 40 player raid content that Blizzard made", but you didn't. If you did phrase it like that though, I would then point out to you that the core team of senior game designers at Intrepid consist of developers from EQ, EQ2, Planetside, Planetside 2, Vanguard and Star Wars Galaxies - among others. It wasn't until recently that they even hired a developer that had worked at Blizzard. Suffice to say, the way Blizzard do things is not the way Intrepid will do things.

Ashes will also have 20 player raid content.

Point 2, this will be hard to do.

The way content in Ashes will be set up, there will be the potential for essentially 5 clusters of end game content per server - based around each of the 5 metropolis nodes.

This means that in order for a guild to block out gear from other players on the server, they would need to block it out in 5 different corners of teh game world. In some games, even this is still possible - however, one needs to remember that Ashes doesn't have fast travel like other games do.

This means that if a spotter sees an encounter has spawned, and then alerts the guild, the guild will still be potentially several hours away from actually getting to the location. That is several hours that competing guilds - or even entire competing nodes - can attack and slow down that guild, giving others time to take on the encounter.

Essentially, the only real way a guild would be able to completely block top end content from the rest of the server is if the rest of that server suffers from a severe case of apathy - in which case I don't think that many people will care if that guild does maintain it's monopoly.

point 3, this is a point I agree with you on, but not necessarily for the same reasons. I have been suggesting to Intrepid for a long while now that they implement a combat tracker in to the game themselves, rather than opening it up to third parties to develop one (which will happen whether Intrepid allow it or not).

The suggestion I have made is for them to implement it as a guild reward, but one that is only able to be selected at one point in guild progression - and that is as a choice along side tools that would be useful in other parts of the game (and as it is a part of guild progression, it is also limiting guild size if you take it).

I have also suggested that this combat tracker only track combat of members of the guild that have selected it.

What this suggestion does is eliminate most of the percieved negative aspects of combat trackers by keeping them out of the hands of people that don't understand their value. It means people running pick up groups do not need to worry that others may be tracking and assessing their performance. However, it does both of those things while still allowing players and guilds that understand their value to still use them to their fullest potential, which benefits the guild, the community and the developers.

A side effect that this will have is that raid guilds wil have to understand that when recruiting a new player, there will be an amount of training that needs to go in to them. With the exception of raid guilds that only recruit from other raid guilds (which is common in WoW, but rare in other games, and likely won't exist in Ashes by the end of the games first year), there will have to be an understanding that a new recruit can't have their combat parsed until they are in the guild, but also that the recruit would never have had the opportunity to work on inproving themself until they are in the guild.

This means guilds will have to assume a level of training for each new recruit, and will have to recruit based on player personality more than player performance, as performance will be unknow upon recruiting.

While some players coming from other games may see this as a negative, I see it as nothing but a positive, as it should be up to raid guilds to provide some training to their recruits.

tugowar

To the last post, TLDR

Nonetheless, I will still say, you’re skeptical of everyone no matter what they say

thorgar runemaster

just saw some interview with the dev and all is goin' to be gud don't worry we are going to have a first look with the alpha

HazardNumberSeven

1. I disagree, the PvE I've seen so far already seems way more immersive and interesting than current MMOs.
2. Yes it will force sacrifices. I love it and am looking forward to it. PvE only puts me to sleep, I like having to stay alert and ready for anything! Exciting!
3. I just don't see it at all. It's totally uninteresting and boring to me. I couldn't care less about someone doing more DPS than someone else on a PvE encounter. I'm actually drawn to this game because it seems to not be catering to that type of playstyle, and that's great news for me because I think that type of mentality is adds nothing to a game. Instead, I see it as a symptom of there being nothing to do in WoW that people resort to such brain-numbing and repetitive behaviors. I don't see it as content, I see it as denial, lol... That's just my opinion, but I share it to bring attention to how what one person thinks is 'bad' another person thinks is amazing.

mcstackerson

1. I don't think there is a reason to assume this.
2. This is why I backed the game. I want this with the caveat that others can still compete with the guild (which I think they will). This one of the things I like to see in MMOs. I don't like it when the game's progression is just a checklist. I prefer it when I have to work to overcome obstacles and pvp is my favorite way to be challenged. The best part is how these events can contribute to the feeling of a living world and create stories that make up the server's history.
3. There will still be tracking around dungeon runs that keep track of how well groups perform so I'm not sure if this is an issue. They plan on having leader boards around this and based of asmon's interview, sounds like groups will receive harder content as well as greater rewards for performing better.

Namil

From reading your initial post it sounds like you are generally uninspired, it sounds like Ashes of Creation isn't the game for you and not every game is made for every player. The heart of this game is the interactions that come from all elements co-existing in the open world whether that be PvE or PvP and that's something players will need to accommodate for.

The gate-keeping gameplay you talk about will no doubt be a factor in AOC as it is in many games, but groups of players can't prevent an entire area such as a boss zone from being absolutely inaccessible to the rest of the population because of the corruption system and the subsequent consequences that come from repeatedly killer other players, in my opinion the worst type of gatekeeping in an MMO is requiring players to have certain addons just to be able to participate in a high-level raiding guild and because of this I'm very supportive of there being no addons. Also, with the world being so dynamic and ever-changing, the points of interest where there may be valuable bosses and monsters to kill will change and there is potential for many nodes to provide these without scarcity across the entire world.

I think preventing parsing addons creates a lot more personal player agency, instead of worrying about how you parse and what gear you're wearing to maximise your DPS, players can actually focus on mechanics and other aspects in the world that they can enjoy. I am a WoW player and I do enjoy the game but raiding at Heroic and Mythic difficulty and requiring addons like Deadly Boss Mods, Details and Exorcus Raid tools to participate and not be at a disadvantage was a major turn off for me, aswell as the fact that it's impossible to entirely balance all classes made me feel like I was making a wrong choice for playing a class I actually enjoyed rather than one that parsed well consistently despite me doing mechanically well on a fight.

Realistically it sounds like the game you're looking for is the generic carrot on a stick MMO like World of Warcraft, it doesn't sound like you want to embrace the systems AOC is advertising. There is a lot more to a High-Fantasy MMORPG than just gear and parsing competition.

With no disrespect, you do sound like a parsing drone and your enjoyment seems to derive from competitiveness rather than from the game having engaging systems. If they made the game more in line with what you're asking then it wouldn't be the unique experience they've advertised and I would personally prefer that not to be the case

BlackBrony

Namil wrote: »

From reading your initial post it sounds like you are generally uninspired, it sounds like Ashes of Creation isn't the game for you and not every game is made for every player. The heart of this game is the interactions that come from all elements co-existing in the open world whether that be PvE or PvP and that's something players will need to accommodate for.

The gate-keeping gameplay you talk about will no doubt be a factor in AOC as it is in many games, but groups of players can't prevent an entire area such as a boss zone from being absolutely inaccessible to the rest of the population because of the corruption system and the subsequent consequences that come from repeatedly killer other players, in my opinion the worst type of gatekeeping in an MMO is requiring players to have certain addons just to be able to participate in a high-level raiding guild and because of this I'm very supportive of there being no addons. Also, with the world being so dynamic and ever-changing, the points of interest where there may be valuable bosses and monsters to kill will change and there is potential for many nodes to provide these without scarcity across the entire world.

I think preventing parsing addons creates a lot more personal player agency, instead of worrying about how you parse and what gear you're wearing to maximise your DPS, players can actually focus on mechanics and other aspects in the world that they can enjoy. I am a WoW player and I do enjoy the game but raiding at Heroic and Mythic difficulty and requiring addons like Deadly Boss Mods, Details and Exorcus Raid tools to participate and not be at a disadvantage was a major turn off for me, aswell as the fact that it's impossible to entirely balance all classes made me feel like I was making a wrong choice for playing a class I actually enjoyed rather than one that parsed well consistently despite me doing mechanically well on a fight.

Realistically it sounds like the game you're looking for is the generic carrot on a stick MMO like World of Warcraft, it doesn't sound like you want to embrace the systems AOC is advertising. There is a lot more to a High-Fantasy MMORPG than just gear and parsing competition.

With no disrespect, you do sound like a parsing drone and your enjoyment seems to derive from competitiveness rather than from the game having engaging systems. If they made the game more in line with what you're asking then it wouldn't be the unique experience they've advertised and I would personally prefer that not to be the case

I agree with all of this. We need interaction, friction and risks. We need not being able to isolate ourselves from other players and their decisions.

Child Item