Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
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.
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.
Respecting peoples time
Keith
Member
A lot of people have responsibilities outside of playing video games. If the requirement to maintaining gear that you get through repairs is deep on top of requiring u to be around for raids. Honestly I think this game is gonna appeal to a very small player base. People want a good game and they also want a game that they don't need to be on it 8 hours a day just to maintain the gear they already obtained. This will affect all people who have time restraints but want to be able to progress and enjoy end game pve/pvp.
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Comments
I wouldn't worry about the repair requirement being a limiting factor. You won't have to be around for raids because mostly everything can be traded. Others in your node/guild/community/server will be able to get those things and you'll be able to trade/buy them doing the things you do have time for.
Also you won't have to get the mats exclusively from a raid, there's sure to be dungeons and other ways to get the same mats.
If your play time is so limited you could even prey on caravans. One of them could be full of the mats you covet! Join a guild and they'll gladly keep you repaired in case they need you for a fight.
It's all good.
The game will require a heavy time-investment though, as it's an MMO. If you can only play casually I am sure there will still be place for you, this isn't an esport .. it's an immersive world. I think it'll be all sweet.
However, they have taken steps to provide activities for people that can't play 8h a day.
However2, don't want to eat the cake and have it. Be realistic about the games you chose to play.
Personal I dont have time for 8h a day, and I am a hardocore open world PvPr.
I also got back to uni even tho I work. I can always go back to some other shitty mmorpg, if I dont have time to do what I want in Ashes.
Saying that the customer target is very small is not true my friend, and the devs know that, otherwise they wouldn't publish a sub only, no p2w game, without charging box price and expansions.
There is a massive amount of people wanting a meaningful mmo.
Steven said that it is a gold sink mechanic, so that as players approach max lv they shouldn't rest on their treasures and hammer down up-comers, without and drawback.
I agree there is a massive amount. We've all been starving for a decade and a half now. It is still in fact small, in comparison to the gaming market as a whole, most of which is currently consumed by mobas and mobile games. MMO markets are niche and always have been, especially MMOs with a PvP focus.
Look at Ultima Online, or EVE the two most popular examples. Very popular as far as MMOs go, but no where near as popular as far as "gaming" goes. My point being there are far more casual-friendly game genres.
At it's peak the most mainstream "mmo" (and I use that term lightly, because it is at this point the antithesis of what a traditional mmo was) World of Warcraft had 12 million subs, which is HUGE for an MMO. Their entire game plan was to market to as wide an audience as possible and make their game as accessible as possible to every single person on the planet. But we can see what happens when you try to please everyone.
Compare that to popular gaming titles outside the MMO sphere, like..
Pokemon Go with 147 million players.
Minecraft with 126 million
LoL with 115 million (and 8 million concurrent players a day!)
So we can see MMOs are quite niche, even the biggest one.
AoC is a far superior MMO concept, but unfortantely that makes it far less marketable. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, in fact I think it's good. It means it's being made for us, the people who want a true MMO, and not for the people who don't want an MMO and would demand changes (like dungeon finder, fast travel, etc).
I am over-tired and just drank a lot of coffee. Hope I didn't come across as rude at all.
I am very confident there will be a place for casual play and you won't feel inconvenienced at all. It's very difficult to imagine how, because WoW has been a benchmark for MMOs for so long, but a lot of us are pre-WoW and this MMO is a return to the genre traditions. People are going to need to get used to not using WoW as the benchmark because this game is nothing like it.
I think it would ease your concerns a lot if you checked out some of the interviews Steven did recently on youtube/twitch and also to browse through the wiki and check out all the non-competitive options that are also supported.
I mean... You can spend all your time crafting, or running a tavern or whatever, and if they cater to roleplayers and purely economic/crafting playstyles, it sort of goes without saying if you're willing to still raid (even casually) you're going to be pretty rich and powerful. I wouldn't worry about it. It's all about teamwork too, people will support you because you're an additional, competent person.
I don't think you have thought this through too much.
The entire system of item degredation and repair is the best thing that a casual player could hope for.
Put simply, the more a player plays, the more they have to repair. The more a player takes on harder content, the more they have to repair.
What the system will likely do is see players use equipment that is appropriate for the content. You won't see a raider wearing top end raid gear in a pick up group, because why would they?
If you leave and then come back 6 months later, rather than everyone being 6 months ahead of you in gear (that in a game like WoW is literally impossible to make up), they spent most of that 6 months repairing the gear they had, rather than getting better stuff. It may take you a while to catch up still (or it may not), but at least the gap that exists won't be very big at all.
That's what excites me most about the system!
It's actually more respectful of our time than the current trend of treadmill-gear that never ends and can never be completed/caught up to.
Hate to tell you this but “more time spent = more power” is exactly what it means to respect players’ time
It's great gold sink, it supports crafters and the economy, and it means you won't be able to use your best gear all of the time. If your best set get worn out, that is OK, you will have spare set to use in the mean time. Then periodically you will take your broken sets all at once to the crafter you usually work with and have them all repaired. These are all fantastic things, hopefully none of them change under the guaranteed pressure to make it all more casual.
I did that in Ultima Online all the time. Had all my fancy armors and swords in my armory in my castle, and just wore mediocre replaceable stuff while out in the world. Good enough to function in, but not something I had to freak out about if it was lost or damaged.
Most MMO's use a system of binding equipment to reduce the life of the equipment and reduce flooding the market for the equipment. The system sucks as not very many people want to vendor trash all the gear that they have outgrown.
Ashes uses a system with very few bound items. Instead, gear will need to be salvaged to get the raw materials to repair gear. A high repair cost is necessary to keep all of the spawned gear moving out of the game for a healthy economy. That high repair cost may not feel very high as all that you may be doing is salvaging the low quality gear to pay it.
Yeah i agree with this and also we have to test it out to see what the rates are and give our feedback once we get in to testing
How much you play or how much you wear it? If I farm mats in all blues will my legendaries still degrade ?
I think gear will be degrading when it's used or upon death, so if you're storing it away safely it should be perfectly fine.
I don't think all gear pieces will degrade from any activity. You don't use a sword to mine mithril ore, and you don't exactly damage your armor while mining it. I highly doubt there will be a real time timer by which gear degrades.
By using a piece of equipment it means you are using it for its designed purpose. If you are using a blue sword and you don't have that legendary equiped then the legendary will not degrade by simply being in your inventory.
The point of having degrading equipment from usage is to promote gathering, processing and crafting activities and keep them alive. The point of needing actual materials to repair items instead of just gold is there to do the same.
There is a quote somewhere from Steven or Jeff that you won't be using legendary equipment for your day to day activities as they:
1. Are REALLY REALLY HARD to obtain
2. Require extremely rare materials to forge (if forged from a recipe and not a direct item drop, which is a possibility as well)
3. Require the same extremely rare materials to repair
All 3 of the above are by design because they want such items to be hard to maintain.
Now, how much of these rare materials you will need to repair said legendary/unique legendary item will most probably depend on how much durability it has lost:
90/100 durability requiring 20 mithril ore (or insert another even more rare fantasy ore), rubies, leather, sharpening stones etc
50/100 durability requiring 60, and all other supporting materials like the above
10/100 durability requiring even more materials
That's at least what makes the most sense to me in principle (the numbers above are examples, not real numbers).
That might have been off-topic but whatever.
I honestly wouldn't worry about it. The devs will be taking people with less time into consideration, and your friends and allies will aid you in your journey. I, for one, hope they allow for high level players to assist lower level players in some capacity, as I've always enjoyed helping others, be it power-leveling, hanging out and dropping buffs on groups for a few hours (and saving/rezing), or even doing drive-by buffs on noobs. (I also always loved twinking--that was one of my favorite things about EQ!).
I was always way far behind everyone else in Everquest, but I still enjoyed it thoroughly and made tons of friends along the way. Same thing with DAOC's PvP. The more time you spent, the more powerful you were. I was never a top Realm Rank (PvP rank) player, which means I was always fighting against people more powerful than me... but I still had tons of fun and often ran around with people who WERE high Realm Rank.
Manage your in-game time wisely, and make good use of whatever help your friends/guildies give you, and you'll be just fine. I already know I'm not going to be a top-tier player, at least until the game has aged 7-10 months. Even then, maybe not. But I don't care. As long as I'm having fun and I find a great guild with great people, the game will be a blast.
Just my 2c.