I know you believe that 1-3 guaranteed instanced single boss encounters per guild would be good for the health of the game but I hold the opposite belief. I believe that it actually cuts down on the amount of lifespan the game could have through open world interactions and is generally not good for the game. When the devs say that the world is dangerous and unforgiving and difficult and you need to compete with people it doesn't jive with me to have 1-3 guaranteed boss kills a week. Because that's what they are after the first few weeks and all the youtube videos start getting released and yadda yadda. We will agree to disagree with this particular issue.
Just because an encounter is in an instance, that doesn't mean it is a guaranteed kill.
It is guaranteed content, but not guaranteed rewards.
If there is no guaranteed content, that means there will only be content for 2 or 3 guilds, which means anyone wanting to actually play the PvE aspect of the game that is not in one of those guilds will have no choice but to go to another game (in much the same way as if you don't like the PvP, you will go to another game).
The only way I would say that it is ok for there to be no guaranteed content (not guaranteed rewards - content) is if there is enough open world raid content for 25 guilds to participate at the same time, and enough group content for 200 guilds to participate at the same time.
Less than that and your lack of content will see you with a lack of subscribers.
This is where we part ways again. It is guaranteed content and rewards because youtube videos for handholding purposes come out over time and the bosses become farm after a few nights of attempts at the absolute most. 1% of the player population actually works out how to kill bosses in games like WoW and FF and the other 99% ride the coattails of other peoples success.
This sounds like an open world game that won't last very long because everybody will have gear after a few months after reaching max level if your vision became reality. It doesn't work very well if resources aren't scarce and fought over. Seeing people with S grade gear was always insane on my server in L2 during my duration of playing retail, not many people had it and you were JEALOUS. Not many people were even high enough level to wear it for a long time. Like I said we will have to agree to disagree because as I said I believe this is more harmful to the health of the game than you think.
inb4 "Well then the content was never very good in the first place if it only takes a few nights"
That's how it works for every game with instanced dungeons and raids.
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akabearMember, Braver of Worlds, Kickstarter, Alpha One
L2 had several rings that gave considerable stat increase that were only obtained from certain bosses.
Those bosses were only able to be killed by top clans with large organised raids.
Some of those raids were instanced and the gate to entry fought over.
If I recall the spawn time was varied between the various bosses but at the time the upper limit was something like 10hrs for low, 24 for higher, 3-4 days for other and some top bosses 2-4 weeks.
With only a chance any of the bosses would drop the key item, those drops became very valuable
Once obtained they were rarely for sale on the open market, more in-clan deals
If the bosses in AoC don`t drop gear but drop key mats for crafting the top tier gear that is otherwise unobtainable, I am fine with that.
In L2, I had the only recipe on the server for 6 months or more for a particular craft from a mob drop. So rare that nobody believed but also so useless as to put in my recipe book I needed 2.
This is where we part ways again. It is guaranteed content and rewards because youtube videos for handholding purposes come out over time and the bosses become farm after a few nights of attempts at the absolute most.
This is only the case if Intrepid do a poor job.
If we are to assume this, then we should assume the worst from them in every situation. You can not assume the worst from them to argue one point if you do not assume the worst from them in all cases.
If they add content in to instances that is on par with WoW's easiest raids, then sure, you'd be right here and the game would be worse off for it.
However, I would expect them to be the equivlent of WoW's heroic raids or harder - which is content that about 10% of WoW's playerbase is able to kill. That 10% of all players being able to kill these encounters is about what I would expect.
As to loot rarity, lets assume the game has a total of 10 instanced encounters, and they are on the one week timer that I talked about above.
If we also assume that a guild is able successfully kill one new encounter per week, and once they have that encounter undersood they kill it every week from then on. We will also assume no breaks, no double ups in loot, no intervention by other guilds, no cancelling raids in order to defend a siege, literally nothing at all stopping the guild in question. We are even assuming that the guild uses the exact same 40 players every day.
Hell, we are even assuming no nodes are successfully sieged that will see them lose an encounter and need to spend several weeks waiting for a node to be leveled up to replace what was lost, and a further week learning what ever new one eventually replaces it.
Even with literally every single thing going there way, a raid guild would still need 31 weeks to get one item for each slot for each raider.
If we assume that the guild in question is actually using 60 raiders not 40 (people like days off sometimes), then it will take that guild 43 weeks to get one item for each slot for each member. If we assume that two raids a week are not completed for what ever reason (sieges, PvP, guild wars, just didn't get it this week, what ever), it will take that guild a full year to get one item for each of their 60 raiders.
If we assume 5 metropolis nodes are successfully sieged in that time, and it takes 4 weeks to level up a replacement, then that is a further 3 or 4 weeks it would take to get that guild geared up.
10% of the guilds in the game taking a year or more to get the first tier of raid loot. You really can't look at that and complain that loot will be entering the game too quickly - especially when there are still two more tiers of raiding to happen above all of that.
I hate when people bring WoW into every mmorpg that is up and coming. New World is one of the mmos that fell under the WoW clone category because, people hated dying in a PvP game. New world could of been great it had good systems but got ruined because people cried about dying and losing gear. Now I do believe that was harsh and all they had to do was fix certain problems to stop player griefing but no... they did a whole 360; scrap what they were doing, and do a whole WoW clone. If you want PVE game go play those PVE games you guys turn them to. People say WoW is the only big mmorpg out there...look at GW2...FF, man even Eve online.... in Eve online they literally have a big player base without media behind it why? Because it’s fun. That games been thriving for years and I don’t even play it. I read stories and listen to people’s stories on that game and what they went through and it sounds so fun.. I just can’t get into it because of its sci-fi setting. But if you take it’s elements that it’s thriving off of I.E(Community, Politics, Pseudo Factions, Resource Fighting, player notoriety, economy, player conflicts, etc,) then you’ll know that it’s something we are missing out on because mmos became so anti social with the LFG’s and addons and third party stuff. I literally do not play that game but will watch videos and read books on the stories that took place in that game for hours.. because it’s so interesting. Never once picked up a book about WoW because nothing in that is interesting. That’s the direction ashes of creation is taking and I think it’s a good direction to be unique.
Just very Briefly for me. I am really looking forward to Ashes but for a mmo and such a massive one i really don't understand the lack of instances / dungeons / raid content. i totally get they want a much more interactive open world feel to this which is great but if you really really do want to pull as many mmo fans as possible to this game then i would think having an an element of what has made another game so successful in its history ie instances / dungeons / raids also a significant part of this game . i do believe ignoring these elements of an mmo will potentially over time be the reason you could possibly loose a massive amount of the initial player base. don't be fooled in the first 3-6 months of this game by massive player counts it happens in all new games the trick is keeping them and without that significant part of mmo's i do worry that this game wont keep a lot of them after the initial hype.
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akabearMember, Braver of Worlds, Kickstarter, Alpha One
Well as far as I can see, all the numbers and statistics being thrown around at the moment don`t have a frame of reference.
20% could be a lot of raid instances if there are 1,000 bosses but if there are only 10 bosses then that is only 2!
Perhaps if there were solid stats from other games to provide a frame of refence, that might be a good start for speculative comparisons to what might be.
Even quantity means less when time to complete, frequency of access, variability and difficulty are factored in and a multitude of other factors.
So really, until there is some reference to what is in game, then this thread is an entertaining distraction with some great intentions but really quite limited.
Perhaps if there were solid stats from other games to provide a frame of refence, that might be a good start for speculative comparisons to what might be.
Early EQ2 had roughly 20% of it's bosses instanced.
That game had open dungeons with 30+ bosses, and most early instances only had 2 or 3 bosses, many with just 1.
Incidentally, most of the senior staff at Intrepid worked on EQ2.
Perhaps if there were solid stats from other games to provide a frame of refence, that might be a good start for speculative comparisons to what might be.
Early EQ2 had roughly 20% of it's bosses instanced.
That game had open dungeons with 30+ bosses, and most early instances only had 2 or 3 bosses, many with just 1.
Incidentally, most of the senior staff at Intrepid worked on EQ2.
Meaningless. Everquest isn't one of 4 games that they are basing Ashes off of.
Perhaps if there were solid stats from other games to provide a frame of refence, that might be a good start for speculative comparisons to what might be.
Early EQ2 had roughly 20% of it's bosses instanced.
That game had open dungeons with 30+ bosses, and most early instances only had 2 or 3 bosses, many with just 1.
Incidentally, most of the senior staff at Intrepid worked on EQ2.
Meaningless. Everquest isn't one of 4 games that they are basing Ashes off of.
What, you expect Ashes to only contain things if they were in one of those four games?
Those games were cited as the major influence for specific aspects of the game, not as the only influences for the game. I did note a distinct lack of presence of any of those games when the developers proudly displayed the games their developers had worked on in the past way back with the kickstarter - yet both EQ games were present.
Like it or not, EQ and EQ2 are not meaningless in discussions around Ashes.
Further, I was providing a frame of reference, as asked - which means it is far from meaningless.
Perhaps if there were solid stats from other games to provide a frame of refence, that might be a good start for speculative comparisons to what might be.
Early EQ2 had roughly 20% of it's bosses instanced.
That game had open dungeons with 30+ bosses, and most early instances only had 2 or 3 bosses, many with just 1.
Incidentally, most of the senior staff at Intrepid worked on EQ2.
Meaningless. Everquest isn't one of 4 games that they are basing Ashes off of.
Perhaps if there were solid stats from other games to provide a frame of refence, that might be a good start for speculative comparisons to what might be.
Early EQ2 had roughly 20% of it's bosses instanced.
That game had open dungeons with 30+ bosses, and most early instances only had 2 or 3 bosses, many with just 1.
Incidentally, most of the senior staff at Intrepid worked on EQ2.
Meaningless. Everquest isn't one of 4 games that they are basing Ashes off of.
What, you expect Ashes to only contain things if they were in one of those four games?
Those games were cited as the major influence for specific aspects of the game, not as the only influences for the game.
They have planetside devs, can we expect a persistent FPS war game too?
Did I say we can expect everything from EQ2 in Ashes?
You can absolutely bet that some aspects of Ashes action combat will come from Planetside though, as will some of the objectives in PvP scenarios, most likely.
This is where we part ways again. It is guaranteed content and rewards because youtube videos for handholding purposes come out over time and the bosses become farm after a few nights of attempts at the absolute most.
This is only the case if Intrepid do a poor job.
If we are to assume this, then we should assume the worst from them in every situation. You can not assume the worst from them to argue one point if you do not assume the worst from them in all cases.
If they add content in to instances that is on par with WoW's easiest raids, then sure, you'd be right here and the game would be worse off for it.
However, I would expect them to be the equivlent of WoW's heroic raids or harder - which is content that about 10% of WoW's playerbase is able to kill. That 10% of all players being able to kill these encounters is about what I would expect.
As to loot rarity, lets assume the game has a total of 10 instanced encounters, and they are on the one week timer that I talked about above.
If we also assume that a guild is able successfully kill one new encounter per week, and once they have that encounter undersood they kill it every week from then on. We will also assume no breaks, no double ups in loot, no intervention by other guilds, no cancelling raids in order to defend a siege, literally nothing at all stopping the guild in question. We are even assuming that the guild uses the exact same 40 players every day.
Hell, we are even assuming no nodes are successfully sieged that will see them lose an encounter and need to spend several weeks waiting for a node to be leveled up to replace what was lost, and a further week learning what ever new one eventually replaces it.
Even with literally every single thing going there way, a raid guild would still need 31 weeks to get one item for each slot for each raider.
If we assume that the guild in question is actually using 60 raiders not 40 (people like days off sometimes), then it will take that guild 43 weeks to get one item for each slot for each member. If we assume that two raids a week are not completed for what ever reason (sieges, PvP, guild wars, just didn't get it this week, what ever), it will take that guild a full year to get one item for each of their 60 raiders.
If we assume 5 metropolis nodes are successfully sieged in that time, and it takes 4 weeks to level up a replacement, then that is a further 3 or 4 weeks it would take to get that guild geared up.
10% of the guilds in the game taking a year or more to get the first tier of raid loot. You really can't look at that and complain that loot will be entering the game too quickly - especially when there are still two more tiers of raiding to happen above all of that.
That also assumes every drop is useful... over time there will be duplicate drops that nobody in the raid needs. This progression on loot seems too slow to me, but I'm used to ~4-6 month raid tiers as well.
I hate when people bring WoW into every mmorpg that is up and coming. New World is one of the mmos that fell under the WoW clone category because, people hated dying in a PvP game. New world could of been great it had good systems but got ruined because people cried about dying and losing gear. Now I do believe that was harsh and all they had to do was fix certain problems to stop player griefing but no... they did a whole 360; scrap what they were doing, and do a whole WoW clone. If you want PVE game go play those PVE games you guys turn them to. People say WoW is the only big mmorpg out there...look at GW2...FF, man even Eve online.... in Eve online they literally have a big player base without media behind it why? Because it’s fun. That games been thriving for years and I don’t even play it. I read stories and listen to people’s stories on that game and what they went through and it sounds so fun.. I just can’t get into it because of its sci-fi setting. But if you take it’s elements that it’s thriving off of I.E(Community, Politics, Pseudo Factions, Resource Fighting, player notoriety, economy, player conflicts, etc,) then you’ll know that it’s something we are missing out on because mmos became so anti social with the LFG’s and addons and third party stuff. I literally do not play that game but will watch videos and read books on the stories that took place in that game for hours.. because it’s so interesting. Never once picked up a book about WoW because nothing in that is interesting. That’s the direction ashes of creation is taking and I think it’s a good direction to be unique.
I hate it when people bash anything because it happened to be in WoW and it must automatically be trash. There are good and bad elements in every game. The source of the game inspiration shouldn't make the argument for the feature better or worse. I hope the IS team can set aside any game specific bias and rather learn from them all to do what is best.
We all know this game isn't going to be a WoW clone so stop freaking out if there are some good ideas that they could take from it...
Comments
This is where we part ways again. It is guaranteed content and rewards because youtube videos for handholding purposes come out over time and the bosses become farm after a few nights of attempts at the absolute most. 1% of the player population actually works out how to kill bosses in games like WoW and FF and the other 99% ride the coattails of other peoples success.
This sounds like an open world game that won't last very long because everybody will have gear after a few months after reaching max level if your vision became reality. It doesn't work very well if resources aren't scarce and fought over. Seeing people with S grade gear was always insane on my server in L2 during my duration of playing retail, not many people had it and you were JEALOUS. Not many people were even high enough level to wear it for a long time. Like I said we will have to agree to disagree because as I said I believe this is more harmful to the health of the game than you think.
inb4 "Well then the content was never very good in the first place if it only takes a few nights"
That's how it works for every game with instanced dungeons and raids.
Those bosses were only able to be killed by top clans with large organised raids.
Some of those raids were instanced and the gate to entry fought over.
If I recall the spawn time was varied between the various bosses but at the time the upper limit was something like 10hrs for low, 24 for higher, 3-4 days for other and some top bosses 2-4 weeks.
With only a chance any of the bosses would drop the key item, those drops became very valuable
Once obtained they were rarely for sale on the open market, more in-clan deals
If the bosses in AoC don`t drop gear but drop key mats for crafting the top tier gear that is otherwise unobtainable, I am fine with that.
In L2, I had the only recipe on the server for 6 months or more for a particular craft from a mob drop. So rare that nobody believed but also so useless as to put in my recipe book I needed 2.
I am all for scarcity!
If we are to assume this, then we should assume the worst from them in every situation. You can not assume the worst from them to argue one point if you do not assume the worst from them in all cases.
If they add content in to instances that is on par with WoW's easiest raids, then sure, you'd be right here and the game would be worse off for it.
However, I would expect them to be the equivlent of WoW's heroic raids or harder - which is content that about 10% of WoW's playerbase is able to kill. That 10% of all players being able to kill these encounters is about what I would expect.
As to loot rarity, lets assume the game has a total of 10 instanced encounters, and they are on the one week timer that I talked about above.
If we also assume that a guild is able successfully kill one new encounter per week, and once they have that encounter undersood they kill it every week from then on. We will also assume no breaks, no double ups in loot, no intervention by other guilds, no cancelling raids in order to defend a siege, literally nothing at all stopping the guild in question. We are even assuming that the guild uses the exact same 40 players every day.
Hell, we are even assuming no nodes are successfully sieged that will see them lose an encounter and need to spend several weeks waiting for a node to be leveled up to replace what was lost, and a further week learning what ever new one eventually replaces it.
Even with literally every single thing going there way, a raid guild would still need 31 weeks to get one item for each slot for each raider.
If we assume that the guild in question is actually using 60 raiders not 40 (people like days off sometimes), then it will take that guild 43 weeks to get one item for each slot for each member. If we assume that two raids a week are not completed for what ever reason (sieges, PvP, guild wars, just didn't get it this week, what ever), it will take that guild a full year to get one item for each of their 60 raiders.
If we assume 5 metropolis nodes are successfully sieged in that time, and it takes 4 weeks to level up a replacement, then that is a further 3 or 4 weeks it would take to get that guild geared up.
10% of the guilds in the game taking a year or more to get the first tier of raid loot. You really can't look at that and complain that loot will be entering the game too quickly - especially when there are still two more tiers of raiding to happen above all of that.
20% could be a lot of raid instances if there are 1,000 bosses but if there are only 10 bosses then that is only 2!
Perhaps if there were solid stats from other games to provide a frame of refence, that might be a good start for speculative comparisons to what might be.
Even quantity means less when time to complete, frequency of access, variability and difficulty are factored in and a multitude of other factors.
So really, until there is some reference to what is in game, then this thread is an entertaining distraction with some great intentions but really quite limited.
That game had open dungeons with 30+ bosses, and most early instances only had 2 or 3 bosses, many with just 1.
Incidentally, most of the senior staff at Intrepid worked on EQ2.
Meaningless. Everquest isn't one of 4 games that they are basing Ashes off of.
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Design_pillars#Inspiration
What, you expect Ashes to only contain things if they were in one of those four games?
Those games were cited as the major influence for specific aspects of the game, not as the only influences for the game. I did note a distinct lack of presence of any of those games when the developers proudly displayed the games their developers had worked on in the past way back with the kickstarter - yet both EQ games were present.
Like it or not, EQ and EQ2 are not meaningless in discussions around Ashes.
Further, I was providing a frame of reference, as asked - which means it is far from meaningless.
They have planetside devs, can we expect a persistent FPS war game too?
Did I say we can expect everything from EQ2 in Ashes?
You can absolutely bet that some aspects of Ashes action combat will come from Planetside though, as will some of the objectives in PvP scenarios, most likely.
That also assumes every drop is useful... over time there will be duplicate drops that nobody in the raid needs. This progression on loot seems too slow to me, but I'm used to ~4-6 month raid tiers as well.
I hate it when people bash anything because it happened to be in WoW and it must automatically be trash. There are good and bad elements in every game. The source of the game inspiration shouldn't make the argument for the feature better or worse. I hope the IS team can set aside any game specific bias and rather learn from them all to do what is best.
We all know this game isn't going to be a WoW clone so stop freaking out if there are some good ideas that they could take from it...