I've been hanging out in the forums for a month and a half now, and feel more or less settled in. I want to preempt the upcoming concerns with the following: I'm
extremely excited to play Ashes of Creation, and I would love to see this game succeed. I love the PvX ideas, the open-world concepts, resource contention, emphasis on the economy, and especially the nodes. I have heavily considered applying to work for Intrepid, but being a work-from-home mechanism designer cypto-finance is way too cushy to drop to pursue a passion project (in terms of salary, work:life balance, etc).
On with it.
Background:
I'm 31, I'm trained as an Industrial and Systems Engineer from Georgia Tech with a focus in optimization and simulation. That degree, in the abstract, teaches you how to take complex systems and represent them mathematically and answer questions about them. You'll often see ISYEs in logistics, factory optimization, consulting, warehouses, etc. Part of being a
good systems engineer is software development, learning economics, and a dash of game theory.
Out of college, I worked in software instead (better pay, better hours, more fun), and eventually got into writing compilers, artificial intelligence R&D (which requires understanding neurons, and brain structures), and machine vision. From there, I moved to crypto-finance as a mechanism designer, which is like reverse-game-theory. Where a game-theorist would take an abstract game and then analyze it to figure out how rational agents would behave, a mechanism designer starts with how they want rational agents to behave, and then they design the game (and the payouts) to generate that behavior. My day-to-day involves writing simulations, drawing math on a whiteboard, and a lot of staring off into space. Eventually that all becomes whitepapers that get approved and engineers implement. Hopefully, this all adds some weight to the later sections.
Gaming-wise, I've played almost every genre at the highest level you can play. I was a top-10 player in super smash bros brawl in Georgia while I was active from 2009 to 2013. In games with MMRs or ELOs, I consistently have top 1%. Master in starcraft 2. Grandmaster in rocket league. 10+ K/D in Fortnite for seasons 4-9 when I was active, and then ran thousands of creative 1v1s in private discords. 15k+ hours of super smash bros melee. 8k+ hours of street fighter 4. Quake. Kovaaks. Guitar Hero.
I played WoW from release until college like a madman. I put in an average of 10 hours a day every day for 3 years. I was a gladiator for seasons 2-6 on my rogue, and then mostly stopped playing as the game became more and more front-loaded. I flew out to MLG Orlando in 2009 for WoW. I got to meet Hafu, Neilyo, Hoodrych, and that whole crowd and party with them in a hotel room in the evenings. Really cool folks. Neilyo introduced me to Ronald Jenkees, who I still listen to in 2021.
I've played every WoW expansion, but none of them extensively since lich king (though, my definition of extensive probably isn't normal). I've also played other MMOs enough to experience the endgame and get a feel for what they're about, and how they're different: GW2, FFXIV, and BDO. I played Albion briefly, but couldn't stomach the idea that I could buy gold, exchange it for silver, and then buy gear (and xp tomes) for silver.
I have a growth mindset - I don't play games to win, I just play to get better at stuff. I tend to think deeply about what I'm doing, why I'm doing it, and the experiences I'm having. A lot of my thinking about MMOs has resulted in
this series of essays.
Economic Degeneration
We know that ashes will give players the ability to arbitrarily
earn currency by killing mobs and then selling the certificates to NPCs. This means that there's a currency faucet. It's also my understanding that all gear is purchasable, even the best gear. It stands to reason, then, that if your goal as a player is to have all of the best gear possible, all you need to do is become very, very wealthy.
We also know that ashes wants you to specialize. You either become really good at mining, or really good at herbalism, or maybe you're a crafter, or a processor, or a crab killer enthusiast. In any case, it would stand to reason that different folks specialize in different things, and then provide the market with the product of their labor. Other folks buy that product with currency (which is always being generated by players killing mobs and selling the certs to NPCs).
After a hard day's work of killing crabs you have a bunch of crab certs, and a few crab meat. You cart your crab certs to the nearest economic node, sell them to the NPC who buys certs, and then list your meat on the auction house. Now you have more currency, and as far as I'm aware there's no way for other players to take this currency away from you.
Repeat for hundreds of hours and then eventually you can buy all of the best gear in the game.
At some point, the best way to earn currency is to play the market itself. Once you have enough capital (from the above), you spin up your spreadsheets, start tracking prices, start tracking trends, and start trying to buy low and sell high.
There are probably
a lot of folks who want to play a game exactly like this, and maybe it's just a taste thing. That's not what I want to do! I don't want to feel stuck in my lane because my specialty is my most effective way to make currency. I don't want to see players in the sickest weapons and armor and think "a lot of crabs died for that". Maybe in order to equip a weapon forged from boss materials, that player needs to register a kill on that boss (or multiple kills)?
Hopefully, the more novel and limited-time activities (castle sieges, raids, contesting world bosses, doing a variety of activities on a monthly basis) are more efficient gold-per-hour wise than staying in your lane.
for more, check
this thread
Archetype Supply And Demand
Right now, we have 1 Archetype that is a tank (tank), 1 that is a healer (cleric), and 5 that are dps, and 1 that is a big question mark.
It's been said that a "proper" (references to this vary) group has 1 character of each archetype. This leads to a host of problems. Say that your friend group has 6 players. If you and your friend both want to play a rogue, that's a no-go. One of you has to switch. If your friend group has been playing for 5 months and you meet a new friend who wants to play, but they're a Ranger and you already have a Ranger, that's friction.
Say your 6-man group has all of the classes except bard and summoner, but bard and summoner are the least popular classes on your server. In an ideal world, each class would have 12.5% of the population, but on your server, bard has only 8% and summoner is 7%. Now you're either spamming chat looking specifically for a bard and summoner, or you're willing to hurt your group's effectiveness and take duplicates of classes.
Separately, 8-man content has 1 tank 1 healer 6 dps. Does 40 man content (5 groups) have equal ratios? 5 tanks 5 healers 30 dps? In my experience, you want less tanks (2-3) and more healers, so something like 3 tank 7 healer 30 dps. Does 250-man siege content want 31 tanks, 31 healers, and 188 dps? If any of those ratios aren't aligned, then it creates pressure.
Say, for example, that we want 1 tank 1 healer 6 dps for 8-man content, but only 3 tank for 40 man content. If there are 800 players on the server, and 100 of them are tanks, then you have the right ratio for 8-man content, but you have
way too many for 40-man content, and those tanks won't find spots in raiding guilds. If those tanks quit and reroll dps, to make the raiding ratio correct, then there will be 60 tanks for 800 total people, meaning that there can only be 60 8-man groups going at once, leaving a ton of healers and DPS groupless.
Mana As A Resource
Mana, on a game design level, as it is traditionally used, is a slowly-filling, slowly-draining resource that limits how long a character can be effective in combat. When you're at full mana, you have all of your options available, and when you use one of those options, you use some mana, but you still have your options. This means that mana creates a binary effect, where the only time mana actually matters is when you don't have it, and since you'll have it for a long time, it doesn't tend to matter for a long time.
Further, gameplay with mana tends to involve getting full mana, spending all of your mana, and then taking a break to get full mana again. Why do we need to take a break?
Much better design, in my opinion, is to have a resource that ramps up quickly and then quickly depletes and forces players to make constant trade-offs. So maybe by using a few of your filler abilities or weapon skills, you generate a resource that you can either spend on big damage, utility, or a defensive. In contrast with mana, where you can do all of those things until you're out of mana, this creates constant decision pressure and dynamic gameplay. You also never have to stop to drink and can go right into the next fight with
momentum, and this feels amazing. This design principle can be applied to tanks, dps, and healers alike.
You can still call this resource "mana", and games like Path of Exile do, even though it operates nothing like how mana traditionally does. It's all about how the resource operates, whether or not the damage is front-loaded or back-loaded, whether or not there is forced downtime or momentum, etc.
Combat Depth
You'll find arguments on the internet talking about how tab combat is boring or how action combat is spazzy. These arguments all miss the mark.
Tab-based combat is a hit resolution mechanism. It's a way to tell the server "I want my attack to hit this target in particular". It makes zerging less effective, because your attack only hits one thing. It makes the server's job incredibly easy: now it only has to check to see if the specified target is in range, and if your character is in line of sight and has the right facing (and whatever other checks you want to do). This allows the servers to stay performant in high-player-count environments.
Action-based combat is also a hit resolution mechanism. It's a way to tell the server "I want my attack to hit all of the targets in this particular area". Maybe the area is a simple geometric shape, like a ground-targeted aoe or radius around your character. Maybe the area is more complicated, the moving hitbox of an axe in new world, or the moving hitbox of an arrow. In order for the server to resolve attacks when there are many clients on screen at the same time, now you have to loop through all of the potential targets, and figure out if they're in range, for all of the potential attacks, for all of the frames of animation. This gets really complicated, and it's why new world falls apart in 50v50 environments. I won't even get into delay-based netcode vs rollback netcode, but you can read more
here.
So, now that we've established that tab vs action are just about hit resolution mechanisms, why is it that tab feels boring and action doesn't? It comes down to the
Beat Map.
Imagine that you're playing FFXIV black mage at level 20. Your rotation is that you spam fire (1) every 2.5 seconds until you run out mana, then you press transpose (2). Then you spam blizzard (3) until you have full mana, and you transpose (2). Repeat.
Here's what the gameplay looks like: 1111111233333111111123333322
Every 2.5 seconds.
Now, imagine that's in Guitar Hero (or DDR).
1 is bound to the left button, 2 is bound to the next button, and 3 is bound to the button after that. Every 2.5 seconds, you strum. Playing this song in Guitar Hero would be
insanely boring.
Every game is composed of two parts: distilling the information on the screen and your headphones into the beatmap (the puzzle), and then actually playing the beatmap. A puzzle game is intellectually interesting, but the beatmap doesn't have to be interesting at all. A highly mechanical game (like guitar hero)
needs to have an interesting beatmap. The faster the "notes" come, the less leniency you have to press them, the more different buttons you have to press, etc all make the mechanical aspect more complex.
Traditionally, tab-target games make you press a lot of different buttons, but you're allowed to press them really slowly, and do them in memorizable, repetitive sequences that don't need to be adjusted much (apart from movement) depending on what your opponents do, or what the PvE encounters are doing.
Relatively and traditionally, action-combat games make you press less buttons, but make you press them with much more precision, more quickly, and with more adaptation.
The
beatmap is more interesting in action combat games so far, while the puzzle aspect has been more interesting and emphasized in tab-target games so far.
That's all to say my concern is that the puzzle aspect will not be intellectually stimulating, and the beatmap won't be physically stimulating. Few games are, and this is super hard to get right.
see
this article for thoughts on how to add depth to combat in general
Game Balance
It's been noted multiple times that this game "won't be balanced for 1v1s" (they'll have rock-paper-scissors balancing), and "will be balanced for large siege combat".
I think it's also important to point out that players will be doing
a lot of their PvP in 1v1 situations, and I have no idea what "balanced for large siege combat" even means.
Say that you play a rock-style character and you're doing farm while you're waiting for your guildies to log on. After you fill up your inventory, you need to haul it back to a node to sell, but you run into another player. That player is either a rock-style (in which case you can have a fair fight), a scissors-style (in which case you have a crushing advantage), or a paper-style (in which case you have a crushing disadvantage). Presumably, if the other player knows what's up, unless they're also rock-style or there's a huge gear differential (or someone suspects a huge skill differential), you just try as hard as you can to avoid combat.
This sounds terrible! I don't want to win/lose or be forced to run based on having a really skewed matchup chart! I don't want to have to try to seek out other rock-types to practice my dueling against because those are my own fair fights!
Then, onto "what is balance?"
We know, from fighting games, what "balance" means on those contexts. When you create a matchup chart like:
Instead of having a bunch of those 70+ and 30- numbers, you hopefully keep it
so that your worst matchup in the whole chart is 65:35. In a perfect world,
every matchup would be 50:50, but that's unrealistic.
So, super smash bros melee is not a balanced game because you have all of these garbage-tier characters. Fortunately, if you only play the top 5 characters, it suddenly
is a balanced game:
What then, does "balance" mean at the 250v250 scale? Are we saying that every possible combination of 250 characters has a 50:50 matchup against every other possible combination of 250 characters? That's absolutely inconceivable. Linear increases to team size lead to exponential growth of the number of matchups that the devs have to balance. Couple this with the fact that they don't even control how the players build their characters (you can choose to build your character in a nonsense way), and I don't know how this phrase has meaning.
At best, you might be able to claim "there will be a build for every class (main+sub combination) that performs well enough in a siege setting that it's worth bringing at least one of them". That's
still a tall order. That's claiming that the "best" 250-man team has one of each of the 64 classes. The probability that it's optimal to bring
every single class seems astoundingly low to me.
edit:
I'm unable to find a reference to where I got the idea that they want to balance for siege combat, and instead am finding reference that they want to balance for "group play". Assuming that this roughly means "8v8", then this still runs into the same sort of combinatorial problem.
Even if you restrict your "viable 8-man teams" to 1 of each primary archetype and everything else is allowed to be sub-optimal, and if there are only 2 viable builds for each secondary archetype, that would mean there are 16 builds for each primary.
This would mean there are 16 bard builds * 16 cleric builds * 16 fighter builds * 16 mage builds * 16 ranger builds * 16 rogue builds * 16 summoner builds * 16 tank builds = 4.3 billion different 8-man teams to try to balance. Not going to happen.
Phew. That's it for now. I'll probably address stuff in this thread, and
if any dev wants to reach out and chat with me in a discord call or something, I'd love to do that. Then, I'll be taking a step back from the forums for a while
and watch to see how alpha 2 unfolds!
