gear progression.

From what I have heard and correct me if I'm wrong but gear is going to be more of the traditional vertical progression in ashes but just with a kind of soft cap where progressing gear past that point is kinda meh and not really needed but more of a humble brag type idea. Personally I feel that this wouldnt be the best idea in light of another system that a different game currently. This game is of course ESO where while I would say its gear system doesnt shine in that game, I would argue its cause the combat at its core is flawed for a mmo in that game as the game is build around the idea that you should be able to do almost everything solo to the point that people make 'invinicible builds' of all types to complete the hardest veteran content like it was nothing. The point is that the way that ESO does their gear progression is entirly horizontal as once gear reaches legendary and has max enchants placed on it than there isnt antyhing you can do to increase it further with the few options that do exist are either cp point passives for more armor or things like traits like infused that boost the enchants however at the cost that you can only have 11 infused traits maxed. This idea at its core without anything else would be bad but eso manages to make it very intresting which is set bonus's that boost your stats in certain ways and can even full blown give you massive new effects at a full set completetion that can REALLY change the way you play.

Personally i feel a system like this would work very well in ashes especially in light of the more special types of gear called monster sets and more importantly, mythics. monster helms are 2 piece sets that only have, well, 2 pieces in each set as you would expect and come often with set effects that MASSIVELY change how you play if you have the full on and mythics not just changing how you play but alterting how the core mechanics of the game apply to you like the snow treaders making you immune to immobilizations and snares but at the cost of being able to sprint and sets like the gaze of sithis or the soon to release oakenshield or the shield dodge ring that all 3 full blown disable a system of the game for you while giving you massive benefits with the shield dodge ring being the most intresting that doesnt just boost your stats massively like the oakenshield ring and gaze of sithis but full blown changing the way you dodge from actually dodging to producing a really damn big 20k dmg shield at base that last for 1 second and appears whenever you dodge.

At the end of the day im sure no matter what intrepid decides to do on this front, they will make it great but i feel that at least with the resources you get to make gear from things like end game world bosses like dragons at least could be used to replicate at least the monster helm set and or mythic system from eso of getting to wear legendary gear made from truly mythic materials and providing awe inspired changes to how you interact with the world around you to help give those who choose to really interact with the endgame something to try hard to make and fight for and especially give us ways to take on challenges with it could be really cool if certain mythics are great for certain areas but not others like how the harpooner's wading kilt for example is great if your playing in a group but not if your going to be playing solo as in a group you can avoid taking any damage and get the full buff without issue as the tank takes it all for you but if your solo than its almost as if you just took off a piece of armor with how worthless it would be with if ashes has mythics like this than it could be cool of what sort of stats open up depending on what mythics your raid group has or doesnt have and could alllow for RIDICULUS challenges for the hardcore guilds to have to do that requires you having put in enough time and research to get the right mythics to be able to take on the challenge that your guild wants to take on.

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George_Black

fabula wrote: »

George_Black wrote: »

First things first. Do you associate new content with instanced raids?

I do not consider the leveling experience to be a part of the content I am talking about because this is just a one off thing you do once per character and unless a person hardly plays at all, most of their time will not be spent leveling up.

Content would then be any activity you can do in the game after you reach max-lvl or if you don't care about leveling up at all. This includes things like dungeons/raids, all the pvp activities such as sieges and wars and all tradeskill activities. It doesn't matter if its open-world or instanced.

Ye. I can see that you are conditioned to activities gameplay.
The mmos I played and the mmo ashes will be is a journey. An ongoing gameplay. I will leave it at that so that the topic can go back to gear progression instead of the expansions from games like L2, not like wow eso ff14.

Dygz

fabula wrote: »

Content would then be any activity you can do in the game after you reach max-lvl or if you don't care about leveling up at all. This includes things like dungeons/raids, all the pvp activities such as sieges and wars and all tradeskill activities. It doesn't matter if its open-world or instanced.

That is a warped view of content.
The devs working on Vanilla EQ and WoW hopes that it would take most players 3-4 months to reach max level. Giving them enough time to add new content via expansions quarterly or bi-annually.
It fairly quickly turned out that most players were able to rush to max level in a few weeks, rather than in a few months while expansions took 18-24+ months to release.
By 2010, many MMORPG players had the warped view that “Endgame is the real game”.

In Ashes, content includes all forms of progression: Adventurer, Artisan, Racial, Religion, Node, Social Org.
Content also includes Raids and Dungeons and Caravans and Sieges and Events. And quests and tasks.

Because new content is introduced via the rise and fall of Nodes, reaching max Adventurer level really has no bearing on reaching the end of content. You don’t wait for the devs to make an expansion. Instead you progress different Nodes and construct different buildings and support different races so that new content will be revealed.

We’ll have to see how much content we can exhaust before the devs add new content.
Right now, that’s all just lip service.
We’ll have to see how well they can actually make their dream come true.

fabula

Noaani wrote: »

You aren't supposed to end up with more content, you aresupposed to end up with content you've not yet done.

Sure, all the previous max level content isn't worth doing, but this is only an issue if you're the kind of person that wants new content when they are ready for it, and not a moment earlier.

Developers need to add new content as soon as the games top end players have completed the existing content (ideally). If that means you miss out on some top end content, start getting through it faster instead of complaining.

My point has nothing to do with the speed someone completes content. I'm stating that a better return on investment is to have older content still be relevant to some degree and get some play time instead of being abandoned because the trash mobs of the next expansion give better stuff than the top tier raid from the previous expansion.

In the context of AoC that would be for materials from dungeons and raids of one expansion to still be in demand in the next. The specifics and issues have to be worked out but it makes sense since they are already going to be doing that for all the gatherable materials anyways.

George_Black

fabula wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

You aren't supposed to end up with more content, you aresupposed to end up with content you've not yet done.

Sure, all the previous max level content isn't worth doing, but this is only an issue if you're the kind of person that wants new content when they are ready for it, and not a moment earlier.

Developers need to add new content as soon as the games top end players have completed the existing content (ideally). If that means you miss out on some top end content, start getting through it faster instead of complaining.

My point has nothing to do with the speed someone completes content. I'm stating that a better return on investment is to have older content still be relevant to some degree and get some play time instead of being abandoned because the trash mobs of the next expansion give better stuff than the top tier raid from the previous expansion.

In the context of AoC that would be for materials from dungeons and raids of one expansion to still be in demand in the next. The specifics and issues have to be worked out but it makes sense since they are already going to be doing that for all the gatherable materials anyways.

I dont understand the fascination with low lv areas. Why go back to killing wolves when I am lv50 fighting demons and stuff.
I dont care to go back to the low lv stuff. They are not relevant to me. I want a new expansion with new areas.

And since AoC wont be based on instanced raids (raids that wont award the best gear), they should go ahead and release new gear with new expansions. Make the players populate the new areas.

The low lv areas will always be populated by low lv ppl until it's time for a new server.
And I will not miss them.

George_Black

You see, in my mmorpgs I enjoyed my lv 1-30. There was pvp, there was crafting, there was open world raiding. There was exploration and amazement. If I was lv 10 I'd be amazed by the guy wearing lv20 gear.

If you guys in wow eso and ff14 rushed to endgame in a week, doing ez solo npc questing and the occasional low lv instance, then you should be prepared to face a new experience in AoC, where every lv is fun. And if every lv is fun then if IS introduces a new lv cap, from 50 to 55 and then 2 years down the track to lv60, for me that will mean more fun with new stuff.

Dygz

In Ashes, areas are dynamic and don't stay low level - which should be standard for RPGs.
All areas should have a mix of low level and high level content. We should be wanting to return to our homes - if we abandon our homes.
Just because we dabble with new stuff, doesn't mean we have to completely abandon the old stuff.

New stuff could be horizontally different; doesn't necesarily have to be vertically different.

Noaani

fabula wrote: »

My point has nothing to do with the speed someone completes content. I'm stating that a better return on investment is to have older content still be relevant to some degree and get some play time instead of being abandoned because the trash mobs of the next expansion give better stuff than the top tier raid from the previous expansion.

No, that wouldn't be better.

Most MMO back ends are designed where each zone exists on the server, and has hardware dedicated to it based on how busy the developers expect it to be.

When a new expansion comes out, developers don't want you to stick in the older content, because that means they need to assign more resources to it. They want as many people on the smallest amount of content as possible, so they dan concentrate the highest amount of server resources on that part of the game as possible.

Now, while it is possible Ashes back end won't be designed this way, literally every MMO I have spe t the time to learn about has been designed this way, with exactly one exception - Rift.

So, it is in both the developer and the players best interest for older content to be basically scrapped as new content is added to the game.

Even from a player perspective, after having run content for 9 to 12 months, why would anyone want to have to carry on running it?

The only people that wish content could stay relevant in the next cycle are those that didn't run it while it was max level. This is why the speed at which people run content is the key factor.

JustVine

Content staying relevant is something desired because in the end sometimes an activity is fun, and the fact that it is economically rewarding means you get to have fun AND make money. When content is either removed or supersede there is a chance the replacement is not fun for the same set of people and that sucks big time.

You can do things for the sake of fun in an mmo of course, but in a game with open world pvp with ever closing and widening gaps in strength, if you aren't making money from an activity that takes a decent amount of time, you are not doing yourself any favors in the long run.

If content can still make you a relevant amount of money and they focus on making content have strong gameplay loops rather than 'filler', it is in everyone's favor. I like dlc content. I just think that dlc content shouldn't cause the economic activities up to that point to be entirely irrelevant. If they follow those guidelines I think things will be more or less fine when it comes to dlc in Ashes.

Noaani

JustVine wrote: »

Content staying relevant is something desired because in the end sometimes an activity is fun, and the fact that it is economically rewarding means you get to have fun AND make money. When content is either removed or supersede there is a chance the replacement is not fun for the same set of people and that sucks big time.

If an old piece of content is fun, that is what you have alts for.

However, while it is a nice idea, there is an intrinsic issue with the idea of old content being worth it for coin.

Any content cycle added to an MMO will have to result in an increase in power of players at the top end. This inherently means that old content becomes easier in comparison. If this older content is easier, it should not generate the same amount of coin as the newer, harder content that is designed for players that have that increase in power that the new content provided.

As such, players won't want to run that old content that they have already been running for a while in order to get coin, because the newer content that is just added is not only new content that they haven't played to death, but it also rewards more coin.

This means that the only people that would even consider that older content for coin are people that are ok with less profit - generally because they are unable or unwilling to compete. People in this situation absolutely should be making less profit, which is conveniently what happens anyway.

Now, an argument could be made that the developers could retune the old content to the new increased power level of players. The problem here is that you are basically saying the developers should either blanket increase stats on the mobs in question, or should spend developer time to redevelop all of the content.

The second option there is obviously not a great idea. The first option though, blanket increases like that is how you end up with soulless, heartless filler content - which I think we both agree we would like to avoid.

The key factor in all of the above though, is in how much of an increase the new content provides.

If the old content provided 10 gold an hour, the new content shouldn't provide 100 gold an hour. It shouldn't even provide 20. 12 is about the most it should offer in this situation.

This is more a case of power scale than it is anything to do with the content being made obsolete.

fabula

Noaani wrote: »

No, that wouldn't be better.

Most MMO back ends are designed where each zone exists on the server, and has hardware dedicated to it based on how busy the developers expect it to be.

When a new expansion comes out, developers don't want you to stick in the older content, because that means they need to assign more resources to it. They want as many people on the smallest amount of content as possible, so they dan concentrate the highest amount of server resources on that part of the game as possible.

Now, while it is possible Ashes back end won't be designed this way, literally every MMO I have spe t the time to learn about has been designed this way, with exactly one exception - Rift.

So, it is in both the developer and the players best interest for older content to be basically scrapped as new content is added to the game.

Even from a player perspective, after having run content for 9 to 12 months, why would anyone want to have to carry on running it?

The only people that wish content could stay relevant in the next cycle are those that didn't run it while it was max level. This is why the speed at which people run content is the key factor.

You keep saying that the only people that care about such things are those that are unable to finish or complete current content and that is not true. I have always done all the top tier content is every major mmo going back to UO and I like this sort of stuff and I'm sure plenty of others do aswell, plenty of people did this in EQ because some items were always valuable.

In AoC all large scale PvP events will be weekly at the least. I doubt they will implement some sort of alternate advancement past max lvl that would serve as a reason to keep grinding dungeons/raids for xp. If you have everything you want and you cannot progress anymore what motivates you to log into the game daily?. At this point you are pretty much hoping a conflict takes place so you can join in but you need to have something to do while you wait and it must not feel like a waste of time to you. Going back for older content is just one more of these things that you do while you wait for something better to come along, they are important though because without them you log in less and less and eventually stop.

George_Black

Node sieges will be monthly IF any node manages to organize a decleration of attack.
I dont see guild owned sieges being weekly either. It was 2 weeks in L2 and it was still stressful for the big guilds.

Noaani

fabula wrote: »

If you have everything you want and you cannot progress anymore what motivates you to log into the game daily?

Not old content that I have run to death, that's for sure.

Your argument here is more an argument for the speed at which Intrepid need to add new content to the game to keep people interested.

As every player that has run top end content to death knows, old content is a thing that sometimes needs to be endured through - it is not something that keeps you in an MMO.

But since you claim to have run all top tier content in every major MMO since UO, you know doubt know that.

AidanKD

Just to hop onto this "old content" discussion. I think that one of the games that manages this somewhat is probably Guild Wars 2 with its Horizontal progression. When a new expansion is rolled out, you can continue to access old content (if you ignore the living story stuff that you have to pay currency for to unlock) - but it remains relevant, builds up the world/story and also has rewards which are more along the lines of cosmetics, legendaries etc.

Now I never fully committed to GW2 so i'm not exactly an example of it being successful, BUT - wouldn't it be great if you find ways to validate old content by either:

- Providing rewards which don't go towards vertical progression, i.e. cosmetics, achievements, life-skill based rewards, FUN items like the engineering stuff in WoW something that doesn't necessarily give a combat benefit but is just nice.

- Or things like scaling old content to be relevant now. I'd probably compare it to Timewalking in WoW, or the currency you get for doing dungeon finder in FF14 but more-so the timewalking as you can get current-gen gear (fresh end-gameish ilv). I would probably see to just make "mythic +" versions of old dungeons to increase the pool and give people options.

That last point with open world and a dynamic-changing world might need another form of implementation - but I think that GW2 always nailed the open world exploration side with things like Jumping Puzzles and the more modern mount system to make *exploration* fun and not just x% faster.

Dygz

There are weekly Castle/Caravan raids for each Castle.
"At the end of each week leading up to a castle siege there is a period of time in the weekend where NPC generated caravans start moving toward one of the castle nodes carrying castle taxes from the nodes that fall under the castle's purview."

Each week you can try to prevent one of the three associated Nodes from progressing to Stage 3.
Week 4 is the Castle Siege.

superhero6785

Noaani wrote: »

You aren't supposed to end up with more content, you aresupposed to end up with content you've not yet done.

Sure, all the previous max level content isn't worth doing, but this is only an issue if you're the kind of person that wants new content when they are ready for it, and not a moment earlier.

Developers need to add new content as soon as the games top end players have completed the existing content (ideally). If that means you miss out on some top end content, start getting through it faster instead of complaining.

Woah, now that's an interesting take. An expansion is supposed to - Expand - the game. It's not "seasonal content" that is intended to be played now-or-never. Expansions should add upward and outward gameplay that can be enjoyed in addition to existing content. Telling someone to "get through it faster" is absolutely the wrong answer, imo. Content should be enjoyable at whatever pace the players want to enjoy it. Making existing content irrelevant with expansions is a perfect example of poor game design. Many games do it, and many expansions are bad.

HumblePuffin

George_Black wrote: »

I dont understand the fascination with low lv areas. Why go back to killing wolves when I am lv50 fighting demons and stuff.
I dont care to go back to the low lv stuff. They are not relevant to me. I want a new expansion with new areas.

And since AoC wont be based on instanced raids (raids that wont award the best gear), they should go ahead and release new gear with new expansions. Make the players populate the new areas.

The low lv areas will always be populated by low lv ppl until it's time for a new server.
And I will not miss them.

They can’t really do that with the world they’re building. In WoW and other theme parks you can get away with that. Who cares if a low level questing is void of all characters in those games since it doesn’t matter.

In AoC that part of the world will just stagnate and all the nodes with it. In a theme park you can still go run those dungeons that are old content no matter what other players are doing. In AoC if other players aren’t participating in that area you will most likely never see those “max level “ dungeons again.

That’s not to say they can’t add new areas, dungeons, gear, etc.; but they do kinda need to keep all content and areas of the world relevant in someway. Their current system doesn’t really let them get away with content islands.

George_Black

Lv5 nodes will prevent nearby nodes from becoming lv5 (unless the dominant falls in a siege).
The population of the nearby nodes will interract with the lv5 areas for higher lv mobs, not their own nodes. Their nodes will remain places for low-mid lv adventuring.

George_Black

The only difference is that the harder areas wont be the further you move from, let's say west to east, rather than the further you move from the center of a high lv node, towards its outer perimeter.

The concept of the game doesnt change.
And why change it? Look at what ESO did with One Tamriel. Made all areas the same, no matter how few or many skills your char has.

HumblePuffin

George_Black wrote: »

Lv5 nodes will prevent nearby nodes from becoming lv5 (unless the dominant falls in a siege).
The population of the nearby nodes will interract with the lv5 areas for higher lv mobs, not their own nodes. Their nodes will remain places for low-mid lv adventuring.

Huh? Was that a reply to my post?

I’m not talking about low-mid level nodes, I’m talking about a max level vanilla content not being achievable in a world of Ashes of Creation if you make content islands where the whole player base shifts too. So yeah if the whole player base shifts to a new area and leaves the old stuff behind everything in the old world will fit that low-mid level content range.

Unless you’re talking about new dungeons and stuff popping up within the existing area, which in that case I apologize because I didn’t realize that, and it wouldn’t effect older content any way since you’d have to interact with the old content to a degree anyway.

Rookk

ok sooooooo this is so fucking far past where it was when i left for the last 2 days sooooooo im not gonna read throught the 33 DAMN NEW COMMENTS and leave it to you fine folks to keep talkin this out cause yeah.... thats a bit much for me to handle.....

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