The Discussion Round is celebrating our 6th anniversary with Steven - Do you have any questions?

Hey there all, as you may or may not have already heard by now Steven will be joining us on Sunday, September 10, 2023 at 12pm pacific time, for our six-year anniversary!

We are super excited to have Steven join us again and help us celebrate this milestone.

If you have a question you would like to see us ask Steven feel free to post it here, over on the reddit, twitter, or even in the Enveus discord and we will try to get to as many as we can in the time that we have.
https://discord.gg/enveus

We try not to add any repeat questions or things you can easily find over on the wiki. And we like to think you will ask the hard hitting questions everyone is hungry for.

So come on over and join us for some good talk with friends, drinks, and good time.

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Comments

Ludullu

Has the Bounty Hunter system undergone any changes?

Depraved

will bard buffs be as necessary as buffs are in lineage 2?

Cadac

With appropriate level conditions, could two major islands be connected to one another, or to a continent by way of the Underrealm?

Imoxator

I’ve searched pretty thoroughly on the wiki and can’t find an answer to this, so I hope it isn’t a fact most know and I seemingly don’t haha.

Games like Destiny have rare equipment (exotics) that offers unique abilities, skills, or effects that change, either somewhat or completely, how a class is played. Will there be equipment, either singular pieces or set gear bonuses, that offers unique abilities that change how a class is played? If so, are there current examples you can give?

Dygz

Depends on what you mean by how a class is played.

A Tank wearing Phyiscal Armor is not going to play the exact same way as a Tank wearing Magical armor.

Probably a Tank/Tank would wear Physical Armor and a Tank/Mage would wear Magical armor.

But, also, a Tank/Tank wearing Physical Armor would probably use different Active Skills, Passive Skills and Augments than a Tank/Tank wearing Magical Armor.

Demostrathe

Do you ever plan on adding in a sort of martial artist archetype in later expansions? if not, why?

Raven016

Will the corruption be balanced to allow ganking solo players at least once every 2 hours anywhere in the open world and kill them even if they don't fight back (not because they cannot fight back but because they defy the intentions behind the corruption system)?
The purpose of the question is to understand if solo gatherers who refuse to become combatants will have to run away from any player they see (even their own citizens) or if they can continue their gathering activity (cutting wood, mining, fishing, taming...).
Same for any player walking around with a mule (e.g. between a freehold and a node).

Ludullu

Raven016 wrote: »

can we see the hunting grounds as a PvE friendly area where players can gather safely?

What are these hunting grounds? Do you mean "literally anywhere in the open world"?

Kilion

Do they still intend on having a showcase for each class available during the Alpha 2? And in conjunction with that: Will we get a livestream explaining the augmentation system to us?

With that being said, I really want to point out that the mage showcase and the freehold update were extremely well structured and I hope these will be standards for future streams! Well done, keep it going

Thanks for letting us ask questions!
Happy anniversary

Fiddlez

Can I save a spot for after the node reveal? 😉

Raven016

NiKr wrote: »

Raven016 wrote: »

can we see the hunting grounds as a PvE friendly area where players can gather safely?

What are these hunting grounds? Do you mean "literally anywhere in the open world"?

Hunting grounds are open-world PvP corruption-enabled areas that encompass most of the map.[2]

Hunting grounds refer to killing monsters or NPCs in the open-world.[2][3]
This also refers to contesting resources.[4]

One of the interesting components of Ashes of Creation and our flagging system is that it presents the potential for two conflicting parties to have open conflict in the open world over pretty much anything that they may want or disagree with; and if that pertains to a hunting ground, not just the caravan or the castles or the nodes or whatever, it can exist in that area.[5] – Steven Sharif

And I do not refer to open world dungeons where you go to farm in teams.

Ludullu

Raven016 wrote: »

And I do not refer to open world dungeons where you go to farm in teams.

You might not be referring to them, but those quotes do. "Hunting grounds", as written there - are literally all of the open world. Well, outside of open seas cause for some reason Steven just had to make those a forced flag location.

Steven did say previously that he wants PKing to be a rare thing, so I doubt that casual/pve players would have to run away at the sight of another player. And if they do cause the balancing is off - Steven will fix that.

Raven016

NiKr wrote: »

Raven016 wrote: »

And I do not refer to open world dungeons where you go to farm in teams.

You might not be referring to them, but those quotes do. "Hunting grounds", as written there - are literally all of the open world. Well, outside of open seas cause for some reason Steven just had to make those a forced flag location.

Steven did say previously that he wants PKing to be a rare thing, so I doubt that casual/pve players would have to run away at the sight of another player. And if they do cause the balancing is off - Steven will fix that.

Steven has the habit of dodging answers by going further away from the question and entering in details which were not asked.
I hope he will not start speaking about dungeons and PvX.

Ludullu

Raven016 wrote: »

I hope he will not start speaking about dungeons and PvX.

But that is exactly what "hunting grounds" are. They're just on a scale from "there's a 100 super easy mobs with no aggro in an open field of flowers" to "there's a single super hard boss at the end of a full-aggro ow dungeon of super hard mobs and he has a respawn of a week".

I think you're trying to ask about the players who'd spend most of their time in that first location, right? So in order to prevent Steven from answering a vague question vaguely, you should ask a super direct question and then see how exactly Steven will worm his way out of answering it (cause that's usually the main hint at the plan).

For Steven "hunting grounds" is a super huge umbrella term of "if there's a mob there - that's a hunting ground", so asking him if there's gonna be high lvls of PKing at pretty much any location on the map - he'll probably just answer with the standard "we'll balance the system in such a way that players don't experience griefing".

Tryol

Design-related

Flavors of shared mechanics
For mechanics that are shared across all archetypes like dodge and active blocking, will each archetype interface with them differently in terms of efficiency or flavor (like 50% vs 75% damage reduction for blocks)?
If so, could you give some examples?

Pets for everyone
What purpose is the battle pet system meant to serve that is worth compromising the class fantasy of summoners to some extent, by making the pet mechanic archetype-agnostic?

Fast travel transfer limitations
Are you planning to fully limit transfer of gatherables and materials equally across all "hard and soft" fast travel methods (e.g. teleports, airships, flight paths), or will they have different limitations?

NPC factions
Do you plan on having NPC factions, or food chain that will cause certain NPC groups to fight each other? Like large dogs or cats hunting deer, territorial beasts fighting for control, etc.

Mob behaviors
In the raid boss stream you showcased spiders standing off against players. Do you have plans to implement other similar features, like some diurnal/nocturnal mobs sleeping (and reducing their aggro range)?

AOE/Cleave
With players using melee weapons (with wide frontal cone attacks) being able to cleave down a large number of mobs at once, will there be mitigations to offset that, and prevent the PvE combat meta from becoming a so-called "AoE/cleave-fest"?

Gliding mount availability
Given how gliding mounts can allow you to avoid dangerous PvP situations and even bypass content in some scenarios, how limited will they be?

Open world difficulty scaling
How will you implement difficulty scaling for dungeons in the open world; an environment where multiple groups of varying strength and skill can fight multiple of the same dungeon's bosses at the same time?

Misc

The scope of the A2
Around how many quests (events/tasks/narratives) are planned for the launch of A2?
(I believe this number could give us a good indication of the content scope of A2 compared to A1.)

Team update
How big is the current team, and which open positions would be most important to hire for?

Veeshan

Q1) Bit of an odd one, might we see once in a server life time event such as the sleeper in Everquest that dragon that was never mean to be killed and every server had 1 shot at it when the woke him otherwise he do his thing and despawn for ever (

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXb4gzgvHQk)
These kinda thing leave impression and unforgettableness when overcome

Imnotkio

Q1) Monster coin events can disable certain buildings, services, and NPCs within a node. How big is the impact of the damage caused by this event in the day-to-day gameplay? What measures are implemented to prevent players from using monster coins bought in the store to impact the gameplay, effectively making it p2w?

Q2) Can you elaborate a bit further on the design of family teleports? How do you design this mechanic to prevent people from exploiting it and bypassing many of the intended systems and mechanics in the game?

Q3) Will there be any tech that helps with the immersion in freehold cosmetics? For instance, a snowy skin in the desert loses its snow, or an oasis skin on an ice biome becomes snowy.

Q4) In the age of complete guides and full optimization, how do you plan not to trivialize every puzzle and mystery in your game?

Q5) Will the event system implement completely random events, or will they be set on a hidden timetable unknown to the player base, but predictable (for world bosses and smaller events)?

Q6) Since the game is so big, and there is no widely-available fast travel in the game, will we have a skill to find other players, for instance, a cleric divination skill that you would give a player name and it would tell you a direction(north, northwest) and how far (close, far, very far)?

Q7) What's the extent of the dynamic portion of the node system? Is the plan still that every time a node levels up or gets destroyed its layout/building placements/assets will differ?

Q8) Could you elaborate a little bit further on the happiness mechanic? Is it something solely controlled by policies or is it also controlled by some demand of resources by the node population?

Q9) What are your expectations for node trade agreements? Are you expecting trade agreements to be a long-term constant flux of resource trading, or do you expect node trade agreements to work in bursts, more of a case-by-case deal?

Q10) In the crafting system, what's the purpose of the molds? Is it to bypass the manual crafting minigame or a byproduct of this minigame?

Q11) Is the plan still for a node to contain only one racial aesthetic? There is a diminishing return system in place to stop all nodes from becoming human nodes, but with 9 different racial aesthetics, what are the odds of us seeing a nikuan metropolis? Is this going to impact players of racial minorities negatively?

Q12) If people's choice of node takes racial aesthetics into account, and that racial aesthetic changes later, isn't it a little weird for the residents? Have you given this any thought?

Q13) What do you have to say to people who ask for more transparency in the development? Do you and your community team feel responsible for managing people's expectations? Why don't you tell us at what point you are in the development of the systems and content? Why didn't you tell us beforehand that last month's update would not show a tier above village, or node transitions, like people were expecting?

hleV

(nevermind)

xorgo

This is a test comment to test my badges. Please disregard.

xorgo

I wish the twitter was more active. Really all avenues of Social Media should be active for this game.
Seeing a social media outlet with last activity being 2+ years old, casts some doubt on the game.

Please get a full time PR person.

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