Don't restrict PvP to timeslots or incentivise it only through PvE/gear.

BlindingRadiance wrote: »

Can they remove stealth from archer

Once again, it's not an Archer, but a Ranger.

It's camouflage, and not stealth.

Laetitian wrote: »

ArcheAge-related thread inspiration context for those interested:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRzxBIQunIA
The first 8 minutes of this opinion piece about the current state of Archeage (If you have barely any background info, the summary in first 10 minutes here is worth a watch) highlight the problem fairly directly.

I was only around when Trion set up the ArcheAge beta and have recently been watching videos about the course ArcheAge took that led to its downfall. In my perception, aside from the obvious monetization stuff, it comes down to one very vital thing: Motivation and justification to do what you want to do, when you want to do it.

I wrote a 1k word long essay on why PvP needs its own space, but no one's gonna read that, so I'll try my best to leave the discussion to the community, and only give the gist of my suggestion.

I come from a different background than the average Lineage or themepark player on this forum. The games I've played didn't have much PvE at all, and the best ones I've played had post-level-farming gameplay loops that had nothing to do with mobs or dungeons or raids. There was PvP or RvR, and that was what the game was - and it was glorious. You logged on, attacked an enemy (3 opposing realms) castle or fort, defended your own, or picked a fight with groups around hotspots. And when your sieging was successful, you raided the enemy territory.

My suggestion is pretty direct. Give us meaningful territory-control-related PvP content (It can't just be caravans, because the current caravan design just doesn't impact the game world enough on the long term to be a persistent motivator) to measure our strategic and fighting skill every day, around the clock.
Make it possible for 3 players to start it and force a response out of their opponents. Make it spontaneous and important, just like important bosses, raids, and events/quests. PvP players will still show up everywhere else, just like PvE players will still show up for important metropolis sieges. But give the PvPers something to do when they decide it's time for PvP action, rather than force them to follow an artificial schedule.

I completely see the need for protecting players from having to be terminally online in order to preserve their achievements (if only because free wins make wins lose their meaning), but I don't think you have to restrict all PvP siege engagements to timeslots for that. You can just make sieges span over longer stretches of time (think: days) and across multiple buildings, so defenders have ample time to respond to sieges across different outposts and fight and defend across stages of a siege. Outposts don't have to decide the outcome of sieges: Each hour of controlling an outpost could just influence an upcoming siege's timers and power balances. Or a certain duration of controlling a circle of forts could open up a PvP raid micro-invasion heist to steal defence equipment or (on the defending side) set up additional defences.

I understand and accept that Ashes doesn't want to be a PvP-centric game, and I don't mean to replace the need for players to participate in non-PVP in order to compete. Players should be encouraged to care about the game as a whole, and fulfil their role in the entirety of it, but I do think the healthiest way to create a long-lasting PvX game with a large playerbase has to give players space to soak in their preferred side of the content when they feel like it, rather than having to subordinate their mood to the game's calendar and list of responsibilities.

Excited to hear what people think.

if you're talking about DAOC, you're miss-leading this conversation.

Darkness Falls (PvEvP) dungeon was a must for character progression in PvP.

Was the majority of the game-loop for PvP in the frontier? Yes, but contestable PvE was still a necessity

This content has been removed.

BlindingRadiance wrote: »

Saying that like PvPetd aren’t forced to do pve now when are pvers forced to do PvP
Where

It's called Ashes of Creation

This content has been removed.

Vyril wrote: »

Laetitian wrote: »

ArcheAge-related thread inspiration context for those interested:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRzxBIQunIA
The first 8 minutes of this opinion piece about the current state of Archeage (If you have barely any background info, the summary in first 10 minutes here is worth a watch) highlight the problem fairly directly.

I was only around when Trion set up the ArcheAge beta and have recently been watching videos about the course ArcheAge took that led to its downfall. In my perception, aside from the obvious monetization stuff, it comes down to one very vital thing: Motivation and justification to do what you want to do, when you want to do it.

I wrote a 1k word long essay on why PvP needs its own space, but no one's gonna read that, so I'll try my best to leave the discussion to the community, and only give the gist of my suggestion.

I come from a different background than the average Lineage or themepark player on this forum. The games I've played didn't have much PvE at all, and the best ones I've played had post-level-farming gameplay loops that had nothing to do with mobs or dungeons or raids. There was PvP or RvR, and that was what the game was - and it was glorious. You logged on, attacked an enemy (3 opposing realms) castle or fort, defended your own, or picked a fight with groups around hotspots. And when your sieging was successful, you raided the enemy territory.

My suggestion is pretty direct. Give us meaningful territory-control-related PvP content (It can't just be caravans, because the current caravan design just doesn't impact the game world enough on the long term to be a persistent motivator) to measure our strategic and fighting skill every day, around the clock.
Make it possible for 3 players to start it and force a response out of their opponents. Make it spontaneous and important, just like important bosses, raids, and events/quests. PvP players will still show up everywhere else, just like PvE players will still show up for important metropolis sieges. But give the PvPers something to do when they decide it's time for PvP action, rather than force them to follow an artificial schedule.

I completely see the need for protecting players from having to be terminally online in order to preserve their achievements (if only because free wins make wins lose their meaning), but I don't think you have to restrict all PvP siege engagements to timeslots for that. You can just make sieges span over longer stretches of time (think: days) and across multiple buildings, so defenders have ample time to respond to sieges across different outposts and fight and defend across stages of a siege. Outposts don't have to decide the outcome of sieges: Each hour of controlling an outpost could just influence an upcoming siege's timers and power balances. Or a certain duration of controlling a circle of forts could open up a PvP raid micro-invasion heist to steal defence equipment or (on the defending side) set up additional defences.

I understand and accept that Ashes doesn't want to be a PvP-centric game, and I don't mean to replace the need for players to participate in non-PVP in order to compete. Players should be encouraged to care about the game as a whole, and fulfil their role in the entirety of it, but I do think the healthiest way to create a long-lasting PvX game with a large playerbase has to give players space to soak in their preferred side of the content when they feel like it, rather than having to subordinate their mood to the game's calendar and list of responsibilities.

Excited to hear what people think.

if you're talking about DAOC, you're miss-leading this conversation.

Darkness Falls (PvEvP) dungeon was a must for character progression in PvP.

Was the majority of the game-loop for PvP in the frontier? Yes, but contestable PvE was still a necessity

That's what I was saying. The argument is that it's possible for a game to be PvP-centric but still allow for PvE to be essential and leave room PvE-preferring players to enjoy the game without being forced to engage in PvP duty constantly.

Laetitian wrote: »

Vyril wrote: »

Laetitian wrote: »

ArcheAge-related thread inspiration context for those interested:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRzxBIQunIA
The first 8 minutes of this opinion piece about the current state of Archeage (If you have barely any background info, the summary in first 10 minutes here is worth a watch) highlight the problem fairly directly.

I was only around when Trion set up the ArcheAge beta and have recently been watching videos about the course ArcheAge took that led to its downfall. In my perception, aside from the obvious monetization stuff, it comes down to one very vital thing: Motivation and justification to do what you want to do, when you want to do it.

I wrote a 1k word long essay on why PvP needs its own space, but no one's gonna read that, so I'll try my best to leave the discussion to the community, and only give the gist of my suggestion.

I come from a different background than the average Lineage or themepark player on this forum. The games I've played didn't have much PvE at all, and the best ones I've played had post-level-farming gameplay loops that had nothing to do with mobs or dungeons or raids. There was PvP or RvR, and that was what the game was - and it was glorious. You logged on, attacked an enemy (3 opposing realms) castle or fort, defended your own, or picked a fight with groups around hotspots. And when your sieging was successful, you raided the enemy territory.

My suggestion is pretty direct. Give us meaningful territory-control-related PvP content (It can't just be caravans, because the current caravan design just doesn't impact the game world enough on the long term to be a persistent motivator) to measure our strategic and fighting skill every day, around the clock.
Make it possible for 3 players to start it and force a response out of their opponents. Make it spontaneous and important, just like important bosses, raids, and events/quests. PvP players will still show up everywhere else, just like PvE players will still show up for important metropolis sieges. But give the PvPers something to do when they decide it's time for PvP action, rather than force them to follow an artificial schedule.

I completely see the need for protecting players from having to be terminally online in order to preserve their achievements (if only because free wins make wins lose their meaning), but I don't think you have to restrict all PvP siege engagements to timeslots for that. You can just make sieges span over longer stretches of time (think: days) and across multiple buildings, so defenders have ample time to respond to sieges across different outposts and fight and defend across stages of a siege. Outposts don't have to decide the outcome of sieges: Each hour of controlling an outpost could just influence an upcoming siege's timers and power balances. Or a certain duration of controlling a circle of forts could open up a PvP raid micro-invasion heist to steal defence equipment or (on the defending side) set up additional defences.

I understand and accept that Ashes doesn't want to be a PvP-centric game, and I don't mean to replace the need for players to participate in non-PVP in order to compete. Players should be encouraged to care about the game as a whole, and fulfil their role in the entirety of it, but I do think the healthiest way to create a long-lasting PvX game with a large playerbase has to give players space to soak in their preferred side of the content when they feel like it, rather than having to subordinate their mood to the game's calendar and list of responsibilities.

Excited to hear what people think.

if you're talking about DAOC, you're miss-leading this conversation.

Darkness Falls (PvEvP) dungeon was a must for character progression in PvP.

Was the majority of the game-loop for PvP in the frontier? Yes, but contestable PvE was still a necessity

That's what I was saying. The argument is that it's possible for a game to be PvP-centric but still allow for PvE to be essential and leave room PvE-preferring players to enjoy the game without being forced to engage in PvP duty constantly.

DAoC is one of my favorite games of all time, but with AoC the mechanics don't line up the same way.
Warhammer Online had it's chance to be DAoC2, but they added keeps to late in the game and wasn't designed properly, and then their game performance ruined it.

Warhammer Online also has open world PvPvE. Which was awesome.

The reality is, DAoC and AoC at the core are completely different, and it's either you're ok with the direction, and design of AoC because it's not going to change at all, or you'll need to wait for Camelot Unchained.

Vyril wrote: »

Laetitian wrote: »

Vyril wrote: »

Laetitian wrote: »

ArcheAge-related thread inspiration context for those interested:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRzxBIQunIA
The first 8 minutes of this opinion piece about the current state of Archeage (If you have barely any background info, the summary in first 10 minutes here is worth a watch) highlight the problem fairly directly.

I was only around when Trion set up the ArcheAge beta and have recently been watching videos about the course ArcheAge took that led to its downfall. In my perception, aside from the obvious monetization stuff, it comes down to one very vital thing: Motivation and justification to do what you want to do, when you want to do it.

I wrote a 1k word long essay on why PvP needs its own space, but no one's gonna read that, so I'll try my best to leave the discussion to the community, and only give the gist of my suggestion.

I come from a different background than the average Lineage or themepark player on this forum. The games I've played didn't have much PvE at all, and the best ones I've played had post-level-farming gameplay loops that had nothing to do with mobs or dungeons or raids. There was PvP or RvR, and that was what the game was - and it was glorious. You logged on, attacked an enemy (3 opposing realms) castle or fort, defended your own, or picked a fight with groups around hotspots. And when your sieging was successful, you raided the enemy territory.

My suggestion is pretty direct. Give us meaningful territory-control-related PvP content (It can't just be caravans, because the current caravan design just doesn't impact the game world enough on the long term to be a persistent motivator) to measure our strategic and fighting skill every day, around the clock.
Make it possible for 3 players to start it and force a response out of their opponents. Make it spontaneous and important, just like important bosses, raids, and events/quests. PvP players will still show up everywhere else, just like PvE players will still show up for important metropolis sieges. But give the PvPers something to do when they decide it's time for PvP action, rather than force them to follow an artificial schedule.

I completely see the need for protecting players from having to be terminally online in order to preserve their achievements (if only because free wins make wins lose their meaning), but I don't think you have to restrict all PvP siege engagements to timeslots for that. You can just make sieges span over longer stretches of time (think: days) and across multiple buildings, so defenders have ample time to respond to sieges across different outposts and fight and defend across stages of a siege. Outposts don't have to decide the outcome of sieges: Each hour of controlling an outpost could just influence an upcoming siege's timers and power balances. Or a certain duration of controlling a circle of forts could open up a PvP raid micro-invasion heist to steal defence equipment or (on the defending side) set up additional defences.

I understand and accept that Ashes doesn't want to be a PvP-centric game, and I don't mean to replace the need for players to participate in non-PVP in order to compete. Players should be encouraged to care about the game as a whole, and fulfil their role in the entirety of it, but I do think the healthiest way to create a long-lasting PvX game with a large playerbase has to give players space to soak in their preferred side of the content when they feel like it, rather than having to subordinate their mood to the game's calendar and list of responsibilities.

Excited to hear what people think.

if you're talking about DAOC, you're miss-leading this conversation.

Darkness Falls (PvEvP) dungeon was a must for character progression in PvP.

Was the majority of the game-loop for PvP in the frontier? Yes, but contestable PvE was still a necessity

That's what I was saying. The argument is that it's possible for a game to be PvP-centric but still allow for PvE to be essential and leave room PvE-preferring players to enjoy the game without being forced to engage in PvP duty constantly.

wait for Camelot Unchained.

If you want me to stop playing video games you should say so directly, lol. That ship sank in Marc Jacobs's bitter tears many years ago.

I don't think you've read any of my points. I'm not here to recreate Camelot. I've just played a lot of RvR, and I know how much it does to tie a community together and make PvP players stick around in a game for a looong time, and I've played a lot of mixed PvE & PvP games where the PvP crowd just runs out of motivation to show up, so I'm trying to offer suggestions to avoid that very repetitive cycle. I'm recognising that it's been turned down, but if you don't have another argument than "it's not possble" or "it's not the direction for this game", you're not really adding anything interesting here.

Noaani wrote: »

Laetitian wrote: »

Okay, there are idiots on both sides, I thought that went without saying.

For someone that claimed they don't want to make this a PvP vs PvE thing, you've done a really poor job at it.

I mean, that's the angle it's been attacked from, so that's where I defend it.

I didn't imply there weren't idiots on both sides.

Edit: I finally noticed what you meant.
Yes, I said no PvP players ever do that. I meant reasonable PvP players. Which, you know, maybe that's only 10% of reasonable people on each side. More likely a small majority, and a very loud rest.
But the thing is, reasonable PvE players do do the opposite, and despite being overall reasonable people complain that PvP players get anything at all. It's definitely giving envious older sibling energy, regretting their life choices like: "I'm just doing PvE because I've been told I have to in order to be worth something, but I really think PvP is more fun, so now I'm jealous of PvP players for getting to enjoy themselves and still being relevant, so they better get annoyed me doing 20% more damage than them, otherwise what's the point of existence?" And then when no one respects them for their gear, they feel like they *have* to win the PvP dominance game, too, in order to feel validated - instead of just doing the part of the game they like and accepting that other players will dictate the tone in other parts of the game.
And when they realise that that's too exhausting of a life to live, they demand that PvP be diminished in significance, and complain why people are forcing them to do all of that.

It's just such a self-inflicted string of problems.

Azherae wrote: »

Please explain to me anything else that Regnum Online consists of.

Otherwise, I'm not sure what meaningful discussion we can have. I don't have the information to do anything but either 'continue to think you're wrong based on your love of a narrow game', or 'take your word for it without basis, against all my experience'.

Well, I do have more as proof for the potential viability of my claim that these systems can coexist, but it's more a web of experiences than specific perfect proof.

1) DaoC. I haven't played the game long enough to know how directly it overlaps, but I've played with enough past DaoC players to know that it involved vastly more near-mandatory (for gear) PvE content, and its RvR content (sieging, ganking, zone control, group fights, invasions) was pretty directly comparable to Regnum. Its combat and graphics were just a bit more outdated.

2) World bosses and other PvE shenanigans in Regnum. Like I said, they never made up a massive part of its gameplay loop, but people still engaged in it, and it functioned, and the sieging didn't break apart when players chose not to siege that day. It just changed the power dynamics, and people were okay with those choices, just like they were okay with being offline and getting debuffs for being invaded. Such is life in a world that doesn't hold its breath to wait for you to witness it.

3) ESO had it and it was horrible because it had barely any consequences, and the mechanics weren't strategically interesting enough (forts too large to coordinate, sieging timers not strategically impactful enough), so hardly anyone paid attention. It's a negative example, but to me it shows that what really decides the quality and participation of realm versus realm combat is always the significance of the outcome, and the impact of strategic coordination. That's what gets players to care about pulling at a common string, and what gets the PVEers to root for their army in the warzone while the PvPers proudly defend their PvEers excelling at preparing the next generation's equipment. It can be such a lovely dynamic when neither part is too meaningless.

4) The point I made about just being okay with accepting that the part of the game you don't invest your time into, other players will supersede you in. That part's just a necessary truth of life that PvPers and PvEers alike need to learn to accept, and it's honestly something more carebears need to be taught a lesson about, if we ever want to outgrow MMO communities where everyone aspires to be the best at everything and then asks for the part they're not excelling at to be diminished, so their egos can handle it better. Instead, just let everything be very important, and accept that other players will have something you don't have, but enjoy getting to consistently do the things you prefer doing.

[I wrote these comments hours ago and then forget to send before I left. :`( ]

NiKr wrote: »

But I'd say that we already kinda have what you're suggesting. Node/guild wars have unlimited killing during their existence. So one side's players are free to go and search for enemies during whichever hours.

Yeah, no, that's just skirmishes without a goal. A glorified kill count statistic. Those are just not comparable to "meaningful" objective-based PvP.

NiKr wrote: »

The main problem with wars though is that we know jackshit about their design. We don't know costs of declaration, we don't know consequences of refusal to participate, we don't know if there's any links to any even semi-meaningful goals outside of the prime-time ones. We only know that you can declare at any time, but goals only spawn at prime-time.

I mean, if you're essentially saying: "Who knows, for all we know Intrepid might already be planning everything you crave." sure, but I don't think that makes the discussion less warranted given what we know.

NiKr wrote: »

I'd say that involving guild-related freeholds in the off-hours guild wars and in-node housing in off-hours node wars would be a good way to get close to your suggestion. You won't be able to destroy those locations, but you'll need to do smth in them to have maybe a buff or an item for the prime-time goals of the wars. Node/guild gets notified that you're aiming to raid their stuff and can decide whether they want to defend (that is, if there's even anyone online).

With a reasonably meaningful reward, I could easily be satisfied with something like that. (If it can't be territory control, at least *some* way other players can feel something happened that they could have intervened but didn't; maybe a guild gets reduced profits or another gets increased ones, or certain loot is more likely to show up in a victorious area - that type of tangible trophy that extends beyond just the contestants in the war effort)

NiKr wrote: »

I think the main problem with your suggestion in the context of Ashes (and seemingly from those vids in AA as well) is with reward balancing. Mmos have kinda shifted towards "session-based" designs, because devs have realized that majority of their players are on the older side, and what do those players have? Right, life schedules. So devs design the game around such schedules.

If you reward the nolifers too much - you'll have the game for only nolifers, and they're usually a fairly small bunch. And you if you don't really rewards them for their time - you get what ZZav described in AA, which is no one participating in content that has lower rewards for their higher efforts.

I think you're overestimating how much of a problem that is. You can solve it by scaling the reward for this type of PvP/territory control/whatever with the amount of online players. You can solve it by deciding the rewards in 24 hour or 1-week-intervals. So most no-lifer activity should cancel out across nodes/guilds/metropoles.
But you can also just fix it by completely disabling this type of PvP from 2am to 2pm. If I said 24/7, I apologise if that was confusing. I was simplifying my point about just not wanting to be restricted to predetermined scheduled PvP events. Naturally, spontaneously developing player competition is ultimately what this is all about. Upon using these words I remember having this discussion before with you. I'll have to look it up to see what our conclusions were.

This content has been removed.

Aszkalon wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

You think a PvPer ever complained that the PvEers got to be 30% stronger after spending 50 hours per week grinding raids?

Yes.

Yes they do.

Literally all the time.

I can confirm that. It's just as Noaani says. (lol)

It's even worse when "Casual PvP'ers" in for Example World of WoW-Token Craft, meet other Players who grinded and farmed the most ridiculous Arena-Items while using +5 PvP Addons and more.

The Difference even then is like Day and Night even if the "Casual" PvP'ers have unlocked a strong PvP-Set which you don't need to do Arena for.

You are stuck either using PvP-Items that negate Stuns and give You serious Stat Buffs for like 20 Seconds, or you just get obliterated like the Casual you are. * sighs in Casual * ^-^ x'D

It's EVEN. WORSE. when it's a Battleground that is "Pre-made". Meaning +20 to 40 PvP-Lunatics farm up and entirely shred to bits a Casual-Player Group that is simply there for farming Honor Points and Batches. 🤣👍

Your WoW examples are pretty amazing examples for why these are non-issues to the PvP players in the games I play. Because you just recognise that it's an open-world group game, and there's strength in diplomacy (well, it would be in Ashes or sandboxes - in the games I've actually played it's just "morale", I guess), strategy, pacing, and only finally battle skill. So yes, that equipment is going to whoop you. But that doesn't mean you'll be useless or even that you'll lose, and to a rational open-world PvP player, that's all that counts.

Saabynator wrote: »

Laetitian wrote: »

Excited to hear what people think.

I think AoC is trying to be a PvE & PvP game in equal measures. As far as I know, you can actually make one note declare war on another note, without siege even. Guilds can declare war on other guilds. I am not sure there is more ways to declare wars, but if you want a ton of PvP, I am thinking you can make a guild and declare war on several guilds that is around your area. Maybe you could even take somewhat controll over a dungeon that way.

Honestly, yeah, that's a great start to open the PvP significance up towards a more spontaneous, interactive level. Not so much the war declaration on its own if that primarily just means who you get to whack when they're in your way, and then someone else from a different node comes and snacks that objective while you're busy asserting dominance on that specific node you're bullying. That sounds a bit miserable. But gaining control over areas through war in a more profound way, like perhaps gaining corruption immunity in one specific boss area your node controls. That would be pretty cool stuff. But it's still PvP for the sake of PvE. A slightly more neutral sense of reward would be nice, you know? Because if that's all we have, then PvEers who don't care will just...go somewhere else. And PvP-preferring players will still be dependent on PvE-centric rewards, but PvE-preferring players will just dodge PvP-influenced content and not care. It just doesn't seem balanced.

Selo wrote: »

Never been a fan of timeslot pvp
Any mmorpg that has tried it has had very bad PvP, Age of Conan had it and PvP was nonexistant.
Imo Ashes of Creation would be better if it had DaoC type of PvP.
Theres a reason its considered the pinacle of PvP mmorpgs and Archage/Lineage arent
It was discussed in the old forums way back when already and i said the same thing back then but yea, it wont change.

Oh man. I just don't understand why there can't be room for some of it, you know? I'm just asking for outposts that slightly influence sieges, and everyone instantly goes: "No, the game would collapse, no one would be able to PvE, you're ruining everything, just go away, this isn't a PvP game." Like, Jesus, in how many languages do I have to say that I am excited to engage in the proposed AoC PvX game loop as it is, I just want to add some meaningful-feeling PvP-options to make it futureproof.

Azherae

Well, with all that said, I will absolutely accept sieges more often if Ashes can do anything close to my other two games.

Campaign 'rolls over/resets' on Sundays. If you try to Campaign on a Sunday before any players have done any Intel Gathering or Procurement Ops, you can't get advance knowledge of enemy troop movements and your own forces are weaker.

Elite Conflict Zones have enemy ship strength based on the economic and morale statuses of the enemy faction, and I strongly suspect (no concrete proof) that even when two players play maybe an hour apart, on opposing sides, what happens is that the game will add at least one equivalent ship to the Conflict to 'represent that player's effect' if they won.

So a player that takes a Heavy Offense medium ship to a conflict zone and wins, then logs off, causes me to encounter an 'extra' Heavy Offense build medium NPC ship when I go later on.

If someone can convince Intrepid that players should be debuffed in sieges if they don't eat, or that forts/outposts/freeholds need to receive repairs, etc, I'll take 'can initiate anytime' sieges or similar. Go all the way to Campaign and have NPCs that constantly repair and replenish fortifications/Node buildings whenever anyone isn't attacking it, at the cost of overall Node/Guild revenue.

When continually holding a fort against hostiles is draining the guild coffers instead of 'rewarding' the fort holders directly, then I'm all in on freely initiated attacks. That's how I prefer territory PvP games to work.

BlindingRadiance wrote: »

So why does archer have stealth

You need to stop spamming incorrect information, and at the same time you've been explained why.

Laetitian wrote: »

Vyril wrote: »

Laetitian wrote: »

Vyril wrote: »

Laetitian wrote: »

ArcheAge-related thread inspiration context for those interested:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRzxBIQunIA
The first 8 minutes of this opinion piece about the current state of Archeage (If you have barely any background info, the summary in first 10 minutes here is worth a watch) highlight the problem fairly directly.

I was only around when Trion set up the ArcheAge beta and have recently been watching videos about the course ArcheAge took that led to its downfall. In my perception, aside from the obvious monetization stuff, it comes down to one very vital thing: Motivation and justification to do what you want to do, when you want to do it.

I wrote a 1k word long essay on why PvP needs its own space, but no one's gonna read that, so I'll try my best to leave the discussion to the community, and only give the gist of my suggestion.

I come from a different background than the average Lineage or themepark player on this forum. The games I've played didn't have much PvE at all, and the best ones I've played had post-level-farming gameplay loops that had nothing to do with mobs or dungeons or raids. There was PvP or RvR, and that was what the game was - and it was glorious. You logged on, attacked an enemy (3 opposing realms) castle or fort, defended your own, or picked a fight with groups around hotspots. And when your sieging was successful, you raided the enemy territory.

My suggestion is pretty direct. Give us meaningful territory-control-related PvP content (It can't just be caravans, because the current caravan design just doesn't impact the game world enough on the long term to be a persistent motivator) to measure our strategic and fighting skill every day, around the clock.
Make it possible for 3 players to start it and force a response out of their opponents. Make it spontaneous and important, just like important bosses, raids, and events/quests. PvP players will still show up everywhere else, just like PvE players will still show up for important metropolis sieges. But give the PvPers something to do when they decide it's time for PvP action, rather than force them to follow an artificial schedule.

I completely see the need for protecting players from having to be terminally online in order to preserve their achievements (if only because free wins make wins lose their meaning), but I don't think you have to restrict all PvP siege engagements to timeslots for that. You can just make sieges span over longer stretches of time (think: days) and across multiple buildings, so defenders have ample time to respond to sieges across different outposts and fight and defend across stages of a siege. Outposts don't have to decide the outcome of sieges: Each hour of controlling an outpost could just influence an upcoming siege's timers and power balances. Or a certain duration of controlling a circle of forts could open up a PvP raid micro-invasion heist to steal defence equipment or (on the defending side) set up additional defences.

I understand and accept that Ashes doesn't want to be a PvP-centric game, and I don't mean to replace the need for players to participate in non-PVP in order to compete. Players should be encouraged to care about the game as a whole, and fulfil their role in the entirety of it, but I do think the healthiest way to create a long-lasting PvX game with a large playerbase has to give players space to soak in their preferred side of the content when they feel like it, rather than having to subordinate their mood to the game's calendar and list of responsibilities.

Excited to hear what people think.

if you're talking about DAOC, you're miss-leading this conversation.

Darkness Falls (PvEvP) dungeon was a must for character progression in PvP.

Was the majority of the game-loop for PvP in the frontier? Yes, but contestable PvE was still a necessity

That's what I was saying. The argument is that it's possible for a game to be PvP-centric but still allow for PvE to be essential and leave room PvE-preferring players to enjoy the game without being forced to engage in PvP duty constantly.

wait for Camelot Unchained.

If you want me to stop playing video games you should say so directly, lol. That ship sank in Marc Jacobs's bitter tears many years ago.

I don't think you've read any of my points. I'm not here to recreate Camelot. I've just played a lot of RvR, and I know how much it does to tie a community together and make PvP players stick around in a game for a looong time, and I've played a lot of mixed PvE & PvP games where the PvP crowd just runs out of motivation to show up, so I'm trying to offer suggestions to avoid that very repetitive cycle. I'm recognising that it's been turned down, but if you don't have another argument than "it's not possble" or "it's not the direction for this game", you're not really adding anything interesting here.

I highly suggest reading more on the node system, and how node siege, castle siege, guild wars, and caravan systems work. These are your motivators.

Because players are motivated by different things, because they want something from the game that other players don't want, that's going to cause people to butt heads. Different players are going to want different experiences and the conflict between the two of them will create a bigger and better thing. Out of strife comes rebirth and that's a core symbol, it's a core theme that occurs throughout the game.[6] – Jeffrey Bard

https://ashesofcreation.wiki/PvP
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Risk_vs_reward
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Nodes
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Node_sieges
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Castle_sieges
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Guild_wars
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Arenas
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Caravans

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