Solo Players - Thoughts?

So as the title says, this discussion will be based on solo players. I am currently in a glorious guild & community that I have been in for a long time so I don't personally plan on doing many things solo, but I know a lot of people enjoy doing a bunch of solo adventuring and perhaps maybe I have a solo character just to see how that turns out for some fun when the game launches.

So what are your thoughts on a few things.
What do you want as a solo player
Personally if I was to tackle this game solo and with the knowledge that it's tailored to group gameplay, I would say that for a solo experience I would like to see at least some things implemented in terms of content like for example; perhaps the tower of Carphin has a secret area that only allows one persons mortal coil to enter and it is essentially the same as other games with tower content, you kill trash, kill a boss go to the next level and the Mobs and bosses get harder and harder until you get to like the final boss and for that you really gotta be a skilled player in order to kill it. And with that keeping it to the Ashes sort of hardcore theme, if you die then have it set so you drop everything you got from the Tower till you leave the tower. Then when you leave it reverts to the dropping 20% of materials sorta thing, that way people cant just unalive to get out of the Tower quicker.

Perhaps you can even have mini little ships that you can take out to see and attempt to fight some see monsters etc without needing a massive ship?

Some smaller dungeons that aren't massive and filled with mountains of things, just a small little crack randomly in the side of a mountain with some little hidden corridors and traps etc. (obviously you can't stop people from swarming with guilds but going for bigger fish is more beneficial anyways, so why waste time)

How do you think the game will play out for solo players?
We already know the game isn't going to be tailored for solo players, but despite that I don't see it being impossible to play for solo players. I'm hoping that they implement some sort of LFG (calm down and wait, not a WoW LFG 😂), what I mean by LFG is probably the wrong wording but having the ability to go to a tavern or something and see like a board or something that shows groups and if they are getting a group together for a boss etc. It has the username who put it up and when and where to go, then you can message them and tell them to add to group and then you head over and done pretty much. Think that would be cool and immersive.

As for how it will play out potentially in reality, I see it being hard. I mean if you are artisan main then going round chopping trees and mining etc in the open world, it won't be terrible as long as you keep an eye out for people and stay away so you don't get attacked and loose materials. For people who want to do dungeons and open world stuff I can't really see that being an option to tackle solo unless you are very skilled and just very good at kiting Mobs and pulling set amounts etc. But even then I don't think you'd survive against the bosses haha.

The questing I think will be fine for solos for the most part and just enjoying a nice adventure will be amazing in the game with all the scenery, you could just be a travelling solo adventurer going from city to city meeting people and such. Perhaps even become a merchant and build connections and pay for people to defend your caravan etc.

What does everyone else think?

Find more posts tagged with

Comments

Otr

Dygz wrote: »

Otr wrote: »

You will not be in danger all the time.
Traveling from city to city without caravans will definitely be possible. But with small fast caravans, it will be a nice adventure.
You can be a merchant too. If you are skilled at predicting prices and talking to people, for sure you can find others to help you out. You just drive the caravan and they fight.

Ashes is designed for players to have high Risk 90% of the time.
Sure, players will not be in danger inside of a Freehold House or their own Player Stalls. But people will not be having adventures there.

When somebody asks you if he can have a nice adventure in the game, you understand a relaxing adventure? :thinking:
Adventure implies risk:
noun
an unusual and exciting, typically hazardous, experience or activity:
if something can happen 90% of the time players don't perceive it as a risk anymore but a constant manifestation of harmful events. Adrenaline stops flowing.
You wouldn't attempt to explore the map if you would be in constant risk. And when you will see that nobody kills you, will you not try (test) some quests too?

Otr

P0GG0 wrote: »

i'd love some mechanic were you gain vision range when solo. basically a way to lower the chances of getting ganked.

you'd lose that buff for some amount of time if you take part in group content.

Would you find acceptable to activate and increase that vision by allowing more of your inventory to be lootable?
Lower chance = more losses.
Similar to how green are protected against CC but if they still die, they lose more inventory.

Or to trade it against CC protection. You gain vision range and you loose the protection to CC.

Dygz

Otr wrote: »

When somebody asks you if he can have a nice adventure in the game, you understand a relaxing adventure? :thinking:
Adventure implies risk:
noun
an unusual and exciting, typically hazardous, experience or activity:
if something can happen 90% of the time players don't perceive it as a risk anymore but a constant manifestation of harmful events. Adrenaline stops flowing.
You wouldn't attempt to explore the map if you would be in constant risk. And when you will see that nobody kills you, will you not try (test) some quests too?

The disconnect is more with "nice" than with "adventure".
"Nice adventure" is something cozy - like Palia.
"Exciting adventure" - I expect Ashes will have tons of that.

Effah

Otr wrote: »

P0GG0 wrote: »

i'd love some mechanic were you gain vision range when solo. basically a way to lower the chances of getting ganked.

you'd lose that buff for some amount of time if you take part in group content.

Would you find acceptable to activate and increase that vision by allowing more of your inventory to be lootable?
Lower chance = more losses.
Similar to how green are protected against CC but if they still die, they lose more inventory.

Or to trade it against CC protection. You gain vision range and you loose the protection to CC.

depends on the amount of range gained, i'm just asking for 10 meter maximum. ofc people here will make a big deal out of everything.

Noaani

P0GG0 wrote: »

Otr wrote: »

P0GG0 wrote: »

i'd love some mechanic were you gain vision range when solo. basically a way to lower the chances of getting ganked.

you'd lose that buff for some amount of time if you take part in group content.

Would you find acceptable to activate and increase that vision by allowing more of your inventory to be lootable?
Lower chance = more losses.
Similar to how green are protected against CC but if they still die, they lose more inventory.

Or to trade it against CC protection. You gain vision range and you loose the protection to CC.

depends on the amount of range gained, i'm just asking for 10 meter maximum. ofc people here will make a big deal out of everything.

I don't see how visual range would assist anyone. Verra is not a flat, empty world. There are hills, mountains, trees, cliffs, caves, buildings, walls, all sorts of other things to block view. These are the things that prevent you seeing a potential threat, not how far you can see.

The only time something like this would even come in to play is on the ocean. However, I would wager a warship would know where a solo player is long before they are in visual range anyway (Archeage ships had radar, Ashes probably will too).

iccer

rollox wrote: »

That's just because I do a lot of crafting, exploring, and stuff like fishing. I certainly hope it's not required by these pillars to be grouped up when fishing. And it seems that some opinions on the forums here have a very definitive definition of solo i.e. not in a guild, not doing any raids, not in discord, etc etc.

What I see Ashes offering is social interactions being created. First through node citizenship. I would say the definition of solo player does not fit with someone who is a citizen of a node. Actively participating in tasks and work to build xp for that node. That's a social interaction that is not something that you are grouped with someone. But it could lead to a few ad hoc pugs of players doing the same tasks going out together.

Problem with me is I tend to get distracted, and veer off path to go check out something interesting. Having group mates begin yelling at me to get back to the task. For gods sake I hope that do a happen here if I go take some time to explore something.

Also there will be the guilds which also offer paths to social interaction. I really liked games where a guild has some organized events, whether it be a raid, farming, or PvP whatever. I would point to experiences in New Wold how this worked well.

I think this is how the game should actually be like.
I've mentioned it in another thread, but majority of time you spend in game won't be group content.

Raids, world bosses, sieges, PvP in general, it's all nice to do, but these are events, events that are important.
They cannot be important, if that's all you do in the game. If all you do is just events, then basically there is nothing special about them, that's what the game is. They lose importance.

But that's not what the game should be. The game should allow you to spend time doing random stuff, gathering, mob farming, quests, exploring, etc. and then on top of that you have stuff that you group up for, like dungeons, PvP events, etc.

As a solo player out on a daily gathering run. I could see that an opposing faction was attempting to obtain control of a stronghold. So I went to check it out. Found a few other strays in my faction around there. And we formed a group. Someone in that group called in some friends from their guild. And an hour of PvP over this stronghold ensued.

Now I wasn't a member of this guild, but I was invited to join the discord. A sizable portion of the players went to another stronghold in another territory. But a few of us stayed back as scouts and defenders. I was still in a small group, and we all kind of went back to doing our own thing around the stronghold. Mining, skinning, killing some overland mob, a boss... And whamo! The opponents had returned and started fighting again.

It's not an either or proposition. You are not ever entirely solo and you are not ever entirely grouped for content. Although you may stay in a small group out of necessity of protection in some cases. For me this turns out to be about 25% of my time actively adventuring with a group.

I would really like to emphasize this point, and to add to it.

Just because you spend time as a "solo" player, doing your own thing, it doesn't mean that the game should punish you for it. This should actually be the norm, because most of the players will spend majority of time playing the game "solo".
And then, like you mentioned, while playing solo, you can "stumble upon" group content, where you'd group up with players around you who have a common goal. Whether it's defending/attacking a caravan, PvP in general, some elite/boss that you want to take down, etc. etc.

The game shouldn't force you into groups, by making solo gameplay unviable, but it should have a lot of content, that will make you WANT to group up for it.

Obviously if you want to group up and play like that, then it should be viable as well, you can do dungeons, PvP, caravans, gathering, etc. together.

KingDDD

Solo players should absolutely have content and progression. The key however is to do that within the confines of AoC systems.

For example, player A goes to an open world dungeon. Floor 1 is designed around 1 player. Player a sees player b in floor 1 and asks if they want to do floor 2 which is designed for two people. Once on floor 2 they met player c and d. The same thing happens to floor 3 and floor 4.

This creates content that is soloable but also reinforces the need to group to complete challenges. Obviously rewards scale based group activity and size but if you hard lock solo players out then you are significantly reducing the population necessary to make this game interesting.

Effah

multi layered dungeons sound really cool. if its taking for ever to fill up the trinity you can still have fun grinding at the target location.

please someone make a thread about this.

Vospha

KingDDD wrote: »

Solo players should absolutely have content and progression. The key however is to do that within the confines of AoC systems.

For example, player A goes to an open world dungeon. Floor 1 is designed around 1 player. Player a sees player b in floor 1 and asks if they want to do floor 2 which is designed for two people. Once on floor 2 they met player c and d. The same thing happens to floor 3 and floor 4.

This creates content that is soloable but also reinforces the need to group to complete challenges. Obviously rewards scale based group activity and size but if you hard lock solo players out then you are significantly reducing the population necessary to make this game interesting.

I do like the idea, though then you are a bit stuck it you end up not finding someone or no one else shows up for ages etc. So I feel like just having a good way to find groups before hand would be the best option to avoid the issue of not actually finding someone while in the dungeon if that makes sense. Like mentioned previously using taverns and a notice board to find currently active groups for example would be great!

Otr

KingDDD wrote: »

Solo players should absolutely have content and progression. The key however is to do that within the confines of AoC systems.

For example, player A goes to an open world dungeon. Floor 1 is designed around 1 player. Player a sees player b in floor 1 and asks if they want to do floor 2 which is designed for two people. ....

Player b says no.

Vospha

Otr wrote: »

KingDDD wrote: »

Solo players should absolutely have content and progression. The key however is to do that within the confines of AoC systems.

For example, player A goes to an open world dungeon. Floor 1 is designed around 1 player. Player a sees player b in floor 1 and asks if they want to do floor 2 which is designed for two people. ....

Player b says no.

Just imagining two players who can't go to the next floor because they need 2 and he just looks at the guy who said no like... "seriously?" 😂

Otr

Noaani wrote: »

P0GG0 wrote: »

Otr wrote: »

P0GG0 wrote: »

i'd love some mechanic were you gain vision range when solo. basically a way to lower the chances of getting ganked.

you'd lose that buff for some amount of time if you take part in group content.

Would you find acceptable to activate and increase that vision by allowing more of your inventory to be lootable?
Lower chance = more losses.
Similar to how green are protected against CC but if they still die, they lose more inventory.

Or to trade it against CC protection. You gain vision range and you loose the protection to CC.

depends on the amount of range gained, i'm just asking for 10 meter maximum. ofc people here will make a big deal out of everything.

I don't see how visual range would assist anyone. Verra is not a flat, empty world. There are hills, mountains, trees, cliffs, caves, buildings, walls, all sorts of other things to block view. These are the things that prevent you seeing a potential threat, not how far you can see.

The only time something like this would even come in to play is on the ocean. However, I would wager a warship would know where a solo player is long before they are in visual range anyway (Archeage ships had radar, Ashes probably will too).

I forgot to check if we can see through walls

rollox

Otr wrote: »

Player b says no.

Another New World experience to relate. Not that I have any stake in that game whatsoever. It is just the one in most recent memory for me.

On a solo fishing expedition. I had caught and landed a legendary fish which was in my inventory. I was exploring around this area and found a cave, with a big bear in it, named overland boss. I thought what the hell, let's try it because of pretty small death penalties and I needed to get back to town anyhow.

As I was buffing myself up and preparing to attack this bear. An enemy player shows up. We are both red to each other. But he doesn't attack me, and I don't attack him. Instead we talk about what is in that cave, and he says to me that if I want that bear I will need to kill him first. Lol

Again limited or no loot drop penalties and such. I'm like ok buddy it's on. I almost won but got in a bad position with no line of sight. Which allowed him to heal himself. Yea I was killed by a healer. But I was so close, on respawn I decided to try him again. It was close, down to who will get the last hit. Again I died to this healer

Now instead of doing something rude to me. This player whispers me to ask what I know about the bear. The conversation lead to a sort of friendship. We stayed in touch over time. Met several other times on the battlefield in other situations. But also had a kind of back channel spy vs spy thing going on where we would help or hinder each other with information about what our "team" is up to.

It turns out this bear was pretty insignificant. I had to go offline and look up in a database what I was fighting for. And the drops from that bear just were not useful to me. I even told others in the territory about this guy camping the bear cave. Nobody cares about it or him. Which is too bad to have this content and this conflict over something insignificant.

But the social play from that one encounter lasted for a lifetime of gameplay between the two of us.

Again, solo gameplay that leads to progression in some other way than just a piece of loot or a PvP kill on the board.

Edit for main point. I kind of missed it. In Ashes this encounter would have been different. With loot drop penalties I perhaps would have never stumbled upon the bear cave. Because my priority would've been getting my trophy fish back home asap. Also, if I did find the bear cave, the other play would possibly reacted differently. Seeing a solo gathering type wandering around, I suspect I would've been attacked on sight.

Effah

dear dairy.

Otr

P0GG0 wrote: »

dear dairy.

My 4 words were a good seed \o/
Let's try again

KingDDD wrote: »

Solo players should absolutely have content and progression. The key however is to do that within the confines of AoC systems.

For example, player A goes to an open world dungeon. Floor 1 is designed around 1 player. Player a sees player b in floor 1 and ....

helps the mobs kill player b. 💀☠️💀

KingDDD

Vospha wrote: »

KingDDD wrote: »

Solo players should absolutely have content and progression. The key however is to do that within the confines of AoC systems.

For example, player A goes to an open world dungeon. Floor 1 is designed around 1 player. Player a sees player b in floor 1 and asks if they want to do floor 2 which is designed for two people. Once on floor 2 they met player c and d. The same thing happens to floor 3 and floor 4.

This creates content that is soloable but also reinforces the need to group to complete challenges. Obviously rewards scale based group activity and size but if you hard lock solo players out then you are significantly reducing the population necessary to make this game interesting.

I do like the idea, though then you are a bit stuck it you end up not finding someone or no one else shows up for ages etc. So I feel like just having a good way to find groups before hand would be the best option to avoid the issue of not actually finding someone while in the dungeon if that makes sense. Like mentioned previously using taverns and a notice board to find currently active groups for example would be great!

I'm not convinced you need taverns to function this way as players will find work arounds through avenues like discord. However it does give taverns more uses and keeps people actively in the game which isn't a bad thing.

Otr wrote: »

KingDDD wrote: »

Solo players should absolutely have content and progression. The key however is to do that within the confines of AoC systems.

For example, player A goes to an open world dungeon. Floor 1 is designed around 1 player. Player a sees player b in floor 1 and asks if they want to do floor 2 which is designed for two people. ....

Player b says no.

And thats their prerogative. The rewards at higher levels should be good enough that working with other players is seen as a net benefit unless there are other social factors. IE my guild/node/friend group hates the other person.

Aszkalon

ItsNoGood wrote: »

Yes, Youmu-Chan. You are right.

I am now seeing the Error of my ways ... ... ... i am sorry ... ... ... ... Everyone have a great Day ... ... ...

Effah

u made a funny.

Aszkalon

I think the Players need to know EXACTLY - > what - they - want.

In the last few Years, i think " Survival-Games " became more and more popular, now didn't they ?

If you want to have to play veeeeery carefully and look around and over your Shoulder very often - > being a Lonewolf Solo Player might be just the thing for You, in Verra.

Every single Situation is more dangerous alone. Even when faced with PvE only.

But ... ...
... ... ... do You perhaps aim to have a Freehold one Day ? Or a "static House" in a Node ? Or a Tavern ?

Then, the Solo Player Gamestyle might not be the very thing for You. You might need some help. And be it "only" a handful of other Players and not more.

Dygz

You can get help from other players while playing Solo.
Solo is not synonymous with non-social.

Child Item