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Alpha Two Phase II testing is currently taking place 5+ days each week. More information about testing schedule can be found here
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
How to fix the EXTREME server drop off we are experiencing.
1970merlin
Member, Alpha Two
Ashes has the problem that if you start late or can't' grind for the 1st 72 hours you feel like you are too far behind. That is not good for the grinders in the long run because people don't stay once they feel left behind.
I think Intrepid will have to nerf progression the 1st week or two for every new server. What I mean by this is the following: Once someone is more than 5 levels ahead of the average player, they greatly increase the experience needed to advance. I understand there may be strong opposition among the sweaty, but this will ensure a stronger server and thus better growth for nodes in the long run, and more people staying on the server.
Also, of course, exploiters need serious punishment.
I think Intrepid will have to nerf progression the 1st week or two for every new server. What I mean by this is the following: Once someone is more than 5 levels ahead of the average player, they greatly increase the experience needed to advance. I understand there may be strong opposition among the sweaty, but this will ensure a stronger server and thus better growth for nodes in the long run, and more people staying on the server.
Also, of course, exploiters need serious punishment.
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They just need to ease party restrictions so you can still play with your friends of any level and not be punished for it.
I would rather have a brutal leveling curve to struggle against than 4-6k people acting like anchors that slow me down.
I personally, don't see the issue though. I have group and solo grinded hard on different characters and there are trade offs. Group is faster xp most of the time, but less drops. Solo can be slower xp, but you get all the drops.
I think if I wanted to make an alt I would not have a problem capping.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
Nerfign progression for the first week or two will nerf it for everyone. It'll just take 144 hours for the sweaties to level to max. I'm all for a grind, but don't making it grindy to try to slow down the sweaties, that'll just slow me down too. I generally don't even start until 2 or 3 days after launch, or a week. And if you cut gains those first two weeks or so I wouldn't even start until that lifted. I think this would just piss everyone off.
I never like these mechanics. ESO was terrible, nothing felt like progression. FFXIV felt cheap too. Level gaps between friends and groups isn't really the games problem, it's more the friends problem. Anytime a game tries to fix it, it just cheapens the game IMO. I get the point though, I've mostly found myself playing catch up to my friends due to my work schedules. A lot of times they'd make alts to come back and play with us slow pokes. When I find myself on the speedy side I do the same.
Asheron's Call style? This would be pretty cool. I bet they could improve on it a lot.
AC didn't have mentorship.
It had Exp chains.
Done through Leadership and Loyalty skills.
This passed exps up the chain, not down.
*this may have changed in later years.
I don't like the Mentor program concept.
I am against anything artificial.
The game should work and be fun in a natural way, without giving the feeling to the lower player that he is being helped and should be grateful in any way to the higher level player.
I've seen almost dead MMOs where veterans were making alts to help new players enjoy the game but it feels bad from new player's perspective when the player realizes what happens, that those low levels are not random players interested to level up but know everything about the game. I don't want to help youtubers or streamers in any way while playing the game.
If AoC is more a PvP game then it should reduce the leveling time for late comers and make them useful for the node as fast as possible.
What I would do is an Experience Bank, which would be filled by high level players and used by the low level citizens. The time gained should be payed back before leaving the node.
In a game like Ashes there can't really be a winner. The world is open, so you can't really do level-sync stuff. There's forced pvp, so even if you did do lvl-sync - you'd risk dying to others more easily (especially in wars). There'll always be alts, so hoping to never meet them is foolish. Giving xp for free or just super fast would go diretly opposite Steven's desire for the leveling stage to matter. And letting people powerlvl would kinda achieve the same thing.
I've always said that having additional mobs of the appropriate lvl, if your party has lowbies, would be great. Appearance of those mobs could be triggered either by quests or by the mentor program. These mobs would have additional AI behaviors (namely, ignoring the high lvl attacks both physically and behaviorally) and would go around the powerlvling prevention system because of that behavior.
Have this shit during boss/dungeon encounters and you have yourself a game where newbies can join max lvl players w/o lvl scaling/syncing/etc. The game would still be easier for the newbie, but that's nothing different from literally any other approach to the situation.
I am retired. I can literally play all day. My concern is not my progression vs others. My concern is the way the game is many players can't go the first 72 your without sleep and play all week. This is leading to huge drop offs in participation. We can already see this leads to empty servers. That will not be fun.
I am trying to find a way to decrease server drop of to maintain the enjoyment of the game. My solution is to increase the XP requirements for those more than 5 levels ahead of the average for the first 2 weeks. Players can still progress beyond others but it would just become much harder. I know this will suck for the sweaty and I am one of them, but I also want long term enjoyment out of the game and a healthy server. I don't see any other way this can be accomplished. Realistically it might need to be for 3-4 weeks.
Turns out, instead of finding new players and dealing with the issue of all of that (new players not being regular, often not sticking around, not wanting to stick to your schedule etc), you can just use alts or alt accounts. This completely eliminates those issues, and means guilds can put this mentor system to full use, without actually mentoring any new players at all.
If it is benefitial to guilds, it will not be used to assist new players.
In L2 the guild's "mentorship" system would need you to level up to 40, which could take several days of fairly hardcore grinding. Majority of guilds would usually have way more beneficial methods of spending their time. But newbies would still be hunted and invited, mainly because it was just a passive benefit income for the guild, while also being a tool to potentially find some good new players.
Ashes already has a chatch up system for leveling.
The node system slows people down by making them travel between nodes to complete all tasks needed. This slows people down a bit. People coming in a week later will have much less traveling to get what they need.
This is not where the problem lies. I would argue gear is a bigger problem.
Yes.
There are a few things a system like this needs, and one of them is a cap on how much value a guild (or mentor player) can get from it.
So, what people would do is guarantee they had enough alts/alt accounts to hit that cap, since new players are never consistent.
The kind of thing you are talking about in L2 also happened in EQ2. Most guilds were always on the lookout for new players - but thst was happening in EQ2 before the game had a mentor system. After that system was added, it was still common for guilds to use level appropriate alts rather than mentoring.
I would have to assume there is a system, mechanic or some such other than a mentor program that encourages guilds to hunt new players out to see if they would like to join. I don't see it as a direct result of a mentor system.
Ok wait I might need to bring up something that you may not have thought of as much as me/some others.
1. Ashes has a long early leveling phase in a game that doesn't suit it demographically
2. Ashes has a currently poorly balanced stat system in a game that has a long leveling phase
3. Ashes is very guild focused.
The reason these three things combine poorly is simple. Back when our beloved old games launched, MMORPGs were some of the first games to offer real-time synchronous tactical teamwork across multiple people not in the same area (for many of the people trying to play them).
Even if you consider that there were such games long before L2 and similar, that was still within a range where a lot of younger people learned how to work in groups and the concept of roles in their first MMORPGs.
They gained a lot from those long early leveling phases because they spent a lot of time learning their roles, how the games worked, how to get along with people, etc, so it was fine if leveling took forever, and more experienced players would sometimes have memories of 'what it was like to be an MMORPG noob/beginner' and relate to that.
The 2010s games are after all that. Idk if you've ever looked into why this aspect of MMORPGs changed, so I'm offering it now. There are definitely still 'MMORPG beginners' out there, but they get their 'early information' differently, they often have many of the execution and teamwork skills from other games, and they don't have mentors who 'remember what exactly it is like to be a newbie at the genre as a whole'.
Anyways, I'm not against Mentor systems that are Guild-based (i.e. the benefits go to the Guild), other than it having the tendency to make the first experience of many new players 'being pulled into the most obnoxious guilds'. Seems to be working fine in TL, balanced to the point where I think about it, but consider it optional enough to not do it if it would take up too much of my time, which feels about the right amount of incentive.
That's what I want from the mentor system.
The gameplay part can definitely come from way more sources these days, but does the social part of the game exist in too many other genres?
There's moba-likes (shooters included) and maybe stuff like team BR gameplay, but do those relate all too much to a guild experience in an mmo? In my experience they aren't really similar, but, as you know, mine is a really limited experience.
There's also the fairly high possibility that we won't even have mmo newbies in Ashes, purely due to how niche it is, but then I think the system should showcase the features specific to Ashes (nodes, markets, artisanry, etc), which then ties back to discussions of "how much adventuring xp should you get from non-grind activities" and with no concrete answer to that, it's difficult to say how far/well the Mentor system in Ashes can go.
Hell, I wouldn't be against Mentorship system boosting that adventuring xp from non-grind activities. Would introduce people to the game at a broader scale, would give new players more of a choice of what they want to do throughout those early lvls, would introduce community connections even more (especially the artisanry side of things). And the cross-lvl mob spawns I mentioned could also provide way more xp than normal mob population, so even the mob grind side is faster due to mentoring.
"The ability to understand your role, communicate, and have enough control over your emotions to reach a small goal after a setback."
Many veterans think of those who lack these things as 'weak people who should be weeded out' (not saying you do, since your 'weed out the weak or at least don't reward them' is much more sensibly targeted), and this causes issues, or rather, it would...
If most of those players weren't out there frothing at the mouth and ragequitting over pings in Pred/SMITE/LoL.
It's a skill one has to learn (not everyone does) when under frustrating pressure, and it's a skill that is actually easier to learn in MOBAs because you don't have to deal with the fallout of 'losing your temper at your team and it making things awkward for a week for you to even log into the game'.
Sure, there's the bad side to this, that some people 'never learn and get to keep being terrible at it' if the game doesn't penalize them (i.e. the thing that serious devs are referring to when they talk about managing toxicity) but in short, yeah...
NOOB level teamwork and emotional control in groups with unknowns/strangers used to be an MMO thing, now it's a Battle Arena Shooter/MOBA thing ('tactical' shooters less so because sometimes the low TTK means that a single player can absolutely stomp an entire enemy team).
The thing is that it actually isn't that well known/understood outside of studios that make these games simply because the 'average rando' doesn't ever 'finish the Teamwork 101 course' in MMORPGs now.
"YouTube the fight to know what you should do, assume everyone else did that too, yell at/kick whoever didn't, requeue."
The most popular MMORPGs right now don't even require you to clear anything that would ask for a 'passing grade' in that 'class' to actually do most of their content. So you get this weird split of 'people who don't have those skills' and 'people who have them, but didn't get them from MMOs and therefore probably enter the MMO with a gaming friend group who they know also has them'.
It's really rough on designers right now because of this. Those who like challenge don't come to MMOs to make new friends to face challenges with, and those who 'like MMOs' don't necessarily like challenges.
I agree that a system that accomplishes this would be great, I just don't know what that system looks like.
To me, if EQ2 players were doing this before the game had a mentor system, and Archeage players were never doing this despite having one, it isn't the mentor system you need to look at.
Perhaps it is more to do with the over all player culture than any one system - though right now, I really don't know.
Edit; thinking on this some more, I think it comes down to basic respect - but respect that the game shows it's players.
EQ2 treated it's players with a level of respect, and it's players treated each other with a level of respect as a result. Archeage never treated it's players with any respect.
I don't see a lot of respect for players in Ashes so far.
there also no endgame loops atm outside of getting caravan runs for gold that they cant spend due to above reason
While i completely get what you mean - and i am not even saying you are necessarily wrong,
-> that is not the Problem actually. In any MMO there will always be People who join the Competition and Adventure significantly later than others.
What is so hard, is the fact - that similar like in Planetside 2 - > you are "completely" fxxxed if you can not find any Group to efficiently work together with. Either sooner - or later.
Haaah. I don't wish to experience it again. At honestly "any" Point in time. The "fact" and Experience that You need to forge Bonds either "BEFORE" you play the Game at all,
or while Your Character is already created and falling behind for either Days, Weeks, or "MONTHS" or even half to full a Year -> only because You didn't already had a well-coordinated Group right at the Beginning.
Imagine a thing like "DISCORD" deciding over who is the most efficient Group in the Game. Oh wait. It is. This is the biggest Cockblock and Offturner imaginable.
( Yes i admit it. I like Teamspeak way more. Now stone me for it, lol. )
✓ Occasional Roleplayer
✓ Maybe i look after a Guild sometime soon
I was thinking about this too, actually a player showing up a couple weeks late has HUGE advantages.
-More resources on the ground: While copper is still being farmed heavily, you have much more access to T1 gatherables across the map after the first two weeks. Alot less downtime searching and finding nothing.
-Nodes and services are already leveled up: Easier to purchase things from node vendors and get your professions progressing.
-Players shops have more gear: Can just buy basic gear from player shops and not need to grind for items as much.
In actuality, a person showing up 2-3 weeks after launch can catch up MUCH faster than the majority of people grinding from launch, just from access to gear in the shops alone. Solo/small group exp grinding can be incredibly fast and efficient if you are geared.