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Alpha Two testing is currently taking place five days each week. More information about Phase II and Phase III 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.
Comments
So im going to put this scenario happens your node and guild are set on the riverlands right but you are on the other half of the map all the way up there in the north of it, suddenly you get a call that your node is getting attacked! When you finally manage to arrive there, war is over and the node its gone lost! « this will 100% happen btw
It cost Silver to cast, and was based on Distance to Home x Danger zone modifier x Inventory Items.
If you had Gatherable items in Inventory, it would cost up to 100x as much.
[Since Albion has real $ to Silver in game, these teleports could literally cost you $5]
So this was for pvpers/scouts/explorers to go out and check the world out, and have an option to get home.
It was NOT for moving goods - circumventing Albion's very pvp-focused trade networks.
Is this something you guys would like to see in AoC? A Hearthstone with a steep gold/glint cost based on Distance x Inventory?
The biggest direct link to this would be caravans. Let's say a powerful guild lives in the lower left part of the map. They make a shitton of caravans full of glint and go to the very top right part of the map. This kinda stunt would obviously take houuurs. And the farm required for this would take days as well, so any counteractions by other guilds would have to take place within that window of time.
Caravans can be stopped at any node to take a break in the travel. Now, if the enemies of this caravan train want to do something against the guild running that train - say, a guild war related to their guild house/hall, they'd obviously want to plan their attack for the moment where the caravan guild is as far away from their base as possible.
This kind of strategy would be completely undermined by the type of TP you're suggesting. Because the caravan guild can park their stuff at the nearest node and then be back at their base within minutes of any kind of shit starting there.
Obviously, this can already happen in the current state of the game due to home ember respawn after death. Which is also why I definitely hope that we get a limiter on how far from home you can be to be able to use that respawn choice.
So tl;dr no, I don't want hearthstone-like mechanics in Ashes.
It can't be used to circumvent caravans, and it can't be used to zerg.
In that one move, half of the pointless travel in the game is just removed.
I'd think this was the 'most obvious thing' to add.
I don't feel the answer to this lies anywhere toward either end.
The Family Summon concept for example would work way better if you had to 'give one person an item, that costs Glint to make, that lets them attune on your behalf at an Emberspring', combined with a 'Home Teleport'.
Prevents 'being able to pop to just anywhere', gives you the limit that once you have done that, you are 'stuck there', and then layer as many 'hardships' as you want on top of it (must be an Item received from Guild, maybe can only be obtained with Node Currency in Home Node, can literally only be used by family members, etc).
There's probably a tune-able solution that fits this game that isn't 'My car stalled/train was late so I might as well not log in and also since I'm the Tank for my group they might as well not log in either'.
The fact that the Family Summon was ever considered at all means that they know there will be issues and don't want all of them, so they should be able to eventually define 'exactly which fast travel they do and don't want' and tune it.
I'll hope that it doesn't turn out to be another 'Guilds and Large Groups get to do it more easily than small ones' in the end, ofc, but I'm not as opposed to things like 'Large Guilds have some alt whose job it is to reset the Home Point of certain members after an expedition'.
You could still prevent even that if you wanted, though. FF11's equivalent (the Warp Scroll) is one of those items a character can only hold one of. It's probably not TOO hard to code it so that only one 'Attunement Stone: Plannindorf' can even exist, so that quick jumps are at least 'always one way'.
Make 'em time out after 24h or something, to protect against lockouts and also counter a bunch of logistics stuff. So many ways to solve it that we'll probably get one, assuming whatever made them consider the Family Summon is still a concern.
"For what...?"
"Just about everything, really."
Above all, keep imagining and don’t stop now.
Then, when you want to discuss concrete details, I encourage you to do some research on the game to distinguish between your imagination and the reality of the project.
Sieges will be declared X days in advance to allow the defense to organize, switch the city into siege mode, and build fortifications.
Currently, like many others, the existing feature is absolutely not representative of what awaits us at launch, nor of what is already present on the PTR.
So rest assured: in practice, you will have plenty of time to reach your city, even on foot and without a mount.
Huh...what i said still apply tho if he was all the way up there he may not even be aware '...players in the region to see.' he might not even been on in those respective days as well (hence why i said scenario) plus i did also said in the other half of the map so not only by foot but he also has to cross a sea which is a Lawless zone. Also i've heard from someone who tried siege in ptr that they might redo the nodes, so...as Steven have said multiple times everything might be subject to change.
well, year after year people may wonder: why the forum has no polls?
RMT is most popular among people in guilds that pressure their members to keep up.
A game that is heavy solo play has significantly less RMT.
However, conversly, games that are heavy solo play have more open RMT, because people don't feel as bad about use it. Games that are more group.guild oriented tend to have most of it's RMT operate more quietly.
This is also true at the supply end. 90%+ of all gold sold via third party RMT originated from large guilds whom sell excess gold to gold sellers, who then onsell it for a profit.
Perhaps the reason - or part thereof - that the forum has no polls is because the bulk of people on MMO forums are woefully uninformed about things, but tend to have very strong opinions about them regardless.
It's called holes in the grand design. Unfortunately, disconnected millionnaires who run groups and are never alone, have little experience with the issues in the base design which has the opposite trigger than the one desired.
Does the party want to continue farming? Does the DCed person come back waaaay later? Is the dungeon so damn empty of other people that no other mob is being farmed actively?
This... is totally separate from the real 'problem', though, even if you dismiss/diminish what akabear is getting at (because yeah, I get it, losing one member shouldn't really make basic backtracking impossible even in big dungeons, but that's a Dungeon Design question)
The problem is the 'gap', not 'traveling'. You know this from BDO. So the 'issue' in the base design is that they want to have both 'the feeling that you live in X place' and 'a way to resolve grouping'.
But your 'disconnected millionaire' thing has no connection to that. A solo player who isn't an explorer/wanderer will probably live somewhere and go to the dungeon with other locals and visitors. The 'fast travel' needed here is only because their Dungeon Design is still in infancy (you could make an argument that the PvE is too trivial and it leads to exp-pump metas, but that's still not a fast travel problem).
Everyone can have that experience if the world is designed well enough. People didn't ride from Kamasylve to Arehaza because someone shouted in world chat that they were forming a party there. If they wanted to party they would form one in Kamasylve (using BDO as the example because it's basically the only game with no Fast Travel, but other games with limited waypoints to teleport out to (and in FF11's case, only one or two options for return target) would often see the same thing happen.
If the POI/Dungeon is more than 6 minutes travel from your home location, just don't go. When the game reaches the point where 'just don't go' is a valid way of playing, or they work out some form of 'one way' teleport to go out to a specific spot or join a group, that should be enough for this game type.
I know that I definitely notice and can simulate 'what TL feels like if I can't teleport more than once or twice a day' and while I won't claim it's 'better' (for me, probably), it recreates that feeling that BDO gives of 'I live here, and this other place counts as a faraway place that I have to plan a trip to visit'.
This comes down to the problem of having dungeons/main exp spots that people have to plan trips to visit because they don't have similar ones nearby, combined with a lack of progress if you don't visit them.
We can list a bunch of things that are causing the problem of feeling that we need fast travel, but we don't have:
Catacombs, Taxi-Caravans, Family Summons, Home-Spring Return Scrolls/Magic, Social Org Trigger Missions, Mini-Arcs, Quest Schemas, most Wandering Bosses, and probably 50% or more of potential Pocket Dungeons.
"For what...?"
"Just about everything, really."
The need to be able to log in and port home from any location is paramount to a social game. There is no fast travel in bdo because the world is small. The grind zones all public areas. I got 8 toons to level 62 in 16 days on BDO. Not happening in Ashes.
Archeage even had teleport at high cost. Lineage 2 has fast travel. SWG has fast travel. In fact most of the 'game inspiration' for Ashes have fast travel. We get 'Family Summons' instead which is a band aid. I often debate where mmo meets rpg. I still do not believe longevity will be in Ashes.
I watch limited football in reality. Not because I hate football but because it equates to 124.5 total hours a year (without extra time/half time). 6625 hours in 50 years. 260 days lost. Now. I also believe in the journey more than the destination. It is precisely like everything has been designed in isolation without links to actual real game situations.
It's like complaining that BDO has long pointless roads to ride, because the world team didn't have time to place enough gatherables and PvP is locked pre-50, or that Throne and Liberty's Pre-Talandre overland areas are boring/mob-overcrowded, when they started from an Auto-battler/Astral Hunting grind game with no meaningful gathering/artisanship.
The difference is that Ashes has 'told us what its DNA is supposed to be', and we can explicitly go 'this thing that you have said you will add, is missing, so we have X problem right now'.
I could easily claim 'Ashes needs Fast Travel because its Fishing->Cooking pipeline isn't good' and I'd be very meaninglessly correct. Would it be easier to add Fast Travel than to fix/balance Fishing? Yes. Should they do it? Probably not.
"For what...?"
"Just about everything, really."
You go large, you do fast travel. You go small, you do not do fast travel. The areas you mention like roads are pvp areas in other games. Except oops, once again the design pillar is not designed to facilitate standard content. So. I look for actual content. Still. Grinding is all.
Steven used to say grinding would be doable but not efficient. TTK is a shambles. Enchanting is a shambles. Im not talking about fleshed out systems. Im taking about the foundation system design choices. Its not even about placeholders. 🤔
You're contradicting yourself from my point of view. Grinding is currently doable, and not 'efficient', it's only 'efficient' because there's nothing else to do yet.
TTK is a shambles, sure, but 1) some people prefer it as it is and 2) Steven has walked back a lot of his prior concepts of content difficulty as he has presumably learned more about difficult MMO content, so his concept didn't change from the L2/AA style, he just learned to communicate it better.
Enchanting is literally a placeholder, '+1 to every stat', I don't think any game actually does it that way, they have growth formulae for gear, we can't judge Enchanting until they install theirs.
I'm sure that you actually know it's not as simple as 'go big, add Fast Travel' and are just saving keystrokes at this point, but at least criticize the actual problems.
"For what...?"
"Just about everything, really."
Wow flight paths nothing more.
Even the alpha testing that I did for an upcoming EVE project had a way smaller world, but it still had no fast travel and going to the other side of the map was a wholeass adventure, with dangerous mobs camping gates, people controlling systems and killing anyone who's not with them, proper planning of jumps cause you had to control fuel expenditure (and stations for refueling weren't present in each system) and in a later update you even needed an item that would jump you through unconnected systems, which had its own radius so you'd need to plan for that as well.
And I fucking loved that part of the game
Hell, can you go 5 systems over? L2 had TPs, but even those were limited on town connections, so, at least in earlier versions, you'd have to jump through several towns if you wanted to go from one end of the map to the other. And this is not even counting the fact that you'd often need to run quite far, if you wanted to farm some deep point in a dungeon, cause you'd rarely have direct TPs to all of them, let alone deep into them.
But at least from my example of the EVE alpha testing, you could not skip systems, so there was no fast travel relative to the size of the game. And afaik og EVE is waaaay bigger, but still doesn't have direct fast travel (I thiiink wormholes can bring you to far places? not sure though).
In other words, if you had to be at the other side of the map for some big event - you'd better get going way ahead of that event starting. Ashes is planning on being the same. Distance matters and good planning is crucial.
Ashes is also a big game and will also not allow you to do that same action. We'll have Scientific Metros with their local TPing, we'll have family TPs (fucking hopefully they won't let us jump all over the map), we'll have respawn mechanics - but none of that should (and supposedly won't) allow us to just disregard travel times.
Afaik WoW's dungeons are accessible from towns, even if the dungeon itself is god knows where. That's pretty much a form of fast travel, especially in the context of getting yourself to content.
But even w/o true direct TPs, in L2 you could move across the entire map within under a minute. To me, THAT's "fast travel". I asked ChatGPT and it says that in EVE, even if you use a super fast ship, travel from one corner to the other would take 30-60 mins. I could definitely see how using the fastest mounts in Ashes would let you cross the map diagonally in roughly the same amount of time.
And it also said that in SWG you could literally cross the map in hyperspacae in seconds. Sounds like real fast travel to me. And even if you went planet to planet through Starports - that's still just a few minutes. Is this true, or did it hallucinate the info? Cause you say you don't know any games that let the player do what I'm talking about, yet you've talked about SWG as an example of games with some quick traveling.
And pretty much like L2, where you TP to the nearest TPable location, but then still gotta run for a while to get somewhere valuable.
If Ashes had the same kind of fast travel - the map would be tiny, because any point on it would be accessible within 10min tops, instead of proper long travel.
Yes that can happen and it will happen probably a few times. Your travel should be planned, and a consequence to traveling far is not being around your node to defend it. The point of a system like this is so you CAN NOT be anywhere anytime you want. All pvp games have some form of tactical planning, some have strategic planning, very few have logistical planning. Ashes seems to aim to have some forms of logistical mechanics such as caravans and nodes and the events around them. If fast travel is implement to too high a degree you'll break a lot of what they're trying to make.