Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
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.
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.
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What keeps me from playing
nanfoodle
Member, Founder, Kickstarter, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
Skills for crafting taking longer then it takes me to level.
Waiting for nodes to catch up to our crafting so that we can sell items to players.
Finally making level 10 gear when people are level 15-20, it does not feel organic as a whole.
Grinding for hours and walking away mostly empty handed and feeling like the only gain I made was some exp
Spending more time looking for a team then playing
Getting to level 20 and most of my gear is grey
Spending to much time figuring out quests when a boring grind would have yielded better results.
Traveling vast distances to only have team after team dissolve because it takes everyone 30 min to get a team together somewhere.
With the above statement, doing this same process three to four times in a evening and realize you would have spent better time grinding mobs for 2hrs to get 20% of an exp bar
Frustrated that there is no other path to level but grind
Coming to terms that crafting is the main way to get gear and its not a fun system but designed to have as much clicking as possible over the thought of a fun process
Getting your char wiped because the economy is broken and your starting over with the economy still broken
Playing honestly and the same players exploiting last week are doing it again with very little action being taken
Conclusion: I love the vision and the end goal of Ashes. I love the classes and the combat but I feel the staff that has many years of experience on how to make an MMO, some of the staff going back to making EQ1 back in the 90s. Need to be listed too on how to look after these things. Everything does not need to be reinvited. Pls start tapping into the staff at IS for the answers to these problems. At this point people are walking away. My entire guild, Lore Forge has just disbanded.
What is your pain point?
Waiting for nodes to catch up to our crafting so that we can sell items to players.
Finally making level 10 gear when people are level 15-20, it does not feel organic as a whole.
Grinding for hours and walking away mostly empty handed and feeling like the only gain I made was some exp
Spending more time looking for a team then playing
Getting to level 20 and most of my gear is grey
Spending to much time figuring out quests when a boring grind would have yielded better results.
Traveling vast distances to only have team after team dissolve because it takes everyone 30 min to get a team together somewhere.
With the above statement, doing this same process three to four times in a evening and realize you would have spent better time grinding mobs for 2hrs to get 20% of an exp bar
Frustrated that there is no other path to level but grind
Coming to terms that crafting is the main way to get gear and its not a fun system but designed to have as much clicking as possible over the thought of a fun process
Getting your char wiped because the economy is broken and your starting over with the economy still broken
Playing honestly and the same players exploiting last week are doing it again with very little action being taken
Conclusion: I love the vision and the end goal of Ashes. I love the classes and the combat but I feel the staff that has many years of experience on how to make an MMO, some of the staff going back to making EQ1 back in the 90s. Need to be listed too on how to look after these things. Everything does not need to be reinvited. Pls start tapping into the staff at IS for the answers to these problems. At this point people are walking away. My entire guild, Lore Forge has just disbanded.
What is your pain point?
17
Comments
But yeah, this time on Shol has been pretty darn grim. Can't really fault any of your points there.
I'd suggest maybe to take a step back, plan out some small goals of things you'd like to test and achieve, and then just plug away at those.
Also - Node leveling and Freehold leveling are currently not as intended.
Ashes is available to test - when you're in the mood to test.
I feel you on this. Grind doesn't make a game a good. I understand it takes time to become a god-like player, and it should! But a game that feels like a chore with repetitive content is such a turn-off. "Run to this mob and grind it for 4h, then go to this mob for another 4h" and so on.
In the end, as a static group, I think the main thing keeping us from helping as much with testing right now is the lack of an RP-framing to do it in. It was probably a mistake to count on having that as a consistent driving point.
Everything else is just 'the phase we're in' and sure, the other incorrect expectation (that Economy would be different/in a first-phase testable state by now) is contributing, but...
That was just how we had always planned to get through the 'slog' of testing, using the world of Verra as a backdrop to internally RP 'on' and just letting whatever new test changes be the 'session basis' every weekend. Unfortunately the state of the world and a lot of the prioritization of decisions feels like something inimical to RP itself, especially the basic 'reactive' kind.
We had a decent 'proactive' early-level one for a bit, but it was only intended to 'carry us through' until Econ testing (or at least some viable form of Artisanship) came online. I really should give it another shot, as 'RP-lead', but mostly I've been told 'wait for whenever they actually do an Econ pass' (or change some incentives for the more toxic testing methods).
It really isn't all that bad if you come into it with a pretty big premade group already, but it's hard to 'use that group's RP-session time' on Ashes when we could be running a TTRPG oneshot or using whatever RP-frame we've been granted that month by Throne and Liberty or Elite Dangerous (so, pretty surprised that LoreForged of all groups didn't endure).
But as always, 'us choosing not to test because it isn't even a thing one can find a way to enjoy' is, in itself, data for Intrepid, so we think this is probably okay.
Got to understands is grinding is really fun when the combat is good. Ashes has that. My point is I love stake. Five months of stake and I may never eat it again. I need more ways to level. I get there is other types of content but right now. You need to level to play with friends. We have grinding. I have leveled 5 chars and right now. I need other option to level or I need to be given a level 25 char to test till they add new ways to level.
Please whine silently ... ...
✓ Occasional Roleplayer
I am in the guildless Guild so to say, lol. But i won't give up. I will find my fitting Guild "one Day".
I played some pretty grindy games in my time...but yeah, Ashes progression paths are simply NOT enjoyable. This doesn't press any of my buttons. There is no feeling of reward or progression. Extremely low drop rates from mobs. Crafting recipe drop rates should be improved, especially if crafting is supposed to be THE SOURCE of gear. Resource cost and crafting COMPLEXITY of crafted level 0 and level 10 gear have to be far lower. The same should apply to early node progression and buildings. Stop pushing the grind where it doesn't belong. This is part of the reason why the whole game is just falling apart.
It would be nice to see stats on Uncommon+ gear actually make sense, outside the BIS / "meta" picks. You get extra points if our characters don't look like they shop at second-hand clothing shop. Currently we all look like scarecrows in poorly matched gear, with zero sense of style.
Gathering and crafting continue to bring their own frustrations. Over-farmed resource nodes ("copper doesn't exist" memes etc), wasting hours for "dry" resource runs. The first thing which comes to my mind about name mobs is boredom, followed by lack of engagement and feeling of no reward.
Some of that stuff is bound to improve from the UX perspective, but the design trends, heavily pushing dull grind instead of actually enjoyable and creative gameplay are fairly obvious. It also doesn't matter how big your game world is, if its filled with very generic and basic content.
Blown past falling sands…
The grind wouldn’t be terrible if it was broken up by other enjoyable content. I can take it every once in a while but dang. Sitting in one spot for 8 hours with no change in gear, lvl, or story it gets dull fast. The combat is really fun but right now the fastest ways to level takes that away because you just get into a huge raid and mass mob everything. There isn’t much thinking. The most fun Iv had was running around with a small group jumping around buildings looking for named mobs to snipe. As far as early crafting I couldn’t agree more. There is no reason the early game of crafting should be this complicated and slow. You have to let people feel engaged and fulfilled early on if you want them to stick it out through the really complex stuff.
No mob should have 335 fucking items on their loot table. And yessss, "it's a work in progress, first pass, basic lvl implementation", but holy hell dude. Even if we go purely by lvl brackets and consider each bracket as its own mob - the fucking lvl<7 Aggressor has 54 god damn items.
If I wanted to 100% a crafting line and wanted to get all the recipes for items, so that I can make those items for myself - how many alts would I need to go through to successfully roll the loot gacha to get the correct 1/54, before I overlvl the fuck out of those mobs?
And sure, one might say "just buy it from a lucky person who managed to get it", but do you really think that majority of people won't overlvl these mobs faaaar sooner than all those recipes drop reliably? And this is not even considering that whichever recipes DO drop won't just go to their guildies or friends, instead of on the market.
Here's a lvl7 mob from L2
He drops money, 2 basic crafting mats (valuable at literally all lvls), a crafting recipe and 2 full items at fairly low chances. And you can spoil him for a specific weapon crafting material and 2 recipes.
He gives 250xp and at lvl7 a player needs 8k xp to level up, so 32 of these dudes would get you to lvl8, where you can still keep killing them for normal drops/xp. These were fairly abundant, so at those rates, on average, there'd be a single drop of each of those items per 3 people who'd level on these mobs. And if you wanted a specific recipe (say, Leather Stockings) - you'd start with that mob and then could move onto just a few others, if you were unlucky
This gives players a direct goal, a direct execution of actions for said goal and a theoretical competition, if someone else has the same goal.
I'd be reaaal damn interested in seeing how exactly Intrepid plan to spread their drop tables across all their mobs. I dearly hope that we do get the promised "nodes control mob lvls", with each region (hell, if not each node) having their own mobs with their own loot table. So the current fifty fucking four items from a single Aggressor could be spread across, say, 15 different mobs (this spread assumes that these mobs will also drop the crafting material for their items and potentially some general crafting mat as well). Which would create an insentive for people to go to other nodes, if they wanna craft smth or get something very particular.
Also, as for the recipe itself, here it is. 2 specific mats and a dozen general ones, with tables of mobs that drop each (up to the lvl of the last mob that drops the specific stuff)
Basic and straightforward, as lowbie crafting should be. And while chance of that loot appears to be low per mob, don't forget that these all were hunted by the hundreds across the entire server, so these mats would be abundant enough to craft stuff.
My assumption this whole time has pretty much been "we'll get something similar, but with much more depth". So far we're barely even one step towards THIS, let alone any amount of depth below it, especially when it comes to player behavior and motivation.
Also if this game is using that 'this mob drops this item when you are on this quest or during this world-status' setup, the numbers for drops would be inflated like this even without it being an issue of 'we aren't really working on this yet'.
Though I very obviously agree that if we have all that but nothing material related, it's less fun, that particular mob seems more like the type that would naturally have this type of droptable. If we ignore/remove the massive pile of 'actual gear drops' (which would still show in a datamined drop table even if there was code to prevent those drops) they mostly just drop low level accessories/recipes for those in the 1-7 range (plus a bunch of Copper weapons that we don't know for certain that they actually drop anymore and even if they did, the overall effect on any economic progression would just be bizarre and disconnected).
So they're getting there, this is the basis for it, it's just obfuscated if you look at Ashes Codex that way.
My dream that I posted a while back. Is that loot tables change with Ashes. Mobs should drop fully usable items but what should drop more often is crafting supplies, mats that augment a weapon to be more powerful and much much more. These items should go from low end con right up to Legendary and off the right mob, Red con for Artifact. Even if you are not a crafter, earning these should be so important that become part of the trade system. We should be wanting to bring these things to crafters, maybe even earning all the drops needed to make that Bow you need. So you can say hay crafter can I pay you 50 silver to make me my level 10 bow?
Till that day comes they work out how they want this to work. We should not be suffering trying to level and find gear, unless they are testing something. We have tested the drop rate and our reaction was not good. So IS just made it even harder. I get a game being challenging but thats not what this is. Its unnecessarily complicated. This needs to be balance with fun and not just the hard core player. This game will not make it without casuals. Casual players should be able to earn gear that makes them feel good for the effort put. Casual players get they will never be top tear but they will not be happy with getting level 20 and 90% of their gear is grey with a few greens and getting one shooted every turn. Something needs to be balanced here.
It's not a type of balance most people can do, not because it's impossible, but because it's a choice.
Most games try their best to sit in the middle, desperately holding onto as many people as possible and responding to each complaint.
Unfortunately Intrepid is probably never going to know why most of the people who just lose interest, do that, or what it would have taken to retain them.
You say 'casual players should be able to earn gear that makes them feel good for the effort put', but at the end of the day, 'casual players' are also the people complaining 'I ran this dungeon 3 times and I didn't get a single BIS gear piece for my specific class, this game is such bs on droprates'.
The only solution to this sort of thing is seasonal server states and even the games that do those still hit the same problem.
In the end, MMOs are played by more types of people than they're designed for.
Similar to how some games have seperate stats for PvE and PvP, if a game had stats (and counter-stats) for casual and less casual PvE content, they absolutely could give casual players best in slot items for casual content after running a casual dungeon 3 times.
I'm not saying this would be easy, and I don't know of a game that has even attempted it, but it is theoretically possible. It is one of the three things I would do to make my MMORPG stand out if I had the kind of money Steven does.
If any game dev is reading this and needs the reminder. This is the most important aspect of modern game design. There are a lot of 'noob traps' in game design right now. This is the most important one for mmo game dev's in particular to keep in mind.
Yes and running a dungeon three times when you are dressed in grey and green gear and walking away with nothing is not acceptable. You should walk away with more then I got some exp.
Another, possibly easier solution to enact and manage, would be to remove crafting restrictions and allow players to craft their own decent but not BIS gear. Also, stop the insanely long processing times, 1 minute per item??!!! Hell, I processed 25 timber and for 25 minutes I went out back and cleaned the rear deck. That is just insane, make people stare at the screen for no good reason, a process per item shouldn't be longer than 5 seconds each (I think I hi-jacked this thread a little bit to vent on how stupid the timetables are for processing).
My point here is that 'nothing' isn't what those people get.
But there's just no answer. If I get a Blue Tier Bow from a dungeon and I don't use bows, I want daggers, and I run it 2x more and don't get Blue Daggers, it's not hard to say I 'came away with nothing'.
At least, I'm very aware of a large number of people who will do that.
Imagine getting the Blue Tier Bow TWICE. The outrage is a meaningful thing.
I'm not saying 'all casual players are this way', but instead that there will always be a meaningful number of players that just go 'I'm not getting what I want when I want it, fix it!' and won't be 'having fun' until that's changed even when it's random droprate that is causing the outcome.
The best thing that a game like that can do is make it so that for half the year, everything is dead easy and super casual, and for the other half of the year, it's more hardcore. Preferably put the easy half like two weeks after an expansion.
Because that's what they effectively end up doing anyway, but it's unsatisfying to both sides because it always feels like they're reluctant to do it. Intrepid just did basically the same thing, raising Copper and Zinc yields.
It's not a hijack if Processing times are keeping you from playing. It doesn't sound like they are though.
But they're part of what is keeping me from playing, so it evens out, I'll stand in for you on this.
And sometimes the drops across everyone who farmed that boss in the first weeks were so wack, that several classes went w/o new BiS items for that time. So quite often guilds would start making alts to fill out the slots required for entrance and would go as low as possible on the proper attacking member numbers, just to bump up the overall rates of getting something good.
A few people would complain if they didn't get a drop in a week or two, but ultimately everyone knew that it was just chance and that those other items made the guild stronger, so even the complainers just kept playing and supporting their guild.
If L2 was played mostly by casuals - they'd fucking leave the game after the first week
This isn't the same though, it's more like 'inviting 4 casuals to fill out the last few slots for the 36', then 'they get less contribution rewards because they are casual and don't have as much contribution', and they see the top players get weapons, and then go:
"Wtf why does this boss only drop 2 items, how am I supposed to get mine?"
There's no way to explain to that person 'you're not even supposed to get one yet' without making most of them mad.
And yeah, sometimes those extra players would think that they deserved some loot from a piece of content that they barely had anything to do with. Though majority of these players would get filtered out either way before this boss or soon after it. And that was in L2 day and in L2. I'd imagine that type of player would not even think of playing Ashes, as soon as they learn that rewards from mobs are not universal and can be completely horded by others.
- The cheaters/exploiters not being banned
- Performance/game not being optimised
The second point isn't something I blame Intrepid for. They can do that when the game is feature complete. But their relationship with Polar and Enveus makes them look corrupt.
true , i dont think they understand that good game play isnt stupid grind but accessibility and then making higher tier stuff have a mix of easily gathered mats, mid difficulty stuff and a piece or two that are hard to get which is what leads to adventure ,group play,pvp and conflict not having everything in the game require a billion mat,hours and money even a beginner tool ..its so stupid
I played Chrono Odyssey last weekend and was thrilled to craft items that were meaningful within the level I needed them. Also getting exp that leveled my char so I didnt fall behind while crafting. I am not saying Chrono is a standard of an awesome game, I would just like to see Ashes tuned crafting this way as well.
Skills for crafting taking longer then it takes me to level.
It's not organic at all. It's a large detour to leveling it's not worth the time until you're max level. Which is actually a problem is most MMOs, but much worse in this Alpha.
Waiting for nodes to catch up to our crafting so that we can sell items to players.
I think this will balance out as the world grows and more testers are testing. If the wars don't keep Nodes down.
Finally making level 10 gear when people are level 15-20, it does not feel organic as a whole.
YES! This right here bugs me so much. Low level crafting has ZERO value.
Grinding for hours and walking away mostly empty handed and feeling like the only gain I made was some exp
This can be rough, but a lot of this lack of reward is because materials really have no value on the market and crafting has no value. I think this will be better after other systems are smoothed out.
Spending more time looking for a team then playing
We need a good LFG/LFM tool. I'm a fan of Pantheons. Also there's not many people testing. Many that are have power leveled and at cap. Power leveling will need to be stopped too, it'll be a solved game when it releases and people will find these power leveling routes/exploits and they will use them if they're left in.
Getting to level 20 and most of my gear is grey
This is caused by the crafting issue.
Spending to much time figuring out quests when a boring grind would have yielded better results.
Leveling Meta. This is too slow, I'll just grind. Or grinding is too slow I'll just quest. Why quest or grind if you can just power level? They are taking questions on quests at the top of the forums. It'd be worth stating your opinions there if you haven't already.
Traveling vast distances to only have team after team dissolve because it takes everyone 30 min to get a team together somewhere.
Although this sucks there's nothing to be done about it. Later there will be some summons and other forms of fast travel to ease this, but it'll never be like the theme park MMOs and shouldn't. Also the realm is pretty empty. I found leveling in a group of 2 or 3 to be the fastest and most fun option.
With the above statement, doing this same process three to four times in a evening and realize you would have spent better time grinding mobs for 2hrs to get 20% of an exp bar
The grind doesn't bother me, as long as everyone is subjected to the same grind and there's no powerlevel short cuts. Solo grinding will be the slowest, a good group should be the fastest, and paired or trio should be a good middle ground. Also gathering and crafting should reward more exp, but not as much as solo grinding. If we think about this as EXP PER HOUR. Just my opinions.
Frustrated that there is no other path to level but grind
Hate to say this but, yeah it's alpha, there'll be more, lots of systems haven't come online. But yes it IS frustrating. Take a break, I am.
Coming to terms that crafting is the main way to get gear and its not a fun system but designed to have as much clicking as possible over the thought of a fun process
In P3 they might be working on some of this, at least that's what I took away from the May dev stream. So lets hope for some improvements.
Getting your char wiped because the economy is broken and your starting over with the economy still broken
I think this is a major reason a lot of people have ignored P2.5. I don't blame them and I don't blame Intrepid, these are things that need to be fix. Could it have been done better? Maybe, no for us to know.
Playing honestly and the same players exploiting last week are doing it again with very little action being taken
I hear about this a lot. Think about it this way. The exploiters are studying the game and Intrepid is studying the exploiters. If they just banned them out right they'd be missing opportunities to study them. Also have to be careful banning, might be a false positive. This game WILL fail if there's exploiting or RMT, any form of cheating. This is my biggest worry and as it is right now they aren't doing enough and don't plan to, I think this will kill the game.
I think a lot of people walked into this with a Early Access or Head Start mentality. The game is very much NOT finished and there will be bugs, wipes, exploiting, imbalances, and so on. Actually testing developing software is HARD, it's time consuming and punishing. The lack of communication we've had from Intrepid makes it worse. People are just doing whatever, and what they want to do is play the game. Intrepid is getting "data" but testers don't know what's going and see very little value in their efforts. People wanting to play the game are frustrated because it's not finished mostly, people wanting to test the game are frustrated because our "testing" is just playing and we don't see results. And it's probably because we're testing stuff that the devs aren't focused on. Testers are burning cycles for no reason... 2.5 is focused on the networking, but that doesn't mean they can't be pushing other changes to classes, assets, mob ai, ect. Intrepid calls this open development, and it is in a way, but it's also very closed too.
The fix? Global messages, game start notifications/messages, dev streams, and or wiki updates of the current testing goals. If you want to test those, do so, if you don't then don't.
I'll agree the crafting grind isn't fun, the leveling grind doesn't bother me at all. I don't enjoy the 'hell' levels at all though. Would originality or fresh concept did you expect? I was under the impression some old school systems were coming back, such as the grinding for levels. I would say the grind is WAY over done for testing though.
Zerging POIs is what killed NW for me. I thought is was fixed in ashes but I guess I'm wrong. It's such a glaring issue I don't understand why they'd leave it.... unless they're tailoring the game to massive groups and streamies. And that'll last all of 3 months for them.