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
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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.
Can we just get rid of boss/monster drops altogether?
Xeeg
Member, Alpha Two
The way it is right now, players can just mob/boss grind all the way to max level and never even think about crafting. Crafting is mostly a noob trap time waster.
The only way I can see this game working is if they completely stopped all monster/boss drops and only dropped mats. Trying to grind to max level in starter/novice gear will become such a slog that people will actually be incentivized to stop the leveling grind at some point (high teens?) and instead work on getting the professions up and so that leveling becomes more time efficient.
As long as we can gear up/level up without wasting time on nodes/professions then those things are just a noob trap to slow down players who dont know any better.
The only way I can see this game working is if they completely stopped all monster/boss drops and only dropped mats. Trying to grind to max level in starter/novice gear will become such a slog that people will actually be incentivized to stop the leveling grind at some point (high teens?) and instead work on getting the professions up and so that leveling becomes more time efficient.
As long as we can gear up/level up without wasting time on nodes/professions then those things are just a noob trap to slow down players who dont know any better.
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Comments
This is how it should be.
Crafting should be optional.
Using crafted gear should be optimal, but not required.
Why put it in even? Its just a noob trap. Anyone who tries crafting just falls behind everyone else and can't compete in pvp. Might as well play a different game.
Q: Are Alpha-2 bosses dropping full items instead of recipes and mats placeholder?
A: The reward tables are very much in a functional state right now. So, I wouldn't look at these reward tables and say oh this is long-term intended. This is for A2 purposes. However, it is going to be a combination of both. You're going to have full loot drops that are going to occur with world bosses. That is an expectation that should be kept. But, in addition, you will have recipes, you will have unique material components that are used to create those items as well; and you'll also have the ability to deconstruct those items to recoup some of those more unique materials to potentially create more.[13] – Steven Sharif
That is an issue with where crafting is at right now - that is what needs to be fixed.
Low level crafting needs to be simple - add that complexity in later. The problem Ashes has now is that they are trying to have nearly end game level complexity with crafting on low level stuff. Low level stuff results in low level benefits, and so should also require low level effort.
I agree with this. I had one of my friends join this week and one of his biggest complaints is that the game is far from beginner friendly. He doesn’t want the game to be “easier” but easier to follow. We need people to feel engaged and like they are progressing in the game. If they want the game to be more about crafting we need to be able to craft the gear for our level. The way the game is now you will be level 20 before you find enough copper to craft even a full set of novice gear. I think this issue is also exacerbated by the fact you have to wait for the node to level up to even try to craft high level gear.
Yeah, I think it would add more interdependence between levellers and crafters. Make it a social game again!
No, it would add resentment.
Interaction between those fighting and those making should be voluntary, not manditory. People should want to seek out a crafter because they found a rare item they can have made in to something special, or they have saved up enough coin to purchase a specific upgrade - not because they are still using gear that is 8 levels below them with no real hope of finding upgrades any other way.
All of those "wouldn't it be great if MMORPG's were like this again" things need to be done in a way where players feel like they are chosing to do that, not in ways where they feel they are being forced to do that.
If instead the leveling is by exploring/questing/node commissions - you will be able to gather materials for crafting as you level up. Just on your way to complete a quest you will find some materials that you can just spend 20 seconds to collect.
This will allow to keep up with your profession together with your character level.
Will also be a lot more fun/you will see bigger part of the world and more zones in each biome/You will experience AOC story from the quests/Will interact with different nodes and people connected to it which will give you broader picture of the world in the server you are at so you can choose what suits you best
Also this will give advantage to smaller groups (like 8 man) over big raids (40+ man) since they materials the groups find trough their journey will be split among all party members. Which will be great since the average players wont be able to form that big raid groups, they will be with smaller group of friends and this will allow them to be competitive which will greatly increase the fun they have.
And there are enough places for raid groups to shine. Like world bosses, or dungeons/ Node/guild wars/sieges and ect will all be for large scale pvp
another problem at the moment is that the server is too crowded, which means that the total mats are split among too many players, making leveling professions harder.
Hard disagree. But we're not going to change each other's minds, so no point in prolonging everybody's agony.
We probably won't change each other's mind, but I want to be clear on what you are saying.
My take is that you think players being forced to use player crafters for every gear upgrade for the entirety of the game will make the game more social.
This implies that you consider purely transactional interactions to be social.
My opinion is that if you want a game to be more social, you should decrease transactional interactions and increase social interactions.
No.
✓ 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 enjoy the world PvP that comes from fighting over these mobs, but I’d rather be fighting for materials to craft items—not for full items themselves.
As it stands, crafters don’t really need to exist.
We could coast all the way to August just fighting over named mobs on fixed timers, never crafting anything, because no one is motivated to push nodes to the level of the player base.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
I agree with you in terms of the issue you are talking about. I would just go about a remedy in a different manner.
Crafting needs to be made more important than it is now (it will be, it is still only partially implemented even for the level range we have now).
I also agree with you in terms of how bad timed spawns are.
However, I don't believe the answer is in lowering drop rates on named mobs, but rather on switching the drops to items that enhance crafted items.
Actual drop rates (the number of valuable items that drop per kill) on named mobs needs to be high. Killing challenge appropriate named mobs should be the single most rewarding activity in the game. You should want to drop literally everything you are doing when presented with a real chance of killing a named mob.
However, this requires those mobs not have a spawn based on time. It should be a window, or better yet, it should be based on kills of appropriate mob types in the region.
Best L2 contests for content happened during the times when the respawn timer went deep into the + range. With each minute and each failed pvp battle the tension would rise, because THIS one might be the last attempt to remove the competition from the location. And when you did manage to remove them juuuust in time for the respawn - the reward would feel that much better, because it was truly earned.
See, this is where the dynamic of spawning them based on mob kills completely changes things.
If you remove the competition, then the rate at which the appropriate mobs are being killed goes down. As such, you kind of what to keep your competition around, as long as they are killing the appropriate mobs.
If you have both in a game (and players know the basics of each), it can create a bigger range of experiences just due to how a named mob spawn is triggered.
If this one goes to Live/Release as is, I definitely want to see the 'dev reasoning' video on it, since one of the most curious things to me in modern game Dev is how often a 'well-known' historical method is eroded.
Intrepid may be the first studio willing to tell me whether it was because of inexperience, a logical path to determining it wasn't the best fit for their goals/game, or just a way to appease the 'masses'.
Because one way or the other, it's true that you can generate a lot of bad sentiment when the timer happens to be +enough for some group to have to disperse due to availability of members, especially if the new window is something like 8h+?90m from last death.
Ah, the days of 'pushing bosses into your own favored spawn window'...
A three hour timer you can often do this with, as with a 24, 48 or 72 hour timer. As soon as that timer moves out of your general play time though, you no longer have reliable information on it.
Unless of course the developers do the actual worst thing they could possibly do, and set a despawn timer on the mob of a similar period to it's spawn window variance. If you have this, you know when the mob will spawn today based on its kill time yeterday (to within a window), even though there were two spawns happen in between.
In my opinion, a spawn window should be far longer than the ~20% of the respawn duration in an 8 hour +/- 90 minute spawn. To me, a mob with the intention that this kind of spawn would suggest (one kill per prime time, per day) is better off being something akin to a 9 hour +/-4 hours. This means the respawn window is actually open for 8 hours - enough of a window that it simply isn't worth waiting around unless there is something valuable to do near by.
You brought up a good point about how instead of full items the mobs could drop items to enhance crafting.
Without changing crafting too much they could drop enchant scrolls more often. This would make them good for everyone while having the effect of enhancing gear.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
Thanks for joining! Please keep it on topic or close to topic.
Hey now, we don't really have options on that front, do we?
It's either listening to ourselves, listening to Intrepid, or leaving.
Plus, we stopped talking as much so there's less to listen to, and a lot of people did leave, so it's not astonishing at all!
Thanks! I appreciate the advice even if what I commented was in-fact on topic.
Free bonus post for you good sir!
lol this place is a constant. never changes
how's that lyrical quote go... "streets don't change, just maybe the name"
guess I better be careful due to fragility before I offend a forums moderator with a hyphen or something
If people don't know if the window is open or closed and don't know for how long it might be in either state - they're less likely to stay around the location and contest it against others who might wanna farm it.
What would your opinion be on preset window with a constant upper limit on it? So, say, that mob on an 8h respawn would have a +-2h window of respawn, would always respawn at 8h (meaning that shortest time is 4h respawn), but if it was alive at the upper limit of the preset timer - he just stays there chilling, while the timer moves onto the next 8h cycle.
I think I explained it shittily so here's an example:
In other words, there's 3 assured respawns a day, but there could be more. In my experience there's always an outlook on the lower limit of respawn window and then it just about how long it takes for the guild to get to the boss and whether there's any enemies with the knowledge of the respawn.
With this kind of approach these kinds of bosses would create content for players of all timezones and could also provide more or less loot for either of those groups. I think this would increase cross-timezone trade (or at the very least internal timezone trade) and would increase the amount of pvp for this content, because everyone would know that at this exact time the boss is 100% to be there, so even if someone has already farmed it an hour ago - you can still go contest it. All the while the super hardcores/time-havers can have several kills a day, if other timezones aren't as contested.
Obviously the loot quality of this kind of design would need to be adjusted accordingly. Though, considering the heightened potential for contest, it miiight be fine just leaving it at "it's 3 kills a day" worth.
I don't think he would either, but making decisions that are best for PvP as opposed to best for the game is par for the course.
Remember, "Ashes is not anPvP game, it's a PvX game".
A very wide window like that - assuming there are a number of mobs with similar widows- means no one is farming that spot with the primary intention of killing the boss. People may farm the area for lower tier mobs in the area, or for quests or harvesting or what ever, but not that boss mob.
What this means is that getting a group together capable of killing the mob before anyone else is an exercise in diplomacy. You want the people in the area to tell you that the mob has spawned, and you gather your forces to go and take it on. You can't just be waiting there, because you don't know which mob is going to spawn.
This kind of spawn does indeed lower the amount of PvP over a given spawn of a boss, but again, Ashes isn't supposed to be a PvP game, it is supposed to be a PvX game. If every decision is made to amplify PvP over other aspects of the game, then Ashes is just another PvP game (as i have been saying is the case for years).
As to your suggestion of a mob spawn, I'm sticking with my big issue of any respawns that are multiple times a day in Ashes.
Ashes is designed to be played at prime time. Each server (or region, for now) has its own prime time, and players are greatly encouraged to pick a server that has its prime time at a time when that player is able to be online.
The game then putting in mob spawns that greatly incentivise players to log on two other times during the day seems like bad game design.
In a game like EQ2 or Archeage, the population had less of an incentive to be on a server with a given prime time, and so there were players on basically all the time (i assume this was the case for L2 as well).
Basically, if the game is going to encourage players to log in for server prime time, it shouldn't encourage players to log in any other time, for any reason.
I have no illusion that Intrepid would do this, as this game is full of contradictions. However, that is my opinion on the matter.
Prime time was a big thing, but it mostly consisted of holding a farm spot and/or helping your guildies do the same.
One thing I can definitely 'confirm' from Throne and Liberty that Ashes is right(?) about (and the current window spawn timing is not helping with in Ashes) is that people do not enjoy when both the timing and the opposition is 'known' for contesting bosses, which is why the current status just seems unintended.
Their recent attempt to solve the issue of 'big guilds locking down PvP-enabled versions of World Bosses' (which ofc have extremely specific spawn timers that do not budge at all) was to instead put two Guilds into an instance to fight it out. Basically matchmaking. Also offered 'random faction groups that at least keep parties intact when you enter the instance' as the alternative to the same boss in the same timing...
And then reduced the number of bosses that spawned on the server at once, from 3 to 2.
Result? Mostly people do the PvE-only version of the boss (there are some other reasons for this too, but not very directly). And of course it works that way, since if you only spawn two boss instances, at a known timing, and then only allow in the two applying Guilds that have the 'highest' potential, the outcome is almost exactly the same as what we're discussing now, but with no disruption option.
It didn't give any 'casual' guilds any greater chance of anything, and in fact it mostly stripped those chances away (you can't enter the Guild version of a boss unless your Guild is in the top 100 on the server even if practically no one else is there, and you can't lowman it even if you somehow were because you're just not allowed to). It didn't improve PvP, at least not according to anyone who I've heard from (but I presume that's just because I wouldn't hear from anyone who was getting the benefit). It didn't lead to any interesting shakeups that any of the rest of the server gets to hear about, watch, or experience, at least not in that patch (maybe soon).
So for a lot of people it was 'a pile of nothing' or worse, an outright removal of dynamic content for them.
The last thing I want to see in Ashes is the BDO+FF/EQ combo of 'timing spawn windows + alts geared at location that people switch to in order to boost their numbers for a boss kill', but if we have 'tight spawn windows' + 'no fast travel' + 'widening power gap between the top and average players', I don't see how this will turn out any other way.
TL can't do the 'spawn windows' thing because they don't really implement 'open world bosses' of the level required anymore, and if they somehow desynced the spawn timings of two valuable Timed bosses in any similar way, then there would be no 'less important boss' for the average players to target, the big guilds would just try to go to both.
So we got a BDO style outcome, and that's what I'd expect to see in Ashes too. (As a reminder to the unfamiliar, BDO does not have Fast Travel, and their world bosses can spawn quite far apart, so having an alt just for fighting that boss is common). There might be at least a period where those alts aren't geared up enough to always contest the boss against average players, but PvP+no exclusive tagging+sharp spawn timings devolves pretty fast.
What if we had smth like "a guild that has a hall can summon an open world boss within the server's primetime window (maybe even a window within that one), but it comes at the cost of their hall being open for attacks by other guilds. And those attacks can result in some resource loss for the guild, maybe a debuff for a day or two, and some gains for the attackers".
Gains would need to be at least slightly lower than the boss reward, cause obviously massive guilds would attempt to double dip. Gains would also need to be spread across all attackers, for that exact reason. Hell, make the reward "a part of the summoning item", so that after a few such attacks the attackers can summon their own boss. Though I guess this could lead directly to all the sub-guilds from the massive metaguild just joning the attackers and then still double dipping.
Human nature really makes it hard to try and equalize people's enjoyment w/o just letting everyone be in their own little instance with their own little boss