Can we just get rid of boss/monster drops altogether?

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.

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Xeeg

Enigmatic Sage wrote: »

The attention to detail in the game's design is astonishing but what's more astonishing is how a year later these forums still going around in circles so people can metaphorically listen to themselves

Thanks for joining! Please keep it on topic or close to topic.

Azherae

Enigmatic Sage wrote: »

The attention to detail in the game's design is astonishing but what's more astonishing is how a year later these forums still going around in circles so people can metaphorically listen to themselves

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!

Enigmatic Sage

Xeeg wrote: »

Enigmatic Sage wrote: »

The attention to detail in the game's design is astonishing but what's more astonishing is how a year later these forums still going around in circles so people can metaphorically listen to themselves

Thanks for joining! Please keep it on topic or close to topic.

Thanks! I appreciate the advice even if what I commented was in-fact on topic.

Free bonus post for you good sir!

Enigmatic Sage

Azherae wrote: »

Enigmatic Sage wrote: »

The attention to detail in the game's design is astonishing but what's more astonishing is how a year later these forums still going around in circles so people can metaphorically listen to themselves

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!

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

Zapatos80

Drops are in a temporary Alpha 2 state. I do agree though that even in this state, no level 20 completed gear should drop, just mats and recipes. Even completed lvl 10 gear should be extremely rare, the vast majority of lvl 10 gear should be from crafting. Nobody cares about leveling stations because lvl 20 gear just drops as is, so servers don't or barely reach Journeyman stage before a wipe, so we can't test anything there.

Ludullu

Noaani wrote: »

better off being something akin to a 9 hour +/-4 hours.

I highly doubt Steven would ever go for smth like this, cause this (at least in most likely his opinion) would reduce the amount of pvp contestation of that content.

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:

Boss respawned at 12pm
It was killed right at respawn in 20 minutes
It now has a chance to respawn either at 4:20 pm or at 8pm
It respawned at 5pm
Got killed at 5:30
It respawns at 8pm because that's the preset timer
Gets killed at 8:20 pm
Can respawn at 12:20 am or 4am
Respawns at 3:20 am
The farm is highly contested, so it dies at 4:10am
Can respawn at 8:10am or 12pm
Response at 12pm
Rinse repeat

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.

Noaani

Ludullu wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

better off being something akin to a 9 hour +/-4 hours.

I highly doubt Steven would ever go for smth like this, cause this (at least in most likely his opinion) would reduce the amount of pvp contestation of that content.

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.

Ludullu

Noaani wrote: »

i assume this was the case for L2 as well.

Majority of bosses were on a 24h respawn (with some kind of random window), so fights were mainly over those rough times and the mobs around those locations.

Prime time was a big thing, but it mostly consisted of holding a farm spot and/or helping your guildies do the same.

Azherae

Ludullu wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

i assume this was the case for L2 as well.

Majority of bosses were on a 24h respawn (with some kind of random window), so fights were mainly over those rough times and the mobs around those locations.

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.

Ludullu

Yeah, we definitely need near-equal alternatives for contested content at the same time, if Intrepid want people to even have the slightest chance of progressing beyond the most basic of items.

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

Noaani

Ludullu wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

i assume this was the case for L2 as well.

Majority of bosses were on a 24h respawn (with some kind of random window), so fights were mainly over those rough times and the mobs around those locations.

Prime time was a big thing, but it mostly consisted of holding a farm spot and/or helping your guildies do the same.

I assume you can see how incompatible that kind of gameplay (holding a spot during the prime time window) is with a game like Ashes.

Bosses in this game (at least daily spawning ones) should not be content people spend hours farming. This kind of breaks the fundamentals of the game.

If there is a mob that spawn between 7pm and 9pm every day, and the top local guilds are all trying to farm it, then statistically speaking, that is the safest time to run a caravan, or gain corruption, or anything where those players would be your primary opposition. Having content like that takes players out of the aspects of the world that set this game apart.

To me, Intrepid have two option. Make respawns so predictable that players spend a minimal amount of time on them and then. Ove on to the "real" parts of this game, or make the respawns so wildly unpredictable that players consider it a waste of time to wait around, and instead just carry on playing the game, detouring to take on those bosses should they catch wind of their spawn.

Noaani

Ludullu wrote: »

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

Yeah, but who would want to make a game that works with human nature in order to provide enjoyment.

Seems like a silly way to make literally billions of dollars in profit.

Ludullu

Noaani wrote: »

Having content like that takes players out of the aspects of the world that set this game apart.

We have a differing outlook on this. To me that is THE best design possible, exactly because of the stuff you mentioned. The big bois would be preoccupied with their own important content, so the weaker players would have the time to do the stuff that they couldn't do before due to attacks from the big bois.

This would also directly relate to risk/reward stuff. Do you want your guild to go fight over an upcoming boss respawn, spending time on organization, movement, gear/consumables prep, gear decay costs - all for a CHANCE to get the loot. Or do you give up the boss because you now have the ability to do something else, that might have a lower immediate value, but now also has a much lower risk of failing.

I see this as exactly "design working as intended" rather than something bad.

Noaani wrote: »

Yeah, but who would want to make a game that works with human nature in order to provide enjoyment.

And there are a ton of games that do that. And I'm glad for them, but I do want a game that doesn't do that. For me L2 became much worse once they started adding more and more soloable and instanced content. Because every damn night turned from "let's figure out what we're doing and then see what happens then" to "let's do this instance then this instance, then each of us can do the soloable content and then that's pretty much it for the night".

Noaani wrote: »

Seems like a silly way to make literally billions of dollars in profit.

But that has only worked for a single game though. The game that came out at just the right time (especially economically speaking), at just the right industry time (Bliz at peak and barely any internet 3rd spaces), at just the right branding - all while being the most casual one amongst the competition, so everyone and their mother (sometimes literally) could get into it.

Like, the only 2 other mmos that are not absolute p2w eastern BS on here are RuneScape and ESO (though I forget whether ESO had p2w issues or not)

And even those 2 barely made multiple billions, with Runescape being one of the oldest mmos out there at this point.

There's of course a chance that chatgpt is hallucinating and/or not all companies revealed their profits, but I'd imagine that saying "ey, we've made a cool Bil" would be some nice free advertisement for the game, so I kinda doubt that.

Azherae

Ludullu wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

Having content like that takes players out of the aspects of the world that set this game apart.

We have a differing outlook on this. To me that is THE best design possible, exactly because of the stuff you mentioned. The big bois would be preoccupied with their own important content, so the weaker players would have the time to do the stuff that they couldn't do before due to attacks from the big bois.

But that doesn't make for a good experience in Ashes, it works in TL, which is why you want it. You know your own preferences already.

The quote is 'set the game apart', not 'are/would be the best'. Unfortunately those two things are often not aligned, even if they're not directly opposed.

(also, ESO 'is P2W' in the 'usual annoying way that sparks endless internet arguments about P2W')

Noaani

Ludullu wrote: »

But that has only worked for a single game though.

That is a pretty bad list.

There are games on that list that should not be there, games not on that list that should be there, and if we include franchises rather than individual games, there are even more that should be on there (Final Fantasy, Guild Wars and EQ have all bought in over a billion in revenue, when combined).

Because every damn night turned from "let's figure out what we're doing and then see what happens then" to "let's do this instance then this instance, then each of us can do the soloable content and then that's pretty much it for the night".

That notion of having a plan but not knowing what will happen is the exact thing I am saying Ashes should be. The basic plan should be node, castle or guild based, with caravans in there as well. The "see what happens" should include unpredictable boss spawns, as well as other forms of PvP (wars especially come to mind).

Ludullu

Noaani wrote: »

That notion of having a plan but not knowing what will happen is the exact thing I am saying Ashes should be. The basic plan should be node, castle or guild based, with caravans in there as well. The "see what happens" should include unpredictable boss spawns, as well as other forms of PvP (wars especially come to mind).

But this ties directly to potential competition for the day-to-day content though. If I log on and hear "hey, there's a massive fight going on between strong guilds, cause a huge boss can respawn within the next 3h", then my party from a small guild can safely go farm a lucrative mob spot for those 3h, cause we know for sure that the big bois won't come there.

And on the opposite side of that experience I've had times when I was called up by one of my guildmates, yelling "the boss respawned on the way earlier time in his window, so get on and get to it, cause our enemies haven't gathered yet!!".

To me, that is the "world is controlled by the player action" design that I think Ashes is going for. It's just that in Ashes those actions include waaay more than just a boss/farm spot contest.

As for both of yours and Azherae's points of Ashes' design not being compatible with mob spot grinding - I think I'm missing something that you both see. Most likely due to my obvious lack of experience and L2 bias. As long as normal mobs get gear crafting parts added to them, I see no reason why the stuff I'm talking about can't fir AoC's design. And afaik adding gear crafting parts to mobs is still the plan.

And so, if farming a spot for, say, 3h is roughly worth 1/3-1/2 of an item's required parts, while the boss that can respawn within the same 3h window doprs parts for a full item or two and soooometimes a full item on top of that, all while rare gatherables can respawn within a similar 3h window somewhere around the same location (i.e. all of this could be happening in the same dungeon) - to me all of this sounds like it fits what Ashes is going for.

Big guilds get to fight over a boss. Smaller groups/guilds get to farm the spots that were taken by big guilds previously. Gatherers get to collect some stuff that woulda had more contest for it were it not for the boss. And also, in this context, the boss would be killable fast enough to require the guilds to stay in very close vicinity to it, because if they decide to spread out over the dungeon to farm some other stuff, while the other big guild is just waiting for the spawn - the spread out guild will miss out. Though, in a way, that is its own balancing tool for risk/reward.

And its because of that balancing tool, I say that we should have a few alternatives for this kind of content across the map at the same time. And ideally the full sets of crafted gear would require items from the entire map, so that people that are going for those sets would have higher chances of having content to do majority of the time.

And as I see it so far, all of AoC's plans fit this kind of gameplay just fine. So what am I missing here that makes it not fit? Am I forgetting one of our previous conversations on this topic?

Azherae

Ludullu wrote: »

And as I see it so far, all of AoC's plans fit this kind of gameplay just fine. So what am I missing here that makes it not fit? Am I forgetting one of our previous conversations on this topic?

EQ2 players and FF11 players are almost opposite in their expectations of 'farming' and 'open world' gameplay.

It's why the two games have such a relatively small overlap in their playerbases.

All I can tell you is that as of now Ashes is closer to the FF11 side in terms of what they seem to want, and this may be meaningfully less appealing to the EQ2 side.

The two groups/demographics are roughly the same size, afaik, so this is another case where Ashes 'sorta has to choose'. I believe they should choose the EQ2 side because:
a) Game combat already plays like WoW and gears like WoW
b) I'm still desperately hoping that Throne and Liberty stops drifting toward the WoW side (if Ashes had come out by now, and the MMO Oligarchs weren't pushy, I would expect having competition to soak up that side would make TL better)
c) The game is heavily built around that contesting of specific content (that's what they keep showing us they want, PoIs, static respawns, Starred mobs, less solo content), not contesting of 'space' or the dynamics around that

As always I advise you the same as I advise my own group, don't get caught up in the 'mental trap' of thinking Ashes is hoping to provide what TL does (the thing you actually want) just because it theoretically can.

Azherae

And to maybe briefly illustrate the 'difference'.

We went into Crimson Manor Basement 3 yesterday. We knew night would fall and it would become PvP, but we didn't go for PvP because only our 'casual' strength Tank was online.

But we knew this could happen because it was also time for scheduled Boonstones, so all the big stronger guilds should be off doing their Territory defense for most of the night. And so, we got loot. And we also got decent PvP against the same sort of smaller guild that also doesn't have a Boonstone to be at. And if we were a little slower we'd have lost a boss to them (we beat it just before they came to contest it, they took advantage of that and went past us to get the loot from the chests we were going to attempt next.

For Ashes to offer this as it is designed now, is impossible. Because the big guilds will have alts at the boss login location and a smaller team intended to watch the area and grab the spawn and bait corruption, while their main characters are still 'gatekeeping' the dungeon/PoI.

This would happen regardless of the spawn timers, if anything a tighter spawn timer would be cleaner 'protection' for smaller guilds because you know that they will be highly attentive to the fight in that moment. The smaller the spawn window, the better for smaller guilds, up to a point, where it's too small to be dynamic, i.e. 'the 60-90m one'.

Like many other things in MMOs, it's 'combination of all the things at once toward the goal'.

Ludullu

Azherae wrote: »

c) The game is heavily built around that contesting of specific content (that's what they keep showing us they want, PoIs, static respawns, Starred mobs, less solo content), not contesting of 'space' or the dynamics around that

But to me this sounds exactly like L2. You'd pick a spot that had a specific mob respawns, because you were hunting for a specific drop from it, and you'd farm that spot for as long as you can, while other groups come in and contest it.

You might've fought over the space in general, but the core goal was "this is my mob, so I gotta remove competition".

And in that context

Azherae wrote: »

For Ashes to offer this as it is designed now, is impossible. Because the big guilds will have alts at the boss login location and a smaller team intended to watch the area and grab the spawn and bait corruption, while their main characters are still 'gatekeeping' the dungeon/PoI.

this becomes the reason why I keep saying that corruption balancing and movement through a dungeon is important (along with inability to just lay there dead endlessly).

Lookouts get PKed by people with 0 PK count, and then they gotta get help to get back to the boss location. The PKers get cleansed in a single kill, rezzed by a cleric and they're fine.

And if Steven does want to keep the corruption soooo overtuned that there's no point in PKing - it'd just become a yet another contradiction in design imo. We now have pvpers complaining about lawless zone removal, even though that's a move closer to the initlal plan. And Steven doesn't want endless wars, so that pvp source is kinda out the window as well. At which point you kinda have no real pvp contest for stuff, and we really go away from the PvXness of it all.

P.S. I'll never stop cursing Amazon for their dumbassery

Coulda been neck deep in TL by this point.

Noaani

Ludullu wrote: »

And as I see it so far, all of AoC's plans fit this kind of gameplay just fine. So what am I missing here that makes it not fit? Am I forgetting one of our previous conversations on this topic?

The thing you are missing (imo) is the basic concept of Ashes.

If you take your over all picture of the game from the perspective of a top end guilds, we agree.

These players will have a major piece of content that they want to run, but on any given day that plan could change based on many different factors.

You are taking your experience from L2 and assuming that content will be farming mobs with a daily respawn timer. I am reading the basic design of Ashes and assuming that those top end guilds will I stead be working on castles and nodes. I believe weekly (or longer) respawn mobs will be a high priority for them, but not daily respawn mobs.

This is exasperated even more if farming those mobs would take many hours.

If your guild is farming those mobs, my guild is farming to prepare to siege your node or castle. If the most organized, dedicated players are spending 3 hours a day farming mobs and we are spending that time preparing a siege, you have no real shot.

If you honestly believe top end guilds will be farming daily mob spawns, who do you think will own castles? The two activities are kind of mutually exclusive.

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