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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
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.
Seems like a silly way to make literally billions of dollars in profit.
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.
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".
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.
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')
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).
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).
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?
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.
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'.
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 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
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.
So when I'm talking about farming spots - I mean farming mobs in them, while you wait for the boss to spawn. And I laid out the situation where a few guilds might contest the boss spawn window (which means constant pvp, trying to remove the competitor, in case the boss does respawn right as you remove them), while weaker guilds get to have mob spots open to them.
As for the siege preps - that highly depends on what exactly that includes. In my experience, getting better gear for as many members as possible is one of the main ways of preping for the siege, so farming mobs/bosses would directly make you more prepared for it.
Running caravans could be another way, because that's money and you can use economy to get gear, but then you're making the guilds, that farmed/crafted items in the first place, stronger.
And then if there's specific requirements for the sieges - the guilds that plan on participation will be doing those. Castle node caravans, node buildup (which will most likely include killing mobs and bosses within those ZOIs) and on the attacking side - contesting all of those actions.
But considering the amount of siegable things in the game and the cost of the action - I'd imagine only 5-10% of guilds will be involved in that, if even that. At which point we simply shift the stuff I'm talking about by that amount of guilds and we have the same situation. The leftover stronger guilds might be contesting general daily bosses, while even weaker guilds (or at this point potentially solo pugs) get to farm mobs more.
Obviously there's also the underlying gathering lvl of actions, but we've yet to see how pylons will work exactly, so it's hard to say how they'll impact guild-based contests of gatherables (if at all).
And so again, given even the current state of things, it sure looks like farming normal mobs is the thing that people are meant to be doing. And it'll only be even more true once gear craftable parts are added into them.
Right, and this happens because L2 was simpler and had less paths, particularly less guild-self-contained paths, to actual contesting and building of power (and specific types of easier PvE/less of specific dynamics).
Either that or your definition of 'weaker guild' is way above what I'm referring to.
So instead, view it through the lens of Static Respawns, even though those went away, and consider how they're similar to Caravans and Freeholds. Because the type of mob farming that I expect to be meaningful in Ashes is closer to those Static Respawns than to what I believe you are describing from L2.
If you knew the Static Respawn, you could get powered up and geared up without fighting normal mobs even considering that you might need materials from them (just to be clear there are reasons why you can't do this in TL, they're just unintuitive and definitely don't fit Ashes)
If you can run a Caravan with the Glint that drops universally (but higher qualities of Glint drop from the same bosses we're talking about), you can buy materials. If you can raid Caravans successfully, even better. And to remind of your usual complaint, if you can swipe materials from a smaller Guild you somehow set up a Purple v Purple situation on, that too.
If you can lock down a Freehold for your guild, you can now charge others to spend their time using it. Top guilds practically print money without even needing to farm 'normal' mobs, which means they can then spend that money on things that get or keep them ahead (repairs, taxes, new Freeholds after Sieges, gearing alts), and then use the bulk of their time to be at every boss spawn they catch a whiff of.
And also remember that as of now we understand the rules around Corruption to be 'you can drop gear no matter what your PK count is'. It's not even about dropping gear though. It's as you said it, an arms race of alts and counter-alts.
Except that 'weak guilds' don't have strong counter-alts, if they have them at all.
Then yeah, I can see why the same ways of content contest wouldn't really work out. And then this is kinda goes back to Steven's love for contradicting design directions
In that case I'd probably prefer an almost fully randomized respawn timer, because I experienced the precise timers in L2 with a few instances and that stuff inevitably lead to the dirtiest most boring tactics imaginable. The random timer (given that there's enough overall content in the world to fill out the 24h of the day) would at least just create the reactive gameplay flow that would keep everyone on their toes, especially if they already had some other plans for that day.
If you knew that the boss was 'only' going to drop a Material, either the Guild must have at least one person (honestly probably another Alt, possibly not even actually in the Guild) who can craft or use it, and you risk being killed for it after the fight (if you can't just log off first).
Whereas if the boss drops a full item, winning camper wins, which is 'what happens now' but what I absolutely expect to change. This goes for much 'weaker' mobs in the same way, as long as they are 'special' enough to have anything even near to an hour respawn.
Material at least implies that money must be spread around to all the people who 'help with the Artisanship leveling' (we're assuming not the absolute hyper-optimized guilds for this moment), dropped gear implies 'camping is just profit'.
Nah, we've had that in the past, but I am not making any assumptions as to what you are thinking in this regard.
My main point here is that top end guilds in Ashes shouldn't be spending time every day farming mobs - of any type. They shouldn't need to farm base population at all, and daily spawns should be something they only take on if they are in a position to do so without compromising the more important activities they should be doing.
I'm sure this was the case in L2, but Ashes has entire layers of content on top of what L2 ever had.
You say that you are used to seeing siege preperation in games be focused mostly on getting the best gear you can get. While I can't find the quote, and it may not even be valid any more, Steven has said in the past that the effort required to successfully siege a node should be on par with the effort taken to build that node in the first place. This is in things like building siege weapons, so it is effort expended in the game that is exclusively for sieges.
So yeah, if you are a top end guild wanting to siege a metropolis, you aren't spending time farming a daily spawn mob. If you own a castle you have a whole list of things you need to be doing all the time, and so would probably not want to risk that for the quality of item that can come from a daily spawn. A weekly or monthly spawn, sure, but not daily. Spending 20 or 30 minutes on a daily one may even be fine, but not several hours.
I mean, top end guilds are after power and influence. What will provide them that better - a 2% increase of a stat on a single item on a single player (that will be able to be purchased for gold anyway), or a castle where among other things, you are pulling in gold from taxes across a massive region?
It isn't in Intrepids (or the games) best interest to pull these players out of the game for 3 hours a day for these mobs - which is probably why it looks like they are going with specific respawn times rather than a window (I would still prefer a larger window so that farming the location waiting for the spawn is just inefficient use of top end player time).
If you want to then say "then daily spawn mobs are for the next tier of guilds down", then sure, potentially. But that is a discussion I am less inclined to be a part of, as I understand the perspective of top end guilds well, but not of second tier. I wouldn't want to speak for them.
So we agree on this, but just our expectation of what actions will need to be taken differs. And obviously we have no real clue either way, so it's hard to talk around this part of the topic.
But getting the castle requires those 2% increases on a lot of your people, cause they allow you to outmatch the potential competition for the castle.
Though, if we actually don't need all that much better gear to contest a castle - I'll be all for that, as I'm sure you know. I hate snowballs and want the weaker groups to have as much of a chance as possible, so it Intrepid come up with a design where they have that - awesome!
This is the opposite of the 'avoiding snowball', but not for a reason that the gearing you see in L2 or BDO would indicate. For this, I think you have to understand ESO or reference TL much more.
It's not that 2% increase doesn't help, it's that 'more powerful' isn't usually the thing gear is giving in the way most people from games with simpler itemization 'understand' easily. And that's why bosses dropping full gear is so troublesome.
Obviously there will always be top end gear that is rare and hard to get which makes you 'better at your role', but in a less simplistic game, the number of these gear pieces that a guild already winning, needs to actually have, is much smaller.
TL has quite a few weapons that are actually easyish to get, or are harder to get but only used by one out of (effectively) 100 'classes', which have a huge impact on planned/structured PvP. So it's more like 'this guild of 70 only needs a single Nirma Sword' (back when this was BiS for a specific type of Tank).
Sure, it's better if all the Tanks have this sword and can practice to fill that position in the battle formation, but if your guild is active and organized, especially in Ashes where you can just trade any gear to any guildmate, there's much less need to contest the boss except to suppress others from having such swords.
If you know a boss drops 'the best Full Defense PvP Tanking Shield', you have an incentive as a top guild to contest this just to prevent your rivals from getting that shield.
If multiple bosses drop materials that can be used to make (or build up to, as in the case of Throne and Liberty) the 'best Full Defense PvP Tanking Shield', you have to spread yourself thinner to stop them all.
If there's a group out there who figures out a team composition where the Tank isn't even using Full Defense Tanking as their strategy, now you don't even know what to suppress.
There's a big difference between 'Achievements' and 'Stuff You Can Lord Over Other People' that PvP games often mess up. Sure, the average wannabe-top guild will usually mock people who aren't using the meta gear, but that only lasts until they start to WIN.
Then it becomes 'the new meta' and people mock others for not having those, as if it was always a given that they should. If you ignore the mockery, your build/idea might still be garbage, but the thing about a complex MMO is that you can't usually know that without actually trying it out quite a bit with people competent enough to actually implement the strategy.
This would result in lots more experimental gear being made too, rather than 'Guys lets kill Firebrand for the Fire Shield because it's the best and Ice magic sucks in PvP anyway'. Remember, PvP demographic is just as much if not more crybabies than PvE demographic.
So if anything, mobs shouldn't drop completed pieces because it makes people even more whiny.
And this would also relate to the supposed likeness to SWG's crafting, where different mats would interact differently with each other, so if you were crafting Shield A which needed a few different mats and Shield A part from Boss A - those parts might boost their defense from, say, riverlands mats, while if you were making Shield B with mats from Boss B - they'd boost their fed from tropics mats. So you'd have 2 completely different paths to the same stat value.
And obviously those shield parts should boost other stats from other mats as well. Feel like that would really make crafting valuable, especially if working with different mats becomes its own gameplay-based skill that you gotta do a few times for your character to "learn" how to work with them.
Possibilities are endless
Oh this recent lawless zone change where Jundark got them removed showed exactly this. PvPers lost their ganking spots and immediately started crying worse than a hurt baby.
Bam, problem solved.