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.
Comments
Oh how the times/cultures change... I guess it'll take Steven dumping a few dozen million into the game to realize this too. Or he'll just succumb to the majority's preference and the game will no longer be what it wanted to be.
Node Reputation. Using a Node Reputation system to mimic some RvR elements. This will clearly identify friend vs foe, and isolate those who attack non-flagged players within certain areas. For those that attack non-flagged players it reduces the corruption penalty but adds the Reputation penalty, this could be worse or better for you depending on what Node that non-flagged player is apart of. This bridges the gap between those who want to PvP and those who would rather avoid it. By reducing (by a lot) the stiff crippling penalties you're encouraging those who want to PvP to engage in PvP. A lot more risk is going to happen. Those who want to avoid PvP will be able to keep within "safe zones" of the Nodes influence, only venturing out when they really have to. This will encourage people to band up beyond just their guild to defend their land or Realm, from others attacking. This will also encourage and reward those who venture out seeking conflict in the "wilds", who only venture into the "safe zones" to cause a little havoc, before being hunted away.
Definitions:
AOI = Area of Influence. This is the area a Node has influence over.
This area could be the zone that the Node is in if it's single Node.
If the Node is has a Vassal the area extends to any Vassals Node zones.
If the Node has a Sponsor the area extends to any Sponsor Node Zones.
In short the AOI is the area of the Node or Kingdom it's part of.
Reputation = How a Node views a player. This could be any Node to any Player.
This reputation will always begin at Neutral. And will consist of the following levels.
Revered -> Heroic -> Ally -> Friend -> Neutral <- Nuisance <- Enemy <- Hated <- Reviled
100 | 66 | 33 | 11 | 0 | -11 | -33 | -66 | -100
(These are rough numbers that would be need to be adjusted, this is just enough to give an idea)
Yellow Icon: minimal reduction of corruption gain for killing this player
Orange Icon: reduction of corruption gain for killing this this player
Red Icon: severally reduced corruption gain for killing this player.
Black Icon: no corruption for killing this player.
Reputation would layer on top of the corruption system and affect it some ways.
With Reputation corruption wouldn't have to be so steep, and your entire penalty for killing a non-flagged player
wouldn't be spread world wide, it'd mostly be isolated to the Node/Religion/Guild that player is apart of.
Corruption would still exist and acts mild deterrent in the more uncivil areas.
The Reputation layered on top of corruption acts as the deterrent in the civil areas.
Corruption penalties would need to be toned down a lot, they're too stiff.
The basic idea.
None flagged player only will be effected by reputation
Player A Kills Player B in Zone A
Player A receives reduced corruption gain
Player A Kills Player B in Zone B
Player A receives corruption gain and reduced reputation with Node B
Player A Kills Player B in Neutral Zone
Player A receives corruption gain
Bad reputation penalties explained
Player A has Neutral reputation with Node B.
Player A Kills Player B in Zone B's AOI.
Player A has Nuisance reputation (-11) with Node B.
Player A has raised cost to use stations in Node B.
Node B Players see Player A with a Yellow Icon next to name plate.
-> If Player B Kills Player A they'll receive a slightly milder than normal corruption gain.
Player A Kills Player BB in Zone B's AOI.
Player A has Nuisance reputation (-22) with Node B.
Player A has extreme cost to use stations in Node B.
Player A Kills Player BBB in Zone B's AOI.
Player A has Enemy reputation (-33) with Node B.
Node B Players (And Node B's Vassals) see Player A with an Orange Icon next to name plate.
Node B Guards (And Node B Vassals' Guards) are hostile to Player A.
-> If Player B Kills Player A they'll receive reduced corruption gain
Player A Kills Player BBBB in Zone B's AOI.
Player A has Hated reputation (-66) with Node B. (we skipped a few, but the increase can be tuned)
Node B Players (And Node B's Vassals and Sponsors(if any)) see Player A with a Red Icon next to name plate.
Node B Guards (And Node B's Vassals' Guards and Sponsors' Guards(if any)) are hostile to Player A
-> If Player B Kills Player A they'll receive a very minimal corruption gain.
Player A Kills Player BBBBB in Zone B's AOI.
Player A has Reviled reputation (-100) Node B.
Node B Players (And Node B's Vassals and Sponsors(if any)) see Player A with a Black Icon next to name plate.
To reset reputation
Natural reset after so many hours.
Reputation quests.
Success attack on Node.
This is a rough idea, and I might have missed typed a few things and there's plenty of wholes to poke in it as it is. But the game is complex and to create a balance it really needs a lot of strings to pull to adjust things, a Reputation like this gives some control to the devs to balance out things ganking, griefing, deflaging, hiding behind non-flag, ect. The idea is to encourage pvp but not random chaotic free for all style pvp, something structured with clearly identified friends and foes. People getting together to form a raiding party, and others banding together to chase them out of the zone. Without needing to be in every discord or without having to watch Node chat like a hawk. Something more organic and flexible.
What snacks we got?
Imagine reading all these pages about no subject at all
I seen the subject as what do you think of the term "this game is not for everyone". Then later "how would you bridge those gaps"? It's a high level conversation, not detailed about any specific mechanic or system though if that's what you were looking for.
You can use these bridges here and there to calm down people's temperament, but they ultimately won't solve the issue. You primarily have to communicate why the gap exists, and what's already in it for casual players to discover, if they embrace the advantages of it. Why the trade-offs are worth it, and there's no point being stubborn about them.
If you focus on using bridges to make the transition easier, you'll inevitably invite the people who will just keep complaining that you don't also add more of their other creature comforts, without ever really being interested in your original vision.
Instead of building bridges, make your side so impressive that those on the other side willingly swim through the river without a need for a bridge.
I think Steven's already 'vetoed' everything that could.
And yes, I realize it's among the heights of arrogance to respond just to say 'nah it can't happen rn' but alas, I am bound to be the voice of a Seven...
I just saw Steven’s message on Discord, and I have to say it’s really great to see. First, because there was a quick response and real communication, and second, because I truly believe the direction you’re taking is the right one. As I mentioned before, the system from ArcheAge was very well designed, and I’m convinced it would fit perfectly into Ashes of Creation while satisfying a large part of the playerbase. Either way, the fact that you’re giving it a try is already awesome!
I think this is a yet another step away from the initial vision and will make all the other pvp systems. And with no visible mention of "we'll do this just for Alpha", it comes off as something that they're looking at as a fully new feature for the game.
This page had no damn mentions of "flipping lawless zones on and off" until that discord post was made
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Open_world_battlegrounds
And now with bigger rewards in those areas Ashes is truly becoming a pvp game rather than a pvx one.
I am the frog sitting at the bottom of a boiling pot
What Steven is talking about with battlegrounds is what I always assumed they would eventually do with at least some bosses.
However, doing it with entire zones is horrendous.
Since this is something Steven has previously said he absolutely does not want, all I can assume is that he is pandering to what amounts to a very small group of players.
Edit to add; anyone want to take bets on what Steven does a 180 degree flip on next?
That seems like it would be a much more productive discussion than asking what Intrepid can do to bridge a gap between two types of players of which Steven only wants one type in the game.
I'd love to be proven wrong, but by the time we get to a point where proper full crafting cycles are being tested - there'll only be super hardcore pvpers in the testing and they couldn't care less about all of that shit, so we'll just get gear from mobs in pvp zones (pretty much already the case, if named mobs will exist in these "pop-up lawless zones") and crafting will never catch up to that progression so why even attempt making it complex and deep.
So, when I typed up what you quoted, I considered adding in a few potential options.
Reducing crafting complexity was the first one I thought of.
It was kind of the only one I could think of though, as everything else that I thought of had already been changed.
Nah, we're absolutely still gonna be around for those tests. Even if Intrepid doesn't manage to make it 'worth the time' for most players, I'll get giant piles of data.
Also the sensible thing to walk back would be stuff related to Node Management depth, because if the audience shifts towards PvP, and Steven actually enjoys that atmosphere more, there's no reason to spend the months of incentive-tweaking required to make a Node run like a real place, when they're just going to be Guild-dominated.
- Expansive, immersive questing. Something that if you log on for 30 minutes or an hour, you're able to have fun and rewarding experience while playing independently.
- Questing that is rewarding enough that it draws groups of players to go to other 3-star areas throughout the world. There was an estate area I tried to duo to complete a few quests; I looked for about an hour and a half for a group to come play in the area, and no one cared because it was considered a waste of time not to grind at HH or OAK.
- Quest Sharing/Group Questing would allow people (who may not be able to go all the way to Winstead) to pickup a quest enjoy going outside of one group-grind room to encourage exploring an entire area dedicated to group play.
- Crafting Accessibility I don't have specific recommendations on the solution, but after 30 hours of gathering as a noobie, I wasn't able to create a single piece of gear or potion or sell the gatherables for even 50 silver.
- Mob Training is another one that I don't have a specific resolution suggestion. It's really annoying/disheartening to take the time to find a group, travel to the location, have an absolute excellent team you're grinding with (finally!!), only for zergers to train mobs on you. Then after a few times, you flag for PvP and get corruption for killing them. And then you get trained again, die, and they loot all of your equipment.
- Caravans should buff the driver better. If I've spent 15 hours on gathering resources and paying money to get a caravan going, there's nothing I can do if someone 7 levels higher than me wants to take it. Or maybe make it a guild activity where money is split instead of an independent venture that encourage level 10 players to do as a noobie quest.
Meaningful risk is a good pillar. Taking everything a new player has worked for because they were following a noobie quest or because of a poor game design isn't fun.Thanks for keeping the convo going and for all y'all do!
I have to admit that I thought Steven's "not for you" comment was related to alpha testing or not liking PvP or not wanting immediate gratification for everything. I didn't know he actually said this game isn't for casual players. That's pretty disheartening.
Being a casual doesn’t mean avoiding PvP, shunning group play, or resenting the hardcore. Many of us admire dedication—we just want a game that welcomes all playstyles without forcing one path. Playing casually means that the 400 hours it took someone to level to 50 in 6 weeks may take me 600 hours and 6 months.
Because Archeage had them. Not the same as what Steven seems to have planned for Ashes that he literally never once mentioned to us in 8 years of communication, but Archeage still had them.
So, if I log back into a zone I camped out of a few days earlier, that has since turned Lawless, does this mean I have to fight my out to leave? Should there be a "Get out of Dodge fast" option?
Edit: Not to derail from the original topic but just following the stream of consciousness of this thread....
If for some reason a player has an issue with the way the system handles it when you log back in to find your area has become Lawless, then that might be a really direct case of the game not being for you, since it's one of those things you can't easily do anything about in a game with no Fast Travel.
But really, it might just be handled similar to 'as if you died and respawned' without the dying part (which would potentially be one of the most roundabout forms of 'fast travel' possible).
Hey Margret!
Thank you for taking the time to participate in these discussion, the extra effort doesn’t go unnoticed.
Ash’s has a lot stacked against it. Extra long leveling grinds, outdated death mechanics the industry moved on from years ago, not having a solo friendly gathering system, and the ability to have everything you own taken from you with a siege, and almost always on PVP.
Personally I think Ash’s can bring the gap in a few ways that don’t disrupt the pillars. Number 1, making solo play more rewarding and viable. Having a good questing system (RuneScape is a great example), making crafting feel achievable as a solo player and not a whole guild activity, and easing some of the early game hardships to encourage players to take that journey so they’re already invested once they get to max level and they have to deal with the games less avoidable PVP.
In short, I think Ash’s should care less about the risk versus reward starting at the beginning of the game, and more about the real meat towards mid and end game. That’s where the risk reward actually becomes fun and compelling.
Ash’s is a game that needs to have a thriving player base make it to the end game for it to really shine. Massive earth altering battles, constantly evolving alliances & politics are amazing ideas but if the average player ops out before they get their, that’s huge opportunity lost. The game revolves around risk VS reward and I think that’s awesome, but the current penalties are simply unfun.
When you die in ashes you have to deal with stat dampening, at least 25% permanent item loss, above average travel times, and XP debt.
I encourage you to rethink these compounding affects. They don’t offer fun challenge, which is challenge that’s feels good to overcome, they offer frustering obstacles that decrease the risk and fun players will attempt.
At the end of the day, all video game punishments serve as a time waster for the player experiencing it. You have 4 different time wasters stacked on top of one another. A casual player will look at that and go wow, this game doesn’t respect my time and that’s the problem. Games can be non casual and still value your time. I think any souls game is a wonderful example.
I’m also not saying don’t get rid of punishments on death, just rethink how how many you have and their intensity.
You will also get the a few hardcore dad gamers left from the old days who think this is still good game design and anyone who disagrees is wrong.
Think to yourselves, will the game be more fun for your extra hardcore players if they have a healthier ecosystem of casual players to make it to the end game to flush out those extra battles, or will your hardcore player base have more fun with a needlessly smaller player count and extra time wasted every time they die.
As much as I like to give Steven well deserved shit, I also do try to be fair.
To that end, I feel it worth pointing out that he said "areas" not "zones". Since he also said there will be objectives in these areas, I am taking this to be that areas around top end bosses will infact be lawless - which is something I have assumed for actual years.
If this is the case, my actual assumption for how this would work (based on Stevens reliance on other games for his ideas) is that there will be bosses in a set spawn timer (probably with an in game calander) that when they spawn they will turn the local area lawless.
If this is accurate, you should never be in a situation where you don't know that an area is due to turn lawless, as they will all be known well in advance - and the areas themselves will always be known.
My big issue with this is the lack of any mention of anything to do with this in 8 years of communication during what is claimed to be "open development".
Thank you for taking the time to clarify this, I'm sleeping better already!
They say that pvpers are a niche in the mmorpg genre. I'd say that's true, but not nearly as niche as the average carebear makes it out to be. But you know what's REALLY niche amongst the likely pool of some amount of millions of pvp players open to a new mmo that caters to them? Being in a mega guild. The vast majority of players who want to pvp in an mmo do not want to be in a mega guild. We are talking a tiny, tiny percentage of that pool of millions that actually wants to be in a mega guild. In fact, the average pvper looks at mega guilds as a net negative for pvp mmos, and the entire mmo genre in general. Certainly in the case of more pvp focused mmos, mega guilds are viewed as one of the major contributing factors of why some games fail or are not as fun as they could be.
I believe the same goes for pvers. The vast majority of them probably don't want to be just a number in a mega guild either. Why? Well I'll be prickly and straight up about it. Because mega guilds are fkn lame. There are many multiple and varied reasons why people don't want to be in mega guilds. Most of the reasons are common sense.
But almost everything in your game is catered to mega guilds. Caravans, crafting, general pvp, node sieges and node politics, leveling itself. Speaking of the leveling, ya know...the whole "we want leveling to mean something" line. Yeah that's great. I think most would agree with that. We're certainly over the 1-60 levels in a day mmos. But that doesn't mean we want a system where mega guilders breeze through leveling, in what, I dunno, I haven't played Ashes in months, but what, like 2-3 days? Is that the time the average mega guilder breezes to max level? Whereas everyone else that doesn't have access to dozens of potential group mates is faced with a long, trudging unbelievably slow grind.
Or take gathering, and I believe this has recently been changed. But just the thought process behind it...is out there. When the gathering nodes were static, as in you could predict that a single tree was going to produce legendary logs before it was harvested...the reasoning behind that, which I believe was stated by Steven or a dev, was essentially that they wanted full set piece mega guild battles over....a single tree. Throw away all the good and normal things about a gathering system (organic luck, searching, exploration, just keeping at it), let's pigeon hole it into timed, scheduled zerg battles over singular trees.
Now "open world battlegrounds." A new idea, just popped out of nowhere. Maybe it'll be good, maybe not. But I'd bet a lot of money it's going to be a timed, scheduled type thing, that yep, you guessed it, benefits mega guilds.
The corruption system being so ridiculously harsh, while it might seem counterintuitive, absolutely benefits mega guilders. Caravans being nothing but a zerg activity - mega guilds. Anything and everything really to do with nodes - mega guilds. Crafting - mega guilds. "We want getting to a high level of crafting to mean something!" Translation - the high level crafters will be players who had mats funneled to them by a mega guild. There's nothing special about that. There's nothing cool about that. No one's going to look up to them for that, or even give a flying fk.
So what does this all mean? Sounds like you need to completely change your game from the ground up eh. Well no not really. Just take your boots off the necks of the average players. There's no reason why my little group of 5 dudes should be making moves that determine whether a node is sieged or not. That's mega guild/mega alliance territory. No reason my group of 5 should feel as safe running a caravan as a mega guild does. Everyone fully expects that mega guilds will be able to do things and accomplish things that typical players cant. And I think many players are open to working with larger groups of players to accomplish certain things.
But this is the part you guys gotta figure out. Somehow you have to figure out how to make the game fun for the 95%+ of people who absolutely will refuse to be in a mega guild.
Edit a day later: How could I forget? Freeholds - mega guilds. Ya know I remember a couple years ago, the open ocean showcase, Steven revealed that the ocean would be lawless. RAWRRR. YES. Of course, it always had to be. Common sense design principles, beautiful. Precedent was set in Archeage, it worked beautifully there. And of course it has to be lawless, we're talking big ship battles, people are going to die in mass, shits gonna be wild. Like duh, has to be lawless.
Then like the next month Stevens like yeah gear drop chance starts with the first noncombatant kill. What. Ok you just killed organic open world pvp. You just killed the bounty hunting system. You just killed risk/reward in the open world. Ok.
Then like the next month, oh btw freeholds are pretty much just going to be for mega guilds now. Ok you just killed the interest of potentially hundreds of thousands of players that would have played for that unique feature alone. Not many mmos have an Archeage style housing/farming system. And many people will play just for that. But nah, lets give it to mega guilds. Ok.
And it's just like wtf man. The freehold change isolated to itself, I was kinda neutral on. I understood the reasoning of not wanting urban sprawl. Though I think there are other ways to mitigate that potentially. But while being neutral on it, at the same time I was just like...fuck, well there goes a lot of potential players. But I'm sure the mega guilders love it.
And it's just like god damn what is happening. I watched a Zybak video a month or two ago and apparently ESO style animation cancelling might have somehow slipped its way into the game. I think that's what he indicated, not 100% on it. And then I watched a couple of his pvp videos and he's bunny hopping and launching himself around during pvp. Yeah all that shit has to go. Casuals and average players will quit your game en masse with that stuff left in.
And for the love of god, ya gotta stop listening solely to people like DA of Enveus. I believe that problem, in the case of DA, has solved itself now. But others like him, yeah take their feedback. But my god, when so much of the game's design seems to benefit people like him, it begs the question are you even listening to the feedback of anyone else?
You've gone super hardcore into just straight pve/crafting grind. And super softcore on pvp other than the pvp that benefits mega guilds. Like the opposite of the direction you should be going in my opinion. Where's the fun and excitement in that? Here come stand in one spot and grind these mobs for hundreds of hours so one day you can maybe be strong enough to get absolutely slam dunked by a zerg mega guild in our sanctioned pvp. You're fuckin up imo. I could be wrong, we'll see.
I'm not trying to be too harsh, just spouting. I realize there are so many unfinished and unimplemented mechanics and systems in the game that it's really hard to fully judge anything.