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
The only reason we have high lvl players killing lowbies is the broken mob leashing and aggro design.
I agree with you in the current system but Im pretty sure the author was saying they wanted it less punishing for pvp which really cant happen unless they change their combat system totally. They could make small tweaks but it has to be pretty damn brutal to pvp with this current system otherwise the game would really never succeed imo. They could always have a bounty system and a totally consensual pvp system with areas that were totally open. Other games with low skill combat systems have done that and it was worked. I think a bounty system is a must in an open world. Bounty systems are almost always a lot of fun.
So, you are conflating a few things here.
You are saying the DPS race is bad design, and then are citing encounter design specifics as your reasoning.
I totally agree that the concept of a DPS race doesn't work well in conjunction with encounter design that requires something other than max DPS, if that mechanic other than DPS isnt applied to every grouo present equally. That doesn't mean a DPS race is bad design though.
The player corruption system is meant to add weight to PvP decisions, but if it's getting in the way of emergent gameplay systems, it might feel less strategic and more limiting. The player corruption system is something that will take reiteration, balance passes, and keen eyes to balance in a satisfying way. This is something we'll be doing throughout testing, and we appreciate your feedback
To be honest, this is *why* I get in to discussions/debates with people here. While it annoys some posters, it is something I know to occasionally be very useful.
In the case of this discussion, it is as you say - the corruption system isn't fully in place. Yet we also arrived at the very useful point for you to pass on to appropriate developers that having a paradigm where best DPS wins the loot on open world bosses , this needs to be taken in to account with encounter design of any encounter subject to this.
I'm all about raids, with intricate, well curated encounter design. That really is what I play MMORPG's for. However, when the loot goes to the group with the highest DPS on the encounter, you just shouldn't have those mechanics in with those encounters.
Make your game a gangbox, and player count will drop.
And MMORPGs aren't No Man's Sky - no matter how much you patch them and how hard you'll try, lost players won't return.
i see a few issues with the corruption design as well as the current implementation.
steven said in yesterdays livestream again that corruption is overtuned and SHOULD GIVE THEM THE AMOUNT OF PEOPLE ENGAGING WITH IT FOR A PROPER LIVE COMPARISON.
maybe i missunderstand what he was saying there, but if the intend is to have such a big detour that no one ever wants to possibly risk getting corrupt i dont think the system even needs to be in the game then. going corrupt is and should be a high risk, but also offer a big reward when used at the appropiate moments.
example would be a relic crate on some players bag. that should be possible without you loosing your gear.
at the same note that now corrupted player cant even bring the relic to their node since they would be killed by the guards and other players. so there seem to be some things missing to make the intended gameplay possible.
as for general issues with the corruption design. as i understand it, it seems to be intended, that corrupted players are not allowed to defend themselves from being attacked without occuring more corruption. imo thats a really bad design.
lets say i was killing that player with the relic. i picked it up went to a grindspot to work off my corruption, since i cant go to the node with corruption. while im trying to "better" myself while slaying harmless npcs
Tldr: as a corrupted player i should be allowed to defend myself. if i attack someone first thats my fault.
imo going corrupt should be something you dont want to but also something that can be necessary in order to make your home the most powerful one as example.
with how steven talked about it i dont think that we are allowed to use corruption to defend our grindspot. not enough reward vs. the risk/inevitable
apparently i needed so much words to make my point
Steven is not interested in making corruption a system that has even a shred of fairness, but he's more than ok to create a whole different system that accomplishes the same damn thing (except with higher rewards and even lower risk) - but with the absence of fairness for the victims of murder.
Fun times all around
My point exactly, i havent checked in a while but i was in the livestream and was advocating to make corruption be viable where steven explicity said to me he doesnt want it to be but just a "scare".
This is not a good thing if you create a system that is not viable at all then that system doesnt have any reason to exist in the first place. As Magarat dismissed it with "griefer enjoy griefing people" which was a silly thing to say tbh. I played a lot of ashes and competed/pvp with the current best guilds in the world and i can tell you the absolute majority doesnt want or ever griefed people myself included I want a viable system that has drawbacks when killing someone (risk and reward one of the keypoints to this game) but losing gear to the point where you lose your gear which can take literal days to get 1 pieces (seen in 2.5) its just not doable so you could also just disable the corruption feature and you can not kill anyone anymore when you are about to go corrupt it would have the same effect. Before anyone says "its overtuned on purpose right now" I know thats not the point and the reasoning Steven gave in his livestream was just downright silly, People do indeed care for their gear over killing someone with rather no effect since they can come back in less than 5minutes.
Tldr the system is flawed and should be reworked to make a greater product in the end, which is what I want for the game to be a great game
Steven copied, imo, one of the best pvp systems in the genre. Added super correct details to the system, which made it even better. And then just did a fucking 180 in design, said that the balancing will be super harsh, item drops start from your first PK, and then started adding fucking lawless zones WHICH LET PEOPLE GRIEF EACH OTHER FOR NOT COST OR PENALTY
I would've laughed so hard, was it no so damn sad, when both Steven and Margaret said they don't want griefers in their game RIGHT AFTER introducing an entire system that ENCOURAGES griefing
Tldr I question a system that is not viable to exist in the first place
I don't think anyone in the thread would consider this a 'fix' for any of the things they were talking about.
Posters so far seem to want more contestation opportunities, not less.
And yes, this does affect it, because people won't fight back if they expect that their attacker 'will have to stop attacking to avoid going corrupt', that's the whole concern of a large section of the tester-base now.
Intrepid just gotta decide which exact niche audience they wanna hit with their game. So far it seems to be the pvper audience. Maybe we'll shift slightly more to PvX once they start adding more PvE stuff into the game.
In this thread, both sides still basically want the same thing, and both EVE and TL offer that same thing, it's just the current form of Ashes that hasn't gotten there yet.
The only thing almost everyone agrees on is that Corruption sucks.
It sure does, but the unsuck direction preferences seem to be quite different for a ton of people, and quite often there's barely any overlap where several sides can be pleased with the outcome.
The not-for-everyoneness shines brightest when it comes to corruption in Ashes.
We now have two different types of Lawless Zones that are both unnecessarily 'bad'.
"Permanent" and "Innately Rewarding".
EVE can get away with this because it's a 'full loot' Space Sim.
TL doesn't functionally do either of those things to the extent that it would matter, and Ashes could just do the same. We don't know what the final incentive design will be, it's just people having insufficient faith in Steven and the team because sometimes Steven makes decisions that don't have any backstory so we can't tell if they're random.
I don't exactly have a ton of faith either, but it's not like this is hard, and I trust the team to push Steven to give up on at least some of his blatantly mismatching ideals.
I'll paint a brief picture of a Lawless Zone for you:
The temporary zone has no hugely additional rewards, but can have some extra materials, but...
Every time anyone dies in that zone, they have a 1-2% chance of a Goblin appearing and stealing one random piece of gear off them and running away.
If they can kill the Goblin they get it back. Whoever kills the Goblin gets the gear drop. The Goblin is pretty hard to kill without teamwork of a fairly balanced group (there are so many ways to do this) and if it escapes it goes and puts the loot in some treasure chest in some random spot in the zone.
Now you have a Lawless Zone where gear can be randomly redistributed to participants at a low chance. No one needs to 'gain more than what is available when the Zone isn't Lawless' other than through PvP. People who attempt to punch down will probably be dogpiled and lose gear. Large guilds spending too many bodies on controlling this area only gain if they have opponents.
Done.
"Lawless Zone" is not a problem in itself. (The above is an Ashes-appropriate mutation of Shadowed Crypt in TL, and I know the behaviour types from there with relative certainty now).
And yeah, that would be a nice PvX addition to an inherently PvP location. We'll just have to see what Intrepid are capable of with their PvE design once they're able to start realizing their ideas. Sure hope that time comes around within the next year.