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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.
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Risk, Reward, Difficulty & FUN: What Intrepid is Missing
RonDog98
Member, Alpha Two
In a recent thread, Margret asked how we think Ash’s can help bridge the gap between casual and hardcore players and I felt that question was worth dedicating a post to.
After some thought; I honestly think the answer, or at least a large part of the answer, is pretty straightforward:
Reevaluating what is fun risk and difficulty and what is not.
Ash’s will never be a casual game, but at least it can be a casual friendly one.
What does this mean? AoC has long & grindy leveling, a hard very in-depth crafting system, heavy emphasis on economy gameplay, heavy emphasis on group gameplay, and potentially always on PVP.
These are all considered hardcore by todays standards and are also all core pillars of AoC’s game play. What do I mean by that? AoC would not PLAY the same without these features. I do think some steps can be taken to make each one of these more appealing to casuals, but you need all of these for the game to PLAY the same. None of these are inherently unfun, as long as steps are taken to make them engaging and rewarding. In other words, you can make them fun for a casual player.
You know what’s not fun for a casual player? Overly punishing death mechanics? Why is that you may ask? Great question!
A video game is only able to truly punish you in two ways: Monetarily or Wasting your TIME!
1) Monetarily. Games like candy crush will charge you extra for more attempts, for example.
2) Wasting your TIME: this method is much more common, and can be disguised in many different ways.
You die and lose materials? Cool you have to spend more TIME getting more.
You die and gain XP debt? Cool you have to to spend more TIME to work it off.
You die and gain a stat dampening effect? Sweet so it takes more TIME to kill mobs and level
You die and have an extremely long travel time? Rad that means it’ll take more TIME to get back to the fun part of the game.
See what I did there? AoC can pretend it has 4 different death penalties, but in reality it has 1 penalty x 4.
This is pure and simple fundamentally not fun. Now I’ve brought this up before in global chat and it’s been met with the: “Who cares cry more carebear this game isn’t for people who care about that. A game can’t be fun unless it’s bending me over it’s knee and slapping my booty.”
Unfortunately, this kind of gamer is objectively in the minority. There’s decades of data on player counts and player behavior to support this, and anyone who disagrees is either misinformed or purposely ignorant.
That leaves us with AoC. A game defined by its more hardcore nature. This means AoC is a game that will have a more uphill battle retaining players simply by being the game it wants to be. AoC cannot change that without becoming a different game.
However, what it can change are these outdated time wasting mechanics.
If you lessen death penalties nothing is affected:
AoC will still have:
Long meaningful leveling experience
A deep and engaging crafting system
A heavy economy focus
A heavy group gameplay emphasis
And always on PVP
With when you remove intentional time wasters, All of these core pillars remain intact. The game play loops are unaffected and they actually become more enjoyable to engage with.
Last night I spent 2 hours trying to kill a boss in Black Myth Wukong, and when I finally did it I felt EUPHORIC. I can absolutely promise you that had that same boss given me status debuff I had to work off between each attempt, I would have given up, returned the game, and never touched it again.
Games should feel good to play as often as you can get away with. Going out of your comfort zone to try an encounter you might not be ready for should not be met with 4 versions or the same punishment; it should be met with a walk back and the feeling that this time will be the time I triumph.
I hope anyone who read this enjoyed it or at least found it insightful, especially Margret and the team If they are still takin feedback on this subject.
After some thought; I honestly think the answer, or at least a large part of the answer, is pretty straightforward:
Reevaluating what is fun risk and difficulty and what is not.
Ash’s will never be a casual game, but at least it can be a casual friendly one.
What does this mean? AoC has long & grindy leveling, a hard very in-depth crafting system, heavy emphasis on economy gameplay, heavy emphasis on group gameplay, and potentially always on PVP.
These are all considered hardcore by todays standards and are also all core pillars of AoC’s game play. What do I mean by that? AoC would not PLAY the same without these features. I do think some steps can be taken to make each one of these more appealing to casuals, but you need all of these for the game to PLAY the same. None of these are inherently unfun, as long as steps are taken to make them engaging and rewarding. In other words, you can make them fun for a casual player.
You know what’s not fun for a casual player? Overly punishing death mechanics? Why is that you may ask? Great question!
A video game is only able to truly punish you in two ways: Monetarily or Wasting your TIME!
1) Monetarily. Games like candy crush will charge you extra for more attempts, for example.
2) Wasting your TIME: this method is much more common, and can be disguised in many different ways.
You die and lose materials? Cool you have to spend more TIME getting more.
You die and gain XP debt? Cool you have to to spend more TIME to work it off.
You die and gain a stat dampening effect? Sweet so it takes more TIME to kill mobs and level
You die and have an extremely long travel time? Rad that means it’ll take more TIME to get back to the fun part of the game.
See what I did there? AoC can pretend it has 4 different death penalties, but in reality it has 1 penalty x 4.
This is pure and simple fundamentally not fun. Now I’ve brought this up before in global chat and it’s been met with the: “Who cares cry more carebear this game isn’t for people who care about that. A game can’t be fun unless it’s bending me over it’s knee and slapping my booty.”
Unfortunately, this kind of gamer is objectively in the minority. There’s decades of data on player counts and player behavior to support this, and anyone who disagrees is either misinformed or purposely ignorant.
That leaves us with AoC. A game defined by its more hardcore nature. This means AoC is a game that will have a more uphill battle retaining players simply by being the game it wants to be. AoC cannot change that without becoming a different game.
However, what it can change are these outdated time wasting mechanics.
If you lessen death penalties nothing is affected:
AoC will still have:
Long meaningful leveling experience
A deep and engaging crafting system
A heavy economy focus
A heavy group gameplay emphasis
And always on PVP
With when you remove intentional time wasters, All of these core pillars remain intact. The game play loops are unaffected and they actually become more enjoyable to engage with.
Last night I spent 2 hours trying to kill a boss in Black Myth Wukong, and when I finally did it I felt EUPHORIC. I can absolutely promise you that had that same boss given me status debuff I had to work off between each attempt, I would have given up, returned the game, and never touched it again.
Games should feel good to play as often as you can get away with. Going out of your comfort zone to try an encounter you might not be ready for should not be met with 4 versions or the same punishment; it should be met with a walk back and the feeling that this time will be the time I triumph.
I hope anyone who read this enjoyed it or at least found it insightful, especially Margret and the team If they are still takin feedback on this subject.
4
Comments
As for the other points: Not losing mats on death means that economy has to be rebalanced, because the sinks for mats are weaker.
Not gaining xp debt will require rebalancing of xp and loot rewards from hardcore content, because people will be able to just hit that wall over and over again with barely any gear on them and progress faster due to higher rewards. Intrepid is already working on this by making higher lvl mobs hit you harder, while you hit them weaker. And we also have lower loot rates against higher lvl mobs already. And that approach sure makes me think that Steven doesn't want us fighting stronger foes, as opposed to your example of BMW.
If you remove stat dampen on death penalties, people will keep throwing their bodies at both bosses and pvp, which will mean that PvX just ends up being an exercise of "bring even more people than your enemies, so that you can keep their deathwaves at bay". And afaik majority of people dislike zerg being the optimal gameplay method.
Long travel times relate to my stat dampen example and also to a greater localization of players. If you can get anywhere on the map within a short period of time - there'll only be a single meta of leveling, gear progression and node progress on all realms. While Steven wants each realm to be unique, soft friction to be better than "literally entire realm is trying to fight over the same (few) spot(s)" and for the world to feel truly massive. Any amount of really fast travel would make the world feel much smaller. And putting strong restriction on that travel would just have you end up with the New World situation where everyone cried about inability to fast travel as often as they want.
Now, all of that is not to say that I agree with all of those designs or that I consider them good. But as far as I understand Steven's design - those are the rough reasoning behind these features. And changing them WOULD in fact change the core pillars in a fairly big way, especially when you consider all the other things related to them.
and more too
As it stands the moves are driving away casuels. That's breaks the need for a large world being designed. With smaller populations the world needs to be smaller to make the world alive and functioning for a live PvX game.
So punishing game needs a smaller world
More casuel friendly can support a large world
You can't have both. I don't care what Steven picks. He just needs to decide what game he wants and take everything in that direction.
This is the fact for every area of the game. Crafting, questing, gear and much more. Does all of it fit the goal of driving away casuels? Is every system designed to keep a large population playing?
What do people even mean with "meaningful"?
Almost never any dev made any PvE meaningful, except for EVE Online where we shaped the galaxy according to what we did in battle, example: The Triglavian Invasion and the Drifter Crisis
PvE impact is so strong in EVE that it has chapters LOL and we could never fix the galaxy ever again, what is broken is broken
I do wish there were redeemer options if you die quite a bit. At lvl 15 on my fighter, I ran to the epic dragon world boss that I had no reason joining because it was fun. I'd get rezzed, oneshot, rezzed, oneshot -- I had a blast. I also got almost a half-level of XP debt. I haven't logged on the fighter since. BUT it was fun; I'd probably do it again even knowing. I do agree with the death penalty being important to Ashes.
Personally, along the same concept of, this sucks because the time sink is the amount of risk related to goods. Loss because of node wars and caravans where you walk away with nothing that you spent hours gathering is just... ew. Why wouldn't you always attack caravans? You get all of the reward and none of the risk.
I dislike the risk being one-sided, where people who attack don't stand losing nearly as much as the person who poured blood, sweat, tears into something.
It's harder now that people tend to quit games that force their playstyle to be the objectively worse one.
Either way I still think exp Debt might be a required part of Ashes as it's described so far.
I would bet that no longer dropping mats wouldn’t impact the economy that much. People are gathering such massive amounts of mats at once and very few of those players are getting interrupted. I bet for every 100 mats an organized guild gathers, they maybe lose like 2.
This affects the casual player much more significantly.
I don’t understand how no XP debt requires loot rebalance? When I died and got XP debt I just kept doing exactly what I was doing before (most people do) I just had to kill more things and was annoyed.
If you really think XP debt affects the curve so much, just scale up XP required. I’d say don’t bother the curve is long enough.
Let them throw their bodies that’s simply more fun gameplay. Also major PvP is decided by objectives. You can have stat dampening in PvP events if you want.
I like long travel and think it should be the main time “waster”
Can I ask why? It’s just psychological not fun. It would be smarter to just increase XP requirements I’d people are that worried about leveling too fast.
Also, if you’re making a game in 2025 that requires XP debt to function, I don’t think ashes does, you’re making a game for almost no one.
Almost no one in 2025 says to themselves: man going backwards is so much fun I really enjoy having profession taken from me.
1. The concept that you should retreat when faced with certain situations
2. A direct dampener on the idea that one can throw more bodies at a problem even if they keep dying.
I don't think that either of these things by themselves is enough to justify it, in the first case you could just lose durability, and in the second case you could design the mobs somehow (assuming it was mobs) to somehow take advantage of that repeated death.
The problem comes when the person doing the dying is somehow doing it to reduce the capacity of someone else to achieve a goal or maintain their position, and Ashes is one of the few games where that can happen.
Because Resurrection only costs your Cleric some MP, but if we ever get a difficult openworld enemy, a group that can just keep throwing more bodies at it, especially if they don't need a lot of good gear to damage it, would keep doing that.
And if the mob was designed to power up or similar because of players dying around it, then without a cost, your 'enemies' might suicide into the mob to power it up, and for that they wouldn't even need to be wearing gear.
I prefer other methods too, but I don't think Resurrection Weakness nor 'expanding Resurrection/Respawn timers' suit the game as it's presented right now.
More on this as well,driving away cauel players will also break the balance of the world's content ,with open world dungeons, world bosses and events.
If the world stays this big and we drive off casuels. More of that content would consistently let people do this content without PvX happening as often. So this content would consistently be easier as it would be tuned for PvX.
Usually that's the PvE Locusts, but it's just as easy for it to be the PvP Lich brigade, which is where Ashes would probably go, design wise.
The obvious final problem is that a punishing game is usually less popular, but Ashes isn't punishing 'at every turn' like a linear themepark game. If you get tired of doing something that you keep getting 'punished' for, in Ashes, stop doing it (the game is supposed to have enough alternatives that you don't mind this, right?)
Myself I want some of the old world sting but not all. In open world dungeons, repeated wipes help people rotate. So others get to play. The good pains are needed. But gaining debt in a PvX game play, it serves no purpose. That de incentivises PvP. We want what was positive from these old school pains. The pains that don't add to the design should go.
I personally think looking at it like this, can earn many casuel players like myself. I'm in my 50s work full time and many obligations. I really want to see that healthy play base with casuel players finding there place. Running in a large world filled with risk.
I won't give more of my money if I can't progress to have a fighting chance. One hit your dead PvP? Really? Casuel's need a gear score we have a fighting chance.
Getting my 3hr of game time planed Sat night to PvP to be upside down in exp from PvPing. Makes me want to avoid it for now.
Or using that 3hrs to progress and walk away with almost always no gear progression. Woot I got 20% of a level.
Great let's have slow leveling, but don't make all forms of exp suck, so you have to decide, do I fight to keep up in levels and for go all areas of the game at a chance to play with your friends/guildies? Or craft and watch everyone pass you?
If I could gain good exp while crafting, I could have the option of full time crafter as a casuel. The real question is what game are we trying to make here, and make that. The systems being designed are not meshing together. The vision is awesome but it needs to gel. Ashes is its own thing and games are organic. Sometimes changing plans is needed just because of the game it becomes.
if i loose xp/get death penalty for dying in pvp i also want to get xp for killing in pvp. same as pve. i die i loose xp i kill i get xp. either both or nothing.
thats it. short n sweet
As a once-upon-a-time top end PvE player, I'll tell you what meaningful PvE is to PvE players.
Meaningful PvE is new shared experiences.
Those experiences don't need to change the game world, for the most part we don't care about that. What they need to do is put me and my friends in a new situation with a new challenge that we can work on and overcome together.
Most people do, and that is important. Having meaningful questing system goes a long way.
I really do think rethinking some of those punishments would go a long way in maintaining a healthy player base, and that the end of the day every single person wants that, even the people who cry carebare.
As of now, I believe you can assume that I 'speak for 5 others' (maybe 6) but if you want to hear from each of them individually, lmk.
"It boosts engagement!"
I definitely do not see quests as content
Tbf tho, you aren't exactly the sort of person who has a lot of tolerance for the sort of player who isn't good at mid-level PvE, so it follows that you wouldn't have a high opinion of the PvE itself.
Would you have the same reaction to a fantasy MMO where losing in PvE could change the world for a month, and you could technically just keep losing if you didn't organize/gain skill?
Because those exist, but I guess if not even that counts as meaningful, then I get your point.
How can you say I don’t have much tolerance? I think I have too much tolerance. It’s just that PvE has never been the main appeal of MMOs for me since it is not real content. Most of the time it feels meaningless and overly grindy.
I’m already used to permanent world changes since that’s been my normal for years, and I’m totally fine with it. A lot of those changes came from the collective PvE efforts of thousands of players grinding 24 hours a day non-stop for weeks.
In a fantasy MMO, that might mean road changes, adding and removing bridges, cave entrances appearing or disappearing, new dungeons popping up while others being removed, ferry routes changing, entire NPC cities getting wiped out, all of that is fine by me.
Real content comes from player interactions and for that to happen the game needs systems for diplomacy, industry chains, trading, contracting, wars and many small systems that tracks what people are doing in the world in regard of resources and money usage plus pvp. If you have systems for these you can even remove all NPCs from the game.
That's what the OP was trying to address, right?
You say you can remove all NPCs (I assume you mean mobs too) from the game, but I'm moreso asking why you would do that? Mobs have known power levels and players don't. Less invested players can always find a mob to hit that is a reasonable challenge for them.
PvP doesn't work that way.
I'm pointing out that if people want the game to be meaningful, what truly matters are specifically the systems built around player interaction because they are like the the cow's tits we can milk content from everyday. We’ll never be able to milk enough lasting content from quests and game lore alone you see
MORE SPECIFICALLY, systems for:
For the 50h a week group, if a game offered something dangerous and risky enough for them to view it as 'real content', but also the game has Fantasy MMO style progression, there's no way the 5h a week group will touch that content.
That's what I meant by low tolerance. A Fantasy MMO doesn't ever really 'take enough things away' from a player who loses to ever make it even back out, that's something you only get in EVE.
This thread already started discussing one of the few things Ashes does take away, your exp, and the gap is already obvious, like... who dies often enough in Fantasy MMOs these days to even care about exp debt? The 'average' player trying to keep up with the top ranks.
I'm sure you have just as many stories as me about this, unless somehow your Guild Wars allies were all great players.
There will never be a group formed by 5h week players since such groups will simply vanish.
The groups that will stay are the groups with average playtime of 15-20h a week and those groups will have some people who play for 5h a week.
Nowadays I play 0h hours a month in my alliance lol, unless a big war comes up and then people can batphone me and i will simply play the war for helping my friends and then i will logoff. This happens because we already lived that cycle from 1 to 5 many times together
IT IS CRUCIAL patching up the group after getting destroyed in battle (winning or losing there are always some losses right), people absolutely need systems they can patch their people up collectively... maybe the guild should have systems they can use the guild's gold for repairs and for ship replacements, resources and maybe even a collective xp pool so they can counter xp loss during sactioned events
Not even kidding about it, this is important, its from this that the bro vibe arises, here is from where content and meaningfulness comes from
Fantasy games are not generally built around the 'build up resources and then spend them and repeat' because only like 2 of them have ever been good enough at making that consistently fun.
Like, in this discussion, EXP itself is a 'resource'.
For this to work, regaining EXP would have to be fun, while somehow '40h of grinding that very fun exp loop' somehow not also be a good idea? This is a thing that 'only' works in GW2 and games like Elite and EVE where no matter how much you grind you can still only use a certain portion of that power at a time.
(to my own group, yes, I know that FF11 and TL do some of this, leave it be)
I have no idea why you are reading that way, what I would do as dev is having some type of XP pool in the guild and then the guild leader will sprinkle XP on people who play once a week during the sanctioned pvp event and fix them up. When the player who only play only once a week come online again they can skip the dull xp grind
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