Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Phase III testing has begun! During this phase, our realms will be open every day, and we'll only have downtime for updates and maintenance. We'll keep everyone up-to-date about downtimes in Discord.
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 Phase III testing has begun! During this phase, our realms will be open every day, and we'll only have downtime for updates and maintenance. We'll keep everyone up-to-date about downtimes in Discord.
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
Your "solution" is a bandaid on a gunshot wound. This is exactly why I was giving a solution to the underlying problem of "the locations, loot, mobs, attractions, etc - all SUCK".
We shouldn't be forced to run to Carphin from the other continent, if we just want gear equivalent in power to what you can get from Carphin. And those people that DO want that exact gear should have several more content pieces related to the region around Carphin, so that the issue you described doesn't come up.
At any given time in the game you should have something valuable to do as a solo player, as a small group, as a full party and as a raid.
You said that your incomplete group had literally nothing to do while you were waiting for the other members to come to you - that should not be the case. And it shouldn't be the case NOT because traveling takes time, but because grouping up will always have someone that's being slow or didn't take something from their storage, or had to take a shit or literally anything else in the world.
So creating a random TP in some random place that's not connected to any other place does literally nothing to solve the issue you have with the game.
Again... it's not that my group couldn't do anything while we were low man... it's that we all were there for something specific.... a specific thing we needed the TANK AND HEALER for. The two people we were waiting on. Also my example was one of the easier situations that could happen in game. We were all local and didn't have to wait finding people. Which would have made this already bad situation worse. Now imagine we wanted to do what we were doing but in the Jundark, or over in Korrin. Now that's a situation where Cross Region travel options would be useful. Gets everyone closer to where they need to be so they have time to do the content and afterwards once they have loot, they now have to get it home. Which opens up chance for open world content.
This is why I asked you about gear acquisition. Majority of this game will be about getting gear. That can either come in the form of straight full drops or through crafting that requires specific and general mats. And I'm saying that the latter option should have a range of content that addresses all gameplay styles.
You keep saying "I need this dude from godknowswhere to come to this specific location and holy fuck it's taking too long". I'm saying that the basic design shouldn't even require that, but if it does - people should still be able to actively wait for those people to arrive, rather than passivle sit on their ass alt-tabbed into something else.
If your goal from a dungeon is to get, say, 10 specialized mats (out of required 20) and enough money for half the general mats from the market - whatever current setup of your party is, you should be able to start farming those mats as soon as you come to the location. And before that tank/cleric/whoeverthefuck comes there too, you should've already gotten 1-2 items, especially if for some reason those people were coming from a whole different biome.
Having said that, if you goal for the day is PURELY "to kill this exact boss in this exact location", then why in the fuck are you doing it with a random pug of people instead of a guild. And if you ARE doing it in a guild, why wasn't this encounter planned for accordingly?
Though again, if the design that I'm talking about is properly implemented, even pugs will be faster in grouping up on the spot than guildies, because you should be able to pick up whoever you need near your target POI, because, as I keep saying, people should be enticed to exist there at most time.
You complain that there's no nodes near those locations and that the POI is the only thing important, right? I'm literally saying this should be fixed in the design and not patchworked with a "well we got a teleporter in the general area now, so yall can just TP to an empty land with fuckall else to do, but you're marginally closer to the only dungeon in the region. Hurraaay! Oh, there's also supposedly a fucking lawless zone there, so gl not fucking dying btw
That is not a solution to your problem.
The problem here is that you're talking about something that is literally unsolvable by the nature of these games.
"We need a Tank and Healer to do this thing, but they aren't available."
Yes, I agree that a huge aspect of this problem for you was that they were available but would take long to arrive, but this problem type 'stacks'.
As long as you set out to do any non-instanced 'full group' worthwhile content, one member leaving is always going to cause this same thing unless the replacement can teleport directly to you, and that isn't allowed because PvP winners need to get their victory time.
So it makes more 'sense' to solve the problem in the way that allows a group to have a useful option once they have less members. Teleports won't solve anything if that replacement gets killed on the way as soon as they spawn in.
So think of it more as 'extending' the concept of the problem you presented. Faster Travel alone won't solve it, but 'better ecology/drop tables' would help to solve that problem and many others, without creating new problems for PvP players.
No... again you guys keep focusing on the specifics of the example used not the problem I'm trying to address here.
I'm not saying the issue was we couldn't do anything because we had to wait for a tank and a healer to get there. We could of done stuff. But the stuff was not the stuff we were there as a group for. That was the only thing we wanted to do. Killing random shit while we wait wouldn't have fixed the issue here.
The issue here was it took everyone way too long to arrive at the location due to where they had to travel from. It make everyone who was already there impatient. Some of them left, replacements were immediately found, and then we had to wait on them as well.
The problem was we had to keep waiting because IT TAKES TOO LONG TO TRAVEL IN THIS GAME
That's the issue I'm trying to address here. Not that I didn't have a tank and healer to kill random trash mobs that didn't drop anything the group wanted.
It takes long to travel in this game to help promote meaningful PvP.
The travel times will probably never be reduced below the level at which it would start to affect PvP, because the entire point of the way it is, is so you can't arrive quickly to an area to PvP.
The result is that you also can't arrive quickly to an area to PvE.
There is a reason why no hard core PvP game has ever had any longevity.
More locations available, better loot in those locations, more content variance that appeals to all players rather than just hardcore pvpers, a better econ design to fit the loot - all of that results in a much better experience for the casuals.
Getting a TP with a lawless zone around, while the TP itself is not even connected to any valuable POI won't do shit for casuals. A one-way TP, as you're suggesting, will be even worse, because casuals might join a party godknowswhere, use the one-way TP there and then be stuck there with some juicy loot, super far from their home.
So you have now created the biggest friction for a casual player. And even if they do manage to get home with all of their loot (which would take a shitton of time and a fair bit of risk) - they'll think 10 times before ever joining a group that's outside of their immediate surroundings.
I'm literally saying "bring the content to the players, rather than always bringing players to the content". This, btw, was the initial plan for the game. All nodes were supposed to have node content parity, so that you DIDN'T have to travel to another end of the continent just to kill a few mobs. On top of that the crafting was presented as something modular, where instead of "this recipe requires oak" it would be "this recipe requires wood, and you get to choose which wood you want, cause they all give different effects".
But Steven realized that he doesn't have the money to finance that initial design, so now we have no parity, a broken super static crafting system and the resulting horrible experience for anyone that doesn't have 10h to spend on going from one end of the map to the other.
And no, one-way TPs between those points will not help the situation.
DO YOU GET THAT? To easy to exploit.
A boat load of things to do while wait for a group, gather, fish, kill mobs you can handle close to poi. Craft at nearest town, duel each other.. If time was wasted, U wasted it by how YOU picked to use your time. If none of the other things are fun and only full group pve, I would suggest you find a guild that has organized pve nights, find a good flick to watch while u w8, or play WOW,,, which has the same issues in concerns to groups and wasting time after 100 of thousands of dollars and 20 years.. Was made clear, no fast Travel in this game. When the real pvp part of the game hits you will ve happy. Zergs and gank groups are not logging bots by pois to fast travel. .
"Lets make a Hardcore game that is tough to play"
Oh wait, we need to make money so we do not have to fire real people because we think tough is awesome.
There were two major complaints that New World got after the game released.
1. World Movement.
a. They decreased price to teleport and they placed Port stones in front of dungeons.
2. Bank allocation spaces.
a. They realized players did not like a separation of banks and thus joined all banks allowing for access from whatever bank you were at.
New world also had the ability to recall back to a bind point in a city that was on a timer. The timer was shortened a bit.
New World does not have a monthly fee. The drop off for Ashes of Creation will occur even faster with a monthly fee.
I pretty much guarantee Ashes of Creation is going to eventually follow the same path. I know Steven is all about "I am making the game my way" but when he starts having to let people go because the game is not making money.....
They had all the money they could get from Amazon, while if Ashes betrays literal years of promises and direction - they will not have the money to survive for 4 years just to get a few % of the initial playerbase back.
A game that delivers on its promise, no matter how niche, will survive longer than a game that betrays it and pretends to be something that it was never planning to be.
Steven will have to fire people no matter what happens, because no matter what Intrepid does - the game will never be anywhere big enough to sustain their current team size.
The issue you are having, my friend, is in deciding on the content before organizing the group.
If you had to wait as long as you claim you had to wait, it is because you did it wrong.