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
For some people, the two words can't even usually go together.
I get your point though.
Some people play PoE2, some people play Aion2, and it seems unlikely to me that Ashes will make both those demographics happy, which I guess is why you're feeling the way you are about the Augment-related development.
As usual though, just the request to give the Devs credit for their effort and Designers credit for their intent for a few more months.
If it flops, some other game will surely take up the mantle, and the Influencers will have lots of content to make sure that happens.
While I agree, you should look at the bigger picture around this statement.
I dont like WoW as a game, for a number of reasons. However, it is VERY close to what that new MMO you talk about needs to be. This is the reason WoW is the game you used to make this statement, rather than GW2, FFXIV or EQ.
That isn't to say this new MMO needs to be a WoW clone - far from it in fact. WoW exists because people at Blizzard played EQ, and decided they wanted to do similar with their own twist to it.
That is what someone needs to do with WoW. Don't clone it, take what it does well, improve what it does poorly, and treat it as a new game rather than as a new WoW.
That is not what Ashes has ever been. It isnt what it is intended to be.
People always find challenge fun its why games don't have "I win" buttons. When games have stuff like that people stop playing them because they get bored very quickly.
The question is what levels of challenge do they like and the answer is always it depends on the person, but as they get better they find things that used to be challenging easy and need more difficult content.
That's another major problem with this game. Which is there is no way to learn how to PvP without having to deal with all the punishments. And since most people are going to just die over and over and over. With little to no gain they are going to avoid PvPing at all.
Lots of games have 'I win' buttons now though.
Like, the MMORPG genre is literally being shoved around by IdleRPGs, which are sometimes specifically 'games with win buttons'.
Anyway, I'll hope you're right, and I'm just overexposed to players who actually want something close to that (if not directly a 'win button', often a 'I want to be carried/autoplay plz' button.
you see there is challenging and fun and then there is ashes , would it be challenging and fun making a legendary weapon that you would need to go fight a dungeon boss for some materials or mine some mats deep in a dungeon where you'd need to group up to do so and even need some type of help to craft the weapon ..yes that would be great.
would be if needing to grind 10k mats from rng to craft said weapon on top of an unnecessary amount of over complicated and blown steps to gather,process and craft said weapon while being required a couple other players to do so and not for the legendary weapon but for almost every tier all of that on top of other horrible systems around it like a stupid,annoying and small tetris inventory,an amount of gold no one would have ,going back and fourth between storage boxes cuz of your inventory a billion time ,same with the crafting station who are all put at the other side of the globe on top of the chance of someone randomly killing you inside or outside a town and making you lose half of your materials...etc
same with the rest of the systems and game design..see this is how ashes is designed and most people would never like that but alas i doubt they will wake up and realize that which is funny when they are making a game played from the top down for toxic zerg guilds which wont keep a game alive ,a game designed to work with a huge amount of people yet targeting the nichest part of an already niche player base lol
its not just one niche its 4. Its basically as niche as you can get. Its an MMORPG, focused on the PvP, but only in the open world, and only if you doing large scale combat. None of this comes across in the ads the game runs.
Which is going to cause a lot of people to think the game has the other forms of PvP and its going to be non-existent. Not only that its not planned to have any sort of balanced PvP. Which is going to infuriate people.
I personally attribute that to a style of enjoyment that doesn't really have room for 'players figuring things out for themselves', and auto-play gaming got lumped in.
As for the people who you mentioned won't be satisfied without the balanced 1v1 or 2v2 PvP (I assume you must mean this because they have implied that 8v8 is supposed to be balanced, but I guess you could also just have no faith in that)...
Those people aren't really the target audience of the game, considering that the vision has never been particularly 'confusing' or 'misleading' about that point. We're supposed to go 8v8. Sure, people will complain, but it's kind of 'not Intrepid's problem' if people come into their game for a thing they never offered.
Idk how they hope to solve the issue of reviews from those types of people, but maybe they don't even need to.
None of the arenas will be properly balanced. None of the caravans will be properly balanced. None of the PvP in this game is designed to be balanced. its all designed to reward zerg gameplay.
None of it will be balanced. The only thing that will be balanced will be GvG activities where both guilds have around the same number of people. Because the number will be so large it wont make a difference if one side has a few more or less. Which a PvP focused game would have.
Apparently they are the target audience because the damn ads say PvP focused game, not GvG, not OWPvP, not a griefers playground. Which is the problem.
Also, are all other mmos with pvp in them perfectly balanced? And perfectly balanced across all classes and all gear builds and all skill builds and all skill lvls and not a single person of the lower skill lvl can go against someone with higher skill? Cause I personally don't believe that, no matter how good the mmr or how horizontal the gear design is in the game.
Hell, if any pvp game was perfectly balanced - we'd never get patches in pvp games. I guess the closest thing to a perfectly balanced pvp game is smash bros.
I i love it when i go to PvP get stunned and then burned down and im able to do nothing because the other team has double the number of players you do.
Have you ever been Honor farmed before? Its not fucking fun. its also not fun knowing the result of a PvP match before it starts.
Did I say perfectly balanced? Did i even imply that? No I didn't. That's damn near impossible. But you can still keep the matches close. This game doesn't even intend to do that.
Your whole argument is "it will not be balanced". First of all, it WILL be balanced. The balance is simple RPS
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Game_balance
1v1 matchups will have a rock-paper-scissors dynamic, where one build will be superior to another. Different skills, passives, weapon skills, and gear choice selections allows players to 'flirt' the line with rock-paper-scissors balancing.[1][6][2][3][5]
There will be match ups in 1v1s where one class will be superior to another; and that application should be a rock-paper-scissors dynamic. We want there to be counter-play between the different classes... Instead it's going to be a group focused balance, where as long as you have the diversity of classes present, that's going to be an equal level playing field. It's going to be very dependent on skill and strategy.[5] – Steven Sharif
And so, considering how many builds we'll have (hopefully), there's quite a high chance that even in a disadvantageous RPS match-up you can still win because your build is better or your skill is higher.
That is exactly how L2's 1v1 arena worked. Some classes were better than others, but people could still win through gear or skill.
Here's the results of the recent 1v1 tourney. Seems like a fairly balanced spread of archetypes to me. Obviously the CC tanks are aplenty, but that's subject to what? That's right! Balance patches!!
And obviously, this is even very far from the finalized skillsets and gearsets and player knowledge and skill, and literally everything else in the game, so there's still a ton of space to make this better.
P.S. as for honor farmed. Yes, I've been in guilds at war where I wasn't leveled yet, so any war enemy could easily murder me (quite often right on TP spawns). I simply had to find a different place to farm for a while. In a game with open world pvp, you simply gotta deal with those things. And the corruption system is there exactly in order to prevent casuals and off-guild people from being "honor farmed".
Your right the minimal amount of Balancing will definitely result in the maximum amount of balancing.