Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Comments
Guilds will have to level up quite a bit because it's gonna be very difficult to get the castle from NPCs.
Again, I'm talking about meaningful non-grindy content. I will not believe that Intrepid can manage to create literal hundreds of unique quests within the first, say, 30 lvls of a character, until Intrepid proves me otherwise. And if they manage to prove me wrong - I'll only be super happy. I'd prefer to defend caravans instead of attacking them, so my side would potentially be less exciting. But even on the off chance that there's enough people running caravans at lvls 20-30, enough people attacking/defending them instead of just leveling up or doing artisan shit, and enough of both of those to fill up 18h of gameplay each and every day with quality pvp where one side (a hardcore player) doesn't just annihilate another side (just normal people who play 2-3h a day and have lowish tier of gear) - repetition of the same action of going from one node to the other could be seen as grindy.
Again, as I've stated in my very first post in this thread, none of the things I'm trying to explain would be considered grind in my eyes. I've grown up on farming the same damn mob for over a week in L2 before getting enough resources for a craft (not even talking about full gear drop here). And I liked that and I'd like that if it was in Ashes.
What I'm trying to argue here is that it's nigh on impossible to completely avoid grind-like activities in an mmo. Yet you're trying to claim that no grind should be present in the game.
Nodes reach Stage 3 within a few days. And then you start working on the quests and tasks that help you construct the buildings and the services you want as the Nodes progress to Stage 4. As well as continue with Social Org and Racial progression and Artisan progression, etc.
Hitting a soft cap in Adventurer level - even if that were possible - does not create a soft cap in all the other forms of progression.
If you refuse to believe stuff, further conversation is pointless.
You will have to play to be convinced.
This can be Gathering, Hunting, PvP, Cavarans,Crafting really any part of the game which makes it intesesting as it got so many opportunities.
But why do players spend so much time on achiving that goal?
i think its a combination out of personal goals and prestige or some kind of points/currency.
What defines a good grind for me?
Something really unique that shows other players how invested i am/was
or something really useful or expensive
and if its a very monotone or low% grind, its nice to spark it up with an random victory down the line
lets say you want to grind Wolfes for a 0.2 % drop and after 10 hours you get a nice title saying "Wolf Slayer"
even if you didnt get your item yet it still provides a little victory
I'm not sure if I can think of another MMO that I felt did this aspect of grinding resources perfectly... I feel each that I've played has done well and not well with this.
For me, I think open-world PvP will create an element to grinding resources that makes it more engaging
PvPers will find PvPing while Gathering to be more engaging.
I think people who are PvE or PvE-sometimes will have the opposite response of PvPers.
I'm most interested to see what the PvP grind will be like, as that's much more of a 'real thing'. Getting enough practice to be properly competent in competitive, online PvP games of this style is often really daunting, so for PvE players, I expect finding the time and will to practice may be their main hurdle, especially if they also want to experience as much PvE as possible.
Hopefully the two experiences aren't too far different.
Even with all the social organizations and religions in Ashes - just as in any game with similar mechanisms - players will get to the end of that content before long.
It takes multiple orders of magnitude (bordering on factorial) longer to produce than to consume. Content that takes a developer weeks of their time to make (and this is just the content designer, not the art, sound, or background development) takes players minutes to complete.
This is why so many MMO's rely on repetitive quests - developers can spend minutes making a quest, and players can repeat it for dozens or hundreds of hours. Not saying I am a fan of this, just that it is all simple fact.
Trash mobs are an inherent aspect of MMO's. Since all a trash mobs is, when examined, is any mob that is not a named encounter, they are clearly an essential part of all MMO's. Now, I agree with you if you are suggesting that they don't need to be made as easy as some games make them. However, since players will call any mob that is not the boss "trash" - and developers would refer to as "base population" - and since such mobs are essential to an MMO that is not wanting to be purely PvP, I can't say I agree with that aspect as you have applied it.
As to the part about needing more player conflict out in the field - that lack is what has kept games like EQ and WoW around with such high (comparatively) populations for so long. It is why ESO is still live - if that game had it's PvP open world rather than confined to one section of the world, the game would have closed years ago.
Some people love PvP and player conflict. However, history shows that such people are unable to sustain a AAA MMO for long. On the other hand, players that are less inclined to such conflict have proven time and again that they can sustain an MMO.
Ashes has a lot of objective-based PvP I expect to enjoy. That does not mean that PvP will make grinding Harvesting feel more engaging to me. That will still feel as annoying as it always does.
Good grind is, chasing the carrot:
-Hard.... Getting better and better at it skillwise per run but still able to fail by misplays
-being rewarded by playing better then average/expected
Bad Grind would be my current game Lost Ark:
-Time gated
-Braindead easy
-no special reward
-no other options
Most satisfying grind was Monster Hunter Freedom Unite reasoning as follows:
- Needed 6 rare items droprate base 1% i guess
- Destroying parts (aka playing good) increased Droprate
- misssteps could lead to death/fail (playing bad)
- toke me 270 runs Rank 9 2xNargacugas
- i never got bored since it wasn´t easy (1 run toke me 10-15 min)
- afterwards i had the hole set + 2 weapons
former Hardcore PvPer in multiple games Ranked in the Top 10
dislikes QoL / Quality of Lazyness
there is no "it´s to hard" only "u are to bad"
Where the quest is to kill 25 Skeletal Warriors. Only to learn that you have to kill 15 Laughing Skeletons in order to get 1 Skeletal Warrior to spawn.
Would be fine if this Warrior is hard to kill.
But let me guess it was dead after 2 spells?
Then yea its considered a bad grind
former Hardcore PvPer in multiple games Ranked in the Top 10
dislikes QoL / Quality of Lazyness
there is no "it´s to hard" only "u are to bad"
(I have never used the terms catassing or pushing the bar before
My main thing for grinds is that they have to be challenging somehow. The fear of death from the activity itself (not from another player) for example. Or I need to be able to become better and better at it through efficiency and skill.
For short amounts of time I can grind easy mobs or run circles farming easy to get materials, but invariably i get sick of the game in the long run, and might stop playing altogether, if it's part of required gameplay.
It's not OK when it takes 10 minutes to kill 25 Skeletal Warriors.
A quest update that takes 10 minutes?
Really? Too much of a grind?
No wonder you play children's games
It might be fine if the Skeletal Warriors were trash that can be killed with two spells.
It's not OK when it takes 10 minutes to kill 25 Skeletal Warriors.[/quote]
Well woldnt dat be exactly what we consider a good grind (if it isnt braindead)
+ 10 min for a quest is way to short id say
+ a good quest is more then running from A to B and skiping throw NPCs
+ the longer it takes the longer it will be remembered and we all what memories
+ even stressfull or hatred ones aslong its origin is in the games world not the system
Grind quest i find okay would be:
-Collect a by defeating b
-b only spwans if lurd with a consumable c (@specific time/noone)
-c is crafted with gatherables d+e
here and there i found quest like this but always done in matter of minutes
make it a real hassle with need preparations and dedication
after collecting x amount of a u get a hefty reward and all the "suffering" will be remembered a long time
former Hardcore PvPer in multiple games Ranked in the Top 10
dislikes QoL / Quality of Lazyness
there is no "it´s to hard" only "u are to bad"
Distracted by work and forgot which mobs I using as examples.
It might be fine if the Laughing Skeletons were trash mobs that can be killed with two spells.
It's not OK when it takes 8+ minutes to kill 15 Laughing Skeletons in order to spawn 1 Skeletal Warrior.
And then you have to do all of that 25 times to complete the quest.
You are now not talking about any content at all in EQ2 - the game you claimed it was from.
As a fun fact, the only Skeletal Warrior mobsI am aware of in EQ2 are base population from a raid zone that is needed for the Prismatic Ring quest series.
I'm sure you are just adding names to create a scene for others to understand, but it makes it hard to check where you went wrong (because you have gotten something wrong here - what you are talking about has never been a part of EQ2's design philosophy as a stand alone quest update).
What I think you may be referring to here is when SoE added in a solo path to complete an otherwise group based quest. They did require you to kill a mob at the end of a ring event, but you only needed to kill four of said mob, and there were 8 locations where that ring event spawned.
If a player were to not have any friends and so opt to do this quest solo, and also not have a basic knowledge of the zone in question (Antonica, if you're are talking about what I think you are talking about), then said player may assume there is only one spawn location for this mob they need, and the ring event that spawns it is indeed on a 12 minute timer.
However, this is a failure on the part of said player. They are assuming the content is something other than what it is.
I would agree with you that needing to kill a large number of mobs that spawn at the end of a ring event (even if only a single wave event) would suck if you need to kill a dozen or more of them, and there was only one of such ring event spawns.
However, as I said earlier, this was never a part of EQ2 game design - at least not as you stated, and not in the time I played the game
.
You mean, as usual you don't know what I'm talking about.
No, I mean as usual you don't know what you are talking about.
The content you are talking about above is clearly hypothetical. As hypothetical content, I agree, it sucks. However, as you described it, it does not exist in EQ2 as you claimed.
Either you made it up, you are mis-remembering, or you simply didn't know that you were only working on a fraction of the mobs available to you.
I don't know (or care) which of the above it is, I just know it has to be one of them.
A: A good grind in my mind, is a grind that goes against its concept's main flaw, repetitivity.
What is the best counter against boring repetitivity? RNG!
May it be:
1°RNG in the combat(Monsters AI RNG patterns),
2°RNG in the loot-table
(A nice and big list of drops possibilities, ranging from fairly common drops to extremely rare ones),
3°RNG in the environment(Possible buffs or debuffs the area may provide from time to time),
4°RNG in variation of monsters types spawns, possible even elites to shake things up sometimes,
5°"RNG" of the constant possibility of random encounters with other players aiming for you or your spot.
Q: What MMO had a good grind system and what made it good?
A: Lineage 2 had a good grind system, it had 1° but quite limited in term of monsters that had it, it had an amazing 2° in general, very few areas had the 3° but those were pretty cool, Sadly only a single area had the 4°, the 5° was a given as it probably will be for Ashes.
Q: How would you want grind to be implemented in the game?
A: I would want the grind to have as many as possible of the RNGs factors presented in the first answer.
Aren't we all sinners?
To me, this isn't a grind at all, it is a rough outline for an end game concept.
The very notion of a grind is performing a specific task in order to achieve a specific outcome.
Some aspects of the above are fine for a grind, but if you are after a specific item (say, bear hide), you absolutely do not want to be grinding in an area where bears are only one of many possible spawns, nor do you want multiple potential drops from the bears you are grinding on.
On the other hand, if you are just playing the game, then having mobs randomized to a degree, and drops randomized to a degree are both perfectly fine. However, that is not a grind.
I mean, it's still a specific task even witrh all the RNG(killling monsters) in order to achieve a specific outcome(acquing certain drops and/or exp). This 'very notion' is malleable, and still works under RNG aspects.
How about different type of bears?
I would assume a basic material like bear hide would probably be the most common drop on their loot table.
Aren't we all sinners?
I would prefer the pve to require forethought and planning. At the same time I have to protect solo play.
In my mind, Steven is correct to prevent grinding. Grinding a a cancer because when a player can't complete a quest chain or kill equal level mobs they will still gain max level by killing anything at all (wow panda boar reference).
A grind should not replace challenge and a grind should not replace content. I also believe resources should have more than 1 mob it spawns on unless it is legendary mat, otherwise patches of the map will be empty and patches of the map will be congested.
System design is a wholistic process hence why you should design classes and combat mechanics before you complete the npc combatants.