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
So when I hear "TL" and "mobile" in one sentence, my mind just immediately goes to L2M (which influenced normal L2 btw) AND THAT SHIT SUCKS imo.
Yeah, sounds like classic BDO. And auto-heal seems just like a yet another result of korean mobile mmos. Mobile phones have definitely ruined a pretty big chunk of gaming, huh.
That's the use, yes. I was talking about their deeper connection to the crafting system through grade crystal dependencies, castle taxes and their overall influence on farming pace within the game.
So they had to add something to make the healing instant and not reliant on your ping or your ability to recognize that you needed to do it.
However the other leaks have indicated three things that still give me hope for TL combat:
1. Autobattle is for weak enemies and won't use your skills for you (in this regard it's like playing FFXI and winning by just using AutoAttack and a specific reactive skill and a buff)
2. The enemies themselves are pretty challenging (by the leaker's standards) and none of your reactive stuff like dodges or parries are enabled during Autobattle at ALL.
3. Their damage numbers shown, relative to their HP numbers shown, imply a 48 second TTK.
EDIT: Oh, and apparently that 'play on Mobile' thing is like any of the many 'streaming game as a service' that Consoles and certain PC setups have, which I think some people hate for... reasons I don't fully understand since I can only think of two games that I couldn't play like that.
For a reference, while it isn't great, one team member often plays certain easier parts of Elite Dangerous, on PS5, from her phone remotely, and could probably successfully do the harder parts too, she just doesn't like to risk it.
I'm mainly worried about the "bottiness" of the game's design. Auto-farming implies all kinds of design decisions, even if you can only fight weaker mobs. At some point people will outgear good mobs strongly enough to auto-farm those mobs and any potential loot will overfill the market, which will influence everything else.
And with a ton of people already auto-farming, any potential botters will go unpunished. And Lost Ark showed that Amazon is trash at addressing bots, so even if they did try to ban them in TL - they'd fail even harder, because it'd be way more difficult to differentiate them from normal players on auto.
In other words, it's just a damn mess.
They might fuck it up. Everything is unconfirmed, so who knows. But I'm hearing it's basically a mobile game. Heavy on the autoplay. Autoplay for quests, grinding mobs, and even pvp(?) wth.
On the other hand I've read the opposite, that the autoplay/autocombat is very weak/limited and won't be a prominent feature.
And the latest version of Lineage mobile has auto-questing as well. Others might too, but I haven't looked into them. Was kinda interested in Lineage W because it's closer to L1 and I wanted to try it out, but their fucking "global" release is just for the asia region, so I only played it for a few hours through a vpn.
All in all it's a sad state of affairs and if TL follows that path then it'll be a glorified mobile game.
Why would they do this to us. I dunno, I've never played a game with autoplay before. Man they need to disable that shit. Or tune it down. Like what a fucking bummer move lmao
It's mainly because 'farming lower level mobs' (for much less reward) can be quite tedious, and anything that tedious can and (bear with me here) 'should' be botted.
So if they build internal bots to run large scale tests, to try to tune the game so that weak stuff can be autobattled, they 'might as well' give it to people, because there are more people who bot to escape tedium than those who bot to get advantages.
If you give me a game that is tedious and the tedium stops being fun, then my first instinct is to automate it because the act of automating it is more fun than playing it (especially if you have to do the automatic thing in order to get to do the cooler thing).
All I can really add to that is that I can 'engage on an enemy considerably weaker than me' in quite a few games and 'basically hold down the attack button' anyway, but it doesn't really determine how troublesome it is to deal with anything around my level.
So yeah, I understand if you dislike it on principle, but the presence of autobattle alone isn't a thing that I'd immediately assume would lead to a bad game overall.
I was telling my group that what we need to worry about is not the 'games made for mobile' but rather the 'games made for busy people who don't actually own their own gaming PCs'. The Internet Cafe gang. Part of this is probably also meant to bring Console in line with PC, so they have to consider core design stuff relative to it.
I'm way more worried about autopathing than autobattle.
This is why I'll never play any game made primarily for the Korean market ever again.
It's just a completely different mindset and attitude towards playing a game. This leads to completely different games.
Yeah I get the logic behind that. It's automating something repetitive. What some would probably call a quality of life feature. I'm fine with that to an extent. But I also think autoplay/autocombat is just a weird implementation of that principle.
But I see the logic in it. It's the model of their gameplay. You go auto farm, then you go pvp. Or then you go do a dungeon. But can the dungeon be autoplayed too? Some rumors are that yeah, can be too. Some are that no you can't.
It's just a weird model to me though. I see the logic behind it. If I have to routinely craft 200 leather gloves at a time while leveling up armorsmithing, I want that automated. Combat is not something I traditionally want automated. I'm keeping a somewhat open mind to it. Have to see what the rest of the game is about.
But in these same leaks, a guy asked what the endgame gameplay loop is like. The answer was, you go auto farm, and then you go to pvp event. We need more than that. I dunno, there could be all kinds of stuff we just don't know yet.
corruption destroyed .... How far we think from each other.
Here is my answer. Throne and Liberty will have exactly the same corruption system, which brought a lot of fun and variability to the game.
You are only refering to RMT/gold sellers selling Soulshots right?
Because shots where only implemented in the cash shop after around Gracia Epilogue version
(late ~2009 - early ~2010)
Aren't we all sinners?
Please re-read my comment. I think there's a word you missed.
No, from what I remember, gold sellers only sold gold coins. They had farmers/bots killing low challenging mobs for that and were doing RMT on advertised sites. Details are fuzzy, it's been a while and I've never used that kind of "service". That said, gold farmers and bots weren't liked by the general NA players.
I've never used the cash shop. Yet I've used SoulShots and even if we were given a few at character creation (I certainly don't remember anything specific about that), I've had SS on my skill bar for emergencies up until I stopped playing at around level 27. I remember buying some, but no details
I, sadly, can't confirm anything with accuracy, it's been too long and I didn't play L2 for long enough, it was a "in between" game for me while I waited for the next big release I was interested into (EQ2 I think...). I still have my few screenshots, some of them with the HUD and, sure enough, there are the SS on my bar. I kind of still remember the charging sound when you activated one and a white flash on my next attack.
edit: I'm not even sure if there was a cash shop at release, NA L2 was monthly subscription based only, no free to play option.
edit 2: Just found mention of SS on a forum post dated before the official release! Anyone wanting a trip to the past, head for the mmorpg.com forums of Lineage 2. Go to the end: page 119 and make your way going forward. I haven't the time now, I'll have a look later and post my best finds!
Interesting things:
That's the kind of stuff I expect from games
Zhuge Liang, The Wind!
SS were my bread and butter. I made so much money off them once I leveled a crafting dwarf to 40. Set her up as an AFK shop selling shots, and that could be done while making shots all night via macro
I think only the lowest level shots could be bought from merchants? The next level came from salvaging higher level weapons (those could still be bought at a merchant) and crafting shots. Since mana regen was so slow, making shots was a time sink. Hence the all night macro
I don't have much hope for T&L. You know it's going to be pay to win
Convergent design continues.
Food system is better even than mine (in a risky way, let's see how it works out for 'em)
Base combat principles convergent to (what I consider) the current standard for the game type, low on the CC options, Stun Resistance is a Duration reduction though, and similar things also work that way.
Elements apparently limited to Fire, Earth, Lightning, Air, Water, but related mechanics at least seem to have some depth. Might be more though.
Boss encounters should be at least decent. Some targeting manipulation (ability for a boss to tactically choose one non-Tank target to target for a duration and the player must 'shake it off' via some mechanic specific to the boss PROBABLY).
Those grappling hooks for scaling terrain are probably consumables.
Basic per-creature drops that go straight into crafting.
Season Pass type gameplay.
Mounts are a thing (possibly aside from the fact that you can ride on other players when they transform into things like wolves).
Based only on extrapolation from reading it all and putting it through ze cruncher, all is well, gameplay aspect will be fine. I look forward to seeing Ashes meet and surpass it in whatever way Intrepid chooses.
Around this point my 'I'm doing work and sharing info with people who mostly don't care tho' kicked in. So there's more, but eh.
And so, I leave you with:
"LetterText01_FTT74": "Zombie puke, zombie spit, zombies exploding...\nI crafted all of them with love. (?)\nI was very highly praised when we did the team testing.\nThey said it was gross, and they didn't want to play anymore...",
"LetterText02_TJR63": "From that point on, they started calling me\nthe Mother of Zombies.\n\nDesigner Y",
To Intrepid staff, this is my reminder that we love all you do.
Do your best. I'll complain anyway, but it's love that makes me complain.
don't be fooled, auto attacks can be very strong. autofarm ruined l2, but they couldn't get rid of all the bots so they gave everybody a bot (since every top player botted anyways). also, if TL is like l2 essence, auto farming with multiple computers / accounts will be the primary method of making money, which sucks for people with 1 pc or who just want / can play 1 character / client.
also, it makes the world dead...everybody will be auto farming. ugh another single player mmorpg .-.
I wanted to try it out but now I have my doubts..maybe ill still try it until aoc alpha hits and while I'm not playing diablo 4...:D
Yes, sure, it will be terrible, please don't waste your time playing it.
It's definitely P2W too. You can just buy their P2W currency and buy stuff off the Marketplace from other players with it.
It's even got SoulShots (Stellarite) and you can probably buy those in similar ways. I won't bother explaining the Autobattle system since you're already convinced/aware of how it will go. Since it will ruin the game anyway, you can probably write this one off.
Thanks for letting everyone else know how it will be.
Depends on the game. TL has some fast Travel and a specific type of higher skill ceiling than Ashes is currently looking like it would have (it's harder to KILL people who are trying to not die without getting aggro, and zones where the aggro would be insufficient to stop you are safe zones).
It probably wouldn't fit Ashes at all.
Also, TL seems to have benefits/leaderboards for oWPvP but only if your opponent fights back. So you can still kill them if somehow they are standing in this type of zone at night with no "Corruption", but if they don't fight back then you haven't gained anything anyway.
It IS more likely to be an overall more 'friendly to PvP' game than what we currently know of Ashes design, but that's a base principles thing. Adding 'no Corruption at night' to Ashes would not make anything meaningfully better that I can see, as of now.
The sort of player who goes out at night 'because it is more risky and that's cool' is more likely to also be the sort of player who flags up when you hit them. The player type that doesn't want to be attacked... just won't go out/stay online at night. The only thing 'No Corruption at night' would do is make high level players able to gank low level ones.
"If you are low level you should log off at night." doesn't sound like it'd work out for most people, but you might not want to play with the sort of person that avoids fighting level 50s anyway.
That appears to have always been the plan, and probably they could not remove the core gameplay aspect related to it.
But the rest is good, few pain points for an L2 lover that I can see, only a few for me and my type, econ status is iffy but it is at least not BDO tier.
If you can stand some Integrated P2W (buy a separate ingame currency but this currency is also tradeable and not used by the NPCs so you must participate somewhere else to get regular currency) it looks passable.
I'm just thankful because it gives me one more game I can use to point at and tell Intrepid 'This is why I want you to do X thing, and this is why I don't want you to do Y thing'. It's very much 'ok let's build the Minimum Viable Product out of the Convergent requirements' still.
The sort of thing you build when your boss tells you 'just put all the stuff that's good in the game so we have something to sell' and you take no risks because you don't have anyone who knows how to integrate your risky stuff into the convergent base.
Lineage by Committee. An AI could have made this game, I think. (based on some of the dialogue from the leak, I'm pretty sure one did)
I'm not saying this is a bad thing, but it's not really ambitious. Just 'ok, take all the good stuff and don't screw it up by adding anything weird!'
A good strategy when you plan to be 'first to market' in the New Wave.
didn't say its terrible and when did I say it has p2w? T_T
I know how the auto farm system is...remember I know ncsoft..I've played all their games
just go play l2 essence and that's how T&L will be minus the p2w (they promised no p2w, imma trust it)
didn't say its gonna suck and I will definitely try it...but that was a major turn off (unless the game is rly good and then I can auto farm while working or sleeping and just manual play to pvp).
edit: also L3 was going to be tera, but someone stole it, there was a law suit etc, so technically this is L4? hhahaha
Oh, no, that was me telling you that it's definitely P2W.
It was just one of the things that wasn't in my summary.
I believe that you know how the autofarm system works, you know better than me, I play a game that might make a person think it was alright.
TL definitely has P2W, I'll explain it if anyone cares, obviously some is speculation from the leak, but the data I have already has a translated line for 'Buying 1200 Lucent on the Playstation Store'.
It's P2W.
To be honest, from all i saw in the leaks and recent informations i got from a korean friend, it is far more "Lineage3M(Mobile)" or "Lineage 2W(Mobile)" and a "Mobilization" of a PC game in its systems than what could ever be a actual "L3" which is a shame, but within expectations knowning NCSoft and how profitable Lineage W, LineageM and Lineage2M are.
Aren't we all sinners?
Fk man. Alright...cmon Pax Dei. woo. I dunno, guess we'll see whats up for real in a day or two. Some people say they're going to be streaming the beta. I'm still willing to give TL a shot depending on what I see.