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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.
How is AoC going to incorporate all level of players in node warfare?
Kesthely
Member
A little background: I'm a avid Eve online player, and many of the systems that AoC is going to have have similar like systems in Eve Online. Eve online however is not a level based system, and that is very good for its pvp playground. Due to Eve online's rock paper scissors systems and role dependancy and specialization options, new players can participate in, and sometimes even perform key roles in pvp. And more importantly no matter what skill level (both player skill and charactar skill point amount) they can all participate in attacking or defending someones home.
How will this be in ashes of creation? If i'm level 20, just got my first tiny house and membership of a node, what will i be able to do to defend my home? Will the level disparity between me and max level attackers make it that i have no chance? will i experiance a dissatisfying time, when i realize that the time and money my character has invested in his or her new home can't realisticly be defended because of level disparity, or will there be options to make yourself usefull?
Here are my suggestions:
Instead of a fixed amount of players, have it set to combined level. Eg 50 lvl 40 players attack, Total pool of levels is 200, the defending team can defend with 40 level 50 players, or 100 level 20 players (Or any combination resulting up to 200 level pool)
Siege weapon efficiency is independant of level or class. This will allow lower level players to partake without having to use immersion breaking scaling effects.
Battleground is split up in brackets of similar levels whenever possible.
When not all levels are equally important in node warfare, the game will become a must be max level to participate, wich will lead to stagnation, and ultimatly player decline and will prevent new player influx
How will this be in ashes of creation? If i'm level 20, just got my first tiny house and membership of a node, what will i be able to do to defend my home? Will the level disparity between me and max level attackers make it that i have no chance? will i experiance a dissatisfying time, when i realize that the time and money my character has invested in his or her new home can't realisticly be defended because of level disparity, or will there be options to make yourself usefull?
Here are my suggestions:
Instead of a fixed amount of players, have it set to combined level. Eg 50 lvl 40 players attack, Total pool of levels is 200, the defending team can defend with 40 level 50 players, or 100 level 20 players (Or any combination resulting up to 200 level pool)
Siege weapon efficiency is independant of level or class. This will allow lower level players to partake without having to use immersion breaking scaling effects.
Battleground is split up in brackets of similar levels whenever possible.
When not all levels are equally important in node warfare, the game will become a must be max level to participate, wich will lead to stagnation, and ultimatly player decline and will prevent new player influx
1
Comments
In theory Intrepid could add some war goals for purely low lvl characters, but I don't think we've heard about anything like that so far.
This simply means that low-lvl are generally useless, and node owner will invite/let-in only high lvl mates into defence
But yes, your smaller time investment will be less influential than someone else's bigger time investment.
Primarily adressing this for the instanced battles.
In many MMO's you don't have a realistic chance of fighting a much higher level. It is a sideffect of level based gameplay.
And its not about time investment either. After a set amount of time a (large) portion of the population will be max level if you join the game as a new player a year after AoC is out, you want that player to experiance the same excitement of beeing able to purchase a home, become a citizen, and participate in home defense. And you want that player to have at least a chance to be impactfull in the battle.
Only 250 people can join a battle at the moment for one side. It might be increased to 500 per side. However, nodes with more than 500 players online will see some not being able to participate.
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Node_sieges
During the declaration period, individuals or guilds can register to attack or defend providing they meet the criteria.[15][16]
The player who originally declared the siege cannot exclude anyone from joining the attack.[15]
Citizens of the node or provincial nodes being attacked are automatically registered as defenders.[29]
Players do not need to be citizens of the node in order to register as defenders, but they cannot be citizens of a node that is at war with the node they wish to defend.[30]
Citizens of allied nodes cannot register to attack.[31]
I'll wait for the blog entry.
Opt in system. Limited spots? Qualifications for those?
From what we know so far, the only thing close to a meaningful impact a lower level player will have in a siege is if they are using siege equipment - which should be available for both attack and defense.
The reason for this is that using such equipment means they are not using their class abilities, which are inherently weaker.
Character progression is the sum of how good a player is at the game over all.
If you are better than me in equalized 1v1 PvP, but I am better than you at playing the market (as an example) and so have gear and better consumables than you, and that allows me to beat you, I am better at the game overall than you, and so should win in a 1v1 fight.
Whether you win a 1v1 fight should be based on the sum total of how good you are at the game as a whole, not just on one small aspect of it. As such, if you want to win, put some effort in to other aspects of the game.
There are many ways how this can be done, Siege equipment, level restricted secondary objectives, bracketed instances, monster, npc or guard coins just something that the lower level player feels usefull, so that after the siege, he or she can look back, and say i did my best and i was usefull, regardless the outcome.
Lower level players are sadly not important in this activity. Also caravan combat might be unbalanced until players reach max level. Probably Steven had no idea how to solve this or he wants the game this way.
After time most of the content will be experienced at max level, that does not however signify that no attention should be spend to new player or lower level gameplay and experiances..
If at low to mid level you lose a lot of assets due to a node siege, and you feel you had no influence whatseover in preventing that, you will lose players, and more importantly will have a hard time getting new players.
true. But the leveling time in AoC is very short while the Eve system is endless. So Eve had to design the game with such differences in mind. If that would be applied to AoC, ships would be armor sets and equipment, similar to mechs. Each with abilities and specialized to fight against other gear. But is not so. Gear is just armor and the skills belong 100% to the flesh below them which will reach max level after an inconvenient 2 month leveling, which is short for an eve player. Even more, guilds can gift gear to help new players while in Eve you could not fly and use any kind of ship even if you would own it.
This is a weird take, in Asherons Call a lower level could dominate even the best geared players. Because at the end of the day they fought past the gear, honed their craft and were just better players.
When they caught up in gear and wealth, it wasn't even a close match; they absolutely destroyed the people who were now evenly geared.
Progression =/= Talent or Superiority.
I don't think you understood the point of what I was saying.
In fact, you are actually agreeing with what I said, you just don't understand that yet.
When you say that the player that originally had worse gear but won in PvP then gets better gear and dominates, that is total agreeance with what I said.
Gear matters. That is what I said, and is also what you said.
The only difference is that you are starting off with a far worse player against a far better player than I was.
In fact, you were probably coming at the situation from a totally unreasonable perspective, as a player that has good gear has already proven to be good at the game in general - that is how they got their gear. Someone that has earned gear in a game is demonstrably better at that game than someone that has not earned gear in that same game. If that second person was as good at the game as you claim, they would have better gear.
That's a strange take, considering I played Asherons Call at a lower level and was able to dominate most players irregardless of level.
You described a gear carried individual, not someone of actual acumen and talent.
Social aspects of the game are as important as economic or PvP aspects. Having friends to just hand you gear means you are doing really well in the social aspects of the game.
Time is a slightly different situation. If the gear was acquired over time, but that player isn't good at the game, then the gear will reflect that. The players gear won't be that good, there is an amount of skill required to get gear in most games, and if that game is one with active PvP (as I think we should assume is the case here), being reasonably good at PvP is a pre-requisite for being able to get good gear.
Have you known a game with open world PvP where you have been able to earn gear without being at least somewhat good at PvP?
The next thing I am expecting someone to say is that they used their guild to get their gear, and that player with worse gear came across them when they were by themselves - basically someone good at solo PvP killed someone good at large scale PvP. However, I am sure you will agree from your time in L2 that should this be the case, the story isn't over with just that solo PvP'er killing our better geared friend and then us coming back to the situation weeks later when that solo PvP'er has better gear.
You yourself know that the guild of our friend with the better gear will have something to say about the situation - which is once again our better geared friend using the social aspects of the game to their advantage.
If we limit our discussion to actual reasonable cases, and we actually examine those cases in some depth, the player with the better gear is going to win in the end.
Here's another quote that seems relevant to the conversation ^_^
"Lower level characters will have usefulness in mass combat that does not depend on their level, such as manning siege weapons, helping repair fortifications, bringing proximity-based buffs to key positions, using stealth or scaling walls. These types of things are relevant to the tide of battle and do not require the player to be max-level or have high combat stats." - Found here, on the wiki!
I mean, your point here is as easy to refute as - in Asherons call, lower level players were able to beat higher level players. Asherons call is no longer live, and I see no reason at all to not assume a connection between these two facts.
Actually, I didn't.
All I said about player skill was that one was better than the other in PvP.
You assumed a gear carried individual.
In my experience, people that assume people with good gear are being carried by said gear are people that are not good enough to get good gear themselves.
They then love to brag about how they can kill players from guilds with such good gear in 1v1, totally forgetting that said players in these guilds have their characters built for large scale PvP, not 1v1.
The number of these I saw in Archeage while I was there, and who then had the arrogance to assume they could beat me (only pirate on the server, so literally no one else to be in a guild with, and no faction backup of any sort) was amazing.
This quote is placed in a segment about castle sieges, can we conclude from this, that the same is applicable to node sieges?
There's also a chance that the second player's guild were newcomers themselves, so they had better mechanical skill but just didn't have enough time to show it off at max lvl content. I've seen guilds like that show themselves off in L2 too. They'd come to the server later on, but they'd immediately start fighting at a decent lvl just because their overall skill was higher. And once they managed to get better gear - they'd dominate.
In other words, it comes down to the game's combat and gear design/balance. In L2 you could outplay some people through your own skill, but mostly the outcome would be determined by class matchup and gear difference. In Ashes the gear will supposedly represent ~50% of your power, so there's a slight chance that a lvl30 super skilled player might be able to beat a lvl50 mid-good skilled player, even if that lvl50 dude has much better gear.
I just think that player power is an always-shifting thing that exists on a time scale. Your guild might've been super powerful at the start of the game because they could play it 24/7 which let them push for better gear in those early days. But some other guild might come a few months later and wipe yours w/o a problem, just because they're more skilled. Both guilds were strongest on the server at some point in time, but only one came out on top in the end (which might also change later).
Login hours and being handed gear does not denote mastery. Nor does saying a game which is no longer running refute that fact.
Just like, buying an expensive anvil and hammer does not make a someone a master blacksmith.
Using a game that is no longer live to attempt to prove a point that literally can't be proven in any game that is live today was a foolish thing for that poster to try and do. If we want to talk about literal dead games, we can find all manner of bad mechanics and systems - which is why so many of these games are dead.
As such, using an example that can only be found in a game that has had it's servers shut down for well over a decade, and literally can't be found anywhere else - yeah, just not a good argument.
I've seen a few guilds like this, some that were successful in taking over a server, and some that failed miserably.
One thing all of those that were successful had in common was that they would all avoid even fights if they were under geared. I did see one specific guild get trash talked off the server because they were recorded losing a few small scale skirmishes where the numbers were about even. In games with even a remotely average economy, guilds like this still need assistance from others - and that trash talk saw that no one was willing to side with them, where as the guilds that were successful did manage to have people side with them.
This may well play out differently on games without such a robust economy. For reference with that term, I only personally consider two games that I am aware of to have a robust economy - Archeage and EVE (others may, I am just not aware of them).
However, in games where the economy is a key pillar of the games design, it needs to offer more importance.
Take your L2 example here. You yourself said that most fights were determined by the RPS nature of classes, and gear. In L2, the economy essentially existed to function, it wasn't a core aspect of the game. In order to make a games economy a core aspect, I assume you would agree that this would require making it more important. How do you make it more important other than by making it a bigger factor?
The thing is, this doesn't need to all just be via gear. There are other ways in which the economy can assist a player in winning a PvP fight - and that is why I made a point of including consumables in my original point (there are further avenues still, however).
There are many titles that ran their lifespan in, still doesn’t address mastery.
But I wasn't using that to attempt to explain it. I explained "mastery" here - in the post where I quoted you, rather than the post where I quoted someone else.
I will add to my point - any game with a combat system worth a damn would take longer to master the combat system than it takes to level to the cap, and indeed longer than it takes to get geared up.
EQ2, as an example (a game that is still live, by the way), I would say that you hadn't mastered your class until you had been playing for a solid 3 years. You could be ok at your class, perhaps even fairly good - but not a master.
I know Asherons Call had a much more simple combat system, and maybe that allowed people to "master" it before they hit the level cap. However, that isn't a good thing.