Do successful events always pay off more than deliberately failing hoping to pop off a bigger event?
Do you have any plans to defend against players deliberately joining events to make it harder but not helping so it fails on purpose?
To answer your first question - it could end up being possible that some players would want other players to fail an event, because the failed event perhaps benefits that group!
We’d like your feedback on the Alpha Two Event System Update shown during the September 2023 Development Update Livestream.
To help guide this conversation, here are a few thought starters you can choose from:
How do you feel about the Event System Update so far?
What excites you about playing and interacting with the Event system?
Is there anything in particular you’re excited or concerned about regarding what was shown with the Event System Update?
Are there any particular Events you hope to see in-game?
Are there Events you’ve seen in other games that you like or dislike? If so, please explain!
Please don’t feel limited by the thought starters above. Feel free to share anything you’d like about Ashes of Creation’s Alpha Two Event System Update shown during the September Development Update
We’ll be compiling a report for the design team on Friday, October 13, 2023, so please try to get your feedback into this thread by then!
Everyone here at Intrepid Studios looks forward to reading all the feedback you have to share!
The event system looks great. I doubt we have the full details of the diversity of tools and predicates that the content team has access to, but I can see everything from drunk NPC telling a joke that happens to be an actionable clue to one player once and it never happens again, to a full on global Dragon Ball loop of finding the dragon orbs and one player asking Shenron for a server altering wish once a year.
I like that there won't be static quests from static NPCs in static towns, that's kinda why I'm here to begin with. The world is meant to be dynamic and changing, and the world needs to reflect that in all the biggest and smallest ways with each day of player interaction and world opportunities being different than the day before or the day after.
I'm not sure I like big content chunks returning but zero chance to the change the outcome is kinda weird. The idea that people can know the Carphin mobs well enough to know who drops what when you're trying to farm for the whole set is odd and seems to be very theme park like in nature. That honestly struck me as being anti-Ashes design as a result, and while I understand wanting to reuse high budget POIs and their corresponding content multiple times, it feels like there should be another way to let players revisit the content--or perhaps not and let some things be exclusive to the players that witness them. My thought is that the blood storm may return after, but it instead affects the local wildlife and bandits instead of resurrecting long dead Carphin acolytes and leadership for a second round. Likewise, instead of dropping fixes items, blueprints and component parts make more sense. You may find a blood magic infused blade where the hilt had rotted away, or be so (un?)lucky to learn how to craft such a blade with the whole nasty ritual process. That way Carphin Prime happens once per server, and Future echoes of Carphin focus more on how the local area is pushed into upheaval by the return of the blood storm. Don't worry, bandits will still have some items from Carphin Prime that they scavenged, maybe a bandit captain will ascend to the top to try to lay claim to the tower and become a newly void corrupted entity in the process.
Everything being dynamic and connected excites me though. Instead of the "history is one damn thing after another" world view that nothing is interconnected and things just happen all of a sudden, this is more the "historical materialist" view where everything was caused by actions and events that occurred prior, and one incident or event isn't just an isolated instance but part of a chain of events and part of how future events will unfold. For themeparks I think of the former, there is basically whatever players get to do and everyone can do it, and that doesn't change until the next expansion. And that doesn't mean everyone will do everything, even theme parks have what is essentially lowbie throw away content since you have no reason to do the starting zone content in every factional ally's starting region.
But for Ashes that means opportunities will come and go, something that happened won't simply happen again unless the driving predicates have been fulfilled, and that is meant to be unknowable to the player to a great extent. This is a game you can't just wiki, a game where you'll see things that others don't and they'll see things that you don't. That's exciting, it gets to the emergent gameplay of a sandbox, but with more of the structure and guidance seen in theme parks. The events systems, perhaps even more than the nodes system, is what I expect to be the biggest driver of meaningful gameplay and player retention.
It isn't in the scope for Ashes but I did like the systems from Defiance where players who were under power for an event would be scaled up to a competitive minimum baseline, while still getting drops relative to their unadjusted level. This meant everyone could drive in, unholster, and be a part of the team alongside the big damn heroes that are way above the minimum threshold. Like the "attend a funeral" example, I would like to see things that really are for all participants, no matter how low their level, trade skill, node rep, etc.
Do successful events always pay off more than deliberately failing hoping to pop off a bigger event?
Do you have any plans to defend against players deliberately joining events to make it harder but not helping so it fails on purpose?
I too wrote a concern about this, there are so many griefers/elitist/exploiters in MMO's that generally ruin the experience (rushed dungeon runs anyone? no time to enjoy the story.) for people just enjoying the game as it is instead of having people making things more difficult or destroying the system to the point it is not fun to play. In this update I also noticed it mentioned that failing will escalate into a larger event and this seems like an incentive to fail to get a bigger badder boss in order to generate more rewards like a rare item that only spawns off a lv10 boss instead of a lv5 boss from the simple caravan raid.
How do you feel about the Event System Update so far?
I really like the auto-group feature and idea that some events will let me choose a side (attacker vs. defender). However, the event system feels a little lackluster and disappointing. Part of my disappointment probably stems from the fact that the event itself was almost exactly the same as the caravan under siege event from Diablo 4. In D4, this event quickly became tedious and repetitive. My fear is the same thing will happen here.
I think it would have been more interesting and more fun if the event had more options in terms of how players can participate. Instead of just defending the caravan, you could have also had quests to find and return the caravan's horses, collect repair materials, kill the bandit leader to disrupt their attacks, craft caravan parts, and repair the caravan. This would have also created an interesting dynamic where players have to decide who is going to fix the caravan and who is going to defend it with increasing waves of enemies until the caravan is either fixed or destroyed.
Is there anything in particular you’re excited or concerned about regarding what was shown with the Event System Update?
If the goal is to make player actions feel meaningful and to have them shape the world, then I feel that the event shown is missing the mark. The trigger for the event shown in the video was not intuitive. There isn't a clear connection between killing animals and bandits raiding a caravan so I feel that this event will feel more like a random spawn than a player driven consequence for interacting with the world. Instead, it would be better if there were clear connections between event triggers and the events themselves. For example, I think it would make much more sense if the caravan event had a chance to trigger whenever a traveling caravan is damaged.
Are there any particular Events you hope to see in-game?
I'd love to see King of the hill, racing, and crafting competitions, but I'd also love to see some wacky events such as:
Zombies vs. Survivors where players can be infected and turned into zombies.
Sacrifice Players (willingly or otherwise) in a ritual to summon a boss. If more players are sacrificed, the boss becomes stronger and has better loot.
Player becomes a boss and will get to keep the boss loot if they survive long enough.
Players temporarily get a new, powerful ability, but every time they use it, the event loot gets worse.
I would enjoy a system that allows for players to organically discover events. Without a lot of help from UI. I feel as if the UI system just adds to the overload and a mind that's more engaged in numbers and check boxes, in my opinion. Id much rather be totally immersed and have to figure things out or be there to find out myself. The days of rushing around a MMO should be long gone. Let's slow down and enjoy!
Make mini bosses like the one shown on live stream have some Go F yourself mechanics that keep people on their toes. Gamers are tired of tank and spank. If a mini boss doesn't randomly kill someone no matter how good the group is doing. Then the fight loses it "fear factor" edge and excitement. This is why I think active block and active dodge MUST be part of the game. It allows you guys to make mean ass bosses with skills and moves that hurt if you are to slow or not paying attention. This goes for elites too....
An elite samurai is not scary if he just has a bigger health pool and armor. But if he has a leg sweep cc followed by an aoe sword spin that if you don't block or dodge you die. Thats what makes an advisory memorable. I will say this over and over as I test your Alpha 2.... DO NOT MAKE A GAME FOR LAZY PEOPLE.
Make a combat mechanics and encounters mentally challenging.
My ideal situation in a game is to see an elite bar on target and have a moment of doubt and hesitation before I decide to engage. That is realism, a pause, fight of flight dopamine dump. This is what players want. Not just the steam roll aoe, trash can, farm pull the world bullshit. If an elite is at my level, I want it to be a little sweaty and test my skill. Not just be oh I got this it's just going to take a little longer to kill.
I hope to see, if i can use the environment ingame for my advantage.
There will be job-related ingame-times when most of my guildis or friends are asleep.
It would be helpful, when we are only with 2 or 3 players, if we can use choke points or higher positions to optimize our chances infight.
I disliked it very much in GW2 to fight in a blinky circle against a boss (raid). That´s more like at the fair then a proper bossfight in natural environment. But that´s only my opinion.
I already assume this is the case, but, unless I missed it or misunderstood Steven, this wasn't mentioned in the stream. I hope that both good and bad event results can carry over into smth bigger.
So smth like "you defended that caravan successfully, but now the attacker's boss is angered, so he'll go ruin a nearby POI". And then, even if you succeed at stopping that boss, all the activity in the POI awakens some ancient boss.
I believe the goal of the system is for dynamic and impactful changes to the world to happen with and through events. The example you gave is within the ethos of the idea of the system (that is to say, one event could cascade into other events or things happening)
in general , I liked the event . what caught my eye was how the AI behaves by placing archers in advantageous positions . but there is a fear that if a loss in an event leads to a subsequent strengthening of bandits (bosses) in this region, then there will be players who will specifically lead events to a loss. there are several reasons to lead to the loss of an event, this is when you want to annoy an enemy (if the rewards do not increase due to difficulty) or an increase in profits (if the increased difficulty improves the rewards). so I think it is necessary to fine-tune the awards in the event in such a way that the event does not lose relevance, but does not turn into a farm. written using a browser translator, I hope the meaning is clear!
Regarding:
Are there any particular Events you hope to see in-game?
I wanted to just expand a little bit of my comment during community hours. I had made the recommendation that not all events should be a negative aspect to the game. Bandits attacking a node, goblins rampaging and killing the local wildlife. Large elemental causing the environment to change for the negative. A lot of these have components that are really targeted to the adventurers and going out and dealing with the baddies. It would be neat to see a "positive" boon appear on nodes occasionally.
A swarm of bees have come into the area increasing pollination rate causing Herbs to spread/grow faster by 5%. Make it where artisans can continue to entice the bees (on an ever increasing difficulty) to make the effect last longer, or possibly make it where artisans can boost it from 1%, 3%, 5% for all people in the node's influence. 1% extra for one person is nothing, 1% extra for 1,000 is a lot. 5% extra for 1,000 is even larger!
Also, rather than having killing enemies be the only way to end some events, maybe have alternate ways to "resolve" them. Using the bandit attack as an example. Why not give people the option to 'negotiate" with the bandits. "We have enough forces here to beat you, but we don't want the spill your blood today. Instead, how about we pay you to go to [Choose between 3 neighboring node's of influence] and raid them instead. Then give another option to where you might be able to increase how much you pay them to up the base difficulty to the next node. You can use this has a "passive war mechanic" to help hinder neighboring nodes to better your own nodes without an actual declaration. However, if the enemy node defeats the event, they are given a contract that was signed between previous parties or a note saying 'Node: Hishum agreed to pay us extensively to attack Node: Grimmuk. We were able to recruit more to our cause and also bolster our equipment to make this attack more successful than previously anticipated!'
This could easily spark a node vs node war, start communications between nodes where Grimmuk says "Hishum, we know what your citizens did. Do X/Y/Z or we will declare war and burn you to the ground" and maybe a 'peaceful' talk can come from it. Maybe nothing comes from it. But could add some cool social aspects to the game!
How do you feel about the Event System Update so far?
I feel optimistic, as usual the design intent seems to be well thought out and headed in the right direction, and just has some minor room for imrovement and needs some time to be fully fleshed out and polished.
Is there anything in particular you’re excited or concerned about regarding what was shown with the Event System Update?
1. Excited:
- its great design that there is actually a risk of failure for events, with actual consequences in the grand scheme of things. This gives makes the content feel more meaningful and engaging.
- I also love the dynamic difficulty.
2. Concerns:
Im unsure of the design intent regarding the player being able to rely on the UI and popups in order to notice and join an event, rather than using the environmental cues to investigate for themselves. Generally, the latter is more engaging and immersive, but I understand its not always possible to rely on that approach as well, so just a minor concern there.
- There is still a severe lack of enemy mechanics, which I know is a work in progress but still a concern nonetheless
- what was the point/gameplay benefit of going around and manually resetting traps with a simple click? Those particular traps kind of seems like a chore with their current design.
- regarding the metrics used to reward players with loot, just keep in mind that players will game those metrics, so you really want to make sure that these incentivize and encourage players to play in the intended way, rather than them just playing to min max those metrics numbers
Are there any particular Events you hope to see in-game?
Yes, here are some features that are important to me for having a good event system:
1. Dynamic gameplay opportunities
I think a big draw of events is the ability to mix up the player's experience and challenge them in different ways. This means that I think there should be events that represent each of the other core systems (such as combat, crafting, processing, gathering, naval, traversal, economic, etc., based events) that way you can create a varied experience for each type of player, through the events system. The events themselves should be varied and have unique content to keep things fresh for whatever the type of gameplay a given event represents. This also means that I think there should be enough events to support pvp, pve, and pvx experiences as well.
2. Unique skill-checks
I also think there are some unique fantasies and skill-checks that the event system could support. Things like:
- spying to gather information from a rival node, while the people in the node try to figure out who the imposter is
- making plans to infiltrate and assasinate key political/player targets
- working with your fellow node citizens to figure out who killed the target, how, and why
- religious based conflicts centered around morality and philosophy
- drafting other players in the combat arena to form a fantasy team that is tracked and competes against other teams to form a competitive event or "league"
- racing events that focus on efficient traversal over long distances
- competitive treasure hunts
- managing pet/mount fights in arenas
- etc. (there are plenty of examples in the dev discussion that asked about fantasies)
3. Events should offer opportunities for both player conflict and/or player cooperation
- things like having npc tribes that are at war with another and who have different motivations, but you have to choose a side and settle the dispute by dueling a player that chose the opposing side.
4. Events should tie in to the story and lore
I like when events are connected to the lore and story in ways that are relevant to gameplay and that make sense.
For story telling purposes, events are an opportunity to:
- develop characters in the lore
- have different micro-stories that can fit into the over-arching narrative
- opportunities for individual player-stories and emergent experiences
- Regarding stories, this leads into the next point about utilizing knowledge based gameplay
5. knowledge/discovery driven event triggers
I think that knowledge is a very under-utilized skill/type of gameplay.
It is very satisfying to make logical connections and deductions that end up being correct and being rewarded for that. For example, it should be important to know details about the lore and create your own "head canon", and for the story to make logical sense so that way you can make reasonable predictions and draw conclusions about the unknown, and it should matter if you know about the characters and the state of the world at any given time.
I think that events are a great system to reward knowledge acqusition and knowledge application. This is due to the fact that they are triggered by player actions, meaning they are hidden in a sense until the player activates the events in some way. These triggers are a perfect opportunity to reward that player knowledge, and the dynamic design of events could allow for continuous player discoveries over a long period of time, rather than a more "one and done" discovery experience that most discovery based games tend to have with their fixed storyline and static world state, which would make for a unique experience in Ashes.
This could mean including a host of knowledge-based triggers for events that can be discovered by players through utilizing their knowledge they have gained throughout the game. This could be something simple like learning in the lore how a certain group of people behaved or interacted in the past, and applying that knowledge in the same way within the game world to reveal something interesting or to trigger an event. There are a lot of different routes you could take knowledge-based gameplay.
When it comes to an event I want to see in-game, it would 100% be the Clue Scroll system from RuneScape/Old School RuneScape. It provides so much content while being seemingly pretty simple to code/create, which is why I have no clue why other MMOs haven't done it.
The tl;dr is, lot of activities in the game and lots of mobs have the chance to drop a clue scroll. A clue scroll can be different difficulties, Beginner/Easy/Medium/Hard/Elite/Master. A clue scroll has multiple steps to complete it. One step might be "Dance at X place while wearing Y gear" or "Dig at these X and Y co-ordinates" or "Speak to this NPC" or a riddle of some sort. After completing a certain number of steps, you'll be rewarded with a Chest which contains some loot. Usually this loot is loot that can be found around the game, e.g. basic supplies or basic armour/weaponry, but sometimes you get Unique loot which can only be found from the clue scroll. Most of the time the loot is mostly cosmetic but the loot can be very very rare, and thus even though it's purely cosmetic, it can go for billions of gold.
Clue scrolls help break up the monotony of whatever you're doing. Maybe you're farming a group of mobs, and a clue scroll is dropped. Maybe you're mining some rocks and you receive a clue scroll. It adds a ton of variety to gameplay and replayability. So yeah, clue scrolls seem like a no-brainer when it comes to content. 1000x easier than adding new dungeons or raids or entire new zones, and is also a system that you can easily expand in the future (e.g. adding different clue steps, rewarding new cosmetics etc.)
New Event Request: PvE Seasons. To match PvP Seasons on each server. Similar rewards but with a PvE focus. Cheers all. Thank you for your hard work and dedication.
Neurath.
Edit: from the other thread: Caravans and Guild Wars aren't controlled environments and they are part of PvP Seasons. Contested Dungeons, Instanced Dungeons and World Boss Kills can all be used for PvE Seasons without the need for a controlled environment.
In terms of the stream I think it would be good if players can choose either side of the event to join. I've seen the complaints about players making deliberate issues to make an event fail. I think in an owpvx game there should be options to progress disasters etc. Why would citizens of a different node care about the local poi of a different node? There should be competition and the option to fight in a sanctioned event.
Otherwise I like the events. They are like public quests in Gw2.
Comments
To answer your first question - it could end up being possible that some players would want other players to fail an event, because the failed event perhaps benefits that group!
For your second question - It's not just based on the number of participants, but also on player activity. This is something we'll test in Alpha Two. Here's a timestamp of where we discussed this during the September 2023 Development Update
The event system looks great. I doubt we have the full details of the diversity of tools and predicates that the content team has access to, but I can see everything from drunk NPC telling a joke that happens to be an actionable clue to one player once and it never happens again, to a full on global Dragon Ball loop of finding the dragon orbs and one player asking Shenron for a server altering wish once a year.
I like that there won't be static quests from static NPCs in static towns, that's kinda why I'm here to begin with. The world is meant to be dynamic and changing, and the world needs to reflect that in all the biggest and smallest ways with each day of player interaction and world opportunities being different than the day before or the day after.
I'm not sure I like big content chunks returning but zero chance to the change the outcome is kinda weird. The idea that people can know the Carphin mobs well enough to know who drops what when you're trying to farm for the whole set is odd and seems to be very theme park like in nature. That honestly struck me as being anti-Ashes design as a result, and while I understand wanting to reuse high budget POIs and their corresponding content multiple times, it feels like there should be another way to let players revisit the content--or perhaps not and let some things be exclusive to the players that witness them. My thought is that the blood storm may return after, but it instead affects the local wildlife and bandits instead of resurrecting long dead Carphin acolytes and leadership for a second round. Likewise, instead of dropping fixes items, blueprints and component parts make more sense. You may find a blood magic infused blade where the hilt had rotted away, or be so (un?)lucky to learn how to craft such a blade with the whole nasty ritual process. That way Carphin Prime happens once per server, and Future echoes of Carphin focus more on how the local area is pushed into upheaval by the return of the blood storm. Don't worry, bandits will still have some items from Carphin Prime that they scavenged, maybe a bandit captain will ascend to the top to try to lay claim to the tower and become a newly void corrupted entity in the process.
Everything being dynamic and connected excites me though. Instead of the "history is one damn thing after another" world view that nothing is interconnected and things just happen all of a sudden, this is more the "historical materialist" view where everything was caused by actions and events that occurred prior, and one incident or event isn't just an isolated instance but part of a chain of events and part of how future events will unfold. For themeparks I think of the former, there is basically whatever players get to do and everyone can do it, and that doesn't change until the next expansion. And that doesn't mean everyone will do everything, even theme parks have what is essentially lowbie throw away content since you have no reason to do the starting zone content in every factional ally's starting region.
But for Ashes that means opportunities will come and go, something that happened won't simply happen again unless the driving predicates have been fulfilled, and that is meant to be unknowable to the player to a great extent. This is a game you can't just wiki, a game where you'll see things that others don't and they'll see things that you don't. That's exciting, it gets to the emergent gameplay of a sandbox, but with more of the structure and guidance seen in theme parks. The events systems, perhaps even more than the nodes system, is what I expect to be the biggest driver of meaningful gameplay and player retention.
It isn't in the scope for Ashes but I did like the systems from Defiance where players who were under power for an event would be scaled up to a competitive minimum baseline, while still getting drops relative to their unadjusted level. This meant everyone could drive in, unholster, and be a part of the team alongside the big damn heroes that are way above the minimum threshold. Like the "attend a funeral" example, I would like to see things that really are for all participants, no matter how low their level, trade skill, node rep, etc.
I too wrote a concern about this, there are so many griefers/elitist/exploiters in MMO's that generally ruin the experience (rushed dungeon runs anyone? no time to enjoy the story.) for people just enjoying the game as it is instead of having people making things more difficult or destroying the system to the point it is not fun to play. In this update I also noticed it mentioned that failing will escalate into a larger event and this seems like an incentive to fail to get a bigger badder boss in order to generate more rewards like a rare item that only spawns off a lv10 boss instead of a lv5 boss from the simple caravan raid.
I really like the auto-group feature and idea that some events will let me choose a side (attacker vs. defender). However, the event system feels a little lackluster and disappointing. Part of my disappointment probably stems from the fact that the event itself was almost exactly the same as the caravan under siege event from Diablo 4. In D4, this event quickly became tedious and repetitive. My fear is the same thing will happen here.
I think it would have been more interesting and more fun if the event had more options in terms of how players can participate. Instead of just defending the caravan, you could have also had quests to find and return the caravan's horses, collect repair materials, kill the bandit leader to disrupt their attacks, craft caravan parts, and repair the caravan. This would have also created an interesting dynamic where players have to decide who is going to fix the caravan and who is going to defend it with increasing waves of enemies until the caravan is either fixed or destroyed.
Is there anything in particular you’re excited or concerned about regarding what was shown with the Event System Update?
If the goal is to make player actions feel meaningful and to have them shape the world, then I feel that the event shown is missing the mark. The trigger for the event shown in the video was not intuitive. There isn't a clear connection between killing animals and bandits raiding a caravan so I feel that this event will feel more like a random spawn than a player driven consequence for interacting with the world. Instead, it would be better if there were clear connections between event triggers and the events themselves. For example, I think it would make much more sense if the caravan event had a chance to trigger whenever a traveling caravan is damaged.
Are there any particular Events you hope to see in-game?
I'd love to see King of the hill, racing, and crafting competitions, but I'd also love to see some wacky events such as:
An elite samurai is not scary if he just has a bigger health pool and armor. But if he has a leg sweep cc followed by an aoe sword spin that if you don't block or dodge you die. Thats what makes an advisory memorable. I will say this over and over as I test your Alpha 2.... DO NOT MAKE A GAME FOR LAZY PEOPLE.
Make a combat mechanics and encounters mentally challenging.
My ideal situation in a game is to see an elite bar on target and have a moment of doubt and hesitation before I decide to engage. That is realism, a pause, fight of flight dopamine dump. This is what players want. Not just the steam roll aoe, trash can, farm pull the world bullshit. If an elite is at my level, I want it to be a little sweaty and test my skill. Not just be oh I got this it's just going to take a little longer to kill.
There will be job-related ingame-times when most of my guildis or friends are asleep.
It would be helpful, when we are only with 2 or 3 players, if we can use choke points or higher positions to optimize our chances infight.
I disliked it very much in GW2 to fight in a blinky circle against a boss (raid). That´s more like at the fair then a proper bossfight in natural environment. But that´s only my opinion.
I believe the goal of the system is for dynamic and impactful changes to the world to happen with and through events. The example you gave is within the ethos of the idea of the system (that is to say, one event could cascade into other events or things happening)
Are there any particular Events you hope to see in-game?
I wanted to just expand a little bit of my comment during community hours. I had made the recommendation that not all events should be a negative aspect to the game. Bandits attacking a node, goblins rampaging and killing the local wildlife. Large elemental causing the environment to change for the negative. A lot of these have components that are really targeted to the adventurers and going out and dealing with the baddies. It would be neat to see a "positive" boon appear on nodes occasionally.
A swarm of bees have come into the area increasing pollination rate causing Herbs to spread/grow faster by 5%. Make it where artisans can continue to entice the bees (on an ever increasing difficulty) to make the effect last longer, or possibly make it where artisans can boost it from 1%, 3%, 5% for all people in the node's influence. 1% extra for one person is nothing, 1% extra for 1,000 is a lot. 5% extra for 1,000 is even larger!
Also, rather than having killing enemies be the only way to end some events, maybe have alternate ways to "resolve" them. Using the bandit attack as an example. Why not give people the option to 'negotiate" with the bandits. "We have enough forces here to beat you, but we don't want the spill your blood today. Instead, how about we pay you to go to [Choose between 3 neighboring node's of influence] and raid them instead. Then give another option to where you might be able to increase how much you pay them to up the base difficulty to the next node. You can use this has a "passive war mechanic" to help hinder neighboring nodes to better your own nodes without an actual declaration. However, if the enemy node defeats the event, they are given a contract that was signed between previous parties or a note saying 'Node: Hishum agreed to pay us extensively to attack Node: Grimmuk. We were able to recruit more to our cause and also bolster our equipment to make this attack more successful than previously anticipated!'
This could easily spark a node vs node war, start communications between nodes where Grimmuk says "Hishum, we know what your citizens did. Do X/Y/Z or we will declare war and burn you to the ground" and maybe a 'peaceful' talk can come from it. Maybe nothing comes from it. But could add some cool social aspects to the game!
I feel optimistic, as usual the design intent seems to be well thought out and headed in the right direction, and just has some minor room for imrovement and needs some time to be fully fleshed out and polished.
1. Excited:
- its great design that there is actually a risk of failure for events, with actual consequences in the grand scheme of things. This gives makes the content feel more meaningful and engaging.
- I also love the dynamic difficulty.
2. Concerns:
Im unsure of the design intent regarding the player being able to rely on the UI and popups in order to notice and join an event, rather than using the environmental cues to investigate for themselves. Generally, the latter is more engaging and immersive, but I understand its not always possible to rely on that approach as well, so just a minor concern there.
- There is still a severe lack of enemy mechanics, which I know is a work in progress but still a concern nonetheless
- what was the point/gameplay benefit of going around and manually resetting traps with a simple click? Those particular traps kind of seems like a chore with their current design.
- regarding the metrics used to reward players with loot, just keep in mind that players will game those metrics, so you really want to make sure that these incentivize and encourage players to play in the intended way, rather than them just playing to min max those metrics numbers
Yes, here are some features that are important to me for having a good event system:
1. Dynamic gameplay opportunities
I think a big draw of events is the ability to mix up the player's experience and challenge them in different ways. This means that I think there should be events that represent each of the other core systems (such as combat, crafting, processing, gathering, naval, traversal, economic, etc., based events) that way you can create a varied experience for each type of player, through the events system. The events themselves should be varied and have unique content to keep things fresh for whatever the type of gameplay a given event represents. This also means that I think there should be enough events to support pvp, pve, and pvx experiences as well.
2. Unique skill-checks
I also think there are some unique fantasies and skill-checks that the event system could support. Things like:
- spying to gather information from a rival node, while the people in the node try to figure out who the imposter is
- making plans to infiltrate and assasinate key political/player targets
- working with your fellow node citizens to figure out who killed the target, how, and why
- religious based conflicts centered around morality and philosophy
- drafting other players in the combat arena to form a fantasy team that is tracked and competes against other teams to form a competitive event or "league"
- racing events that focus on efficient traversal over long distances
- competitive treasure hunts
- managing pet/mount fights in arenas
- etc. (there are plenty of examples in the dev discussion that asked about fantasies)
3. Events should offer opportunities for both player conflict and/or player cooperation
- things like having npc tribes that are at war with another and who have different motivations, but you have to choose a side and settle the dispute by dueling a player that chose the opposing side.
4. Events should tie in to the story and lore
I like when events are connected to the lore and story in ways that are relevant to gameplay and that make sense.
For story telling purposes, events are an opportunity to:
- develop characters in the lore
- have different micro-stories that can fit into the over-arching narrative
- opportunities for individual player-stories and emergent experiences
- Regarding stories, this leads into the next point about utilizing knowledge based gameplay
5. knowledge/discovery driven event triggers
I think that knowledge is a very under-utilized skill/type of gameplay.
It is very satisfying to make logical connections and deductions that end up being correct and being rewarded for that. For example, it should be important to know details about the lore and create your own "head canon", and for the story to make logical sense so that way you can make reasonable predictions and draw conclusions about the unknown, and it should matter if you know about the characters and the state of the world at any given time.
I think that events are a great system to reward knowledge acqusition and knowledge application. This is due to the fact that they are triggered by player actions, meaning they are hidden in a sense until the player activates the events in some way. These triggers are a perfect opportunity to reward that player knowledge, and the dynamic design of events could allow for continuous player discoveries over a long period of time, rather than a more "one and done" discovery experience that most discovery based games tend to have with their fixed storyline and static world state, which would make for a unique experience in Ashes.
This could mean including a host of knowledge-based triggers for events that can be discovered by players through utilizing their knowledge they have gained throughout the game. This could be something simple like learning in the lore how a certain group of people behaved or interacted in the past, and applying that knowledge in the same way within the game world to reveal something interesting or to trigger an event. There are a lot of different routes you could take knowledge-based gameplay.
Thanks for reading!
The tl;dr is, lot of activities in the game and lots of mobs have the chance to drop a clue scroll. A clue scroll can be different difficulties, Beginner/Easy/Medium/Hard/Elite/Master. A clue scroll has multiple steps to complete it. One step might be "Dance at X place while wearing Y gear" or "Dig at these X and Y co-ordinates" or "Speak to this NPC" or a riddle of some sort. After completing a certain number of steps, you'll be rewarded with a Chest which contains some loot. Usually this loot is loot that can be found around the game, e.g. basic supplies or basic armour/weaponry, but sometimes you get Unique loot which can only be found from the clue scroll. Most of the time the loot is mostly cosmetic but the loot can be very very rare, and thus even though it's purely cosmetic, it can go for billions of gold.
Clue scrolls help break up the monotony of whatever you're doing. Maybe you're farming a group of mobs, and a clue scroll is dropped. Maybe you're mining some rocks and you receive a clue scroll. It adds a ton of variety to gameplay and replayability. So yeah, clue scrolls seem like a no-brainer when it comes to content. 1000x easier than adding new dungeons or raids or entire new zones, and is also a system that you can easily expand in the future (e.g. adding different clue steps, rewarding new cosmetics etc.)
Here's a link to the OSRS wiki that describes it better than I did probably https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/w/Treasure_Trails
Neurath.
Edit: from the other thread: Caravans and Guild Wars aren't controlled environments and they are part of PvP Seasons. Contested Dungeons, Instanced Dungeons and World Boss Kills can all be used for PvE Seasons without the need for a controlled environment.
Otherwise I like the events. They are like public quests in Gw2.