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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.
Solo/Group - Casual/Competitive
Alhem
Member, Alpha Two
I always prefer to combine solo and group play in mmos (most solo) and casual and competitive (most casual). Will there be content for all of this throughout the world, or will there be a focus on just group up and play competitively?
In Albion Online, my impression was that the most powerful guilds controlled the economy. And same with New World where to most powerful guilds taxed everyone else. I understand there needs to be incentives to be competitive and to group play, just hoping the scales won't favor playing like that too much, making you feel like a sucker for playing more casually.
In Albion Online, my impression was that the most powerful guilds controlled the economy. And same with New World where to most powerful guilds taxed everyone else. I understand there needs to be incentives to be competitive and to group play, just hoping the scales won't favor playing like that too much, making you feel like a sucker for playing more casually.
The game won't be kind to solo players (allegedly), so we'll see how it'll be played by the masses.
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There will be solo content, but it's better not to expect that you'll somehow be at the top of the world by being a casual solo player. Steven's "this game is not for all" usually means "you gotta work real hard to achieve things". And that hard work often means working in a group and due to how mmo groups work - you'll need to work a lot.
There will be places for both solo and casual players (I know that because I will create one), but they'll be most likely few and far between, because people these days like to optimize their gameplay and in Ashes that means being in a strong guild that dominates as much as possible.
You know what freeholds mean? High lvl processing. So you either have to be in a guild that can help you buy one or be in a group that has a person in a guild that let them buy one (and then hope that this groupmate will invite you to their family, instead of inviting their guildmates).
High lvl gathering will be blocked by groups through pvp/PK.
High lvl crafting requires you to have mats from the 2 professions above.
You can always participate in all of the things in the game as a solo casual player - but only as long as you don't expect to win and/or excel at said things. In other words, restrain your expectations and just enjoy the game for what it is.
And I still have no idea how the guild system will be. It could be that the guilds require players to grind boring things a lot to prepare for 2-3 hours of group play every week at a set time or it could involve more fun and creative things to do.
Solo grinding resources seems like a perfect opportunity for solo players. With the added danger of PvP the resources could have increased value. If the most dedicated guild controls all resource spawns, that wouldn't be possible, but who knows if that's going to be the case.
We know little about the guild details, but general gameplay should be varied enough. Though repetitive actions are inevitable, so members might in fact have to grind smth for a few days to have a bigger payoff. And this grind would, once again, come from the players' own desire for optimizations, rather than simply from the game's design.
Let's say the top 250 most active players in the top 3 guilds on a server that are "winning".
Will they gain an economic bonus of 10% more than the next 750 players and a 20% bonus compared with the next 1,000 players. Or would they "win" even greater benefits. Will their "winning" cause degraded experiences for the more casual players, and if so to what extent.
I don't see a reason for the top players that are the best on the server to degrade the experiences of the rest by gaining too much control of everything. Slight bonuses should be motivating enough.
If the game is too competitive, I think a lot of players are in for a rude awakening that they're really not as skilled as they think.
Another strong and helpful post! Nice one, @NiKr
OP, if you haven't checked out the wiki, I highly recommend it! Everything on there should have a citation to an official source. Oftentimes, that is a clip of Steven discussing the topic on a livestream. This can be an insightful way to hear his thoughts on many of the games' systems!
Here's the page for solo players, and here's the page for playstyles!
Also, in case you want to get ahead of finding a group to play with (if you so choose), here is the guild recruitment section of the forums
I'm pretty sure I didnt say that lol, can you fix that up for me. Cheers.
Done.
Anyways, after reading the links that the moderator Vaknar posted, I see that Intrepid expects the majority of players to be casual so that's awesome.
Thanks
Shhhhhh
You're going to make people angry.
What they showed in the last stream seems solo friendly because during the event they said players can join.
Those players might typically roam solo, join and complete together the event and then go their way again.
For solo players we will have social organizations.
Social organizations cater for solo players who don't wish to engage in guild-oriented organizations.[7][8]
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Social_organizations
I don't think of it being this bad, at least not until a long long time after launch. And it will be quite a free for all during the first few months.
1) From what I've seen, "High-level processing" only refers to Epic and Legendary materials. All skilling up can be done without this stuff, and there will still be a market for blues (crafted/processed/finished goods). Especially if repairing an epic can be done with blue or lower mats, for example.
2) A single character can only be a gatherer OR a processor OR a crafter. This means that any individual is going to find a market for buying and/or selling things related to their craft. Eventually people will have high enough level alts to get vertically integrated. And I get that a guild will have better hand-offs of materials from gatherer->refiner->crafter, but the large number of small guild and solo/casual players will be trading with each other.
3) There are going to be a lot of freeholds available. (Big) guilds are going to buy all the well placed ones. The ones in crappy out-of-the-way places and/or high property tax areas, are going to be more available. The key here is that building up a freehold looks like it is going to take a lot of basic mats. For the casual solo player? No. For the casual small group or dedicated solo player? Maybe.
4) PK owning of the best gathering areas will happen, but we really have no idea about how resources are going to be spread out. If there are 20 orichalcum spawns in a mine: it will be owned (or fought over) during prime times. The 1-2 orichalcum spawn groups spread all over a mountain range: not owned.
5) IF level 50 grey/green/blue material spawns actually are rare (IE, they only appear in L5/6 nodes), then you will be completely right. However, I think that L50 grey/green/blue mats won't be so tough to come by that a person can't gather enough for skilling up or crafting items. Rather, I think that upgrade/rare resources (IE, the ones that have a higher chance of dropping rare/epic materials) for L50 mats will be concentrated in small areas, or limited to high level nodes.