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📝 Dev Discussion #61 - Time Dedication ⌛
Glorious Ashes community - it's time for another Dev Discussion! Dev Discussion topics are kind of like a "reverse Q&A" - rather than you asking us questions about Ashes of Creation, we want to ask YOU what your thoughts are.
Our design team has compiled a list of burning questions we'd love to get your feedback on regarding gameplay, your past MMO experiences, and more. Join in on the Dev Discussion and share what makes gaming special to you!
Dev Discussion - Time Dedication
How much time do you think someone should invest in order to become an expert at an MMORPG? What are the differences between an expert player versus a casual player - time commitment, skill, and game knowledge?
Here are some additional thought-starters that might help you with this discussion:
- "Expert" and "Casual" can be subjective terms. What does being an expert or a casual mean to you?
- What are the differences you see in casual vs expert-level play on a day-to-day basis in your favorite MMORPGs?
- Is total time spent in an MMORPG an important factor to you?
- Do you feel you're an expert in some MMORPGs or systems within them, but not in others? If so, please explain
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Differences would include all of those things and would also separate people into groups. People could be an expert in combat (so skill), but not really know any lore and might've not invested a lot of time into the game because they're just good at playing this kind of game.
Some could've invested a shitton of time into the game, but only into a specific part of the game, so they got 0 clue about anything else.
Some might've learned a ton about the game, but in short time or w/o practical application (anyone who can read fast and reads all of Ashes wiki right now would be this imo).
In other words, there's 3 different "experts", but if you want to be considered a "true expert" - you'd need to do it all.
edit: oh yeah, if this was purely about "how long should we make the grind in the game", then my answer is artisanry should take as long as vertical leveling, so just multiply what I said in this post by those values.
However, a low barrier to entry is critical.
As an example, you might be a grandmaster blacksmith according to a game after a hundred hours, but you aren't an expert and still have a very long way to go in terms of sourcing materials for your blacksmith business and selling your products. In a social game, mastery can mean a lot more than what the game tracks.
to start off, leveling to max level should take at least 300 to 500 hours, acquiring your soft cap gear lets say 1 to 2 tiers below BiS should take you many months (for dedicated players and guilds) BiS gear, which should be legendary, should be years/thousands of hours per piece, so that someone getting 1 piece of legendary is a monumental achievement even for whole guilds with hundreds of players playing together,
being a master artisan should also be extremely time-consuming even for large guilds funneling resources, should take many many months for one individual to be boosted by his whole guild to get to that master tier, for someone without guild support should be years/thousands of hours,
combat should also be in-depth enough so that there is a considerable skill gap between players, religions, node advancement, social organizations, everything should be long-term progressions for thousands of hours worth of gameplay,
I hope Intrepid doesn't fall into the trap of modern MMOs to make things quick and easy catering to casual players with limited game time, because if so, your dedicated player base that has hundreds of players organized will eat through content and "beat" the game in the first month, also, do not underestimate players when balancing content difficulty,
What exactly are you trying to figure out here? Development-wise. What's the point of this question? Or, which system(s) are you unsure of how to implement that you need this answered? I am not trying to be facetious here, I genuinely don't understand the purpose of this Dev Discussion, so please clarify if you can @Vaknar
In general terms, an expert is a person who has a lot of knowledge, skill or experience in a given area. An expert ship's captain needs a different mix of skills than an expert processer.
Are you just exchanging the word hardcore with expert?
And as for casual, do you mean time-casual or approach-casual? Because a time-casual player can absolutely be an expert in some areas of the game. It's a mindset thing more than anything else. And on the flip-side, an approach-casual who plays 16 hours a day may never become an expert in anything, because they don't care to really sit down and learn the intricacies of anything, but sorta just coast along being happy with a "good enough" approach to everything.
A: The answer for this question is entirely dependent on the level of complexity of the MMORPG in question, some MMORPG's far outclasses others in the complexity of their systems, the amount of time required to become an "expert" in a game like Lineage 2 is on a whole different scale than to become an expert in a game like New World.
As for my personal preference i'm very fond of high game complexity, i would say a game that takes atleast 1K hours for the average player to reach an reasonable level of expertise is interesting in my eyes.
Q: What are the differences between an expert player versus a casual player - time commitment, skill, and game knowledge?
A: Time commitment, skill and game knowledge are certainly huge factors that usually creates the differences and gaps between what one would call an expert player and a casual player.
Even tho its important to acknowledge the outliers in those equations of factors, like players with not too high time commitiment but reasonable very high skill and game knowledge aswell as the opposite, players with very high time commitment but lackluster skill and game knowledge.
In the end efficiency of time usage will almost always dictate how fast someone will reach an expertise level or remain a casual longer.
Aren't we all sinners?
Enough time that they seriously consider spending six hours just answering the equivalent of this question for the mechanics of the game.
(my group has pointed out the irony of the fact that for an answer here to be any real help, the player must already be quite dedicated, then they 'laughed' and wished me good luck)
I'm literally going to split this up into different posts, and unfortunately maybe even go back to the 'arguing with people in feedback'. Mmk.
Combat Skill
Time commitment and logic ability (or research ability) is the only thing that will ever seriously affect a player's expertise in an MMO. MMOs must have a skill ceiling similar to the average-to-lower complexity characters in MOBA games, and can afford to have more if they have more abilities but players are not expected to play too many alts to succeed. After that, it is a time commitment of practicing your responses and reactions, and ability to recognize the many situations an MMO brings. Minimum investment time to 'git gud': 300 hours ingame, maybe another 100+ chatting/guide watching. Minimum investment time to 'be an actual expert': 800 hours ingame. This theoretically includes PvP, but PvP investment scaling is 'infinite', because the playerbase will move the goalposts of 'expert' over time.
Economy/Earning Expertise
Logic ability massively trumps time commitment here. The more the game tries to offer socioeconomic experiences, the closer it gets to being a true timesink, to the point of EVE where they've basically honed this to the point where there is no ceiling and it's similar to the aforementioned PvP investment scaling. Situations where Earning Expertise is based on time commitment and low Logic Ability means alts and bots proliferate and choke gameplay, and 'becoming an expert' is a matter of 'finding the most exploitative system and maybe also throwing automation or your army of serfs or yes-men at it'. Optimally the game doesn't reward logic ability much either, just social decision making and logistics. So a perfect, flawless game transforms 'expertise' here into the only real world equivalent, 'being able to bring out the most profit from human and natural resources in any situation'. Then it's more similar to combat skill finally. Recognition of situations, ability to advise, knowledge of historical data. Maybe 200 hours in most games. Borderline infinite in Ashes type games, but I'd think the average player would call their local manager an 'expert' after maybe 40-100 hours.
Cartographical Knowledge
For expertise, probably just '1/3 of whatever time spent by the level or area designer for a specific area or leveling path', time however many such areas/leveling paths a player needs in order to reach BiS for them. In games with horizontal progression this normally doesn't change too much, maybe triples to become 'equal to the entire design time put into it'. Unlike reading a book where the effort of writing is much longer than the time to read or possibly understand, MMO level design is about re-experiencing things and discovering things, so most of the 'effort' which is put in to avoid pain points and places where people get 'stuck' don't matter except for those dumb quests where you have to find switches in a specific order.
Military Expertise
Relative to the game, large scale tactical combat requires large scale tacticians. Historically 'expert' was just survivor 'bias' irl. In MMOs, gated by the large scale combat schedule. If only the time spent planning and participating in that combat is counted, then 'expert' is probably 800-3000 hours, but logic and research ability far outweigh anything else. I don't think these sort of people even spend that much time 'directly playing the game' when it comes to gaining this specific skill? By the nature of an MMO though, it can be a rare skill, whereas for a 'strategy game', it's basically a prerequisite skill. This massively skews the 'expert' designation in the same way that PvP Combat Skill investment gets affected. You're back closer to RL then. 'Expert' is 'whoever can win'. In an MMO this takes long, you can't just 'come in with above average military tactics knowledge, not read the game mechanics and win, so at minimum you must put in the time to learn and apply all your previous training to the game's presented situations. If the game has any real skill involved here, it rises exponentially. For me, if this doesn't take 800 hours, the game didn't require much military expertise at all.
Social/Soft Power/Political Skill
Entirely dependent on how much fiat the game employs, and how long the game itself lives. To answer for Ashes which claims itself to be a soft friction game with espionage options and character persistence fiat (the bare minimum for an MMORPG), maybe 2000 hours? This is separate from 'Diplomacy and Negotiation' skill which is the other side. Soft Power is 'for when you have the resources and strategy for managing less invested people and controlling their incentives', whereas Diplomacy and Negotiation is for 'power equals', or in the case of players whose goals are not entirely aligned with the current ruling power, 'presenting the challenge to the political skill of the Empowered'. I feel like this is a prerequisite skill for MMOs, but it's hard to tell since it depends on the game's fiat level. Since people who are 'experts' at this usually already come with this skill and unlike Military it doesn't need to be adjusted for the game (unless the game is dying), time dedication is a weird way to look at it. You either have 2000 hours of this experience from some other game or your job, or you don't. Building it up in an MMO these days is less likely, but maybe Ashes will be a good training ground for it if those with the prerequisites already met don't utterly dominate.
Production/Artisan Skill
Dependent entirely on the system devs for the thing and the market demand flexibility. Since most of this is memorization in games or relies entirely on one of the previously mentioned skills instead, a general 'predictive model', AI or otherwise, generally would handle this for people, in this age. No matter how complex a crafting system/production in a game is, it's still just 'input to output' and all the real 'skill' is contained somewhere above. Logical or analytic skill to know how to produce anything someone wants, in a system complex enough to require step by step production (Legend of Mana Tempering) is maybe 50 hours maximum, since that's about the time it would take to spin up a predictive model, these days (dependent on number of token-effect pairs in the system). I can see players who enjoy the process of manual discovery and don't have specific ways of thinking, enjoying the same system for a much longer time (I've seen people take at least 7x as long to develop their mental schema for things because of the way they enjoy the grind of the approach), but that's just 'taking the scenic route to expertise' and not really a thing that a designer can consider much, since they can't really make the scenic route 'longer' due to the complexity constraints of 'gaming in general'. Basically if someone's sword isn't randomly doing less damage every time it loses some of its sharpness, there's no way a game's underlying statistics/damage models will give production expertise enough weight for the 'skill ceiling' to be high and then allow the 'scenic route' to be longer. Adding noob traps or RNG is generally artificial inflation, so...
I should probably have split this post up, but I feel like this isn't directly the place for that, so I'll just throw data/opinions at people instead and expand on them later.
I'd like to give a clearer answer relative to my personal wishes/expectations for Ashes of Creation, but I can't say that I know with enough certainty what Ashes 'is' and since it's a system, my answers would change based on data.
I can talk about comparisons to other games though, of course, as I always do, Fighting, MOBA, Strategy, Eastern MMO, jRPG, TCG, TableTop, City Builder, Simulator, Optimizing, Pattern-Matcher, Loot Shooter, Tactical Shooter, Battle Arena Shooter, Platformer, listed in 'expertise' order, anything above 'Simulator', the number of hours spent is too high to be easily estimated.
I guess if there was ever a thread where I got to explicitly claim 'spending thousands of hours practicing and trying to understand games is actually an indication of expertise to some extent', this would be it.
Ok, with all that mess of text out of the way... echoing this.
Like, what 'rank' is 'Expert'? I have a model of this for MOBAs, Krashy has 900+ hours in Predecessor and I'd have considered Krashy an 'expert' at Predecessor from probably 400 hours (long enough to play every available Hero in the game in a meaningful match around 20 times).
I have separate models for specific fighting games based on their ranking systems and player projected tournament performances (you need this so you can seed them in basically any large tournament bracket). A player is an 'expert' when you just 'assume they will be the one to get out of their pool at a large event if you don't place another 2+ known experts in the pool. I'd say this takes around 1200 hours of general knowledge and then maybe 60 hours per character they intend to use, for a single game.
For stock market traders (RL) I consider people 'experts' when they reach the point of understanding not to buy anything for a period for a reason other than fear of loss. When they can look at a trendline and predictively 'decide to not do any day trading for 3-4 days because a useless market condition is about to happen and they can't predict the dip duration. Starting from 'no understanding of trading', that's maybe 700 hours?
But in all those cases, there are non-experts who spend much more time. And in all those cases, previous understanding of the 'genre' (I feel we can call the NASDAQ or NYSE a 'genre', right?) is weighted much higher than anything else. It's possible for me to start in Ashes as an 'expert' healer, 'expert' tactician, 'expert' stock market trader, with minimal time invested, depending on the design, and that would be an upside down bell curve based on complexity, I think. Very high complexity weights previous knowledge higher, and very low complexity is a Syndrome.
MMOs are not really a genre where 'expertise' comes from within the game anymore. AI modeling makes that worse. Guides, wikis, easy information and recruitment networks (these always existed, but people didn't care enough to interact with them, leaving it all to nerds, geeks, and 'no lifers') now mean that even the definition of 'casual' shifts.
Maybe a 'casual' now is a person who doesn't ask for advice in their group chat/Discord, an intermediate player is someone who asks, and an expert is 'anyone who can actually answer with accurate information' (including ChatGPT; Bard, etc).
If there is a specific thing you need addressed, give us another hint. If this is 'hey how grindy do you think we can make this game without the casuals leaving?', that fortunately has a simple answer. It's not short but it's simple.
are you talking about time every day or time over a long period? e.g 4 hours every day for 10 days to get something or 1 hour every day for 40 days or 5 years?
as long as i dont have to spend even an hour a day logging in to do some daily activity that if i dont do, i will never be able to get what i missed that day. some games make you do dailies for like 3-4 hours everyday, and then after that you can do whatever you want. it feels like a chore.
without any dailies, if you dont log in one day, you can still play more hours the next day and get that loot.
so in such system, i cant think of a specific time investment to be good, such as play 4 hours everyday for the next 3 months to get your items, and then you start missing days and suddenly it will take you 4 months vs someone who didnt miss a day and got everything in 3 months. you could get your items in 1 month with rng or trading playing 4 hours a day, or it might take you 2 months playing 10 hours a day.
for your second question, all of them make for a good player.
You can define expert as someone how spent 10 000 houers or more on a subject.
But dont see how this translate to a mmo.
I'd agree with NiKr's definition. That seems reasonable for the definition of "expert".
As others have said, though, I'm not sure that's what's actually being asked here. The difference between Very Good and Expert is vast.
"to become an expert at an MMORPG" - At any MMORPG? At MMORPGs in general? At this specific MMORPG? At specific areas in any/general/specific MMORPG? At all areas in any/general/specific MMORPG?
Throw it back to the Design Team, and ask them for a real question, please!
I almost would, but for the sake of offering another take from my experience (this one is relevant to Combat Skill specifically again).
I consider someone who knows themselves so well that they can articulate why they do not play a certain class/character/champion/whatever, to be more of an expert in a game than someone who can play everything.
This is also amplified by the fact that one can't normally raise the skill floor too high, so I find that in the games I play, generalists are less knowledgeable than specialists (where the first are intermediate and the second are advanced, casuals simply being 'those who don't play multiple AND don't know much about them).
Basically 'I know enough to tell you in detail why I don't play Muriel or Riktor, Ken in Street Fighter, etc', but it's not just 'this sounded cooler so I chose that', it's really specific. And similarly, I know people who 'can play any character' but they do so superficially, focused only on the basic understanding required for 'standard effectiveness', and I can't consider them experts because any contact with an unfamiliar opposing style or situation results in no adaptation or even consideration of possible adaptation.
As for Ashes, therefore, relative to Combat Skill, I'd think an expert knows themselves, their friends, their enemies, and 'what they do if a mob has a particular combination of weaknesses', but 'my guild and I have cleared all the mobs in the game' doesn't indicate expertise to me, and the 'time dedicated' can therefore be entirely unrelated.
And I mostly based that on the assumption that personal experience of playing smth allows for better responses when playing against it. It worked relatively well for me in dota, cause I could at least roughly feel the distance of my own abilities vs my current opponents.
Though I guess this just comes down to the types of learners. Someone can learn smth perfectly by simply reading about it, while others gotta experience it themselves. And this difference is just yet another proof of this thread's question being bad and too vague
To echo others, what are you really trying to ask here?
If we think about leveling and suggest that the highest level content gets enabled with a node level 5 (since not every node can reach level 6) I would say leveling should take about as long as leveling the node. Leveling the crafting skills should take a bit longer if the last resources can only be found at level 5-6 nodes.
For the point of becoming an expert in the game.
that's hard to measure.
You would need to know good trade routes. Where you can find the different crafting resources in the world. Know common caravan ambush spots. Know conter against all archetypes. And much more.
So I would say to become an expert in the game that can have no real limit since a player with 1000 hour playtime has more knowledge as a player with 500 hours and a player with 2000 has more than someone with 1000 hours playtime.
I'm with Nerror The Terror and am a bit curious as to the motivation for this question. What gives.
The stranger's eyes lifted to the blood red cloud on the horizon.
'We have to move. It's not safe here.'
I disagree, a player with 1000h who has played casually cannot have the same knowledge as one with 500h who has played them intensively.
In this case, I think that cataloging expert or novice players according to the amount of hours dedicated, if we take into account that these supposed 1000h have been extended in time, say 3 years, compared to the player who has achieved 500h in 6 months of play, is a mistake. It is not really comparable, it all depends on the dedication of each one.
In the same way that there will be players who will understand more quickly certain game mechanics or character archetypes versus others who, undoubtedly there will be, it will cost them more.
This is massively dependent on how often the devs change, rebalance or patch things. I'll bring this up in terms of Combat Skill (Predecessor, easiest to relate to an MMO).
Once again we're gonna be discussing https://omeda.city/heroes/Sevarog .
Specifically playing this character in the Jungle role. Sevarog's passive makes the early game a time management minigame, but your first item and first Crest built change the starting parameters of this minigame. I'll gloss over most of this, just know that choosing Health, Phys Attack, Mag Attack, Phys Def, all affect how exactly you approach the Stacking mechanic in the first few minutes.
If the developers decide to balance Sevarog by changing his primary ability Siphon in any way, it forces the expert player to refactor the entirety of their jungle flow. And ofc since they were in early access, they rebalanced it a lot. Even practicing this requires 10-15 minutes per attempt, and each change requires you to recheck at least all 16 common combinations of Crest+Item.
You can probably get away with 'making some assumptions', but that would be more 'casual'. So I'm effectively saying that 'every time this ability is changed in any way, it costs at least 4 hours to retain 'expertise' if you're not making assumptions.
So far, I'd say even I, who 'can skip over it' (I skipped a whole period when they made the base cooldown 7 seconds, knowing that it would be changed back because 7 seconds doesn't work balance wise, as, y'know, an expert) have spent at least 48 hours in Predecessor just retaining Sevarog Jungle expertise due to patches to just one ability (probably double that).
Except that it's actually more than that because you could also change two or three other things, and the combinations of 'situations where you need to take a different path due to team composition, and adapt initial stuff due to that', and 'situations where you can afford to not purchase Phantom Rush at level 3 and therefore can/should boost Siphon again.
My 'question', as the above is not actually a complaint in any way, is, are we counting this? I personally am biased to say that if you don't do at least half of the 'recalibration to a Siphon change', you aren't an expert (once you've done enough of it, you might be expert enough to adapt on the fly, as one does for team composition). And to be clear, in case Steven has not gotten around to playing much Sevarog yet, if you mess up this first five minutes and your opponent does not mess up theirs, you slowly become ineffective and eventually usually lose (matchmaking). This is 'just jungle', effectively 'non interactive PvE' where you only need to pay attention to the PvP possibilities, not actually engage them.
Every time you patch anything close to a baseline concept in a complex game, that data needs to be absorbed and extrapolated. Sometimes you can watch a guide, sometimes you have to go in and recreate a potentially rare situation 2-4 times yourself. I feel like you have to do this before you can call yourself an expert. This isn't 'every change', I'm talking about changes to a player's expectations or a character's abilities. Frame Data, Cooldowns, Damage formulae, the speed of a specific common mount, basically. Not necessarily 'gear' or 'a few dials in the underlying BGS'.
So there's a difference. "I spent 12 hours learning a new thing because you changed something about a character I use" - Expert. "I know that I need to eventually spend 6+ hours to get back up to where I was due to a change" - Intermediate. "Something changed? It's about the same right?" - Casual (with branches for how much they complain if it isn't about the same!)
I move to have Nerror's forum name changed to "Nerror The Terror".
Let's at least have something come out of this discussion.
The point is for us to have a conversation about time dedication
I am gonna mirror that in real life. A doctor is an expert in its discipline, but can have less knowledge in other things such as mechanic or construction. The same reflects an 'expert' in an MMO where if you only play a certain aspect of the game but only 2h a day (which is casual), you can definitely know enough things about that aspect of the game (ex.: Arena, raiding, etc.) and be considered an 'expert' in the long run.
In PvP, the expert (casual or not) must have knowledge of everything PvP related (each class skills, counter-skills, mechanics and be good at it.
In PvE, the expert must have knowledge in the content he's considered expert. Raids must known mechanics, enemies skills, team composition for effective raid clear, etc.
Is this discussion supposed to help develop the game ?
So TLDR, the mmorpg expert is the player that has put 20 hours of preparation into a 5 minute encounter. It is the player that has no life, and thats the way it should be.
Upon thinking a bit more I think the best way to define expertise is comfort within the game. The higher expertise the more comfortable a player is in their role, game mechanics, and new situations.
As for my answer, Idk if you're using expert and hardcore interchangeably or meaning different things entirely. I'm going to assume they're interchangeable since you used causal in the post as well. I'd say someone can be both hardcore and casual. Timewise someone may only be limited to a few hours per week but they are going super heavy on number crunching and min-maxing when they're on. Always watching content throughout the day but not having the time to play. While someone with plenty of time on their hands could just be having fun running around fishing, questing, and RPing.
Time sync doesn't mean expert to me. The knowledge is what defines an expert. The person constantly sucking in content and knowing the nitty gritty regardless of actually being able to play is the expert.
But when it comes to skill, imo both knowledge and time play equal parts. I would consider someone an expert in the skill department when they're able to clear the more difficult aspects of the game.
You got too carried away being self-centered to not realize this question exists to get input on what should define an expert generally. Time, skill, and game knowledge wise.
Make the combat and play style complex while making the progession of the game simple and easy to understand. That way you wont scare away people 5 years into the game who havent played.
_______________________________________________________________________
I will assume this question is about Mentor status Qualifications,
so you'll need one Achievement in each of these 5 categories:
-Max Character level.
-Master Craftsman, Gathering, or Processing level.
-Max Reputation with one Guild/Node.
-100 Dungeons/Raids cleared.
-1000 Hours played.
That's what I'd consider the mark of an Expert Player for an MMO.
Ok.
Time can also be a factor for sure, if the aspect you want to become an expert in requires a lot of muscle memory for example. Combat with a specific class is an obvious one. But the time dedication needed can vary wildly depending on age, reaction time, ability to keep a cool head, fine motor skills and analytical capability and quick thinking. Anywhere between 100 hours to never, depending on the person.
For something like crafting, you can probably become an expert without even logging into the game, if you can find all the info on the web. A few hours ingame I guess, to actually check if the info is true.