Instanced vs Open World dungeons

As my 2 cents - no, 80/20 (with most instances being story-based) is more than enough and well-balanced. The game will be about player on player interaction, so 80% of dungeons being open world is right in line with that goal.

Now Steven has said that he wants super difficult bosses in Ashes, but it's yet to be proven how exactly he plans on designing such bosses in the context of open world.

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I think this mantra might work against you sooner rather than later. L2 was PvX too, but I don't remember a single farming session where I wouldn't see/fight a person in the same place. And that was on way smaller servers than what Ashes has planned.

And allegedly Intrepid doesn't want grind in their game so farming stuff might be tied to particular world events or boss spawns or dungeon openings (due to node progress), which will push anyone who wants to get that farm towards the place of said farm. So there'll probably be way more friction in Ashes than there was in L2.

And then we have a shitton of "prime-time events" in the game too, which will push people to play during those times even more, which in turn will decrease the amount of free space around any given piece of content.

I might be wrong in my assumption, but so far all the design choices definitely tell me that there's a pretty high chance of high player friction on most, if not all, days.

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Oh, I attempted it a lot, but in L2 even at 3 am in bumfucknowhere there was always some nerd just grinding. But Ashes will be way more concentrated on prime-time gaming so there's higher chances that most people will see each other in the open world.

And you can give advise to "just pick another time to do what you want" because you're a time-hardcore person, but most people can't just pick their gametime willy-nilly. Especially if they're playing in a group/guild, where the shared gameplay window is even narrower.

I'll be playing Ashes for a ton of hours every day so I can dodge people as much as I want, but I'm the exception and not the rule in that regard. You are too.

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Instanced content in Ashes won't be repeatable and won't reward you with BiS stuff. Let's say there's 100 dungeons overall. If 20 of them are just one-offs with cosmetic/mid gear rewards, that means that 80 will have farmable content with varying levels of gear, that includes BiS stuff. Obviously, not all of those dungeons will be top lvl, so let's say 8 of them are (10%). If they're properly spread out throughout the world, you have 8 distinct places you can farm when you reach top lvl of your character's progress.

If the split is 7/3 - you'll only have 7 such places. To me that sounds great cause I'm used to having 3-4 places to grind, but considering that Ashes doesn't want to have gear grind, they'll need more variety of content, because all of this open world stuff will be fought over, and the less content there is the harder it'll be for people to farm anything.

So in order to have enough content for people we need enough open world dungeons. I mean, we need that if we want to keep the game from becoming yet another instanced mmo. Now there a question of how Intrepid will make that open world content interesting and difficult w/o making it instanced, but that's a problem for a later time.

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Well yeah, that's the thing they gotta prove to me, cause right now I don't see how an open world dungeon won't just be a grindable place.

If only bosses drop anything valuable, then the game might die real quick, cause all the pvers will just leave after learning that they can only farm a few bosses a day IF they're lucky enough to be the first ones to farm said bosses that day. This is assuming that bosses don't have just a 1-2h respawn timer.

But if mobs give some valuable mats - the dungeon will be grindable, even if mobs have a fairly long respawn. The dungeon itself might just be quest-based with simply a few npcs there that are tied to different quests, though I'd personally consider that a waste of physical space, if a whole damn dungeon just exists to house a few npcs.

And so far I don't think we've heard any info on how exactly Intrepid's planning on preventing grindability of their open world content. If you have some info that I've missed, I'd be very grateful if you could link it.

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There. Fixed it for you

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These 2 are contradicting statements. You can't have many big owd if you have 50% of all dungeons being instanced. There's only so many dungeons Intrepid can make for the release of the game. You can always add a shitton of instances later on because they don't take up physical space in the game. But in order to add an owd you'll have to account for how nodes are situated and leveled and how deep the dungeons go (especially if they're "HUGE in size").

Also, you can always reuse an instanced dungeon for more story. Especially considering the tech they've shown in yesterday's stream. They could easily make several versions of the same instanced dungeon that would show the passing of time throughout the story quest, w/o making several completely new dungeons.

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I mean, none of those things remove the fact that big Nodes will probably stay the same for a while. Steven has said that the cost of siege scroll will be equivalent to the approximate value of the node being sieged. So sieging a metropolis will be insanely expensive. And due to that cost, a metro might stay up for a few weeks after its advancement. And that is if anyone even wants to siege it right away, which is also a huge "will they even" question.

Even if we assume that each season change brings a huge node event and Intrepid puts seasons on a 1week timer, that's still ~6d of grinding whichever dungeons the node controls. And the events themselves might not change the dungeons either, so there's that too.

And even if literally all metro-controlled dungeons get their mobs switched with each new season, that doesn't stop the grind for anyone who's trying to be at the top of the food chain. Anything they can farm will be valuable because everything in the game is valuable. "The dungeon changed and no longer drops you bow parts for your ranger party? Well it now drops staff parts which weren't accessible before so literally every mage will want to buy them, SO KEEP GRINDING!"

So again, unless there's literal lockouts or limiters on how much one player can farm - I really don't see how Intrepid's gonna stop the game from having grinds. And if they do have those features, I'd be interested in seeing whether they want to appeal to time-hardcore players who want to do non-artisan stuff in the game all the time.

Now I'm not saying Intrepid must do any of those things or that I'll think the game's shit if they don't have a grind. I'm just curious how exactly they'll design it. And to me, an event once a day/week is definitely not enough to dilute my grind so much that I stop seeing it as grind.

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Yeah, we'll have to see how they design those dungeons

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Well, as I've somewhat stated in the grinding thread, to me "anything that can be farmed repeatedly can be grinded". If some of those owd don't have mobs at all, that to me would be a non-grindable dungeon. But I personally doubt they'll have such dungeons.

They could of course have mobs with 0 loot, just as a way of making an "npc dungeon" more fun, but I somehow doubt this one too. Though I guess this would fit the "risk vs reward" scheme, so the possibility of Ashes having this kind of dungeons is definitely higher than it having empty dungeons.

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But you can grind those mobs for money that you then use to buy what you want. And even if what you want is not sold at that moment, you can instead buy what you need so that you have more money later when you do get what you want.

And just to clarify, imo grinding is not boring. So whether I'm just killing mobs for money or doing some artisan stuff for myself - the value of the action is the same to me. The grind in this case just indicates some action that I can do for a very long period of time repeatedly. Our definitions for grind are different, so I think this clarification is important.