What might 'actually' be AoC's biggest problem

We have not received permission from Noaani to share the quoted post.

If Intrepid really intend to have "<10% pve content" then I'd say it's gonna be more about pve. Mmo pvp is usually about who has achieved more, than purely about skill. This is one of the biggest reasons why people dislike pvp in mmos.

But you can't really "achieve more" against a mob that was specifically designed around you having achieved that already. And the "<10%" difficulty would indicate that Intrepid want to create bosses that are meant to push those overachieving players to their limit.

Now there's a question of how in the living fuck Intrepid's planning on succeeding with that goal (that is if they want to keep bosses open world), but that's a whole different discussion that's probably months (if not years) out. We haven't heard a single word on this front and I'd definitely love if Intrepid fixed that.

We have not received permission from Noaani to share the quoted post.

Oh, for sure, it's all based purely on Steven's promises. And I have the same doubts as you, cause his promises definitely don't quite match up with other designs. We've discussed this before already, Steven has promised himself into a corner and I don't really know how exactly he's planning on getting out of it.

We have not received permission from AntVictus to share the quoted post.

Dumb choices in whose opinion? Pvers'? Pvpers'? Both? Neither?

He jumped on your comment because it's so vague and pointless that anyone could read it any which way.

We have not received permission from Mag7spy to share the quoted post.

I haven't been interested in games that had any type of hardcore pve content. Last time I tried following a new mmo was back when BDO was coming out. And I was mainly interested in it because it seemed like yet another "L2 successor", so I had 0 clue about its pve outside of the obvious "you gather 20 mobs and use aoes on them".

The next mmo that I'm kinda interested in is TL (well, outside of Ashes obviously) and we don't know shit about that game either, but from just the videos alone it seems like you basic "stand and shoot and maybe step to the side to avoid a mechanic"-type of pve.

The main difference between those 2 games and Ashes is that Steven went ahead and said that he wants to have super hardcore pve that would even have scaling difficulty based on your previous performance. That's the type of shit you gotta prove that you're even able to achieve.

I'd be interested to know how Lost Ark promoted itself back when it was just coming out in Korea. They seem to care about their pve difficulty so I'd assume they showed at least an encounter or two to show what kind of difficulty would be expected in the game.

And as for Ashes, we'll obviously test pve during alpha2 but I'm just curious, will the devs start laying out the tracks right before our "train" or have they already done some work on the harder pve encounters and could show off at least one mob or boss who has an above average AI or at least a complex set of abilities and moves.