Power Progression (To Infinity and Beyond?)

Logarithmic Stop&Go, but with parallel x1.1 expansions rather than continuous x2 ones. (colors are the expansions)


Each expansion would give an alternative way to get to the 90th percentile of power, while also pushing the ceiling of power by ~10%. And those alternative ways will be faster than the previous versions, but staggered by 1 tier, so if the max tier in Update 1 is 5 then in Update 2 all gear up to tier 4 will get an faster alternative way of acquisition and Upd2 would add a tier 6.

With overenchantment the previous top tier would be more powerful than the basic max tier of the next expansion, but OE would obviously take huge amounts of money/resources and would require constant heavy upkeep.

Imo, this way all the previous top content would still remain valuable, because in time people would just start OEing older gear (because more and more people would be able to clear it, due to higher tiers of gear), which would be on par with newest shit, but would be more available than the stuff that comes from the hardest most contested bosses around. It worked this way in L2 and I liked it quite a bit

edit: oh, also, you can keep adding and removing loot tiers from previous bosses to keep them even more relevant, if you want. I'm sure the pve side of the playerbase would complain so I doubt Intrepid would do it, but I'd be fine with that.

I like none of these, because I'm probably not primarily an MMORPG player in the same way, but here goes.

I'll take 'role based tradeoffs' whenever I can.

Since I always view power as directly relative to whatever it is you're supposed to be fighting at that 'level' and never have a reason to 'go back to things below that level to fight them with more power', only 'new cooler abilities'...

I CAN accept a game where I am just making tradeoffs the whole time. For some games, this IS what you do as soon as the leveling phase is over anyway, and many such games, once the game is decently understood, just let you speedrun or even skip leveling up entirely.

There's a tendency in those games to simply treat any part of leveling as just 'the tutorial', or almost to the end of that process, anyway. If the game is telling me a story in which my character is growing in strength, then I appreciate it. Otherwise I sort of agree with this assessment.

This isn't to say that I don't like the idea of leveling up, but I view it as 'experiencing a game', as in, 'real experience'. I don't want to fight the same 3 mob types for 50 levels because it's the fastest way to get to the 50th level to then 'do real stuff'.

I want 'fighting each mob' to be a different experience, and each time I learn to fight a new one I get stronger as a player overall, or I refine my understanding of my role or something I like to do.

Therefore based on all that rambling...

I'll take asymptotic, I think. Unsurprising given the sorts of games I play/build. But I don't care, and I think that whatever most MMO players value the most, or whatever makes the game most healthy for the style of playerbase it has, should be the one used.

As for what I actually EXPECT from Ashes... peaks and valleys. You get good gear, you eventually have to stop using it because it's too hard to repair because the Metro that unlocked the dungeon that let you have that gear got razed and now the dungeon and hence the drop for repairing the gear is gone and you earn new gear.

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The ceiling goes up while the players with old gear stay the same, so effectively those players are now "weaker". But weaker only when compared to a person who's gonna be the first one to get a full BiS set of newest top tier of gear.

What I meant by the 90th percentile is that any new player would be able to farm up to the previous top tier of gear faster because there would now be a different way to do it.

Here's an example.

• In update 1 there's 5 tiers of gear representing 20% of "power" each
• there's however many ways to get any given tier. Let's say there's 3 for each one except the top one (the legendaries)
• in update 2 there's now 6 tiers of gear, with the first 5 tiers representing 18% and the 6th representing 20%, adding up to "110%" as compared to the first update
• tiers 1-4 now have 5 ways to acquire them, with the 2 new ones being a bit faster
• repeat these steps in each expansion

By "tiers" I mean "whatever you can wear at particular stages of the leveling process". So, say, in update 1 at lvl30 you had a quest that would give you gear, a few bosses that would drop it directly and mats for crafting, and several mob locations who would drop mats at low chances.

In update 2 you'd have those 3 previous ways to get gear and would now, not only have more gear choice overall at your level, but also 2 new ways of getting it. One could be tied to your profession and another to religion or some other social organization. Time-wise these would take a bit less effort than the first 3 methods.

With proper balancing (maybe even mid-expansion one), you could change those acquisition timers around. The mobs that drop mats could become more plentiful for a while or the bosses could drop more full items, or the quest could get an additional reward to entice its completion.

Azherae wrote: »

As for what I actually EXPECT from Ashes... peaks and valleys. You get good gear, you eventually have to stop using it because it's too hard to repair because the Metro that unlocked the dungeon that let you have that gear got razed and now the dungeon and hence the drop for repairing the gear is gone and you earn new gear.

But wouldn't this in theory mean that you'd need to go back to some previous stage of farming? Or do you think that there'll be some stage of progress that'll be almost universal across all node lvls, where you'd be able to just buy repair mats for your older gear?

Cause, if we assume that best (or at least great) gear requires a few weeks (if not months) of farming and then needs constant upkeep to sustain itself - you'd be on a constant treadmill of farming any and all versions of best gear that's in the game. Mainly because you never know when what you said might happen.

If you lived in a metro and managed to farm its dungeon and some other related bosses to get a full set of great gear - when the metro falls your gear will be fucked. And knowing that, you'd have to either stock up on repair mats for your previous (not so great) gear set or just go to another metro and start farming shit there, in hopes of that metro not falling if yours does.

And that would also take you several weeks. And you'd now be dependent on 2 metros. Well, that is if you even can farm that metro, cause it obviously has its own top bois who're farming its locations.

All of this is definitely up my alley, mainly because I'm used to farming the same stuff over and over, but, if I understood you correctly, you'd dislike this kind of system because it might make you fight the same or even lower lvl mobs again and again.

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But that's my point. To me it'd be completely fine to just raise the difficulty of the same old bosses and change their loot to the newer gear. But I'd assume that pvers would complain about the repeated content.

L2 had boss drops in later updates that were exact same as they had been at game's release (at least afaik). And the bosses themselves didn't change all that much either. And as Azherae pointed out, some people wouldn't want to keep fighting the same old mobs time and time again just to farm some piece of gear.

NiKr wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

As for what I actually EXPECT from Ashes... peaks and valleys. You get good gear, you eventually have to stop using it because it's too hard to repair because the Metro that unlocked the dungeon that let you have that gear got razed and now the dungeon and hence the drop for repairing the gear is gone and you earn new gear.

But wouldn't this in theory mean that you'd need to go back to some previous stage of farming? Or do you think that there'll be some stage of progress that'll be almost universal across all node lvls, where you'd be able to just buy repair mats for your older gear?

Cause, if we assume that best (or at least great) gear requires a few weeks (if not months) of farming and then needs constant upkeep to sustain itself - you'd be on a constant treadmill of farming any and all versions of best gear that's in the game. Mainly because you never know when what you said might happen.

If you lived in a metro and managed to farm its dungeon and some other related bosses to get a full set of great gear - when the metro falls your gear will be fucked. And knowing that, you'd have to either stock up on repair mats for your previous (not so great) gear set or just go to another metro and start farming shit there, in hopes of that metro not falling if yours does.

And that would also take you several weeks. And you'd now be dependent on 2 metros. Well, that is if you even can farm that metro, cause it obviously has its own top bois who're farming its locations.

All of this is definitely up my alley, mainly because I'm used to farming the same stuff over and over, but, if I understood you correctly, you'd dislike this kind of system because it might make you fight the same or even lower lvl mobs again and again.

I think my point didn't come across correctly if this is what it sounds like.

So let's see if that's true.

1. I don't mind fighting the same mobs, I mind 'the game making me overleveled so that the fun and challenge of fighting them is gone' (this applies only to PvE games with real challenges)
2. I would expect that I would simply do what I do in BDO. I don't actually keep my progression in that game with any seriousness. I farm some area for a while and when I want to go back to a lower level one, I attempt to enhance gear. It invariably fails and weakens me until I feel like enchanting it up again.

Except that in this form, I wouldn't lose the gear, I would still have it IF something hard appeared that required it. I would just never use it outside of that situation.

I just EXPECT that Ashes' design will FORCE some people to play more like I do now, which will make it 'more acceptable', which will also mean more people are willing to do it and the balance of the game won't be based around 'top level players with their perpetually rising strength'.

You might ask 'why don't I just fight things with less gear on'. In some games, your abilities/muscle memory/cooldowns are tied to gear buffs and those things are part of specialization moreso than 'raw power'. But in some cases that IS what I do. My Rathalos/Rathian Hunting sets in MHW are both downgrades. One for when there's another actually dangerous Monster around just in case, and another that is just gauntlets and no other armor (the expansion made this unnecessary by giving me stronger versions of them to fight so I just use the other set all the time now).

tl;dr if I have to go back to a previous farming spot but I also have to use roughly the same gear that I used then, then I'm happy, not sad.

Azherae wrote: »

tl;dr if I have to go back to a previous farming spot but I also have to use roughly the same gear that I used then, then I'm happy, not sad.

Ok, then it was just a misunderstanding on my part.

Then I hope the masses are ok with regrinding the same spots. Though considering the entirety of the mmo genre, I don't think there's been a single game that didn't have you do that. Maybe EQ2 is close, but from what I understood from Noaani's posts, there you just grinded the failed attempts at bosses rather than just beat the boss again and again.

In other words, as long as the content itself is fun, people will most likely not mind.