Leveling the playing field in instanced PvP

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Which is as intended, as far as I understand it.

Steven's gaming history and what little of his philosophy I actually understand from checking into it, indicates that this is EXACTLY the desired outcome.

Strong single leaders that achieve it by coordination and domination over those who have less skill in that sphere. It's relatively antithetical to the design types required for eSports.

But I wasn't talking about 'top' gear. I'm just pointing out that this is very likely to be 'what Steven wants'. This is likely why the PvP Season rewards factor Caravans, Guild Wars, and the Arena rather than just the Arena.

I would, at this time, doubt that a 'mostly Arena' player would stand much chance of receiving rewards, based on this.

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

Basically?

Steven says a lot of things.

Particularly back when that was said.

You are an eSports style competitive player so your preference and outcome is not surprising. I'm not saying that Steven 'didn't know how eSports worked' when he said that, I'm moreso saying that the original concepts of the game were MUCH more 'flexible', let's say.

Or maybe not. Since they're still not particularly 'inflexible'. They could maybe have made an 'eSport' out of Ashes of Creation Apocalypse, for example.

I personally don't hold Intrepid to the wording of things they said before Alpha-1, but I'm not necessarily suggesting that you don't. The easiest thing to do would be to ask on next month's Q&A and see if they're at the point where they can give a clear answer.

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

I am opposed to pve-onlies only doing pve. The whole point of AoC taking design inspiration from AA and L2 is to prevent that. PvE will require people to PvP and all PvP, therefore, should require people to PvE. That's the PvX balance of the entire system.

The only acceptable exception to that, to me, would be the military mayor selection, but even there we have no real idea how the champion system will be set up. And from previous statements it seems like you'd have to PvE as much as you could in order to make the best champion, so even there the PvX balance is upheld.

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It will be on Intrepid to design their farming locations in such a way that lvl10s don't pvp around lvl50s. Yes, people will see each other here and there regardless of their levels, but if a lvl50 has nothing better to do than going around looking for flagged lowbies - there's something wrong with the game's design.

The only time highbies in L2 came to lowbie locations to kill someone was when two warring guilds had their lowbies interacting and it snowballed into a huge fight through the classic "ey, I've got high lvl friends! don't touch me!" argument.

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

Mostly it's because Ashes doesn't require Arenas at all.

This is a level of design semantics that I personally feel can't possibly end in anything good unless people make a serious effort to come to the same understanding of what the game is 'for' without their own preferences (not even biases) involved.

Ashes is a persistent open world MMORPG that does not need an Arena to even function.

It does, however, need owPvP to function (as described). To the point where we tell people consistently 'no, you can't take it out'.

You could take Arenas out.