Leveling the playing field in instanced PvP

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With the suggested methodology for achieving it though, you actually do NOT.

The communities do not often blend much more than they might have even if you were playing separate GAMES.

The money spent then has to be assigned to the person whose job it is to sit and pore over the balance spreadsheet for months.

The content contribution is mostly only viewership of a game mode that doesn't affect the ingame much other than to throw more people in whose only goal is to be boosted to the 'competitive' level.

You've already said explicitly that in terms of the 'Persistent MMO population' part, you intend to add basically nothing personally.

It's certainly not impossible, but as I understand the points made so FAR, Dolyem's suggestion would do a BETTER job of all the things you said, than reducing the barriers to entry for Ashes' Arenas.

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I fail to see the relevance, that works that way because of what League IS.

Ashes does not benefit that much from a situation like that.

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

I have so many many disagreements with your stance and perception here that I feel it would be futile to even engage.

But you are, from my data, a serious Twitch Streamer (unless you are somehow unrelated to the streamer of the same name) which means you have probably done at least as much study on how this works and the marketing side of it as myself and my team have, so I doubt either of us will change their conclusions based on a forum conversation.

I can only offer to Intrepid, if they are tracking/parsing this thread:

I am one of your other 'eSports' players. I don't agree with the reasonings given here for the following reasons which I am not going to bother backing up:

1. The success of a game as an eSport is related more to team-based play and strong matchmaking that is core to the main game experience, than it is to the quality of the game in question, be it fun or competitive nature.
2. The success of a game's streaming is almost entirely personality based rather than gameplay based for games that do not have a very low skill ceiling.
3. The prize pools of games come primarily from sponsorships, often from the company that runs the game, itself, because it is a good use of their marketing/advertising budget.
4. Ashes does not benefit from influx of players with certain goals as a generality, while it might be interesting once or twice, the WAY it is likely to destabilize Verra and its economies would probably frustrate more longstanding players, or the incoming, in ways that would lead to negative attention.
5. The Arena mode taking a large space in the 'ranking' aspect of Ashes due to eSports has the potential to introduce incentive structures within the game that Intrepid does not control themselves in ANY WAY, leading to conflicts if any metrics-driven game design is used, or, if not, it will necessitate discarding the metrics themselves.
6. Assuming that the goal is consistent subs and players, not just 'more money', lowering the barriers of entry to the Arena mode, even with excellent MMR, would require a large increase in metrics and balance related staff over what is LIKELY currently planned/available (I am basing this on my understanding of the progress of combat, basically if you had the numbers of staff I'm thinking of for doing this, combat would be done, so I must assume you don't)

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As an example of this from L2, during the arena (olympiad) period in the last few days of each month (5h every evening) most high lvl locations would be half empty because most players that could farm those locations would be grinding the arena in hopes of getting more points than their enemies.

And with L2's arena everyone still had to farm mobs and bosses to have the gear required to succeed in arena pvp. If they could just go fight in the arena w/o playing the game - all those locations would always be empty. Hell, I know that for sure because I've played on private servers that provided this exact setup. Players would get the gear for free and would not play the game itself. And the whole server was worse for it.

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To be clear, just in case, I am not 1000% against this idea.

I believe Intrepid intends for us to only be able to equip certain gear after reaching a certain level. So let's SAY for level 40 I could only wear level 38 gear, and I can't get new gear until level 43.

Then I'd want them to try to balance MOST of the level 40-ish gear to be similar (or rather, to just have a good balance equation for it all).

Then I would want them to have a 'level 40 bracket' for Arenas.

My point is that I don't think they would have to equalize anything extra gear-wise for this.

If you're only talking about level 50, that's a different matter, I have multiple opinions on gear balance for 'endgame', but they'd probably be even less popular than yours because they would somewhat apply to the whole game.

I think this might lead to a MORE interesting situation, where there are some players that have 'Alts for the level 40 bracket'. In fact, if I had to try to arrange a tournament scene in Ashes, this would be the first place I'd start. So really, I just have even more draconian solutions to the problem than even you are suggesting.

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I think the main point here is that those arenas still require you to play the game if you want to be anywhere near successful in them. You have to participate in the open world activities for a long time before spending a bit of time in the arena. And if you stop spending time in the open world - the ones who still do will outpace you.

Equalized gear that's just given out to people would completely remove that interaction.

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WoW's pve is completely instanced (at least the one that matters) as is its pvp. So neither of them influence each other in any way, which is why it works somewhat fine there. WoW also has a full separation of pvp and pve gear, so two completely different paths of acquiring your gear is also fine. Ashes will mostly have open world content and its gear won't be separated, which is why so many people here are vehemently against the suggestion of pretty much copying WoW's (or GW2's) design.

As has been said multiple times, this suggestion just doesn't work with what Steven is trying to create.

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Well, for that you probably have to put in 400+ hours anyway.

I can see a reasoning for 'The person with 1000 hours shouldn't beat the person with 400 hours', but still.

EDIT: @Gui10 - are you also suggesting that players who are 'only' level 47 get boosted to level 50 when competing in the arena modes?

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And I'm sure that RIOT will try to target exactly those short attention span teens instead of the old guard that Steven's trying to attract. "Make mmos great again" implies that the person who'd want to play an mmo with that slogan knows how the mmos were back in the day, which, by default, removes anyone younger than 20 (if not even 25).

And if Ashes manages to become a good game, all those current teens will grow out of their hyper states and might check out something slower, just as FF14 has dominated the mmo genre in the recent years. But Ashes can only survive that long if it keeps its vision and its core target audience to support it through the hard years. Making a whole different game and then spending resources on a separate balancing development for it doesn't seem like a smart idea right now.

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I see.

Then definitely it would just be about the same in my opinion, and if I wanted to make Arenas in Ashes a thing of this type, I would just set everything to level 40.

This solves three problems.

1. Absolute endgame gear doesn't need to be balanced for the Arena.
2. Very powerful class skills that are obtained near the game's end or through min-maxing can be balanced for that bracket without worrying about the endgame FoTM balance.
3. Players do not need to do what I PERSONALLY expect to be 45% of the leveling, in order to compete.

I don't have an opinion on whether or not 'the level 40 Arena should provide gear or just cap the options'.

If the intention is to give people the feelings you're mentioning, I don't see a reason why they need to reach 'actual max level' to do it.