Supporting PvE Raiders in Ashes

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In the scenario of "only one dude picks up/gets all the loot from the boss", your entire guild flagging up doesn't matter. Because the loot is on one person. And they'll flag up just to decrease the amount of loot that drops. So the amount the attackers would get would be even smaller than if they were to PK this looter.

Also, I hope you're not implying that boss would give every raider a piece of their own personal loot and I hope you're not implying that the "valuable" loot would be whatever the raiders took with them to the raid, cause both of those things are unrealistic to me.

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This works against your own desire for instances though. I guild wars do have this mechanic, then it's way more convenient for the pvp guild to let the pvers farm the boss (even in the cage design) and then not only kill them for fun afterwards, but also get their entire loot through the war.

I know that AoC's war is more goal-based, but Steven said that pvp will be free throughout the entire war, so to me it's super obvious that he still wants us to fight our enemies at all times. Of course your guild can go for the deccer's goals, but the deccers would've already accounted for that, because that's part of the risk/reward equation in this situation. And if they still decced you - they're sure they can handle you.

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And to me "running" being the biggest part of my gameplay is horrid. I want gameplay to come to me, while I'm constantly busy with the other part of gameplay.

Which is why I proposed the growing difficulty rooms idea, combined with "this spot is for this gear mats, so whoever wants them gotta fight for them".

Steven seems to be closer to my preference, so we'll see whether the other devs you keep talking about can convince him that his preference is ass.

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I'm sure that's part of it, but unless all gear/mats can be dropped from all mobs in the game - people will be farming the same source of their mats or simply the most money-valuable location in the game.

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Again though, I'd expect tower floors to have different mat drops or money value per kill. And even if they get reshuffled every day - you're still grinding the same spot for that day, which is my point.

Unless every damn mob respawn changes their loot/money, but then I don't really know who'd like that kind of design, cause it's unstable as fuck.

And if the entire tower provides the same loot - I guess that's fine, but then we have econ issues of "there's several hundreds people filling the market with these items", so we'd either need suuuuper low drop rates or suuuuper high mat requirements in crafting. And I'm sure people would hate either approach.

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Yes, this is literally L2 approach to dungeon design. One of the reasons I got interested in the game in the first place

But you do realize that this means that rooms won't be as dynamic as you want. So my assumption that high lvl players will be grinding the same room or two deep in the dungeon still stands (again, unless drops change every spawn or at least hour).

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Are we talking about that example of yours of moving through a huge single dungeon or about real world travel?

Cause moving within one dungeon might have less running time than farming time, but then we go back to the discussion of "should every point have its own instance or should it be boss/named mobs in open world"? Cause the former is against what Steven wants and the latter doesn't work in a full server, because those rooms will be farmed already and you won't have your content (in the way you want).

And moving across the entire world will be taking up way more time than the, supposed, ~10min per boss-like encounter in one place. Though again, this still requires an instance in each place, which then is also repeatable, so that you have this kind of content every day. And we're once again back to "barely any instances in the game" not matching to this approach.

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Ok, people wanna run around, good for their health. What would they be running towards? Cause as I said, it's either all instances or they'll simply won't have the content that you're arguing for, because that content will be farmed by someone who just so happened to be closer to it or was simply already waiting for it.

L2 had some general open world bosses (Named mobs by your standards) who had relatively ok drops. Their respawns were known by several guilds and controlled to their best ability by them as well. So if you tried to just run around between those bosses, even if you did know their respawn - you might've at best gotten a single one per day (they were on a daily respawn), because everyone one else was already killed by people who chose to farm those first or were simply there just a few minutes before you. And don't forget that L2 had teleportation.

And that was true even on barely filled servers. AoC's full servers would kill such bosses even quicker. So you'd ultimately just come back to the "people don't have content to do all the time because they gotta fight over it first" (and that's if they are in the right place at the right time in the first time).

My point is, running around doesn't work in an open world game, because most of the time someone will have already been there before you. If bosses respawn so quick that anyone at any point can come and farm one - why would others even move, if they already have a boss with their preferred loot table in one place respawning constantly.

And if it's instances for every damn boss, just so that people have content every day (and for any gear) - that's a different game.

NiKr wrote: »

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Ok, people wanna run around, good for their health. What would they be running towards? Cause as I said, it's either all instances or they'll simply won't have the content that you're arguing for, because that content will be farmed by someone who just so happened to be closer to it or was simply already waiting for it.

L2 had some general open world bosses (Named mobs by your standards) who had relatively ok drops. Their respawns were known by several guilds and controlled to their best ability by them as well. So if you tried to just run around between those bosses, even if you did know their respawn - you might've at best gotten a single one per day (they were on a daily respawn), because everyone one else was already killed by people who chose to farm those first or were simply there just a few minutes before you. And don't forget that L2 had teleportation.

And that was true even on barely filled servers. AoC's full servers would kill such bosses even quicker. So you'd ultimately just come back to the "people don't have content to do all the time because they gotta fight over it first" (and that's if they are in the right place at the right time in the first time).

My point is, running around doesn't work in an open world game, because most of the time someone will have already been there before you. If bosses respawn so quick that anyone at any point can come and farm one - why would others even move, if they already have a boss with their preferred loot table in one place respawning constantly.

And if it's instances for every damn boss, just so that people have content every day (and for any gear) - that's a different game.

Again, lottery pops.

Respawn times don't matter in that case except for the minimums.

Competition, clashing, drama, all happen. Works fine.

Azherae wrote: »

Again, lottery pops.

Yes, which is exactly why I say that sitting in one place has a higher chance of popping that lottery in your favor. Or the alternative is having all your members stand outside of dungeon rooms and just watching people farm them, until a boss pops and then everyone else in the party rushes towards that room, while the watcher tries to fuck up the farm in an unflagged way.

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And this is where we come to the Steven's "every reward gotta have risk in it". If every person has their own piece of content - there's 0 risk. There's no point in fighting someone else, when you have your own stuff to farm.

And on top of that I gotta come back to loot table distribution. Do you expect all bosses within a dungeon to have the same loot table or do you expect them to vary?

Because if these respawning bosses are randomized (with different loot tables) across all top lvl rooms in a dungeon - the only viable way of getting exactly what you want is to have your party members ONLY run around the dungeon looking for the boss your party wants to get. There's no point in farming random useless bosses. I guess if an entire guild takes over part of the dungeon it'd be fine, but then why even run around, cause your guild is already farming any potential spawn spot.

I'm also discussing this from yet another L2 experience. Some L2 servers had "Champion" mobs. It was literally just the same mob but with x10 or x50 drop rates and stat values (atk was a bit lower so as to not oneshot people). You know what was the optimal thing to do, if the dungeon had any people in it? Running around and waiting for someone else to spawn it.

So we're back again to "my optimal gameplay is running around". And if there's not that many people in the dungeon (or it just so happens to have so many damn rooms that even a full server can't fill them up) - then I have a question.

In this pop lottery, do rooms have their own separate chances to spawn a boss or is the the dungeon overall that has a chance to spawn a boss in any given room when a mob dies (let's say that chance applies separately to room lvls, so early room with lvl45 mobs would have their own chance, and rooms with lvl50 mobs theirs)?

Cause if it's a dungeon-wide thing - would it not be more optimal to just farm as many mobs in your own room as possible, because that increases your chances of popping a boss? This also brings up a question of "what is your expected plain mob respawn value", cause it seems to me that you expect them to have smth like 5min respawns, at which point it'd be indeed better to run around, but then the dungeon will definitely not have enough content.

If the spawn chance is room-specific, then does it go down or up when you kill a mob, or is it always neutral? What happens when the boss does spawn. Does the room go on cooldown and you have to move? Cause if that's the case then it is still more optimal to sit in one room and kill until a boss spawns and move after that, but with randomized spawns you might be farming that room for hours.

Though again, none of this addresses the loot tables. So to me this just seems like "run around, farm random mobs in hopes that you'll be able to sell/trade their loot for the thing that you want" instead of just "I have a plan to get this and I'm gonna work towards it". And I find THAT kind of design horrid as fuck. I don't want to have random gameplay. I'm more than fine with randomized stats on bosses or environmental effects or whatever, but playing w/o a plan is the shittiest kind of gameplay to me.

So if there's any kind of feedback Intrepid would get from this wall of text it's this: PLEASE DON'T GIVE US RANDOM GAMEPLAY.

So, NiKr, the problem you're having here is one that I'm familiar with, from people who like thinking about game design.

Your mind moved from thinking about options to thinking about optimals. But good design doesn't work like that. You design things so that they are optimal for different people. The lottery pop works because the people who want X item, go there for that.

The people who want CONTENT, wander around. When they get to the room with the person who wants the ITEM, they have a social interaction of some kind, to benefit everyone (hopefully). Their goals are not the same. But some systems don't support more options.

This is the largest flaw I've always noted from anything you told me from L2 and I see it creeping into Ashes at every turn. As Dygz says, Steven's design philosophy of 'Risk vs Reward', which relies heavily on the risk existing because of conflict, unnecessarily opposes options.

The Lottery Pop doesn't result in entlrely random gameplay. You're just patmat optimizing subconsciously. The social dynamics around these systems are complex and 'deep', and rather fun, for different mentalities of people. Even the 'I want my thing and I'm gonna push for hours and hours for it and kill whoever comes!' people still get to experience what they want if they know how to have certain social interactions.

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So why move then?

Azherae wrote: »

The Lottery Pop doesn't result in entlrely random gameplay. You're just patmat optimizing subconsciously. The social dynamics around these systems are complex and 'deep', and rather fun, for different mentalities of people. Even the 'I want my thing and I'm gonna push for hours and hours for it and kill whoever comes!' people still get to experience what they want if they know how to have certain social interactions.

So then if we have a non-randomized boss spawner together with mob spawns - I can just farm one spot and get what I want sooner or later, while Noaani runs around doing his running around. So the only thing that's gotta be added to Ashes is a chance to spawn a Boss/Named Mob and we seemingly satisfy everyone

Still got no damn clue why people would need to run around in that design, but I guess that's beside the point already.

p.s. Spent 10h playing AC6. Got to the Convergence boss and spent 3.5 hours on it, but fucking beat it with that build (same type of weapons but of higher tier) Dunno if that's close to the end of the game, but I'm done for today. Will probably move onto NG+ tomorrow.

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Another question for this, though it mostly relates to the crafting part, but it's kinda in the context of pvx, which is in the context of trying to appeal to raiders.

Should weapons have any specific mob mats or just "random bone fits any weapon that requires a bone, and any mob drops a bone (except slime or smth)"?

Cause both of those quotes imply to me that you don't want specific mats (unless they come from epic bosses or smth). I feel like this would play a pretty big part in how much pvxness there is in the game.

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I'll stick to me opinion for now, until Intrepid can show us 10 50-room dungeons under a single metro. Because w/o that your moving simply doesn't work in a full server. You miiight get a room or two, though even that depends on how precise the mob spawn timers are, cause I got an example for super precise mob spawns in L2 as well

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I think I asked this before, but I'm not sure I remember the answer correctly. How many rooms did EQ2's dungeons have and how many groups wanted to farm stuff in that dungeon at any given time?

Because again, what you're saying only works if there's more mobs than people. Which is why I said that I'm gonna wait till Intrepid shows us so many damn dungeon rooms that even a full server wouldn't be able to fill them up. Right now I simply do not believe they will accomplish that.