PvP aspect and the likely effect to casual players

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And yet there's countless Lineage 2 private servers, with at least a few hundred to a few thousand players on each, playing 2007-2010 versions of the game. And they play it because they enjoy the pvp and the community.

Oh and L2 is a pvx game, so Intrepid ain't inventing anything new there. It's just that L2's pve is kinda trash, but pretty much anything you do in L2 is tied to pve, and usually to do that pve you gotta go through pvp, hence PvX.

Now obviously those player numbers are not WoW/FF14-sized, but L2 is also a game from 2003 and is very very grindy so of course not that many people would want to play it. Ashes aims to have no grind (I'll believe that when I see that) and have a ton of casual-friendly stuff in the game, so I'd assume it'll have a few hundred thousand players, which in theory should be enough to sustain future development.

But if the idea of a community-based/led game is not interesting to you, I'd suggest waiting a few months after the release and seeing if by that point the game is still alive and whether it has something to offer you outside of purely community gameplay.

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Nah, it was just an example of a pvx game based around purely community interaction that's still played even w/o any new content. I'm not saying it's successful, just saying that these kinds of games are viable too (with EVE being another example).

I haven't played EQ and haven't really researched anything about it. Has it changed a lot through its existence? Cause L2 died exactly because NCsoft not only disregarded their core playerbase by implementing a shitton of changes that people disliked, which led to "classic" private servers. And even when they implemented their own classic servers, they changed so much stuff in it and added a fucking autofarming function.

I'm assuming EQ didn't do any of that, which is why it's still as successful as it is.

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I definitely agree, but I see one super obvious problem in Ashes case. Most of its pve will be done through/after/before pvp. And no matter how good that pve is, if all the pvers hate pvp so much that they're ready to leave the game - they'll leave Ashes. L2's epic boss rooms were a semi-instance (the doors to them would open for some period of time and anyone could come in, but, once they closed, those who were inside had to beat the boss. If they wiped completely, the doors would open up again a bit later) and the game still died, as you said (though I do believe it wasn't due to pvp, but that's beside the point).

And from what I've seen AoC's bosses won't even have that kind of semi-instance (unless it gets added, which I think it might), so it'll be even harder to farm/defend them. And if we look at the successful examples you gave, all of them (afaik) let their players to just pve to their heart's content.

In other words, unless Intrepid completely change their core designs, Ashes won't survive for 10 years.

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And I hope Ashes manages to appeal to all of those people.

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And they also said that those 20% would probably be mainly story-related. And even outside of story-based instances, they won't be repeatable nor would they give BiS gear, so most wow/ff14 players would find themselves fighting other people for their gear. And afaik WoW went away from open world bosses exactly because they were too difficult to farm on pvp servers. And considering Steven's promises of "only 1% of players will be able to clear some content", I'd assume the pvp would only make that content near-impossible.

Now I'm wrong and Intrepid manages to make a game that appeals to both sides of the pvx spectrum and a ton of people play the game and we all live happily ever after, but just as you said, pvp mmos usually die. And they die quite fast.

I haven't read up on Wildstar, but from what I've heard it was a super high lvl pve game, yet you bundled it with the pvp crowd of dead games in your example. Did Wildstar have open world bosses with pvp for them or was it just the difficulty of content that led to its death? Cause both of those are supposedly present in Ashes, which only gives me more reasons to worry about the game's future.

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Yeah, that mechanic is also very interesting to me cause it will either be somewhat useless cause it's in an instanced dungeon that doesn't give BiS (unless they go back on that statement) or it's an impossible pvx fiesta that gets abused by all sides of the conflict.

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I see.

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Yeah, I hope they can manage to develop it in the way the want and not give in to the obvious solution of "we'll just separate the pvpers and the pvers with instances". Though I really dunno how they can realistically do that.

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The only thing that worries me is the 2nd reference from this page . And that's september of 2021, so pretty close to the current stage of development (with a more recent reference talking about the no-BiS stuff). And Steven says that those instances are not something to farm repeatedly, so how exactly would those pve players have enough non-pvp content to enjoy the game?

If we assume one big instance per metro (with some pre-top gear as a one-time reward), there'll be 5 dungeons that top lvl people can do once as non-pvp content. And that's assuming that Intrepid somehow manages to create, at least, 4 different great dungeon (one per node type) on top of all the open world stuff they'd need to make. Otherwise you risk having same instanced dungeons with same bosses.

But then would that be enough content to do? Yes, leveling will be a big part of the game so the endgame of Ashes probably won't be as big as it is in smth like Lost Ark, where you get to the top lvl within a day and then just do random shit and grind instances for the evergrowing gear score.

But in the long run, the first few months of leveling will be nothing compared to years of playing at the top lvl (that is if the game survives that long). And with only a few one-off instances to clear, will people be satisfied with only pvp-based and purely artisanry-based stuff left over? I know I will because I love pvp way more than pve, but what about the potential hundreds of thousands of people that are more interested in pve.

I guess expansions could somewhat solve that issue, but then we get another problem. How do you use your studio's assets/developers? Do you go all-out on one-off instances or do you instead spend most of your time on the repeatable open world bosses that should not only be difficult and hard on their own, but also include the possibility of pvp happening around them within their design so that their farm is not completely impossible?

In other words, I really can't see too many pve people enjoying the game for too long. I understand that your EQ2 experience tells you otherwise, but I personally haven't heard of any newer gamers even talk about EQ(2), let alone playing it. So my theory is that the oldschoolers who played it from the early days are the ones who're still playing and enjoying its design. Same as with L2, just on a bigger scale because EQ itself was way more popular in the west. But from everything that I see online I'm really not sure that a lot of current gamers will enjoy Ashes in its current design.

Now, we obviously don't know if that design will even stay the same until release, and I might be completely wrong with my assessment of the current gamers, but right now I'd rather prepare myself for disappointment of either development (design completely changing or the game dying with the current one) than huff copium that it survives and stays relatively successful w/o ever going back on their core principles.

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There's a question of chicken and egg there. Was it the companies that screwed up those games with those "features" or was it the pvp games that required those "features" to survive on the market for longer than a month?

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Yeah, I bet pvpers will spend a lot of time/resources removing their PK counts just so they can PK an extra few people during some upcoming raid just to secure their farm. We did that in L2 even though the penalty there is nowhere near AoC's. No one will care about immediate corruption penalties during the raid because they don't influence pve, so yeah, people will be pvp/pk-ing a ton around any BiS farm locations/mobs/bosses.

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Even before AA, Lineage 2 shifted from sub model to a f2p with a ton of p2w shit, back in the day when WoW still sold like hotcakes and kept the sub. And I guess it made NCsoft so much money that any and all korean companies just decided to have that as a default. And acceptance of p2w shit in that culture also didn't help. At least from what I've heard recently, koreans are trying to push against p2w stuff, so maybe it'll at least reduce in the next few years.

And I really hope that Ashes succeeds with their monetization model and it'll show other companies that it can be done (though obviously execs won't care about that shit cause they just always want more).