What might 'actually' be AoC's biggest problem

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And yet any time I exit a node I'll be met with mobs who'll attack me for no damn reason. So Ashes is a pve-centric game, because I can't go 5 minutes w/o being attacked by an npc.

It can all be turned and twisted in any way we want it to. This is why, as much of a marketing ploy as it is, "pvx" works for me. It's just an easier way of saying "a game with mobs that has owpvp in it".

Also, even purely pve games would have economic pvp, as long as there's at least some sort of rarity on the game's resources. There's only 5 particular plants in a region? If you take all of them - you've "won the economic pvp fight against another gatherer". There's some exploratory system that rewards only frontier-lvl pioneers? You'll win the exploration pvp by being that pioneer.

Pretty much all games exist on a pvx spectrum, some are just closer to one side or the other. Ashes is definitely moving in the pvp direction, I admit that.

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I'm on the opposite side of this. To me "pvp" and "pve" are meaningless terms, when talking about the type of the game. I'd much rather prefer if everyone understood the pvx scale and judged games by where they are on that scale.

But it's way easier for the masses to fall into "black and white" mentality instead of a greyscale. And games like wow obviously didn't help with their separation of pvp and pve servers.

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The thing that could be a good identifier of how much of any given feature (pvp or pve) the game has. A fully instanced pve game with no free market would pretty much max out on the pve side of the scale.

Smth like PUBG would probably be at the pvp end, cause iirc they have no "pve" part.

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And they do that because that's where the money is.

Do you really think they're "leaning towards pve", when they have auto-battling and a pretty small skillset? And the bosses we saw in the test barely had any cool mechanic, so I wouldn't really call that a "lean" towards pve.

I hope they show and have much better pve in the rest of the game's world, just for the game's sake, even if I don't get to experience it (fuck amazon btw )

NiKr wrote: »

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I'm on the opposite side of this. To me "pvp" and "pve" are meaningless terms, when talking about the type of the game. I'd much rather prefer if everyone understood the pvx scale and judged games by where they are on that scale.

But it's way easier for the masses to fall into "black and white" mentality instead of a greyscale. And games like wow obviously didn't help with their separation of pvp and pve servers.

The simple problem with the scale is... I don't know a game type where this comes up other than Fighting games actually because no other set of players is masochistic/foolish enough to put up with it...

The fighting game genre is full of what we who partake in it like to call 'One Touch' or "Touch of Death" games. You may have heard of the term.

Basically a sufficiently skilled opponent lands one hit and then uses their combo skill to kill you from there, the entirety of the round is 'avoiding that one hit'. Games can be ranked on a scale of how 'interactive' they are based on this.

But there's also some other terms that I won't get into that rely on that not being true. This is the way in which some things are similar. BDO for example is terrible because technically, it has very little PvP AND very little PvE until a very specific point in endgame/Node Wars.

Your PvP opponent touches you and if they have enough skill, whether or not you die is random. Your PvE opponents, if you have enough skill, could theoretically never touch you.

You can say 'well it has PvE and it has PvP so it's on the scale' but it really isn't either except for a very small subset of situations, and those are the situations in which we judge it, right?

I don't know what PvP games (not just MMOs) you've played seriously other than Lineage, but for some people, trying to explain what I just did above ends up sounding like a black and white thing. The PvX term is meaningless because it tries to explain a thing that theoretically exists but that requires a bunch of assumptions to describe.

PvX can absolutely exist, but the way the term is used as we experience Ashes now is about as meaningful as someone saying that DragonBall FighterZ is a 'Strategic Fighting Game'. You can't say it isn't because there is a Strategy (for most people it is 'choose a team with a Touch of Death combo and practice it and then use it when your opponent makes a mistake', preferably learn more than one) but then another entire subset of people that play a different 'part' of the genre will absolutely not accept 'Strategic Fighting Game' as a term and would end up arguing about it the same way we do.

PvX only has meaning in the context of being able to define both the PvP general situation and the PvE general situation. If either is underdefined, some people are going to say 'the game doesn't have that'. And since PvX is supposed to be the blend, the same thing happens. If either is underdefined, the game 'is the other one'.

I'm just saying that it might actually be that 'the masses' actually have enough experience to say 'Ashes is PvP' or 'Ashes isn't PvX' not because they're dismissing the concept, but because the concept doesn't resonate with the word used as yet. So every time we say 'this game is PvX' it just rings hollow.

Azherae wrote: »

I don't know what PvP games (not just MMOs) you've played seriously other than Lineage, but for some people, trying to explain what I just did above ends up sounding like a black and white thing. The PvX term is meaningless because it tries to explain a thing that theoretically exists but that requires a bunch of assumptions to describe.

In other words, instead of a scale we need a dome! We make that shit 3d and put additional points on it, like market gameplay, artisanry, etc. Which would also go from "completely secluded and self-reliant" to "pretty much pvp by using money or time".

My other biggest pvp game would be dota2. A 1.5k hours there. I haven't played LoL, but from what I've heard/seen of it, it seems like a way more "pve" game than dota. So on the scale it would be closer to that. And on the dome it would also take up less space cause afaik dota has more gameplay features.

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I used those other games as an example because there's no "true pvp" mmo out there afaik. Which imo is already a sign of the whole genre's lean towards pve, as a whole.

But I get your point.