Leveling the playing field in instanced PvP

Azherae wrote: »

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.

Yep, I'd be totally fine with this, though I'd definitely prefer if the gear was just capped and not given out for free. I could definitely see a rent/trade mechanic, where you could replace your normal gear for some other set just for a fight. This way people could still experiment with builds w/o just grinding lowbie mobs whom players would outgrow fairly fast.

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I fear you have ended up in that place in an 'argument' where the only person who understands the purpose of your own point is yourself.

Ashes would have to do work to make eSports happen.

None of US necessarily want it to happen. None of us (as far as I can see) care if Intrepid wants it to happen or tries to make it happen.

Some of us aren't even sure that INTREPID wants to make it happen.

We're just not the Target Audience for your points in the first place, however well-presented your overall 'case' manages to be.

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There is literally no problem. You are trying to create one where there is none. You want to force esports onto a game that has nothing to do with esports and then you claim that the game will die off if it doesn't do what you want it to do, even though devs have said from the start that they are not making the game into an esport.

I don't have the stats, but I'm fairly sure that quite the majority of mmo twitch viewers would be in that 25-34 group, which is exactly the people I mentioned. And if Ashes becomes a good MMORPG , that audience will watch the game, boost its viewers on twitch which could then attract even more people to the game even outside of that TA. I'm fairly sure that's what happened to FF14 (outside of pure word of mouth).

If by some chance the final version of Ashes can support an esport scene within the game w/o completely ruining the game in the process, I'm sure that Steven will do good on his promise and support that scene. But forcing esports onto a game that's not meant for it doesn't bode well. Hell, forcing it onto a game that was literally made for it doesn't really work either. Iirc OW tried that shit and failed miserably. Pretty sure there were a few more examples too.

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Yes, good. We agree.

We don't want those things, generally, it seems, and therefore don't want Ashes to be an eSport.

Perhaps Steven did not know what eSports required back when he made that comment, and therefore did not know what needed to be considered or added to the game.

If you give Steven a 'list of requirements for making a good eSport', he can then go 'yes these sound good' or 'these sound bad for Ashes'.

Our feedback is 'these sound bad for Ashes'. Yours seems to be 'these sound good'.

EDIT: Actually for clarity MY feedback is 'I have no idea how you would manage half of this based on what we have seen so far and what you seemed to want but as a person who likes to poke at eSports I bet you CAN do it in a very specific way', but if I have to distill it down, particularly in the context of this thread, as a y/n 'feedback point', then I do in fact say 'n'.

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And this is all I meant. I think others got off your train of thought a few stations ago.

Something has to change for Ashes to be an eSport.

Therefore Steven should take back any comments related to Ashes becoming an eSport, now that this new knowledge has been made available (namely the outcomes of the efforts of eSports organizers for the four years since he said it).

To me, that's what 'should' happen here. Steven should say 'I no longer have any interest in making Ashes an eSport due to the mismatch between the game's goals/demographic and those required for successful eSports'.

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It's not even about ddosing. It's just about servers not keeping up with the demand. And that demand can be enforced by people going to a particular server. If people see that esports is coming in the way of the MMO part of the game - quite a lot of people will complain and might even do what Noaani suggests.

Now there's a little problem of "how would they know", but I guess that joining an arena queue (cause there'll always be one) and seeing how fast/slow you get a game would indicate how many people are playing the arena.

And under the assumption that those arenas are not cross-server, you'd know exactly which servers have the most arena players and you could then go to the forum or reddit or discord and write a scathing post of "why de fak can't I play the game because of these fackers?!" People might agree with you and start complaining on other threads and social mediums (which brings Intrepid bad pr) and might even go overload that server with their characters.

Overall I'd say the chance of that happening is fairly low, but the chance to destroy Intrepid's reputation is quite high. Amazon was SHIT ON for their queues and failing servers. If people figure out that there's a non-mmo mechanic in Ashes that effectively creates the same problem - Intrepid will get a ton of butthurt fans.

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This is just yet another issue and reason why most people here argue so much against your points. You come at this discussion from the pov of an esporter who's only thinking of how Ashes would/could/should implement esports into its design. While pretty much everyone else comes from the pov of mmo players who just want a good mmo and couldn't give fewer shits about esport arena battling.

The arena can only be cross-server if it provides gear or puts a cap on how high of a tier you can use. The former goes against the current Ashes design and the latter doesn't solve your issue of "I don't want to play the mmo for hundreds of hours before playing the arena".

In other words, as Noaani has already said several times, it would make much more sense to just have a separate client for the equalized arena battler and just tread it as an offshoot of the main game, rather than trying to turn the mmo into something that it's not supposed to be.

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Can be, but should not be.

"Breaker" hypotheticals are important for design of anything that is basically 'a competition between normal players and possibly psychopathic speedrunners'.

There's probably no reason to immediately take 'I would just overload the queue so you can't play' as a thing Noaani would specifically actually do.

But I bet you, like Noaani, know people who WOULD.

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I care about them when they can influence the game I'm playing. And as has been explained before, they can and will influence the mmo itself, if implemented in the way that was suggested in this thread.

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And the suggestions of providing equalized gear or full level ups of alt chars to the max level go directly against "playing the mmo".

Also, how exactly do you imagine queuing for the arena while running around the open world? Can you get TPed to the arena while fighting a mob? While gathering a resource? While pvping another player? While crafting something? While riding a mount or a caravan? While playing a minigame in a tavern? And what of any results of you getting TPed out of those actions?

And as for the alternative ways to progress - that's already the case in the game. You can pvx (kill mobs with a chance of other playing fighting you for them), you can be an artisan (make money for gear and maybe lvl boosting), you can make money through interactions with caravans, you can be a mercenary, you can be a market mogul.

All of those methods range from 0 interactions with pvp or pve to 100% interaction with both, but all of them directly influence the MMO part of the game. In all of them you're a character in the world of the game who's interacting with the world around it and its inhabitants. And your resources come from that world and its inhabitants.

Instanced equalized arena progression method goes directly against all of those, especially in the case of alt characters that got leveled up and geared automatically. You're not interacting with the world, hell you don't even exist in it other than your server slot. Your rewards come from a quite highly abusable system. And you barely interact with other players outside of the few seconds/minutes of your fight. Oh and that's even if you fight other players rather than your friends who're helping you progress faster and better (you might not do this, but I know countless people who will). And, as has been stated before, all of that also requires its own separate balancing, which is just additional work for Intrepid.

And just to make it clear, I'm not against the arenas themselves. I love arenas and spent years trying to be #1 in my class on dozens of L2 servers. What I'm against is the proposed implementation of arenas into Ashes.