Leveling the playing field in instanced PvP

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Well from MY end you already hit my 'hard line, no sell' point as of 'instanced equalized granted gear'.

I will accept 'instanced' grudgingly. I will accept 'equalized' easily (hence the level 40 suggestion). I won't accept 'granted gear'. I MIGHT accept 'able to test classes you don't play' but I consider that pointless without the gear being granted.

There is no scenario in which 'game grants equalized gear and ability to play other classes to remove the barrier to entry to the arena' that I'm okay with.

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So even if you were fighting a weak mob, you'd still die and get death penalties that might set you back several hours of progress. Definitely doesn't sound like a good solution.

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My only need is for arenas to not be separated from the mmo. Your core premise doesn't work with that.

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Ambivalent.

The issue with 'invite a friend' is that it quickly turns into 'form a community of duelists on one big friends list and lock that down'.

However, if those players need to at least earn their gear, it's probably fine.

I don't quite see the POINT of 'max level character with no equivalent gear' but it would honestly seem so 'pointless' to me that I'd have to spend much more time analyzing what the likeliest 'negative use case' is.

I believe Intrepid has implied that there will be SOME sort of 'testing ground' though, so perhaps they've already done that 'deep dive'.

As for why this matters to me so much, server caps.

Ashes has a very specific server cap and a very specific number of players required for the game to feel 'alive' and 'engaging' for the AVERAGE player.

Every player who is 'registered toward the server cap of Server A' who is actually 'in the Arena dueling, not interactable with the rest of the world', makes Server A feel a little more empty. I'm glad that you would definitely interact with the world. I certainly will.

And I know a lot of people whose response to any instanced Arena would be:

"Damn I need to find someone to PL me so I can get to playing the real game."
"I should get myself a crafting alt to afk-farm stuff to make money for my gear."
"Finally, got through all that pointless MMO stuff, who wants matches?"
"Yeah man I found a Node for quick exp, everyone should head there so we can level faster so we can have some proper arena matches." (then basically never support the Node again)

I would prefer those people don't look at Ashes Arena and go 'yeah I should get into this game, too bad I have to deal with all this MMO gearing up crap, but so it is'.

But that's going to happen as long as there is ANY arena, and then the question just becomes 'how good are players at turning your training mode into an Arena?'

So... that's technically Pay To Win.

Anyone who trains hard in a game where other people can 'train harder by spending more money' will see this as Pay To Win. (note that I am NOT a very strong anti-p2w player, if it is treated similar to subscription models, you'd have to take that up with others)

So to clarify something... I wouldn't even put an instanced, easily accessible Arena in a game like Ashes to begin with, if it were up to me. Thankfully for all arena enjoyers (and the success of the game) it is not.

I don't think it fits with Ashes' design philosophy and would make things worse as a whole except as a venue for properly prepared 'tournaments' in the true gameworld sense. Note that Ashes is not 'sharded'. If I choose to play on Server A, I am a registered member of Server A on that character and ALWAYS count toward that server's total cap (but that one is much higher so possibly ignorable).

There are quite a few things about Ashes I have this opinion on, because Ashes is still, even now, in a state where many people are not quite sure what the actual limits of the design and the underlying structure of the goals actually are.

One teammate often tells me "Steven is a salesman, not a designer", particularly regarding things said more than a few years in the past. Ashes' list of features is just a laundry list of 'stuff Steven enjoys in MMOs' + 'stuff Steven thinks other people want in MMOs' + 'Steven's pet peeves in MMOs, subverted'.

She often points out further that this is exactly the sort of game development you'd expect from a salesman. Offer everything, keep talking until you figure out what the potential customer actually wants, sell them that. I've got ZERO problems with this, mind you, I just don't know if I'm actually a customer yet or not (past what I've already paid for).

Similarly, there's no way to know if you are, or not. What seems unlikely at this time, however, is that we both would be SATISFIED customers of this product.

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This is a whole other kettle of fish that we should probably open in a different thread if at all.

You're RIGHT, but it's kinda unrelated.

Meta-conformity is a thing I have a LOT of experience with, though, so that's a discussion I can probably speak with some authority on.

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Automatically dying because you got pulled into the arena would probably feel bad for most people. And punishing players for exiting queue because they got into trouble while waiting would feel doubly bad. So you either auto-kick them from the queue if they enter combat or just hope that they won't be dumb enough to make themselves feel bad. In either case players would probably just stand around waiting for queue rather than doing anything meaningful.

Also, I'd assume the arena would only be accessible through an npc in a node above some stage (probably 3+), cause if it's accessible through some UI window from anywhere in the world - there'd be countless ways to abuse that mechanic. And considering that there's no fast travel, most players would probably just stand around the npc and not do anything at all (speaking from experience here). So in a way they'd be just emulating a "separate client game" within the mmo itself. Except in this case they'd be taking up server slots, as pointed out by Azherae and Noaani.

This is why Noaani kept saying that it'd be better to just have a separate client for it. And that separate client would also allow for any kinds of balancing to classes and gear and whatever else.

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Yes, open world arenas and friends could allow you to do that. But if you want a full testing ground where you can try every single archetype/class/gear setup, and potentially in a group setting - I, yet again, would want that in a separate client or at least a completely separate game mode in the launcher, with no rewards no ties to the main game and no influence on it. Ideally I wouldn't want that to exist at all, because I don't want the game to be "solved" within the first week of release (or even in alpha/beta if this mode would be available then).

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Right, but you are even softer anti-P2W than me.

No matter what your personal definition of 'reasonably' is, you are to the 'left' of most of the anti-p2w sentiment you will encounter here, and Steven has to somewhat live up to his promise.

People consistently argue that being able to wear store-bought-cosmetics that hide your exact gear in PvP is P2W.

You will certainly gain no support for this style of thing from those people, nor will Intrepid's reputation do well if implemented.

Here's an open world arena (with closing doors if needed) from L2. People had player/GM-made tournaments here and private training/practice matches whenever they wanted. The game had several more smaller arenas near some cities.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcZ0utTDT3g

Imo there's no reason to separate this kind of gameplay from the game. Well, in the context of it being within the game's rules rather than "get anything and everything you want and test it".

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At that point I don't care anymore except for the uncontrollable effects on the economy whenever a new 'big tournament' comes up if the ingame currency for the Training Area is a gold-sink.

Where does the gold go?

EDIT: s/Arena/Training Area/g

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Craftable how? You'll end up in the weeds on this one quite quickly, and there is no actual current understanding of the economy of Ashes at this time.

It is my opinion as that type of player that it would be bad as a Gold Sink, but 'anything can be worked around'.

I know that I wouldn't play a game like this (either Crafted by players or Bought in a goldsink way)

Please note that as I said, I'm not anti-p2w enough to care about this, it's not me you'd need to satisfy with the 'method of creating the token' if it were Real World Currency available.

Similarly, I can't even tell if you're trying to make it a deterrent for players so that they don't overuse the Training Area, or not. I also disagree with the concept that training with parameters that you have complete control over won't help you in the real game, because that's literally what I design and build.

You won't find any agreement from ME there under basically any circumstance, I think. My entire 'thing' is 'using training mode options to make people much stronger than they might otherwise be in short periods of time' in Fighting games.

But I'm the one who'll accept the RMT/P2W.

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I don't care about purchasing of Tokens with Real Life currency. For that you'd have to talk to someone else. I can talk to my team to see if any of them care enough, but they generally leave design economics to me, so it may not be worth it today.

Maybe Dolyem has an opinion that would be relevant.

The situation here relative to ME is that I generally consider this entire flow to be a negative for what Ashes is based on the games I've designed and the way their communities played out. If it were up to me, I would simply have cut you off awhile back and offered nothing whatsoever, again, based on prior experience. I would be unwilling to take the risk of repeating the same sorts of experiences I've had before, particularly in a genre that is much more sensitive to it.

I've spent far too much time in the past 'trying to get players to actually engage with the community instead of just training against each other in hopes of becoming unbeatable' to not view 'Training Area in an MMO where you can test stuff freely' as a big red flag.

EDIT: Realized that you might have been using the 'general you' here in point #2, so clarifying differently.

I 'speak for' 7 people currently relative to feedback for this game in non-official threads that become serious discussion (they are generally requested to give their own feedback in those), and none of those people generally participate in those threads. Anyone else who happens to agree with me should still be addressed entirely separately. Sometimes I'll give aggregate data from my archives/parses, but that's just trends to inform what might come up if you continue, it generally isn't related to anyone I 'represent'.

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I had an idea for server queues that could provide a way for people to see the gameplay of any archetype w/o spending hundreds of hours, but my idea only provided the basic non-augmented archetype abilities, so it wouldn't serve as a proper training platform. And my idea would still be completely separated from the game or its characters, though it would be in-client.

In the context of mmo esports, I'd assume that any given high end pvping would require thousands of hours of investment into the game (be it just pvp or the game as a whole). Ashes would just require that investment to always be into the whole game rather than just the arena gameplay. GW is a horizontal progress game so its arena-to-mmo content balancing might be somewhat easy (though its esport failing kinda points to it not being so). And afaik raid gear in WoW is better than the stuff that you can get through the arena, though I'm not sure if you can use raid gear there, but if you can then even WoW requires you to participate in other forms of content if you want to be truly the best. And if that's the case then I think that making people play the game to get their training gear would be fine (especially considering that most gear will be non-BoP/E).

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I was thinking of a basic top lvl non-class archetype character that could try out any weapon, the three basic types of armor and would have a training dummy, a mob or two and could then, ideally, get into an instanced castle siege with other players in queue so that people could try pvping each other with their chosen setup.

If my super basic surface lvl knowledge of how mmos work is correct, this kind of thing wouldn't have to put big strain on the main game servers. And the non-castle part could in fact be purely client-side so no strain at all.

I saw this as the best way to prevent people from just leaving the game open for hours while they're waiting in queue and a way for them to try out top lvl gameplay of an archetype w/o knowing anything about its potential augments or builds or whatever (well, if they haven't watch youtube of course). And while this system would be accessible by default when you're in queue, Intrepid could obviously just let people enter this "training" place whenever they want.

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Yeah, discussion went into the weeds quite a bit there, which is why I didn't explain the idea completely.