Steven, Please Rethink “Not for Everyone”

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Hi Ace. I was mulling something related to Throne and Liberty design issues recently and then in another thread something @Ludullu and Arya_Yeshe said really stuck out to me relative to this. It is very much in the 'design hell is other people' frustration I have with modern gamERS that I think also targets the 'not for everyone' concept.

So to give you a little background as to where my mind is: Currently at this time Throne and Liberty is running into a problem both in Korea and Global versions (but more so Global) where they have a lot of what I will call 'hard content' and by hard i don't mean difficult I mean 'mechanically involved in the systems design intended for CORE progression of a character'. This content in TL's case is world bosses, instanced dungeons, raids, and various PvX and PvP battlegrounds. You could even argue that the open world dungeons also falls into this category but I might get that later into our conversation if it goes that direction. Notably in TL if you have good mechanical skill at the game you get noticeably statistically stronger by doing this content more quickly, consistently, and efficiently than anyone else. There is also a 'hard content' related system with guild progression that heavily rewards the people who are successful at this content. By putting such a heavy emphasis on this, a lot of the less skilled players both 'feel they need to do cutting edge content' but also do a lot of the 'questing' and open world interactions when they can't manage it. This has lead to a social disconnect between the 'strong' and the 'weak' that is rapidly eating away at the overall player base.

I think this issue happens in many games, but in Throne and Liberty they have it much worse and I'll tell you why. Many of the 'strong' and a few of the devs on staff have at least PRIORITIZED development in a way that would make 'quests are not content' ring true to this cohort.

Part of an rpg is roleplay for many people. Quests in particular give rpers and life skillers a framework that leads to higher satisfaction, better stepping stones to making their own content, and generally a down time activity that let's you stay immersed in the world without leaving it. I will call this knock on effect 'soft content' because it's not really the quest itself that makes it content (although you can make very engaging dynamic repeatable quests into a whole SYSTEM e.g. Assault from FFXI in the Tales of Aht Urgahn expansion) but the head space and interactivity this creates for the more casual, rp, and life skill involved person.

The 'design hell' for me is that often games feel a need to cater a lot more to 'hard content' in the way that Arya proposes in that thread, but so many other mmos have this underlying fall back of this 'soft content' that keeps the 'weaker' or 'less time available' people to keep progressing and positively contributing to the game. This happens to also be why I originally thought Ashes COULD be really successful as they had originally prioritized that type of 'soft content' and that community in the Alpha 1 era development.

When I think of Arya like people and I think about what makes a game sustainable in the long term, I think that some games without 'hard content' only style design are 'not for everyone' in a more fundamental way than games with a mix of soft and hard content. Design hell for me, therefore is the people who are 'the strong' that 'thrive easily with only hard content systems' the 'sweat lords who excel at the game in both skill and time' that ALSO then demand that the game be very SOCIAL and codependent on PvP rather than PvE serving as a fundamental force that unites the player base. They constantly stomp on and undervalue the 'soft content' and this leads to the developers feeling uneasy about adding it at all even though it in terms of collective man hours adds WAY more. This is a fundamental issue I see with TL's raid system in particular. It took a lot of resources to create this system, but ultimately with the same amount of dev time they could have made thousands of hours more if they had focused on 'soft system' content that helped amplify and enhance their existing building blocks.

It is funny, in a way I feel like AoC and TL are in somewhat similar places right now with their fan base but Ashes is doing all the stuff that would really 'attract the TL type top enders' and TL is doing all the sort of stuff that would really 'attract the AoC type top enders'.

As a person who thrives off of making 'soft content' challenging through various self limitations to help me improve my core fundamental skills for the 'hard content' I find myself constantly in the presence of design hell when people turn around and tell me the content I am clearly spending dozens of hours on is somehow not content. I'm doing it and it is leading to tangible interactive skilled gameplay am I not? In a way I find it a 'skill issue' but in another I recognize that 'the game I want is not for everyone and vice versa'. But it sure is design hell. How do you keep people like me and people like Arya happy? Well I thought AoC had the answer originally but they went in a direction that seems no longer to involve my audience demographic type.

JustVine wrote: »

Hi Ace. I was mulling something related to Throne and Liberty design issues recently and then in another thread something Ludullu and Arya_Yeshe said really stuck out to me relative to this.

My preferrence for "content" would just be a part of quests, cause I just wanna better mobs across the board. And with better mobs, quests can build on that through lore/mechanics/interactions.

Hell, my main pve-related desire is for mobs to be able to lose their corruption and become interactible npcs with quests. If that ain't immersive rp potential - I dunno what is.

Ludullu wrote: »

JustVine wrote: »

Hi Ace. I was mulling something related to Throne and Liberty design issues recently and then in another thread something Ludullu and Arya_Yeshe said really stuck out to me relative to this.

My preferrence for "content" would just be a part of quests, cause I just wanna better mobs across the board. And with better mobs, quests can build on that through lore/mechanics/interactions.

Hell, my main pve-related desire is for mobs to be able to lose their corruption and become interactible npcs with quests. If that ain't immersive rp potential - I dunno what is.

I think everyone wants good combat and good mob design/ai are a huge core part of that. So I agree. It is part of why I like certain areas of Throne and Liberty so very much. At least pre-Talandre there was a lot of good spots where you could really master fighting the mob in a meaningful and deep way. I think Talandre has less of this and it is less diverse but just the other day I was duoing the open world dungeon, what is generally designed for full parties, and there was some stuff to teach them they had never thought about before because they are used to the group play kind of papering over some of the unique challenges that come with the level design. Idk if THEY found it interesting, but that is certainly a big deal for me in my gameplay. Having quests that involve challenging mobs I'm not naturally going to steam roll is a big deal for me personally.

JustVine wrote: »

Having quests that involve challenging mobs I'm not naturally going to steam roll is a big deal for me personally.

Yep, quests can definitely point towards that kind of content, or even create it, if needed. Especially if those quests have proper indicators of recommended lvl to clear, but don't put a lower bound on which lvl you can get the quest at.

One related problem, or perhaps the one that JustVine was actually referring to, is the way in which designers invalidate their own softer content in the name of efficiency. We actually don't know if Ashes intends to allow this or not, we only know that they say leveling will take long.

However, I'm forced to use similar examples since Throne and Liberty is the only Ashes-like game playable by the public at the moment, so...

Another simple binary. TL has a rudimentary 'level cap' system, that they have recently disabled . Understandable, since it did not work that well within the next expansion, there were multiple ways to tweak characters to benefit. The important thing about this is that it was never actually applied to dungeons anyway, and TL is a 'gearscore' based game.

This means that a 'new' soft content enjoyer who gains positive experiences from trying to do a level 50 dungeon at around level 50, particularly the first 'wave' of those dungeons expected to be done by players of a certain gearscore, basically cannot get that experience anymore.

The dungeon is intended to be done by 6 people, the 'fun' of it for some would be the challenge of coordination, teamwork, etc. Since no level sync or cap exists, it can be obliterated by 2 top-geared players before the boss has time to activate a single 'mechanic'.

The design invalidates the content for the 'soft' content enjoyer by making it easier for the 'hard' content enjoyer (they can skip it and only go back when it will only cost them a few minutes). This isn't a binary thing since if they had a fully working Level Cap/Sync (think FF11 or GW tier, whichever style) it could simply be a toggle, and the player could decide which experience they wanted.

Then it would be up to the community, as long as it was clear enough. Some would join 'Capped' versions of the Dungeon, some would not (the debate, incentive-wise, about if that should have extra rewards, is right back to considering how much to reward the 'hard' content enjoyer).

This is why it's not quite accurate to equate 'hard' with 'skilled'. It's moreso a 'cutting edge' vs 'already conquered' problem. Certainly it's true that a first wave Dungeon or BCNM30 or whatever is well known, the sort of thing a player can just look up and perform, but Ashes will face this same problem for everything about it in 6 months just as every other MMORPG does.

If the audience of the game leans too far toward cutting-edge content enjoyers only, the 'already conquered' content gets invalidated, and for an open-World PvX game this happens way faster (e.g. I can't imagine year-2 players of AoC ever getting to really feel what it is like to fight Tumok).

Also, some enemy types can't practically be scaled up to match this, and even if one did, it still 'clumps the cutting-edge competitors with the experience-seekers'.

Maybe MMOs in general discarded the 'experience-seeker' demographic because they aren't profitable enough, but I genuinely don't believe that it's even my bias that makes me think that the problem can't be that they aren't numerous enough.

i.e. if someone shouts for 50-Cap DCNM in TL, I'll go, to help them have that experience, and because I like to occasionally relive it, whereas now, the 'barrier' to that is quite high on both sides.

I believe our reactions were moreso from 'discouragement' or 'concern', not based in anything 'directly expected' from Intrepid, yes.

We see these changes occur in many games and the reasons, if even given, always seem to be based around 'we were losing players by retaining things in the game that were hard or not skippable so we changed that'.

Thanks to the new Throne and Liberty event I finally have something that might actually be helpful in terms of the 'bridging the gap' request.

Disclaimer: This is just as subject to design hell as nearly everything else that players 'grief' to annoy others.

So the new Arkeum Event has a stage where you're fighting powerful enemies (denoted by the fact that they are large!) and then when you defeat them there's still a phase where a lot of smaller ones rush in and there's artillery fire.

Your goal is to defeat the large ones and then interact with something for a while, and the artillery fire interrupts this interaction. For people who have seen me gushing about FF11 Campaign Battles, think of it like that, but with a different 'ending', and the 'rank and file troops' don't charge in with the Generals every time.

This happens across all zones, but suffers from the same 'standard problem' that BDO Field Bosses have across servers. Everyone 'agrees' to go one at a time, even arguing in World Chat about which one is the 'correct' next target when it gets to the final part. Newbies/less invested/geared players are wildly outmatched, particularly if the playerbase decides to just uncoordinatedly 'zerg' the Generals (and it's not that the coordination is super complex, players are just... y'know).

The 'best' implementation of this I can see that would help both sides is therefore that you get FF11 Campaign style 'Contribution' for beating on the enemies, and then that is the 'power' or whatever that you use on the Objective at the end...

But that the Artillery disruption stays, and the waves of smaller enemies that are 'related to it' give less 'Contribution'.

As the event stands now, (I can't say if it works like this already or not, I didn't check deeply yet), three issues pop up that can be 'solved':

1. If everyone only gets a smaller amount of 'Contribution' by zerging each zone, they all 'have to touch the Objective', the enemy might die faster, but at least in the other case, a smaller elite group could 'choose one that isn't done yet' and do that one with mostly just them, and still be able to 'bring down the objective' just as quickly.
2. Those types of groups still need some less geared players whose role is then to clear out the Artillery and run in to finish off the 'channeling the Objective'. They would all have lower individual Contribution so whatever 'missing percentage' would be brought in more easily. Also, this gives them a better chance at getting drops, whereas you could 'make it so that very powerful players somehow get less from the rank-and-file' (not really necessary, but at some point you have to do something to encourage the 'player version' of the 'rank-and-file'.
3. Players who don't end up Contributing because by the time they arrive to the next objective everything is already defeated and they still just think 'I should run up and channel the objective too!' aren't really 'experiencing' this event now, but the way other players talk about it would lead to this, it is just a set of 'commands' of 'Go here, do this in this most efficient way, then to the next!' A split like this (assuming at least some NPC explaining it somewhere) would at least lead to, dare I dream it, maybe even 'each Guild declaring which objective they are going to' or some other form of ~angel chorus~ Organization where the less invested players get to do something other than run from point to point following the zerver.

Ashes already intends to do stuff like this, they say, this is just me sharing an experience relative to the 'how' of it.

And once again, yes, I know, design hell, the complaints from people who 'didn't understand the event and get mad because reasons' never end, but this is one of those cases where I really feel that making it too simplistically accessible backfires by removing all the actual 'core experience', for the less invested.

Ok, finally had time to do that above event properly instead of spending all my time analysing player behaviour, not much to change in the share though:

The 'regular soldiers' are there at the start, so it basically is equivalent of a campaign battle where the Beastman Generals are all defending at once (best likened to a Windurst side battle against Kazan + Moo Ouzi + Dee Xalmo + Yuu Mjuu and today I guess Vaa Oozu because I got to fight in the spot where the Giant Scorpion spawns so shoutouts to whichever Vaa Oozu fan at NCSoft chose to spawn it there)

Today it wasn't easy to discern from World Chat if the 'Generals' on our side (basically whoever has enough clout to give instructions in world chat) were complaining about people doing other areas instead of 'following the zerg', and therefore I don't want to imply that they caused any issues, but in the end it turned out that they almost fell short on time, cutting it close enough that it's possible we'd have failed one Region if not for 'rogue subgroups' going for 'off-script objectives' (obv bias here since I was in one).

I definitely also saw some players that I know for certain are 'not super geared' with us, and with mostly just those players we managed to clear it (and only two of my Guild members were around other than me, so I believe this would be doable, if difficult, with one Party, certainly with one Vanguard even with half of them being less powerful).

Hope that helps a bit, Intrepid (I'm probably not going to report more on this one, except as part of discussion on whatever else this thread goes into).

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For all we know, by the time the game is supposed to come out, USA might have a wholeass revolution or civil war 2: electoral boogaloo on its hands. I'm fairly sure that Intrepid going into crunch, Steven saying "yeah, some stuff has been cut out of the release list of features" and A2 keybundles immediately appeasing the complainers - are all indicators of that shakey economic situation.

And all of those things happened before the current entire shitstorm.