Re: Risk, Reward, Difficulty & FUN: What Intrepid is Missing

Steven wants "losers to suffer", so I highly doubt the penalties will ever change. If anything, we've literally had a change to make the game HARDER, where pvp event death penalties went from "gear decay" to "lessened pvp death penalties". And this change led to a shitton of extra devwork, just to rebalance the entire game to account for those losses and for the abuse by players. All could've been avoided had Steven not loved to fuck over his players royally.

As for the other points:

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Not losing mats on death means that economy has to be rebalanced, because the sinks for mats are weaker.

Not gaining xp debt will require rebalancing of xp and loot rewards from hardcore content, because people will be able to just hit that wall over and over again with barely any gear on them and progress faster due to higher rewards. Intrepid is already working on this by making higher lvl mobs hit you harder, while you hit them weaker. And we also have lower loot rates against higher lvl mobs already. And that approach sure makes me think that Steven doesn't want us fighting stronger foes, as opposed to your example of BMW.

If you remove stat dampen on death penalties, people will keep throwing their bodies at both bosses and pvp, which will mean that PvX just ends up being an exercise of "bring even more people than your enemies, so that you can keep their deathwaves at bay". And afaik majority of people dislike zerg being the optimal gameplay method.

Long travel times relate to my stat dampen example and also to a greater localization of players. If you can get anywhere on the map within a short period of time - there'll only be a single meta of leveling, gear progression and node progress on all realms. While Steven wants each realm to be unique, soft friction to be better than "literally entire realm is trying to fight over the same (few) spot(s)" and for the world to feel truly massive. Any amount of really fast travel would make the world feel much smaller. And putting strong restriction on that travel would just have you end up with the New World situation where everyone cried about inability to fast travel as often as they want.

Now, all of that is not to say that I agree with all of those designs or that I consider them good. But as far as I understand Steven's design - those are the rough reasoning behind these features. And changing them WOULD in fact change the core pillars in a fairly big way, especially when you consider all the other things related to them.

Designers of MMOs from the era that Ashes is trying to 'revive the spirit of' always relied somewhat on the fact that the games were niche and many people would just 'play suboptimally, either not knowing they were doing that or not caring because it was social enough'.

It's harder now that people tend to quit games that force their playstyle to be the objectively worse one.

Either way I still think exp Debt might be a required part of Ashes as it's described so far.

Ashes is a game that seems to need two things:

1. The concept that you should retreat when faced with certain situations
2. A direct dampener on the idea that one can throw more bodies at a problem even if they keep dying.

I don't think that either of these things by themselves is enough to justify it, in the first case you could just lose durability, and in the second case you could design the mobs somehow (assuming it was mobs) to somehow take advantage of that repeated death.

The problem comes when the person doing the dying is somehow doing it to reduce the capacity of someone else to achieve a goal or maintain their position, and Ashes is one of the few games where that can happen.

Because Resurrection only costs your Cleric some MP, but if we ever get a difficult openworld enemy, a group that can just keep throwing more bodies at it, especially if they don't need a lot of good gear to damage it, would keep doing that.

And if the mob was designed to power up or similar because of players dying around it, then without a cost, your 'enemies' might suicide into the mob to power it up, and for that they wouldn't even need to be wearing gear.

I prefer other methods too, but I don't think Resurrection Weakness nor 'expanding Resurrection/Respawn timers' suit the game as it's presented right now.

I definitely agree that a punishing game requires a smaller world, but a game that punishes people unevenly can't function with a smaller world, because the travel time is your only protection from those who set themselves up to minimize their 'punishments'.

Usually that's the PvE Locusts, but it's just as easy for it to be the PvP Lich brigade, which is where Ashes would probably go, design wise.

The obvious final problem is that a punishing game is usually less popular, but Ashes isn't punishing 'at every turn' like a linear themepark game. If you get tired of doing something that you keep getting 'punished' for, in Ashes, stop doing it (the game is supposed to have enough alternatives that you don't mind this, right?)

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Not everyone views quests as content.

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As of now, I believe you can assume that I 'speak for 5 others' (maybe 6) but if you want to hear from each of them individually, lmk.

"It boosts engagement!"

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Tbf tho, you aren't exactly the sort of person who has a lot of tolerance for the sort of player who isn't good at mid-level PvE, so it follows that you wouldn't have a high opinion of the PvE itself.

Would you have the same reaction to a fantasy MMO where losing in PvE could change the world for a month, and you could technically just keep losing if you didn't organize/gain skill?

Because those exist, but I guess if not even that counts as meaningful, then I get your point.

You can't, because there will always be people who play 5h a week and people who play 55 hours a week and the game supposedly has to somehow be actual fun for both those groups.

That's what the OP was trying to address, right?

You say you can remove all NPCs (I assume you mean mobs too) from the game, but I'm moreso asking why you would do that? Mobs have known power levels and players don't. Less invested players can always find a mob to hit that is a reasonable challenge for them.

PvP doesn't work that way.

Yeah, it's that point #2 that is where we have the 'disconnect' here.

For the 50h a week group, if a game offered something dangerous and risky enough for them to view it as 'real content', but also the game has Fantasy MMO style progression, there's no way the 5h a week group will touch that content.

That's what I meant by low tolerance. A Fantasy MMO doesn't ever really 'take enough things away' from a player who loses to ever make it even back out, that's something you only get in EVE.

This thread already started discussing one of the few things Ashes does take away, your exp, and the gap is already obvious, like... who dies often enough in Fantasy MMOs these days to even care about exp debt? The 'average' player trying to keep up with the top ranks.

I'm sure you have just as many stories as me about this, unless somehow your Guild Wars allies were all great players.

I'm trying not to read your post as basically 'average players who can't play often don't matter here' but it's hard not to.

Fantasy games are not generally built around the 'build up resources and then spend them and repeat' because only like 2 of them have ever been good enough at making that consistently fun.

Like, in this discussion, EXP itself is a 'resource'.

For this to work, regaining EXP would have to be fun, while somehow '40h of grinding that very fun exp loop' somehow not also be a good idea? This is a thing that 'only' works in GW2 and games like Elite and EVE where no matter how much you grind you can still only use a certain portion of that power at a time.

(to my own group, yes, I know that FF11 and TL do some of this, leave it be)