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

The posters in question had a reaction that made me go 'of course y'all talk as if killing regular mobs is inherently boring/flat, because the game had no complexity so that was true'.

I have not played Allods much, it got the usual levels of analytical play from me some time 'recently'. Probably less than usual even. I wouldn't have played long enough to say if it was complex or not later, but it didn't seem to be.

I asked because I would be able to revisit it or learn something about the game (or the person making the claim) if they said it was, in fact, complex.

I believe that players who have only played games with minimally complex open-world PvE and where choosing to be challenged does not result in additional exp, will view 'grinding' as much less fun due to the lack of challenge, variety, planning, and incentives to work on team synergy/communication if doing it in groups.

That's not strange, since it's a design style that isn't common and mostly I don't bother explaining it because people like to diminish or discredit it (or devalue players who can't easily do it) leading to nonproductive discussions.

But it is as you say, a game like Ashes must provide its complexity within the open world, or just be labeled as a game with poor PvE.

It doesn't matter a lot though because for many, having challenging Open world would BE poor PvE, and for those who are very used to complex instances, Open World can never quite match up. It's just that Alpha-1 started with the type of experience gaining system that implied it would have it.

That's probably no longer relevant much, even though signs of it are still there. Either way, I think I answered your question, and I don't think there's anyone here outside of my own group and probably Ludullu who would care about the 'open world enemy complexity' thing.

EDIT: A possibly reasonable 'shorthand' would be 'did the game have a common/'at least not rare' enemy type that had access to Sleep/AoE Sleep?'. If it has this as a semi-common thing, it probably fits my personal 'standard' for complex open world PvE.

The thing that sometimes makes the conversation difficult (no sign of it this time) is the following sequence:

"I hate grinding, it's so boring."
"That's because the average player chooses the easiest, lowest challenge grindspot so that they don't have to worry about weak teammates or friction, just go somewhere else."
"There's no 'somewhere else, it's all the same'."

The third line has three possible explanations to me.

1. Game they played really only has braindead progression-PvE
2. Player has never explored enough to know that there is other progression-PvE
3. Devs made it so there's no real benefit to taking on challenge

The games I play are usually #3. FF11 forces the issue for certain level stretches, which then become the 'hell-levels' for people who aren't very good, to me AA is a bit of #2 and a bit of #3, Throne and Liberty is 'a bit of all 3' for exp gains. BDO is a long debate, Guild Wars 2 is... well... let's not discuss GW2 and 'challenge' for this context. TERA is also a long debate but I'd say it was closer to TL.

So sometimes people are saying "I just want to progress as fast as possible and therefore I must do the most boring thing", and sometimes they are saying "I only play games where there's absolutely only boring repeated situations" and occasionally they are saying "I judge games while only following the strategy guides which are always written by someone in one of the first two groups".

But I hate that in these sorts of situations because obviously if you are putting Questing up against the experiences of those types of people, Questing is better.

Comparing low-quality 'grinding' to 'Questing' is an auto-win for Questing, but that doesn't mean Questing is 'better' or often even 'good.

Dygz also brings up a thing I really 'fear' for Ashes, but have some faith that Steven will 'fight'.

I encounter far too many Hardcore players who (by the nature of being Hardcore, in some cases/respects), can't or don't maintain even the RP-PvP aspect of games properly.

A recent event in TL was supposed to be a cooperative-ish event. Players would hunt some 'loot Goblins' that appeared for about half an hour, in many areas, including open-world dungeons.

The person who has control of the 'Eclipse' on my server consistently activated it during this event, making the dungeons PvP zones during it. Specifically after newbies and more casual players would have spread out across the world to do this event. Just punching down, I know because my group went to one of the less-popular but not max-level ones to see if the Goblins spawned there (and the people who PvP'ed us out of the zone were def way stronger than us and we're not THAT weak).

Note that the only people who will know for certain this is going to happen are that person and probably their Guild. Their Guild controls the Castle. This is important for the main reason of this long ranty complaint...

This person is enjoying 'being the villain', in the name of 'spicing up the event', they say. Would anyone like to take bets on what will happen if a bunch of people decide to bring down the castle because of this behaviour?

That's the thing that 'should' happen in Ashes. Because a nontrivial number of people were calling out that 'villain' in world chat for their actions. My small guild, certainly, is more likely to at least try to fight on the attacking side in next Siege (we sometimes disrupt attackers instead), and there's been talk even of actually forming up in whatever small Alliance, just for the minor advantages this might give toward this.

I still want a game where these things get connected properly. Where the villain doesn't whine about how 'people take things too seriously' if they lose the castle, but instead maintain at least the same attitude as they had when they were Eclipsing the event. I want a game where "I made the lives of the peasants harder because I thought it would be more interesting" -> "The peasants didn't like it and revolted against my Liege the King/Queen" doesn't end in 'Y'all are just snowflakes I was just having fun'.

So I get story instead of just OOC disgust.

We have not received permission from RonDog98 to share the quoted post.

It doesn't accomplish that goal in the same way though. Unless I'm misunderstanding what "increased res time" means here - you'd be literally NOT playing the game for longer, while stat dampen just makes you shift to a slightly weaker content or even gives you more of a challenge (if you're into that).

Those are nowhere near the same thing.

We have not received permission from Dygz to share the quoted post.

This one makes me think of something. I think that maybe there's a sort-of equivalent of this feeling for Econ-focused players, it's just so long/complex that I never want to try explaining it, but honestly this is probably the thread for a short-form.

"Not being able to even guess why someone/a small group is in an area."

I think that line doesn't make sense on its own, but in this case, if the only reason a player has, to be in an area, is to look for someone else (not someone specific, just 'another person') to kill for the sake of killing them, I don't think one can call it 'meaningful conflict'.

The next step normally is 'well maybe they are defending the territory and have a good reason to keep everyone out'. Ok, sure, that implies a reason why they do that, though. I don't have a problem with being fought or hunted while walking through a Py'Rai forest if I think they're protecting their trees or something.

I think this is actually somewhat a designer's responsibility. If your MMORPG is supposed to attract a bunch of players who just want to fight other players on the road, it's your job as a Dev to put a reason behind that in the world a decent portion of the time.

Most games I've played 'ignore' this or make it a loose enough connection, resulting in a higher population of players who are not there to play an MMORPG, they're there to play a combat sim where they can snowball or ego-check people who did, and the only win-condition for those is 'when the other player acknowledges defeat/the hierarchy'.

I don't like playing games with too many people who get mad at you for not giving up. Fortunately this works out for those players!

Azherae wrote: »

I think that line doesn't make sense on its own, but in this case, if the only reason a player has, to be in an area, is to look for someone else (not someone specific, just 'another person') to kill for the sake of killing them, I don't think one can call it 'meaningful conflict'.

What if we had smth like this?

• POI-based debuff for flagging up
• It would put a multiplier on your flagged state timer
• The multiplier would depend on the lvl of the debuff
• The lvl would go up with hits against a player (the amount of hits per lvl subject to tests)
• You can decrease the lvl by killing mobs in that POI (amount of mobs per lvl down is also stt)
• Killing harder mobs (named, bosses, quest-related ones) removes more lvls
• Killing a person gives you several lvls immediately
• BHs start seeing players who are above a certain threshold of the debuff on their map
• Mayors can set that threshold value for their local POIs
• BHs get, say, 1/10 a reward for hunting a player like that
• If you die with this debuff - you lose a few lvls of it (#stt)

The attackers get more pvp (supposedly what they came there for, right?). BHs have another reason to exist. Nodes can range in their riskiness. PvPers attract pvp onto themselves w/o being corrupted. Victims get defenders in the form of BHs, or even just other pvpers who were near and saw a shout in chat about someone who keeps flagging up on people (I've seen this countless times in L2).

And if these attacks were over the content itself - the attackers would immediately remove the buff, because the pvp was meaningful, or at the very least the pvxness of the encounter was upheld.

We have not received permission from ordotemplarii to share the quoted post.

Ashes is still relatively early in Alpha and extremely open-world.

Which means that difficult enemies would be more likely to have their difficulty negated or be subjected to players finding exploits in terrain anyway.

If they do have difficult content in testing it would probably be in 'arenas' so they could test various ways of handling the mechanics and distances that one can engage them from, and therefore we as external testers wouldn't even see it.

We have not received permission from ordotemplarii to share the quoted post.

Which exact skill expression are you talking about? Mouse movement? Reaction speed? Skill usage planning? Proper movement within the surroundings?

You gave the example of mordhau, but that's a first person game. In third person mmos (especially the ones with zoom distance that Ashes will have), the skill is usually represented through proper skill usage, party coordination in that action and general battlefield awareness. You won't be swinging around your mouse like a crazy person, in attempts of properly aiming a strike. Though depending on how well Intrepid polish their targeting, and whether we get detargeting abilities, we could see a requirement in mouse aiming skill as well (though this is usually the job of 1-2 people in a party).

I've seen people (and did myself) die to goblin shamans, because the player didn't react in time to the green goo the mob throws at you. I've seen people die to wolves and grems, because they didn't use their abilities correctly. I've seen people die to mob abilities, because they didn't dodge in time.

All of those things (and many more) are also representative of player skill and of the game's requirement for it. If you really are so high skill in other games, of course a more basic combat design won't seem as hard to you, but it doesn't mean that the game is not hard for other people.

We have not received permission from ordotemplarii to share the quoted post.

Ah, I understand better now, then, you're moreso in the 'Single-Player MMO' camp.

You are right, Ashes is definitely not trying to be that as far as we know and is not likely to be fun for that player type compared to other more single-player focused games.

We have not received permission from ordotemplarii to share the quoted post.

Zerging content is only good when the entire zerg benefits from it. That will not really be the case in Ashes, because loot and resources are limited, so the optimal way to farm is to split up your zerg into proper farming parties and let them grind out mobs/bosses.

As for the difficulty of any given mob - we're noooowhere near any kind of point where we'd know how the game will look like on release. We have pretty much no mob AI, no skill depth both on our chars and on mobs, no properly difficult bosses and no finished weapon passives.

All of those things can wildly change players' interactions with the mobs and the game itself. And while I do agree that most likely Ashes will never be at the lvl of smth like WoW's Myth+++ or FF14's Ultimates - it can still come out as a game with some difficult pve. But we'll only know for sure 2-3 years from now.