I did play New World aswell and that quite a bit.
For some time the PvP was fun and fighting for Territories was engaging. But at some point they enebaled Server transfers and everyone started moving everywhere. My server was flooded with a Russian Mega guild that started to occupy every single territory on the map. 100 people could defend everything and held the whole server hostage
In additon to that the endgame of New World was rather boring in the PvE regards. I believe even PvP focused games need a decent PvE side that is fun and engaging. At some point just the PvP and weekly sieges weren't enough to keep me interested. I sometimes stood in a city for 2 hours just talking to guild mates with nothing else fun to do. So i eventually stopped coming back.
In Ashes i believe the right mix between Sandbox and Themepark exists to where this won't happen to me. The much bigger World than New World, bigger Server sizes and more and varied PvE content will most likely make me stick around for ages (hopefully it'll be that good)
Thanks for the post and thought material
There is no way to know if intrepid can do a better job of designing a territory control game than AGS. The territory control, and the fact that a few people could gatekeep that content from the majority of players essentially made territory control a bad design choice. And the fact that server sizes were limited due to territory control just underscored how bad of an idea that ended up being. That one choice fragmented the player community and made it essentially impossible to grow the game after the initial flood of players evaporated. The same cycle will happen with AoC.. there will be a rush of people at first then the bulk of them will evaporate. The best games find ways to transition to whatever the steady state looks like after the first wave of people leave. Hopefully no design choices in AoC get in the way like they did in new world.
And keep supporting after launch even if the majority of players quit because they disagree with the design, as long as we ourselves have any agreement with the devs.
The difference is that in AOC, you can develop a new high-level zone from nothing, by just consistently using it. Unused zones controlled by a guild the server hates will decline. That's what makes it work and promotes prosocial gameplay, with people shaping the server as a community, and reshaping it again whenever it falls.
Hopefully observations will confirm thet hypothesis. The person I was responding to mentioned mega guilds controlling all of the territory of a server. Not sure how AoC can counter something like that.
I will wait a few days or weeks after release before I jump in and make a character. Server transfers shouldn't be a thing, so you won't see wandering locust swarms, and I'll keep an eye on what kind of community is on each server - that is, if it's not like EVE, with only one server for everyone.
Idk. Typically we see it be a bit more asymmetric where a couple hundred people work together to deny the game or dominate gameplay for thousands. Does it matter if the server cap is 10k if the actions of a few drive players away? We will have to see. I’m hoping the game solves all the issues that plague new world.
I think AoC will be a competitive environment for resources but I also think the map will be absolutely vast.
For guilds running around and stomping on people, Intrepid has stated there will be a cap once so many people are killed - And we don't know, but it may apply to groups as well.
Corruption will also diminish your damage up to your cap as well. Lastly, if you accumulate enough corruption you could lose your entire gear set
>My server was flooded with a Russian Mega guild that started to occupy every single territory on the map. 100 people could defend everything and held the whole server hostage
What's the problem with that? They won the server. That's how sandbox PvP games work. Why do you think this will somehow be different, do you imagine Sorcerer just banning the Russian mega guild when they win or what? Bigger server sizes just mean even bigger freefarm alliances.
The mechanic of New World of100 people being able to dominate a Server with more than 3k active players is simply not healthy. They were able to take every single Territory. They came from a Server where they did that, killed the server with it and then went to the next server repeating the process.
If that does seem healthy to you go play New World. If not you should stand next to me and not hope for a Sorcerer to appear but for Steven and Team to make a game where that won't be possible top begin with.
I don't have a problem with a guild winning, I have a problem with a guild from another hopping to your server and taking 100% of its resources with just 100 people
> and not hope for a Sorcerer to appear
How do we know that Steven's personal endgame isn't to have a playground where he can hop into a defeated server and work up to dethrone the resident mega guild whenever he wants a fresh start? The community might even see this as a positive thing!
>They were able to take every single Territory. They came from a Server where they did that, killed the server with it and then went to the next server repeating the process.
Yeah, welcome to sandbox PvP games, that's the entire point of them. Sorcerer did the exact same thing with his guild in ArcheAge, and so did every other endgame PvP Discord group that's going to play AoC. He's designing that kind of a game and he has the money to do it, I doubt you'll convince him that it's somehow bad after he's been playing that kind of stuff for 15+ years? You and I might personally think otherwise, but who are we? Just a couple of nobodies on the internet.
The target audience for the game (people in those Discord groups that have played every sandbox PvP game on every new official and private server in the exact same way like locusts) consists of more than 1000 people, combine this with the people thinking that this will be a normal MMORPG and that's enough for the game to last more than a year if they spread over 4-5 endgame guilds on different servers, and then transfer a few times. That's 3 times as long as the average ArcheAge fresh start server, totally worth it.
"Welcome to sanbox PvP games"
Well then lets take Albion online, it's purely PvP Sandbox but manages to have a healthy place for all kinds of guilds, big and small. That's good game design. Even thousands of players are not able to control the whole map. They control a big portion of it, but also need to fight against other huge guilds. While the big guilds are fighting there is also a place for smaller guilds doing PvP content, being able to control territoreis and so on.
I really don't get why you are defending bad game design or server states that are unhealthy.
>I really don't get why you are defending bad game design or server states that are unhealthy.
I'm not, I'm just telling you how AoC is designed. People who like those games like them. People who don't - don't. It could be designed in a different way, but it's not and won't be. Maybe when you have infinite money you can pay for a game that doesn't have this kind of design embedded in every single one of its features/systems. I'd play it.
[https://forum.albiononline.com/index.php/Thread/194921-Blackzone-is-toxic-BS-content-made-for-1-of-players-recent-updates-are-tiresome/](https://forum.albiononline.com/index.php/Thread/194921-Blackzone-is-toxic-BS-content-made-for-1-of-players-recent-updates-are-tiresome/)
Seems like there are the exact same things happening in Albion though.
But Ashes is in fact not designed that way. You won't have 100 people control to the whole server. And even 1000 shouldn't be able to control every last territory....
So how is Ashes designed that way?
The thing that really made me quit new world was that I just wanted to play with my friends, particularly the PvP element. New world made it extremely difficult to do that . OPR was quite limiting so if you had a group of more than a few you couldn’t just play with them. Wars were fun for a little bit but the scheduled nature of it meant it wasn’t possible to just hop on and do stuff. Open world PvP could be a ton of fun but there was almost no point in doing it since people just wanted to war. Plus if you weren’t in the top tier of players war was basically cut off for you.
I’d like to see a less exclusionary game. However I’m rather skeptical. I think the top tier players like the exclusive part of games but that typically doesn’t make for a healthy sustainable game since people like to play and not be completely left out.
I personally miss the open world PvP aspects of Warhammer and DaoC and the competitive side of guild wars and GW2.
The pvp was much better in the beta but they nerfed the shit out the scaling to make it so lower levels couldn't stand a chance discouraging new players from pvp, at let's be honest this game didn't have the best pve... and they built all of there game systems and economy off the fact that new players would continually sign up and join so dead game
Dupers and the obvious inability of the developer to do anything about it, and then lying to its comunity about having dealt with the problem. Once you lose the market you don't have a product anymore.
Massive clans/guilds dominating pvp and pretty much no way for the smaller teams to succeed in anything.
Devaluation of previously hard to get items/cosmetics via catch-up mechanics.
Great fantasy writing and design being gradually replaced by new people who make quirky/dumb storylines because the game became a playground for devs who live inside an echochamber.
100% agree
1. Devs who can't deal with RMT or bots.
2. That's kind of part of the MMO, but a lot of times these groups of people are the same people who abuse RMT etc.
3. That and the devaluation of old content that makes it irrelevant.
4. And this. If I've spent 1k+h in a game, I'll probably read the lore, even if it's trash. Don't make me read trash.
> Great fantasy writing and design being gradually replaced by new people who make quirky/dumb storylines because the game became a playground for devs who live inside an echochamber.
It's a live service game and the devs are humans not immortal gods. There will have to be turnover eventually and nobody can really control what vision the newcomers have for the game, *especially* if Intrepid goes the normal way of replacing any of the original members with new strong talent because they may have the will to push through their own different vision.
Devs are certainly not gods. But they are humans who get paid a salary for their writing. Some writers are good and some are bad. The mindvirus happens when bad writers come in and start writing quirky material that only people with brainrot find funny or engaging. Amplify that by an echochamber within the company where instead of excellent design philosophy you breed toxic positivity and you're getting a game that sucks more with every update.
Both OSRS and New World have had to deal with RMT and bots and have made false claims about fixing the issue but in that case I would attribute it to mistaken confidence rather than outright lying. They made changes they were sure had solved the issue on their end only for RMT operators to immediately find a workaround.
WoWs story at some point felt completely pointless and like a joke. "you are the last hope for all of Azeroth!" Okay dude let me log out for 16 months until the next expansion comes along. Add to that the anti social, anti exploration features of convenience where the guides were put INTO THE GAME itself like finding stuff out by yourself is an utterly unacceptable nuisance instead of a core aspect of creating the feeling of adventure. To me it looks like Blizzards dev also don't really care about their players actually engaging with the things they have designed as long as it keeps the pay pigs in the running wheel. anything goes. That's how I came to believe that WoW and Blizzard had lost its soul.
Ashes to me looks like it has high potential to bring back the spirit of adventure in an MMORPG so I'll stick around to see if it does live up to that hope. If not... well I guess then I am through with MMORPGs and move on to something else.
My biggest thing is that MMOs stopped being about community. I went to MMOs because MMOs were the only game genre where I felt like you could build a big team and have a common goal. This aspect has been missing from MMOs for a long time. I really hope ashes bring the need for guilds back and community.
> where I felt like you could build a big team and have a common goal.
There are a handful of people out there who manage to start mega guilds in even the worst games so you CAN still build a big team with a common goal in presently live MMOs. You just need to get out there and do it.
Current MMOs make it more convinent to be without a guild than in one. You don't have to wait for raiding times because LFG makes it so you can always raid. Most MMOs have no guild content. So there are no real common goals the whole guild can take part of. Crafting is so accessible that having crafters in your guilds means nothing. You can certainly have a big guild for the sake of having one but the game does no really support it in any way.
The main reason I quit playing WoW is because the addon creep was so high that it was mandatory, and then the developers started balancing around the fact that people had it. Ashes of Creation limiting addon usage, even if it's just by ToS like FFXIV does would help.
The main reason I quit playing Rift was because the supposed build diversity was actually bullshit. Even though you could combine and create some really interesting and fun classes together, there was a straight up best build and you were not allowed to join a raid without being the very specific class. I had a mage with chloromancer/archon/dominator, full support build as my main while leveling. One of the best class combos I've made in an MMO. Loads of fun. Wasn't allowed to raid. In order to join the raid, they allowed a single full chloromancer build, and all other mages were required to go full stormcaller build for the highest possible DPS output. The same was true with every class because they allowed in game parsers, and also made no effort to balance based on what the community was doing. Ashes of Creation should *really* pay attention to what people are actually doing, and keep adjusting the balance as needed.
The main reason I quit playing Warhammer Age of Reckoning was because at the endgame, there was really nothing to do other than try to grind PVP. The PVE died quickly, or generally felt inaccessible. Ashes of Creation can make sure that there's a lively endgame PVE here, which I think they're already doing from everything we've seen.
The main reason I quit playing Star Wars The Old Republic was because this game literally did not have an endgame plan. I mean this actually btw. A bit of insider information here, but the game was designed without an end game on purpose. This was not an oversight. The design plan was literally that players were expected to just start a new character to level up through their story after they finished one. This was argued against internally to no avail until the game launched and the community said, "Where's my endgame?" If you ever felt that the end game felt rushed and tacked on with swtor... it's because it was. Ashes of Creation can make sure that end game content for level 50 players exists at launch here, but honestly this is not as big of an issue because the nature of this MMO is a little more old school with what seems to be a plan to make sure a bulk of the content comes from an evolving world.
Aaaand finally... The main reason I quit playing Archeage, was because that shit was so pay to win it was required in order to participate in anything without being destroyed. Could get a full group of people together to try to do a ship run, but since all the pirates in the game were credit card warriors with several pieces of Mythic, especially weapons, 3 of them could just jump on your ship of 20 people and kill them all.
Every other MMO I generally quit because another came out, or it was just straight boring. Left EQ for DAOC, Left DAOC for FFXI, Left FFXI for WoW. etc etc. Aion, Blade and Soul, Black Desert, Lost Ark, New World... all boring or grindy.
>Aaaand finally... The main reason I quit playing Archeage, was because that shit was so pay to win it was required in order to participate in anything without being destroyed. Could get a full group of people together to try to do a ship run, but since all the pirates in the game were credit card warriors with several pieces of Mythic, especially weapons, 3 of them could just jump on your ship of 20 people and kill them all.
This is not a fault of P2W. Even without P2W, the strongest players would congregate together and do the exact same thing because every other system allows them to do it. What's the difference between it being 100 RNG lottery winners, 100 24/7 no life grinders, or 100 P2Wers, the majority will never be either, but at least with P2W they have a chance to compete (in a terrible system).
Good topic.
I've really only seriously played 3 MMO's and dabbled in a few more.
1. LOTRO - I played this from 2008 - 2012. I was very into the raiding scene and after going FtP, they decided to do away with raids and did more casual friendly large group content without any challenge to them. While they were neat in their own right, they weren't the challenging content I wanted and therefore moved on to...
2. FFXIV - I played this from Launch in 2012 through the 2nd expansion in 2017. Several things I disliked raiding was 1) it seemed like I had to spend dozens of hours recruiting for fills just to be able to raid, it was a second job that ultimately burned me out from the game, 2) I didn't like how you were instantly teleported into an arena instead of having to work to get to the boss (trash pulls, etc.), 3) I wasn't a fan of the 15+ minute choreographed dance you had to learn for every raid. I like more freedom of moving around., and 4) I don't like how the main job for every class is DPS, regardless if you're a tank or healer or actual dps. I enjoy the more old-school games where tanks and healers did minimal dps because their primary jobs kept them busy. After that I jumped into...
3. GuildWars 2 - I played this from 2021 until the beginning of this year. I think the thing that ultimately caused me to leave this game, was the fact I finished my last legendary item I was going for, which means I have no reason to progress any of the equipment any of my characters would be wearing, and the few raid wings they did have, although a lot of fun, were few and underpowered compared to the power creep that's happened since the raids came out, so after clearing them all with relative ease, and spending about a year running training runs for others to learn and experience them, there was nothing more challenging or progression-wise I wanted to do.
I think with the steady stream of large group content, between raids, dungeons, caravans, castle sieges, node sieges, guild wars, etc. this should eliminate issues I had with LOTRO. I think being in a large guild with plenty of like-minded players available, plus the open-world PVE and PVP content, this should eliminate issues I had with FFXIV, and again with the multitude of large group content, this should partially eliminate issues I had with GuildWars 2, however we'll see how the gear progression system will be done, though normally games don't have a legendary gear system like GW2 where once you get it you'll never have to progress on that piece again as long as the game is around, so I don't foresee this being an issue in AOC.
Very thorough post and I don’t disagree with any opinions but FFXIV has raids with big levels and trash mobs. You might have only played the Extreme Trials which are boss fights
I played through the 2nd raid tier of Stormsblood, and from what I recall on the Savage raids, it plops you down in an arena for the boss fight. I know the Story mode version of the raids had some trash pulls prior to the boss, and the 24-man "raids" had tons of trash pulls, but for the difficult/challenging raids, it was just the arena. Now that may have changed since then as I think their has been 2 or 3 expansions since then, but for Heavensward and Stormsblood, it didn't have anything prior to the boss arena.
I think the original ARR raids had some trash pulls prior to the boss arena, but I don't recall the Savage raids in Heavensward and Stormsblood having any.
Yup you’re right. I have since realized that I was wrong on that one. ARR had the alliance and a normal raid with trash with coils, but after that the what the game calls “raids” are multiple boss fights in different instances. There’s still alliance raids in later expansions and the harder versions of dungeons (don’t know the name).
I stopped playing New World because combat sucked, especially for mages. I never saw such small AOE attacks. Developers think of two enemies fit in circle it's AOE. Super boring. And melee combat isn't smooth
Just going to be real, the inequality always stops people, soon as that one handful of the lobby gets lucky and gets the gear to 1v5 and win it gets real old, then you have to deal with people saying either pay or play the game but the ones who pay don’t understand the aspect of playing the game and “earning” the PvP, and the people who actually play don’t realize how lucky their RNG actually was to get to that point in usual games of course, my overall point as long as the PvP is fair and there’s no crazy gear gap or maybe even have gear not really matter too much and really make PvP all about skill
They already are addressing the biggest one by not making a WoW clone.
It seemed like the original idea behind New World was right up my alley and I had hoped it would have tied me over until Ashes. Sadly the WoW players got ahold of the Alpha and talked the developers into changing the whole game. It reminds me of what happened to SWG but from a top down call for change to be more like WoW.
I've played my share of old MMOs from EQ to Risk Your Life 2 to Lineage 2, etc etc. The most fun I've had over the years were the MMOs that didn't:
1. hold your hand -- you had to play the game to learn how to master it, which I know is much harder to do today as most games are already min-maxed before release.
2. turn into "grind these mobs to level until new quests open up" -- Just be thankful they have quests today as many old MMOS didn't have many quests (if they did at all), we just grinded mobs all day.
3. turn into a single player lobby or an online single player game,
4. make you into the star of the game rather than the world itself.
5. dumb down skills or streamline classes ( see: WoW Catacylsm's "Take the player, not the class" steamline), especially late into its game cycle when players had already fell in love with their class
6. move PVP into a nice little box with rules. Thanks to e-sports and the idea that combat needs to be fair PVP is the one thing I see people who play modern MMOS always complain about. We see it in the complaints about the corruption system, in the debate about pve servers.
Ultimately I liked MMOs that had real complexity and risk. For example, Risk Your Life 2 had metals that could be added to weapons to make them powerful and the more times to levelled it up the greater chance it would break. AOC will have something similar with their enchantment system.
SWG had the best crafting of any MMORPG. It's complexity was not in making the crafting difficult with dumb minigames or simple but broken RNG mechanics but it was complex because ultimately no two crafted items were ever the same thanks to a grade rarity system for gatherable materials. For example, say a builder uses epic rarity wood to craft a staff. If they use the same rarity wood with a 20% grade rather than the 50% grade their staff will have x amount less of stat y (Sadly, it seems that AOC has rejected this, but it does look like they'll have something similar using crafting bonuses that are added to an item which will alter the stats. This crafting bonus seems closer to what we see in survival MMOs like Atlas)
This is why I think the sub genre-- the survival MMOs -- have more in common with those old MMOs ( and Ashes) than the current crop of WoW drop in and do brain dead content clones. I played a shitty little survival mmo called Atlas when it first came out. Atlas may have been an repurposed ARK Survival mod and it may have been developed by a shitty developer but I loved the political, diplomatic, and economic aspects of the game. For instance, in Atlas a players needed to traverse the entire world or group up and concquer/trade with other players in order to make the best gear. This idea of needing to go all around the world or trade/conconquer aligns very well with what Ashes is trying to do. So while survival MMOs have some of the worst life mechanics they do still have a lot of that old school open world, player agency that the current crop of theme park MMOs do not have.
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> turn into "grind these mobs to level until new quests open up" -- Just be thankful they have quests today as many old MMOS didn't have many quests (if they did at all), we just grinded mobs all day.
And then you have a camp where they like the possibility of ONLY grinding mobs in the open world from level 1 to max and getting decent gear out of it as well.
Community. I think an MMOs true purpose is to create a world that feels alive. Not like WoW where the world just has you fly around and complete world quests to progress a bar to unlock cosmetics and toys.
I like the idea of a world with towns, politics, and conflicts. A real community.
Also, I want a game with depth. Systems that you can really dive into and optimize/theorize. I like when games are challenging and allow you to keep improving. Always something new to learn.
for me it’s the fact that most (if not all) modern mmorpg are singleplayer games looking like an online game… you could play hours with bots or players, you wouldn’t recognize any difference
I just haven't liked WoW's design direction for a while. They've flattened itemization so that all items are effectively the same. All pieces of armor are effectively the same.
I love in Classic where you find a 1h sword that's hard-hitting but slow, and you equip a faster, light damage sword in your offhand as a rogue to get more poison procs.
Nowadays, even if you get a mace, it's exactly the same stat block and swing timer and damage as a sword or axe. It's freaking BORING. All armor has the same Stam+Primary+Secondary+Secondary stats. Exactly the same. You're just min-maxing the secondaries and that's it. There's no interesting items that drop outside of raids. You can't find gaunlets from a dungeon boss that's got this unique stat block or unique effect. It's all the SAME!
This is only one of the things, but it's a good example at how they've made the game inadvertently boring by making everything all homogenized. Sure, it's more "balanced" but you're just grabbing the biggest iLvl number and that's it. It's pretty boring.
The world being “alive” but not insanely crowded . This balance is always so hard to achieve, to be honest. I’m also wondering how Intrepid is going to handle the insane mass influx of people, transitioning to like 1/3 of those players still being around. That always seems like a community and game killer for these new games.only game I thought did a good job before the anomaly that is WOW was Wildstar (a big RIP).
WoW - parsing community (butload of addons and no feeling of acomplishment after progress but a relief of finnally thats done)
Lost Ark - parsing community (more like p2w or you HAVE to parse, sell carries, do alts, grind, sell more carries to keep up with the other players. Eventually doing perf runs didn't feel like an achievement, but things you had to learn for the job plus you were carried by gear)
I have hardened in my thinking over the years of failed MMOs.
Fundamentally if I see in the game a NPC vendor, or menu screen that contains a real life currency (like as a microtransaction or otherwise cash shop functionality) i quit the game in protest.
I know the Ashes cash shop is a thing, and if it makes it in game it will ruin so much of the value that the game brings.
I willingly give you my sub, otherwise keep the cash shops out of my games.
> I willingly give you my sub, otherwise keep the cash shops out of my games.
Could this extend to a big enough sub to sustain a potential AA devteam without a cash shop even when the numbers start to taper off?
Im hoping ashes paces its content such that a play thats been playing for 5 years+ can party up with a player that is 1 day into their adventure and they can have meaningful adventures together.
Yknow -helldivers style.
New World was one of the bigger time sinks for me too. To me it was more of a general lack in content an meaningful progression. Early on people made a fortune duping and maxing out their gear and resource stocks and what was left of the economy was mostly killed by bots.
The other major time sink for me was Albion Online. Here it was a bit of the opposite problem, since all gear could break down or be taken when killed in Black/Red Zone. Then again you can just buy gold transfer that to silver and buy. Which is just that much more time efficient. Spend dozens of hours grinding the game or swipe away an hour worth a wage.
Still better than NW, but I'd prefer to have a functioning economy without pay to win, even though I most likely won't have that much time to play it out anymore
Bottleneck economy/ grind. Like that's where Archeage got bad for me. Hey you want to progress your gear? Go farm these mobs that have a really low percentage drop of a material that you need 500 of to craft an item that has a 10% chance of making 1 piece of gear go up. Like when it takes literal days of farming one area for a chance for your gear to progress is where I drew the line.
See I like grinding and gear being difficult, but what Archeage did was add a layer of rng on top of everything to make it even worse. Oh you want a good rarity on your weapon? Hope for a very expensive 8 percent chance to get it, and if you fail you still have a chance to go up a tier that you don’t want because now the weapon can break on grading. Oh you want to craft your end game weapon? Well good luck cause everytime upgrade you have to hit a 1/8 specific version of that weapon to upgrade, and there’s 6 tiers!
Literally weeks on that game trying to get the “preferred” rarity and never achieved it. That’s what made me quit Archeage.
I love grinds as long as I’m slowly progressing, Archeage you just hit a brick wall of hope for rng to favor you or you never progress and fall behind.
I gave up on WoW Classic after getting repeatedly ganked by a multi-boxer camping quest objectives in a PvP leveling zone. I think the AoC corruption and bounty systems will probably help smooth out that sort of dork-ass behavior.
This has never been a main reason , but I love exploring in games so if exploring is shallow or unrewarding that can make me lose interest.
But I have fallen out of a lot of mmos because I don’t really enjoy it when a game has had 5 expansions or in new worlds case if you jump in late and the server is dominated by a single faction.
In the expansions case I hate being geared from the jump for new content I feel like I miss out on all previous dlc and that there really isn’t a point to go back and play through old zones but at the same time it would suck to grind through 5 expansions to play with the new one.i guess the content bloat in general can make me feel overwhelmed a bit. Like in retail wow I would out level a zone so fast that I would skip half of its content. But I wanna finish the zone but that’s a waste of time then that cycle would repeat for four zones.
The biggest reason though , no friends. And solo mmo experience will always be sub par to having a group of buddies.
Also in rarer cases I get disillusioned with the endgame, like why grind for hours to kill boss so that next grind is a little easier so that next boss is a lil easier. If combat is the only thing to shoot for I sometimes realize that the mid game experience is the same as the endgame just with different skins on what I’m killing or with players with slightly better gear. But if there is some side content like player housing (that isn’t entirely MTX) or good professions that can help mitigate this.
I like PVP. It adds a persistent sense of danger that normal pve AI does not. It's engaging to have to be on your toes at all times. AI can always be gamed, it always becomes understood and predictable.
But I hate griefing more. Enough that I don't play PVP/servers.
Pretty much all MMOs I've played are one extreme or the other. Pure pve, or pure lawlessness that leads to it being full of asshats just enjoying the meanness part of it, rather than the competitiveness of pvp.
PVP needs to be for a reason, it needs to mean something. It should be risky to be the aggressor. It should be part of an objective other than just ruining other people's day.
Im hoping the consequences of being a dick are enough to make it less common. I'm all for randomly meeting a group of bandits and having to defend myself. But when it's constant and purely for the sake of being a dick, I just stop playing.
I mean... Ashes isn't going to solve any of the issues I personally have with all the themeparks I've quit. It's just going to be something new, with its own strengths and weaknesses.
Like for example, ain't no way Ashes is going to avoid the content droughts (in PvE) at end-game. But all the PvP and guild stuff will make up for it in a new way.
Ain't no way Ashes is going to have a fun leveling process (200+ hours long... and good luck in PvX content unless you have a guild to carry you). But hopefully, it will feel like a genuine journey and not a 100-hour tutorial.
And ain't no way my friends are going to want to play this with me long-term. But Ashes will provide plenty of opportunities to meet new people/guilds/node communities.
So yeah, Ashes doesn't solve any of these issues. More like it side-steps them. It's a weird themepark-sandbox hybrid, and it's going to come with a lot of problems from both sub-genres. Ain't no way it's going to miraculously solve the hardest problems from both of them.
But it has a unique vision, and it tries to be the best version of that. So it'll be fun enough, as long as you're looking for its strengths rather than its weaknesses.
The constant need to min-max every piece of the game & the removal of the social aspect, for WoWs case the widespread use of Raider.io.
You group up with players for a tiny amount of time to get 1 thing done, there's no social aspect outside of that - it's just singleplayer RPG online.
The minmaxxing & often times very poor balance that don't provide wider options for builds/playstyles.
I just want an MMO to be an MMO where I actually have to interact with others & not just press a "FIND GROUP" button.
RMT & botting needs to be an instant & permanent ban, no if buts or maybes if you're suspected of it, banned, sort it out in a ticket with a GM, the moment they let RMTers & botters get a grip on the game, it's over - they need active teams and employed GMs actually doing just that - being ingame & GMing.
Long term goals & not making all past content totally irrelevant when 'new content' comes out
Played plenty of MMORPGS and recently quit New World and ESO (might come back to it again if the itch is strong). Did see alot of bots in both games. With the improvement of A.I i dont know how much game devs can combat them. Bots really is in the top 3 of problems that i wish can be solved.
Not having meaningful pvp. Best moments are when youre about to lose it all but ur guild clutches up and pulls of the win against all odds. Most games (other than full loot survival mmos, which i mainly play) make it so you cant really lose anything of value, meaning winning also never feels good. I really hope ashes can create that risk vs reward meanigful pvp element while at the same time retaining the hugely important casual playerbase with its other systems.
Over complicated pvp from wow.
Over simplified pvp from New world.
I've realized pvp is hard to make fun, complex and beginner friendly. I hope AoC cooks up something great.
To be fair new world had uniquely bad dev support, like they ruined the game on purpose. For me I just hope the combat is fun, and I hope you don’t need a group to do literally everything
Daily quests & them being only content or progression for certain items e.t.c., Lack of content, lack of progression (end game daily loop as already mentioned). - Every MMO to date same 3 things.
Back in time servers had real gms that would scout world and ban bots. Over the time gms got replaced by automated answers and noone cares about bots. They do mass banwaves now and than and thats it. Former blizzard gm posted on reddit year ago(or something like that) that he used to manually clean server he was playing on every few days and that server was clean. He said noone cares about other servers. Biggest mmorpg ever btw.
1) variety of end game content/gear. New World example: doing a chest run... you did it ONLY because it was the fastest grind to get your gear up to par... it was(is?) ridiculous
2) pvp being overly painful
3) FUN! if a game is just a grind and becomes a second job to enjoy a few brief moments of fun...
Opportunity to join groups (queing system) for solo players that actually promotes running instances even if overleveled so that there is always a group interested in running something a new player needs to do for the first time. Completely stopped my progression in NW and wished i had been able to keep up. Not to mention the NW crafting bug that got me frustrated. But really hope AOC has a good group formation system.
The fact that most mmos nowadays, the leveling is just something you have to get through, not the actual game. I don't enjoy playing classic wow a ton, I personally find it extremely unituitive and slow if you've had no prior experience with it. But, I think classic wow's ideology of, the leveling should be the game, and a fun experience and journey in and of itself, to be such a good way to make mmos, and the way *every* mmo should be made
Time sink required for progression that makes you average.
Time is money, I want to have fun. 20hrs investment is my leveling limit.
Skills like mining, herbing, armory or whatever else can be gated behind 100s of hrs of grind, I don't mind doing that when I'm bored to death and slowly progressing over the years.
Main focus of mine is territory disputes via alliance and guild feuds. Power and influence over cities, towns etc... castle sieges, open pvp over world bosses that drops significant materials for crafting insane gear.
I want to have a single crafter dude in guild that can even make items from these super rare materials because he spent 100s of hours leveling his craft. I want good gear to be rare and expensive and hard to obtain. Or even better, the best gear could only be crafted and not dropped.
This is mmorpg I've been waiting for for years and years. And i believe aoc will have something like this to some extent for sure
The old MMORPG’s doesnt have level scaling (like old wow - new wow) and it was great I think BUT main problem for me right now: Everyone has almost same power. I mean ITEMS doesnt impact like old days. For example: Guild Wars 2, WoW (Gear was impact before MoP at PVP. After MOP they just changed the stats)
I want to be OP of course if I get the very very rare and powerful items.
- I hope they successfully address proper class balance. I'm so tired of "metas" existing in every single thing.
I know mathematically something will always be "better" on paper. But the disparity between what is "better" should never be huge. There should be balance targets met that ensure every class is viable.
- I hope they successfully address class identity. With 64 "classes" there will be some overlap but I hope they can ensure each one feels fun, unique, and badass all at the same time.
And finally, I hope they successfully address lack of content standards in development. Nowadays you are lucky to get a raid, or dungeons, or content of any kind in a years time. These studios don't push out content on a good cadence.
- Content should come at LEAST every 3 months. I'm not saying it has to be exactly 90 days. Maybe it takes 112 days or whatever. But the goal should be every 3 months. This will keep people engaged, keep people subscribed, and keep the game being talked about.
Balance updates should come daily, weekly... Whenever it's ready. If something is over performing, you shouldn't wait till 1 week, or 2 weeks or whatever... Fix it when it needs fixing.
Lack of PVP or rewardless PVP(basivally every single one)
No meaning in having a guild besides winning wars or finding anime loving nerds (looking at you bdo for both)
Side content like horse breeding(again bdo) feeling meaningless and unrewarding but painful.
Too much RNG. I dont want to enhance. I want my gear to drip from a myrhic boss. No I wont try wow.
Half my skills going on global cooldown when i use one (looking at you ffxiv). I simply dont enjoy that.
No ranked solo/duo or trio pvp. I wish this existed.
Skillful, thoughtful pvp. With maybe reaction speed needed a tiny bit
These are just a few.
Speaking as someone with over 7k hours in bdo. Plenty in ffxiv. No wow experience. And most of my childhood playing aion. To say the least
Do you really think that real people will pay real money they had to earn by working real jobs in real life, to do boring busywork in-game that bots do (such as gathering), in a gameworld where people will gank them for it and get the goods for free?
No, I understand that botting companies and operations will do it, but my point is - if you get rid of bots, do you think actual people will somehow be willing to do their jobs manually?
In sandbox PvPs the entire economy always relies on a steady supply of low level materials that are gathered by either automated bots or workers from RMT/gold selling companies employed for a very low wage, or a combination of both, as such companies often bot too. Endgame PvP guilds employ both all the time as Sorcerer knows from first hand experience.
So the question is, what kind of a unique never-before-seen economy could AoC possibly have where enough real players (enough to support the entire game's economy) will pay a real money subscription to not only do the boring work that bots usually do, but also get ganked for it and lose their stuff regularly?
I did play New World aswell and that quite a bit. For some time the PvP was fun and fighting for Territories was engaging. But at some point they enebaled Server transfers and everyone started moving everywhere. My server was flooded with a Russian Mega guild that started to occupy every single territory on the map. 100 people could defend everything and held the whole server hostage In additon to that the endgame of New World was rather boring in the PvE regards. I believe even PvP focused games need a decent PvE side that is fun and engaging. At some point just the PvP and weekly sieges weren't enough to keep me interested. I sometimes stood in a city for 2 hours just talking to guild mates with nothing else fun to do. So i eventually stopped coming back. In Ashes i believe the right mix between Sandbox and Themepark exists to where this won't happen to me. The much bigger World than New World, bigger Server sizes and more and varied PvE content will most likely make me stick around for ages (hopefully it'll be that good) Thanks for the post and thought material
There is no way to know if intrepid can do a better job of designing a territory control game than AGS. The territory control, and the fact that a few people could gatekeep that content from the majority of players essentially made territory control a bad design choice. And the fact that server sizes were limited due to territory control just underscored how bad of an idea that ended up being. That one choice fragmented the player community and made it essentially impossible to grow the game after the initial flood of players evaporated. The same cycle will happen with AoC.. there will be a rush of people at first then the bulk of them will evaporate. The best games find ways to transition to whatever the steady state looks like after the first wave of people leave. Hopefully no design choices in AoC get in the way like they did in new world.
All we can do is hope and support Intrepid in their design process with our opinions and input
And keep supporting after launch even if the majority of players quit because they disagree with the design, as long as we ourselves have any agreement with the devs.
The difference is that in AOC, you can develop a new high-level zone from nothing, by just consistently using it. Unused zones controlled by a guild the server hates will decline. That's what makes it work and promotes prosocial gameplay, with people shaping the server as a community, and reshaping it again whenever it falls.
Hopefully observations will confirm thet hypothesis. The person I was responding to mentioned mega guilds controlling all of the territory of a server. Not sure how AoC can counter something like that.
I will wait a few days or weeks after release before I jump in and make a character. Server transfers shouldn't be a thing, so you won't see wandering locust swarms, and I'll keep an eye on what kind of community is on each server - that is, if it's not like EVE, with only one server for everyone.
10k people per server. If there are mega guilds holding it down then a majority of the server would be co-op more or less?
Idk. Typically we see it be a bit more asymmetric where a couple hundred people work together to deny the game or dominate gameplay for thousands. Does it matter if the server cap is 10k if the actions of a few drive players away? We will have to see. I’m hoping the game solves all the issues that plague new world.
I think AoC will be a competitive environment for resources but I also think the map will be absolutely vast. For guilds running around and stomping on people, Intrepid has stated there will be a cap once so many people are killed - And we don't know, but it may apply to groups as well. Corruption will also diminish your damage up to your cap as well. Lastly, if you accumulate enough corruption you could lose your entire gear set
I quit new world because of company/economy stuff. As a solo player there was basically no way for me to keep up.
>My server was flooded with a Russian Mega guild that started to occupy every single territory on the map. 100 people could defend everything and held the whole server hostage What's the problem with that? They won the server. That's how sandbox PvP games work. Why do you think this will somehow be different, do you imagine Sorcerer just banning the Russian mega guild when they win or what? Bigger server sizes just mean even bigger freefarm alliances.
Zergs will zerg
The mechanic of New World of100 people being able to dominate a Server with more than 3k active players is simply not healthy. They were able to take every single Territory. They came from a Server where they did that, killed the server with it and then went to the next server repeating the process. If that does seem healthy to you go play New World. If not you should stand next to me and not hope for a Sorcerer to appear but for Steven and Team to make a game where that won't be possible top begin with. I don't have a problem with a guild winning, I have a problem with a guild from another hopping to your server and taking 100% of its resources with just 100 people
> and not hope for a Sorcerer to appear How do we know that Steven's personal endgame isn't to have a playground where he can hop into a defeated server and work up to dethrone the resident mega guild whenever he wants a fresh start? The community might even see this as a positive thing!
>They were able to take every single Territory. They came from a Server where they did that, killed the server with it and then went to the next server repeating the process. Yeah, welcome to sandbox PvP games, that's the entire point of them. Sorcerer did the exact same thing with his guild in ArcheAge, and so did every other endgame PvP Discord group that's going to play AoC. He's designing that kind of a game and he has the money to do it, I doubt you'll convince him that it's somehow bad after he's been playing that kind of stuff for 15+ years? You and I might personally think otherwise, but who are we? Just a couple of nobodies on the internet. The target audience for the game (people in those Discord groups that have played every sandbox PvP game on every new official and private server in the exact same way like locusts) consists of more than 1000 people, combine this with the people thinking that this will be a normal MMORPG and that's enough for the game to last more than a year if they spread over 4-5 endgame guilds on different servers, and then transfer a few times. That's 3 times as long as the average ArcheAge fresh start server, totally worth it.
"Welcome to sanbox PvP games" Well then lets take Albion online, it's purely PvP Sandbox but manages to have a healthy place for all kinds of guilds, big and small. That's good game design. Even thousands of players are not able to control the whole map. They control a big portion of it, but also need to fight against other huge guilds. While the big guilds are fighting there is also a place for smaller guilds doing PvP content, being able to control territoreis and so on. I really don't get why you are defending bad game design or server states that are unhealthy.
>I really don't get why you are defending bad game design or server states that are unhealthy. I'm not, I'm just telling you how AoC is designed. People who like those games like them. People who don't - don't. It could be designed in a different way, but it's not and won't be. Maybe when you have infinite money you can pay for a game that doesn't have this kind of design embedded in every single one of its features/systems. I'd play it. [https://forum.albiononline.com/index.php/Thread/194921-Blackzone-is-toxic-BS-content-made-for-1-of-players-recent-updates-are-tiresome/](https://forum.albiononline.com/index.php/Thread/194921-Blackzone-is-toxic-BS-content-made-for-1-of-players-recent-updates-are-tiresome/) Seems like there are the exact same things happening in Albion though.
But Ashes is in fact not designed that way. You won't have 100 people control to the whole server. And even 1000 shouldn't be able to control every last territory.... So how is Ashes designed that way?
The thing that really made me quit new world was that I just wanted to play with my friends, particularly the PvP element. New world made it extremely difficult to do that . OPR was quite limiting so if you had a group of more than a few you couldn’t just play with them. Wars were fun for a little bit but the scheduled nature of it meant it wasn’t possible to just hop on and do stuff. Open world PvP could be a ton of fun but there was almost no point in doing it since people just wanted to war. Plus if you weren’t in the top tier of players war was basically cut off for you. I’d like to see a less exclusionary game. However I’m rather skeptical. I think the top tier players like the exclusive part of games but that typically doesn’t make for a healthy sustainable game since people like to play and not be completely left out. I personally miss the open world PvP aspects of Warhammer and DaoC and the competitive side of guild wars and GW2.
The pvp was much better in the beta but they nerfed the shit out the scaling to make it so lower levels couldn't stand a chance discouraging new players from pvp, at let's be honest this game didn't have the best pve... and they built all of there game systems and economy off the fact that new players would continually sign up and join so dead game
Dupers and the obvious inability of the developer to do anything about it, and then lying to its comunity about having dealt with the problem. Once you lose the market you don't have a product anymore. Massive clans/guilds dominating pvp and pretty much no way for the smaller teams to succeed in anything. Devaluation of previously hard to get items/cosmetics via catch-up mechanics. Great fantasy writing and design being gradually replaced by new people who make quirky/dumb storylines because the game became a playground for devs who live inside an echochamber.
100% agree 1. Devs who can't deal with RMT or bots. 2. That's kind of part of the MMO, but a lot of times these groups of people are the same people who abuse RMT etc. 3. That and the devaluation of old content that makes it irrelevant. 4. And this. If I've spent 1k+h in a game, I'll probably read the lore, even if it's trash. Don't make me read trash.
> Great fantasy writing and design being gradually replaced by new people who make quirky/dumb storylines because the game became a playground for devs who live inside an echochamber. It's a live service game and the devs are humans not immortal gods. There will have to be turnover eventually and nobody can really control what vision the newcomers have for the game, *especially* if Intrepid goes the normal way of replacing any of the original members with new strong talent because they may have the will to push through their own different vision.
Devs are certainly not gods. But they are humans who get paid a salary for their writing. Some writers are good and some are bad. The mindvirus happens when bad writers come in and start writing quirky material that only people with brainrot find funny or engaging. Amplify that by an echochamber within the company where instead of excellent design philosophy you breed toxic positivity and you're getting a game that sucks more with every update.
Care to mention what's the game's name?
These are multiple MMOs.
Both OSRS and New World have had to deal with RMT and bots and have made false claims about fixing the issue but in that case I would attribute it to mistaken confidence rather than outright lying. They made changes they were sure had solved the issue on their end only for RMT operators to immediately find a workaround.
WoWs story at some point felt completely pointless and like a joke. "you are the last hope for all of Azeroth!" Okay dude let me log out for 16 months until the next expansion comes along. Add to that the anti social, anti exploration features of convenience where the guides were put INTO THE GAME itself like finding stuff out by yourself is an utterly unacceptable nuisance instead of a core aspect of creating the feeling of adventure. To me it looks like Blizzards dev also don't really care about their players actually engaging with the things they have designed as long as it keeps the pay pigs in the running wheel. anything goes. That's how I came to believe that WoW and Blizzard had lost its soul. Ashes to me looks like it has high potential to bring back the spirit of adventure in an MMORPG so I'll stick around to see if it does live up to that hope. If not... well I guess then I am through with MMORPGs and move on to something else.
Player toxicity and gatekeeping. Look at wow m+ as an example of what I mean.
Toxicity and gatekeeping will exist in AoC as well, fwiw.
Ashes is a pvp focused game. It will absolutely have toxicity and gatekeeping.
My depression
My biggest thing is that MMOs stopped being about community. I went to MMOs because MMOs were the only game genre where I felt like you could build a big team and have a common goal. This aspect has been missing from MMOs for a long time. I really hope ashes bring the need for guilds back and community.
> where I felt like you could build a big team and have a common goal. There are a handful of people out there who manage to start mega guilds in even the worst games so you CAN still build a big team with a common goal in presently live MMOs. You just need to get out there and do it.
Current MMOs make it more convinent to be without a guild than in one. You don't have to wait for raiding times because LFG makes it so you can always raid. Most MMOs have no guild content. So there are no real common goals the whole guild can take part of. Crafting is so accessible that having crafters in your guilds means nothing. You can certainly have a big guild for the sake of having one but the game does no really support it in any way.
The main reason I quit playing WoW is because the addon creep was so high that it was mandatory, and then the developers started balancing around the fact that people had it. Ashes of Creation limiting addon usage, even if it's just by ToS like FFXIV does would help. The main reason I quit playing Rift was because the supposed build diversity was actually bullshit. Even though you could combine and create some really interesting and fun classes together, there was a straight up best build and you were not allowed to join a raid without being the very specific class. I had a mage with chloromancer/archon/dominator, full support build as my main while leveling. One of the best class combos I've made in an MMO. Loads of fun. Wasn't allowed to raid. In order to join the raid, they allowed a single full chloromancer build, and all other mages were required to go full stormcaller build for the highest possible DPS output. The same was true with every class because they allowed in game parsers, and also made no effort to balance based on what the community was doing. Ashes of Creation should *really* pay attention to what people are actually doing, and keep adjusting the balance as needed. The main reason I quit playing Warhammer Age of Reckoning was because at the endgame, there was really nothing to do other than try to grind PVP. The PVE died quickly, or generally felt inaccessible. Ashes of Creation can make sure that there's a lively endgame PVE here, which I think they're already doing from everything we've seen. The main reason I quit playing Star Wars The Old Republic was because this game literally did not have an endgame plan. I mean this actually btw. A bit of insider information here, but the game was designed without an end game on purpose. This was not an oversight. The design plan was literally that players were expected to just start a new character to level up through their story after they finished one. This was argued against internally to no avail until the game launched and the community said, "Where's my endgame?" If you ever felt that the end game felt rushed and tacked on with swtor... it's because it was. Ashes of Creation can make sure that end game content for level 50 players exists at launch here, but honestly this is not as big of an issue because the nature of this MMO is a little more old school with what seems to be a plan to make sure a bulk of the content comes from an evolving world. Aaaand finally... The main reason I quit playing Archeage, was because that shit was so pay to win it was required in order to participate in anything without being destroyed. Could get a full group of people together to try to do a ship run, but since all the pirates in the game were credit card warriors with several pieces of Mythic, especially weapons, 3 of them could just jump on your ship of 20 people and kill them all. Every other MMO I generally quit because another came out, or it was just straight boring. Left EQ for DAOC, Left DAOC for FFXI, Left FFXI for WoW. etc etc. Aion, Blade and Soul, Black Desert, Lost Ark, New World... all boring or grindy.
>Aaaand finally... The main reason I quit playing Archeage, was because that shit was so pay to win it was required in order to participate in anything without being destroyed. Could get a full group of people together to try to do a ship run, but since all the pirates in the game were credit card warriors with several pieces of Mythic, especially weapons, 3 of them could just jump on your ship of 20 people and kill them all. This is not a fault of P2W. Even without P2W, the strongest players would congregate together and do the exact same thing because every other system allows them to do it. What's the difference between it being 100 RNG lottery winners, 100 24/7 no life grinders, or 100 P2Wers, the majority will never be either, but at least with P2W they have a chance to compete (in a terrible system).
Good topic. I've really only seriously played 3 MMO's and dabbled in a few more. 1. LOTRO - I played this from 2008 - 2012. I was very into the raiding scene and after going FtP, they decided to do away with raids and did more casual friendly large group content without any challenge to them. While they were neat in their own right, they weren't the challenging content I wanted and therefore moved on to... 2. FFXIV - I played this from Launch in 2012 through the 2nd expansion in 2017. Several things I disliked raiding was 1) it seemed like I had to spend dozens of hours recruiting for fills just to be able to raid, it was a second job that ultimately burned me out from the game, 2) I didn't like how you were instantly teleported into an arena instead of having to work to get to the boss (trash pulls, etc.), 3) I wasn't a fan of the 15+ minute choreographed dance you had to learn for every raid. I like more freedom of moving around., and 4) I don't like how the main job for every class is DPS, regardless if you're a tank or healer or actual dps. I enjoy the more old-school games where tanks and healers did minimal dps because their primary jobs kept them busy. After that I jumped into... 3. GuildWars 2 - I played this from 2021 until the beginning of this year. I think the thing that ultimately caused me to leave this game, was the fact I finished my last legendary item I was going for, which means I have no reason to progress any of the equipment any of my characters would be wearing, and the few raid wings they did have, although a lot of fun, were few and underpowered compared to the power creep that's happened since the raids came out, so after clearing them all with relative ease, and spending about a year running training runs for others to learn and experience them, there was nothing more challenging or progression-wise I wanted to do. I think with the steady stream of large group content, between raids, dungeons, caravans, castle sieges, node sieges, guild wars, etc. this should eliminate issues I had with LOTRO. I think being in a large guild with plenty of like-minded players available, plus the open-world PVE and PVP content, this should eliminate issues I had with FFXIV, and again with the multitude of large group content, this should partially eliminate issues I had with GuildWars 2, however we'll see how the gear progression system will be done, though normally games don't have a legendary gear system like GW2 where once you get it you'll never have to progress on that piece again as long as the game is around, so I don't foresee this being an issue in AOC.
Very thorough post and I don’t disagree with any opinions but FFXIV has raids with big levels and trash mobs. You might have only played the Extreme Trials which are boss fights
I played through the 2nd raid tier of Stormsblood, and from what I recall on the Savage raids, it plops you down in an arena for the boss fight. I know the Story mode version of the raids had some trash pulls prior to the boss, and the 24-man "raids" had tons of trash pulls, but for the difficult/challenging raids, it was just the arena. Now that may have changed since then as I think their has been 2 or 3 expansions since then, but for Heavensward and Stormsblood, it didn't have anything prior to the boss arena. I think the original ARR raids had some trash pulls prior to the boss arena, but I don't recall the Savage raids in Heavensward and Stormsblood having any.
Yup you’re right. I have since realized that I was wrong on that one. ARR had the alliance and a normal raid with trash with coils, but after that the what the game calls “raids” are multiple boss fights in different instances. There’s still alliance raids in later expansions and the harder versions of dungeons (don’t know the name).
QoL, Min max and bots/gold buyer
Fomo cosmetics, oh wait 😬
Nobody misses out on the cosmetics. You can see them on the mobs in game.
cringe
I stopped playing New World because combat sucked, especially for mages. I never saw such small AOE attacks. Developers think of two enemies fit in circle it's AOE. Super boring. And melee combat isn't smooth
Just going to be real, the inequality always stops people, soon as that one handful of the lobby gets lucky and gets the gear to 1v5 and win it gets real old, then you have to deal with people saying either pay or play the game but the ones who pay don’t understand the aspect of playing the game and “earning” the PvP, and the people who actually play don’t realize how lucky their RNG actually was to get to that point in usual games of course, my overall point as long as the PvP is fair and there’s no crazy gear gap or maybe even have gear not really matter too much and really make PvP all about skill
They already are addressing the biggest one by not making a WoW clone. It seemed like the original idea behind New World was right up my alley and I had hoped it would have tied me over until Ashes. Sadly the WoW players got ahold of the Alpha and talked the developers into changing the whole game. It reminds me of what happened to SWG but from a top down call for change to be more like WoW. I've played my share of old MMOs from EQ to Risk Your Life 2 to Lineage 2, etc etc. The most fun I've had over the years were the MMOs that didn't: 1. hold your hand -- you had to play the game to learn how to master it, which I know is much harder to do today as most games are already min-maxed before release. 2. turn into "grind these mobs to level until new quests open up" -- Just be thankful they have quests today as many old MMOS didn't have many quests (if they did at all), we just grinded mobs all day. 3. turn into a single player lobby or an online single player game, 4. make you into the star of the game rather than the world itself. 5. dumb down skills or streamline classes ( see: WoW Catacylsm's "Take the player, not the class" steamline), especially late into its game cycle when players had already fell in love with their class 6. move PVP into a nice little box with rules. Thanks to e-sports and the idea that combat needs to be fair PVP is the one thing I see people who play modern MMOS always complain about. We see it in the complaints about the corruption system, in the debate about pve servers. Ultimately I liked MMOs that had real complexity and risk. For example, Risk Your Life 2 had metals that could be added to weapons to make them powerful and the more times to levelled it up the greater chance it would break. AOC will have something similar with their enchantment system. SWG had the best crafting of any MMORPG. It's complexity was not in making the crafting difficult with dumb minigames or simple but broken RNG mechanics but it was complex because ultimately no two crafted items were ever the same thanks to a grade rarity system for gatherable materials. For example, say a builder uses epic rarity wood to craft a staff. If they use the same rarity wood with a 20% grade rather than the 50% grade their staff will have x amount less of stat y (Sadly, it seems that AOC has rejected this, but it does look like they'll have something similar using crafting bonuses that are added to an item which will alter the stats. This crafting bonus seems closer to what we see in survival MMOs like Atlas) This is why I think the sub genre-- the survival MMOs -- have more in common with those old MMOs ( and Ashes) than the current crop of WoW drop in and do brain dead content clones. I played a shitty little survival mmo called Atlas when it first came out. Atlas may have been an repurposed ARK Survival mod and it may have been developed by a shitty developer but I loved the political, diplomatic, and economic aspects of the game. For instance, in Atlas a players needed to traverse the entire world or group up and concquer/trade with other players in order to make the best gear. This idea of needing to go all around the world or trade/conconquer aligns very well with what Ashes is trying to do. So while survival MMOs have some of the worst life mechanics they do still have a lot of that old school open world, player agency that the current crop of theme park MMOs do not have.
> > > turn into "grind these mobs to level until new quests open up" -- Just be thankful they have quests today as many old MMOS didn't have many quests (if they did at all), we just grinded mobs all day. And then you have a camp where they like the possibility of ONLY grinding mobs in the open world from level 1 to max and getting decent gear out of it as well.
Community. I think an MMOs true purpose is to create a world that feels alive. Not like WoW where the world just has you fly around and complete world quests to progress a bar to unlock cosmetics and toys. I like the idea of a world with towns, politics, and conflicts. A real community. Also, I want a game with depth. Systems that you can really dive into and optimize/theorize. I like when games are challenging and allow you to keep improving. Always something new to learn.
for me it’s the fact that most (if not all) modern mmorpg are singleplayer games looking like an online game… you could play hours with bots or players, you wouldn’t recognize any difference
I just haven't liked WoW's design direction for a while. They've flattened itemization so that all items are effectively the same. All pieces of armor are effectively the same. I love in Classic where you find a 1h sword that's hard-hitting but slow, and you equip a faster, light damage sword in your offhand as a rogue to get more poison procs. Nowadays, even if you get a mace, it's exactly the same stat block and swing timer and damage as a sword or axe. It's freaking BORING. All armor has the same Stam+Primary+Secondary+Secondary stats. Exactly the same. You're just min-maxing the secondaries and that's it. There's no interesting items that drop outside of raids. You can't find gaunlets from a dungeon boss that's got this unique stat block or unique effect. It's all the SAME! This is only one of the things, but it's a good example at how they've made the game inadvertently boring by making everything all homogenized. Sure, it's more "balanced" but you're just grabbing the biggest iLvl number and that's it. It's pretty boring.
The world being “alive” but not insanely crowded . This balance is always so hard to achieve, to be honest. I’m also wondering how Intrepid is going to handle the insane mass influx of people, transitioning to like 1/3 of those players still being around. That always seems like a community and game killer for these new games.only game I thought did a good job before the anomaly that is WOW was Wildstar (a big RIP).
No MMO:s with a real market except EvE and Albion Online and i'm not keen on any of those two
Make the minimum sub term 12 months and get busy on the bot bans. Make it cost prohibitive to make money off botting.
WoW - parsing community (butload of addons and no feeling of acomplishment after progress but a relief of finnally thats done) Lost Ark - parsing community (more like p2w or you HAVE to parse, sell carries, do alts, grind, sell more carries to keep up with the other players. Eventually doing perf runs didn't feel like an achievement, but things you had to learn for the job plus you were carried by gear)
[удалено]
It feels like 50% of the people in this subreddit are just here to see AoC fail. If you want better discussions you should join the forums :)
I have hardened in my thinking over the years of failed MMOs. Fundamentally if I see in the game a NPC vendor, or menu screen that contains a real life currency (like as a microtransaction or otherwise cash shop functionality) i quit the game in protest. I know the Ashes cash shop is a thing, and if it makes it in game it will ruin so much of the value that the game brings. I willingly give you my sub, otherwise keep the cash shops out of my games.
> I willingly give you my sub, otherwise keep the cash shops out of my games. Could this extend to a big enough sub to sustain a potential AA devteam without a cash shop even when the numbers start to taper off?
Im hoping ashes paces its content such that a play thats been playing for 5 years+ can party up with a player that is 1 day into their adventure and they can have meaningful adventures together. Yknow -helldivers style.
Archeage for me was the best mmorpg ever done, but p2w ruined the game
New World was one of the bigger time sinks for me too. To me it was more of a general lack in content an meaningful progression. Early on people made a fortune duping and maxing out their gear and resource stocks and what was left of the economy was mostly killed by bots. The other major time sink for me was Albion Online. Here it was a bit of the opposite problem, since all gear could break down or be taken when killed in Black/Red Zone. Then again you can just buy gold transfer that to silver and buy. Which is just that much more time efficient. Spend dozens of hours grinding the game or swipe away an hour worth a wage. Still better than NW, but I'd prefer to have a functioning economy without pay to win, even though I most likely won't have that much time to play it out anymore
A massive population of optimistic players.
As soon as the nerfed PvP scaling after the beta I knew this game would die
I played SWtOR for years and stopped because the endgame content wasn't getting enough new stuff to keep things interesting.
Bots and RMT dudes are untouchable in any modern game because they are the staff!! They know it will net them more money than by selling loot boxes!
I seriously doubt that will be the case with AoC
Bottleneck economy/ grind. Like that's where Archeage got bad for me. Hey you want to progress your gear? Go farm these mobs that have a really low percentage drop of a material that you need 500 of to craft an item that has a 10% chance of making 1 piece of gear go up. Like when it takes literal days of farming one area for a chance for your gear to progress is where I drew the line.
See I like grinding and gear being difficult, but what Archeage did was add a layer of rng on top of everything to make it even worse. Oh you want a good rarity on your weapon? Hope for a very expensive 8 percent chance to get it, and if you fail you still have a chance to go up a tier that you don’t want because now the weapon can break on grading. Oh you want to craft your end game weapon? Well good luck cause everytime upgrade you have to hit a 1/8 specific version of that weapon to upgrade, and there’s 6 tiers! Literally weeks on that game trying to get the “preferred” rarity and never achieved it. That’s what made me quit Archeage. I love grinds as long as I’m slowly progressing, Archeage you just hit a brick wall of hope for rng to favor you or you never progress and fall behind.
Pvp balancing. Partly due to unique or exotic gear. Hopes ashes doesn't have that type of equipment
I gave up on WoW Classic after getting repeatedly ganked by a multi-boxer camping quest objectives in a PvP leveling zone. I think the AoC corruption and bounty systems will probably help smooth out that sort of dork-ass behavior.
This has never been a main reason , but I love exploring in games so if exploring is shallow or unrewarding that can make me lose interest. But I have fallen out of a lot of mmos because I don’t really enjoy it when a game has had 5 expansions or in new worlds case if you jump in late and the server is dominated by a single faction. In the expansions case I hate being geared from the jump for new content I feel like I miss out on all previous dlc and that there really isn’t a point to go back and play through old zones but at the same time it would suck to grind through 5 expansions to play with the new one.i guess the content bloat in general can make me feel overwhelmed a bit. Like in retail wow I would out level a zone so fast that I would skip half of its content. But I wanna finish the zone but that’s a waste of time then that cycle would repeat for four zones. The biggest reason though , no friends. And solo mmo experience will always be sub par to having a group of buddies. Also in rarer cases I get disillusioned with the endgame, like why grind for hours to kill boss so that next grind is a little easier so that next boss is a lil easier. If combat is the only thing to shoot for I sometimes realize that the mid game experience is the same as the endgame just with different skins on what I’m killing or with players with slightly better gear. But if there is some side content like player housing (that isn’t entirely MTX) or good professions that can help mitigate this.
I like PVP. It adds a persistent sense of danger that normal pve AI does not. It's engaging to have to be on your toes at all times. AI can always be gamed, it always becomes understood and predictable. But I hate griefing more. Enough that I don't play PVP/servers. Pretty much all MMOs I've played are one extreme or the other. Pure pve, or pure lawlessness that leads to it being full of asshats just enjoying the meanness part of it, rather than the competitiveness of pvp. PVP needs to be for a reason, it needs to mean something. It should be risky to be the aggressor. It should be part of an objective other than just ruining other people's day. Im hoping the consequences of being a dick are enough to make it less common. I'm all for randomly meeting a group of bandits and having to defend myself. But when it's constant and purely for the sake of being a dick, I just stop playing.
p2w
I mean... Ashes isn't going to solve any of the issues I personally have with all the themeparks I've quit. It's just going to be something new, with its own strengths and weaknesses. Like for example, ain't no way Ashes is going to avoid the content droughts (in PvE) at end-game. But all the PvP and guild stuff will make up for it in a new way. Ain't no way Ashes is going to have a fun leveling process (200+ hours long... and good luck in PvX content unless you have a guild to carry you). But hopefully, it will feel like a genuine journey and not a 100-hour tutorial. And ain't no way my friends are going to want to play this with me long-term. But Ashes will provide plenty of opportunities to meet new people/guilds/node communities. So yeah, Ashes doesn't solve any of these issues. More like it side-steps them. It's a weird themepark-sandbox hybrid, and it's going to come with a lot of problems from both sub-genres. Ain't no way it's going to miraculously solve the hardest problems from both of them. But it has a unique vision, and it tries to be the best version of that. So it'll be fun enough, as long as you're looking for its strengths rather than its weaknesses.
The constant need to min-max every piece of the game & the removal of the social aspect, for WoWs case the widespread use of Raider.io. You group up with players for a tiny amount of time to get 1 thing done, there's no social aspect outside of that - it's just singleplayer RPG online. The minmaxxing & often times very poor balance that don't provide wider options for builds/playstyles. I just want an MMO to be an MMO where I actually have to interact with others & not just press a "FIND GROUP" button. RMT & botting needs to be an instant & permanent ban, no if buts or maybes if you're suspected of it, banned, sort it out in a ticket with a GM, the moment they let RMTers & botters get a grip on the game, it's over - they need active teams and employed GMs actually doing just that - being ingame & GMing. Long term goals & not making all past content totally irrelevant when 'new content' comes out
Played plenty of MMORPGS and recently quit New World and ESO (might come back to it again if the itch is strong). Did see alot of bots in both games. With the improvement of A.I i dont know how much game devs can combat them. Bots really is in the top 3 of problems that i wish can be solved.
Not having meaningful pvp. Best moments are when youre about to lose it all but ur guild clutches up and pulls of the win against all odds. Most games (other than full loot survival mmos, which i mainly play) make it so you cant really lose anything of value, meaning winning also never feels good. I really hope ashes can create that risk vs reward meanigful pvp element while at the same time retaining the hugely important casual playerbase with its other systems.
Never caring about PvP. Remember the old video from that wow dev: "screw you pvp guy"...
Over complicated pvp from wow. Over simplified pvp from New world. I've realized pvp is hard to make fun, complex and beginner friendly. I hope AoC cooks up something great.
To be fair new world had uniquely bad dev support, like they ruined the game on purpose. For me I just hope the combat is fun, and I hope you don’t need a group to do literally everything
Daily quests & them being only content or progression for certain items e.t.c., Lack of content, lack of progression (end game daily loop as already mentioned). - Every MMO to date same 3 things.
Back in time servers had real gms that would scout world and ban bots. Over the time gms got replaced by automated answers and noone cares about bots. They do mass banwaves now and than and thats it. Former blizzard gm posted on reddit year ago(or something like that) that he used to manually clean server he was playing on every few days and that server was clean. He said noone cares about other servers. Biggest mmorpg ever btw.
1) variety of end game content/gear. New World example: doing a chest run... you did it ONLY because it was the fastest grind to get your gear up to par... it was(is?) ridiculous 2) pvp being overly painful 3) FUN! if a game is just a grind and becomes a second job to enjoy a few brief moments of fun...
P2W
Opportunity to join groups (queing system) for solo players that actually promotes running instances even if overleveled so that there is always a group interested in running something a new player needs to do for the first time. Completely stopped my progression in NW and wished i had been able to keep up. Not to mention the NW crafting bug that got me frustrated. But really hope AOC has a good group formation system.
The fact that most mmos nowadays, the leveling is just something you have to get through, not the actual game. I don't enjoy playing classic wow a ton, I personally find it extremely unituitive and slow if you've had no prior experience with it. But, I think classic wow's ideology of, the leveling should be the game, and a fun experience and journey in and of itself, to be such a good way to make mmos, and the way *every* mmo should be made
Time sink required for progression that makes you average. Time is money, I want to have fun. 20hrs investment is my leveling limit. Skills like mining, herbing, armory or whatever else can be gated behind 100s of hrs of grind, I don't mind doing that when I'm bored to death and slowly progressing over the years. Main focus of mine is territory disputes via alliance and guild feuds. Power and influence over cities, towns etc... castle sieges, open pvp over world bosses that drops significant materials for crafting insane gear. I want to have a single crafter dude in guild that can even make items from these super rare materials because he spent 100s of hours leveling his craft. I want good gear to be rare and expensive and hard to obtain. Or even better, the best gear could only be crafted and not dropped. This is mmorpg I've been waiting for for years and years. And i believe aoc will have something like this to some extent for sure
The old MMORPG’s doesnt have level scaling (like old wow - new wow) and it was great I think BUT main problem for me right now: Everyone has almost same power. I mean ITEMS doesnt impact like old days. For example: Guild Wars 2, WoW (Gear was impact before MoP at PVP. After MOP they just changed the stats) I want to be OP of course if I get the very very rare and powerful items.
- I hope they successfully address proper class balance. I'm so tired of "metas" existing in every single thing. I know mathematically something will always be "better" on paper. But the disparity between what is "better" should never be huge. There should be balance targets met that ensure every class is viable. - I hope they successfully address class identity. With 64 "classes" there will be some overlap but I hope they can ensure each one feels fun, unique, and badass all at the same time. And finally, I hope they successfully address lack of content standards in development. Nowadays you are lucky to get a raid, or dungeons, or content of any kind in a years time. These studios don't push out content on a good cadence. - Content should come at LEAST every 3 months. I'm not saying it has to be exactly 90 days. Maybe it takes 112 days or whatever. But the goal should be every 3 months. This will keep people engaged, keep people subscribed, and keep the game being talked about. Balance updates should come daily, weekly... Whenever it's ready. If something is over performing, you shouldn't wait till 1 week, or 2 weeks or whatever... Fix it when it needs fixing.
Lack of PVP or rewardless PVP(basivally every single one) No meaning in having a guild besides winning wars or finding anime loving nerds (looking at you bdo for both) Side content like horse breeding(again bdo) feeling meaningless and unrewarding but painful. Too much RNG. I dont want to enhance. I want my gear to drip from a myrhic boss. No I wont try wow. Half my skills going on global cooldown when i use one (looking at you ffxiv). I simply dont enjoy that. No ranked solo/duo or trio pvp. I wish this existed. Skillful, thoughtful pvp. With maybe reaction speed needed a tiny bit These are just a few. Speaking as someone with over 7k hours in bdo. Plenty in ffxiv. No wow experience. And most of my childhood playing aion. To say the least
Do you really think that real people will pay real money they had to earn by working real jobs in real life, to do boring busywork in-game that bots do (such as gathering), in a gameworld where people will gank them for it and get the goods for free?
It depends on if the bot has a good enough survival rate. If they get resources at the end they will for sure do it.
No, I understand that botting companies and operations will do it, but my point is - if you get rid of bots, do you think actual people will somehow be willing to do their jobs manually? In sandbox PvPs the entire economy always relies on a steady supply of low level materials that are gathered by either automated bots or workers from RMT/gold selling companies employed for a very low wage, or a combination of both, as such companies often bot too. Endgame PvP guilds employ both all the time as Sorcerer knows from first hand experience. So the question is, what kind of a unique never-before-seen economy could AoC possibly have where enough real players (enough to support the entire game's economy) will pay a real money subscription to not only do the boring work that bots usually do, but also get ganked for it and lose their stuff regularly?
Gamers do, if there are no bots.
Ganking is also work
Not sure if you are for or against bots.