Ashes of Creation

They need to region lock China from the start on this also. Even if sieges are locked to NA prime time, RMT PK squads are a disease in these types of games and ruin everything

Neranja said:

Think about it: Isn't the ultimate form of P2W to bankroll your own game? Of course without P2W on the front, because P2W is bad! No one likes P2W!
But you can set up the rules in your favor, and your opposition can neither P2W, nor can they use RMT or they'll get banned. You even have all the transaction logs in the backend available to find something they are guilty of!

I think that would be the ultimate troll MMO.

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Any dev who'd actually want to play their own game is in the wrong line of work.

PVE will stick with it until they lose their progress or get perma murdered by griefers.

So any realistic time frame to release or is it still 3 years out?

Neranja said:

Wasn't it obvious from the start that this is somewhat the plan? The creative director of AoC is Sorcerer, the guild leader of The White Order. I'd be surprised if there aren't mechanics so a big and organized guild can steamroll their smaller opponents in both PvE and PvP.

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Exactly this. I'm willing to believe that he can be a different kind of dev than he is a player, but I also recognize that he 100% has biases about who "should" be on top in games.

The funniest thing is that his zerg guild wasn't even the largest in ArcheAge, that title goes to Oran'Thul (although ironically, OT was worse at PvP).

It’s been forever, but didn’t TWO get ganged on by East, pirates, and rival West guilds...then after they lost their castle, TWO poofed and he quit the game?

The node system sounds like that shit will happen all over again, except now pirates can drop gear(until they figure out a way to game the system).

Ukerric said:

That sounds like an euphemism to me.

The PVE crowd will simply say "fuck nodes, where my dungeon" "what do you mean, I need a tier four node for a dungeon? Okay, where did I put my BNet password..."

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true the on-demand fun of WoW is going to be a strong competitor to Ashes.

Not so much that people will play WoW consistently, but that Ashes could remind them of the instantaneous fun activities WoW offers and they may play 1 or 2 days of WoW-- subsequently never returning to Ashes.

The dopamine offering is hard to compete with.

Neranja said:

History is somewhat 50:50 on this: On one hand you have Aradune strutting around like a peacock with his flaming sword (claiming it is obtainable), on the other hand you have the original WoW dev team, which were EQ veterans who thought they could do a better quest based MMO than EverQuest. Turns out you can, and the finger on the monkey's paw curled.

The current generation of "player turned MMO dev" is pretty bad though, with examples like Curt Schilling and Ion Hazzikostas. I think the trick is to have firm leadership that was a game designer first before starting to play MMOs.

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What's the history of League of Legends lead design. Were they Warcraft DOTA players or did they come from other games without having MOBA experience?

I'm talking about guys like Morello.

Both Dota 2 and LoL were created by designers of the original dota allstars mod for wc3 (the very first dota was by Eul who I don't think works on any games now).

Valderen said:

This is kind of my concern, essentially it looks like PVE players will be the one to advance the Nodes only for PVP players to destroy them. I'm not sure the PVE crowd will not be in for that for the long term.

It still looks pretty interesting though, and will give it a try when it comes out if it reviews are good.

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It sounds like they are setting themselves up for failure. IMO, MMO's need to be 100% pvp or 100% pve. I don't think I've ever seen an MMO do both well.

I'm pretty sure this is a primary PvP game, with PvE supporting the PvP. That can work fine. Really anything can work fine, if the devs are humble and listen to players.

TJT said:

Shadowbane and DAOC were all cool for a while. But you don't really have staying power when people don't all gravitate to the factions evenly. And when you don't do shit about big guilds roflstomping smaller ones. Or let people siege you across different timezones.

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DAOC had three factions, and usually the two out-numbered factions teamed up. It worked pretty well.

It's when they tried to go a hard PVE route to gear for PVP that they ruined the game. Up until ToA you could gear for PVP by just buying player made gear. It was a great system, then ToA fucked it all up.

Araxen said:

DAOC had three factions, and usually the two out-numbered factions teamed up. It worked pretty well.

It's when they tried to go a hard PVE route to gear for PVP that they ruined the game. Up until ToA you could gear for PVP by just buying player made gear. It was a great system, then ToA fucked it all up.

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it didn't age well. the emulator was fucking aids.

Some off the top

- Ashes just crossed the 3 year full-production mark. It's been in full scale production for 3 years.

- They just started another hiring phase as of this summer, hiring for 24 positions total

- Professions are a big fucking deal

- Recipes use are limited (expended/disposed/locked out after certain use)

- Profession gear is raiding gear, same value and stats

- Bosses drop profession materials as well as completed gear

- Desire for Lineage II guild-driven politics, strongly opposed to Blue + Red locked factions. Dislikes WoW.

- Bosses related to story are instanced

- 80% of bosses are open-world non-instanced

- Siege scroll will be between 3 PM and 7 PM for EST servers

- Difficulty is tiered, reward depends on performance in dungeon

- Dungeon AI and reward change depending on performance in each tier of the dungeon

- Drop table is influenced by performance by tier in dungeon. Best drop table means best performance

- Raid sizes are confirmed 8, 16, and 40.

- No scaled dungeons scaling to your level. Hates scaling.

- Node progress/mining reveals points of interest/dungeons.

- No forced hostility. PvP opt-in is typically controlled by guild leader.

- Enemies can't prevent or stop all progression of other players

- Safeguards are in place against extreme griefing

- Borrows heavily from Lineage II intentionally. Big fan of Lineage II.

- Consensual PvP has incentives

- Fast travel is limited

- Castles, Node, Caravan, guild wars, node wars are self-contained PvP ruleset. Open world PvP permissions are a separate system.