Ashes of Creation

Mahes said:

I have no doubt that pirate gangs will exist. The other thing that I liked seeing was the cyclops. World boss that actually roams around a zone like a Sand Giant or Reaver. I always loved the portion of adventuring that involved knowing what was roaming around you.

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That was one of the best part of EQ, the roaming high level mobs in zones. One of the best memories from early in EQ was when we started in Qeynos and were making the trek across Antonica through Highpass and one of my buddies got out in front of the group and found one of the wandering Cyclopes; "What's a Choon?" <splat>

The PVP part of Ashes is my biggest worry; I tend to play/explore solo a lot and the whole gank experience in early UO ruined me on PVP forever. I do not want to fuck with people whose enjoyment of the game is killing other people, mostly other people who are unable to effectively fight back in super lopsided fights Hopefully the seas aren't required gankfests or 0.0 "content". I played a fair amount of siege/pvp in ESO and elective PVP is fine.

Cybsled said:

Hopefully they change their plans for how PvP works, but I have yet to see a criminal/karma system in any PvP game where gankers don't figure out loopholes within the first few days of the game to circumvent it. Archeage had one, but they also had cash shop potions you could chug to remove bad karma/criminal points, so gankers could swipe to avoid punishment.

Based on his interviews, he has the flawed idea of "pvers paying pvpers to protect them". It's one of those ideas that sounds cool on paper, but very rarely works in a game. The protection gets bored playing babysitter, or they're busy doing something else, or well geared gankers just roll the "protection" anyways, or they blockade known chokepoints to bottom feed off defenseless players.

Open world PVP needs rewards. If the reward in PVP is just shit you steal from other players, then the people who keep dying aren't incentivized to keep being sheep and stop playing the game, at which point the gankers get bored and become even more trollish/exploitative to try to get their dopamine hit.

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Supposedly in this game they incentivize you to fight back but what does that even mean when the gank squads are rolling vs unprepped PVE players i.e. bluebees? Many of the gankers don't enjoy fair/good fights but merciless one-sided slaughter; not all of couse, and sure there are PVPers who want good fights. But like every ecosystem, the gankers follow the easy kills and find loopholes etc as you mention, which drives off the masses of PVE players who don't want to hassle with the gankers etc and will find another game to play if they can't be avoided. Its why most PVP has been limited because the anti-social gankers can langoleer an environment of players faster than anything but XP or economy bugs.

It works for games like Eve because the whole game is built on that premise. It can severely limit the appeal of a game; despite all the lipservice to the contrary.

I think their overall approach to openworld needs some testing or it may drag the overall game down.

Daidraco said:

The hype behind AoC was a lot higher than it has been in the last 6 months to a year ago. The masses realized its going to be some brutal pvp shit like Aion / Acheage and lost a lot of interest, if not all interest. Thats why Riot's MMO, sight unseen, has more hype than AoC. I think a lot of people are going to try it, no doubt. But its hard for me to believe this'll be more than just a niche MMO unless he makes some major moves towards PVE. Im not saying he needs to cater to the masses, or homogenize everything - but PVP is its own beast and for the most part, it just brings out the toxic nature of people. Game will still be profitable over several years, and I dont think Shariff has anything to worry about on that front.

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I am in love with the potential of it all, the world, the changing seasons, and potential of the nodes, different levels of challenge/spawns, and the class system/mix. Realistically they have many a slip betwixt the cup and the lips to prove they can come up with systems to maximize any/all of these and keep them balanced with a relatively small company. The idea that some servers will have great cities and others will have shitty services seems...weird. The meta for that is going to be AMAZING or terrible. Are people going to say, "Let's build that here!" or are they going to say " Let's all move to ZZZZ server with the awesome X! city in Y node". If you have great guilds, will your server be great and without mega guild will your server be shit? Will there be any AI organization to step in place?

EDIT: In 20+ years of MMOs, I have never seen a game with PVP at it center A) get big B) last. Eve is the only one that kinda defied that with an economy built around death/easy item replacement along with mining as the main wealth generator, no special items, and content build around guild/corp drama sandbox territory control. The scifi setting also contributed to its success. No fantasy MMO could have utilized similar mechanics. Will caravans provide the same opportunities? My magic 8 ball seems doubtful.

I like the Riot MMO; that looks like another Theme park MMO, which great and I am happy to play that one as well but as a whole, the continent seems...sparsely urbanized, which I am sure will be rectified in the actual game. Everything Riot touches turns to gold seemingly so I am sure it will be amazing.

They are both probably years away so no reason to get overly hyped about either; AOC is probably a Q1 2024 and Riots MMO is probably a year later than that. Sadly, part of the reason I am engaged with the copium/hopium cycle is that I am looking for something to play NOW. I am already bored with Tower of Fantasy: Who knows if I (or anyone else for that matter) will live to see Q1 2025, sorry to be a downer able it.

Mahes said:

The good news I think is that Alpha 2 will last a long time. Hopefully this will flesh out a lot of the potential PvP problems and exploits. It might even lead to a change that that evens out the PvE/PvP content in such a way as to please more of the players that do not cater as much to PvP, but certainly spend the money. Yes this is Steven's game, but money goes a long way to changing ideas that sounded great on paper.

Whatever happens, it is almost guaranteed to be entertaining even if you just watch it unfold on the side lines.

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Reportedly the Alpha 2 server will become the PTR server for release, IIRC.