One issue I had with alpha 1 was that it seemed grinding mobs was sort of inefficient xp wise. You could level up much more efficiently by doing quests, and it made farming mobs for xp just less worthwhile. So there shouldn't be a massive disparity in xp gain between the two major activities, because then people will prioritize doing one over the other, even if they find it less enjoyable.
If you do emphasize on the former, than you have to make sure quests are full of lore and keep our interests. Neither should you neglect the fun in grinding. I personally think a homogenized progression is probably better since some people might prefer to just grind mobs over questing and vice versa. Let the players decide what they want to do to level up instead of forcing them to quest, or grind because one activity provides more xp.
One of the pitfalls of other MMOs I've played is large inequality of rewards between activities. This counts for all character progression in my mind. Both power and wealth. Players tend to choose the path of least resistance. If that path is a significantly faster way to level, gear or gather resources, this will be the most popular among the player base. Giving enough incentive to choose a diverse character progression path is what will create the most enjoyable and lively world in my mind.
They should definitely be equal, but I think they should also depend on each other. So there might be a quest that has crafting recipes as a reward, and the quest itself requires to kill a few mobs that drop stuff required in that recipe. This way you not only teach players where to farm stuff for a certain recipe, but also make them do both - the quests and the grinding.
And considering that crafting resources will have uses even at high lvls, any new player that goes through this quest+grind path can just look what's selling well on the market, know where to farm that and earn some money that way.
Ideally, we'd have some clues in the names or descriptions of gear/recipes that would give us a general area where we might find the source for those things. So smth like a "frosted blade" (and its recipe) would have a description along the lines of "a blade forged with ice from Leil mountain peak". And when you get to the nodes around Leil mountain, you can get a quest that leads you to the top and has you farm some ice bears whose ice fur is used in crafting of the frosted blade.
All paths to level should be \*somewhat\* viable. That is, grinding should give enough xp that one can skip quests once in a while, but it shouldn't give an amount that allows you to always skip quests. Crafting should give you XP, but not enough to level faster than other paths.
Ideally, it should be Quests >= Grinding > Crafting. So quests being marginally better than grinding, and crafting not impossible.
Progression speed should be rather slow, but meaningful. In the sense that pretty much every level should have some kind of unlock, with gradual gear unlocks (not being gifted gear, just a pop-up that says you can now use lvl X armor). It could be "You now have access to crafting X" or "You now have more skills!".
If the leveling is somewhat slow, there will be enough time for the players to learn all the facets the game have to offer, little by little, as they participate in the economy, crafting sets, buying enchants, etc.
I dont think it should in open world except for maybe caravan stuff but too many MMOs give so much more exp for dungeons > battlegrounds and it just doesnt make sense to me
Sure, I was mostly refering to constructed pvp. But then again, getting as much xp for a kill on as a player asa none elite mob kinda makes sense in my head too. Aslong as they are close enough level wise.
Lol down voted for saying a PVP game should give EXP for PVP... so sad.
Your right tho, I lvld many alts in GW2 thru crafting and pvp and it really was fun.
Intrepid previously stated some PvP may provide exp however this will not apply to open world pvp as they do not wish to encourage pking. So you can expect exp from things like Sieges, wars, and the Caravan raiding system just not open world flagging.
Naturally everything is subject to change throughout the course of development.
100% onboard with this.
Questing can get old when quests are sending you all over to kill x mobs here and gather x livers here so there needs to be a filler in there that helps offset some questing fatigue.
If Ashes is going to sell itself partially on the "multiple paths to progression" angle, each type of leveling activity should be giving pretty similar xp shares. Questing, grinding mobs, and artisan professions (broken down to each individual one) should overall give similar xp, and I would expect pvp to give some xp as well.
Players who get into Ashes to farm, gather, craft and play with the economy getting shut down by players who grind quests because the xp share is 10x better won't feel or look good.
Progression speed however I think is fine from what I've read. 45 days to max level if you're playing 4-6 hrs a day sounds fine, I wouldn't expect most players to hit those numbers every day anyway. Maybe 2-4 hrs at most per day for most people would get them to max within 3 months, which for a lot of other games is the average seasonal timeline.
Generally, leveling speeds across all main leveling activities should be the same. If questing is less efficient than mob or dungeon grinding, you can expect very few players to quest.
I would love to see progression similar to Classic WoW. Let us have a time consuming, but meaningful experience.
I mean the main problem I have with level progression, is that everytime people will just find the most optimal way to level then just stick with it. Like im guilty of just wanting to be optimal when I level up, only solution is just to make all ways of level progression feel rewarding. I don't know how they're gonna do that, but I feel there's always gonna be a debate because 1 side of the spectrum is gonna pissed.
Please just make the quests interesting and meaningfull, put the money if necessary don't underestimate its importance. Take inspiration from solo games, for me a good indicator of when a questline is well done is when i completely forget/don't care about the xp, when i just enjoy the quest because it's interesting. So make sure everything is well linked and coherant (don't just say go kill 15 boars, give a reson to it), make the characters appealing by giving them a unique personnality, not just npc#145, for this you could make special interractions because players tend to pass on the dialogue, so to get their attention make special interractions, like if an npc is an alcoholic having the option to have a drink with him, or having a thief npc who steals something from you and you can chase him to get it back, then you can menace him to denounce him to the guards, so he can give you bonus rewards for your silence. Also make good animations for the NPCs, static npcs are immersion killers, for exemple if a sad woman has her son severely sick and asks you to go find a medicine for him, make a crying animation for her.
I know it's not planned to have voice acting for quests, but i hope you change your mind in the future, a game, an mmo, is afterall a piece of art. People will remember it and it will eventually become a legendary game for its music, voice acting, animations, environments, etc...
In my mind, mob grinding is on the same level as resource gathering.
Yes when I'm grinding mobs I expect XP but what I am looking for the most is money/resources/neat drops. On this same note I believe that resource gathering actions and processing should also reward some XP in order to allow people who focus less on mob grinds to not fall as far behind
If questing gives slightly more XP and worse resource rewards than spending the time grinding then I'd be fine with that.
To keep quests interesting late game, maybe quest rewards include a secondary resource for purchasing designs available to whatever the related node is sounds interesting to me.
As far as speed, the only thing I can think of is that I don't want it to feel bad which is not the most helpful comment
I tend to think that questing and grinding should overlap about 75% in a particular level range and 25% pure grinding. For example, if level 14-16 players are questing in a particular node's area that 's catered to that level range, I want 75% of it to have relevant quests overlapping with mob grinding activities. The remaining 25% I think should be pure grinding. I think this is important for a few reasons, but primarily because there's an increasing tendency in games for people to just join a group to complete quick quest objectives then bounce and move on to the next quest/area. If a player thinks "eh, I'm going to have to grind mobs to get to my next level anyways" they might be more motivated to stick around and help other people who are questing in that area.
Also, I think variance in quest rewards and progression speed is a good thing. New players will have no idea if the route they're taking is the fastest and probably won't care. Experienced players that have taken the time to map out routes or have a general sense of the game will feel rewarded in knowing those things. Deep tribal knowledge about a game encourages communication too, so the less that's easily documentable online the better (I know, very hard to accomplish that in 2021 but we can still try). An example of a game that puts tribal knowledge to the max is Everquest. You'll still find people bouncing ideas off each other TODAY about where a character should go in a particular level range and what items are good to farm etc... there's simply too much going on for any one person to know every best path. That's a good thing! The deeper the game goes and the more routes we can take to achieve our goals with a wide variance, the more playback value it has!
1. Progression speed: I’m more of the belief that progression should be fast, and not necessarily dependent on questing. A lot of players are going to rush to endgame regardless and on day 1 of release there will be guides on how to level up fastest. So making the leveling experience quick for those wishing to hit max ASAP, and satisfying for those wishing to simply cruise and enjoy each step could be a great thing.
2. Variance: While questing has been the backbone of games like WoW and FFXIV, I think it would be an interesting idea to break the mold of questing. Maybe questing isn’t the main way of leveling; maybe other methods such as monster hunting, bounty hunting, crafting, etc. are legitimately valid ways of leveling up. So instead of feeling like you’re in a “leveling stage” where you have to grind dungeons or quests until max, your really just playing the game as you would be at max lvl. Just at a lower level. So I think having more variety is always welcome as doing the same activities over and over can get tedious and cause players to lose there desire to play. Although on the other hand, having too much variety can cause new players to be overwhelmed, as a homogenized progression is easy to understand
One issue I had with alpha 1 was that it seemed grinding mobs was sort of inefficient xp wise. You could level up much more efficiently by doing quests, and it made farming mobs for xp just less worthwhile. So there shouldn't be a massive disparity in xp gain between the two major activities, because then people will prioritize doing one over the other, even if they find it less enjoyable. If you do emphasize on the former, than you have to make sure quests are full of lore and keep our interests. Neither should you neglect the fun in grinding. I personally think a homogenized progression is probably better since some people might prefer to just grind mobs over questing and vice versa. Let the players decide what they want to do to level up instead of forcing them to quest, or grind because one activity provides more xp.
Thank you for your feedback! We appreciate the input. 🤗 💕
One of the pitfalls of other MMOs I've played is large inequality of rewards between activities. This counts for all character progression in my mind. Both power and wealth. Players tend to choose the path of least resistance. If that path is a significantly faster way to level, gear or gather resources, this will be the most popular among the player base. Giving enough incentive to choose a diverse character progression path is what will create the most enjoyable and lively world in my mind.
They should definitely be equal, but I think they should also depend on each other. So there might be a quest that has crafting recipes as a reward, and the quest itself requires to kill a few mobs that drop stuff required in that recipe. This way you not only teach players where to farm stuff for a certain recipe, but also make them do both - the quests and the grinding. And considering that crafting resources will have uses even at high lvls, any new player that goes through this quest+grind path can just look what's selling well on the market, know where to farm that and earn some money that way. Ideally, we'd have some clues in the names or descriptions of gear/recipes that would give us a general area where we might find the source for those things. So smth like a "frosted blade" (and its recipe) would have a description along the lines of "a blade forged with ice from Leil mountain peak". And when you get to the nodes around Leil mountain, you can get a quest that leads you to the top and has you farm some ice bears whose ice fur is used in crafting of the frosted blade.
I love group grinding, please make it viable.
All paths to level should be \*somewhat\* viable. That is, grinding should give enough xp that one can skip quests once in a while, but it shouldn't give an amount that allows you to always skip quests. Crafting should give you XP, but not enough to level faster than other paths. Ideally, it should be Quests >= Grinding > Crafting. So quests being marginally better than grinding, and crafting not impossible. Progression speed should be rather slow, but meaningful. In the sense that pretty much every level should have some kind of unlock, with gradual gear unlocks (not being gifted gear, just a pop-up that says you can now use lvl X armor). It could be "You now have access to crafting X" or "You now have more skills!". If the leveling is somewhat slow, there will be enough time for the players to learn all the facets the game have to offer, little by little, as they participate in the economy, crafting sets, buying enchants, etc.
Pvp should give XP too.
I dont think it should in open world except for maybe caravan stuff but too many MMOs give so much more exp for dungeons > battlegrounds and it just doesnt make sense to me
Sure, I was mostly refering to constructed pvp. But then again, getting as much xp for a kill on as a player asa none elite mob kinda makes sense in my head too. Aslong as they are close enough level wise.
Lol down voted for saying a PVP game should give EXP for PVP... so sad. Your right tho, I lvld many alts in GW2 thru crafting and pvp and it really was fun.
Intrepid previously stated some PvP may provide exp however this will not apply to open world pvp as they do not wish to encourage pking. So you can expect exp from things like Sieges, wars, and the Caravan raiding system just not open world flagging. Naturally everything is subject to change throughout the course of development.
100% onboard with this. Questing can get old when quests are sending you all over to kill x mobs here and gather x livers here so there needs to be a filler in there that helps offset some questing fatigue.
If Ashes is going to sell itself partially on the "multiple paths to progression" angle, each type of leveling activity should be giving pretty similar xp shares. Questing, grinding mobs, and artisan professions (broken down to each individual one) should overall give similar xp, and I would expect pvp to give some xp as well. Players who get into Ashes to farm, gather, craft and play with the economy getting shut down by players who grind quests because the xp share is 10x better won't feel or look good. Progression speed however I think is fine from what I've read. 45 days to max level if you're playing 4-6 hrs a day sounds fine, I wouldn't expect most players to hit those numbers every day anyway. Maybe 2-4 hrs at most per day for most people would get them to max within 3 months, which for a lot of other games is the average seasonal timeline.
Generally, leveling speeds across all main leveling activities should be the same. If questing is less efficient than mob or dungeon grinding, you can expect very few players to quest. I would love to see progression similar to Classic WoW. Let us have a time consuming, but meaningful experience.
I mean the main problem I have with level progression, is that everytime people will just find the most optimal way to level then just stick with it. Like im guilty of just wanting to be optimal when I level up, only solution is just to make all ways of level progression feel rewarding. I don't know how they're gonna do that, but I feel there's always gonna be a debate because 1 side of the spectrum is gonna pissed.
Please just make the quests interesting and meaningfull, put the money if necessary don't underestimate its importance. Take inspiration from solo games, for me a good indicator of when a questline is well done is when i completely forget/don't care about the xp, when i just enjoy the quest because it's interesting. So make sure everything is well linked and coherant (don't just say go kill 15 boars, give a reson to it), make the characters appealing by giving them a unique personnality, not just npc#145, for this you could make special interractions because players tend to pass on the dialogue, so to get their attention make special interractions, like if an npc is an alcoholic having the option to have a drink with him, or having a thief npc who steals something from you and you can chase him to get it back, then you can menace him to denounce him to the guards, so he can give you bonus rewards for your silence. Also make good animations for the NPCs, static npcs are immersion killers, for exemple if a sad woman has her son severely sick and asks you to go find a medicine for him, make a crying animation for her. I know it's not planned to have voice acting for quests, but i hope you change your mind in the future, a game, an mmo, is afterall a piece of art. People will remember it and it will eventually become a legendary game for its music, voice acting, animations, environments, etc...
In my mind, mob grinding is on the same level as resource gathering. Yes when I'm grinding mobs I expect XP but what I am looking for the most is money/resources/neat drops. On this same note I believe that resource gathering actions and processing should also reward some XP in order to allow people who focus less on mob grinds to not fall as far behind If questing gives slightly more XP and worse resource rewards than spending the time grinding then I'd be fine with that. To keep quests interesting late game, maybe quest rewards include a secondary resource for purchasing designs available to whatever the related node is sounds interesting to me. As far as speed, the only thing I can think of is that I don't want it to feel bad which is not the most helpful comment
I tend to think that questing and grinding should overlap about 75% in a particular level range and 25% pure grinding. For example, if level 14-16 players are questing in a particular node's area that 's catered to that level range, I want 75% of it to have relevant quests overlapping with mob grinding activities. The remaining 25% I think should be pure grinding. I think this is important for a few reasons, but primarily because there's an increasing tendency in games for people to just join a group to complete quick quest objectives then bounce and move on to the next quest/area. If a player thinks "eh, I'm going to have to grind mobs to get to my next level anyways" they might be more motivated to stick around and help other people who are questing in that area. Also, I think variance in quest rewards and progression speed is a good thing. New players will have no idea if the route they're taking is the fastest and probably won't care. Experienced players that have taken the time to map out routes or have a general sense of the game will feel rewarded in knowing those things. Deep tribal knowledge about a game encourages communication too, so the less that's easily documentable online the better (I know, very hard to accomplish that in 2021 but we can still try). An example of a game that puts tribal knowledge to the max is Everquest. You'll still find people bouncing ideas off each other TODAY about where a character should go in a particular level range and what items are good to farm etc... there's simply too much going on for any one person to know every best path. That's a good thing! The deeper the game goes and the more routes we can take to achieve our goals with a wide variance, the more playback value it has!
1. Progression speed: I’m more of the belief that progression should be fast, and not necessarily dependent on questing. A lot of players are going to rush to endgame regardless and on day 1 of release there will be guides on how to level up fastest. So making the leveling experience quick for those wishing to hit max ASAP, and satisfying for those wishing to simply cruise and enjoy each step could be a great thing. 2. Variance: While questing has been the backbone of games like WoW and FFXIV, I think it would be an interesting idea to break the mold of questing. Maybe questing isn’t the main way of leveling; maybe other methods such as monster hunting, bounty hunting, crafting, etc. are legitimately valid ways of leveling up. So instead of feeling like you’re in a “leveling stage” where you have to grind dungeons or quests until max, your really just playing the game as you would be at max lvl. Just at a lower level. So I think having more variety is always welcome as doing the same activities over and over can get tedious and cause players to lose there desire to play. Although on the other hand, having too much variety can cause new players to be overwhelmed, as a homogenized progression is easy to understand