Argue with me Live on Twitch: twitch.tv/nycegamingtv Something I should have mentioned in this video is how we aren’t going to be limited to 4 man or 12 man trial groups. You can literally for most of these be 30 deep which in its self will limit difficulty. So with the threat of open world dungeons also comes the benefit AOC Focused Discord: discord.gg/tNHaDmqgTz Nyce Discord: Discord: discord.gg/EsfdACR7J9

To make a great PvP game you need to focus on PvE, PvE brings the players, Players = content for PvP, so yeah PvP games that neglect the pve side of things often die fairly quick when the world stop being populated by players out farming

I agree with the HOT TAKE 🔥

Great and very based take Nyce, not enough people talking about this. People always jumping to extremes when talking about PVE vs PVP. It doesn't have to be one or the other, when they work well together we will finally have the golden age of MMOs back. I would argue even people who traditionally don't like PVP, will actually enjoy the balance of PVE and PVP if it is done well like AoC is setting out to accomplish. The problem in the past has always been as Nyce pointed out, that PVP was always an afterthought at best and never baked into the development. So, of course it was only a small group of people who ever really took to it. And it just became a source of frustration for everyone else.

I reacted to this for 4 hours. Thanks for the amazing content to react to and have really fun discussions with. Also happy birthday

I agree with your take. Hard pve feeds into community pvp protection and good cross pollination. Could have the boss put pvp players on aggro list based on damage to surrounding players. This would make the boss engage solo griefers and support tactical pvp engagement.

I think ppl are forgetting that a lot of the PvP is curated by node wars, castle sieges, guild wars, etc.

As long as arena is good, I am happy. Any other thing, PvP or PvE is of no importance to me. Just point at the thing you want smashed. I UNGA, therefore I BUNGA.

Everquest had large public dungeons and bosses on pvp servers and is one of the legendary mmorpgs of all time. It was Simple mechanically but the content was challenging. I think a lot of mmo players are from newer takes on the mmo genre and have difficulty seeing how these systems can work well together.

PvE content needs to be just as engaging as PvP in my opinion. Like, equal. I'd prefer if every enemy engagement was just as exhilarating as engaging in combat with another player. One of the things I see in a lot of games is making their enemies weak and easy. That's not fun to me. Enemy AI needs to be "hyper-adaptive," in my opinion, because that's exactly how a human mind works. It hyper adapts to every little change on the screen. And chellenging enemies feel extremely rewarding to take down. Ashes already has plans to make their bosses adaptive to certain situations like the number of opponent's its facing or how fast it's being beaten and stuff. As cool as that is, I still (selfishly) prefer more. The game focuses on risk vs. reward after all. Make all combat risky! Lol. Enemy AI matters a lot.

Letting people pvp on an end-raid big boss would put limits on how difficult that boss can be. You can't make it a boss that's barely killable with perfect mechanics and timing if it can all be ruined by a single random griefer walking in and standing in the wrong spot. As a former prog teamer in SWTOR, I like me some tough af bosses. The real balance, imo, is allowing open world pvp everywhere in said dungeon other than in boss rooms, which could have doors. It's pretty standard anime stuff that is a sound compromise between both sides.

Its a weird balance right? I'm not sure if you've ever completed any ultimate or mythic difficulty raids from FFXIV or WoW but they are some of the most difficult content we have in mmos. I can recall hundreds of wipes of a single fight and just trying to imagine that with the threat of pvp is mind boggling. Not to mention you won't be able to pull the boss over and over and prog it for hours due to death penalties. But it also needs to have a fun factor to it. Its not a secret that hard raids have ended guilds so the element of frustration is there. And we all know pvp enters a realm of frustration that most cant handle haha. I want the pve difficulty to be nasty. And if pvp intervenes then so be it. The death penalties are there to define a winner. So eventually the best team will get a shot at the boss. But on the other hand. The Tumok fight did not convince me that Ashes will have high difficulty raid bosses. The fight had 3-4 mechanics to worry about and all seemed very manageable. But I'm also aware its early. So I don't judge to harshly.

Is there a way to play the closed alphas of this game? I would pay for it lol Been waiting since 2019, even in my acc inventory it says i have some gear bundles and other stuff

Big true. Realistically speaking, I think MOST pvp will be happening in the ocean. I mean, no corruption plus cargo bays filled with mats? That's where I'll be. There might be a few WB contests, but I don't think AoC is going to be a gank box like some people have convinced themselves.

Need to punish jumping in pvp battles. Limited dodge rolling and weighty attacks seem to be lacking so far.

*Nah, people are forgetting Ashes bosses change based on the worlds going-ons around them, and your partys performance on the boss before it. So a variable regular difficulty Boss/Raid + PvP will be way more difficult than your tightly tuned dance dance revolution content you're used to doing.*

Honestly your best video so far! Great clips and based take 🔥🤟🏻

We agree with your take. We aren't worried about the lack of PvE content, we are worried about the lack of difficulty just because PvP exists. I get the idea of it world bosses being less challenging as long as there are challenging bosses/ gameplay that PvE players can focus on as well

For the most played mmorpg in the world (whether you like it or not) which is World of Warcraft Blizzard, over time, have created the PvP and PvE realms. Or if you want to do PvP you can turn on in open world and obviously it's your business if people gank you. Because it's your time and your money and you must have the choice to risk or not and not be forced to take risks. If I want to be forced to take risks I choose to play FPS or Moba. Or talking about PvP on WoW you can choose to play BG or Arena. So I don't think it's the right choice to do both contents at the same time and with the same difficulty, because any mmorpg has exploration, quest, lore, achievement and so on. If I'm forced to worry about people ganking me I can't play the content pve.

During the whole "PvP-always-on" discussion I've always said, that PvP players don't really understand, that while AoC is not a PvE game, it will not be a PvP game either. There was a great quote in the last stream, that was about PvP being balanced about groups, the rock/paper/scissor system and casuals feeling valuable too. I think you should make a vid about that. Although your audience might not like it. Here's my hot take: PvP will be very different from BDO/NW/ESO-PvP etc because the focus of it's design is not about duels (everyone can win against everyone), competitive groups (3v3, 6v6 etc) or even skill (geared and trained PvPer should own others). The focus is on group composition/organization, large scale PvP and EVERYONE having fun. I like PvP, but I'm more of a professions/crafting/economy player overall. I listen closely to everything Steven says about PvP and often get the feeling, that especially the loud majority of PvPers only hear what they want to hear regarding his comments. I think there will be a big hate train of "AOC IS UNBALANCED", "AOC IS A ZERGFEST", "STEVEN PROMISED US A PVP GAME". I think AoC will not be for hardcore PvEers. But also not for hardcore PvPers. Most of the PvP community hasn't realized that yet. I don't mean PvP will not be good, but that it will be a different kind of PvP than what especially the younger crowd is used to. Numbers will count much more (2v3 will be high risk and much harder to win/ a 2:1 ratio of defenders will crush a commando group no matter how "good" they are). A good commander/good coordination will be more valuable than a high skilled commando group. A class-varied group will win against a 6MetaWarris/1Tank/1Healer group. That's my hot take/ Hopium. I like having fun in PvP. I like beating the odds of a tough 2v3 even if I lose 9/10 times (the win is so much sweeter even if it was luck). I love it when not only the 10% PvPers have fun/a reason for existing in a nodewar. Competitive, hormone fueled, teabagging, win oriented PvP absolutely has a place in games, but based on Stevens comments a seriously doubt it will be the AoC PvP. But hey....AoC is not for everyone and that's OK.

As for your hot take, agree and PvE is typically trivial so anything difficult will be most welcome, PvP during it will make it epic (hopefully). In general, PvX can be great to epic, and often games that try it start off really fun and full of PvP. Issues I find is that over time zerg guilds form to make the PvE easy and any attackers trivialized by numbers. Early on, everyone is 'in it for the adventure and fun', then comes the 'people who must always win' forming massive guilds. Ashes devs talk about this and how they plan to deter it but they will have to really stay on top of it because 'the people who must win' will try all kinds of tricks to "win". (easy example: consider off-hours, so many shenanigans go on during off-hours...) Ways to design for reasonable fair PvX can be seen best in Albion Online with their PvX dungeons (and has appeared in Aion and some other MMOs previously). Of course, Ashes is open-world PvX, which is both great but also very difficult to properly balance the risk-v-reward. Let's say devs manage to "zerg bust" but then 2 guilds will ally for boss take downs. One guards the other, this is an easy way to 'form a zerg' that is not technically a zerg. Fair? Or part of the game? That will be rage debated for certain.

I opened up KZfaq about 8 times in the last 3 hours and this video was the first thing I saw every single time.

The issue with dumbed down PvE isn't about the challenge of other people wanting to fight. It's that the advanced raid mechanics I've seen aren't even possible with a malicious player. Just an unaware player could run in and blow up an entire raid, only by their presence. These mechanics takes month to train everyone to be at the right spot at the right time so everyone doesn't get blown up. You can't have those types of mechanics. I don't see the advance mechanics as being an issue of should or shouldn't but an issue of can or can't. We are both familiar to ESO, so I would ask you to look at the 2nd boss in vet Rockgrove hardmode and the 1st boss in vet Dreadsail Reef hardmode (two of my favorite fights in ESO). Then ask yourself if something like that is even possible in an openworld setting, especially with a single malicious actor. Heck pretty much every fight in Maw isn't possible open world, especially the 2nd boss. Well except that content is pretty outdated and most the one shots don't one shot you anymore. They have confirmed some instanced content. Hopefully they give us a taste of some real PvE difficulty. I think the open world stuff will be pretty generic tank and spank. Basic mechanics that where if you fail you might die individually. So you can easily carry anyone through as long as the supports can keep the fight going or you meet some dps threshold. You won't see mechanics where the whole raids survival is tied to every player's performance in that raid.

PvE should have levels of difficulty and the game loops should reflect that. The added risk of PvP is a spice to enhance the game play. Furthermore, the risk of PvP should incentivize communication with other players as this is an MMO not a moba and not an FPS.

5:10 A-FRIGGEN-MEN!!! I'll primarily be focused on the PvE content to help support those that are more focused/better at PvP. I'm not particularly good at PvP, I won't go out of my way to PvP, but I'll do it if I need to. If the game is truly PvX the threat of PvP shouldn't impact the content of PvE in any way, shape, or form (other than loot distribution since final kill snipes are stupid). If anything it's just another layer to factor in when dealing with PvE content. I think the inclusion of potential PvP actually enhances the need for socialization/community because a group setting out for a raid may bring an extra party that can participate in the raid, but whose main job is purely to intervene/mitigate damage if PvP arises. If the PvE is scaled down/made easier because of a possible PvP threat that's shifting away from PvX and more towards PvP. Us PvE-ers know what we're getting into when we join a PvX game and it's a threat/annoyance we'll either accept or manage (maybe hire a protective merc or something), but lowering the quality of our content simply because of a possibility isn't a solution. It's a cop-out. Good video, good thoughts, well put together!

you can call a game however you like, pve pvp pvx pvz etc. but there are two kind of players pvers and pvpers. the food chain npcs-pvers-pvpers must be always balanced, brake the chain population collapse. in my opinion both need to have their own content, no need to mix them all. time will tell, hope devs will find the golden rule

Didn't seem so hot to me. It will be interesting to see how the players handle loss though.

Very well said Nyce! I agree with you 100% on this one

They has to be a fast reset for those bosses or the aggressor will have to much of an advantage and we'll end up in a game of chicken were no PvE is ever done.

Making ANYTHING easier for something else is never the answer

“Upcoming”…lol. What they in now? BETA 17? Im gonna die of old age before this game is fully released…

Nyce

Please lol, my content creation for aoc will open your eyes, facts

I am so sick and tired of any gamers, PVEers or PVPers, complaining that AoC is not exactly like ESO, NW, GW, BDO, FF, WoW, etc. Just let them do THEIR thing and if it doesn't work for you, don't buy it. If those systems/difficulties/focus in the other game plays to your style, than play that game. I don't want a copy and paste of one of those previously mentioned games. I want something unique, and to me, that is what AoC seems to be striving for, and that is what gets me excited.

NYCE says Nay!

well i grow up playing lineage2 and always it was pve and pvp all together thats ehy we loved this game and until today many people still pay it it rough some times when you want to grind or do something specific and a random guy or 2 come and kill you but is still more fun and challenging than just pve alone and pvp only areas as eso has right now is the only mmo im playing btw so yes pve-pvp-pvx it must exist to birng back that fire inside us for mmo stop crying we are all adults here life is never fair we a game should be?

PVP is just stronger than PVE IN AOC! Period

Thats Hot... I mean.. Nyce

If anything, death penalty will be what holds back PvE. Hard to make truly difficult content and expect players not to die against it.

Hotty Totty!

Hot Cakes!

I'm sorry nyce, but PVP is stronger than PVE in AOC. despite what steven sais

dead on arrival game