Arena ladder

Pre-alpha Arena UI.

The arena ladder system records a player's progress within PvP seasons based on their arena win/loss ratios.

• Titles can be received from arena play.
• Other rewards will be revealed at a later time.
• Arena points that can be used to buy gear is not currently in the design.

Arenas

Pre-alpha arena combat footage from PAX West 2017.

Pre-alpha arenas.

Arenas are instanced PvP scenarios and are not part of open world PvP.

The arena system as we've spoken about before is going to have ladder systems where people can progress within certain seasons based on their win/loss ratios. The importance of arenas are obviously that players have an opportunity to participate [and] practice out certain builds from a PvP perspective and can compete with one another within the system. – Steven Sharif

• Arenas will have 1 man, 3 man, 5 man, 8 man, and possibly 20 man Free-For-All (Deathmatch) group sizes.
  • There won't specifically be guild vs guild arenas but team-based matchmaking allows teams to face other teams.
• Arenas will have a minimum level requirement to participate.
• There won't be bifurcated brackets with separate player pools.
• There might be some form of an ELO system that gets flushed on a seasonal basis.
• There will be an arena ladder system.
  • Rewards for arena ladders will be revealed at a later time.
  • Titles can be received from arena play.
  • Arena points that can be used to buy gear are not currently in the design.
• Mayors of military nodes are chosen from citizens through last man standing (gladiatorial arena style) combat.
• The arena system may support cross-server combat.
• Arena style combat is instanced but spectators may be possible through an interface.

PvP seasons

Performance in various PvP systems (such as Caravans, Arenas, Guild wars) is measured over the course of ~6 month PvP seasons (season duration is subject to Alpha-2 testing). At the end of each season, a player's cumulative score may unlock various rewards.

• Gear enhancement rewards.
• Achievement ranks.
• Purchasing power (Currency).
• Potentially more granular player health bars.

The goal there is obviously that players can rinse clean the history in the season and start fresh. Whether or not those will be six-month, I think that's the goal of Alpha-2 is to help test that. It might be shorter than that, but the intent is to have a system that provides ability to track your wins and losses and to have those wiped fresh on some cadence. – Steven Sharif

Gear enhancement rewards

Gear enhancements are possible both during and after an item is crafted.

There is a combination of systems that take an item to its max potential. Players will need to contribute in a certain number of these systems to reach max. Some of the systems are an either/or situation. – Kory Rice

• Crafting recipes can be enhanced by adding higher rarity or different crafting materials into their selectable crafting slots at crafting stations.

• Enchantment scrolls and tempering allow gear to be enhanced post-crafting.

• Gems and sockets enable the addition of additional waterfall stats to items.

• The bulk of a weapon's power comes from its crafting recipe and the materials used in its construction.

The contribution of materials to crafting an item results in advancing the rarity of that item. Now, that doesn't exclude players who don't have the legendary or the higher quality contributed resources from progressing their common item up the rarity tree through enchantments such as scroll enchanting or through tempering the gear. Both of those can affect the quality and the rarity of the gear that you produce, but by contributing the resources during the crafting process you are getting a head start with the higher quality item and now are less dependent on those other avenues to achieve that, which might be again a different vertical space of progression that you don't have as good of access to. – Steven Sharif

Some of the following information has not been recently confirmed by the developers and may not be on the current development roadmap.

• Runes/Power stones are a potential methods for enhancing weapons.
• Enchantment stones are potential rewards for performance over six month PvP seasons. These grant temporary PvP-focused benefits to gear (via a socketing system).

Metrics

Ashes of Creation gathers tracking data to facilitate achievements, titles and other accolades on a server realm.

• Number of successful siege defenses.
• Number of successful siege assaults.
• Number of PvP kills.
• Number of PvP deaths.
• Raid participation points.
• Number of firsts.

Visibility of those types of things on the server help to promote a competitive atmosphere. If there is an attainable impression that you can work towards, so that others know your success, you have more drive to succeed. – Steven Sharif

Guild ladder

An inter-guild ladder will rank guilds based on their performance within competitive activities:

• Guild wars.
• Castle sieges.
• World bosses.

When the guild participates in guild wars or they participate in sieges, you'll be able to climb the ranks of your inter-guild ladder as well so you get bragging rights amongst your friends. – Steven Sharif

Leader boards

Players will be able to opt-in to track certain achievements on leaderboards, such as.

• Dungeons completed.
• Raids completed.
• PvP kills.
• Caravans raided.
• Gathering activity.

Leaderboards may be seasonal.

We have many dreams that we want to do with game-to-web and game-to-mobile in regards to showing stats and being making things shareable for you. We know how social media works; how sharing content with friends works. But those things will come in due time. – Margaret Krohn

Some of the following information has not been recently confirmed by the developers and may not be on the current development roadmap.

• Some leaderboards will be across all server realms.

Military node arena

Military node mayors are elected based on trial by combat. During the election week the node will enter an open-PvP battleground state for hour-long periods where candidates (and their citizen supporters) compete to gain points by securing objectives. The highest point winner at the end of the week will win.

• Previously the developers were considering champions that fought in a last-man-standing arena.

Server vs server

Some of the following information has not been recently confirmed by the developers and may not be on the current development roadmap.

The arena system may support cross-server realm combat.

• There may be monthly competitions where the winning server and winning team receive beneficial buffs for the month.

We definitely like cross-server play. I think it's cool because it is something that players get to participate in. – Steven Sharif

When you're talking about Arena play especially, one server might not be able to support that depending on what's going on with it, but across all the servers then we've got a really great pool for matchmaking. – Jeffrey Bard

Esports

Esports in Ashes of Creation.

Esports is not the main focus of Ashes of Creation, but the game may move in that direction if the gameplay is compelling, competitive, and fun.

What I would say as an MMO player is Esports tends to miss out on a core element that's unique to MMORPGs, which is progression; and it's difficult to represent that progression in the traditional Esports format that we see with other games and genres today. However, what I will say is that I have participated in some MMOs that have stood up cross-server competitions and I've really personally enjoyed those types of cross-server competitions where you bring the best that those individual servers have to offer with regards to groups, or teams, or constant parties as we like to call them; and you allow them to compete in an arena format, or in a castle siege format. Like that is super cool. I love that server versus server type of competition and I think that's where there is a potential to do something interesting with regards to Esports and the MMORPG genre. – Steven Sharif

See also

• Arenas
• PvP