Hello Bolbi here. At the time of writing this (6/28/26) I have roughly over 450 hours in game. I’m not 100% asking for this in the game because I’m not 100% sure, I am simply begging you to at least try it internally and see how it feels. What I am referring to is in relation to third partying in Ascension. If someone loses fights over and over due to being third partied they are more than likely going to be pushed to spires or simply quit the game. I think a great and rewarding fix would be that if you fully wipe a team your whole team gets revived and healed. If that sounds too broken maybe just a full bar of fortitude and some health for those revived, but you get the point. This would NOT be applied while the storm is active (can even throw a lore reason in there surely). But this would be a GREAT (exclamation mark all caps great) change because you are rewarded for winning the fight, there is game iq involved in committing on a team or escaping, and your game doesn’t get ruined from the “rng” of a team happening to run by at the worst time. I think this would be a welcomed change and could be very positive for the game. If you want to hire me you know where to find me!
If someone loses fights over and over due to being third partied they are more than likely going to be pushed to spires or simply quit the game.
Yep.
Isn’t that what both empowered and heal-on-knock do already?
Your entire team already gets healed for knocks. You’re already likely empowered from having won the fight.
If you’ve gotten any executes during the fight to win it, then you’ve gotten that extra bit of healing as well.
I feel like another win-more mechanic would be a bit much given we’ve already got some, and I feel like wiping a team granting another heal (let alone rezzing anyone for free) to your team would probably excessively discourage fighting outside of beacons, moreso than it’s already generally discouraged by simply not being worthwhile.
Which is an inherent part of battle royale as a genre, so maybe the problem is less about whether third-partying and playing macro is permitted and more about whether the game should be a battle royale?
IMO trying to remove/discourage/limit/etc. third-partying in Ascension defeats the point of having Ascension be a battle royale.
What exactly does discouraging PvP in a PvP game achieve? If people want to just teamfight without any risk of third party, then that is quite literally what Spires is for, no? What good does it do to change Ascension to suit the tastes of people that prefer Spires gameplay?
Hi Bolbi!! Thanks so much for writing this up, we really appreciate your thoughts and the time you are giving to the game. (also sorry for the delay in response!) Regarding 3rd teaming in the wild, I think we are very similar to other BR’s in this sense, where every fight carries risk in Arkheron. Combat (PVP or PVE) attracts attention, and choosing when to engage is as important as mechanical skill. Winning isn’t just about defeating the team in front of you, it’s about surviving everything that follows. We agree though that this is something that could use more awareness (of an incoming team) and its something we are going to spend some time discussing in the near future. I know your post was not about beacon fights, but our hope with challenge rifts is also to help present teams with more options that don’t enjoy that chaos.
Hi Sug3rz thanks so much for the reply. I know you guys are busy and I really respect you and the team, but this feels like an “f you and your idea.” You guys have lost the excitement of players (me and some close friends) with a range of 400-600 hours already in the game. We would play, practice and talk about the game everyday because we loved it so much. I don’t think anyone understands how insane that actually is. We are still wondering how the game will have 45 top tier players in a lobby within a 10 minute que window, or if that is impossible, will we be stuck to unranked spires for close games at a high level?
The game needs to go from a 3k max concurrent player test into a 2k max concurrent player test, to an I’m guessing 30,000+ player game to up keep a large team and fund the future of the game and studio. The game doesn’t need to be like other Br’s it can be better. Why not look at possible big changes that could make the game feel drastically better. You and Oatmeal both mention “we are very similar to other BR’s in this sense, where every fight carries risk in Arkheron.” With this change there is still a risk. You now have to make a decision to fully commit on an enemy team, try to not get sandwiched, calculate your resources in terms of pots and cds and if you do all that correctly you could wipe a team and reset your health and cds. You are then rewarded for it instead of simply killed because you wanted to play the game and fight instead of hiding and holding max resources until a beacon comes up. (This is where huge outplay clips that can go viral to a wider audience can also be made). Other Arkheron friends and I just playtested a game with this mechanic and it felt so smooth and incredibly rewarding that it is one of our most anticipated games now.
I don’t think Bonfire should be shy of trying things. We have had this playtest up for these last excruciating months for us to sit here and not even test anything. You guys do the testing then decide if the patch is good or not and ship it before anything we do or say matters. We were giving feedback often for months in the discord just for it not to be listened to. This is why all of the high skill EU players quit the game by the way. Then all of a sudden we change to forums for some reason. And last I checked, even after a month, there were still more Bonfire signed up in the forums than actual players. If you guys just don’t want our feedback, again, we would really appreciate the transparency of you guys telling us that. We keep being told “we want your feedback” just for none of it to ever be listened to or matter.
Just wanted to jump here and talk about the feedback process a little - it’s the area of our development that I’m personally the most invested in. I think it’s totally reasonable that you’re feeling frustrated, there’s been a bit of a ‘waiting room’ vibe for the last little while, and even though that was sort of by design, it doesn’t make the wait any easier.
There’s a few things I want to touch on, and the first is that yeah I don’t think we’ve been super successful at taking some of the more granular community feedback that’s come through during the weekly playtests since next fest. We do share feedback with the studio from across community spaces but it’s been challenging to communicate our thoughts about that feedback clearly enough - and other work has been taking priority so the feedback hasn’t always been reflected in what you see in the patch notes.
This is partially because of the other things we’ve been working on in this time, and partially because some of our internal systems aren’t flexible enough yet to work at that particular cadence. We are improving these over time. The mindset of wanting to build alongside the community is there, the infrastructure doesn’t completely support it yet.
Just to zoom out a little further, I want to talk a little about what’s happened internally since Next Fest. This playtest had a huge impact on our team, it was the largest amount of data and feedback we’ve received since starting development on Arkheron.
The bulk of what we learned as around performance, the new player learning curve, hit registration and UI clarity (as well as other things, but these were the larger ones). We recognized that if we want to grow the community, we’ll need to address these things. If new players are excited about our game but bounce immediately because of performance, we may not get them to try it again.
These are pretty large buckets of work and it was tempting to go dark for a while so that we could focus on it. However, we also knew that there were a bunch of players who had ok performance and had gotten over the new player hump. So instead we quickly created custom matches weekly playtests to have a bare minimum to play while we worked.
The last few months have been dedicated to feedback just in a bigger picture sense. That doesn’t mean you should be like “oh well yay you take feedback” - just that we’re putting one foot in front of the other, and these steps needed to come first.
We’ll know a lot more about what needs doing next after the results of this upcoming extended playtest. We’ll have more news about what to expect from this next week.
We are so appreciative of you hanging out with us - and while it may not feel like it, it has helped us tremendously. There’s other hidden things that we’ve been able to work on because of the community showing up to our weekly playtests. For example, the way we ship builds and manage live problems has improved during this time. Again, not super satisfying in the given moment but more foundation for us to build on for the fun times ahead.
Feel drastically better for whom, exactly?
I don’t even need to test this hypothetical change in person, let alone see hypothetical patch notes, to know I would not enjoy it in the slightest.
Despite that, I am very curious as to what exactly it’s trying to do that the game doesn’t already do. I’m strictly and staunchly against both Empowered and heal-on-knock, so I am admittedly biased here, but they both seem to already achieve what you’re wanting based on description alone.
Out of curiosity, how exactly is this any different from how the game plays out currently?
Perhaps there is/are some secret top-tier-player-only tech(s) that I am not even vaguely aware of, but I’ve always found the “calculate what my team has and if we can realistically take a fight” strategy when considering whether to take a fight to be rather effective for preventing my team from getting wiped without warning. Barring 3rd parties, of course, but then there’s issues like “why did we let the fight go on so long that other people could show up”.
Removing other players from the match and get whatever gear + money they’ve got for upgrades, especially if I can third party a fight and get more removals far easier with far less risk, is a significant power spike early game - IMO getting my team into a far stronger position to win the match is enough of a reward for winning a fight.
For sake of discussion, is there a particular reason that people generally don’t fight until beacons come up? Is there anything, other than beacons, on any given floor that’s currently truly worth fighting over? In earlier tests, especially on floor 1 and without vision pulse present, there were matches where I wouldn’t see players at all until there was only 1 other team left, which sometimes lasted until floor 3 even despite my team’s best efforts to find people to fight, and I have to wonder if maybe there’s a lack of reason to engage in PvP (i.e. something that would cause teams to want to fight and be in proximity to actually do so) outside of beacons.
Hey Bolbi, losing to a third is genuinely one of the most frustrating ways to lose in the game, and it’s usually the best teams who feel it the hardest. You’re exactly the kind of team a third team is hoping to find.
Des is right that every fight in this game carries real risk, that’s core to how we built it. I want to add the history behind why, since I don’t think we’ve ever actually laid it out.
Earlier in the project Sunset Lion was so angry at being third teamed a few too many times that he decided to try something drastic. For a stretch he ran an internal build where beacons were locked to two teams only. We jokingly called it “Thunderdome.” Third teaming disappeared completely. But it also took away so much of what makes a beacon fight interesting: not knowing if you’re getting a free ride, a single team you can handle clean, a team dragging a Destroyer into the fight to tip the odds, or two more teams arriving late to something already in progress. Losing that uncertainty made every fight feel too similar, so we changed it back.
We want players to have strategic options depending on where their team is at. If your build feels strong, Challenge Rifts let you go find a clean fight on your own terms. If you’re underpowered, you might hope for that free ride, drag grandma into a fight to even the odds, or hang back and look to ambush as the third team once two others have worn each other down.
I think it’s fair to have the opinion that we may not have found the balance yet. But also the community is so small right now that we would want to see how it plays out later when we grow. Certainly if we need to make changes we will, but we do want to preserve the overall choice and variance in beacon fights.
I don’t think it’s bonfire’s responsibility to solve this one. Third partying has been a part of the game for every battle royale since the genre took off with PUBG. It’s not a bug, it’s not something to solve, it’s a feature. It can definitely be frustrating at times, but that’s just how it goes. It’s possible that ascension just isn’t for you. Some people prefer spires.
Its actually something to always consider when playing a Battle Royale style game like Ascension.
When we get third partied, i usually call my team to back off, regroup and wait for the 2 teams to fight it out - its a strategic depth to consider, not something that really needs “fixing” - but can obviously be frustrating at times.