Best Of

Saabynator wrote: »

I think you are being a bit bitter. So you dont like the pace of the game, so leave it alone and come back. Is is slow? For a game this size, I dont think so.
I def think there is a lot more hype surrounding the game because of open development. The monthly videos is also something I know ton of people are looking forward to. Hell, I think a ton of people are talking about the game, because streamers can stream with no NDA.

The point about a lot of features is, AoC has taken a ton of features into their game. Some of those features, whole games are made around. They took it as part of their features. If they deliever, which personally I think they do, this will be the biggest MMO that ever launched.

Sound like a lot of you alpha testers are wanting this to move along way quicker than it is. To me, it looks like an unrealistic look at what speed a game of this size is developing at. Step away, take a break for some months and come back. Your annoyance and bitterness will only grow from here.

Steven is unexperienced as a game developer. But he has an age where wisdom comes into play. He has been around, he played a ton of games, he knows what he thinks is fun. He didnt hire all new guys here either, he hired some good devs.

No bitterness that I can detect.
MMORPGs take many years to develop. Nobody is really bitter about it taking 8+ years for Ashes to release.
But, we have to keep in mind that in 2017, Steven kept hyping that his team was sooo excellent that Intrepid would release Ashes Before 2020. Even when those of us with game dev experience told him that was highly unlikely.
Ashes had tons of promise as the next great MMORPG Before 2020. With designs planed to solve people's disillusionment with a lack of focus on PvP and static Endgame loops.

Ashes still hasn't implemented most of the features players were initially hyped about: Node Stages, Node Sieges and Castle Sieges and 64 Classes. Freeholds are barely working.
What Ashes has implemented isn't really much better than any generic UE5 MMORPG - and it's all mired down with some pretty major bugs.
Many long-time fans are just fatigued - and there are now other MMOs that have been released and/or have also reached Alpha and Beta - and are just more fun and eaiser to play/test than Ashes.

In 2017, I didn't really have any games that I was looking forward to playing.
I was burnt out of the MMORPG Endgame loop - and I primarily play RPGs. I don't enjoy repeating Dungeons and Raids. I want to be (for)Ever Questing. So once new Quests dry up, I stop playing MMORPGs. And I would rather not have to wait 12-24+ months for an Expansion.

In the past couple of years - that has been solved by Seasons. Even WoW, which I stopped playing between 2012 to 2021 is now fun to play again.
I now do not have time to play all the games I want to play:
NMS; New World; WoW....
Ashes had features that are not a good fit for my playstyle so, truly, Ashes is not made for me. I was willing to try to compromise with some stuff if Ashes was going to be the next MMORPG released Before 2020.
Now, there is too much competition. There is no reason for me to compromise on the PvP and Steven's obsession with Risk v Reward. And, really, it's just too much of a hassle to try to get the builds to download and install to my laptop - only game I've played that my laptop struggles to install.

Even if Ashes eventually implements everything in their Kickstarter - there will not be much hype for it.
There are too many other games out there now.
Sure, the gamers who want an updated ArcheAge or Lineage II will enjoy the gameplay - if Intrepid can get the Economy working correctly.
But, Ashes probably won't release before 2028. We really do have to hope it will release Before 2030.
But, by then, there will be several more MMORPGs around that also have innovative features. And Ashes will have features that many players now expect to be fundamental - like Building your own villages and homes, similar to Valheim and Nightingale.

Githal wrote: »

These should not be that GAME CHANGING so if you lose it you will feel that you are set behind that much. But in the same time they should be rewarding. And if there are several such systems, even if you lose 1 you own, there is good chance that you are already working on getting different one, which will keep you engaged in the game

As someone who has played a game with the same castle design - Noaani is right, people will definitely leave if they lose the castle or anything remotely as valuable as that.

They lose not because of "omg, I lost and I dunno what to do", but because the loss usually means that the enemy gets to progress even further, so the gap between your powers widens. And if you already lost once to your enemy - there's now an even higher chance of losing again.

Different people have different mental thresholds for this stuff, but I've seen countless people leave the game even on their first loss.

Sophisticus wrote: »

Most of you seem to agree somehow, but you're not assuming this will be drastically changed.

I accept it because there is no solution.

One of your complaints is essentially in regards to character progression, the amount of it that exists - lets look at that.

A western MMORPG needs character progression to survive. That is what keeps players logging in, keeps players paying their subscription. As soon as players stop having a means of progression, they play something else until a means of progression is opened up for them.

However, constant character progression in a PvP MMORPG is a bad thing. The greater the disparity between two given characters in regards to progression, the less of a contest any PvP would be between them. This applies to multiple people situations as well.

So, a game like Ashes literally needs character progression, but also can't have character progression. They can't just cut back the vertical progression down, because then everyone will leave the game when they hit that point, they can't just leave it in because then PvP becomes one sided very quickly.

But then you have how this ties in to another of your issues - the grind. Eventually, players are going to hit the progression cap - or at least the cap of where they are happy to progress to. When players hit this, if there is nothing interesting for them to do (there will be interesting things for a handful of guilds to do), they will go and play a different game. So, if there is a long grind to get to that point, more people are more likely to spend more time in the game before they eventually leave for what ever they move on to afterwards.

The reason we "accept" things is because there is no correct way to do this. The games foundation is already in conflict with itself.

Most gamers are used to no more then 1-3 min between things to see or do. This is a standard game developers have learned. Ashes is so far from that loop its shooking. I really hope this giant game space does not stay the way it is and also hope Ashes does not become a cookie cutter rush to make the game see full and alive.

When i mine Ore's in the World of Worst of ever Story-written Warcraft,

i get EXP.
When i pick up Herbs in Worst of ever-Story-written Warcraft -> i get EXP.



I can't remember when this was patched in. But i liked it. I really really liked it. It was definitely one of the best Additions to the Content of the whole Game.

The Option to do something else than to senselessly slaughter countless Mobs over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.



Did You Guys ever heard something,
alone the Lines of like : " Power ... ... ... ... usually always comes with a Price. "



When i - in Phase 1 during the likes of Middle-November or so,
had killed S~OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO MANY Goblins - that i had the feeling between insane headache i had something that felt like a drop of blood maybe bleeding inside my brain or so,

you know a HOT-COLD-WET-"tingle" somewhere inside my brain. ( )



I decided the Prize is too high.
It is just too high.

I gave up around 5% of EXP after reaching LvL 11 towards LvL 12,

and i was disappointed into myself and felt bad for no longer being able to test. But that was my Limit.
Jepp.
Figured i better stop. I should admit it here right now.




In WoW Vanilla when levelling was insanely hard -> before Burning Crusade -> the ever first Expansion of Worst of Warcraft -> i managed to level THREE Characters up to LvL 60 back then - which was the Max-Level in WoW Vanilla,

and it was no biggie. It was doable. It wasn't bad. I don't know what was so different in Ashes of Creatio Phase 1 killing Mobs around Aela/the Starting Area.

But it felt different.
It felt like i am chained down. And i am struggling for every single Percent of EXP for every Level. Knowing fully well i would be set back should i die even a single time. .

I'll continue to disagree, I guess.

Firstly, you might be confusing Commissions with 'Tasks', there is an entire separate Commissions Board in the game right now that sends you off to find places, deliver things (I think), defeat specific mobs, etc.

That's at least 15m per, so they 'only' need around 600 unique ones, and yes, some number of those will be mob killing.

But that's still only like 20 per 'area' (where 'area' can mean a lot of things depending on the game, I don't think that the basis of my 'disagreement' is based on us not being able to agree on what an 'area' would be in Ashes relative to this) to get most people 'to level cap' (assuming a fixed FTUE such that you only really do a bunch of these after level 11 or so).

Anyone who is taking Ashes seriously as what it sells itself as will probably visit at least 5 nodes on their way to level cap, and if we go by the 'standards of the industry' (about 50 Commission type content pieces per Node) that's 250+ pieces of content, at around 15-20m each, easily 80h and each Commission can absolutely be 'allowed' to then give between 10% of exp in the 11-20 range all the way up to '10% of exp in the 30-40 range' for more difficult ones (or ones that open up when the nodes level).

The reason this works is simply because most people don't get bored of an area from just 3 visits, and designers can definitely get 2-3 unique things into each area, sometimes 'per visit'. When you have a lot of world-space (and Ashes certainly does) the goal of a good team is to use it. Use every bit of it you can manage to use without it being ridiculous. Recycle, reuse, refactor, retell stories. If you have an open plain doing nothing in your MMORPG in 2025 fill that with some random thought from a cool dev.

The reason people don't hear about/know about this massive source of content is that some people don't experience even half of it (me, for example, I am literally too busy in TL to consume all their side-content quickly), and those that do enjoy it, but don't have much need to talk about it because it's so personal to them.

Uncommon Sense wrote: »

either perspective I would like to assume suggests less than %25 grind

I can assure you, it will be waaay more than 25%.

And Steven's "some grind" is simply a sugarcoating of bad news that there will be a lot of grind.

The game's design does not work (as Steven wants it) if there is no grind. If people are not present in grind spots - there's no reason to fight for them. If people are not out there gathering - there's no one fighting for them.

Steven loves "soft friction", but that friction can only happen when people are out in the open world grinding locations. Everything else is either a predetermined pvp event or people living in their own little world doing quests.

Uncommon Sense wrote: »

I hope Bard's legacy holds true...

It will not, cause, since he left, Steven has already said "yeah, we'll have some grind".

I don't really see how they even CAN get the "~225h to max lvl" design w/o grind. That would be an insane amount of questing, if you tried making that path non-grindable. And both mob and artisanry leveling is just grind.

I actually just watched this last night! Loved the animation style.

Ludullu wrote: »

Githal wrote: »

These should not be that GAME CHANGING so if you lose it you will feel that you are set behind that much. But in the same time they should be rewarding. And if there are several such systems, even if you lose 1 you own, there is good chance that you are already working on getting different one, which will keep you engaged in the game

As someone who has played a game with the same castle design - Noaani is right, people will definitely leave if they lose the castle or anything remotely as valuable as that.

They lose not because of "omg, I lost and I dunno what to do", but because the loss usually means that the enemy gets to progress even further, so the gap between your powers widens. And if you already lost once to your enemy - there's now an even higher chance of losing again.

Different people have different mental thresholds for this stuff, but I've seen countless people leave the game even on their first loss.

Well i have seen players leave games for such reasons too. But AOC is filled with risks and rewards. You can lose the materials you gathered by someone killing you or destroying your caravan. Can lose a fight for a Boss. Can get exp debt when you die. Your node can become Vasal node to other that develops faster - meaning your progression is capped and you "Lost" the Node progression competition.
Even if your node gets to metropolis, it can be destroyed and you lose a lot by this.

What i want to say it is that players with the mentality to leave when they lose something wont play AOC at all.

And also those who stay, would most likely love the competitive nature of the game.