Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Dev Discussion #4 - Share Your MMO Experience
LieutenantToast
Member, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
Glorious Ashes community - it's time for another Dev Discussion! Dev Discussion topics are kind of like a "reverse Q&A" - rather than you asking us questions about Ashes of Creation, we want to ask YOU what your thoughts are.
Our design team has compiled a list of burning questions we'd love to get your feedback on regarding gameplay, your past MMO experiences, and more. Join in on the Dev Discussion and share what makes gaming special to you!
Dev Discussion #4 - Share Your MMO Experience
What's the worst experience you've ever had in an MMO? What's the best experience?
Keep an eye out for our next Dev Discussion topic featuring your favorite types of content!
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Worst experience in an MMO is anything that feels like a copy pasta korean mmo port. Its why I like Ashes, NA created its own game not a copy pasta trying to grab money from a different fantasy perspective.
Best would probably be winning fights outnumbered and outgeared through strategic use of the environment; noticing my enemies do not have breath underwater potions and swimming down and ccing them when their breath runs out, luring world bosses into enemy raids, using high and low ground when gap closers cannot be used vertically.
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The worst experience for me was the launch of Bless online which was an absolute mess. I do not mind launches being chaotic, but that was just the worst
My most disliked experience in any MMORPG is the inability to create younger characters.
Main "disgusting" thing for me was endless CC chains and possibility of getting one tapped.
The BEST experience that I've had was taking part in the Dread Lord vs. Great Lord wars of the Great Lakes shard in Ultima Online. Utter madness for a weekend where the good guys squared off against the bad guys. It was a load of fun with battles breaking out at multiple locations across the world at all times of day, and finally culminating in one MASSIVE battle south of Moonglow
My WORST experience was probably ESO. I had issues for months and so did other players with high latency and massive lag due to the akamai DDOS protection having issues. I liked the game, but I couldn't play half the time because login server timed out or I would get disconnected.
Addon Developer
OG Backer
Unfortunately the developers did not really care about this game at all, or at least, that's how it felt like. More and more players have gone because it was highly pay to win and the game just got worse with every update making it even more pay to win as it was before. Because of the low player number the servers got merged together. 5 servers became 3 and the players even had to pay to switch to another server because two servers should be closed. All guildmembers got seperated because everyone chose another server to continue to play on. So many people I've played with were just gone from time to time. It was truly a horrible experience.
The best PVP experience: Black Desert Online hands down, no doubt about it
The worst: cashgrabs, unfair business models (p2w)
The worst MMORPG experience I've had was the utter let down of Bless after it released. I was so excited to finally find a home again, only to realize it was a half-baked mess that the developers were frantically trying to fix. Unbalanced classes. No way to meaningfully find a group. Dungeon content way too hard. Non existent PvP (from broken class mechanics). It was overall just an awful experience realizing that the developers actually had no idea what they were doing.
Hard to pick a worst.
Mostly EQ2 raiding, but also quite a lot of Archeage raiding. A cross faction raid of 300 players killing the Red Dragon in Archeage was a highlight in that particular game.
Probably the worst experience I've had in an MMO was when a specific guild decided to lock down a specific spawn in EQ2's KoS expansion. The spawn in question was required for a quest that granted access to the end game raid zone of that expansion, so while they maintained a lock down on that one encounter, no other guilds were able to progress.
The single most enjoyable experience in an MMO was two expansions later when the guild I was in started killing contested Avatars in front of that same guild.
The worst was having open world raids in Everquest locked down by a few guilds that traded off the spawns and didn't let anyone else raid.
The best experiences I've had all center on completing a challenging piece of content or PvP with a big group of players, both because the in-game reward were top class and because the effort took so much coordination across so many people.
I can't think of any one particular instance that's the 'worst'. But, I would say, the slow deterioration of the MMO genre because of the lack of conviction and passion (and abundance of greed in the industry) is the worst. Hence my interest in Intrepid Stuidos and Ashes of Creation.
What's the best experience?
I fell in love with MMO's when I was about 12 or 13 - back when I was goofing around in late Vanilla WoW & early Burning Crusade. My uncle was the one who got me in to WoW and I was excited to try raiding with him. So he says, "Get to max level and we'll talk about you raiding". I grinded my ass to level 70 and was able to progress with them in Karazhan and on. Now, I raid lead a Mythic Raid Team in the current expansion. To this day, that time is my fondest memory of my MMO experience.
My worst games where dominate pay to win
I have a lot of fond memories, unfortunately mixed with some sour ones. Knight Online had arguably one of the best teamplay combat at that time...or that was what everyone there would say. Having a party working like a well oiled machine was awesome.
Ofc personally skill is also a factor and 1v1s were huge in KO. 1v1ing some of the best players on the server and winning through better combo chaining and healing techniques was heart bursting. I literally used to feel my heart beating in my chest.
Being in different clans made me meet loads of cool people, some of which I still talk to this day.
Getting XP was an incredible grind. I actually never hit max level even before they increased another 3 bone breaking levels to be capped at 83. I stopped xping at 78 and tried to actually enjoy the game from there on.
GMs were never around, hacking was prevelant even though an antihacking software was in place. The cherry on the cake was that I got hacked and even though I payed gold premium for years (best premium ingame) and had my items sealed with a password, I still lost everything I owned. 4yrs lost in half an hour.
Looking back, I spend so much time on Knight Online. The people and adventures made it worthed. I really hope that AoC will be another great chapter in my life, just as Knight Online minus the sour grapes.
2. When it all feels like everyone's following one path one road.. ie: grind grind grind
3. When no world pvp exists or has to too much penalty and bads. It's an mmo!
4. When spammers start spamming *selling gold or runs etc*
5. When you loose EXPERIENCE when you die to bosses.
6. Skill sets like bless online 1 spell has like 3 tabs when you use it in battle such difficulty playing hate it! combos are cool but overdoing something is not!
What's the worst experience you've ever had in an MMO? What's the best experience?
Worst - Seeing hours of grinding a rotation in BDO for a specific drop for days and sometimes weeks only to blow up in my face when it was time to finally attempt to upgrade. Damn you Crescent Rings...
RNG progression is a terrible system.
Best - Sailing the seas looking for enemy faction trade ships, killing the crew and owner and looting their cargo to make a huge profit in ArcheAge. Risk vs Reward.
What games did right that I'd like to see in AoC:
Black Desert Online - graphics, combat mechanics and depth of the world.
ArcheAge - Class options, trading, boats, naval battles and OWPvP. Crafting to an extent (just remove the RNG).
WoW - Battlegrounds, dungeons, raids and linear progression for gear (until the next expansion made everything obsolete) and Honor used to purchase gear.
Rift - Public Events (rifts) and class combos.
Warhammer Online - dark/gothic areas that gave you a sense of dread and made tanks viable in PvP (body block).
DAoC - castle sieges, relic sieges and their battlegrounds. Realm Ranks. Weapon strengths and weaknesses vs certain armor types.
GW2 - Being able to play with your friends regardless of your level or theirs. Down scaling players to meet a standard for an area. WvW and sPvP.
My best experiences are, obviously, the opposite of that: Triumphing over challenging encounters with friends, after learning and improving a lot together.
I'll give an honorable mention to the time I realized I could make a lot of money just by trading stuff on the auction house in WoW. Using an auctioneer add-on, it was like it's own little game, and a pretty slick one too. However, I was quite young at the time, so it didn't take much to impress me.
My least favorite experiences are when people come to any piece of content with no idea about what to do and don't ask for help. Then proceed to screw up what could otherwise be a smooth and fun experience.
Best: That feeling of escaping from the real world and diving in to a world where you know that you go exploring freely, no barriers and with the people that you adhere to most. That might be a dream now I've come to think of it... 🤔😋
The worst experience I have ever had has to be RNG enhancing gear in BDO. Doing hundreds of fails running still, and then seeing a guild member getting upgrades with a quarter of the effort...
Best experiences Ive ever had are from Runescape and WoW.
I remember doing arenas in WotLK with my brother and a healer we met in bg and became good friends with. We loved the competition and the rewarding feeling of learning new things, trying new builds and getting better every day. We just played arena and bgs for the whole expansion. Unfortunately WotLK was the last expansion of WoW I enjoyed PvP in.
I started focusing more on PvE in Legion as I somehow ended up in an amazing guild. We constantly gave tips to one another, talked theory a lot and had incredibly fun times struggling with mythic EN when it finally was released.
The best economy and quests Ive seen to this date are in os runescape. The quests were filled with black humor and none of them were force fed on u.
I remember laughing a lot reading the quest dialogs.
I loved doing the stocks in rs also, I could check the graphs and then ponder what caused peaks and act on my instincts to make profit.
You're bleeding for salvation, but you can't see that you are the damnation itself." -Norther
Best times were back years ago, I don't remember the internet being so Toxic as it is today 15 years ago
Normally in this situation I would use my bow and shoot one of them, pulling them to me out of range of the others, but since they were ranged attackers this didn't work, and there was nowhere I could line of sight pull them. My only option was to charge in and kill them one by one as quickly as possible. So I would charge in, do a few hits, then the mob I'm attacking would snare me and back off, using ranged attacks to hit me while snared. This would usually put the mob I was attacking into aggro range of a second mob, so now I have 2 attacking me. This also meant 2 sets of snares to deal with. On top of all of that, when I got one of the mobs low it would run away, pulling even more mobs.
This is the most frustrating experience I have had in an mmorpg in a long time. Why? Because I wasn't given the tools to handle this kind of situation. It didn't matter how well I played, my character was physically incapable of dealing with these mobs.
By contrast, one of the best mmorpg experiences I've recently was when I did a dungeon run on that same character. The run started off really badly as I was tanking for the first time in 10 years and had forgotten how easy it is to pull extra mobs and get overwhelmed. Needless to say we pulled too many mobs, I couldn't hold aggro and we all died very quickly. But this time, unless in the quest above, I had the tools to deal with this. By utilising my kit properly and using my surroundings (there were plenty of places where I could line of sight pull the mobs) I was able to pull safe amounts.
This felt amazing, because it came down to my skill with the kit, not some random chance, and more importantly I saw myself improve as I went. With each pull I learned something. With each pack of mobs I got better and by the end of the dungeon I was confident in my tanking and felt able to do it again.
The worst is probably when a game locks a player down. So when a game has mounts that are singleplayer or mostly singleplayer only. Also when a game locks down an area based on levels or story progression and when friends want to just hang out or follow they can't it can get annoying. TBH games that instance zones of the map so you have to load from zone to zone just destroys immersion especially when you see areas you want to explore, but they are just renderings or far off areas you will never be able to see. # I wanted to add this in because this is a personal annoyance. I understand why games do this, but sometimes when you are gone for a month a game will completely remove your house from the game including all possessions. I don't like this because I have seen friends have medical issues, job emergencies, or irl issues that take them from the game and when they return everything they spent months or even a year working towards is just gone.
I think the best games are those you feel like you are in a whole different world.. A game where you aren't constantly reminded you are in a game by the tedious amounts of loading screens. A game where friends can follow you around and if they follow you in a high level area you have to save your friend as they attracted the attention of some larger foe. I think that is what makes games fun. When you feel like you are in a world and that world truly embraces you in. That is a game I want to call home.
Housing Experience: Wildstar Housing. Never have I been more satisfied after finally building a manor, mansion, keep or graveyard. Of course it was all Halloween themed. Would be remiss of me if I did not mention Rift as well.
Open World Experience: Vanilla Guild Wars 2 open world adventuring, namely launch. I loved it immensely. Especially during the first Mad King Halloween event. By far the most memorable time experience I've had to remember to date. Fighting world bosses felt satisfying.
Combat Experience: Guild Wars 2 & Wildstar kind of tie together here. Telegraphs when they're quick and diverse can be very enjoyable. Not a fan of healers particularly so I really enjoy the self heal that GW2's combat has. Variety is key.
Atmospheric Experiences: Guild Wars 1, namely prophecies's Pre Ascalon. Elderscrolls Online did well for environmental designs, especially sound and weather shame they catered to console users, really hindered the game's graphical and mechanical potential. Lord of the Rings Online is also an unmentioned gem in terms of atmospheric quality. Vanilla Guild Wars 2 also did this extremely well if not the best, it would be second to their original's Pre-Ascalon of course.
Economy Experience: Elderscrolls Online. Auction houses are guild controlled and are based in various locations. One of the best methods of combating item inflation.
Crafting Experience: Runescape and Elderscrolls online. Nearly all of the materials in game have a use. Shame to see nodes that really have no use in general like WoW.
Worst
Housing Experience: Star Wars: The Old Republic/Lord of the Rings Online. Static placement isn't the way to go. Hinders creativity. Better than nothing I suppose so worst is WoW if that counts.
Open World: Warcraft, finished questing. Nothing to do and nothing to engage. No max level scaling or events or just anything in general to make spending time in the zone enjoyable or feel alive.
Combat Experience: Elderscolls online, had potential to be the best instead it's squandered by dropping a mass of AoE spells and weaving attacks which makes it feel clunky. Gets tiring fast. Classes do not play a role in effecting your weapon types so there's no feeling to being unique. If you're a melee based class, you're using all the same abilities everyone else uses, if you're ranged you still are roughly using the same abilities everyone also is using.
Atmospheric Experience: Anything really out of place. Pretty much anything humanoid animal based or cutesy, and sci-fi based.
Economy Experience: Warcraft. One auction house system.Nearly all items are worthless and not relevant.
Crafting Experience: It's a tough one. I would say it would have to Guild Wars 2 out of all of them I've actively played. For everyone else though it probably would have to be BDO. In all actuality for everyone, anything with heavy RNG.
Devs designing an entire game around p2w pvp'rs seal clubbing pve'rs builders farmers on their farms, homes, caravans.
Best
ASCII based Battletech MUX live scenarios 1994. I slept on my keyboard. Everything you did mattered.