Neckbeard Opinions

BrizzTv

I've been playing MMOs for over 10 years now and consider myself one of the unlucky, heavily addicted, no-life neckbeards that will have a lot to say about any new MMO. I've played just about every MMO that has hit the market since Final Fantasy 11 and Ashes of Creation has *almost* every aspect of a game that I would want. This game looks great. With what I've seen, I plan to play regardless of the end product, but here are my concerns for its longevity.

Combat. Action combat is the future. Fluid movement and fast paced pvp and pve can hook a player to a game more then any other kind of content. I will likely play for a couple months and then return to my favorite combat MMO once I start to miss the action. Look toward games like Black Desert(S), Terra(A),Blade and Soul(B+) and Elder Scrolls Online(B) for some of the best Action combat.

My other concern is player-to-player trading. While it is fantastic that there will be no pay to win within the cash shop, it can still very much exist outside of the game through real money transfer services. This means buying gold, buying items and buying power leveling services from other sites or players. This CAN AND WILL kill your game if it is not addressed quickly and proactively. Trading is going to be very important in Ashes, so this is probably the biggest issue I could see for the game.

Games like Archeage Unchained had a great non-p2w model on release but they did next to nothing about RMT and the game fell apart very quickly, even though they claimed that they were going to be on top of it. I truly hope Ashes will do better.

Thank you for your time,

BrizzTv

streaming daily @ https://twitch.tv/BrizzTv
https://youtube.com/channel/UCdXnxYWeey2qbQ2K8Y8Lt6A
Reddit Mirror Post: https://www.reddit.com/r/AshesofCreation/comments/hy9m96/neckbeard_opinions/

phdmonster

Combat is one of the things that will probably be worked on until everyone is happy (devs and community included) and probably up until the game releases to hash out existing problems.

On to the real money transactions. Steveo and Co have already addressed that they have ways to track such activities in past streams.
Like, a person receiving an abnormal ammount of gold in exchange for nothing or in exchange to something that has little to no value. Abnormal activities of characters in similar aspects and things like that. We will probably never get a full understanding of how they will combat this kind of stuff because that would give information to the bad actors that want to exploit holes in their systems.

I am not sure how you would justify banning people for helping others level up for gold when similar services will be mechanics in the game (caravans is an example or just hiring healers for a raid). This one is harder to do i think.