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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
[Discussion] Community
D3ATHSPARK
Member, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
I have had a lot of my doubts about the game squashed by helping test A1. It is by far the best Alpha I've been a part of. Yet there are a few concerns I still have about the games possibility of success. The most notable is the community aspect.
Community is BY FAR the most important thing in an MMO. You could have the greatest game ever but have it completely decimated by a toxic community. For comparison references I'm going to use WoW since it is well known to all MMO players and it has also begun a second version of it's journey. To understand where I'm coming from know that I just turned 35 over the weekend and have been playing MMOs since Ultima Online. IMO there were no better communities than the UO and original WoW communities. I believe this is why they were so successful.
The original classic WoW had a variety of elements to bring people together. You had to manually from dungeons, there were a ton of group quests, and the buffing system also added to a friendly atmosphere. It was extremely easy to find new friends and the game brought people together. With the rerelease of Classic WoW I saw the polar opposite of this. People were antisocial, they paid for dungeon runs instead of running them, and buffing people 90% of the time resulted in no interaction. I was completely dumbfounded how bad the game was the second time around... and it's the same game! The difference in community made all the difference. I couldn't even finish leveling to 60 before I quit playing, and that is saying a lot considering how much I love classic and TBC. IT takes A LOT for me to not want to continue playing WoW in it's best state.
Now, the community aspect is something outside Intrepid's hands. They have been doing a great job promoting the positive people covering the game so far. Yet after witnessing the Discord I have my concerns. There are a lot of good people, but there are also a lot of bad people. Some so bad I've seen straight up bullying tactics being used in the Discord. This has me a bit concerned. If you did this stuff in WoW back in the day you would never get a guild and be an outcast. The second time around no one even bats an eye and considers it normal. Maybe it's just my age showing, but I feel as if that mentality can greatly harm the success chances to the game.
Granted it's too early to tell how things will play out, but Ashes is being designed as an extremely social game. Most MMOs are theme parks that require no socialization which may be the cause for the toxic and lazy behavior I've been witnessing in the second version of WoW. I'm curious what everyone else's thoughts are on this topic. Is anyone else concerned?
I plan to talk about this on the first episode of my talk show coming soon, so it would be nice to get some other opinions.
Community is BY FAR the most important thing in an MMO. You could have the greatest game ever but have it completely decimated by a toxic community. For comparison references I'm going to use WoW since it is well known to all MMO players and it has also begun a second version of it's journey. To understand where I'm coming from know that I just turned 35 over the weekend and have been playing MMOs since Ultima Online. IMO there were no better communities than the UO and original WoW communities. I believe this is why they were so successful.
The original classic WoW had a variety of elements to bring people together. You had to manually from dungeons, there were a ton of group quests, and the buffing system also added to a friendly atmosphere. It was extremely easy to find new friends and the game brought people together. With the rerelease of Classic WoW I saw the polar opposite of this. People were antisocial, they paid for dungeon runs instead of running them, and buffing people 90% of the time resulted in no interaction. I was completely dumbfounded how bad the game was the second time around... and it's the same game! The difference in community made all the difference. I couldn't even finish leveling to 60 before I quit playing, and that is saying a lot considering how much I love classic and TBC. IT takes A LOT for me to not want to continue playing WoW in it's best state.
Now, the community aspect is something outside Intrepid's hands. They have been doing a great job promoting the positive people covering the game so far. Yet after witnessing the Discord I have my concerns. There are a lot of good people, but there are also a lot of bad people. Some so bad I've seen straight up bullying tactics being used in the Discord. This has me a bit concerned. If you did this stuff in WoW back in the day you would never get a guild and be an outcast. The second time around no one even bats an eye and considers it normal. Maybe it's just my age showing, but I feel as if that mentality can greatly harm the success chances to the game.
Granted it's too early to tell how things will play out, but Ashes is being designed as an extremely social game. Most MMOs are theme parks that require no socialization which may be the cause for the toxic and lazy behavior I've been witnessing in the second version of WoW. I'm curious what everyone else's thoughts are on this topic. Is anyone else concerned?
I plan to talk about this on the first episode of my talk show coming soon, so it would be nice to get some other opinions.
3
Comments
Ashes seems to aim to walk a fine line between 'play the game how you want' and 'other people can hurt you, if they accept the penalty', which is hard to do while maintaining a population, since players without a community can be frustrated easily.
Subscription Model will also 'weed out' some people over time, but I mean, there's WoW.
The way people look at games now, I believe is known and studied, to have changed. But this game tells you up front 'you're going to lose things when you try to do things'.
It doesn't go so far as to say 'if you don't like it, the door's that way', but 'knowing' that the Devs might just ignore the person who 'complains that they can't get a flying mount' or 'that their caravan got robbed when they took the most obvious route', seems to me to be more likely to lead to a low population problem, than a full toxicity/low interaction problem.
There will always be people who don't socialize well, and gaming has brought those people into a space that has been a fairly social one up to now. The shift was in demographic more than anything else. If Ashes does not appeal as much to the 'antisocial' player demographic, you'll probably get a different result.
Edit: Since this post is asking for opinions and thoughts, my group's rule about not generally posting feedback in the same thread doesn't apply, mentioning this in case one of them sees it later.
I never considered myself very social but I had no problems in an MMO. This genre makes it easy to meet people. I’m just curious what a large group of bad apples can do to a server. Would people feel that impact? Would entire regions of the world be avoided due to these people? Could servers actually die if there were too many toxic Zerg guilds?
Games go through cycles. There will likely be a rush to play and then a scale back. Seen this with most MMOs. I am sure Intrepid would prefer to see steady growth, but that’s pretty rare these days. There will be periods of adjustments, like server transfers. Not sure that server mergers work with what they intend to do.
Players have changed and I am not sure you can do much about that. People are generally more connected via social media but are actually less social. I am not sure that trend is reversible.
What AoC offers is a game where those who want to play the old way can (considered by some as the golden years). Ironically it may take a toxic community to drive out those who do not value that. So I suppose “toxic” may just depend on your position on the style of play.
Latest trends with people seem to be to declare anything they don’t like or disagree with as toxic. That’s a far cry from the early days in gaming of adapting to challenges and finding mutually agreeable solutions, even on points of major contention. Or a spirit of just finding a way. Today it seems too common for folks to draw lines in the sand and declare their ultimatums, and then if they don’t get their way try to destroy everything.
I’ve seen a lot of people concerned the game will be too niche but I don’t believe that will be an issue. The environments alone will suck you in making you want to explore the world. It’s a newer experience to the new generation of gamers but even negative encounters can yield positive results sometimes. Some of my favorite memories from Ultimat Online was when I was the victim in a PvP situation. You get to learn from mistakes and the risk vs reward systems at play.
I think it’s more the ultimatum part that is concerning. People go to extremes quickly and have gotten extremely anti social due to the theme park MMOs. Putting in work to level a character may be too much for some.
Here, the Alpha is ongoing, but sadly, it´s quite an investment to have the possibility to help, and in the pandemic at that. This is holding many people back, some for financial reasons, others for time and some for the scheduled tests only as it´s not a fully ongoing Alpha as i understood it.
The community is indeed a hugely important aspect of a successful game, and i really hope the community will not be too divided afterwards, as in testers that could afford to cash up right now opposed to others that do not have that extra to spare. There are fans on both ends of the wallet.
Outside of Classic most MMO players likely aren't familiar w/ someone being instantly recognizable based on just a gamertag. For better or for worse you're going to have people making a name for themselves and when you start playing w/ high level people that reputation is going to stick. This creates a plethora of opportunities for further community growth such as people coming together to hunt down a known griefer.
I don't foresee people actually traveling that far away from their home node very often so you'll likely become very familiar w/ the people in that vicinity as you play w/ them day after day and week after week.
I can understand this. Luckily Ashes isn't a linear game, and players won't know content until stuff starts unlocking through nodes.
I come from an Ultima Online background where reputation was everything. Classic WoW also started with this but it diminished every expansion and was pretty much abolished during Wrath. You're right that it never really existed beyond these moments but it is the one thing that kept players in check.
One could argue that big streamers like Asmongold could also completely ruin servers with their presence and army of simpletons. That many people catering to a single individual would result in some chaos. I can't imagine it would be fun sharing a server with someone like that. Then again with the flavor of the month style streaming that streamers partake in it will probably be unavoidable at launch.
The realm of influence will most likely constantly change. People will get bored if they only visit two nodes and not much changes. People will quickly look to conquer more.
I strongly disagree w/ the idea that streamers will destroy entire servers. Now streamers might all rally into one server so that Asmongold and Summit could interact w/ each other but even in those servers the world of Verra is so large and the actual influence of nodes so small that I think everything is going to be very localized.
IMO it's far more likely that even the biggest of streamers will only have an effect over at most a single node, maybe two, and a few of the surrounding ones which means only small pockets of the overall world.
You even see this in WoW where even at it's worst Asmon's community only has an effect on his immediate surroundings.
The open Beta that was capped at lvl 15 is actually the perfect counter to your worries. During that event, the meta was completely different than what was expected at 60. No one had every really been capped like that before, so even though a bunch was known about the game in general, there was no idea of a "meta." People just wanted to mess around and have fun, and it was one of the best weekends in a game that I've ever played.
What I see as some of the contributing factors to your experience in Classic were:
1. Players have been experimenting with the Vanilla format for years on private servers.
2. As new players hit 60 in a trickle in the beginning, they didn't really have much of a choice other than to play with the try-hards and conform to their play patterns. This made the toxic meta spread like the plague.
3. In end-game, there wasn't challenging PvE content to do outside of raids (which take a lot of effort). Dungeons just took a long time and weren't really all that challenging (but maybe I feel that way because I was playing with other's who clearly knew how to game the system).
4. When players started being rewarded for open world PvP, there was no incentive to protect your fellow faction members, only those in your guild/party who were farming with you.
5. Blizzard didn't really put much effort into addressing issues in Classic. It may not even have been in their best interest since with the release of the boost and cash shop for TBC that they may just be trying to "boil the frog" so to speak and convert Classic players into Retail ones, or at least just get rid of the less dedicated players so they can heavily monetize the one's that are in too deep to quit.
Here's how I see Ashes changing each of these items:
1.Same as what people are saying up above, new game, new meta, and they are doing their best to obscure meta information so it is harder to game the system.
2.There is time for Alpha and Beta players to gain knowledge during the testing and form that cancerous try-hard attitude, however, with the way players will be split into many factions, those that want to form a counter-meta will actually have gameplay features to fight back (literally). It seems guild sizes may be limited too, so perhaps they will collapse to infighting and the greater number of other players.
3. I'm actually worried about the adaptive difficulty here that the challenge won't be surviving or doing the dungeon, but actually being able to do it quickly enough. I do feel that any issues here can be made up for by enjoyment of the open world pvp system.
4. Straight up bounty hunting on those abusing open world pvp. Plus there will possibly be more than one faction in a fight considering all the allegiances you could have to guild, node, or just wanting to attack those around you.
5. Only game this studio is going to have for a while. Steven seems genuinely dedicated to making this a great experience and understands what made previous games fail. I am worried about how a cash shop incentivizes bad things for the player base, and how a lot of this seems to be riding on Steven directly.
All in all, I am very hopeful and see a lot of things planned for this game that will address things that went poorly for me in Classic WoW.
My concern was the general atmosphere of the game. Take the most basic interaction for example: buffing. The most common thing back in the day was the mutual exchange of buffs by two passing players. This was extremely common and even resulting in verbal exchanges. This is nearly non-existent the second time around. It is typically one sided and verbal exchanges never happen. I was leveling a priest and saved dozens of players from death or resurrected them if not near enough to heal. 90% of the time not even a thank you is mentioned. It's a pure anti-social shift that has taken place. These players will gravitate towards Ashes and they will keep these anti-social tendencies until the game forces them to break them. The real question becomes do they quit or actually change?
This might have also been an experience unique to you. When I played Classic it was as a Mage and my buffs were frequently reciprocated. On top of that, unlike Classic, AoC won't be "solved" and so long as Intrepid builds their Nodes correctly it can't be meaning things like buffing and helping others will be more encouraged as people will likely be consistently bumping into the same player over and over while they strive to build their Node.
That makes sense, and it's a valid worry. I really liked this theory crafting video from a YouTuber I found recently Guilds Are Going About This COMPLETELY Backwards
For those who haven't watched it, I'll summarize real quick. The YouTuber theorizes that it will be the regional aspec of nodes that will form guilds, and not as much guilds that find and develop nodes because many may discover they have other priorities or needs than those that can be addressed by their current home.
I really liked this idea, and it may serve to fight some of this negative community you are after where you will get thanks for healing others because they realize you are helping them complete their objective of developing the regional community you are both at. In fact, in a healing situation, you will probably be saving them from some other player ganking them.
As far as being addicted to instant gratification, I think you are right, those kinds of players are going to either quit, or they will find true pleasure in joining one of these communities and just having fun making friends there. That's my hope anyways.
This is possibly true. I could have just picked a bad server or caught people on a bad day. It just seemed like people didn't care or even come alive until they were in a group. It seemed pretty awkward to me being that your presence in an MMO is pretty much all social. I quickly began to notice it was the same players over and over who behaved this way and they would have been outcasts in the older version of WoW. Then again maybe they didn't care because they were just using WoW to level up and kill time?
I'll have to check that out.
For example in a different thread someone was suggesting a built in reputation system to use against bullies and the ability for a shop to recuse service. The right to refuse service against a player that killed you is a good mechanism. You can change your mind. They can get shamed by the community if they ganked you in a repeated and mean spirited way. They have the opportunity to change via social means.
Social change through social interactions. A reputation based price penalty system otoh is a bad mechanism. No social experience has to happen to be 'forgiven' to be 'forgotten'.
Lots of little decisions add up combined with a community culture to cause a positive social environment.
I think Maezriel has a good point about the regionality of the game. I think its one of ashes possible places its design can really done relative to dealing with toxic people. A lot of peeps who just want to enjoy the game rather than be harassed in the field will start clustering during the initial gankfest of the first year. Once those people grow bored as 'nice' people get stronger gear and skill, they will eventually leave since it will be riskier and harder to pick on the 'weak'/'new', giving room to frontier even after launch.
The real question is what tools do we need if any that haven't been clarified that can let positive cultures flourish in a 'pvx' style game? What social norms can we as players add to the mix or want to see promoted?
I would like to start the answers to your question of "What social norms can we as players add to the mix or want to see promoted?"
As a general rule I would submit: Take actions that benefit the health of the game.
That would include such things as...
- Helping new players and certainly not doing things to them that would make them quit
- Basic common decency, treat others as you would like to be treated. Someone lost? Give them directions. Someone buffs you, thank them.
- Do not encourage cheating, discourage cheating. Don't buy gold. Don't try to get around the rules.
- Have fun, enjoy the game journey. Because if YOU have fun, others around you will as well.
It's more important to build the game around stopping abuse of systems than to build with the community in mind. If players don't have an avenue to essentially cheat then they won't. If they are able to cheat then they will take it 100% of the time. The game is already built to punish toxicity in many ways. Especially if there won't be server linking system and the only people you see are on your server. If they maintain the servers properly then there shouldn't be like 100 different servers. xD It may be wise to have more at the start and if it turns out you don't need them, then fuse them into other servers in the same regions.
I don't necessarily believe the mentality that players always only seek to benefit themselves with balance recommendations, but there will always be those with that in mind. Those are the kind of people that run around telling people they are playing the wrong build and not having fun in the right way. They are a plague to the genre because MMO's often aren't built so that min/maxing is the only way to beat the content. All it does is alienate people who want to play certain viable ways and makes them quit leaving the morons behind.
The problem with WoW's community is often that they chased all of the players people like away and all that was left was the toxic assholes. It's impossible to have a balanced community when they are all toxic assholes. A lot of the players that never say anything in WoW are actually nice players who learned to not talk because no one ever had anything good to say.
With classic WoW I also play a few days behind the min/maxing crowd on purpose because you get better interactions with the stragglers.
U.S. East
This is a beyond simplistic perspective. You can't just block a player sharing the same game as you as their actions still matter. I brought up the point that the culture in gaming is trending negative and people are just accepting that behavior. Saying "There are just bad people out there" is confirming that point. You've already accepted it and consider it normal.
I'd agree with pretty much all of this.
That is not dead which can eternal lie. And with strange aeons even death may die.
That is not dead which can eternal lie. And with strange aeons even death may die.
I am not sure about that because there is no one way to win in AoC. What is winning? Is everything that is not winning, therefore, losing?
I think 'winning' is having a good time playing the game. That will sometimes include not having a good time. I'll have lots of goals starting out and many others as I play. I will achieve some of them.
We might have a really nice thread about what different people call winning in a game without winners. Kind of like in 'real life' - at what point do you win?
Winning in AoC is when I stand atop you all as the God-King of Verra
No? What are you even talking about? You either win or you lose the castle seige. You either get pked or you kill the pker. In Ashes alot of the systems are designed in away where if you don't succeed and somebody else succeeds. Where everybody doesn't just get a participation prize from showing up. Is everything that isn't a win a loss? No but there will be alot of things some people will never get to do, get to complete or get to have. That's okay. It's also not toxic to have this in a game.
That is not dead which can eternal lie. And with strange aeons even death may die.
U.S. East