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.
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U.S. East
But, if you don't want to explain that's fine.
I don't think I could have been clearer. It has nothing to do with the group thing and everything to do with his thought process. I have no stance regarding group corruption specifically.
@Azherae this was extremely well articulated. I like a lot of their vague design goals but worry about their implementations. I like that the PvE encounters will be open world. I worry that they'll be trivially easy for vets. I love the idea of open markets, but worry that their supply/demand won't be balanced properly to create enough pressure to make buying goods at one place, buying a caravan, risking getting raided, and selling them somewhere else worth the risk.
I love the idea of having crafted gear, but worry that gold sellers will have a massive impact, or that the whole game will devolve into farming your highest g/h farm for the whole time you're on so that you can convert gold into character power. Why clean my own gutters when I can write more cryptology code and buy someone's labor to clean my gutters? Why go to x-unique-spot-in-the-world to farm-y-unique-item when I can earn more gold-per-hour farming somewhere else and then just buy it? If everything is open-market, doesn't everything boil down to gold? I feel like I'm just selling carries and buying everything I want extremely quickly.
They say they're balancing the game for "group play", but what does that even mean? If someone says "the game is balanced for 1v1s", I interpret that as "if we make a matchup chart of all the characters, most of the matchups are relatively even. Does "balanced for group play" mean that "every possible combination of group has a roughly equal chance to win in pvp against every other possible combination"?
Or maybe "every combination of 2 tanks 4 dps 2 healers"? Or maybe "2 tanks, 2 melee, 2 ranged, 2 healers"? Even that last one is still an intractable number of matchups to try to balance properly. I think balance will be a total nightmare with the number of ways that players can customize their character. Balance gets harder the more dials you allow players to adjust, not easier.
If they're okay with their game not being balanced, what do they do about the folks who play the classes that aren't in favor? The proverbial ret paladins of classic wow? They can take the stance "you can choose your build, but that includes choosing to be a terrible build", but I don't know how palatable the community will find that.
I'm also worried in general about the overall combat depth. I want to be able to put 10,000 hours into a game like this. I'm wondering if there's enough depth that when I'm losing a fight in hour 8000 that it still feels like I'm barely scratching the surface and that there's something I could have done, rather than that everything is pretty much solved. That the fights are more decided on a shallow RPS level composition-wise, or based on character builds, rng, or simple flowchart play at a high level.
Did they design in appreciable yomi? Functioning and fair netcode? Is the combat interactive, or do we both just kind of wail on each other until one wins? Is figuring out which button to press difficult? Do I have to press buttons quickly enough that there's any relevant mechanical skill cap?
I'm wondering how often a 99th percentile skill team defeats a 95th percentile skill team in a mirror match. Or in a favorable matchup. Or in an unfavorable matchup. Same thing with a 99th vs a 80th or 60th.
idk, I really hope the game is great and they pull through
The Steven quote you shared specifically refers to Corruption as related to groups/guilds/regions/religions, but now you say that group Corruption has nothing to do with what you learned about Corruption during that stream.
But, it doesn't have to be clear to me.
Thanks for the replies.
This is a line of thought from phase 2 of the militant pvers handbook. If you can't abolish the system, castrate/neuter it to meaninglessness.
Cute made up othering nick name. It goes really well with your fantasy warfare delusion.
I fully support open world PvP. But corruption is designed to keep the game from dying and drying up like every other open world PvP system. The reason that happens is because casuals and people who like crafting tend to need some level of confidence their gathering isn't for nothing every time they go out. Yes there should be risk. But too much risk suffocates.
Crafters and casuals are a large population base and create a healthy economy both in game and for the studio. Corruption is a good system. If you balance it to be too soft you lose a big audience. Just like every other open world pvp game. If you balance in favor of the crafters, the population stays and the hunters are more likely to hunt other hunters. The gatherers still get hunted by it's more dynamic. That's a good system. That's what Corruption looks like on paper.
However, Steven worrying about the wolves shows he didn't understand that principle and is likely to sign off on ratios in favor of something that will lower the games population. Which is needlessly destructive to the games ecosystem and potential growth. That's all I meant by that one piece of my much broader criticism.
Why you think the hunters(wolves) want to be punished for hunting?
There wont be guild/group corruption bs.
Move along.
I made a joke over a year ago about the removal of the corruption system. It turned into a 4 or 5 hour debate with Noanni lol.
It remains to be seen how harsh the corruption system will be. Based on his statement, we can deduce that it will not be so harsh that murderers do not exist. We've known that for some time now, common sense alone let's you know that. Whats the point of creating a system thats not used.
But this thread got derailed let's go back to the original question.
Yes. I seem to be the target audience, provided they don't listen to the community to much and stick to the game design that was laid out that caused me to get my wallet out for kickstarter. I want them to stick as close to the original intent as possible. Will things change and not go as planned, absolutely. Plans never survive first contact with reality. Some things will be technical challenges and can be over come some can't. Some things will look and sound good in planning then in practice will be realized not so much. Like the quick time event way back when. Sounded good but was taking focus from the combat to play a mini game and they removed it and the project is better for it. But the main core philosophies need to stay true. Details can change as long as the main focus stays the same.
The whole cooperative development idea I think is WAY overblown. Most communities don't have a clue what they want, and if a developer is honestly listening to everything and "giving players what they want", they are going to end up with a horrible, incoherent mess. Any community involvement has to be tempered with a very strong vision for the game overall and a super tight scope and schedule. In short, players have way less influence over making "the game they want to play" than the marketing would have you believe.
I've been fairly impressed with this game and its developers so far. They are avoiding many of the typical red flags and pitfalls, and seem to be aware of and working on most of the elements and hitting the milestones that normally clue me in to whether a game might make it to release and be worth playing. That probably doesn't sound like a ringing endorsement at all, but compared to the last 5+ years in the genre, that's actually damn good. Most games don't make it to release, and of those that do, those that actually get to compete for my time and money, even fewer survive the quickest review of their basic design.
With all that said, my take on this question is... you can't know. The game we all build in our heads during development is very unlikely to be the game we end up playing when and if it reaches launch. Right now you are hearing all the marketing and filling in all the gaps with your imagination, whether you realize it or not. No game is as perfect or as tailored to you personally as the one you build in your mind before launch day.
Confirmation bias and sunk cost cause a very strong tendency to rationalize that the game is going to fit you just right in all the deepest detail, almost like it was designed especially for you. In short, you definitely are the "target audience" for the game you are imagining. It's just not likely that the game you are imagining will be exactly like Ashes of Creation when it launches. The cognitive dissonance that we experience when those two worlds collide shortly after launch day is often what makes people quit these games after only a few days or weeks. Players often feel lied to...without realizing they were lying to themselves.
Even for those who play early versions of a game in development, if you are a fan, you are very likely viewing things through that confirmation bias lens, filling in the gaps and ignoring the faults with benefit of the doubt and generous imagination...and shortly after launch a reckoning will arrive where you'll realize that the game isn't what it seemed.
That doesn't mean the game will be bad, necessarily. There's a chance it will be great. It doesn't mean that some folks won't indeed be the "target audience". Of course some will (I hope, the devs better be thinking in those terms) I just don't think any of us can truly know until they finish making it, we play it for a bit, and see how the real thing works for us.
At this point in the genre, with the massive, thirsty desert in between decent games and the lack of serious development going on...I'm totally willing to buy almost any game that meets basic criteria and survives until launch day. I'll try it, and then make up my mind if it's made for me.
Actually on topic too. I have worried myself that I am filling in the gaps with my own bias. What normally makes me feel like I am on the right track with my speculation of what Ashes will be is my understanding of the game Steven never shuts up about, Lineage 2. To be very clear L2 is not my favorite mmo. I like it and have spent a lot of time with it. If I was filling in the gaps with my personal desires we would see a very different game. I am sure of that.
I try to understand Ashes in the context of what I know worked for the games Steven has said are the inspiration for Ashes: L2, EVE, ArcheAge, and star wars galaxies. I have spent a good deal of time with each of these titles with the exception of AA. I have always tried to use stated inspirations to fill in the gaps not what I want.
I love hardcore instanced raiding, but I don't think Ashes will have that. I am fine with Ashes not having something that I want because I understand it is not good for a game focused around open world risk vs reward. I feel that my interpretation of Ashes is better tempered than most of the ones I see because I try to use the inspirations and Steven's vision as he defines it as a guide. I don't see a lot of that in the community.
Which is part of the reason for this thread. I wanted to hear people speak about why they think Ashes is for them. I wanted to hear these interpretations of the game in people's own words. To better understand what people think Ashes is.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
Maybe from the way the devs describe a particular system, it sounds all wrong to us and we spend years arguing with them to change it...then it releases and we realize we love it. The devs might be great at design and terrible at describing what they are doing.
I guess the way I would put it is that I hope I'm part of the target audience. I hope it's a game I enjoy, no matter what it turns out to be. There aren't a whole lot of options these days...so far this one looks promising.
You spelt my name wrong.
In the end he may choose to identify as a correct name speller, just like many people desperatly want to identify as target audience, as if it matters.
The downside to this line of thought is that the MMO community is significant different to what it was back then.
We are more informed, better organized and have much, much better communication.
This means any weakness in any system would be 10 times worse now than back then. Just because it worked back then, doesnt mean the same system will work now.
No.
People are more entittled. I hope AoC sticks to their guns. After all, either you create a solid passion product, or you go wow clone and cash in.
There are more than two options, and there is no reason a passion product cant take inspiration from what used to work and modify it to fit in to today's climate.
In fact, I would say doing that is a requirement of a passion project, otherwise it's just a clone of L2 instead of WoW - and that is no less bad.
I do agree with you about people being more entitled though. However, that doesnt stop them being better informed and better organized.
Things that I don't want: Any P2W or pay for convenience. I also don't want a lobby MMO where people spend time removed from the open world in instances; there are plenty of games that already do that.
As far as I know, all of these fall in line with the game design that Intrepid has advertised so far.
Yeah I'm dyslexic and didn't scan for a confirmation post. Also, it's the thought that counts
To be fair, the list of people that have spelt it that same way on accident is somewhat distinguished.
Yeah, it wasn't meant to be a malicious error but I haven't edited the error away either lol.
Gaining Corruption is supposed to be relatively uncommon - not practically non-existent.
I agree with this.
The question I have for people (Steven included) is this; if I am out with my guild of 40 people,and we run across a group of 8, what penalty do we face from attacking them?
We are going to win, and some of us are going to gain corruption. However, thay corruption will be worked off before anyone can kill those that gained corruption.
To me, this sounds like a reward treadmill.
Word gets out. An enemy guild shows up. Big pvp. Great story for the server to discuss for days to come.
So what if you got away with it this time?