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Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest news on Alpha Two.
Check out general Announcements here to see the latest news on Ashes of Creation & Intrepid Studios.
To get the quickest updates regarding Alpha Two, connect your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Comments
Currently the bar is low and they can do better and raise it up. Do they need to go full high? nope.
as I suggested, you can keep the the format but let a few well deserved alpha one player take the lead on the characters while steven/dev talk over them.
then once stream is over, they devs and steven can also talk to those few players to get instant feedback on feel internally.
I just want Steven to cut his "Daddy talking to his little child" attitude. "ohhhh what is this, oh is that a a NPC, swipy no swipy"
There are countless others who slice and dice the content (like narc who you pointed out) and I'd rather have the source be the devs than someone like Narc.
I made a rather scaling comment about the first video and I haven't retracted the comment but the second take was much improved. I'm not sure what else you want improved because the general flow was in contention.
That is my issue. I want them to do better for their own good. Vocal minority can influence perceived quality of the product (even if not fully change the majority's opinion). And when that vocal minority has been asking for better quality for months, there's a much higher chance that any newcomer to AoC's social media sees its veterans complaining about the quality of what Intrepid presents - they might turn away and, at the very least, just come back later, instead of maybe providing good feedback.
I'm sure that Intrepid can do better, because they literally showed us they can multiple times already. So why not just do that from the start? I'm not quite so paranoid to really think this, but this could even be seen as a "no pr is bad pr" kind of move. Anyone coming to watch the stream later would just see the good version, while the current CCs can make videos about the "drama", which would draw clicks much better than just a video about the livestream. The scale is obviously tiny, because the community is tiny, which is why I believe this is not the case, but still.
I dabble in economics quite a bit and have learnt about something called "unseen costs". You may see an improved video, but you don't know what using this time to set it up, getting away Steven and the other devs from their other work portion does to their progression. I'm not a game developer or media person but it COULD be - and therefore is worth considering - that making these scripted showcases takes up a lot of time and therefore hours away from the actual development process, especially when something different from a class reveal comes along. Having unscripted livestreams in the past could have turned out to be the most economic option and with viewer feedback being largely positive, there was no need to go beyond that.
It might just be that for things like a class reveal a scripted showcase works better, but it might not be necessary to go full 100% with that when show casing e.g. the gathering mechanics or so.
Even though I'm in full support of a more mmorpg insider kind of personality vibe I completely understand why it's "ok" to maintain a warmer and in touch lingo of sorts and express the joy of everything to provide more of a complete overview for a lot of those people who aren't just here to win castle/node rights and coax their guild into being the Tywin Lannister of the server.
As long as Steven produces the end product to be a competitive and drama-ersome experience I don't really care what kind of fishing bait he uses for the development showcase journey.
And I feel like this could've been avoided if at least some parts of the showcase were properly planned. At the very least the recording should be. It's not like they're doing it literally live, so I see no reason why they couldn't have recorded it a few days before the stream and let Margaret's team fix any potential issues or ask them to redo the video (with time left over before the stream itself).
Now I really want to know if they lost the first recording.
Since this 'criticism' is only 'valid' if they hadn't lost their original hard work, technically.
Just so we don't derail: I think the second showcase was major improvement to the first one we saw during the livestream, but mainly because of the audio in my opinion (and maybe because of that I didn't catch all the explanations for the abilities).
With that being said: With the technical issues beforehand, it might just be - and this is why I can't be overly harsh - that they had a plan for this livestream to structure it well and it ultimately failed. This is also something unseen. We do not know for sure, we just see the results. And in my opinion they haven't been consistently disappointing - quite the opposite in fact! - which is why the outburst that I've seen here seems simply unwarranted to me. If this kind of chaos, delayed streams, information not coming across due to bad audio, information not coming out because of "no" script and so on, if this would have been EVERY stream or a few ones in a row, I would have understood the discontent, but not like this.
But my main point has been exactly what you've said. We know for certain that Intrepid can do better, so it's difficult to accept that they could mess it up after all this time. Especially when it really seems that it could've been avoided through proper planning. I'd imagine that people would be less dramatic in their feedback were it not for the audio issues and the seeming lightheartedness of Steven's attitude towards the delay and the content of the video.
People on the internet are quite often overly angry even w/o a real reason, so when they find several reasons for anger - that anger multiplies severalfold and spills out of every hole.
If they lost their first video, that would mean it was their 2nd play through and they would have been much more prepared. But that wasnt the case imho. See the YT video - is soo much better in presentation and gameplay.