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.
Comments
Who do you think would win? A highly coordinated guild (not even necessarily a big one) that's great at pvp and wants to pvp (and might even be ready to PK often) or a bunch of anti-pvp spergs that only logged on because they thought they'd get to meet their favorite strimmer in the game?
They'll have to unlearn their puritan bullshit eventually.
Anyone who loved pvp have moved on to other genres that support equal power and don't require you to play the game for hundreds of hours to enjoy the pvp. I just hope that Intrepid manages to balance their corruption correctly and has enough players to sustain it for a decade or two, cause I'm damn sure that no other mmo will have owpvp in it.
Will anti-PvPers have to unlearn their puritan bullshit? To play Ashes they most certainly will. Or they're going to die.
That's their choice, by accepting that Ashes has pvp even if they are anti-pvp they accept the terms that they're going to die and get flagged on.
It's just like the combat debacle, people will have to unlearn their puritan bullshit and realize this game is truly going to be hybrid.
It's not going to be "too tab" or "too action", combat has many different nuances.
They can go to mobas all they want, it'll never overshadow the fun that is PVP in a MMORPG. They'll be back.
This is why I don't see streamers as that big of a problem. The only real problem related to them is the exodus of players and the impact of THAT on the game. But this will happen even w/o streamers so once again they're irrelevant.
Netflix doesn't allow streams on their platform, they could use the model, from a programming standpoint sniffing out a platform like twitch would be next to no effort.
Do you feel concerned about playing on a server with a major portion of the player base being a streamer and their community?
I will be doing some serious due diligence to ensure my guild avoids any of the servers major streamers plan to populate. Hopefully I am capable of avoiding them as I believe that the streamers population will lower the server pop count enough to potentially force a merge which I will try to avoid (ideally anyway)
Would you consider moving to a different server if you knew it had no streamers on it?
Yes
Would having servers that do not allow the use of streaming tools be something you would generally be against?
I would rather IS have a list of the top streamers for AOC and their respective servers
Do you think that Ashes of Creation would benefit from having possibly bigger (in max. player numbers) servers dedicated to streamers and their community from a marketing perspective?
This would require a rebalancing of resource spawns == more work and thus no. Although generally I prefer larger servers over smaller ones so 8k or 15k idc as long as its balanced appropriately.
Also, if this was a known application of this ban, people would just cover up any potential visual of their name. Which would then probably lead to some people trying to find them in the game and then report them to Intrepid, which would waste GM time when instead those GMs coulda been addressing bot problems and literally any more pressing issue.
And the netflix approach of "black screen" (iirc) wouldn't work against 2-PC setups or phone streams or whichever other method people would definitely find if they wanted to.
netflix doesn't allow people to stream their content because then, people wouldn't subscribe to netflix and they would lose money.
a streamer brings players into the game, which means Is makes money and servers are populated.
not the same.
Aye I have not disagreed with you. I just said hopefully they unlearn their puritan bullshit.
It was merely a suggestion to use a style like Netflix where streaming just resulted in a black screen being streamed. Of course there would be work arounds but many major streamers wouldn't utilize those strategies.
@NiKr "Are you suggesting banning streamer people if they're playing on a streaming-restricted server? " no I am suggesting exactly what I wrote 2 sentences below where you obviously stopped reading.
Also I was suggesting a potential option before suggesting a different one
"I would rather IS have a list of the top streamers for AOC and their respective servers"
so relax @depraved
I just misunderstood the twitch part here Cause netflix is checking the action on your PC and then blocks them. But twitch has nothing to do with the actions on your PC, it's just a platform that you stream to from the app you're using. So when I read "sniffing out a platform like twitch", I thought you meant that Intrepid would go through the entire Ashes category on twitch, look at what server the streamers are playing on and then try to ban them if they're playing on the streamer-restricted servers, because it'd be against the rules (in the context of streamers going around the "black screen" thing).
Tbh, Asmongolds take in one of his videos was "If you give players the power to influence over other players gaming experience, then that's bad game design." So I have no idea why the dude is playing MMORPGs in the first place if he just wants to hang out alone in a world of NPCs. [sarcasm] Those probably are also badly designed in his opinion because they can influence his experience. [/sarcasm] Most ironically that he himself is on record being a griefer for no other reason but to ruin other peoples gaming experience just for the lols of it. Now that he's older he gets afraid that someone does it to him?
But those are the ones I hope to stay clear of. Sedated PvE carebears who don't give a damn about what the game was designed for and instead just buy the game, put their own expectations on it and rage when they find out that the game didn't magically change to fit their delusion.
Thanks for answering the questions.
Especially the points you made on question 3 and 4 were some that I had not considered, that really was eye opening.
I'll definitely will be in the same category as to try and avoid the servers with big influencers and streamers on them as best as I can to not deal with their world. I think that will lead to a more enjoyable game play experience for me with more people present that want to be invested in the game rather than a streamer who just happens to be playing this game for now.
I'm not saying that Intrepid have to listen to their takes and follow only them when making design decisions, but that audience will be quite a nice representation of the potential response of the masses. And that should be taken into the account, when preparing for the inevitable huge wave of feedback. I hope Intrepid are ready for it and are ready to stand their ground on their own goals and ideals. Though my hope in that is slowly dying with each new piece of info about the corruption system.
WoW was also my primary MMORPG with a bit of Runescape before, but I quit after it became.... lonely. Past WotLK I played the game without any major social interaction, the guilds felt dead, heroic dungeons could be made casually with the dungeon finder just throwing you in with random people where no word had to be spoken and that even reached raids at some point. I quit that because it felt meaningless.
And I don't even like PvP that much, I just recognize that a world where there are no stakes that can bum you out will not be able to be fun.
If I had to make a prediction, I would guess that a lot of the hyped casuals will fall off during the continued development phase, some coming back for the release, becoming frustrated due to slower character progression and the reality of PvP being unavoidable, player number fall significantly and then the type of people who actually like to play games like this will come trickling in. So I am already expecting a significant fall down after launch (probably when the play time included in the 75$ package runs out).
I sincerely hope that threats like this get noted and accounts like yours are permabanned. I don't care if it is a streamer or anybody else. If your goal is to harass people and make their time unpleasant. YOU ARE THE PROBLEM.
i don't care, i don't think the streamer has much influence on the gameplay. streamer not = good player
2. Would you consider moving to a different server if you knew it had no streamers on it?
No, where there is a streamer, there are a lot of people, and where there are a lot of people, there is a lot of fun. Competition is cool
3. Would having servers that do not allow the use of streaming tools be something you would generally be against?
In fact, it is very difficult for me to imagine how this can be implemented. And the developers won't do it.
4. Do you think that Ashes of Creation would benefit from having possibly bigger (in max. player numbers) servers dedicated to streamers and their community from a marketing perspective?
I think yes, there is enough space for everyone. Although personally I hope that it will be crowded and have to fight for every piece of land and resource xD
Thanks for answering the questions!
Regarding the 3rd point, I might add that Intrepid is already scanning the PC for third party software and are confident that they can identify it, this is however to prevent analysis tools like DPS and threat meters from being used.
I think it would technically be possible to also use the same "anti-cheat" tool to prevent active streaming tools to run in the background. But before this is taken as me trying to convince you, I'm just trying to say: It would probably be fairly easy to do, if they wanted. NiKr already brought up a solid point in that regard in general, that scanning the PC should be kept to a minimum to avoid unnecessary invasion of privacy.
Yes, they've said that they're against meters and addons, but I don't remember if they've explained how exactly they gonna deal with those.
No they didn't explicitly say so, it's my best guess what they will do after reading up on Addons and security systems. I should have made that more clear from the very beginning, sorry.
I think it's possible. But I know that many people are inattentive, then I think it will be like this - Streamer does not read the warning, enters the server, he was banned, he opens a forum with his subscribers and writes a complaint xD
The thing is I never said they get banned though. In my suggestion, they would simply get logged out when the system detects an active streaming tool running, they'd get a message "We detected a running streaming tool, unfortunately this is not possible on this (and 2 other) servers. Please deactivate the tool or choose another server"
The point was never to generally ban streamers, that would be a reputation suicide. My question always pointed towards having a few (less than 5%) servers where streaming wasn't a thing understanding that this would probably be a niche criteria. Which is why I also don't agree with the hate streamers are getting. They just tend to create gaming experiences that not everyone enjoys - thats where I was coming from hence the suggestion to establish a "private corner".