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Number of Questions Asked in the Livestream Forum Post by Month
SkylarckTheBotanist
Member
Hi All,
As of late I have been feeling as if there has been less and less activity on the forums, specifically around the Monthly Livestream. But feelings lie and should not be taken as fact, as such I did a quick and surficial analysis of each month's livestream forum post and counted the number of questions asked*. Note that there are blanks which are associated with months where questions were not solicited (for reasons such as Reddit AMA)
*I did not count replies as questions (such as community members answering another community members question)
*I did not count questions asked after the question period was closed.
Since last July the number of community questions has been decreasing. This could be for a variety of reasons such as:
I wanted to know if anyone else has noticed this tread and have any hypothesis as to why.
As well as potential ideas for Intrepid to potentially reverse this trend.
-Skylarck The Botanist
As of late I have been feeling as if there has been less and less activity on the forums, specifically around the Monthly Livestream. But feelings lie and should not be taken as fact, as such I did a quick and surficial analysis of each month's livestream forum post and counted the number of questions asked*. Note that there are blanks which are associated with months where questions were not solicited (for reasons such as Reddit AMA)
*I did not count replies as questions (such as community members answering another community members question)
*I did not count questions asked after the question period was closed.
Since last July the number of community questions has been decreasing. This could be for a variety of reasons such as:
- the forums have became less welcoming for people to ask question,
- interests in Ashes has slowed down,
- the quality of the livestreams have diminished,
I wanted to know if anyone else has noticed this tread and have any hypothesis as to why.
As well as potential ideas for Intrepid to potentially reverse this trend.
-Skylarck The Botanist
1
Comments
Now I will tell the inputs I received from other people from Guild Wars 2 and EVE, when commented about AoC, their replies where mostly like this:
Pay good attention now on this paragraph:
I said Guild Wars 2, that is mostly a PvE RPG MMO and EVE that is mostly a PvP sandbox... both games are very opposite to each other, I play both games, nearly all people who I talked to about AoC they already visited the project in the past and all of them didn't care
Even when I brought stuff to them, telling the systems, how dynamic the world is, most of them did not seemed interested at all, they don't see the appeal... only a couple heavy gankers said instantly the game will bad. Very few people got curious about it
So that's what I got to report you, I was the last to hear about AoC, nearly all of them already knew it and were uninterested and sometimes they gave me their reasons why they didn't care about the game
All of those things would lead to a decrease in the amount of questions. And obviously interest in the game has gone down since the huge 2020 wave so there'd be just fewer people visiting the forums to even know when to ask their questions.
There were also some changes that I would have expected to drastically reduce interest in the game from certain demographics. That's totally speculation, though.
I'll say that regardless of the specific reason, I'm not surprised that this has been diminishing. Some other forms of engagement in the regular forum have diminished too, certain types of questions aren't asked much anymore.
One thing I can add is that I do watch a Throne and Liberty Content Creator who occasionally does comparisons or mentions Ashes, and the general trend in those comments is also one that I'd think indicates less interest in Ashes relative to TL, and not just because TL is likely to be soon, it's moreso the same sort of thing that causes my interest to tilt that way sometimes.
There's probably some confirmation bias there though, so just another anecdote for the pile.
Yeah I have stopped asking questions. I tried to ask for specific clarifications on a topic a few times, but so far all I've gotten are short replies with a link to the wiki, that don't answer my questions.
This is part of the problem from my perspective.
A casual partaker of content knows more about TL than about Ashes if you remove everything that is 'speculation by an Ashes-heavy content creator'.
TL Content is normally analysis of things we have been explicitly told and shown, with some speculation, most of which is quickly confirmed whenever NCSoft releases new data, so the loop for TL is 'analysis' -> 'speculation (usually positive)' -> 'confirmation'.
The loop for Ashes is 'speculation' -> 'disruption' -> 'analysis of the reason for the disruption (which fails)' -> 'new speculation (half and half positive/negative'.
I think Intrepid knows this and that's why Steven is doing another Q&A. It's a good way to disseminate lots of information about stuff that is 'closer to confirmed but less people are asking about' because us 'regulars' have 'learned not to ask' except in the 'analysis of disruption' phase.
Though I found it kinda funny that TL sent out an email to the amazon workers about the internal "alpha testing", while the game is supposed to come out in 2023 (iirc even the first half). And we have Ashes with more than a year before alpha2 and years more before release. As much as I consider Steven's constant reiterations of "this is a developmental alpha which is why the game is far from done" almost a marketing defense tool against any potential haters, the use of "alpha" by other dev companies definitely reinforces the belief that there's no real differentiation when it comes to testing phase naming schemes these days.
That's different. Internal Alpha of this type is Localization related, and possibly a methodology for testing balance based on a different monetization.
Obviously I am not 'speaking from Amazon's perspective' here, but I can say from some experience that one does still run a 'Language Test Alpha', because the build can sometimes be significantly different due to certain aspects of dialogue trees, chat, and moderation code.
Certain database optimizations (very few, perhaps none by now, it's 2023) may also be involved.
I feel like Ashes is doing a bit 'worse' because we started from a lot of mostly concrete stuff back in 2021, even if it was subject to change, there was considerable clarity on systems. Since then there have been 6 'major' disruptions and 11 'minor', and now we have much less clarity.
We could ask for more, but I, for one, wouldn't expect to get it unless the staff are able to talk on forums more.
Hopefully skotty's recent appearance will be the beginning of a trend. Those posts were closer to 'confirmation', or at least 'responses quick and clear enough that analysis was not a long phase, and there was minimal disruption anyway'.
The way this was handled previously puts my Marketer in a bad mood, whereas skotty making just two posts basically made her go 'finally, that's better'.
Alpha 2 is not around the corner.
Several other games to play while we wait for Alpha 2.
This is also the longest gap where there has been no Ashes content to play.
I'd much rather have a shorter list of better questions that haven't already been answered, than the old WILL DERE BE SORDZ, WILL I DY IN DIS GAYME, WEN IS ALFFA TOO, DE GRAFFICS LUK LYK DERE NOT FINNISHT YET, etc nonsense that we've had previously.
Then there are posters (even on this thread) that make threads faster than Disney makes Marvel shows, but with ideas very detached from anything this open world PvE, non-faction PvP mmo is aspiring to be. Either pk hobos or pve carebears (it doesnt matter), they are suggesting or opposing designs completely outlandish and selfcentered.
Unless you are bored, it's not worth responding to them.
And most people are bored with the content of these posts. Yet somehow manage to exchange likes for a few pages.
They remind youtube echochambers.
People hear about AoC. They want a new mmo environment to make a new character. Do you know what they say? "Make this like wow. Make this like eso. Make this like ff14. Make this like fortnite. Make this like rust". Use a descriptive word about them that covers the essence and you will get banned, rightfuly so, but... you'd be 100% spot on on the description).
There are posters here that act like schoolchildren that just got enrolled in an IT course. Talking about stuff that are not interesting to gamers, nor are of value to accomplished, professional, videogame designers. How many people will read the self patting on the back walltexts? Not many.
Feedback/critisism vs "it'S STilL in AlPhA...".
The usual suspects are too quick to dismiss valid concerns, which dont go outside of the open world pve, non-faction PvP philosophy.. It's silly rly... there is nothing else to do that discuss concerns before it's too late as Steven said.
QnA... I laugh when I rdy the QnA thread before the monthly update. "Pick my name!! Pick my name!!"
Some of the questions are total fluff. Luckily we get a good variety of answers when Steven goes off-script, even if the chosen question happened to be lame.
Anyway... my fav part of last months show was "Ashes is pvx. It's not for everyone. There are other games if you want the usual braindead mmo experience of the last 15 years."
He just went off-script. Not a professional move, but a damn good, gamer, move.
One of us.
This made me think of a related thing, along with Arya's claim that most EVE players in their circle don't care.
I don't want to say 'old FFXI players don't care' because I can't say that with certainty but there are three extrapolations you can make based on the responses of all the ones I know and have observed passing through the forums over the years.
1. Steven promises a lot of things and treats them as revolutionary when that specific subset of MMO players often has those same things as their foundational experience of the genre, and a lot of forum and Content Creators do the same.
2. As a result of #1, many of those people have up to a decade of experience with the period before that game fixed the pain points and irritations, so they eyeroll whenever they see the same things 'unfixed' in Ashes design for no reason.
3. Related to #3, a majority of 'serious' Ashes Content Creators are hostile to people who like Eastern MMOs in any form and the forums are now tilting that way too (a lot of interplay with the way the more invested players treat the few non-hostile Content Creators, too).
There's a bunch of stuff that actively pushes away a specific demographic of MMO player, but unfortunately it's at least somewhat the style of player this game might need.
tl;dr hot take this is a game for EVE-lover, L2-lovers and FFXI-philes on paper and it's currently slowly irritating all three those groups unnecessarily.
Every old FFXI player that has come onto the forum recently has been met with hostility (you can tell some of them because they have specific verbal 'tics' that exist because of that game's Auto-Translate function, it has preset phrases that people then start to think in and use sorta like emojis).
The EVE players get similar treatment.
Is it a problem? Maybe not. But most of the time the response to this sort of thing falls squarely in the field of 'Wait so y'all just don't want us in your game at all... oh, that's ok then."
It's a little suspicious to me at least that there aren't more players 'like me', from that perspective, but if you think about how it looks and feels it could make sense. Why would you take an MMO Community seriously when they treat stuff you consider 'basic old hat' as 'revolutionary' and go so far as to claim it's 'never been done'? (this isn't some general truth, but it's the sort of snap judgement a less involved person can easily make)
And since Steven (correctly) technically doesn't specify who Ashes is 'for', only repeats 'it's not for everyone', it gets close to being {Ashes} {Looking for Party} {No thanks.}.
I couldn't find players in Guild Wars 2 interested too, even tough GW2 is a carebear game, I play hundreds of PvP arena there and the world itself is amazing, GW2 is a reference for many good systems... some systems are shit but no game is perfect
GW2 is a mega carebear game, there is no owpvp, people share all loot equally, if you kill a boss you get a chess, if you bring 130 people they will all get the same chest, nobody can ninja loot nobody since everybody has rights on the loot, the loot is instanced for each player
EVE is a brutal sandbox pvp, I play both games, they are extremely different, they are in the opposite sides of the player spectrum... I can't find in them people interested in AoC
Every person who I ask and wait for their answer, they will just have no interest in answering at all...that's how much they don't care.... it's not that they don't care with a passion, they do not want to take the effort of knowing the game... they see no initia appeal and then they don't try to know more
I came to AoC, not because the game, I came here because I saw a short video on youtube in which Steven said that what makes games fun it's their systems, that's why I became curious about it
AoC is not a pve or pvp or pvx game, it is a highly dynamic MMO RPG which people live adventures in a high fantasy dynamic world called Verra. The PvE is there to develop Verra, the PvP is there for the peril
Intrepid tends to prioritize Verra over PvP in clashes between the two. PvP is only chosen by Intrepid when it does not conflict with Verra's sense of peril, meaning that even when PvP is selected over Verra, it is ultimately in service of Verra's interest since Verra needs peril...when PvP is too much it will be scaled down, then PvP is too little then PvP will be increased.
Verra is the focus of everything in this game and everything is at the service of Verra
The high fantasy dynamic reactive living world of Verra is above everything, everything is in service of it
It is not sandbox or themebox, it is 90% a theme park and maybe 10% sandbox, the theme park of Verra is like a Disneyland in peril
Yours truly has also tried telling a few people about AoC - and usually get the same response, in-part largely because there's no release date. Maybe a lot of players aren't excited for what's not already out? It's the Node-mechanics that really got me interested; SS and IS are taking a step in the direction that MMORPG's *should* have been going: New, interesting - and, if possible, unique - game-mechanics.
Yours truly logs to the forums here almost every day, though; I'm genuinely excited, and the monthly dev updates keep that excitement well-fueled!
I don't think there is anything to be worried about. Once A2 is announced it will pick back up again. And then we will have a lull waiting on closed beta. Attention spans wax and wane, new games are announced, some live streams are better than others, etc.
https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/categories/aoc-announcements
Usually, a week before the livestream, they put up a thread titled something like "Next Livestream and Q&A" where you can post a single, short question.
A
single
short
question.
Don't do what others do and spam the thread with 11 different questions of four paragraphs each. Those questions just don't get asked in the livestream.
A single, short question.
edited: I meant to say arent, not are. oops
Of my current guild, of which there are a LARGE number going to be playing, I think I'm the only one who uses the forum.
I'll set up a thing to ping you the next time the thread becomes available.
This game has 10k alpha 2 players that have paid up and are ready to go.
The forum has a few dozen posters.
That pretty much sums it up for me.
And this coming from my question actually being chosen to be answered on the last live stream. I'm kinda bummed even though it's completely understandable that the answer was "we're still trying to figure that one out"
Don't get me wrong, I'm still interested in the game. But I've come to the position that there needs to be more meat on the bones that they keep showing us for this game to really gain traction.
I meant to say arent. oops