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
When did I argue that? Reading comprehension is important.
Signed in (very much a lurker) to say what a great post this is and how it encapsulates how I feel. Myself and boyfriend absolutely love housing in MMOs and we watched the Freehold video with growing interest and excitement, (because we often desire more functionality in housing), only to then learn it's going to be limited to the few, alongside other exclusive aspects of the game.
We sound very similar to your parents in the way we play. I consider us "hardcore casuals" because we can put in a lot of gaming hours, just as many as "hardcore" players, but we do not join big guilds. We play by our own roster as a duo. We take care of each other.
I left NW because I disliked feeling like a gold-paying serf to immature pvp guilds, and the fact AGS then gave pvpers a private server, which then became elitist/exclusive to hardcore pvpers and their buddies, so I looked to AoC as I often have... which despite my lurking, I have been following with interest for a long time.
But now, I'm honestly wondering what value an average, non-elitist player will get from this game, especially since it asks for a monthly sub? They're making so much exclusive. I'm fine with some exclusivity, but too much makes one feel deflated before you've even started.
I agree, MMOs generally need all kinds of players, and I do wonder how much traction this game will have if it fails to retain average casual players. In my experience, what drives a roleplayer is different to what drives a hardcore pvper, and what drives a life skiller, is different to what drives a housing lover.
I've been so close to buying one of those Alpha packages a number of times, but now I'm glad I didn't.
They'll create the game they want to, but I'm skeptical it'll have wide appeal once people learn how much will be gatekept.
See, at the time I thought we were all just quoting random people and saying random things.
I mean, that seems to me to be what you had just done with your comment about a participation trophy.
Reading your post I couldn’t help but feel that the family system sounds like it could totally help mitigate your families problems. If you have 8 slots (if I’m remembering correctly at this early hour), do you need all of them to go to your min-max friends? Couldn’t you and your friends being min-maxers enable you personally to be able to facilitate your family? Buy a home for them, let them retire, or maybe let them stay in the guest house where they do their life skills and relax.
Just for clarity I do think that intrepid needs to keep tooling around with their current vision of freeholds and player housing. I think the bidding system will be a problem if it includes a universal currency like gold, and needs to use specific freehold-bidding specific currencies with limited trading options so the individual or family can not just get it handed to them by a powerful guild to expand their power. I think there does need to be some kind of built in system with that bidding process/currency that means “sure if you didn’t get it this time don’t worry, you will eventually be able to outbid someone within a reasonable time frame if that is a goal you are working towards. (not talking days/a few weeks necessarily, but also not 6 months/a year).
I also agree that 50 might not be the best place to start this. In my head I feel like 30-40 is better so you are still committed but you have a basic understanding of the game world before taking up a valuable spot in it.
We will see how it evolves though. Intrepid did ask for feedback on this and I’m sure are not against adjusting their system if their numbers are off, but they do like to stick to their guns on design choices like these to some degree, and I like to think how can they do the parts of a design choice better without fundamentally just saying that their design choice doesn’t work.
For this type game to not just survive but thrive you'll need a good portion of players that aren't just hardcore guild players. The casual and hardcore casuals need to have a place. You need these players interacting in the world outside of major guilds, spending coin in various places, adventuring etc. That way the economy moves and stays fluid. If there are too many bottlenecks those players stop caring and fall off.
That's the balance I hope they find. Plenty of stuff for high end guilds to do, but also plenty of things for others to do as well. You can have both.
"Come join us as you wont like the taste of the Grapefruits we're throwing at our enemies."
"Never settle for what you think you know" - C. Krauthammer
I am not sure that will work as we think it will. If you have a freehold, you have exclusivity on processing materials for higher crafting. Why would you give access to this materials to anyone that is not in your guild? If you do that and there is not a strong alliance in between, you're basically gearing your future enemies. It's like giving some random country specs on how to create nuclear weapons, it makes no sense.
The logic solution would be to maybe sell the master item, but without the mats, you can't repair it.
We still need to see this, but I don't think it will be as easy as "I add you as family, enjoy my freehold". From my point of view, if guilds are SO COMPETITIVE like they say they are, why gear your enemy? It makes no logical sense.
If they approve exclusivity in freehold, sure as hell they approve exclusivity in who has the best gear.
i agree with you. you have a freehold and you gear your allies. however, your enemies will also have a freehold and they will gear up their allies and not their enemies, aka you and your allies. in the end, everybody will get geared
We don’t know a lot of things. I do know tho that the kind of players you describe absolutely exist, but there are lots of other types of players too.
Personally I tend to be a lone wolf of sorts. I tend to dive extremely deep into whatever game I am currently playing, and I tend to be a reasonably high skilled player. I never mind puging and at times tend to enjoy it more. However I do not put extreme care into the bleeding edge high end content. One of my friends does.
We play games together frequently, usually in different guilds than each other but we regularly still do play the game together. I also tend to do crafting and economic stuff more than he does, and in turn he will regularly give me mats he knows I can use. I’ll make the stuff, sell or throw him some if he needs it, and usually give him a piece of the sale as a “thanks!”. I’ve had this situation occur it a lot of games I’ve played actually to different extents with varying amounts of people.
I can 100% see a world where I aim to get a freehold to process, he’s off in his own bleeding edge world in another guild but also in my family. As with the person I originally quoted he was talking about literal family. And as I originally said in response to that, do you really need all 8 family spots to go to your guild?
My point being, it can’t be as black and white as only Uber casual people and Uber competitive people exist. There’s a lot of grey area. Some people will be like “100k gold for family spot!” And others just chilling like “oh yeah I trust you, enjoy playing with you, and have some room. Welcome to the family!”.
As I’ve said a few times, I don’t think the exact implementation is perfect, I believe it should have gates to make it accessible and achievable if it is your goal as a player, and I believe that the level requirement and size to number of freeholds should be tested out.
Also I didn’t really consider it before the freehold stream, but the more I thought about it I don’t want to have random freeholds just thrown up willy nilly everywhere. I think it would feel bad to have 20 different taverns stacked right next to each other. At that point it is no longer special, and from my current never played with the system perspective wouldn’t feel as good as rolling up on 1 tavern off the beaten path on my way to a new hunting ground.
If everyone spent as much time looking within the confines of the design Intrepid told us, for ways to level the playing field for those that do want to own a freehold and to prevent the scary mega guilds from monopolizing the freehold market, as they do saying “this is the only way this could ever work out”, then maybe we can help intrepid find that sweet spot.
Random take while writing this, what if you limited the amount of freehold ownership a guild can have in their ranks. A guild perk could even be “increase number of allowed guild freeholds”. Add in some other things like I stated in my op that limited the trading of bidding currency, so you don’t get 1 guild turned into 50 to trade and abuse the perk, and now we don’t only have another gate to how monopolized the freehold system is, but we also add in another incentive to not mega guild, and another incentive for conflict and betrayal.
Maybe the current guild leader won’t let you have a family/freehold spot, maybe that makes you and some others mad. Maybe you leave the guild, form your own taking other disgruntled people with you, and help incite a war between two nodes to get back at your previous guild and claim your own lands.
Maybe it'll end up working how it does in real life. If players invest all that money in resources in taverns but placed them next to each other then almost all of them will fail as only some of them that are in the best spots will be used. Hopefully there will be a way to remove your own buildings, but still people will have to do a bit of thinking about the competition when it comes to deciding what services their freeholds will offer.
They announced a great crafting system and a great housing system. Then they told the players that would naturally be excited about both that only a small percentage of the player base can participate (which sets a soft cap on your server populations) and those who do can only choose one or the other.
For those that care about this type of gamplay, this is a loss. For those that don't care about this type of gameplay this is a way to prove what tough internet badasses they are without actually losing anything that they care about.
Good enough summary?
Straight from the Wiki: There are a limited amount of freeholds available on a server.
The developers are expecting the number of freehold plots on each server to be in "the low thousands".
15000 person servers
Low thousands 1k-3.5k, that's 6.6% to 23.3% of players. That doesn't seem like you need to be in the right clique. It's an MMO make friends. If a player that wants to play solo and not experience this MMO as intended by the developers then maybe it's not for you. And that's ok.
The argument you seem to be making could be used for almost anything in any game that involves other people. I want to be the strongest Fighter on the server, but the best weapon involves a 10 step quest that I need an alliance to complete. It's not fair that there are people getting it with their friends. I realize that's a bit of a ridiculous comparison but they line up. This MMO is not a single player game like some other MMOs, you know this, you should be able to expect road blocks involving making friends and finding like mined people to achieve a certain goal.
That is not the argument actually being made. It is currently closer to:
"I want to have one of the best weapons for my class in the game by beating this boss but Bigger Guild is killing anyone they don't approve of who tries to even get into the dungeon where the boss usually spawns."
If relevant.
Maybe I'm out of the MMO loop, but aren't all endgame craftable items always tied into end game players to an extent? Whether or not it's the items used to make the finished product or the skill needed to make the finished product? Also, if you are interested in a game, specifically being a crafter, aren't you going to do some level of research before committing to a membership fee? The number of freeholds will be in the "low thousands". Out of 15000 people that's anywhere from 6.67%(1000 people) of the population to 23.3%(3500 people). Let's say 2000 people will have freeholds. Every single MMO I have played I had a relationship with the other crafters of my main profession. We would all sit together at the best vendor spots for mats and craft for hours. Why would I expect AoC to be different? "Hey 'freehold owner' if I gather the raw materials to upgrade the smithing tree on your freehold and pay a percentage of the tax, can I join your freehold group to pursue my aspiration of becoming the best weaponsmith in the game?". They say nope, now you have 1999 other people to ask. Forced interactions with other player. I don't think it's an issue .
15K at launch. They'll increase the cap after launch. Up to 50K accounts, which dramatically changes those percentages. Players who don't join at launch are pretty much screwed unless they have connections or use RMT.
I think it's fair to say a person joining AoC a year after launch would have a tough time acquiring a freehold. But I think Steven's vision is that neighboring nodes will siege the main Node and upon victory more freeholds would open up for the new Main node.
Villages(node 3) is when you can start a freehold. Those Freeholds might end up being cemented in that nodes life span. Assuming the rate at which freehold disappear are newest to oldest?
Gotcha. I'm still all for that, a player driven world. Crafters always hang with other crafters. If there is a lumbermill that is in a great spot and you aspire to be a lumbersmith make friends with them. If it doesn't work out there will be more options elsewhere. Whether its though conflict, borrowing money, or joining a new family or guild.
Gold bid.
That said, putting all production and thus most of the economy into the hands of a single digit percentage of the player base is mind boggling. Anybody that wants to do one of the processing skills (I like cooking myself) will be locked out if they can't get a freehold. Not only that, but anybody that wants to do any crafting will have to deal with the processing monopolies to get materials and they will undoubtedly 1- charge crazy prices and 2- keep the good stuff for themselves.
How can anybody think this is a good idea? In most games there are some crafting materials that are hard to come by (this is good), but I have never even heard of a successful game that locked out the crafting itself. Crafting is supposed to be about putting in the work, not about getting hard locked out of the system.
Having limited housing in general is going to cause problems (ask FFXiv players),but locking crafting behind it also is not going to go over well. If freeholds are to be exclusive then there needs to be another way for players to reliably reach max level processing.
It wasn't the mass manufactured experience you get now where online gaming is now for the cool kids as well.
With that in mind, I do think there's a lot of risk involved in trusting today's playerbase with too much control, especially with things that will impact other players. My hope is there will be mature co-operation, and opportunities for anyone who works for them, but I'm expecting guilds to be insular, scheming, resource greedy, and elitist to a degree. Maybe this is what AoC wants.
AoC is essentially going to be putting a lot of trust and responsibility in player's hands. It could work out very well, or it could end up being counterproductive. Hopefully, future tests will help determine this.
Once upon a time there was an mmo called Wildstar. It was an amazing game that was way ahead of it's time. The NPC voice acting was great, the story was good, the classes were fun, the races were interesting, and the game didn't try to take itself too seriously. To this day I haven't played a game with housing that I thought was better. Wildstar was just straight up fun to play.
Unfortunately, Wildstar had a fatal flaw. The devs decided they would cater the game exclusively to the hardcore crowd. A casual player could enjoy the leveling experience, but once at max level they were pretty much done. The devs grossly overestimated just how large the hardcore crowd was in mmos and thus there weren't enough subs to keep the lights on. The game flopped hard.
Ashes looks like an amazing game, but I fear it may be going down the same road as Wildstar. A game does not have to be for everyone, but it does have to be for enough.
Ashes has the potential to just downsize their team and coast on a semi-small sub base. Obviously the quality and pace of updates would be way lower, but the game could still just live with its core fanbase and be great for them.
This is something I have talked about a few times on these forums - trying to recreate a game from 20 years ago but with the playerbase of today isnt necessarily the best fit.
I'll disagree with this.
Ashes has a 'problem' where most of the systems it uses absolutely require a critical mass of players to function.
The game would either not have most of its 'features' active at all, or downsize in a way that changes its core, with too small a server population of dedicated players. And 'PvX' MMOs atrophy the same way that Fighting Games do or worse.
Bear in mind that the 'core fanbase' of this game type actually 'enjoys' the P2W/RMT aspects quite often. And this is something we can literally 'prove' because we know how much money they spend and how that interaction happens for quite a few similarly designed games.
Previously, people were thinking that if there aren't enough available Freeholds, you Siege and destroy a Node.
Then, if you do all the quests and meet the requirements (pay a static fee or whatever) before others - you get to have a Freehold. Until the Freeholds run out.
Whereas, now you can do all that stuff and then somehow still miss out by losing a bid. Which seems closer to RNG?
Shortly after Kickstarter, the focus was on Nodes and Sieges and Archetype Active Skills/Combat.
Risk v Reward seemed to mostly be about Corruption and Sieges.
The Ashes Kickstarter video listed the four primary pillars as:
Nodes
Meaningful Conflict
Economy
Narrative
Here's how Meaningful Conflict was first described:
"Our Castle system, our Sieges against Nodes, our Caravan system, battlegrounds that exist, Guild Wars...
We want there to be a meaning to this conflict. We want players to actually have some skin in the game when it comes to participating in PvP. If you own a home in a Node and you don't want to see that home destroyed, you need to defend that City. Risk v reward is what gives you that adrenaline. It gives you that meaning to participate."
---Steven Kickstarter Video
"Quick clarification in regards to our terminology when using the term "battleground"...
Because we're instituting a flagging system that allows for PvP to errupt anywhere, I consider a battle ground to be a zone that exists within the Open World which does not include our flagging mechanics but instead flags everyone for battle. So it's a battle ground - it's open PvP. And that includes the Caravan system, that includes Castle Sieges and Node Sieges... objective-based Guild Wars and stuff like that.
'Battlegrounds is just a way for me to refer to Open World systems that relate to everyone being involved in a PvP situation specific to that occurrence."
---Steven Ashes of Creation Kickstarter Livestream May 19, 2017 - Featuring Aggelos
"[ArcheAge] doesn't really relate well to what Ashes is trying to do because Ashes is an Open World and there are no zoned-flagged PvP areas."
---Steven The Ashen Forge - Episode 15: An Interview with Steven Sharif from Ashes of Creation May 11, 2018
I was actually greatly anticipating Meaningful Conflict - because my favorite form of PvP is city defense.
I'm a PvP-sometimes player. So being able to choose when I want to participate in Sieges and Caravans seemed awesome. I was always a bit skeptical about Corruption, but Lineage II players said it works very well to deter non-consensual PvP combat, so that was just something that would have to be tested to know if it fit within my comfort zone.
I was not particularly interested in the Economy stuff, but... Nodes, Meaningful Conflict and Narrative held a great deal of appeal for me. Seemed right up my alley.
Here's how Risk v Reward was first described:
"The Risk vs Reward relationship, when, say for instance, you've dedicated time towards building a Node and other players have dedicated that equivalent time towards Sieging the node, there's going to be a pitched battle between those players.
They spend that time doing this because they care passionately about having access to that content."
---Steven May 22, 2017
A focus on exclusivity and scarcity seems very new.
That kind of stuff started being stressed by Steven after Jeffrey Bard left IS in 2021, I think.
Risk v Reward began to take center stage as topic of discussion for Steven:
Competition, competition, comptition. The fun is all in the thrill from adrenaline rush.
In Feb 2021, Steven states that Ashes will not have permanent zones that are Corruption-free. By Sep 2022, Steven announces they have changed that and added The Open Seas which auto-flags non-Corrupt players to Purple. Because... where there's greater rewards, there's greater risk. And by greater risk, he means obligatory/auto-consent PvP combat.
(It's not really greater risk because the death penalties from PvP in the Open Seas are lesser than the normal death penalties.)
At this point, part of the fun of Inventory management is intended to be strategizing for economic warfare and retaking PvP battlefields.
But, Steven now spins it as though he has always been stressing exclusivity and scarcity in all aspects of the game as a core pillar.
So... what someone thinks is a core pillar, really depends on when they began following the game.
"Everything is subject to change."
https://ashesofcreation.com/news/a-world-with-consequences
I'm not sure pillars really matter.
mark: 20:23
---The Ashen Forge - Episode 15: An Interview with Steven Sharif from Ashes of Creation May 11, 2018
Just noticed this post.
Two points - first, if you are in a smaller node, you can't siege your neighboring "main node". Your node will be a vassal of that node.
Second, if I have a freehold and you do not, I will be earning at a higher rate than you. If I then lose my freehold and you and I are against each other bidding for one in the next node, who do you think is going to win?
I've started following the game after the kickstarter and that's what I remember. That's why I feel like every month that goes by my gameplay content is being chipped away by exclusivity.
I feel like there's already so much content I won't be able to participate that you question yourself "why play at all".
It's all good, they can have the game they want, but it doesn't seem to include anything else besides hardcore PvPers. People keep saying you can run away and stuff like that, but they seem to forget that usually PvErs don't like to have their gameplay disrupted, and that's a given right now.
Materials also have scarcity, people won't let you farm around a large node, you will have to go so far away from it that it's gonna take more time traveling than doing the actual content.