AoC isn't as Niche as everyone thinks

So here's my take...

WoW Hardcore, Extraction Shooters, Survival, Classic WoW. We are definitely seeing a trend in what gamers want. Theme Park/Railroad content games are going the way of Guitar Hero.

Blizzard saw so much success with Classic and Hardcore they made them official.

Survival games,some if not most have come with hardcore rule sets,( dropping all gear, open PVP) Ark being one of the biggest had both of these. Now even Blizzard is jumping in although I suspect it will be a watered down for everyone experience.

Extraction shooters stemming from Tarkov's success(very hardcore style game) have started popping up everywhere.

If I know one thing it's when companies and investors start putting their money in to it you know the numbers are there in some fashion and they like what they see.

All I hear from everyone, Including Asmongold and other streamers is this is a niche game and it's not for everyone. Don While I don't disagree I think the degree of which they are implying is over stated, to the point that they think it might not be a very big game at all.

While it certainly won't be COD, I also think it's potential could be much higher then New World saw at its peak. Which would be considered a massive success.

I Understand that people don't want to get their hopes up and there's a lot of cynical people and deservedly so but if I am going to be real about it, the more I see the better it gets. It's like going from a narcissistic relationship to a healthy one, sometimes it just seems too good to be true but that's more about your past relationship then your current one. Just like that I think it's only fair we treat AoC and the devs with their fair shake. They have done nothing but be completely upfront and honest and currently in my eyes have the most integrity I have seen in a while and I have been around for a while.(I played UO and EQ1 a lot)

There is a lot to look forward to and don't let your past disappoints ruin your experience. Judge it on its own merits. Don't buy into the cynical majority and copy past the copium quotes. I might be disappointed, that's definitely a possibility but I am also ok with that. At least as far as I can tell they are putting their best foot forward and for now that's enough.

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Dygz

Azherae wrote: »

And there's the fundamental disagreement. I don't think I can say 'you are wrong' because even then I'm only calling on my own experience. Even Dygz, the person probably most qualified to speak on the matter, would still probably not be able to say 'you are wrong' about the development timeline in a way that would sway you.

But I don't really have anything to go on except the experience of myself and people I talk to who do these things.

I do have a question though. If ArcheAge 2 were to have most of what Ashes does and actually release in 2024/25, would there be any reason to play Ashes specifically other than 'guaranteed no P2W'? (note I am absolutely not saying 'AA2 will blow Ashes out of the water and no one will play Ashes', moreso saying that it would be a cointoss for many people, they'd go wherever their guild went).

Yes. I think that Ashes had great potential to be massive if it had released before 2020.
When the Kickstarter was announced in 2017 - I had been disgruntled by the Endgame conundrum for 5 or 6 years. And I was not expecting to be interested in any MMORPG that did not have a feature similar to Nodes.
I backed Ashes specifically because Nodes seems similar to a design feature for EQNext: Players build up and defend their cities from environmental and mob and PvP threats. That loop negates Endgame.
Should leave my character with plenty of stuff to do after reaching max level and completing the story - besides repeating the same dungeons and raids over and over and over and over again for 2+ years.

In 2017, with a release date of before 2020...
It seemed as though Ashes would be the first MMORPG to release with a feature like that.

Now that we're in 2023...
World of Warcraft has solved the Endgame conundrum to my satisfaction with the release of Dragonflight.
Plenty of new content for me to experience after max level and I can play on a PvE-Only server.

I would play New World more often if I weren't spending most of my time in WoW. And I play with PvP turned off.

I expect to be playing Palia when it releases - and it's going into Closed Beta very soon - I expect to play that way more than Ashes. Because I don't have to be concerned about PvP at all.

Project E and Throne & Liberty are also on my radar. Those Lineage II devs believe that the vast majority of players prefer PvE content. "Skill expression is also something the developers are trying to focus on. Raids, dungeons, and other PVE content will focus heavily on allowing players to show off their PvE skills through well-timed abilities, coordination, and build crafting."
T&L also has sieges, so... I expect I will be playing these games if they are available, instead of playing Ashes.

Pax Dei is being developed by former EvE Online devs. I am also concerned that it seems there will permanent zones with auto-flag PvP combat, but...
There's also large PvE-Only zones where players can build their towns and villages. If I want to help friends farm and craft, I'm way more likely to hop into Pax Dei where I can do that without any threat of PvP, than I am to hop into Ashes.

I'm also quite intrigued by Nightingale. And Wagadu Chronicles.

TL:DR
I think Steven has a sizeable enough target audience to be successful enough for his satisfaction.
I also think a signifcant chunk of Lineage II "PvEers" will choose to play Throne and Liberty rather than Ashes.
I also think a significant chunk of EvE Online "Casual Challenge players and PvEers" will choose to play Pax Dei rather than Ashes.

I'm not predicting doom and gloom. But... the population numbers for Ashes will very likely be considerably smaller than they would have been had Ashes released in 2023. Because there will be more competition.
A lot of MMORPGs in development are also using UE5. And it seems they will release before Ashes does.
So, other than catering to Hardcore Challenge players and PvPers, Ashes won't be offering much that's particularly innovative by the time the game actually releases.

But, hopefully, Ashes will be a long-term home for the gamers who loved UO, AC, DAoC, Lineage II, EvE Online, ArcheAge and the PvPers who loved the NW Alpha PvP combat. I think that will equate a subset of Lineage II fans in terms of population numbers, but... if you consider that subset to be "masses"... maybe we actually agree and it's just a semantics issue.

Noaani

Vyril wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

JamesSunderland wrote: »

If Ashes reach L2/AA Highest population peaks, i certainly believe Steven will be quite happy.

The problem is, both of those games peaks are heavily reliant on the Korean market.

Based on some discussions I've had recently with people that were in a position to know these things back in the day, the NA/EU population of EQ2 was higher than the NA/EU population of L2.

I've said it a few times - the way Ashes is shaping up, it needs a solid marketing push in Korea.

That said, the numbers in the above chart are not accurate. There were at least 7 MMO's that broke 1 million subscribers before 2008 on that list - but the chart only shows 4.

Easy comparison.

1 game was sub only
The others are p2w.

2 different cultures in gaming.

@Vyril

If we are talking L2 and EQ2 (just for clarity, since Archeage is in the same discussion), the time period I am talking about was back when L2 was absolutely a subscription only game - so it was actually a comparison of two subscription games.

Now, two different cultures in gaming is actually a point I have made many times.

L2 absolutely was designed for a Korean audience. It was designed for people to meet up with their friends at an internet cafe and play with them in person. This means that even if you were constantly losing, you were still out having fun with your friends. If you have the right friends, you actually have more fun earnestly trying and then losing than you have if you win.

This is why the game was substatntially more successful in Korean than in NA/EU. By my count, it had ten times the players at it's peak in Korea than in the rest of the world.

The same thing applies to Archeage. It's popularity in Korea and Japan (and China, to a lesser extent) make the NA/EU servers seem insignificant by comparison. While the servers were a financial success for Trion (and now Kakao), that is only because they didn't need to pay for the games development. If Archeage was released without any changes as a game primarily for the NA/EU market, there wouldn't be an Archeage 2 in the works.

The problem we now have is that Ashes is taking it's lead primarily from those two games, and is trying to focus on an NA/EU market.

JamesSunderland

Noaani wrote: »

Ask them how long the game had over 500k paying subscribers.

Come on Noaani, number of "paying subscribers"? What the hell are you even talking about?

Archeage wasn't a subscription game to get the number of "paying subscribers", and there is no way you can confuse it with Patron status when Apex(duplication exploit included) was literally tradable credits that was used for stackable 30 days of patreon status.

In terms of population i managed to get the Trion AA numbers, the "EQ and EQ2 each beat Archeage" in terms of population claim is ludicrous as i expected, even with the reasonably sharp drops in population 3 months in and after the Auroria opening fiasco and the Thunderstruck rumbling archeum tree still managed retain numbers beyond EQ/EQ2 with reasonable peaks till late 2016 were it really started dying off thereafter.

I will say that if Ashes maintains a population of 200k, the game will likely survive just fine. It may not ever make Stevens investment back, but it should stay live for a while.

The problem there is the *maintain* part of that.

Again, this is why I have said a few times now that Intrepid need a marketing push in Korea.

How about a 2 Million population number for Ashes NA/EU only (not even counting korea) like Archeage Noaani? Maybe maintaining more than half that for a good time? Maybe getting some increases along the way?

There is always room to play around with assumptions, right Noaani?

Noaani

JamesSunderland wrote: »

In terms of population i managed to get the Trion AA numbers, the "EQ and EQ2 each beat Archeage" in terms of population claim is ludicrous as i expected, even with the reasonably sharp drops in population 3 months in and after the Auroria opening fiasco and the Thunderstruck rumbling archeum tree still managed retain numbers beyond EQ/EQ2 with reasonable peaks till late 2016 were it really started dying off thereafter.

I'm a little confused as to what you are comparing here.

In 2014, Archeage had a larger population than EQ2 had in 2014.

However, I was talking about a given period post launch of each respective game.

6 months after it's launch, EQ2 (I can't speak for EQ at this point in time, to be fair) had a greater population than Archeage had 6 months after it's launch.

Your attempt at differentiating between subscriptions and those that used apex is kind of pointless. You would use Apex to get shop currency, and use that currency to purchase a subscription. As such, anyone that purchased a subscription in this manner was in fact a subscription, because they bought a subscription.

Trion did track each individually, but at the end of the day, both were counted as subscribers.

JamesSunderland wrote: »

How about a 2 Million population number for Ashes NA/EU only (not even counting korea) like Archeage Noaani?

I have almost no doubt at all that Ashes will achieve a population of 2 million players for as long as Archeage did.

As to your comments about things like the Auroria launch and the thunderstruck tree changes, you are off a little. Auroria launch was botched slightly, but the population of the game was higher a week after than it was a week before. Heaps of people said they were leaving, but few did (we've all seen this happen on so many occasions)

The thunderstruck tree change kept people in the game, not made them leave. The people that actually left the game due to it were those exploiting other players for profit (convince others to plant illegal forests, pull thunderstruck trees without telling, leave them with a forest of mature trees they will never have the labor to harvest).

People were leaving the game because of the price of thunerstruck trees. To most people, they only valid way to get a thunderstruck tree was to RMT (even if via Trions shop). The change to it made it so people could RMT for it in a much easier manner, meant those people exploiting others couldn't do it any more, and actually saved many people from leaving the game.

Sure, at the time, players were super upset. However, the bulk of those that left the game due to this were indeed those exploiting others for profit - and I am of the opinion that any game is better off without such people.

Mag7spy

KingDDD wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

My point was that things are quick to add and the coding and design skill at Amazon, as well as Lumberyard itself, were not good enough to be used as a metric.

In short, I would not use New World as a way to estimate how long anything takes to add to any MMO because they did not have the experience required to reach even average development time/quality of an AAA studio at any point during development.

If you believe that the latter half of that video's issues, bugs, and design flaws are the result of the design change and not their skill/quality issues, then yeah, we should probably stop.

This video focuses more on actual bugs than on the other design flaws I've studied from them (at least until 35:00 or so when it starts really getting into design decisions), but I'd like to say that I truly appreciate your willingness to engage with it enough to clearly give your stance without making accusations or whatever, it is refreshing.

I'd say two years to make the amount of content they did is pretty impressive considering they had to code/make art for all the tools needed for designers to make a more indepth pve experience. Bugs like the window drag glitch were never found because QA/coders/designers were in perpetual crunch making the pve content. That has nothing to do with their competence but has everything to do with suits and release dates.

Likewise to you. Some of the folks on these forums make me laugh.

yo they had no content in that game at launch. I was fighting the same mobs from the tutorial area as end game.

The only interesting thing about that game was pvp and politics, everything else was dead boring and extremely basic.

Areas, mobs, quest, everything is just copy pasted do to rushing it out.

Mag7spy

JamesSunderland wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

Ask them how long the game had over 500k paying subscribers.

Come on Noaani, number of "paying subscribers"? What the hell are you even talking about?

Archeage wasn't a subscription game to get the number of "paying subscribers", and there is no way you can confuse it with Patron status when Apex(duplication exploit included) was literally tradable credits that was used for stackable 30 days of patreon status.

In terms of population i managed to get the Trion AA numbers, the "EQ and EQ2 each beat Archeage" in terms of population claim is ludicrous as i expected, even with the reasonably sharp drops in population 3 months in and after the Auroria opening fiasco and the Thunderstruck rumbling archeum tree still managed retain numbers beyond EQ/EQ2 with reasonable peaks till late 2016 were it really started dying off thereafter.

I will say that if Ashes maintains a population of 200k, the game will likely survive just fine. It may not ever make Stevens investment back, but it should stay live for a while.

The problem there is the *maintain* part of that.

Again, this is why I have said a few times now that Intrepid need a marketing push in Korea.

How about a 2 Million population number for Ashes NA/EU only (not even counting korea) like Archeage Noaani? Maybe maintaining more than half that for a good time? Maybe getting some increases along the way?

There is always room to play around with assumptions, right Noaani?

MY assumption for AoC is 2m+ concurrent first day. Screenshot this xD

Noaani

Mag7spy wrote: »

JamesSunderland wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

Ask them how long the game had over 500k paying subscribers.

Come on Noaani, number of "paying subscribers"? What the hell are you even talking about?

Archeage wasn't a subscription game to get the number of "paying subscribers", and there is no way you can confuse it with Patron status when Apex(duplication exploit included) was literally tradable credits that was used for stackable 30 days of patreon status.

In terms of population i managed to get the Trion AA numbers, the "EQ and EQ2 each beat Archeage" in terms of population claim is ludicrous as i expected, even with the reasonably sharp drops in population 3 months in and after the Auroria opening fiasco and the Thunderstruck rumbling archeum tree still managed retain numbers beyond EQ/EQ2 with reasonable peaks till late 2016 were it really started dying off thereafter.

I will say that if Ashes maintains a population of 200k, the game will likely survive just fine. It may not ever make Stevens investment back, but it should stay live for a while.

The problem there is the *maintain* part of that.

Again, this is why I have said a few times now that Intrepid need a marketing push in Korea.

How about a 2 Million population number for Ashes NA/EU only (not even counting korea) like Archeage Noaani? Maybe maintaining more than half that for a good time? Maybe getting some increases along the way?

There is always room to play around with assumptions, right Noaani?

MY assumption for AoC is 2m+ concurrent first day. Screenshot this xD

So is mine.

MMO success isn't determined by it's day one population, it is determined by it's day 365 population, or it's day 730 population, or it's day 1826 population. Games without a box cost make the above even more true.

JamesSunderland

Noaani wrote: »

I'm a little confused as to what you are comparing here.

In 2014, Archeage had a larger population than EQ2 had in 2014.

However, I was talking about a given period post launch of each respective game.

6 months after it's launch, EQ2 (I can't speak for EQ at this point in time, to be fair) had a greater population than Archeage had 6 months after it's launch.

Your attempt at differentiating between subscriptions and those that used apex is kind of pointless. You would use Apex to get shop currency, and use that currency to purchase a subscription. As such, anyone that purchased a subscription in this manner was in fact a subscription, because they bought a subscription.

Trion did track each individually, but at the end of the day, both were counted as subscribers.

Was that confusing? I though it was pretty clear that i was refering to the 6 month after launch numbers.

6 months after release, EQ was still consistently rising its numbers till near the EQ 2 Release where it reached its highest peak(550K) and then sharply few after EQ2 release which still maintained numbers lower than its EQ ancestor for 6 months.

And no EQ2 6 months after it's launch did not had a greater population than Archeage had 6 months after it's launch.

So you actually consider Patreon Status numbers and Subscription numbers to be interchangable and not for the apex bought in bulk by players to fall into the logical "Cash shop item revenue" category very interesting, i guess...
Even tho they probably have the number of Patreon Status users at times this actually seems pointless over the revenue numbers of Apex which are the source of the non-direct buyers patreon status.

As to your comments about things like the Auroria launch and the thunderstruck tree changes, you are off a little. Auroria launch was botched slightly, but the population of the game was higher a week after than it was a week before. Heaps of people said they were leaving, but few did (we've all seen this happen on so many occasions)

Sorry Noaani, the numbers of those periods tells otherwise. Even with the nice first week peak created by the novelty of the auroria continent opening its following months shows a reasonably sharp drop,
The rumbling archeum trees appeared fairly close to Auroria continent release around november 2014 so the drops in population in its following months can be harder to pin point, but your Thunderstruck tree idea/assumption of maintaining players instead of making them leave just becomes more unreasonable.

Noaani

JamesSunderland wrote: »

So you actually consider Patreon Status numbers and Subscription numbers to be interchangable and not for the apex bought in bulk by players to fall into the logical "Cash shop item revenue" category very interesting, i guess...
Even tho they probably have the number of Patreon Status users at times this actually seems pointless over the revenue numbers of Apex which are the source of the non-direct buyers patreon status.

We aren't talking revenue.

The games have vastly different monetization schemes with Archeage being subscription and cash shop and EQ2 being box purchase and subscription.

Also, I have no figures at all as to Archeages revenue with Trion - just the number of people that were paying to play (wither via their credit card or someone elses with apex). Since I don't have those numbers (or haven't ever talked to anyone about them), I'm not really willing to get in to a discussion on revenue of the two games - despite what some people think, I do avoid topics of discussion if I don't have some information on them.

JamesSunderland wrote: »

The rumbling archeum trees appeared fairly close to Auroria continent release around november 2014 so the drops in population in its following months can be harder to pin point, but your Thunderstruck tree idea/assumption of maintaining players instead of making them leave just becomes more unreasonable.

That wasn't my "idea", it was the reason I was given when I asked about it a few years ago.

The way the economy around thunderstruck trees was, people were either buying them for real money (via apex), or leaving the game.

At the time, the average ratio of converting labor to silver was less than 1 (not much less, about 0.8).

A thunderstruck tree was selling for an easy 1.2 - 1.5k gold.

At the time, labor was replenishing at 1220 per day.

This meant that a single thunderstruck tree was selling for just under 123 days worth of labor - before the game was 123 days old.

Now, I could go on a little more about this, but I would assume the above is enough for you to get a picture of how things actually were at the time, rather than how a few loud peple that lost thousands of gold due to the trees being added wanted people to think.

KingDDD

Mag7spy wrote: »

lp

KingDDD wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

My point was that things are quick to add and the coding and design skill at Amazon, as well as Lumberyard itself, were not good enough to be used as a metric.

In short, I would not use New World as a way to estimate how long anything takes to add to any MMO because they did not have the experience required to reach even average development time/quality of an AAA studio at any point during development.

If you believe that the latter half of that video's issues, bugs, and design flaws are the result of the design change and not their skill/quality issues, then yeah, we should probably stop.

This video focuses more on actual bugs than on the other design flaws I've studied from them (at least until 35:00 or so when it starts really getting into design decisions), but I'd like to say that I truly appreciate your willingness to engage with it enough to clearly give your stance without making accusations or whatever, it is refreshing.

I'd say two years to make the amount of content they did is pretty impressive considering they had to code/make art for all the tools needed for designers to make a more indepth pve experience. Bugs like the window drag glitch were never found because QA/coders/designers were in perpetual crunch making the pve content. That has nothing to do with their competence but has everything to do with suits and release dates.

Likewise to you. Some of the folks on these forums make me laugh.

yo they had no content in that game at launch. I was fighting the same mobs from the tutorial area as end game.

The only interesting thing about that game was pvp and politics, everything else was dead boring and extremely basic.

Areas, mobs, quest, everything is just copy pasted do to rushing it out.

According to the art director for EQN it took their art team roughly 8 weeks (if the same person did everything) to take a basic critter creature (in the example given it was a bunny) from concept art to basic sculpture, to rigging to texture work to in game with 4 or so animations. This gets more and more complicated when you are adding weapon swings, unique abilities, and the like.

Is NW or Ashes the same game as EQN, no. But assets frankly take a lot of time to make.

JamesSunderland

Noaani wrote: »

The games have vastly different monetization schemes with Archeage being subscription and cash shop and EQ2 being box purchase and subscription.

Archeage was literally F2P, i'm unable to accept that you believe patreon status can be considered a Subscription even tho it became more and more important as time went by, and the games P2W progressively rose up.

The main point of population still stands strong anyway.

The way the economy around thunderstruck trees was, people were either buying them for real money (via apex), or leaving the game.

Once again this assumption... there is no way you really believe in this Black or White logical fallacy.
You obviously understand there were plenty of people focusing in many other activities who didn't give a single f about the TS tree and weren't focusing in the professions that would make use of them.

Noaani

JamesSunderland wrote: »

Archeage was literally F2P, i'm unable to accept that you believe patreon status can be considered a Subscription even tho it became more and more important as time went by, and the games P2W progressively rose up.
The main point of population still stands strong anyway.

This isn't about what I consider each to be, or anything like that.

It is about the number I was told for the population of Archeage included those that had purchased subscriptions via credit card and those that had purchased it via apex.

I'm not trying to differentiation anything between the two, I'm not trying to even discuss it other than saying the population figures I was given included both of these combined.

I do not even know the ratio of each - all I know is what I was told the total number of the two was.

I mean, I agree with you in that the pay to win aspect of the game increased a time went on. As the population dropped, Trion attempted to keep revenue from the game stable via increasing the monetization from both pay to win and cosmetic sales. This much is obvious to anyone that played the game. I'm not going to argue that point at all - but I have no comment at all (outside of my own observations) as to the increase in players using apex to subscribe to the game as opposed to those paying for it.

You are welcome to come to what ever conclusion you like, I don't have the info on that so won't really talk on it past my own observations - though I am happy to share them in an anecdotal manner if you like.

Once again this assumption... there is no way you really believe in this Black or White logical fallacy.

To be clear, it isn't an assumption.

Trion saw people in Archeage progress up, get to the point where they wanted to build a tractor or fishing boat, and leave the game a few weeks later.

After the drop in price of thunderstruck trees, they saw this form of attrition drop drastically.

You may want to say "you can't attribute it to that" or some such - but you really can.

I mean, Trion did. If they did, I can, and I will.

Mag7spy

KingDDD wrote: »

Mag7spy wrote: »

lp

KingDDD wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

My point was that things are quick to add and the coding and design skill at Amazon, as well as Lumberyard itself, were not good enough to be used as a metric.

In short, I would not use New World as a way to estimate how long anything takes to add to any MMO because they did not have the experience required to reach even average development time/quality of an AAA studio at any point during development.

If you believe that the latter half of that video's issues, bugs, and design flaws are the result of the design change and not their skill/quality issues, then yeah, we should probably stop.

This video focuses more on actual bugs than on the other design flaws I've studied from them (at least until 35:00 or so when it starts really getting into design decisions), but I'd like to say that I truly appreciate your willingness to engage with it enough to clearly give your stance without making accusations or whatever, it is refreshing.

I'd say two years to make the amount of content they did is pretty impressive considering they had to code/make art for all the tools needed for designers to make a more indepth pve experience. Bugs like the window drag glitch were never found because QA/coders/designers were in perpetual crunch making the pve content. That has nothing to do with their competence but has everything to do with suits and release dates.

Likewise to you. Some of the folks on these forums make me laugh.

yo they had no content in that game at launch. I was fighting the same mobs from the tutorial area as end game.

The only interesting thing about that game was pvp and politics, everything else was dead boring and extremely basic.

Areas, mobs, quest, everything is just copy pasted do to rushing it out.

According to the art director for EQN it took their art team roughly 8 weeks (if the same person did everything) to take a basic critter creature (in the example given it was a bunny) from concept art to basic sculpture, to rigging to texture work to in game with 4 or so animations. This gets more and more complicated when you are adding weapon swings, unique abilities, and the like.

Is NW or Ashes the same game as EQN, no. But assets frankly take a lot of time to make.

I'm a artist i know how work goes lmao. Doesnt change the fact there was no content and the same few mobs you could count on one or two hands were copy pasted, including those animations you are talking about on different races of mobs on top of it.

Fiddlez

Dygz wrote: »

I don't consider Amazon a AAA game dev company.
Especially not for MMOs. They have a horrible track record for MMO releases.

I mean New World is doing fine, now at least. It's actually one of my favorites as far as atmosphere and

Dygz wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

And there's the fundamental disagreement. I don't think I can say 'you are wrong' because even then I'm only calling on my own experience. Even Dygz, the person probably most qualified to speak on the matter, would still probably not be able to say 'you are wrong' about the development timeline in a way that would sway you.

But I don't really have anything to go on except the experience of myself and people I talk to who do these things.

I do have a question though. If ArcheAge 2 were to have most of what Ashes does and actually release in 2024/25, would there be any reason to play Ashes specifically other than 'guaranteed no P2W'? (note I am absolutely not saying 'AA2 will blow Ashes out of the water and no one will play Ashes', moreso saying that it would be a cointoss for many people, they'd go wherever their guild went).

Yes. I think that Ashes had great potential to be massive if it had released before 2020.
When the Kickstarter was announced in 2017 - I had been disgruntled by the Endgame conundrum for 5 or 6 years. And I was not expecting to be interested in any MMORPG that did not have a feature similar to Nodes.
I backed Ashes specifically because Nodes seems similar to a design feature for EQNext: Players build up and defend their cities from environmental and mob and PvP threats. That loop negates Endgame.
Should leave my character with plenty of stuff to do after reaching max level and completing the story - besides repeating the same dungeons and raids over and over and over and over again for 2+ years.

In 2017, with a release date of before 2020...
It seemed as though Ashes would be the first MMORPG to release with a feature like that.

Now that we're in 2023...
World of Warcraft has solved the Endgame conundrum to my satisfaction with the release of Dragonflight.
Plenty of new content for me to experience after max level and I can play on a PvE-Only server.

I would play New World more often if I weren't spending most of my time in WoW. And I play with PvP turned off.

I expect to be playing Palia when it releases - and it's going into Closed Beta very soon - I expect to play that way more than Ashes. Because I don't have to be concerned about PvP at all.

Project E and Throne & Liberty are also on my radar. Those Lineage II devs believe that the vast majority of players prefer PvE content. "Skill expression is also something the developers are trying to focus on. Raids, dungeons, and other PVE content will focus heavily on allowing players to show off their PvE skills through well-timed abilities, coordination, and build crafting."
T&L also has sieges, so... I expect I will be playing these games if they are available, instead of playing Ashes.

Pax Dei is being developed by former EvE Online devs. I am also concerned that it seems there will permanent zones with auto-flag PvP combat, but...
There's also large PvE-Only zones where players can build their towns and villages. If I want to help friends farm and craft, I'm way more likely to hop into Pax Dei where I can do that without any threat of PvP, than I am to hop into Ashes.

I'm also quite intrigued by Nightingale. And Wagadu Chronicles.
TL:DR
I think Steven has a sizeable enough target audience to be successful enough for his satisfaction.
I also think a signifcant chunk of Lineage II "PvEers" will choose to play Throne and Liberty rather than Ashes.
I also think a significant chunk of EvE Online "Casual Challenge players and PvEers" will choose to play Pax Dei rather than Ashes.

I'm not predicting doom and gloom. But... the population numbers for Ashes will very likely be considerably smaller than they would have been had Ashes released in 2023. Because there will be more competition.
A lot of MMORPGs in development are also using UE5. And it seems they will release before Ashes does.
So, other than catering to Hardcore Challenge players and PvPers, Ashes won't be offering much that's particularly innovative by the time the game actually releases.

But, hopefully, Ashes will be a long-term home for the gamers who loved UO, AC, DAoC, Lineage II, EvE Online, ArcheAge and the PvPers who loved the NW Alpha PvP combat. I think that will equate a subset of Lineage II fans in terms of population numbers, but... if you consider that subset to be "masses"... maybe we actually agree and it's just a semantics issue.

You know this argument is sort of why I made the post. It's to me, completely tunneled vision.

You get caught up on the participation trophy side. Plus two different games can have fishing and only one will be good. Not to mention but those same systems also play off each other as well. The argument that similar games will nullify the other completely lacks any logic whatsoever. It avoids all creativity.

I am not saying this game will be successful because it has open world PVP. I am saying it is attempting to create its own thing and open world PVP will most likely help it more then hurt it. If you told me Tarkov would be so popular it would create its own genre I would have called you crazy. Here we are though and I don't think anything out there that I've seen has much in common with AoC. Might have open world pvo, crafting, combat, housing etc but each of those obviously can all be different substantially

Noaani

Fiddlez wrote: »

You get caught up on the participation trophy side.

I may be missing something here, but Dygz seems more about participating, not about participation trophies.

Games should encourage participation in every aspect. I mean, people play to participate.

Rewarding people for just aprticipating is bad - but that has never been something Dygz has been about.

JamesSunderland

Noaani wrote: »

Trion saw people in Archeage progress up, get to the point where they wanted to build a tractor or fishing boat, and leave the game a few weeks later.

After the drop in price of thunderstruck trees, they saw this form of attrition drop drastically.

You may want to say "you can't attribute it to that" or some such - but you really can.

I mean, Trion did. If they did, I can, and I will.

Trion's excuses for the grotesque economy destroying P2W trees simple fails to save them, if you want to fall for their well known and well criticized BS PR that's up to you, but i would honestly expect more from you,
as it's more than obvious that if it was their intent they would simple put it in the game in an non-p2w way instead of literally slamming it in the cash shop(inside a random p2w loot box) making people even more furious with the P2W aspects of the game.

Azherae

JamesSunderland wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

Trion saw people in Archeage progress up, get to the point where they wanted to build a tractor or fishing boat, and leave the game a few weeks later.

After the drop in price of thunderstruck trees, they saw this form of attrition drop drastically.

You may want to say "you can't attribute it to that" or some such - but you really can.

I mean, Trion did. If they did, I can, and I will.

Trion's excuses for the grotesque economy destroying P2W trees simple fails to save them, if you want to fall for their well known and well criticized BS PR that's up to you, but i would honestly expect more from you,
as it's more than obvious that if it was their intent they would simple put it in the game in an non-p2w way instead of literally slamming it in the cash shop(inside a random p2w loot box) making people even more furious with the P2W aspects of the game.

So, for my education since I only know about this through later reports:

Noaani is claiming that Trion 'said' that a certain thing was a cause of a problem in losing players, and they addressed that thing...

And you aren't specifically claiming that Noaani is wrong that Trion said this, but rather that Trion themselves lied about ... what exactly?

Because it sounds like you're saying that Noaani's claim is true but disingenuous because the information he is claiming did (in some way) come from them, but that their information was just 'BS PR'?

KingDDD

Mag7spy wrote: »

KingDDD wrote: »

Mag7spy wrote: »

lp

KingDDD wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

My point was that things are quick to add and the coding and design skill at Amazon, as well as Lumberyard itself, were not good enough to be used as a metric.

In short, I would not use New World as a way to estimate how long anything takes to add to any MMO because they did not have the experience required to reach even average development time/quality of an AAA studio at any point during development.

If you believe that the latter half of that video's issues, bugs, and design flaws are the result of the design change and not their skill/quality issues, then yeah, we should probably stop.

This video focuses more on actual bugs than on the other design flaws I've studied from them (at least until 35:00 or so when it starts really getting into design decisions), but I'd like to say that I truly appreciate your willingness to engage with it enough to clearly give your stance without making accusations or whatever, it is refreshing.

I'd say two years to make the amount of content they did is pretty impressive considering they had to code/make art for all the tools needed for designers to make a more indepth pve experience. Bugs like the window drag glitch were never found because QA/coders/designers were in perpetual crunch making the pve content. That has nothing to do with their competence but has everything to do with suits and release dates.

Likewise to you. Some of the folks on these forums make me laugh.

yo they had no content in that game at launch. I was fighting the same mobs from the tutorial area as end game.

The only interesting thing about that game was pvp and politics, everything else was dead boring and extremely basic.

Areas, mobs, quest, everything is just copy pasted do to rushing it out.

According to the art director for EQN it took their art team roughly 8 weeks (if the same person did everything) to take a basic critter creature (in the example given it was a bunny) from concept art to basic sculpture, to rigging to texture work to in game with 4 or so animations. This gets more and more complicated when you are adding weapon swings, unique abilities, and the like.

Is NW or Ashes the same game as EQN, no. But assets frankly take a lot of time to make.

I'm a artist i know how work goes lmao. Doesnt change the fact there was no content and the same few mobs you could count on one or two hands were copy pasted, including those animations you are talking about on different races of mobs on top of it.

So as an artist does that sound accurate? Did you find the number of models and animations in NW roughly applicable to what you'd expect of 2 years of development from a team of 20 or so?

JamesSunderland

Azherae wrote: »

JamesSunderland wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

Trion saw people in Archeage progress up, get to the point where they wanted to build a tractor or fishing boat, and leave the game a few weeks later.

After the drop in price of thunderstruck trees, they saw this form of attrition drop drastically.

You may want to say "you can't attribute it to that" or some such - but you really can.

I mean, Trion did. If they did, I can, and I will.

Trion's excuses for the grotesque economy destroying P2W trees simple fails to save them, if you want to fall for their well known and well criticized BS PR that's up to you, but i would honestly expect more from you,
as it's more than obvious that if it was their intent they would simple put it in the game in an non-p2w way instead of literally slamming it in the cash shop(inside a random p2w loot box) making people even more furious with the P2W aspects of the game.

So, for my education since I only know about this through later reports:

Noaani is claiming that Trion 'said' that a certain thing was a cause of a problem in losing players, and they addressed that thing...

And you aren't specifically claiming that Noaani is wrong that Trion said this, but rather that Trion themselves lied about ... what exactly?

Because it sounds like you're saying that Noaani's claim is true but disingenuous because the information he is claiming did (in some way) come from them, but that their information was just 'BS PR'?

If there is a specific post of Trion directly saying "we losing players cuz Thunderstruck tree" i have honestly not seen it.

If Noaani can back up the:
"Trion saw people in Archeage progress up, get to the point where they wanted to build a tractor or fishing boat, and leave the game a few weeks later." claim with such direct Trion statement that would certainly help his point of wanting to believe in such claim.

Even if it was their honest objective, they failed as the population numbers only dropped and the majority of players had a massive hatred towards the P2W trees inside an RNG P2W loot box(chance to get the tree), instead of his idea of it actually being a net positive maintaining players instead of making them leave.

Noaani

JamesSunderland wrote: »

if you want to fall for their well known and well criticized BS PR that's up to you

None of what I have been talking about is public knowledge.

You know this.

How can you claim it is bullshit public relations if the public didn't know about it?

JamesSunderland wrote: »

If Noaani can back up the:
"Trion saw people in Archeage progress up, get to the point where they wanted to build a tractor or fishing boat, and leave the game a few weeks later." claim with such direct Trion statement that would certainly help his point of wanting to believe in such claim.

See, I don't record conversations I have with friends. I assume that if I start doing this, they will stop being friends.

However, when I talk about things that I have been told - that aren't backed up by public comments - I run it past a basic filter. That filter amounts to "does this thing make sense based on what the public knows around the topic?"

If the answer is no, I won't even bother talking about it - even if I have reason to know it is true. It is worth noting that there are some really interesting things that fall in to this specific bracket of things I will not talk about.

If the answer is yes, that it does make sense to those that know the events around the topic, then I feel happy talking about it.

However, as always, any individual is free to not believe me. It is inherently hearsay (I am simply telling you something that I was told), and honestly people are generally better served not outright believing hearsay - the best thing to do is to think on the actual facts around the topic and see if that piece of hearsay fits in with it. If it fits, it still isn't necessary to just believe it, but at that point it shouldn't be discounted.

I will debate points based on these things I have been told being true, but I am not insisting you believe them.

With the above in mind, I'll point out that information on the price of thunderstrck trees both before and after adding the tree to the store, as well as the labor regeneration rate and average silver per point of labor at the time are all pieces of information that are available even today, should someone want to look for it.

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