Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Comments
The problem with trying to rely solely on the shooter, moba, BR crowds is attention span and longevity. Ashes is going to require a long attention span.
Asherons Call lasted for officially seventeen years and is still going on private servers, same for all of these games. DAoC is still going on its official website.
Respectfully I think you are missing the point of why they are saying niche. It doesn't have anything to do with old schools days. I played EQ from beta. It was as old school as it gets. But I could always opt out of pvp and always had something to do as a PvE player for hours and hours a day.
I think part of why the word niche is being used is because we are hearing more and more the line "this game may not be for you" which started to ramp in use at the time open seas pvp was released. And so the more we use that line the less people we will find interested. So, niche.
Of course this is all theory and conjecture until the game is released.
As a part of some of those 'crowds', the attention span does not seem to in itself be the problem.
The sense of progression is the thing that falls off first, the 'attention span' is a function of 'how much effort they are putting in to get visible improvements or movements toward their goal' out. MMOs are quite good for this if designed well.
Most of the people I know with this type of mindset (a reasonably high number of people for one person to know, about 80 direct and another 300 or so indirect) don't play MMOs because they can see a specific part of the systemics they don't like.
1) "My skill is meaningfully less important than raw time investment or gear acquisition"
2) "MMOs in general are designed badly in the sense of specialist personal growth." (recent)
This seems to be because Themeparks are not even trying to do the above, and Sandboxes often get so caught up in the 'freeform personal experience' that one of them is lost. Ashes would get quite a lot of the people I know if it could manage just those.
But we'll see if it caters to the Zerglord mentality, which currently it's in that direction without the higher tiers of players to keep the balance.
That's a cause to watch the development, because the zerglords wont admit it and will decry that statement.
Currently there is no plan to have any combat in the game thats other than "fun" and passable, which is a mistake IMO.
Zerglords don't contribute to the genre, they actively erode it if there aren't the superior elite smaller guilds to smash them into their proper place.
It's all about balance.
When they "feel" the game is designated to reward large groups. Then they try to circumvent game design. They game is built in a certain way, and they feel like they need the advantage to go outside game perimeters to gain advantage instead of playing the game as designed. Why do they need to play a game designed for what they do not want?
Well, the thing is, a lot of people don't play them.
One of the hardest parts of discussing Ashes is that the discussion ends up having to be about inclusivity. To put it another way.
If I build a game that I expect 10% of all people to like, and 90% to hate, what happens is that 10% of that 90% join anyway.
That gives me almost equal amounts of people who love and hate the game, actually playing it and talking about it, right? But 80% of people still didn't bother.
It's just that it's really hard to tell the difference between that and the other (extreme) of 'not even 2% of the 90% even bothered to join, but my design decisions are upsetting half of my expected 10%'. What I would need is a really really good definition of the 10%.
The entire discussion here is based on what is niche. I think that games designed to reward large groups for being large are actually niche because they slowly destroy their own playerbase. Same as games that are designed to reward really good players by making them even better faster.
Agreed. Which is why I don't think the OP's premise is accurate. My use of 'niche' is coming from a product marketing perspective. If you're targeting a micro-segment of a consumer audience you're going to be in a niche position. Selling artisanal pour over coffee with fusion spices for $15 a cup is a niche market. In this case gamers > mmo players > not strict pvp audience / not strict pve audience, combined with a tagline of 'this may not be for you.'
we established that pve only servers have pvp players. they play there because they dont want open world pvp, they probs dont wanna be steam rolled. but they still play arenas and bg...
So why would those people play Ashes?
I do understand your point. So far, ashes is a new concept with nodes that rise and fall, freeholds will rise and fall. The game will have corruption and ani pvp deterrents that will allow many people that like pve to enjoy the world, but they will have to be wary still. If people join a guild they will have safety in numbers and the freehold nodes to work on their professions. I do not think people will hate the game if they know what they are getting into in the first place. If they assume and jump in thinking it will be like a wow handholding game then it will be their mistake for not knowing how the game is designed. The hate will be on them, not on the game.
This @Ravicus
The question isn't 'why did you walk into my Artisanal Pourover Coffee Establishment in the first place?'
It's 'why are you expecting this spice blend that I have chosen not to offer?'
And the answer is usually 'well I thought it was an obvious blend to offer'.
The person doesn't know the precise spice blends available before they walk in. And so they walk back out.
Those concepts aren't new, I am not sure they are even entirely new to Fantasy MMOs. They've definitely advanced since the days of static locations that could change hands or 'fall to PvE' that didn't look like actual towns, but the concepts themselves, for the sort of person who doesn't need the feeling of 'this actual city that I can see on the horizon might be gone tomorrow', they're decades old.
As with most of the things Ashes has in it.
It's honestly just that MMOs have been so bad for so long that players who aren't familiar with very old ones (no fault of theirs) don't know that these are old concepts.
To further your analogy, and what you wrote states. A customer walks into the coffee shop. He reads what they have and before they buy anything, they see they do not have what they want, and does not purchase anything. They then leave as an informed coffee buyer to not go back to that shop.
I thought I would prefer EQ2 over WoW, but...
WoW was just mechanically easier to play - primarily EQ2 took way too long to load into zones - a problem I did not have with WoW. And also EQ2 had too many invisible walls when it comes to navigating the maps.
I would alternate between WoW and EQ2, but... by 2010, navigating the invisible walls felt too laborious compared to contemporary MMORPGs. Even when I was done with WoW, navigating the maps of EQ2 was too much of turn-off to return to EQ2.
By the time I stopped playing NWO in 2013, due to the endgame treadmill, and I thought I was done playing MMORPGs... EQNext was announced.
Yes, I agree entirely. The problem with Ashes is that at the moment, it's not quite that simple, it's a little closer to the following timeline.
"Guys I am gonna open a Pourover with Spice blends, really good spice blends (gives some examples)."
The public goes wild! All the old Pourovers have closed down or fallen into disrepair or use old tech and don't accept Google Pay (or something). A new one would be great!
"Ok guys I'm going to offer a lot of blends from the old days, but note that my staff won't combine all the spice combinations, I have to keep it realistic and on theme, so this shop may not be for you."
Public (right or wrong) still clamors for it, all expecting their favorite 'most obvious' spice blends to be available.
"Ok guys I'll let you know which spice blends once we open our mall kiosk, we'll be testing which ones are best for the theme and flavors, here's a list of what we definitely won't be allowing."
Public still eager, except everyone who left because of the things on the disallowed list.
Now from here it's just 'removing people' as one adds to the disallowed list.
The whole reason I'm here is because Intrepid might need to know if they are removing customers they actually want by 'not offering certain blends' that they could theoretically offer. That's why I always ask people for clarification on the exact reason they are opposing something, and what they like instead, and whatever else. I am not sure Intrepid can afford to just go 'eh, I'll offer what I feel like and anyone who doesn't like it can just not come', but idk how much money Steven actually has. I only know that he's said 'Taking feedback'.
It's up to them to decide if it's worth changing X because it makes Y group leave. Our part is to define 'why X is a problem' and 'Which group we're part of' when leaving or considering leaving. Intrepid will handle analyzing 'did they want or expect this person to play at all?'
Wow beat EQ 2 because it ran better on a variety of systems and felt more fluid to play. SOE gambled that CPUs would get significantly faster vs going for multiple cores and it bit them in the ass in terms of performance. Conversely, Wow would run on any family computer from that current decade. If you look at any forums circa 2003-4 the overwhelming number of comments talk about how great wow felt to play.
when you buy something, do you want 100 options or just 3?
also, by removing things, people who aren't the target audience might leave (before the game is out), but guess what? new people who are the target audience might join.
you cant offer everything to everybody and you cant give them too many options.
It's good that you're defending the approach, but I think the way we view the world is just too far removed for any productive conversation to happen.
Basically I fundamentally disagree with everything in this post, but I think it's because we just have entirely different bases.
I think my Marketer doesn't agree with you, but I'm not the specialist in consumer sentiment management. She's unlikely to care to engage, so maybe you can have this discussion with @CROW3 if that works out. I'd be glad to learn from any discussion you two did have, or 'learn from the fact that CROW3 doesn't actually have the discussion'. Either's good.
While those games do have shorter matches compared to an MMO, I'd think thatll be a boon. Longterm play sessions haven't died in the last decade, they just morphed into 20-45 min chunks. As long as Ashes has things you can accomplish in those chunks it'll be fine. The issue will arise if players spend 20 mins getting from point a to b and accomplish nothing in that time period. The node system should solve this as it gives players a way to progress in those small chunks and at the same time encourages engagement in longer play sessions.
That's a bit of a strawman comparison. 7-11 sells coffee, Starbucks sells coffee, and Philz sells coffee. Each have different approaches to the consumer segment for who is buying coffee when. If Starbucks doesn't want to focus their product line on 3rd wave artisanal coffee, it doesn't mean they start selling coke and pepsi. They just have a broader consumer base they are marketing toward.
WoW is chasing a broad commercial segment of gamers . Ashes isn't - they are much more focused, and happy to trade off the revenue of broader consumer segments to retain that focus.
I pretty much agree with this. To me it depends on what the people want that needs to be changed. If its a core principle or something less that does not affect the core principles. One thing that you mentioned is questions. I do think over the years they could have been addressing questions more, especially on the forums here. I am just recently joining after a long time some I have missed out on much. Thank you for your input on saying many games have had some of the same mechanics, but they are new to me I guess lol. I think the forums would do good with a community manager to help with this. I do understand the point of the process being dragged out since kickstarter and people are wondering if they will get to play before they die. There are many elderly people that back these games that have started in their late 50's when they pledged and now are mid 60's. A few more years and they will be 70. So I can understand people who think it should have been sped up.
if your marketeer disagrees, then you need to re-read those books and re-take thouse courses
havent you noticed lots of things that are sold come in 3? subscriptions, products, etc. think abou tthat for a second.
if you disagree about target audiences, then what can i tell you? thats how things work o.o
nopee, you still focus on a segment, that segment might be huge for example...bigger than other segments. thats why you get the illusion that they are catering to a a broader audience.
Well, if I may suggest, it will help a bit if you 'let Intrepid know what group you are in', by whatever means. We've got quite a few more vocal forum people who are known to be in certain groups and have the time to weigh in on most things, so even if you primarily lurk, it's likely that someone is already 'advocating for your interests'.
Intrepid would then 'need to know' things like 'who does that for you sometimes' and 'when you disagree with that person'.
If you hang around for more than a week you'll generally know who's who, I think. This is, again, assuming that Intrepid actually cares or does this in this way, but we've had 'hints' before that this is how they do it (different developers align with different 'groups' and hash things out behind the scenes, etc)
But how much are we really going to be able to do in a 20 to 30 minute session in Ashes? I'm betting it is not too much.
Unfortunately I think I have a bias against arguments from people who have this sort of reaction, which is both ironic and hypocritical considering that I want to say this sort of thing in arguments a lot.
It's probably because when I say it, people latch onto it as rude or bad form, so it irritates me that others get away with it when I don't.
I'm jealous of you, honestly, but I do think it doesn't add much to conversations. Then again, if people are wrong they're wrong and one should be able to just call them out until someone with better knowledge can actually challenge your position.
I can't challenge yours with my current level of expertise, so I leave it to the pros.
Lots of solo players are in guilds, by the way.