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.
Takeaways from playing SoD - GDKP
Chicago
Member, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
For the past month, me and im sure quite a few people here have been playing SoD, something i have noticed that i would really like to see intrepid fix in AoC is the vast number of GDKPS's that run and for most people really ruin the experience,
for anyone that is unaware a GDKP is when you use in game currency (gold ) in this case to buy items that drop from raids,
this by its self is not a terrible system but what it promotes is, it highly promotes RMT trading, and makes it almost pointless to farm gold in game, it also takes away a group aspect from the game and any real joy of winning loot with your friends/guild as you can just buy every item,
intrepid have taken a hard stance on RMT saying there will be no pay to win i would love to see what they do to counter bots as bots running rampid is the fastest way to kill a game in my opinion, whats everyones thoughts on this issue? and if you have had any experiences with GDKP/bots please leave a comment
for anyone that is unaware a GDKP is when you use in game currency (gold ) in this case to buy items that drop from raids,
this by its self is not a terrible system but what it promotes is, it highly promotes RMT trading, and makes it almost pointless to farm gold in game, it also takes away a group aspect from the game and any real joy of winning loot with your friends/guild as you can just buy every item,
intrepid have taken a hard stance on RMT saying there will be no pay to win i would love to see what they do to counter bots as bots running rampid is the fastest way to kill a game in my opinion, whats everyones thoughts on this issue? and if you have had any experiences with GDKP/bots please leave a comment
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Comments
They promise to somehow fight against bots and rmt, but that'll remain to be seen allll the way till after release.
Bold of you to assume there won't be RMT in Alpha2.
How else will Early Bird Content Creators get their internet clout?
I honestly expect MORE of it early on in Alpha-2 (yes, even with the resets) than anything else. There's RMT on 2b2t, nowhere is safe.
I mean, it's MineCraft, it's a 'full loot griefing enabled no rules PvP always on' game.
The estimated gross revenue of a certain hidden base on that server was $14,000 USD.
People are wild.
Interestingly, I saw some conversations about server culture specifically regarding GDKP. Players were reporting vastly different behaviors depending on which SoD server you were on! I'm not sure I ever saw GDKP on the server I'm on when I was hunting for a guild. This is of course just an anecdote.
I found this interesting since perhaps the only real difference between servers in that game is players. The content itself is largely the same. In a game like Ashes of Creation, not only will the players and player culture vary, but the content too could vary.
definitley, i think all servers at this stage vastly have a solid group of GDKPs going they are not to difficult to find but you are right it varies alot from server to server, the long lasting effects of GDKPs though have a ripple effect through the entire community whether you participate or not, seeing items on the AH for 5000g on a lvl 25 capped server is ridiculous and this can generally be traced back to GDKP's, i really hope intrepid do something to combat this as GDKP meta is just a free advertisement for gold sellers / buyers
Well that's the whole point of their anti-bot, and anti-gold selling philosophy.
Being that most of the content is open world, it's going to be a little harder to run GDKP. On top of that you won't ever stop guilds from combining their gold reserves to get an item if they do a pickup run, but once again random raids will be a lot harder.
Open world content is LIMITED by time and availability. It's shaping up to just not work the same way.
beside ashes probs wont be that game where you can hide in a dungeon 24/7 and farm.
The problem isn't GDKPs, bots are the problem.
GDKPs is, in it self, a pretty good system for people with alts and that just like to farm gold.
But the big problem, as you mentioned, is bots and RMT (which is gold farmed mostly by bots).
Problem is RMT and bots. Blizzard gave up on solving it long time ago and rather started selling gold themself. Without this it would be way less popular as you would not make nearly as much money, but as a system it would work.
Every game will have various ways to divvy up loot/items. GDKP is very popular in many WoW versions due to the multitude of bots. More bots running around equals more gold available that players can buy. Hence the popularity of the loot system. I have been in multiple GDKP runs over my WoW time where players were spending ridiculous amounts of gold just to flex they are rich outside of the game.
With that being said, GDKP are not the problem. Bots are the problem. AoC Team will work hard to eliminate bots and those who buy gold. GDKP will never go away, but they will be toned down if AoC Team is successful in deescalating the bot situation.
A small side note to this. WoW has plenty of addons to assist with managing a GDKP run. As AoC does not plan to have addons, I am curious to see how popular GDKPs will be seeing as it will put more stress/legwork to manage.
Given that not many items are expected to be BoP or even BoE (so far), people who manage to buy gold will just be able to buy them on AH's.