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Alpha Two Phase II testing is currently taking place 5+ days each week. More information about testing schedule can be found here
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
Comments
1) PvP-only folks aren't playing Ashes, PvP-only folks are playing Eve, and survival games (Ark, Rust)
2) Players who enjoy PvP-centric ("PvX") MMOs like Ashes
PvP players need other PvP players to compete with. And some amount of PvE content to compete around.
All the meaningful, objective-based PvP content can prosper and engage players without a single PvE-only player. Territory sieges, guild wars, caravan raids, PvX world bosses, PvX dungeons, node politics in general; these things are all exciting without a single PvE-preferring player in the playerbase.
Don't get me wrong, it's *nice* if there are also PvE-preferring players in the community. It adds to the variety and makes the politics and the decisionmaking more colourful.
But you don't need to dilute what the game is trying to be, in order to lure in PvE players as prey for the PvP predators; that's completely backwards for everyone involved.
What you call success is the reason the genre's industry is in the dire, soul-less spot it's in. ESO, FFXIV, GW2, and similar cases to various degrees all became commercial "successes" by copying the WoW-themeparks-but-with-more-options system, the way you're suggesting. They fall in line and appease the mainstream in order to make sure they don't flop.
But in the process they lose the chance at adding anything to the market that gives players something that addresses the lack of any good title for players with niche preferences. Such game concepts are inhibited by mindless participation trophy hunting of dailies, LfG dungeons, meaningless economies where everyone does everything, and inconsequential PvP.
And by not giving players with those preferences a place to thrive, you're also killing the opportunity for the industry to try out new approaches.
If you want innovation, you can't rely on backup plans that copy everything that's worked so far.
If you don't want innovation, you get a dying genre because the WoW treadmill can only breed sad neckbeards for so long before the rest of the world decides the genre isn't worth their time and kids just play MOBAs and single-player games instead.
I've played PvP-centric MMOs. They're fantastic. Players group up to achieve difficult things, the gameplay-loop is player-driven and the realm's story gets written by community goals, instead of being predetermined and mindlessly consumed. People know their opponents and care about their territory.
I've also seen what happens when games try to do both. The PvP becomes an empty shell that might as well not exist, while the playerbase is just a PvE carebear crowd lost in a game that happens to have PvP gameplay systems somewhere forgotten in the background. It's nothing but a counterproductive distractive chore that leads the game away from realising its vision. So the game ultimately ends up disappointing every player type, because there's no coherent identity to the game.
You don't believe in the vision because the only ways you've ever seen PvP play out is mindless ganking or zerging. Because that's all that exists when PvP is a gimmick instead of a challenge central to the gameplay loop. But if you want the game design industry to add something more engaging and community-connecting than the WoW treadmill, you'll have to trust the process of experimenting with something that's different, and the people who have seen something better.
If you're disinterested in territory sieges, guild wars, and caravan raids, that's totally cool, there are 5 highly successful titles for you to go play right now. Surely you must love them, considering how confidently you're advocating for Ashes to copy their success story. You don't need to hold this sermon on the unviability of niche games in order to just go play those successful games.
More Cult of ashes talk. Just because Steven wants something doesn't mean its good, nor does it mean it will work in the long run. Just because your friend group, who all think alike and like the same things, like the game doesn't mean the majority of people will like this game. Hell of the 2 million people registered on the AoC site most of them will probably leave the game in the first month.
No one is talking about core gameplay. No one said that. What I said was "This game is an MMORPG that is hard core, open world, sand box, OWPvP, guild focused." That's 6 niches; 1% of 1% of 1% of 1% of 1% of 1%. On the entire planet there might be 70,000 in total that are willing to play this game. The game isn't Niche it's hyper-niche and it focuses on the smallest categories, OWPvP and Raiding. I am 100% fine with people being hopeful and excited about getting a game that caters to them. What I am not okay with is delusions that this game is going to do anything other then crash and burn when 2-4 million people get the game and 99.99% of them leave in the first 3 months.
Is this a troll take?
I can't be in the cult because I know that ducks are nasty and shit on everything...
The niche isn’t as small as you make it out to be.
"Lineage 2: Reborn," a private server for a game in the genre you claim only has 70k players worldwide, launched a new server right when Alpha 2 Phase 1 started a few months ago. It’s sustaining 12k concurrent players.
That means over a seventh of your estimated global total of people who enjoy "OWPvP" are currently spending their time playing a game from 2003—a game notorious for having some of the worst controls in MMORPG history.
Let me just check EVE Online... Oh, look at that—23k people on the Tranquility server right now. Dead game, huh?
What’s most baffling about your perspective, @AirborneBerserker, is your refusal to acknowledge that it’s okay for Intrepid to take a risk on a niche market.
As players, the most we risk is the cost of some keys and cosmetics. For Steven and Intrepid, the stakes are far higher, and they’ve consistently shown their commitment to seeing this vision through. If Ashes fails, it could have a lasting negative impact on everyone’s careers at Intrepid.
They’re fine with taking that risk. So why do you care what they do, especially if you clearly don’t like Ashes as it’s intended?
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
Not wanting to speak for them, but imo this;
Is kind of what they are saying.
Translated to looking at it from Intrepids perspective - them taking that risk is fine. People pretending this game is going to be something it absolutely is never going to be, that is not fine.
This is a statement I agree with. People need to be realistic about what Ashes is. It is a game that has promised regional servers it absolutely will not be able to populate. It is a game that has a real chance of collapsing months after launch (I don't personally think it will, but the risk is real). It is a game that is aimed at a very small segment of people, yet is being designed in a way that needs a large population per server. It is a game based on open world PvP as being where the risk comes from, yet discourages open world PvP. It is a game that has a solo friendly end game, yet requires a group to get there in any reasonable amount of time.
I could go on for a while, but the point is thst this game has many flaws - flaws are baked in to the very core of the game. We shouldn't pretend they don't exist. That doesn't help anyone.
Except we aren't talking about ducks were talking about Steven, and your inability to accept that he is a human being and is just as fallible as anyone one else. "We need to adhere to his vision" is some thing a cult member would say when someone criticized their "dear leader".
You understand that 35K is less then 70k right, also your including a completely different genre of game. Also, also your skipping over the other 5 niches it's not just open world PvP.
Know what I'm just going to break it down for you there are an estimated 3.32 billion people that play games.
MMORPGs account for 3% of the total number of gamers
Hardcore (dropping items on death) account of 5-10% of players
Hard Core (investing large amounts of time) accounts for 10-20%
PvP accounts for 20-30%
Sand box 20-30%
Fantasy accounts for (over) 70%
Guild focused Players account for 50-70%
((3.32x10^9) x .03 x .1 x .2 x .3 x.3 x .7 x .7) = 87,847
That is including all PvPers not open world PvPers. so the number should be smaller. Lets do a quick check though. Since Eve Online is basically the only Sci-Fi OWPvP game there is we can take the number of players multiply it by 3.33 and we should get around 87,847.
23,000 x 3.33 = 76,590
What was it you said? Oh, look at that. Exactly what you would expect the numbers to be since Eve Online probably has 90% of the people interested in a Sci-Fi OWPvP game.
Now riddle me this there are over 3,000,000 registered accounts on the AoC site. How did that happen? We have a couple of opitons.
1.) This game is a wonder of gaming design before anyone one had ever played it. (Not likely)
2.) The analytics are wrong (Not likely)
3.) People saw an ad about a new MMORPG clicked on a link entered their email, and know fuck all about the game. (very likely)
Or... I enjoyed many of the same games Steven is using for inspiration.
I also don't care if the game attracts massive numbers. That’s Intrepid’s problem, not mine.
As long as there’s at least one well-populated server, I’m fine with that.
I understand that @Noaani feels strongly about the game needing enough success to support good servers in every region, but I’d be content with just one solid server, similar to EVE.
Worst-case scenario: the game crashes and burns, and I move on to another PvX game. It wouldn’t be as big of a loss for me as it would be for Intrepid.
The reason I mentioned a random L2 private server and EVE was simply to point out that there are respectable numbers of players out there enjoying PvX on random single servers for very old games in 2024.
I’m not sure why you went off on a rant with made-up percentages—it’s not particularly useful or insightful to me.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
What’s it been, man?
Like 4–5 years of us debating random things about this game here?
After all this time, I still don’t even know if you like anything about Ashes—or why.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
That means if there is only one large server, people with that prime time window in the right place are the only ones that are going to be overly successful.
The thing is, the whole single server thing wouldn't even be a discussion if it weren't for Intrepids decision to have each server hold 10k concurent players - meaning each server needs to be home to 30k+ players. If servers could be viable with 1,500 players, then this discussion wouldn't be an issue.
But no, Intrepid decided to create their niche of a niche of a niche game in a way where it has the largest server capacity of any MMORPG other than EVE, and where each server essentially only supports players in a specific region due to content windows.
While each of these two decisions may have had it's merits, and may have been the correct decision in isolation, the two of them made together are a really bad combination.
Ashes is a game that had many great things, that were then ruined by stupid, unnecessary decisions like I mentioned above.
It's funny, the reason Steven made this game is because he looked at Archeage and thought to himself "this game could have been so much more" - which is exactly how many people are already looking at Ashes.
And I am fairly sure it's been longer than 5 years - we were talking about this shit on the old forums if I recall correctly.
That's especially crucial in the 0.1 and 0.2 factor, at least the higher of which might be nearly eliminated by this overlap. That's nearly an extra 400% on top of your result just from this one cleanup, and if the same applies to several of the other factors to varying degrees (keep in mind this cleanup applies multiplicatively just like the factors in your original calculation), that might be the difference between 100k players and 10 million players.
In other words, these calculations are completely meaningless. You can't use statistics like this. It's not much more meaningful than if I were to say that only 1% of the population are healthcare professionals and only 0.1% of the population have medical college degrees, therefore only 0.001% work as doctors (simplified fake numbers for the sake of simplicity of the example)...
(I'm a little shocked Noaani didn't point this out; feel like this should be his forte. I'll give the benefit of the doubt and assume he didn't read it.)
Part of which is because WoW has tainted the public image of the market and not allowed it to grow into something other than its stereotype. You can't exclude the possibility that another percent or two might simply open up for a new successful game with a different hype and deeper game mechanics. Ashes might not deliver on that, but it shouldn't lead you to forget about the possibility, because otherwise there's no point in ever trying anything new, and you could just go play WoW or forget about the genre.
However, while it did miss a few things that would increase the result, it also missed a few things that would decrease it - like people that fit the description of an Ashes player but just can't be bothered with it, or are playing a different game, or are so guild focused that they are sticking with their guild in their existing game.
Truth be told, his end result is about where I expect Ashes subscription numbers to be 36 months after launch - under 100k players, but enough to support a total of 2 servers worldwide of the capacity Intrepid want for this game.
This is possible - and you are correct in that this will not be Ashes.
The game that eventually makes this happen will be a PvE focused game (probably a purely PvE game) releasing new content every month for solo players, small groups, medium groups, large groups, small raids and large raids (all sizes, every month); eliminates the time sinks this genre is known for, increases the social aspects of the game (in game chat connected to social media or message apps, for example); has dozens of what would currently be termed "cozy" optional gameplay mechanics on the side (farming, crafting, fishing etc) that each have their own gameplay loops, are all easily accessable and not mutually exclusive in terms of basic level participation; does not segregate it's population by server at all.
This is as far away from what Ashes is as WoW is - though this theoretical game would be equally as far from WoW as Ashes. The three games would essentially make a triangle.
That is a game that could well see a hundred million players, a few million concurrent.
The siege timing issue is a valid concern, but it’s one that has been addressed in other games. There are several known solutions that Intrepid can draw inspiration from, along with Ashes-specific solutions yet to be discovered.
Off the top of my head, once the mayor selects the defending party, that party could vote on a time for the siege to go vulnerable within the next 24–48 hours. It’s not a perfect system, but there are ways to schedule a large fight in a timely manner.
The key takeaway here is that I’d rather have an imperfect system than end up with a bunch of dead regional servers.
As for the 1,500 players per server point, I have to disagree. Steven mentioned on Saturday during his impromptu Twitch stream that Vyra had around 4,000 players. As we all know, 4,000 players in the Riverlands feels a bit cramped for some (though personally, I’m loving it). That said, I’ve abandoned any faith in pre-Alpha 2 server numbers—it was all just napkin math for Intrepid up to this point. I’m thinking 2,000–3,000 players per biome might be more realistic. Otherwise, players are going to be too spread out for my taste.
I would downplay the importance of ArcheAge. It’s well-documented that I’m a Lineage 2 fanboy, but I never had any real interest in ArcheAge. The pay-to-win (P2W) aspect was a complete dealbreaker for me.
In some ways, ArcheAge undermined the things Lineage 2 got right. I’m not going to link the inspirations page because I know you’re already familiar with it, but realistically, the only notable features we’re directly inheriting from ArcheAge are caravans and naval combat. I don’t believe Jake Song (Lineage 1 and ArcheAge developer) truly understood what made Lineage 2 so great for so long.
Anyway, you’re free to spend your time however you like, but personally, if I didn’t like the direction a game was headed, I wouldn’t bother with the forums.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
I know a good number of people in other games that lost out due to things happening at times when they couldn't be online. A lot of it was me and my guild doing it to them, but still, people don't want to play a game where they put time and effort in to a node or castle, only to have it taken from them at a point in time when they can't log on. People knowing what time that is going to be before hand only leads to people that know they can't easily log in at that time simply ignoring that aspect of the game (which in Ashes, would mean dropping the game).
There is no viable way to make it so NA, EU, SEA and Oceania players can all compete over the same resources at the same time.
With the size the game world is set to be, yeah, they can't have that many people per server. The game world size was determined by the number of people they wanted per server though, and the final decision on that size was made after the server capacity was decided on.
Again though, that is kind of my point. The game is a mass of decisions that may well have been made correctly in some aspects, but when combined don't actually work well together.
I'm sure you remember me saying years ago that this game is a mess of contradictions...
Your either talking about a Union, a person that occupies more then one category at a time, which wouldn't make any difference. Or what your trying to say is the categories are larger then the numbers I used. My question to you would be which one?
PvP? Nope notoriously small, I'm certain I wont get an argument on that one since most of the people here know that's the case.
Sand Box? Again, well known that Theme park games do much much better. Sand box games just aren't nearly as popular because PEOPLE don't like them as much.
Hard Core? Extremely well known that it's about 20% of players.
Hardcore? Again, a notoriously tiny group, especially within the MMORPG community. But even in gaming in general.
Which would be a good point if this game was actually trying some thing new. Which it isn't it's taking old shit giving it a fresh coat of paint. That's not new, problem is this game doesn't have hordes of people pining for the good ol' days.
@Noaani Unfortunately this game doesn't have the luxury of having almost no competition. It has mountains of competition that's the problem. There are loads of Fantasy games out there for people to choose from. At 36 months I'll be surprised if this game has 3,000 players, let alone 30,000. That's being the result of two things having lots of competition and so many systems that reward toxic behaviors of the worst possible kind.
I don't recall talking about how much competition I expect Ashes to have.
I like your enthusiasm but those numbers don’t sound very impressive.
Meaningful PVP in this game will be predominantly Endgame focus unless intrepid temporary scales up players to be equal level for node/gild wars.
Otherwise, low levels who have no roll to play will just slaughtered.
Intrepid should mitigate the harshness of a lot of its early game punishments to players arw more incentivized to stick it out for the good stuff later on.
And, again, keep in mind this problem applies multiplicatively each time it happens in your calculation. So even what you might assume to be negligible (and realistically it's not negligible; the 0.2 and 0.1 factor probably overlap nearly 1:1) still accumulates to a massive change of the result across the 7 factors you picked.
Nodes are new. Their implementation isn't perfect, and I'm not here to argue Ashes is perfect, or that it will suffice to take over the industry. But that's not a reason to pretend that its concept couldn't be viable enough to fill its niche, and in theory sweep the industry if the execution was better. (Remember your claim was that a "hardcore" PVP MMO CANNOT succeed. You even tried to prove that it was a statistical impossibility.)
Okay no a Union would make a difference, just as much as an Intersection wouldn't make a difference. Because they posses multiple aspects doesn't mean anything. They have to posses ALL of the factors.
As for Nodes being new, its not. There have been games where you build your own towns SWG comes to mind.
Finally if you think the categories are larger which one. Exactly which one. Do you think PvP is more then 30%, Hardcore is more the 10%, Sandbox is more then 30%, or if Hard Core players account for more then 10%?
Ok, not sure where I was talking about what competition the game would have when it goes live. I don't think the game has much in the way of competition.
They don't have to be.
If they wanted impressive numbers they would just make a WOW clone.
Intrepid believes strongly enough in their design that there is room in the market for what they are offering to take the risk in it.
Let them take that risk is all I am saying.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
What I’m saying is they don’t need wow numbers, but I worry anything less than 200k players wouldn’t be able to sustain the development cost of a game like this
Just because you don't talk about the tornado about to hit your house doesn't mean it's not going to tear it to pieces.
The Fantasy MMORPG dosent have much competition? Are you serious right now?
The top-down-hierarchy city builder GvG sandbox-ish Western-style Fantasy Class-Defined MMORPG with an explicit winner-loser dynamic and always-on PvP does not have much competition right now.
"People actually wanting a different product" isn't 'competition' unless for some reason you want to copy that product or the product fulfills most/all of the same needs for that group of people.
In which case, not a chance.
(meanwhile some of us out here refusing to play different installments of the same series far less 'within same genre')
"For what...?"
"Just about everything, really."
Sure, there is some competition if you look that broad, but you shouldn't look that broad because the bulk of players interested in "fantasy MMORPG's as a whole would not be at all interested in Ashes.
Rather, Ashes is specifically a somewhat punishing, time consuming, guild focused PvP MMORPG. The term "fantasy" doesn't really play a part in terms of competition, but these three that I have used here do.
In this segment, there isn't really much competition. So, to the kinds of players that would consider Ashes, there isn't that much competition.
Dude the game is in alpha stage 2, yea? Tons of systems, quest chain etc are not in the game yet. How do you see the final product there?
Just have the game copy actual characters on the server and change the name but nothing else. Then spawn them as bots to be gank bait.
I guess it would be too obvious when none of the bots had a guild name attached, though.
Not related to income (that's a separate issue), but you need a critical mass of fish or the whales will leave. So you have to provide content and rewards for the fish to enjoy; you can't just crank out whale stuff or your game will collapse.
You also need fish for the whales to beat so they can feel good about all the money they spent to show off to the fish. But the fish need other fish so they don't feel totally worthless.
I don't know what the ratio of whales to fish is, probably 1 to 1000 but PvP to PvE probably needs to be 1 to 10 or something like that. If PvE isn't enjoyable (perhaps due to PvP and griefing tactics;spawn camping, etc) then PvE will leave, and when they leave, everyone leaves.