Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two testing is currently taking place five days each week. More information about Phase II and Phase III 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.
Alpha Two testing is currently taking place five days each week. More information about Phase II and Phase III 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.
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Ofcource, its his vision. But the diners and chef does have sway. Dishes gets changed from time to time.
Steven openly displayed a complete lack of understanding as to what combat trackers are, and what they are not. Worse yet, he made decisions based on his total lack of understanding.
Top end raiders are both the most loyal MMORPG players that exist (they are why EQ, EQ2 and WoW still exist), but are also the least forgiving of outright stupidity.
As a final blow to raiders, the above total lack of understanding, the open show of outright stupidity, was made in relation to a tool that actually is key to top end raiding existing in an MMORPG. If players do not have the tools to be able to actually maximise their own output, the game simply can not create content that requires players to maximise their own output - which is essentially what the definition of top end gameplay in an MMORPG is.
So no, this wasn't a harsh judgement at all, this was a well considered realization that Steven is not capable of running an MMORPG that would be of value to that segment of the player base. He simply does not have the knowledge, yet he insists on being the person that makes the decisions.
My point was, I dont think its going to hold off millions of raiders, even if there is no combat trackers. I think people will find out in time, about, healing/dmg meters, agro meters and the like. People will figure it out eventually, and there will be a meta... Probably just not as sharp as it could have been.
I think you misunderstood my point here, almost entirely.
My point was that if that self-owned CEO makes a game he wants to play, and all of us also want to play it, and the 'suits' realize 'wait these people really wanted weather and dynamic NPCs and build variety and all that?'
Those suits will show up to tell the Devs 'hey! add those things to our game!'
And in many cases the Devs will go 'won't work, we didn't build the base to be able to support those things'.
But what if they did?
Other companies also hold Aces.
I did miss your point then. But I am confused now. You seem to contradict yourself here?
Most of what makes Ashes unique is just 'stuff other companies chose not to do' and it's usually easy to add.
There is almost no 'Intrepid twist on it'.
So, think about what this is saying here.
Steven is saying that he thinks that if players have proper information on their characters, they will have fewer build options than if they didn't actually know what they were doing.
This isn't a fault of combat trackers, this is the fault of a game designer not being good enough at their job to create real and valid options for their players. As such, this is Steven unintentionally telling us that he has little faith in his team, or in his direction of that team, or both. Objective information doesn't limit what builds people will use, poor class design does.
As to Steven saying "he wan'ts people to play the way they want", in doing so he has made it so hundreds of thousands of MMORPG players can't - because we are not allowed to use the tool that allows us to play the way we want.
You may not think it, but those raiders do.
I know first hand leaders of dozens of guilds that stopped paying attention to this game because of that - and not one single raid guild that continued to pay attention to Ashes after his stance on trackers was made clear. From my singular perspective, that is a 100% rate of raid guilds being perpetually uninterested in this game due to his comments - they will not change their mind on this, even if Steven does.
but steven is the one who get to say what dish stays and what dosent , if steven likes spicy lobster and a 100 people came and ate it , 90 of them said they dont like the way its done or just hate it all together and the chefs tell steven 90 people out of a 100 didnt like it so we have to change the way its done or to something else in a way where most people like it but steven refuses to because he likes it done that way even when most people dont.
FF11 has had the Mog House functionality as far as I know since launch. Mog Houses allow you to decorate your private instanced space (the ability to allow visitors was added much later)..
Depending on the Elemental Balances of your furniture, you got a Moghancement, which is a buff to something.
No matter what you do, some players will consider one Moghancement (or some subset group of them) to be the best ones. If those happen to be easy to attain or can be built up gradually with no significant downside, fine. Content.
The moment one of them offers what some vocal influencer (even in world chat) considers an optimal advantage, some set of players will switch from 'this is fun, slowly building up and experimenting with decorating my house, it's like leveling' to 'why is this game gatekeeping the good stuff just to inflate hours/make me RMT?'
It's not that Moghancements are bad, it's that someone hit the wrong switch in players' brains. Originally it was just them and you could only have one at a time. Could you rearrange your entire house to switch from 'Tiny chance of retaining more materials when you fail a synth with this specific crystal' to 'lose less EXP when you die' because you expected to be doing hard content? Yes. Was it worth it? Good question.
Competitive players measure against each other and that's a large part of this trigger. Well-informed players measure against 'obvious optimals' and that is another.
Moghancements had to not be particularly good on purpose to avoid the above. And even within that, it was still talked about in this way. To be clear your overall options were:
"Lose less exp on death." "Gain slightly more money from mob drops in a game where very few mobs drop money and it is a tiny amount relatively" and "gain more Conquest points (Node Exp basically)".
This system is 'not rewarding' on purpose. It is not impactful on purpose. It is tedious to min-max entirely on purpose. Because 'singular, low impact choices' are one of the few ways to keep your playerbase from becoming a toxic separatist column of people arguing over whether optimizing is right.
Ashes needs to have more spaces where Intrepid demonstrates an understanding of this, without it, it will get the usual novelty rush, then the world-chat ignorance phase, then the falloff. Ashes has, so far, made six separate decisions that fast-track it directly into the world-chat ignorance phase.
A lot of the things that make Ashes 'unique' are the equivalent of having powerful Moghancements for players to fight in world chat over. I don't think this is a positive kind of uniqueness for a game to have.
Sure, it is probably his call in the end. But Steven does not strike me as a stupid man. He knows there is a marked for his type of MMO. He has a good idea on what is fun and what is not. If a vast majority of players end up hating something, it will most likely change.
There is a very big difference between someone that is stupid, and someone that is trying to do a job they are ill equipped to do.
Unfortunately, if you put a stupid person and a smart person in a difficult position that they are both equally ill equipped for, the stupid person is probably going to do better because they are more likely to be familiar with situations where they are over their heads.
For the smart person, this may well be new territory, and they may not know how to deal with that at all.
Steven absolutely is smart. However, that isn't an advantage for him here, it is potentially a disadvantage.
As to your last comment, keep in mind that Steven has already made comments that have turned hundreds of thousands of potential players away from this game.
There aren't that many players interested in Ashes as a long term game left - how many people need to hate a thing before Steven changes it?
I guess thats one take on it. There is no way to design a game in such a way, that the dmg is even all over. I am not sure if you see not downsides to having a dmg parser, but I think there is some clear downsides. I can see his argument, agree or not.
What Steven is trying to do, is make more than 1 valid spec. Raiders mostly see a class having 1 spec. So they might need 1 wizard to have this or that spec, and after that, they all pretty much have to be identical, thats what Steven is trying to upset.
The counter argument could be. Are those millions of raiders so pampered, that they cant make a spec themselves? Shouldnt raiders be able to navigate abilities, numbers, rotations - without the extras?
Like most everything else, combat trackers is a coin with two sides. Some like it, some dont. Personally, I am a bit tired of some of the combst trackers. I think some are beneficial in a good way, and some are very dictating. I do not like the dictating ones.
I think you are wrong about raiders though. I think when the game is in a launch state, people will reconsider. There will be a ton of hype and exposure around the game come 6 months before launch, and raids etc. will be front and center. I think when people have a more complete picture, AoC will suddenly become a thing to test and look at. And hey, who knows, maybe Steven will soften his stance on it.
Ohh, but I think there is. Some of the features they are promising in the game is quite unique. We have seen day/night, but seasons like this? City management like this? Thats quite of a twist from other games. Quite easy to add, I think is wrong. Intrepid is taking their time to make a game with a ton of features. Their timspan of making the game is quite long. When shareholders have a say, its usually short. They want money in the bank, and if the game dies after a few years, it does not matter too much, they are on to the next thing. Intrepid is not developing with that goal in mind. Steven would not hurl his own money at this game like this, if he wanted a quick payday. He build something from the ground up, that to me, is respectable. I can only imagine the sleepless nights and worrying that comes with making a company that big. It takes a toll.
I think they are doing so much different, than other companies, that dispite you not liking it, you should acknowledge it. I mean, open development/no NDA... How many does that? The amount of features in this game, thats alot man. You might say, that they are easy to implement in other games, but they havent does it though. Its a huge undertaking for a dude, to make a game for you, from the ground up, starting with a handful of people. Appreciate the effort
Your response to Noaani about "hype around release..." would've worked if people didn't know what the game was about. See Chrono Odyssey for example. People were really hyped for it until they realized that it's just a NW clone. And they only realized that because CO released a beta test.
Ashes is holding a near-permanent ALPHA test, where nothing is done and everything that's being done is moving at a snail's pace. And that is game development for a newer team under an unexperienced leader. But the fact that everyone who's interested in the game can just come and see that the game is barely moving, the design is all over the place and the direction can often contradict itself - none of that will support the release hype of the game.
Every damn scam game that overpromised the world and underdelivered a piece of shit had more hype than what Ashes will have by the time release comes along.
And I would love to be wrong, because I myself believed that we're barely even 1% of the people that will be there on release, so the majority will get hyped for the game, as you say. But the more time passes, the more I feel like my initial assumption was the wrong one.
We already gave examples of the games where these systems were present. And Ashes doesn't even compare to the space games, cause its supposed depth doesn't even reach "you can build your own stuff and other players can interact with it".
I tested an Alpha for a new EVE game and that shit had space buildings that could function as trading posts, as turrets, as stores and had the potential to be coded by the players themselves to be near-anything players wanted. Ashes is nowhere near that kind of freedom.
So yes, it is that easy to add this stuff into a game. Other studios don't do it because it's too much work for too little payoff, when you only care about that payoff. And yes, it's cool that Steven can kinda disregard the amount of work his ideas require, but it's a double-edged sword, which, in the context of "open development", hits the studio more than it benefits it.
Technically Throne and Liberty already has seasons mostly-implemented and they're just taking the path of implementation that Intrepid is now learning. But what is a season in an MMORPG really?
"Trees lose their leaves, ground is snowy, spawns and economy change."
Have you ever looked into BDO's Farming system? BDO simulates the movement of rainclouds over the landscape and the topography of the runoff.
Should we assume Ashes will also implement water tables when Freeholds are released? Because BDO does.