My short Q&A with Steven

Some time ago I was able to do a short interview with Steven when we met in Cologne.
At that point in time my.com was still a topic, so you may skip the first 2 questions now, but I think the other topics are still quite relevant & interesting.

Here is the original voice recording:
https://youtu.be/TUdY96kiDI8

And here is the transcript for the first 10 questions I've asked:

When you say no region locking or IP blocking, does this refer to all regions? Or does is just refer to EU, RU or NA?

Currently that refers to regions that are territories in our license agreement with mydot.com and mail.ru which is Europe and Russia as it relates to our North American service as well. However, moving forward, should we announce additional strategic partners for foreign territories, it would be a red line for us as well not to allow for any region locking or IP blocking.

2. When I play on EU-Server and change to NA-Server, will I lose my unlimited subscription?

No, you will not. As it stands currently we’ll be making an announcement Monday. I went to Amsterdam yesterday and sat down at mydot.com headquarters with their team and we came to an announcement we make Monday which states that a player may choose to migrate their account from mydot.com to intrepid studios should they wish, additionally if they own a package from either kickstarter or summer backers they can migrate that package over to mydot.com registration as well.

3. Will there be damage numbers like in most of the far eastern games (far over 1000) or will there be lower ones?

There will likely be lower numbers, we don’t see the need to have these enormous numbers that really start to loose meaning, that seems to be an innate design issue with other games as they try to balance the damage output in pvp and pve, but our design allows for a more manageable damagage protocol for pve and pvp to be shared, and those damage protocols relate more to lower numbers.

4. Will there be one server for the whole European community or separate server for each country (Germany, Spain, France and so on)?

There will be separate servers [For each country?] There’s localization that will be present in the German/French/Russian languages to start, and then we tend to localize also in Italian, Polish and Spanish, so servers will be allocated within the region as being one of those language type servers, so it’s not gonna be per country per se as it might be per language.

5. Do you have plans to integrate chats for each different language?

You will be able to separate them. That’s built in our UI. Intrepid studios created localization tools that allow for the ease of access on your side of the chat window per se, that you can quickly change between things in game.

6. Will there be a gear treadmill? In my opinion it's frustrating to know that the gear I farmed for months or had to run a dungeon 100 times until it dropped for me will be useless in the next expansion, because the level cap will be increased and new better gear will be introduced.

A lot of what we experienced in games that came before us is that many things are account bound and soul bound to your character. The way that they then force players to relive the same content over and over mindlessly until you just want to shoot yourself is not what we want in the game( haha). So instead, very little gear is character bound. You will get quest related gear as reward, but it won’t be one set in one dungeon so you would have to run the dungeon over and over again. Instead we want to really emphasize the reliance on the economy and tractors and gatherers and processors to support the majority of the gear structure in game combined with that of world-raid bosses and dungeon bosses, not a repetitive quest-line for a single dungeon.

7. Is a transmutation feature planned? (shifting a skin from one gear piece to another?)

Yes there is a transmod where you can change the appearance of items to different cosmetic appearances.

8. Do we get a list of all skills (for every class/subclass) before Beta testing starts?

I don’t’ wanna do that, I think discovery is an important part of the process in learning a game. I think those type of lists will be created but I like them to be created by the players and communities by discovering those things. I think that it is a fun experience for people who are first involved in the game to discover these things for themselves-

9. What plans do you have to support roleplaying? Emotes? Possibilities for character biographies? Social clothing?

We have plans for Emotes, and there will be roleplaying specific mechanics in place for certain building types you can have in your freehold or within the node itself. We have a very in-depth storyline and titlery that is capable for the player, you can even customize the player information on your unique character website page where you can have in-depth background stories your players can read about, you can have trade supplies that kind of describe what your history is. We must remember that MMORPG has RPG in it as well, that sometimes gets lost.

10. Is there anything else you want to tell to or share with the German community?

We love the German community, we believe it is one of our largest in Europe, actually. The German community has a rich history of being MMORPG lovers, more so than I think any other European country and the engagement of the German community in our community is something that really helps us moving forward because we get valuable feedback and we love hearing that.

You can also find the german translation on our german community page:
https://ashes-of-creation.de/news/ashestalk_interview_steven_sharif