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.
Comments
Basically the game is over focusing on Group play at end game. Solo players not only having a more difficult time leveling, and a more difficult time leveling but also no meaningful endgame loop will mean most casual and solo players will leave the game.
He seems fine with breaking the pillars when it comes to group play. Like giving groups a 30-40% boost to experience while doing something that makes them inherently safer in an open world PvP game.
I want to start with: I can understand all of your points (believe me, I do), and nevertheless I'm giving AoC a try, although I've quite the same concerns in general.
But, I had one or two questions for you, but you skipped them. To fill the last gap, would you please answer them? I will not quote myself in my first commentary here, but here are the questions:
- What‘s the reason why you think you won‘t find a suitable guild? (you never said that, but I'm assuming, because you are quite defending the sole playing part of the game)
- Or do you just dislike being part of a group?
-- If yes, why?
-- If no, why shouldn't you join one?
To that I've attached, also from that posting:
"My very beginnings in MMOs (DAoC, WoW) were not possible without groups, guilds and friends. And thats the best experience, but the most time-binding and -consuming one."
I've to attach: If somebody asks my about the best times in all my MMOs, especially WoW which was the deepest cut for me, I clearly have to state: The best memories are those that where done a) with online frieds/groups/guilds and b) in pvp.
But both are the most time-consuming aspects! And here (my personal) issue starts, not the social aspect of grouping, but to respect the other guild members and somethimes not being in a position to fulfill their expectations, because perhaps I will only login three times a week, if workload is huge and private matters are intensive.
I've played 60-70% pve and 30-40% pvp. I've played in groups and solo (mostly with my rogue ;-)) and I can remember 12h Alterac Valley (pvp battleground in World Of Warcraft), or playing pvp with them in the open world or in battlegrounds together, or PK-ing in Ironforge all those alliance players with my rogue (or some of them in our teamspeak group -> yeah... teamspeak my friends, not discord). I cannot remember my solo things, my farming, my crafting, all the dungeons run with randoms and so on.
I can remember idling in Orgrimmar and just talking to my guild members without really playing the game. All these memories are sweet. All the drama which happens in such guilds are the other side of the coin.
I'm ~20 year older than I was in my MMO beginnings. I didn't change to be a social guy (hopefully), but my playing style changed a lot (sometimes to "more solo" and "less in groups" - but that's only a matter of time, not a social one for my personally). Beside being not that good in pvp as in earlier days I mainly cannot affort playing 10h a day or 30h during an entire weekend in a virtual world, as there are little things like job, family and other distracting strange things ;-)
Some of the questions I'm asking my self all the time are:
- "Is this the problem of the game, or is it my problem?"
Well, with bit self reflection. It's my problem. 20 years ago I played like an addicted player and loved it (never was addicted, just to put that message here)
- "Will AoC provide meaningful content to me, a not too bad player (Gladiator in Arena and rated battlegrouds in WoW (whoever knows what that is) high ranks in structere pvp in Guild Wars 2), but a player, that cannot invest so many hours as in the past?"
This is my main question and the entire game, I'm convinced, will rise or fall out of this question. The target group is "old school" MMO players and veterans. They all have this nostalgia. I'm in the same boat. But life changes, fortunately. The available time is different (usually reduced), it's just a fact as long as life progressed well during the last 20 years. And I'm assuming, seriously, that the main target audience will have this question in their heads OR will face this situation up from release, because not all players are watching this game during development phase, but will check up from release and not before.
- "Steven is mid 40 (I guess). He thinks about his time being 20+. He is designing a game with this nostalgia. Is he sure, that he, by himself, can invest and play in the same style and with time quota as before?"
I'm not sure. Some of the systems/features seem not to fit to this type of aged player with lots of real life matters.
So the MAIN question, for me, is and will be: Is AoC for (average to good, but also aged) players with a "casual" time quota, so possible to perform in pve oder pvp fights, but only playing 2hours a day in the evening after work? 15 hours a week? (just as examples..) and therefore, this is the context, also can find meaningful solo content, because after serveral logins that will happen after 20:00h in the evening these players perhaps only will play 1-2 hours and that's it. Will there be meaningful content? Which "system" can they play? Does it make sense to take part of a caravan escort? Does it make sense to run into a dungeon to get loot in the end, but it will be only pvp fighting during the way to the dungeon and then after 10 deaths the 2 hours are over? Will it make sense to run into the woods gathering ressources, solo, because the guild members are already running in full groups in dungeons or siege battles or whatever and there are not enough players online to group for another thing?
Or will AoC only get an elitist target group (like I was 20 years before: Playing up to 10h a day and if possible 80% during the weekend)?
(again, hopefully my messages are not to misleading, English is not my native language)
I would have to accept being a humble peon, and not the saviour of the world, as the game has no main quest to lead me solo through to illogical greatness.
Therefore I asked myself how can I still have fun while being in the bottom half (or less if joining late) of gear and progression? Well that depends on my play style, self-esteem and my psychological needs from gaming.
Luckily for me I would actually enjoy trying to find my place in the world, the massive world, with up to 10,000 live players and 50,000 potential members on my realm.
I think guilds with even 100 players will have the same humbling experience, as their large member count only fills 1% of the server and they probably only muster around 1% of the nodes at a time.
Find you place, or have fun trying.
Discord
Forum
There's gonna be a ton of stuff that solo/casual players can enjoy in the game, as long as they realize that they're solo/casuals, which is not the same as a large group of coordinated players.
You realize MMOs all have the same game play loop, Kill stuff to get more power, to kill harder stuff to get even more power. At max level that loop revolves around gear. Solo players have no avenue to participate in that loop at end game.
Since Guilds will be dictating when people can and can't participate in the open world you would think you would be a little more upset about it, but you do you.
We know that social organizations will be PvE quests. What more do we need to know?
What disadvantages will citizenship bring? Node Wars shut off the Corruption system and allow people to any kill citizens of the enemy node freely. Making the game a gank box. Who's going to suffer the most from that, solo players.
I'm not going to have any fellow citizens, because I'll never become a citizen of any node, because the down side of being a citizen is so bad it's not worth being a citizen of any node. And most solo players will feel the same way the first time they can't play the game for 6 hours because a node war happened.
Please quote where I said that. Or something similar to that.
A solo player and a casual player are different playertypes or can be different player types.
Casual usually references to the time quota possible to put into the game. A casual still can be a very good player (with our without a group) and perform well, but perhaps cannot put 10h a day into a computer game. A guild member can be casual, so having not enough time and performing low. This "barrier" between "casual", "solo" and whatever is pointless. And he can do this solo or in group content, as long as the game supports this (if not, it's an issue of the game, not the player) This said, he should be rewarded for this investment, even if it is a different kind of investment, but he definitley should not get nothing or low rewards, as long as he puts in high investment.
I wish more people wouldn't take a game that serious that having elitist and frequent-player behaviour overwhelm a fantasy MMO with lots of potential in modern design, UE5 graphics, combining good old-school features (and leaving out the bad ones based around exclusion and elitism) for different sort of players and entertainment and fun.
Your English is perfectly fine.
To answer your first questions, It's not that I dislike being in a group. It's that l like being able to do as I please in the game. Being part of a group means you have to do something the group agrees on. With guilds you get even less flexibility.
There is not much else to respond to in this post, I do apologize for not answering your questions before, I read them then was interrupted and forgot about them.
Amen. 😌👌
✓ Occasional Roleplayer
✓ Currently no guild !! (o_o)
Let's see what happens during the next weeks/month during testing and at release, and afterwards ;-)
<snipped a lot for length>
See now THIS is very real concern I also share about not just the final result, but about how the game is being designed.
We’ve seen a lot of gameplay so far, heard about a lot of intended systems, and I do have concerns about the respect to players’ time compared to what they can actually get from the game. Personally I think, more than any ‘solo v group’ aspect, the biggest issue right now is that even a hardcore player can’t do much if they can’t devote a large swatch of time each day.
MMO vets have lives now, jobs, families, so while some systems will hit that nostalgia factor, is Ashes really going to be for them? To me personally, it actually seems to be focused around younger players with excessive free time and minimal responsibilities like when current MMO vets first started out.
If you can only invest a few hours a day, and hours of work could be gone in one siege when you aren’t able to be online, well, suddenly that’s almost all your playtime progress rendered null and void other than level gains.
After all, you can’t reasonably call off work just to take part in a node siege. You can’t reasonably ditch your kid’s events or sports to go run a caravan. You can’t reasonably raid until 5am if you get up for work at 7am.
So if the game isn’t made for MMO vets, who simply can’t devote the time investment required by the design tenants of Ashes, and it doesn’t appeal to the more modern iteration of young players due to nostalgia based design tenants, then who is it for?
The hope is for a lasting game with 10k players per server, but where are those players going to end up coming from? Vets who go back to some no-living ways? Or younger players who are used to the current (not so great) design of MMOs?
Testing will also show the same thing as this forum, except even to a worse degree. Thousands of people who paid AT LEAST $100 to test a game that doesn't exist. They're already so damn deep into sunk cost fallacy that I'm not even sure if anyone's gonna be as objective as they might think they are.
Though I'm more than sure that all the twitch viewers (especially Asmongold's) will shit on every piece of Ashes design, because it doesn't appeal to the masses in pretty much any way.
For an adult with a job (most vet MMO players) that isn’t much of an investment as you think.
It is an investment for a teenager with a part time job and a car note, but those aren’t (or weren’t) the ones intended to be drawn in by the nostalgic MMO design format of Ashes.
And people have definitely been telling Steven that he's making a horrible game for those past 7 years. Somehow he keeps making it still
Correct.
Let's see how this caravan stuff looks like during a real caravan gameplay. Is this caravan shipping around for 4 hours through half of the map? That's a game design only for elitists and frequent players investing more time in the game than somewhere else. And this is called a meaningful goal in game design? We will see, I don't think so, I guess it will be reduced to some hyper guilds which players are permament online and they will thus get huge advantages out of this systems because they will carry this caravans 1000 times and a normal player in a mid to large guild will do it 5-10 times with much higher risk but much reduced reward.
That's a really good and justified question. The game doesnt seem to be for time-casual but well-experienced MMO players with family, hobbies, job, some normal real life things. So not for the majority of MMO players out there, because if you ask a teenager the MMO field is dead, for them it's not existing, they are playing Fortnite, Roblox and perhaps Minecraft.
It will be interesting how all this stuff will work with AoE skills and other different mechanics (i.e. true stealth from rogues / will they be attacked with an AoE effect and show up, although they are flagged non-combatant?) AoC is not the first pvp game trying to regulate this abusing and this obligation to pvp, it's just one out of many MMOs and all of them frustrated the players and increased toxic behaviour overall over time.
Perhaps, yes. But seriously, for a MMO veteran (that means adult guys) 100 Dollars are a joke. Who cares about this peanuts? We are talking about 40y+ players, fully positioned adults with families and jobs over one or two decades. No MMO veteran and old-school MMO player cares about 100 Dollars, otherwise these guys shouldnt consider playing a MMO with sub-fee. (one reason why this adult gamers are listening, because what the mainly don't want is F2P and P2W or something like this, but they want to consume the entire content as long as they pay for it and there is no reason why they shouldn't be in a position to do this - if you invest 20 Dollars in a TV streaming service you get all the movies and series offered, like your friend, neighbor or biggest enemy. Same movies, same series. Once you are in a computer game (!) this should change and a few elitist payers, ups, players, should get more than others?
I guess something else is the problem, but that's clear and a self-made consequence. If you want feedback, I mean real feedback, than you are NOT gating this feedback behind hardcore fans, because if you only want to hear from your players that they agree to what you've designed, than your try only to get those money-paying hardcore fans because they will follow this promises like cultists and they will "defend" (year right, that's your wording) the game designs even if they are bad.
If you want constructive and real feedback from all sort of players and you really want to hear the opinion of 20y+ MMO veterans (and that's the marketing of intrepid) and old-school fans, than invite them but do no paywall before that. (especially don't do this if you said before the game is already financed - because obviously it's not, it was said, but it's not true). I never bought a game (or product in general) before it was released and I've no idea why this should be done, especially if there are plans like releasetime and other crucial parts missing, so I dont' know what I will get and also not when. And again also with this opinion I'm not alone - I guess we all know what happend after the last developer stream on Friday somewhen in August
You just cannot let testers pay to test. I don't want to name my daily rate, but if Steven wants me for testing, he must pay me and not the other way round. And then there will be feedback from 20y MMO experience and not only from one or two MMOs (so I'm not telling him something in his "bubble" he already knows and wants to hear) and yes, some of the systems are cool, and for some the design is poor and the feedback will hurt. And a mass of players will provide this, let's just wait for testing phase and if nothing will be changed, so he will insist on his opinion and vision, than the game will be a MMO for hardcore elistist frequent MMO players - so a game even he, by himself, will not be able to play to a meaningful sense, as I've heard he is the leader of a company from ~200 employees and thus has some responsibilty which is not pvp-ing 10h long in an hardcore pvp game like he did during his younger ages
I usuall don't give a f** on content creators, youtubers/twitch-talkers and those sort of guys, instead I'm reading facts from wiki or developer site to build up my opinion. There are a few guys out there where I can listen and watch, but the majority is just not worth my time. But I'm watching sometimes.
Here is a funny one. What do you think? (delete space after "p") http s://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OnJlK3grdw
And, if something is not appealing to the masses it's no surprise that those masses provide their negative feedback. If AoC is for the 10% hardcore players out there it should definitly change it's marketing and communication approach, because it will disappoint and decrease in reputation continously.
If it is an elitis pvp hardcore 10h+ game, than say it. If it is a competitive only game and pve is just a gap-filler, name it. Dont play with the attention and desire of MMO veterans, showing pve gameplay and firebrand pve raiding, if you only mean "PvP hardcore players", because veterans aged 20y+ meanwhile and they are NOT the pvp hardcore players nowadays, but family mum or dad with lots of real life, hopefully sucessful job and additional hobbies beside pc gaming.
They are not the target group? Well, then, tell us, who is the target group?
Hyperbole isn’t doing you any favors.
$100 is half the cost of a trip to the grocery store. It’s one meal out for the family. Less than an electric bill in the summer etc. It’s not chump change, but adults have much more expensive things they have to pay for regularly than a teenager whose most consistent expense is a car note which takes up most of their monthly income from a part time job.
It’s not going to be hard for adults, the MMO vets, to simply drop Ashes if the gameplay is unrewarding and their ability to progress isn’t based on their skill, but on exceptionally high time investments.
As was mentioned before: a caravan might take multiple hours, so if you can’t devote a straight 4 hours of game time to it, then you shouldn’t bother at all because you’ll be gone before it’s completed and thus that would all be time wasted.
(unless, of course, design adjustments are made to account for partial participation and reward it adequately)
All of those points will not appeal to the modern mmo players. And all of those things have been stated and restated countless times in the last 7 years.
If by this point people still think that Ashes will somehow magically change into something similar to ff14 or wow - that's on them.
There are other countries outside of usa and good eu ones.
$100 for me is a full month of living.
But as I said, anything that the common majority would say about Ashes - they can say right now on the forums, because they don't need to test pvp to know that they can be killed in pvp, so if they dislike that prospect - they would 100% dislike that in testing. Same applies to open world pve, to risk/reward designs, to slow leveling, to everything else that's not "modern".
And such a change would be a full 180 to what Steven has been promising for years. In majority of cases, such 180 changes in design direction do not end up well. So I sure hope this doesn't happen.
Very accurate. But You can actually truly expect that things are going to be just as intended since now about +8 Years or so.
Well. " IF " the Alpha Two would finally - slooowly - start to appear - so that People can FINALLY erase their doubts a little bit and start Intrepid by helping to test ... ...
This Duke Nukem Forever Development Time stopped being funny with Star Citizen i admit.
✓ Occasional Roleplayer
✓ Currently no guild !! (o_o)
Are we looking for a good MMO or another pretender/clone of something else with no challenge handing out gold stars everytime someone does something?
You can say '180 change' as many times as you want, but that doesn't fix the problem that the current design philosophies won't land with a lasting audience size suitable to the experience Steven wants Ashes to have.
But isn't that true for AoC in terms of Lineage2 - which failed meanwhile? Which target group wants to play it?
WoW, GW2, ESO an FF14 (to name the real sucessful ones) are still living and played.
AoC would have the potential to at least outplay GW2 and ESO, maybe some players that are tired of WoW after 20years as well - but all of this games offer pve and pvp and are no copy from each other, by contrast, they have a lot of differences and different strenghts but also weaknesses.
What's the strength of hardcore elitist pvp MMOs out there? Would you please name 3-4 MMOs to me?
But, to intend (or insist) doing things like planned but continously asking for feedback (but from whom? from paying potential customers? So if I'm not paying, my feedback is useless but once I pay my feedback increases in quality for intrepid?) but only listening to the feedback that confirm the own vision is some kind of semi-honest feedback-gathering... but it helps to say "we are not finished because of all this feedback and we will have to change this and this in the future..."
Well, as Steven is not committing to any dates (which is an advantage if you work with publishers, because than you have to do you work also in time and not iterate and iterate and iterate ...) the normal player will know in 2026 or 2027 - or 2028? Which is also quite interesting, because a 33 old fan will be 43 and believe me when I say: Life will change a lot during this phase - at least hopefully if there is progress in real life and not only in computer games