Greetings, glorious testers!
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest news on Alpha Two.
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Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest news on Alpha Two.
Check out general Announcements here to see the latest news on Ashes of Creation & Intrepid Studios.
To get the quickest updates regarding Alpha Two, connect your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Comments
Vaknar will funnel suggestions from the Forums to the dev team like he does every week.
Steven is not going to make changes to cater to "Soloers" until he gets feedback from A2.
From player perspective investors ensure that usually budget, high production quality and timeline hold. Those are good aspects in professional software development projects of that complexity.
Yes, this means that the full freedom of doing what you want by your own is gone, but that's the developer perspective. I prefer the player perspective and I really like plans about budget and timelines - that hold. This is crucial for me personally, I don't like promises and missing commitments. Iterations and delay just increases expecatations that perfection is reached then, which never will be the case. Waiting 10years long (so knowing it from the start) gets high expecations as results - so the quality must be perfect in the end, especially if that's the focus: Quality > Time. We will see, if that promise will hold in a IT project like this. Heard that hundred times before, seen it equally often not happening.
I'm sure thats (the next) point were we agree to disagree, as you (I assume) already paid money to intrepid and you dont care if the games releases in 2026 or 2028. You follow the promises and ideas.
For me that's not enough. I'm not paying a promise or an unfinished product with my money with that little to no influence. I'm doing investments (but for other business), but I can control and really decide then. As this part is missing for me I see no reason why I should pay something unfinished in advance which even has no fixed time scale or transparent financial situation (from company overall).
So, investors/publishers are nothing bad, really. It depends on the point of view and access to this topic.
Throwing in "Ubisoft" (or whatever) doestn't change anything, because you can at least - if you like their games - rely on high production quality and solid time plans and replenishment of game series that you like ("next album from the metal band you love").
So, that's why, again, for me it's neither impressive nor special or important, that it is Steven (or Kevin, or Donald, or...), but only that a huge next MMO is coming out attracting (with this current marketing on website and showcases) all types of players in a high-fantasy setting with 3rd person characters with different races and classes, solid gameplay/combat mechanics (action combat + targeting), pvp AND pve content and thus choices what to play depending on the particual situation with or without guildies/friends. That's why I'm watching, that's what I'm hopeing, but it's no personal cult for me following a person or whatever - it's just one promising MMO combining pvp and pve as I don't want to only have one content type of it.
I don't consider that strange at all.
Most games have good and bad aspects to their design. Picking good aspects of games that didn't do well is perfectly fine.
It's going to be relatively niche.
And... it will release when it's ready. Or become vaporware.
https://ashesofcreation.com/
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Playstyles
Longer, but not "not".
So Ahses by its own definition wants all player types, all of them.
I'm in for sure, because I'm a casual pvp player. Sounds strange? But that's realiy. I like pvp, I dont have a lot of time (1-3 hours a day at max in the evening, but not every evening). There will be countless players like me and the game needs them to work smoothly.
This is a Steven for you. He provides one good example. The wants those players, he NEEDs those players. The game will not work without. Your "not made for everyone" is marketing speech, just rhetorical stuff only naive humans are even listeing.
This is very very essential. It's crucial. If you think this game will only be done from 20-35aged guys growing up with L2 as teenager or whatever, you are absolutely wrong. By contrast, it will attract 40y+ until open end age to play this MMO as they want to play it. And nearly all of them just share one same opinion: Having a funny gameplay, without getting disturbed from others (like the young toxic player fulfilling his wet virtual dreams by compensating success in real life). That is the majority. That will be the core playerbase wide over 50%. The niche you are talking about are only the niche gamers (some percentage) playing this game like a hard competetive business job for 10h a day. All the other players are playing this game in their sparetime in the afternoon/eveneing and a bit at the weekend, because it attracts mature humans, family persons, guys that are in solid well-payed jobs. There is no "this game is not for you" - wrong. It's PER DEFINTION for those gamers. It's neither fortnite, nor LoL or a survival game - and also not L2 copy.
Its ONLY you (some in this forums) that only want a small and very very special playerbase.
I'm sorry, but you are not correct. If you think so, please be author in the wiki and correct all the articles there and the webpage information from official developers. You hold onto a dream which will not come true.
Makes no sense form an economical point of view. intrepid is a company, so profit counts. Thats the responsibliy (!) af the companys boss and taking care (by law, company contracts) of his employees not to push it against the wall for huge unemployment.
When it's done is unprofessional at this large scale. This is no garage programming from clowns. Take responsiblity and do commitments as this is done in professional mature business.
I mean, I'm the best example and countless are the same.
I'm an average guy loving playing MMOs since decades. Well-situated in real life with family, kids and few, but real friends (not the social media ones, I'm talking about the real ones) and quite everything already available what you can buy with money as good business man (but without fully being rich, I work hard for my money, but don't miss anything from a monetary perspective). What I lack is only one thing: Time.
But still this game, Ashes, attracts me. Why? Because of the same things it's attracting you: Promises.
I count of all the things Steven said and that is documented in the Wiki. But only from a completely different direction as a L2 pvp player. And I'm respecting this fully but I expect that this also is done the other way round. I dont want to hear exclusion allegations, I want to hear inclusion and cooperative gameplay mechanics to fullfill the promises for casuals and non-casual players. I'm (quite) ok in playing pvp, not the best, not the worst. I like it. But only to a certain degree and only if I want to do it and get reward out of it - somehow. This is not strange expectations, it's a normal one. And the game is promising, that I can play this game casual, with pve or pvp content and with or without groups. And this mix must work, if not, I'm gone. That's easy - I'm not engaged to it, I will not pay one Euro for it before my first sub-fee. I will watch and work together with other fans (like me) that this is no full L2 copy and no playing ground for toxic players that like the situation, that the virtual e-peen is bigger than the real one in real life.
There are more self-reflected single-player MMO fans than you out there who understand that what they ultimately want to experience in a game doesn't have to correspond directly to the first thing that comes to their mind when they think about a good MMO. The game's systems have to be internally consistent, so you're working towards a larger goal, in a system where a certain set of actions are rewarded.
Ashes is a game that rewards group play, because group play optimises the advantages of a holy-trinity system of class specialisation to maximise each player's potential. Players who don't do that should expect to be vastly less successful at what they're doing. You keep asking for compromises on those principles with questions like "Why should I not continue to keep asking for these minor aspects of the game to be changed, if I like everything else?"
Ashes is a game that rewards risk-versus-reward, which means people taking larger risks need to be punishable, so they don't get the big rewards for free, simply by showing up and being inconspicuous. This punishment is created by other players, if leeches try to sneak rewards with no effort, or take control of a different guild's area simply by existing and not fighting. If you try to play that way, other players get the option of challenging you for their resources, and they get to bring the friends they allied with in order to manifest that power over the contested objective/territory.
If you can't accept that the game has design pillars that don't align with your preferences, the game isn't for you, regardless of how many other parts of the game's content do appeal to you.
If you can accept these deviations from your preference, you have to stop asserting that these things have to change in order for the game to be good or popular - because most other people also understand that a game's systems have to be internally consistent in order to produce an interesting game that doesn't just copy the themepark experience that already exists in 10 different copies of the same game.
This thread is wild. We got people denying that newbie guilds work, when they are so prevalent in EVERY game on the market that the "multiplayer" gameplay they encourage effectively resembles LFG solo play without any actual communication.
We got Dygz arguing against solo players. I don't think you appreciate how deeply in denial you have to be to get to this point.
That's not evidence that the defining features of those games weren't interesting enough to appeal to the playerbase, it just means that the game as a whole didn't stay up to par with the market. The fundamental gameplay loop might still be vastly more intriguing than the mainstream game's loop; the surrounding features just weren't good enough to keep the thing as a whole alive.
Ashes solves this problem perfectly by investing more into curated content. The PvX, high-risk-high-reward principles underlying the game's system that the game copies weren't the reason why games like Lineage 2 died, and you seriously have to expand your thinking if you can't let go of that assumption.
The simple truth your mainstream-addicted mind is in denial about is that the MMO market as a whole has been dying a painful death in the larger landscape of multiplayer online gaming, and needs something that's not yet another WoW clone, if you want the genre to survive.
Something that revives the advantages of traditional MMO gameplay (= challenging, dangerous worlds; enticements for player interaction and competition; and giving players control over the development of the world around them) embedded in the comforts of the mainstream games that have appealed to the masses of the genre (= high output of curated content.)
The downside of that is that you'll have to take a risk. A risk to do something that isn't a proven concept. Appealing to evidence of what worked in the past, and arguing against things because they failed once, is exactly how you prevent innovation that changes the status quo.
Your suggestion takes most of this innovation out of Ashes and replaces it with easy rewards for existing as a solo player, and most likely shallow, trite dailies and afk-brained quests, so everyone can reach the same level of success as everyone else by existing on their own. We already have themeparks. Those are not the games we need more of.
I'm not convinced yet that this will be the case and will be rewarding with solid items, materials, whatsoever.
Showing up and being inconspicuous is nothing bad, that's your personal take and attidue within a computer game. I dont have to demonstrate or prove something in a video game, I'm no teenager. If you take it serious, that's not my problem or the problem from the game.
Testphase and future month will show, whether time invested and contribution done equals the rewards the player gets, solo, in groups, in raids. As long as there is meaningful content and appropriate rewards that's fine.
As this discussion is like 20y aged, because of MMOs getting popular at this time, I'm not sure which result do you expect now?
I'm not in the same opinion and not interested that proving some virtual performance or time-invest of 12h per day are a benchmark. If somebody wants to invest 12h a day, he should. As long as the game provides meaningful content and rewards also for players that invest 2h a day to keep pace and use and play the integrated systems (node questing, etc.) it's fine for the overall game health.
There is no statement and no goal available that says that this game should only attract hardcore players or that there won't be good rewards for time-casuals "just showing up", in your wording with undertone.
Longer, but not "not".
As I've already stated. We will see, time will show. If you cannot reach meaningful rewards (i.e. gear) as casual and/or solo-player, the overall playerbase will shrink to your elistist playerbase ("you have to work in a computer game") and thus will have the same fate all the ohter MMOs before had, independent of the fact whether they were pvp, pve, pvx (most of them are) based or not.
The major point that must be adressed correctly from intrepid, that's their responsibility, is, to respect the time of the player. Just because some 10h+ guys doesnt' want this because of resentment doesnt change that fact.
The most vocal community is almost always the 8h+ per day community. This community warps public perception of games.
The real solution is to 'disrespect' the time of a player who plays more than X hours per day. Steven doesn't want to implement this in the simple way (Labor), nor in the complex ways (grind droprate decay, limit scaling), instead preferring to put it into the World Manager, as far as we know now.
Ashes' design does not allow for any solution to this that I know of. We can hope they come up with one.
But any game with a basic econ loop that doesn't give diminishing returns for playing longer in a very specific way will have this problem. Older MMOs tend to solve this problem 'accidentally' through some things that are now treated as pain-points. Ashes has not added the relevant ones yet.
You've admitted early on that your English isn't the most refined, so you should also be able to understand that if you're going to dig for statements to interpret in a way that benefits you, you'll very easily be able to misunderstand them in a way that favours your interpretation of flaws in the game.
doesn't entail that they'll be rewarded anywhere near as well, or have anywhere near as much success, as grouped players.
Who the hell are you arguing with here, anyway? You understand that ignoring my response and monologue-rambling is just a clear admission that you don't have an actual reply to offer, right?
If you're a player who cares about receiving high rewards for their time, and you choose to play Ashes alone, *YOU'RE* the one who doesn't value your time. That's not Intrepid's problem to fix.
Intrepid is making it possible for solo players to casually invest their time into slow progression, and for ambitious players to communicate with others and connect with like-minded players to coordinate towards a higher objective and larger rewards.
You're the only one here who's managing to take the options given to you and find a way to mess it up for yourself.
Oooooor they'll learn from the community to appreciate working towards a shared goal, gearing up their guild together, and embracing having lower rewards than others, but working together in order to achieve great rewards as a group.
If people can't play a game without having a carrot dangled in front of their eyes (that's guaranteed to be the same size as everyone else's carrot, and that they must be guaranteed not to have taken away by other players), the genre is doomed anyway.
Good time-gating designs are absolutely needed to stop the 10h+ players.
Because there is something more happening then: Players are getting bored, if they have "everything". If the wrong players get bored, they start doing bad stuff. So, the full-geared Kevin is running around and is griefing, harassing and ganking other players during levling phase, during questing, during gathering.
This must be stopped as good as possible, and some MMOs out there showed that with success. If you implement a MMO for frequent players, it will not survive the first 6 month.
That's not my intention, I'm referring to them to provide the perspective of "the other side", which means player types or styles that are not yet frequenting this forums.
Here are engaged AoC fans, mainly. Usually no casuals (they wouldn't be here years before release), usually elitist players (can be derived easily from their attidue and understanding of how to play a MMO). I'm doing the other side of the coin, I'm talking about things and topics player types like me WILL bring up more (!) frequently in the future with the same opinion on it. And that's the point. Including opinions outside the bubble, because for sure within the bubble everything is just fine. But it's not. And it's allowed that this is adressed. It will anyhow be adressed again in the future, because the consequence of doubtful decisions and designs leads to feedback.
Already postet a reference that casuals can achieve lots of rewards, but just take more time. I've never said that equal rewards are needed, but not nothing and still meaningful rewards to keep pace.
What's open? It's me getting the feeling that you avoid answering to questions and topics I'm talking about and moreover stating that I should stop quoting lines from wiki. And you leave out essential lines and explanations frequently, so context is missing.
Thats your opinion, an elitist thinking player. It's not my opinion, a player that is - nowadays - a casual in terms of available time quota but not in terms of performing for pvp or pve challanges.
You can get good rewards also with low time invest. Other games prove this since years. And that's why invested time must be respected, if that is done in a group or solo makes no difference. That some things are not possible to be done solo is clear since MMOs started - don't know what you think I'm saying here. I've been playing MMOs for more then 20years now. And that's the reason why I know what's important for a good running, healthy MMO: If the game respects the players time invested and provides progression and rewards for that. It stays simple as that.
Absolutely. Never said something different. What I'm saying is, that there must be meaningful rewards and not "nothing". And the pace must be balanced. If a casual player needs 6 month for a reward that is even worse than the reward from frequent eliist player in 1 week, than it IS the games fault and the game is separateing into a two-class community which kills MMOs. It always does. Because casuals will leave and this game needs a lot of players of all types, not only elitist hardcore pvp players (that attack non-combatants at their will if they like).
Players change, markets adept. Companies ignoring that will not survive. Games that igore that, will fail. It's only doomed (or will be doomend) because of a stoic approach and insisting on designs that are in place for teenagers and MMOs that worked 20y ago.
The carrot is needed, but is must be reachable and yes, believe it our not, the majority doesnt want that getting the carrot is disturbed by somebody else because it's all about own control and choice to achieve goals to get the carrot. If the casual non-combatant/green player cannot reach carrots or only gets the smallest carrots or needs 6 month for one single small carrot the entire game with all those connected systems will not work, because there will be no playerbase left doing it. You can do your guild-wars and repeatnig firebrand raids all day long against the same few other guilds, in best case, but the world will get empty soon and will only leave an elitist, 10h+ playing player base that likes to harass the last casuals remaining running around as non-combatants.
If this is what you want, THEN the game is doomed already.
It's not just that. It's generic problems like how OWPvP works in MMORPGs. One group/guild tends to build up power and dominate everyone else which drives most people out of the server. This is because of how MMORPGs work on a fundamental level so it can't be removed. It has to be dealt with which they aren't doing.
Most PvPers like having a balanced fight. Not stomping people that never stood a chance in winning in the first place. This game has no access to that at all, with the exception of arenas which wont work because the classes aren't balanced to each other they are balanced on a paper-rock-scissors system.
And since most of end game is based around OWPvP that means most people coming in late (6+ months) wont be able to participate in PvP for the first 6 -12 months of play because they will have to level to max then get mostly geared before they can ever touch any kind of PvP.
That’s not what Steven wants Ashes to be primarily about for Steven.
Steven wants Ashes to mostly be about massive groups of PvP combat.
That being said, Soloers can do stuff in Ashes.
Steven wants to have all playertypes in that game, and his promises and what I‘ve seen so far (no mass pvp) looks fine, beside some design gaps.
They game will NOT be massive groups all the long, that just wont happen. There are thousands, hopefully millions of players that will play solo or im very small friend-groups. If you feel that it will happen because he „wants“ Ive to tell you the truth: This will only apply for some players that are in large guilds and have the time to act like this. The majority will be casuals playing im the evening, alone, in small friend groups and such things.
The others have left because they realised Ashes isn't the game for them.
And they'll be shut down, because the MMO they want is not what Ashes can be. That has nothing to do with a bubble. Not every game should appeal to the masses. And as I said two comments ago in the comments you ignored, the MMO genre in particular is in desperate need of fresh air, and you can't get innovation without straying from what the mainstream approved of in the past.
So there will absolutely be players from the mainstream crowd who will find their new home in Ashes, but they need to view the game's pros and cons as a complete package.
You can still make suggestions, but you can't tear apart the reward schemes; at best you can tweak the systems to fine-tune how accurately it they can pinpoint harassment that's distinct from competitive PvP, and tweak how easily solo-players can integrate themselves into the competition for high-tier rewards.
Then what's the problem? Ashes does that. Your definition of "keep pace" is just dishonest. I'll go into this in the next paragraph, and at the bottom of the comment.
Nope. Not elitist. Just capable of handling it when other players get more than me. I like that challenge. I get motivated by the fact that there is more out there to reach, if I keep trying.
And I mean rare stuff that actually makes a difference, not just achievement-collection rewards that every player gets after playing for a year.
If I can only ever have equipment 70-80% as strong as the top players, I'll be happy, as long as much of the rest of the casuals are in the same boat as me, and a few of us get lucky or win a special reward for a special challenge every once in a while.
Yeah, and they're all boring as hell because of it. You're free to go play them.
Again, the genre is *already* not surviving. If there's anything that's guaranteed not to save it, proven from experience, then it's yet another company that jumps the themepark treadmill production train.
The developers you refer to as the ones that "adapted" - never changed anything. They just took what WoW was already doing, and streamlined it even more. More dailies, more LFG automation, more guaranteed participation trophies and highscore hypersuperultra dungeon runs that every PvE-player gets the same access to, and more of the same loot hamster wheels where everyone expects to have the same stuff, progress at the same pace, play the game the same way, and be equally as irrelevant to the game world, as everyone else.
Then the majority needs to stick to themeparks. You're wrong, though. Most of them have gotten tired of the equalisation machine, and are fully aware that they need a more engaging challenge. They just need to find something that's meaningfully different, with an internally consistent gameplay loop that feels rewarding. Ashes will be that game for many of them; provided the game launches, and doesn't give up on its main appeals in order to appeal to the mainstream.
Casuals can be okay with getting smaller rewards, as long as there are enough other players in the game who also get those low rewards, and they get to play with and against those players.
More importantly, it'll help if they can feel like a part of supporting their guild, node, and more ambitious friends to get stronger.
And they'll also realise that they don't always have to be greens in order to have fun trying to do those things.
Whew... just three more months or so...
So-called 'casual' players want to get something tangible out of playing for 2h blocks, where 'tangible' is defined as 'growth that they don't feel stupid for having pursued instead of whatever the hardcore players were doing'.
If they're not good enough to gain something from activity X, they want a reasonable activity Y to exist.
There is a floor to this, there is a playertype that needs to succeed to have fun, but only has the skill level required to succeed in the leveling phase of ThemeParks. The genre 'isn't doing well' because it can't appeal to both and still balance PvP unless we as players let go of the entitlement complex of hardcore players.
The game does not have to give me 6x as much loot as the average player because I happen to have 6x as much free time to play. Don't suppose we can stop arguing about the extreme ends of this spectrum?
✓ Occasional Roleplayer
✓ Kinda starting to look for a Guild right now. (German)
But I'm also this kind of player, so I'm off the spectrum
And now I need to go finish the achievements, cause those fuckers added 12 since I've finished the game
Someone has to win the forum PVP
timestamp 3:38
Eh, just ignore me, bad managerial habits.
I sometimes forget that for some, provoking each other is the point.
It's not supposed to be the point, it just seems due. Like I feel like I tried my hardest to ignore this thread for over a week, after offering some understanding reframing in the beginning, but it looks like in all that time and all those pages full of patient responses, the needle didn't move an inch.
Anyway, I'll stop fighting and let everyone have their opinions. I'll only talk in node mechanics threads. 👨🔧
Parser pass, and personal re-read, both lead me to the same conclusion.
Chaliux was trying to be reasonable for most of their posts, then got provoked by NiKr, then got pulled into the vortex. Mixups everywhere.
So at some point maybe you lumped Chaliux and Airborne together due to NiKr's Provoke after a while. And I then had my usual tendency to 'defuse any two people who don't actually strongly disagree with each other'.
It might not be worth your time, but eh, that's what the sentiment score says. "These two people shouldn't actually be pushing on each other, a misconception has appeared somewhere."