Good day Intrepid & Alpha Testers!
For all of the past 3 weekends I did feedback posts with 20-30 points each for the different stuff I tested, issues I encountered and so on. Initially I planned on continuing this for every week as I take notes during testing, especially for the stuff that don't belong in bug reports and during the server downtime throughout the week I write the more detailed feedback post. However, this weekend I will focus on 3 points that are in my opinion part of one big issue, that I personally feel should be adressed as soon as possible because it keeps getting worse every day the servers are online.
Feel free to discuss, disagree, agree or add, thank you for taking your time reading this!'
So what is the Topic of this post?
Toxicity, Griefing and Exploiting.
Those three have one thing in common, they are a big part of why the community in games has shifted over the past years. And that not being a good direction. Of course all of this is subjective, but I think a lot of people can relate.
The community of people that are playing games, MMOs in the case of Ashes has dramatically shifted to being more and more toxic, unfriendly and the main part about the gameplay that people consider fun is consisting of ruining the fun at the game for others. Now the things I'm going to list might be more true on some realms than on others, but just taking a quick look through the different discord channels pretty much shows that it's about the same for most of them.
I will again put details in spoilers so it's easier to skip stuff that you think is irrelevant.
We need ingame support now already.
From what Intrepid shares to far, for example, the reply you get when writing a support ticket about player reports, says that there won't be any ingame support during the Alpha.
In my opinion this already starts causing one of the worst things than can happen to any game. The community is getting more and more toxic every weekend, people grief, people exploit and nothing is being done about any of that. This not being addressed right away causes more and more people to either join that type of behaviour or simply stop testing.
For me personally, this type of stuff being talked about by Steven yes, but nothing being done about it causes me personally not to quit testing, but I am much less motivated to put effort in or to test with others, because the entire mood on the realm is shifting. There's the people that enjoy ruining the fun for others, but not testing much, don't know if they even report the issues they cause themselves, like using abusable mechanics to terrorize low level players - and then there's the people that genuinely want to help the game with the testing, but are being kept from doing so.
Personally, this leaves me with the same feeling that I have encountered in so many other games, where there were claims that they'd do something about it, but eventually nothing every happened.
A toxic community will kill any game.
This might be a bit drastic to say for some people, but the reason I believe this to be true are simple to explain.
A toxic community always results in the same things from my experience.
- Toxic people are having fun harassing people that just want to enjoy the game
- If nothing is being done about it the harassed people eventually quit
- Being left with nobody to harass, many of the toxic people will quit as well after some time
- Few players = little income for the game
Now I know that Ashes isn't about being all fun, peace and happiness at all times, but just because there is PvP in a game, that's not the reason it's getting toxic. 10-15 years ago there was a different mentality than there is now, systems that worked back then, issues that got solved within the community itself back then, all that is different now, and it needs to be seen and to be acknowledged. People will abuse things, exploits and mechanics that are abusable, people will use the given systems to actively try to be as toxic as they can be. Because again - ruining the fun for others is their fun.
And from my experience, honestly, I have been part of the toxicity problem myself until around 2-3 years ago, this won't resolve itself. It needs the game devs to actively work against it. As long as there are abusable systems, people will abuse it.
Griefing has to be bannable, not just when the gaming world is watching.
This might sound a little harsh, but it's honestly just the way I feel about this.
I personally think it's great that people got banned for griefing Asmongold like that, but as a normal player it currently feels like, while this issue was addressed in the stream and at first had me feeling happy that there was something done about the issue, griefers on other realms, griefing players that are not Asmongold get away unpunished, they do whatever the hell they want, they kill low level players, blame it on other guilds by creating guilds with similar names and whatnot. Reporting this however only resulted in being told that there wont be any ingame support during the Alpha. So now I personally feel like I think a lot of people do - why does this seemingly only matter when it happens to one of the biggest streamers? It feels really shitty as a normal player. I fully support banning griefers, but all players have to matter equally.
Exploiters need to be banned as well.
This honestly seems to be one of the most common issues across the realms from what I could gather on the discord. Because people are using exploits to get an advantage over others and then use that advantage to grief. Whether it's getting to level 25 within the first 2 weekends, duping or alike. The issue results in toxic people, that are already causing trouble for the community use exploits to have an even worse impact. The discord is flooded with evidence, screenshots, clips showing people exploiting, even using scripts and so far nothing is happening.
I know exploits need to be tested, they need to be discovered and validated. But it should be easy to check the logs for people that killed the same exploitable monsters more than 10 times, that duped the same item more than 3 times, I understand this is a lot of work that needs to be put in, but if it's not being addressed in time it might actually damage the game, as there are already people quitting because of it, and we're only in week 4.
And isn't that harmful for the testing as well? You're losing players that test different systems to players that farm the same exploitable monster for hours straight, probably not even reporting the exploit.
Something needs to be done about abusable PvP systems quickly.
I personally feel that the changes to corruption were really good, it definitely caused people on our realm to go corrupt less often. But while this has reduced the number of corrupted griefers, people have found new ways to abuse the PvP systems.
I know solutions aren't really the feedback you're looking for, but I think there's a need for quick temporary solutions that help the harassed people until you find a solution that works for the finished game.
Here's a list of things that I think should be looked into:
- Guild wars need to not be instant for now
I feel a 5min time frame between the guild war announcement and the start of the war, making players attackable would already do a lot to prevent people from abusing it for now. Because the way the system currently is, on our realm there are people running around, declaring war on any group of players they see grinding, no matter the level etc, kill them until they leave their guild and then move on to the next victim. This has been insanely frustrating to a lot of people on our server this weekend. Giving people the opportunity to leave the guild b4 turning into a free kill would at least lower that frustration imo
- Make Home Nodes a Safe Zone
While I understand why guild wars result in free kills within a node, this is being abused like crazy atm. People can't even craft or go afk for a minute if they're in a guild. I don't think all Nodes should be safe for everyone, but making the node you're citizen in a safe zone for you could help fighting the rising toxicity levels a bit. (this should obviously not apply during a Node War)
- Put a Level Lock for Guild Wars to protect lower players.
By this I don't mean a general level restriction for guild wars. I am talking about having a minimum of 5 levels below the highest level guild member being attackable in a guild war. So that for example, if you have an exploiter guild with multiple people being lvl 25 already declaring war on another guild, they can only attack people of level 20 or higher. So if they go around, declaring war on low level guilds that are farming around the lvl 12 areas, they can't attack them.
- Remove Exp Penalty for GW, NW and force flag PvP deaths
I think having an exp penalty on PvP deaths are good, but not for all PvP mechanics. I feel like there should be a difference made between stuff like Guild War, Force Flag PvP and Node War vs. PvP zone, Caravans and Corruption. The last three really are a risk&reward thing, but I feel for the others, losing items and time is penalty enough.
Feel free to share your experiences on your realm, whether you share my opinion or not! Have you experienced the types of toxicity and griefing on your realm?
