There's no risk in moving crafted goods, and that needs to change.

My interest in this game focuses largely on running caravans - and I have a concern about the fact that crafted gear / items don't risk being looted / deleted on death like gatherables / processed goods.

As it stands, I won't stand to gain any profit by moving crafted items, because there's simply no risk in doing so.

I also don't think intrepid currently intends on changing this, because they treat this strictly as a risk of corruption.

I believe this will create an environment where gear floods the market and becomes extremely cheap as crafters sell at a loss in order to gain crafting experience. This in turn will make leveling crafting professions even more expensive than they already are, and create an impenetrable barrier for anyone who doesn't get into the crafting early enough. World of Warcraft has this same market environment and I find it very uncompelling.

If intrepid wants to follow their "Risk v Reward" model, they need to change this.
If intrepid wants a game that allows people to devote themselves to crafting, they need to change this.

Some people might complain that its 'too hardcore' to risk losing gear on death. Perhaps they're right. But I didn't put my hopes in this game for it end up like World of Warcraft.

Albion Online has a great economic model, and I would advise the devs to take some lessons from that game.

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Noaani

DroneTheMask wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

DroneTheMask wrote: »

ghojinn wrote: »

Good way to kill the game.

Game is dead in the water if its too care-bear. EVE and Albion are proof such a decision would not kill the game.

EVE and Albion prove that this kind of thing is niche.

Keep in mind, those games have populations in the tens of thousands, ESO, WoW and FFXIV have populations in the millions or tens of millions.

Now, Ashes isn't aiming for the popularity of those three games with millions of players. However, Ashes is planning on supporting an Oceania and Brazil server. Since Oceania players are usually about less than 10% of the EU population of a given game, and 5% of the NA population, that means in order for Ashes to achieve the success Steven has said he wants, and is starting up servers based on attaining that success, Ashes would need to support 10 NA servers and 5 EU servers all at full capacity, just to statistically have a single half population Oceania server.

That actually puts Intrepids required total sustained, long term player population at significantly over a million.

Saying "this thing is proven to work" and then pointing at 2 games that each have 5% or so of the population Ashes needs in order to meet the expectations Steven has set isn't an overly good argument.

These games' success isn't in the membership alone. It's in the micro-transactions as well. Steven isn't banking on subs alone to meet his mark either. Neither do any of the games you've mentioned.

Steven is also betting that his game will succeed due to his focus on the games integrity (Anti-gold buying / botting / p2w / etc), which we don't see in any other MMO on the market. You can't measure how this will affect his success, but he's making that gamble knowingly. If he's confident enough to forward $40+ million into his game, we can assume he's not going to sacrifice his core tenants to avoid being 'niche'. He's stated already this will not be a game for everyone. He's entirely focused on risk and reward game design, which I've already argued is why they should consider my OP.

He's not here to compete with WoW, ESO, or FFXIV. So bringing them up is entirely irrelevent. This game will not be even similar to those games.

I think you need to pay better attention to what you are replying to.

Steven has stated a population expectation for Ashes. This has no relation to a microtransaction revenue stream.

My comments above were based on Steven's expectations for population, and thus only comparing to population of other games is 100% appropriate. Microtransaction revenue is a different topic entirely.

Since the games that are closest to Ashes in terms of the population expectations Steven has set out for the game are the likes of WoW, ESO and FFXIV, discussing them in this thread is actually more appropriate than discussing EVE or Albion. If Steven wasn't here to compete with WoW or ESO, he should not have put himself in a position where he needs a sustained 50k+ Australian population - as that is (by all accounts) more than either of those games has right now.

DroneTheMask

Noaani wrote: »

DroneTheMask wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

DroneTheMask wrote: »

ghojinn wrote: »

Good way to kill the game.

Game is dead in the water if its too care-bear. EVE and Albion are proof such a decision would not kill the game.

EVE and Albion prove that this kind of thing is niche.

Keep in mind, those games have populations in the tens of thousands, ESO, WoW and FFXIV have populations in the millions or tens of millions.

Now, Ashes isn't aiming for the popularity of those three games with millions of players. However, Ashes is planning on supporting an Oceania and Brazil server. Since Oceania players are usually about less than 10% of the EU population of a given game, and 5% of the NA population, that means in order for Ashes to achieve the success Steven has said he wants, and is starting up servers based on attaining that success, Ashes would need to support 10 NA servers and 5 EU servers all at full capacity, just to statistically have a single half population Oceania server.

That actually puts Intrepids required total sustained, long term player population at significantly over a million.

Saying "this thing is proven to work" and then pointing at 2 games that each have 5% or so of the population Ashes needs in order to meet the expectations Steven has set isn't an overly good argument.

These games' success isn't in the membership alone. It's in the micro-transactions as well. Steven isn't banking on subs alone to meet his mark either. Neither do any of the games you've mentioned.

Steven is also betting that his game will succeed due to his focus on the games integrity (Anti-gold buying / botting / p2w / etc), which we don't see in any other MMO on the market. You can't measure how this will affect his success, but he's making that gamble knowingly. If he's confident enough to forward $40+ million into his game, we can assume he's not going to sacrifice his core tenants to avoid being 'niche'. He's stated already this will not be a game for everyone. He's entirely focused on risk and reward game design, which I've already argued is why they should consider my OP.

He's not here to compete with WoW, ESO, or FFXIV. So bringing them up is entirely irrelevent. This game will not be even similar to those games.

I think you need to pay better attention to what you are replying to.

Steven has stated a population expectation for Ashes. This has no relation to a microtransaction revenue stream.

My comments above were based on Steven's expectations for population, and thus only comparing to population of other games is 100% appropriate. Microtransaction revenue is a different topic entirely.

Since the games that are closest to Ashes in terms of the population expectations Steven has set out for the game are the likes of WoW, ESO and FFXIV, discussing them in this thread is actually more appropriate than discussing EVE or Albion. If Steven wasn't here to compete with WoW or ESO, he should not have put himself in a position where he needs a sustained 50k+ Australian population - as that is (by all accounts) more than either of those games has right now.

You never really explained why Steven needs a specific # of people to play the game in order to get Oceania and Brazil servers. Your correlation of "Oceania / brazil servers MUST account for 10% of the playerbase" is an arbitrary number, and is not strictly necessary for the game to support such servers. It could be 3% of the playerbase, and Steven may still support those servers for reasons not strictly related to finance.

Steven gave a population expectation believing in his 'niche' game design. That is to say, because his game offers something that the MMO genre hasn't really gotten at all in decades.

Lastly, my point wasn't that Ashes should be everything that is "EVE" and "Albion". It already simply isnt; neither of these have the traditional Fantasy MMO style. One plays like its League of Legends and the other has the reputation of playing like a spreadsheet. Of course these games don't meet WOW, FFXIV, or ESO; they are a different style of gameplay.

Ashes on the other hand, will have a similar kind of gameplay that promotes immersion into a fantasy setting - and that's about as far as a comparison between ashes and these games will get. And it's really the only important one, and its something that Albion and EVE lacks.

Noaani

DroneTheMask wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

DroneTheMask wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

DroneTheMask wrote: »

ghojinn wrote: »

Good way to kill the game.

Game is dead in the water if its too care-bear. EVE and Albion are proof such a decision would not kill the game.

EVE and Albion prove that this kind of thing is niche.

Keep in mind, those games have populations in the tens of thousands, ESO, WoW and FFXIV have populations in the millions or tens of millions.

Now, Ashes isn't aiming for the popularity of those three games with millions of players. However, Ashes is planning on supporting an Oceania and Brazil server. Since Oceania players are usually about less than 10% of the EU population of a given game, and 5% of the NA population, that means in order for Ashes to achieve the success Steven has said he wants, and is starting up servers based on attaining that success, Ashes would need to support 10 NA servers and 5 EU servers all at full capacity, just to statistically have a single half population Oceania server.

That actually puts Intrepids required total sustained, long term player population at significantly over a million.

Saying "this thing is proven to work" and then pointing at 2 games that each have 5% or so of the population Ashes needs in order to meet the expectations Steven has set isn't an overly good argument.

These games' success isn't in the membership alone. It's in the micro-transactions as well. Steven isn't banking on subs alone to meet his mark either. Neither do any of the games you've mentioned.

Steven is also betting that his game will succeed due to his focus on the games integrity (Anti-gold buying / botting / p2w / etc), which we don't see in any other MMO on the market. You can't measure how this will affect his success, but he's making that gamble knowingly. If he's confident enough to forward $40+ million into his game, we can assume he's not going to sacrifice his core tenants to avoid being 'niche'. He's stated already this will not be a game for everyone. He's entirely focused on risk and reward game design, which I've already argued is why they should consider my OP.

He's not here to compete with WoW, ESO, or FFXIV. So bringing them up is entirely irrelevent. This game will not be even similar to those games.

I think you need to pay better attention to what you are replying to.

Steven has stated a population expectation for Ashes. This has no relation to a microtransaction revenue stream.

My comments above were based on Steven's expectations for population, and thus only comparing to population of other games is 100% appropriate. Microtransaction revenue is a different topic entirely.

Since the games that are closest to Ashes in terms of the population expectations Steven has set out for the game are the likes of WoW, ESO and FFXIV, discussing them in this thread is actually more appropriate than discussing EVE or Albion. If Steven wasn't here to compete with WoW or ESO, he should not have put himself in a position where he needs a sustained 50k+ Australian population - as that is (by all accounts) more than either of those games has right now.

You never really explained why Steven needs a specific # of people to play the game in order to get Oceania and Brazil servers. Your correlation of "Oceania / brazil servers MUST account for 10% of the playerbase" is an arbitrary number, and is not strictly necessary for the game to support such servers.

It isn't an arbitrary number, it is both a historical and statistical number.

Oceania has never made up 10% of the population of any major MMORPG. We have no reason to assume Ashes will break from the norm. This makes my comments perfectly appropriate from a historical perspective.

From a statistical perspective, Oceania has a little less than 45 million people, North America and Europe combined have a little over a billion. Without any reason to assume there is a higher percentage of gamers in Oceania than North America or Europe, we have to assume the in game population would be a similar ratio.

As such, I don't need to give a reason why my stated numbers are what they are. They are the default assumption/expectation.

If you disagree, explain why you think Ashes would appeal to the average Australian or New Zealand gamer more than the average US or Canadian gamer. If you don't have a reason to assume that, then the only assumption is that the numbers that match both historical and statistical data are accurate.

If Steven does support a server that only has a third of the population the game is designed for (your 3% population comment), then that would be a dead server. There would be no PvP for resources, no fighting over caravans, no sieges because everyone thet wants a castle or freehold will have one.

Essentially, it would play like a broken game. This isn't a matter of finances, it is a matter of the game itself being viable to play on the regional servers Steven has said the game will support.

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