Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Phase III testing has begun! During this phase, our realms will be open every day, and we'll only have downtime for updates and maintenance. We'll keep everyone up-to-date about downtimes in Discord.
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Phase III testing has begun! During this phase, our realms will be open every day, and we'll only have downtime for updates and maintenance. We'll keep everyone up-to-date about downtimes in Discord.
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
Comments
Right, that would be my expectation from you, because you don't like the same type of quests and world as those people.
I would also expect you to go 'you're lying' because you aren't generally able to perceive that other people can want things to be the other way from the way you want them.
But there are people who prefer most quests to be closer to those things you described but with better framing. There are people who prefer to play games with almost no quests at all. There are people who know that because it's simply not possible to keep generating those forever, they have to 'put in the mental effort' to find meaning in quests like that (obv the Devs should help whenever possible).
There are people who are sick of 'what everyone else considers to be the game' ending when someone has chewed through thousands of hours of dev effort in 80 hours and hit max level.
Maybe those people should only play old MMORPGs (or Sandbox ones, or TL). Maybe those people should not be 'allowed' to be satisfied with the offerings given until something can be added that makes your style of player happy too. But those people are still real.
Yeah, agreed mostly, but you can say that for anything right now, as Dygz pointed out.
They told us to wait, I believe. I think the main reason everything is coming to a friction point now is that this is probably the first time they have told us something that directly seemed intended to make people think 'ok this is a meaningful attempt to make it better' (the Economy) and then missed the mark (for some people who are complaining).
But it's still Alpha, and I don't think they've made a single 'promise' that anything will be 'good enough' yet. Only that they are standing things up to see if they work at all.
LoreForged leaving 'because there is nothing for them to test' is the right outcome, isn't it?
true , fair enough , i might be a little angry at all of it but its unfair to say they didnt take feedback but lets be real, whatever feedback they took was either stuff like bugs or things from the few loud toxic side of the fanbase, if they listened to the huge amount of feedback the rest of the fanbase gave..well we would of had a fixed artisan systems,economy,gear diversity and ttk(at least an even better one) by now ..instead we got broken not needed or extra systems or the ones that already in got worse.
at least for new world that game got the luxury of having amazing non blurry and beautiful world with great scale,great gathering,ambient and atmosphere that looks like a fantasy world even if it was on the lower end but in ashes ..yeah do i need to say at this point lol
maybe yeah, but this is 20 years on, there should be
and you are the type of person to resort to personal stabs lol, but lets be honest, the questing in this game is terrible, no one is saying that it is good, and to even put that into the devs head is basically an insult to everyone testing this alpha, they need to know what systems are not fun or engaging
You just "perfectly" described me. As expected of Dygz, one of the few who never gives up and always manages to see the big Picture.
This Game really needs all Archetypes plus needs to level up it's Landscapes and Possibilities to some extent. ESPECIALLY for a few, mostly Solo-Players like me - it was absolutely horrible during the Start of Phase 1.
I can't wait for my own Archetype. Soon. Sometime soon, maybe already next Month in November. So soon. I am hyped and can't for the graphics/looks of the Landscapes to get improved as well.
✓ Occasional Roleplayer
I am in the guildless Guild so to say, lol. But i won't give up. I will find my fitting Guild "one Day".
Commissions are meant to be the most basic always-available "thing to do", if you've got nothing better to do. Of course they won't be some revolutionary incredible experience that no one has ever seen before.
in my understanding commissions should be something you do while you are on your main quest or whatever else you are aiming for like gathering some mats , killing a mob for a drop or mat...etc its something that should generally be on the same way as the place you're heading to so you can grab some as an extra reward
Its was a compound of reasons they left. The cheaters that were left unchecked.
Broken node progression, not being able to craft, the toxic environment that Steven has created between the guilds by showing favoritism and also grind being the only mode of leveling.
This left them with no lore or story to make content. Most of their lore videos became just about the lore we have and made up stories. Myself my love for PvP combat and love for lore/story is equal. I am frustrated with the lack of main line story quests to the point im just playing other games. Its a big part of what i want to test and make sure its ready for the greater public.
Soulframe has become my main game. MMO light games are filling in where MMOs are failing. Never thought Ashes would be part of that lol
Well, there's a natural reason for that, but it goes all the way back through the history of video games to the Arcade days.
I see it every time, but still wasn't expecting to see it from Intrepid. Games with a clear focus from the start (even if they're heavy adventure/PvP) don't tend to 'resist' the efforts of internal devs to create fun alternate/downtime activities because they're not 'afraid' of turning into 'cozy' games (because they know they won't, so why worry about adding some other stuff to do?)
Games that are trying to be more things or start off that way always end up with hypercompetitives struggling to increase the 'draw' for the audience of their playstyle, because they know that if the competition aspect is unbalanced or bad, the public perception of the game will latch onto whatever good 'smaller fun thing' the other Devs have added.
If we find out in 5 years that the reason Ashes has a bad economy is because someone was worried that it would diminish PvP, I will not be surprised at all.
I know you hate to hear it, so do I, but it is alpha. All of what you're upset about is really to be expected. They get tons of feed back, how they use that is a mystery to me. If they keep trying to make everyone happy they're going to piss everyone off. Ashes has an identity crisis. Period. It doesn't know what it wants to be. It wants to bring back hard core gaming like L2 and some AA elements, but also bring in the new age causals who are used to games like NW and T&L that give dopamine hits every 3 minutes or less. It wants to innovate crafting systems, but bends to the loot goblins. You can't get just grab a ton of great systems from other games and mash them together and expect it to work. Systems will cancel each other out, or override one another. You'll have PvP griefers chipping away at the PvE crowd, corruption isn't going to be enough as it is. Okay rant over, obviously I'm not satisfied either.
I did expect a better artisan system in P3 because of the Aug dev stream. Aug to Sep wasn't enough time to fix the problems it had. I like the idea of low drops, but crafting has GOT to get more reasonable. Crafters need to be able to keep up with leveling. Slow down leveling, it's at least 5 times too quick. Then just ease a bit of the costs and travel times for crafters so they can profit a bit more and craft a little quicker. Those seems like reasonable first steps.
To fair though, it's like we sat down to eat at the table when the brisket is still on the smoker. They service up some salads here and there, but what we really want is that meat. And every so often we get glimpses into the kitchen.
The three things Ashes needs to tie those two gameplay types together are just the exact three things that aren't in the game yet, and that's why 'the casuals' are suffering.
Econ Slots, Social Orgs, Housing stuff. Done.
i am not mad cuz its an alpha , been here for years its just sad seeing how they had a lot of stuff right in A1 yet ditched all of it in A2 , seeing how they get so much feedback for systems yet they implement none of it after reworking them 3 or more times.
tryhard and casuals ...etc at the end of the day the game is supposed to be fun not a grind fest for griefers.
imo the right way is to have a lot if not most systems designed to be able to achieve something in them , what things i dunno but good things and actual progress in the span of 30 min to 1hr at least for the general experience for all the systems then you add stuff that take longer and stuff that take less time to get done.
right now if you log in ashes for 1 hour you might not find a group and considering most of the game force grouping ..yeah that would be a great experience lets add that even if you got lucky and found one it will probably take you 20-30 minutes at the very least of boring slow traveling to get there, the possibility of getting killed by the broken mobs or some random pvpers , the multiple penalties on death ...etc, no one will bother to do that nor anyone would be like damn i got 2 hrs of play time ashes sure do sound like a great time to spend those 2 hours in ..
they seem to be trying to base the game mostly on Lineage which IMO is a horrible idea , they imo should of based it more on AA since that game did actually have a somewhat of a decent balance of PVX even with the couple of big problems it had that ruined the experience for the more casual playerbase than the hardcore ones imo, it still had enough breathing space and stuff to do for the casuals to stick around for a while until they fixed the problems(which they obviously didnt), that game died cuz of these problems not cuz of the little bit of P2W they added not to say it didnt affect the game it obviously did do damage but it wasnt the "Big Bad" people try to make it out to be that ruined the game.
Your personal survey means little only because most of us here want that old school feel. We are here for meaningful PvP and PvE. When the masses get here to try the new shiny that Steven is hoping for. He is not making this game just to have something he wants to play. He plans on making money. Hardcore play style is normally about 20% of any MMOs players. Of that only the top 1% will do the hardest content and that's taken from the data of many MMO's.
The 80% that come behind that, that makes up most of a MMOs profit is the people looking for that dopamine hit. They will be looking to be rewarding every 1-2 hours with the feeling of progression. Before you say that's not what Ashes is about. It will have to be for people like us to have Ashes as a game long term. IS can, with creative thinking, do this is a way that preserves the game we want and help these gamers feeling rewarded. This can be done but uts not a sliding scale between no drops to 100% drops.
Why the hell can't anyone left seem to stop projecting that I'm not like y'all?
Is literally every disagreement now going to go back to this tribal bullshit where you just dismiss stuff because you convinced yourself that the person speaking is not part of your ingroup?
I play a game where quests don't even give you exp ffs. I am definitely more 'oldschool' than half the people here.
How did you manage to read a post I made about three things Casuals need for this game to be better for them and end up talking about how 'we want old school tho!'
Nanfoodle's post is even funnier considering that "most of us" have spent literal years arguing with each other cause all of our hardcoreness/veteranism/etc are all based on different views and experiences. We have several people form several different games - all from late 90s-early 00s, but pretty much all of us want different things. There's soooome overlap, though it usually depends on a super basic detail, rather than a bigger part of the design.
But in the current discourse, if you're not completely agreeing with an opinion IN THE EXACT WAY THE PERSON WANTS - you're the enemy, even if your own opinion is almost the same but you also want something on top of that to make it better for "the enemy".
Steven has designed Ashes for the less than 15% who share his Risk v Reward Hardcore-PvP playstyle - especially those who love massive PvP battles.
Steven is making Ashes just for the people who like to play MMORPGs the way he likes to play MMORPGs.
He's definitely not designing Ashes to attract NW or TL players. Those players will play NW and TL instead of playing Ashes.
What's the point of exploring?
To find Limestone. Near rivers. White Rocks. You hit 'em and you get Limestone, or 'Marl', or if you're lucky, Marble!
You do cool stuff with them in your Profession. Maybe someone buys something for their house or to build a building foundation. Maybe for their farm. Maybe someone needs to make Concrete.
Maybe the Stonemason's Association in your Node wanted some and you get Rep for that, and you can cash it in for cool gemstones that someone else brought/found while working the stone. Maybe the neighbouring Node citizens are mad because you came and dug up too much of their riverbed and something flooded or a landslide got caused and they declared a Protectorate War on Halcyon's North Riverbed and all citizens of Halcyon now will kill you if they see you around there poaching their White Rocks.
Then you and the gang form up and go there in the dead of night in winter and make off like literal bandits with a Caravan full of Limestone and Marble when the Citizens were mostly sleeping, because y'all really want that Stonemason Association Rep since you want to do something to build a cool Guild Hall and there's no way you are traveling halfway across the world to try to gather Limestone in that Wilderness Node far up North, you'd rather fight it out with the Halcyon Citizens. On the upside, your new Guild Hall looks SWEET.
Risk vs Reward.
Except even that warning system won't change things, because the core issue is still there. And the only solution for a not-maxlvl-maxgear player is to simply not play the game during the war.
Oh and the war itself - it's only during prime-time, right. Cause it's a pvp event and afaik that part of the design hasn't changed. So your situation, supposedly, won't even work, cause no one would be asleep. Instead the weaker node would simply not log on that day and the stronger one will have 0 risk, while all the reward AND will get loot from locals too.
All of that came from a simple change to the design that wasn't there back when Ashes was sold as a cool fantasy of what you described in your post.
And the issue remains because in Steven's eyes all those weaker nodes deserve the suffering and loss simply because they're weaker. They're losers. They didn't grind the game 24/7 for weeks in time and are now undergeared/lvled, so they deserve to be punished for not having the time/will to play the game how Steven wants people to play it.
And I'm sure there's ways to change the design slightly, which would resolve the core issue in some way (I've suggested at least one before), but would Steven be willing to implement that change, given his views on this stuff? And if he WAS willing, then would a year's worth of feedback of "we dislike this, this is suffering, this is bad, we want something better" not be enough for him to at least say "yeah, we hear you, we'll think up of some other approach to this design, but for now we gotta fix other things".
https://youtube.com/shorts/fChLTATOx0I?si=_dNcs7xggy2lN78c
To him, all of the hardcore suffering pvpness IS the core design, and that ain't changing.
If this is the way, Just remove crafting, remove Crate runs, Remove C-Vans, Remove gathering. Remove the AH. Many people just want to sit in one spot and grind mobs over and over,,, We can do this in MANY other MMOs, do not need another one, to do the same old thing.
but even this is concerning, steven is a self proclaimed RMTer, not throwing shade just the truth, so hitting max level and buying your self and your friends max level gear to skip interacting with the systems probably makes him not even realise how bad and tedious the systems he is designing actually are, i think no one is disagreeing that casual players and pvpers/players like steven can co - exist in an mmo, but one thing we can all agree on is no one wants to play an mmo with a dwindling player base, New world is a prime example of this, once people started leaving, everyone started leaving
MMO's are suppose to be social, once you have the best weapons, best gear, titles, mounts etc, you are suppose to be able to go to a populated town and flex them, some of the most nostalgic moments we have in MMO's is seeing the max lvl players with their high tier gear and aspiring to be like this one day.
i think if we keep going the way we are going, sadly this game wont have enough population to support any of this, and a game like ashes simply does not work without population, we can take phase 3 as a good reference for this
My understanding is that Node Wars wouldn't work like that? Did I miss something? I thought it was only Node Sieges and specific objectives within Wars that would be Primetime Only?
A Protectorate War would be, like, exactly the thing that should spawn a targeted 'Lawless Zone' with real stakes that could genuinely be up 'the whole time'. Especially since the 'aggressor' group wouldn't be able to do it at all?
Am I just not seeing the flaw in this activity type/concept due to my biases?
Agreed overall but please please no more 'Emblems', no more 'Certificates', no more 'Additives' that all serve the purpose of 'we know some of y'all can't/don't want to keep track of or remember more than 3 items so here's a wildcard'.
Let those of us who enjoy crafting from the perspective of at least a little immersion keep SOMETHING.
The last thing I want to see in Ashes is people farming 'Rare/Epic/Legendary Sanctus Emblem' at level 50. (basically, progression requirements dictate that devs probably don't save any 'item number implementation' by using this catch-all, so I want them to do it properly and let people just get used to different materials, it doesn't have to be as binary as 'Emblems' or 'Bloat')
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Server_prime-time
The prime-time is about the objectives themselves, while the "kill each other all the time" is supposed to be 24/7 (or at least was the case as of may 2024).
Though the "no risk" part would still kinda remain, cause if you're doing something that's outside of the war's objecetives and during off-hours - your risk is waaaay lower.
And supposedly war objectives are the main source of "points" that go towards winning the war, so it'd also be a question of whether the war would even still be up during your white stone theft. Assuming that the targeted node was the one to declare the war, I'd imagine that they'd do this during as beneficial to them time as possible, which would usually mean prime-time and with an immediate push for objectives to punish your side (well, whichever objectives can exist in a protectorate war).
But either way, yes, I was wrong in my statement there.
I think THAT would exactly be an "objective" in such a war. And then it'd be a prime-time thing.
Though I do agree that a player-controlled lawless zone spawn (especially if it's 24/7) as a war option would be much better than the current "we just murder each other for loot anywhere in the world" (at least afaik it's anywhere, though not sure tbh). And it'd be a much more of an opt-in kinda deal too, which would go a long way to help the lowbie and the casual citizens.
But then the question of "is it a protectorate against literally anyone or just a specific node's citizens"? And if it's anyone, then how exactly is that a node war and not just a mayoral edict or smth. And if it's against certain citizens then what's stopping the target of the war from just getting some guildie friends from other nodes to do the gathering instead.
I'd be ok with a mayor-controlled lawless zone spawn, but iirc the last time this kinda idea was brought up - a fair bit of people were against it? Though not sure if I'm misremembering it. Maybe your parser has some data on that in its history.
I can check, but I don't think the priors would match.
This would be more of a 'enemy triggered this negative condition', 'mayor THEN has the option to respond by declaring Protectorate War'. And the 'War' in this case basically being 'Lawless Zone, all non-Citizens of this node can be killed without immediate corruption penalty'.
I realize that I'm much more used to PvP-RP situations where people do the actual playing out of the stakes even if the system isn't entirely about forcing it, but I think you can force it.
Games already track all this sort of thing for their Achievements and just basic background data metrics. Stacking Social/Node incentives on top of that isn't hard, just 'work that takes long'. Obviously things like Elite do this for everything but even back then there was still the option for it.
So without going into detail, I think Intrepid's Designers could easily come up with a system for this type of war that would definitely still be 'cheesed' but it would be cheesed 'in the right way' and come at a cost to some character even if that character never suffered the most direct consequences of it.
As for sieges they need a few things to feel better then the current war ball situation. If there was a bunch of smaller objectives that existed in the fields so it distributes the players across the space. Then more farther spaced critical objectives for the smaller group tactics that prevents the zergy feeling it currently presents in sieges. I also propose a negotiation phase and system to the siege's lead up, which can present changes in the situation such as changing the time it takes place.
Then he has been lying.
I am more like - concerned - that he goes and kills his Game with it.
For like " ONLY 15% " of all Players or less ?? How is that ever going to finance the Game ? Am i underestimating such a low Number when the Game has monthly Subscriptions ?
Sir Steven shouldn't hate the Concept that "Everyone" can get something like a Trophy - and/or Achievement : and partake in something rare and/or special and score a rare Win with it.
I myself for Example,
can be completely content with being a lowly - and i truly mean "LOWLY" - > Underdog Grunt who will never ever forever being able to own a Freehold,
never be able to do any Group Content aside from if i am lucky and others are unusually merciful and/or generous : and that i will forever be a Victim on the huge Worldmap for most Players or at least more than One other Player who could just go and attack my Character.
But that doesn't mean that the Game is good because of it.
That also doesn't mean that the Game is unique because of it.
That doesn't mean that Ashes of Creation is something special only because most Players will forever be an Underdog and only like a handful of People or more will for Example being able to have a flying Mount.
And No !
I don't mean the flying Mounts specifically. I mean everything else.
The Game needs to -> let's say,
be AT LEAST a little bit more rewarding and fun for Solo Players than it has been in Phase 1.
I have no Doubts that 1.0. Release Ashes of Creation can* be this Game.
But the important Question is, if Sir Steven even wants that.
✓ Occasional Roleplayer
I am in the guildless Guild so to say, lol. But i won't give up. I will find my fitting Guild "one Day".