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
Lol you think im here to bash this game lol I been backing this game with money and words since the start. Mmorpg.com forums I have been setting records straight on this game from there to dumb YouTube videos lol. I have been MMOing for over 26 years. I have followed the development of more MMOs then I can count. I have tested more MMOs and games then I can count. I know Ashes is on a bad track. Im here still posting that someone will listen. I dont want Ashes to go down the road they are. The current plan to make the game Steven and I want. Is not on this current plan and direction.
Here this is relevant...
Quests in starter locations should be tied up to the liveliest nodes around and should ideally take you to a few POIS where people are gathering frequently. Their oh-so-beloved World Manager should have the ability to redirect quest hooks based on node/poi activity, though maybe that's me asking a bit too much here.
And the mentorship program has to push guilds to be more proactive with their recrutment of newbies, so that it's not just basic shouts in global.
In other words, if Intrepid still want to have a dynamic world - they gotta build one. And, hell, considering that we will no longer have node content parity - it's even easier to do now! Player funnels will 100% exist, because only certain nodes will have good enough content for people to gather at, so the option variety for the quest hooks would be much smaller, which is easier to code/work around.
Actually I think this would be great.
Elite's BGS already does exactly this and it is awesome. I can 'pull randoms to our sector' without them ever reading the actual Missions I put up on INARA because I can trigger states that benefit them, and situations that would draw them to the region, then my group can chain these.
While this doesn't result in actual recruitment in that game, in a game like Ashes it definitely would.
I was somewhat expecting it already but genuinely kinda 'forgot' that some of this was in the plan, and hopefully still is.
The issue with THAT though, is, given the current direction, those places will almost assuredly be lawless zones, which means that it's gonna be a first come first serve kinda thing, except instead of "serve" it's gonna be "win". The dudes that come there first (the hardcore grinders) will farm out as much benefits as they can. Then they can snowball from there because they'll have absolute free reign on anyone that comes there.
This will be only worse if Steven does cave into people's demands and makes full gear way more droppable. Then the snowball will be a literal avalanche, as we've already seen in A2.
And when all of those things combine into the final evil boss of game design - that's when your mid-core people leave the game, cause they can't get anything of value, your hardcores start hunting casuals risk-free, cause the gap between them is a fucking canyon, and the casuals eventually leave because of that.
If Steven wants a grindy mmo - he needs to go full L2. Full items barely drop. Cafting is viable, but still takes a fair bit of time, especially the higher you go in grades. The leveling is slooooooow. And gear scaling is relatively tight.
This would mean that even the hardcorest people are not too far away from midcores, so there's at least an illusion of the ability to fight against them. This would allow the game to survive till lategame, where the true grind of OE and farming for a 1% boost begins, where midcores will start being more and more able to fight against the hardcores. All while casuals are not really touched all that much, cause both parts of the upper cores are preoccupied.
Though even this would require a fair bit of content in the world, so that the midcores that are too scared to lose too much stuff can still have some alternative to farm at. The size of the world would imply that we'll have this, but with the recent statements by Steven, I'm no longer so sure about that.
Leads me to believe that we aren't getting the whole story or Steven isn't understanding why player retention is so low. Honestly if they need to cut content they can but there needs to be deliberate choice where and what. Not some of the important systems that lead to the Dynamic feel of the the game. Like maybe we don't get that northern island on the west continent. Or the undersea stuff is not released until after launch. But they need to hunker down on some of the current systems that are pretty terrible for people to deal with and get them in a workable state.
Then all of us need to hang somewhat with this inside Sir Steven's Ears for numerous Months.
( I personally wish the Jundark to be a Jungle with Tree's like a HUNDRED METERS HIGH or so, which pose a certain Danger of insta-killing Players nearby when being chopped down. ) ^.^
✓ 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".
I want it too but what other land mass can we cut? Planned to head up myself
Doesn't have to be the best weapons, best gear - my Ratonga main in EQ2 was max Level, but wore starting rags because the only gear she was allowed to use were the Jewelry and Weapon crafted by her slave-master Kerran.
The most nostalgic moments are created by seeing all the diverse ways each character progresses and the stories they bring with them to the game world.
There are many different ways to inspire others besides just being "the best". It's cool enough just being different.
My Ratonga main in EQ2 sparked many fun interactions with other players being so shocked that they would ask, "Why are you in this region in only starting rags??!!??"
"Because this is all my master will allow me to wear."
In WoW, I typically accomplished that by running a 0 Level Forsaken over to the Tauren starting area.
But, Steven believes that the most memorable moments are when you have gained big Rewards after surviving a dramatic PvP ordeal - especially when that PvP is a massive group battle.
Sure. Being an asshole to other players by impeding their game session goals can also create memorable encounters.
Not necessarily the best way to retain a massive playerbase, though.
The very first question I asked Steven the first time he joined us on The Ashen Forge was to compare Ashes PvP to ArcheAge and EvE PvP. He said the primary difference is that Ashes would not have any permanent zones that auto-flagged FFA PvP - that the Corruption mechanics would be the same across the entire map.
Steven says a lot of things he knows the MMORPG playerbase want to hear - especially when Jeffrey Bard was a round to help coach him.
But, Steven doesn't know how to support other playstyles besides his own and has disdain for other playstyles.
By now, we know we can't really trust what Steven says - even though he's not intending to be untruthful.
I don't think the world is that big as it is. Travelling from Anvils to Lionhold isn't that long considering it's from the end to end of a continent . For either someone who plays causally, 2 to 8 hours a week, or someone who plays 20 hours a weeks. I don't see this being a problem. You also have to note that we don't have the forms of fast travel in yet, and faster mounts are in, ships, ect. The world is going to seem big to some without those. I think it's small still. As long as the world has content it'll be fine for both HC and C players.
I don't even know what PvX is in Ashes, when explained it just sounds like PvP.. So finding consistent PvX I'll assume is just finding some consistent PvP. Because any PvE content is going to known that you can go do. I don't see how finding consistent PvP in a less populated world would be hard, just go to where the population is. Or stick with a server that is high population, go to a streamer server.
some numbers:
about 40k people have bought in to ashes. (gpt guess). with the game not having a box price I can see many more joining in at launch. The prelaunch bug will be real. They got 8k people on one realm, that's insane. I could see them needing 10 or 20 realms at launch if that 8K is stable. 8K on a single realm without layers/shards ect really hasn't been done before.
There might not be many people testing now (I'm not) but that's okay, it's probably a good thing. Let the devs work on these issues. Players will be back when the game hits mile stones, the devs don't need us. Open development might be hurting development. They need to rely more on internal blind testing. And we get an option to check stuff out and report bugs as find them. This will help the game be better at launch. We also can complain on the forums.
Unless IS publishes the number of purchases we're all guessing. I think 40K is a safe guess, 100K buy ins? Maybe? But that's a lot of money. 100k buy ins at 100 dollars is:
Not sure if you are joking or not, but since a lot of people fail at this kind of math, I'm going to correct you.
100,000 people paying $100 does not equal a billion dollars, it equals ten million - not enough to make an MMORPG.
It's a joke. I didn't want to add it up so put a meme up. Although thinking about it I did start to question how much money they have left. I don't think A2 is progressing as quick as they planned and with such a high team count, 200 or 250, that'll be some run away spending with no revenue. I'm not a money or business guy so I don't know.
Also no, it was not 100k at $100. The 100k figure was before that iirc. If anything THAT is what the AI should've pointed to. Steven is in at over 60mil and ~25 were brought in from the bundles. $100 bundles miiiight've brought in a few hundred thousands, but I highly doubt that. Cosmetics might've brought in a few hundred thousands as well, over the years.
And I think he also said that he was about to go at least 20mil deeper from his own money, and this was at the start of A2 iirc.
So, overall, we should be over 100mil. And supposedly there's been a few private investors as well, so there's that.
(Deleted section as @Noaani mentioned because maths wasn't 100% coherent, however if we were to take New Worlds fall off, they lost 90% of their concurrent player base within 6 months, therefore the math may not have been as far off as we think)
If we based AOC's sub count hypothetically on New Worlds 2021 - 2022 Daily Player count (assuming that only the daily player count was subbed) the approximate sub income for the first year would be $51,000,000.00 again hypothetical because there would be players that were subbed and not playing.
I think you get where I am coming from on a player retention basis.
If we take Throne of Liberty as an example which is free to play, this game had 3 million players at launch in October 2024 and now has a daily average player count of 14k in October 2025 (less than 1% retention in a year since release, the same as new world). With MMO's having notoriously poor retention numbers I think it's safe to say that Steven certainly has money to play with when he considered going down the niche route.
With the state of the game I think we are miles off of being finished which could quite easily be another 2-3 years of development.
Ofcourse this is all hypothetical, but business profit forecasting is usually mostly hypothetical at this stage without knowing exact costs.
I'm interested to know how many of us think the game will retain over 500k players?
For comparison
Guildwars has 12m active accounts
ESO has 25m active accounts
BDO - 200k daily players
All of which are not subscription based
WOW has an approximate 7.5m active accounts in a subscription format
But is the most successful mmo the planet has ever seen.
And FF14 unofficial consensus indicates a active subscriber count of sub 1m, a franchise with a diehard fan base built over decades.
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/final-fantasy/ff14-unofficial-census-finds-what-we-were-all-pretty-much-feeling-before-patch-7-25-dawntrails-playerbase-has-likely-been-on-the-decline/
Thoughts?
@ELRYNO ; Your math is off too lol, but I see your point.
If they lock down the issues and protect the game from exploits/rmt then I think they'll stay over 1 million at year 1 and 2. Probably start out much higher like 10mil. If those number maintain then yeah they'll be good.
Thank you for the response. I do find hypothetical mathematics interesting & the idea of 10 million at launch equally interesting. If we were to look at New World as an example, their marketing push was phenomenal, bagging them an approximate 17 million box sales since 2021 (4.5 million in the first month), estimating their revenue to be close to a billion dollars on just box sales alone. Their player retention however has not been a success, leading to over 90% of their player count becoming inactive within 1 year. Their launch concurrent player went from 900k in October 2021 to 50k in October 2022 (verified from multiple sources).
This staggering stat means that out of the approximate 17 million box sales, they have managed to retain a daily concurrent player count of less than 1%. On a game that has had a AAA studio with some of the best developers the industry has to offer working on it.
If AOC had similar player retention figures based on 10 million players, the daily player count would be somewhere in the region of 10,000. Likely only enough to sustain 2 realms.
Would this happen? Who knows, they might have an extremely strong player retention because of their niche design philosophy and live happily ever after.
If not then the studio will be banging out the cosmetic content and early access box fees quicker than you can say boo to a goose.
In the January 2023 livestream Steven said Alpha 2 had over 100,000 players that had "purchased into it."
At that time, the CHEAPEST option to purchase Alpha 2 was $250. That was more than 1.5 years before the start of A2. In Summer of 2023 Intrepid was actively trying to create fomo for Alpha-2 with their January 2024 deadline, and if you believe the 100K number from Jan 2023, I have a hard time thinking the Jan 2024 deadline passed with less than 150K A2 purchasers (perhaps 200K tbh). As a side note, the A2 fomo in Summer 2023 was extremely under-handed and dirty, so as much as it would suck to see AoC fail, I won't shed any tears for Steven if it does.
Shortly after the Jan 2024 deadline they started selling A2 access for $100 (lol!), and I'd be willing to bet they got at least another 50K purchasers from that (likely a VERY low estimate, because it seems like at least half the people I encountered in A2 were $100 buyers).
So (150,000 x $250) + (50,000 x $100) = $30 mil. It's probably double that based on my conservative estimates, in addition to Kickstarter, early backers, $500 backers and cosmetic-only sales. So maybe as much as $60 mil.
Many people seem to believe Steven put in $25 mil. of his own money. Perhaps he did, technically, at some point. But I'm skeptical that he hasn't recouped some or even all of it at this point. He's very likely using other people's money for development, not his own, and there are various mechanisms to accomplish that.
Regardless, at this point they have what, 240 employees? I don't recall the actual number. If you figure the avg salary is $130k, and a fully loaded comp cost of $200K (conservative tbh), that's an annual headcount cost of $48 million. But take that with a grain of salt, because there are people who claim that Steven has lied multiple times about the number of people working on the project. Of course that doesn't include any other costs, like facilities, equipment, licenses, contractors, etc.
While we can't nail down all the exact numbers, I think it's fair to say that the clock is ticking big time. The scope of the game is WAY to ambitious, and they need to do some SERIOUS trimming if they have any hope of launching a product with a minimum level of quality. 2020 launch lol. I have to laugh at myself more than anything, because there was a time when I believed that.
I really hope they can pull it off, because the game seemed like the MMO of my dreams. Sadly though, 8 years later, I am now probably one of the people in the category of "this games not for you, and that's ok." I would definitely be a casual these days.
I'm pretty bummed that the game is taking the direction it is, and agree with Nanfoodle and others that it needs more mass appeal. But whatever, I'll stick around and see it through launch, if we get there, and if I don't die before then.
I'm ****. Let's hope they keep 2.5 million players for a year!
But the concurrent player count math is right....right?
Do you feel like your feedback is being listened too? Because I sure as shit don't.
Besides, I can't think of a more important topic than player retention for this game or any game for that matter, with AOC's core design pillars focusing so heavily on group gameplay, how on earth would it be sustainable without a large player base when Verra is so expansive and needs a high player count for progression of the world to occur.
As has been mentioned before, it's intended for servers to have 10k players. If they launch with 10 million players and retain 1% that's not going to be enough to fully fill a US / EU server to capacity.
How will this impact exploration, economy, levelling and endgame? Has Intrepid taken this into account within their design of group content? How empty will such an expansive world feel with a minimal player count in a niche game with such high risk reward scenarios?
This in my opinion is valid feedback and something to be conscious of.
200k subs is more than doable for Ashes, as long as they actually manage to make a good game. More is definitely possible, if the east-eu/asian markets pick it up well, though they'll have lower paying power, so it'd still be a rough equivalent of 200k subs.
@Ludullu
This is good hypothetically for the economic viability of the game long term. However my main concern is the daily concurrent players If they are similar to the figures I presented earlier in the thread, e.g new world, throne and liberty, Albion online, etc (all of which are regularly less than 20k players concurrent) will AOC have robust mechanisms & solo levelling routes to combat low population? How this will impact the feeling of the world, given it's size and that it relies so heavily on group content / grinding.
As always it bears repeating, any numbers you have for New World, TL, etc are not valid.
They show you 'players on Steam' which is often less than half.
I'm not saying it's massively different, but you should assume that if Steam shows you 20k Concurrent, the number is 50k.