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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Splinter Topic: What can "Make MMOS Great ... Again"?
Strevi
Member
That website says WoW is at the top. It also includes non-MMOs.Given that FFXIV is on 1st position right now
https://mmo-population.com/activity
I hope AoC will stay on 40 to avoid attracting voices who want fast travel and all no risk activities.
Though, those population numbers are all pathetic, especially compared to WoW's 12 million peak. If anything, I think that proves that MMORPGs are a dying genre. This is one of the reasons *not* to follow modern MMO trends. You could argue that "the current MMO market wants and expects X, Y and Z," but that's ignoring the fact that this market is heavily on the decline and approaching death.
If you want your new MMO to be a big success, it should strive to be more than just "another one."
The last statements is directed more to Steven.
I searched a bit and from wiki
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/index.php?title=Ashes_of_Creation_PAX_Panel_Making_MMOS_Great_Again
I was directed to this video
Ashes of Creation PAX Panel - 17:32
where they say that they want to capture the nostalgia of old mmos but also be innovative
url="
https://youtu.be/rcOdyuV0tX8I think over the years, MMOs learned what players really want.
Ashes of Creation should not try to be a game for old people.
September 12. 2022: Being naked can also be used to bring a skilled artisan to different freeholds... Don't summon family!
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MMORPG's need to focus on the replay factor, currently FF14 and WoW are hard proving that many casuals are willing to play the story/quest content game but once it's complete that's it, they're not interested in dungeons, especially ones with strict mechanic difficulties as the only end game.
They need to reduce the gap between sweat lords and casual players with enjoyable replay factors and get players properly soaked into the economy and prosper game with other players without it being over baring and a chore.
It needs to allow for more natural player interactions using the world and NOT instancing, maintaining player excitement as well as NOT making pve AND PVP gameplay boring and easily concluded by gear and stats!
If the economy, pvp and node wars are the ones which are supposed to retain players, then I think they could have released the game already, maybe with a smaller map.
MMO's aren't supposed to play like lobby games, and developers trying to make it so they do is one of the major reasons MMO's are not as great as they used to be.
The thing with this is that it includes PvP. The ability to join a queue for PvP is as much a detraction from what an MMO should be as the ability to join a PvE queue.
This is not the only thing that has caused MMO's to be less than what they should be, but it absolutely is a major detraction.
I think that question is fairly easy, and I think it comes down to two things.
First, as a thought experiment, imagine a first person shooter comes out that's so wildly popular, it attracts a large periphery demographic who don't normally like or play FPS. Whatever attracted this demographic, it wasn't the FPS mechanics and many of them start doing things like installing aimbots. Instead of banning the aimbot and the players that used it, the developer starts catering to them and adds its own official aimbot into the game. Over time, the developer caters more and more to this periphery demographic and even tries to pull in many more periphery demographics. Since the game is so popular, the rule of corporate "follow the leader" nonsense kicks in and basically all modern FPS games follow this model. It comes to a point that the idea that you should have to manually aim your gun in an FPS is treated with scorn as some kind of ancient boomer opinion. The FPS genre begins to die.
The question is: is the problem here that first person shooters were just a craze and always doomed for the grave? Should they have just implemented an even more innovative aimbot that allowed players to annihilate the entire map with a single click of a button? It should be obvious in this instance that the problem is that they have veered away from what makes an FPS an FPS. FPS is always going to be a potentially popular genre, but not as the strange abominations they've become in this scenario.
That's what happened to MMORPGs.The whole draw of the MMORPG is having an RPG where you play as a relatively normal dude inside of a big fantasy world, but this fantasy world is a big, persistent online server and its populated by other players. That's really the core idea behind any MMO, not just MMORPGs. You have a big game world hosted on a server that a large number of players call all connect into in order to interact with that world and other players. How many MMOs have stayed true to that core philosophy?
Why have MMORPGs taken this turn? It's partially catering to a periphery demographic who want to play a singleplayer game (and not an RPG at that), and it's partially just the typical corporate trend of wanting to put everything into a sterile, reliable package while nickel and diming the customer for all that they're worth. And consequently, you have a situation where modern WoW is less an MMO and more a psychological manipulation casino designed to do little more than keep players coming back and funnel them into the cash shop.
I think MMORPGs have the capacity to be a massive genre, but not in the current forms and not in the direction they've been going. What you need is an MMORPG that tries to be its best self instead of being built around hunting whales, and that's not going to be found in any of the modern trends.
The second thing is a little more basic. Casual friendliness.
Now, I know, that's what everyone talks about and that's supposedly what all the modern MMOs are going for. However, what they mean by "casual friendly" is, essentially, "Can a player with a low time commitment make the numbers go up?" What they should be asking is, "Can a player with a low time commitment have fun?" Now, admittedly, progression is a part of that equation. It can be frustrating if it feels like the only way to progress is to dedicate more time to the game than you want to or actually have time for. The more important question, though, is able to pick up your game and have fun within 30 minutes to an hour of playing it.
In terms of being able to make the numbers go up, modern MMOs are more "casual friendly" than they've ever been, but in terms of actually being able to have fun, modern MMOs have never been more hostile towards casuals. It's now a common adage that most MMOs don't start getting good until 100 hours in. That's disastrous for trying to attract new and casual players.
And very often these new MMOs fail the "I Win Button" principle. Imagine a game where there's a single button. You press the button, and it says "You win!" Now, that's a very easy game and a very accessible game, but was it a fun game? I don't think many would think so. Yet, that's how many modern MMOs approach making content "casual friendly," by making it full baby-mode easy. Casual players aren't idiots and terrible at the game. They're just people who have a low time commitment to the game. WoW's original map was plenty challenging for the casual player. When they "updated" the old world map with a new map based on their new corporate philosophies in the Cataclysm expansion, that constituted the first major drop subscriptions in WoW's history and Cataclysm is still seen as WoW's first major failure, even by the company itself apparently. Not that they learned any kind of lesson from it.
Focus less on making sure the casuals can all get to max level and have full BiS epic gear and more on making sure the casuals have a fun game to play.
It is not the fact that AoC or any other MMORPG should focus on the old or modern audience, but to improve and make that MMORPG a better MMORPG and not the typical fast food MMORPG or WOW copycat attempts of the last decade.
Innovation is for the common good, not just for a group of people.
Let's face it, an mmorpg won't be able to do story-telling as well as a single player RPG, or combat as exciting and fluid as a single player action game. Yes, some mmorpgs come close, but they will never match the other genres in those aspects.
And they don't need to! The reason why I follow Ashes of Creation is because Steven and Intrepid understand that what makes an mmorpg is the players.
This is what I'm saying. Where modern MMORPGs have faltered is in trying to be more like other games. MMORPGs should simply strive to be the best versions of themselves and play to their own unique strengths.
That is crafting and PvE.
Don't all MMOs have this?
For me is not important the game to have a few million players. To be for casuals... I don't know.
For me progression is important. That is leveling and getting gear or making money to buy that gear. Once I have this, I roll new alts.
AoC brings the node leveling. I am not sure how that will feel. Especially after a siege when the node will fall because the casuals had no time to help building up the defense.
There will be queues to login into the server if the game is popular, at least at release, until players finish the story or give up paying the subscription.
In game I liked the chat LF messages.
Some people hate them and prefer the dedicated lfg game interface.
I used to sell items too which I advertised in chat. Global auction houses made such things useless.
For lfg, right to loot in raids, trading... players make their own 3rd party solutions if the game does not provide it, or if is not good enough.
None of this has anything to do with what I said.
I'm assuming you quoted the wrong post.
No, my answer was not clear and not exactly to the point you highlighted.
Sorry about that.
Queues have a performance reason too. And developers can chose to move them from within the game to the server login stage, and hoping that in game, players will not all of them move to the same place at the same time.
Queues to get in to the game and queues for participating in content serve different purposes. I wasn't talking about queues to get in to the game.
Crafting and PvE are ways to increase player interaction, but only if the systems are designed around player interaction.
WoW has both crafting sure, but most of the crafting can be done solo with no interaction at all. If on the rare occasion you do need items from other players, you can just visit the auction house and buy the stuff without ever speaking to the players selling the items at all.
As for PvE, the dungeon system is specifically designed so that you don't need to interact with other players. Just press a button to enter the queue and the game does the rest for you. Then when you get into the dungeons, if you're lucky you'll get a "hi" at the beginning and a "thanks for the run" at the end, but that will be it. After all, why bother forming close connections with other players when most of the time those other players will be from different servers, meaning as soon as you finish the dungeon, they will disappear and you'll likely never see them again.
Open world PvE? Unless you are fighting mobs 5-10 levels above you, you can solo practically everything. Again, the game is designed around solo gameplay these days. You CAN interact with other players but the game doesn't incentivise you to do it, so most players don't.
At the risk of sounding like Narc, I think this whole genre did best when the focus was primarily on the social experience embedded in an engaging gameplay system. With that being said, social games heavily depend on their players actually wanting to be social and it would start a whole other chicken-egg debate about whether players became less social or the game design became more casual-solo ("antisocial") first. But the fact remains that both seem to be the case compared to the past. Asmongold once said something alone the line of "almost every time you give players agency over other players gaming experience it will become a shitty gaming experience" and that basically seems to me like the best sum up of the casual solo care bear expectation for MMOs where engagement between players stays shallow in fear of people ruining the game for each other. (I not firing shots or blaming the dude, I don't know whether he elaborated on that statement or anything, it was simply a good example for what one kind of MMO players thinks, independent of whether Asmongold can be counted into that group or not)
Bringing back the more social engagement and trying to design a "high stake" game is not something everyone will enjoy, of that I am absolutely sure. Not only will it not be for everyone, I think Ashes will not be for a lot of people who still think this will be a game for them. People who want to grief / cause havoc like you can in Rust will in all likelihood find this game to slow and protective of people who don't want to engage in much PvP, while a lot of solo grind and casual gaming folks will find it frustrating that they cannot push their character progression to the point where they would hoped to reach.
To conclude this: To me it looks like Ashes wants to be more of a niche game, not boasting with numbers to kick WoW off the top of some list by any means possible, but it wants to offer a game with compelling story and gameplay to those who are still interested in that, with higher stakes than in a PvE game but not the shallow progression of some full PvP titles. And making some simple calculations it seems like Ashes can achieve that goal and be profitable without ever reaching the player numbers of WoW.
For a lot of people it's "Make MMOs social again"
What purpose do in game queues serve?
This is one aspect I mean when I say that developers learned what players want.
Statistically I think more prefer no / or weak interaction.
2. Properly defined niches.
3. Not relying on players to be your primary adversarial content for other players (because too many other genres do this better, it shouldn't be primary)
Yes, I think a lot of people got used to that but I think this game will be designed for someone who wants a different experience from playing an MMORPG. All the things I've read on this game and heard during the livestreams points in the direction of it not being something you can play solo.
And while I think this will be the reason why a lot of people will not want to play this or those who refuse to play together will fall out of the loop quickly, I think there are enough people not only willing to be more social again ingame but a good number of players who may specifically want that back.
I talked about a sloppy calculation I did regarding the financial viability of Ashes of Creation. Assuming that Intrepid needs 150 staff members to keep the game running, and pays them on average 80k USD per year, that makes about 12mio USD. Now add costs for running the servers, maintaining the building(s), taxes and what not let's just add +200% to the bill and we are at 36 mio. Now we want to make a profit of lets say 10-20% revenue and it puts us at ~44mio USD the game needs from subscriptions and cosmetics. Each player at a subscription fee of 15$ a month will contribute 180$ to this. So by that (again sloppy) calculation it takes around 245'000 people to achieve a profit. So about 2.5 times the numbers of Alpha 2 keys sold (no idea how many beta keys were sold)
I think even a niche MMORPG can achieve those numbers. That puts it to my knowledge in the ballpark of Black Desert Online and at around half the player numbers of Guild Wars 2. The point is: If Intrepid delivers an enjoyable game they can make this work with a number of player a lot of people would probably think is modest.
For the most part, you are waiting for enough people to sign up for the content.
If you join a queue for a 20v20 PvP arena, as an example, you are in the queue until 40 people want to play that arena type.
That's true.
Even smaller ones 6 vs 6, may have algorithms trying to put together players of same rank.
I see on wiki that AoC plans such things too.
Players who prefer to participate in those battles could go and hunt caravans of fight on seas.
Indeed.
Any content in an MMO that you sign up for is making the game less of an MMO.
PvP shouldn't be happening in instanced lobby settings, where your opponent is literally just someone else that happened to sign up at the same time as you. That is literally why lobby games exist.
PvP should happen in the open world, against people you have an actual reason to want to fight. Be that because you don't like them, their guild or their faction, or that you want resources or a mob that they are also trying to get.
While instances are perfectly fine (both PvP and PvE), the conditions for them (as in, players participating, and in the right location) should all happen organically in the games world. If developers want to set up some deathmatch style arena, or a capture the flag style arena, great, have at it. Set up that arena, give it a reason for existing in your world and then have people form up teams to participate in it, move to the location of said arena and fight it out against other teams that have done the same.
I agree that good in-game economies, gameplay, and community are some of the most important aspects that create a great MMORPG.
To me, this idea of
"nostalgia of old MMOs" is the ability to capture or create unique player-made situations and scenarios. Memories that come from actions and decisions that players make. Roshen and I love discussing these core memories that cemented the genre in our hearts. To me, if an MMORPG can make these moments in time occur, it can be a great MMORPG. That's easily one of the most exciting factors of our game to me—the systems and design decisions around this idea of risk vs reward and player agency.
Unfortunately, I do worry about AoC in terms of #
1) I know they don't aim to be a WoW Killer or king of the mmo
2) They arent looking to be a game hosted for 12 mil, 5 mil let alone 1 mil.
HOWEVER I think this may be one of it's downfall in terms of server size and system.
This game is cornering itself by putting a number, cause a low number may not be great for AoC node system.
100 nodes, if we were to play 50 players per node, we would have 5,000 players.
100 nodes x 100 players per node is the current design AFIAK. We know the server caps at 10k. Also citizenship is cap to 1 per account, so Alts can't fix issues when server is below cap or below 50%.
These numbers dont really add up / or be the cause of "death". under 10k, there is no tension. Even 10k players may not be enough tension. Anything less and it's a static world.
If the playerbase divides themselves evenly, 10k players, 100 per node. IDK - I cant articulate but I fear this is the weakness AoC has and IDK if they even realize it.
I love the idea of 100 nodes but maybe its too much.
I think 5k server cap with an active 3k players per server to work around may be doable, but that will require reducing the amount of nodes. Nothing wrong having large nodes tho.
5 metropolis isnt gonna host only 100 players. It's gonna be more
tier 5 nodes isnt gonna host only 100 players. It's gonna be more
Tier 1 = 50 players sounds about right
Tier 2 = 50 players sounds about right
Tier 3 = 75 players sounds about right
Tier 4 = 100-150 players sounds about right
tier 5 = 200-300 sounds about right
Tier 6 = 500
while there is no cap in citizenship - this is still the progression or feel of nodes having active players on any given time. You start placing those numbers on the map - the numbers don't add up for this node system to function as intended.
First: I don't think the goal is to have every account be associated with a node necessarily. Especially for adventurers looking for gear worldwide it could even be reasonable to avoid political association to have broader access to opportunities for raids and sieges.
Second: Yes, 8000-10000 might be too few players on a server, but that's not really something to sweat at given that the number can simply be increased, as this project moves forward. It's not set in stone and it is exactly one of the reasons why there are Alpha and Beta tests.
Third: There are already considerations of server mergers in place probably because Intrepid is keenly aware of the necessity of lively servers.
Fourth: The playerbase won't divide themselves evenly. It doesn't make sense at all. With options for things to do clearly unevenly distributed amongst nodes of different stages, there is a clear incentive for players to seek out nodes of higher stages.
I think it is more reasonable to assume that the metropolis will see 1000-2000 players basing their actions around them, especially once the game has been running for a while and high level players have become more numerous. On the other hand, I don't see much more than maybe 10-20 people in stage 1 or 2 nodes. Even Stage 3 and Stage 4 Nodes may struggle to attract anyone apart from adventurer groups seeking out nearby POI - which could mean those are more temporary alliances than incentives to acquire citizenship.
It ultimately comes down to where a Node is located and whether the POI are currently relevant to something going on in the rest of the world. If there is for example a Metropolis developing in the Frostgrave Falls it might create global demand for more coal and fire magic items as part of the upkeep of that Node and to fend of the Yetis that don't like these artificial caves being built on their lands call for more protection of caravans going into these snowy mountains, which makes relocation towards nearby vassal nodes lucrative but also to that node in the Dünzenkell Mountains where coal can be mined in big amounts.
This all seems a bit to early to really say what changes will be necessary in terms of player size and so on. I'd say patience is our best option for now. But I see where your concerns are coming from, I am however optimistic that this is something Intrepid is keenly aware of.
That again is under the assumption that everyone wants a citizenship.