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Alpha Two testing is currently taking place five days each week. More information about Phase II and Phase III testing schedule can be found here
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.
Ashes likely biggest launch issue
pattw555
Member, Alpha Two
In all likelihood, with the attention it's getting, ashes is going to have absolutely insane player counts at launch (true launch, or hell, even beta). New World had >700k concurrent players at launch, ashes will likely have more, my money is on 1M+ easily.
Let's say intrepid is able to grab that hot potato, and they have enough servers for everyone to play with reasonable queue times. That's not even the real problem.
The real problem is what happens after, as player counts drop and you now have a (still massive) player base scattered over too many servers.
So much in Ashes depends on having a healthy server with a healthy server population, even more so than in most MMOs. That player drop off is inevitable, it happens in every game 1-2 months after launch, no matter how good or successful the game is. Given ashes unique systems (i.e. nodes) that drop off could be an unrecoverable deathblow to many servers / players.
Just calling out there needs to be some plan for server transfer or server merger going into big launches / big influxes of players. It is absolutely not something that can be kicked down the road post-launch or solutions created as it happens, by that point it'll be too late. There isn't going to be a "perfect" solution to server merges either given the node system, and that's fine, some solution allowing players to get to a server with a stable and playable population is required though.
This isn't something that needs to be solved now obviously, but it needs to be on the radar / road map.
Let's say intrepid is able to grab that hot potato, and they have enough servers for everyone to play with reasonable queue times. That's not even the real problem.
The real problem is what happens after, as player counts drop and you now have a (still massive) player base scattered over too many servers.
So much in Ashes depends on having a healthy server with a healthy server population, even more so than in most MMOs. That player drop off is inevitable, it happens in every game 1-2 months after launch, no matter how good or successful the game is. Given ashes unique systems (i.e. nodes) that drop off could be an unrecoverable deathblow to many servers / players.
Just calling out there needs to be some plan for server transfer or server merger going into big launches / big influxes of players. It is absolutely not something that can be kicked down the road post-launch or solutions created as it happens, by that point it'll be too late. There isn't going to be a "perfect" solution to server merges either given the node system, and that's fine, some solution allowing players to get to a server with a stable and playable population is required though.
This isn't something that needs to be solved now obviously, but it needs to be on the radar / road map.
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They should have a plan jn place for this by now.
Just zoning in on the numbers. I really doubt Ashes will reach these numbers, especially in comparison with New World, for various reasons.
* New World had a very large marketing campaign supported by Amazon's money which brought attentition even to folk who're normally not very interested in MMOs. Many of my friends, of whom several never really touched an MMO before, bought New World because it had so much publicity at the time of its release. I don't see a similar marketing campaign happening for Ashes.
* New World was buy-to-play. The MMO genre has been in decline for years, even more so oldschool sub-based MMOs. I'm not convinced that there are too many people willing to subscribe to a game on a monthly basis outside the MMO niché anymore. For lots of folks it's more attratice to pay 40$ once and then owning the game instead of knowing you have to commit ~15$ / month for the next couple of months or years. Most of my friends who gave New World a try back then will certainly never touch Ashes for this reason.
* New World enjoys a larger visibility due to Steam and even a larger visibility outside of steam, because they were constant news about New World, e.g. regarding its good sale numbers, etc. and this publicity was based on steam. Also being able to put New World frequently on sales would push it to the top of Steam Shop every now and then. As Ashes will have its own financial ecosystem, it won't get any visibility on Steam, e.g. you'll never see a popup mentioning that your friend just started Ashes. Given the dominance of Steam, this will also hampers Ashes publicity outside of the MMO niche.
* ... and let's be honest. The MMO core audience isn't getting any younger and if you want to succeed, you need a healthy playerbase whose average age isn't 40+ and who can tell stories about the good ol' times in EQ1 or DAoC.
So, I disagree. I'm pretty sure Ashes will do fairly well at its released - when it's released - but I doubt it'll reach the numbers New World did. Which hasn't to be a bad thing. New World was a fucked up mess after all, and we don't want to experience that again, do we.
I disagree with this part.
Younger people aren't really interested in MMORPG's in general. They would rather a shorter gaming experience which is why games like Fortnite are so popular.
Rather, in order to succeed as an MMORPG in today's market, you need to appeal to the 40+ (35+ really) market. However, in doing this, you need to understand that people in this age bracket with the disposable income to subscribe to an MMORPG generally all work 40-50 hous a week, as well as having actual commitments many nights each week. In order to be a successful MMORPG today, the game needs to take this in to account by not penalizing players that cant dedicate 20+ hours a week, and that is what Ashes doesn't do.
NW world also didnt have a subscription where AoC does and alot of peopel just dislike sub fes for some reason
It would be interesting to see how much smaller the AoC's playerbase will become, considering that initial investment into the game is also smaller than into NW, but Intrepid won't release those numbers and the game won't be on steam, so I think we'll never know that. Well, that, and of course the fact that the game still needs to release in a good enough state to even compare to other mmo releases.
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Server_merges
While this is true and logical, a dislike of subscriptions when talking about a service with ongoing costs is not logical, so you need to think with less logic when thinking about these people.
Rather than looking at Ashes as a game they could spend $30 and enjoy for 2 months, these illogical people will ask themselves "what if I like it?"
If they end up liking the game, then they would be in a situation where they want to play a subscription game, but hate subscription games.
Thus the logical conclusion is to just not play the game to begin with.
The above is a discussion I have had several times with people in regard to MMO's over the years.
The game is being 'solved' by testers today. The people who haven't bought in yet will get a more clear look into the full game than they would have compared to any other MMO at launch. Unless late Beta goes into NDA...
I don't know if that will be a boon or bane for Intrepid.
There, you can see a quote from Steven when asked about this topic on a past livestream:
Q: What is your plan and what systems are in place to avoid the first few months of server queues and congestion; and when players drop off, how do you plan on handling that when the time comes?
A: "I think that obviously is a problem that every MMO launch suffers. That is the balance between your active users your expected peak concurrencies: where that fall-off begins and how you consolidate servers. You don't want to expand too much at the beginning to alleviate server queues and then end up with like 30% pop servers that you have to consolidate later.
The same is going to be true for Alpha-2. So, we're going to be leveraging- obviously we know how many users we have available when it comes to Alpha-2 entrance and then as we allow additional people to purchase in with these new key sales that we'll be doing later, we're going to get an idea of what that is. Generally I would expect we're going to see 30 to 40% peak concurrencies when it comes to opening the servers, when it comes to prime-time, when it comes to events that happen.
And, so when we talk about server queuing server congestion, we want to make sure that we have healthy Alpha-2 servers, so we're going to leverage server queuing as much as possible. That means that sometimes those server queues might get into the thousands during those peak times, during the servers spinning up, or during those prime times or events; and that's okay. It's not going to be the most fun for a lot of players to have to sit in a queue.
Obviously, we've all done that before in MMOs that we played, but the alternative is that we have too many servers available, we don't have those queues during peak times; and then when it's not peak times those server populations dilapidate and that's not what we want to have obviously." – Steven Sharif