Ashes of Creation

Then its just varying degrees. Which is how I felt about it at first, but overall... its really shitty design. Outside of +1, what is actually there to make you want to pursue the design choice? You cant separate the item level treadmill and cosmetics as a whole without people becoming apathetic towards the game.

To me personally "ideally" there would be a sub fee for access, and a content fee (expansion price) for content. Release cash shop with items that are grindy af to get, or just pay money. If I care enough about the item that I want it, I'll either pay money for it right away or just grind it out if Im broke or w/e.

Steven A1 test screenshot post on twitter :

Thats a lot of bears

Wizard looking for AoE group!!!!!!

It is looking better and better. Loved that the game appears to be back on track. They seemed a lot more optimistic this time with current schedule.

They are reopening Alpha One access purchase in the near future. I like that they are currently looking for about 150 people to add to the team? That is insane.

The thousands of bears made me smile.

The hardest part of making a sandbox pvp game is making sure the rpks don’t drive everyone off. So many pvp games that had some fun combat decent building mechanics and fun stuff to do have been ruined because the rpks run wild.

EVE has been the only successful model and I think that was partially an accident with their travel, local chat and territory mechanics and insurance making it fairly tough to be the friendless guys who just go around murdering. They also had huge areas of the game that did not allow pvp at all and you could basically stay there forever if you wanted.

if the devs are smart the anti rpk systems will be very unfriendly to people just murdering each other and give lots of advantages to being involved only in the faction/node pvp. They also need a big area that is entirely no pvp for people to play in. Otherwise no matter how good the systems are this game will be dead in 6 months

Creslin said:

The hardest part of making a sandbox pvp game is making sure the rpks don’t drive everyone off. So many pvp games that had some fun combat decent building mechanics and fun stuff to do have been ruined because the rpks run wild.

EVE has been the only successful model and I think that was partially an accident with their travel, local chat and territory mechanics and insurance making it fairly tough to be the friendless guys who just go around murdering. They also had huge areas of the game that did not allow pvp at all and you could basically stay there forever if you wanted.

if the devs are smart the anti rpk systems will be very unfriendly to people just murdering each other and give lots of advantages to being involved only in the faction/node pvp. They also need a big area that is entirely no pvp for people to play in. Otherwise no matter how good the systems are this game will be dead in 6 months

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I dont want to question how much you played Eve, but travel only has a small part in it. Their solution is a cat and mouse to each and every type of ship. This big ship can be decimated by a certain class of other ship if built correctly, regardless of SP. Those that bring out the biggest baddest ships are destined to lose that ship simply because you cant hide it. Very rarely have I seen classes in an RPGMMO where this class outright stomps another class simply because of rock paper scissors. What makes that situation better is that some of those situations in Eve are hard counters even with your average player at the helm. Something skill would surely cock block in this game.

I think if you just go around PK'ing, you build up corruption, and when that gets high you don't just lose mats when you die, you lose your actual gear. That's just about the best way to handle things imo. Leave the players the freedom to do what they want, but with potential serious consequences if you just want to farm salt from randoms (allow "bad behavior", but have repurcussions). Ya getting ganked might suck, but if you know that the ganker is risking a lot more than you are, it motivates you to bring them down.

Daidraco said:

I dont want to question how much you played Eve, but travel only has a small part in it. Their solution is a cat and mouse to each and every type of ship. This big ship can be decimated by a certain class of other ship if built correctly, regardless of SP. Those that bring out the biggest baddest ships are destined to lose that ship simply because you cant hide it. Very rarely have I seen classes in an RPGMMO where this class outright stomps another class simply because of rock paper scissors. What makes that situation better is that some of those situations in Eve are hard counters even with your average player at the helm. Something skill would surely cock block in this game.

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Ya for sure, I meant travel in the sense that if you went pking in null sec your path out isn't always clear, it isn't like other pk,games where you gank and hearth home. That guild hunting you may block the escape and force you to log out for a day. Ganking in so many games is a low risk high reward activity which is what ruins pvp balance, in eve it could be high reward but also high risk.

The system they have reminds me of lineage 2 which did an OK job of limiting pvp too but I always felt that system discouraged good pvp too much too like guild wars etc where eve let guild wars happen but limited random pking with other mechanics.

There are always ways to exploit that. Gold farmers exploited the ever living fuck out of that in Lineage 2 to score loot from other players

New Director's letter. The parts that caught my eye were...

Last year, I spoke of attempting to incorporate sieges into the Alpha One experience. This has obviously been a goal of mine because it provides considerable data and a consistent event within the world that players can participate in to help stress test the deployment. Well, I am happy to say that it is appearing more and more likely by the day! Initial implementation of the Apocalypse siege code has been migrated into the Alpha One client, and we should begin internal testing next month. I will caveat this expectation with the fact that we are cutting it a bit close from an internal QA standpoint, but I have some confidence that the system will be online and capable of inclusion for the Alpha One test in the month of June. The siege component will obviously not be representative of what the siege system will be at launch, or even in Alpha Two. I will keep you updated on its progress in our monthly live streams.

and...

Final Thoughts​

Lastly, I know that for the past several months we have received a considerable number of requests with regards to opening Alpha One sales again. Well, I am happy to announce that we will be reintroducing Alpha One options sometime in May. More information on this will be posted to our website around the end of April and we will announce this across our socials, so make sure to keep an eye out if you are interested in participating. I do, however, want to give a stern warning - participating in our Alpha One test should not be regarded as playing a game. You are helping to test our work in progress. You will be expected to provide feedback to help us iterate on systems and designs. We love and appreciate our testers and the support they provide Ashes, and each and every one of our Alpha One testers will have a special place in Ashes’ history. So, if you plan to participate, take the commitment seriously and know you have our respect and appreciation. This will not be everyone’s cup of tea.


Will be watching for Alpha 1....

todays post by Steven on twitter RE: character updates https://mobile.twitter.com/StevenJSharif

Raid content today

This game has a ton of potential and really a wide open opportunity in the MMO community to get a big response. WoW will probably always have a massive following but I really believe from your old school MMO purist to your modern day casual, and everything in between will probably give this game a try as long as they don't shoot themselves in the foot.

It's probably he first MMO in awhile I would pay to get into early access or whatever I can to see what it's all about.

If there ever was a WoW killer this will be it. Much like New World is going to kill TESO. Fanbases will keep the games going though

Stream is at 11am/2pm EST

This and Amazon are the only 2 coming in the forseable future that have a real chance of calling themselves next generation MMO's. I am leaning a lot more to this game over Amazons just because I have liked pretty much everything I have seen up to this point.

I think they're going to serve two different types of MMO players which is what Xerge has kinda alluded to which I think is a good thing. I hope they're not in direct competition with each other and can both breathe some life in the genre. Thus far, Ashes looks more like a next-step in the traditional MMO framework with New World leaning towards that open-world, PvP style with some player driven systems. I probably don't know the in-depth details of either game enough to speculate but I'm hoping they each serve a purpose in bringing MMO's to a new phase beyond WoW.

Muligan said:

I think they're going to serve two different types of MMO players which is what Xerge has kinda alluded to which I think is a good thing. I hope they're not in direct competition with each other and can both breathe some life in the genre. Thus far, Ashes looks more like a next-step in the traditional MMO framework with New World leaning towards that open-world, PvP style with some player driven systems. I probably don't know the in-depth details of either game enough to speculate but I'm hoping they each serve a purpose in bringing MMO's to a new phase beyond WoW.

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Kinda seems like the opposite to me. New World has completely changed their direction since last year, now they're going full on bland theme park experience and trying to remove anything they've said previously about being a pvp focused sandbox game to capture the 1hr a day casual player. Ashes on the other hand, is supposed to have a player driven world where you can build cities, open pvp with loot drop, warfare etc. and seems aimed at the more hardcore player.