Do you think you are a part of the "Target Audience"? Why or Why not?

Honestly I am kind of on the fence right now for two reasons.

1. Without knowing what summoners design is going to be like relative to the combat system, it's really hard to say if I will get to enjoy the open world pvp. I love strategic combat. I love team combat, but god do pet classes usually suck in pvp. I originally had more faith Ashes would be the one to breal the curse but some of their design decisions relative to action combat are making me question that. If they go split body my hope for a good summon class will drop quite a bit.

2. They have said very little about farming. I am a farmer. I am a tavern owner. If the farming system sucks my ability to meaningfully participate in the economy drops considerably. I know what crafts I like to do in games. Farming is my jam. Ashes claims they will have one. But if it sucks I am less targeted as an audience.

Why I think I am probably in the intended target audience anyway:

I like risk. I'm a thrill seeker. I am comfortable with swings in fortune WHEN an emergent story forms from it and I had agency in taking that risk and my fate in the outcome. The emergent story telling is what attracts me most. The npc quest writing in alpha gives me hope tgat there will be a good blend of player and world creative interplay. Im tired of stale linear storytelling worlds. I like good story, but I want to be a part of it. Few mmos give me that feeling. The possibilities of Ashes emergent stories, culture, and politics excite me.

I crave a good economic system where travel and emergent regional trends matter. Every mmo I have played other than ffxi (which I arrived slightly too late to existence it's true peak) has a terrible stale meaningless economy. Ashes hits so many things I would do if I were making an mmo with a good economic system. Ashes claims it requires so much interconnectivity between crafts and players. I can't help but feel targeted. I'm risk tolerant enough that i'd be one of the brave crafters wilding out for rare stuff and Ashes will need people like me for the game to be great economically.

Team based combat is what I want out of an mmo most. I am tired of mmos with either too small a team size for my core team, or too few or inflexible roles. The 8 classes Ashes chose for it's archtypes make me really believe they mean it when they say they want a good teamwork oriented experience. I just need the 2nd archetypes to really deliver in flexibility in role and play style for certain team members and the combat system to not be ass for these three things to be a masterpiece for me. I really hope Jeffery's influence on the teamwork oriented design focus holds through.

Even if they end up missing me due to design mistakes or narrowing their scope I think the above are some pretty damn good reasons for thinking I am their target audience.

We have not received permission from Dygz to share the quoted post.

Almost everyone. I'm here.

I don't believe I'm part of the Target Audience of Ashes of Creation as it is currently shown.

I believe that the systems used for managing PvP and aggression are outside of the scope of my enjoyment, and that the design schema have the potential to be simplistic and restrictive relative to my preferences. I believe that the rewards will go to groups that have power through methods that I don't have any way to access, and it will rapidly degrade my enjoyment of the game.

I believe that the tendency to be able to keep one's 'hard' power, i.e. gear, wealth, levels, will completely dominate over people who focus on roleplaying and 'soft' power in most forms (social things, effort building up Nodes, effort following and learning 'story' things or making Alliances) because the player who puts work into those things gets what appears to be a 'group benefit' which by the nature of the game, is supposed to be easily destroyed for 'freshness' and 'rotation'.

I believe that players who do this in smaller groups will eventually be subjected to, or subsumed into, larger guilds whether they like it or not, and will still be 'underpowered' except in the cases where they somehow draw favor with the big guilds. The impermanence of 'results' from the time commitment to soft power probably shouldn't be changed, but I don't think it is likely that the degradation rate of powerful equipment could, or should, be set to anything approximating it.

I believe that in order for a game to be successful, a certain type of player cannot be allowed to translate over specific RL tendencies, skills, or resources, whereas another type does, and this type of game is therefore, in the long term , less enjoyable to them.

I don't believe that anyone whose success (defined as 'being able to continue doing the thing they enjoy doing, rather than spending 50% or more of their time doing something they don't actually want to do') is controlled by a large group of non -like minded individuals, is within the Target Audience. That's definitional, and perfectly fine. It might be hard to communicate to some, but so it is.

I don't believe I'm in the Target Audience for Ashes because I've seen other people talk about what they believe Ashes is, and what they want it to be, and I know that those people's wishes are backed up with data, indicators, and the Creative Director's design models, making it more likely that those things will shift in that direction.

People tell you who they are, and if you give them a place to freely be that, and a big enough 'tribe' of people who are okay with them being that, they'll do it, because at that point, there is no social pressure to not, only tribal pressure. And you defeat tribal pressure by changing tribe, or gaining enough power to kill the other tribe.

I don't believe I'm the Target Audience for Ashes in the long term because 20 years of watching MMOs has taught me that my tribe is too small or too unrewarded in games like Ashes, to have any chance of standing up to the other tribes, and therefore will be wiped out within a few months if the design follows the requests of the vocal players giving feedback now.

I intend to do absolutely nothing about this. It's a no box cost sub based game. If my tribe is wiped out, or fighting to defend it takes more time than my life grants me to play Ashes, I'll just leave.

We have not received permission from Dygz to share the quoted post.

Oh, I thought we were talking about what the development decisions were targeting, not the devs themselves.

The devs can target whatever and whoever they want. Their designs, though, have constraints. This isn't a 'one size fits all' pants (get it?).

So sure, they can 'want everyone to wear the pants', make it stretchy, put clips on the bottom of it to let you roll up the leg parts if they're too long, try to make the fabric both somehow super-breathable and also heat-retentive, and make all the excess space around the waist fit neatly into a pocket dimension for really skinny folk.

I'm not going to make some sarcastic closing point because I genuinely believe this is actually what you are saying and fully believe. That the Devs are marketing their Magic Pants to everyone.