Steven, Please Rethink “Not for Everyone”

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Most of what makes Ashes unique is just 'stuff other companies chose not to do' and it's usually easy to add.

There is almost no 'Intrepid twist on it'.

I'm sad that it took me a whole day to figure out the shorthand explanation but here it is. It's probably not worth a Splinter Topic but bear with me it's a bit of a tale. Perhaps one that will be interesting 'historical reading' for some at least.

FF11 has had the Mog House functionality as far as I know since launch. Mog Houses allow you to decorate your private instanced space (the ability to allow visitors was added much later)..

Depending on the Elemental Balances of your furniture, you got a Moghancement , which is a buff to something.

No matter what you do, some players will consider one Moghancement (or some subset group of them) to be the best ones. If those happen to be easy to attain or can be built up gradually with no significant downside, fine. Content.

The moment one of them offers what some vocal influencer (even in world chat) considers an optimal advantage, some set of players will switch from 'this is fun, slowly building up and experimenting with decorating my house, it's like leveling' to 'why is this game gatekeeping the good stuff just to inflate hours/make me RMT?'

It's not that Moghancements are bad, it's that someone hit the wrong switch in players' brains. Originally it was just them and you could only have one at a time. Could you rearrange your entire house to switch from 'Tiny chance of retaining more materials when you fail a synth with this specific crystal' to 'lose less EXP when you die' because you expected to be doing hard content? Yes. Was it worth it? Good question.

Competitive players measure against each other and that's a large part of this trigger. Well-informed players measure against 'obvious optimals' and that is another.

Moghancements had to not be particularly good on purpose to avoid the above. And even within that, it was still talked about in this way. To be clear your overall options were:
"Lose less exp on death." "Gain slightly more money from mob drops in a game where very few mobs drop money and it is a tiny amount relatively" and "gain more Conquest points (Node Exp basically)".

This system is 'not rewarding' on purpose . It is not impactful on purpose. It is tedious to min-max entirely on purpose. Because 'singular, low impact choices' are one of the few ways to keep your playerbase from becoming a toxic separatist column of people arguing over whether optimizing is right.

Ashes needs to have more spaces where Intrepid demonstrates an understanding of this, without it, it will get the usual novelty rush, then the world-chat ignorance phase, then the falloff. Ashes has, so far, made six separate decisions that fast-track it directly into the world-chat ignorance phase.

A lot of the things that make Ashes 'unique' are the equivalent of having powerful Moghancements for players to fight in world chat over. I don't think this is a positive kind of uniqueness for a game to have.

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And no one else will, exactly because Intrepid's approach has fully proven that you SHOULD NEVER tell players about the development process.

Your response to Noaani about "hype around release..." would've worked if people didn't know what the game was about. See Chrono Odyssey for example. People were really hyped for it until they realized that it's just a NW clone. And they only realized that because CO released a beta test.

Ashes is holding a near-permanent ALPHA test, where nothing is done and everything that's being done is moving at a snail's pace. And that is game development for a newer team under an unexperienced leader. But the fact that everyone who's interested in the game can just come and see that the game is barely moving, the design is all over the place and the direction can often contradict itself - none of that will support the release hype of the game.

Every damn scam game that overpromised the world and underdelivered a piece of shit had more hype than what Ashes will have by the time release comes along.

And I would love to be wrong, because I myself believed that we're barely even 1% of the people that will be there on release, so the majority will get hyped for the game, as you say. But the more time passes, the more I feel like my initial assumption was the wrong one.

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We already gave examples of the games where these systems were present. And Ashes doesn't even compare to the space games, cause its supposed depth doesn't even reach "you can build your own stuff and other players can interact with it".

I tested an Alpha for a new EVE game and that shit had space buildings that could function as trading posts, as turrets, as stores and had the potential to be coded by the players themselves to be near-anything players wanted. Ashes is nowhere near that kind of freedom.

So yes, it is that easy to add this stuff into a game. Other studios don't do it because it's too much work for too little payoff, when you only care about that payoff. And yes, it's cool that Steven can kinda disregard the amount of work his ideas require, but it's a double-edged sword, which, in the context of "open development", hits the studio more than it benefits it.

I can absolutely assure you that FF14, BDO, Throne and Liberty and probably Eternal Tombs can implement seasons faster than Ashes can.

Technically Throne and Liberty already has seasons mostly-implemented and they're just taking the path of implementation that Intrepid is now learning. But what is a season in an MMORPG really?

"Trees lose their leaves, ground is snowy, spawns and economy change."

Have you ever looked into BDO's Farming system? BDO simulates the movement of rainclouds over the landscape and the topography of the runoff .

Should we assume Ashes will also implement water tables when Freeholds are released? Because BDO does.

I'm honestly sad that this is what we always end up at. I really continue to hope that Intrepid, at least, can understand that these reactions aren't about negativity, because at least for me, nothing could be further from the truth.

It's 'easy' to just keep patting them on the back and downplaying/downcrying other MMOs as if they only halfassed the implementations. It comes from ignorance though, and I'm honestly quite scared sometimes that Intrepid is gonna end up huffing the same development copium as many other failed projects did.

Ignorance of the scope of other games is not basis for dismissing this concern.

I'll continue to hope, to provide my data and counterpoints, and to do whatever I can to help them realize the dreams that they have as developers.

I hope that you can move past the tribalism that leads to dismissing the idea that weather and seasons are a 2002 thing and that people who point out facts are bitter.

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Nope, I want it to go slower, but directed at the proper parts of the game. Instead they're working on shit like FTUI and gear balancing.

I sure hope they somehow magically developed a ton of stuff behind the scenes and there's simply 1-2 systems that are holding it all back (i.e. dynamic gridding), but for now I'm real doubtful about that being the case.

Also, I've already stepped back from the game. I had big plans for it for July, but none of those worked out because game's performance became even worse on my ancient PC and now, with yet another PTR delay, my motivation to be deeply involved became even weaker. I'll still help test big things, but I won't really have the time for much else.

None of that will stop me from voicing my opninions on the game's design direction here, on reddit or discord, because I can give that feedback even w/o directly experiencing it. Well, at least for the non-combat kinda stuff.

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By the time Ashes releases, the private server with L2 on UE4 will be polished much better, so anyone who was tired of playing the exact same old version of L2 will simply play that, instead of trying out Ashes (this is already the case for thouuusands of people).

This is concurrents on the testing phase of that server.


And that is an old game (even though some changes have been introduced to the gearing/class balance and mobs) with an even harsher grind, yet people are more than willing to play it. THIS is the audience I've been talking about when I said "yeah, I think Ashes can hit 200-300k subs worldwide, if it delivers on its promises".

If even ancient L2 can get over 10k concurrents - Ashes could easily have 50-70k+, which would be right around 200-300k subs overall.

And there's still a chance it hits that, though we'll definitely see huge chunks of that potential playerbase being eaten away by all the other mmos with similar systems, but more attractive parts in other places (like better raiding or better pvp or better econ or better questing, etc).