Steven, Please Rethink “Not for Everyone”

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It will not be free. It will cost $15 in godknows which year, by which point those $15 could be someone's entire egg, so paying for a "not for everyone" random mmo with slow leveling and open world pvp will not be on people's priority lists.

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And I think you're underestimating the sheer hate for those kinds of mmos, because pretty much all of them have either completely failed, or have been deemed scams, because they've been in development for nearly a decade, if not more.

And by the time Ashes comes out - it WILL be over a decade of development, and that's the first thing people will hear about it. And you know what "this game has been in development over a decade" phrase creates? Very high expectations. And Ashes will never meet them, no matter how well the team does.

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Steven needs to not go bankrupt before that, if he wants to advertise this game to that extent. And it's gonna be real damn hard w/o pulling in more money. And pulling in more money in pretty much any way (other than his own of course) would give the outsiders even more ammo to say "oh, this is a SCAM scam, huh".

Also, I'm sure that Ashes will pull in people in its first month. I'd even wager that it'll pull around a million people, depending on the world and game industry situation at the time. But that million will leave reaaaaal quickly. And it'll leave even faster if all the competitors or games with similar mechanics will have already released by that point and have pre-established audiences and a steady pace of updates.

As I always say, I hope I'm wrong on all of my negative assumptions, but god damn have I been right on almost every god damn one of them so far, which does not help my outlook on things.

Ludullu wrote: »

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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).

If Ashes delivers on what it promised, the only real 'problem' I can see it having is that it's a very 'exclusive' kind of MMORPG, and I don't mean 'it excludes players or player types'. I mean that it demands a level of dedication that makes it difficult to find time to play other MMORPGs (or sometimes just deal with life stuff), by nature.

This is one of the harsher parts of PvP MMORPGs with less protection.

"I stopped playing months ago and now I'm lost."
"I got into an accident and couldn't play for a month."
"Exams came up, had to cut back."

Ashes is less friendly to these situations when the player is not a casual player. Less invested players can come and go because they're not trying to hold onto their guild's position, world state, or Freehold.

People who actually care and then have life disruptions often get kicked out of guilds for inactivity, 'hold back' their groups if they were critical for harder content, or simply lose their anchor, and that's in games where you can't come back and find that your literal home was destroyed.

I feel like I kinda caused this derail(?) so I'm just reminding that the only reason we got here was 'trying to talk about how Ashes can't rely on uniqueness to win out'. The quality of the game's goalpoint was never in question, nor did I mean to go into 'if I think they will reach it'.

Just the 'yeah this isn't special/unique enough to get huge traction anymore (and for many players never was)'.