Ashes of Creation - Dec 6 Livestream Recap...Ashes Season Passes?

jahlon

In this Episode:
Ashes of Creation: Apocalypse release date - 18 December
Ashes of Creation Season Passes?
December Cosmetics
Staff Size Goals and Inconsistencies

Phry

So this is a full release on december 18, not a beta release? and there are going to be season passes too, which sounds a lot like the battle passes you get in Fortnite? 

celtwulf

Well the hype-train for this game is derailing rather quickly

Wizardry

Yeah it sounds like it is just attempting to make some money by bandwagon jumping into the Battle Royale idea.
IMO NOT very intelligent.The people that want to play BR want a bigger stage,a better game and are already playing BR in Fortnite and PUBG.
So what are they going to do ,offer Ninja 200k to jump ship and play their game to make it popular?
I can feel their reasoning though,they figure i they can get ANY sucker to give them money,why not,anything is better than nothing.

So just like COE  another game that created a ton of hype but really had NOTHING to show.The fact these operations can hang around so long says there are tons of gullible people giving them free money.

jahlon

Wizardry said:

Yeah it sounds like it is just attempting to make some money by bandwagon jumping into the Battle Royale idea.
IMO NOT very intelligent.The people that want to play BR want a bigger stage,a better game and are already playing BR in Fortnite and PUBG.
So what are they going to do ,offer Ninja 200k to jump ship and play their game to make it popular?
I can feel their reasoning though,they figure i they can get ANY sucker to give them money,why not,anything is better than nothing.

So just like COE  another game that created a ton of hype but really had NOTHING to show.The fact these operations can hang around so long says there are tons of gullible people giving them free money.

I think the first part of that is a reasonable concern.   

The second part though, they've already put their MMORPG out in a show format to their A0 players.  They've also put the BR out to all their backers, so its not that they've got NOTHING to show.  All the assets and stuff for the BR mode are assets that are developed for the MMORPG.   With the exception of the Storm and crouching.   

Again though, all reasonable concerns that I can't really argue against.   This is one of those situations where its like "Yup, spot on.  No counter argument"

As far as the montezation of the BR mode.   I had the paraphrased version of the question on the day I cut the video.

Here is the full transcript of the exchange between Steven and myself on discord:

https://www.paradoxgaming.net/the-steven-answer

Kyleran

I'll go out on a limb and say a separate BR game is a smart marketing idea and Steven is a master craftsman in this area.

To borrow from Blizzcon, what, don't you people play BRs? While I don't it seems many gamers regularly cross over between genres. (Weird, right?)

So some current fans of his planned MMORPG will also enjoy playing this BR and...it makes money now rather than later.

More importantly,  I am sure there are untold millions of BR players who might enjoy playing ASHES except they may never know of or pay attention to its existence. 

Releasing a BR will very likely draw significant interest from a new and possibly very large untapped customer base.

As an article by Raph Koster someone here shared recently stated, the gaming market has long since gone past the saturation point, companies are increasingly going to focus on stealing customers away from other games to build a base.

Retention of these customers will also be very important, so having more than one product is the smart play here.

Though many are loath to hear it, creating a mobile game tied into the ASHES universe is also the way to go, and if the BR gains decent popularity porting it to mobile is only a natural, not so much for the MMORPG.

Soybean

jahlon said:

Wizardry said:

Yeah it sounds like it is just attempting to make some money by bandwagon jumping into the Battle Royale idea.
IMO NOT very intelligent.The people that want to play BR want a bigger stage,a better game and are already playing BR in Fortnite and PUBG.
So what are they going to do ,offer Ninja 200k to jump ship and play their game to make it popular?
I can feel their reasoning though,they figure i they can get ANY sucker to give them money,why not,anything is better than nothing.

So just like COE  another game that created a ton of hype but really had NOTHING to show.The fact these operations can hang around so long says there are tons of gullible people giving them free money.

I think the first part of that is a reasonable concern.   

The second part though, they've already put their MMORPG out in a show format to their A0 players.  They've also put the BR out to all their backers, so its not that they've got NOTHING to show.  All the assets and stuff for the BR mode are assets that are developed for the MMORPG.   With the exception of the Storm and crouching.   

Again though, all reasonable concerns that I can't really argue against.   This is one of those situations where its like "Yup, spot on.  No counter argument"

As far as the montezation of the BR mode.   I had the paraphrased version of the question on the day I cut the video.

Here is the full transcript of the exchange between Steven and myself on discord:

https://www.paradoxgaming.net/the-steven-answer

Oh my Raptr Jesus! Every time Steven opens his mouth another lie comes out of it. You know, because his lips are moving. You notice those A0 backers were people who did not pay for the game but got it free at PAX. The A1 and A2 people were the ones who actually paid money should have be the first to test anything but they had to wait. Stevens Idea of giving back to his backers is nothing short of appalling.

No one who backed this game asked for a BR. Show us where it says that on the KS if I am wrong. You keep apologizing for this company. Look at your last post, you said it was not going to be a BR. We were told it was for testing pvp. Now you tell us Steven is make a BR to give the backers something. Something no one asked for. He gave all of the Alpha people who backed KS Lifetime legendary access. What happens if you don't like BRs? Great! you get a lifetime subscription to a game you don't like. / golf clap.

But hey, they can't sue him because they got something right? BTW buy more shit out of his BS shop.

Have you ever heard of poo pals? I will get to my point, I promise. Poo pals were turds molded in to the shape of little animals so people could put them in their gardens and it was to help fertilize plants. Image being that poor guy who had the job of molding the turds into the shape of a bunny questioning his life choices. AoC is a giant turd in the shape of a game. Now some of the backers are questioning their life choices.

Angreeegamer

Alpha 0: Pre-Alpha, Friends and Family testing, NDA Alpha

• December 15th, 2017 commenced

• Access Points: Weekly key drawings , Extra Life Charity Stream , All Hallows Eve Contest , Twitch Stream drawings

• Scope Summary: Back end server testing, login server testing, load balancing and basic world interactions

Source: https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/40288/ashes-of-creation-release-dates/p1 

If you were actively engaged in the community, 9/10 times you were able to get into A0. They just got their servers up to the point to run over 10,000 people at the same time this year. You expect them to get all 23,000 backers (just for Kickstarter and Summer alone, 40,000+ if we include pre-order backers) into their A0 3 months after their KS? 

Set aside your feelings of whats fair and what you think you're entitled to since you chose to DONATE to support the games development. Realistically understand what technology is capable of. Out of the box, UE4 can't support 23,000 players all at once. They've slowly been building up to this point through a years worth of work on their source engine code. 

So backers can cry all they want but it literally spells it out on the May 1st, 2017 kickstarter FAQ page that NDA Alpha (Alpha 0) was ALWAYS going to be raffle/lottery entry and always was going to come before the Kickstarter Alpha 1.

Steven never lied to you, you just never took the time to actually listen to what he was saying.

Kyleran

Angreeegamer said:

Alpha 0: Pre-Alpha, Friends and Family testing, NDA Alpha

• December 15th, 2017 commenced

• Access Points: Weekly key drawings , Extra Life Charity Stream , All Hallows Eve Contest , Twitch Stream drawings

• Scope Summary: Back end server testing, login server testing, load balancing and basic world interactions

Source: https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/40288/ashes-of-creation-release-dates/p1 

If you were actively engaged in the community, 9/10 times you were able to get into A0. They just got their servers up to the point to run over 10,000 people at the same time this year. You expect them to get all 23,000 backers (just for Kickstarter and Summer alone, 40,000+ if we include pre-order backers) into their A0 3 months after their KS? 

Set aside your feelings of whats fair and what you think you're entitled to since you chose to DONATE to support the games development. Realistically understand what technology is capable of. Out of the box, UE4 can't support 23,000 players all at once. They've slowly been building up to this point through a years worth of work on their source engine code. 

So backers can cry all they want but it literally spells it out on the May 1st, 2017 kickstarter FAQ page that NDA Alpha (Alpha 0) was ALWAYS going to be raffle/lottery entry and always was going to come before the Kickstarter Alpha 1.

Steven never lied to you, you just never took the time to actually listen to what he was saying.

I'd like to see hard evidence they've ever run a successful test with 23K plus, on a single environment no less?

They talk about the legions of people testing this game, yet the evidence of such really isn't there.

Angreeegamer

Kyleran said:

I'd like to see hard evidence they've ever run a successful test with 23K plus, on a single environment no less?

They talk about the legions of people testing this game, yet the evidence of such really isn't there.

To run a 23k test requires them to spin up their AWS cloud servers. Cost of continuously running servers is $36,270 a month as a baseline quote pulled up from AWS. To make those sort of numbers justified they need to be sure their game doesn't have game breaking bugs that interferes with data collection which is why I'd wager they scaled their testing phases to first include just 250 testers before getting to the 10k+ we're at currently. The current single environment cap has been set to 100 for these tests while thousands of instances are spun up at the same time. You can just visit twitch to search for streamed footage of the 100 player games, fps has been smooth for the most part when we get an optimized build. By the end of this month we should see them pushing the environments to 200 for the 100 v 100 castle sieges. You also have the open beta in 5 days. Doubt they would let 700,000 testers play the game if they weren't confident that their game was ready or close to ready for that sort of stress testing.