Ashes of Creation - If it sucks at launch, it's only $500

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > The MMO HMO > Ashes of Creation - If it sucks at launch, it's only $500

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Zaodai: May 23, 2009; Death before dishonor?
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Honestly cosmetic cash shop makes a fair amount of sense for any MMO. It gives them a reason to develop more fancy poo poo without it being game-breaking or locking mechanics behind a paywall. WoW ends up doing it for mounts and pets, Planetside 2 did it with camo and armor, etc.

That said, I have no real faith that this is going to end up going well. I'm not surprised they've raised $400k already, though i am a little surprised they're asking only $750k to try and make a super ambitious open-world MMO. I don't know necessarily that the tech is out there for their plan to work and not be half-assed even if they knew what they were doing, and I imagine this will end up as a janky, half-finished mess.

# ¿ May 1, 2017 20:15

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 20:10

Zaodai: May 23, 2009; Death before dishonor?
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Also it's a nice touch that even with all their artists, they couldn't be asked to have the backer tier image not have the little pictures overlap the text, so you get places where the actual reward information is covered up by a horses rear end. :allears:

# ¿ May 1, 2017 20:19

Zaodai: May 23, 2009; Death before dishonor?
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Pryce posted:

Can't wait for the stretch goals where they add 8 more classes.

And 50 additional genders for the character creator.

# ¿ May 1, 2017 21:45

Zaodai: May 23, 2009; Death before dishonor?
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I feel like the guy listed as their Senior Artist is actually them trying to sneak concept art for one of the characters past us. Fake sounding Bacon name, dwarven hair...

# ¿ May 1, 2017 22:36

Zaodai: May 23, 2009; Death before dishonor?
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I'd be surprised if it ends up half as playable as Star Citizen.

And yes, I realize exactly what I'm saying.

# ¿ May 2, 2017 03:26

Zaodai: May 23, 2009; Death before dishonor?
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Stevefin posted:

Not at all, its close to 900k now. Will we have another Star Citizen on our hands here?

Truthfully. I hope not, I hope these guys actually make something. They seem much further ahead than Star citizen is with their current spotlight videos

And Star Citizen has playable portions of the game too. I think they both run into the issue where technology just isn't going to support what they want to do on a large scale. But hey, maybe everything shakes out and we get a fun game. If that happens, then I've got no problem giving them subscription money when it comes out. So it works out for me that all these other people have already backed it. :smugdog:

Those stretch goals, while not worldbreaking, do seem at least fairly reasonable for the amount of extra money being tacked on. Not a bunch of extra classes or systems. We get some minigames and fancier mounts. Seems like something they could actually implement.

# ¿ May 2, 2017 15:19

Zaodai: May 23, 2009; Death before dishonor?
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Programmers just get in the way of your artistic vision.

# ¿ May 3, 2017 08:06

Zaodai: May 23, 2009; Death before dishonor?
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FireWhizzle posted:

In an MMO context, the first thing you should be doing - and this is touted repeatedly by every successful MMO team ever in their dev blogs:

write a hurricane proof server architecture and netcode suite

The netcode / server arch is the foundation upon which you build your MMO house. If the foundation sucks, the whole McMansion, though flashy, will just crumble

I agree whole-heartedly with this, and I believe this is one of the things that actually has kept World of Warcraft popular for so long. Its netcode is pretty good in just about any environment. Playing on low ping? High ping? loving dial up? You're mostly fine (except for capital cities on dial up, I guess). They even have movement partially clientside somehow without speed hacks being an issue, so you don't get jittery lag-step animations like most MMOs, everything stays fluid on your screen so you don't really notice it unless you have like a full second of lag.

It makes it just "feel" better than most MMOs, even though it is old as poo poo at this point.

# ¿ May 3, 2017 15:12

Zaodai: May 23, 2009; Death before dishonor?
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The Matrix Online was a hilarious shitheap. I don't know how anyone played that on release. Then again, I didn't play SWG, so if there was a favorable comparison I wouldn't know it.

# ¿ May 3, 2017 15:52

Zaodai: May 23, 2009; Death before dishonor?
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On release, the combat was this weird turn based rock-paper-scissors system. Not an abstracted one like the weapon triangle from Fire Emblem or something, but actual Rock Paper Scissors against the various enemies. I think it went standard tab-targeted later? I couldn't really get into it. It was cool as a premise but it felt very much like a mid 90's MMO.

# ¿ May 3, 2017 16:04

Zaodai: May 23, 2009; Death before dishonor?
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FireWhizzle posted:

I think the Matrix Online was from the era of EQ engine McMMOs from SOE.

Essentially they took the EQ engine and modded it for all their games and just kept printing hoping one would stick. SWG iirc was partially an EQ McMMO with heavy modding. I haven't ripped up SWG's game files so idk

So WoW is in it's own special realm here to be fair. WoW is one of the few client-trusted MMOs, but they have a really loving good warden subprogram to track sketchy activity, and a warden on the server side that scans user data for things that look out of whack. They are able to do this for a few reasons, primarily that trusting a client in WoW, then having that client do something bad can't really permanently gently caress up the game, since the game is designed in a certain way. That and they have very good tools for tracing/removing illicit game states. Other online games that have much more at stake - e.g. BDO, can't really do this because of the node-war/crystal destroy system to name a few. Thus, BDO had issues with it's double-handshake-ball-tug-reacharound secure netcode at first, essentially DDOSing themselves into the ground before removing some of the constant updates like karma pings.

In fact, here is blizzard watching the state of the servers at all times. I guarantee there is a set of these with a maintenance-QA staff approving autoban requests:

Yeah, but it was in that realm on its own over a decade ago. Other people could approximate their system. They're not running lost tech from the Dark Age of Technology. It would be more expensive, of that I have no doubt. But it contributes to one of the reasons there hasn't been a true "WoW-killer" despite all the new MMOs that have puffed out their chest and made that claim before being kicked off a bridge.

I've played WoW since Vanilla Beta, and I can recall precisely one time I've seen a hacker first hand. And he mysteriously disappeared (I am assuming banned, but cannot confirm) within like two hours, for using a speed hack on his priest in battlegrounds.

It's not that people couldn't make an MMO that truly surpasses WoW. It's that everybody wants to do it on the cheap. That's why I laugh at this game for having a paltry $750k as their funding goal. A $750k MMO is going to be poo poo. There are bootleg chinese knockoff MMOs with bigger budgets than that.

# ¿ May 3, 2017 16:47

Zaodai: May 23, 2009; Death before dishonor?
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Ignorance is bliss, right up until you realize the house you're in is actually on fire like everybody was saying.

# ¿ May 3, 2017 23:36

Zaodai: May 23, 2009; Death before dishonor?
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FireWhizzle posted:

here's an idea (circa 1995)

build a loving product then sell it

The product they built is hope, which is pretty cheap because it has no resource costs.

# ¿ May 4, 2017 01:17

Zaodai: May 23, 2009; Death before dishonor?
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Raylen posted:

All of the fanboys on their forums are now calling people conspiracy theorists for asking about their coding team.

Even if they presumably have some kind of coders lined up, the fact that the ~*artists*~ don't have anybody high profile enough or that they give enough of a poo poo about to mention in the kickstarter is pretty telling about their thought process. In general, never trust an artist for poo poo, they're the least logic minded people on earth.

# ¿ May 4, 2017 02:01

Zaodai: May 23, 2009; Death before dishonor?
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Ah yes, Planetside 2. The game where if you turned your graphics settings down, you could scale vertical walls because the bigger polys had bigger hitboxes than a flat wall. And the stealth wouldn't render so you could see the cloaking class. Until that was unfair, so instead you just flat out couldn't see the cloaking class because the shimmer wouldn't render. And that had pretty awful netcode.

Faith restored.

# ¿ May 4, 2017 02:36

Zaodai: May 23, 2009; Death before dishonor?
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You would think with having a dedicated scam artist on staff he'd have warned them to at least lie about having talked to programmers about all their promises first. Amateurs.

# ¿ May 4, 2017 02:43

Zaodai: May 23, 2009; Death before dishonor?
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Raylen posted:

Trust us, we're hiring the people we need to make this game! And you better support the devs because if you ask questions about their lack of programmers, we'll call you a conspiracy theorist!

If you can't trust someone who defrauds people out of their money based on their fear of dying, who can you trust? I think at the very least this kickstarter has earned them our unconditional blind trust. We owe it to them.

# ¿ May 4, 2017 04:17

Zaodai: May 23, 2009; Death before dishonor?
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Alexander DeLarge posted:

Wait what the gently caress?

If you turned down your video settings far enough, the walls went from being smooth, solid surfaces to jagged looking stacks of tiny, tiny polygons. Despite this being a rendering change, the hitbox of the walls would actually change to match the render so you could repeatedly jump up the series of very small ledges to scale a wall that a person playing on higher settings would not be able to climb.

Zaodai fucked around with this message at 05:11 on May 4, 2017

# ¿ May 4, 2017 05:09

Zaodai: May 23, 2009; Death before dishonor?
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They have one programmer, and I don't think anybody is taking solace in that. We've mostly been making GBS threads on them for not actually having programmers in the process at all, because it's a bunch of artists and marketing people making GBS threads in a hat and selling it to you as totally gourmet chocolate, you can trust us.

# ¿ May 4, 2017 15:56

Zaodai: May 23, 2009; Death before dishonor?
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I mean, they aren't wrong about the Kickstarter format being the perfect platform for attracting the type of player they want.

Gullible retards who have currency.

# ¿ May 4, 2017 17:59

Zaodai: May 23, 2009; Death before dishonor?
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Vanilla WoW, as much as I dearly loved it (it was my favorite version of WoW!) WAS poo poo game by modern standards, because modern standards have a bunch of quality of life improvements.

The thing is, Vanilla WoW was from over a decade and a half ago. A WW2 fighter would get wrecked, no contest, by modern tech. But the best of its day was still the best of its day. Vanilla WoW was MILES ahead of anything else on the market at the time. And nothing really has bothered to close that gap in the intervening time, because it would cost money and come with risk, and nobody wants to risk that money.

# ¿ May 6, 2017 00:57

Zaodai: May 23, 2009; Death before dishonor?
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The key words, again, were "by modern standards".

# ¿ May 6, 2017 05:43

Zaodai: May 23, 2009; Death before dishonor?
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Cithen posted:

I've always found WoW to be super boring. I've tried getting into it multiple times, but it just doesn't work for me. It feels like I'm doing the same quests with different scenery, all of which have been done by countless others in the same way. Maybe it's rose colored glasses or whatever, but I like the sense of adventure and consequence from games like EQ. Quests and raids were something you found and felt like you were doing them in your own way. I've tried quite a few MMOs and don't think there's been something that has scratched that itch since.

Edit:
That isn't to justify dropping cash on crowd-funding scams like this.

Honestly, I think a lot of this comes down to whatever MMO you really played as your first, in-depth MMO. A lot of people I've talked to seem to have that same feeling, and it really doesn't matter what MMO you started with, whichever one you put a lot of time into first is the one that gets that sense of wonderment to it.

Any subsequent ones end up paling in comparison because they just don't have that same feeling. You've gotten used to MMOs on some level, so your mind now has a frame of reference to compare to.

# ¿ May 8, 2017 01:33

Zaodai: May 23, 2009; Death before dishonor?
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You know what game let one player dumpster a bunch of people in a city with a monster? World of Warcraft. Sure, you weren't supposed to, but it was a popular pastime for Hunters back in the day to kite one of the worldbosses into Orgrimmar (or Stormwind on the alliance side) and watch it just murder the poo poo out of people who were otherwise just trying to hit the auction house or the bank, or that were AFK in what they thought would be a safe area. There would be times where people couldn't organize a proper group to kill the boss, and it would just go around one shotting people until that part of the city was a ghost town and it either de-aggro'd or a raid geared tank and healer showed up to pull it out of the city.

Also I love the "people will always call something that is being successful a scam" comment. :allears:

Ashes of Creation - Already a Success(ful Scam)

# ¿ May 15, 2017 16:41

Zaodai: May 23, 2009; Death before dishonor?
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Byolante posted:

Getting your pet living bomb on baron then unsummoning it, leaving it unsummoned until after the raid then summoning it in the AH was better than the zombie plague. The TBC launch event made the capitals death zones you could not enter for hours or even on smaller servers days. It was the same situation kiting a green dragon into org got you, but done intentionally by the devs. The only thing that disrupted the flow of the game to the same extent was launch day plagued blood on hakkar.

There was also that quest that flagged you hostile to your own faction NPCs temporarily and you could use it to cause the battelmasters (for the PvP queues) to spam their one-shot AoE cleave around them, and because they were targeting a player of the same faction, it would hit people that they should have normally not been able to damage, IE all the people queueing for PvP in the room. You could lock down all battleground PvP on a given server for like half an hour until the debuff ran out.

# ¿ May 17, 2017 16:32

Zaodai: May 23, 2009; Death before dishonor?
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They've raised over 2 million dollars. Jesus Christ. The supplement pyramid scheme scam guy must be patting himself on the back right now for a job well done.

# ¿ May 19, 2017 17:43

Zaodai: May 23, 2009; Death before dishonor?
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The problem with that is a bunch of 100 man servers tend to be expensive if they're all going to be super-responsive action gameplay, and you either end up with the Survival game type thing where none of the instances talk to each other which means if 70 of the 100 people on your node stop playing after an hour, you now live on a dead server, or that none of your progress means anything because you lose it the next time you log in and get pulled to a new server.

The one main thing that survival games and MMOs do have in common however is that they're breeding grounds for half-assed shovelware full of promises people can't keep, lovely retread ideas, and horribly coded janky garbage that plays about as smooth as a sandpaper handjob.

The ultimate problem the "next generation" of MMO is going to face is finding a business model that can sustain the monetary outlay required to run an infrastructure to support an appreciably different playstyle than what currently exists. Everybody wants to cheap out and run their game on a potato with a coathanger coming out of it. That poo poo isn't going to work, and until they get over it, you'll get your various tab targeted MMOs and occasional moderately laggy action MMO.

# ¿ May 25, 2017 18:07

Zaodai: May 23, 2009; Death before dishonor?
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SweetBro posted:

Only if made by people who don't know what the gently caress they're doing. If you're going to do sharded servers for an MMO you have an auto-scaling setup with AWS or someshit with a bunch of Docker containers for all the micro-shards. "super-responsiveness" has almost jackshit to do with server cost since you're bottleneck is networking latency, not CPU cycles, so you can jam a bunch of 100 man shards onto a single large EC2 instance whose cost is negligible if each shard has at least one $15 or something subscriber since you're down scaling instance amount and size based on peak.

Like these are all problems that have been solved before, they just require a sufficient knowledge of technical know-how to implement which all of these companies clearly lack.

For action MMOs, 100 people on the same screen all doing anime teleport flip kicks in realtime would take up a fair amount of processing power to keep track of all of them while they're all interacting with each other. For it being "solved", nobody bothers to do it, suggesting it hasn't actually been solved suitably.

If it were that cheap and easy, I can't bring myself to believe that every company just elects to use garbage backends for their games to save an extra $200 or something.

# ¿ May 26, 2017 03:48

Zaodai: May 23, 2009; Death before dishonor?
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Wouldn't goons liking the game be more damning of it being a poo poo game? As a community, we don't have the best track record for enjoying particularly well-made games.

# ¿ May 27, 2017 04:42

Zaodai: May 23, 2009; Death before dishonor?
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I'd happily pay a subscription for a good MMO in 2017.

Sadly, that would be a discussion for another thread. :v:

# ¿ May 30, 2017 13:11

Zaodai: May 23, 2009; Death before dishonor?
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TheAgent posted:

we just need to drain the swamp of these career developers

Artists are not developers. :argh:

# ¿ Jun 1, 2017 23:08

Zaodai: May 23, 2009; Death before dishonor?
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I don't think I'd ever want to be in a position where EA is my defense.

# ¿ Jun 2, 2017 01:57

Zaodai: May 23, 2009; Death before dishonor?
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At least Blade and Soul wasn't complete trash. So he's 1 for 3!

# ¿ Jun 2, 2017 23:56

Zaodai: May 23, 2009; Death before dishonor?
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Byolante posted:

Expecting a tech startup to act ethically or follow rules that would cost it money is laughable.

Especially one run by a guy whose business portfolio is scamming people about their health.

# ¿ Jun 3, 2017 19:25

Zaodai: May 23, 2009; Death before dishonor?
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AlmightyBob posted:

It took a big email campaign to get kickstarter to do anything about the guy kickstarting a manual on raping women and all they did was cancel it and let him keep the money

Okay, I'll bite. What is the context of this?

I don't get how that would even be a product if it weren't monstrously horrible. Wouldn't people who aspired to rape already know how it works, given that they're, you know, motivated to rape?

# ¿ Jun 6, 2017 19:37

Zaodai: May 23, 2009; Death before dishonor?
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One of the stretch goals was reading a fanfiction he wrote and recording it for youtube. That may well be the greatest kickstarter of all time, in a backwards kind of way.

# ¿ Jun 6, 2017 21:15

Zaodai: May 23, 2009; Death before dishonor?
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More power to them in that regard. If that one in ten trillion chance that they make a good game is pulled off, I'll happily give them money to come play in their golden age playground. I never feel bad about spending money on a fun game.

# ¿ Jun 8, 2017 23:35

Zaodai: May 23, 2009; Death before dishonor?
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TheAgent posted:

I have this awesome idea for a game, all I need are programmers ~~and artists~~ to make it a reality
--every wannabe designer and the Ashes of Creation management

I think the Ashes of Creation management quote would be more like "I have this great idea for getting a bunch of money and fleeing to Uruguay. Now all I need is some concept art."

# ¿ Jun 9, 2017 02:03

Zaodai: May 23, 2009; Death before dishonor?
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Kimsemus posted:

But guys what if this time things are different!

Then we, the third party with no particular investment, win anyway because we get the reward with none of the risk. If it ends up actually being a thing that is good and fun, we just play it.

# ¿ Sep 4, 2017 20:03

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 20:10

Zaodai: May 23, 2009; Death before dishonor?
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Mirificus posted:

https://twitter.com/real_lethality/status/909590405053911040

Top 10 MMOs in Development

I haven't even heard of half of those MMOs.
Star Citizen, Ashes (obviously) and Crowfall I've heard of. I didn't even know Life is Feudal was an MMO.

# ¿ Sep 18, 2017 17:58

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > The MMO HMO > Ashes of Creation - If it sucks at launch, it's only $500

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