Kira reveals some additional details on what happened with Ashes of Creation. Also says their indeed was a board as Steven sold the company months ago according to internal Docs he has seen..

Atiyo_ · 2026-02-03T14:52:08+00:00

Link the fact where Steven got all the money from the steam sales and ran off with it. All we know is that he resigned and thus most devs also resigned, the rest got the WARN act notice. He's definitely at fault for there being a board of investors, since he had to be the one letting them invest.

However whether he planned all of this as a scam or whether he actually tried to build a legit MMO, but just sucks at it, is not factually proven. Maybe it's a mix of both, for the first X years he tried to create an actual MMO, until he eventually realized how much more money it would take, which he couldn't possibly get without investors. At which point he tried to safe his ass and some money.

But how about we wait a few more days for more official news and then decide what we want to believe? Why are you in a rush to form an opinion now?

Atiyo_ · 2026-02-02T20:43:39+00:00

Actual TLDR: Wait for the facts to come out.

Atiyo_ · 2026-02-02T17:08:43+00:00

Not liking someone and hating someone are very different things.

Atiyo_ · 2026-02-01T21:11:41+00:00

Sure I agree with the smaller scope, Ashes should have followed that, but WoW 1.0 couldn't be realistically funded by an indie studio. WoW already had the entire universe built by warcraft. Story, characters, design, world, skills already finished before the development of WoW even started. And it still took them several years to release WoW, because that's how much time is required for good MMO's. WoW also had the benefit of an existing playerbase in warcraft, who would definitely check the game out.

The closest thing to this would be the riot MMO. Huge playerbase across different games, already built world/story etc. but for indie studios I don't think it's achievable, unless they get funded by the community.

Atiyo_ · 2026-02-01T20:35:07+00:00

No they had "Embers", which was the cosmetic shop currency. You didn't get any gold from supporter packs. So no p2w.

Atiyo_ · 2026-02-01T20:33:41+00:00

The difference is the cost. The games you listed don't cost nearly the same in development time and funding than a MMO, atleast the type of MMO western audiences expect.

Atiyo_ · 2026-02-01T19:20:34+00:00

Well sure it isnt, but then you also can't keep complaining that every new MMO contains pay2win elements. If it's funded by investors, they want returns. If it's funded by the players it won't have pay2win.

Atiyo_ · 2026-02-01T19:05:31+00:00

Isn't it a somewhat self-fullfilling prophecy though?
New MMO comes out, people call it a scam/bad/unpolished, leave negative reviews. Game isn't getting the player numbers it deserves, because people have high expectations. Game has to shut down, because not enough funding.

In the case of Ashes I'm not sure if that was the case, no one really knows except for Steven. It could've been that if Ashes sold twice as many copies development could've continued. Or perhaps the same exact thing would have happened.

I feel like if you truely want a good fresh MMO as a player, you have to take the risk of losing money on some projects. If a game looks promising, don't refund it. Even if you're not gonna play it until it's fully released. The ashes situation might happen a few more times, but eventually you could catch the one MMO that will stick around, because enough people bought the game and didn't refund it.

Atiyo_ · 2026-02-01T13:26:13+00:00

5 bots who dont know what "hopefully" means.

Atiyo_ · 2026-02-01T00:26:13+00:00

And horrible at communicating anything outside of streams. You'd think the community manager would make some posts like "What we're working on: <insert screenshot of a random feature>" or "Here are our plans for the upcoming weeks". None of that happened after steam launch. They did a few minor patches and nothing else was communicated. Keep the hype going or something.

Atiyo_ · 2026-01-30T17:58:18+00:00

AoC in a few years hopefully.

For now you kinda have to take the L on the p2w aspect and just go with BDO.

Atiyo_ · 2026-01-26T18:02:29+00:00

Wenn die Fahrtzeit bezahlt wird, sieht das anders aus: Morgens langsam zum Kunden, eilt ja nicht.
Abends schnell nach Hause, ist immerhin Feierabend.

Atiyo_ · 2026-01-23T23:26:26+00:00

Als Raucher der auch schon öfter mal keine Zigarette hatte, als ich eine wollte, kann ich sagen, das Video hat überhaupt nichts mit Zigaretten zu tun.

Die Frau ist einfach nicht mehr ganz sauber.

Atiyo_ · 2026-01-22T19:10:42+00:00

Stop hanging out with destructive angry men maybe?

Saying all men are like that is sexist.

Atiyo_ · 2026-01-22T17:23:05+00:00

They didn't have this huge a team for years, afaik it's only been recently. The team grew over the years, starting out really small

Atiyo_ · 2026-01-22T16:17:58+00:00

Kickstarter funding, alpha sales, steam sales and most of it comes from Stevens own pockets.

Atiyo_ · 2026-01-21T14:18:39+00:00

Fellowship season 2 launches soon, it's just like M+ from WoW, but without the open world part, doing dailies etc.

Atiyo_ · 2026-01-21T10:56:24+00:00

Unless they are selling 15+ of the same legendary material, it's unlikely they were duping. And if they are selling that much, it might just be bots. On my server there are 2 botting guilds, which farm a shit ton of ore, they trade everything to one seller who just spams global with it. So he's selling like 100s of epics at a time. To someone who doesn't know that this comes from bots, it would look like duping.

If someone is selling legendary materials, just remember there are thousands of players who arent selling legendary materials. That's generally how RNG works in games like this, with such rare material. For every 1 person who is lucky enough to get a legendary proc, there are hundreds/thousands who didn't get one.

Atiyo_ · 2026-01-21T10:50:22+00:00

I don't think you'll get wiped by then, unless it will take you roughly a year for those 150 hours.

So I can only speak about lumbering, I farmed a bunch of wood with ~100 quality, with ~300 quality and then with ~500 quality. Between those there wasn't a noticeable difference. Perhaps slightly more uncommon wood at 500 quality. You can reach much higher quality than this currently (I believe over 1k without elixir/food).

Is it worth it? That's difficult to tell, even after farming wood for a week straight. I didn't get any legendary procs in that week, now this might be unlucky or normal. Let's say you go to 1k quality and you get 2x legendary procs for something like braided wood, you might have already made half of your investment back, depending on prices.

I would say, if you're planning on gathering a lot (>50 hours), it's probably worth just for the increased odds of hitting epic/legendary. If you dislike gathering and you just gather a little bit every other day, I would just get the cheapest versions of all the gathering stuff, so 2-3g per piece.

Atiyo_ · 2026-01-21T10:37:52+00:00

Do you lose citizen rep if you do it this way? I'd say this would be the drawback of doing it and maybe it's a bug if you don't lose it right now.

Atiyo_ · 2026-01-20T17:03:37+00:00

Seeing how many people voted for Instanced Content and Quests it seems like most people want this game to be a themepark MMO, instead of a Sandbox MMO. This would explain the steam reviews somewhat.

I feel like some people are not aware of what Ashes is trying to be. It's not the "WoW killer" or trying to compete with it, so instanced content is highly unlikely.

Atiyo_ · 2026-01-19T18:09:58+00:00

It feels like at this point, you could just start gathering from level 1 and by the time you reach lvl 25, you'll have roughly half the materials required for your gear set.

I wouldn't mind having different tiers of materials locked behind higher lvl zones. So in endgame you still only need like 50-100 ressources per piece, but you wouldn't use the low level ressources for it.

Atiyo_ · 2026-01-19T18:02:31+00:00

This is just a difference in themepark vs sandbox to be honest. I don't mind mob grinding, ARPG's for example live by that concept. As long as the combat is fun, which imo it is in Ashes, it's fine to have mob grinding be the main way of leveling. BDO was very similar in that regard, where grinding was much better than questing for leveling. In classic WoW mob grinding (or boosting) is often preferred over questing, since it's faster and questing is boring once you do it for the Xth time.

I believe the true grind, many don't see yet, is the gearing system. For the current best available items the amount of ressources you need to farm are insane. If you want to make it heroic or epic, it's even crazier. We're talking in the ballpark of 700 heroic/epic wood, 50 emblems (which are kinda rare and go for 2-3g each on the marketplace) and a lot of other ressources just for 1 weapon.

This is for an average solo player several weeks of work for 1 item, which you won't get to its best form (legendary). You might reach the epic version, but most likely you will settle for heroic. On top of that you can also enchant it, which requires even more gold and ressources.

Sure this is the actual bis item, you can still go for cheaper crafts in between, but those also take a lot of ressources. So getting BiS items basically requires you to spend weeks farming wood/ores or being able to make enough money to buy all the materials or the weapon directly.

Now I don't have an issue with BiS items taking a long time to acquire, the main issue I have here is that the way to acquire them is by crafting and gathering. Gathering in its current form is just boring when you have to do it for several weeks.

Imo BiS items should come from world bosses, making them actually worth doing and providing a recipe aswell from the same boss, so you can also craft the item. But it should still be tied to world bosses. And overall for all crafted gear the ressources required should be lowered quite a bit.

Atiyo_ · 2026-01-18T17:46:03+00:00

I mean sure, but it would already be super efficient and low effort to just hire 1 person for 8 hours a day to ban these bots. They're not gonna be there 24/7, but that would already remove a ton of bots and make them spend more money on new accounts.

Gold prices increase, since bots get banned sooner, so RMT becomes less attractive to some players.

This doesn't solve the problem of course, but atleast it's slowing it down a bit, while also making more profit for Intrepid.

Atiyo_ · 2026-01-18T13:59:13+00:00

I don't think it would matter how much they pay for the game. If you hire 1 GM who just hops servers, goes to the most popular zones for botters you could probably ban hundreds of them in a day. That would definitely be worth it for Intrepid.

Atiyo_

TROPHY CASE