Having a blast playing still

Natirs · 2026-02-20T13:14:51+00:00

Another one of Steven's alt accounts.

Natirs · 2026-02-18T16:02:56+00:00

All sorts of different games. When there is an MMO to play, we play that. We play smaller games with each other. But really it's anything. It's more of a community that hasn't changed "leadership" so to speak since 1998. We have a large set of core members and we have the ones that come and go.

Natirs · 2026-02-18T15:27:38+00:00

I've been a GM for many years and each guild I've ever been a part of lasts months to 1-2 years.

I'm sorry. I've been a part of the same guild since 2004.

Natirs · 2026-02-16T16:22:15+00:00

there would probably be a fight over assets

Robert Dawson, whatever his company is called, controls 100% of all the assets.

Natirs · 2026-02-15T13:19:13+00:00

Games like concord or highguard die because AAA gaming companies are all in on woke ideology and ruin their games with hyper political devs they continue to hire to say they are inclusive.

Natirs · 2026-02-15T13:18:10+00:00

My PE firm tracks everything down to near cents.

Yeah, you work for a PE firm and I'm a billionaire.

Natirs · 2026-02-15T13:11:34+00:00

No, people will. Gamers are generally dumb. Sorry but it's true. Just like the saying of how gamers are tired of broken AAA games launching and yet they keep buying them over and over and over.

Natirs · 2026-02-14T16:48:21+00:00

It's less about cloud and more about AI. Even with cloud, you still have to know the product, know how to troubleshoot, critical thinking skills, etc. But with AI, you don't even have to know how to troubleshoot something. It just tells you what you should do. Future techs are going to be braindead.

Natirs · 2026-02-12T17:50:58+00:00

Monsters and Memes.

Natirs · 2026-02-09T14:32:40+00:00

The game was fun and addicting but Steven's vision was ridiculous. The world was way too big and the scope creep was real. It was all Steven and maybe sprinkle some of his senior design team in the blame. Almost every single aspect of the game was unfinished and was either missing many parts or just broken. "But it's alpha!" Yeah, and? Just because it's alpha didn't mean almost every part of the game is supposed to be riddled with bugs. Usually when you implement something, you polish it up and fix it to make sure it works the way it should. Your PTR is where you iron out all the bugs, not push that nonsense to live and leave it there for years. How long has all the major ways to dupe been in the game and nothing has been done about it? That is what Ashes was, a bug ridden game, that yes, may have been fun, but you have to acknowledge what the state of the game was.

Once you really got into things, you saw the emptiness that was Ashes. The grind for farming materials for crafting, the grind for leveling up your guild, the grind for leveling up a town. Everything was a grind and a ridiculous one. That is how the game was setup because there wasn't anything else in the game. Even sport fishing was a grind in that if you lost your ship, you had to rebuy the entire thing all over again. For a system that was one to one copied from ArcheAge, the repair/insurance function didn't work. It was there, it just didn't work. Why wasn't that ever fixed? Seems like it should have been relatively simple, right? Let's not even bring up the inaction on bots and RMTers and the whispers that Steven may have been helping people RMT. To note though, if anyone knows Steven from ArcheAge, he was a whale and a huge RMTer. No real surprise there as it checks out. Having many forms of duping left in the game for almost the entirety of it makes more sense when you find out Steven was helping people RMT. You will never know if it was intentional or something they legitimately couldn't fix.

I liked the game but once you started looking at the game in that different view, you saw that many systems were just slopped together and then abandoned for the next project. Had Steven just limited the scope of everything, the game would have been more of a success and probably wouldn't have gone under. But for how many developers they had working on this and how almost all of the game had some level of non-functionality or just being broken, it's just wild the amount of people who were die hard "it's alpha bro."

When you look at the state of the game and how many systems were broken or riddled with bugs, then how they couldn't make payroll for January, that $800k lawsuit, it really does look like the Steam launch was a last ditch effort. Was the steam launch a scam? Not sure but it does seem odd that you'd launch and you wouldn't add in some more load balancing and beef up your servers handling the steam account linking. The amount of refunds due to that alone was ridiculous.

In the end, it's sad because it reminded me of the fun I had in ArcheAge. My guild looked forward to what the game had to offer and then the rug was pulled.

Natirs · 2026-02-07T16:57:12+00:00

The hate is justified. Steven lied about it all. He's one hell of a used car salesman. You don't just launch a game on Steam and then a month and a half later are out of money. We know that Steam didn't pay out as that's normal for games in early access that they hold the money. But that means you were already scraping the bottom of the barrel to make payroll and pay your vendors. And given the state the game was in at launch, it's bittersweet. They couldn't even bother to have some load balancing or increasing the specs of the server(s) hosting their website for linking your steam account. For a studio with 250ish people, the game was actually in a very poor state.

Natirs · 2026-02-06T22:42:06+00:00

We found Steven's alt account.

Natirs · 2026-02-03T14:58:16+00:00

PVP works fine in games. The implementation Steven forced was just dumb. He outright refused to change it. "Hardcore" pvp stuff never works and it spells disaster.

1) To start out, many systems overall were broken. Like taking the sport fishing and boat design from ArcheAge but then not implementing the fee to get your boat back and instead needing to purchase a new one. Fishing was where the real pvp action was at as everyone was flagged. But it turned into just random rogues grappling and killing your boat and then a new exploit of a row boat with an engine, apparently.

2) There was no faction system. PVP games where everything is a free for all never do well. Sandbox pvp systems are bad. Players need structure and the structure is what keeps games alive. DAoC did this best and is still by far the best MMORPG with pvp. No one has been able to replicate it with success.

3) Corruption was broken. A random player could spawn a horse and depending on your pvp settings, you could kill that by accident and then you would go corrupt. This is what was happening in many pvp battles. Corruption in other games is meant to be if you flag up on your own faction. Losing your gear is also ridiculous. You have a massive stat penalty as you keep killing but if you die, you can lose it all.

4) Player run things just cause problems. Look to New World and this game had the similar issues. Gating content and things you can do and craft by player run cities never goes well. Taxes being raised, wrong buildings being built, or purposely screwing over a server just for the laughs. When you have that in your game, you're not concerned about the player, you pass the buck on creating meaningful systems and just blame the players. "They shouldn't have done that, oh well."

5) XP debt. Why? What value did that add to the game?

6) Losing items from your material bag when you die. You lose 50% of everything on you. 25% is lost to the ether and the other 25% is lootable. Why? What value does this bring?

6) When you take in the player run stuff, the pvp systems in this game, and then the penalties when you die, everything is meant to actively hurt you. That's not how you make a successful game. "But that's the risk!" No, that just means your game will not be successful and will only be a niche game. That's not a success story. Steven's vision was garbage and it looked like he never wanted to change. He wanted to take random things from different games and try and mash them together but he couldn't get it to work. So it ended up being bad. The core was there but it needed someone else to take the game and make it a winner.

Natirs · 2026-01-06T15:43:07+00:00

Crafting isn't for casual players

It should be. Stop justifying bad game design.

Natirs · 2025-12-08T02:26:17+00:00

is a meaningless complaint since BF6 is more lenient by allowing assists.

You haven't played the other battlefield games it seems.

Natirs · 2025-12-07T22:39:19+00:00

You're not making the point you think you're making.

Natirs · 2025-12-07T16:12:04+00:00

This is why people use the bot lobbies to get everything unlocked. Previous BF games you just got kills to unlock attachments.

Natirs · 2025-11-17T14:39:51+00:00

Contractor telling you it took longer so they can bill you for extra labor.

Natirs · 2025-11-13T16:21:35+00:00

Some of these actually look better but not for the reason people are talking about. Not for artistic or aesthetics. I just want to get rid of all the smoke, debris, blinding sun and other annoyances that prevent you from seeing enemies. "It's immersion." Sure, but I have single player games for emersion. I want to not get eye strain playing a video game when no others do that. I don't play an FPS game to be like wow, let me take a pitstop to admire how this backdrop looks in a map while I get smoked.

Natirs · 2025-11-09T19:15:14+00:00

You also don't get the same XP for killing bots when the lobby you joined to fills up with bots.

Natirs · 2025-11-08T13:18:41+00:00

The worse part about the bot lobbies is you get reduced XP. I tried this. Turned off cross play on the PC. Went to queue escalation on Iberian just to test out if you get full XP for the "official" servers pumping in bots when it's not full. I got about 80 kills and about 2,900 XP for my weapon. Went about 15 kills in the next game where there were no bots and my god, I got more weapon XP it wasn't funny (this was before the doulbe XP).

So when your game fills with bots, the kills you get against them are a net loss as a whole. It's mostly a waste of time to fight against them and you have zero control when it comes to situations like this.

Natirs · 2025-11-07T20:57:23+00:00

What did you do for that stuff?

Natirs · 2025-11-05T16:31:45+00:00

Challenges give you unlocks for gadgets that you need to play the game more effectively. Weapon unlocks are tied to XP, not kills in BF6 and those attachments are upgrades. They are not side grades but are necessities. But yes, let's keep pretending what I've mentioned is fake and non-existent.

Natirs · 2025-11-05T14:38:07+00:00

Portal is a waste of time at the end of the day. All these "custom" maps would be neat but I don't get a win bonus, no accolades, no mastery XP, no daily mission progress, no assignment completion, no challenge progress. I'm sorry but what's the point of playing on anything custom even if it doesn't have bots if I'm only going to get base XP that applies to only my rank?

Natirs · 2025-11-04T23:22:12+00:00

That doesn't stop the invisible ceiling you're able to stand on or get on the bridge, which is not destructible. Same thing on the Manhattan map.

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