When a Streamer is clear about what Ashes is working on and what their intention is to improve the MMORPG genre.

Originally posted by luhelld

It's not transparent to show videos for two years and then drop out of nothing when it's playable "surpriseee that was just a showcase, not our actual progress"

Originally posted by Adlehyde

I will say as another developer, we also have tried to have a better dialogue with our community, but often times, some people can just be flat out rude and disrespectful, but insist they're just passionate or say things like, "I'm only saying this because I care," but all it does is demoralize developers and make them less inclined to communicate.

I praise your steadfast approach and ability to stay the course with communicating so transparently. It is not easy to maintain.

Originally posted by luhelld

Doesn't change anything, that you mislead everyone knowingly. You knew it generates hype over things that are not real, at least not yet.

Originally posted by Yawanoc

Seems like every game I play has this issue: passionate devs forced to distance themselves from their communities after bad actors take it too far.

Recently WoW Classic had Aggrend who used to be very active on social media and had a lot of great discussions with players, before certain people started pushing their luck and harassing him on vacation.

Steven’s been good at pushing through this in the past.  He’s a lot more resilient than I would be.  I wish the team the best of luck at pulling through this wave too.

Originally posted by TalkingSeaOtter

It's very much a intersection of both in-complete experience fatigue and Early Access disillusionment.

We're living at the (hopefully) tail end of a period in where companies gain the ability to patch games after release and as such, began shipping incomplete/buggy experiences to get games out the door at a lower cost, since less internal testing was required.

Around the same time, Marketing teams at said companies began realizing that consumers would pay extra to play a game even just a few weeks early, so they start throwing around "Alpha" and "Beta" in their marketing outside of what those terms meant in a development context. Consumers began expecting these terms to essentially be stand-ins for Early Access or Head Start weekends.

Now, we have a developer actually using the terms correctly and a bunch of players are losing their shit because Marketing Teams have conditioned to expectations to be out of line with what those terms mean. Those with actual Software development experience seem to understand and be pretty chill about it.

This post is crystalizing that difference of perspectives between two content creators; one that as far as I am aware has no software development experience and one that does it for a living outside streaming.

u/Steven_AoC , as a former PM myself, please tell the team to keep up the hard work and open communication this year. Carving out a new trail is grueling work, but your opening up a potential new path for the industry as a whole.... and maybe put up one of those "Hang in there" kitten on a branch motivational posters.

Originally posted by ZeroZelath

If you're passing concept zones off as real work when it's not indicative of what is *exactly* going into the game (Desert biome is a GOOD example of this) then the negativity is justified and it's your own fault at that point for misleading your paying supporters and it calls in question all the other showcases you had shown off so far just like that MMO kickstarter that got sued.

If that area does exist then you should add it to the game to prove that. Otherwise, I think future showcases should make it abandantly clear what is and what is not actually going in the game. Of course stuff changes in game dev, we all understand that, but making fake showcases for something you don't intend on putting into the game is not okay and never will be. That's not "open devlopment" as you call it.

Originally posted by PaleontologistSlow66

And what changed in the specific example of the Desert biome Steven? Did someone open Unreal Editor, load up the entire Desert biome, select all and press delete?

Originally posted by terenn_nash

He’s a lot more resilient than I would be. I wish the team the best of luck at pulling through this wave too.

Steven can vent his frustrations by logging in to AoC and playing god.

the other day he dropped a dragon right outside halcyon. just a field of corpses