[2.0] A Realm Reborn: Post may contain potential spoilers.
Ul’Dah
This will be the first screenshot showcasing the city-states. I’ll be taking about two more for Ul’dah and will repeat it for the next two city-states. I don’t have any comment to make for the screenshot today, but I’ll be discussing on some stuff related to mmos and this little series down below
State of MMOs?
I think as a whole there’s promise for MMO’s to grow but they are suffering a rather significant setback known as Real Money Trading (RMT) and other forms of monetization via the companies developing them.
RMT honestly has the most impact right now and can easily spell the demise of any up and coming MMOs like Ashes of Creations. The main cause of RMT is conveinence. Why spend hours possibly hundreds of hours to achieve something when you can spend some real money to achieve it now? There’s a couple ways as to how you can look at this decision.
Escaping reality
Firstly, there are those who simply just want to immerse themselves into a world and not have to deal with the chores of grinding when they already do it in the real world. Why grind for hours when you already did that in real life for some lump of money. How about taking a small portion of that lump and place it into the game and immediately get rewarded for all of that effort that they had already done before in real life. Sounds like a great solution when one does not have to experience a tedious chore as experienced in real life.
Showing off
Secondly, showing off is a common thing to do. Everyone does it in some form, yet others seek to show off great rewards that they may not have achieved genuinely. Buying a mount or getting a house may feel great at that moment especially when showing it off to others, but imagine if those folks finding out it was achieved by spending real money and hardly any effort. Then again if everyone in that group does the same thing they might just praise them for how big their wallet is instead.
Solutions?
There’s many reasons that people can attribute towards RMT, but honestly the solution is a fairly simple one. People stop spending real money on these markets. Unfortunately, that’s a challenge to solve in itself but I think its feasible if people are able to find the right mindset. Even if such a thing fails government regulation is technically a possibility and a doubtful one at that. Regulation is something that should be done by the companies and the audience not by some large entity. Although, if we can’t handle the problem ourselves then such actions may need to be accomplished by a government body.
Ultimately, there’s not a perfect solution to the problem. Money is simply going to be the main driver of this problem and its not going to change overnight. Its very possible that this problem may escalate and get worse before it improves.
Ashes of Creations
Ok so I kind’ve went on a bit of a rant on the previous section, but part of the reasoning for it is so I can discuss a little bit about Ashes of Creations (AoC) and how it may affect this blog.
Ashes of Creations is an upcoming MMO that has primarily been fundraised by a bunch of folks. Intrepid Studios the folks developing the game seems to have a fair amount of experience on bothe developing and playing MMOs in the past. They have a rather bold goal on trying to capture the experience that MMOs had acquired back in the past. To be frank, I think it has potential yet doesn’t mean they will succeed. One of my concerns regarding the game is RMT.
Currently, RMT has plagued World of Warcraft (WoW) and is also with Final Fantasy 14 Online (FFXIV). How this affect AoC is a fairly simple reason. Its a new MMO with slew of things that will cause people to look for more convenient solutions. A path with the least resistance in a sense. Due to a rather transparent development method that Intrepid is using. Folks will devise tools and bots to quickly erode the economy and force people to rely on RMT to actually accomplish anything or possibly peered pressured into it. Its very likely that the Alpha/Beta phases of development won’t experience any major bot incursion and as such Intrepid may not have battle-tested tools to tackle them when they do show up. At the same time if Intrepid shows off their tools to battle bots. Bot makers will simply circumvent those tools.
Unfortunately, it will be a never ending battle. The only real solution to stop such a threat is to make the game undesireable for RMT, but given AoC designs it will probably be difficult to achieve.
Disclaimer
One thing that I should mention that I haven’t already. I have spent about 250 dollars on AoC which in turn I should be able to participate in Alpha 2 and the future beta phases. I would say “invest” instead of spent, but unforuntately I am not going to be making money off of the game. I wouldn’t really consider it a pre-order either, since I mainly spending the 250 dollars with the intent on helping its development. As such I kind’ve view it as a form of investment, but not on the monetary side of things and instead on what kind of experience it can offer.
I’ll be fine if the game were to ever flop and development on it stops. Knowing that there are those who wished to create such a game and those who wanted to support. Thats all I need to feel satisfy of what I had spent towards the game. I try not set a high bar for the game as a whole, but I do think it will capture an interesting experience.
In regards to this blog
When alpha 2 comes around. I’m probably going to start doing a daily screenshot thing similar to FFXIV. Although, I don’t know if I’ll make a seperate post or bunch it up into more of a weekly post instead. Regardless, I intend to keep making daily screenshots for FFXIV for the foreseeable future (or if I get sick and tired of the game)
Thats all Folks
A fairly long post today. Kind of was meant to make up for the prior posts I wasn’t able to work much on. I do want to make a warning that the short posts will probably become a trend for a little bit due to the release of Xenoblade Chronicles 3. I intend to invest a lot of time on that game and probably won’t spend much on these posts. I will still do the daily posts, but be warned that it might just show a screenshot and nothing more.
I hope you folks have a good day/night and may the future ever be fruitful. (I’m trying to think of something different at the end for each of these posts and probably already failing at that.)