Summoner Pets Sneak Peek, Economy Revamp, and Cheater Prevention | Ashes of Creation May Development Livestream Summary

With a rotating panel of developers and a series of hot community topics to discuss, this livestream was a mega-dump of information

This livestream was jam-packed with useful and interesting information, so let’s jump into it.

Reminders & Notable Information

Steven and Margaret chatted a bit initially, informing players about the Dev Discussions that are currently live on the forums, where players can give feedback on testing, questing, and other topics. Some other information discussed was:

• Creator Program is coming online soon. Applications will soon be paused. Accepted applicants will get an email once they have joined the Creator Program

• Steven confirmed that the Shol Realm will be wiped or completely removed come Phase 3

• DLSS 4/FSR is coming, but unlikely to introduce MSAA

• Dynamic Gridding is going well, with the next step being PTR Testing

• Additional language support will come in Beta launch

• Thomas Blair was hired as Lead Combat Designer

  • Worked on Star Wars Galaxies & Everquest

• Skill trees being reworked by Designer Bucky

  • Each skill will have three ranks

  • Will split into ative and passive skill points

  • Starting with Cleric rework

Bug Hunting Breakdown

Our first major topic is centered on Community Feedback & Bugs. We are joined by two additional Intrepid employees: Brian, an Executive Producer on Ashes of Creation, and Jacob (GM Jacob), the Director of Production.

Bountiful /Bugs

They discussed how /bug reports get triaged by a core team, breaking them down by priority, estimating difficulty level, and figuring out when they can tackle it in conjunctoin with ongoing work.

There are thousands of bug reports sent in daily, with hundreds of thousands of bug reports so far in the Alpha.

The team thanks the community for all their bug reports, discussing how useful each one, especially the ones that detail steps to reproduce the bug. This helps the team tackle them much quicker.

In July, the team will have a Bug Sprint where they tackle a good chunk of the technical debt that has accumulated during the Alpha, most likely ahead of the August Phase 3 release, to get ready for the influx of players (new & old) that will want to experience the new content.

Summoner Spotlight

For the Summoner discussion, we are joined by Trad & Aaron, both Combat Designers, as well as Natalie who has worked on some of the major archetype iconography and website art.

Summoner will be the most versatile of all archetypes, capable of tanking, dealing damage, or healing. This is all dependent on the summoned pet.

Summoner Kit

Summoner will be a caster type, similar to a mage. There will be more DoTs and channels in this archetype than other classes, but will also be direct damage abilities.

Summoners will be able to directly heal their pet, as well as have their pet heal them. Summoners will be able to teleport themselves as well as their pet, and eventually their entire party. Summoners will also be able to dispel buffs off enemies. They will also have access to various CCs like silences, roots, and stuns.

Balancing such a hybrid archetype provides it’s own challenges, but it follows the same rock-paper-scissors philosophy of balancing that Steven espouses. Where Summoners excel, they’re meant to excel. But in certain scenarios, they are meant to not provide as much benefit as another archetype.

Focus the Pet

Controlling the Summoner Pet will be similar to other MMOs, controlling it through Attack/Follow/Move/etc. commands. They will also have stances, directing the Pet to be aggressive and attack anything within range, or completely passive.

You will also be able to move Pet actions to your own hotbar, or move to a dedicated Pet Hotbar (which may not be online on initial release). You will also be able to set-up logic for pet abilities like heals, where you can have it trigger on you at certain thresholds (initially system set, but possibly one day manually set by the player).

The base summoner will only be able to have one active pet. Guardian, Hunter, and Mystic are the 3 currently planned pets. Eventually, players will be able to have multiple pets, whether thats two large pets or many smaller pets. These smaller pets may not be distinct summons, but possibly summon a Skeleton Commander who comes with many smaller skeletons that it can command.

The Pet Hotbars are a requirement for summoning multiple pets, but the current implemented tech supports it, as they are currently internally demoing a Skeleton Army.

Lore-wise, the Summoner Pets before you specialize (post level-25) are meant to be primordial and ethereal in form due to their basic control over the powers of Vyra, but as players choose their specialization, their Summoner Pets will draw from this focus to take different forms.

Summon Pets will not have equippable gear, and will be balanced through cooldowns and mana similar to archetypes.

Economy Revamp

Next we’re joined by Cory, a Technical Designer on the Economy Team, and Rhett, Lead Systems Designer overseeing economy.

Steven emphasizes that this revamp touches many systems, hundreds of recipes and gatherables, and is massive effort that will be adjusted based on feedback, but he hears the players concerns so it has been increased in priority.

The initial goal of the previous change was to have crafting matter, but they may have over-indexed in that direction, resulting in the current situation.

Some more notes on economy revamp:

• Increased priority of economy revamp in order to test it prior to Phase 3, to make necessary adjustments ahead of P3 Fresh Start

• Crafting amounts

  • Was too much on the low-end beforehand

  • Change compounded as players got to apprentice/journeyman

  • Will be toning these numbers back at the higher-end

• Adjust recipe resources to better reflect the accessible resources

  • Introduction recipes should lean more on abundant resources and less on scarce ones (e.g. less reliance on copper)

• Should scale better with adventuring power so players aren’t grinding mobs for full items as a primary way to get gear

• As world expands, there will be more space to spawn gatherables and get a better idea of how the economy is supposed to look

Unreal Engine 5

We’re joined by Mark, Director of Engineering, Zack who is a Technical Director, and Willis, a Senior QA Analyst to discuss Unreal Engine and it’s impact on Ashes of Creation.

Due to an issue in the Unreal 5.5 update that would affect closer to 50% of testers, the upcoming Unreal Engine Upgrade was delayed until the release of Unreal 5.6.

Zack answered the common question of "when will you land on an Unreal Engine version” by saying that once they’re happy with the available functionality & state of the engine, then they will stop doing periodic upgrades.

Here are some considerations when deciding when Intrepid decide to upgrade engine version:

• Studio impact

  • Impact on developers

• Advances in technical art (mainly PCG - procedural content generation)

• Player impact

  • Impact on tester base

• Can we afford to do it?

  • Few engineers dedicated to it for a couple months

  • Always adds technical debt upfront

Cheater Cheater

Zack and Mark stick around to discuss Business Intelligence (BI) and Cheat Prevention in Ashes of Creation

BI is associated with each gameplay hook, from trades, to votes, or experience, all this data is gathered and informs business decisions. This data visualized can help pinpoint outliers and discrepancies in player behaviour.

Over 600 accounts have been actioned through this method, and other cheat prevention methods. Hundreds of those actions have been character or account bans,

Steven then discussed the well-known hacking service that was introduced a few weeks ago. They’ve introduced heat-mapping and other measures to quickly take actions against users of these services.

Steven also responded to calls for public outings of characters that were actioned for cheating or using cheating services. This is due to legally being murky, as well as it being possible for false positives that may occur.

Player reports, including videos, are also very helpful in discovering users of cheating software, and both Margaret and Steven emphasized it’s usefulness in keeping Verra hacker-free.

Steven also emphasized that all players are subject to the same Terms of Service, including Phoenix Initiative members, who have spent thousands of dollars. This is addressing allegations from various players that friends of Steven have avoided punishment due to their relationship with him. He also directly referenced a story from Falco in the Copium Clinic video below:

Some additional game integrity items mentioned are:

• Some actions players can take are automatically sent to an internal Intrepid Slack channel to be immediately actioned

• Support ticket response times are between under 20 hours

• Currently hiring dedicated technical support staff, in the process towards in-game GMs that will be there on launch

• As time goes on, the auto-detection thresholds will be lower and lower, which will flag the “blatant” hackers that may take additional time to track down

  • This is to limit the number of false positives that can be flagged due accidentally breaking the threshold as a result of anomalous actions

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That wraps the Ashes of Creation May Development Livestream! For those that want the full video, check it out here, and don’t forget to check out the recent Top Ashes Moments that was just dropped!

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