Exploring Ashes of Creation

3 days ago8 min read

A Series - Life as a Guild Member in Bad Girls Club

Hello fellow sweet potatoes! Welcome back to the blog. This week is going to involve a recap of what has been going on in our little Ashes of Creation world that we have been living in.

Ashes of Creation is a brand new MMO (massively multiplayer online game) that is currently in it's Alpha II testing phase. My partner and I, along with some of our friends we had made through streaming, made the jump into buying alpha keys back in late October/early November. We created a guild called the Bad Girls Club, and have recently grown into making a sister guild called the Good Girls Club.

It has been a ton of fun these past few months trying to learn the game and explore what is currently available for us to adventure through. At this phase of Alpha II we currently have the Riverlands (consisting of the nodes Miraleth, Halcyon, Joeva, New Aela, and Winstead) and a portion of the desert (consisting of the nodes Aithanahr, Azmaran, and Sunhaven). The fun of this game is that players have the opportunity to win mayorship of a node and assist in the progression of the growth of that node in the game. In future renditions of the game, the race for mayor will fall under 4 different types: Economic, Divine, Academic, and Military. Currently though, mayorship involves a voting system. This means that you can throw your name in the hat and hope you get more votes than your counterparts in the race. The mayor role won't be for everyone, as a lot of communication and decision making falls into that, but once you reach level 10 in the game you can choose to become citizens of a node and help the progression of the node through duties such as paying taxes as well as gathering the needed materials to assist the mayor in building new aspects of the town. It is a very hands on progressive form of game to play in, and all your actions can hold a lot of meaning when it comes to the growth of the game as a whole.

Our guild has been doing a ton of fun things in this game. We are all pretty chill and been having a fun time slowly making our way through the different areas and leveling up. As a guild we have pushed level in a few key spots in the game: Highwayman Hills, Church of the Seven Stars, Daragal Estates, Oakenbane Keep, and Remnants of Sephillion. I know there are several other areas as well that some of our guildies were able to go to that I unfortunately was not able to log on and be with them in. Many of the people in this alpha phase of the game have questioned us for being such a low level guild, but little do they know that we are just having fun taking our time and just slowly learning our way through the game. A lot of us could care less about pushing level to get straight to the end game content, it kind of loses its fun when you play it that way.

Week of February 17th-23rd

With the game being in its testing phases, Intrepid Studios shuts down the servers from Mondays at 1am to Thursdays at 1pm to work on updates and additions to the game server.

This week was a specific week of leveling for our guild members. Thursday through Saturday was spent exploring higher level bear caves, group Highwayman Hills runs, and group Sephillion runs. Thursday night was the group Highwayman Hills run. Our group that runs together usually have a full party size of 8. The group was doing a great run, suriving 1 and 2 star mobs alike and obtaining several good gear upgrades to share around the guild. I was unfortunately not able to partake in the fun this night due to a wind storm blowing out our internet service. I instead had to watch everything happen through our stream on my phone. Friday (the 21st), our guild decided to switch things up and head toward the Ursine Caves up toward Halcyon. This cave consisted of slightly higher level 2 and 3 star mobs. I do not believe that a whole lot of good gear drops came from this location like they were able to receive in Highwayman Hills, but a lot of experience was gained and several of our members were able to level that night. I kept sweet potato (my mage) in New Aela that night working on professions due to the unfortunate circumstance of high lag spikes on my end, an issue that I believe was stemming from my internet problems the night before.

Saturday night, I was actually able to participate with the guild in running a party through the Remnants of Sephillion. We had a really good group this night. It was a busy night at Sephillion, with other players running groups as well, so mobs sometimes were a little harder to pull and it sometimes became a bit of a fight to grab things. Sephillion gifted us with 3 blue drops, as well as many other gear drops for our lower level characters. Due to the nature of some of the pulls being too large at times, it did create a bit of tension in the group that night. We had several people having to step away from their computers for a brief minute, but our tanks weren't aware that they were away, leading to not having our full level of DPS hitting the mobs which in turn lead to a lot of us getting killed a few times. Things just needed to be communicated better within the group. I did finally level to 14 that night, still way behind our other guild members but slow progress is still progress. Sunday is our stream off day. My partner and I, though, still logged into the game and played a little bit together. We spent our time running around Azmaran and Aithanar killing the different scorpions and Minotaur's in an oasis area up north of Azmaran. These mobs unfortunately do not drop any good gear, but if you are looking to just farm up some glint for caravans or to pay your citizenship taxes then this is the spot for you. This is a spot that we easily end up back at if we are just looking for a low key activity to work on. Once we were finished with fighting mobs for the day, we decided to sit back and work on our professions for a little bit.

Professions, from my experience so far in this game, is an interesting concept after coming to this game from World of Warcraft (WOW). In WOW, your professions are almost completed instantaneously, like creating potions, enchanting things, or making gear. In Ashes of Creation (AoC) though, professions are a longer process. Depending on the number of materials that I have on hand, I could easily spend several hours just waiting for alchemy powders, thread, or anything else I am working on to level up my skills to be ready. I am not by any means trying to speak negatively to that though. Honestly, the chill time of just creating things in the game is why I am here. I am by far the furthest thing from a PvP player, as I have never been experienced in those types of games. With that being said, if I am able to avoid that aspect of the game by just gathering materials and crafting items for hours I am one happy potato.

Week of February 24th-March 3rd

On February 24th at 1am to February 26th at 1pm, the AoC servers went down for their scheduled maintenance. This update was supposed to be the biggest update of the month and was supposed to give us more areas of the desert to explore. This update though had created some underlying problems, so unfortunately all realms stayed closed until the 27th. On the 27th, we got word that the realms were back up, so we all were pumped and ready to get back into the game. I think we were all in the game for maybe an hour exploring the new Squall's End part of the desert when we all got booted from the server. Unfortunately, Intrepid had to make the unfortunate decision to shut down the game due to exploits in the desert causing issues. The exploit was that high level glint was dropping from every mob out in the desert. Stephen gave word to everyone that even though the servers had to go back down, he promised the following week that they would keep servers open for extended game play but the downfall was that everything we had started doing on the 27th would revert back to where we had been in the game on that previous Sunday. Unfortunately that meant that we would have to wait until further notice to get to explore more of the new desert nodes as they were no longer going to be in the game.

When the servers came back up on the 28th, it was time to get to some serious work. My partner, our guild leader, had been working so hard to get his character Kokkonut in the bid for mayor of Azmaran. It's been his ultimate goal to be able to assist in the game development in this magnitude since we first heard of the game. We spent a lot of time during the March 1st-March 4th time frame recruiting new guild members and helping them get to level 10 to be able to vote. We were also working on our relationships with other guilds trying to find ways to gain support from them as well in the race. Kokkonut did a ton of work to get to where our guild is and to get so many people to rally behind him, that come March 5th we found out that HE WON MAYOR!

Our guild was thrilled that we were able to accomplish what we thought was the impossible, but what we didn't realize was the uproar that was to follow from the news. The rest of the server did not take kindly to Kokkonut winning the mayorship. Our stream that night was flooded with players angry about the decisions already being made as well as so many hateful messages directed toward Kokkonut in the official Ashes of Creation discord channel. You would have thought that someone came in and took away everyone's most prized possession from them. The amount of hate my partner, as well as our guild, has received since this win has just blown my mind. Everyone out there has a main goal to help build in the development of this game, and that means that everyone involved in Alpha II should get an unbiased attempt at making an impact. Yes, our guild is small but one thing our guild is great at is learning things about this game relatively quickly. Being able to win this mayorship gives us a bigger picture of how to run a node as well as how to communicate with other nodes and learn the larger scope of how the game is ran. Although the backlash was brutal, I am extremely proud of Kokkonut for his perserverance in striking a great plan with other mayors in the game as to what journeyman workbenches were going to be in what node. I think for the most part that they were able to appease most of the people that were so upset to begin with. Now, you are never going to please everyone but at least most of the population of the game seems to be getting what they wanted out of all of this. Now lets just hope the rest of this month of mayorship can go smoother than the start and lets soak in this feeling of making the impossible happen.