Account management

Ashes of Creation web site design preview (WIP).

The account management page is used to assign or reassign cosmetics to characters within an account.

• Cosmetics can be reassigned to other characters (alts), but can only be active on one character at a time.

• There will likely be a cooldown for reassigning cosmetics between characters.

Accounts

Players are permitted to own multiple accounts, but are subject to rules relating to multi-boxing.

Account transfers from mail.ru/my.com/my.games

Account transfers from MY.GAMES (My.Com/Mail.Ru) to enable access to Ashes of Creation testing phases can be done by registering an account with Intrepid Studios and submitting a support ticket. The intention is for all purchases and achievements to be preserved.

Q: What does this mean for my Ashes of Creation account with MY.GAMES moving forward?

A: We are working with MY.GAMES (previously My.Com and Mail.Ru) to transfer purchases made in the MY.GAMES platform to the Intrepid Account system, so that you will be able to use those purchases in Ashes of Creation. Please create a support ticket using the "I need assistance with my account" and "MY.GAMES Migration" option and our support team will assist you with this transfer process.

Q: What happens if I don’t have an Intrepid Account?

A: You will need to have an Intrepid Account for the transfer to take place. If you have not already done so, please create an Intrepid Account with the same email address that is associated with your MY.GAMES account.

Q: What happens to the purchases on my MY.GAMES account moving forward?

A: Once accounts are migrated to the Intrepid Account platform, any Ashes of Creation purchases would be available on your Intrepid Account.

Q: If I don't want to transfer or migrate my MY.GAMES account, can I get a refund?

A: Any players who previously purchased their pre-order through MY.GAMES can submit a support request through MY.GAMES for a full refund.

Q: What happens to my personal information associated with my MY.GAMES account?

A: Your MY.GAMES account and all associated data will remain safely within the MY.GAMES account system. In order to facilitate the migration of your purchases, MY.GAMES will provide Intrepid Studios with the following data, ONLY if you have made a purchase related to Ashes of Creation or Ashes of Creation: Apocalypse through the MY.GAMES systems.

Character slots

There will be character limits during the Alpha and Beta testing phases. These are probably going to be more relaxed than for live launch.

• Allow testing of different builds as needed.
• Provide equipment needed to test various scenarios.

There will be a "comfortable" number of character slots available for alts.

Cosmetics

All cosmetic store items will be non-tradeable.

• Cosmetics are not tradeable with other players but can be reassigned to other characters (alts) within the same account.
  • This is a reversal of the earlier statement that assignment of account-bound cosmetics to a character cannot be undone.

Skins

Cinderhorn Steer pre-order pack cosmetic mount skin.

Providing these limited options that collectors out there like when it comes to achieving and/or purchasing cosmetics. It means something I think when players make that decision to purchase or they go through the rigorous portion of achieving those things in game that it is not just everywhere around them and becomes meaningless at that point. – Steven Sharif

Cosmetic skins are Accessories, Buildings, Caravans, Mounts, Pets, and Ships that are sold in the cosmetic store.

• Skins are cosmetic items that do not grant the user any benefit.

• Cosmetic skins are only be able to be applied to things that have already been earned, crafted or found within Ashes of Creation.
  • Certain cosmetic skins require specific items or item tiers have been achieved in-game before they can be used.

Owning cosmetics does not guarantee the acquisition of the item the cosmetic can be used on. Players must still achieve the corresponding item/building. – Steven Sharif

• The lore on store cosmetics is flavor text.

• Caravan skins change the appearance of an in-game mount and in-game caravan that are hooked up to each other.
  • The caravan and mount skin components are not able to be utilized separately.

• The best cosmetic skins will be in-game achievable.

The best skins will be in-game achievable (obviously “best” is subjective, so I’d say the most ornate and detailed/unique). – Steven Sharif

Server population

Population limits will be enforced on each server realm.

• Around 8-10k concurrent users (CCU) per realm is projected. This limit may be increased based on the effectiveness of dynamic gridding.
  • Initially there will be a limited number of registered accounts (approximately 15,000) per realm to help mitigate login queues.
  • This limit will increase over time to around 50,000 registered accounts per realm.
  • Alpha-2 phase-1 is expected to support 3,000+ concurrent users per realm. This is expected to ramp up to 8-10k as testing progresses.

• A queueing system will be present, starting in Alpha-2 phase 1.
  • There may be queues to get into high population realms, but the aim is to avoid excessively long queues.
  • The queueing system takes into account several factors, including server performance and population density in the divine gateways (temples) and adjacent starting areas.

That district grid right now is relative to the starting temple and that starting area just outside of it; and then Lion Hold is on a completely separate worker. So, even if players move out of the starting temple and into Lion Hold, they're now on a separate worker, but it still contributes to informing the queue and how people get trickled in. Because again, we take into account all the worker's populations, and we even weight the relevancy of that worker population based on proximity to the starting worker. – Steven Sharif

• The developers intend to carefully manage realm populations via the use of character creation throttles to avoid the need to merge servers.

We heat map player movement and progression through the world. A lot of player progression stays relatively sticky to the center of the Riverlands; and we know that that's in-part because a lot of the initial content is more dense in those locations; and the leveling experience and time to level keeps those locations more relevant. So. part of what we've been doing on the world design side of things over the last few weeks has been to introduce safe corridors, or safe paths, that lead out to the node locations to better alleviate the network constraints that exist within the density of the central's Riverlands, so that we can ferry, players out of that zone a little bit quicker. – Steven Sharif

• The developers may occasionally release stats relating to realm populations and archetype/class makeup, but there isn't going to be an official page that surfaces this information.

Q: What is your plan and what systems are in place to avoid the first few months of server queues and congestion; and when players drop off, how do you plan on handling that when the time comes?

A: I think that obviously is a problem that every MMO launch suffers. That is the balance between your active users your expected peak concurrencies: where that fall-off begins and how you consolidate servers. You don't want to expand too much at the beginning to alleviate server queues and then end up with like 30% pop servers that you have to consolidate later. The same is going to be true for Alpha-2. So, we're going to be leveraging- obviously we know how many users we have available when it comes to Alpha-2 entrance and then as we allow additional people to purchase in with these new key sales that we'll be doing later, we're going to get an idea of what that is. Generally I would expect we're going to see 30 to 40% peak concurrencies when it comes to opening the servers, when it comes to prime-time, when it comes to events that happen. And, so when we talk about server queuing server congestion, we want to make sure that we have healthy Alpha-2 servers, so we're going to leverage server queuing as much as possible. That means that sometimes those server queues might get into the thousands during those peak times, during the servers spinning up, or during those prime times or events; and that's okay. It's not going to be the most fun for a lot of players to have to sit in a queue. Obviously, we've all done that before in MMOs that we played, but the alternative is that we have too many servers available, we don't have those queues during peak times; and then when it's not peak times those server populations dilapidate and that's not what we want to have obviously. – Steven Sharif

Server reservations

Server reservations allow guild members as well as unaffiliated players to reserve character slots on a server realm starting in the Beta testing stages of the game.

This would likely be utilized more so by guilds than that would be solo or unaffiliated players; and I believe that the solo player they may have friends that they want to play with. That's fine, they can also still with those friends do the reservation system, but the player who is just joining the game fresh and doesn't have a community that they're part of, I don't think they really mind in that regard and will not utilize that system. – Steven Sharif

Server transfers

Server transfers, outside of server merges, will not be possible initially.

• The developers intend to assess the impact on housing and other systems closer to launch.

Name reservation

Name reservations were rewards for backing at the Pioneer level and higher and were previously available through the Voyager plus pre-order pack.

• Accounts will have name reservation tokens, that entitle its holder to reserve a name on a specific server realm when the reservation time comes. These will be able to be entered into a player's account page to secure a name for a specific realm following a wipe.

It would be a field essentially that you fill out in the back end of your account page for the website that would preserve based on a realm basis. So you would select a realm. You would input your reservation token essentially; and then that space would be reserved after the wipe. – Steven Sharif

Name reservation priority

Name reservations will be allocated from the highest backer tier to the lowest backer tier.

1. Kickstarter backer tiers, highest to lowest.
2. Summer crowdfunding backer tiers, highest to lowest.
3. Pre-order packs purchased from the web store.

Within each tier, the name reservations are on a first-come-first-served basis.

Name reservation availability

Name reservations are planned for late in Alpha-2 phase-3, but this is subject to change.

We will get back to you on when name reservations will be available. We might try to see if we can get something in place by phase three, but no guarantees there. It might not be until after. – Steven Sharif

• Previously, name reservations were slated to begin during Alpha-1.

Multi-boxing

The current policy on multi-boxing (multi client) is that players are allowed to own multiple accounts, but may not launch multiple game clients from the same computer. Players may not use any software to automate character actions or mimic keystrokes.

• This was previously stated to be: If a user has a legitimate account and is not botting or using complex scripting then multi-boxing will be permitted.

Multiple accounts and multi-boxing, that's a little bit difficult for me because it could be conceived as pay-to-win, because you can progress on a second character and you can then gift that progression to your primary character. In that scenario yes I can see the argument. However if the character progresses with the same amount of effort and time needed by the person who's playing and they maintain that progression on that character, then I don't consider it pay-to-win. I consider it a second account. So initially what I'm going to say is having multi-boxing capability will be allowed within Ashes of Creation. There are a few safety nets that I put in place that restrict the ability for abuses that we've seen in other games. – Steven Sharif

Gear binding

There may be some gear binding (BoE or BoP) but it will be an exception rather than the rule, as this doesn't facilitate the objectives for the economy.

Q: Right now, there's no soulbinding on any of the gear. Is that intended game design or is that something that'll be addressed later?

A: No, it is intended game design... Very little to no things are intended to be soulbound. They're all a part of an open economy, which are missing a few features in phase one. As we know phase one is about stability and performance, and as we enter into phase two and phase three, some of those additional features and systems will come online: one of which is deconstruction, tempering, over enchantments. Those are are expected to sink open economy items out of the economy to help reach that balance between the faucets and the sinks. – Steven Sharif

• Very little gear will be account bound or soulbound in Ashes of Creation. The game economy is based around crafting and degradation of items.

A lot of what we experienced in games that usually come before us is that many things are account bound and they're soulbound to your character... Instead very little here is character bound. Very very little. The vast majority of gear- yes you will get quest related gear as rewards- but it won't be let's say one set in one dungeon and you must run the dungeon over and over. Instead we want to really emphasize the reliance on the economy and crafters and gatherers and processors to support a majority of the gear structure in-game, combined with that of world raid bosses and dungeon bosses; not a repetitive quest line through a single dungeon. – Steven Sharif

• Gear is obtained via crafting, gathering and processing along with raid and dungeon bosses.

• The developers are investing in security systems, customer services and game masters to combat RMT, rather than relying on gear binding.

Q: If items are intended to not have soul-binding, how is your team going to effectively plan to fight RMT?

A: We are going to be investing heavily in our GMS and in our CS teams, which we have a plan and we have some rudimentary elements of that plan currently in Alpha that relate to player heat-mapping, action heat-mapping, and RMT flags that will then cause some investigative things to occur on our side. This is something that I think has to be done in order to preserve the integrity of the economy of the game. RNT is obviously, even in a game where you had 100% soulbound, can still be done. Whether that be through things like power leveling, purchasing accounts, whatever it might be: a soulbound approach to the economy doesn't solve that per-se. You still have to, as a company, choose to invest in combating those things. And I think many players who played in this genre know that at some point the lights get turned off for many publishers around making those investments. However, that's not our mandate. Our mandate is to ensure that in order to provide a environment where integrity matters, we have to be willing to invest, not just in the tools that discover these types of things, but also in the CS response that includes the GM's availability. – Steven Sharif

See also

• Accounts
• Crowdfunding
• Cosmetic store