Had to edit and repost this to correct the statement about the gacha. There is a way to get the outfits in the gacha via something called BP Points. You can salvage stuff you don't want from the gacha into BP Points. However, the chance of getting the fancy outfits from through the gacha is still less than 1%.
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Right before the weekend, Bandai has done a ban wave in #BlueProtocol hitting players who are playing outside of Japan or using VPNs. The Spanish guy I have been watching cover info about the game got banned on stream today and many of the people in his Discord server also got hit on the 16th. He stated he had actually been playing without a VPN most of the time but those in his servers using the free Urban VPN got hit. I'm unsure if any other VPNs got hit.
Both me and him aren't personally mad about this. We knew it was coming, as Bandai ToS says it's for the Japanese public only, and I anticipated the ban wave as well since they likely wanted to reduce server load for the Japanese player base right before the weekend so the experience is better for them. I haven't felt any bad lag or even disconnects after the rocky first day, at least.
I also personally haven't been banned yet and neither has my friend. But we may get banned soon. We took a break after playing close to 12 hours today. I also streamed for 7 hours.
The latest vod for today has footage of a 40 man raid and the gigantic boss, which was buttery smooth and I was getting 40-50 fps on max settings during it while also streaming. The optimization for an MMO made with Unreal Engine 4 is honestly impressive.
Despite how tedious and difficult it is to play even with a translator due to everything mostly being viewable within menus and me having basically no short term memory, we have over 30 hours now and reached around level 18 and obtained a mount today. For native players, they can breeze through a lot faster though I didn't see anyone today at the level 40 raid boss portal.
The gameplay is solid and the progression even at these early levels feels so rewarding. It's not perfect and I feel combat elements need adjustments but I'll gather my thoughts more about it in the following days. I think it's been overhyped as "the MMO savior" and I just don't think it is. I haven't personally seen how reasonable the BP Points store is when it comes to getting the currency. But it is still extremely fun if you want actual enjoyment in this cursed genre full of garbage P2W MMOs.
@beardalaxy Took down the last reply because some stuff is incorrect there.
So the game actually has a way to get the outfits in the gacha even if you are unlucky. You can convert unwanted items into something called BP Points. With enough BP points, you can straight up buy the outfit you want. Every 10 pulls, you can get something though I'm unsure that the "something" actually is. The site I used said it's stuff like gestures or cosmetics. You can see the outfits in the BP Point store are the same as the ones shown for the gacha ticket prizes in the main lobby.
F2P option to obtain BP points = unclear to me for now and it didn't say anything on the info site I checked out either. Unsure if there is any player stores and rather than say dumb shit again, we gonna have to wait until it gets localized or you could maybe ask one of the Youtubers covering the game that actually understand Japanese, like Aethersong.
The BP Point method could either be reasonable or extremely expensive but since I'm not spending, I can't personally tell for now. I know I got some gacha tickets from logging in.
@beardalaxy I agree it can't be avoided with a trading system, sadly. Due to lazy and/or wallet warrior players. Any system that has any potential to be abused will be and it only gets worse if the game is shit, too. Like Lost Ark being nothing but bots. Amazon didn't bring the hammer down on those during critical times after the game's launch. These companies always fall into the same pitfalls every time when it comes to RMT and bots.
@beardalaxy It's an issue that mostly comes down to: don't make the game shit and people won't be encouraged to cheat in it.
As much of a meme that Ashes of Creation is, the lead developer actually addressed RMT in a dev stream I saw. He says he wants to make sure his game doesn't "force" or encourage people to RMT because even he has been forced to RMT to stay competitive or achieve the best gear in past MMOs he's played.
When MMO developers make gearing unreasonable or impossible for the player to achieve via normal gameplay, that's when they "have" to RMT.
F2P games are notorious for abusive practices that lead to frustrated players choosing to P2W and RMT. The players that get burned the most are the competitive ones that aren't whales and but also aren't F2P, aka the dolphins. They are always enslaving themselves in the game even after spending and still won't reach the best gear due to dickish publishers and developers.
Happy players because the game isn't shit = less RMT. There is simply not a reason to RMT or P2W if the gear is achievable by simply playing the game. There will still lazy people who RMT in good games. I still blame the large portion of the issue on the people in charge of the game.
@beardalaxy @picandor @LukeAlmighty @matrix @McMongoose This is just my experience but the hilarious thing is that almost all actual black guys I've met in MMOs don't even play black characters like the ones shown, much less a young looking one. The ones I have personally met and ran with play light skinned girls.
I've always seen very few people with actual black characters (dreads, etc and not just dark skin; ie tanned) and I can't even confirm if they were actually black. The MMO genre is tailored for fantasy, so don't be surprised people are trying to escape reality as much as possible.
I can only tell if they're black if they talk in VC or tell me. I don't recall meeting too many black chicks in the last MMO I've played but the one I can remember (because she was obnoxious) was the same. Her character wasn't even black compared to her irl picture on Discord. I've been in the genre for many years now and it's overwhelmingly white and asian playing MMOs here in the West.
Amazon doesn't know their audience and it shows. So much push to show you can make a nigga in the trailer and on their website and this demographic don't even play MMOs. It's all done for disingenuous reasons ofc. They would have done a better job replacing the guy with a cute girl!
The first clan I was in in my last MMO was like 80% Chinese and rest white and then I was the only Hispanic. In fact, Amazon would have much better luck fishing up some beaners because the ones in South America play garbage F2P MMOs a lot so they can sell the gold to Westerners. Though in BP, there is no trading so no more gold sellers. lmao
The one thing I see happening is just piloting services.
@beardalaxy The game would play fine even with a free VPN but it's the stream that is having lag issues and dropping network frames. It's temperamental. Seems to be working fine now when I changed the Pomf server back to the USA yet that wasn't working at all earlier either, so I changed it to Japan and it was flawless.
Had to stop the stream for a bit because Mullvad keeps shitting itself in its Japan nodes and causing the stream to lag.
Gonna eat and try to stream later using TorGuard. I've used it before for streaming without issues though not sure how it will handle connecting to Japan either.
Here we go frens. I have been able to get into the JP servers. It's really late now in JP so the server is allowing more people in.
I played a bit earlier on stream too. It's gonna be a slow stream since I'm translating most of the time.
Combat feels really smooth so far despite me playing with high ping.
@matrix They delayed the global release for 6 months to add more joggers to the game.
I am very pleased to report that アノニマスの見解 Mitra has now been upgraded to v1.27.0
While this is largely backend changes that aren't visible to end-users, I am happy to see that the embedded XMR button on each post now offers a "Subscribe" button when pressed, allowing for both easy one-time donations AND easier access to the subscription dialogue.
As expected, the servers are getting raped so people are unable to log in. This is why I didn't start the stream beforehand because I knew it would happen, so it would have been a whole lot of nothing and launcher errors.
I also screwed up by logging out the launcher to go do other things while the maintenance concluded; it was previously working. Now the launcher broke and it won't let me relog. 🫠
It's also broken for Japanese users.
It doesn't help them that retards like myself are trying to play on their server, so I will just try again in a few hours or on Wednesday during the daytime when it's downtime for Japan. Honestly feel bad for them but Amazon thought it was a genius idea to delay our version in favor of shit game Throne and Liberty, which is a glorified mobile game full of P2W and posing as a PC MMO. Remember kids, if the MMO comes from Korea, it's not a game at all but a casino disguised as a game that will be dead in 3-6 months.
This is what happens when people who don't play games run the industry.
The official Twitter gave a notice an hour ago that they are extending the maintenance of the game and website, so the launch is delayed.
Which also means the stream I planned is delayed. lol
Not sure when they are going to get the game going. If it gets really late, I may stream it sometime during Wednesday at this point.
I want to think that the "phone anti theft" on the 3rd ones is simply because they are so fucking shitty, nobody would possibly think of stealing such garbage.
The jackass of all trades.