My.com's Volker Boenigk has returned to the Ashes of Creation Discord with a strikingly honest and frank discussion of a number of issues raised by European fans of the game. Boenigk tackles issues including pay-to-win and My.com's role in the creative process for the game. As a reminder, Ashes of Creation will be published in Europe by My.com as announced last week. Other regional publishers have not yet been announced.
On "Pay-to-Win":
"In the past, My.com has published and developed primarily titles that were, from the ground up, built around a Free-To-Play model. This is not the case with Ashes of Creation, which is fully tailored towards a subscription-based business model. We want to make sure the game reaches our players with a business model and monetisation options that matches the expectations of the fans and backers of Ashes of Creation.
We are fully supporting the Non-Pay-to-Win vision that Steven and Intrepid Studios have, and we will implement the same model for the My.com version as they implement for their version.
We believe that Ashes of Creation will be one of the largest MMOs ever to be globally published, and as a publisher, we are excited to help lead the charge , together with Steven and our friends at Intrepid
On Customer Service:
While My.com is always striving to provide the best possible Customer Service for any of our titles, we may not always be meeting the players’ expectations in this regard. The feedback about Customer Service is traditionally one of the toughest parts of publishing an online game, but this will not deter us from improving. We are continually working on getting better in this area, and we want you to keep on telling us about your expectations.
In order to provide the best possible Customer Service for Ashes of Creation specifically, My.com will be working closely with Intrepid Studios to establish global procedures and policies for our players in the European and CIS regions. We will also establish joint service level expectations that My.com will commit to fulfilling.
As a first step to underline our commitment, we will already begin providing a base level of Customer Service for the European and CIS region, starting on the first of September. This will give us some head start on making sure that everything is set up for the times when players in Europe will have actual issues with which they contact us. Should you want to get in contact already - we are looking forward to hearing how we are doing there and where specifically you would want us to improve.
On Account Security:
With the most recent implementation of the GDPR changes for European users, we have already solidified the security of your account and personal information, and given all My.com users more direct control over their data. These recent upgrades together with the plans we are pursuing with Intrepid will ensure that our data security is now up to the highest standards of the industry.
In addition to this, we will also closely collaborate on providing the client-server technology that will support this account security. Intrepid Studios will remain in full charge of compiling and providing the Ashes of Creation client through the My.com / mail.ru infrastructure, so that the process is as concise and secure as possible.
On Localization:
Intrepid Studios is already providing us with the necessary localisation tools that will allow My.com to focus on the actual localisation rather than having to work around a missing infrastructure. This will ultimately allow us to provide a localisation quality that meets our own expectations as much as those of the Ashes of Creation community. Additionally, the benefits of cooperating so early with the developers as in this case, allows us to provide feedback on matters of translations before things are set, which will further benefit the quality of translation in the game.
On Quality:
In order to provide the server quality, uptime and general operations stability that we all expect from a game like Ashes of Creation, we will once again work closely with Intrepid Studios who, by building a solid and robust infrastructure and the necessary tools for managing them in the first place, will lay the foundation for what will be a high quality server environment for the European and CIS players.
In addition to the close consultation with Intrepid, our IT teams are already now beginning our technical planning. Working with our five, globally distributed data centers, we will be able to provide local servers that allow for the best possible connectivity, while working with cloud server providers such as Google and Amazon we are investigating possibilities for quick and efficient scaling of resources to quickly react to changes in demand of computing power.
You can visit the Ashes of Creation Discord to participate in the conversation.
