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Flanker wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

Hey, maybe you did, maybe you didn't.

Not 100% sure I read it though.

I did read you claiming I didn't pay attention to things you thought were important but were actually not even worth my time to read, however. Maybe that is what you meant.

The funny thing is, because everyone here has seen it many times, they all know I'm basically just treating you as a form of entertainment. You have long since proven that you currently have no points worth discussing.

Ah yes, of course, it all was your "genius 9000 iq plan"

I mean, people here have seen it many times.

As I said earlier, some random seems to get themselves all obsessed with me about every 15 months or so.

And my IQ isn't 9000. I can see how someone like you looks at any number with 3 or more digits as being "unfathomly large", and can see how all such 3 or more digit numbers may just kind of blend in together in to a mass of "numbers you don't need to understand" - but my IQ is not even 900 (shock), let alone 9000.

As to "I should be ashamed of behavior", nope.

You came in here ranting about shit, using data from an inappropriate source that is unable to be verified, claiming it to be the only true data that matters, ignoring more accessable, more acurate data simply because it proves that a different demographic has a different opinion, ignoring a poll that you yourself ran on Reddit, and attempted to slam home your point with the above. It was right back here (before I even looked in to where your charts came from) that you proved to not be worth the time to have a real discussion or debate with. You weren't interested in truth, just in your opinion and in being right - and you would twist and contort things to that end.

I just worked 12 hours so I am not going to quote everything make responses but i will leave you with this for the evening

On release the developers anticipate max level should be attainable in approximately 45 days if playing 4-6 hours per day.

This is equivalent to approximately 225 hours to reach level 50. What is your opinion on this? Would you prefer it to be faster, slower, or keep it as it is? Why?
Closed • 557 total votes
139
Slower
306 < that's called a majority
Keep it as it is
112
Faster
Voting closed 7 months ago
this is the link
https://www.reddit.com/r/AshesofCreation/comments/1arkw7s/leveling_speed/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

So what does a majority do? it rules!

I'm generally a strong advocate for localization to the greatest degree feasable. So server wide anything should be completly a no go, the widest possible reach of an auction house system should be the vassal network of a top tier node and even this should be avoided or tightly constrained if possible.

Note also that we should be making BIG distinctions bewteen types of goods. They should not all be equally tradable at range. Raw and Processed materials should have the highest degree of localization, ideally all their movement being by players either carrying them or using the Caravan system to the location where the final crafting step occours. These goods are going to be in bulk and the person/s transporting them is looking to make bank for thouse good. So preserving the risk involved and the value-added effect of requiring transport is vital because it preserves the gameplay of the gatherer, processor and transporter. And even makes crafters think about where they will locate themselves to be access the best and cheapest materials.

On the other hand I am far more lenient towards the purchasers of finished goods to be able to 'shop' and then have 'mailed' those items from wider areas then their local node. For the individual player most purchases are out of need not greed and going to pick up that purchase from the location in was crafted is a disproportionate time investment given the typical small size of the purchase. Also with localized only purchases you have the difficulty of each node stocking the huge number of final craft items (with all their potential optional craft modifiers) that might be desired, a retailer trying to maintin all thouse stocks would be in for quite the headache, and while we should encourage them to TRY, I'm reluctant to force all other players to be dependent on them succeding.

So I would want to see a high mail fee for player purchases which move goods from their current node. The fees should depend on the number of 'steps' away the source and destination are in a vassal node chain, with each step being a multiplier that is cumulative. So if you are in a tier 3 node which is a vassal to a tier 4, vassaled to a tier 5 vassaled to a tier 6 and want goods currently sitting in the tier 6 node, thats 3 'jumps' each of which is going to impose a fee multiplictivly. The same fee works in the other direction if the tier 6 node citizen is trying to buy from the tier 3 node, but the citizen of the high tier node is able to search the vassal network under them, while the bottom node can only look 'up' through their patron chain, a node in the middle can search both it's vassals and up through patrons so the higher the node the better the shopping diversity. Their is also a time delay on delivery which scales with node distance and is computed vassal step by vassal step and items are picked up at a post office in the node, not delivered directly to player inventory. Lastly individual players can mail items using the same system but the sender must access the post office with the item in hand and the recipient needs to be a resident of a node to determine the destination and fee, no mail for murder hobos.

This fee should be something each node sets, aka their Tarriff rate on mailed goods, but their wold be a minimum level to this tarriff, I'm thinking atleast 10%, setting the tarriff above that would generate revenue to the node with each purchase, the minimum portion of the fee being a global gold sink. Merchants who bring in goods physically don't pay the tarrif, though they may have a different lesser fee assosiated with the unloading of caravans, use of warehouses etc if they use them. This will give local retailers potential to undercut the mail system with its high fees, if they price they items reasonably, stock what players want etc. Nodes at the lower tiers of development likely won't have any doing that which is why the players in them will likely be completly reliant on mail and are by design going to be paying the highest fees. That gives a high incentive to set up as a retailer as the customer base is likely small so they need more profit margin per sale.As nodes get higher tier the availability of local goods rises and the retailer gets lower profit margins, but they make it up in volume.

Laetitian wrote: »

Azherae wrote:

I can find a few direct examples on FFXIAH if you need more than my anecdotal 'we had a problem literally getting people to stop selling things on Auction House for less than the price that an NPC would pay them for the item'. And I don't mean 'after you calculate the AH fees' either.

Do you think there's a chance the games didn't do enough to make other parts of the game feel attractive enough to the average "crafter main"? Other things to spend their money in and get the same kick out of?

I do not, but this is a combination of bias and arrogance.

Even then, however, you asked how much of your position it makes me dismiss. Unfortunately, all of it, much like how the L2 players generally dismiss concerns about most aspects of corruption.

I've played games with extremely functional crafting and market interaction systems for years, and I (obviously biasedly) believe in my observations, for one reason more than any other.

The things I have observed to be true are frustrating to me. I don't want to have to think about how to solve 'players that undercut things just so they can feel like they're a shopkeeper', just as I don't want to have to think about players who log into a game that is clearly crafting/economy related and complain about having to interact with it.

But as you noted, players do this, and they do it enough to make me constantly annoyed at how much you have to 'babysit' them, even the ones that know this is what they are doing.

So the gap between our perspectives is that you say "I think we can just not worry about those players" and I say "I have been wishing I could just not worry about those players for decades".

Laetitian wrote: »

I think you can control way more of that than you're willing to admit. Perhaps due to the risk of sounding naive? In my experience, way too many of these discussions devolve into economy majors waxing poetic about how "markets control themselves and if you try to do anything to control the behaviour of market agents, you're only ever going to make it worse."
They tend to forget that what they know about the economy applies in a world where the baseline will always be real predetermined needs. In an MMO, you can design the needs any way you like.

If you want players to care about local markets without hyper-obsessing about prices, you have to (1) give them products to trade that are important and rare enough to keep an eye out for, but (2) not give their competition so much money that whenever anything remotely worthwhile gets put on the market, the competition will be able to buy it all up and resell it for profit by principle. (Further regulated by processing fees.)

Both the competition's access to money, and the players' need for resources is fully controllable through the game's skill design (limited artisan classes per player; gold-intensive artisan class progression) and loot design (restricted resource distribution, restricted gold distribution, high gold sinks in node/guild/equipment development.)
If the merchants stubbornly try to raise their profit margins anyway, players who want to improve their artisan class skills will just spend more time actively farming their own resources, and fewer players will bother to level their class skills in the first place.

Don't get me wrong, merchant players won't like this. So there will definitely be loud complaints. But they will like that the game will live longer, because there will be less spite and stress in the rest of the community. And I'm sure in the end they'll get their profits, and there will be monopolies here and there. But the escalations will be slowed down enough that competition will have an equal share of the profits, and the wealth will be distributed more homogenously, and players won't be so stressed out chasing prices.

Bear in mind that I am the definition of that sort of person, except that I go even further and study MMO economies specifically.

Whether you put any stock in my understanding is up to you, but I'm saying that from the perspective of MMO economies specifically. If anyone would like an essay on precisely why I don't believe devs can control the specific concept of 'whether or not a player considers it a worthwhile investment to trade', I'll provide it, but for the sake of simplicity in this thread, for now, just know that I still disagree.

Particularly with this line, so that you know where we diverge:
In an MMO, you can design the needs any way you like.

My response to this is 'not a chance'. You can generally only add and remove them.

And my experience on this is that FFXI had literally every thing you said, and it still was not controllable, so I feel like I have many years of experience, including interactions that border on 'interviews' with other players, as to why this is so.

Laetitian wrote: »

Azherae wrote:

So, briefly, what do you say about the player whose wish to undertake the crafting gameplay loop is itself so much more important to them than any profit that they will choose to consistently take actions that cause them to lose money or 'waste time' just so that they can have that feeling?

I'm not too worried about them in my system, because their gold income will be too limited for this to lead to overly drastic profit increases for the merchants trying to profit off those players' tendencies.

If 90% of players acted like that, yeah, merchants would have monopolies within the first 2 months.
But this excessive tendency I believe you can counteract by designing these class skills in a way that incentivises most players to use their money and resources on other, more incentivised gold-sink investments, like node progression, guild progression, or itemisation (which also has an aggressive item sink mechanic in Ashes with the over-enchant system.)

My data from FF11 and BDO puts this percentage of players between 30 and 45%.

Both those games have a higher tolerance for this value than Ashes. Ashes, practically speaking, can only have 30% as their absolute upper bound of players willing to behave like this, given their world size.

I can find a few direct examples on FFXIAH if you need more than my anecdotal 'we had a problem literally getting people to stop selling things on Auction House for less than the price that an NPC would pay them for the item'. And I don't mean 'after you calculate the AH fees' either.

BDO similarly had an issue that I think I could theoretically still prove where they raised the price caps on some components for potions, yet did not raise the price of the potions, and the supply remained.

World chat confirmed for me multiple times that people will just go 'hey I log into this game to craft and I don't have another game to do it in and I like it here, so I will just burn the money so that I can continue to have that feeling of being part of this'.

People will 'accept Merchants underpaying them for their work just so they get something', your suggestion/method simply increases the burden on that player type. Now, maybe they shouldn't play this type of game, but I'd prefer that they were able to enjoy it, since I know they can't be 'controlled' by those specific incentive structures.

(note, high processing costs also tend to drive others who do not enjoy it out of the markets, and this results in the BDO Pain Point of basically 'lifeskill players being economically abused while also being reduced to precisely the demographic of player that accepts that abuse', and there was still enough of this behaviour for certain monopolists to continue doing their thing)

Laetitian wrote: »

Azherae wrote:

Particularly with this line, so that you know where we diverge:
In an MMO, you can design the needs any way you like.

My response to this is 'not a chance'. You can generally only add and remove them.

I can accept this, though I do wonder how much of my ideas this makes you discount.

Also, just quickly (though I'll gladly take the essay if you ever feel like it):
Would your stance change to any extent, if I clarify that we'd account for the fact that we can't design the exact needs of all/any given player, but just the general tendency, while accepting that different personalities will veer drastically to the left and right of the mean?

Then we're at semantics, but we'd probably be agreeing.

So, briefly, what do you say about the player whose wish to undertake the crafting gameplay loop is itself so much more important to them than any profit that they will choose to consistently take actions that cause them to lose money or 'waste time' just so that they can have that feeling?

And note, I'm specifically talking about very mundane activities.

Syblitrh wrote: »

How do you guys feel about the current fight mechanic which the current ranged attack mobs have it implemented?.
Currently any mob in the world which is using a ranged attack: spell, throwing spears, arrows, etc, will auto lock on you , no matter if you strafe or try to avoid their direction of attack by moving fast around.
I think this is a little silly for 2024 being forced to just embrace their incoming attack, no matter how good your hero movement is.
Is this how you guys want?, to be just statues in front of mobs and let the stats dictate our fate?.
For pvp it might be a different story, but for pve mobs, this makes no sense. Is like going back to the old click to move, let the mob hit you, and just click skills on the skillbar...

"Good" hero movement is a game abstraction, though.

Characters in MMOs often move without any true momentum, if you move fast enough to dodge an arrow, then you also shouldn't be able to easily 'stop' that motion.

But many MMO players don't like games where they don't have total control over their character, even to the point where they don't like having to slow down before they change direction. So, games give them a dodge roll, which solves 'both issues'.

Would you be fine with it if the dodge roll was the only way to dodge projectiles? It could probably be coded so that a locked-on projectile loses its target if the player uses their dodge roll.

Caeryl wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

Syblitrh wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

Syblitrh wrote: »

I think this is a little silly for 2024 being forced to just embrace their incoming attack, no matter how good your hero movement is.

Movement shouldn't be what you use to avoid an incoming attack - that is what abilities like the tanks "reflect" ability are for.

i don't think you see my point, but ok

Let's find out.

Your point, as I see it, is that you think players should be able to use regular character movement to dodge attacks.

My point is that this isn't what regular character movement is for. The game provides specific activated abilities to perform this specific function.

'You don't use movement to dodge' has to be one of the funnier things to come out of a person's keyboard

Not only do you not use movement to dodge, you don't use dodge to move.

Is the notion of a dodge ability that foreign to you?

The notion that moving can cause an attack to miss in a game with tab target mechanics is absolutely off the charts in terms of naivety.