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I feel like one of the big issues with logistics is having to be in the same place to trade with others, where it seems feasible that I should be able to leave a package of gold and materials for someone to pick up when they're there. It could use the crate system or some other method, and cost a small fee, in fact that'd be great since a fee would mean more income for nodes.

So WTF do I mean? Let me give you an example:
I am a multi-gatherer, and I have a pile of threads that I want guild JM weavers to run, so I run my thread to the node with journeyman weaving and create a warehouse package with thread, some silver to cover the fees, and a some fuel wood to run it. I can choose the names or guilds who may pick it up, in this case I'd add the names of the JM weavers I trust.

When they are finished, they can then create a warehouse package for me to pick up using the same steps. Next time I'm online and in the area, I can pick those materials up. If I have a trusted materials runner, I may ask that their name be added as well so they can bring the materials to the thread to the stoneworks where the weapon molds are being made.

The idea that players have to be in the same place at the same time just makes the crafting system more encumbered, and when you need an herbalist, a miner, a woodcutter, a weaver, a lumbermiller, a stonemason, JUST TO MAKE ONE COMPONENT, there needs to be some relief added to the system so all that coordination can be done asynchronously for an extra fee.


Is this a system you'd like? Is there anything you'd want to see added or different?

Right, that's partly how TL works now.

There's a whole subsystem.

You don't 'Trait Up' common Traits on your Purple gear by constantly trying to get another Purple (it's def faster, but you don't need to). You get or make (in Ashes case or in a hypothetical TL with artisanship) Blue gear with the desired trait and fuse it in, for a chance to Trait up.

Then you have Blessing when you fail, which is basically 'Failstacks but sane'.

I have no issues with that part actually, I know there's a way it can go poorly if mishandled, but I would give a dev the benefit of the doubt when it came to that (and in TL this has paid off, but that's another long story about them and their skill).

If TL introduced Artisanship and disabled the up-trade on certain things we wouldn't all suddenly 'be stuck'. We'd switch to making Blue Gear, which they actually make very DIFFICULT and unnecessary to do right now.

But the slots for it are all there.

Technically, TL specifically makes sure that you can't do the last thing you said, though, to maintain the competition and 'gear chase'.

You have to earn the Purple yourself, but once you've done it, the 'Artisans' put in work in other ways toward your improvement of it. If they added Jewelry Making, I would still need to go fight bosses or use the AH to buy one of the low supply of Purple Rings, for example, but once I have it, I either 'only need two more' or need something else I can farm, and then after that I only need Blues and Greens with the same qualities (Traits) to min-max it.

Honestly I barely use the up-convert as is, I use the down-convert more often (except for progression type items, which I think Ashes doesn't even have, and Throne and Liberty doesn't even need - they're about to drastically reduce the requirement for most of them, I think they realized this too).

I've had enough time to gather data on this actually, since game start. The number of people who 'expect to be able to upgrade their Green Gear into Blue gear seems to be about 10%. The number of people who I've seen be confused about the inability to combine Green Gear directly into Blue gear is about 20%-ish.

The few I've seen get the actual explanation of 'it wouldn't be much of an MMO if you didn't have to group up to get good gear and could just upgrade into it', and then reject this explanation, is pretty high, true... but Ashes isn't really marketing to that subset anyway.

Resources should be respawning within their general regions (i.e. willows by the rivers, minerals closer to mountains, etc) with a 2+-1h timer (could be faster, if testing shows that's better). Their rarity should be completely randomized on each respawn.

We should have 3 types of pylons. One is a research pylon, the other is quality and the third is quantity.

Research pylon should have a fairly big radius, fairly cheap cost, some reusability (either limited uses or fix requirements) and tell you how many resources will spawn in that radius within the next 3h. Could potentially show their rarity, if the pylon was of a high-enough quality.

The other 2 pylons would become "artisan events". Once a player places one of them down, other players in the vicinity would see it as an artisan event circle on their map for the duration of the pylon.

The quality pylon should immediately make the respawn of the resources longer (so they'd be rolling the +1h rng window, up to the max of 3h from their initial respawn start time), but their quality would be a step above whatever they would've been normally (could be more steps, depending on the quality of the pylon).

The quantity pylon would give the -1h roll and would obviously increase the quantity of gatherables. If a respawn was about to happen in, say, 2 minutes and the rng roll for the -1h hit that respawn with 58+min - the resource should immediately respawn.

The pylon durations themselves should be determined by their own crafting materials and they should also be their own things, rather than linked to the player's character (cause I fucking hated that my pylon would go away on relog/crash).

I think this could be a good way to not only let players control their gameplay more, but would also create a caravan-like artisan-based guild/group event, where you can get a high return on investment as long as you can defend it or use it at an opportune moment. And the research pylons would allow solo players to try and hunt down a good gatherable respawn w/o activating the event.

Imo this would be a much better approach to creating pvp around gatherables, rather than letting bots relogin next to a staticly-spawning resource. And to just clarify, imo this should not be a pvp zone, cause otherwise you'd completely cut off any and all solo players and even small groups of gatherers.

The gameplay would go down smth like this

1. a gatherer comes up to a mountain
2. uses a research pylon
3. sees that there's gonna be a few rare minerals respawning within the next 3h
4. gatherer asks their guild/friends how soon they can come to that spot to defend it from competition
5. if they are close and/or if the research showed that the spawns will have high rarity - the gatherer uses the quantity pylon
6. otherwise they could use quality, to get the best return on investment or if they just have enough time to wait
7. everyone in the vicinity now knows that there's a potentially juicy gathering spot nearby and can react to that in an according manner
8. Ashes gameplay ensues

Pylons could be specialized (i.e. for trees, flowers, mining) and craftable either with items from a different specialization or from the same one, depending on how cross-profession Intrepid want this activity to be.

What do yall think about this kind of design for Pylons and gathering gameplay related to them?

Thanks, I skipped some stuff personally and I wasn't sure if it was a mistake to do so, you've confirmed for me that it is.

In Ashes, with the current system, it will be difficult to not have Rarity take up separate Econ slots.
Comparing to TL:
Rarity in TL explicitly has separate Econ slots on purpose, but we have one example of a place where it doesn't, cooking. Cooking also lacks the conversion, though, partly because they know this to be true for cooking (I hope that's why, I feel like their Econ designers are quite good and I really want to believe it's not by accident).

If I have a Blue grade Freshwater 'oily' Fish in TL, and I make food with it, I will get 3x Green Grade result, each lasting 30m long. This used to be implemented as 'increased chances of getting 1x Blue grade result lasting 1h long'. This was the FF11 method, but FF11 didn't have the Rarity options on input.

If you used White grade fish for the same dish, you would now make 1x result, and before, you had nearly no chance (or no chance) of the Blue Grade result, and a chance of a White Grade result (which you no longer have, if you do it this way now you will get 1x Green Grade result).

But economically this doesn't make any sense for many reasons, the RNG was obviously part of it, but it's not super important. Right now it's basically saying '1 Blue Grade fish is worth 15 White Grade Fish', because of the difference in amount made.

This is the illustration of what I'm talking about because it creates the same sort of inconsistency that would exist in Ashes, but at least here it is factored for, and I'd say implemented well, actually.

Even if Intrepid attempted to tune every Gathering/Input Artisanship to prevent this, they will all end up weirdly different if not unintuitive, and more importantly tightly developer controlled in the same space because:
1) They would have to make sure that every conversion was either equal in terms of time, or in terms of focus
2) They would have to make sure that the jump between grades was numerically 'balanced' properly in terms of its desirability.

Using the above, not saying that Ashes would have to turn out like pre-fix Throne and Liberty cooking, but hopefully Corey and the others crunching through this madness get what I mean...

No one needed a 15m duration White Grade Fish Steak usually. Maybe for bosses. But you had no reason to make them on purpose. It cost 5x as many casts of your rod to make this.

It can't be left as 'White Grade Fish x1 makes White Grade Fish Steak x1' because that would instantly make White Grade Fish 'more efficient' at least when not factoring hugely for other ingredients (which is then a massive battle to make this work for all ingredients of every synth - forgive me for calling them that, I am leaving it, in this case, cause I know I'll do it again too).

It definitely can't be '10 White Grade Fish -> X White Grade Fish Steak' combined with '1 Green Grade Fish -> X White Grade Fish Steak', this is Market Oversaturation.

It can't be '1 Green Grade Fish -> X/5 White Grade Fish Steak' without requiring you to clamp and control fishing itself to ridiculous degrees, even moreso than New World.

This goes back to 'Artisanship Team working too hard', but it applies to other things. it's a system that basically puts a massive strain on the Econ team and constantly develops new holes, even with formulae and probably even with AI (I have both of these myself and I still would not do this, that might be bias but remember, this post is about moreso explaining why I hate the system as an Econ Designer, I never have another direct reason which is why I don't have visceral rage at it in TL... yet.)

Not even BDO does this, exactly. They have their own whole 'way that works' which is an even longer explanation than the other two.

The reason Ludullu does not have the perception of different rarities having different Econ slots is precisely because he comes from L2 where they don't, and the L2-tier economy that goes with that. TL is the example of 'a developer trying to use the L2 approach a bit, to Cooking, and throwing in the FF11-style Output Result'. It did not work because the two need a System type effort to mesh them. This was done correctly by their designer.

But I'd bet they are over there struggling on how to do this somewhat for other materials, because the 10->1 Grade Higher, L2 style 'ladder' that is implemented for Gold, Manasteel, etc, is a balance nightmare. This is probably 'why' their Econ options haven't expanded on that yet. There's a simple solution, but that's getting into 'solution' territory, and the solution that TL needs is the same one Ashes needs so...

I will only mention the hypothetical, therefore.
Throne and Liberty has Weapons made of 'Silver'. This isn't 'true' in the sense that when you make these items they are actually possible to make from 'Rare Manasteel' or even 'Rare Mystwood'. No one is paying attention to this, it's just a shoddy abstraction layer that no one is thinking of as Artisanship and therefore won't actually complain about. That is, I give TL a pass because it's so jank as to be ignored whereas Ashes would not get that pass, and BDO doing the same would be 'constant irritation, but not enough to bother saying anything'.

If TL were to introduce a new gatherable 'Silver' with the same intention as Ashes to eventually create an FF11 tier Artisanship system, then it would make nearly no sense to have Silver be converted into Manasteel. It would be fine to have Silver replace 'Rare Manasteel', but then there would be some weapons that would not make sense like huge Iron-type Greatswords that appear to be the same as relatively smaller Daggers of Undead Severing (Silver-type).

So they're in that situation of 'we need Blue Grade Iron/Manasteel, and Blue Grade Silver, to elevate our Artisanship from ignorable jank to presentable, but we shouldn't convert the Silver 'up' to Epic Manasteel.
Now, you either have the Silver only drop in a few specific places or from Gathering (because Silver Weapons aren't that needed) making it 'Niche' (or useless) or you have Silver share all the Rare manasteel drop spots (this would be worse).

In Throne and Liberty this is easy. It would absolutely work, I doubt anyone would even complain, long story. But they don't have 'Gathering' as a profession, it works like FF11 again. We do it, and some people really are (and would be) 'Gatherers', but it means something different and has no levels (and in this game type, it should not)

In Ashes, you have to consider 'whether to even add Silver'. A robust Artisanship system where Gatherers have variety in their experience and outputs is not supported by a 10->1 grade system.

Yet again I'm 'cutting it short, assuming that the Econ/Artisanship team has already had all the conversations that are the prerequisites of the above, so it's probably still unclear', but that's enough essay for this specific post. Might write yet another 'reply' in a bit, regardless of if this clarified for my 'bias checker' or not.

Thanks for that, Ludullu, if you read all of this one too.

Ashes is not really past the L2 level yet.

I have various reasons to say it is actually considerably worse even in core implementation, in terms of 'fitting to the game's form', but I can't tell if my Alchemist bias and Econ Design bias are mixing together. I'll just give the usual 'this is a massive red flag for me if you also want me to care about Artisanship in your game'.

As usual, Throne and Liberty 'example'.

Right now, TL potions last the same duration as Ashes Potions as of this post.

They require 3 of a specific Green Grade Gem Ore and some Natural Essence (a drop from Dungeon mobs).

They cost only a tiny bit of time to make, and while I don't really 'believe in drinking ground up gemstones', I'm choosing to deludedly believe that they were trying to 'copy' FF11 and look enough like L2 at the same time. so their four types of Gem are just FF Crystal Drops to me.

So for FF players (confirmed that I did not have to tell people this for them to get the same view), this is 'Natural Essence, but processed using different methods' (Powdered, Heat Distilled, Compressed, etc).

So from that example, this is easy to work with. Those 'Crystals' are easyish to get, but interestingly not exactly. They are handling their 'Econ slots' well enough, and just once again 'making sure easily confused people don't care about too many names'.

There is Rubrix Ore (used for this and making Upgrade stuff), Rubrix (used for Weapons but can be used for Upgrade stuff but not for this, and no way to convert it back to Ore) and Polished Rubrix. They started from Rubrix, worked out the Econ slots, and adapted their items.

So when I see my Amitoi bring me back '25 Green Rubrix Ore', even though I have hundreds of Blue Rubrix Ore, I'm still a bit happy. A low level player who doesn't have the option to easily farm Blue Rubrix Ore, or a busy Dungeoneer, are also happy.

FF11 Equivalent, those people who would just try to grow the Crystals they needed with Gardening because they didn't need food ingredients as much as they needed Crystals.

I don't know what the Econ slots in Ashes are, I know my biased opinions of what they are, and because I have such a clear idea of all that, I shouldn't talk about it, probably.

But I can definitely say that the Surging Might Potion slot, for Ashes of Creation, is sus.

The 15-30s Stat/Buff-similar-to-stat slot is separate from the 5 minute one, and different again from the 15 minute one (in my experience, the Itemization team can get away with treating the 15, 30, and anything higher potions as all one slot, and the Econ team only needs to split those three into two categories, at their discretion of where the 30 min one goes).

So much data... but it's useless to spend time thinking and not typing, so...

This is the obvious solution. I have issues with it, too, but it's the 'thing I'd expect my junior dev to bring to me as the first proposal of how to do this' as soon as the word 'Pylons' came down from the Sandal Lord.

I'll detail my issues about it if you care about them, but note that it would get into 'offering solutions' territory.