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Re: why are you putting the cart before the horse?

Crafting is a system in the game currently. Placeholder or alpha status aside it's getting tested by people and people are giving feedback on its current state with legit questions about its future.

There's no direction from intrepid on what we should be testing or how. So people test what they want how they want. And they should give feed, good or bad. Testing the features as they currently are is what we can do, and crafting as is, is in a poor state, its frustrating to say the least. This makes people think about how will it look like at launch.

If crafting was laid out on the roadmap we could say ' crafting will get focus in alpha/beta x or y. 'But right now it's just a work in progress with no clear image for testers of what its end state will be.

Volgaris

why are you putting the cart before the horse?

so I'm kind of a filthy casual and a gatherer/crafter that has very limited hours in the game and I'm kind of scared for the future of ashes.

because of changes to apprentice needing 2x some things, and with people surging to L20 with L20 drops actually a thing, crafting really is useless. as long as people can power level to 20 and get ANY type of L20 drops (full items) no one cares about crafting until we get to Journeyman and by then the power levelers will be at 20 and up their crafting skills and even then its's just gonna be wiped in a month so us casuals who don't care about PVP and only care about the gathering and crafting of the game....well we really are useless and don't really matter. why would anyone buy a L10 gear that took me 4 hours to gather and craft when someone can grind Carphin for 40min and have a L20 item that is so much better? you wouldn't.

With the Caravans breaking and the large guilds PVPing everyone out of existence there is also no way for a casual to make gold needed to level up crafting, you almost HAVE to be in a big guild to matter at any level and if you aren't by the time you level then the big guilds crafters can out pace you every day of the week.
Don't get me started on Farming and Cooking, I have spreadsheets on this and Steven really I could present to you how complicated it is and why some things going to needing 2x the needed materials makes things 3-5X more expensive so its really hard to start these professions.

I get it, because of the wipes you have lost alot of testers but right now the game is a PVP grind to 20 and then PVP. the whole leveling thing through quests (that still don't work half the time and take WAYYYY too long to complete for the reward because of disappearing quest markers) and gathering and crafting...well unless its an Epic or Legendary and even then large guilds will have a Carphin drop or one of their guildmates make it there really is no point to leveling nodes for Journeyman stuff when you can just have L20 gear drops.

if you really want to test the "crafter is king" stuff Steven says...well put the horse before the cart...and this will piss off alot of people
1) NO COMPLETED ITEM DROPS, ONLY THE RECIPIE AND MAYBE 1 SPECIAL THING NEEDED TO CRAFT, THATS IT. (people who power level to 20 can deal or help raise the node so we have Journeyman crafting before they get past starting Novice gear.
2) seriously go after the hackers and RMT people, its easy to see who levels faster and who has more gold faster, you have 3 versions of resets and can see who power levels the right way and who is hacking
3) make Cooking a Craft not a Process. (seriously i have spreadsheets and graphs on this Journeyman level cooking is complicated and the having to have everything the same rarity and now 2x some things make it a nightmare i am willing to talk to whomever does Cooking programing because honestly its well thought out and designed but in practice of playing i can tell yall had unlimited gold and storage space when internally testing)
4) SEROUSLY FIX THE QUESTS SO THEY COMPLETE OR WE CAN ABANDON AND TRY AGAIN AND COMPLETE THEM
5) I hope this is fixed with gathering trees but the random rarity shouldn't be a thing, the higher you go in gathering, the better tools and the better specs you have in your tree should determine rarity. the better gatherer you are with better cloths and tools the better stuff you find. same with processing and crafting, the better you are and the better stuff you make the more likely you can upgrade things.
6) there needs to be biome substitute for things (say Fish can be used as droppings in farming recipes, or Acacia wood can be substuted for Oak in tools. Otherwise to do alot of things people HAVE to stay in the Riverlands which prevents people from spreading out into the world (also each Biome should have L1-30 creatures, the Desert and Jungle are pretty much end game places but as a nonL20 i can still gather and be out there....but why would I when none of my tools or cloths or anything can be used to upgrade my gathering tools???)

I really hope P3 changes alot and yes im even saying this as someone who is tired of wipes but we need another wipe.
Make the Nodes STATIC FOR NOW. Figure out a good this goes here, that goes there up to Journeyman and allow us to gather and craft. make the spawns fast and rarity easy to obtain, you dont want to get to Pre-Launch and find out that if I make a copper sword out of all but 1 Legendary part but because of my crafting level the sword is still Legendary but because of the code and that 1 common part I now have a +99999999 to everything and even hit nothing but constant Artifact rarity stuff when gathering by simply having it equipped. Or if i take my caravan off this specific cliff it crashes the server.
Testing Economy and balance is good when ALL SYSTEMS ARE IN PLACE, until then Gold and Rarity on gathering should be useless things (its just gonna be wiped anyways) and we need to make sure if we ride our cats into mountains or bridges we don't clip through (gee wonder why i got specific there). I honestly LOVE Ashes, but it feels you are catering to the Hardcore PVP guilds because they are the majority of testers, and testing a game and playing a game are 2 different things because you can call it an Alpha all you want but right now it just seems like a PVP grindfest with seasonal content and occasional wipes.

Again I LOVE the idea of Ashes, its why I backed the Kickstarter in the first place, to own my own tavern, but the more I play the more it seems the large PVP guilds are what will end up owning the game and the casual gatherer/crafter will just not play at all.

Kala Silverheart,
Head Chef of the Legendary Two Tailed Fox Inn/Tavern

KrystalKitten

Re: why are you putting the cart before the horse?

Volgaris wrote: »

What worries me is I seen this stuff in FFXIV early on. The same bad linkage between recipes for crafting and it made it to release (and a ton of other craft that broke the game leading a Realm Reborn). If crafting progression isn't balanced with character level progression than there probably won't be a point to level crafting on you are max level, which ever level that maybe at the time.

I guess they could soft cap the leveling process by not give gear drops beyond the starter/basics, which would force players into crafting/gathering which could work well. But that also open the gates to more RMT. I think the issue I see beyond that is the gathering treadmill is going to be too steep for many causals, whether that effects the success of the game I don't know.

You made it farther in cooking that I did, thanks for finding these things! As someone who played archage for the life skills and occasional pvp this stuff is critical and the sooner we spot it the better. If they didn't want you test it yet, it wouldn't be in there.

I Grand Mastered Cooking and Farming in Pre-Alpha it was a SLOG with only the common fish (thankfully they hadn't linked the fish to the items and I had Lampreys to get Gold with...but still it was with mainly Novice Cooking/Farming stations and I will TELL YOU THE SLOG TO GET FROM 40 TO 50 WAS REAL...but i did it. I have Journeyman Cooking figured out (and yes FF1.0 think of that level of you need to plan your item recipes out) it takes about 20+ refining[ img]https://us.v-cdn.net/6030144/uploads/editor/7c/4vmwg7rchk8x.png[/img]
Seriously Look at that! and that is just 1 Journeyman recipe on the bottom (not to mention the spreadsheet I made (Yes FF1.0 I played) to figure out how much it costs to do everything).

If that is Journeyman I CANT WAIT FOR MASTER/GRANDMASTER, that's like maybe 30-50 different processes to make 1 dish (MY BANK SPACE!!!!) (SEROUSLY DID THEY THINK OF THIS WHEN THEY MADE BANK SPACE?)

KrystalKitten

Re: Some Requests

Andi wrote: »

Also a slider for gamma. The game is crazy bright.

One issue I've had, and I've mentioned this on the forums before, is that at certain times of the day the world gets very white washed and bright in certain locations when the camera is pointing in the direction of the light source. I had this issue a lot in the tropics. It makes it really hard to spot mobs in dense locations. Being on an OLED, it also really bothers my eyes when I'm blasted with bright white light for a long period of time.

thermalx

[ECONOMY] Ideas for fixing some of its problems

Major problems right now:

- Economy pace is different from lvl up pace
- Not clear ressource progression
- Crafting is not an option
- Bad progression of items betweens tiers

- Economy pace:

Its no mistery that the lvl up pace is much more faster than the economy / gear pace, what makes the lvl of items way of the reality. On P2, everyone were using lvl 10 itens, despite of being lvl 25 (current max lvl). On P2, everyone completely skipped lvl 10 itens and went directly to lvl 20 farming gear.

One way to solve that is greatly increase the lvl grind, but that is far from popular.

Another option is better balance the mobs and gear, so you NEED lvl 10 stuff in order to kill lvl 20+ mobs. Like in other MMO´s, like Lineage and many others, you just CANT go kill a higher level mob using an initial gear. On Ashes is not just possible, but the most eficient way to far: you skip a whole tier of equipment (tier 1) and farm directly the endgame (at least for now) stuff (lvl 20). This needs to be adressed. But it must come alongside with many eco changes that are needed that are going to be discussed.

Another thing that greatly affects economy pace is its link with NODE progression. And a really bad design make this even worse: resources from different grades sharing the same respawn (like iron node and copper / Weping Willow and Braidwood and etc). I think that the certification for that particular profession SHOULD BE ENOUGH for allowing you to gather that resourse. But, if you need more quantity and rarity, you should craft better tools.

So the grade of the tool should have a HUGE impact on the quantity and rarity of the resource you are getting, but you can still mine a iron node using a novice pickaxe, but you will NEVER get anything better than white or green.

With that, we can fix this resource spawn problem and avoid mostly of the delay that NODES causes to the economy.

- Not clear ressource progression:

Even on P2, after JM gathering and crafting were unlocked, was easier to find iron than copper, at some point. There is no clear progression over resources.

The game is going to be capped at lvl 50, so we are expecting items lvl 0, 10, 20, 30, 40 and 50 (5 tier, since i will exclude lvl 0, since they are like tutorial items). It should have a clear progression:

Resources for lvl 10 stuff: very abudant - noone should have no problem acquiring them, even on larger quantities (like 10 copper nodes on a cluster, with a very quick respawn time)
Resources for lvl 20 stuff: easily found - they should be very abundant, but with some spots with better efficiency, to create a dispute between larger groups that needs it (like 4 or 5 iron nodes on a cluster, with a respawn time of like 5 min; but with some areas where they respawn on larger quantities)
Resources for lvl 30 stuff: somewhat rare to be found - they still should be found almost anywhere, but with low efficiency (you can find 1 or 2 nodes, but they start to have bigger respawn times, like 10 + min)
Resources for lvl 40 stuff: rare - they can be found on specific places, with low quantities and high respawn time)
Resources for lvl 50 stuff: much rare - they can spawn on certain areas, under certains condiditons, very few quantity and very high respawn time

Over that, you still need to set the rarity. The rarity should be much closer to the hunting rarity right now. A lvl 10 white resource should be abundant. Nobody should have any problem to craft a white copper longsword. But a legendary one, should REALLY feel legendary.

And the rarity rate of the resources should get lowered the higher is the resource lvl:

Common lvl 0: 60% chance
Uncommon lvl 0: 20% chance
Rare lvl 0: 10% chance
Heroic lvl 0: 5% chance
Epic lvl 0: 3% chance
Legendary lvl 0: 2% chance

Common lvl 10: 70% chance
Uncommon lvl 10: 15% chance
Rare lvl 10: 7,5% chance
Heroic lvl 10: 4% chance
Epic lvl 10: 2,5% chance
Legendary lvl 10: 1,0 % chance

And so on...a legendary lvl 50 resource should be extremely rare, while a legendary lvl 0 resource should be rare, but yet not very hard to find.

Chances to get higher rarities should be linked to rarity bonuses from tools / artisan clothes.

- Craft is not an option

The meta on P2 was: lets craft leg lvl 10 stuff and overenchant it.
The meta on P2.5 is: lets get the best named drop while we wait for economy update and, maybe, we can craft stuff.

What it should be:

I NEED to craft lvl 0 stuff, in order to be efficient while farming from my lvl 0 to 10. Then, i need to lvl up my artisan and gathering skill cause i NEED to craft lvl 10 stuff in order to be efficient while farming from lvl 0 to 10. And so on.

But, for that to work like this, we need to solve the pace problem and the progression problem.

b]- Bad progression of items between tiers/b]

Overall, items should have this progression:

Drops full are up to green. Very low chance of dropping rare. 0 chance to drop anything above rare.
A higher tier item should be equivalent to a item from the previous tier that is 3 rarity above it. Example:
A Leg lvl 0 stuff should be equivalent to a Heroic lvl 10 stuff.
A Leg lvl 10 stuff should be equivalent to a Heroic lvl 20 stuff, but better than a Rare lvl 20 stuff.

A Heroic lvl 0 stuff should be equivalent to a Common lvl 10 stuff.
A Heroic lvl 10 stuff should be equivalent to a Common lvl 20 stuff.

And so on.

You CANT be able to drop something that will be better than the best item you can craft from the previous tier. If thats is true, you will COMPLETELY avoid that tier.

About named drops:

They should drop NO FULL ITEM. Only the special material necessary for crafting it. Those items should be slightly better than its equivalent on the same tier (a "regular" legendary lvl 20 GS should be slightly worse than a legendary named lvl 20 GS). Also, named drops should be more focused on giving different build options for players, not necessary the best build options. More set bonuses should be implemented to help on that.

CoioTe

Steven, Please Rethink “Not for Everyone”

1. Saying a game is “not for everyone” in 2025 just feels out of touch.
Steven recently said Ashes of Creation is “not for everyone.” And sure, maybe that’s meant to sound bold or unapologetic, but in reality, it’s a limiting take that could end up doing more harm than good.

In 2025, sticking to your vision doesn’t mean shutting people out. Look at Baldur’s Gate 3 or Expeditions. Both are turn-based RPGs, a genre that historically had “niche” written all over it. But those studios didn’t say “this isn’t for you.” Instead, they kept the heart of the game intact and made it easier for new players to jump in. Now look where they are.

Ashes should be doing the same. Saying "we're not for everyone" might feel like drawing a line in the sand, but it ends up sounding more like a closed door. And if the first impression people get is that this game isn’t welcoming or worth their time unless they’re already hardcore, you’re losing them before they even log in.

2. That mindset doesn't just affect the players, it affects the team too.
When the founder says something like that, it’s not just players listening. The industry is listening. And let’s be real, this isn’t 2015 anymore. It’s not an employer’s market. The best talent wants to work on games that feel exciting, future-facing, and like they’ll actually reach a big audience.

If Ashes is being positioned as a selective, high-barrier MMO, that narrows the pool of people who want to work on it. It’s not just about taste, it’s about stability. A game with long-term growth potential is way more appealing than one that already feels like it’s limiting itself before launch.

The game runs on a subscription model. That only works if new players are constantly coming in and sticking around. But right now, the early and mid-game experience feels like an afterthought. It’s all grindy, high-investment content focused on end-game PvP. Most players won’t even make it there. If the game doesn’t widen its reach, it’ll struggle to keep a big team employed, plain and simple.

3. The “not for everyone” line sends the wrong message.
Nobody’s saying Ashes should be watered down. No one’s asking it to become a theme park MMO. But when leadership says “this isn’t for everyone,” it feels like a warning instead of an invitation.

Ashes already has a lot going for it, complex systems, big ideas, and a community that wants this game to win. But the way it's being framed right now makes it feel like it's only meant for a specific type of player. That’s not how you grow a game. That’s how you shrink your audience before it even has a chance to expand.

Steven, with all respect, this isn’t just about wording. It’s about the message you're putting out into the world. And right now, that message feels a little too boxed in for a game that should be aiming way higher.

TheDarkSorcerer

Re: How much does the quality of the game drop

2 out of 10 seems fair, perhaps by Aug. it'll be a 4 out of 10, right now it is just a chat room for desperate external validation seekers

SzaboHarvester

Re: Can we just get rid of boss/monster drops altogether?

Azherae wrote: »

If multiple bosses drop materials that can be used to make (or build up to, as in the case of Throne and Liberty) the 'best Full Defense PvP Tanking Shield', you have to spread yourself thinner to stop them all.

Yep, definitely agree. I usually talk about this in terms of crafting sets and stuff, because I'm used to them giving you the biggest part of your gear-based stat boost, but if Intrepid can do this per each item - that'd be great. And they seeemingly said they'd do something similar, with different mats giving different stats on items during crafting, but we still haven't heard anything about that since.

And this would also relate to the supposed likeness to SWG's crafting, where different mats would interact differently with each other, so if you were crafting Shield A which needed a few different mats and Shield A part from Boss A - those parts might boost their defense from, say, riverlands mats, while if you were making Shield B with mats from Boss B - they'd boost their fed from tropics mats. So you'd have 2 completely different paths to the same stat value.

And obviously those shield parts should boost other stats from other mats as well. Feel like that would really make crafting valuable, especially if working with different mats becomes its own gameplay-based skill that you gotta do a few times for your character to "learn" how to work with them.

Possibilities are endless

Azherae wrote: »

This would result in lots more experimental gear being made too, rather than 'Guys lets kill Firebrand for the Fire Shield because it's the best and Ice magic sucks in PvP anyway'. Remember, PvP demographic is just as much if not more crybabies than PvE demographic.

Oh this recent lawless zone change where Jundark got them removed showed exactly this. PvPers lost their ganking spots and immediately started crying worse than a hurt baby.

Ludullu

Is Under-water Gathering Intended?

Given the currents and the spawn of things underwater. I want to ensure that this is intended and if so, what things are not intended to go with it?

For example, the current moving you while you are trying to gather/mine it.

My hope is to better understand what is a bug and what is not for better assistance in reporting issues

chibibree

Re: Can we just get rid of boss/monster drops altogether?

Ludullu wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

Steven has said in the past that the effort required to successfully siege a node should be on par with the effort taken to build that node in the first place. This is in things like building siege weapons, so it is effort expended in the game that is exclusively for sieges.

But node building requires killings mobs, not just for the node xp it gives, but for the mats they drop, cause you use those in node buildings.

So we agree on this, but just our expectation of what actions will need to be taken differs. And obviously we have no real clue either way, so it's hard to talk around this part of the topic.

Noaani wrote: »

a 2% increase of a stat on a single item on a single player (that will be able to be purchased for gold anyway), or a castle where among other things, you are pulling in gold from taxes across a massive region?

But getting the castle requires those 2% increases on a lot of your people, cause they allow you to outmatch the potential competition for the castle.

Though, if we actually don't need all that much better gear to contest a castle - I'll be all for that, as I'm sure you know. I hate snowballs and want the weaker groups to have as much of a chance as possible, so it Intrepid come up with a design where they have that - awesome!

This is the opposite of the 'avoiding snowball', but not for a reason that the gearing you see in L2 or BDO would indicate. For this, I think you have to understand ESO or reference TL much more.

It's not that 2% increase doesn't help, it's that 'more powerful' isn't usually the thing gear is giving in the way most people from games with simpler itemization 'understand' easily. And that's why bosses dropping full gear is so troublesome.

Obviously there will always be top end gear that is rare and hard to get which makes you 'better at your role', but in a less simplistic game, the number of these gear pieces that a guild already winning, needs to actually have, is much smaller.

TL has quite a few weapons that are actually easyish to get, or are harder to get but only used by one out of (effectively) 100 'classes', which have a huge impact on planned/structured PvP. So it's more like 'this guild of 70 only needs a single Nirma Sword' (back when this was BiS for a specific type of Tank).

Sure, it's better if all the Tanks have this sword and can practice to fill that position in the battle formation, but if your guild is active and organized, especially in Ashes where you can just trade any gear to any guildmate, there's much less need to contest the boss except to suppress others from having such swords.

Azherae