Best Of

lbpiggy wrote: »

Hello!
This was a discussion on Thor's stream, where he gave some good points on rarity not really serving a purpose especially on Gatherables.

I am paraphrasing here; Thor was discussing in this stream that way its currently implemented, only Common and Legendary resources actually matter, he was using wood as an example. Way he felt about it was that Legendary woodcutting axe was so much better than any other rarity below it, and relatively easy to obtain. therefore you should really only need legendaries or commons, where as other tiers kind of just bloat your inventory.

I think gatherables should only be one rarity per item. Any items you want to craft could have some other rare resource and then decides the rarity, or have it tied to quantity of items, or the recipe, or just plain old RNG. Though personally I am in the camp of no rarities, just have them on magical and other powerful items to denote their powerful status, and generally not multiple tiers of different rarities on the same item apart from some rare cases.

What do you think? Is rarity on gatherables an issue, or is it issue on all items? or not issue at all, but just needs tweaks?

The related system has only begun the beginnings of a start of a hint of an idea of balance and design.

Rarity serves a purpose in that it's fun to experience it, and more importantly, it serves the secondary purpose of specifically making newer players or newer Artisans have their porgression and dopamine feedback loops without utterly destroying the economy.

Basically, MMOs have a really simple problem. Every player wants to feel good and able to progress very basic things without devoting hours, but they also want an economy to work.

So you have, say 100 people who need to be able to get started and feel like they're doing something, but you also don't want 'enough resources available all the time for those 100 people to constantly want to do it, or to get burnt out of doing it'.

Enter the 10%.

Some games do it by making the combat really engaging and having the droprate be 10%. Some do it by having multiple gatherables that can come from one type of gathering point, and 10% of those are 'really important' and the others are designed to fall into natural personal consumption sinks. Throne and Liberty has recently tried putting the 10% on the output side with no real explanation, but in combination with the rest of their systems, it seems to be having mostly good effects.

If the designers are sticking with the 'common practice' of 'letting players trade 10% of what they personally interact with', then we need that Rarity system to be almost exactly as it is. They could fix some other things to make the pyramid work, and they've already started some of that, so we should probably just wait for them to finish it, before 'deciding to just scrap an unfinished system because it isn't fulfilling the feelings it is supposed to'.

It's not doing its job because it's not complete enough to do its job properly, so I say let 'em cook.

You could fix this by making an extremely high crafting cost in legendary items

It is annoying logging into a town that you are a citizen of and then getting instantly killed. Why are the guards not attacking the enemy players that declared war on the node? It would be nice if they would have to fight the guards first instead of being allowed to just walk into the node and kill people.

Ludullu wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

This isn't good game design. It literally makes for a game where no one is challenging themselves.

The weak don't - yes. The strong persevere.

It isn't often you are objectively wrong, so I'm assuming this is a misunderstanding.

People (not gamers, every one) will naturally limit the amount of risk they put themselves under. Some people will allow more risk than others, but everyone has their limit.

This is the basis of gameshows like Deal or No Deal. This is the basis for poker. This is the basis for blackjack. Needless to say, this is known and understood.

If you put someone in a situation where they can risk $5 for a 10% chance of winning $100, most people would take those odds. If you increase the amount of money people have to risk from that initial $5 up to $10, many people will opt out. Increase it up to $15, and almost everyone will opt out.

This translates to MMO's just fine too. EVE's mantra of "don't fly what you can't afford to lose" is literally the same concept - people self regulating risk by simply not putting themselves in a situation where they are likely to lose more than they want to lose.

In a game like Ashes, that shows up as people taking more people than the content itself dictates, or taking on easier content even if the reward isn't as good.

Now, you may want to say something along the lines of " but some people will still take risks", which is why I think you are misunderstanding. Yes, people will still take some risks, because everyone has their own level of risk acceptance.

However, even the people that would qualify as "the strong" in your post above are subject to this. They may be taking risks that others aren't, but there is still a point where they would stop and rethink. They would have to, because they stand to lose too much if they don't constantly consider the risk.

These people aren't going to walk up solo to a raid boss thst is 30 levels above them and just have a go. There is a line somewhere between that extreme and putting themselves at zero risk for everyone, even these people. However, the greater the penalty, the lower that line will be - self preservation has to be a consideration for everyone

This is something that EQ2 is a great example of. The game launched with a reasonably death penalty. Not too harsh, but enough for people to be risk averse. People would only run groups with close to an optimal mix of classes, and with gear that was basically on par with what the content offered. Raids at the time were quite simple by design, as they needed to be.

The developers removed the bulk of that death penalty half way through the initial content cycle (ie, before the first expansion). Their argument at the time was basically "if a gamer doesn't feel a sense of failure for dying, a death penalty isn't going to make the feel that sense of failure".

All of a sudden, people were not just running that same content with sub-optimal groups, they were attempting it with less than full groups. Sometimes it worked, but sometimes it didn't - in a spectacular fashion.

The content was exactly the same, the player characters were exactly the same, but due to less of a penalty, players were able to take risks trying things out, not stressing if it didn't work.

This massively increased the amount of fun players could have. It is a big part of the reason the game has (or had, I can't speak to it now) such an incredibly low level of toxicity.

Now, you could then go on to say "but that isn't what Ashes is, Ashes is a game about risk, and that risk is coming from its death penalty". As a statement, this is something I completely agree with. My initial point wasn't that Ashes needed to change, it was that it is bad game design - and it IS bad game design.

The thing is, Ashes is being built on a foundation of bad game design.

Azherae wrote: »

I guess you can lmk if you just don't put any stock in the observations of behaviours of competitive players from other genres, but if you do, we now have literal decades of data about it. MMORPGs were the genre 'most lacking' that data because they 'played it safe' for a decade.

I'm not fully sure if the competitive players from other genres behave the same way the mmo ones do. Both on the good side of behavior and the bad.

Mainly exactly for the reason that all the players who might've been competitive in the mmos in the past (or others with similar mentality) have left for other games, which then created their own behavioral patterns and cultures.

Azherae wrote: »

No matter what you remember from the good days, remember that this is not L2, the suffering involved in being weaker is definitively greater.

And this is why I've always tried suggesting middlegrounds for systems. The "BHs should be returning the victim's loot to them", "event-based pvp should remain as promised, with minimal penalties, while also highly accounting for the possibility that the strong ones will always try to bully the weak ones", "proper hardcore pve should be instanced and with limited-to-no penalties on death" - are a few of those suggestions.

In other words, I'm a professional fence-sitter, trying to have and eat all my cake on my fence.