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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Challenges with the crafting ecosystem
Marzzo
Member, Leader of Men, Kickstarter, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
Crafting has often been an irrelevant system from a progression POV in many MMO:s. It has often also been boring. This is a shame since a great MMO need a great crafting system. A system where crafted items can rival random drops and quest rewards from around the game.
1
The first challenge for a healthy crafting ecosystem is to make people actually bother with it. For people to care, crafting needs to be relevant during all stages of the game. Random quest rewards and drops should not outclass almost all crafted items, weather it is during early, mid or endgame.
2
The second challenge is for crafters to have access to a steady flow of supplies that are price competitive. For this there needs to be a lot of supply and demand. The first point cowers demand but supply is a bit trickier. For people to bother with gathering and refining there needs to be enough incentive for people to pick these professions and actually spend time gathering and refining stuff during all stages of the game.
Good incentives could be unique quests that are designed for refiners/gatherers or competitive gold/xp rewards from farming the materials needed by the crafters. The first point makes gold farming by gathering competitive if it is done right.
Another interesting incentive is one IS has already denied but could use more thought. Gathering professions and refining could give small or fun buffs to players. For example, a woodcutter would become a lot stronger than a herbalist. This could mean that the woodcutter gets a small strength buff. These buffs would make every single player interested in picking at least one profession which is great for the health of the ecosystem.
Alternatively, some professions could give small fun abilities. For example, the ability for a herbalist to transform into a cactus or “The amount of times you had to squat down to pick up herbs has given you the ability to jump high once every 5 minutes”
3
One interesting thing is where gathered materials comes from. Instead of a dragon or monster randomly carrying equipment certain bosses could drop specific farming materials. For example, killing “Butter Dragon” could make him drop “Tooth of Butter Dragon” or be skinned for “Scale of Butter Dragon” which in turn could be used to craft great end-game gear by dedicated crafters. This would make many players seek out crafters to work with their gathered materials.
4
Crafting progression is also something that is half done in many games. There should be different rarities or quality to fishing rods, mining picks, skinning knives etc. For example, “Tooth of Butter Dragon” could be used to create a high quality skinning knife that in turn opens up new rare and exciting skinning possibilities.
There could also be some for of crafting guild or NPC-hub with reputation tied to it. Higher reputation would unlock new recipes, rewards and cosmetics.
5
But the most important factor by far is that many, many people decide to join in the ecosystem. We need tons of crafters, refiners and gatherers for the system to be fun and healthy. And the only way to get many players is to make it relevant and fun. Do not put this on second priority. It is vital for the game.
1
The first challenge for a healthy crafting ecosystem is to make people actually bother with it. For people to care, crafting needs to be relevant during all stages of the game. Random quest rewards and drops should not outclass almost all crafted items, weather it is during early, mid or endgame.
2
The second challenge is for crafters to have access to a steady flow of supplies that are price competitive. For this there needs to be a lot of supply and demand. The first point cowers demand but supply is a bit trickier. For people to bother with gathering and refining there needs to be enough incentive for people to pick these professions and actually spend time gathering and refining stuff during all stages of the game.
Good incentives could be unique quests that are designed for refiners/gatherers or competitive gold/xp rewards from farming the materials needed by the crafters. The first point makes gold farming by gathering competitive if it is done right.
Another interesting incentive is one IS has already denied but could use more thought. Gathering professions and refining could give small or fun buffs to players. For example, a woodcutter would become a lot stronger than a herbalist. This could mean that the woodcutter gets a small strength buff. These buffs would make every single player interested in picking at least one profession which is great for the health of the ecosystem.
Alternatively, some professions could give small fun abilities. For example, the ability for a herbalist to transform into a cactus or “The amount of times you had to squat down to pick up herbs has given you the ability to jump high once every 5 minutes”
3
One interesting thing is where gathered materials comes from. Instead of a dragon or monster randomly carrying equipment certain bosses could drop specific farming materials. For example, killing “Butter Dragon” could make him drop “Tooth of Butter Dragon” or be skinned for “Scale of Butter Dragon” which in turn could be used to craft great end-game gear by dedicated crafters. This would make many players seek out crafters to work with their gathered materials.
4
Crafting progression is also something that is half done in many games. There should be different rarities or quality to fishing rods, mining picks, skinning knives etc. For example, “Tooth of Butter Dragon” could be used to create a high quality skinning knife that in turn opens up new rare and exciting skinning possibilities.
There could also be some for of crafting guild or NPC-hub with reputation tied to it. Higher reputation would unlock new recipes, rewards and cosmetics.
5
But the most important factor by far is that many, many people decide to join in the ecosystem. We need tons of crafters, refiners and gatherers for the system to be fun and healthy. And the only way to get many players is to make it relevant and fun. Do not put this on second priority. It is vital for the game.
4
Comments
1. Gear will have a maximum duration. You will be able to rapair equipment, but they will loose overall durability, which correspomds with the rarity of items i believe. Only legendary equipment will be indestructible. This leads to a constant need for equipment and the need to constantly/regularly switch out your gear, which is a hassle for pve/pvp players but a good thing for crafting professions.
2. Auctionhouses will be something that ONLY mercantile nodes and the nodes in their zoi will have!
3. The best crafting stations will most of the time be in scientific nodes, which will mean that people will most of the time buy there, then transport them with a caravan to the next biggest mercantile node.
4. Mobs in general wont drop gear most of the time. A wolf is supposed to drop pelts, meat and fangs or bones. A dragon will drop the same equivalent in its case, and then harvest specialists will be able to harvest it for even more or better loot. They also said i believe that bosses aill still drop gear or such things, but think of it that around 30-40% of the best gear is supposed to be crafted by the crafting professions.
5. I do have founded a specialised crafting guild with the main focus on procuring materials from raids/ the open world and the production of high end armour, weapons and trinkets. (Sadly we only have 2 people in the guild currently, we dont seem to have many interested people)
6. We dont know how the recipes will end up in the game, because it is always easy for developers to tell us vague facts, but not to tell us the real deal.
7. We know that materials are supposed to have different qualities.
8. Crafters are supposed to choose, what gear will recieve different stats, which is awesome.
Everything i said is mostlikely in constant change, and they somehow dont want to answere my infrequent questions about crafting.
Where did you find the info about gear being "permanently destroyed"? This is what I can find on the wiki:
There is item durability (item decay) in Ashes of Creation.[92]
0% durability will unequip items, increasing their repair costs.[93]
Destroyed gear can be reforged at a player stall using a portion of the materials that were necessary to craft the item.[94]
I didnt know about the reforging, you always learn something new xD
It has honestly been theory crafted to death at this point we really do need some hard facts and reveals but who knows when that will be. Closer to Alpha 1 hopefully.
Specifics would be great to know, but after hearing that crafting isn’t nearly as focused as I’d imagined, I’m slightly concerned to hear more as well.
Overpowered gear lvl 40 100% perfection would be as good as a 60 lvl gear 25% .
It would give the possibility to choose tuff base on the look you like and not only the lvl your are.
And higher the gear will be less probably a master will make it perfect.
In some MMO I played the end game gears hadn't a lot of variety and I didn't like there look.
So if I got the opportunity to buy a well looking lvl 80 gear and still be able to play my role in lvl 100 dungeons or PvP battles. I'll go for it !
Variety it's healthy, but this way they won't need to make to many various gears base on rarity but players make rarity throw the gears we will have at any point of development of the game .
I like the idea of a mastery. They could implement it at the end, when you reached grandmaster in crafting.
Someone who just reached grandmaster would be at mastery 0 for swords, daggers, axes etc for example, and then for every weapon of that specific type, he would gain mastery. And with each mastery milestone, they could increase the stats even more.
There will be risks to adding stats to gear, more risk it destroys the gear the more different stats you add. Changing one stat to another will be risk free (as per current plans)
I’m hoping for mastery being prestigious and useful, so it would reward someone who focuses all their points into a specific craft. A minigame would be great so it would actually have skill to get the best results. I personally am not a fan of “make this thirty times and now it get +1”. Seems sort of... anticlimactic.
They already said that the (for example), two pieces of iron ore can have different qualities. It would be cool, if working with higher quality items in later stages would then trigger the mastery mechanic we are talking about.
That way, there would be three things artisans could aim for in crafting at later levels. Concentrating on pure quality to raise their mastery, training with quantity instead of quality (lets say that an item with high quality ingredients would raise mastery by 1, while an item with normal materials raises mastery by .2), and maybe some random "breakthrough", that can occur if you do late game artisan quests or when creating an item from a new recipe.
I figure the viability of a masterwork material (or High Quality material, or elite material, whatever they’re called) will depend very much on how many total materials there will be for a particular craft, and how much storage a typical player will have access to.
I still think mastery shouldn’t be near so simple as “make enough of these things to make other things” which just boils down to pressing Interact on something enough times to level up. The mini games might be a bit of a pipe dream but there’s gotta be something more engaging than just spam-crafting to max mastery.
I do like the ideas of questing for NPCs in exchange for crafting knowledge or new schematics. Something that requires a bit of exploration to break up the cycle of "craft this craft that"
You should ask Steven about the minigames for artisan professions next stream
Base on risk and reward, if the material needed to craft it are extremely rare , the one who took the risk may become extremely rich or just loose the stuff ^^"
I’m going to have to resist the urge to suggest keyboard DDR for alchemy, tempted as I am.
Actually, now that I think about it, that might be fun if it’s set to some kind of tune.
They could give you the sound of a brewing cauldron and the tempo/intensity wohld demand thatyou press different buttons
The Monster Mash (sfx version)? I’d be down
I'm also interested in your crafting guild.
Basic low quality gear vendored by npcs and most of the relevant gear created by players would make crafting encouraged.
@Muro wouldnt a system like that be heavily RNG reliant?
You're bleeding for salvation, but you can't see that you are the damnation itself." -Norther
It make me think that most of the early crafted stuff won't be buy because lvl would rise to quickly and only late lvl stuff will be worth to be bought.
Saying how many “days” it can take to reach a goal is meaningless when discussing video games. Note that in game reviews people talk about “hours” rather than “days” of gameplay for that very reason.
yes the experiments will be fun for like 1 or 2 months and then we all just look up wikki to make the "best" one .
example :
its great if you can have studded leather whith iron or copper or silver or bone or watever other material you can find studs .
but once thy are all made and you check thyr stats you will have 1 come out as the "best" and all will make those .
baring of cource fashion choice becous the leather ( black panther skin ) armor whith bone studs just looks so cool .
olso please no minigames while crafting .
i do not want to lose most of my crafting supplies becous i am bad at DDR games .
Exactly 2 Pinky Talons. hahah
In Star Wars Galaxies we had certain crafters who were famous on their servers. They had High skills and got the best materials, and produced better gear than others. I remember on my server (Corbantis) there was a rifle maker so famous that people would show off the fact that they got one of his guns. He charged a premium and he only had so many guns at any given time so not everybody could have one. I’d love to see something like that in this game.
Most MMO's I've played, it took me less than a week to hit max level. I don't think I've ever played one where it took longer than 2 weeks (though I have not played every MMO).
If he is saying it is "possible" to hit level 50 in 45 days, that would suggest that most people will take twice that long, or even longer. This would make Ashes one of the slower leveling MMO's out there.
But what it make me generally think it's if leveling a crafter is slower than leveling a character , we will have to past time to lvl up our crafting skills without being able to sell anything because low lvl gears won't be attractive enough vs the time low and mid lvl players will gather the gold needed to buy it.
I had play a game where the economy what pretty decent and healthy but where 99% of early gears where useless because that 1% what enough to reached mid game and it was only the 50% last lvl where you had to really choose between different gears and participate at the economy.
On the crafter side to be economy viable he had to reach 60% of max lvl.
But all depends of IS choose , and feedback of the crafter community during beta.