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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.
Comments
Its was not a dream in SWG, to add to my statement of 30 mins to craft a sword - I do not mean of standing there for 30 mins doing nothing but look at bar to fill up. It was actually active crafting each item part by part then putting them together( 2 mins each part: handle, blade, guard, sharpening, mending if you know what you are doing). It would require you to press number of skills and windows to increase the quality of specific stat in a weapon for example with a rng chance of success (similar to FF14 chance increase). It will get higher with mastery and better quality materials.
You may also have crafting stations that will produce specific amount of materials automatically for you (for part of exp) if you use a recipe and macros for experimenting on an item craft (without use of materials) to increase your level. But overall SWG had really active and deep crafting to get exactly the item you want.
What they are also not saying is that crafting will take hours to make a single item.
It is your suggestion (if implemented as stated) that would see a shortage of crafter, not the design Intrepid have in mind, and the design Intrepid have in mind is the one they developed this specific system for.
Yeah, after complaints from bards in the 9 months before Storm Legion (the period I was playing the game) they "fixed" it and made it so bards could essentially just cast random buffs on random players and get more credit than other classes. Your buffs didn't even need to be useful - the class just got credit for casting them. The way they "fixed" this was one of the factors that contributed to me not playing that game any longer.
Again, this is not an example of a good design of this type of system that I'd want to highlight as something to attempt to emulate.
I fail to see how that’s any worse than many people from a 20man raid getting nothing in a bid system, or five people all relying on RNG because they all Needed the same item, or the obvious issues that will arise with favoritism among guilds and groups.
Systems can be tweaked to weigh participation that flags a player for loot privileges. What cannot be tweaked is a system that is doomed to only make a few people happy due to insufficient amounts of loot to go around. It’s going to frustrate people in the long run.
I am not saying that it will take hours to make a single item. I clarified above that making high quality one of a kind weapon would take up to 30 mins of processing like in SWG.
You may also have crafting stations that will produce specific amount of materials automatically for you (for part of exp) if you use a recipe and macros for experimenting on an item craft (without use of materials) to increase your level. But overall SWG had really active and deep crafting to get exactly the item you want.
It is very deep and complex crafting system that is hard to explain in a quick way. Here is a video of some of it if that helps > https://youtube.com/watch?v=GuDmLz0ToIY
Intrepid are looking toward making crafting system like SWG, good crafters in that game were 1 in a whole server. People from other servers would often switch just to have something crafted from #1 guy just for the types of PvP stats that he was working years to acquire on pvp weapons. Funny thing, he would also often die to his own crafted weapons in PvP.
When you go in to a raid, you go in knowing that there will be fewer drops than there are players present. It is a simple case of statistics that some players will leave with no rewards.
The ONLY time this is an issue is if you participate in a raid as a one off. If you are raiding regularly with the same general group of people - whether a guild or a regular pick up raid - then this all balances out just fine. it is also important to point out that in these situations, trust is key.
A single player will get more over all excitement from participating in 4 raids and getting one item on the fourth than they would in participating in 4 raids and getting 25% of an item each time.
Again, when in this kind of situation, it feels like you are simply being paid to go to work.
In the case of world events (such as the rifts in Rift, or other examples from GW2 and ESO - among others) an evenly distributed loot system like this is the only way to distribute the rewards. As such, in these situations, the pros of such a system outweigh the cons. However, in terms of general loot, this is not the case - the cons absolutely outweigh the pros.
I fundamentally disagree with this. By what logic have you concluded that players would rather spend ~4 hours to get one item, than they would like to spend ~1 hours you get one item?
By what logic do you believe that drawing the short straw for 3 raids out of 4 is going to be enjoyable?
Imagine playing MHW with that logic of getting 1 item out of killing 4 monsters lol, I disagree with @noaani too in this
If you run four raids and get one item on the last raid, that is one item in four raids.
If you run four raids and get 25% of an item per raid, that is one item in four raids.
Where does spending one hour come in to it?
As I said in the paragraph above the one you quoted, if a player raids as a one off event, then there is a good chance they will get nothing for their time. However, if they raid with the same group regularly (be it guild or pick up), then they will average out to get roughly the same rewards.
It should also be somewhat obvious to anyone putting thought in to the situation that a developer would not alter the rate at which new top end items were introduced to the game due to an alternate reward structure. If an encounter were to offer 40 players a single item under normal circumstances, then that same encounter would - at best - offer those that participate in a kill exactly 2.5% of an item.
I say *at best* because under this specific system, the situations where a reward is offered to players that is undesired and thus unused is almost zero. It stands to reason that there would be a slight increase in dropped loot to compensate for this - though I am happy to ignore this likelihood for now if you'd rather.
Thus, if a raid were to take on 10 encounters in a night, that raid could expect 10 items, and a player participating in that raid four times would expect to get one item over that time.
That same raid under your loot suggestion would get 2.5% of an item each kill, or 25% of an item each night. This would mean each person in that raid would get one item after four raids.
Under both scenarios, a player that only raids once will end up with nothing of any worth for their efforts. Under your suggestion, a player would need to raid those four nights in order to get an item, which is the same amount of time they would expect to need to participate in a raid in order to get an item normally anyway.
We could get in to a discussion about dopamine and it's effects in relation to rewards. I'm happy to do that, if you want.
However, it is probably easier to point out that this same effect has been used in computer games for several years now as loot boxes - not that an MMO reward structure should be taken that far. It is also why winning $100,000 is more exciting than earning $100,000 in a year.
I agree, that would be weird.
I never suggested anything that would alter the rate at which items enter the game though, so I'm not sure where this weird idea that we are talking about came from.
What...? Where did you pull that from?
Instanced loot gives each person their own loot. It doesn’t give them part of an item. The group doesn’t split the loot. You seem to have a pretty big misunderstanding of how instanced looting works.
In the system I described, you run with your group through four raids. Your entire group comes out with minimum four items each, because everyone had unique loot.
Ashes’ main loot off creature-type mobs is crafting materials. So your raid would all get some kind of craft material, your players with higher crafting levels would get the rarer types.
For humanoids, your group gets various trinkets you’d find on the body, then throw in lots for the rare one-off like their weapons.
They aren't "splitting" the item, they are getting a portion of the materials to make an item.
We can assume in a normal situation a player only needs one dragon claw to make the item they want, and the raid of 40 gets one claw per kill. If you translate that to your suggestion, that would mean that every player would get 1 dragon claw per kill, but they would need 40 dragon claws to make the item they want. Thus they are getting 2.5% of an item per kill - as the dragon claw isn't a reward at all until you have enough to make the usable item.
This is the only way it could work in an MMO. If the game offered each player a claw per kill and only needed one claw to make an item, that would lead to two possible outcomes, based on how Intrepid designed things.
The first is that they design the game so that players have many items they can make with these claws. Thus, each kill would result in 40 new raid quality items entering the game. This would result in massive player power creep, as players would be getting multiple upgrades per day (raiders don't only kill one encounter a day).
The second option is that there are only a few items that can be made with these claws that are of use to each individual class. With this situation, players will only ever kill the encounter a few times, as there would quickly become no point in continuing to kill that encounter. This means either developers need to develop new raid content at a much faster pace than any game has managed to do so far (like, 250% faster), or players will leave the game due to no valid content remaining.
So yeah, the only valid way to have a loot system that you are suggesting is to base it around players getting a fraction of an item per kill so that these high end items still enter the game at the same speed they would with a regular loot system.
I'm a little shocked you would even suggest one actual, usable raid level item per player present in a raid. That is actually ridiculous and completely untenable. Since Ashes has no real form of item binding, this suggestion would mean that two raid guilds would be able to keep an entire node equipped in raid level loot.
I mean, take a competent raid guild though a raid dungeon and kill 10 bosses, and that is 400 items entering the game. Even if those items are of use to the raid, they will still be replacing raid level items that the character have in those slots, which are then able to be sold or given to other characters to use.
Utterly ridiculous.
Well first off, of course you’re shocked by something you imagine I suggested but in reality didn’t suggest anything of the sort.
All of your argument hinges on every player getting duplicate loot, which again, is not how instanced looting works (it can, but that’s to exception, not the rule).
It depends on IS being entirely incapable of balancing common vs. rare materials.
It also hinges on one material being enough to make a full weapon or full piece of armor, which would be laughable. I’ve never been under any impression weaponcrafting would be a couple pieces of common ore + one piece of flair material (in your example, one dragon claw).
Unless it’s an ultra rare, legendary quality drop that requires a max level gatherer you even have a chance at, but even so, with instanced loot your raid would all be getting one of many drops.
Your example but with instanced loot dependent of gathering levels: Your 40man raid kills a dragon, 8 of you with some points into gathering get a Dragon Claw or Dragon Scale (low chance of HQ mat), 9 players with high leveled gatherering get a Dragon Tooth, Dragon Claw, or Dragon Scale (moderate chance of HQ mat), 18 with no exp in gathering get a Dragon Scale (no chance of HQ mat), 5 with fully maxed gathering get a Pristine Dragon Claw, Pristine Dragon Tooth, or Pristine Dragon Scale (guaranteed HQ mat).
Scales would be the basic material for any dragon armor gear. Claws would be the basic materials for dragon weapons. Teeth would be for the stronger versions of these pieces of armor and weapons.
You’d need multiple of each material to make a full set of armor for anyone, and HQ materials would mean the armor/weapons are better by some percentage, but requiring multiple materials for a full item is the standard across all crafting systems. Ashes will be no different there.
I’d much rather have raid tier gear be accessible to, yknow, a whole raid group as long as they value bringing crafters and trading amongst themselves for any piece they might be missing. No one is making the claim one run should get an instant weapon—I would be disappointed if anything beyond lvl10 only required one standard *special* mat to make—but everyone in the raid should be able to steadily work toward their gear progression with each raid without depending on RNG, or hoping they have enough currency or popularity to be given any loot.
And I do find it somewhat funny that you made the analogy to winning $100k in the lottery vs. earning $100k over a year, because bids and need/greeding is the lottery that would still only be part of what you need for a full piece of gear, while instanced looting that awards materials based on crafting levels or even RNG where you don’t walk away with nothing, is more akin to earning money over the course of a year.
For obvious reasons, I’d like to be able to see my progress toward more power.
Edit: shitton added
You've not done much of a job of explaining what this loot system you have in mind is.
You have made no distinction at all between raids dropping materials used to create items, whether via quest turn in or player crafting - which is why it is easier to talk about this as players getting a percentage of an item rather than a number of materials.
You have made absolutely no statements as to how the 50% of raid drops that we know will be dropped as finished items will be handled.
I'm attempting to understand what the hell it is you are actually talking about here, but honestly have so little information to go on that I am finding myself having to piece things together.
Lets look at that 50% of raid level items that are not going to be player crafted.
Your system outright does not work here. Feel free to argue otherwise - just keep in mind that through this entire discussion my main focus has been the rate at which items are able to enter the game world.
Based on that, as I said a while ago, this system may have it's place, but it is not at all suitable as the only looting system in Ashes.
Now lets turn to your most recent idea.
So all a raid needs to do to guarantee the best rewards from all encounters that use this loot scheme is to make sure everyone in the raid is max gathering.
Now you've given raids a valid, quantifiable reason to exclude players from raids. But that's cool, now my raid is getting 40 HQ materials per kill - I hope these weren't supposed to be rare.
Since players can max every gathering skill, that is exactly what raids would ask of their members - and those members would be only too happy to oblige.
Good luck getting good raid level gear if your main is not a gatherer. This has no connection to the method of loot distribution you are talking about here. This is now a discussion on how many crafting materials we each think a raid should drop.
If an entire guild spends months to max out their gathering, then they absolutely deserve to have an excess of materials to sell or use. Having access to HQ mats isn’t some metric of rarity, it means you put time into crafting that you could’ve spent elsewhere.
I and others have given you examples of how instanced loot works in other games, you’re free to look them up if you want to be more knowledgeable as to how they work.
In games where loot is a full weapon or armor piece, everyone would get an entire armor piece or a full weapon. That’s perfectly fine since it gets its fine tuning, bonus stats, and general upgrades from crafters. Your guild would have plenty of crafters anyway for that reason alone, and no doubt you’d want max level gatherers for raids anyway because we’ve been explicitly told they will be able to get the best materials off of mobs.
That’s not even mentioning how many raids and dungeons will not be persistent in Ashes. For some things you may never even get a second chance to raid it, so where does that leave the majority of players who got literally nothing from the raid? Do they just wait a year or more for the major event boss to come back? Do you expect them to be happy to have to depend on RNG that only lets them roll once every few months? At what point is it fair to the raiders who end up with gear leagues behind the rest because they were unlucky or your loot master decided he’d favor his buddies more or they just don’t have the cash to win bids?
In what way is someone encouraged to try group content, when chances are they’ll end up with nothing to show for it even if they succeed?
Things to clarify before anything else,
Lets me shorten and describe that for you in better way.
1. Highest tier items will not be 50% dropped from boss 50% crafted. Its a combo of both things at once, dropped boss loot will be combined / comboed with crafting.
2. They said that world bosses and crafting will be the main end game. They did not mention that raid bosses will be dropping top-tier loot on their own.
3. They are mentioning the fact of interdependencies, completely separating adventuring class and gatherer's class into two groups of people. That may or may not show that you will have to choose either or to be good at one.
4. Only gatherers will have an ability of getting high tier materials, no one else will.
All of this information can be found on wiki, and was talked about in 2018 podcast.
PS: I wish they designate another stream or more info to clarify looting system at this moment.
Now, lets talk about individual looting and group loot pools:
1. Individual looting does not mean 100% drop chance of any items individually.
-In total from a boss, each one of the members will (use your example) get 25 trash loot, gather 5 hide if you are unlucky and get 1 fang if you are lucky (not super rare mat) for crafting gear. You may get more mats if you have some levels in gathering. You may be extra lucky and get 1 claw (super rare 2% chance) to craft a dagger.
|| Total equaling to 1000 trash items, 200 hide, 20 fangs, 1-2 claws per raid group run ||
-If you are a max gatherer, you would get special mats (Steven described as "other mats that no one but you will be able to obtain")
2. Group loot does not mean that every player would get something.
-In total from a boss, your group will receive 1000 trash items, 200 hide, 20 fangs, 2 claws, 10 special mats from gatherers. There will be 4 choices to looting that:
1) Master loot (lootmaster) - party leader will decide whom to give each item individually.
2) Round-robin - each person rolls on each material individually, some players will get only 10 trash, 3 hide and 1 special mat nothing more. Others will receive 35 trash, 12 hide, 2 special mats, 4 fangs and 1 claw if they roll good numbers.
3) Bidding - on each roll, a player may choose to buy out the item for gold, which will be dispersed to all members equally. If a player has gold at that time, he may choose to buy out those 20 fangs and 2 claws for 1000 gold total. That would mean that the rest of the members only get 26 gold each.
With both looting pools, in general, group in total would get same amount of materials. However, each player may or may not receive any loot. It will be distributed differently based on individual rolls.
-- Individual loot guarantees that you will receive what you loot (only based on your luck).
- If you get that 2% drop item, you rolled a 98 on 100 scale.
-- Group loot, on opposite, divides the large amount of loot to each individual based on yours and other raid member's luck. That means that you are dependent on what other players will roll, unlike in individual loot where you depend on your luck only.
- Each player would roll, and if you roll a 98 out of a 100 that doesn't mean that you would get that item. Someone rolls a 99 and your chance of getting that item is 0%.
I, of course, kept numbers simple for the example just to demonstrate dependency.
Now, what if you had each of both worlds? Would that actually work?
Having an individual (low rarity and special) loot pool for each player, and have a group pool loot for (higher rarity material)
Personally, I like group looting more than individual loot for my successful 100 rolls.
Except one is a huge pillar of their design for this game, and the other is “meh, we’ll just do what the other games have done”.
There are better systems, but of course it’s easiest to stick to the norm.
I can't imagine a healer class stacking a Health buff like that unless it was a raid "banner" skill like Steven was mentioning in the last stream. This is starting to sound exciting now.
The way I've read some of the statements (earlier ones), it sounds like every single item in the game will be player made.
Some of the later statements though indicate that there will be items dropped in a ready to use fashion. It is all a case of how you read the individual statements (all of which should be put in to context via the discussion that proceeded the question).
I would personally rather the first of these - I like the idea of crafters being required to make every item in the game, as long as there is a crafter available to make an item when you need it (and again, there is a different situation when you are looking at getting an item you expect to last you 6 - 9 months or more).
It is worth noting though, this possibility is only a small fraction of my reasons against the proposed looting system. It is very easy to just say "well, when that happens, use normal loot rolls". And yes, you would have to use normal loot rolls - it is simply not feasible to reward 40 raid level items from a single kill in a game where all items are able to be traded.
However, as a looting system, this suggestion goes a long way to removing any suggestion of unity that a top end guild brings. Players start looking at character progression as being a result of participation, and the items obtained as being a thing "they earned" rather than a thing their guild earned.
This is a bad way to look at things in a game, and would only serve to satisfy a small group of players at the raid level that put themselves above their raid (these people don't usually last long at the raid level).
Every single thing you have suggested here can be obtained via normal loot rules. If a mob does drop 40 or more materials for a 40 man raid, they can simply set the NBG system to not award a player a second item until everyone present has been awarded one.
That in itself completely solves your issues - all of them.
So now we have solved your issue, but in a way that leaves raids to be able to determine their own reward structure, and gives everyone far more options for how to deal with looting in any kind of situation the game may throw at us.
---
In terms of your comments in regards to maxing gathering skills taking months, and how players deserve those rewards in that case - an MMO (a good one, at least) should be designed around the notion of people playing for years. So a few months worth of easy investment (running around harvesting things isn't hard - it can be time consuming, but not hard), and the whole raid gets significantly better loot for years to come.
The big issue with this is when a new raid guild then comes along. Not only are they going to have a hard time catching up in terms of gear - even if they are killing the same content - but because it is Ashes, they may well be facing people in PvP who are killing the same PvE content as they are, but getting better rewards from it.
That is no way to keep a new guild in the game - any raid that kills a piece of content should get the same reward as any other raid that kills that same piece of content.
I never said that I would not listen to them. I have even mentioned at the end of my discussion question thread that if any of these items that I have listed are already been discussed by the devs - please let me know about them. @leonerdo's first message on this thread linked me exactly the website with looting information, that is where I have quoted all my info from.
However, not to forget the fact of things that I would want to see in looting aspect, that is what the discussion is about.
I am a bit confused about healer health buff that you are mentioning. Would you mind describing that for me in a little more detail?
This is better way to explain what I meant by debuffs. Overall what I meant in my thread did not involve any health buffs, only environmental de-buffs.
Healers will not be able to heal "locked hp", so each minute into the fight, all your raid members will have less and less hp that they can heal to the point of not being able to out-heal dps done by the boss. Lets say he does 5,500 single target heavy attack on the tank, and 2,500 dps fire aoe breath. At the beginning of the fight, it will be easy to out-heal, however, when all your raid members get (burned alive by hot temperature in the room) HP locked, it will be impossible to heal 2,500 fire aoe if your party member has only 2,000 hp.
Another system suggested to support that is making the fight more realistic. Instead of buffing the boss the closer it is to death, it will do less dps. I am not disregarding the "rage mode" in this, which would be fun to see extreme spike in dps boss does at his last 5% of health (animal instinct) However, during the fight the boss dps will lower in the same way as character's ability to stay in the volcanic room. 5,500 heavy attack will lower to 5,000 > 4,500 and stop at some point before enrage.
If you kill the boss in a correct amount of time, you will balance out the dps done by the boss and hp total that you have to survive. If you are missing dps, boss will hit harder than healer can out heal. If you overpower the boss, you will just have safer hp zone to not die.
From what I can understand, you are mentioning healers being able to buff players to higher HP totals, and stacking other buffs to make the fight easier. I like that idea, not only dps buffs will be important in the game, but also hp increase buffs will have some meanings. (Who, if ever, bought HP increase food > DPS output food in any mmorpg) So players will have to choose, survivability over dps.
Debuff from the hot ass volcanic room, lava itself will just do normal hp damage if you stand in it.
Too many games let crafting become either a side show that noone pays any attention to after whatever point lootable gear becomes better, or something everyone can be all thing in.
In ESO and many other games, a single character can perform many crafting professions to mastery level, which means everybody is self sufficient.
That means that nobody wants to pay another person for a craft, since they can do it themselves.
GATHERING is profitable, because all crafters can spare gold to avoid going out to gather materials, even though they have complete mastery to gather all the games material options..
CRAFTING is not a means to make money.
(If somebody argues that: crafting furniture in eso makes lots of money, I will tell you this. Furniture/housing is solo gameplay gold sink. It doesn't affect progress. Nobody needs to pay gold for furniture.)
For me in AoC, a character should be able to perform only one profession in order to make the economy craft product driven as well as material driven and NOT only material driven.
Now imagine that instead of wearing this gear, the group decides to sell it. Can you see how much gold would be gain from all that effort?
That's a good mmorpg economy.
High lv gear for 8 people? Two months?
Selling that gear? It will guarrantee that your group has CASH TO BID for a city guild hall.
An economy that diversifies on crafted gear, crafted furniture/transportation items, AS WELL AS provisions (food, potions) and raid loot is strong and player driven.
An economy in which crafting doesnt matter (since anyone can craft for themselves), relies only on provisions and materials. Do you know what this means? A cycle of:
1)constant price competition (I am selling 50 iron ores. The lowest price I found in the node is 45g, I will sell them at 43g.)
2)one person with a fair bit of gold goes around the node, buys all the 45g-44g-43g iron ores and sells them for 50g
One character must NOT be able to perform all craft professions.
Only one.
I agree, looking at the Ashes right now, Intrepid are heading towards more realistic type of approach towards their game unlike any other mmorpg on market (except SWG which is their main influence). When I read that few days after making this thread, I was finally excited to play an mmorpg game again in so long.
I really hope that they go over a little bit of crafting and experimenting, also gathering in their next stream. That is what I would like to see next after seeing successful node system, since crafting is what they are really focusing on and making it a required class to level.
I am also glad to see that there is people who are all up for the "taking lots of time to get good" especially now, with many games require only RNG aspect with no time investment. And if there is any with time investment, it would be just continuous grind of dailies and weeklies like ArcheAge.
It gives depth of accomplishments.
However, daily quests like AA are a terrible feature, designed to force players to log in every day or else lose progress.
If I missed two days of AA, a 24h marathon wity ny friends would never make up for the loss of my gear progress. That is wrong.
Time investment should be tied to farming materials, leveling up, completing serious quests that demand teamwork and organization.
Not rng or dailies progress.