Greetings, glorious adventurers! If you're joining in our Alpha One spot testing, please follow the steps here to see all the latest test info on our forums and Discord!
Options
Should there be perks to having a crafting main?
Hartwell
Member, Leader of Men, Kickstarter, Alpha One
There are 3 types of artisan classes:
• Gathering
• Processing
• Crafting
There are a great deal of advantages to having a gatherer main in MMORPGs. Picking up materials everywhere you go is pretty useful. A lot of games allow you to send all of your gathered items to an alternative character and reap the benefits of having a crafting and processing alt. Should this allow for players to obtain all of the benefits of crafting and processing or should there be benefits to having a main character that crafts/processes? If you would like to see mains have a benefit to being crafters/processors, what would it be?
• Gathering
• Processing
• Crafting
There are a great deal of advantages to having a gatherer main in MMORPGs. Picking up materials everywhere you go is pretty useful. A lot of games allow you to send all of your gathered items to an alternative character and reap the benefits of having a crafting and processing alt. Should this allow for players to obtain all of the benefits of crafting and processing or should there be benefits to having a main character that crafts/processes? If you would like to see mains have a benefit to being crafters/processors, what would it be?
1
Comments
Don't need a bigger perk than that.
Your main character is the one that travels around the world as such you came across all kind of gathering spots and materials -> can gather while doing other things, then send it to the crafter alt.
If your main is a crafter/refiner your ability to gather will be limited which means that you cannot gather everything and switch to your alt if you want more materials instead of switching to your alt to craft with the materials you take out of storage. -> more running around involved.
OPs question seems to be if there should be anything to make up that advantage.
To OP: I'm not sure if that advantage is really all that big seeing that you will need caravans to move ressources around. That makes it somewhat unlikely that you will harvest large amounts of resources as a side activity it seems more likely that you go out in specific planed harvest ventures. The only exceütion for that would be extremly rare materials that you can only harvest in limited amounts to beginn with, that might be an advantage.
*Edit: there migth be one advantage of a gatherer alt. If you do not level up your alt and leave your gatherer as a lvl 1 non combatant a end lvl player would get much more corruption. Of course you could just have one main that is a gatherer and 3 alts that are crafter/refiner/gatherer.
I don't believe that I remember this. Thank you for sharing. I hope there are some meaningful things for crafting and processing mains that Steven has planned.
Yeah, the Burning Crusade went kind of ham with direct combat bonuses to professions. They even later put some abilities and stat boosts in for gatherers, to keep things even. I hope that doesn't become a thing. It creates more issues that it solves, although I do understand it in WoW's case with how the engineering profession is basically peak combat advantages.
WoW has flip-flopped back and forth between crafting being absolutely useless and being mandatory with no middleground. It doesn't help that even when it was mandatory, crafting in WoW was boring and 99% pointless. Aside from the crafter-specific bonuses, everything you could make from crafting was outright worse than anything gained from quests or dungeons.
The way you combat that is to give people a reason to craft the items for the items themselves, not just as a means to level up their crafting.
GW2 sort of has a system like you describe, where the first of an item you craft gives you lots of exp because you are "discovering" the recipe for it. Crafting an item after you've discovered the recipe gives significantly less exp.
Of course, this just means that instead of mindlessly spamming a single item, players mindlessly spam lots of different items to level up fast, but the problem remains the same - players crafting just to max out their crafting skill. In the case of GW2, the only crafted items of any real worth are max level items, so anything below that is meaningless.
It is hard enough gathering all the materials for crafting let alone having to spend time running to the bank swapping inventory out and/or having to run to an action house to purchase it. Some might say that make sure you have everything prepared beforehand, but it is more often that my inventory space is low and I miss something or a guild member needed something made quickly….as I run around for 5 minutes gathering ingredients. Sigh.
Just a note from the wiki about warehouse storage:
"Warehouses may enable a player to transfer non-material goods between alts. This excludes resources, materials or anything that relies on the caravan system."
I don't know if the same rule applies to storage chests (e.g. in your house), but I wouldn't be surprised if it does for the sake of consistency.
@ssweet Check out the info on backpacks - https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Backpacks
If this is the case, other than by selling them, how does one get materials from the player that gathers them to the player that refines them? I mean, this is a system that absolutely does need to exist in some form - the economy depends on it existing.
If it is a simple character to character trade system, then that surely defeats the point of not allowing access to materials that are placed in storage containers in house.
Yes, I take it the gatherer simply trades materials to the processor.
It makes sense to prohibit this transfer between alts if the goal is to encourage economic/social interaction and create an interdependence between players, particularly those specialising in different artisan professions.
I'm not saying it doesn't make sense to encourage evonomic interaction - just that preventing a player from transferring material from one character to another on the same account won't actually accomplish that.
I mean, who exactly is it that this would cause to play differently?
Any player with an in game friend won't ever have any issues with this - that should be obvious.
Players that play MMO's but don't have friends are not exactly the kind of people that will go out and interact with others for any reason. The kind of people that don't trust anyone in game enough to be able to transfer some raw materials with are generally the kind of people that will look at this situation and either simply get a second account (which will give them a second freehold as well, meaning they can be even more economically isolationist) or just go to another game.
Basically, I don't see a single situation in which a player will look at the inability to use raw materials in their housing across alts as a means to be more economically interactive. So if that is the point, I would say that it will fail. On the other hand, if that is not the point, then what is?
Literally the only thing I see it resulting in is more individual players with second accounts.
This is the thought process that lead me to take the comments made in that particular live stream as being specific to warehouse type storage, not to all in home storage.
And those will be second accounts they’re required to pay for each month if they insist on going the hermit route.
It’s not supposed to make player in-trading impossible, it’s there to be a barrier so that the first option someone has to move mats between their own characters will never be the convenient option. It’s discouraging hermit behavior in the general populace, and honestly it’ll probably work alright. Of course some people will find ways around it, but it’s not exactly hard to track proxy transfers with friends or funneling behavior with accounts, so if IS really wants to stop it, they certainly can.
But again, the point mostly seems to be discouraging alt-muling as the convenient option. Still possible, but people using the systems as intended will have more convenience allowed them.
It doesn't need to change the play style of die hard alt-thusiasts. It can serve as a deterrent to the many other types of players who may be considering using alts but for whom that feature is not a deal-breaker in deciding (how) to play the game. This includes veterans and new players whose idea of MMORPG game play is currently being shaped by AoC mechanics.
You seem to be forgetting, the only people this will affect at all are the hermit type.
Any veteran MMO player - or any player that a veteran brings to the game - will have no trouble getting around this restriction, if it does end up as per your understanding.
Players new to the MMO genre are only likely to come to Ashes based on a friend's recommendation, at which point they will have that friend to help them transfer materials.
Again, the people that this kind of thing will have any effect on really are only the hermit type crafters - it will annoy a lot of other players, but it won't stop them playing how they are going to play.
I mean, no one is going to specifically not level a crafting alt just because it is a two step process to get the materials their main gathered to them, all they will do is complain that the two step process is stupid.
Which is it.
Sure, players can rely on friends for transfers unless they're not logged in, have different play schedules, are occupied, are half way across the map, or don't want to help that particular day.
When it's too inconvenient, it's possible any player may opt to buy materials from the marketplace to save time. That's not to say they have to do it all the time and abandon their alts; it could just be sporadic, but it's still one way the restriction can affect all player types to interact more with the broader economy.
Will it be annoying for people? In-deed. I'm actually wondering if 2-step transfers will even be possible at this point.
This will kill the games economy, not enhance it.
Selling materials on the market isn't player interaction - it is 2 players interacting with NPC's. It is not what should be encouraged.
What should be encouraged is players enlisting other players to supply them with what they need. If I am a crafter that uses a lot of iron, I should be able to talk to someone that smelts ore in to iron bars and ask them to supply me with how ever many I think I will need, at what price we collectively deem to be fair. That player should then be able to enlist someone to collect all of that iron ore, supplying as much as that player thinks they will need to fulfill my order as well as any other orders that they may have.
This is actual economic interaction between players, and makes for a far more interesting game than having go to the marketplace to find materials they may want, and then having to go to a different nodes marketplace if what you want isn't there - then having to physically move those resources to where you want them.
So no, the notion of removing this trade won't work in Ashes.
So, since trading will have to be in place, and since trading will be able to be used to circumvent any restrictions that might possibly be put on storage (which at this point are still conjecture), it would seem the logical thing to do is to not have those restrictions on storage in the first place, as they will serve no pratical purpose.
You could say the practical purpose of restrictions is served in those cases where players 'can' use trade to circumvent restrictions, but circumstances make it so inconvenient that they instead choose to make deals with other players or use markets/stalls.
I feel these cases are highly possible, but to what extent they'll occur, and whether you'd want a certain threshold of cases in order to call the mechanic practical, is another matter.
With the 2-step transfer, I suppose you can't stop them; I was thinking more in lines of whether they'd prevent a material from even being held by a character if another character on the same account harvested it. In this case, you'd need 2 accounts to circumvent it...I think.
Like, the effort has already been put in at the time this becomes a relevant factor, the transferring of materials from one account to the other is the final part of the sequence - players are not going to get to that point and then decide to buy the materials.
You could argue that this would see players buy materials from the start - but I find it very unlikely that any real number of people will look at the time it would take to harvest materials (including the PvP that comes with that), and then decide it is the transferring of those materials to a different character that is causing them to rethink the situation.
If someone is going to go through the effort of actually harvesting their own materials, refine them all themselves, and then turn them in to finished items - keeping in mind that this will take multiple leveled professions - then the act of needing to transfer materials between accounts simply isn't going to stop them. This would require a fairly resource intensive tracking system - every single individual resource item (both raw and processed) would need to be tagged with the character that harvested it - and also presumably the character that refined it.
This would also cause all sorts of chaos when people attempt to combine partial stacks of resources - the game would either have to continusally keep track of how many individual items from what characters were in each stack of resources, or would have to only count the character with the most items in the stack.
If they did the first, the tracking resources the server would then need to use would crawl the game to a halt - instead of a caravan containing 10,000 copies of 1 database entry, it would contain 10,000 individual database entries, since each individual resource that enters the game would need to be tracked individually.
If the latter, obviously it would be pointless as the entire system could be easily circumvented.
Well they may not be comparing time taken up by the activities but simply foreseeing that they might not have anyone to facilitate a trade with later on. Anyone who plans their play session ahead of time might go this route, but I wouldn't have a guess on how many people fall into this category; I'd agree it could very well just be a small percentage of players.
Yeah that would be too problematic.
Remember, housing storage should be able to hold at least 100 times the resources a player can carry on them (based on the idea that housing storage needs to hold at least as much as a caravan).
If it turns out that 100 times what you can carry on you is only enough for one play session, that means harvesting the materials for one play session will require 100 trips out to the resources and back to your storage.
It would also mean that the act of going to town to get materials for a play session and then bring them back to your freehold will require 100 trips to town and back.
So, really, the resources that are able to be stored in a freehold (or any other housing) really do need to be significant in terms of how long they will see a single crafter last on them. The longer the resources you are able to store in your house, the less often you need to find someone to transfer things for you - which in turn means this can easily become a case of grabbing an opportunity when it arises once or twice a week, rather than having to do it every day.
Current info says raw crafting materials, and presumably processed materials, will be stored by stack, rather than individually.
However, it seems like some people aren’t getting that IS doesn’t want nor intend to provide riskless ways for mass transferring materials between characters. Even for characters belonging to two different players, they want those players to be using mules or caravans, not meeting up in a safe town to trade 1k items at once.
It is by design a huge pain to do big direct player-to-player trading, because they want people using the PvP systems. They want people to need allies to move their stuff around. They’re intentionally making it frustrating if you want to completely avoid risk.
I would also make the assumption that the stack size will change based on inventory type - but that last one really is just an assumption at this stage.
While I agree with you, I think that the idea Intrepid have here is in relation to moving materials from where they are harvested, to where they are refined. That is where the risk is, and where it should be.
Once they have been moved that distance, getting those materials in to the hands of the player that is intended to use them simply can not be an issue. It simply doesn't follow.
If there is a system in place stopping a character from taking possession of materials while in their freehold, then that same system must surely stop them from taking possession of those same materials in someone elses freehold.
If this is the case, how are materials supposed to move from the possession of the character that harvested them, in to the possession of the character that will process them? I am not talking about miving from one node to another - it is a given that this will be performed via the caravan system.
It is when that caravan terminates that I am questioning - there needs to then be a way to get those materials in to the possession of the character that is to use them.
Any such system that will allow one player to transfer materials that they have crafted from their possession in to the possession of a player that is going to then process them in to something further pr sell them on can also by definition be used to transfer those same materials from one character to another, and then back to a different character on the original account.
Again, I am not talking about moving materials from a node you live in to a neighboring node that I live in - the caravan system takes care of that. I am talking about transferring materials from where you stand to where I stand, which is right next to you, so that those materials are now in my possession as opposed to in your possession.
Basically, what I am saying is that if I manage to procure materials that I want, then move them successully to my freehold, there is no reason that I should not be able to then use an alt to craft with those materials - and there is no reasonable system taht Intrepid could put in place that would be able to stop me from doing so.
I've already gone through the risk aspect by this stage.
That’s all up in the air. I’m sure small person-to-person sales will be allowed, but I don’t see any world in which they’d let a caravan’s worth of goods be directly transferred from one character to another. There’s yet to be much info on how player market stalls will work, but for now that’s where I imagine they will expect ownership transfers to occur. It sounds like something to ask in their next livestream, since while it’s reasonable to restrict access to prevent hermit alt-ing, it has to focus on being inconvenient to the anti-social playstyle only and not annoy regular players in the process.
As far as I’m concerned, as long as large direct character-to-character material transferring requires both characters be logged in at the same time, it’ll be fine. Enough of a deterrent to annoy solo hermit behavior, but easily usable by anyone else. Requiring two steps and two players cooperating to move materials en masse seems fine.
This is pretty much a key factor I was thinking about too: how often players move their goods.
In AA I knew organised players who waited a fortnight to do big, valuable trade runs while others did runs daily because they were impatient by nature or their goods sold best in smaller quantities at regular intervals rather than a single load saturating the market.
There was a whole spectrum of behaviours, so it will be interesting to see how the player base in AoC distributes along this dimension.
The only way this works is if storage in a freeheld is able to be shared.
While I agree that things should be done to discourage a hermit style gameplay, I would argue that anything done to that end should come across as additional gameply to regular people - not as a pure annoyance.
To me, the caravan system fulfills the above role perfectly an adequately. It will stop the hermit between the harvesting and refining stage, and probably again between the refining and finishing stage.
Yet to everyone else, caravans are just gameplay.
This is why - to me - if you have the materials on your freehold, you should be able to freely set who has access to take them from storage.
At that point, the risk factor has been cleared and the anti-hermit mechanic has been defeated. The materials should now be cleared to use as the owner sees fit, by who the owner sees fit.