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Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest news on Alpha Two.
Check out general Announcements here to see the latest news on Ashes of Creation & Intrepid Studios.
To get the quickest updates regarding Alpha Two, connect your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Profession Confessions
Judeth
Member, Alpha Two
So from what I've seen so far, each character will only be able to choose one profession. This is to try and make players more dependent on each other. I really like the idea, player interaction is something that I noticed most mmorpgs lack, but i'm not sure it'll work as they intend.
I have a feeling this is just going to push players to have more alts, that way they can just trade the goods between each of their characters. I personally don't like having to play multiple characters. I saw someone else's post saying to limit professions to one per account, only issue with that is that it forces players to miss out on content.
How would a gatherer get crafted goods? I'm assuming they'd be making money from the materials they gather, but I feel like crafted goods will be more expensive and probably hard to find on the market.
What do you guys think? I really like their idea but I think it might only work in theory. I think if they want something like this to work then they should make it so separate characters on the same account (and server) can't share their inventory with each other. This would upset a lot of people because they'd have to basically restart if they make a new character - I personally don't mind it. I'd prefer to see people sticking to one character.
I have a feeling this is just going to push players to have more alts, that way they can just trade the goods between each of their characters. I personally don't like having to play multiple characters. I saw someone else's post saying to limit professions to one per account, only issue with that is that it forces players to miss out on content.
How would a gatherer get crafted goods? I'm assuming they'd be making money from the materials they gather, but I feel like crafted goods will be more expensive and probably hard to find on the market.
What do you guys think? I really like their idea but I think it might only work in theory. I think if they want something like this to work then they should make it so separate characters on the same account (and server) can't share their inventory with each other. This would upset a lot of people because they'd have to basically restart if they make a new character - I personally don't mind it. I'd prefer to see people sticking to one character.
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So it can be because people find leveling alts fun, but sometimes it's because people didn't want to work with them fairly too.
U.S. East
That or they're too scared to work with people, or they realize they'll actually make more money if they use alts rather than buying materials and selling the finished product. That in its self will hurt the market because materials that are gathered will be less likely to sell since most people will be using alts to save themselves money. That will just raise the value of crafted items greatly over gathered or processed materials. So gatherers and processors will be making less money than crafters and most likely feel forced to play on an alt so that they can get the gear they need.
I can see most players making that decision, and also because they'd rather do everything themselves than actually having interaction with other people.
The only thing I can see maybe restricting this is if mastering professions is a huge consumption of time and energy. It won't really make a difference to most of these hardcore players though who are used to being in their room all day grinding.
- Banking between characters will likely be restricted to Furniture and completed items.
- A warehouse ability may enable a player to transfer non-material goods between alternate characters. This excludes resources, materials or anything that relies on the caravan system.
This basically makes setting up profession alts super awkward, as you either need to multibox or involve a second person in all transactions. Even if you 100% trust that person, that's just annoying and time-consuming to grab them every time you want to transfer your ore to your smelter.
You can also specialize in one profession per character. There's several things to master in one specific profession. Since you need tons of materials to master something though, you'll need to buy a lot, or trade a lot (or pvp a lot).
I think the biggest bottleneck will be gathering professions. Unless those are interesting enough on their own, it'll be difficult to entice enough players to sustain a population of players mostly interested in crafting.
Even though this is an encouragement for people to interact with each other, it's also absolutely an encouragement for people to multi-box and/or have alts, which's not healthy in my opinion.
Players who put in the effort to master a profession but don't have multiple characters will probably be at a disadvantage against those who do. Simply have your main character gather materials and your alts semi-afk processing and crafting safely in your freehold.
I don't know what's fair and what isn't fair, that's up to Intrepid to determine, however I would like to entertain the idea of allowing for one character to master one Profession of each Artisan Class, because that's essentially what people who have enough IRL resources will be able to achieve with alts and/or multi-boxing. Then, whatever player interaction that was lost due to this could be re-designed into professions needing resources from each other, because you still can only choose one profession in each Artisan Class.
I believe this could be looked into by Intrepid, because it may be impracticable to have Gathering alts and multi-boxing is impossible to enforce. For people who will still have multiple characters, now they will need less alts to master Processing and Crafting professions, but it will be unlikely that the materials will have been gathered by the same person.
At the end of the day, it all comes down to how many alts Intrepid will make you have if you want to master every profession. If it's one Master per character, create alts. If it's one Master per server, create many accounts.
I hope Ashes doesn't turn into one of those games which having multiple characters/accounts is almost mandatory.
Lets take maybe something like an iron sword of flame. You will need iron, leather for the grip, and the fire potion to make the product.
Ok so you need a gatherer to get the fire root. An alt to take the fire root and turn it into fire paste or whatever. Then another alt to turn the fire paste into a fire enchant/potion.
Then you need a gatherer alt to get the iron. Another the smelt the iron, and another to create the iron sword blade.
Now you need another alt to gather the hide, tan the hide, and create the straps for the grip.
We are now up to 9 alts just to create one item. And for every sword you want to make you need to spend the time getting the resources each time. Also who knows if all those resources are available in the zone you are in, so maybe you can get the hide and iron where you are, but have to travel somewhere else to get the fire root.
That seems like an insane time sink, when a guild who has these professions already leveled, and is working together to make that same sword will be doing it far more efficiently and quickly.
Now just think how much time and effort it will take if the item you are trying to make is actually near end game, needing far more specialized gatherers, processors and crafters? I just fail to see how anything but very minor savings will be afforded by creating a ton of alts, and will those savings even be worth the time of actually gathering everything you need yourself?
The only way it seems like alts will be a thing is if I am misunderstanding the professions specializations, and one character can do all gathering, one for all processing, and another for all crafting, but I feel like that is not how it is supposed to work, maybe I am wrong.
You did misunderstand (no offense),
You can only master one parent path, so you will be able to master all the professions within that parent class. Thus an account will only need 3 characters to do all the life-skilling on their own.
The way you mistook it would of course be more of a pain for people who use alts, but would also make life skills incredibly dull.
What are life skills? Sorry not familiar with that term.
You say I am wrong, and it seems in part I am, but the wiki seems to offer conflicting statements, do you have a better source?
For example in one part is says " You may only ever master one parent path. But you may spend time mastering each profession within the parent artisan path", then just under it it says "It is possible to master multiple professions (but not all) within a parent artisan path, but this will be a long and labor intensive feat, requiring many resources". These two statements are contradictory, one clearly states all, while the others says not all. Not sure which statement was made first, and if maybe the cause of the shift is an adapting mindset, but there is another quote "Based on testing, it may be decided to limit profession mastery certificates to a capped value." it does seem like they are at least considering the possibility that one character should not be able to master all professions in a path.
Either way the concern was that people would take themselves out of the economy, or only enter it at the full crafted item stage, thus making gatherers or processors less desirable, yet I still fail to see how that would be true.
Having to gather, process and craft everything for yourself would still be far less efficient that having friends or guildmates help with the areas you have not mastered, especially with the fact that you will not have access to all resources in a single zone. This means you will need to spend time traveling, gathering there, and then transporting back(risking losing more time possibly getting your caravan attacked) all the different materials needed for various items.
Then there is the question of whether a single freehold, or node you are a citizen of, even allows you to have all the necessary processing buildings, which then means you might have to transport certain goods to other places and well.....I think it would be pretty clear at this point that time investment will be almost assuredly not worth saving a little bit of money by not just purchasing certain things from the local market or getting them from guildies. Sure some portion of the things you make might be done independently, but I highly doubt it will be a rampant issue that will cause markets to be barren and lifeless for people who do gather or process goods and sell them.
In WoW it is so easy to level professions, and even easier to level alts, yet there is always a crap ton of materials on the AH. I just do not see how in a game where everything will take considerably more time to accomplish, people will suddenly stop being lazy and choose to do everything themselves. Maybe I am wrong though
For the most part i'm going to agree to disagree with you.
I can agree its less efficient but I can still see players using their alts instead of buying from the market place, and I still believe that finalized crafted products will make more profit and be rarer to see on the market than what gatherers or processors sell. That alone would force people to play an alt so that they could make the items they need for their kit.
Maybe if rare materials are gathered then that could be a good point of profit for that profession, but if rare materials are needed for rare items that would make it even harder for gatherers and processors to get those items from the market. Because those completed items will be less likely to show up. They'd basically have to know a master crafter to get those items, but I guess that still counts as player interaction
All in all i'm hoping you're right and that mastering professions will be so difficult that it will make people less likely to play alts.
However, if I were to offer my own profession confession, I am worried AoC will add too many odd mechanics to enjoy professions. From my own mmo experiences, I love interacting with other players through crafting systems and maximizing my utility out of combat and raids. I don't mind putting in time and effort to master many professions, but it's sort of a drain if I need a bunch of alts to master different professions. It also seems like I might be at a disadvantage if I don't spec gathering with a main. In my GW2 experience raw and processed materials were fairly rare and crafting was comparatively very easy. So crafters were constantly losing money. I am really happy it sounds like certain recipes have to be learned from rare drops, it would be cool if only crafter artisans "discovered" these recipes as drops. That might prevent low level alts from acting as craft assembly lines, and give me incentive to take a crafting artisan into the field instead of a gatherer.
Some another guys will be lucky because they will be able to splitt the professions between the family members. I.e. most probably my wife will select another profession as me. Because we have 100% trust to each other and can ask to help each other anytime.
But not all will have this advantage. I am 100% for removing of this restriction. It should be solved not by restriction per account, but by the process itself. To make people not want to focus on all 3 professions... I.e- by complexity or time consumption or somehow else. But if there is one person which want to hardcore master everything - why should he be forced to create extra alts for such stuff ?