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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.
Certificates
Tausomaki
Member, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
Hello awesome people. I was thinking about system of the caravans and certificates dropped from monsters. I can't help but wonder one simple thing. Why bother with caravans transporting your good when you can simply just run or ride on your mounto into an another node. When people will see caravan they gonna think - damn free loot, but when you ride on a mount you look like a regular player getting into your random destination. Can someone explain it to me please ? I was looking at wiki and couldn't find anything. Cheers have a good day.
Don't take life to seriously. It's not like you're going to get out alive 
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Comments
Caravans = materials like tooths, pelts...
Certificates = replacement for gold directly dropped from monsters. You get the gold from a hunter by handing in the kill certs.
This is the main reason.
Travel back and forth 100 times, or do 1 caravan?
I just realized this is what bots will probably be doing.
Sounds like an easy source of income then - kill the bots, take their stuff, farm some mobs to work off the corruption before the next one comes along.
Caravans aren't any less safe than transporting goods by foot.
These two.
As Warth said, the Hunting Certificates are a replacement drop for money, cos it's a little unbelievable that a Wolf would drop 15 gold coins and an Iron Breastplate. Instead, they might drop a Wolf Pelt or a Wolf Claw, and you take them to a vendor in the nearby city to get the money.
Caravans will be taking goods/resources/etc. So, if you go out and mine some iron ore, you might find that you can only sell it for 3 gold coins each at your local city. However, at the city two nodes over, you can sell it for 16 gold coins each. The caravan is for this sort of circumstance. And yeah, you could take some yourself, but as Talents said, the caravan can hold a whooooole lot more than you can, and you and whoever else fills your caravan with you will be defending it with everything you've got.
You kill mob you get pelts. Pelts can deliver to closest NPC and get certtificates right ?
But really the inventory will be so small that you need entire caravan to transport all this stuff ? Do you really gonna get so many cert and mats that you wont have space in inv ? Plus maybe you wanna sell stone / iron etc on AH of economic node and not using caravan - cuz tbh I'm not sure how caravan works.
Will it sell stone / iron immediately upon arrival ? And if not than how can you carry for example 1000 iron when you needed caravan to deliver them instead of using mount and travel normally. Thx for all info
Not quite.
You kill a mob and get a certificate. That certificate can be taken back to a node and exchanged for gold. This is in place of mobs dropping gold, and other than the fact that you can drop these certificates when killed in PvP, that is the end of the story for 'these' certificates.
Also, if that mob you killed has a pelt, if you are of an appropriate gathering class, you may be able to skin it.
These pelts, as well as all other raw materials (herbs, wood, stone, metal ore etc) take up a lot of inventory space, but need to be transported in order to be used.
To transport them efficiently, you need to gather up a lot of these materials, then put them in a caravan and move them to where they are able to be used.
This is why the caravan system is important - it is the only way to move large amounts of material from where they are gathered to where they can be used.
Now, the part I think you are getting confused with is what happens when someone successfully attacks your caravan. Rather than taking it over and carrying on, the attacker gets a certificate that can be exchanged at the origin node of your caravan for the resources that were contained in it.
Also, if you decide to sell the materials where they are rather than transporting them, the buyer will have to take possession of them in the node the materials are in, and will need to then transport them to where they want them anyway. So it may well be that you are simply using your caravan to take raw materials from where they are gathered (and thus where they are cheap) to where they are used and in high demand (and thus expensive).
Think of "certificates" as trash loots. They're pelts, antlers, etc. that you will need to redeem as gold (and maybe something else) at any vendors in any nodes.
The distance between the location where you obtained the certificates and the node that you're selling it at matters as well. The longer the distance, the higher the price.
You might not need a Caravan at all. You can also use a Mule. Mules can carry 10x the amount of your backpack and they're also a mount.
The owner of the caravan gathered tonnes of raw materials or crafted items to send somewhere, which NEED a caravan in order to move everything from point A to point B, but brigands just need to a pocket to keep some of that TONNES of raw materials to run away and pass the city gates in front of guards or anyone else looking for the stolen goods after they heared about the robbery.
About the mobs certificate drop... a pelt needs to be skinned and takes a lot more room in your bag than a certificate (unless it is a very biggggg certificate)!
Keep in mind, that certificate you get for destroying a caravan is for an amount of those raw resources at the location the caravan departed from. Also, the certificates that drop the you destroy a caravan are only for a portion of the good within, not all of the goods (it isnt entirely clear to me what happens to the remaining goods).
Since that caravan was moving the resources away from that node, there is a safe assumption to make that those resources aren't needed at that node and thus are of low value. In order to extract value from those resources, the player needs to take that certificate back to that node, convert it to the raw materials, and then transport those raw materials via their own caravan to a node where they are in demand.
It isnt as if many people are going to be transporting large amounts of material AWAY from a node where they have value. You generally wouldnt put those resources up against that much of a risk if you could turn a decent profit where they are.
Based on this, the person that defeated the caravan still has a need to transport those goods, it just doesnt need to happen right then.
as far as I know, transporting goods using the caravan system will get you more money than going on foot
My point is that a portion of 5 Tonnes of goods, if is half of it, will still be 2500 kg (5511 lb). So for you it is quite acceptable to imagine to store in your backpack 2500 kg and acte as normal, run in the wild like a fresh cut flower?
At the start, having to use a caravan, regardless the economic or usefulness point of view, comes from the NEED to move all that weight/volume (a small weight but big volume is still not easy to move). Even juste a drop of it, like a small 100 kg (220 lb), can be lifted by someone strong but that peson isn't going to run and act as normal.
From my perspective, it would be more fair and realistic to have the brigands use there own cart or repair the attacked caravan (which can't be destroyed so easily (unless you attack it with catapult, trebuchet, fireball...)) and then leave the area by driving the caravan themselves (running the risk of being attacked by other brigands).
@tautau I think that the general idea of "inventory management" in that matter drives us back to the same point of being able to loot gold coins and a breastplate on a dead wolf.
Ashes is a game, not a world simulator. Steven has explained very specifically why destroying a caravan results in certificates rather than resulting in raw materials on the spot - and it is purely due to gameplay reasons.
There is literally never a situation with game mechanics where picking an option that is more realistic is acceptable over picking the option that makes the game play better.
The actual point of view works for robbers not for crafters. The crafter/gatherer need to be realistic and run the risk of loosing hours of gameplay, but the robber doesn't need to be realistic because... it bother his gameplay?!?!?
Even in Albion online, when someone kills an other player in red or black zone, when looting from the gear and backpack of the victim, the killer has to choose what to take if too many things can be looted (according to his inventory space slots or weight already carried).
Being more of a crafter/gatherer sort of player, in the current setup, I feel more cheated than excited.
If you continue the line of enquiry you have here, the eventual end question is "so why play an MMO in the first place?".
The caravan system should only be fun for robbers? What crafters/gatherer are for you? Mobs that can be looted? If the brigands see from a distance what i gathered for days and have it moved to sell it far away, then it's normal that the brigand who robb the caravan (and I have no problem with that) has to carry my burden and become a prey on his turn. When you make some choices you have to face the consequencies ; the crafter does as soon as he builds a caravan, the robber should have to do it as soon as he decide to attack a caravan (run away with your loot the same way the crafter HAD to move it). Then the gameplay will be fair.
If there is a system it has to be the same for everyone.
Remove this shit from your above post immediately.
This is exactly where your blindness leads.
You keep on looking at the system from your pespective and don't give a fuck of other's way of playing and even dare telling me to move away if I don't like the way you want to play a/this game, so, sorry if I waked you up, but the people I referred to were, at their time and condiction, on the side of the system, not part of it. (I know their conditions were lot worst than the way I feel crafters are with the actual system of caravan in AOC, but either you reconcider your point of view and come to a debate which shows that you put yourself in the craftrer shoes, then I'll edit my post, or you keep on seeing crafters like lootable mobs and I'll keep my post on ; maybe you forgot an point of human social things = freedom of speech).
You said that you think it is stupid that you can attack and defeat a caravan and don't need to take the materials as they are and transport them. I said that the reason they did it this way is because they feel (note; not I feel) that it is better gameplay.
You then asked what the point of even having caravans were, to which I simply answered that they are gameplay. I mean, Intrepid could make the game without them, but then there will be one less thing to do in the game. We could then ask what the point of crafting is, the game would be fine without it, there would just be one less thing to do. As I said in the post, the eventual last question in that line of thinking is - why play an MMO in the first place.
You then mistook that as me saying you shouldn't play, which is quite clearly not what I said - I was VERY CLEARLAY talking about your line of questioning, and how asking why even have any specific gameplay loop is pointless - the answer in every case will be simply "gameplay". Take away those gameplay loops and you have no game left to, well, play.
You also then simply assumed that I am talking about things from my perspective, despite me specifically saying it was Intrepids reasoning, not my own - not that we have even arrived at me giving you their reasoning as yet.
Then you made the false assumption that because the caravan system doesn't have the exact risk vs reward structure that you want to see, it must not have any risk vs reward structure. This is the whole part in your post that ends with you stating that "then gameplay will be fair" - you are simply assuming that because it doesn't work how you want, it isn't fair. This is despite you very clearly not knowing how it works.
Then you end up with the most unnecessary, vile comment I have ever seen on any forum outside of 4chan - a comment that is very clearly a reflection of how you view thew world (your inference is that anyone that doesn't agree with you on all things must be racist and sexist).
Again, that is a vile and unnecessary comment, and I will not converse any longer with you while that comment remains in place.
Second : I'm talking about facts not just my point of view (you took it personaly while I was seeing you blocked on the same point ; had to wake you move ahead so debate can even start). And I'd rather see Intrepid saying that the caravan system (about the looting part of it) will be improved but not now because they have more important point to work on, then I'd say "ok. I won't use caravans for now, I'll check that later." . (Maybe they said it, I didn't reed that yet).
Third : what the point of discussing/debating on a subject if you can't say more what we already know? Isn't a forum on "in development" game made for debating on points of the game so the devs can build it a more effective way? And then we can make the difference between a gameplay we choose or not (like the orcs side in LOTRO are the bad guys because Tolkien's world is like that) and a gameplay we see broken because of a system where class balancing isn't right (here : crafters vs robbers).
Point two - no you aren't, you don't know how the system works as a whole, not Intrepids reasoning for why it works that way. You literally can not be claiming that you are talking facts when you do not know the facts.
Point three - before a discussion or debate can actually begin on Intrepids current design decisions, those design decisions need to be understood by all parties in that discussion or debate.
So no point talking to you.
And by the way, why do you think I need to be excused from anything? ... wait. No, don't bahter to answer, I don't care anymore.
I never argued on "can be attacked or not". I'm talking about running away with a tonne of goods in your pockets rather having to caravan it yourself. The debate is only about that.
So, when I have resources in a node, if they have value in that node I am going to sell them there. Why would I risk it if I can make a profit without moving them?
So, if I load them all on to a caravan and start moving them, and then someone comes along and destroys my caravan, they are left with a certificate that entitles them to those resources back at the node I just left - the node where they are worthless (or near enough).
As such, if this player wants to make money from their activities, they then need to organize moving those resources to a node where they are in demand - this is the logistical aspect that Steven is talking about in your quote. This player cant just wait until I am 45 seconds from my destination before attacking me and my caravan and then moving those resources that last 45 seconds to get said resources in a node where they are more valuable. They have to do that whole logistics aspect all over again.
Also;
Could you read with your eyes not with your brain for a sec?
I'm talking about the robbers having to deal with a volume/weight stolen, not on the way it works after. The "selling the certificats" mecanics that goes with it is ok... is ok according the certificats mecanics. I'm saying the certificats mecanics is not a good system. If the robbers would have to deal with the volume/weight rather than just with the "how to deal with a peace of paper", they would check more on "is it worth it or not?" rather than what risk to happen = ppl jumping on what ever caravan because in the end it's the same.
No, it isn't us that really don't get it!!! Terrible.
You seem to be suggesting that if you are running a caravan and I destroy it, I get a certificate that I can turn in somewhere for coin.
That is incorrect.