Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
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.
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
Yours truly has certainly fallen victim to "optimizing myself out of the game", in a few titles. Am looking forward to the gear-loss mechanic in AoC, as this will ensure that you're not just "set for life" the moment you complete an end-game gearset; You've got to be on your toes to safeguard your gear and to try to always carry spares and alternates. In this way, it's not just the weapon in your hand you're constantly trying to improve. Instead, you're trying to have 2 or 3 alternates ready, and the best that you can get THOSE, too.
Am hoping that running a shop will be the best way to get money in the game. If it is, it'll ensure a better player-economy mechanic, in that we'll all know that it's the way to go - and our cities will be more-populated with unique shops and merchant stalls. I hate games where AFK-grinding is a valid mechanic for earning money. Once you've killed a spawn of NPCs 5 times, you shouldn't get any more loot from that particular spawn, for the rest of the day.
Yeah, no argument there. When the Diablo 3 devs added adventures, they relatively hurt the subset of folks who liked running the bridge over and over ad infinitum.
It comes down to what Intrepid's vision for what they think fun is, and then designing the mechanism to make optimal play align with that vision. If they think "fun" is doing activity-42 over and over ad infinitum, then all they have to do is make a game with high liquidity and high reward for specialization, and you'll get to have fun while being optimal, right? You just specialize in what you enjoy doing, do it infinitely, and trade forever.
If they think fun is closer to what I think fun is (having a lot of novelty in my play, getting to do a lot of different activities, seeing a lot of content, etc), then they can align "optimal play" with that vision at the expense of players that like to do just one thing infinitely.
What I'm saying is that the robustness of a low to medium liquidity market has the benefit of working for both, most of the time.
If I can gather 20 crab meat per hour, and I farm crabs for 4 hours, and I'm really good at it, but some others come along and because of some buff or something can match my l33t crab farming skilz for 30 minutes, I'm okay with some number of these people.
8 such people would manage to provide 'the other half of the crab meat market'. The price is set.
If another 6 hear 'Crab meat is profitable', and show up, I as the Incredible Crab Meat Enthusiast can see a trend with the market supply getting too high, undercutting starting to happen because people want their crab meat to sell 'right now', and undercut further to make them miserable enough to leave. Economic PvP.
I just need to push them out of my market (which my additional knowledge can help with) and then things go back to normal.
But that way you've got 8 people who 'happened to feel like farming crabs today' not really affecting me, the 'I farm crabs all day' person. Maybe some days, the other Incredible Crab Meat Enthusiast who plays less often, logs in, and they also farm crabs for 4 hours.
Maybe I know that person. Maybe we are crab hunting buds. Neither of us is trying to (nor likely to) push the other out of the Crab Meat business. Basically the lower liquidity allows us to have enough power to say "This is how I have fun, you people who are only here because you hear it is higher profit lately, gtfo, this is my fun spot, you can only stay if it's fun for you too".
And maybe we form like a whole Crab Hunting guild and go all around the world finding new places to hunt crabs. Maybe we have a rotation of who can hunt which crabs where and when for maximum Crab Meat Enthusiasm.
And none of us have to feel 'I have to do something else because these 24 other players worked crab hunts into their daily novelty rotation and now I'm unprofitable after my first hour'.
Because the problem with solving optimizing by 'forcing novelty' is that people optimize the novelty.
EDIT: I just realized that this example might seem farfetched if I didn't clarify that this is exactly a scenario I have experienced directly in FFXI, (it was something else, though, not crabs). No actual 'guild' formation, but we did have the whole '/t hey did you farm X today? how many you putting up?' '/r Yeah but if you're low on money you can put yours up first, I'm good'.
This is what ESO does (or at least did) with gear. Every so often you just have to drop everything and start again, because there is a new item 42.
Developers WANT players to specialize, so that they can build in both choice and progression in to the system.
Oh dear god no.
This is basically just daily quests/tasks, and all it does is make players feel like they have to do those tasks before they do anything else.
This is literally the worst game design imaginable for an MMO (not exaggerating there).
"Hi frand, I just logged on, would you like to do activity 27 with me?"
"Sorry, I can't just yet, I still have activity 6 through to 19 I need to do for the day, maybe in 2 hours when I have done them I may be able to do activity 27 with you. By the way, have you done all 42 activities for the day already?"
"Oh, no, I haven't, I forgot that I am playing a piece of shit game that basically forces me to do all these stupid activities every day before I can do anything I want to do, and even if I didn't do them, all my friends are doing them and it is taking up literally all of the time they have to spend online."
This is not the goal of developers, nor should it be.
What is fun for you may not be fun for me. As such, they can't make the optimal way to play fun for both of us.
What developers do is give players a game. What us players do in that game is up to us. We have to balance fun things (killing stuff, hanging out with friends etc) with things we don't find fun (inventory management, sourcing supplies etc) in order to get the most out of the game. It is up to us players to take as much fun from the game as we want, it is our own responsibility, not Intrepids.
If you do not get enjoyment out of just progressing as fast as you can regardless of the task you are doing, then don't make just progressing as fast as you can your primary action in the game. If you enjoy progressing as fast as you can, you will enjoy what ever task it is you are doing BECAUSE of the rate of progression you are getting.
If you are on that same content, and you are not enjoying it, then you clearly do not enjoy progressing as fast as you can and would be better off spending some time on content that you enjoy doing.
Again, that isn't an Intrepid thing, that is a player thing.
I can see the fun in both - what if the "incentive" to rotate activity had both a slow-cycle component (with more significant change) and fast-cycle component (cycles you through a bunch of related activities?)
EDIT: forgot to say why: The slow cycle would mean niches have time to mature and become seasonal. The fast-cycle would keep activities within a niche novel.
This solution is basically Wow's exp bonus system - I think it was well recieved by players at the time.
Here, I agree with Noaani that it tends towards "dailies" which I don't like (though not as strongly as Noaani).
If this kind of bonus could be:
- earned
- driven by other game systems, instead of being an inherent artificial bonus on a timer
- (also non-linear is way more fun)
That would be really cool.A simple example:
White-tailed Aluvae are a mob that drop Aluvean Fur and can be farmed, sold to artisans to make wool.
In Spring, it's breeding season for Aluvae so their spawnrate is much denser (and a bunch of quests appear) bringing people from all around Verra.
However, too many Aluvean carcasses will attract a rare Lynx Noire (boss) which will cause the Aluvae to hide in their burrows.
Defeating Lynx Noire will give some exclusive materials, but will also cause the breeding grounds to be covered in knee-deep black mist.
With the right tools, this mist can be bottled and:
- sold to artisans for use in both dyes and as a magic ingredient
- or handed in to a quest that helps clear black mist faster
When the black mist has been cleared, the Aluvae come out of hiding and can be farmed again.At the end of Spring, the Aluvae breeding season ends and their spawnrates return to normal.
(This means it's much harder to summon Lynx Noire, but it's still possible for those who work at it in the off-season).
Couple of things here - first:
Examples are allowed to be farfetched! As long as they explain their underlying abstraction, they can be as contrived as they like. Some folks never realize this, understand the underlying abstraction, and then argue with the example. I'm not one of those folks!
So, the underlying abstraction is as maouw said - it's fun to corner / own a niche in the market. This is believable to me.
Here's my question to the Crab Enthusiast, who chose to use the phrase "wants to do the exact same thing over and over ad infinitum". When the world bosses are about to spawn, and your guild says "Hey Rae, would you like to help us contest the world bosses?" Do you say "Nah, I'd rather keep farming crab meat. I'll buy the boss mats from you once I'm rich enough."
Or, when a new player joins the guild, and ya'll are showing her the ropes and introducing her to some raiding content for the first time, and your guild asks "Hey Rae, we could use another DPS, want to come to the Dunmire Swap with us?". Is it "Another time perhaps. These crabs won't kill themselves and you know me, I like to kill them infinitely."
Or, when a node gets Sieged, and you get invited to participate - same thing?
Or when a new node finally gets the opportunity to advance to a tier that you haven't seen it in before, and that unlocks content that you haven't gotten to experience yet, do you leave the crab farm?
I know that, on a personal level, I'd love to go experience all of that content, and I think Intrepid is building the game where players shouldn't feel bad about leaving the crab farm to go do that stuff. This means that, if they get their mech design correctly, the fun way to play (doing new content, helping your friends, contesting world bosses when they come up, participating in sieges, etc), is also the optimal way to play.
This would mean, by definition, that passing all of this up in favor of planting yourself at the crab farm indefinitely has to be suboptimal.
Second
Yeah, and that's completely okay! Maybe a real-life example will help here. I was around for the evolution of the Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice any% speedrun. In the really early days, before any major glitches had been figured out, that was my favorite.
It was just clean boss fights and efficient routing. Folks figured out the fastest path to the absolute minimum stuff you needed to get to the end credit screen. The speedrun itself was really satisfying because doing the route was itself, fun. In the process of being optimal, you get to actually play the game. You get to fight the bosses efficiently. You're a speed demon. You're a well-oiled machine.
Then, folks start discovered the first major terrain glitches and start skipping some bosses using some frame-perfect jumps. Fine. You hit the lab, open up your save states, and get to practicing. Now, you don't get to kill as many as the bosses you liked to kill, and that gameplay has been replaced with frame-perfect terrain skips, which is less fun. The 3-hour run is now a 1.5 hour run.
Then, folks started discovering all of the out-of-bounds glitches. Now, the record looks like this. 19m55s. We have degen strats to cheese bosses and out-of-bounds glitches to swim through the air to the end of the game. This is what optimal play looks like.
Runners who loved running the original game just stopped running the any% category, or quit running sekiro altogether. This is because the way to play optimally stopped being fun.
If I'm an optimizer trying to earn my 2000 points as fast as possible, I would also like for that experience to be as fun and as novel as possible! If those things are all aligned on a game theory perspective, then the folks optimizing for efficiency will be given an optimal solution that also provides them with tons of fun and novelty.
The folks optimizing for fun and novelty will be given an optimal solution that provides them with optimal efficiency.
I hope that you can see the contradiction that you simultaneously hold here.
On one hand, you think that blizzard has designed a game poorly, right? They're incentivizing behavior that you don't find fun. It leads to player behavior (where players don't play with each other because their tasks aren't aligned) that is unfun. So, you criticize the underlying game design because the optimal play doesn't align with intended play.
Then in the same forum post, you write "what players do in that game is up to us". Can't the players in the blizzard game just decide to group up to do activity 27 even though it isn't efficient? If they're not enjoying being forced to do all of these different activities for marginal benefit, they don't have to do them, right? They can just do whatever they want, as you say.
In The Burning Crusade, there were a number of dailies for 3 main factions: skyguard, ogri'la, and netherwing. Each day, they would give you the SAME quests that you could repeat. Fly to netherwing. Talk to NPC. Kill 15 dudes, destroy 10 eggs. kill 8 corrupted wyverns, fly back to NPC. Done with netherwing. Fly to ogri'la...
It would take about ~45 minutes to knock out all three factions once your route was well oiled, and after ~4 months of doing this every day, you had max reputation with all of these factions and (and could access the faction vendors and buy the exclusive mounts and tabards and whatnot).
It was mind-numbing, and if you ever missed a day, then you would never get that day back and you would hit max reputation 1 day slower than everyone else.
It was also worse gold/h than other available farms, but if you wanted the netherwing rare mount, it was your only option.
Wow's bonus XP, on the other hand, works like this: When you log off (especially in an inn or a city), you earn bonus XP. When you log back on, any XP earned through combat is doubled until you burn through your bonus XP. All this does is make it not feel as bad to take breaks! Logging off is strictly worse than continuously playing, but they don't make you fall behind as much. A+
What I'm describing with activity-based diminishing-return bonus-yield looks like this: periodically (could be monthly - a full seasonal cycle, could be weekly - a season), you get bonus yield for farming. At the beginning of the period, the crab enthusiast gets ~5 crab meat every 10 crab kills. Then, after a bunch of farming, that goes down to ~4 crab meat every 10 crab kills. Then ~3 crab meat every 10 crab kills, where it stays there. Non-linear curve to gold/hour.
The layman might not ever actually even notice that this system is in place. They can just happily farm. Maybe they don't even play enough to ever hit normal yield. The extreme specialists and crab enthusiasts still have the economic freedom to keep killing crabs for their meat. It might be more efficient gold/h wise for them to do something else, but they still have their economic freedom.
If your friend says "hey, want to come contest world bosses with us?", and you say "no, I still have full yield on spider fangs", they should say "you huge nerd, get out here, your yield will still be there when we get back".
Unlike the WoW daily system where missing a day of netherwing dailies permanently puts you 1 day behind the timegate of maximum earnable reputation, here choosing to go do something else is totally fine.
Your optimal activity will still be there with its optimal yields and you can catch up.
Remember that I'm not a pure economic optimizer, I have fun weighted equal to or higher than economic outcomes, relative to my answers.
If I am needed to help contest the World boss, and it is fun to do, then it is now my optimal because it's part 'duty' and part fun. If it is considerably less fun to me than farming crabs, I keep farming crabs as long as I am not needed.
The important part is that I have the option to go contest the World boss, for fun, and the option to continue farming crabs. In the example where my crab-farming was less effective after one hour, I would feel more compelled to go to the World Boss even if it were as fun, because:
Fun Factor of World Boss + Economic Value of World Boss is compared against Fun Factor of Crabs + Economic Value of Crabs.
If you lower the Economic Value of Crabs, then you can also lower the Fun Factor of the World Boss, and then I'll probably go to the World Boss. But I don't necessarily want to. If you 'allowed my Crab Fun Factor' to remain constant, then I wouldn't have to calculate this. Some days I might go, some days not, assuming I'm not 'needed'. This gets even more complicated by 'how exactly is this system implemented'? FFXI actually does have this, to an extent, when a character has not left a specific zone or killed a monster in a different zone for some period of time. But if I am 20 minutes into my 'Daily Crabs' and I get an offer to fight a World Boss, now what do I do? Hope the system 'remembers my exact 20 minutes'? Or will it 'reset me' because I went to the World Boss?
Similarly, with the new guild member. DPS is a good example because they're usually in good supply, and therefore I'm less likely to be needed and go 'wait which raid? oh, I don't really like that one more than I like just killing crabs, but good luck though guys, I'll do my part and keep control of the Crab Meat market for us since you all will be busy with the raid'.
Or in the fully social situation, I'll just ask 'yo who wants to do this raid more than they wanna farm crabs?' and someone may go 'I wanna go but who will fill in my share? If I go, there may be crabs left unslain on the shores of Traitor's Rock'.
And I'll go 'I got you fam I will ride out to Traitor's Rock to kill your share of crabs, go have fun with that raid.' The important thing here is that now, I, who have been killing crabs for an hour, and 'Traitor's Rock Crabslayer Of The Fifth Order' who has just logged on, are not making a calculation based on the fact that my bonus for the day has run out and theirs hasn't. They get to go to raid, even if they care about nothing from the raid, and I'll just trade them the crab meat I gather for some Raid drop I might want, without either of us thinking 'oh wait this would have been more profitable the other way though'.
I won't kick up a fuss if yet another game 'forces me to rotate through stuff I don't want in order to be optimal', I'm just making the point that if you are correct, then we are definitionally at odds. As you said, you have to make my experience worse in order to make your experience better.
Sometimes it's like that, that's why different games exist I guess. If only there were enough good ones that we weren't all fighting for scraps of what we want from Intrepid. But I trust they will do something good, and someone will do the 'other side', even if that someone someday has to be me. By that reasoning I should hope that they implement things your way entirely (assuming that your perception is right and the two cannot coexist, which I am not explicitly accepting yet). Since I'm losing interest based on their design implications at the moment, I would hope that those who haven't, also get an economic system they like.
But those players are doing it because of competitive optimization freedom that assigns a specific value as important and only that one. Just the timer. That has to do with the way human brains do pattern matching, and social pressure. So the key point before I proceed into a bunch of priors, based on this, is the crack in the design.
"Novelty is absolutely not a high weight for me in terms of fun, and is often negative."
I can give many examples of this, and I definitely don't think that games should be designed in ways that strip away options for novelty, but if you do anything to force it, you're having a negative effect on me. Later on in this post I'll get to what 'forcing it' means. For now, random examples!
Monster Hunter World is by most reasonings an easy game for veteran MH players or just veteran gamers. For this reason, many players and speedrunners apply additional challenges to themselves and change their value system to optimize for their fun while still being within a competitive environment. I agree that all absolute incentives to be competitive over fun should be reduced or removed as much as possible. But different 'tiers' of fun or fun styles can exist.
Some people find it more fun to challenge themselves to perfectly attack the monster and never let up and defeat it super fast doing exactly the same thing very quickly.
I find it more fun to challenge myself to fight monsters with Armor and defensive values considerably below what the game intends so that when they hit, they do a specific amount of damage on average.
I don't expect to convince anyone else to play this way in some 'competitive' sense, but maybe I should, because I have learned that, at least for a while, a lot of other players explicitly did so because it's relatively easy to agree on, and feels intuitive enough.
But when we're talking about an MMO, optimizing novelty isn't the same feeling. I can optimize 'my skill at fighting monsters with 375 Armor' in any number of ways, but the baseline experience of 'if I get hit, X damage will be done so I must play around this' remains. In your specific lens, I believe what you are talking about is 'optimizing novelty relative to economic status', which is not the same thing as 'optimizing novelty itself'.
So to round out that example, I'll give the reason why I don't like the optimal MHW playstyle. It's based around 'preventing the monster from posing a threat'. That's obviously the most efficient and effective way to play Monster Hunter. Minimize the monster's ability to do anything and you can't be harmed. That's efficient, and fun for some, because it is definitely still mechanically challenging. It's not fun for me.
There are people out there who feel the 'this is against the spirit of the game' and want other people to be made unable to play that way, but some of them want this because they don't want to compete in that sphere, and since 'kill time' is the most easily available metric, it is the one most people will see value in. People don't like to feel undervalued.
Honestly, the only reason that economic optimization is so inescapable is that in an MMO, economic power is the only solid and uncounterable power. No one messes with your bank account. Contrast this with PvP Minecraft servers, where 'secrecy' and 'territory control' are the optimization, because people absolutely can take/destroy your valuables. All of them. Would someone 'buy currency' in Minecraft if it didn't come with a Super Secret Base to protect it all?
That means we get the following:
1. Economic Optimization is the Optimal Optimization therefore Optimal Optimizers will view all Optimization through the lens of Economics in MMORPGs.
2. Introducing a system to make Optimal Optimizers more likely to experience novelty will involve introducing the Novelty into the Economic Optimization
3. If this system damages the Fun Optimization of Fun Optimizers (it's much more robust, but it can be damaged, which is my point) by reducing the Economic Optimization aspects related to their Fun, then their Economic power is reduced for no guaranteed benefit to them (because not all value Novelty).
4. Since Economic Power is linked to Fun at least some of the time, their Fun is eventually impacted and they must participate in the forced novelty offered by the Economic Optimization Novelty system or at least start calculating, which may in turn also impact their Fun.
The above is almost exactly what BDO is, and why I had to stop. BDO's regular Fun factor is gated behind timers for activities and 'dailies'. The other fun things to do in BDO are economically unviable for most people since there is no fast travel in the game. Also, the more people seek fun, the more the rewards from fun become economically unviable due to saturation, and the less economic power is available to Fun Optimizers. Quite frankly it is so bad as to get that game 'Garbage Tier' rating from me.
In fact, that's one of the most interesting outcomes of all this. The more fun something is for a majority, the less valuable the rewards will be on any market unless that fun does not rely on success and most engagements with the content are definitely intended to be failures (in which case, unrewarded, in which case, Economic power lost). And that is often why the less fun option is the optimal.
If gathering the materials for an item was really fun and achievable for everyone, then there would be no market for them, because people would all have so much fun gathering the materials themselves. And we know this works even outside of the game because there are many people out there who decide 'it is more efficient to work at my day job and spend money to have someone else level my character for me, than it is to level myself'. Why? Because to them, leveling isn't fun, but 'being high level' is either 'fun' or 'helps them resist the social pressure of conformity' or 'helps them deal with the pattern-matching impulse of humans to be at least above average in performance'.
If we were somehow free of these pressures, if we were not a species of wildly varying psychological profiles, where some people literally can't 'choose not to conform to social pressure', we'd all just 'choose our fun and go with it'. Oh, and of course those annoying requirements like 'food' and 'shelter' that you have to pay for, for some reason, which led us down this path.
Anyways this continues to be a complex topic so I look forward to your answer, I'd say the numbered points section is the only one worth directly responding to, since the rest is 'personal background priors', and this time, those are pretty 'set-in-stone' because of my psychology, just as yours are.
If we can agree on the premises of the numbered points bit, maybe we can agree that they are at odds in your worldview regardless?
We're all typically "utility optimizers", where utility is some function of economic concern and fun concern and other stuff. How much weight you place on those different concern varies from person to person. The game is awesome when you ask "what activity optimizes for fun right now" and the answer is the same as "what activity optimizes for economy right now?".
Everyone has different definitions of what fun is, so you can't design this to be the case for everyone simultaneously, but the developers can pick a vision for what they think fun is, and if the players align behind that vision, then the folks who don't find that vision to be fun find a different game to play.
Something I want to double check here. Say that these bonuses reset monthly and it takes a few hours of farming before the bonuses start running out. If you no longer have a crab bonus, but still have a raid bonus, and your friend still has a crab bonus but no longer has a raid bonus, then it would be slightly more economically efficient for ya'll to trade places.
But, if ya'll knew that you were going to farm crabs without a bonus anyway that month, and do the raid without a bonus anyway that month, then so long as you collect your bonus at some point then it's fine (you don't lose anything) that you do it out of order this time. You risk maybe not collecting your bonus because of something unexpected happening, but small losses.
The larger you make the bonuses, and the more frequently they expire, the more pressure you have to do them. The smaller you make the bonuses, and the less frequently they expire, the less pressure you have to do them.
I'm just trying to find a way to make it so that players who are trying to minimize the amount of time it takes for them to farm all of the currency they need discover that the optimal solution is infinitely farming crabs (when they would love to do all sorts of different types of content). It sounds like you would love it if the optimal solution is to infinitely farm crabs, and so I think that just means we'd make / play different games, and that's totally reasonable.
Yeah, no argument here. If folks want to repeat the same thing over and over, then any system which in any way incentivizes not doing that will relatively hurt those folks. Simple as that.
What you're describing actually sounds like the problem I'm trying to fix. "Fun" and "optimal" are out of alignment. You can either choose to do the fun activities like PvP or node wars or whatever else, but then you're not infinitely grinding in Star's End or whatever. So you have to choose between "having fun" or "being optimal" and that's painful.
Instead, the game should somehow make it so that when those events are available, the expected value is somehow higher than infinitely grinding in Star's End, that way folks actually leave Star's End and go do them.
I think that's one of the main troubles with BDO in general. At any given time, I just think to myself "why am I not grinding in Star's End?" and then I just go back to Star's End. (though, when I was playing it was this loop of coastal humanoids, forget what it was called). So you just haul your ass back to that grind spot and do it for the next 200 hours. Grind. FIll inventory. Sell. Repeat. Eventually, you have enough money to buy an upgrade and now you grind slightly faster. Bleh.
This circles back to arguments about liquidity, specialization, scarcity, demand pressure, the ability for the game to create external sinks, etc. WoW did this thing called the AQ gate event: HUGE external market pressure. Super cool case study if you're willing to read about it. Some servers never completed it.
Also, It may be worth pointing out that I think ashes will be a lot larger of a game than you're probably used to. This is going to be a game played and shilled by Asmongold, Shroud, and TimTheTatman. I think the hype might eventually settle and the game might eventually find its niche, but in the beginning, it'll be wild. Not sure if that information helps update priors at all.
My perception is that a game with enough specialization bonuses to carefully equal or near-equal the timed novelty bonuses would be a good push here.
For example let's say I have the title 'Crab Meat Enthusiast' which explicitly goes 'your bonus yield from crab hunting does not drop below 75%', and in order to get this I had to farm a LOT OF CRABS and I can only hold some number of these 'Enthusiast' titles and must re-earn them every time.
Everyone who just 'randomly wants to farm crabs on a day where the supply is low' can still do that and it be economically viable. But I, as the 'Crab Meat Enthusiast' can't be explicitly pushed into conflict with these players over long term.
The bonus yield would mean that I can remain competitive at my chosen thing, without feeling 'my bonus has run out on this thing I find fun, I have to move to remain viable'. Since I have 'chosen this life', I can't just 'move to the next big thing' either, nor am I incentivized to, unless that thing is profit above '100% bonus Crab Yield' (an arbitrary point, basically saying that at 25% reduced efficiency I'm not likely to move from my favored activity, I don't have to start calculating 'should I move' until I'm at 40% reduced).
Now the obvious problem here would be 'Well there would just be a lot of Activity-42 Enthusiasts'. My perception is that the liquidity of the game and the intended/expected limitations on Registered Accounts Per Server will lead to this being a balanced situation. Too many of them, and the market will flop enough for them to want to do other things.
This is one of the things BDO did correctly, except not because BDO never does anything truly correctly. LifeSkill Mastery gear. You put money and time into raising it and it increases your efficiency at the lifeskill.
Except that you didn't have to choose, so whoever had the most money just got all the different types, aaand we're back where we started. Ashes intends for you to have to choose. They seem to plan to do this through Artisan classes which is what I'm used to. Is this something you disagree with? If so, I may need a clarification on why.
If I choose 'Processor' because I like Metallurgy (for me it's usually between this, Alchemy, and Cooking, I was once on the path to Chemistry Doctorate before I fell into the glorious world of programming) in Ashes, and I raise that skill high, I want it to be the optimal thing for me to do quite often. I probably invested in it. Anything to the contrary is the game telling me, at 'best', 'you didn't need to specialize but I'm glad you're happy, hope you get your investment back eventually' (BDO before Lifeskill Mastery) and at worst 'You should have become a jill-of-all-trades to keep up with the dynamic market' (BDO after Lifeskill Mastery).
So my expectation has always been 'specialization is most rewarding because it is specialization, and explicitly because other people will specialize into other things and not compete with you'. So on the 'economic ladder', specialists 'stay in their lane' while people like you (I think?) wander around doing other cool content that is generally just above it on the ladder and then selling things to people like me. Money flows to me in a concentrated form over time, then gets transferred to someone like you in a lump, whether that's 'paying you to help defend my node' or 'buying that cool boss drop you got'.
My understanding is simply that one should make it so that the rarer activities have good rewards, but my point earlier with the whole 'wand maker' example was...
"Those rewards are automatically worth as much as the person who wants it the most, has money."
So if I sit around gathering money and you get a boss drop, that boss drop is now worth 'whatever money I am willing to part with' which is 'slightly more than whatever anyone else is willing to part with' which technically means that there's always an incentive to go fight the boss.
If I have less money, your boss drops are worth less money simply because the buyer doesn't have money to give you. This is another 'wonderful' BDO parallel. Whenever a new class appears, the Kzarka and Nouver and Kutum weapons for that class skyrocket in value, to the point where it's worth making a character of that class just to open the ones you have lying around. Playing that Market is easy because you can just check the month's event. Does this event cause money to leave the economy or concentrate itself into the hands of hoarders? Wait 14 days and then buy stuff that people are likely to want during the next event, if you can guess what those are. Is the event going to pour money into the economy because it rewards a lot of silver for doing very little? Wait a little while and then start selling off mid-ticket items or enhancement materials, depending on how you want to control the server.
That's why I keep having trouble with the presupposition that one can just go 'I'll just keep doing my economically viable thing until I have enough money to buy the item' in a game where the faucet drips. Currency is, after all, just a representation, you know that better than everyone here, I'm sure. I do absolutely agree that someone would go 'I will just do the most economically viable thing until I have enough money to buy the item'. I just feel like eventually, the most economically viable thing will always become 'go get the item or some equivalent item yourself' if the faucet drips.
Something I've noticed about you is that you attempt to look at everything in isolation.
My (and many others) distaste for daily quests/tasks isn't because the optimal play doesn't align with intended play. it is because the more obvious the optimal thing to do at any moment is, the harder it is for any one player to justify doing any other activity. I am not talking about theoretical here either, nor am I just talking about Blizzard games (though Blizzard do seem to be among the worst at this).
Rather, in practice, people in those games often find themselves logging in, spending time getting those daily tasks done that were the optimal way to play, and then finding they are out of time to play for the day and so logging out. Because those daily tasks were a big, bright sign in front of them saying "this is what the game thinks you should be doing", of course that is what they did.
It is perfectly ok for players to work out what they think is the most efficient thing for them to do at any one time, and to then go and do that, or to tell others to do that if they wish. It is not ok for the game to tell players what the most efficient thing to do is.
This sounds like some really solid iteration toward supporting both playstyles!
I don't disagree with anything there - I think having to choose a specialization is really important for other aspects of the game (progression, class fantasy, etc), it just has some downstream market-degeneracy consequences that folks often don't think about (if this thread is any indication). So I want to preserve making that choice, and then offset the downstream economic consequences.
Please take absolutely no offense to this, but you're explaining how an external change (like the release of a new class) causes ripple effects throughout the market right? Tons of different ways to predict/profit on those.
Eventually, you have enough capital that your activity-42 becomes sitting in an economic node doing nothing but trying to play the market instead of actually "doing content", though for some folks that's what they enjoy!
Maybe that's one of the sources of confusion. I'm not claiming that it will never be. I'm claiming "it will often, under a whole lot of market conditions, take the market too long to release optimizers from optimization hell".
And then, to mitigate that, I'm suggesting we add some game mechanics to make it so that the optimal solution for those players moves sooner than it would otherwise.
It'll move sooner if there is low liquidity, but I don't think there will be (on high-pop servers).
I'll move sooner if there's some sort of decreasing bonus the more you do a single activity (that resets either weekly or monthly).
It'll move sooner if the supply/demand changes with the seasons (this is weekly and may be enough on its own).
etc
Ok I'm definitely with you now. Yes, what I was describing was 'that market optimization', and I think what I'm surprised by might be 'the idea that an optimizer doesn't explicitly enjoy doing that'. I haven't, so far, met anyone who spends their time doing this sort of optimization while also feeling compelled enough to do it that it affects their fun.
That's an entire aside from 'should the game have a system to prevent obvious things from happening'. I was simply saying 'BDO is fluid and predictable'. I would personally prefer if Ashes was less fluid and therefore less predictable, but would have less fun if it were unpredictable. That's probably another difference between us as players. I prefer micro-adaptation strongly, which is what the Monster Hunter thing was a prior for. If the monster/market gets to take any action or direction that I have to respond to, but that I do understand, I have fun. If it never gets to move outside of a specific point, or on the other side, is completely unpredictable and novel, I don't have anywhere near as much fun.
So yes, we're in alignment now. We disagree on the amount of liquidity, but neither of us knows. So the next question is, would lower liquidity alone solve the problem of 'time to release for optimizers', and would the low liquidity in itself be a negative to an optimizer like yourself?
EDIT: I missed a point (did I delete my own paragraph when typing?) related to a question. You agreed that it can be easy to predict the release of new content's effect on markets. Do you personally find this interesting, not-interesting, or neutral?
And then you'll hear a long sigh...followed by something like "yeah, I suppose I can treat myself a bit." and then we get to hang out in-game.
But yeah, if you go into other games where this sort of thing happens, you'll find threads that are like "I have to farm the bridge over and over and I hate it, blizz pls fix". And then someone else will reply "you don't have to farm the bridge, do something else you dolt." Optimizing the fun out is definitely a hot-topic, and maybe @AaronH could point to more examples here.
Yeah, all I have is speculation about liquidity, and it's not solid enough to bet on.
And yeah, I think lower liquidity alone just straight up fixes it, and I don't think it's a negative at all. The lower the liquidity, the more survivalist it feels, where you have to gather your own stuff and craft your own gear, and I think that leads to a really varied, rich, novel experience. Super fun.
I think that's a really layered question. On a personal level, beau-the-finance-guy eats it up. When I get done working and want to game, I wish that predicting markets was less efficient than being really good at killing stuff (but I know it probably won't be). I want to spend my time in-game killing stuff and playing PvP and being a speed demon, and not feeling guilt that I'm not playing Cathie Wood simulator.
I know that if my friends just gave me all of their money, let me manage all of their funds and they spent all of their time killing stuff, and I was just actively-managed-portfolio-guy, we'd all make more money, but that isn't how I want to game
Ok. So then we have three takeaways.
1. If liquidity is too obviously high, we RIOT!
2. If farming mobs repetitively is a valid option, some limits on this over some period longer than 1 day should exist, (my numbers say 3-day reset, but that's using the numbers from my own stuff and assuming 'hardcore' players) with maybe some limited Titles as an 'out' for those of us whose idea of relaxation is just 'yeah do the same thing literally all the time.
3. As optimizers, we should complain whenever we find ourselves thinking getting pulled into optimizer hell, and hope we don't end up going to war with the people who want to lord it over everyone else (boy do I have a long story about a card game for this one if it ever comes up)
Anyways, added to my design document.
If there's anyone else out there reading this thread who feels 'no, lower liquidity is bad' while also feeling 'I don't want to be caught up in optimization', do me a favor and explain why, I may need an assumptions check. Because I absolutely understand 'optimizing the fun out of the game', the part I didn't get before now was that I honestly thought that most people who did that were enjoying the result of doing so enough that they'd just want 'their optimization itself' to be more fun, I didn't think of 'I want the optimization itself to shift toward consistent novelty'.
edited the main post to summarize the above
First, I want to start off by saying I agree with everything @Azherae and @beaushinkle have discussed economically. That was a really fun read and I think you both did a great job unpacking a pretty complex topic. That being said, I think I fall into a slightly different camp.
I have always considered myself an optimizer but I've learned in this thread that we all have slight variations of this playstyle. My gameplay loop typically looks like this:
1. Find a rewarding activity. When I say rewarding here, I mean almost any type of reward. It may be in terms of raw gold, materials, gear, rare title/cosmetic, or intrensically satisfying like defeating a difficult boss with some friends (even if it doesn't give any tangible loot). The main thing is that I want it to feel worth my time.
2. Optimize this new activity I've become obsessed with. I'm a competitive person and if I'm going to do something, I want to do it well and I really enjoy the process of figure out what is good and why it is good and then putting that discovery into action.
3. Practice And iterate on step 2.
4. Start to get bored. After a few weeks/months the novelty has worn off and the new discoveries for optimization become more and more rare. Eventually the labor of whatever activity I've been doing just doesn't do enough for me and I need to find something else to do.
5. Find a new activity.
I fell in love with MMOs because they allow me cycle through this loop many many times for many many years without losing the progress I've made by switching to a completely different game or separating me from new friendships I've built. MMOs allow us to change our gameplay drastically without changing games, and I think that's super cool.
Here's my problem: Often, the content I'm most interested is locked behind something I don't find rewarding or isn't rewarding long enough to keep my attention. My time is important to me and Id rather not spend Most of it doing boring or unfun things just to keep up with the fun content. I think it's really important to enjoy the journey in MMOs so I'm trying to think of ways I, and other players like me, can enjoy the journey to get to the most challenging content.
I think incentivizing different content or locations in the world is a great way to achieve this and I think it can work really well with the idea of specializing. I'm imagining a world where maybe the creatures are migratory or they hybernate during different seasons which forces player's to change where they farm or changes the availability of certain resources. It can be flavored however developers want, but I think it is important that there is an in game reason for these types of fluctuations to happen and they should be relatively infrequent (1 to 6 months?) so that people that choose to specialize heavily aren't punished for it.
Sorry if this got a little rambly or off topic but I thought it might be worth describing what my gameplay loop looks like and maybe shed some light on what my motivations are for varying the incintives for different content (especially farming/economically focused content). I'll try to think of some other solutions that are more fleshed out but I'm really curious what others think or if there are more interesting/creative solutions. I admit it is entirely possible that I've just grown out of MMOs and my lifestyle just isn't conducive to the time consuming grinds like it used to be.
Some of what you've said implies that you are one of those people who is affected by immersion, but that the immersion itself is the 'hook' to keep you playing the game or caring about it, hence 'needing the ingame reason'?
Ashes is so compelling and appealing in the worldbuild sense, to me, because they seem to be planning to put some effort into this. In fact, I'd be surprised if they didn't 'create and curate new content based on points of interest'. After all, in such a dynamic world, 'the DM gets to play too' and Steven seems to quite enjoy that.
If they build from the ground up with certain forms of malleability in mind, it should work, but the problem I see with this is simply that players often 'respond to novelty all at once' which can actually make certain things feel much less interesting to me personally. Does this affect you?
Example from Elite Dangerous:
A Pharma company 'stole' some designer drug data from a big pirate syndicate and this turned into a war situation, but while this type of event is pretty interesting lore-wise, and most people who play this game know what part they want to play in such events, the 'tendency for everyone to respond at once because it is something novel to do' turns it into a different experience than it might be otherwise, and it doesn't last long enough to really do much optimization.
Does PvP or other player behaviour affecting your optimization experience feel like a fun challenge, or a disruption of your fun?
Because honestly, that is all that is needed, as far as I can see.
I mean, if you have a game where you pick your economic activity to specialize in, and each of them will have their turn in the sun, the only real issue is people that want to always only ever do the best thing possible - to whom I say "suck it up, buttercup" (the design of the game is specifically preventing this, both economically and in terms of combat/experience), and people that genuinely get board of the one activity.
People that get board of that one activity have the choice of doing something non-economic for a while (like killing stuff - as none of this has any bearing on just general mob farming), or a host of other activities.
If it turns out they are genuinely board of their main economic activity long term (ie, their profession), then that is literally what alts exist for - for players to experience other aspects of the game.
First off, I am a bit confused by your premise. Why exactly would you even need to switch accounts to shift profession? Half the kinds of economic activity Azherae and Beaushinkles were talking about were combat related and changing which craft is your main isn't exactly rocket science just pick within your tier of production.
None of Beaushinkles 'need for novelty' ever stemmed from 'boredom with class design' or craft activity. A need for novelty is a separate type of drive, one normally filled in mmos by rotating between the different games within the mmo itself or changing locales/niches. That's the really simplistic tl;dr of 'What Azherae was explaining to someone who hadn't experienced a low liquidity game that makes doing that economical.'
Second of all, I don't really understand your assumption that killing mobs will have no economic value. If that's not what you meant maybe your language isn't clear enough to me? If you did, has it been said somewhere this will be the case? Is Steven vegetarian? Surely the Macaws will drop poultry. To get meat, hide, blood, and bone from an activity other than fighting would be pretty un-immersive.
Yeah, read "getting board with" as "wanting a change from", because they are essentially the same thing, and are absolutely the same driver. You want to stop doing one activity and do another because you are want to do something else. The fact way to say that is to simply say you were board of the first activity, and literally every reasonable person alive will understand.
People shouldn't need to clarify basic things like this, it really is semantics.
I didn't say that killing mobs has no economic value - that is literally what certificates in Ashes are.
What I did say (earlier) is that killing mobs is not an economic activity that you specialize in to. As such, it is not a part of that getting board of your economic activity issue, and absolutely should not be discussed as if it were.
Also, I am purposefully ignoring the liquidity discussion here, as I don't see any relevance to it in terms of Ashes. The game will have fairly high liquidity of all but the rarest items, so the discussion seems rather moot to me (or moo, if you're a fan of Joey from Friends)
Most people on the planet don't understand psychology in the first place. Being bored with economic activity is not the same as being bored with your class. You can be bored of farming crabs and go fight a world boss and have your problem solved. Fighting crabs on mage after fighting them on fighter would be 'novel' to a point but.... That's a different feeling from staying on fighter and going out to fight Betty The Fish. I would be in no way surprised if you don't understand why that's different.
If mobs don't have DIFFERENTIATED economic value, then there are possibly several flaws in Ashes economic systems. Surely you aren't going to tell me that bird feathers and bear meat will have the same purpose in crafting recipes? And again if those are not things, was it said somewhere that it won't be?
If it is a thing then economic demand for those things will be different depending on ttk, local artisan population, crafting effect, meta, combat class population, popularity of activity, ease of imports from cheaper areas etc. Being very good at fighting bears vs fighting birds vs other specialist in those niches (in both senses ) will have a very real meaningful impact on your gold per hour depending on which of those you specialize in, in such a system.
If the mobs are dumb enough or uncomplicated enough or their mob population design lacking in proper difficulty loops and kill staggers to not warrant any specialization what so ever the game will flatly be BAD. It would be a very strong sign of missing skilled ai designers, system's devs, or a level designer (or design philosophy squishing what such people are allowed to do.) There is no way a team lacking people who can or would naturally think to design any of those facets to the point where economic differentiation in hunting niche exists will make good PvE(system's dev and ai), Worldbosses (mostly ai the rest is combat and level design), raids(all three), or sieges (level design and systems dev definitely required.) And if all of those suck, and their combat system is at all lacking and their corruption system the least bit flawed, the game will simply die from sheer lack of anything interesting to do.
Lets say you have a fighter that is an alchemist. You make potions and stuff, and all is well. If you get board of making potions (see above), then you can go out and kill stuff. Cool. You can also join a siege, or get on a ship, or assist in running a caravan, what ever.
If you are still board of being an alchemist, and of being a fighter, roll an alt. Then you can be a miner and a mage. Perhaps you can even be a gunner on the ship instead of what ever you were previously.
Novelty.
This is why I fail to see the need for a game developer to build in the things being suggested. Oh for sure.
Crafting materials aren't even going to be the main economic reason for killing though, that is that certificates are for.
Kill a mob, get a certificate, take that certificate in to a node and exchange for coin. Not only that, but the further away the node you take it to is from the node you killed the mob at, the more gold you get (not sure on the in-game logic there). As an added bonus, certificates drop when you are killed just as raw materials do.
Not only will this be the main economic value behind killing mobs, but I assume it will be the main means of generating new coin in the game as a whole.
In fact, I don't even predict most mobs will even drop crafting materials other than perhaps skins. Rare mobs will likely drop them, but basic mobs I don't think will.
As a statement, this is a little more hyperbolic than I am used to from you.
You are basically saying that if this game doesn't have a system that the developers haven't talked about, at all, then the game will be bad.
Actually, you are literally saying that. I kind of want to ask you if this mean you've always thought the game was bad, but I am fairly sure you just made a poor choice of words.
Would a game with a system like that be enjoyable? sure, maybe.
Would it work for Ashes, a game where the nature of the encounters in any given region can change fairly frequently? Probably not.
Right.... And Beau's game experiences have been lacking in a way that made their discussion with Azherae relevant, because they haven't had the experiences that would inform them of that basic thing you and I take for granted.
Well, this statement leads me to believe you don't actually understand what Beau's problem was, or your devaluing their specific lived experience. Either way... A good game developer doesn't ignore the kinds of concerns Beau was expressing, they certainly design around them because good design protects the average player from bad psychological traps and misconceptions.
That's not how crafting economies work.... Wealth is always a comparative. If the crafting materials are differentiated, the bonus vouchers aren't part of the real wealth comparative even if they are a real economic actor. It just boosts the numbers. Is what I was going to start trying to explain but then you said:
Why do you predict that?
If regular mobs aren't going to drop crafting materials NOR be involved in spawning the ones that do NOR exist as part of the encounter challenge with the elite mob, they have no gameplay value. They are at best a nusance at worst a waste of time, vouchers or not. If they are somehow involved it goes back to my 'hyperbole'.
I'd go on to try and explain why my 'hyperbole' was warranted, but it only makes sense if we share the same premise of the role of mobs in Ashes, which at the moment we seem to not share.
The purpose of an MMO could well be defined as a means of wasting ones time. As such, any aspect of an MMO that does this could well be considered successful.
However, I would argue that base population with the express purpose of dropping a crafting material are no more or less valuable to the game as a whole, and the economy of that game specifically, as they would be if that base population were instead the primary means by which raw coin entered that economy.
In both cases, there is a distinct and specific reason to kill the mobs, a specific goal you would have in order to want to attack and kill them en masse.
I completely fail to see why that goal being the gathering of crafting materials to trade with players is good, yet that specific goal being gathering certificates to take to a far-away node in order to exchange for gold to trade with players is bad.
To me, the notion that what I get for killing these mobs increases in value the farther away I take it from where they were killed - yet increases the risk of me losing some to PvP - seems far more interesting a system than just plucking some feathers and selling them to the first person I see that may want feathers for what ever reason.
No not really. Even a bad mmo like BDO has level design built into it's mob encounters. The more efficient you are at completing a circuit the better you are at making money. Specializing for your niche region in that game isn't particularly purposeless. FFXI mobs fit none of those descriptions on average as Azherae has already exhaustively covered, and to my knowledge FFXIV has a similar but weaker design for this.
The goal of a game is to have fun. Watching grass grow passes time.
I will leave that discussion to @beaushinkle or Azherae.
Never said that. But I will say as a crafting oriented player I would rather there be a social aspect between me and a person good at hunting bears if I am a leathersmith or cook other than 'worrying about them possibly killing me.' Coin being the sole thing involved in mobs makes you much more faceless and ignorable. I don't need to request your services. I only need my PvP guy. In a mob drops crafting materials system, I need the person best at hunting said mob AND my PvP guy.
Por que no los dos? As an economically oriented player I feel both being involved adds economic depth and social depth.
That person that tans leather probably needs someone to supply them with pelts - but that supply is likely to come from a freehold. If you have both, then both are devalued.