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Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
A mount sink proposal
Geronimo
Member, Alpha Two
A mount sink is 100% necessary for a few reasons:
We really just need an incentive to release mounts back to the wild (or a reason to grind them up for resources if you have no feelings).
The simplest way to do this is actually to implement a little reality: I don't currently operate a zoo mainly because I can't afford to feed 1000 animals every day.
A requirement of a bushel of hay a week for a common horse and something more obscure for the rare mounts would solve all of these problems. If you don't feed them they will simply be too hungry to carry your sorry arse around, wait another week and they will escape to go and find their own food.
Mounts that are up for sale on the market would not need to be fed by the seller, that would make it so that this mechanic is not a block to the economy but actually drives more sales, many people like to change up their mount every so often. I'm looking at you Russell Brand.
This actually improves the whole economy, not just the mount professions because we could have things like an aquatic turtle that requires certain types of fish (adding synergies with the fishing profession) and a ram that requires some kind of alfalfa (or something from herbalism) and the uber horse that only eats special oats (from farming). A common horse would have something extremely common and cheap like hay, to make it the easiest mount to keep for people that just want to move a little faster and aren't too interested in the aesthetic side of it.
If you really wanted to maintain a zoo you still can, it will just cost more and require getting obscure food in some cases, which in the end will only help support the economy.
Other methods of mount sinks are not so great. I don't think outright killing of mounts in PVP or PVE is great as a sink because of the griefing factor involved. I also dislike the aging mount or timing factor because of how it takes agency away from the player. I suppose a hard limit of 3 or 4 could simply be imposed but this then stops the people who do actually want to operate a menagerie, it also loses some of the useful economical bonuses proposed above.
I am interested to know if there is any problems with this or any other ways around this?
(Edit 6 Feb to state the top 4 reasons a little clearer, it does not invalidate any rebuttals or their counters from later in the thread)
- There are two professions used to create mounts (taming and animal husbandry), both of them need to stay relevant in the end game.
- Mounts do not really degrade in any meaningful way for these professions, vs something like a sword which requires the blacksmith to repair it.
- About 1 month after release the "common" horse will most definitely be the LEAST common mount in the game and might as well not even exist, the "rare" and "uncommon" mounts will be everywhere.
- Every player will have a complete zoo after a few months, new players that are trying to learn these professions will be totally useless because only the few AAA+ professionals will be relevant.
We really just need an incentive to release mounts back to the wild (or a reason to grind them up for resources if you have no feelings).
The simplest way to do this is actually to implement a little reality: I don't currently operate a zoo mainly because I can't afford to feed 1000 animals every day.
A requirement of a bushel of hay a week for a common horse and something more obscure for the rare mounts would solve all of these problems. If you don't feed them they will simply be too hungry to carry your sorry arse around, wait another week and they will escape to go and find their own food.
Mounts that are up for sale on the market would not need to be fed by the seller, that would make it so that this mechanic is not a block to the economy but actually drives more sales, many people like to change up their mount every so often. I'm looking at you Russell Brand.
This actually improves the whole economy, not just the mount professions because we could have things like an aquatic turtle that requires certain types of fish (adding synergies with the fishing profession) and a ram that requires some kind of alfalfa (or something from herbalism) and the uber horse that only eats special oats (from farming). A common horse would have something extremely common and cheap like hay, to make it the easiest mount to keep for people that just want to move a little faster and aren't too interested in the aesthetic side of it.
If you really wanted to maintain a zoo you still can, it will just cost more and require getting obscure food in some cases, which in the end will only help support the economy.
Other methods of mount sinks are not so great. I don't think outright killing of mounts in PVP or PVE is great as a sink because of the griefing factor involved. I also dislike the aging mount or timing factor because of how it takes agency away from the player. I suppose a hard limit of 3 or 4 could simply be imposed but this then stops the people who do actually want to operate a menagerie, it also loses some of the useful economical bonuses proposed above.
I am interested to know if there is any problems with this or any other ways around this?
(Edit 6 Feb to state the top 4 reasons a little clearer, it does not invalidate any rebuttals or their counters from later in the thread)
3
Comments
I would like to think that animal husbandry is to be used for more than just creating mounts. It could create things like livestock to be butchered for cooking or alchemical reagents, so that the professions have a use beyond merely providing mounts.
If they are only for mounts, then I agree there will come a point where there won't be a demand for the professions since everyone will have their mounts. At which point, I would expect people to focus on/respec into other more lucrative professions and the ones who do not will have a niche market of their own for the people coming after the main wave of players, which I think isn't really that bad of an outcome.
Of your proposed solutions, I think aging would be the best. Maybe not an outright "your mount dies after 4 months" but more of a slow, constant reduction in effectiveness until you reach a point where you just replace it.
An interesting problem. I look forward to seeing the solution the devs decide on. I would put my money on there being no mount sink, and animal husbandry having a boom of popularity early on in a servers life and then sinking into it's role, be that what it may, later on.
This info is available on the Wiki, it’s easy to find.
@cheezyweasel The drive to mount something new is real. No joke, I am not convinced that requiring hay vs carrots vs a rare dragonheart to sustain your mount will drive people away from buying them. And I think there will be enough lost through attrition and lack of care that it will more than make up for the people that become common horse users. This would also go a long way to keeping common mounts stay common and rare mounts stay rare.
I am not an economist but I am pretty sure that there would be higher demand for mounts overall just by the nature of a sink vs no sink. The end result of this proposed "required resource" system vs some other one would be that the price of the rare mounts would stay higher than the price an NPC is selling a common horse otherwise the epic mount that 90% of the users have will sell for half the price that I could buy a common horse from the first NPC I meet.
In the end I still see only benefits to the economy across multiple professions as well as keeping taming and animal husbandry relevant indefinitely
You may have missed where Steven also mentioned a mount that dies too often can develop a debuff that requires resources to cure. It’s the equivalent of durability loss that the rest of your gear will suffer.
I saw that too, it's definitely a resource sink. Just not a mount sink at all, it doesn't require any further work from the tamers or animal husbands (husbanders? I hate this name). In other words, there is no reason to buy another mount as a result of that "sink".
I guess one way is to make the resource required to remove the debuff more expensive than just buying a new mount so that people just get rid of it... but at that point why not just kill the mount for real?
It seems to me that taking care of your mount seems like a normal part of the game it is much more favourable to player agency along with adding economical boosts and keeping professions relevant. It's like having a house in a node, it's not like you can just take it for granted and not bother with defending it.
We're going for "breeder".
Unless the cure needs to come from a breeder. Interdependence is really important in this game. The resources might need to go to a breeder to turn into the remedy. Steven spoke of an alchemical potion to speed recovery, something similar might be needed to cure the mount. It’s true he didn’t elaborate but it would fit what they’re doing.
Why should mounts die permanently when gear doesn’t break permanently?
Absolutely. Player characters don't age and die. Mobs left unattacked don't age and die. Why should a mount? If people know that they're only going to get to use a mount for 14 days, that's going to crash the price of all mounts, and the profession will become unprofitable.
I see it a bit like armour and gear. When it's used/hit/etc, its durability lessens. You repair it with goods to get it back to its full usefulness. With mounts, they could also have a durability, and feeding them is the repair to get them back to full usefulness. The feed won't be produced by the Breeders. That'd be the job of a Farmer or Fisher, adding to the artisan interdependence. Land mounts need a Farmer, Aquatic mounts need a Fisher.
I agree that there needs to be a way to keep Breeders relevant in the end-game. I'm hoping that our specially bred mounts will add stats to a caravan, possibly increasing its speed, its resistances, health, etc. If a generic crappy mount has the same effect as a specially bred pedigree, then that'll be kinda lame.
"Caravan components obtained from crafters will have stats according to the skill of each artisan.[32]"
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Caravans#Caravan_components
Here's a thought. If you wanted to add an additional sink, then the abilities that your mounts learn, "training" if you will, perhaps it only lasts for a period of time. It could last a month, longer, less - but you need to secure the training from a Breeder for "Horse - Charge Training" to prolong or train your mount for the relevant skill.
So long as there is a good balance between it feeling right, and not being a pain in the *** having to keep this up! But I think by setting suitable time-frames you can prevent this feeling.
I think this will work as a mount-sink system as most mounts will be of very low value and only a few will be desirable in the market.
Eventually, I think everyone will be able to afford most mounts but not all will be able to buy the best mounts(highest stats/best ability/rare mounts)
I do not want to be around a giant snail in heat.
The obvious one is simply butchering them for meat of course. For cooking or for feed for mounts that eat meat. That's the realistic take on it.
Some people might object to that, so perhaps disguise it with a system like in pokemon, where you send the pokemon/mount to professor Willow/a farm, for some type of useful thing used in animal husbandry. It's all a euphemism for brutally slaughtering them of course, but it's less obvious.
What will I do with my old mount when I have better ones? Apart from nostalgic attachments, I will simply sell the old ones for a little cash to a NPC. There you go, the old mounts sink out of the game for a little cash (and to free up my inventory boxes).
i think i prefer them either being destroyed in some way or losing stats as time goes on so you will need to replace them, even at the highest level.
This one doesn't work as well because the playerbase evolves with it. It makes Animal Husbandry a painful timesink after a while unless there is some serious deflation in effort, which is one path they could take, but it's generally the most boring.
If the mounts don't go away, then 'best mounts' just stick with whoever, they either constantly have advantage, or everyone catches up, but for the Animal Husbandry player, now they have a bunch of mid-tier mounts that have less demand because those are just the 'fail conditions' of much more economically empowered players. Basically they need to be able to produce 'the best mounts' or face a hypersaturated market. Rare and specific mounts or skill combos could help here, but from the developer side, it's MUCH more work than just making mounts degrade in some way.
This sort of outcome is generally bad for the longevity of a system.
Again, why is this only the case for mounts and not for gear? Mounts will be in different tiers, will have different qualities, different stats, different abilities. You're unlikely to get one mount and then use it forever, no more than you'd use the same weapon or armor.
The idea that Steven has put forth is that mounts are basically a piece of equipment. They are created by crafters (using animal husbandry) and/or gathered (by tamers) and then provided to players. You will acquire them and probably sell or discard them once you get something better. There will be some kind of maintenance as hinted by Steven talking about "mount sinks". Just like gear, there are skins you can apply to change their appearance too.
Gear will last forever, but its usefulness might not. I imagine the same for mounts. I could see someone with an old and/or low-quality mount getting knocked off the mount in combat quickly because of its poor quality, getting frustrated, and getting rid of it for a new one. The same way you'd get rid of armor that isn't protecting you well enough.
Because gear is usually a 1 to 1 relationship when crafting, in games, or at least easy to control. Mounts are not. You take items A, B, C and you make Armor D which might differ in its quality but you mostly know what you're getting.
Most mount-breeding systems are 'put M and F creatures together and hope that their genetics combine in a way you like and if they have a limited amount of times you can breed them, hope even harder'.
Unless you can control every skill, and can predict every stat outcome, of every breeding, it's not the same. Similarly, gear is not an infinite upward treadmill in Ashes as far as I KNOW and mounts are technically bad if they are.
Gear can be broken down for base materials which can be sold or used again. If mounts are like gear, let's break them down for base materials too. Like meat, glue, sinew, leather.
Edit: I can even see an industry forming around butchering top tier mounts/pets to get rare or hard to get materials.
@Atama I see your point here and I agree that if mountconomy could be made exactly the same as gear that would be workable to keep the professions relevant. They are not the same right now because the mount-makers (tamers and breeders) have no apparent relevance once the mount has been created whereas the gear-makers (blacksmith and leatherworkers) are required to continued to support the gear.
However the "mount = gear" concept (once it has been updated) only handles #1 & #2 of the OP.
To handle 1,2,3,4 the original proposal would work best. We can also add to it to increase the "breeder" relevance by making them able to make food that buffs specific mounts.
As a matter of opinion, I would MUCH prefer that my raptor was treated slightly differently than my spear, just because my raptor is different than my spear (no innuendoes here). It should be treated more like my house: if I just take it for granted, then there will be negative consequence. In this case the consequences are in two stages, first I won't be able to get the buff my mount provides (faster travel) and then after further neglect it will run off somewhere and I lose it totally. I know that is actually worse than the house but I think mounts are more useful than a house so it makes sense that I would have a bit more concern for it than my house.
This also has the added benefit of providing economic synergies and making something awesome like the Prowler of Perdition not handled exactly the same as the common horse.
And in that case, they'd function almost exactly the way other crafters would in being needed to maintain items.
#3 and #4 in the OP are not real issues. The "common" mount being uncommon because there are better alternatives applies the same to everything else. Better and better gear will also flood the market. This is not an issue for mounts. If there is an issue like this, it will affect crafting.
And why is "having a complete zoo" a problem? First of all, there are assumptions here based on nothing. What makes you think there will be no limit on the number of mounts? They will probably take up inventory space like everything else. We already know that combat pets will. You won't have 1,000 mounts just as you won't have 1,000 swords or 1.000 kinds of potions. And even if you do, so what?
You have a solution that is in search of a problem. Those problems aren't in existence as far as we know.
Don't think of mounts in this game like you would a game like WoW, or other MMOs. Every Violet Proto-Drake in WoW is the same. Once you have it, you have it. I have over 100 mounts in that game, and I collected the vast majority of them for achievements. When I played the game, I would only ride a few of them.
In Ashes of Creation, mounts are unique. If you care about your mount (and you should care as much as you would for any other thing that improves your character) you will always be looking for a better one. They aren't generic, and most likely you'll only want a few of them. Maybe one that is fast (to get you around and help you escape trouble), one that is great for combat, an aquatic one, one that glides when you are in mountainous areas. When you get a faster mount you'll probably want to sell or otherwise dispose of the old one in a productive way.
Imagine you could recycle a mount into "mystery meat" for cooking? (I think that is awesome.) Or take it back to a breeder who can put it to stud (in a virtual sense) which gives a boost of some kind to their breeding pens (causing the mount to disappear from the game).
I am in favor of things that make things better and more fun for players, not things that make the game a real pain in the butt (micromanaging mounts as a kind of mini-game, or making them non-permanent) to fix a non-existent problem.
There are "mights" and "could bes" in your first paragraph and even a change to require resources from the breeders, so something clearly should be proposed on this topic.
If the risk of losing a mount is too horrible as proposed in the OP, I still think upkeep in the form of mount food should be implemented to keep a mount usable. The breeders can corner that market to stay relevant, I mean realistically I don't buy the same brand of my cat food as my steaks (I hope at least). The tamers would still become somewhat irrelevant however. That would handle #1, #2 and #3 for at least one profession.
Just because #3 and #4 exist everywhere doesn't mean that they can't be solved. And I definitely think solving them would be beneficial, not just visually but also economically for the game.
I see nothing wrong with mount food. Not because your mount gets hungry after a while (this is not a survival sim and those things are antithetical to the game), but as a way to counter the debuff suffered when a mount dies? Absolutely, that would be great, and it fits with what Steven said they're already planning.
That could work, or even just as a raw buff itself, increased speed or something. Or required to enable sprinting. But if we're doing this already why not just push it a little further and solve at least #3 by making it required for mounting? (forgetting the perma-loss part of the proposal for now and neglecting to solve #4)
To use the gear analogy: I will need to find rare material to repair my rare axe, so why not require some rare food for my rare mount and require common food for my common mount to keep it usable? (and keep breeders relevant)
To keep the tamers relevant we could have unfed mounts degrade to a more wild state, this would require a tamer to do their thing in order to keep them mountable. Alternately, the tamers could be more like "trainers" and level up their sprinting or speed or something.
Both these concepts (food and additional taming/training) could also apply to combat pets.
I like the buff idea and considered it for a moment. Here is my concern with buffs, at least if they are proposed as a way to keep breeders relevant.
If we want this is a solution for animal husbandry and/or taming to have something to provide, then the buffs have to be pretty significant. They have to be so good that you'd be foolish not to have them. I've played games where buffs were mandatory to be competitive, in particular Star Wars Galaxies, where if you didn't have buffs and fought someone with buffs you'd have no chance because they boosted you something like 300%. That screwed things up a lot.
Now, if we have the buff as just a perk, something useful but not something you can't live without, that won't be as harmful, but it won't serve to keep those professions relevant. So, I'd recommend the buffs be something in addition to the other solutions. Let's say that you have something like oats or meat (depending on the mount) which will cure a debuff by giving your mount needed sustenance, or you can give your mount a treat like a sugar cube or something similar but more exotic which might give them an extra burst of speed or more durability for a short time.
I do not like the idea of requiring food to use a mount. I went through that in TERA Online and it was an irritation. Not for mounts, but pets. In TERA Online, you have pets that serve useful functions like looting for you. Those pets would only come out if fed, and so you'd have to buy pet food and keep it on hand. It got to the point where I didn't want to even pull out the pet because it was such a pain to keep the stuff on hand; I'd rather just loot stuff on my own then deal with that headache.
I don't want a system that makes mounts a chore and creates a disincentive to use them. That will do nothing but hurt the mount professions. There is a different psychological effect on players when they have things like healing potions that you might need every now and then, and something like food that you need to keep your hunger meter full. You can argue that there is no real logical difference between the two, but people aren't logical and they don't dislike things because of logic. I know that's the case for me at least. If you have something that you keep on hand to clear up intermittent status issues that mounts suffer, and items that you can voluntarily use to give temporary buffs when the situation warrants it, then players like that kind of stuff. Having to keep food in order to ride a mount the way you have to keep gas in your car makes it a pain and causes people to not like mounts, and to come up with excuses to not ride them unless they really feel the need to (escape from danger, or maybe a really long trip).
Think of it this way... If you needed a whetstone to draw your sword, wouldn't that make you not want to draw your sword? Things like that get me paranoid about being in a situation where I'll need my sword and can't use it because I ran out of whetstones and wasn't paying attention. That anxiety makes people dislike things.
I think the more that a mount feels like a fun, useful, and hassle-free part of your character, the better. The occasional need for upkeep on an intermittent basis is fine, just as it's fine to have to repair your gear on an intermittent basis. Not as something that is a constant thing you need to keep track of and monitor to use it at all.
The same objection could be said of being required to repair my gear before it unequips. Repairing gear is equally a chore and a disincentive to use it.
I see five different solutions:
1) The original proposal would solve all the points listed (some of which may or may not be problems based on opinion, there are posts from others that express similar objections) it also guarantees the relevance for breeders and trainers. On the downside it adds a task to all players (whether they like it or not) of buying the required resources.
2) Use the required food solution but skip the perma-loss part of the mount. It would be only slightly less helpful to #1 but would be just as good solving, #2 and #3. It would omit handling #4.
3) The concept I understand from your posts, (making food = buffs, in a total nutshell, sorry) would definitely mitigate the irrelevance of the professions and would probably work in conjunction with the other "sinks" covered in the wiki. But as you noted, it would require some serious balancing work: too much buff and it would still be a chore (something you HAVE to have) too little and the professions are irrelevant again. It just neglects handling #2, #3 and #4 and would require close monitoring to solve #1.
4) Maybe nothing is changed and we keep two irrelevant professions in the end game.
5) Someone has a better idea.
I still like the original proposal, but I could also settle with solution #2 above.
The main reason I don't like solution #3 is actually because it seems to violate the "mount = gear" analogy: if I don't repair my gear it fully unequips (not just a debuff) and I can't use it until I gather whatever rare/common materials are needed to repair it. It should be the same with the mount, if I don't feed it the right rare/common food then I can't use it. That in addition to all the economic perks just makes the most sense to me.
In my personal opinion, I think that mounts should get a stacking debuff if they die too often, until they can't be used at all if you don't address it. Then they are effectively "broken" like what happens to gear.
I just don't like the idea of them dying permanently and needing to be replaced, because that's worse than what happens to gear. I also don't like the idea of being forced to keep feeding them no matter what if you want to ride them, because frankly that sucks. But if they are beat up so badly that you need to heal them through food or whatever before you can ride them, that works for me.
I could probably settle for that too, I guess it's the difference between proactive resource gathering and reactive resource gathering. I could also live with the lack of perma-death, and leave problem #4 from the OP unhandled (with a slightly weaker handling to #1).
Either way I think something in between those two should be implemented to at least address points 1-3. Thanks for your all your feedback on it
Nerror's Amazing Abattoir
Slaughtering your beloved mounts and pets for profit!
(You get to watch for 100g extra)