Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
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.
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.
Comments
Yes, mounts have stats. They have HPs, speed, armor value. They have abilities you can use while riding them, combat abilities that you can use to attack enemy (since you can’t use all or maybe any regular skills mounted). They’re part of your gear, your stats, your power and progress. They’re not just a way to get around like they are in other MMOs.
They also have their own gear to equip them. We’ve been shown barding (mount armor) and there might be more.
That’s why people aren’t going to just get a mount and hang onto it forever. Mounts will be replaced as you get better ones, just as your weapons and armor are. Forget what mounts were like in other games, they’ll be different in Ashes. (Much better and more important.)
Ah yes, nothing at all like BDO where all those things are true.... And she spends hours outfitting and training high level mounts that she breeds...
Thank you, that's... interesting. I'll be very interested to see how they spin that too, especially if leaving mounts outside of dungeons is a thing one has any good reason to do.
Alternately it could be a disincentive to actually take your mount anywhere that you don't have to.
I see this as a choice between two problems. The problem of a stagnating mount market, and the problem of players losing agency about how and when they can use their old mounts.
I simply believe that the stagnating mount market is a bigger problem that won't be solved by the feeding solution. That's just preference/priority at that point, I think. I'm not saying that 'aging won't cause a problem with player agency' and I don't think you're saying 'feeding will definitely help to sustain the mount market properly'.
We seem to just be disagreeing on which of the two things is more important to fix, given that neither solution is perfect.
I'm finding myself arguing against my own interest here. The feeding solution benefits me, with my tight knit group and economic skills, whilst only probably harming 'not-me', i.e. all the Animal Husbandry artisans that I feel will get the short end of the stick here.
So I'm, at this point, entirely willing to leave it up to Intrepid. I can't rightfully complain if they make a game that I am going to find easier, so by that reasoning I should support your side. I just can't bring myself to do that sort of thing, so you can file my opinion under 'if you wanna bias things toward the rich and number-crunchy, I thank you for the gift'.
My current understanding of mounts is it will work more like AA and not like BDO. Your mount is an item you can summon into the world anywhere(with some restrictions). You will most likely be despawning your mount when you reach the dungeon. Only reason you will be keeping it out is if you are using it as a mule and in that case, I think it's still going to be following you around.
@Atama are you familiar with how mounts work in BDO, then?
You say to forget what they are like in other games, but you describe mounts in the game I currently play involving them, where this exact problem came up not once, not twice, but at three different times and twice required explicit intervention from the developers, one of those times doing relatively serious 'damage' to the mount economy.
What are you suggesting that Ashes mounts will do that BDO mounts do not?
Just a note, @Atama did not make a comment about BDO, that was @JustVine who quoted something from Atama, you seem to have smushed them together.
Maybe you can describe what mounts do in BDO that is similar to AoC, and how that became a problem in your experience.
I was referring to the “”collect a zoo of pets” thing that multiple people have brought up in this thread, which is how mounts work in most MMOs I’ve played. In those games you collect an unending number of mounts like you would Pokémon. AoC doesn’t seem like it will work that way.
Honestly, I played BDO but the combat was so awful I quit long before I got into the mount system.
In BDO mounts have abilities, levels, gear, barding, breeding, and can be used in combat.
I currently have around 30 horses. I have bought a few from others but have never needed to. I haven't really been trying either, it's just part of leveling the Horse Training.
Oversaturation of the mount market has frequently led to 'crashes' in which players who specialized in horse training needed to find alternate sources of income.
Even now, people complain that the Pegasus mount, one of the three current top tier mounts on Console, is hard to sell on the marketplace because most people who want one already have one, and there are many available.
This has happened before, and each time, they had to step in to solve it, I don't know what solution will exist this time or if they intend for people to just 'ride this one out'.
On some of my classes I can use many skills from horseback, on others none, and I depend entirely on the mount's skills. In this case, I can simply spend hours doing PvE in this way. That's more a matter of pathetic enemy design than otherwise, but I hope you can see how my point still stands.
I also explicitly make money in the game by making mount equipment and following the related trends.
None of these problems occurred because of the various other forms of mismanagement or design that BDO is otherwise plagued with. This is one of their few systems that just works as well as they planned it. The problem was that the planning was wrong, for exactly the reason being discussed here.
If you need further information on this so that we can reach the point of mutual understanding, please let me know and I'll try to provide links, though be warned that some of them may be lengthy.
Yes! I would like to avoid exactly this in AoC.
Solution: Pegasus only eats the rare "Manuka™ Honey Oats" native to the Nakua.
Common horse eats hay found everywhere.
It might deter some people from buying Pegasus but it will deter a whole lot more from keeping her forever and some people would buy her more than once.
Result: breeders will continue to have a reason to make Pegasus and stay relevant.
Further, if breeders (AKA Animal Husbandry Crafters) are the suppliers of the mount and pet food, they stay even more relevant. They would just have to procure the ingredients from other professions like fishing, farming and herbalism. Economical boom ensues, high-fives and ass-slaps for everyone.
I guess it remains to be seen if people will sink enough of their mounts into caravans or not, also if mounts are one of the components that are destroyed or if they are salvageable, the wiki does not specify yet.
The “levels” part seems different. Do you get a mount and level it up? Or if you want a different mount, do you need to just get a better one? AoC will have tiers of mounts, I don’t know if that’s equivalent of the levels in BDO.
What if you can’t have 30 mounts? Or if they take up limited storage space? I’m wondering what AoC can do differently. It seems to me that if you feel no need to get better mounts, BDO did a poor job of implementing them.
I am not sure how to further this conversation. I'm telling you from my extensive experience that there is a real problem, and your response is basically 'well maybe it doesn't work that way'. What should I do here?
BDO's mounts have Tiers. You breed them up. I just recently got a Tier 8 Courser. The process is long and involved, and the result is still the same.
My stables have a limit. I'm not quite close to it, but I think I could only reasonably fit another 10.
The point is that once I get this Tier 8 Courser to transform into the Unicorn, I will never need this again. It's objectively the best (of the three, for my purposes) right now. This wasn't easy. This wasn't super fast. It just doesn't matter.
I don't know what else to say here, if you just decide that BDO 'must have done something wrong that Ashes won't do wrong', and can't possibly see that your perception of human behaviour might be wrong.
@tautau Good point, I didn't really factor in merchant NPCs at all, I've been playing too much OSRS lately.
I suppose that could work, it would just become a money making profession once saturation hits maximum (as opposed to one that is based on player supply and demand).
Even if it only produces a little bit of money that may not be a problem as long as the joys of breeding
The NPCs would need to be configured to buy mounts for more than it cost to create them, otherwise you would end up paying money to do the work and it would be pointless.
But again, at no point of this is the problem of any given person accumulating excessive mounts.
I have 30, but I also have the top ones. Mounts, due to fairness, can't be an infinite ladder (do we at least agree on that?)
I could sell all mine to the Stablehands and still never need another one.
I could try to sell them to other players, but with the saturated market, and most of them being lower tier, who would need them?
This isn't about 'excessive mounts' on any single person at all. this problem just takes longer to occur in games where you only have a few.
I raise Chocobos in FFXI, too. Same thing happens (you can't sell them, you just sell eggs)
If you can always sell your high level crafted mounts for more than it cost to create them to a merchant NPC then there should be no problem.
It would be the same with any profession really, once I reach level 999 blacksmith I would not be upset at making 2000x SuperEpicHighLevel Sword that everyone already has and no one wants to buy as long as I can sell them to some dumb NPC for more than it cost to make it.
At a lower level of crafting you could expect the Iron Sword to sell for less than it cost to make because of the benefits I get in crafting experience to make it.
Honestly, I started this whole post neglecting the concept of merchant NPCs because I had been playing OSRS too long where the economy is entirely player-driven. There are no merchant NPCs that will buy my 3000x magic long bows (a pinnacle product of the fletching profession). It actually makes for some really interesting gaming and is probably a major factor in that game staying alive this long.
However, if we throw merchant NPCs into the mix, I do not really see a problem anymore.
I have strong opinions on any systems where players can profit without needing to participate in a player-driven economy, but I feel that I've become overbearing enough as is, and I have nothing new to say, so let me just go on record as saying 'no thank you' to this.
Like I said earlier, having an entirely player-driven economy is probably a factor in OSRS being the longest running major MMORPG that exists, it even predates WOW by a few years and now looks like it will keep running a lot longer than WOW (OSRS also has no graphics requirements at all which helps too). In OSRS, people play the economy almost as much as the game itself, it adds a whole new dimension to crafting because if you craft 10,000x maple long bows they are going to start selling for dirt and you are going to lose money on your investment of maple logs.
However, even in OSRS there are spells to alchemize some of the items and turn them into gold (with a varying figure set by the devs), this helps to establish a baseline cost for some things and control the economy. Merchant NPCs just serve that same function in AoC, it will certainly require some balancing and probably will fluctuate but so does most everything else in a game like this.
You could always sell your mounts to a player if they are willing to pay more than the NPC, which would be the case before saturation of new mounts.
I don’t think you can advance a mount in AoC the way you’re describing in BDO. I’ve played MMOs where you can get a low level piece of gear and keep advancing it, and there is no market for gear as a result. That’s what I was trying to clarify.
Each female horse can only be bred once. Each male horse twice. If you pay, you can extend those numbers by 1x each. After that if you want to, you can exchange 2x horses for one horse.
To catch a horse from any good location takes about 14 minutes for an optimal player to do, and then they hope it is good. If it is not, it may just be leveled for a trade-in.
And this still happens. Because if you have 20 Animal Husbandry players and each of them logs in every day and tames 1x male and 1x female and breeds them and that's literally all they achieve for the day, that's 60 mounts per day added to the server just so that they can have a daily experience that can be described as 'Animal Husbandry'.
Now, you could make it so that most of the time they're not getting 'the best mounts'. You could make it so that it takes, like BDO, approximately 70-100 in game hours of just purely raising horses to get to that Pegasus. At least then you've only generated 20 Pegasi per month from dedicated people.
This is, of course, not counting the 200 other mounts they incidentally generated just trying to get there. Which are now either 'just random discardable stepping stones with a glut of supply', leading to anyone trying to get into the Profession at a lower level than 'knows how to get a Pegasus' up against an endless supply of the equivalent of 'discardable drops' from every higher level artisan...
Or they're something you throw into a meat grinder because they aren't 'important enough anymore' due to the race for higher mounts you are describing.
If you have a third solution to that, please let me know. If you have an objection to my priors, which I tried to make as conservative as possible, let's just leave the conversation here...
In the end, the most workable solution (which seems like an already planned system) is to just have mounts be purchasable by merchant NPCs. This makes a totally workable sink for all the superfluous mounts without introducing other systems.
The super-high-level mounts should earn the breeder money (sell to NPC for more than it cost to make) and the lower-tier versions will probably end up costing the breeder some money in exchange for the experience they get by making the item. I imagine all crafting professions will work this way.
Of course there will ALSO be player driven economical factors: you might be able to sell a bunch of common horses to players for a higher price for the caravan thing or a whole bunch of high-end players will want the new "UberRhinoMount" that was just invented by some top-tier breeder, these can then be sold for the NPC price x 10 for a little while, etc.
This should be a non-starter as an idea.
@Noaani I appreciate the feedback but have you read the original post? it just has nothing to do with the sentence you quoted.
The sentence you are quoting is referring to the system that is currently described in the wiki right now, that was not the idea at all.
The fact that you object to it kind of makes the case for needing to do something about it, which is the whole point of this thread. Any other suggestions are certainly welcome
However, the statement that you can always sell your crafted [item] to an NPC rather than to players is not viable. It is not good game design either.
If you can sell your crafted items at a profit to NPC's, then you can just manufacture items to make infinite profit. You can get a second account and just product mount after mount, and sell them all to that NPC.
I actually know someone that exploited a situation like this in an MMO to generate gold, he sold the gold over a period of time and bought a house.
Not an in game house. A house. From a crafted item that could be sold to NPC's for more than it cost to produce.
So, regardless of what the OP says, that point needed to be cleared up. It is NOT good game design to be able to sell an item to an NPC for more than it costs to make.
But I could go either way I suppose: 1) either high-end breeders can get some monetary gain from merchant NPCs (as I believe is currently intended now) or 2) the proposal in the original post could be implemented to mitigate some of these problems with mount oversaturation.
As long as the problem is solved because I really like the idea of Animal Husbandry and I do not want to be totally irrelevant 3-4 months into the game.
While this game is likely to have fewer ways for players to farm gold than other games, that is because developers are working to avoid situations and systems where players can do that.
Being able to sell crafted items (any items) to NPC's for a profit is a way players can farm gold, and so is one of the things the developers would work to keep out of the game.