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
Ha! I have the exact same thing for bow crafting with variations combing different woods and bone materials to maximize damage, range, and minimize weight. Glad I wasn't the only one that got lost in the depth of their system.
It's a shame their monetization model and server infrastructure didn't match the niche scale of their game.
Rude.
[ ] I actually am a robot.
I just want the same acceptance for my dear creations as for humans of equal intelligence to them, is that so wrong?!
And that is exactly why I don't want minigames. It's about scale and relative amount of crafting per crafter. Guild will have just a few crafters, each specializing in some sub-branch of the system. Each of those crafters will be crafting those specific things for their entire guild (40+ people). So it's, at the very least, dozens upon dozens of crafts per crafter, with some of them crafting thousands of times. And all of those crafts will have to be perfect, because guilds will require that. Yes, and those singular low-mid lvl crafters wouldn't care about the tediousness either way, because they're not crafting hundreds of items. This kinda goes against the whole "profession progress" idea imo. You've spent hours/days/weeks leveling up your profession and mastery, yet your chance to fail a craft constantly increases. To me that doesn't make sense.
The risk in the item system comes from OEing (at least currently). Steven disliked the crafting risks in L2 and decided to remove those, while keeping the risk of item destruction if you want to make it more powerful than it is. It's exactly because I don't think that everyone will be crafting that I think having a minigame would be tedious. If 10 people were making one item each, it wouldn't be tedious for each person (relatively speaking), but when one person is making 10 items instead, it becomes tedious for that one person. I know because I've been that person for yeaaaars in L2. Mats were still rare and still required hours of gameplay to acquire, be it through mob grinding or just boss respawn timers. But because I had to craft for a guild of 120++ members, I usually set for several hours clicking "craft". And in L2 there wasn't a bar. It was instantaneous. And I still spent hours just crafting gear. And L2 required fewer gear pieces than Ashes will, so I can't even begin to imagine being a guild crafter in Ashes if it has minigames. I haven't played WoW so I dunno whether I'd like it or not, but as Azherae and you yourself stated in later comments, it's about the community and the reputation you get from being a crafter. Spending those hours crafting same gear in L2 wasn't tedious to me, because I knew that people spent even more time acquiring those items and that my work would be highly appreciated. I didn't need some simplistic minigame to make the process fun and rewarding, because the reward was me providing gear for my guildies.
If anything, I'd say have the minigames work the other way around. The lower the crafting lvl of the crafter, the more minigames you have in crafting. All the casual crafters will have their fun with playing minigames once a day or rarer, while all the hardcore guild crafters won't have their crafting time prolonged by unneeded mechanics.
I won't be able to make my food and eat during those times.
There is literally nothing you cannot make a bot to do.
Especially in this age when the underlying structures required for making bots are easily available, either custom ones that have been built over time due to all the other games, or just extremely boilerplate that is outright available on GitHub.
The only way to defeat bots is to make systems that require a person to think or grow (their character, separately from the system that then uses that growth), not just 'react'.
Well, I believe the crafting-related professions are broken down into 3 categories. Gathering, Processing, and Crafting. For gathering and processing, I wouldn't include a mini-game. Perhaps something like the lumberjack reference in one of the earlier posts. Crafting actual items though I would say is a lot greater than 10% I would guess around 30%+.
I would fully expect high-end guilds to require the gear to be the best they can make but there are practical limitations. If they only have enough resources to make 40 capes with fire resistance and they kind of mess up 3 of them without time or gold to get more someone will wear the 93% success fire res cape.
A more practical solution could be to allow people to put 10x (or whatever value) more resources to get whatever result they have 10x in a row from doing it a single time? Sort of just a bandaid fix but I can't imagine crafting items thousands of times with a menu to be fun either. Might just need more crafters in the game because at the end of the day doing anything thousands of times isn't going to be fun. Reducing the effort it takes to lessen the pain seems like a bandaid too.
Hopefully, that would drive prices up and you'd make a lot of gold but I agree it doesn't really solve the issue
In my mind, it's like learning to boil, scramble, frying, soft boiling, and souffle with an egg.
Just because you have mastered the easier steps doesn't make the next one less challenging. Just because you are able to do something doesn't make it easy. Your chance to fail increases only by trying harder things. I enjoy that path of progression.
This is of course a matter of preference in games. Survival games use an inverted difficulty curve a lot of time. The beginning is hard and you need everything and are weak but once you have a base, supplies, and weapons the game becomes easy in the end.
This is a good point I hadn't thought about. Thanks for the perspective. I agree that the burden is multiplicatively larger on those large guild crafters and high-skill crafters. Hopefully, they could leverage that to make enough gold to make it worth it. I fully expect ashes to go with the menu-style crafting and I hope they have instant craft times and the ability to craft as many items at the same time as you would like.
Yeah, I think the best part and the part most people agree on is the community aspect. It is a great feeling to bring something important to the table and help your guildies in a tangible way. When people know you for your craft and offer you gold to do what you do best. The social aspect is such a great part of MMOs and where they really shine.
I like that solution but I think we need a solution that solves the issue of the crafter being stuck crafting for hours when they would rather not be. Originally I thought of this idea because I thought it could be fun but the real-life application of forcing a guild crafter to play a mini-game for hours against their will does sound horrific. I'm going to have to think about this one.
Maybe your average success rate could raise your auto-succeed skill so once you make X amount of perfect crafts you can auto-succeed a perfect craft on a particular item? That could give an interesting learning curve but once you've mastered the technique you can pump them out instantly.
Thanks for all your comments! Really valuable perspective and has helped me gain a new understanding!
It's true
This is how things are in other MMOs (with poor crafting systems), and I don't think it should be the goal for Ashes. If crafting is going to be a major part of the game, why should a single smith be able to single handedly supply gear for a full guild? What I want to avoid is the situation that the guild just has "the guy" who gets resource dumped and he has the royal duty of pressing "the button" a bunch. In my eyes this is not really crafting, but rather an economic activity.
Try applying the same to other aspects of gameplay: "A guild will have just a few PvE players, each specializing in their own raid/farming zone. Since every PvEr will have to supply the whole guild, PvE shouldn't have needless chores like 'bosses' or 'mobs' because killing the same thing over and over is just repetetive and takes time"
Clearly bosses and mobs are a major part of gameplay, so this argument is absurd. Why can't crafting be the same?
Additionally, there seems to be an underlying assumption that a guild should be self sufficient in all important aspects of crafting, but this will undermine the interconnectivity that Ashes is trying to create. Consider this: If mass producing weapons at a guild scale would take a number of crafters of the same branch and specialized guild hall production facilities, guilds would have to specialize and trade with each other. This is big good.
To make multiple crafters neccessary, crafting must take time somehow. If there are no energy costs (which is a lazy way to time-gate crafting), then the crafting activity itself must take time. The cost doesn't have to be evenly spread between every activity. My solution? For example, with the current recipe system, if the best recipes are made by the crafters themselves in some intricate process, the individual items could be procduced quickly, but making a top tier recipe could take days. Since a single recipe only produces one thing, multiple crafters would have to work in parallel on different recipes to make all the axes, maces and halbers a guild needs. So if a guild is okay with just basic gear in some aspect, they can just dump basic PvE/Quest/Vendor recipies on their few crafters who will churn out gear. But if they want the good stuff, they'll have to specialize.
Are "minigames" a good thing? Probably not if I have to play a round of Peggle to produce a set of armor. But I refuse to believe that in the current year we can't come up with a crafting activity that isn't at least as engaging as fighting an elite mob. Seriously, great smiths banging metal has been such a power fantasy thing for ages, why can't that feeling be captured in a game?
Finally, just like botting will undermine any mechanical activity, so do wikis, guides and calculators undermine any intellectual activity. Once something is figured out, nowadays it will quickly become public information. The more complex the activity is made, the less people will want to figure it out themselves and eventually a tool will be made that just tells the player what to do. And now if you don't use the tool you will be behind everyone.
Hopefully Intrepid will manage to copy the SWG resource scarcity system, where resource scarcity drives invention and there is no clear optimum. The complexity of the system should also be kept at a level where a player doesn't have to open an excel sheet to understand what they are doing. Or at least the game should supply the excel sheet in the crafting menu.
I could maybe see a requirement for several crafters to make a single item cause irl some things would be made by several people at the same time, but this limits future crafting possibilities. What if you need 3 crafters of the top rank to craft some top item, but on the whole server there's only 2 crafters of that rank and they're in the warring guilds. You could say "that's the intended gameplay", but I'm not sure how many people would be ok with that kind of limitation.
Yes, you need cooperation and all that, but there should be a limit on how much cooperation any given thing requires. By the time you come to a point where you can craft the final item, you would have already spent hours upon hours of man-hours across several professions and several characters. Would that not be enough cooperation?
At the end of the day the game is trying to be competitive (considering open world bosses and pvp and shit), so cross-guild cooperation might not be the goal of its design. Either way, we'll have to see what exactly they have in mind for their system.
Maybe even have a slider for difficulty/time. Maybe a master smith could spend an hour with an easy minigame for a master level sword, vs a difficult one for a few minutes
That's one of my favorite things about AoC is the crafting impact! Making THE sword is such a cool moment.
I like the idea on paper but if you can decrease the difficulty as you increase the time it would make it much easier to script for bots and more importantly diminishes the reward by making it more accessible.
I think the biggest issue though is that the highest tier of items also needs to have exclusivity or else it becomes a chore that you MUST have all BiS or you cant come to the late game raid/ Castle Siege/ etc rather than "Wow, did you see that guy had 3 perfect craft exotic armor pieces?" so I think it needs to be the hardest to craft requiring the hardest materials for gameplay and balance reasons.
I think a difficulty slider vs time could also be useful for bartering as a smith. You only want to pay me X?.... then im not spending more that 10 minutes on this, and you get what you get.
Also the concept of crafting races for prestige. 10 smiths race for the best sword made.
Bot are going to be bots buddy. Either the subscription fee helps limit them, and their anti cheat and reporting to on staff game masters helps ban them. Or they are going to be there. And be programmed to do what they need to do. It doesnt matter how easy or difficult it is to program.
Also, i would argue programing a bot to do something hard, quickly would be more worth while than programing it to do something easy, but only be able to craft 4 things a day because of the time trade off...
Also if the mini games deter some people from crafting then it makes the crafter/item more valuable
Having to play a mini-game while gathering in a PvX game may not feel good, although it's already confirmed that some higher risk gathering activities (at least in fishing) will include mini-games for high reward. A mini-game for crafting a final product feels stressful, especially if it is a valuable item and the crafter is not confident. On the other hand, processing is done in cities/freeholds, the safest places in terms of PvX and has a straight forward input -> output relationship. If Steven decides to go with a SWTOR-like resource system with properties/quality for gathered material, then the mini-games in the processing step could push/pull properties with different potency based on how well they do. If a metal has some +str and +vitality quality, the mini-game would allow processors to either pull some +vitality into the +str or vise versa, curbing some of the gathering rng. This would allow some flexibility at the stage of processing, make that step of crafting more interactive and impactful and there is no 'failing' since you don't lose any stats. Also note that not engaging with the mini-game would also be an option to maintain the original stats of the gathered resource. The mini-games could in principle also impact total processing time and other "can't really fail" variables but anyways.
Minigame crafting is infinitely more fun than loading bar crafting so I really hope they implement it in Ashes!
That's a pretty interesting idea. I just don't see many people opting for a 10 min mini-game that's also designed to be 4-8 seconds. Could it be more resources or some other factor than time? I think the ability to make a range of quality of the same weapon is what gives the player the ability to haggle
I love the race for prestige idea. I like the idea of people knowing their crafters by the quality of their craft.
Oh, I am aware of bots being unavoidable but mitigating them is never a bad idea. I have pointed out in other posts that the purpose of the mini-game crafting is "Fun". It also would deter bots but that is just a synergistic side bonus.
If you have to script a bot to do several actions it is much much harder to code and more taxing to run(so you can't run as many iterations) than a very simple bot that just goes to nodes and right clicks, that's just how it works. That's why you see more bots just grinding mobs or gathering at basic resource nodes and you don't typically see bots farming highly contested high-value resources.
Sounds like they implemented a lot of ideas I've had myself! Would love to know the game if you can remember it! I'm hoping ashes has something like this but I know it would be a HUGE undertaking and they have a full plate already.
I believe a LOT of the high-quality materials will come from world bosses and other high-level PvE activities but I hadn't heard about the fishing one. I'm interested to see how they will implement this.
I would argue that almost all crafting will be done on workbenches in relative safety. I may have an unpopular opinion but I actually like to feel stress when engaging in high-effort risk/reward activities. It feels terrible to fail but as long as it is within reason (not dozens of attempts for a single piece and it breaks if you fail) it feels even better to succeed, to me. If you make certain high-end pieces too strong or too easy to acquire they become socially required despite not being needed and you've engineered a chore for your players.
I really like this idea. Honestly, processors deserve some love too! This could add some really deep and cool customization options with gear. Thanks for the feedback!
I think the main concern definitely lies with the late game/high-impact items and the gameplay loop of crafting one.
If crafting only takes resources and not time, everyone will be a master cratering some description. This would mean that no one has any marketable crafting to sell.
In order to have crafting being actually valuable, the process itself needs to take time - time the player needs to actively spend on only crafting.
And if, by chance, they do go down that path, my main feedback is - I don't want that. I'm gonna be a crafter and I want to craft a shitton of things for my node. But I do not want to spend literally my whole gameplay just crafting and not doing anything else.
I like it.
I like it in lots of games, and I don't mind a minigame. But I don't want anyone to get the illusion that a minigame that is even slightly repetitive is in any way a solution to either botting or interest. Those that are interesting are usually bottable (I mean, basically they all are except one specific kind that no one will put in as a PROCESSING minigame), and those that aren't worth botting are not interesting.
Once again though, I don't hate minigames for processing, I just don't agree that they have a real purpose except as a stopgap for games with poor itemization.
For actual item crafting such as Armorsmithing and so on, I have no strong opinion other than 'people will bot this if a bot can achieve a perfect result and anything else is dangerous to that perfect result'. I believe you can fight botting with itemization but not with minigames.
I think it is more fun to play a 4-8 second mini-game rather than watch a bar fill for 4-8 seconds. Could just be a total difference of opinion. It would certainly get stale but I would do two things. 1.) Have an auto-craft button so you can skip the mini-game for a small penalty to the quality of the good. 2.) After X amount of perfect crafts with Y item you can now auto-craft a perfect quality Y item (maybe limit to per day or some CD for end game stuff). So you never end up doing the same thing over and over and over unless you want to.
The mini-game's purpose is not to fight bots but it would theoretically make it harder. I tend to not find bot arguments too convincing because nearly every game is plagued with bots. If it isn't botting its hacks. Sometimes it's both. We can only hope Intrepid hires GMs and/or takes active measures to reduce hacks and bots because they will certainly be there.
Let me clarify.
If you tell me 'If you don't like to play the minigame then you can take a penalty instead, but it will take the same amount of time', you have incentivized me to bot or quit if the minigame annoys me.
And when I say bots I do not mean something that is 'this whole character is a bot'.
I mean 'the person has got to the point where they want to afk craft for a while because they don't like the minigame but somehow have a ton of things to craft anyway'. Then that person boots up a script with some parameters and it runs.
> .processing-ai.sh --config "lb-ingot" -r 60
It makes 60 ingots and stops.
It mimics the player that did the thing. What is Intrepid's anti-botting measure looking for in this case?