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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Regarding Animal Husbandry.....one weird question:
Schmuky
Member
Morning! So for the last few weeks I was thinking about a potential problem with Animal Husbandry, wanted to ask about it in the livestream, but decided to put it as a forum post first.
So, as far as I understand, genetics will play a big role in how the mounts/pets players will make in game. Its going to decide both the looks of a mount and its stats.
My question is this: Can we castrate mounts before selling them? I know its a weird question! However, when you have genetics involved, its quite valid.
If I spend hours to craft a mount with legendary stats and a unique look, I dont want its genome to go on the market and have someone just copy it. It's like a "recipe" i developed.
Imagine if buying a sword on the market lets to copy the sword yourself. Makes no sense right?
I think there should be a way in the animal husbandry menu to permanently "snip-snip" the mount's ability to pass its genes. What do you all think?
So, as far as I understand, genetics will play a big role in how the mounts/pets players will make in game. Its going to decide both the looks of a mount and its stats.
My question is this: Can we castrate mounts before selling them? I know its a weird question! However, when you have genetics involved, its quite valid.
If I spend hours to craft a mount with legendary stats and a unique look, I dont want its genome to go on the market and have someone just copy it. It's like a "recipe" i developed.
Imagine if buying a sword on the market lets to copy the sword yourself. Makes no sense right?
I think there should be a way in the animal husbandry menu to permanently "snip-snip" the mount's ability to pass its genes. What do you all think?
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Comments
Not saying that there shouldn't be an option to prevent future breeding of your animals, but I don't think it's that big of an issue overall.
Here is the thing, I agree that a mount with amazing genes would sell for a lot of money to another player that is into the profession as well. However, that should be separated from the market. The market should be for all players to find mounts that they would use. If all mounts will be able to breed, then the price of the mount will come from its genes, and might be way to high for a player that is just looking from a better horse for example.
If we can prevent breeding in a mount, yes, that takes its price way down, but that is fine, because yes you get less money, but the "recipe" you used to make it is safe, so you could make another one and still have no competition.
If we can't prevent it, at the start all mounts will have waaay inflated prices, that will plummet to nothing when all breeders have all genes and everyone can make any mount.
I think there would be an issue without having some sort of mechanic that prevents the breeding of legendary mounts. You will effectively have a legendary mount printing machine and if you print too much then legendary won't mean anything.
Instead of castrating, maybe a capacity of times a mount can be bred. The cap could decrease depending on the grade of its genetics
i feel that is overly complicated tbh. Plus a number of times mounts can breed makes no sense. Easier and more realistic to have an option to remove the mounts ability to breed permanently.
You can't breed royal mounts
Schmucky's request for neutering still has a practical purpose at that point; if you neuter the babies, you prevent other players from making use of the genetics of your mount, preventing them from breeding their own version of those same children and undercutting your corner of the market. That's simple self-interest in terms of animal production; you allow other players to gain your mounts/battle pets, all of which are high quality, without risking them being capable of producing more of those same animals.
This would also create a breeder's market, where you can sell the same animals at a markup because you haven't neutered them, creating bidding wars for high-end breeding animals that wouldn't be present for baseline mounts. I think it'd juice up the economy in fairly interesting ways to have both of these available.
How is it overly complicated though? It's a simple maximum capacity of how many times you can breed. I think that the breeding system of itself will be extremely complicated. Finding correct genes, cross-breeding. geographical location are things a "breeder" need to consider. That sounds way more complicated to me
If you give the player the option to castrate so to speak, then that one player can single-handedly crash the top tier mount market.
Maybe I didn't word it correctly but I'm not talking about a royal mount. I meant a for example horse with the best genetics. Maybe calling it this a legendary was incorrect
Either way, we have very limited info about this system so we dunno how Intrepid wants to balance it. I'd be fine with a "neuter" option if they decide to go with that.
I'm concerned you may be disappointed with the game's planned economy, then, given from what I understand temporary monopolies are a planned-for and intended thing.
The monopoly argument is weird, because any breeder can go and find animals with amazing genes. The argument is: If I spend hours finding an amazing set of genes, i don't want another breeder to instantly be able to steal it when i sell my first mount
This is an interesting idea that would indeed slow down the breeding of high-grade mounts. However, the issue I take with this is that you would only need to log in once a week(or whatever the cooldown is) and possibly make as much money as someone who plays every day for that week.
Once you have achieved 1 perfect male and 1 perfect female then there is no need to further breed more animals. At least from a gold-making standpoint. This is not the case with for example crafting a sword. Once you have crafted the best sword, you still need to venture out into the world and gather all resources again.
But from another tangent, if you have have this animal and choose to breed it with another, then you will end up with a cross-breed of sorts.
if you have this animal and breed it with another of its breed i.e pure breed then in theory you should be able to replicate it, ALTHOUGH, some of the breeding elements which aren't just what animal is being bred, i.e. what you feed it, training and other components outside of just the breed of the animal, those should be somewhat of the "secret recipe" which can distinguish it from the quality of the final product.
So I guess my thinking is that in addition to just the "product" we also have varying quality which could work with the tier system somewhat. So you might make it, but it will be lower quality so might not move as quickly, perhaps it has access to different skills or less skills.
And given that most mounts will be land mounts, or gliders - I think that a quality system could be quite fun. Maybe some breeds are hard locked to not ever have gliding, but others can have the potential unlocked through higher quality breeding.
I think because of the "realism" we are trying to apply, it is difficult to think that way and also properly critique/theorycraft the system from a game design and balance perspective but I think incorporating quality will help to find a middle ground perhaps.
I have played monster catching/taming/breeding games before and in those games breeding the perfect monster can be a real headache, at least for a slightly less than average brain size like myself, whilst the training part is a bit simpler. So you are correct that I probably neglected the time it will take to raise the animal.
In that case, I would probably say it depends on how difficult and how much resources it takes to train the animal.
Doesn't seem like a question they would choose for the Dev Livestream, but... doesn't hurt to try asking.
Even if we have the neutering option in the game, any high stat animal will go for a ton of money, just because that animal would've taken insane luck or a ton of hours of work (most likely both). I guess the relative pricing would be cheaper, if we have that option, but at that point if I was a breeder I'd prefer to just get more money by selling a non-neutered animal, but we obviously have differing opinions on this. But blacksmiths can literally copy the design of that sword. If they've spent the same amount of hours honing their craft, they'd have the ability to copy an intricate design.
And like I said, we don't know how the system will work. You might have to do a ton of work on top of just getting lucky with an animal that has good genes. So you selling such an animal would just reimburse your hours spent looking for that animal, while the buyer would've spent the same amount of time farming that money. To me that sounds like an equivalent exchange.
Then because they can just buy amazing stats, every mount make will have amazing stats, so tamers wont have anything more to do and new breeders wont be able to compete. Fast forward a few months, the price of mounts will be next to nothing because every mount will be top tier and as far as i know there is no sink in the mount system, so normal players will get 1 mount of each type and be done with it.
If there is neutering, then taming will be super important, as each breeder will need their own high quality genes, and the market will have more medium-quality mounts as breeders cant just buy top tier genes. It will take waay longer for the market to be supra-saturated with mounts.
And, its realistic, this is something that happens real life for this exact reason. Yes, breeding isnt an exact science, but even IRL, those that do this professionally are mindful of giving their competition good genes.
Yes, combining a "horse" with a "great horse" until you get a "super duper cool and fast horse" will definitely be a thing, but I'm pretty sure the majority of players won't care about a 3% boost to dashing speed on their mount. What they will care about is what animal type that mount is and how it looks with their character. And then you think about the customizability and you see potentially thousands of mounts, which all require some kind of breeding process.
That is, if Intrepid's plans work out as they want them to work out and the system is as deep as they claim it'll be.
In Breeding systems there usually is a max amount of times the mount can give offspring. Otherwise one player with "optimal" stats can flood the floor with infinite amount of copies. Which would break the entire mount economy. That's pretty much the only way to prevent this.
Once it reaches the legendary tier, this might be very well be 0.
Good question! It's been debated before and it's worth taking up again. I am firmly in the camp of being pro-sterilization before selling. Alternately let us have a limited amount of breeding attempts per animal, so we at least can use those up before selling it. Whether or not I go hard into animal husbandry depends on a system like that. Well, there are certainly other factors as well, but this is a major one.
Other blacksmiths can buy the sword and break it down for the recipe (maybe only a chance for it) and some mats. That's going to be one of the many ways to acquire new recipes. However, I also don't think it's really comparable to the animal husbandry system.
So even with that solution, you’re still opening up the market to an exponential dispersal of high quality genes as soon as one with breeding potential hits the market.
Just because you give someone a Legendary Sword, doesn't mean just anybody can break it down and recraft another Legendary Sword out of it.
The product is not a recipe everyone can decipher.
And even people who can decipher the recipe cannot necessarily recreate the product successfully.
I haven’t done a deep dive on the specifics of the system yet, so I’ll take your word for it. I definitely hope the skill, monetary investment, and talent trees for each breeder play a large role in actually being able to do anything with high quality creatures.
This concept interests me a lot. @Nerror claimed that there was a chance of learning the recipe when you break it down and that it was a source of getting new recipes. I’d like to get some sources on that, if anyone has any. I’m not totally against it, but I think it should be something you have to spec into and should have quickly decreasing “eureka” rates as the quality of the item you’re analyzing goes up.
mark 1:19:50
mark 26:00
Sure: https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Recipes#Obtaining_recipes
Now the text on the wiki may or may not be slightly misleading. It's not necessarily only boss drop items that players can disassemble. Listen to the two timestamped dev discussions that are linked. 3 and 10.
It's possible they make it so crafted items can't give a recipe when disassembled. That only dropped items can do that. That is certainly one way to limit recipe dissemination. But we don't actually know that for a fact.
On a tangent, they've also talked about one-use recipes. Specifically in regards to legendary items being disassembled. You can keep the item or perhaps disassemble and get 5 one-use copies of a recipe you would then need to farm mats for. But again, nothing is confirmed or anything, and they can change their minds a hundred times still
This could have significant increases in price either way.
I also wonder if this would establish a broker market between breeders, where a guild could swing in to establish control and a market.