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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.
Harvesting Trees Question
Obamanizer
Member, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
im sure its been asked multiple times. i didnt see it on a quick look so i decided to ask.
The Forests look rich with foliage and my question is, Will we be able to harvest all trees similar to New World?
If yes, then that is simply awesome and i hope is the plan.
If no, Then why not? cause as bad as a game as new world is, just logging in to go cut down every tree you can see is like a game of its own and just feels....... right.
The Forests look rich with foliage and my question is, Will we be able to harvest all trees similar to New World?
If yes, then that is simply awesome and i hope is the plan.
If no, Then why not? cause as bad as a game as new world is, just logging in to go cut down every tree you can see is like a game of its own and just feels....... right.
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Comments
So hard to go to a destination without stopping to grab something.
Felling an area of trees; the sounds, the feeling when chopping, the falling of the tree, the clearings and empty areas waiting to respawn.. great job..
Can only hope
Yes new world did a few things right. I liked the gathering and the ambience of when you walk I to certain areas like the corrupted portals. Just the fog and lighting looked awesome to me.
new world had it right except for one thing. The quantities require for crafting and the quantities gained from gathering. I am saying this from the beta and first month of the game so if its changed oh well. But during that time period Star metal, the t4 metal ore was basically worthless because of how much there was, while iron, the t1 metal, was the cash cow due it its low quantity and exceedingly large need for crafting *any* metal item.
Basically, if they took that system and made the low tier easily gathered in large quantities and scaled up the difficulty and rarity as the tiers get higher, the economy would work itself out.
i get what you are saying. but i feel that if i see a forest of trees and i CANT cut them down while i find the 1 sparkly tree that is a harvestable, it will feel absolutely horribly from a gameplay and immersion standpoint.
i get that if 100 people are able to harvest every tree then it may make wood a pointless thing, but thats all about recipe balance and drop balance. if you havent played new world i would recommend giving it a go and just immerse yourself into the forest. no game has ever come close to the feeling it provides when gathering and if Ashes could mimic that one aspect of it, this game will have a complete sub-category of players who just immerse themselves in the wilds for a few hours every day with the limited game time they may have.
True and the later game this lack of certain materials became even more apparent making even the most basic crafting difficult.
What was interesting, bots kept the basic resources in abundance... having always been anti bots there was an interesting argument for NW to allow them in game to keep the economy going..
But as for Ashes, I would hope that the analytics they monitor of the game prosperity, means they tweak some of the gatherable spawns and locations to keep it challenging and interesting but within reason "balanced". (not broken)
That aside, cannot fault the gathering only side of NW.. For a non-gatherer type, I could have done gathering only!
And crafting.. well in NW if you had the mats (forget how to obtain the mats), it too was a great system that bettered all MMOs I have experienced
New world for the most part copy pasted the basic setup of Albion Online's crafting and gathering system. Honestly, if it was a pure copy the game would be so much better, but sadly its not. Cutting high level trees was in high risk areas and they had generally less to grab from due to the frequency of other players farming those same resources. It is a battle to secure these resources with the major risk of losing all of your equipped gear and resources. An additional effect of dying was that all of the items dropped had a chance of "trashing". This basically destroys the item completely so it cannot be recirculated into the economy. This is a massive sink that New World just does not have.
Now, back to Ashes of creation, they solved this need of a "sink" by changing the regular gold sink required for repairs into a resource sink where you require a partial of the materials that originally crafted an item to repair it. That should be enough to keep things valuable even at the low end.
Also, how do you balance "drops" from a tree? Do you not get wood from cutting down a wholeass tree? Do you only get a singular piece of wood from it? But even if you did, you still have hundreds and thousands of trees around you so you'll have the same amount of resources by the end of your gameplay session. And how would you balance that in the recipe stage? Especially considering that piles or rocks or flowers or realistically any other resource will be way more rare than trees in a forest.
And now you have a huge imbalance between the professions and the pricings on their respective resources. A flower gatherer might pick 20 flowers that go towards 5 strong potions, so those 20 flowers would cost quite a bit. But those 20 flowers only grow on particular hills and a dozen other flower gatherers would want to get them too so you have competition for them. The same could be applied to rocks or metals or whichever other resource that is not trees. All of them will have competition for the limited amounts of the resource.
All while trees are super abundant, potentially require hundreds of piece per recipe (because there'd be thousands and thousands on the market, due to every lumberjack being able to cut trees down in the hundreds per hour) and due to just huge supply you'd most likely have low costs. And now every lumberjack needs to grind trees for hours upon hours to earn as much as a flower gatherer does in an hour after some quick pvp.
And if you try to counterbalance that with either "not all trees drop wood" or "not all wood is usable, so there's rng on drops" then you'd just shift my suggestion of "find a glowing tree" to "find a glowing drop", except with finding trees you're just running around enjoying nature and maybe doing some other stuff on the side, while with finding rng drops you're just grinding the same few trees in the hopes of dropping the valuable stuff. All while not being able to do anything else and not competing with anyone for the resource because every lumberjack can just have his 3-5 respawning trees and just run circles around them. In other words you're just grinding trees for hours.
Now I get that some people will obviously find that activity appealing and might not even care for the bigger picture of market balance or whatever, but exactly how many such people would exist on any given server and would that be enough to support the potential market demand of "we need thousands of wood pieces because recipes require dozens of them, because every tree is choppable and the balance would break if we didn't have it that way"?
I feel like a lot of people that loved the feeling of NW resource gathering fell in love with the sound design of the game rather than the activity itself. Yes, hearing distant sounds of woodcutting or rock smashing was cool and all, but the same can be achieved with rare cuttable trees too. Except with rare trees the sound of someone cutting it could be an attractor to any potential competitors for said trees. So if there's a few cuttable trees growing near each other in a dense forest, the sound of you cutting them down might attract other lumberjacks to your position which could then lead to potential pvp. To me that sounds like a real PvX game.
Going to mention new world again. After playing that I will be upset if we can't cut down every single tree. I don't see why it wouldn't work. There were huge trees that I thought you'd be unable to cut down, but to my surprise it was cuttable. I hope to be able to gather everything I see. Just need to balance how many you get with how many you need to use, also make them usable for multiple things. Also couldn't wr cut down every tree in runescape too? Worked fine there too.
You wouldn't try to remove people from a easily attainable resource.. if there's a special tree, sure. You will get your dopamine rush you mention too from the special trees that I'm sure will be in the game.
Still don't see a problem. If it takes you 10 minutes to gather 100 wood and 10 minutes to gather 5 flowers, the price will reflect it. Also maybe it will take 1 flower to make a potion, but 20 pieces of wood to make a shield. Maybe 3 shields give as much xp as that 1 potion. Maybe normal wood doesn't make anything worthwhile, but there is a special wood that's just as hard to get as the flower. Maybe you need 10k wood to make a siege weapon. Maybe normal wood doesn't give xp after a certain level so not everyone will be cutting it.
Gathering
a) Need 1,000 abundant mats = 10 drop per harvest = 1hr of grinding / makes 2,000 gold
b) Need 10 rare mats = drops 1 in 100 harvests = 1hr of grinding / makes 2,000 gold
Yet, B feels more rewarding but A is far more practical for making money
The issue is the difference in scale and the balance between different scales. Like I said, if flowers are rare and several people are fighting for them - you have yourself some high prices per unit. But if the wood is abundant and there's barely any fighting for it because there's enough trees for everyone - there's literally no point in having the price per unit be any higher than a few "cents".
To counteract that Intrepid would have to make recipes that require a ton of wood, but barely any other resources. And that "a ton" would really have to be a ton, if you want to make the lumberjack profession a worthwhile job. And soon enough you'll get to a point where a single person just can't physically farm enough wood to earn the same amount of money a flower gatherer would. To the crafter they might, yes, but that would only lead to the same grind I've heard about in NW, where people would just spamcraft the same fucking item to level up their crafting. That doesn't feel good to do, it leads to overabundance of trash items and to a stronger requirement for sinks designed just for that kind of resource. Because if you don't have a sink for it, sooner or later you'll just have people with near-infinite amounts of said resource because the supply vastly outpaces the demand. Which is literally what I'm suggesting, but w/o the pointless grinding of pointless wood. And you can still have tiers of rarity too, it's not like I'm saying to just have one type of special tree that can be cut. These two contradict themselves. If you have big sinks (I see that weapon as such sink) - you need to keep farming wood. And if you need to keep farming wood while it doesn't give you any XP - you feel like shit because you're not progressing your profession.
All of these things are not really a problem if instead of every tree being cuttable you have every 10th one being cuttable because it's the only one that has value. And then you have tiers of rare spawns within those 10th trees, with their wood used in different recipes.
But if you just want to make some cool tree cutting sounds in the forest I'd be completely fine with letting the character chop any tree infinitely w/o getting any resources from it. Hell, that could even be a misdirection tactic. Some dude is looking for a new tree spawn and hears someone chopping in the distance. Decides to go there to contest the trees just to see that the sound was coming from some maniac just infinitely chopping a plain useless tree, while their friend might be cutting down real trees in another location.
All the examples weren't things they should do concurrently, but why not. Just ideas. If you need to spend an hour to get 5 flowers, it should be similar in value to the amount of wood you can get in an hour. I still want to chop every tree. If you really can only get 5 of a specific flower in an hour they would probably not go to something like health potions. Probably for conditional potions like resistance that you could use at a dungeon.
We can still have trees worth more than regular trees. In new world I chop a bunch of wood to make charcoal, but I don't use the higher tier wood for charcoal even though you can. In a forest of trees we have normal trees, then there are pockets of mature trees that are worth more. Then there are rarer ones.
Really though if you want to see if being able to cop every tree works or not play new world. You really only see people chopping a massive amount of regular trees in order to raise the skill.
If they didn't screw the economy up a year ago I'd probably still be gathering something in NW right now.
Ideas like land management- and as you draw resources from your surrounding area- what type of effect does that have on the land; and then also how effectively can you draw those resources without having such a deleterious effect on the land, which might impact future resource gathering for some period of time: And it makes relevant the movement of these players who are collecting these goods from the environment, that they actually cannot always just do so in one particular area, as the land management begins to degrade. So it actually encourages movement across the world to discover new areas that might not be as perturbed as the ones you're coming from. It's a very interesting idea. It's something that we're going to be prototyping in Alpha 2 and getting feedback on and testing.
How will players who feel responsible and avoid cutting all trees deal with somebody like you?
Maybe you will need to buy a permit to harvest in a certain area and some player decides yes or no?
Maybe if you harvest without a permit you will become a law breaking player?
Or players will simply be upset and nobody will want to play with you?
This is like when somebody farms a boss and nobody else has the chance to loot.
And bots. How we deal with them? Will anyone ban them because they do not listen and cut trees?
if is called land management, there must be a manager who sells harvesting permits and assigns a quota so you cannot harvest as much as you want.
For me, once reaching level cap and near gear cap there appeared to be nothing more than doing raids (expeditions or equivalent).. Raids are fun the first 2-3x after that.. hmmm . not really into doing raids 100x to get that one piece of gear..
Hope this game is not similar!
Clearing trees is just a fun thing to do. So long as reapawn time isn't absolute cancer. Getting large group together to go mass logging in new world is a joyful moment when you get to see the effects of all your work making the land barren for a few moments. Having that feeling that you can actually influence something around you like that just feels "right" as it's something you could easily do irl but not being able to do it in-game feels wrong.
Noone will play with me because I like to cut trees?
We will have to see how that would work. If it really does ruin the land maybe there can be bounties. I just want the ability to be able to cut down every tree, not actually wanting to go cut every tree lol. It's just weird to say " you can cut these trees, but those trees over there you cant". I figured they would simply respawn after a period of time. Now sure how it would affect the land in game. Idk how it would be implemented.
Reason 1
If world bosses like that giant cyclops is supposed to be able to be seen walking through the forest, isn't it a little ridiculous if something that size just bounces off trees? Considering he's holding a large tree as a weapon.... also applies to all other raid bosses that are open world. If it fits the scenario at hand, huge creatures should be able to destroy trees around them. And if a tree is destructible, it should be harvestable.
Reason 2
Caravan system. If caravans in wooded areas can only travel on main roads then it doesn't matter what side of the city you spawn it on, it will always go the road and travel said road from point a to point b. But if you could pay more and hire woodcutters as extra Guarda they could be in front of the caravan 1shotting trees to clear the way ( non lootable/abusable and 1 shotting for times sake only slowing caravan speed by 30% or so.) Then you could plot way points that are far off the beaten path to avoid a possible trap.
Could even find bosses or secret caravans by following the path of destroyed trees depending on respawn timers
You're conflating bad economy because of bots, dupes and inability to attain gold to bad economy because of some materials being common. You can spend 20 mins getting 1k lumber in new world and it will be gone in 5 minutes.
Who says normal logs even should be scarce? That's why there are different tiers of trees that are more scarce than common trees. Besides you may need a ton of logs. Really there is no reason to have trees that you can't cut. Idk why this is even a conversation. Those darn indestructible trees right next to these choppable ones. They taunt me while I wait for these other trees to grow.
I'll also add that if you look at the map, not all areas even have alot of trees.
Each biome could have more access to certain types of resources over others. It's part of the trading and competition for wanting to acquire/defend these area's.
But no, they're not planning to allow every tree to be harvested.
You're right. A finite amount. Means every tree. I don't agree with the last part.
afaik, they're not planning for every tree regardless if you agree or not
Every tree nagging at you to cut it means that at its core, you where actually having internal fun with how immersive the system was to live life as a lumberjack. Ashes will differ in the sense that you will need to have it as a profession to be able to do it, so if it's not your cup of tea, it will be irrelevant to you.