Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
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.
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.
Comments
If it's 1 - that noob ain't providing shit, because it'd take him ~5h to farm that amount of wood himself (that is if it takes 5 secs to cut a tree and move to another one). So most likely the guild would just buy that wood for super cheap from the dedicated gatherer guilds who've been farming that shit for days/weeks/months and have millions of them.
If it's 10, or let alone 50, then the whole guild should already have way more than 4k on them just through cutting wood here and there or from their personal storage. Well, that is if everyone is able to gather t1 stuff.
While if it was 1 wood per cut down tree with choppable trees being rare and a requirement of 400 wood, that noob would be able to provide a fair chunk of the overall amount (assuming one tree each minute of uncontested farming). That gatherers guild would have a higher price on each piece so it would be more viable to farm the trees yourself, utilizing your noobs/casuals while giving them a bit of protection if needed. And the ship building guild wouldn't really have too much wood in their storage because they most likely weren't going out to high volume forests to specifically farm trees, so, again, actions of casuals/noobs would be more valued.
I'm a gatherer/crafter in Albion and I craft things for thousands of people. I literally, craft 10's of thousands of items every month. Very different scales. I'm talking about a proper crafting system designed for thousands of people which can be scaled massively and includes everyone from day one.
And considering that one player can only master 2 specializations from the whole crafting tree, your choice of crafting will be even more limited which leads to an even smaller scale.
The same applies to all gatherers and processers, and if Intrepid wants to have all of these professions to be at least somewhat equally appealing - they'll need to balance the amount of resources, that any given gatherer can get per hour, with the amount of resources required in each respective branch of other artisan trees.
And on top of that, they'll need to have at least somewhat logical values of carriables in order to justify mule and caravan use. If I can chop every tree and get several pieces of wood from each one, I'll end up with hundreds of pieces after just a bit of farming. Do I carry that on myself or on my mule? How fast would I need to return to the nearest point of storage?
And as a comparison to that, what about a plant gatherer or a hunter. Plants and hides should weigh less than tree pieces which would mean that those gatherers can spend more time gathering their stuff while a lumberjack would have to spend a fair bit of time going back and forth between the forest and the storage. Which would probably lead to those gatherers having a much more valuable yield of resources than a lumberjack would for the same amount of time. Especially if we consider that the recipes would have to account for all trees being choppable so the requirements for wood would be higher by default.
If I was a lumberjack I'd feel bad about my time being less valuable than that of some other gatherer's. Especially if my few hundreds of wood pieces sell for 1 cent a pop (because everyone can chop wood), while rabbit hides sell for way higher (because there's only so many rabbits that could be killed at any given time).
All of these interdependencies and feelbad moments seem like a huge con rather than a benefit to me.
Wood in real life has a low range of quality once you meet the minimum for construction. There is better than Oak, Pine, Ash, Fir, et cetera but it tends to be rare and unutilized due to scarcity and/or difficulty of using it and/or biome specificity that may be far from where you want it to be. The benefits just aren't great enough to most in the business.
In game there could be a few more tiers of tree that would be difficult to chop and process; requiring better tools for Gatherers, Processors, and Crafters to gather, process, and craft with it.
Luckily it's a game and the 'difficulty' wouldn't stop the motivated.
Stone could be enhanced with magic type crafting making it less brittle; engraving symbols and imbedding something would be cool to look at and possibly do. Killing then carving stuff out of Rock Elementals could be cool I guess. . . morbid but it makes sense. Maybe they need to have their 'ley lines' powered shortly after dying to keep their structural integrity greater than stone. Hence Crystals and Mages are intertwined with stoneworking.
And the more blunt damage to it or 'ley line' damage the worse quality [which could be magical damage]. Some sort of crit to the Head would be best. . . or? Head might be good for something on its own too.
Harvesting crystals will probably be a big thing and part of most crafting. They've been in many demos of the world and part of some caravan skins.
Why is everyone talking like an alchemy of tiered eco needs to be achieved? Or whatever it should be called.
Variability in availability is part of Geo-politics.
I like long whole trees being required for Ships. Don't give me 10, 000 planks give me 100 trees that have to be hauled lol come on.
Potato salad is worth 168 thousand silver? What?
That is a poorly designed game.
Remove arbitrary values and give everything proper weight and meaning lol. That's all you have to do. Reality does it better than some random game dev team ---> learn from reality.
And being a bee flying from resource flower to resource flower is dumb. It makes the world small and is a shit gimmick.
Stand in place and hit the tree till it falls. Process the whole tree; planks or keep it whole for a Log Wall or Ship.
NO GIMMICKS FFS
How much benefit does it give you? You don't know. You have no idea about the game, its systems or mechanics which are far from perfect. All of that is irrelevant anyway. It was an example of a game with a thriving economy with over a million active accounts that has trees that you can chop down.
Just because I know, potato salad is extremely valuable because it temporarily increases the speed of your crafting and increases the chance that you craft higher quality items.
Needless to say this is a must have for any serious crafter because it increases the potential profits you make.
It's lazy design. Laziness isn't random, it's systematic. So yeah it can go in the bin and burn! Far from perfect as you say: NO SHIT!
I watched the video enough to hear that. This had an obvious exploit that used up said Potato Salad. Then they stop working.
Over a million accounts includes every botter, every alt, and possibly exaggeration by developers to make themself look better
[because who gives a fuck just add some #s on there Bill; and no you shouldn't believe such exaggeration is rare and choose to be more suspicious of business # claims that are easy to lie about].
Developer Bots are not uncommon either lol; even if you don't believe it there's often no way to know either way unless you are rather good at figuring these things out. The less likely they are to be found-out the more likely they are to be there.
Why it's bad:
Why would an MMORPG have slightly higher crafting speed & quality be tied to food? Did they run out of ways to balance the game and needed something significant under the [Food] category?
Why do people have 167k silver to spare on a crafting boost and how do they still manage to make a profit?
Why is money so useful yet inflated in this MMO? Why is crafting? Is it overpowered? Why is money so easily gotten and thrown at something while still making a profit?
And apparently there are many more people with much more money than that. If it's simply food just make it remove starvation debuffs/ "Getting Food" interruptions and be used up faster when active rather than passive. Differentiate active & passive but still have stuff 'used up'. Take some designer enhancement potion if you want a short boost with possible drawbacks and resistance to the potion building up with repeated use.
Life is much more interesting than the pointless grind lol
Fiscal currency is just a mechanic and shouldn't be universal or relied on; that is relying on a vacuum and devalues itself while also becoming REQUIRED.
If players want to try and fuck the economy and create fiscal currency let them. Keep gold and such as physical objects though. . . lol why do people and devs want something 'physical' then throw that out the window right away? Sword and Shields then introduce hyperinflation modern econ instead of just having Gold and Silver or Iron coins. At least Iron is always useful.
I can bet with great odds that this MMO is a huge time sink for very little actual gameplay and fun; and I won't waste my time on it or have much in common with those that do.
I really don't understand where you get the confidence to say that this random item in a game that you seem to have never played is overpriced and lazy design. Every single food in that game has just as much importance save a very small group of outliers. Also, the video is wrong. Potato salad (Tier 6) is normally between 3-4k silver a piece. The salad it's talking about is Potato Salad Tier 6.3. an item that requires an extremely high quality and quantity of ingredients to make. The decimal number effectively equates to upgrading the item by an entire tier in effectiveness. Meaning a Tier 6.3 Potato Salad has an effectiveness of a Tier 9 item in a game where T8 is the highest baseline you can go.
You really need to chill the hell out with all the sass. You foam at the mouth at almost every opportunity in these discussions and it's honestly getting old.
What are you talking about? Barely legible nonsense.
A million active accounts that have directly engaged in full loot PvP content are numbers directly from an employee of SBI. The game is run on a single mega server and has clocked concurrent highs of nearly a quarter of a million players. It's a low-fidelity game that is completely cross-platform and incredibly popular in mobile charts. There are over 10000 registered guilds and dozens of mega alliances with thousands of players each. However, this isn't about Albion Online and was only mentioned by me as an example of an MMO that would be good to look at for ideas in regards to Gathering/Crafting.
(It's also interesting to note many of the similarities. Albion was a Kickstarter project launched by a small group of devs tired of the state of full-loot MMOs. Since launch, they have gone from strength to strength and have recorded significant player increases each year since launch (which is incredibly rare in the MMO space)
As Steven said in last month's Dev Steam. "Graphics don't make a good game, systems do." Albion has some amazing systems which I would recommend anyone who is a fan of MMORPGs to check out. Like most other popular MMO's it has good things about it and bad things. I'm of the view that there can be lessons learned and ideas and inspiration taken from all types of different games.
Finally. Your aggressive shitty tone is incredibly tiresome to see smeared across the forum.
facts of life.
patterns are patterns and giving everything the infinite benefit of the doubt has nothing to do with wisdom but some kind of masochistic mercy (or simply complete passivity).
If developers want success then there has to be standards. If they succeed with spotty 'good enough' standards then that's fine I guess but it doesn't create a great game or game designer/ team.
EDIT: changed "without standards" to "spotty 'good enough' ".
That's just what standards are about and being lax on it helps no one. Sending the wrong tone is all it does and I don't really care what friction I create; people's passivity and tolerance of poor or arbitrary design as things scale into multi-multi-million dollar enterprises is not how you fucking do things or create a better environment.
Adding progression to every little thing is fine but not 1 game I am aware of has the discipline to keep design focused on a meaningful premise.
Adding "over-powered" progression is a symptom of lack of focus and depth missing elsewhere.
Why are these boons not tied to Alchemy instead? Some for food, others for Alchemy? "There are" Why are things overpowered?
Variation can be shotgunned; with thousands of permutations; but that all reaches a bottleneck and the path is narrow.
tl;dr: Something gimmicky like superfood and hyperinflation of economies suggests a lack of discipline or evolution in the design department. I'm not a saint and the game ain't that good.
If yall love this game then too bad I guess.
Naive faith in businessmen simply because they played MMOs and decided to make one is a smear I wish to see washed as well.
If you need faith in these people to play their game then I am betting such businessmen know this and will do their best to keep their image PRIME.
Bots will be more obvious probably too; dunno. Depends on implementation.
Given you don't chop down what you don't need because of the time waste and difficulty involved (especially if physical stuff increases Hunger thus requiring more Resources) then Low Level Player Importance will increase.
If you have to physically store stuff or it will begin to rot when left in the elements for a month/ 3 weeks or something (reducing yield at least) then that also helps solve the issue.
The scarcity of resources, difficulty of transportation, expiration without [Storage] all contributes to New Player Relevance. It improves the value of MANPOWER.
Improve the value of unskilled/ low level MANPOWER and game will be more fun for everyone.
But the unbelievable amount of grind it required to get anywhere kinda ruined the whole thing for me.
Also, I like having to search for recipes, what are you talking about it's great.
Right now we have many MMORPGs like example with really good mechanics that work and now AOC can see and take good of them and make a beautiful masterpiece for professions and crafting.
All your ideas are very good (almost all
NW gathering was fun and addicting. The high level crafting needing SOO MANY low level materials was annoying. The value of iron in the game was just crazy lol.