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
Assuming the standard is you lose all materials on death...maybe this protection would let you save 25% of your inventory. I think this provides a cool thing to look forward to when you are leveling up your profession.
This profession is going to most likely be the most used (entry/starter) and abused (bots) profession in the game. There are going to be people whose only goal in the game is to manage the economy through the profession system and level up mainly by exploring and gathering. They may never level up in terms of combat. Making sure you get exp from non-combat activities, enough to level up on par with their counterparts to max level.
1. Intrepid needs to make sure that they have all the tools in profession gameplay that allows them to carry out this lifestyle. That include specing into a gathering tree that reduces the amount of materials you drop for a gathering profession.
2. Having crafting attire/gear that provides various run speed buffs, increased gatherable limits, which items have a x% drop value, (could be based on the points you spec in). When I played Runescape I would wear a cloth robe and wizard hat when going to gather because I knew I could drop my real armor and weapons. Giving benefits to gatherers who are the core of the economy and take the risk of exploring the depths of a underwater cavern in search of a precious jewl they heard about through the whispers at a local tavern, in order to sell to this famous Master Orb crafter to make a Master Orb weapon is what crafters live for.
3. Also I think repairing armor/weapons needs to be a profession. After playing new world and seeing how every single player could just repair their own gear (as if we're all blacksmiths) the repair parts becomes useless, (I stay at 2000/2000) never feeling like I was hurting to find a blacksmith or someone who specializes in repairing gear/weapons. There was never a need to make the same gear for me to use again or sell to others. So if I don't have anyone in my guild who has the profession skill tree Repair Armor , then I need to actively seek one out, adding vaule and gameplay and forcing interaction between others. Would be unwise to start a three hour raid and not have anyone who can repair the groups weapons and armor.
A wizard is never late, he arrives precisely when he means to.
But how about regular ol mob grinders? They should be able to mitigate and eliminate too. And dungeon boss/world boss killers. Ya know just create a separate pvp disabled channel where I can run my caravans. Oh and any time my node is destroyed, I need a button I can press to "mitigate and eliminate" my loot loss from my house there too.
Just tell me where Steven is being held hostage at so we can go rescue him. I can arm and equip a 6 man team. GeorgeBlack, Liniker, Warth, you're all drafted lol. Won't even need the full 6.
When this type of question comes up there is a lot of talk about immersion and satisfaction and that this interaction will improve those things. However immersion is not the same for all players or player types.
Typically when we use the term immersion we are referring to the experience of flow. The lost track of time, my character is an extension of me, complete attention, this is so good feeling. Three conditions must be met to reach a flow state:
In the scenario presented the PKer and the harvester will both have clear goals and receive clear and immediate feedback. The differences between the two, and the reason it is so hard to create a massively successful all PvX mmorpg, is number 3.
In this scenario the PKer is balancing perceived challenge and perceived skill when attacking the harvester. This combined with points one and two will probably increase their push towards a positive flow state.
But that is not likely to create a positive flow state for a PvE player. In fact, this is likely to produce the exact opposite for the PvE harvester.
For the majority of the PvE crowd the balance of challenge and skill is in harvesting, refining and crafting. That is their goal of play and likely includes PvE elements for certain products. This scenario interrupts that in two ways. First, the PKer stops their harvesting and in fact gets to take part of what they had already spent their time gathering. Second, because they are not likely to be skilled PvPers like the PKer is there is no balance of challenge and skill for them in the area of PvP combat. They are simply overmatched. Because we don't reach point three with points one and two we never achieve the flow state we want.
The opposite of flow in many ways is stress and anxiety. As anxious feelings rise, positive feelings toward the game experience decline. This then leads to the player quitting the game.
Thinking of it this way the goal should be making this scenario balance the challenge and skills of both parties. One way is to somehow balance out the skill of both players through elevating the skill of the harvester character or decreasing the skill of the PKer. Another method would be to make no changes to characters but reduce the interruption of the harvest, refine, craft game loop either through making common resources more available or reducing the amount of materials lost to a PK versus normal death.
I am sure there are many other great ideas out there as well.
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1. Maybe we can create a system where there are 'safe zones' and there certain resources can be gathered. However, the more valuable resources would be outside of these 'safe zones'. The safe zones would be like 'farming halls' and would require entry fee to be paid in order to gather there for limited time. This would appeal the more 'overall' crowd.
2. I am thinking that there could be a way to cultivate resources at your 'house/home'. And on your garden you cannot be PKd. These 'seeds' can be bought by Gold from players or mechants. The seeds can also be obtained through PvE Content, like: inside dungeons, and someimtes as rare drop while gathering the finished resource. Apply the 'seed' idea also for other types of materials.
3. If someone interacted with a resource (lets say logging the tree) and gets PK'd, that very same tree cannot be interacted by other players for 5-10min. This might discourage people from 'ganking' the ones trying to do some gathering.
MY CONCERN:
The system should not be made in a way where it would be normal to expect that Guild mates will 'cover' you while you do daily resources. Unless we make gathering unimportant and not-fun mechanic, this won't work well.
I dislike having the 'protection' be after pickup instead of 'after a time period following the pickup' for three reasons.
#1: CONFLICT
I think that if I run up to a resource and swipe it from someone, especially if it was rare, they should be able to try to kill me for that resource immediately. They literally just watched me take it, they know I have it.
#2: TEAMWORK
I think that I would like being able to team up with friends or just 'other friendly gatherers'. If two people take turns gathering the same materials, and then letting the timer run down to 'secure' them while the other person gathers those and the first maybe focuses on something else, I think the situation is better, and easier for the Devs to tweak that timer than the other.
#3: TRAVEL
I think that certain areas are more likely to have chokepoints where gatherers can be ambushed, but this seems like it shouldn't be the way it is done? I would like if a player who wants to kill a gatherer has to go INTO the mine and get past all the same dangers if they want the same rewards, instead of 'sitting at the exit waiting to jump the gatherer when they exit'. I think that would be more interesting usually. If you gathered something an hour ago, I feel like you should have at least LESS of a chance of dropping it.
I think a mitigation system could be okay, if it was limited. As many other have said, if for example you could buy a scroll that prevents you from dropping loot, people would just always buy that, and any semblance of risk would be gone. I think you (Intrepid) are smart enough to know this though, and that you would implement something that maintained risk and reward.
A simpler solution might be to just have a certain bag, or number of slots, that do not drop on death. The obvious issue here being that people might just gather until this is full then leave, and never be in danger of losing materials.
Therefore, I believe just dropping a certain portion of your materials, rather than your entire inventory should be sufficient. If, for example, it is a percentage of your total carried items. Then, it does not really benefit someone to gank a person that just started gathering. It makes it so it doesn't feel nearly as bad for the gatherer either, if you do immediately get ganked. This could even incentivize interesting gameplay, like stalking a gatherer until they have more resources for you to take, and provides some risk to the ganker as well, since the longer they hang around, the more likely they are to be spotted and lose the advantage of surprise.
Honestly, the current corruption system, as described on the AoC wiki, seems sufficient to me for 1v1 encounters. My biggest concern is that the corruption system will not work on groups. A rampant problem in sandbox survival games is zergs. Some games try to mitigate this problem with smaller clan or group sizes, but something like this doesn't seem feasible for Ashes. Even a group corruption debuff wouldn't work, since a group of gankers could just coordinate through discord. It is impossible to prevent out of game coordination. Therefore, the only solution I've come up so far, is that instead of a penalty for the ganker, you need to give mitigation to the gankee. Any mitigation system, I believe, would be better suited if aimed at protecting a solo or small group from larger groups.
If a player is attacked by more than one player, then the percentage of loot they drop should decrease (dramatically, in my opinion*). Additionally, this protection would need to last over time, to prevent players from simply running at a gatherer one by one until they inevitably kill them. This protection could be a buff that is removed when a player becomes a combatant. Thus, the peaceful gatherer is safer from hordes of roaming toxicity, and the ganker is more likely to go after other combatants, and to take on fairer fights.
This type of protection could be extended to caravans as well, by simply scaling it with the numbers of players involved. For example, if there are 10 defenders and 20 attackers, the lootable resources could be 25% of the original. This would, again, incentivize fairer PvP. If you wanted to attack a caravan of 10 people, the optimal gains would be to attack with 10 people as well. However, you could choose to bring more people and reduce the risk involved at the price of some of the reward. (For caravans the numbers could probably be less strict. Instead of a one to one ration having ranges of player numbers, 10-12 being the same category for example. Since, the more people you add into the mix, the more possible it is to overcome a disadvantage in numbers.)
*The reason I believe the decrease for such a mitigation system would need to be a dramatic drop-off, is so that it is not always just more efficient/beneficial to out number the defenders for a smaller, but nearly guaranteed reward.
Calibrate the game so that a short, tense expedition of farming resources while someone could kill me at any moment nets me enough money to blind me with greed and make me want to do it again.
Make PvP itself appealing enough that instead of going out into the world to murder the gatherers for their resources, I decide to ambush people that make themselves purple/red trying to kill non-combatants – because the payoff is worth it.
Make corruption something terrible, something that truly marks you as the world's enemy and nets the corrupted person's killer something worth bothering with – a bunch of exp, unique currency, etc.
I'll admit, seeing this question is worrying. To begin with, a killed gatherer was never going to drop all of their materials regardless of how they died – and now you're asking about mitigating that further?
I'd say most of these situations come down to "Was it balanced, and was there anything I could have done about it?"
People don't like the experience of having no way to control the risks they are taking. If you're doing something as basic as gathering mats, and some 5 man comes by and your only real options are "attack them and drop half, or hope that the risk of 1/5 of them going red on you is enough to discourage them", then that is going to feel like a disappointing game experience.
Give people some outs... or find ways to help them have situational awareness so that they aren't getting rolled with no hope of escape. This makes gathering have its own little rush, being on the watch for incoming ganks and pulling sweet moves to avoid it.
i believe that a player who gets jumped out in the wild by a flagged player should only flag to that specific player when defending themselves. if for some reason he has party members who chose to not hit you and you end up hitting them while defending yourself from the aggressor, then you become open flagged, not just defensive flagged.
as it stands, if you try to defend yourself, the aggressor may be trying to bully you into attacking him back so his party can unstealth or ride over the hill and obliterate you.
its a massive feels bad system at current and will be the single largest factor in driving away the largest percentage of people. it FEELS unjust. its not about dieing and losing stuff, it FEELS like you are punished to defend yourself from someone who is Hostile and started conflict.
best way i could compare a more solid flagging system would probably be a simple 2d games pvp system called Tibia. its flags are a skull system, and its already similar to Ashes, but theirs seems more Just than Ashes.
and i get that "This game isnt for everyone" but you actually want to have a large amount of people who actually enjoy the world casually to populate its cities, communities, and economy. it shouldnt have a load of Feels bad systems that are over the top levels of Feels bad when they have no actual reason to other than to the most die-hard of hardcores who would rather play a dead game for 3 months and move on than a solid game for years.
I know, on a personal level, I won't attack anyone because I want to steal their resources. Ever. Killing them to deny the access to a resources spot, maybe if they don't want to share, no problem with that. But gathering resources by looting gatherers? That seems so inefficient to me, at least on a character level. It's a different story for caravans with their larger quantities and that's the mechanic for acquiring resources through PvP that should be the focus.
It's funny how those mentioning the risk vs. reward to gather materials stay suspiciously quiet on the risk vs. reward on the attackers side of things.
I consider dropping resources a toxic reward. For my part, I'll make sure anyone attacking me with impossible odds for me to win will get as little reward as possible: I'll destroy the resources, if I can. I won't be the only one losing my time at least.
if you die you will lose resources regardless of a player/mob killing you. if you die to a mob you can run back to your body and loot the dropped resources. if you are with a group grinding mobs together and a party memebr dies to mobs he will drop loot that you can pick up. any death drops resources.
the risk for the attackers is also dropping their loot/dying and receiving the death penalty/or potentially going corrupted and dropping their actual equipped gear on death. some legendary items will be limited also so some players could potentially be risking one of a kind items for going corrupted which would be a massive loss on their end.
dont think you can delete items i think it just drops them onto the floor. attacking back reduces your losses but staying green will also flag them corrupted so you and your friends can come and kill the murderer for potentially even bigger rewards then your resources
Maybe general resources are in patrolled or more protected places.
Maybe guards roam around making it risky for people flagged as killers.
More risky for them.
But maybe other things are more risky for you because there is no protection in other places.
Maybe the combination of items from both places makes higher end goods, since regardless of which side you're on, it requires some risk. Giving PVP control of higher end resources isn't ideal but rather some sort of balance.
In general, I think if you get pvp'd, maybe they can take some of your resources but not all of it. Or maybe what they get out of it, doesn't even take from your resource pool. Maybe it does? Maybe they can rob you once per 2-hour?
Loss should be inconvenient but not frustrating.
"Is this fun?" "Is this challenging?" or "Is this just annoying"
If you have to creep around everywhere because because of the risk that is a bad scenario.
If it isn't worthwhile for someone to rob you then that's no fun either.
Maybe a mugging system. "You're being held up! What do you do? Pay them off? Run?"
Generally the only option in games it to kill.
One of the reasons looting doesn't make as much sense in modern games is because of how much you put into getting it. In one old game everything was pretty common, so full loot wasn't bad. A sword was just a sword. Then all the games started having epic rare swords, and you have to grind for everything, and then to lose that, well....time to uninstall because grinding is bad enough. Personally I would like to see more common items, where "a sword" is actually practical, and if you did happen to one day get an epic item, maybe that just isn't lootable. Maybe they get to loot a common version. I think it would be fine for there to be a difference between what you're carrying and what gets looted. As long as both sides are satisfied with the result.
"I had 5,000 flowers. I lost 50." "I got loot of 100 flowers." Everyone's happy.
Farmer: "I lost 5,000 flowers, I hate this game."
Bandit: "I get to loot nothing, dumb."
In reality, we can think about what a bandit would want from you? Do they want your bag of flowers? Or iron ore? No lol. They want your food, your gold. They don't want your sword if they have one. In games people will take everything with unlimited inventory, instant sale of all goods. I think that is worth thinking about. Maybe 2 swords is too much weight. Maybe you don't have a flower bag so you can't carry 5,000... only 50. Maybe you can't loot everything because you just can't carry it all. Maybe you don't have a gathering bag because they slow you down and make it hard to fight (or rob). But if you're out gathering, of course you have a bag....which you could drop if you need to. But if you were to take one from someone they could beat you up. Outward's backpack comes to mind.
To summarize: I think the loot drop percentage should probably be around 10%-15%, and node mayors/religions should have small ways to reduce that percentage for certain periods of time, but the risk toward attackers themselves will still 99% be the Corruption System when applicable. The thrill of the risk of losing stuff is fun, but actually losing your stuff rarely ever is. If the percentage/risk is so small that nobody cares, why even have it at that point? And if the risk is significant to any degree, the devs and players alike will have to accept that attacking gatherers will generally be more fun and less annoying, at the cost of the gatherers' own fun and effort.
Artisan gatherers will be prime targets for combatant players. With that said, would you like to see alternative play loops that provide you with a way to mitigate or eliminate the risk of dropping gathered materials?
I love PvP, so ill give a short take from how i would view this as the attacker
I don't think it would be a healthy design to 100% protect gatherers despite that being a popular "fix" that gatherer only type players would suggest, completely opting out of pvp ruins immersion a bit when you have someone untouchable in front of you, and its just frustrating sometimes depending on the situation, in my opinion there has to be a grey area between what is acceptable and what is not when it comes to pvp, not everyone will agree with your reasoning for killing someone whether they wanted to opt in or not. Me personally, incentive is the main reason i would kill someone indiscriminately, and unprovoked. Who am i attacking? What are they doing? what do i get out of it? Is it worth the corruption? How much corruption will i gain? Is there a way to know how much corruption ill get? Is there a way to know what items or whatnot ill get out of it? Not all of these can be answered depending on the amount of info available to the player, but if i can answer a few, that might be good enough.
With that being said, i also love gathering, id rather get my own material for crafting than buy it from an auction house unless im crafting massive amounts of stuff for powerleveling purposes. No gatherer should ever be safe, no item should ever be safe from dropping either, with the exception of armor/weapons. IMO low-level gatherables should be easily available in its respected area, and gathered in a good quantity to make sure its value stays low. Why gain so much corruption over scraps? And rare/high level materials should not have an RNG drop chance from lower-mid level gatherables, this hugely incentives players to kill you on sight on the off chance that you might drop something rare and very valuable you might have come across accidentally, i know i would. Mid-High level gatherables should just have a longer gather time but always yield said item in lower quantities, with less gathering nodes in existence as to make sure there's no huge abundance of them in supply which allows their value to stay high, which would be expected from high level items gained from gathering. Anyone doing high-level gathering will have probably played the game long enough to protect themselves from attackers anyway, or at the very least get away. The same cannot be said about players who ONLY gather, this is why i mentioned the grey area up above.
IMO, this is a pretty good way to look at it, it doesn't completely eliminate risk or allow opt-out of pvp, so the pvp side stays happy, the corruption system and "value" of the item itself that's being gathered would help protect the gatherer (less incentive). And the risk vs reward for gathering high-level items should be well understood, after all I believe it was stated before that the best or near-best gear in the game would be crafted with certain boss drops needed.
No one wants to lose their stuff, but a healthy game has a share of risk/reward. The more rare the resource, the less protections it should have.
Some ways that gatherers could get decreased drop chances:
Some ways that attackers could get increased drop chances:
Again, just to reiterate, not a drastic shift either way I think would be fine and add an bit of extra dynamism to the game as a whole.
Genesis Guild Discord
I agree with the comments about risk and reward. There has to be incentive though for both the gatherer and the ganker(s). I agree with some if the ideas made about having certain areas and or choice of gear enabling this. Higher gather rates and increased drops for rare materials in higher risk areas as well as gear choice on top stacking on this system. Gear for gankers and gatherers having its own associated buffs and debuff from their own side.
Choice for the gankers and the gatherers would be good, sometimes a gatherer might want a low stress easy low risk gather with low reward (low rate low rare drops) other times they might want the high risk excitement and be able to organise a defence more easily from their Guild or other mercenaries.
Gankers could have the choice to equip gear that enables bonus mat's drop but gives more corruption or some other "risk" debuff. High yield and high drop rate node gather areas should be the ones where the gankers like to target the most and gathering parties will need a good defence to get the mats out of the area.
Gankers can still try their luck in the "safer" gather zones but the mats drop should be severely reduced compared to the "rich" node areas.
Basically give the solo and team players and the gatherers, gankers choices based on there own risk and reward choice being through equipable gear that has to be earned and the area's resource nodes having different gather and player kill drop rates.
I agree with this completely. I think that most of the people who are for greater mitigation of loss only have previous experiences with loss in full-loot games. Most games are either full loss on death or no loss on death and I think that Ashes' system where only a percentage of your materials are dropped could easily be enough mitigation so that loss doesn't feel bad enough to quit the game.
I fully understand why gathering for an hour only to lose all your resources to a random player hiding in the bushes can be frustrating and obviously not a fun experience. However, since only a percentage is dropped in Ashes, it shouldn't feel nearly as bad. Progress was still made. The player still has something to show for their time, just a little less than they could have. The only thing lost is efficiency and that should be a great motivator for a player to engage with the game's core systems. Level up, acquire better gear, be on the lookout, get a combat mount, practice PVP, gather with a buddy. None of these are necessary for the baseline of gathering some materials, but the player that wants to be competitive in the market and as efficient as possible will be incentivized to do some of these.
The other point I want to make is that we don't know fully what effect the corruption system will have on the frequency of PKers and gankers. Any complaint that there isn't enough mitigation of loss is 100% speculation because corruption could very well be enough to keep the vast majority of the player base from killing without good reason. We won't know for certain how well it does its job until we actually see it in action. I don't think anything should be done about this until after feedback has been received in Alpha 2. Even then, there are plenty of variables in the system to play around with until it does work as intended. Maybe the base percentage of mats dropped needs to be lowered, maybe non-combatants should only drop 1.5x the base rate instead of 2x, maybe corruption should be gained quicker, maybe corruption takes longer to grind off. So many more factors can be tweaked to change the feel of these systems and cause a change to how real the threat of random open-world PVP is.
Please, wait until sufficient testing is done before making such a fundamental change to game's vision.