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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.
Harvestable Item Visual Queues
StewBad
Member, Alpha Two
I noticed a few dev updates ago that harvestable items are "highlighted" with a sort of visual queue.
Opinion: That makes discovering what is harvestable more of a mindless "just look for the sparkles" kind of playstyle. There is a value to not making harvestable things glaringly obvious.
There are people that desire other parts of MMO's aside from battle and like to focus on those things. It is far less rewarding to harvest a "rare" material/reagent/whatever, when all you have to do is run through an area and look for the sparkles. An important part of exploring Verra and experiencing what it has to offer is the discoverability of things. Not how quickly can I find the most important sparkles that will have the biggest impact.
I would, personally, request that the "sparkles" be removed. Something as simple as a change in the mouse icon when you hover something collectable would be about as far as i'd like to see it taken, and with a range that you would have to be from said collectable for the mouse icon change to even occur (the shorter the better).
Opinion: That makes discovering what is harvestable more of a mindless "just look for the sparkles" kind of playstyle. There is a value to not making harvestable things glaringly obvious.
There are people that desire other parts of MMO's aside from battle and like to focus on those things. It is far less rewarding to harvest a "rare" material/reagent/whatever, when all you have to do is run through an area and look for the sparkles. An important part of exploring Verra and experiencing what it has to offer is the discoverability of things. Not how quickly can I find the most important sparkles that will have the biggest impact.
I would, personally, request that the "sparkles" be removed. Something as simple as a change in the mouse icon when you hover something collectable would be about as far as i'd like to see it taken, and with a range that you would have to be from said collectable for the mouse icon change to even occur (the shorter the better).
3
Comments
There's no value to actively thwarting a player's intuition on this front. At the same time, allowing every tree in the world (even of a given type) to be chopped is insane and unworkable from a resource scarcity perspective. The sparkles on gatherables is a compromise for this. They tell you nothing about the potential quality of any drop, but they allow the devs to control scarcity as appropriate without causing that frustration.
I don't care how you solve it, but don't tell me "Yeah, only one of these three identical trees in this field can be harvested. Good luck!"
(1:11:58)
To be clear: This is exactly what BDO has, and exactly what I'm complaining about. You can tell it's harvestable when you run up next to it and the "Gather" button appears (or doesn't). But which 10 of the hundred trees in this field should I run up to next?
"Good luck!"
They said resources will be scarce. That can be achieved only if valuable trees which can be harvested do not spawn everywhere.
They can of course make every tree harvest-able but to drop worthless wood. Being a fantasy world where gun powder does not explode, most wood can also be worthless and not burn or burn so badly that not even bots would waste time with it. Or decay somehow and lose it's properties fast.
Would that be ok, for immersion purpose?
Worthless wood can also take very little space in inventory
Talking about and solving such things is more interesting than playing any other game, including the real AoC when that eventually comes out.
And reading the titles of all those other threads which forecast the end of Vera.
Even that DPS Meter Megathread feels like an old good friend (who needs help to stay alive) compared to these new ones.
It's not immersive or realistic. There's no way you don't normally know when you go to chop a tree if it's at least useful for lumber or not. Sure you hit a dud sometimes, but if you have any idea what you're looking at you have way more hits than misses.
I personally still somewhat dislike it as a gameplay mechanic, even if it technically solves the problem. "Okay, okay, fine. I won't make you guess which tree in this field you can chop. Now you can chop all of them! But still only 10 of them are real. Good luck!"
The only thing that changed is instead of me getting to see before I chop whether the tree is harvestable, I have to spend the time and durability to chop it, to find out if the tree was "real".
I don't want to play slots to find out if the tree in front of me can be cut into at least basic quality lumber. I almost prefer the "90% of trees don't cut" option. At least it's honest about what it is.
A better solution might be to have trees of varying size and age, in the world. Rather than letting you cut down random trees, there's a certain size you can chop. Huge trees would be too much work for a person to cut down. Tiny saplings won't give enough wood to matter. This would give you a visual cue that all trees of a certain "age" (probably "larger saplings, starting to become proper trees") are choppable. The devs can simply adjust how many "sapling" vs "young adult" (choppable) vs "mature" or "elder" trees are in an environment. You don't need sparklies, but woodcutters have a clear concept of which trees they can usually hit, and devs can adjust the resource density of an area in a reasonable and natural manner.
I can't necessarily say how this translates to other types of gathering. Bushes and thickets might work for herbs. There's usually ways to show mineral veins in rocks. I think it would work for trees, though.
I've had this conversation before and so I'm not going to bother hand-holding you through the myriad of ways you can have all different types of wood be collectible and useful. If you think the only way to create scarcity is to literally only have a few trees that can be cut down in an open-world sandbox MMO then deary me.
I forgot that conversation already.
I think visual queues will be present but subtle.
So it will not be necessary to check each tree to see which one is valuable.
But some people want to be able to destroy the decor, hear and see the tree falling, just for immersion purpose.
If sand will be a resource, the one in the desert will be useless.
I think this is a great idea. Realistically you wouldn't just run around harvesting saplings because they would be the quickest to chop down. You would search for trees that would be of the appropriate size. If this were true in game, it would offer a "sense of accomplishment" for those that train themselves to quickly identify if a tree is harvestable just by looking at it without any other indicators.
For other things, like herbs, perhaps they can "fruit" when they are ready to pick. To get even further into it, maybe they could be no longer harvestable after a period of time spent "ready to pick".