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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.
Splinter Topic: Gathering As A Group Activity?
Azherae
Member, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
Ah, the search for priors. Spawned from the Land Management thread since I was trying to argue there that 'there's no way that the game is going to be full of easy-access solo gatherables anyway'.
What percentage of gatherable nodes would you consider acceptable to be placed such that it is a group activity due to threat level around them?
Gathering is, for many players, a solo time-passing concept. But the design of Ashes almost automatically seems to go against this at some point. Somewhere in the progression of this system, players will need to put themselves in danger, possibly considerable danger, from the environment, in order to get good materials.
How much is okay with you? Percentages I guess.
A secondary question for those who feel positive toward it. If the respawn rate of the 'solo gatherables' is lower, this will make it non-optimal after a certain amount of players. I would assume some subset of those players would 'look around, notice that they are trying to outgather someone else, and just consider grouping up with that person to go gather someplace more dangerous'. Are you in that subset?
I ask this because in my opinion, any game that offers too many quick-respawn gathering nodes near a relatively safe area is going to run into a bunch of problems, but if the majority of players would reject a game that doesn't offer this 'constant stream of easy gathering', then the problem the devs face is 'how to balance that without making gathering dangerous/group based'.
What percentage of gatherable nodes would you consider acceptable to be placed such that it is a group activity due to threat level around them?
Gathering is, for many players, a solo time-passing concept. But the design of Ashes almost automatically seems to go against this at some point. Somewhere in the progression of this system, players will need to put themselves in danger, possibly considerable danger, from the environment, in order to get good materials.
How much is okay with you? Percentages I guess.
A secondary question for those who feel positive toward it. If the respawn rate of the 'solo gatherables' is lower, this will make it non-optimal after a certain amount of players. I would assume some subset of those players would 'look around, notice that they are trying to outgather someone else, and just consider grouping up with that person to go gather someplace more dangerous'. Are you in that subset?
I ask this because in my opinion, any game that offers too many quick-respawn gathering nodes near a relatively safe area is going to run into a bunch of problems, but if the majority of players would reject a game that doesn't offer this 'constant stream of easy gathering', then the problem the devs face is 'how to balance that without making gathering dangerous/group based'.
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I do think there should be ample areas to gather in bigger parties or in more dangerous locations as risk v. reward goes hand in hand with this and I think if you have too few of these locations you open yourself up to the conversation of "X guild is holding 2 of 3 group gathering locations". But as others have said in other threads is that you can't make all gathering group gathering as there are solo/solo-ish players and the game cannot be solely group content.
In other words, funnel the players in order to create the friction and push people to party up. You should always be able to gather stuff solo, but if you have the means or the desire - you should be able to party up and go explore the more dangerous places (both in terms of potential pvp and the environmental hardships).
I'm sure you and I will continue with our spirited discussion/disagreement from the other unrelated thread about why the Pyramid structure is too simplistic/fails and how best to modify the flaws out of it.
Or do you disagree with the funnel function as a whole? And if yes, then how'd you link gathering to soft friction, if even do that at all?
The funnel function creates what we call 'hypervolatility', and incentivizes developers to make that gear/skill type that lets the player gather MORE of something. This can be offset by how you design the gathering space but the current design of Ashes can't do this because they are at 'gather whatever you see', and it will annoy certain players.
Hypervolatility is a decently long explanation and doesn't have any strong real-world parallels, so let me know if you want it. The tl;dr will not do it justice this time, and you can expect to have a lot of reactions where we go back and forth until we reach 'the end reason why it is bad' after exhausting multiple 'modifications to fix it'.
I've got time, and data collection threads don't need anyone else to read anything but the first post for context, so I'm good with it.
And would a solution of "gather different" rather than "more" work? So that a lvl5 lumberjack fells a tree and gets 5 wood, while lvl20 gets 3 proper wood and 5 bark and lvl50 gets 2 pristine wood, 4 pure bark and 3 sap.
Any recipe that needs wood can use all those versions of wood, with slightly different results in the quality of the final product, but the low lvl player's quantity of wood would still be valuable for times when you just need a ton of wood (namely sieges, plain ships and caravans, node stuff).
You could then apply the surveying system to different trees that gave you not just "proper wood" but "proper oak wood", which would in turn has its own addition to the recipe's result.
If this still falls under the issues of "hypervolatility", then yeah, I'd like a proper explanation for it so that I could better understand why the system would still be broken.
Alright, here we go. What you suggested is step one of the usual 'path to fixing it' and it DOES work when applied in terms of everything else, the issue is that it slowly destroys the funnel itself. I might start from the 'wrong side' of this relative to where you are, so bear with me.
The very idea that there is a situation where someone needs 'a ton of a resource' is what leads to hypervolatility.
We have to look at both a player's enjoyment of 'being a low level Artisan' and 'the Economic effect', and these are usually opposed.
1. For it to be POSSIBLE for a large amount of product to be available EVER in a quick enough timeframe to not cause the price to skyrocket as soon as demand rises, the number of spawns/available points for collecting this item must be very large. (LL Artisan effect, good, Econ Effect, sorta bad, but not in Ashes)
2. For it to be even remotely difficult for a rival to control/gouge anyone or anything needing that large amount of product, the number of spawns OR the amount of it that is stored must be even higher than that.
3. Players do not coordinate in these situations effectively, because of the first two points. They go collect things and then either hoard them through market glut (bad, both sides) or someone with more money buys it up to hoard it during undercutting from any undercoordinated player (debatable).
The result of this is hypervolatility. The supply is usually either VERY high (because people think the price is fair and they all go collect it at once, bringing the price down), or it's super low (because people are hoarding it trying to get a better price). Note again that this only happens BECAUSE 'there was a large amount of demand for something that many people can easily collect'. The price goes wild in unregulated economy. This is the 'bottom of the pyramid'.
The solution to this at the END of reasoning is almost always 'this bottom layer of the pyramid should not exist'. There should not be ANY item that is both plentiful and subject to massive fluctuations in demand, in a game economy. You can do 'plentiful with constant steady demand' and 'Rare with spikes in demand'.
The next stage is usually to think 'well what if we make the bottom layer items processable into upper layer items'. This is an abstraction only and does not affect the situation.
Could the WM control those quest and building values in order to keep up the demand at a steady lvl. And once the WM sees that players are starting to build ships/siege mechs/caravans in big numbers, it could potentially lessen the system-based demand to counterweigh the player-based one rising.
If I understand BDO's market system even just a tiny bit correctly, this would be somewhat similar to BDO's system but in a much better way than just limiting floor and ceiling of prices.
This does not change player behaviour significantly in the games I play that has similar systems.
In fact it once again does the opposite. Remember the hoarding part of the issue. Also, these quests have no useful economic impact in their base form, they would simply lead to another MORE complex situation of 'the devs having to constantly fine-tune demand', which I would argue is worse than what BDO does because it's unpredictable and unpredictability leads economic actors to hoard even harder.
But I will ask you for a more specific example of what you mean, for that.
Assume I mine enough Iron for 20 Iron Ingots. I put it in my storage. I do this 15 times because I like mining.
Gimme a condition for the quest spawn, a reward structure, and a frequency.
From my side this is how I see it. Anything rewarding, I either hand in my 20 ingots for the reward, or sell them at a markup to people who want to do the quest. High frequency is back where we started. Quest spawn conditions, however, are possible. It's just way more WORK than just... using the waterfall instead of the funnel, and I don't know who exactly is happier except the person who would probably be happier playing a different game.
I saw it as smth like this.
WM looks at how many basic mats get harvested in a period of time (say a day). It tracks those mats' usage, be it purely storage or crafting or node donations. At the start of the next period the WM determines whether too much of some basic mat has been harvested in the previous period (this would already be happening within the system, due to the land management mechanics). And if those mats went into storage instead of being used, the WM would set the reward for tasks just a bit higher than the node's and its neighbors' market price.
In theory this would push the casual masses to give their stored mats to the node and anyone who doesn't have those mats would probably go and try harvesting some to make a nice profit. This would have some influence on the land management system (need more info to know which exact influence it would be) and could potentially result in the change of resource availability for the next period of time.
If the availability lessens, the regional prices might rise a bit, which could encourage transport from other nodes, which would in turn influence WM actions in that region. So now node 1 has a lower amount of some basic mat, node 2 is now transferring that mat to node 1 which leads the WM to push the reward for the mat in node2 during the next time period. And in theory this would create a net of moving mats, with nodes constantly going from lower to higher availability values of said mats, all while people still need those mats to craft stuff.
And the bigger interconnectedness of this net should theoretically limit the ability of some group of people to abuse the system in a huge way. Though obviously it would have to be tested and balanced extensively.
And I thought that the WM would just be a properly written AI system that would just react to and lead player actions in some directions through different means. So it would still be dev control, but less direct than in BDO (unless that's exactly the system that BDO is using?).
To me, it's really hard to talk about gathering without knowing about the rate at which materials are consumed.
Archeage is a good example of this - I used almost a hundred thousand wood and stone to build my property up. In most games, using this much of a given resource is not something an individual player would do.
Archeage was full of easy gatherables. They maintained a fairly static price for the duration that I played the game, due in part to the fact that people churned through resources so quickly.
The other thing to keep in mind is the value that turning gathering in to a primarily group activity will have on caravans. If it takes a player 10 hours to fill a caravan up, the value of that caravan is 10 hours. If it takes a group 10 hours to fill a caravan up, the value of that caravan is 80 hours.
This drastically shifts the risk/reward factor of attacking a caravan, since the only actual currency in an MMO is time.
You've just described a system that would be gamed relatively easily, which THEN forces additional developer intervention.
That's literally the sort of thing that ends up in a YouTube video.
"Hey guys if you notice that there's a lot of quests for X Item, hand in a bunch of them but ALSO gather a ton of them tomorrow and don't hand them it, it's a bigger profit."
This information doesn't spread THAT fast, but it does spread.
Remember that my ONLY goal here is to verify to you why the FUNNEL doesn't work, not that all the relatively core things you are describing shouldn't be implemented.
Technically, at this point you're 'proposing a system that will be gamed, that is only necessary in order to prop up the funnel function', in my mind.
Unless the rewards aren't currency. But if they aren't currency, then they are taking the place of whatever player investment would generate the same reward. An even bigger problem.
You are now 2 steps remaining from the horror that is BDO (or rather, was BDO, since they took two ADDITIONAL worse steps since the point where I gathered the bulk of the data to support my side of this discussion, presumably in a feeble attempt to fix it).
And like I said, the system would control the award to be just a bit higher than the local market price, but transferring mats would still always bring more benefits (especially if brought to far lands). And if the info is widespread then the market price would rise faster, because people would still need those mats to craft their stuff, especially if there's a siege coming up or a big node project.
How do you see a waterfall system working out with the currently presented designs? Or do you think that those designs should be adjusted to accommodate a waterfall system better?
I just get a little worried if Intrepid can deliver every cool thing at launch, maybe in the future this topic could be visited for an update
But I am not sure what this exactly means.
The way I would like to answer is that a max level player should not be able to obtain epic tier gear by gathering the resources solo.
Yes. Grouping spontaneously can be fun. You never know what can happen. Maybe you group with a thief
But in AoC I would rather form the group in a tavern with players I know and discuss the loot rules before we start. I don't like the "Lootmaster" option but is useful in some cases.
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Group_dynamics#Loot_rules
And because of that it's hard to properly imagine what kind of rewards would these tasks provide, which would not go directly against other means of getting an equal reward.
Right, but whereas your experience is 'hm this is up in the air', mine has the 'there is only one right way to do this' tilt.
I think I've said it before. Ashes' economy is 'designed already'. It is emergent from other factors. They can certainly play around with stuff, but not much and most things are likely to be worse if they don't just put all their pre-known variables together and use what pops out.
This is common in games with high ambitions, so many factors are added to the player incentive pool that the economy can only work one way and still be good. BDO is a failure of exactly this type. They added a TON of incentive factors to make the game broad and sandboxy, and then made the economy so bad that it's a solo game because none of their incentives actually pay off.
Node Tasks should give rewards to the NODE. This sort of game can't allow players to create personal value by doing this type of task.
"Waterfall" post to follow.
In other words, smth less tangible, but still appreciated and potentially useful.
And as for AoC's economy being already designed, I could see that being true, but my point was more about the fact that I, personally, can't come up with a good enough justification for my suggestions w/o knowing those details. And I've rarely gone too deep into design learning to have your knowledge of what the best way for the system to be is.
That lack of knowledge might also be the reason why my suggestions are shit. Most likely is
My lights are about to go out for 2-3h, so I'll come back to this discussion then.
Ashes cannot afford to allow higher level artisans to gather FASTER.
It cannot afford to allow them to gather MORE.
It cannot allow them to gather 'explicitly better' things.
You do NOT want friction between 'The Master Lumberjack' and 'Their Apprentices' in the same Node.
This is how the waterfall works:
Player A (low level) has one option. Player B (mid level) has two. Player C (high level) has three.
All three of these players if solo would make the same amount of money because time is the only real currency. But Player A can be 'forced to make less money' if Player B comes to gather their one option. Player B ALSO makes less money. It is in neither player's benefit to compete IF they are an A-B pair. B should go gather something that only B can gather. Same for a B-C pair or an A-C pair.
The 'Water' in this case is 'the amount of time a player can effectively spend gathering for profit, or you can view it as the amount of profit they get from gathering. Those are the same IF the players are aiming for max $$.
Player C, if in a node completely alone, could gather ANYTHING, so you don't make it that 'the third, high level option is worth more'. You just make it so it is harder to CONTEST. You can make it rarer too, but that's complicating the example.
So player C is at the 'top of the waterfall', taking some of its 'energy'. Player B is further down, Player A is at the bottom.
You NEVER want Player C to go down to the bottom unless there are no interested Player A. But you also want them to be ABLE to do this whenever. Most importantly, you want it so that the INSTANT an interested 'Player A' shows up, Player C goes 'right, that's handled, I'm going back up the waterfall'.
This form of it stays the same with or without lowbies, with or without roulette gathering, with or without specialized gear. It doesn't even require that you separate out all these items from each other. If C chops down a mature tree and then ALSO has a separate, 'time consuming' option to get something from the 'stump of the tree', the important thing is that the TIME is the same, but the amounts don't have to funnel.
Explaining why this is IMPORTANT beyond what I've already said is probably getting into the weeds, but I believe this answers the 'overall waterfall'. Ashes is already built to work like this in terms of incentives, or rather, implementing anything ELSE will lead almost on a straightline path to BDO's outcome.
Thank you, I think you understood the question, based on your answer.
I also appreciate that you specified it as more of a 'max level' thing with player skill, because this is also obviously quite important, but not something I figured most people would be able to easily give an answer for.
Added to data.
I believe the last time we discussed this, I said that I would play until my Alpha-One prepaid time ran out PROBABLY.
Is this a clear enough answer to your question?
My teammates might not bother, though, which is why we had to call off the combat testing.
If the economic design is pretty bad, I might not...
So I really can't answer you right now? Everything is subject to change, including my interest in the game.
If you give me some more specific parameters or a reason you're asking, I might be able to give a clearer answer.
In Landmark and other games I've played with group gathering, solo gatherable is not a thing. It's just gatherables.
I guess if it's like looting a mob, there will be conflict over other players trying to tap the gatherable someone is trying to solo?
No, the question is specifically about threat.
Bearing in mind that I come from a game where your stealth must be disabled in order to gather.
So like, if you want some special roots of a tree, and the roots can only be gathered underground in a cave, but the cave is really dangerous, this would count as 'group content'. Obviously it's not as simple as that due to player levels, but I ALSO come from a game where you can't just go 'I'm higher level than this, I'll be fine', so we can consider that, at least, perhaps?
So yeah that's the example.
"You need to form a group larger than One to survive the area required to get to these roots."
It doesn't matter if it's the ONLY way to get them.
If it's the former (and can be done to all trees), then it's effectively a funnel, because player C is outpaced by player A (and/or B ) and would have to fight him, if he wanted to get that other resource from the same trees.
If it's the latter, then how would the trees be located. You say that player C should ideally stay at the top of the waterfall and barely ever go down to player A's territory, but if there's no separation in resource sources player C would be chopping down the same trees as player A and, in theory, could be just chopping trees w/o taking the other resource (that is if C just needed a ton of wood at that moment). And with his much faster speed, he'd be outpacing player A, so we'd get back to the funneling of players due to limited resources.
I guess that could be resolved by letting B and C gather their additional resources from the trees that were felled by other players who hadn't harvested those different resources from them. And maybe this is what you meant by saying that C should stay at the top, while A just farms the bottom?
I guess I'd be fine with that kind of cooperative gathering, because it would still have a funneling effect, except it'd be present in the profession itself rather than the resource availability. Players C could just run around players A/B and get their own additional resources w/o getting the basic one, but if you see another C doing the same thing - you'd, in theory, try to remove him from that location so that you have more resources available to you.
And this could tie back not only to group activities but even to differently lvled partymates (artisanry-wise). A player A and player C could be in a party, chopping down trees with a two-person saw and then C finishing them up. They'd be able to fight off any potential attackers better, while also having an increased gathering speed.
If any Artisan can cut any tree regardless of level, I'll be surprised (negatively).
Other than that you've got it exactly, I believe. MMOs with fun designs always come down to just 'time', because players have amounts of freedom that the real world does not ever come near to.
The only currency therefore is time. Beware of those who don't understand this. I'm not saying 'not believing/understanding this will always lead to bad designs', but it is definitely a red flag if the designer doesn't seem to even be considering it.
I'd expect Player C to use their higher level to get a tool for cutting down trees that Player A can't even cut. Possibly not even in the same geographical area.
But I would NOT expect there to be anywhere in the game where those trees are just automatically worth more than player A's trees.
As for gathering more or faster... that depends on the design scope. I wouldn't want to play a game where I was incentivized to stop a lower level gatherer from gathering just because "I get more when I cut down the same tree so they should leave all the trees to me". Because you know that would happen, you've met people on these forums who would have that exact response.
Sounds like a recipe for disaster, but I could also just be too 'altruistic' and not like the feeling of it. I don't even agree with Intrepid's plans for 'gathering gear' but I can at least notice that's my bias, since everyone can probably wear it. I don't LIKE there being some 'upfront cost' that you then have to literally push out other gatherers who haven't paid it, and feel justified, but that's psychology, at least, not "I played longer and have a higher skill so I have seniority for every tree".
And if those C trees are indeed rarer, this would increase their prices (especially with friction factored in) and it would also be a funnel of players, because while leveling up your artisanry you'd go from "I can gather pretty much anywhere I want" to "if I want to gather this particular thing, I can only go to these particular places on the map".
And these are the kinds of funnels I was talking about in my original comment in this thread. Just the super obvious ones of "there's probably less high lvl stuff than low lvl stuff, so all the high lvl players will have to meet each other around that limited high lvl stuff". It will already apply to the mob locations and I would personally prefer if it applied to gatherables as well.
This might work for Ashes, but I will point out that your 'PvP' is showing.
Consider what friction does in the mind of a gatherer. Assume that the gatherer's goal is PRIMARILY to enjoy gathering and make coin, and only secondarily is PvP. They're not unwilling, but it's secondary.
In what situation do you see the loser of even an honorable Duel For Spot doing this more than twice? And much more importantly, what makes the situation change more than them just 'joining the masses of B and hoping for the best'?
Just apply all the effects you are used to from "PvP for leveling spots", but take away the whole 'you can't get items/exp from low level mobs'. What happens?
Maybe this is what you want, but now you're 'one and a half steps' from BDO depending on what you believe will happen here. So, what's your call?
"I can't make money here because this other PlayerC is stronger than me and always wins our duels, I could gather up my friends to make the fight favor me, I could work hard on getting stronger so I can fight my rival, I could pay someone else to put pressure on them... or I could go bother someone I know I can beat since by definition I will go from making average 50% gains to making average 75% gains."
Ashes created a situation where even in the MOST honorable situation, PvP winrate translates directly into profit for gatherers if they are pushed to the point of fighting each OTHER. Also, putting pressure on monopolies of rare items actually allows them to make MORE profits as long as they are winning, because again, time is the only currency. They can raise the price as long as 'other people know that the thing is even harder to get now'.
This may be what you/Steven would want, and I certainly wouldn't complain since it would benefit ME. But once more:
"I can just go to a lower level area, my drops aren't actually less there if I put in even close to the same amount of effort/bring people."
I imagine major late-game recipes to require:
5% - identity material - specialized high-risk materials that define the item (limited/dangerous spawn)
30% - "flavour" materials - region specific material that only spawns in 1 or 2 regions, distribution mostly controlled by local gathering teams. These ingredients having substitutional equivalents so players can switch suppliers if needed, but with customization effects (for example: Igneous Ruby imbues +3 Str vs Underrealm Pearl imbues +20 resistance - if the volcanoes are under siege, then you'll have to make do with pearls for some time)
65% - filler materials - low-tier/easy-to-gather materials that are readily available
In terms of effort spent acquiring these items:
35% - identity material
45% - flavour materials
20% - filler materials
So I guess what that means for spawns would be something like:
identity material - single spawn, highly contested
flavour material - region specific 1-3 spawn regions across verra, niche enough to require teamwork to control (potential for oligarchy)
filler material - spawns in the area around 1 in every 5 nodes, impossible to monopolize (I think)
I assume inverted pyramid for gear options at late-game (like MonsterHunter, you just build around a different boss until opportunity is ripe)
I also assume Nodes will have power to influence the types of materials that spawn around them.
> brain dies.
idk, the only way I can see this working is if consumables/dishes are stackable - but only the strongest effects to each stat overwrites the effects of other dishes in that stat. I imagine this means everyone eats full course meals made of multiple dishes so we get a high consumption ratio of a variety of foods.
Otherwise it'll be: everyone drinks Sorcerer's Elixir of Horizons and all other elixirs are ignored.