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
Addressing only this part to share the experience of how this is dealt with 'back where I come from'.
Grilled Hare is super easy to make, gives a whopping +30% attack... but CAPS that granted attack at 15 total.
Dhalmel Pie is considerably more difficult to make, gives Attack +25%, CAPS that granted attack at 45 total.
Similar but more complex stuff happens at endgame.
Variety.
What if there are events in which there are herds of animals travelling by?
The herd will pass by and you gotta have a a group of people to CC and kill.
Could be packs of wolves, big mammals, etc, anything
That is indeed a much simpler idea. Glad someone thought of it.
Moving resources is a great idea and the sort of groundbreaking concepts this game needs and will thrive on.
I say during the seasonal change, it should trigger migration events and players should come together for the big hunt and have a shot of stockpiling those gatherables
My preference for funneling is based on that. I want high lvl player to only fight other high lvl players for resources, mainly because they physically can't gather the same shit the low lvl players can.
And this is why I was trying to see if there's a way to keep that mechanic after the gathering change. And I do think that the additional gatherables thing could potentially work towards some sort of separation between low and high lvls, even if it doesn't physically separate them in the world.
And as for the pvp part, to me that's just the nature of an owpvp game. I just want to push that nature onto more experienced players, who have had time to make connections and have a much higher chance to get some support when they go out to gather high lvl mats.
Which would bring us directly back to the question of this thread. I would personally prefer to push people together, if they want to gather in highly hazardous locations. And, as I see it, most high lvl mats should be located in those hazardous locations. And as much as this is a meme at this point, if a high lvl gatherer (someone who put potentially hundreds of hours into the game) is against partying up to gather high value stuff - the game might not be for them. They're always free to go gather the basic stuff if they just want to hit rocks or trees, and the game should, in theory, support all 10k people doing that to the basic gatherables (as long as the players are spread out far enough).
Well, we can narrow it down to the point of me disagreeing with that VERY last part, but it is, as you say, very 'tuning dependent'.
I THINK we have reached a sorta-agreement on one point, and a clarity on difference in perspective in the other related point, so you can verify for me.
"We agree that with the current implied 'gather everything' system, it would be poor design to create conflict between high and low level gatherers and we MUST encourage the high level gatherers to move somewhere else by SOME means."
"We currently disagree on what is required to make that happen, in terms of actual resource availability and demand, partially because of perspective (you being PvP-primary and me being Econ-primary)."
Hopefully Ashes will pick the one they want and not make the other 'by mistake' somehow. I don't mind which it is, I have new TL data (very minor but confidence boosting).
So IF we continue and the above is right we can focus on one thing, and that is 'the line that leads BDO to where it is'.
People gather for no reason. Just because 'it's in the game to do it'. This leads to massive resource glut AND ridiculous situations where the game explicitly sets the gathering to be less worth your time than anything else, and then flips the whole thing. Remember that thing Mag said awhile back about how lifeskilling in BDO is a terrible way to make money?
That depends on whether or not the devs have made it good or bad this month.
Their solutions to this were:
"Have NPCs buy results." - What fun... they recently removed the competition from this too, because 'We understand it is frustrating for players to want to sell items to the NPC and then realize that someone else has filled the quota so we made the quota per-player!
"Increase the production from Workers which get items for you as long as you are online." - No one's gonna waste their time gathering during the times when gathering is a loss, so supply dries up, BUT they also have that 'price cap' so they had to create a steady supply wholesale (no, removing the price limits does not fix this, it causes hypervolatility)
"Reduce the usefulness of rare materials to prevent the constant bloodbath over their spawnpoints." - One of the problems with massive conflict over resources is that often, no one is actually GATHERING the resources, and often, the ones who are, hoard them just so others CAN'T have them.
But you can do the check yourself, any New World gathering/crafting video after month 2 will just detail the same things again.
(Also I'm obv cool to just end the conversation at 'Difference in Perspective' if you are, it's up to Intrepid anyway)
Even I had huge stockpiles, what the companies did was simply forcing people into reprocessing the materials in attempt of making people burn their entire stockpiles.
Then later on you can skill up your crafting skills.... then sell everything.
What happens then?
It happens that the items have nearly no value, since there's barely any loot drops from PvP or no loot drops at all, no item destruction
Hopefully AoC will get the destruction part covered with wars and sea pvp that will destroy ships.
We need good material sinks, destruction is great for that.
Consumables are also fantastic as sinks, could be specialized ammo, siege weapons, spells, rituals, healing kits, food that offer boosts
Having pets and mounts which consume food and items for upgrading them is also amazing, in the game Dungeon Siege 2 you could have pets who could eat even swords and armors, that would upgrade the pet in a way or other
Having NPC vendors, guards, serfs who actually consume food, materials or gold is also great
If the materials are flowing, being consumed and destroyed then the game is fine
The problems start when stockpiles start growing too fast and too much
In my experience, this is a supply problem, not a demand/sink problem.
As long as the demand is high, ESPECIALLY because of a sink, more people will consider gathering the materials to be worth their time.
These people will not coordinate. It will just be 24/7 'locusts descending on the gatherables'. PvP only redistributes WHO leaves the area with the gatherables, it does not prevent the gatherables from being gathered.
Maybe this was the simpler way to explain it actually, @NiKr.
If the supply is very high because the spawnpoints are high, the sinks don't matter. Production 'hits capacity'. Either because RMT players are 'technically legit until you catch a specific thing happening' or because there are enough players to gather things and very large incentive to do it.
Economically it is impossible for consumption to outstrip supply by increasing CONSUMPTION. You will just always end up 'raising it all the way to the supply limit'.
Therefore fiddling with the supply limit should be done entirely arbitrarily relative to THAT, and should be based on what you want the game/crafting loop to feel like. Especially since the tree placement by nature will only reach a certain density.
2 Logs per Tree vs 20 logs per tree... doesn't matter at all.
Players would have some warning ahead of time which would let them either transfer those goods to a different place (most likely using caravans that have a potential sink) or just use them up for crafting/processing. This would obviously require deconstruction to have a sink in it, but I'm assuming it already does.
This, in theory, would put some strain on the big guild (or just hardcore player) hoarders, while pushing the more casual crowd to just not store up too much of their stuff at any given time.
There's the potential issue of this system colliding with the planned seasonality of resources, but we could chuck that up to the risk vs reward ideology. Want to upsell your goods in the offseason? You either gotta successfully move them if the disaster comes or just risk it and pray that the disaster doesn't come at all.
And those disasters could be linked to overharvesting (at the endpoint of that mechanic of course) or maybe a huge boss spawning or anything like that. And iirc Intrepid are already planning to have weather effects linked to those kinds of events, so this would just be an additional point in the system that would also prop up some other systems.
Or do you think that players would just rage at the game destroying their shit "for no reason"?
And we'll have to test it all out in alpha2 and push the system to its brink as much as possible.
That would require a whole other thread just to ask.
My EXPERIENCE tells me this would make people mad as hell and instantly have them work to convert everything they could into 'securities'. Either by gathering stuff that somehow isn't subject to this system, or processing it into a form that isn't affected.
Beware of stacking systems to solve problems you create by wanting a specific type of gameplay. The taller the Jenga Tower, the more likely some Blade will topple the whole thing.
Requested Data.
While this is true, consider something relative to what you just did yourself with the question of the 'decay system'.
Let's assume that the Econ/Node devs have multiple models of how they can achieve a reasonable gameplay (they must, given that I have multiple, and you have multiple also).
But each of those relies on something that they don't know the general player positivity towards (even with my data and experience I am not quite arrogant ENOUGH to say I know, every game's interested demographic is different).
We can MAYBE, just MAYBE help them fast-track a bit with our discussions. I can tell you from my years in software that this is helpful. I CAN solve your problem five different ways but ALL five have stuff in them that COULD be a dealbreaker for your goals and the more I know which are dealbreakers, the faster I can iterate.
If everyone in this thread gave the same 'yeah 33% group 67% soloable' for gathering nodes, if it were me I'd just pick whatever model worked best with that. That WM is gonna need tuning, might as well get a head start.
FYI Intrepid if you're paying attention to this since I didn't give my own...
Paladin - Doesn't care, leaves economy to me.
Summoner - 40-50%
Bard - no upper limit, if she's alone she'll probably be fishing
Fighter - 35-40%
Rogue - 35-50% (our rogue is a StrifeLord)
Mage - has OCD, considers opinion to be too biased to be helpful
Fighter2 - Unlikely to play this game now
Cleric (self) - 40-50%
I hope Intrepid gets enough alpha2 players to properly test these kinds of big scale systems, even if on a 1/3-1/2 scale. Shitty tuning on release could result in horrible early economy that would most likely create a huge divide between the hardcores and the casuals. Well, even bigger than what it would've already been.
I think it will be somewhat fine since the Alpha map is smaller.
We already have... I think five large 'Alpha Guilds', by my recollection. And I mean properly large.
We just have to count on them to be properly pushing/ruthless.
I've seen at least two on the server I played on in Alpha-1, and we should only need one or two per region.
For clarity when I say large I only mean around this size.