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
You have jumped to so many conclusions over the last few days that I feel you are challenging certain other posters for top spot in that category.
From a game design economics standpoint, your concerns are exaggerated, in my opinion, and that's why you are getting the responses you are getting. You might also be assuming that other people are more negative toward the thing you are trying to say than they actually are.
You have to take everyone's perspectives into account if you want to actually have a discussion on these things, and figure out if the thing you want needs to be exactly that way for the effect you want, or if people who would like different experiences could still get those experiences somehow without losing the main one.
In this case, I will say you're wrong. You are falling into the trap of so many fledgling designers of 'taking something you only understand half of' and ascribing the effect to something that is only part of the causal chain.
Or at least, right now, you're not managing to express yourself in a way that goes past that, even to me. But NOW you're slighting Intrepid and that means I have opinions.
You do not get to just make assumptions about what Ashes will do in the future or the appropriateness of their work (Margaret's work I GUESS?) based on your misunderstanding of consumables, and not get pushback. You can choose to get it from me, or from people who don't understand the flaw in your Econ understanding as well as I do, and who will just call you out for disparaging Intrepid pointlessly.
Look in to that and hopefully we can see the direction they are intending.
Personally I hope they go heavily that way but time will tell. A2 can't come soon enough.
since when MMOs are about grind? Since that poor excuse of a game called WoW brought this to the table
Well, I was a crafter in WoW in all my characters, I know what I am saying
GOOD CRAFTING:
1) Star Wars Galaxies
2) EVE Online
Simple crafting where you make 100 of this item and then 100 of that item, is plainly stupid and grindy and sad
If the player who is crafting could be replaced but a bot, then the crafting system is uninteresting
People should be better than bots
Star Wars Galaxies has the most meaningful crafting there is, crafting not only should be meaningul but also fluid like EVE
I am not for grind that is useless like retail WoW elements, but I am all for open world grind, especially in full loot PvP mmo. Why would you roam without gathering searching for PvP.... this is why old school WoW was fun, simply because of PvP and player interaction...
If you want lobby type of game where you dont need to grind, I assume you assumed wrong for what AoC is going to deliver. Just look at all dev streams, Steven is literally speaking that best gearing comes from professions and doing professions is grind. I just wanted to let them know that the biggest gold sink can be consumables and losing durability on gear, one idea is from WoW and other one is from Gloria Victis...
It seems as if you guys are arguing with me only because I am WoW vanilla fan.
We are 'arguing with you' because you THINK this is the reason we are 'arguing with you'.
This is why we keep coming back to "wow is not perfect and other games have done better or at least the same".
Maybe try looking at it from a slightly different angle.
You don't know many MMOs, so maybe there's some MMOs that are 'like WoW, but better', and maybe Ashes took its inspiration from those MMOs instead.
So if those MMOs were better at the same thing you want than WoW, when you say 'hey guys let's make it like WoW', someone will say 'it's already like WoW, and WoW didn't do it that well anyway, and the thing you think was important that WoW did, that's not actually the important thing, these other games showed it'.
EVE, FFXI, ArcheAge.
These games, as far as I know, all have or had excellent economies, itemization, and player incentive goals. WoW might have been good too, but we don't know for sure and we don't NEED to know for sure, because the thing you talk about is stuff we are familiar with already.
Just imagine a world where it might be done better... can you? You're here to think about Ashes, after all, right?
I would rather grind 2h per day for content that I play then saving gold and doing same content without consumables, this is wow situation, it was not mandatory, but people did it for sake of fun.
We see collapse of EVE online economy yet they hired businessman ... lol i think its funny. Not even similar to IRL.
Dont tey and say it is better or worse than any other games economy, because that is literally only better to people that want a simple game economy.
Anyone that doesnt want a dead simple economy in Ashes (which seems to include Steven) will obviously argue the point that SoWs economy wasnt better, because it was so simple.
Well, that's not weird, businessmen don't keep the real world economy from collapsing either, they just tell you when and how it will. Also, you probably meant economists but I'm not actually sure.
There are many reasons why game economies don't work like IRL ones, and multiple things that Economy designers have to learn about those differences before they can consistently make good game economies.
But it isn't right to say that they aren't similar, either. They follow a specific set of rules which a designer can learn, and then apply the game's actual design goals to, deciding which rules need to be followed and which ones shouldn't.
WoW did a good job of this, I think, but the design goals of WoW lead to an Economy design that most people don't want to see any more, I think that is why they changed it over time. So instead, I'll just tell you this. Steven wants every player to master only 2 or 3 Artisan professions, and he also wants people to be able to play the game while focused on Artisanship.
Alchemy and Cooking (which produce Consumables) are two of those professions. So Steven wants those to be necessary enough for people to spend a large amount of their time doing those professions. The difference between your model and the model I know (I will speak about FFXI because it is the one I know the best personally), is that a player chooses ONE thing they want to 'grind', because they enjoy it and it doesn't feel like 'grinding' to them, and then they pay other people for other products.
So, only about 1 in 10 people would 'grind to make consumables'. Everyone else would 'grind to earn consumables', or 'do content that doesn't require consumables'. But Ashes' Economy designer would need to make sure that SOME content 'required consumables' or there would be no need for Cooks and Alchemists (probably Fishers, Gatherers, and Farmers too) and I don't think Steven would want that.
MMO economies do not collapse because of too many numbers. They collapse because of design flaws, and sometimes because of a game's goals, 'too many numbers' is a design flaw. Probably not here.
There are MMOs that don't require grind, for example retail WoW. You had to do main questline and covenants in Shadowlands, but it was timegated, every week you did 1h of questing to learn story and progress your character, after you do it, you are done. People complained about gear, but let's be honest now, is 3h of farming battlegrounds a lot to get decent gear to PVP casually? Only those that were on top tier list had to grind longer, but even then it could be done within 10 hours, this is peace of cake and its damn too easy. They designed game to be easier and less grindy. In classic people were grinding for the best gear for 3 damn months 12h per day, but again it was not mandatory since classic had sandbox gearing and scaling.
MMOs became less grindy over the years, you are pretty much clueless if you say that EQ99 was less grindy then newer MMOs after WoW because WoW had an impact on those games... Compare gw2 grind that came in 2012, or ESO... lvling is easy and gearing was easy. I am not sure about ESO professions, but one thing I am sure is that gw2 professions and NW professions suck and I would like not to have these economies in AoC. How to do that? Make materials for high end craft harder to get and do not create more materials in order to craft item. Simply by making rare material that drops once per 5hours will do it. Smaller numbers leads to more reasonable economy because we feel like if potion is 5-10g its much more reasonable then it being 0.5g, if we could buy 20 potions per 1 hour of farming it would be much more reasonable then if you could buy 1000 potions per hour of farming, this is my point, make economy reasonable and expensive, do not dump gold on useless thing and make us farm 1h for 2 weeks of gameplay, make it more grindy because of full loot PvP and good gathering, it will be so much more fun to gather and prepare for yourself while doing PvP then just roaming and doing PvP, because you are having this sense of progression which is tradition of every MMO, idk why are you complaining about this, MMOs should have this kind of survival/ish vibe where you gather and prepare yourself all the time. Think of it as if potions were important to us IRL, would you pay 1 dollar for something so important or would you create economy much more expensive since everyone needs it and depends on it... Its insane as why New World potions are so cheap when they need rare materials that are hard to get, idk how it happened, I hope someone can explain this, because we should all aim to avoid this problem and help devs create better economy for consumables.
So, sure, since I'm thinking about it, for those interested.
The 'Key to a successful economy' in a game with no Fiat Magarin (the economic structure based on Land Ownership that comes about in feudal societies but does not actually exist in MMOS) is to make everyone's time worth the same ON THE MARKET.
Players will then go 'I make money about the same no matter what I'm doing, so I should do the thing I enjoy the most'. If you find an activity that no one likes doing even when it has good returns, that content isn't fun enough, or something is stopping the people that would enjoy it from being able to enjoy it. Investigate why.
For activities you don't want people to constantly repeat BUT don't want to be luck, gate that behind 'doing something else that the resources material benefits from, and put some sort of item drop within that activity that slowly generates 'keys' and when you have enough keys you can do the 'limited content'. Adapt the 'key drop' content value accordingly as needed.
Players will do whatever suits them, with some random fluctuation and luck. Players who have a rarer 'thing they enjoy' will make more money until all the ambivalent people realize 'hey, that activity is more money right now!' and go do that. Then someone else will make more money. People who do the same thing 24/7 will make more money OVERALL but they were going to do that anyway, and sometimes if they oversupply, they LOSE money anyway.
Everyone gets their little dopamine hit feelings of reward, not because 'I made lots of money today! I bet I made more than anyone else!' but because 'Wow I made decent money today and I had lots of fun too, this game is great'.
This applies to any game, because you can add or subtract as many fun activities as you like, at the base level.
Almost true but you forget that massive loots makes full bags and storages all the time. Then players are not crafting for pleasure but they are forced to craft to make space and then sell their crated items cheap.
Players also sell their tons of ingredients a super cheap price to make space.
As a result the economy sux.
What if intrepid designed professions to not have skill ups, but instead make them meaningul and make very good gold sink via recipes, ones would need master to learn other can be crafted via normal profession.
We do not need so many progression in games anymore, rather to play for fun. But if you made everything meaningul people will do it and have meanig to do it and also have progression.