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Economy and Permanent Choices
superhero6785
Member
If we're locked into mastering one artisan path, I see this causing problems down the road in the economy. People who chose a profitable profession will be the lucky ones, while those who chose the less profitable or perhaps just oversaturated will be out of luck.
What are your thoughts on allowing players to change their master artisanship - losing their existing master levels? This allows players to identify needs or gaps in the long-term economy and go fill it. Would this help keep the economy in balance and not spiral out of control due to choices made months prior? Obviously there'd need to be a large cost to changing so people don't flip flop constantly. It would need to be deliberate and thoughtful.
What are your thoughts on allowing players to change their master artisanship - losing their existing master levels? This allows players to identify needs or gaps in the long-term economy and go fill it. Would this help keep the economy in balance and not spiral out of control due to choices made months prior? Obviously there'd need to be a large cost to changing so people don't flip flop constantly. It would need to be deliberate and thoughtful.
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Personally I'd probably just make an alt instead of wasting all that work. Even if it's an alt with the exact same class, because I happen to love the class.
Hey there superhero6785, it sounds like we're on the same page. We want players to be able to reach grand mastery (tier 5) of 2 professions and they won't be locked in to those choices permanently. If you'd like to give up your profession mastery and try something else you totally can. You will also be able to dabble in other professions at low to mid tiers in addition to your 2 grand mastered professions. That will give you the freedom to try professions out before you decide to fully commit.
I also don't think that the in-game economy will suffer at all if players regret their Artisan choices. The way the system seems to be set up, there will always be a way for people to make profit. Whether the player enjoys what they're doing is a different thing altogether. But if the goal is making gold, there will be plenty of ways of doing that. 😉
In a game with a weak economy, yes.
However, a lot of the time, it's much more beneficial to leverage the strength of your main character intermittently/as a side action, because the game isn't based around 'ok, right now I'm gathering', 'ok, right now I'm fighting'.
Ashes seems to be this type of game. If getting to a mine vein in a dungeon, for example, would be dangerous.
The main character also has access to the money and money making prospects with much less risk, allowing them to shift focus once they are prepared.
It's oversimplification to say it this way, but it's still mostly true. If 'making an alt to craft' is easier than 'respec your main' for most people, then it's probably bad, as it implies that crafting itself is too easy/detached from the rest of the game's systems.
Be careful not to mix opinion and fact, @Azherae. Not all MMOs with players enjoying crafting on their alts have “weak economies”.
You might not like doing another artisan profession on an alt character … a lot of players have that opinion.
Just don’t let it drive a slippery slope argument that it doesn’t work in other games (or won’t work in Ashes).
Loosing progress kinda sucks when swapping but disabling progress for a month to do other thing/experiment to see if u like it better for a month and switching back if you dont without loosing progression i think is fine and lonmg enough that u cant do anything crazy with the economy and what not
1) I'm thinking you'd only have to pay some gold and lose your Tier 5 Master crafting levels for the profession you chose to reset, not start completely from scratch. So making an Alt would definitely be much more time consuming.
2) In addition to crafting levels, being able to craft on your Main means you don't have to try to gear up an Alt. I'm thinking long term for this one. You'll probably need to be (nearly) max level in order to gain access to certain high level crafting materials. Perhaps legendary hide comes from skinning really tough monsters, for example. So if you started out with Lumberjacking and realized the market is oversaturated with wood, it would be beneficial to switch to Hunting.
sometimes I wonder - if there were no alts. You can only create 1 toon per server. Sure you can buy a 2nd account for a 2nd toon on the same server - atleast AoC is getting $$$ then. Not everyone would be willing to pay for 2 accounts - and having "Decision matters" still be important for most players entering this world.
@QuaternionSlerp Can you reach grand mastery (tier 5) on two professions from different artisan trees? like mastering fishing and weapon smithing
How lethal of a fishing pole are you trying to forge?
I am curious about this aspect myself. Though with Ashes I want to break out of my usual armor craft for my character and really delve into animal husbandry. With the information I got early on I mulled over being stuck as the ultimate pokemonster catcher or breeder. Worst case scenario I think being able to breed interesting creatures was more fun than being able to catch dragon eggs or what not. But if I could master both... I will give it my all to make zombie dragons.
From what I understand, and I might be wrong, and I didnt read all previous thread answer, but there will be no permanent locking.
The way I understand it currently, for example, you can be lv 100 artisan in everything, but lv 110+ extra for one of the 3 main trees (gather process craft) and THEN you can be lv 120 + extra + super extra special for 2 specific skills within that chosen tree.
However, if you wish to change it, you will lose those extra perks and get back down to base lv 100. And will have to grind whole new levels in order to unlock the extra perks. This will make it possible but very inconvenient to switch masteries, so the feature wont be abused.
You cannot. Currently you can only master 2 professions in 1 artisan class tree
Doesn't New World do this? One character per server. I think some other older ones do as well. In New World I think 1 character can do everything though, unlike in Ashes.
I wouldn't want it for Ashes. The game isn't made for only having one character I think, especially not if Steven wants spying to be an actual thing.
But as a general concept I am ok with one character per server. It makes player reputation really mean something.
that's the point - 1 character cant do everything - choices matter. Unless you buy a 2nd account which 80% of the playerbase wont do.
Exactly. New World made it so you only needed 1 character per server. You can literally do every profession and master every weapon on a single character. So there's zero incentive to ever create an alt. This also aided in destroying the entire economy, because anyone who invests any amount of time into the game can just do everything themselves. Open world PvP was almost non existent because everyone would just turn it off and do their own thing. Wars were fought by cliques, so there was nearly no incentive to interact with the community at all. It was basically just a bunch of people playing a single player game together.
and people calls that game an mmorpg.. honestly the definition of mmorpg has changed throughout the years and we accepted single players games in a shared world.
The Term MMCORPG (Multi Massive Co-operative Online Role Playing Game) or something needs to become the term and define future "MM" games.