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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.
Comments
I have PRI Blue Grade Awakening weapon. With only 3 previous fails (from ANY attempt on ANYTHING) upgrade odds are 10%. Chance of downgrade, nil. I can use items that I can farm about 10 per hour of while ALSO making money otherwise, and try to upgrade this as many times as I want if I can repair it (which is actually not super easy but only if I am being REALLY efficient, I can burn money to do it).
Failing that about... 5-6 times will get me to +16 or so Failstack. My odds of upgrade then are 20%. So if I wanted to upgraded this to "DUO" it'll take me... somewhere between 5 minutes and probably 3 hours, and somewhere between 0 cost and I guess 'the amount I would farm in 45-80 minutes.
Then I have a DUO 'Yellow/Gold Offhand' from a Boss. If I START from that +16 I have a 17% chance of success and otherwise it will go back to PRI and cost me a bit more than the above to DUO again. Maybe... 2x as much (efficiency barely matters for Yellow grade, there's only really one option.
Every time I fail it, I'd have to do some shinanigans to get it back to DUO, but the Failstack goes up and raises the chances. Meanwhile, I could basically still use it so I might not even care. If I fail it enough times, I'll get to a point where I go 'you know what, I'm just gonna save this and bet on some lower numbers.
At some point it will go back to DUO, but I might have built up a 40 or 50 failstack while trying it, which I have in reserve for TRI-ing it. Here's a chart.
So about 30% chance, and I'm just throwing the money at it, and throwing it more, and it's multiplying.
L2 is the same. You throw the money at it, you get the crystals back. BDO you throw the money, you get the failstack and you get to keep the gear.
IF people in BDO really hate 'the throwing of the money', then they will hate it in L2 also, is my reasoning. Each upgrade is a jump of about 9 Attack for the Blue Awakening weapon I mentioned. (which seems like a lot, and it sorta is, but in PRACTICE doesn't change too much until you have a lot of different things in tandem, for reference I recently attempted to PEN my TET mainhand, dropped it to TRI, and I have not cared or noticed since).
The thing I counted in my calculation was simple.
In BDO you try something at a 33% chance, and retry it at a 33% chance, and if you fail both times you end up with a weaker weapon that you can retry a lot with.
In L2 you try something at a 66% chance, and keep going until you fail, and IF you fail, you now have no weapon.
I'll spare you the statistical distrubution graphs. A BDO player's chance of 'going straight from PRI to TET' assuming that they have built enough stacks to have 33% odds DUO and TRI and a measly 11% on the TET attempt, is basically 1%. So if you were the sort of person who just 'never prevented level loss' you'd be 'taking this 1% chance repeatedly' to get your gear to the second highest it could possibly be, but at 11% chance to get to 'reasonable'.
General quickwork indicates that for L2 this 'reasonable', where you had your 11% chance starting from the bottom (yes, this is explicitly NOT doing the same as the BDO start point), is at +8. 5 Successful enchants in a row.
Average loss of items in the process if you start from unenchanted singles every time is by 'definition' 10 items and about 30 'enhancement items'. And just like BDO, you could 'start with that and end up with no progress'
Well, that's about enough, right?
It's moreso that they were 'always easier'. It's more specific, just as I am sure it is in L2, based on 'when gear became available and in what ways'.
BDO also SORTA ditched the OE hardcore-ness years ago, and opened up multiple other paths.
I can't say relative to +16 or similar, I was hoping you'd be able to use the BDO numbers to give context, since that IS a thing I cannot find. I wouldn't know 'how many people would have +16' other than to go by the numbers generally.
The result of that is that all either of us could say certainly is 'whichever game requires less OE for effectiveness is probably nicer'.
Hence my long post giving the BDO example. You can enjoy most BDO content (not necessarily at high efficiency) with TRI Boss gear, and full TET Boss Gear (6 pieces total I believe) was considered 'softcap' for a very long time.
So, hit 1% odds 7 times, except that technically it's a little bit nicer than that because you MIGHT 'hit an 11%, fail, drop to DUO, and then (with some additional investment which I can calculate if you care) manage to get it with 4% odds.
So, whatever the L2 equivalent of 'hitting 1% odds 7 times is', was BDO's 'wow you've made it'.
And if I understood correctly, you can't really have 2 of the same item and just alternate between their enhancement until one reaches your preffered lvl, right? Because that'd be a waste of money, cause failures would reduce durability and you want those kinds of failures cause they build stacks and you need stacks to better your chances. If that is correct then I hate the system even more
But that's beside the point now. I agree that on the larger scale BDO is kinder to players, because if those stats from the steam page are true, and if the math comes down to a "tet = +16 in L2" (which I believe is what you were trying to explain to me) - the fact that BDO had over 300 PENs in a year goes to show that its system provides much better enhancement progression, statistically speaking.
But you didn't answer my question. Do expansions that introduce a new tier of gear make the previous tiers easier to enhance? Or does pretty much nothing change and people just gotta keep grinding the exact same content until they overcome their unluckiness?
We're down to the quick answer parts again!
(Yes their system is convoluted, there's dozens of videos with people explaining their own personal enhancing STYLES).
And I accept that you hate it, because it is very convoluted.
"Two of the same item and alternate" is the correct way. The issue is 'getting two', which is exactly where we are in the L2 side, and why I have to ask in that way.
If you have 1 +12, and you want to 'have two so you can try to enhance', you have to be able to build another +12, and I don't know of any shortcut, right?
BDO's method of making things easier is the usual 'BDO levels' of dumb. They either outright GIVE you failstacks/enhancement materials, or, if you IGNORE all that explicitly, they increase the amount of money per hour you make grinding but do NOT increase the cost of the items that prevent the gear from develing.
When people talk about 'PEN Attempts' that's what they are referring to. It's about... 880,000,000 silver for one attempt on a Yellow Grade item even if you buy those things from NPC. (this has never changed ON CONSOLE that I know of)
What changes in the GAME is 'silver per hour'. So as the game expands more and more, you get more and more of it (they literally just increase the silver droprate from mobs in the same areas).
So 'yes', because lower GRADES of item have a lower cost in the item in question (Cron Stones).
tl;dr grind 22 hours, try once, no delevel, odds of success stay the exact same, Orange gear might require 40 hours for the same deal, or they'll raise the 'average silver per hour' to 66 million and then the Yellow will only take 13 hours while the Orange now takes 20-22, blah blah.
That latest and best at first comes through bosses only and then with future expansions gives more ways to acquire (quests and plain mob drops usually). So with each expansion you'd have a much easier time getting a set of gear that was the best in the last expansion (or at least getting the penultimate one much easier).
And distribution of newest best gear is obviously super limited, so it takes time to spread out. And I don't remember how BDO's world bosses distribute loot. Like, the gold tier is boss tier, right? So for a normal player, how long would it take to get a full set of that gear, w/o the OE?
If it's super fast, then the OE itself just equalizes with L2's gear acquisition, but with better chances. If you're a totally random player on a 5k L2 server and you're not in a strong guild, the newest drop from a boss would have an "illusory chance" of going to you of, well, 1/5k
Maybe you're misunderstanding?
I agree with the statement "So purely in the context of math comparisons - BDO is more lenient to the player."
I didn't focus on the math part of chances even tho it is certainly important to determine if a sistem is "kinder" than the other or would be more "hated" than the other.
Much on the contrary, as i've wrote before i believe there are aspect in over enchanting other than the math of chances that would skew someones notion of it being "kinder" or more "hated", main example amount of time to get resources to over enchant and the difficulty of the content to get them or even direct time gates, difference in power of enchants(correlated to the pressure a game puts on over enchanting for things like Gear score requirements and etc), P2W over enchanting?, and also one you most likely is aware would be the correlation between over enchanted gear and gear tier disparity.
I believe disregarding those factors is unreasonable when taking in consideration the games sense of "kindness" or "hatred" regarding their over enchanting systems.
So you can take my point as "I don't believe people who hated BDOs OE would hate L2's OE more just because of chance numbers alone or the "kindness" they perceived from each games system and aspects"
And you know i'm more than willing to provide accurate Lineage 2 Information, as those infromations might appear present in Ashes designs.
Yes, you are correct, top grade crystals(of their respective versions) were definitely pretty valuable as you said they where the cornerstone of the most important comsumable in Lineage 2 Soulshots(2x physical damage multiplier),Spiritshots(2x magic damage multiplier) and Blessed Spiritshots(3x magic damage multiplier (+the cast speed modifier that changed alot with the versions))(And even Arrows obligatory for archers) aswell as crafting the gear of their tier as you also said.
lets get into some L2 numbers
S-Grade Crystals has a base price of 25K Ancient adena(merchant of mammon)
Ancient adena was most of the time stable at ~2x adena price because the seal stones that turn into ancient adena dropped about ~2x less than adena for similar power monsters
So base S-Grade crystal price was around ~45K-49k most of the time.
Destroying a S Grade Weapon +4 to +5 would provide 2298 S-Grade Crystals on destruction
(around ~103KK-112KK)
a S grade weapon uses ~211 S-Grade Crystals to craft(+the rest of the materials) and had an average price around ~110kk-200kk
(depending on which weapon as you may know bows and magic weapons where the most expensive ones);
So the crystals were almost always close to a full refund even at low enchants, not counting the enchant used, S grade enchants where around ~15KK.
If you are curious about it, some people reached +25 and beyond weapons in the official servers like Cadmus before Enchant cap was implemented
Aren't we all sinners?
Hm... I can tell you that I have enough Boss gear that I could start 'wasting it' on repairing other boss gear for some (there are times when this is efficient, and times when it is not, BDO is CONVOLUTED economically).
But I also go all out on Bosses so I can get into the 'upper tiers' of droprate when I do (the method of doing this is even more convoluted). Usually, a successful kill drops 0-2 of the item for everyone on the server and there are 16 or so servers where they spawn (I don't actually even know if the Droprate Tiers are shared across servers, don't hurt your head on BDO nonsense).
But this is also RNG, so... for some people, it's 'I tapped the boss a couple times and got it lol' and for others...
The Pity Trade is set at 100 items and a 'random' normally will get 1 or 2 of those items from a kill, so 50-70 kills to get the item as a one time quest, so you would just have to fight each boss 70 times even if super unlucky.
On average, 300 boss kills, I guess, so 2-600 days (more convoluted, don't ask)
I'm just trying to figure out who's really worse and this post has made it much harder. 20 potential months for a full set of gear is definitely quite slower than L2, considering that L2 updates ~every 6 months, so by the 3rd update that particular tier of gear would be real fucking old and easily acquirable. Hell, you'd probably be getting higher tiers already at that point.
And all of that in BDO w/o even the OEing said gear, which seems to be the main gate to content. Hmmmm
Thank you, data extended, clarity (in some spaces) achieved.
As is often the case with us, we are not talking about the same thing. But that's fine in this case because Ashes OE system 'can't be understood' at this time except to 'assume it will be like L2' right down to the SoulShots.
I believe we disagree on 'the fundamental principle of why people hate OE' and always have, and will always continue to. So rather than continue to say anything about 'easier or harder', 'kinder' or similar from my end, I'll go back to a more sensible point.
If people hate OE because of BDO, then all one would have to do is offer them something that would make them not have the same problem as BDO causes.
For me personally, though, the only thing that can improve BDO's system if insisting on OE as a generality is to do exactly what they did.
Offer guaranteed path alternatives that then make the item character/family bound.
Right because BDO is terrible.
Like, mind-numbingly terrible. I would never ask anyone else to even try to understand it.
And since James has clarified that the 'point of contention', the 'math', is NOT really the question here, then sure.
I have no doubt that L2 is an overall better experience WHILE doing your OE. But I was only talking about the OE itself, which is 'fair to do' in only ONE way.
"Can you remove a specific aspect from BDO's OE that will make people happy and that aspect NOT be the RNG part?"
Because BDO doesn't have item destruction on regular gear anyway, right? It's almost apples and oranges. But overall Ashes is offering to 'Be like BDO' and the point you make sometimes comes off as "It should be MOSTLY like BDO but gear should ALSO be destroyed".
Which works, but only in the sense that 'more people stay weaker for longer and lose progress more randomly'.
That is certainly a way more reasonable point in my eyes, and one i also agreed upon in the OE thread,
that a longer but guaranteed path to OE is reasonable depending on the limitations/restrictions you put upon it to coexist alongside RNG over-enchant.
Aren't we all sinners?
I think I linked this thread to you before, but I'll do it again just in case. https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/52447/a-suggestion-for-crafting-decay-enchanting-system#latest
Just yet another of my suggestions trying to find a compromise between different systems, while trying to uphold the other systems.
I'm going to bed now so just as a final message, I definitely agree that BDO's OEing system is kinder to players, that both systems are definitely bad if you dislike gambling and that BDO is so damn awefuly designed
A lot of C-B grade ones(which as you might know would equate to S grade +4-10), some A Grade ones(equanting to +12 or +16 S-grade ones) and about a dozen S grade ones, about 2 S80 ones that i have in memory. And yes absolute majority of those were in the hands of Big RMT Groups, thankfully enchant cheating wasn't a thing in the officials.
Aren't we all sinners?
I know people who quit archage cause there item broke when they failed an upgrade
Rng system on item break is realy shit system tbh aswell most RNG systems are terrible tbh.
using over enchanting aswell as a item removal system isnt good too either tbh. it comes down to how many people breaking there gear via over enchanting to items being crafted. If for what ever reason everyone gets to the point of enchant level there happy with (aka the point they dont think it worth risking any further) is the time the market stops for crafted gear since there no longer gear being broken but gear is constantly being added.
I saw many quitting after breaking their gear in AA aswell, but the absolute majority of the ones i knew were because the enchants were literally gated by the cash shop and they wanted an excuse to leave.
it actually doesn't matter "how many people are breaking" because a single person/group can go around breaking alot of items for themselves in the pursue of more power, power is one of the strongest motivators out there you know?
So "everyone gets to the point of enchant level there happy with" isn't a thing without a cap and alot of people only become happy with it reaching said cap. The higher/harder to reach the cap is the stronger the market is and longer it lasts at said strength.
Aren't we all sinners?
As James pointed out above, even lower super OEd gear tiers would be equal in strength to mid-high OEd top tier gear, on top of them being cheaper to use because their soulshots are way cheaper.
It's just that L2's OEing always puts a strain on the crafting process of the whole server, while obviously BDO's approach is just "go farm enhancement items or p2w", so there's no strain on anything outside of mob respawns (I'd assume channels deal with that somewhat) which lets the game to have a yet another insanely rare stage of upgrade.
So this kinda goes back to the "you want bdo, but with OE destruction on top" comment. I prefer a crafting system that doesn't stop producing stuff and it seems like BDO's does (? correct me if I'm wrong or if this doesn't even apply). So if Intrepid finds a way to perpetuate item production w/o rng OE destruction - I'll be fine with that. Durability loss seems like it might do that, though that would obviously have to be tested and tuned properly.
Agreed.
BDO used to have the form of this where it actually involved crafting if you had TET gear, but moved away from that because their boss drops are instant.
I was going to go 'I shouldn't derail about this' but then I realized the topic of the thread, so I absolutely SHOULD, especially since we are this far in.
BDO's economy for a person who wants the game to involve player driven economic behaviour, is definitionally bad.
1. Trading is impossible so everything goes through the Central Market
2. The Central Market prices are 'fixed' and their ranges to be manually adjusted by the devs when they are doing one of their 'update the game, overhaul the economy!' updates.(this doesn't always happen)
3. Gearwise, players create minimal items of value, and generally these are created at a loss if sold to other players (they moved away from this over the years basically)
4. The production pipelines are all messed up, and your best bet of making money through crafting/markets is to 'figure out where the devs controlling the economy made the last error/forgot to update something' and profit from their slip-up.
5. All the items that grant 'specializations' in Crafting that matter in BDO are actually 'cheap' relative to the changes they make to increase 'silver per hour' so true specialization is difficult (but hey at least those are exactly OE RNG to make so they're very limited)
6. The enhancement items are actually the 'real drop' from gathering, basically they constantly incentivize the player to gather 'just about anything' and have the gear enhancement items drop randomly while doing so, and THAT is where your profit gathering comes from.
So basically, BDO does not do 'Crafting'. per se. It does 'Life Skilling', which is probably why you hear the term used that way.
If I log on now, the gameplay loop will be:
"Afk ride to another city to pick up 100 fish that are auto-gathered for me by a Worker (other Pet Food ingredient)"
"Stop to log to my Boss Alt to smack a boss a few times and hope I get a weapon box today."
"Log back to main character."
"Go cook that up in 3-4 minutes into around 260 Pet Food (lasts at least a week!) because I have 'TET' Cooking Speed gear"
"Cook up some ridiculous amount of Fruit Pudding with the excess stuff my workers gather and Milk/Milk Products which are great because they are the easiest/fastest way to rapidly burn through 'Energy' for profit."
"Go sell those Fruit Pudding to an NPC for silver"
"Check if the gear I left auto-crafting in the city finished so I can do some upgrades/failstacking on my helmet"
(this is a loss to craft, to make a subpar helmet, which I just like, and I gotta do SOMETHING I enjoy in this game at some point or I'll go crazy)
"Afk auto-ride around poking stuff while figuring out how to 'RP' a reason why I have received today's piles of Login Rewards and RNG-Box login rewards."
"Go get all the stuff off my Farm which has become harvestable because of me passing enough time with all the other stuff."
None of this is crafting anymore except me 'losing money to simulate a functional economy WITH Crafting' (the helmet).
I could choose to lose money on Alchemy instead, but they haven't fixed that yet and I don't feel like making the product on the chain that is profitable. No specific reason, the act of doing so is about equal to making the thing I like making. I just like to IMAGINE that BDO has niches and stuff.
Mine is just 'not Dev Approved' at the moment so I'm not interacting with it. They might never fix it, but that's fine, they do that sometimes. It'll just become 'part of the game' for that specific thing to be unprofitable and you 'have to do something else to profit'.
The part to pay attention to though, is that BDO's overall system, if they didn't make the Boss Drop instant, as Ashes doesn't intend to do, would work the way 'Green Gear' in BDO does, which DOES cause gear creation (the subpar helmet).
Which means that from MY side, all you have to do to achieve the 'correct outcome' in BDO is 'do what Ashes already says to do'. Quite literally that's it. If you wanted BDO to keep CRAFTING going, you would just 'make it possible to craft Boss Gear or Boss Gear REPAIR items out of the boss' pity drops'.
But they decided people don't like crafting/relying on crafters so instead you can just trade the Pity Drops to an NPC for Generic Repair Item that happens to be most effective on Boss Gear but applies to literally all gear in the game if you want.
BDO ditched crafting long ago, because it philosophically changed from 'MMO' to 'Single Player adventure game with Guild/Node wars'. But I say ALL this to say, BDO's systems are annoying/terrible because they are usually INTENTIONALLY 1 or 2 steps away from good, and they took those steps away ON PURPOSE.
It's a perfect model for studying 'how to ruin the MMO part of an MMO, having started with an actual MMO'.
I hope we hear more about crafting in ashes (the more system scale, rather than "well, you can hit a piece of metal instead of just hitting a button"). Pretty much the entire economy will revolve around it, so that information would be highly appreciated. And I want it for selfish reasons too, cause I wanna be a crafter
Following briefly on from the useful part of all that then, let's discuss that helmet and see how you feel about it.
I am literally now in the city, looking at these 5 completed Zereth Helms (unenchanted base).
I have in my inventory a +12 Zereth Helmet (think... +5 or so equivalent, BDO Safe Enchant on armor goes up to +5 and the +6 is at L2 odds or better).
Just a moment ago it was at +10, I tried to enhance it a few times from near-full max durability (90 of 100) and I got... 2 successes (back to back, at 13% odds and 11% odds respectively, go me) and 10 failures, each of which cost 5 durability.
I now need 6 unenchanted base Zereth Helms to repair this to 100% durability. (there's another method to get 5x more with a single helm from a different item). If this game had actual crafting in it, I'd have 'asked you to make me 6 Helms' (or more) so I could keep trying to enhance this helmet.
There are currently 19 on the Market. If it wasn't a loss to make these (at the MOMENT it might actually not be, but it usually is) someone out there would be getting to actually play the crafting part of this game (if there was one).
Translate to Ashes. To me this is sufficient. I want to keep TRYING my enhancements, so I need more helmets. In this sense it is what you are used to. If I get it to the point where it loses enhancement levels too, then I continue to need items for as long as I keep trying.
I already have a TET Zereth Helmet. I'm doing this so I have a SECOND, so that I can poke at PEN Zereth. Every time I do that, I will EITHER:
Lose 1 level, then have to raise it back to TET, using more of 'your' Zereth Helmets'.
OR:
Spend the 'no delevels' items, so that I don't have to worry about that, but still need more Zereth Helmets.
In both cases, you are crafting, and I am buying.
So, if all gear in BDO has the same chances - it's even better than L2. I know we're past this, but it was bugging my damn mind and I decided to just provide some additional data, if you ever need it.
For clarity, I don't actually care about the RNG being removed (this is why I was suspicious that people cared about OE Item destruction because of the BDO system specifically other than maybe 'imagining BDO but with destruction).
I definitely don't like it and many subparts are annoying, but those subparts are actually very easy to work past, games just never DO that because... reasons.
Guaranteed Enhancement for certain tiers of gear in BDO is possible. It normally takes out a 30% durability chunk (3 more Helmets plz) and about 5x the required enhancement items.
BDO doesn't fix their broken parts because the broken parts are now 'part of the game's structure', no matter how hard the Lead Designer works to fix them, someone, probably in corporate, always negates what he does within 2 updates. It's painful to watch, as I've said.
We just need to make sure Ashes doesn't let its 'unnecessary broken parts' get entrenched into core systems, and I am sure Intrepid is counting on us for exactly that.
So if it's me deciding, and you say "I think we need the RNG or something similar so that the demand doesn't eventually dry up", definitely keeping the RNG. I'll just assume for now that you are okay with what Ashes currently proposes (relative to what I've discussed from the BDO side). Durability loss with new item requirement.
I personally hope it isn't so simplistic, but I want to see what they come up with, without building up any biases towards 'my own approaches'.
I'll be even more fine with the currently planned system if they manage to keep the inflow of mats on the lower side of the spectrum. I'm sure that a ton of people will complain, but that's a whole other discussion for a whole other day.
This is one is truthful, it's just post cap implementation(2011).
Its most likely reflective of the Live-Classic(2016) versions onwards.
Aren't we all sinners?
It's complicated as usual. Probably not worth addressing in general, and since I believe James was always saying that things were better before, this is meaningful only as it pertains to one question which I will direct at @JamesSunderland specifically.
Why on earth would they have changed the flat 66% to all this? Should I assume this would be 'at a point where they had an item to prevent the item being destroyed'?
This is also what I found, and ALSO that they didn't add 'item delevel', the Scroll was just difficult to get. But that is a thing I cannot confirm fully without you, I believe you said.
@NiKr, basically this looks ALMOST like:
"BDO copied L2's numbers for certain things." / "L2 changed to BDO numbers." / "The Secret Cabal of MMOligarchs that control our fates decided that this is what we get now."
I'm betting on the third, those guys are scary.
EDIT: To clarify, as you probably saw from the chart, BDO numbers look like the 'Armor Upgrade' numbers from this table, generally, though all in all, they make you 'learn the precise values for each grade of gear and in some cases type'.
Basically, straight up cash and cash event, the cap implementation and 1st enchant rates modification, aligns very near the moment NCsoft started its P2W savagery and right after implemented GoD version turning Lineage 2 F2P,
in this moment we saw NCsoft adding things like chance improvement items straight up in the cash shop(they existed before but on non-P2W events) aswell as the Enchant scroll that did no break the item and maintained the enchant if you failed, you could also get the scroll from a few bosses but the chances were ridiculously low.
It motivated some cashed up maniac whales to over enchant Top-Grade S86(strongest H5 version weapons) to +16
Aren't we all sinners?