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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.
Will Nodes Have 'Stablemasters'?
Azherae
Member, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
That's not the actual specific thing I care about, in the title, it's just the easiest term to bring together some ideas as an example.
Processing is supposed to take time and 'fuel'. Supposedly both of these are important. How important? I don't know. But let's assume something between BDO/FFXI and optimized MineCraft, but not all the way 'down' at unoptimized MineCraft.
Freeholds have processing stations. This is not a complaint about how Freeholds work, but feel free to add some!
The question assumes that only one person can use your Processing Station on your Freehold at once. It is also assuming that some number of people other than 'unlimited' can use the Processing Stations in Nodes, at once. Hit the spoiler Tag for some data if you're not familiar with some things. Note that EVE and SW:TOR are not quite equivalent. I'm aware of them, though.
If everyone can use the Processing station or Stable to do their stuff at the same time, and never affect anyone else, we get the BDO throughput, unless the materials/fuel input required are tuned to the FFXI level (I'll take it! But it's hard, and hardcore, I'm told).
If they can't, someone or something must decide who gets to use it next. A scheduler, a person, or the good old fashioned 'hundred players/bots in an area clicking on an NPC' approach.
A StableMaster would be able to set, for EXAMPLE, priority. In fact, hopefully just Priority, but I'm learning not to expect this as a given for design in Ashes.
With a reasonable timing/number of slots, being able to go through and set Priority on the 'Processing Stations/Breeding Pens' for specific people, guilds, whatever, should probably not result in a lockdown if they can't outright prevent anyone else from doing it. Maybe limit to Citizens only. Maybe a default priority to players with higher craft skill. This part doesn't matter to me. Two things matter to me:
1. I don't know if this (the limitation on number of people who can use stations) would be a problem for people to the point where Intrepid would be pressured to go to the BDO method.
2. The Mayor doesn't have time for this, but it's part of Node Management (I don't care what is done about this, I'm just wondering what people think of it)
Bonus: If you don't mind the limitation, but don't hate the idea that anything other than Might Makes Right matters (you can just have a mage alt to AoE down everyone around the NPC every time you want to cut the line, right? If you don't need to do it too often, it's fine, it's part of leveling your craft quickly, point is that we don't have to worry about crowds of clickers in Ashes of Creation because we can solve our problems with Indiscriminate Violence(TM)):
What would you want to determine who can use the Processing Stations when multiple people want to use them?
Opinions plz. The data, I must have it...
Processing is supposed to take time and 'fuel'. Supposedly both of these are important. How important? I don't know. But let's assume something between BDO/FFXI and optimized MineCraft, but not all the way 'down' at unoptimized MineCraft.
Freeholds have processing stations. This is not a complaint about how Freeholds work, but feel free to add some!
The question assumes that only one person can use your Processing Station on your Freehold at once. It is also assuming that some number of people other than 'unlimited' can use the Processing Stations in Nodes, at once. Hit the spoiler Tag for some data if you're not familiar with some things. Note that EVE and SW:TOR are not quite equivalent. I'm aware of them, though.
Unoptimized MineCraft - You have to have fuel, and a furnace/brewing stand, to process things. These take time. You can use a campfire on a few things for convenience. More time, no fuel requirement. Only one 'person' can use these at a time. More accurate to say that each workstation has a throughput limit, people would need to make their own. The ability to make an infinite amount of their own should be ignored for the purposes of the question (that's back to EVE and SWTOR).
FFXI - You have to have crystals, one per craft, to process things. These take a little time to do the task, but time to gather. Throughput of crystals in the world overall limits the amount of crafting in the world that can happen moreso than the time to craft does, but for big bulk work, the time limitation starts to matter a bit.
BDO - For the few things that require you to have a workstation with durability (Alchemy, Cooking), the Time is the important thing. Optimization is all about bringing down the time, for bulk work, and non-bulk stuff is limited by materials, not 'fuel/Durability'. Everyone can buy or make those stations infinitely and put them in their houses, though, and... I'm skipping the rest of the detail, it's relatively terrible and not terribly relative (to the point).
BDO ('Animal Husbandry') - Your own stable slots are 'limited', but P2W + 'the actual part of the process being per player' means that there's no overall server throughput limit.
Optimized MineCraft (but no hax, cheats, dupes, or Create mod except maybe the carpet duping thing) - Space is the limiter here. You have to build the factory yourself out of components that you have to collect, but once you've done it, sky's the limit. For the 'farms' that you can use to generate the input items, same thing. For various reasons I'm counting the carpet dupe like this, familiar players probably know why. Infinite fuel is not hard ENOUGH to achieve through just 'factory' that it needs to be considered an exploit in itself, it's just less initial time to reach the same balance point.
With all that out of the way:
FFXI - You have to have crystals, one per craft, to process things. These take a little time to do the task, but time to gather. Throughput of crystals in the world overall limits the amount of crafting in the world that can happen moreso than the time to craft does, but for big bulk work, the time limitation starts to matter a bit.
BDO - For the few things that require you to have a workstation with durability (Alchemy, Cooking), the Time is the important thing. Optimization is all about bringing down the time, for bulk work, and non-bulk stuff is limited by materials, not 'fuel/Durability'. Everyone can buy or make those stations infinitely and put them in their houses, though, and... I'm skipping the rest of the detail, it's relatively terrible and not terribly relative (to the point).
BDO ('Animal Husbandry') - Your own stable slots are 'limited', but P2W + 'the actual part of the process being per player' means that there's no overall server throughput limit.
Optimized MineCraft (but no hax, cheats, dupes, or Create mod except maybe the carpet duping thing) - Space is the limiter here. You have to build the factory yourself out of components that you have to collect, but once you've done it, sky's the limit. For the 'farms' that you can use to generate the input items, same thing. For various reasons I'm counting the carpet dupe like this, familiar players probably know why. Infinite fuel is not hard ENOUGH to achieve through just 'factory' that it needs to be considered an exploit in itself, it's just less initial time to reach the same balance point.
With all that out of the way:
If everyone can use the Processing station or Stable to do their stuff at the same time, and never affect anyone else, we get the BDO throughput, unless the materials/fuel input required are tuned to the FFXI level (I'll take it! But it's hard, and hardcore, I'm told).
If they can't, someone or something must decide who gets to use it next. A scheduler, a person, or the good old fashioned 'hundred players/bots in an area clicking on an NPC' approach.
A StableMaster would be able to set, for EXAMPLE, priority. In fact, hopefully just Priority, but I'm learning not to expect this as a given for design in Ashes.
With a reasonable timing/number of slots, being able to go through and set Priority on the 'Processing Stations/Breeding Pens' for specific people, guilds, whatever, should probably not result in a lockdown if they can't outright prevent anyone else from doing it. Maybe limit to Citizens only. Maybe a default priority to players with higher craft skill. This part doesn't matter to me. Two things matter to me:
1. I don't know if this (the limitation on number of people who can use stations) would be a problem for people to the point where Intrepid would be pressured to go to the BDO method.
2. The Mayor doesn't have time for this, but it's part of Node Management (I don't care what is done about this, I'm just wondering what people think of it)
Bonus: If you don't mind the limitation, but don't hate the idea that anything other than Might Makes Right matters (you can just have a mage alt to AoE down everyone around the NPC every time you want to cut the line, right? If you don't need to do it too often, it's fine, it's part of leveling your craft quickly, point is that we don't have to worry about crowds of clickers in Ashes of Creation because we can solve our problems with Indiscriminate Violence(TM)):
What would you want to determine who can use the Processing Stations when multiple people want to use them?
Opinions plz. The data, I must have it...
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0
Comments
So in AoC I would rather go out find creatures and spend less time near stables. I would not care if creatures in stables do their things in a list which I open by accessing an NPC.
If IS want to provide something better, with more immersion, then instanced space in cities is OK for me.
I am not sure I want to show other players what creatures I have. I prefer to keep my production secret. If they want to know what I do, what creatures I get, they should spy when I come or leave and follow me in the world. And I might lead them to jumping puzzels.
I'm asking actually if you go up to the NPC and you get the message:
"You are 15th in queue for using this Station, do you want to continue to register your creatures for breeding at this station? Estimated Time of Completion: 7h 14 minutes (6h 44 minutes waiting, 30 minutes breeding time)"
Are you going to be upset about it, or just go 'oh ok I guess lots of people are breeding today', register your creatures and go back out?
What if you can only register one pair and you have to do this every time?
I think it makes no sense to simulate the Stable and stable master in the city as a limited resource which would handle tasks from different players in a queue.
I would complain if such a solution is chosen unless there is a good reason to make it so.
So I would prefer the BDO style in cities.
But I would prefer the Unoptimized MineCraft way in freeholds where they could allocate more space and provide more immersion.
I get that this could be seen as "demand is super high, but supply is low" kind of situation, but I feel like gameplay wise it's just a pain point rather than interesting design.
Say you know a good node for whatever processing/crafting you want to do. It's a node that's 20 minutes of riding away from you (you're super unlucky, but go with it for the sake of example). You spend those 20 minutes hoping to come there and do your stuff. You come there and the npc tells you to fuck off for several more hours until your turn comes up.
Now you need to waste another 20 minutes to go back to your node (if the node loyalty design is strong enough to make people do this) and do some other content while you wait. AND you'll have to spend another 40 minutes later to do this again, and that's if you even have the time to come back in a few hours.
To me this just seems like the hugest waste of player time, for no apparent reason. The only positive I could see is node competition (or player one, if we're talking stalls), but I'd need to know what other levers mayors would have to compete against other nodes (if any) and what kind of layout the node map will have, cause, in theory, you could spend yet another 20 minutes to go to the other angle of the triangle, see that it's the same situation there and realize that you're royally fucked for the day.
In other words, I want people to fight for the resources, not their usage. This is also obviously L2 bias.
This answer reminds me that I should clarify that yes, I am entirely aware that Intrepid can just 'do it entirely like BDO and not care at all', particularly if the Processing part of the stations is somehow... 'difficult'.
I'm just assuming they won't because the super obvious 'people create a ton of alts to funnel things through faster' seems like a weird approach to take given everything else. Now that we know that crafting gives combat exp, even moreso.
I'm sure there are solutions to that, like I noted (and I'm a fan of most of them), I'm only asking how people would feel about the one where they actually limit it.
(NiKr, moreso assume this isn't a poke at your answer, just quoting it for reference for a specific subset of people, your data is noted, grati as always)
Are you talking about automatic offline processing that's character-locked, so a player would need several chars to run those in parallel? Cause otherwise I'm not quite sure how alts come into play.
I guess I mostly considered only one of the extremes, that I based on my L2 experience, where people would be spending active time processing/crafting stuff, so the queues would be long because they consist of a huge line of people waiting to do a ton of stuff all at once.
If the process is automatic or if the action itself can be scaled to produce several things per interaction - I guess I'd be fine with queues, because they'd be way shorter than what I was envisioning.
Long explanation, mostly the whole 'maximal throughput'.
You mentioned it yourself. In BDO it's more sensible to have an alt that sits next to the crafting station for lower level processing, than to do anything involving travel on your main. Doesn't necessarily increase things much, I guess.
Just removes the throughput control from devs. If they don't care, it's fine.
Problems would come up if we need fully crafted stuff in the crafting process of higher tiers, but I'd assume (hope) that we won't have this, considering the recent reveal that we can simply pick up fully crafted items at any storage.
My problem with travel in my first comment was linked to the inability to do anything due to the queue, not the travel itself. I consider risky travel to be meaningful and required. And I'd imagine that this required time would also decrease the max throughput, because you'd not only slow down the overall process but would also have a chance of losing a part of your product if you/caravan die during transfer.
Just buy it.