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Archeage's Labor System vs AoC's Bag System
Disobedient
Member, Alpha One, Adventurer
Greetings! I'd like to initiate a thought-provoking discussion on the choice between the labor system and the bag system. While it's evident that the labor system in Archeage had its share of imperfections (especially its restrictive time-gating of progression), it undeniably offered crucial economic stability.
The labor system's impact on the economy was profound. By requiring labor for processing tier 2 resources (e.g., converting logs into lumber), it effectively increased the value of these resources and allowed players to generate income based on their labor investments. My concern in Ashes of Creation is that without a similar system, tier 1 resources might become more expensive than tier 2 resources. Since tier 1 resources can be infinitely processed as long as you have them, and they also possess experience-boosting potential due to their abundance, their value could be significantly enhanced.
Considering these factors, I believe it's essential for us to explore the potential merits of both systems, or alternative options, to ensure AoC's economic and gameplay balance.
The labor system's impact on the economy was profound. By requiring labor for processing tier 2 resources (e.g., converting logs into lumber), it effectively increased the value of these resources and allowed players to generate income based on their labor investments. My concern in Ashes of Creation is that without a similar system, tier 1 resources might become more expensive than tier 2 resources. Since tier 1 resources can be infinitely processed as long as you have them, and they also possess experience-boosting potential due to their abundance, their value could be significantly enhanced.
Considering these factors, I believe it's essential for us to explore the potential merits of both systems, or alternative options, to ensure AoC's economic and gameplay balance.
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Ashes will supposedly have a World Manager system that will track gatherables, tradeables and all that player-related-economical shit, so if there's too much tier 1 stuff or not enough tier 2 or whichever way they interact - the system can counteract that through boosting or reducing resource supplies.
Processing in Ashes of Creation is already a complicated affair.
Not only do you have to level up your processing specialization, but you also have to establish your freehold ... and have enough on-hand resources to keep that freehold going (both in-game and when logged off).
I'm sure the devs will be collecting processing data when we test Alpha 2. So, let's enable them to do that without additional layers of bloat on the system.
One other note: You seem convinced tier 1 resources are "abundant" and "infinite" ... but that's not what the Wiki says.
Raw materials, for example, will not always be gatherable at the same location and frequency. Which is due to many factors such as season, story arcing, rarity of the material itself, and location in Verra.
Abundances need sinks accordingly to counter act over-saturation.
labor system was shit. also what does bags have anything to do with this?
anyways processing is limited in aoc. not everybody will be able to process the best stuff, and you cant just fire and forget. you have to tend to your processing stations and "repair them" so they continue processing. you cant just queue 10000 iron ingots and go to sleep and wake up with 10000 ingots in the morning
Labor was there to sell labor pots in the cash shop. It's hard to compare Archeage, many systems were just poorly implemented, mismanaged, or a cash grab.
L2 for example did not have it, yet the economy and it's tier 1 tier 2 tier 3 mats were always balanced.
Pretty simple, some people had to gather whilst others had to process and craft. And there was money to be made at every step. The more effort you put in the more the money you got.
Everything else took labour to do so you basicly got locked out of content like phone game (farmville for example) waiting for it to come back
if they wanted to limit resources entering the game iwould much rather have resource get contested ao longer respawn or maybe a mob camp stop nodes respawning with an event that can be cleared to free that area up. This also adds fricking with players and neighbouring nodes. Like a legit stratergy could be to farm node in other nodes area to deny them resources and bring them back to your node, or sell them back to the node at a higher rate cause there less supply cause ur taking them) adds alot more stratergy to the game bringing elements from old stratergy games like Warcraft 3/starcraft games
to sum up Archage labour system it basicly farmville. you can only do so much before game tell you to take a break or PvE/PvP since they were they only activity that didnt take labour, Crafting/Harvesting/Traderuns all took labour -.- and you could use your days wiorth of labour up in like 30- minutes at times.
They then decided to sell you the solution in the cash shop when people complained they couldnt do 90% of the game content due to no labor :P
Its not meant to give value to some tiered material system,
its not there as a daily system to boost player engagement and daily logins,
its not there as an easy to monitize p2w mechanic,
this excess properties emerged as Arche Age’s publisher had the power to transform the system in order to make more money.
The labor system originally is clearly designed as economic instrument to combat the divergence in wealth of the player base, which is bound to happen if you give the player a way to print resources with little engagement/time required from the player.
If you limit the quantity of times that the player can engage with the system, you level the playing field for casuals and hardcore players.
You rewire the system to be a catch up mechanic, so that casuals actually can participate in the economy, instead of building a snowbally and inflated asset that discourages anyone from joining later on, as players would have to overcome an insane hurdle in order to participate in the housing system.
Now i think intrepid is aware of that dynamic, „we don't have like a labor system that limits it. We have a space constraint system“. They attempt to solve the issue in a different way, that has less of a „dailies“ feeling to it and certainly restricts the player less.
In A2 we will see whether they can accomplish their goals with this solution.
I remain skeptical, as the space constraint system doesnt hard cap the player‘s activity, rather softcaps the quantity of activities he can engage with.
It forced people to pay2win, tons of alternate accounts, daylie "you have to login and you have to do the best Gold/labourpoint activities".
Labor as a system in Archeage is designed to prevent someone being able to just spend 16+ hours a day working on economic activity, thus allowing themselves to outgear others in a short period of time. Basically, every player in the game had a set amount of economic activity they could participate in any given day.
This didn't work at all in the NA/EU version of the game, because players could just get second, third and fourth accounts (or 5th, as was my case) and literally just perform as much economic activities as they have the time to do.
In Korea though, players weren't able to easily have multiple accounts, as they were tied the South Korean version of a social security number. With this, the labour system actually functioned exceptionally well there at it's intended role (as I've said before, games designed for the Korean market don't always translate well to Western markets).
There are discussions to be had around the fact that the labor system and the p2w aspect of Archeage, but the core system of labor in Archeage had it's function as a limiter regardless of that.
The bag system Intrepid have talked about in Ashes won't prevent any one player from performing more economic activity than any other player. It is a limiter on the total amount all players can perform due to it taking longer to move raw materials, but anyone willing to put more time in is able to get more activity completed.
And if that is not the case, then it's simply a very silly system
Nah, there were other ways.
I mean, PvP and PvE were both ways to progress yourself that didn't involve labor. That was kind of the point - you had a limited amount of time each day you could spend on economic activity, and then you needed to leave and go play the game.
the pay to win thing you are talking about were literally just labor potions. You consume one to gain a little less than half a days labor, but that had an hour long cooldown (ie, still had a limitation on it). For the most part, it was cheaper to pay other players to perform economic activity with their labor than it was to buy a potion from the market, meaning potions weren't just chugged down to circumvent the system - it was almost always better to just pay someone to do some part of what you wanted to do for the day (keep in mind, game developers are generally smarter than we are when it comes to designing games).
The system actually worked really well in Korea. In NA/EU, you could just get an account subscription (68,320 labor a month) for the price of 3 potions (3,000 labor). This is why the system fell down outside of Korea.
Also, I'd imagine the labor-based features were quite valuable if people saw it as beneficial to have several accounts just to circumvent the limitations.
And as you said, in korea multi-accounts weren't a thing, so those potions were definitely p2w. Though even in eu/na getting several days worth of labor on several accounts must've been quite beneficial against all the people who only got 2k a day per account.
Now, some people may say "if you don't want to PvP, don't play a game with PvP", but the same can be then said about anything developers purposefully add to their game. If you don't want to play a game with X, then don't play a game with X in it.
Ashes limitation on being able to be all professions is also a limitation to certain gameplay styles. I mean, literally every activity in the game that generated new coin cost labor - so yeah, it was valuable. Yeah, the potions were pay to win - I don't think anyone has ever said Archeage wasn't. The point I am making is that even with a pay to win option, XL maintained limitations to labor so that people still couldn't just work on economic activities all day (realistically, you were limited to 3 hours a day, even with pay to win). This is why people would often just hire people to perform the lower level economical activities, saving their labor for the higher end aspects.
Again though, the point was that the system worked without those pay to win potions, and still worked with them. I would also suggest that basically all the negative comments you would have heard in the past about Archeages labor system were probably based on non-KR versions of the game, where it undeniably didn't work as intended.
I'm not saying this kind of thing is something Intrepid should be trying for - we all know it won't work with Ashes because multi-account players will exist. I'm simply saying a direct comparison of labor to Ashes bag system isn't necessarily applicable.