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
why is the instinct/gut of people who dont know a single design pattern and who dont even have all the information about a game is an indication of the success of a game?_?
that seems like emotion is taking over for no reason. there isnt any facts or strategies involved.
i dont mean you. i mean people in general
And until we have some, our options are the usual conundrum that Intrepid puts us in.
"We would like your feedback on something."
"Oh ok, but wait, we don't know your plans for that something, actually..."
"Just tell us what you think."
That's what's happening. Can't fault it. What else can we give them other than emotions?
And the only feedback I can make right now is based on the tiniest shreds of info I can see in those videos. But then when videos are full of holes and/or invisible GM cheats - it's reaaaal fucking hard to give proper feedback.
They didn't have pvp because they wanted feedback on glint and coms. Glint right now looks like utter shite and we also got ZERO CLUE how it even works. So we can only extrapolate from what we saw and/or make up complete random shit (as I usually do).
And commodities are their own can of worms that people have talked at length about already.
Also, I always just speak my mind. I'm impressed the devs put up with my ideation half the time. You should have seen my Manic Phase before I was sectioned lol.
In an older (now revived) post I said I'd be okay with it if they decoupled Caravans from Crafting.
I'm still pretty much okay with that.
I'm not okay with Glint, Glint being bound, 'Glint conversions to Commodities', etc. But this system sounds like it isn't for me in the first place. It's for RP travelers.
My part is to sneak or mule stuff from one node to another and hope that I can compete with MegaGuild #12's 8x Glint Value Multiplier. So I don't care about Caravans at all unless they're reworked to what I expected to begin with. Intrepid has chosen to make their design fit their older statements OR this was always the plan and we just didn't 'get it'. From what I know of ArcheAge, it was probably the second.
I'll hope AA2 evolves it in the other direction (but I doubt it).
Basically, this is probably what they always meant, as long as its balanced, we don't have to care, there will always be Mules to use for the thing we originally thought was going to be important.
Thank you
Cause why in the fuck would I keep killing mobs if I can just travel a bit and literally x8 my gains instead. And if that x8 applies to the entire party (as Neura supposed) - that's fucking atrocious.
And considering that this is pure money printing, big guilds wouldn't even need to do anything but running caravans. Their entire gameplay will consist of farming a few mobs, buying coms and trucking that stuff all the way to the other side of the world.
Maybe that IS what Steven wants? Big guilds trucking big caravans, while the other big guilds try to prevent that? All while the small fries are toiling away in the mines to exchange their pity 3 rocks and 5 wood for the gold that those big guilds make from mobs. It would make sense, knowing him.
And in theeeeeory, it could work for all the casuals that are into farming 3 rocks and 5 wood per gameplay session and getting some gold for that.
I do still like this system overall, I just dislike the currently presented execution of it. Though I definitely see why you'd dislike it, considering your preferences.
Fuck, there's a whole russian tv show about this. It's called Truckers
Also, I completely missed this at first, but don't glints allow for uber grindable abuses now? With certs we had certain drops that would tie your farm to a location, but now with glints you can grind any location on the map and then just choose the nodes that you wanna start and finish at.
How did I miss that at first
check my response lol.
Either way, I prefer certs way more.
It's not an abuse if it's intentional.
If you ask yourself 'given the goals of Ashes (not the ones we nerds imagine, the ones that are likely to be definite) is this a downside at all?' the answer is 'no'.
There's nothing about Ashes that suffers as a result of this. They 'promised' an important economy, not a 'structured one'. Those things aren't the same. All their claims are still valid.
Previously, in theory, if you grinded mountain wolves for their pelts the manager would see that and could decide whether to increase their spawn rate to curb your profits, because those pelts only dropped from those wolves (in theory). This would then put pressure on you to go trade those pelts out, because the time spent transferring them would be more beneficial than farming them in that same place with their high respawn (because there's no substitute for the mob).
Now, you can grind literally anyone literally anywhere and still profit to high heaven, because the core loot is untethered from the farming location. This puts no pressure to move your "product", because its source is limitless, no matter the WM actions.
Untethered farming also introduces unbalance to node progress, because some places will be way easier to just grind out than others, which could lead to unbalanced decay processes, which can impact whole node chains.
Maybe we're yet again missing some internal changes to systems that address all of this, but then we're back to the "we made a change that brought problems, so we made a change to address those problems, which brought a problem, so we mage a change..."
And all of this then gets "checked" with viewer feedback that's based on absolute lack of knowledge of any other changes
Its only a mess because there was no PvP. Ask yourself this question - When Glints can make you a multi millionaire and everyone drops glints on death, how many PKers will resist PKing?
if yes, then what you are complaining about is just that you don't like the name and icon of the certificate... which imo is completely irrelevant and similar to the change the tank name thread
No, the WM should work fine.
The assumption we probably had about the WM was that things OTHER than Commodities mattered to it. But technically the WM always only implied that it worked relative to Certificates, in terms of monetary values.
But nothing requires that. Steven could have decided that he wanted a World Manager primarily to cause Trade Routes (due to being an ArcheAge fan), and AA doesn't need any integration between 'what you farm' and 'trade route money'. Thankfully it has integration, but if you were 'deciding if to remove it so that you could get more Caravan content', it wouldn't be a 'we can't do that' situation.
In short, again, there's nothing inherently wrong with this, you, George and I just happen to be in the group of players that don't like it. This isn't one of those situations where those who do like it are overlooking something obvious about the game's core requirements. Just another direction.
I could explain...I should explain...I can't really explain. Here goes:
Certificates were localised. You got fuck all for them locally and had to travel long distances to make max profit. You could gain local certificates along the route but localised prices would be lower.
Glints: drop everywhere. Have different tiers and the lowest tier sells for 40 silver a time we've seen so far. That's locally. However, x8 local node is 3 gold 20 from the sale. Not sure how much you get from the other side of the map, however, every glint you achieve on route and locally has no gold value until exchange from commodities. This means that there is no downside to the system. localised prices don't really exist. Only huge profit from the multipliers even in a node next door.
I've only heard of the Black Markets. I haven't heard of other systems Stolen Glint can be used in. The worst part is the corrupted players will earn tons of stolen glint and then earn tons of glint grinding the corruption off in pve. Granted, the bounty hunters might get involved but otherwise those PKers will be very rich.
And if stolen glint also has the same rarity as the original stuff, PKing everyone and anyone would be viable (especially if all rarities of glint have a chance to drop from any mob).
Which brings us to more PKers, which means harsher corruption balancing, which means less owpvp, which pushes pvpers towards more caravan/sea raids, which means that only guilds survive, which means casuals toil away in the mines. And who knows for how long they'll agree to do that.
And we come back to the nicheness of the game. Guess it does all make sense and I hope it doesn't all burn down into the Ashes (pun intended).
I resurrected your old idea. I did ping you in the other thread