Office Hours: Artisanship System - Tuesday, December 12, 2023 at 4PM PT

Roshen

Office Hours is an opportunity to join in on player discussions about topics Intrepid Studios is actively collecting feedback on. Join @Roshen and @Vaknar over in the Ashes of Creation Discord for a voice chat during our next Community Office Hours on Tuesday, December 12, 2023 at 4PM PT (Convert to your local time). This discussion should last about one hour.

This is not a Q&A session. For this session, we will be using Discord Stage. Every 10 minutes, we’ll be bringing up small groups of players to participate in one of the discussion prompts on this topic.

DISCUSSION TOPIC

The main topic of discussion for this Office Hours will be the Artisanship System. This is based on what we shared during the November 2023 Development Update Livestream.

In this session, we’ll break each of the 10 minute segments up to focus on one of these conversations:

• General Artisanship System Discussion - How do you feel about the Artisanship System based on what was shared during the November 2023 Development Update? What are you excited about and what concerns do you have?
• Gathering Discussion - How do you feel about the Gathering professions? How do you feel about the world state changing what resources are available, and how easy it is for players to accumulate them?
• Processing Discussion - How do you feel about the Processing professions? What did you think about Processing Stations and how they work?
• Crafting Discussion - What did you think about the interactions with the recipes and progression of recipe outcomes?

If you’d like to contribute to this discussion, we recommend you watch the Alpha Two Artisanship Preview video before this Community Office Hours session.

Thanks again! We look forward to chatting with you all soon!

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NOTE: If you have Artisanship System feedback to share outside of this Office Hours session, please feel free to provide it here.

SonicXplosion

1. General Artisanship System Discussion - How do you feel about the Artisanship System based on what was shared during the November 2023 Development Update? What are you excited about and what concerns do you have?

Likes:
* Tetris storage
* Experimenting with different materials can result in different effects to a recipe.
* Darkness at night
* Predicates affecting different resource and mob spawns (including corrupted zones)
* Skill tree for each profession
* Certification system

Concerns:
* Glint should not go into gatherable bags (VERY IMPORTANT IMO). It should either have its own bag or its own tab.
- Glint is not tied to any 1 profession
- Glint is something everyone will interact with
- Glint is a 1x1 resource as far as we know, so very space inefficent in a 3x1 or 2x2 bag.
- Annoying to micro manage at least 5 tiers of glint (plus corrupted versions) clogging up your bags. Theres a reason that Steven kept mentioning how the resources would find the most optimal spot to go. Because they know it would be annoying to manage otherwise.
- Would have to keep throwing it out after looting mobs
* Heroic tier should not be before Epic tier

2. Gathering Discussion - How do you feel about the Gathering professions? How do you feel about the world state changing what resources are available, and how easy it is for players to accumulate them?

Likes:
* Physics looking good when not buggy (mostly the trees being buggy)
* Predicates affecting different resource and mob spawns (including corrupted zones)

Concerns:
* Land management system with the ease at which players can accumulate gatherables

Feedback:
* In game beastiary for all gatherables (and let us write personal notes in the beastiary for each resource)


3. Processing Discussion - How do you feel about the Processing professions? What did you think about Processing Stations and how they work?

Likes:
* In node stations are instanced
* Stations having visual indicators to show progress

Concerns:
* Fuel should not have static values that are the same for each processing station. A lumber slicer should be given food as fuel, not coal. Could even be interesting if fuel was different on a per-station basis, with each vendor having different wants. (FUEL IS FINE, IT JUST NEEDS TO MAKE THEMATIC SENSE FOR EACH PROFESSION)

4. Crafting Discussion - What did you think about the interactions with the recipes and progression of recipe outcomes?

Likes:
* Experimenting with different materials can result in different effects to a recipe.

Mixed:
* I like being able to upgrade the rarity of an item with rare materials, but how do you make higher tiers feeling special when you can upgrade the rarity of low tier items?

Feedback:
* When you discover a secret effect due to experimenting with a material, the entire recipe and effect needs be recorded somewhere in game. (basically a recipe book) (VERY IMPORTANT IMO)

Sheeta

General Artisanship System Discussion - How do you feel about the Artisanship System based on what was shared during the November 2023 Development Update? What are you excited about and what concerns do you have?

● There is a concern now that artisans at the grandmaster scale won’t have a niche enough market space if all grandmasters fill out an entire artisan skill tree. We hope and suspect that recipe progression is where the artisans can set themselves apart and create their own niche market specialization. There was some suggestions like the more you craft something you would level that item up and increase the quality and/or quantity. Another suggestion was that some items could require levels of other crafts to be able to craft like lvl 50 main with a lvl 25 sub. EX: Lightbulb needs lvl 50 Arcane Engineering with lvl 25 metalworking AND lvl 25 alchemy to craft
● There is some concern now about a time balance of excessive time traversing the map for the sole purpose of wares, especially for players who have limited time in game.
● There is some concern with limited recipes, though an assumption that being hands on with the systems we’ll be able to have a better understanding of the balancing. If there was a % chance to drop from a boss with a week respawn, there may be chances to get that recipe may take longer to drop than other servers. This might be very off putting. If there was always a choice to farm that % chance without being locked out due to a timer, that might alleviate this concern.

Gathering Discussion - How do you feel about the Gathering professions? How do you feel about the world state changing what resources are available, and how easy it is for players to accumulate them?

● The biggest concern we heard when discussing this was the sheer amount of time that may be necessary traveling may turn the game into more of an exploration game than anything else. This would lead to whole areas of the map that are utterly dead. That being said, the argument was made that those resources in those areas would then catch a high market price.
● Another concern was that animals/mobs would not have the same rarity/uniqueness as other gatherables. Like seeing a snow fox in the winter while it's only snowing or at night.

Processing Discussion - How do you feel about the Processing professions? What did you think about Processing Stations and how they work?

● The quality and quantity between the processing you do personally vs automated processing should be noticeably different.
● It would be interesting if you could hire many different NPCs, who you could level or and/or specialize to a certain extent where it wouldn't diminish the value of processing mains.

Crafting Discussion - What did you think about the interactions with the recipes and progression of recipe outcomes?

● There was a interest in discovering recipes via trial and error. Where people could find hidden crafts rather than depending on NPCs, quests, or drops.
● There was another interest to maybe see limit edition crafts with signatures.

Neurotoxin

Great so far, I can't really say much til I see it in action. I just hope that the range of variations and experimentations let players really push their trade in different ways to the point that players themselves are producing research-driven server-unique items that other servers can't have without tons of effort and maybe luck too.