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You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Current Concerns with Player Only Economy
Zipp_Adoudel
Member, Alpha Two
Looking through the wiki and listening to stream one question keeps popping up regarding a player driven economy. What is going to destroy gear? In order for people to keep needing gear, it has to be destroyed. In games like albion and eve online, when a player is killed, half of the gear is destroyed and the other half is dropped. These are both very PVP focused games, but they both have realistic economies and they are player driven.
What is the plan with AoC? I see that some gear may drop if you go corrupted, but that doesnt destroy gear. Repair might take resources and even rare or unique resources, but in order to train artisans, you need new orders for them to build? Repair requires them to have the broken gear.
My concern is that as the servers mature, the market will die off as people get all the gear they could want. New players will not have a reason to craft as most players will have everything they need and getting repairs will become very hard.
What is the plan with AoC? I see that some gear may drop if you go corrupted, but that doesnt destroy gear. Repair might take resources and even rare or unique resources, but in order to train artisans, you need new orders for them to build? Repair requires them to have the broken gear.
My concern is that as the servers mature, the market will die off as people get all the gear they could want. New players will not have a reason to craft as most players will have everything they need and getting repairs will become very hard.
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Comments
Hm… I haven’t heard this. Do you have a reference? What’s on the wiki is that item degradation will make it unequippable, but the item isn’t destroyed.
@Zipp_Adoudel - here’s a link to item repair:
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Item_repair
This is wrong. As @CROW3 has pointed out.
But the way an item CAN be destroyed in through over-enchanting. Which is a push your luck mechanic.
Specifically.
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Enchantments
The main driver for gear in this economy is the desire for some players to want that additional 1 or 2%, getting that gets exponentially harder and sees the player go through more and more gear.
eh it isn't like that o-o unless something changed and I didn't see.
there isn't any gear destruction at the moment (maybe only overupgrading but not confirmed yet).. the problem you are presenting can be solved in different ways that don't require gear destruction.
How do you keep a player driven economy without gear destruction?
Even if you require low level gear in higher level gear or material or whatever, there will come a point where everyone has high level gear and it is no longer needed. You dont need excatly gear destruction, but you do need to take gear out of the eco system for people to need to keep buying it.
Even Max Level players won't have just one set of BiS gear that works well for every encounter.
Also by making craftes able to repair broken gear you make sure they stay relevant even if no one around them wants new gear. In that case they can switch to repairing players existing gear. Also you can use caravans to sell your gear in another marked where more people want it.
Maybe resources blend into that aswell. If you can craft gear that people in other biomes cant craft then you can sell it there.
Also new events introduce new resources. And through the node systhem new dungeons will open and others closed so this will also introduce new gear ppl may want.
I dont think completely destroying gear is cool. I dont see any good in loosing a legendary item to duration. Instead it should break(either be unusable or have 0 stats) and require materials and and crafter(lvl scaling with rarity of gear) to be repaired
Resources are useless if there isnt a crafter to build it.
Wtf! I don’t sign for disposable gear.
Why does there need to be endless gear cycle? Crafting items are already going to be a multi day venture for a singular item. Nevermind the upkeep costs. Plus not every piece is going to be the best of the best in all cases. I think the endless cycle of having to get something better every 3-6months is worse for casuals more than anything else as they're constantly trying to keep up. I don't want to see nerfed content so lower ilvl players can acquire gear to keep up with the endless regearing cycle.
sure, ill gladly answer that. people with your concern always raise that point.
there are different solutions for that that don't involve doing pve for 1000 hours to use your gear for 5 and when it breaks you just pull out another set and another set and another set until eventually yougo back to 1000 hours of farming the same gear and repeating the same thing over and over and over
we have things like:
a lot of players will want to have multiple sets for their main character, or alt characters. there will also be new gear added to the game, now people need to craft that. new expansions with new level caps and gear, making old gear obsolete. new players will join the game and will need gear.
and last but not least, time. its possible that gearing up 1 character with 1 set of gear takes too long. we already know shes is heading into that direction. not everybody will gear up fast. it will be more than likely that by the time most people have their gear, a new patch will drop and we will need to get the new gear. all of this keeps the economy going. you don't necessarily need to destroy gear, you can just make gear harder to get. this would not work if we didn't receive new gear for 5-10 years which is unlikely.
you can still argue that at some point everybody will still get their gear, but this only happens in games where people shit gear and craft 10293584 pieces a day. what if you need several months to get the 3rd or 2nd best gear then you need 1 month to get one piece of the best gear? you are looking at a couple of years to gear up one character with just one set. then you would want multiple sets, alts, new players, etc. then we can get new patches with new gear, for example.
there are also some ways to add gear destruction that doesn't involve destroying your main equipped gear:
you might need gear to upgrade or repair your gear (you can make it so that your main gear doesn't get destroyed, just gives you lower stats, for example). you can also make it so that you can deconstruct gear to get things you need to craft other things, quests, sell, etc. These are also optional. you don't always have to upgrade for example.
in this case, you would still be remaking the same gear, but the psychological effect is better. you arent losing the gear that you already got. losing something is a more powerful motivator than earning something.
you can add these few extra things to reduce the time it takes to get gear so that most people can get and enjoy their gear before a new patch hits, and also get multiple sets and gear up alts. however, they arent necessary to keep the economy going. only the thing I listed first are, with time being the most important one.
he is talking about the last 2 zelda games. they are more of a survival game kind of..most weapons get destroyed after a few hits and you have to get a new one. most shields are also destroyed after few blocks.
assuming that happens, they could also craft and sell other things that aren't armor and weapons, such as consumables, although those get destroyed when used xd
But you would still need the resources to repair the gear and you would still need crafters to repair the gear. Its really not much different to completely destroying the gear economy wise it just doesnt feel bad when you loose an item you worked really hard for to duration.
Again... Ashes is a dynamic world, rather than a static one.
You don't need destruction to cause a need for new Gear. You just need the currently owned Gear to not always work well, depending on the scenario and environment.
Why would Ashes not have Crafters??!!??!!
I also didn't like that. i bought breath of the wild when it came out and I still haven't finished it. 2 castles left lol. and I'm a huge zelda fan, been playing since the first one on nes. my big flex is I have zelda 1 and 2 for nes golden cartridges and they still work!
i also have a link to the past for snes in french because I was so desperate for that game and for whatever reason there were no english cartridges at the time in my country (in the 90s). there were only french cartridges. wtf? ( I live in a Spanish speaking country)
i still want tears of the kingdom though, when I finally decide to finish botw T_T
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Enchantments
Archage didnt realy work though atleast not when i played it on release, you only need 1 piece of gear and never needed replaced once u git high level unless u risk breaking it to get high + on it which was rare for people to do so crafter turning out weapons at a much much higher rate than they were needed.
Archage was slightly better than say WoW i guess since there a small need for replacing weapon when one break breaks but it was to rare to make a crafting economy
I do think AoC will be slightly better here since it atleast uses resources to repair so that will help processors/harvesters but it skips weapon/armor crafters though so they hit a wall where there making thing that cant be sold due to everyone at the point of not needing them anymore cause there BIS or what not.
Albion probaly did it best for player economy but gear was each come easy go which wont be the case for AoC it seems. So i feel mabinogi would be the best system for AoC which worked this way
Each time your repaired a piece of equipment there was a chance the max durability would decrease slightly based on skill of the repairer (ranged from 90%-99%) for each point of dura repaired to fail and lower the max dura by that much. This creates a situation where the gear needs to be replaced eventually when max dura gets to low.
You could expand on this to a degree by allowing you to merge dmg items with crafted gear of same teir to regain some max durability that was lost this would keep a demand for crafted armor/weapons and allow people to keep X gear by refrshing it durability when it low.
Either way without a gear sink for crafted items player economy for crafters dont work
that just delays the issue and tbh alot of people dont like system where they need say fire resist gear for X area, cold resist gear for X raid and so on just makes organising gear sets annoying, Eventually if there no gear decay crafters will become more and more obsolete as more and more players hit the BiS or people outlevel crafter skill levels.
tanke new world and tool crafting the moment everyone hit lvl 30 tools lvl 30 and below tools were pointless to craft since u could never sell any, when everyone eventualy hit max level there was nolonger any market for crafting tools and they never got sold. Only a handful of toolcrafters made money here since they were ahead of the skill curve so there items were needed as people hit them but people behind the curve never sold anything cause there items were already obsolete by the time they hit that new tier of tool.
if you want a player run economy there needs to be gear decay in some way or form that keeps a demand for crafters to keep crafting goods. Either via gear breaking and needing to be replaced in some way or form or gear needs to be repaired via crafted armor/weapons of same tier so there a constant demand for crafted items.
If I remember right, you left the game very early. I want to say around the time of the thunderstruck tree change.
At that point in time, the games economy wasn't even properly up and running. One thing I will always give XL props on is that they knew how to easy a games economy along.
Realistically, the games economy wasn't fully functional (at the top level, at least) until about a year in to a new server release.
At that point, it wasn't uncommon to see someone blow through 20+ of an item at celestial quality in a sitting, trying to get to divine or epic.
When players are buying then destroying 20+ of an item in a day, the player driven economy thrives under it.
This is a part of the reason why I have always said gear in Ashes needs to be somewhat worthwhile - if gear isn't worthwhile - if spending that time and money for a small shot at a 2% upgrade to one piece of gear isn't worth it - then the economy will fall.
i played long enough to see multiple people quit the game due to there +7/8/9 weapon breaking on them on an upgrade and never come back
to much financial loss to RNG i guess to much for people :P
Four points.
First, literally never once heard regrade levels referred to as numbers for Archeage. Not one time in 10 years of being associated with the game.
Second, you didn't see people quit from regarding weapons to that point, because the 7th grade had no break chance. While I'm happy to put this down to it being years ago, details are important.
Third, obviously people left over this. Some people are stupid and regrade what they can't afford to lose. That doesn't mean there is anything wrong with the system, it means there is something wrong with that player.
Fourth, every player I knew personally do this did it as their way of signing off from the game. Take all your gear, regrade it until it blows up and log out.
I never once saw a single player that knew what they were doing leave teh game over failed regrading. I saw a few people that didn't know what they were doing leave, but see point three for that.