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
Yep, was the same in L2. People were about to leave the server and would just go OE all their shit till it burned. Quite a few times they'd OE it super high and then give it to someone from their guild who were still playing
But absolute majority of OEing was done with at least one backup, even if it was at a way lower enchant stage.
In Eve if you lose a ship, its frustrating, but its a consumable. In Albion, you dont get attached to gear sets since eventually you will lose it. There are ways in both games to be safe and never lose them, but then you never have access to the hardest content, or best crafting resources. Its risk vs reward and a chance in mind set.
Has there ever been a statement from Interpid about how hard gear is to obtain? Eve and Albion both make gear relatively easy to get. The super high end stuff is expensive, but most people are only using truely max level gear for imporant fights.
If there is to be a player driven economy, a gear sink is 100% needed.
This is literally how L2 worked and why zergs there had to work for a long time to gear up their members.
But without numbers that doesnt do anything for crafting. Does a boss drop 1 special crafting material? Does it only take one for super special gear? or does the boss only drop 1 every 50 times and it takes 100 items to make the super special item?
Well i know 7 people who quit cause regrade broke the weapon, 2 in guild 3 more in the pirate nation (when i was a pirate) and 2 more from friendly guild on same server that i was aware of.
And all of that finite loot will have to be shared across upwards of 50k accounts, which might have upwards of 10 chars on them, not counting any potential requirements to break down that loot for crafting requirements.
In other words, Ashes will not be eve or albion, in terms of its gear acquisition, which is why the gear sink is not as big as in those games.
That's the way Ashes gear is designed to work.
HIghly unlikely to be a thing in Ashes.
NW is a Survival Game; not an MMORPG. Crafting is not the same.
I can easily make all my own stuff in NW.
You keep saying that with no meaningful support - especially not with regard to Ashes.
The boss drops a cell phone but you gain no experience.
I'm totally with you on this @Zipp_Adoudel . The mind set to losing/replacing gear is a big hurdle for many players. Personally my focus for alpha 2 will be around the economy and crafting aspects. I have the same concerns about a lack of gear sink. I'm always on the lookout for games that actually support being a full time crafter. (Specifically crafting and not gather + crafting). So far Albion is the only game I've played with a sophisticated enough economy to make crafting not feel like an afterthought.
Specific and necessary crafting materials for higher tier items can only be obtained through the deconstruction of lower-tier items. This is designed to keep lower tier crafted gear relevant through progression and across expansions.[3][4][2]
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Item_deconstruction
And repairing items can be tuned to require the same amount of resources as crafting them, or even more.
its easy to get gear in albion. at some point losing it is the same as not losing anything. and yes, steven said gear will be very hard to craft and get in ashes, so losing it on every death doesn't work for this game.
no to losing gear during pvp events...only if you are corrupted
not really. already explained it.
also wrong. crafters will sell for what people are willing to pay. you can say that maybe the first couple of weapons of a kind will be really expensive, but price will always drop, since people cant afford it. no point in selling a weapon for 1 million when the richest person in the server only has 100,000 and the average player is only willing to pay 30,000 for example.
you might eventually sell it for a million, after a long time when everybody is rich.
Again, not saying it didn't happen - just saying that is a fault in the user, not the system.
You should never regrade an item you are using, you make another (several dozen) of the same and attempt to regrade them.
That is how I got myself to top 10 best geared on my server without using the shop at all - on 3 of the 4 servers I played on (couldn't do it on the KR server).
As NiKr suggested, someone doing this in a game like Archeage is like someone putting all their in game wealth in to one ship in EVE, and then having it destroyed.
That is a user issue.
It’s true, that this is why in L2 people fought for world bosses to get loot. In some mmorps, people stand together and beat the boss and they don’t care if the loot goes to them or others. The L2 community was special and also Archeage players.
If this is the case, only the biggest and best groups will have the high end gear because they can have a monopoly on it. They will recruit the crafters and pay them not to make stuff for others. That sounds like a great game to be in as well.
New World is an MMO Survival game with some RPG elements tacked on at the end.
I don't know why you are obsessing over BiS gear.
But, again... I can very easily make my own Gear in NW. Because the Crafting is designed as Survival Game Crafting. No need to rely on other players for Crafting in NW.
I don't know why Intrepid would comment on that, but...
I am not aware of any intention for Intrepid to make obtaining Gear hard.
I don't know what you mean by too attached.
The easiest way to recognize other player characters in an MMORPG is via the gear they wear.
It is a key aspect of defining identity. So, yes, players are gonna want to hang on tothe BiS Gear they earned. Especially when it takes weeks or months to get a full set for yourself - and more months helping your Guild buddies get their full sets.
But, again, in Ashes - that set of BiS gear will not actually be Best In Slot for all encounters - and players will be pressured by specific scenarios to swap to a different set in order to defeat new challenges - even at Max Level.
doesn't work like that. it depends how intrepid decides to make gear acquisition. there will be scarcity for sure, but even if there wasn't, you can still make the game so that it takes a long time to gear up (because you need too many mats, they ar heard to get, low drop % etc etc). and even with scarcity, you can farm something dn sell it hen buy another mat you cant get. no player will be able to get everything alone anyways so you need to trade. its mandatory
also, one thing is what you feel and another thing is reality. you don't need constant equipped gear destruction to keep the economy going. if you don't want to accept that, then that's on you ;3
At the end of the day, people don't want to lose any of their stuff. Ever. It's not a good mentality, but what can you do?
It is what is it is. If the game releases with no gear destruction, which it likely will, then it's not something they will be able to put in later.
I agree with you that it's a problem, what you describe is exactly what will happen. Mechanics like enchanting and item sacrifice (like the forges in GW2) will help stretch things out, but the issue is still there. The way it is set up now, likely just kicks the can down the road.
Low level gear with eventually flood the market. Hard to say what happens with high level gear, depends on how systems like enchanting etc work. I think what will determine things at high level is power creep and the pace of level increases.
Items need to leave an economy to make room for new items. But gamers have a hard time with that.
not necessarily. coke didnt have to leave the market for pepsi to come in and sell.
sure mmorpg are a bit different, but again, you dont need (main) gear destruction. new items can be introduced before everybody gets 100% of the current items. that keeps the economy going forever without having to re farm your main gear every 2 days instead of doing something else when you are in game.
I agree with all the other points made in favour of Ashes' economy; this one I think is the weakest. You're removing the incentive for new players to engage in the content older players did to craft their gear, if you just let them pass it on as new expensive stuff gets released. The low-levelled or cheaply equipped players are the backbone of the economy. If they don't have to work to loot and maintain their gear, the only one spending resources are the rich players who can spend them effortlessly, and no one has to earn anything.
Keeping repair costs high, and requiring high-effort rare resources and high crafting skill for repairs of high-tier equipment will be essential, and cannot be replaced by power creep.
Not a great example. Soda is consumable, therefore it exits the economy and requires more to be produced.
Can any of you provide a working example of a thriving mmo economy where items never leave? Eve and SWG are examples where items exited and the economies were healthy because of it.
This may be different to some other games, but that doesn't mean it doesn't work.
Archeage.
Items only leave if destroyed via regrading (same as Ashes - almost as if they literally copied it).
The games economy is second only to EVE as far as MMO's go.
That is the thing to keep in mind here, Intrepid aren't doing anything new with the game economy in relation to items.
Just because some people may not have experienced it, doesn't mean it is new. The system works just fine - the concerns are unfounded.
I'm assuming players are heavily incentivized to regrade? Honestly I'm not really going to be able argue for or against Archeage, didn't play it long enough. All I can say is every MMO ( and I mean all of them) that didn't have some form of item sink had garbage economies.
I'd say if Intrepid won't do decay then they will have to:
1 Massively incentivise enchanting
2 Make enchanting beneficial to everyone. Including and especially low level players.
3 Make repairs very cost prohibitive.
4 Make sure that multiple sets of gear are needed to do different types of content.
5 Be extremely active in introducing new content that high level characters need new gear for.
Even all that won't prevent economic decay forever. All that so that no one ever has to lose their pixels..
Regrade or die.
You weren't successful at all in Archeage unless you were using gear that had been decently regraded. You didn't need to do it yourself, but if you bought it, you paid a lot for it.
For all the games faults, Archeage had easily the best economy of any MMO other than EVE.
The first point here is the only one of them that is needed - though it doesn't need to be a "massive" incentive.
The second point is very minor, considering how little time is spent playing MMO's at anything other than max level.
The third point would just dissuade people from running content or taking risk. This is a death penalty rather than an economic measure.
The fourth point - while something I like - just takes away from the better gear you have. Players aren't going to invest more time in their gear than they feel they can allocate to it, if players can invest all of their time in to one set of gear and still not hit the cap, there is no need to require them to invest in multiple sets of gear. All that would do is lower the investment they put in to their main set of gear. While requiring players to have multiple gear sets is not a bad thing (and again, something I like), the over all investment - and thus economic activity - would remain the same.
The fifth point is again something I would like to see, but isn't necessary. Archeage was incerdibly slow at adding new content. All that is actually necessary is for players to not hit the gear ceiling - and literally no one in Archeage got even close.
In fact, I don't think any actual best in slot items actually existed on any server I played. While there were a few items that were regraded to the regrade cap (I saw perhaps 12 items total in my years playing Archeage), it was never done with the best base items.
how am i removing the incentives for new players? they still need to gear up. doesnt matter how you acquire the gear.
its also a good thing that a rich player could buy gear and help someone new. this would help that person be on par with veteran players faster, which is a big challenge games with collectibles face.
it doesnt matter if bob or joe buy my sword, what matters to me (and the economy) is that someone buys it.
you can still have sinks without destroying the main equipped gear to the point the player has to repeat the same process to re acquire it. overenchanting is ok because this is an action that you can decide wether to do it or not. there are also scrolls that prevent the destruction of the gear, but are harder to get.
now you are changing the argument.
anyway, the coke example was just to illustrate that your competition doesnt need to leave the market for you to compete.