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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.
Time To Fill Bags?
Xeeg
Member, Alpha Two
What kind of range should we be looking at for Time to Fill Bags?
I understand that there will be different types of crafted bags, and it also depends on what you are picking up. But if you are going on a gathering run, how long should it take to fill your bags? Maybe a minimum range for a level <10 all the way to max range for level 50 decked out with best bags.
Keep in mind that this rate will be directly related to how loaded you want to fill a caravan up, because each caravan will represent "X" amount of gathering hours, and "Y" amount of runs". As "Y" gets smaller, caravans become less valuable than running the mats by foot.
Example:
It takes 1 hour to fill up your bags on the wood in your area. You get a call to bring 10 hours of wood to another node, 15m run by mount. You can run the caravan with 10 hours of loot (30m round trip), or you can just run by mount 10 times (5hr round trip).
I understand that there will be different types of crafted bags, and it also depends on what you are picking up. But if you are going on a gathering run, how long should it take to fill your bags? Maybe a minimum range for a level <10 all the way to max range for level 50 decked out with best bags.
Keep in mind that this rate will be directly related to how loaded you want to fill a caravan up, because each caravan will represent "X" amount of gathering hours, and "Y" amount of runs". As "Y" gets smaller, caravans become less valuable than running the mats by foot.
Example:
It takes 1 hour to fill up your bags on the wood in your area. You get a call to bring 10 hours of wood to another node, 15m run by mount. You can run the caravan with 10 hours of loot (30m round trip), or you can just run by mount 10 times (5hr round trip).
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Comments
Imo this would be a good stopping point for any of more casual players who don't have much time to play, but want to fill accomplishment after a session (full bags would accomplish that), while more hardcore players won't be able to simply sit in one place overgathering a spot until their ass hurts from not moving.
But that's for pure gathering. I'd want mob farming to take ~3h to fill up an inventory with loot, so a full party could theoretically spend an entire day in one spot, but they'd obviously lose more if attacked. And if the party decides to go with the "carrier" approach to looting (i.e. all loot on one person) - that's a full prime-time of farming, given that they're purely farming and not pvxing.
For example, a common iron ore likely will be quickly harvested, silver will take longer than iron, gold longer than silver and diamonds longer still. This will probably be reflected both in gathering time (time hitting the rock with your pickax) and rarity of the item gathered - which may vary by location and amount already harvested in the area. All this is influenced by character gathering skill, level of gathering tool, level of bag used (determining quantity to fill bag) and other variables not yet known.
Also, we know that caravan speed is influenced by caravan components, which beast is pulling the wagons, development level of the bridges and roads in the node area, route choice, potential attacks by players and mobs, season and weather (which may also influence gathering speed), and yet more unknown variables.
So, @Xeeg 's basic points are right on track, but the actual computations will be more complex.
The idea of 45 to 60 minutes feels right. For higher level, I wouldn't go crazy. I feel like 5 or 10 times longer for a single individual is too much. Maybe max out at 2 1/2 to 3 hours.
So apx 45 to 60 minutes to start. Speccing, leveling and gearing up to 2 1/2 to 3 hours.
I thought the point of having the specific bag limits was mostly about making the players need to bring a mule or some sort of carrying mount, in order to be able to gather more mats.
Will AoC be the first mmo to add a search button in the inventory?
Let's hope.
Lots of MMOs have that feature. Invantory management is the part of MMOing I hate the most. So many ways to make it manageable.
Like grey drop. I like when low worth items are all stackable. Grey items that don't stack should drop rarely but be worth allot.
Little thought behind little things like this. Makes a big difference.
You might be right, I can't think of any that had it. If they did I missed it somehow. Definitely needed, with active search too, so we can sort as we type.
Wow implemented this years ago.
Yes, I meant "forced back to town" if their goal is to gather stuff. So when the bags are full and they cant gather anymore.
We should also consider the difference between the main bag (extra gear, quest items, things that dont drop on death), and the materials bag (gathered items that drop on death and go in caravans).
I mean the latter, materials bag.
Well many of the regular items are going to be gatherables; wood, stone etc. So those should be easy to clean up. Once you get back to the node they go right in the stash.
Other items, like spare armour/weapons, consumables, quest items, etc. I expect are not frequently picked up enough to cause depot trips. And many of these items you might just want to keep on you anyways.
So I doubt that we will have a "bag sorting" end game like Diablo 4 had on launch.
GW2 and apparently WoW have this function. The question would be more like : Are they enough smart to add this inventory function? 🤷♂️
That's only ture if Ashes with one button press you can pull all craftables from your bag into your bank. If you your invatory and bank can be sorted by alpha, numbers, crafting, consumables. I love MMOs when you goto your bank. Chuck all your craftables in the bank and then sort by craftables and this stack and sort for you. Or you are out in the field you can't find that potion you looted 20 min ago and you sort you bags by consumables.
That's the running thing, it's so simple to add, most of what's needed to make these things are baked into these systems. It's work but not like it used to be. I would bet UE5 has that baked in. To lazy to check. I know I could program that kind of filter and drop down in Excel in 10 min
Apparently, mules are only for crates, so players can only carry what they can carry themselves. So yeah, once full, they need to delete some or go back and offload.
In A1, even the level 1 nodes had personal storage. They aren't connected to other nodes, so at some point you'll have to make the trip with the stuff, but they can serve as a drop-off point. Only the level 0/wilderness nodes had nothing.
And as for the OP, about an hour of focused material gathering seems fine. And a few hours of just grinding mobs for glint and other certificates.
Stack Size: 20 (what I've seen and wholeheartedly agree with)
Single Bag max 'grid slots': 12 or 28 (Some things definitely take up 1x2 or 2x2, hence the 28, and herbs might have a lot of variety so even if they are 1x1 it might still be good to have 28-slot bags)
Gathering Time: 1-1.5s minimum (this just seems to be the timing that makes it not feel entirely gamey)
Tool durability: 250
Time-distance between resource cluster spawns: 12-15s (because anything less means you can always see the item or its indicator, which is bad both for player experience and for messing with bots, and gives the better micro-PoI feeling)
Yield of Common Resources per interaction: 2-5, usually lower end (personal preference, higher numbers start to feel really strange even as a skill reward, and rewarding higher skill with higher yields is BDO-tier bad)
Then for me an average-to-high-quality bag is full when you reached approximately:
240 herbs, 120 large ores, 240 'logs', etc, 14-17 types of fish
For economic smoothness, it would likely be impossible for all of that to be the primary goal material if you had one. So you would only actually fill the bag if you, for example, picked up every possible type of log/ore and weren't focusing on a specific one, or trading, and some slots would be taken up by rares which then wouldn't have full stacks.
I'd expect that 60-75% of the stacks would be intended to be full/near-full before the gatherer thought it was time to head back. A better bag would be 'bigger' but would probably still fill in that time as more unique rares fall into slots.
At 20s per cluster and a cluster yield of average 10-12 of a common item (halve for ores), assuming the area contains enough danger that the player must PvE or PvP for at least 15s between 'every other' cluster', bags should fill in 28 minutes with an uncontested (no other Gatherer) gathering route. Tuned this way, there's also an auto-alignment between 'number of empty bag slots' and 'amount of time expected to be gathering' which helps with some things.
Economically, considering no fast travel, that gives us 120-300 items/h per route (I don't measure this by player as that's another BDO flaw due to resource respawns being too quick there sometimes)
Prices can be tuned around this, I prefer 50 Cu for abundant items, and 100-150 for abundant ores, which lets you set very understandable 'at-a-glance' NPC price floors. Rare items can just be double this as NPC price floor, no one should ever want to sell them for that, but it does a good job of showing additional value instantly to players who don't have a need to look it up, and has some other benefits.
Since my bias is that 'adventures' including setup and return, take 60-90m, the above is my preference.
EDIT: Realized that I didn't clarify, 50 isn't the price floor, the price floor is 10-20, 50 is what you expect other players to want to pay, and maybe the world manager for places where the item is unavailable (so that even a 5x WM multiplier on an abundant import is around equal to general player expected price when they come to visit for the purchase)
Hey this is an awesome point!
Maybe its the starting spawn town? If there is a town? I imagine there is, with some basic services.
I guess if level 0 nodes don't have any storage then it would make far away nodes harder to develop at the start. Maybe you just need to farm there anyways and let mats poof until u get it leveled up?
Shrug
Yeah I guess each of these assumptions play some kind of role in the overall player experience.
Do we know yet what the starter material bags look like? In the showcase it looked like they had a few different bags, but I dunno if those were items they equipped or were default.
Hmmm... However they set it up, the devs can calculate the maximum gathering output for any given area to see what prices could be. They will also get more data in Alpha 2 about player behaviors and whatnot that can help them tune their system.
Yeah, "About an hour" seems to make sense as some kind of overall average depending on all the various factors.
But then again. Would it really be good to take an hour of straight gathering with no breaks for combat? Maybe 20m straight grind is long enough...
I'm talking about you want wood and you go outside your node and straight chop wood or something.
But does this include the travel time from the city and back? Rare materials probably aren't going to be sitting a minute or two outside of the town, but further into the wilderness.
If the invested time to get to and fro a destination is high, I think the time to fill your bag within that destination should also be proportionate to the effort involved! And in this example, albeit hypothetical, perhaps 1hr is on the short side!
Longer overall time is for constant parties in guilds, who'd be playing for longer than 1h a day.
Also, do you expect an entire party to fill all 8 of their bags in one hour? Cause I sure as hell hope that's not the case.
Some crafting purists might argue that they want the systems to be complex, so the game's mysteries can be uncovered step by step, and committed crafters can feel accomplished about knowing the best ways to manage their resources. That is all fine, but you can introduce that complexity for higher-tier items, or better yet only in the crafting menus themselves (So the difficulty isn't in figuring out *what* to do with an item, but *how* to do it in the right order, in the right proportions, to be efficient and successful).
For everything that a regular player can do with items to maximise their storage efficiency and regional market value, the expected rarity, general purpose, and general versatility of items should be extremely clearly and concisely communicated in item tool tips and icons/categories/colours.
Essentially, once you have a rudimentary understanding of items and crafting, you should be able to tell with a few short hovers whether you'd regret tossing or vendor-selling any items you've found, and roughly how much value you'll get from researching or processing it.
(You'd still have to decide where your priorities are between artisanship and direct wealth, so it's not like there would be no interesting min-maxing experimentation and math left).
FOMO is already a collective disorder to all gamers. Don't need to make it flare up every time they open their inventories and shops.
From 1 to 25 crafting shouldnt require a huge list of mats or complicated mats. In this case a player could go for a couple of days of class leveling without having to organize their inventory or empty it.
From 25 to 35 crafting should start becoming more complex and so more frequent visits to a storage should be required. Maybe 10h.
From 35 and up, crafted items should have a bigger list of required mats. Mobs should drop more upon their death. The groups should be more organized to tackle mobs that offer the best in both xp and loot.
I think all players should return to their base every 6h or so.
Now keep in mind that in PvP we'd drop portion of our raw mats. In the beginning I expect players to visit towns more often out of fear.
But as people get more organized and they start seeing the potentual of fun in PvP and this new form of gains from looting enemies in an mmo people will want to spend less time returning needlesly in a storage.
I'd also like to propose for remote zones in which organized players would camp for days. Places that are hard to reach and would be pretty eventful of your guilds aims to spent time in there.
Such pokets of areas should offer the best xp possible and the most rare and unique mats.
In order to prevent our inventories from filling, RNG should be harsh but still worth the time spend there for orginized and skilled mmo players.
The pure gathering bags could be a separate topic of discussion because there is more to it than just killing this mob and filling your inv with loot.
I'd like to see mules being a thing that mostly gatherers and their bodyguards use, as well as bandits, and not so much for adventurers looking for xp and loot, who would rather be more agile instead of worrying about mules.
The general inventory should take much longer to fill. And dungeoning to find rare mining node spawns would take longer.
If those same players are also gathering shit (as I expect them to do, cause spoiling mobs is a thing) - that's part of the dungeon's overall loot and should be included in the timings I talked about.
This is my personal preference and the feedback I'll be giving to Intrepid when we get to testing looting loops in A2.
Types were a horizontal category, so Oak Wood might make the Kaeler Staff while Willow makes the Dunir Staff. These not just cosmetic differences in SWG, but they were similar in power items for their quality. This might mean different attack speed or stats in Ashes.
Rarities were vertical. So [rare/blue] Oak Wood could make a [blue] Kaeler staff.
I said all that to say, that perhaps the optimal way to gather in AOC will be to have the best gathering skill, in the best biome for your material, in the highest node zone. You might be able to get lots of woods elsewhere, but that the [Epic Oak Wood] that is so valuable might only drop in a few locations which vary server-to-server and as nodes change.
I would also like to see some nice sorting options and search functions, especially for inventories
I really liked this thread and we chatted about it on our podcast so I wanted to include that clip here: