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Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest news on Alpha Two.
Check out general Announcements here to see the latest news on Ashes of Creation & Intrepid Studios.
To get the quickest updates regarding Alpha Two, connect your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Expanding the Treasure Map system
Lodrig
Member
I'm a very strongly Exploration oriented player, love roving around maps searching for every little thing and doing any kind of exploration activity, but in game maps and external wiki's largely make exploration just glorified sight-seeing. In its place modern games seek to provide an alternative exploration activity which is repeatable and rewarding through randomization. This is what the Treasure maps system aims to be, a kind of repeatable grind for exploration type players, their equivilent of mob farming.
So far the system Ashes has is very rudimentary and could be expanded a lot and broadly should get similar depth to a crafting skill. A few core priciples already present for other players need to be replicated for explorers.
So what I propose is that instead of maps dropping in a ready to use state all drops are replaced with a new 'map fragment' item. These are like a gatherable in the sense that they are the raw material for maps and their only feature is a biome type name/icon such as 'Riverlands map fragment'. Fragments biome mostly match the biome they drop in with distant biomes being rarer in proportion to their distance. These two qualities make map fragments a trade comoditity worth transporting and which most players will choose to sell/trade and which treasure hunters will want to buy. This established the hunters financial investment and their risk of not making back that investment if they can't utilize map fragments efficiently.
The next step is map creation out of fragments, this almost like a crafting process, but like Bounty hunter sits outside of Artisan systems. Ones Treasure hunting level acts to gate the map tiers that can be made and while simple maps might require no station at all, more complex ones could require a station that is found only in academic nodes in either it's library building or in some kind of special 'cartography' building. Academic nodes currently need more of a focus and exploration is exactly what they should be centered on in my opinion as PvP, PvE and Trade are each catered too in a node type. The Academic node would serve Treasure hunters the same way Military nodes serve bounty hunters, as a base of operations for activity that occours mostly outside the node.
Map creations follows some simple recipies, 1 fragment will create a very short, very easy to interpret map with low rewards that is found within the biome of the map fragment type used, possibly even within the limits of the Node ZOI that your in when making it. Multiple fragments of the same biome create longer, harder and more rewarding maps still confined to said biome. Combining several fragments from adjacent biomes can give a treasure hunt which crosses biome bountries. A map with one fragment from each biome on a continent makes a very long and high reward map, and the ultimate map needs 1 fragment from each of the 18 biomes and will take you across the world for a truly epic quest. Longer maps will also generally be 'chains' of points which must be traveled too sequentially with the next point revealed for interpretation only once the prior one is found. Likewise the difficulty in interpreting the map, aka the player skill expression rises with higher map tiers.
That skill expression is ment to be a real puzzle and difficult enough that you should get stumped often. When a player is completly stumped and decides they can't solve a map they have two options. Abort and litterally tear up the map, this will return randomly a portion of the fragments (probably a declining percentage on thouse very high tier maps discourage biting off more then you can chew). Or they can double down and invest more fragments. This would again be done at the cartography station in the academic node (which means you have have to go back to the node in defeat, a metephorical 'death' and respawn for the treasure hunter parrelelling the defeat that PvE players experience). At as cartography station of sufficient level (which could mean the highest tier maps need to be taken to an Academic Metro of which their might only be one in the whole world) expending a matching fragment on the map (and perhapse the purchase of some over-price library paste as a gold sink) will reduce the maps difficulty one degree, and this process is repeatable such that the map can effevtivly be brute force 'solved' by expenditure of copious fragments and paste, but this will end up eating most of the potential profits so good treasure hunting is all about efficiency both in fragment usage and time.
Now for the actualy skill challenge itself, a simple system could be a tiny zoomed in black and white picture of the minimap which players need to identify has been done many times already in other games. Random rotation can spice that up a bit as well and the brute force fragment 'solving' can just be zooming out the image repeatedly. But I will be agnostic as to the details because above all the skill challenge MUST be bullet proof against external tools. And I am very skeptical of any visual map identification system could be made today which could not be cracked with image recognition software simply pulling from a screen shot. Thus any cheating would be impossible to detect or counter from within the game, Intrepid will have enough on its hand stopping bots which leave far more evidence of their pressense and can be caught in real time. So if a suitable skill challenge can't be made then this would unfortunatly have to be dropped.
And lastly the Rewards. I won't say much here other then that I think Glint should be de-emphasized if not entirely eliminated from Treasure map rewards. Glint serves as a way to way to monetize mob kills and drive the caravan system neither of which is pertinent to treasure maps which are already a means of processing a mob droped object aka the fragment (mob->glint->caravan->gold) exists and would be parelleled with (mob->mapfragment->TreasureHunt->gold). Nor is it logical because narrativly treasure maps are things people burried before escaping Vera thousands of years ago so they should be the kinds of things people would actually consider treasure, not trash. What we should get are mostly items, recipies and high tier materials. This lets treasure hunters rewards be more random and exciting, no amount of glint after an hour of traveling is being make you tremble in antispation as you dig up that stash.
If its desirable that a treasure hunters winning should be in danger of being looted from them via pvp then it is simple enough for them to dig up a small chest which can not be opened untill they return to a node and which stays on their corpse and is fully lootable. This might even be condusive to a 'fragments for treasure draft' system in which players in a guild contribute map fragments they find to a treasure hunter in exchange for a portion of the treasure and having a chets that can only be opened upon returning to a node makes it impossible for the Treasure hunter to offer up junk their these investors. And it solves the 'kill yourself to teleport back home' exploit if the chest which was the whole point of the trip is left behind.
So far the system Ashes has is very rudimentary and could be expanded a lot and broadly should get similar depth to a crafting skill. A few core priciples already present for other players need to be replicated for explorers.
- Pick your own difficulty - Just as pve players go to specific dungeons and mob spawns to take on higher challenges an explorer needs options to take on harder more challenging treasure maps, this difficulty needs to be aparent at the start, ideally a challege rating/tier right on the map itself.
- Skill expression - Again just as any other player would expect some degree of skill expression gameplay, and while the process of traveling safely across Vera is a skill it is not unique to exploration as every merchant caravan or raid group dose this every day. So their must be some real navigation or orientation puzzle within the Treashure map and it must be resitent to outside botting/cheating/image recognition.
- Risk vs Reward - To earn significant rewards their must be significant risks. Time being expended is a cost but significant material resources should be risked as well. Just as PvE can have a sting of defeat and consequences so should a Treasure map 'defeat' the player, and just like their is the ability to doubledown on a mob fight you should be able to do the same to a map after defeat.
So what I propose is that instead of maps dropping in a ready to use state all drops are replaced with a new 'map fragment' item. These are like a gatherable in the sense that they are the raw material for maps and their only feature is a biome type name/icon such as 'Riverlands map fragment'. Fragments biome mostly match the biome they drop in with distant biomes being rarer in proportion to their distance. These two qualities make map fragments a trade comoditity worth transporting and which most players will choose to sell/trade and which treasure hunters will want to buy. This established the hunters financial investment and their risk of not making back that investment if they can't utilize map fragments efficiently.
The next step is map creation out of fragments, this almost like a crafting process, but like Bounty hunter sits outside of Artisan systems. Ones Treasure hunting level acts to gate the map tiers that can be made and while simple maps might require no station at all, more complex ones could require a station that is found only in academic nodes in either it's library building or in some kind of special 'cartography' building. Academic nodes currently need more of a focus and exploration is exactly what they should be centered on in my opinion as PvP, PvE and Trade are each catered too in a node type. The Academic node would serve Treasure hunters the same way Military nodes serve bounty hunters, as a base of operations for activity that occours mostly outside the node.
Map creations follows some simple recipies, 1 fragment will create a very short, very easy to interpret map with low rewards that is found within the biome of the map fragment type used, possibly even within the limits of the Node ZOI that your in when making it. Multiple fragments of the same biome create longer, harder and more rewarding maps still confined to said biome. Combining several fragments from adjacent biomes can give a treasure hunt which crosses biome bountries. A map with one fragment from each biome on a continent makes a very long and high reward map, and the ultimate map needs 1 fragment from each of the 18 biomes and will take you across the world for a truly epic quest. Longer maps will also generally be 'chains' of points which must be traveled too sequentially with the next point revealed for interpretation only once the prior one is found. Likewise the difficulty in interpreting the map, aka the player skill expression rises with higher map tiers.
That skill expression is ment to be a real puzzle and difficult enough that you should get stumped often. When a player is completly stumped and decides they can't solve a map they have two options. Abort and litterally tear up the map, this will return randomly a portion of the fragments (probably a declining percentage on thouse very high tier maps discourage biting off more then you can chew). Or they can double down and invest more fragments. This would again be done at the cartography station in the academic node (which means you have have to go back to the node in defeat, a metephorical 'death' and respawn for the treasure hunter parrelelling the defeat that PvE players experience). At as cartography station of sufficient level (which could mean the highest tier maps need to be taken to an Academic Metro of which their might only be one in the whole world) expending a matching fragment on the map (and perhapse the purchase of some over-price library paste as a gold sink) will reduce the maps difficulty one degree, and this process is repeatable such that the map can effevtivly be brute force 'solved' by expenditure of copious fragments and paste, but this will end up eating most of the potential profits so good treasure hunting is all about efficiency both in fragment usage and time.
Now for the actualy skill challenge itself, a simple system could be a tiny zoomed in black and white picture of the minimap which players need to identify has been done many times already in other games. Random rotation can spice that up a bit as well and the brute force fragment 'solving' can just be zooming out the image repeatedly. But I will be agnostic as to the details because above all the skill challenge MUST be bullet proof against external tools. And I am very skeptical of any visual map identification system could be made today which could not be cracked with image recognition software simply pulling from a screen shot. Thus any cheating would be impossible to detect or counter from within the game, Intrepid will have enough on its hand stopping bots which leave far more evidence of their pressense and can be caught in real time. So if a suitable skill challenge can't be made then this would unfortunatly have to be dropped.
And lastly the Rewards. I won't say much here other then that I think Glint should be de-emphasized if not entirely eliminated from Treasure map rewards. Glint serves as a way to way to monetize mob kills and drive the caravan system neither of which is pertinent to treasure maps which are already a means of processing a mob droped object aka the fragment (mob->glint->caravan->gold) exists and would be parelleled with (mob->mapfragment->TreasureHunt->gold). Nor is it logical because narrativly treasure maps are things people burried before escaping Vera thousands of years ago so they should be the kinds of things people would actually consider treasure, not trash. What we should get are mostly items, recipies and high tier materials. This lets treasure hunters rewards be more random and exciting, no amount of glint after an hour of traveling is being make you tremble in antispation as you dig up that stash.
If its desirable that a treasure hunters winning should be in danger of being looted from them via pvp then it is simple enough for them to dig up a small chest which can not be opened untill they return to a node and which stays on their corpse and is fully lootable. This might even be condusive to a 'fragments for treasure draft' system in which players in a guild contribute map fragments they find to a treasure hunter in exchange for a portion of the treasure and having a chets that can only be opened upon returning to a node makes it impossible for the Treasure hunter to offer up junk their these investors. And it solves the 'kill yourself to teleport back home' exploit if the chest which was the whole point of the trip is left behind.
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