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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.
3 Days of Artisanship focus Testing - Observations and Suggestions (Long).
RedLeader1
Member, Alpha Two
Lots of people with levelling focus - decided to focus on artisanship. Love the basic design and where it is going. Love that it is impossible to do everything. System just needs tweaking.
Gathering issues:
1. There are a lot of higher level nodes mixed in with the lower ones and very high level mobs guarding them. The spawning of mobs and gatherables, needs to be better co-ordinated. There should not be a level 20 mob near rubies, or granite. The nodes are levelling faster than the players, and it hurts the crafters. You feel like you send more time running away than playing the game.
2. There are a lot of problems processing your gatherables or storing them for future processing. This is not about bag size, which is about right for each run. You are forced into levelling everything at once, and that is almost the antithesis of what you are trying to do with crafting. It has to be easier to specialize particularly for the crafting chain that has 3 steps and there is nowhere to store your processed goods.
3. It is extremely expensive to process anything. The cost of processing vastly exceeds the price of anything crafted. If this was real life no one would ever craft anything, particularly as the gear that drops or is sold, is so vastly better than anything you can craft. This isn't a balance problem, the gulf is so wide it is a concept problem. I get that the whole economy will be balanced later, but right now it is conceptually unbalanced. If crafting for gear level 1-10 isn't balanced with adventuring for gear level 1-10, you are going to have a hard time balancing it later on.
Suggestions:
1. The mobs in the nodes themselves should cater to the lower end of the level range. Mobs should be 0-5 at nodeL1/L0, 10-15 in nodeL2 areas and so on. Put the Higher level mobs in the points of interest for groups to grind. That's where they are mostly going anyway.
2. Processing shouldn't cost silver. It should require a "tax" of the item you are processing. That is the way the medieval economy worked. I bring in a load of copper ore, I can either pay for it to be processed, OR I give up 10% of the copper to pay for it, 25% if I don't bring my own fuel. And if I like, I should be able to just sell the copper ore to the processor. The less copper ore that node has in storage, the better the price. Or I could just be paid in processed copper.
3. Someone who wants to level processing, can buy the ore (price fixed same as selling + 10%), bring the fuel (or pay 25% markup), and just level processing. Any processed goods, can be sold to the processor, just like the copper ore, again price depends on the quantity in storage. Sometimes you might make a good profit on processing, even buying the copper and the fuel, sometimes you make a big loss.
4. Now you have supply and demand going. If there is a glut of copper, the miners are not making much mining it and the processors are making a loss processing it. Depending on how tight/loose you want the economy you just fiddle with the 10% and 25% margins and the price slope. AND you make the whole system 500% easier for the players.
5. You also create the need for caravans, and make it simple. If a node has no copper, player merchants can go buy bars from the processor and caravan them over! Selling them to the processor in the new node for the obviously calculated profit. No need for some artificial reward mechanic!!! And if no one has sold draft animals or caravans to the caravan place, people have to bring their own caravan mats!
6. Crafting needs to supply the node reputation vendors. You should be able to buy the mats you need from the processors, provide the fuel, craft the gear, and sell them to the vendors, they will buy and sell, once again depending on their supply. No need for gathering or processing. The gear should range in quality but just be basic stats. They shouldn't buy anything but the basic gear. If no one sells them gear, they shouldn't have any gear to sell. You can just disappear any gear over max stock, as a sink.
7. Limit drops in the world to basic stats and then drop mats for crafters to make gear that has the more desirable stats. These have to be sold in the marketplace or (the already mentioned) specific gear to the node vendors.
This may have all been what you had in mind anyway, but it does make the whole crafting thing easier to understand, and make levelling more straightforward, but not less difficult. You also don't force crafters to gather, and gatherers to craft. You also have an economy you can heat-up and cool-down by fiddling with the mark-up rates, and can let the nodes influence it too; player agency right!?
If you leave it the way it is, crafting will be an irrelevancy like every other MMO, which would be a shame. It is fun but it requires so much more time and effort than grinding, it is nowhere near worth doing, because it isn't rewarding at all. I game up about 5-10 levels trying to grind artisanship and got really nowhere. There was no sense of achievement at all.
Hope someone reads this!
Gathering issues:
1. There are a lot of higher level nodes mixed in with the lower ones and very high level mobs guarding them. The spawning of mobs and gatherables, needs to be better co-ordinated. There should not be a level 20 mob near rubies, or granite. The nodes are levelling faster than the players, and it hurts the crafters. You feel like you send more time running away than playing the game.
2. There are a lot of problems processing your gatherables or storing them for future processing. This is not about bag size, which is about right for each run. You are forced into levelling everything at once, and that is almost the antithesis of what you are trying to do with crafting. It has to be easier to specialize particularly for the crafting chain that has 3 steps and there is nowhere to store your processed goods.
3. It is extremely expensive to process anything. The cost of processing vastly exceeds the price of anything crafted. If this was real life no one would ever craft anything, particularly as the gear that drops or is sold, is so vastly better than anything you can craft. This isn't a balance problem, the gulf is so wide it is a concept problem. I get that the whole economy will be balanced later, but right now it is conceptually unbalanced. If crafting for gear level 1-10 isn't balanced with adventuring for gear level 1-10, you are going to have a hard time balancing it later on.
Suggestions:
1. The mobs in the nodes themselves should cater to the lower end of the level range. Mobs should be 0-5 at nodeL1/L0, 10-15 in nodeL2 areas and so on. Put the Higher level mobs in the points of interest for groups to grind. That's where they are mostly going anyway.
2. Processing shouldn't cost silver. It should require a "tax" of the item you are processing. That is the way the medieval economy worked. I bring in a load of copper ore, I can either pay for it to be processed, OR I give up 10% of the copper to pay for it, 25% if I don't bring my own fuel. And if I like, I should be able to just sell the copper ore to the processor. The less copper ore that node has in storage, the better the price. Or I could just be paid in processed copper.
3. Someone who wants to level processing, can buy the ore (price fixed same as selling + 10%), bring the fuel (or pay 25% markup), and just level processing. Any processed goods, can be sold to the processor, just like the copper ore, again price depends on the quantity in storage. Sometimes you might make a good profit on processing, even buying the copper and the fuel, sometimes you make a big loss.
4. Now you have supply and demand going. If there is a glut of copper, the miners are not making much mining it and the processors are making a loss processing it. Depending on how tight/loose you want the economy you just fiddle with the 10% and 25% margins and the price slope. AND you make the whole system 500% easier for the players.
5. You also create the need for caravans, and make it simple. If a node has no copper, player merchants can go buy bars from the processor and caravan them over! Selling them to the processor in the new node for the obviously calculated profit. No need for some artificial reward mechanic!!! And if no one has sold draft animals or caravans to the caravan place, people have to bring their own caravan mats!
6. Crafting needs to supply the node reputation vendors. You should be able to buy the mats you need from the processors, provide the fuel, craft the gear, and sell them to the vendors, they will buy and sell, once again depending on their supply. No need for gathering or processing. The gear should range in quality but just be basic stats. They shouldn't buy anything but the basic gear. If no one sells them gear, they shouldn't have any gear to sell. You can just disappear any gear over max stock, as a sink.
7. Limit drops in the world to basic stats and then drop mats for crafters to make gear that has the more desirable stats. These have to be sold in the marketplace or (the already mentioned) specific gear to the node vendors.
This may have all been what you had in mind anyway, but it does make the whole crafting thing easier to understand, and make levelling more straightforward, but not less difficult. You also don't force crafters to gather, and gatherers to craft. You also have an economy you can heat-up and cool-down by fiddling with the mark-up rates, and can let the nodes influence it too; player agency right!?
If you leave it the way it is, crafting will be an irrelevancy like every other MMO, which would be a shame. It is fun but it requires so much more time and effort than grinding, it is nowhere near worth doing, because it isn't rewarding at all. I game up about 5-10 levels trying to grind artisanship and got really nowhere. There was no sense of achievement at all.
Hope someone reads this!
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