Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
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.
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.
Artisanship - General Feedback
Leukael
Member, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
Here are my biggest pieces of feedback on Artisanship thus far...
- Artisanship feels slow and I am not enjoying it currently. My character's leveling experience and artisan leveling feel so different in pace that it feels like they work against one another. Leveling my character's archetypes has the benefit of socializing while grinding and leveling weapon talents. Artisanship is not something that is as easy to play with others while doing it and there are no talent trees that fill between levels.
I wish early Artisanship worked alongside leveling where you can do it while grinding archetype levels. While I can concede that later game artisanship should slow down even more than the archetype leveling, I feel the first 10-20 levels of both character and artisanship should be able to be done in tandem without too much special effort. Special effort may be an option but should not be required to meaningfully progress. - This results in a second issue, the ability to craft gear falls behind the recipes and materials you find. This creates a tension where I feel like to be able to craft I cannot level (again the first point repeating.) Early on I should be able to experience the gameplay loop of gathering, refining, and crafting in a very quick fashion. That way I get an idea of what I am signing up to do in a longer format for each artisan path (gathering, refining, and crafting.) I realize we will have to choose specialties and we're not meant to do it all. However, skill caps allow us to do a lot of it for a specific craft on our own.
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Comments
From my(our?) end, no one really wants to address it because they don't see any solutions that could/would be implemented at this stage and still be truly enjoyable (other than drop table changes for some mobs).
Artisanship always seems to run into this problem in games where 'accessibility' and 'enjoyability' are somewhat opposed, and adding 'won't break the game economy' constraints just makes it worse.
tl;dr - agree that it's jank/unpleasant, currently assuming that it's so low on the priority list for this phase that current implementation might as well be ignored if they don't want to (or can't) change mob drops/mining node spawns much
I think the prevailing factors are; seasonality impacting prevalence of resources, people dying with resources, and yet another is just the curve of time spend vs. initial progress compared to character leveling. Then there is server population density vs. test server player density (I'm on Resna and I'm not sure if we meet their desired density or exceed it.) The last factor is I tend to level first and push hard on that and go into crafting later or when people aren't around and it seems that timing syncs up with season change and resource density.
It is a lot to unpack and I trust the design team to take the feedback to develop a solution. What I'm not advocating for is Artisanship to not be an investment, but I feel like getting it off the ground initially doesn't feel great. I do realize this is a game in progress and perhaps there aren't tier 1 resources during winter but the thing that sticks out in my head is the thought "lord when it is winter I'd go red for some copper."
The end result is I level my character because artisanship feels like more of a slog than leveling my character. It does not feel like I make meaningful progress and that demotivates me. When I level my character I get weapon talents, new spells, and sometimes loot. When I gather and craft I spend a lot of time wandering and that downtime does not feel good. It is especially frustrating when there is only one resource I need and I can't find it. Then I go back to leveling my character instead.
While you've been gone there has been a lot of discussion and a few changes, as you'd probably expect.
I don't think any of them will resolve the problems as you've described/clarified them, but I assume you're about to give it a try to find out, so good luck.
The Myth of Copper abides.
For me this are the main problems for the crafting :
- when we start to play we have the farm with Novice workbench and we can stat to craft/produce. When we bring the node at T3 the city start with Novice's workbench, this is the first problem, to bring node from T0 to T3 we need weeks, and in this weeks most of the character are level 14/15 but with Novice workbench we can't craft any item lvl 10. To start to can make item lvl 10 and all the city must bring the workbench to apprendice. To make this we need at last 1 month more. But after all this time most of the character will be over lvl 20 and before we can make item lvl 20 we must wait to bring most of the workbench to journey and this will take abount other 2 months. So after 4 months we can craft item for character and this is only because the cap lvl is 25 otherwise we will have the problem until lvl 50.
- The item that you craft are the same of the item dropped. You can drop enoght easy rare weapon from farming monster so for now is not worth spend many days to craft item that give so low differenct from quality upgrade.
I wrote in different post some Idea for example
Give the possibility to the crafter to craft item with different lvl requirement Iwith more cost in resource) with max level the level of the crasfting skill and a range of the item you craft (so Item lvl 0 can have max level 9 for example and item lvl 10 max level 19)
Alternative can be that the crafter item has some different stat from the dropped, 1 stat more , or a bit more high value, or the crafter can choise with kind of stat put in the crafting item.
The workbench in City at lvl 3 would be Apprendice, I remember that to can make Master and Grand Master workbench and item you can only do in freehold.
When the cap will be 50, in the wiki is write that you can take the Freehold at level 50, this mean you can't craft anything from lvl 30 to 50, maybe is better give the possibility to take FreeHold at lvl 30.
CLICCA QUI PER UNIRTI ALL'ORDINE