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.
Artisan feedback
Crimsonyoshi
Member, Alpha Two
in Artisanship
I'm just going to add my voice to the pile here, and echo what others are coalescing around.
Crafting in Ashes as it is right now is so incredibly important. The sheer power increase you get from one single piece of gear upgrade, or even quality upgrade is quite impactful to gameplay. I've seen Steven mention on the livestreams about how crafting is supposed to be the pinnacle of player power, and how crafted goods will be a long road to walk, and I accepted this going in to Alpha Two. But, I think that long road needs to be eased for the first 20 levels. I'd like to see more balanced early level gathering nodes across the board to get up to a level 20 artisan level on the gathering side for everything (i.e. more flax nodes and less daffodils), and a lower total XP requirement to get to level 20 on the crafting and processing side again for every profession. I'm also a little bit terrified as to how long the higher levels will take, and I say this as a father with a full time day job and four school aged kids! Yes, I realize that was my own real life choice right there years ago, but I want to be able to feel like I'm contributing meaningfully to the artisan side of this game even if I can't dedicate a full time second jobs worth of time to it!
Furthermore, I think some improvements to the processing and crafting windows could be done. For processing, we have a dropdown box to choose to process 1, 5, 10, ... and so on items. It feels so bad to have say 9 items to process, and you have to select 5, then four 1's after to get them done. We need to be able to select how much to process in increments of 1, no matter the stack size. I'd also like the ability to choose to process all items of a certain quality or lower, or perhaps of certain selected qualities along with the individual increments. So for example, if I have 16 yellow quality flax, 27 blue quality flax, 54 green quality flax, and 200 white quality flax, there should be an option to process all blue and lower quality flax, or maybe a checkbox list to process yellow, green and white (individual checkboxes per quality level), which allows me to leave blue alone. Or both options? More customizability and flexibility in menu choices is always great. I don't like the totally separate quality processing orders I have to manually start.
The next thing I'm slightly concerned about is if you don't have a real solid guild as you start the game, it's going to be harder for artisans to balance time for crafting and for player XP acquisition. The feel right now is if you make gear for your guild mates, they will group up with you and help bring you along through content to increase player XP on account of your artisan time sacrifice. On paper this is a great idea, but in practice, if you're not part of a group of players who value team power over personal power and greed, it might turn some people off on account of how much time is otherwise required across the board.
Again, I acknowledge there is supposed to be a decent time requirement to everything in Ashes, but if it's in the realm of feeling like a second full time job, I think that's just too much. If I can feel more impactful in a shorter amount of time being an artisan, I think that would ease my current concerns. Optimization of the flow and the UI will also help manage time better since you wouldn't need to sit around town to push multiple processing orders through on smaller numbers.
Crafting in Ashes as it is right now is so incredibly important. The sheer power increase you get from one single piece of gear upgrade, or even quality upgrade is quite impactful to gameplay. I've seen Steven mention on the livestreams about how crafting is supposed to be the pinnacle of player power, and how crafted goods will be a long road to walk, and I accepted this going in to Alpha Two. But, I think that long road needs to be eased for the first 20 levels. I'd like to see more balanced early level gathering nodes across the board to get up to a level 20 artisan level on the gathering side for everything (i.e. more flax nodes and less daffodils), and a lower total XP requirement to get to level 20 on the crafting and processing side again for every profession. I'm also a little bit terrified as to how long the higher levels will take, and I say this as a father with a full time day job and four school aged kids! Yes, I realize that was my own real life choice right there years ago, but I want to be able to feel like I'm contributing meaningfully to the artisan side of this game even if I can't dedicate a full time second jobs worth of time to it!
Furthermore, I think some improvements to the processing and crafting windows could be done. For processing, we have a dropdown box to choose to process 1, 5, 10, ... and so on items. It feels so bad to have say 9 items to process, and you have to select 5, then four 1's after to get them done. We need to be able to select how much to process in increments of 1, no matter the stack size. I'd also like the ability to choose to process all items of a certain quality or lower, or perhaps of certain selected qualities along with the individual increments. So for example, if I have 16 yellow quality flax, 27 blue quality flax, 54 green quality flax, and 200 white quality flax, there should be an option to process all blue and lower quality flax, or maybe a checkbox list to process yellow, green and white (individual checkboxes per quality level), which allows me to leave blue alone. Or both options? More customizability and flexibility in menu choices is always great. I don't like the totally separate quality processing orders I have to manually start.
The next thing I'm slightly concerned about is if you don't have a real solid guild as you start the game, it's going to be harder for artisans to balance time for crafting and for player XP acquisition. The feel right now is if you make gear for your guild mates, they will group up with you and help bring you along through content to increase player XP on account of your artisan time sacrifice. On paper this is a great idea, but in practice, if you're not part of a group of players who value team power over personal power and greed, it might turn some people off on account of how much time is otherwise required across the board.
Again, I acknowledge there is supposed to be a decent time requirement to everything in Ashes, but if it's in the realm of feeling like a second full time job, I think that's just too much. If I can feel more impactful in a shorter amount of time being an artisan, I think that would ease my current concerns. Optimization of the flow and the UI will also help manage time better since you wouldn't need to sit around town to push multiple processing orders through on smaller numbers.
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