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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.
"Professions are not for everyone"
Xeeg
Member, Alpha Two
I gotta say I really hate this take. Whenever I complain about the professions people say "The idea is that the professions are not for everyone".
What they mean by that is that the professions are purposefully made convoluted and monotonous IN ORDER to disincentivize players from engaging in the system. Only the most elite people will bother wasting their lives trying to "discover" how to use them...
This is probably the stupidest idea for a game I ever heard. Might as well make a game called, "Lets stab ourselves in the face!" - Look, no one else is doing it! Aren't we so elite?!?! Hey how come this game has a hard time getting new players? Bunch of crybabies, we don't want them anyways!
Games are supposed to be fun. Activities in games are supposed to be fun. Gathering should be fun, so should processing and crafting. In fact, all of the systems in the game should be so fun that it is hard to decide what you want to do. Not, "I'm only doing this stupid activity to get X result". That shit is lame as hell.
They managed to do a good job in the class design and fighting styles. I love my bard. IT IS FUN!
Please continue to iterate on the professions and find some way to make them pleasing and appealing. Right now its like we are being given a bowl of raw carrots for dinner.
Yes, it's alpha 2. So... cook this shit.
Or is the "professions are supposed to suck" design idea going to last to launch?
What they mean by that is that the professions are purposefully made convoluted and monotonous IN ORDER to disincentivize players from engaging in the system. Only the most elite people will bother wasting their lives trying to "discover" how to use them...
This is probably the stupidest idea for a game I ever heard. Might as well make a game called, "Lets stab ourselves in the face!" - Look, no one else is doing it! Aren't we so elite?!?! Hey how come this game has a hard time getting new players? Bunch of crybabies, we don't want them anyways!
Games are supposed to be fun. Activities in games are supposed to be fun. Gathering should be fun, so should processing and crafting. In fact, all of the systems in the game should be so fun that it is hard to decide what you want to do. Not, "I'm only doing this stupid activity to get X result". That shit is lame as hell.
They managed to do a good job in the class design and fighting styles. I love my bard. IT IS FUN!
Please continue to iterate on the professions and find some way to make them pleasing and appealing. Right now its like we are being given a bowl of raw carrots for dinner.
Yes, it's alpha 2. So... cook this shit.
Or is the "professions are supposed to suck" design idea going to last to launch?
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Comments
And for games, like politics, it is impossible to please all the people all the time.
I won't even be interested in AoC if the profession system is mickey mouse. I'm not interested in something that everyone can do easily - that just makes for a boring (at best) economy.
Sure, yeah, fun is subjective. But "most" people would agree that watching paint dry is less "fun" than playing mario kart.
I'm fine with complicated, I like complexity, in fact i seek it out.
I'm not fine with convoluted and monotonous in order to weed out the player base.
When people say things are "hard" in this game, what they really mean it that it just takes a lot of travel time to figure out. That ain't "hard"... It's not "hard" to be a lumberjack in this game; you go up to a tree and click it, then watch paint dry. And the reward for getting better at the craft and getting more items is you watch paint dry faster...
I have to agree here.
I completely agree with the OP's general statement of monotony not being fun, but examples would be good.
Edit to add; I am also of the opinion that with the number of professions we have, if they do a good job of them, there should be something that everyone enjoys doing.
I don't know what to say exactly, but here was my experience:
I tried to do a play through with a fresh char and see what it would be like to craft my own stuff instead of mob grinding for gear, which i already did on my main. Around level 8 i figured I should start working on the idea of trying to craft a bow for level 10. I had no idea what kind of materials i needed to craft a lvl 10 bow, so I went to Ashes Codex. It said there should be a brass bow using beeswax, brass ingot, western larch, and bluebell thread.
These materials appeared to be a mix of novice and apprentice level. I figured that brass is usually copper and zinc, and western larch i had seen already at novice level. Bluebell was apprentice I think, i had seen it in the open world. At any rate, if I wanted to make a bow at level 10, it seemed that I could go gather a bunch of western larch, some copper and zinc, and then buy the rest of the materials from someone else.
No point making just a common bow as that can be store bought. Uncommon, you can get from monster drops easily... so I was hoping to get rare or better. At this point my goal at level 8 was just to gather a bunch of copper/zinc and western larch and see how long it would take me to get enough rare+ mats for the bow.
Now my experience progression completely stalled. I spent probably at least 10 hours or more at level 8 trying to farm this western larch. I mean, it wasn't the worst game play i ever experienced, but it really wasn't that great. For most of the time i spent chopping trees, I was pretty bored, just hoping it would be over soon. Trying to avoid monsters as most of them were above my level, and besides, if i died i would lose 1/4 of the stuff I spent gathering so why risk that?
Sure, I could quit, and go do something more fun, but then I might as well start leveling again and then why even bother with this system? I was here to test this shit and so i was determined to keep going!
As I am doing this, my storage starts to fill up. I also realized that since lumbermilling is a timed duration thing, I should be lumbermilling 50 stacks while i go out farming. OK thats fine, good synergy, im ok with this. However, it costs money every time i do this and i am broke as hell. So now I start solo mob grinding again just to get enough glint to sell to do the lumbermilling. OK, again, this is also fine. I like that we need to do a mixture of activities, no problem. Still, it was pretty slow going. Only critique here is that both the lumbermilling and carpentry items were completely useless. Crafted like 100 boxes that i didnt give a shit about.
I hit level 9 trying to get glint and then decide to quickly do some commissions to get more glint. I ended up killing some named mob with a group that was doing commissions in the same area and got a level 10 uncommon Flayer Fleshripper (2h phys) randomly. Sweet, now I had a weapon for level 10, but it still wasn't crafted and further proves the point of this post.
Around this time my storage is so packed and I am so broke that I just decide to grind out mobs to level 10, make some glint and become a citizen so I can get some more storage space. Find a few level 9s nearby and quickly mob grind it out to 10.
OK, finally, level 10 and still somewhat broke. I had just a few more trees to go to hit apprentice with lumberjacking. Finish that up and straight sell the wood because of storage space. Realizing that I cannot get my carpentry to level 10 and lumbermilling to 10 without some serious cash, I decide to run a caravan. I was in New Aela at the time, and I saw that Winstead had the Apprentice level carpentry station. Hey, lets kill 2 birds with one stone, I can load up the caravan with glint stuff and carry the best copper/zinc/larch I had at the time in my materials bags. Something like 10 rare larch, 5 rare copper and 5 rare zinc, a bunch of heroics and some epics, and the rest uncommons.
My Plan: Take the caravan from new aela to winstead, become a citizen of winstead, upgrade my lumberjacking, and finish getting my carpentry to 10 so I can craft the bow.
I do the hour and a half trek and LITERALLY right at the end, 5 mins from winstead, some rando starts attacking the caravan. He cant do shit. He starts mage balling it, and the AOE is hitting my char! He kills me and I drop my stuff, I lose all my heroics and epics. Apparently 50% of 2 epics is 2, so I had nothing left and the guy took it all. He didnt even go corrupted because of the caravan. Its about 12:30am and time for bed, I was pissed tbh. Felt like total ass, reminded me of why this game might not be for me...
In the morning I decide, fuck it, at least make this damned bow so I can see what it takes. I prolly dumped like 20 hours into this project from level 8-10 at this point.
I get to Winstead, go check out the apprentice carpentry and see that I cant craft a brass bow....
I can only craft a tin bow..........
Honestly, this is the stupidest game play I have ever experienced. I aint doing this shit again. Fuck that. 20 hours to "explore" the game and find out everything I did was fucked and none of it worked? All because the only way of planning anything at all is relying on Ashes Codex? So fucking dumb. Maybe people are right when they say this game isnt for me. All i felt was like total ass after this experience.
The worst part about it was, I wasn't having fun for that 20 hours. If I was having fun the whole time, then whatever, you win some you lose some. But almost all of that time was just hitting trees and traveling, not exactly fun, really.
Compare that experience to my level 23 bard that I did a big mix of mob grinding, finding parties, soloing, duoing, trios, 8 mans, the works. Had a blast all the way to 23.
There must be a point in ANY profession where a player goes 'this isn't for me, I'm bored/annoyed' and stops. If this doesn't happen, then the economic velocity grinds to a halt just as much (if not more) than the situation where absolutely no one is enjoying anything.
Hard disagree. The stop on professions is that you can only have 2 master level, etc. Not that these core game systems suck so bad that people quit doing them.
It should be that the game is so fun, but there is too much to do so you specialize on a few things. Not that the game sucks so bad that there is only 1 thing you like to do but you have to do all this other lame shit most of the time.
I understand your wish, and I also understand how that could work in a more ideal world, but this isn't how humans work, in the end.
For this very specific interaction, you need it to be this way. I guess there's not much point in going into it if you disagree really stringently, just... take the data if you trust my data, I guess...
I’ve enjoyed the gathering / processing / crafting loop so far. But I also think my server has been relatively free of griefing so no forced drop of mats.
I basically process everything I’ve gathered, so lumbermilling is just behind lumberjacking. I level carpentry in bursts as my bank fills up with timber. My only issue so far is the rate of xp gain versus the sheer amount of material, but that’s going to be calibrated later.
Sorry, Xeeg sounds like a crappy experience on your side. Glad you wrote this up for the devs to read.
The Verra Periodic Table of Elements is quite unique … starter bows can be fashioned out of tin.
I think this is the part I'd like to highlight, if anything, I guess.
If you weren't enjoying the lumberjacking, I'd say that 'you stopping' would lead to what I consider a better game than if you continue just because you can.
It's a question of if it's appealing to someone like @CROW3 or @SongRune. Sure, there should be some effort to make it more interesting overall, but 'wandering around avoiding monsters and chopping trees' is like, the core gameplay loop of lumberjacking, it's not a matter of 'this is tedious and doesn't match the concept of the profession'.
What you described being bored by is the profession...
I spent dozens of hours just grinding lumber and mining. Then spent even more time hunting mobs in the same spot, while killing some mobs on the side. I caravaned my glint from those mobs for money to get a few dozen gold (which woulda allowed me to buy whatever I wanted).
And all of that was super fun for me, because I love that shit. You, Xeeg, sound like you like to grind mobs. So just do that, use that money to drive a caravan to multiply yout money (ideally with the same people you were grinding mobs with) and then simply buy whatever you need/want.
So no, artisanry doesn't have to be for everyone. Let alone the kind of artisanry Ashes is going for, where you're supposed to specialize in a specific branch and just do THAT thing.
And, of course, all of this is in the context of "this is an alpha, so nothing is finished". Processing and crafting are non-existent as a mechanic, they're simply a "press a button and wait" bs. Gathering is pretty much the same, on top of being a luck meter, due to how rare some resources are. All of that stuff is expected to get better and fleshed out, but in late P2 at the earliest.
Yet none of that fleshing out will change the fact that chopping wood will still just be chopping wood. Or that flower gathering will be just flower gathering. If you dislike those actions - you'll still dislike them.
I've already seen people create spreadsheets of where's the best regions to grind specific mats and what's the best way to progress through professions. I learned myself that the best way FOR ME to play is to level up literally everything to lvl10, because that's a free apprentice crafting all by yourself. This will require a shitton of time/money investment, but I'm all about that shit.
Also, on the topic of losing stuff due to death - yep, it's shitty. I lost several legendary and epic wood that I wanted to use for a caravan to a war enemy. Something that literally shouldn't have happened, cause the only penalty is supposed to be gear decay. I also rage quit after that moment. But you know what I did next week? Went back to grinding wood, made that caravan and did this
Had my palms sweaty knees weak arms spaghetti throughout the entire ride, cause I was scared shitless for my big time moneymaking.
But all of it was fun as hell, because AoC's artisanry and general economics are FOR ME. They simply might not be for you. But once player-crafter stalls are in and proper trading is in - the game could still be for you, just as L2's "crafting" was for mob grinders, cause they could simply get money from mobs, come to a market, buy everything they needed, pressed one button in the player stall (or traded those items to their crafter-friend) - and they got their item.
This is all I want to know really. There are so many ways that they could turn "gathering" into more of a game.
Here is how they should think about it: What does the player want to be doing, and how can we make that more engaging and rewarding to do?
For example, in Rust (a first person shooter/survival/gatherer/builder game) you can macro an auto swing for hitting trees. Basically it can act just like AoC where you walk up to the tree and just click a button and wait to chop down the tree. But there is also a red "X" that appears on the tree, and moves around the tree every time you hit it. If you hit it, you chop down the tree twice as fast.Since it is a first person shooter, people playing this game love aiming at things in the center of their screen and clicking on them. The minigame of gathering wood takes the same basic concept of an FPS and applies it to aiming at the tree. Maybe its not THAAAAT fun, but its still more engaging and fun than walking up and auto hitting. It also synergizes with the core gameplay of PVP full loot and paying attention to your surroundings. While you are trying to hit the red X, you are less aware of the guy sneaking up on you with a spear. So this gathering method has multiple ways of intertwining the mini game with other aspects of the game beautifully.
If you expand this way of thinking to AoC's lumberjacking, we might think about what players like most about this game so far. The combat and class abilities might come to mind. Basically, people like using abilities and doing combos and feeling clever about how they are using their character. Maybe we could have some lumberjacking skills and cooldowns we can use? Maybe we can have some ways to combo off of hitting trees, like if you hit 5 in a row while an ability is in effect, you get a higher chance of quality and a new tree spawns right beside it. Or there could be another ability effect that if you chop 2 trees and then kill a monster, you get bonus exp, which also helps to resolve the exp stalling effect of trying to gather. At least some way to turn the act of lumberjacking into more of a "game" that still stays true to the elements that people like in this game so far. I dunno, get creative!
Now take the issue of players complaining about "Not enough copper". Steven's answer was - yeah there is enough, its just not circulating through the realm, so we will introduce player stalls. Great! I like this idea and am happy they are introducing it. But this solution still misses the fundamental problem. People are not having "fun" trying to go get copper, because they cant even find the damn shit. Likely because everyone else is farming it and they are stripped clean as soon as they spawn.
Now you may say "yeah, but the reward of finding copper feels so much better when you do find it!". OK there is some valid point to that, but riding around looking for copper for 2 hours and not finding anything is still a crappy player experience. Perhaps you were just behind someone else doing the same thing and didn't even know it. That guy got loaded and you got nothing, and there was nothing you could do about it. So much for player agency.
If that was your 2 hour session for the night, you probably would have had more fun washing dishes and folding laundry as at least you got to accomplish something. The players are complaining about not enjoying this aspect of the game, and the solution doesn't solve that. This game was supposed to have some kind of "dynamic world". Why not use a "dynamic world" to help players accomplish what they are trying to do?
It could be something like at mining 3, you get a passive "find copper" that sends a pleasant "ding" whenever there is a copper node within 50m, and then goes on cooldown for 10minutes. Maybe at mining 5 you get "dig copper" which is a 20m cooldown that spawns a node within 50m, but you still have to find it.
Each of the 3 gathering professions can have their own lane of abilities, tricks, combos, sound cues, visual cues and things that help make the act of gathering more enjoyable and interesting. Especially if we are going to be spending hundreds of hours on these activities. They can always have an option that appeals to people who just wanna chill and gather and not have to be too active.
OK, I can understand that. My point would be to expand on these concepts to make them more interesting. Perhaps you get a lumberjacking activated cooldown ability that de-agros all monsters for 3s if you are in the process of hitting your 3rd+ tree in a row at the moment. Since, currently, you stall out your player leveling when working on gathering, it might be quite common for players to be underleveled for the areas they are trying to gather in? Shrug.
I would still like to see some kind of abilities or more interesting ways to gather than "click and wait" on repeat for hours. And these abilities should take into consideration the gameplay experience of people who are actively using these professions at various stages in the game.
We're supposed to get party gathering somewhere in P2 iirc, which means that the gathering mechanics will undergo some kind of change. When we were shown mining on a stream, they talked about "you can find rare mats in common rocks" and I think surveying was meant to increase your chances of that as well.
So, while, yes, the feedback of "this unfinished design feels shitty cause it's unfinished" is somewhat valid, it's also nothing more than "alpha is alpha".
If by the end of P2 we don't at least get concrete plans for what artisanry will look like on the gameplay layer - I'll agree that Intrepid are strongly fucking up. But that's 5 months from now. And that's if there's no delays.
If that's the answer then we are good.
My complaint is when people say "nah this is the game design, professions aren't for everyone"
Even if Intrepid come up with the best artisan mechanics in the industry (they will not) - it will still not be for everyone, because not everyone likes to do repetitive tasks, and no matter how intricate the minigame for gathering is - you'll still need to gather thousands of trees/rocks/etc, so people who dislike that would not even touch it.
The game is built on grind. And I highly doubt it'll ever not be built on grind, because if it's not built on grind - that makes it an "everyone gets a prize" game and Steven never wanted that.
MMORPG 'wealth' is tied almost directly to Time, and from the player side, for the game to be good, it has to be Time Spent Having Fun (or afk busywork).
In games where players have too easy access to afk busywork (BDO) or games where 'all economic options are pushed to be as engaging or fun as possible to their demographic (Technically FF11, definitely FF14, EVE sorta now that it is Under New Management), a certain relatively large subset of players immediately ditches the social part of the game and do the Locust transformation thing.
Which makes the economy itself frustrating chaos.
New World still has this problem, but at least that game's approach was never meant to really make Artisanship important and Amazon was still learning. Throne and Liberty has a much better basis but have to go through their growing pains even with that mostly-correct basis installed, I wish Amazon and NCSoft good luck with that...
But Ashes of Creation is a whole different ballgame with much stricter requirements. TL doesn't 'need to stop' the type of player I'm talking about mainly because they don't have anything super important yet (they're about to get their first big acid-test of their economy) and they don't allow fully free Player Trading/Price Setting.
FF11 had both of those things, and the eventual outcome of that is not a thing I wish for either AoC or TL to endure. Just as people often ask to not let this game become a Themepark, not let it become a game where there is no true PvX, I too, am literally begging Intrepid not to let this game fall into the same econ-traps as late stage FF11 or Dark-Period New World.
It's not as simple as "professions are not for everyone", but this game must by definition have a pretty serious dose of 'we're not having fun trying to find copper nodes', for it to not end up like them.
Well we don't even need a "minigame" per say. Even the idea I just randomly thought of while typing the post (every 5 trees you hit in a row while ability is active, increases the drop rate) is not a minigame, but it does make gathering more interesting. If the timer is something like 20s, you are then looking for groupings of trees that you can get 5 down within the time. That alone adds some element of interest because not only are you looking for the trees to chop, you are also searching for specific groupings of trees to optimize this ability.
The devs are smart people. They did a great job on the classes. Surely they can come up with better ideas than me sitting on my ass raging in forums posts randomly.
Grind is fine as long as it is enjoyable.
I can play combat on my bard all day, if the combat is interesting enough. If I am just standing in 1 spot grinding the same mobs, with the same rotation, in 1 corner of carphin all day then yeah that gets old after an hour and i'll leave the group to go do something else. On the other hand, if there is a variety of mechanics and mob types and things that we need to do throughout our combat grind, I don't even notice the time fly by.
I have no problem with how "long" it takes to accomplish something, I just want there to be enough variety in the gameplay experience that the "grind" still means you need to use your brain and react to things from time to time.
That's not me asking for "everyone to get a prize", thats me asking the game devs to put more thought into the gameplay loop so that the most "efficient" thing to do is not repetitive, monotonous, boring tasks for hours on end. Like might as well go get a job in an assembly line and call that "fun".
Maybe I still don't understand the problem you are getting at. I mean first of all, I dont even know what the "social" part is that everyone keeps talking about. I went in the game guildless on purpose, and people called me anti-social for that. But then I was chatting with random people and grouping up and making friends, chatting in global and citizen chat. So I guess I am social? I'm here in the forums yapping with you guys and we aren't even paying a game. "Social" has more to do with the person than the game. Maybe the reason the "Social" side of WOW sucks is because all the "social" people left the game years ago and the only people left are anti-social guildies in their cliques?
I don't see what is more "social" about spamming "23 bard LFG" in global chat, or "2 rare tin for sale". I don't see what's more "social" about hitting w on a horse for 15m to go to a player stall. Especially in a game where everyone tells you to get a guild or stop playing because the game isnt for you. Why even have an economy if everyone is supposed to be in guilds and just trading and grouping inside their guilds?
People will still do the locust swarm of gathering professions whether it is fun or not. Yes, if it isn't fun, less people will do it, which means less people will play the game and servers will merge until the minimum amount of people who still want to play the game are still around. That can't be the desired outcome here.
Since the highest probability of legendary wood drops from adult trees, I need to find adult western larch.
Western larch looks pretty similar to a giant sugar pine, very tall with a spear shaped crown, and no foliage as you get closer to the ground. The adults stand significantly taller than adolescents, and have less foliage at the bottom half of the trunk.
If I climb the tallest peak near me, the view distance (which is epic btw) gives me the ability to spot the exact trees I’m looking for. So I just mark the general location on my map, and orient my way to those trees.
Along the way, I’ll choose two ores to prioritize - typically copper (to improve my current gear) and halcyonite (to vendor and make some silver).
Rinse and repeat until either my bags are totally full, or I farmed the legendary larch I’m looking for and don’t want to push getting hunted down.
Now, I find this loop fun, but it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. Which is great for a healthy economy - if gathering was always fun for everyone it would either deplete Verra of all resources, or it would require the respawn rates to be incredibly low. The obvious impact would be inflation across the board.
Let's look at the idea of guild/player friction for a moment.
If a decently sized guild (let's say 50 players) needs lots of Larch, and gathering Larch is almost universally engaging and fun to most/all players, it is much easier to just 'designate someone who isn't normally interested' and that person will handle it, for the good of the guild.
You don't have to think about their personality much because they're not going to get 'bored', you don't have to worry about their professions because they weren't planning on that much to start and there's no friction so they just default to 'help guild'.
This is the 'guild' version of the 'solo player' problem I was talking about, forgive me (and doubly so if even this comes off as condescending) I'm too used to talking to people with a lot of shared priors on this topic.
What @CROW3 describes above is 'exactly what I expect a Lumberjack player to be thinking about'. I make no assumptions about CROW3 specifically on the matter of Lumbermilling, but you can imagine a player who likes doing the above loop but not the Processing or Carpentry parts, and vice versa.
At some point you need to 'incentivize' people to buy stuff from other people or Verra will be overrun with alts and/or bots. Ashes has none of the standard design protections against this and in many cases explicitly does not intend to implement them.
That's why it 'needs' this, it's part of the package deal.
New World doesn't need it because it's supposed to be a 'single player game' and doesn't have any profession limitations in the first place and there was a bunch of stuff related to that (like how they handled alts).
TL doesn't need it because it doesn't have unrestricted player-to-player trading and uses things that are similar to Labor Points.
Intrepid says, about their game:
"It will be social and require interdependence between Artisans."
"Players will be able to trade freely."
"We do not intend to add systems such as Labor."
This is a hard-ask combination at the best of times, pushing something like 'Crafting your own Bow' to the point where someone like you (in the sense that you don't enjoy the loop as much as CROW3 does) fulfills it, is gonna bring that house of cards tumbling down...
A guild incorporates (from a business perspective) other crafters with other verticals to increase overall production & mutual benefit. More solo players will rely on ‘friending’ preferred vendor stalls where they can reliably acquire sub-components while being relatively free of the social overhead that comes with a guild.
And, to address this more specifically (making at least two assumptions that might not go live), the reason why this is the obvious impact comes from two things, but I must use my main games as the counterexamples again so bear with me.
It makes almost no sense to hoard anything in TL (most of the time). There is no 'profession restriction' and I doubt there ever will be, it's the pure distillation of the good aspect of FF11 for this. If you try to hoard something to drive the price up, people will go get it themselves.
Ashes will not work like this. There will come a day where CROW3 is Master Lumberjack, and the game's systems say to me, Master Alchemist 'if you need Hydalea Sap (made this up) you have to wait for someone to feel like selling it to you, you have no option to get it yourself'.
At no point am I weighing my time spent against CROW3's time spent (I am not asking for this to change). But more importantly, CROW3 has a form of leverage that isn't available in most games. The ability to slow down the relevant economy (in conjunction with other Master Lumberjacks) to maintain their prices, knowing that the barrier to entry for others is high.
The 'intuitive' answer for this, for most people, is to increase the number of lumberjacks by making it more appealing, but this is 'solving the wrong problem' because if you have more Lumberjacks, at some point you have 'the same amount of Lumber spread out more' and what usually happens is that the Devs step in and have to fix it and that takes a long time.
The above shows briefly the level on which that sorta-happens (this is not a dig at Amazon's approach to New World, but that's a whole other post/thread which I just made I guess), point is that then they start controlling spawn rates and whatever else. They get away with calling it a player-driven economy the same way EVE does, but it's more like 'the players drive us, the Devs, to control them but we do our best to make them feel like that's overall control'.
This article literally contains the paragraph:
It’s particularly fun to analyze economic health following big updates such as our expansion, Rise of the Angry Earth. Following speculation on items like Golden Scarabs jumping up in price only to fall back down to normalized prices once the expansion went live was an exciting short-term economic shock. We have a talented team of people keeping a close eye on our economy to make sure it remains healthy.
Very player-driven.
If they theoretically don't want it to work like this, at Intrepid, they have to factor for that. If one thinks they don't, then one would have to assume that Amazon Games is just 'wasting time' with all those unnecessary analytics and controls (they are not).
If you desire this game type, or 'desire for Artisanship to be fun and are willing to pay the cost even if you don't much like this game type', then I totally understand, but as a person who doesn't take this game type as seriously as I would like to take AoC, I'd always choose to pay the cost the other way. Lumberjacking 'fun for CROW3' and not for you.
And yes, I think there are a bunch of inconsistencies and flaws in how Intrepid has represented their plans for Econ so far, which is kinda my point in bringing up the AGS thing. People can use the words 'player driven economy' whenever they want, it doesn't tell the players anything in particular about what to actually expect, apparently.
Outside of me chopping wood, the entire process was passive as hell. But even at this stage it's still rewarding, because I saw my work have direct positive consequences (i.e. a nice caravan). I also did the same thing about the western wood that Crow described, while waiting out my 4h. I even attempted to pylon that shit up, but westerns are so fucking slow on their growth that I only managed to get a few adults into the pylon.
And I also always have my head on a swivel, because I need literally any non-rock mining gatherable for all my other professions. And when I see that bright silvery glimmer of zinc on the horizon - ohhhhh boi my dopamin shoots through the roof. Even more so if it's the spiky triangular silhouette of copper.
To me, all of that is already fun cause the reward is what's fun about it. And the masochistic fuck that I am, I don't think I'd find it as fun if I could simply do a minigame properly and get the super rare wood that I need immediately. The payoff would just be too high, for the low amount of work I'd be doing.
And as Azherae likes to point out, majority of minigames would just be bottable to perfect results, so you'd either be shooting yourself in the leg by not using a bot, while everyone else does - or you'd use a bot and we'd come back to the "artisanry is boring, cause all you do is press a button".
I was thinking this same thing in a response I was about to make to Azherae and Crow.
No one is choosing "processing" because they "like it" at this point, it's just a necessary step in the chain. That being said, I am starting to see some of the synergies and ways that processing could be utilized. Basically, it is good if you plan on staying near your processing node a lot and not traveling too far away for too long of time. You don't really need a mini-game or anything for it, because it allows you to just go play whatever other content you want during the timer window. It acts more like a passive income source, which a lot of players may like about it.