Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Phase II testing is currently taking place 5+ days each week. More information about testing schedule can be found here
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Phase II testing is currently taking place 5+ days each week. More information about testing schedule can be found here
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
Comments
Making professions fun "for their own sake" is a bandaid solution to distract players from the fact that the competitive parts, the economy, and the combat in the game aren't interesting and challenging enough to make the *actual* game interesting.
Whether the minigames are good shouldn't be a consideration in whether you want to log in to spend your time in an MMO. If you want to play minigames, go play minigames.
Longer, is not fun, hard can be fun so long as its not stupid, by stupid I will use a example from T&L, they just introduced tier 2 Dungeons, their idea of making it harder was just give the final boss, 1m more hit points, so its just long slow and boring burning them down, that kind of 'harder' loses players.
Same with crafting, make it fun, easier is almost always better than harder, the point of any MMO is to keep players, and not try be elitist! it just does not work, nor will it ever.
Though its nice to see a lot of people have said playing their characters are fun, which is good but that will only carry a game so far.
MMO to survive must carry the casuals once you lose them, its just spiral to death
I doubt that Ashes of Creation specifically would retain more players by making specific smaller things easier, considering the rest of the game.
This forum has, for years, been full of people talking about how they got bored, lost interest, and stopped playing easier games because they were easy.
Maybe if they wanna change target audience, but that doesn't seem sensible at this point.
Well you can have all the interesting systems in the world, but if a player logs on for a 3 hour session and the actual gameplay for that 3 hours is boring, they will eventually play something else. This is why i quit playing Mortal Online 2. I thought the game and the systems were cool, i just didn't enjoy the minute to minute gameplay. Apparently I am not the only one, as that game currently only has a couple thousand users.
Everything you do in the game that takes player time is a "minigame" whether you call it that or not.
Traveling is a "minigame" where you press W or auto run, aim the mount, and press the boost button on cooldown. (Don't even get me started on this aspect, waiting desperately for interesting mount abilities)
Gathering is a "minigame" where you scan the landscape for the resource then go up and click F on it and wait for the circle to finish.
Character skill selection is a "minigame" where you change your skills to suit the party and monsters you are fighting.
Combat is a "minigame" where you try to use your character skill toolkit and mobility to kill monsters and not die, based on the current situation you are in.
The point is, the complexity and fun of the "minigame" should be proportional to the amount of time a player is expected to be doing it.
The reason so many people love the combat is because there is a large variety of situations that you run into during your time spent doing it. Whether you are solo, small group or large group... Whether you are trying to create an AOE farm, or single target strong monsters, or just finding content appropriate for the group you have at the time.
So yeah, the "minigame" that is provided for us when engaging in different systems absolutely matters. It is what we are actually doing with our time in Verra.
Even if one is given a minigame for chopping wood, if your goal when you set out for the day is to find a very specific tree, the minigame is things like surveying, understanding world conditions, observation, avoiding mobs, etc.
Finding that one tree and hitting a few buttons differently won't change that (and again, I don't have any problem with hitting buttons differently, it's just not the thing that needs to change in order for it to be engaging).
Well i think the point he is making is that making something "time consuming" without adding interest doesn't make something "harder" or "easier". It's completely fine that they make these systems time consuming. The argument is that the more time we are expected to spend on a system, the more interesting, complex and dynamic that system should be. As well as being more beneficial to the player engaging in it.
His example of just adding 1m HPs to a boss is right. This doesn't make the fight "harder". What would make it "harder" would be more boss fight mechanics that that players have to react to that have the effect of making the boss fight longer.
Let's say you have 2 boss fights that are both designed to be about 20m long.
Boss fight 1 has 1 ground slam attack... that's it, but a million hps.
Boss fight 2 has 4 stages, each with 5 different attacks, adds that come out, mobility/movement mechanics, raidwide buffs/debuffs to gather, and the boss has 100k hps.
Would the Ashes community really prefer boss fight 1? At least its "harder" than if the boss only had 500k hps...
I don't know what the Ashes community is like when it comes to bosses.
The problem with the claim made by that poster is that it's a strawman, because that's not really what is happening in boss design, it's not even true for the example they used.
MMOs have been doing that sort of thing for years, claiming that TL or even WoW is 'just adding HP' is, I would hope, obviously wrong. Adding more HP to a boss that is a higher tier is almost never about 'making it take longer' in that sense.
So I was addressing only the crafting part of that post without accounting for the boss part, because the boss part makes no sense.
The problem with this example is that you aren't just looking for 1 tree. You are looking for thousands of trees, and you will spend 20 hours chopping them. How this "feels" for 20 hours of gameplay absolutely matters. If you are spending more time watching youtube videos while chopping than actually engaging in the game, the game sucks.
That being said, it's still fine for the game to have some time sink systems that are like this. But not for all the professions. OR at least give us some options so players that want to be more engaged while doing the professions can be, and those that want to be on autopilot can do that too.
If Ashes of Creation's artisanship is intended to be 'chopping down thousands of trees over 20 hours', then we've gone full BDO and then yeah, sure, we might as well go all the way and make it easier, but then, someone will bot it.
If chopping down thousands of trees is ever a 'generally good use of someone's time' in Ashes, even 20h worth of time, the whole system is already well outside of the realm of its level of engagement mattering, because it will be sacrificing long term satisfaction of engagement for shorter term, as with most games.
That said, if they wanna go full New World style, that's up to them. I think I've ended up in the painful space of this sort of thing, where one 'bad feeling' has a solution that just starts the domino effect, so I guess I might be switching to your side soon, in this discussion. Better to let the whole thing suck for me/people like me, than to have it be boring for you/people like you. No sarc.
If anything I'm not asking for it to be easier, I'm asking for it to be harder. Again, time spent != difficulty.
I'm fine with 20 hours of chopping thousands of trees. Just like 20 hours of killing mobs.
The difference here is the 20hr of killing mobs, I level 10 times and changed skills around and went to 10 different areas with different groups fighting different mob types and combat situations.
My bad, this happens because I have a really different definition of what the challenge is.
To me, the actual chopping of the tree is absolutely irrelevant in the process in every sense, but almost invariably when designers make something like lumberjacking more of a minigame, the other aspects of it become easier, to 'respect players' time'.
Right, I guess we are mixing up "easier" with "enjoyable", and "hard" with "not enjoyable". We could just as easily mix up "easier" with "simpler" and "hard" with "more complex". Or we could take "easier" to mean "less time" and "hard" to mean "more time". And now we mean almost opposite things, especially if we want the game to be "hard".
Typically i think of things being "hard" when there is a greater chance of failure and the person requires more concentration and accuracy to achieve success. But you can be equally right, "hard" can be a state of mind where you really don't want to do something but force yourself to do it anyways.
Maybe if the lumberjacking was an action combat axe swing, with like 4 different ability cooldown, a skill tree, and various tree defenses that you encountered and adjusted your abilities/swings it would be more "enjoyable" for me. Shrug. Could still allow for a "click and wait" option for people who want to zone out. If you action combat the thing right its 3s per tree to chop, if you click and wait its 4s per tree.
I dont really like the current idea of upgrading lumberjacking equipment to decrease the time it takes to chop the tree. It's basically admitting that this part of the game is boring and sucks and is only there to waste time.
For clarity this is what I meant by going full BDO, and they're already halfway there, much to my distress. But all this stuff could be easy placeholder, I think an AI could make the system we have now, at least, based on my experiences in Quinfall...
So to be a bit more helpful with this if you care, the issue here is simple enough. Different people have different subsets of the interaction matrix that they enjoy, and a game with a sufficiently robust artisanship system should leverage this correctly.
For you, chopping trees is not matching your preferred interaction matrix, so you would, in a fleshed out game, probably be a Processor of timber and occasionally a crafter of wood things, rather than a Gatherer of wood. You would then ask CROW3, who has the matching interaction matrix, to gather wood for you, and in turn, offer to handle the part of it that doesn't match.
Everyone wins.
Trying to force your interaction matrix preference into CROW3's gathering will make someone unhappy.
Some examples below:
Lumberjacking: Visual/Scouting, Discernment, Preparation (small)
Mining: (depends on game but usually) Awareness while Moving, Route Planning/Optimization, Preparation
Woodworking (processing type): Visual Timing, Goal/Priority Selection, Reaction (small)
Herbalism: Memory, Preparation, Route Planning (small), in some games Visual/scouting
Alchemy: Sequencing, Memory, Visual Timing
There are tons more of these, most correspond loosely to real life analogues of the activity. Classes/Archetypes can often be similarly sorted by playstyle, that's why there's often correlation between a dedicated 'main' of a particular class and their Artisanship.
OK well fair enough i suppose. I'd hate for them to change every system to match the same playstyle. And for sure they need some calm gameplay loops that are relaxing and people can listen to podcasts or watch some videos while chilling, or chatting with the homies.
I suppose this argument would go back to the "why lumberjacking speed as a progression then?". If the gameplay for this profession is supposed to be chill and relax, wouldn't upgrading the speed of your axe be the opposite of that style? If someone enjoyed lumberjacking in novice, why would they want to change the gameplay? And if they didn't, why would they want to grind out the slow chop to begin with?
And really, at this point, all 3 main gathering professions (mining, herbalism, lumberjacking) are pretty much the exact same playstyle and feel. So maybe make one of them so I can be a gatherer and enjoy it? I like to be active in the open world and gathering is a good profession for that.
Eh, it's just a thing people throw on when they're less experienced with it.
Understanding who, and how, to appeal to, is a whole 'thing' after all. I'm just picky about it because "Market Research Business Intelligence and Databases" was literally my job for a while.
None of my current group/devs actually 'know' how to make these types of decisions, and Intrepid hasn't actually taken down their Economy Designer posting even now, so I'm still a bit worried that they don't have their 'me' so I'm helping(?) as I can.
Point is, it takes many years to get where I am, and it's possible they don't have anyone who knows why not to do/mix certain things.
If it's any help, Intrepid, don't mix large scale gathering with tool speed. Just focus on designing the materials 'ladder' better. From my parses, your general audience up until this point wants that more than they want the BDO style, but of course that includes me, so bias potential.
I was even more upset when i saw just what having 6 copper (8 hours of RL time spent) did for raising my weaponsmithing skill.... that's correct.... Nothing. Unacceptable. Here is a thought... disable that portion of the game until it is really ready to be tested. the only game i saw was lets see how many gathers / crafters we can piss off this weekend.
Gathering is a problem... sure maybe it is an alpha problem or maybe it isnt. I should be able to use my Novice tools to harvest higher lvl resources just more slowly. they have even said so in the videos... is it broken? ... has the plan changed? ... is it an alpha problem?
Copper and zinc are still a problem unless you are willing to get up at 3am USA time to look.
what we have is almost nothing like shown in this video
TLDR; You made mistakes on each step of the way and mad because game didn't give you everything on silver platter only because your grace logged into the game.
Pal, what I'm reading here is it is not a bad system but you wanted to craft knowing nothing about crafting and failed. Did't bother to ask around, instead, you went to an external website that is not finished or you didn't see the requirements for the bow you want to craft.
On top of that you didn't want to craft just any bow, you wanted to craft higher rarity. Do you expect to get level 15 in one hour? Why do you expect to make a good bow and not put any effort into it? You know that you won't get candy just for logging into the game, right?
I don't see how mindless grinding is fun and mindless resource gathering is not fun, if anything then spending a lot of time doing either of them would yield the same result - you want a break and that is what you should've done.
You mentioned a few times that you were broke and couldn't do stuff. Well yes, again, bad planning. Why you didn't start gathering resources right after killing 3 sickly goblins, why wait till level 8? Besides, I don't understand how you became broke when you actually make money chopping trees, each adult tree yield 20 copper(after repairs), chop down 5 and you got a silver coin. But since you wanted western larch and they are not adult your axe is breaking a lot faster, plus you only getting 2 wood instead of 5.
Then you decided to run a caravan, completely unrelated to crafting but okay. I should say I ran a caravan multiple times and luckily didn't get attacked other than once by lowbies, except for last weekend when I loaded 12 packs and was lucky my guildmates were close by and they were able to save me last minute. It's a very unpleasant feeling when you get attacked and realize you will lose hours of work to bandits, it's as exciting when your caravan is saved and you PK those bastards.
Here, you didn't make a mistake running a caravan; you made a mistake running it with a whole bunch of resources on your back. You are a target already. You should know that there is a high chance you will get attacked, so why would you take rare resources? It's a big mistake.
Bad planning or luck thereof lead to a failure. It's not a bad system. Find a guild, find friends, learn a bit and try again.
PS
I would rather chop trees than grind mobs sometimes but you don't see me complain about a bad system. Don't force yourself into something that is not for you.
A crafter can choose not to do dungeons or pvp but an adventurer cannot choose to not to do any life skills or they'll be at a disadvantage
I prefer "Your Majesty"
Should be able to "learn the system" easily enough on my own. I understand that "doing the system" is expected to be time consuming, and i don't have a problem with that.
Well i didnt expect to get 2 levels in 20 hours and still not be anywhere near crafting a bow that i could get in 20minutes of mob grinding.
When I "mob grinded" with my bard to level 23, I was rarely in the same spot or fighting the same mobs for more than 2 hours or so. The whole experience was filled with lots of variety in combat, grouping, roaming, changing skills and builds, looking for new spots to fight etc.
I thought about going out earlier but I couldnt farm the larch until i got a few more levels. I was broke by trying to process the wood and craft into boxes to try and get both processing and crafting up.
Definitely a big mistake. Didn't really understand how those systems worked yet. And I got completely fucked for it. Sure, my bad. But after 20 hours of mindless wood chopping and messing around with the clunky system, it just put me over the edge. I was pissed off man.
Yeah part of what i was going for was to purposefully play without a guild and see what the experience would be like for someone just checking out the game, and not these people who have been following it for years and have teams already all planned out. I've now given up on that plan and am joining a guild. I feel bad for all the people who check out this game without a guild, think it sucks, and just quit. But I guess that's what Intrepid wants to happen?
Sure I guess some people might like the system as it is. I definitely do not. As much as I think it would be useful to be a gatherer in this game, I probably wont engage with this system until/unless they give it some work and try to make it actually fun to do.
I mean, just imagine if you had a lumberjack ability on some skill tree, where if you hit it on your last chop it SLAMS the tree and charges you forward 20 yards or until you hit another tree. If you hit another tree with it, it immediately takes off 50% of the chop time on the tree you hit and engages chopping. I would find shit like that fun as hell to go chopping. Flying around hitting trees and stuff. Right now I feel like im waiting in line at the grocery store or something. It just isnt my jam at all.
You're just asking for the next WoW/ESO/Guild Wars. Those games all still exist for you to go play right now, if you're so convinced that being able to do it all is so fun. Can the rest of us not get one game that doesn't make every player the same, for a change?
The devs can't solve this for you. If they make it easy for everyone to pick up but hard to master, but the best crafted stuff adds 50% to your stats, EVERYONE is going to master it anyways. Then you'll complain that you put all this work into mastering the artisanry but now no one's buying your amazing crafted equipment.
Because they can all do it themselves.
If players can't learn to focus on the niche they like and accept the shorter end of the stick in the other parts of the game, then the players are the problems, and any solutions the devs choose will just create problems in other parts of the game.
The correct choice is to keep everything difficult, and make players learn how to focus on the parts they can do best and enjoy the most, and appreciate the cooperation with others who focus on other elements of the game.
And to make sure that players can be successful in their part of the game and translate it into other parts without having to do it all. That's what makes the formula work so well in games like Eve. You can mostly do PvP, or mostly do trading, or mostly do PvE, and your wealth progression can be equally successful, allowing you to further ground the efforts of your ongoing operation, or to reach out into other parts of the game.
(Obviously PvE and PvP are tied together in Ashes, so those will have to appeal to every player of the game to a sufficient degree, but the principle applies to other elements of the game.)
Hardly any fantasy MMOs make this properly possible. You always have to do everything in almost equal proportions to stay relevant. Because of tedious daily caps/rewards and boring account-binding, etc.
In that setting it would make sense that you'd be afraid of disliking artisanry; you'd be forced to do it, so your time in the game would be worse if you don't like it.
But in a game that allows you to engage at a minimal capacity with the crafting and instead provide services and money to a crafter, you'll be fine skipping the parts of the artisanry system that you dislike.
I do not know of many (any) games where at least one of these items (monotonous) is not a part of the crafting system. 🤔
I also think adding a bit of convolution removes a bit of the monotony. 😉
gosh, it's like you gotta work with a community to get something.
Car manufacturer needs GM Steel Makers to provide mats for their car. Needs GM Chip Maker for their system, needs GM Aluminum for the body, needs a GM Tire maker for their wheels.
Once they got all the mats and pre-assembled stuff, then General Motors GM Car Maker can finally make a car.
Yeah but the "convoluted" part only removes the monotony for the FIRST time you learn it, which isn't monotonous by definition. AFTER you learn the system it becomes monotonous.
The learning phase is only a few days. We are planning on playing this game for years. You can't base the game design on the "learning and discovery" phase being the most important, when the day-to-day gameplay needs to be the most important or people will play other games after a few weeks.
As to some of the other points people are making. The crafting and professions aren't really that complicated at all. It's just the format that the information is presented in is cumbersome and annoying to deal with (hopefully just an alpha issue)
I'd rather have a truly deep and complicated system, but have the information presented beautifully for the players to research, understand, and plan. This is why people turn to 3rd party websites and guides, they just present the information in a better way than the game devs managed to do.
This is alpha, you are not seeing the system, you are seeing a rough draft of the system that is not even the focus of this segment of testing.
You missed my point regarding monotony. Almost everything we do in game is repeated. Everything from killing a world boss to killing NPCs to repeating a dungeon. Crafting in any game I have ever played is based on repetitive steps.
I am sure that the crafting system we see in a couple years from now at launch will be much different than what we are seeing in this early crude alpha testing stage and the changes we see might very well come from the constructive feedback we give during this testing so I would recommend you provide constructive feedback under the A2 feedback section.
What do you mean? With the exception of processing being locked to certain numbers such as 1-5-10-25-50 and so on, the gathering and processing was a lot of fun for me. No idea what you are on about mate.
Well the gathering for one. You just go up, click a button, and wait. Most of the people that "enjoy" it, say they are listening to podcasts or doing other things with their time because this play loop is not interesting enough on its own.
The only possible excitement is potential PVP, which is the whole point of the PVX game. Problem with that, is the last thing people "relaxing and listening to podcasts and barely paying attention to the game" want to do is be disrupted by a group of people that come, insta kill you, then kill their buddy and res him to shake off corruption. Then 1/2 of their gatherables drop and they begin to question whether they are really having a "relaxed time" with this game and if this is what they should be doing with their life.
This is one of the core time sinks in the game, it'd be much better if the gathering aspect was actually as fun and interesting as the combat. Sprinkle in some gathering only skills/abilities (abilities with movement involved are always a good way to add "fun") Make the gathering skill trees (not in place yet) interesting with multiple branch choices for various player styles. Make the gatherables THEMSELVES have various mining methods/efficiencies based off of player skill trees, item use, and clever gameplay.
If it is a fun thing to do, then the end result (amount of mats) is not the only reason to do it, and so losing these mats is not as frustrating. It will also attract the type of player who is more likely to enjoy the PVP aspect when it does happen. People always say "Ashes isn't for everyone", well here you go.
Processing is fine, I guess. It doesn't need to be interesting because it isn't a time sink, you can do other things with the processing time window.
The crafting also isn't currently designed as a time sink, just takes a few seconds to craft something. The annoying part right now is "batch" crafting, crafting useless items, and the lack of UI to see what is even craftable in game so that you can plan things. Running from shop to shop or spamming global chat to see what can be built for what mats and how everything links together is tedious. The craftables themselves are pretty boring, compare them to the Engineering Profession in WOW and then tell me how cool AOCs crafting is.