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.
[FEEDBACK] Crafters make the best ****
Droshi
Member, Alpha Two
I have a few different points of feedback from my time in wave1 & so far 2.
I won't address known bugs or issues that seem to be well regarded as broken or in the works to fix. This is just what I consider to be important feedback that I think Intrepid needs to address if they want testers to continue testing and playing the game.
My overall ideas:
POINT 1
Crafters do make the "best" in an absolute sense but no longer in a practical sense...unlike Wave 1, we can not make Novice or Apprentice gear anymore reasonably. What I mean by this is that people level up to 25, and get white/green/blue Journeyman drop gear that is the same or better than Apprentice epic/legendary gear. This renders crafting near useless until Journeyman (in theory). This problem is further exacerbated by exploiters, and if you think exploits will stop and people will not use exploits in good faith, then you are completely mistaken and will battle this all the way many many years into release. If we had good ways of crafting gear for enough people in economical ways, this wouldn't be as much of an issue and it would allow good faith actors to catch up.
My suggestion to improve point #1 is to slightly balance the stat squish that happened for all gear allowing heroic+ gear to scale a bit better, not to where it was before but better. In addition, crafting shirt/pants gear needs to be multiplicative again and not additive, but the exact amount can be adjusted. In Wave1 this gave such a depth to crafting and making more resources useful that needs to be around. Especially with things like animal fat and dropped farming mats being only blue at the highest rarity. Otherwise crafting will not make the best stuff practically, only in an esoteric sense where a collection of very few people can have amazing gear and everyone else will just be more effective to farm drops.
POINT #2
As a main gatherer, I feel that there are many issues that can be improved. More resources in the world are definitely needed. You can keep craft amounts the same by simply upping spawns by 10x, but then making 10x more materials needed to craft, and allowing 10x the stacks. This makes people feel like they are making progress and it's possible to get nodes, rather than simply getting lucky. End of the day you have the same ratio of things being spawned to what is needed, but gatherers feel much more accomplishment.
Many more improvements to QOL can be done here such as snapping to a node, allowing a larger hitbox, not letting your character stop gathering until complete or unless you press esc/del or cast an ability. As well as some client side sound/animation for hitting heroic/epic/legendary gathering.
POINT#3
This is in my opinion critical. We have paid to be testers of this game. I know this may come as a charged topic on what we as paid "testers" are owed or not owed and what we should expect from Intrepid. But I will just comment on what will help this game progress into the best MMO. That is giving people who report /bug or /feedback some kind of feedback of their own. You may say we shouldn't expect this, but this feedback loop is important to keep people engaged. How many people like knowing that something they reported got fixed? Or is being actively looked at? Or has stopped due to technical reasons? I would say a lot.
Now the question is, how to achieve this without adding a ton more staff? Well, you already have a insane group of highly motivated people. Give the community a title, badge, cosmetic, any kind of recognition, and I believe many people will categorize and delete duplicate bug reports and send progress back to people. Make this all in-game as part of a separate messaging/notification system.
In addition I feel we need an "announcement" pinned static message place where testers can read through what is known broken, being worked on, etc. This sets expectations and it's sad to see traded items for example get deleted only to find out there's a no-ping message in Discord stating this was a known bug. Consolidate and streamline this process for everyone and it will go a long way.
POINT #4
May be obvious to many, there have been very few MMOs to be excited about in a long time. But I feel that there's no point in ignoring this fact. It's just a separate point in my mind to drive home how important some system in-game is such as outlined in point #3. If we treat Ashes like a game without the social testing culture, I don't think we are going to be anything more than a nuisance to Intrepid. Both Intrepid and us testers should be trying to do whatever we can to make a better game for release.
I really feel that in game badges or cosmetics or titles help in that regard. If you found bugs and didn't repeat exploit...you get a badge or title. If you did exploit, I still think you provided valuable data, but you should get char/items wiped and a badge of shame attached to your account. This should be visible in any menu in the game such as Mayor candidates and so on.
Intrepid, this is a plea to give us the tools as a community within the game, and we will help to make the workload easier, and build a better game together.
I won't address known bugs or issues that seem to be well regarded as broken or in the works to fix. This is just what I consider to be important feedback that I think Intrepid needs to address if they want testers to continue testing and playing the game.
My overall ideas:
- Crafters make the best stuff is no longer true, but maybe will be true late into Journeyman crafting
- Gathering resources need a LOT of work.
- Testing and feedback isn't communicated well in a loop
- Many people are much more interested in playing the game than they are testing
POINT 1
Crafters do make the "best" in an absolute sense but no longer in a practical sense...unlike Wave 1, we can not make Novice or Apprentice gear anymore reasonably. What I mean by this is that people level up to 25, and get white/green/blue Journeyman drop gear that is the same or better than Apprentice epic/legendary gear. This renders crafting near useless until Journeyman (in theory). This problem is further exacerbated by exploiters, and if you think exploits will stop and people will not use exploits in good faith, then you are completely mistaken and will battle this all the way many many years into release. If we had good ways of crafting gear for enough people in economical ways, this wouldn't be as much of an issue and it would allow good faith actors to catch up.
My suggestion to improve point #1 is to slightly balance the stat squish that happened for all gear allowing heroic+ gear to scale a bit better, not to where it was before but better. In addition, crafting shirt/pants gear needs to be multiplicative again and not additive, but the exact amount can be adjusted. In Wave1 this gave such a depth to crafting and making more resources useful that needs to be around. Especially with things like animal fat and dropped farming mats being only blue at the highest rarity. Otherwise crafting will not make the best stuff practically, only in an esoteric sense where a collection of very few people can have amazing gear and everyone else will just be more effective to farm drops.
POINT #2
As a main gatherer, I feel that there are many issues that can be improved. More resources in the world are definitely needed. You can keep craft amounts the same by simply upping spawns by 10x, but then making 10x more materials needed to craft, and allowing 10x the stacks. This makes people feel like they are making progress and it's possible to get nodes, rather than simply getting lucky. End of the day you have the same ratio of things being spawned to what is needed, but gatherers feel much more accomplishment.
Many more improvements to QOL can be done here such as snapping to a node, allowing a larger hitbox, not letting your character stop gathering until complete or unless you press esc/del or cast an ability. As well as some client side sound/animation for hitting heroic/epic/legendary gathering.
POINT#3
This is in my opinion critical. We have paid to be testers of this game. I know this may come as a charged topic on what we as paid "testers" are owed or not owed and what we should expect from Intrepid. But I will just comment on what will help this game progress into the best MMO. That is giving people who report /bug or /feedback some kind of feedback of their own. You may say we shouldn't expect this, but this feedback loop is important to keep people engaged. How many people like knowing that something they reported got fixed? Or is being actively looked at? Or has stopped due to technical reasons? I would say a lot.
Now the question is, how to achieve this without adding a ton more staff? Well, you already have a insane group of highly motivated people. Give the community a title, badge, cosmetic, any kind of recognition, and I believe many people will categorize and delete duplicate bug reports and send progress back to people. Make this all in-game as part of a separate messaging/notification system.
In addition I feel we need an "announcement" pinned static message place where testers can read through what is known broken, being worked on, etc. This sets expectations and it's sad to see traded items for example get deleted only to find out there's a no-ping message in Discord stating this was a known bug. Consolidate and streamline this process for everyone and it will go a long way.
POINT #4
May be obvious to many, there have been very few MMOs to be excited about in a long time. But I feel that there's no point in ignoring this fact. It's just a separate point in my mind to drive home how important some system in-game is such as outlined in point #3. If we treat Ashes like a game without the social testing culture, I don't think we are going to be anything more than a nuisance to Intrepid. Both Intrepid and us testers should be trying to do whatever we can to make a better game for release.
I really feel that in game badges or cosmetics or titles help in that regard. If you found bugs and didn't repeat exploit...you get a badge or title. If you did exploit, I still think you provided valuable data, but you should get char/items wiped and a badge of shame attached to your account. This should be visible in any menu in the game such as Mayor candidates and so on.
Intrepid, this is a plea to give us the tools as a community within the game, and we will help to make the workload easier, and build a better game together.
2
Comments
POINT 1
Basically, the corruption system has a few flaws that do need addressing. I believe this is happening and I've heard through the grapevine that accidental corruption is a big focus. A PvP flag can fall off an enemy too quickly in my opinion, and it should be refreshed when being hit. This falling off and getting a killing blow is not good and if you see someone flagged unless you are sure you know when their flag was refreshed is very risky to attack. A setting of some kind for attacking only flagged vs murdering may be possible, but I can see how that might be exploited or abused as well.
Next, actual murders are not being addressed well since gear is often not risked. Murderers can have their friends kill and loot them, effectively clearing corruption. I know with blight this stacks up higher over time and vs lower level targets but assuming the above accidental issues are addressed, then I feel the fix to this is to allow the person murdered to see the corrupt player from a much further distance for some time, and to allow only them to loot that corrupt player for some period of time. Obviously timers and distance should be balanced with occasionally having a good reason to murder a white name for griefing or abusing a system, and so on occasions murderers should get away without dying.
POINT 2
Anti-power leveling measures have been put into place, but I feel they are not effective and instead have an unintended negative effect. As the system exists today, you can't really party with your friend who you may have out-leveled to help them out or simply just to play together even if you aren't at full amazing xp/hour. It's totally not viable other than to follow them around and just gather and do nothing almost (unless you're a high level healer, or tank etc).
If power leveling is really unwanted, more needs to be done, as out of group threat generation and healing does nothing to reduce exp. In addition, a full group of 20+ adding a level 11 or so, doing 3 star 25+ mobs, will still powerlevel that player pretty effectively. Also high crafted gear seems to be the main source of powerleveling, sadly as point 1 in the above post outlines, it's not useful for characters legitimately under 10 or 20 to get and craft that gear, but it's very powerful to twink level a character.
Assuming powerleveling is unwanted, and playing with friends at a level disparity is OK, I think it's possible to address these situations, and still in a group of 2 or 3 at most, allow a larger level disparity. I personally don't have a huge problem with just powerleveling, and I think even giving bonus exp to people who are behind the main curve is a good thing. Rested exp and things of that nature are good to get new players into a game, who would otherwise feel completely left behind by their friends at the front of a curve and decide it's not worth trying to catch up.