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 to the current state of Artisanship
Crimsonyoshi
Member, Alpha Two
in Artisanship
Hello all. Before diving into this, let me state that I know there are systems not yet implemented, iterated on, and this is a microcosm sandbox that isn’t the full game map / live version with potentially a larger overall server population. Knowing that, everything I’m about to type is therefore based on the current version of artisanship and may be null and void with yet upcoming additions / improvements.
I want to start from a real high-level view, and then dive more into detail. For added reference, I am a level 12 bard on Vyra, playing since the launch date of A2 wave 1. My path was reaching level 10 quickly to become a node citizen (specifically to Winstead for this wave), and then divert nearly all gametime to artisanship since then. I did not spend too much time with artisanship in wave 1, but presently in wave 2, I am an apprentice in Tailoring, Farming, Weaving, and Harvesting. I have some levels into hunting and lumberjacking, but fortunately have other guildmates primarying those professions. The server state as of this timestamp does not have an apprentice Hide Works (though I imagine it will in the coming couple of days). We do have most other apprentice buildings which is allowing for some throughput of finished crafted apprentice tier products.
The first thing I want to draw attention too is the gulf we’re seeing between artisanship and levelling. This is something that must be reconciled in any MMORPG. I haven’t been tracking my playtime precisely, but I’ve had at least 3–6-hour gametime days for nearly every real world day (save for perhaps Christmas Day) since wave 2 went live. The guild I’m part of which has a mixture of artisans and PvX & caravan players as of this post’s timestamp has a large chunk of the PvX players into the level 20’s, or just shy of it.
Because we still do not have a Hide Works constructed, we can not process tier 2 carcasses, and we are still limited (at least for tailoring and leatherworking) to tier 1 gear. Meanwhile, the non artisans are acquiring green and blue rarity level 20 gear off group content world mobs.
There is such a huge jump in the stats on the gear tiers that for a good chunk of the PvX player base, they have minimal need to turn to crafted gear at or below blue quality, with perhaps the exception of a small amount of gear pieces to fill out the rest of the gear slots on their character.
This then presents the following problems to crafters:
• There is such a huge quantity requirement to process and craft gear to level through to the next tier, alongside a large currency amount the game destroys to process and craft gear.
• The bulk of the crafting experience we will gain will be from mass producing common and to a lesser extent uncommon gear which then meets reduced demand in the marketplace due to both:
• The tier of gear artisans produces is behind what PvX players are equipping from mob drops.
• The rarity of gear artisans mass produce is largely of equal or lesser quality (common, uncommon, or rare quality) to mob drops.
Crafters can likely turn a profit selling blue (perhaps the floor will be yellow – heroic quality) or higher quality gear, but because the probability breakdowns of higher quality gatherables are what they are, heroic or higher quality gear will have to see large price increases in the marketplace to offset the reduced market demand for lower quality items as well as offsetting the currency the game destroys during the creation process of mass produced crafted gear (crafting XP gains). If gear then is only valuable at blue or higher quality to the world market, then white and green quality gear as well as raw materials are no more than a time and money sink for artisans to gain artisan XP, and that feels bad.
I mostly want to highlight this as there isn’t an easy solution to this problem. Slowing down player XP is not a suggestion I want to make, and speeding up the artisan process flies counter to the current design goal of the game. I understand crafting should be a journey, but this segues into the next point I have which is the psychological impact of the current artisan structure.
Personally, the artisan path I’ve taken does not feel good. I stated in a prior post I made that I do not want to feel like being an artisan is a second full time job, and it’s hard to say it’s not at least a part time job from the hours I’m spending nearly every day in the game dedicated to it to date. Some of it for sure can be attributed to FOMO, but this absolutely ties into the psychological aspect. As the server artisan bell curve moves along with the completion of world artisan buildings, so to does supply and demand. The highest supply of goods will be with the bulk of the current crafter tiers on the server, and demand will always be front loaded because of the leading PvX player levels being ahead of what is available to craft. Also, because gear is not bind on equip (and to be clear I’m not suggesting it should be), there will eventually be market saturation for gear especially at the lower quality and tiers very quickly. This then makes it more challenging for crafters who are not keeping up with the curve to eventually reach grandmaster (once implemented). They will need to find a way to make enough money to offset crafting XP gains while taking a net currency loss on crafting common and uncommon items because they won't sell in the marketplace as easily if they are behind the curve. On a parallel thought, how bad will it feel if a node with needed artisan buildings is sieged and destroyed in the early game thus regressing artisan progress at a critical time like this?
In addition, we also must somewhat take today’s real-world view into account. This itself can easily be a contentious topic, so I’ll dance along the edge a bit by not diving too deep into it. We live in a world today where time is money like it never has been before in modern ages. The player base today is vastly different than the player base from Lineage 2 days. We live in an era where metas are a thing, and even being 0.1% out of the top potential is enough to be excluded from group play. Tutorials are everywhere instantly online. And if something is deemed too much work or too hard, and then is reinforced in the community or elsewhere in an echo chamber, players will quit the game entirely. That said, I’m not advocating for an easy button, but rather somewhere in the middle needs to be achieved, and this is not an easy thing to do.
I agree that more time spent in the game should get an individual further along, but we need to be careful about those who are not part of the leading bell curve of supply and demand. In Lineage 2, if you weren’t part of the larger alliances or joined a server a little bit after it launched, it was exponentially harder to catch up, and I think it would be a mistake to totally emulate that here.
The rest of this is focused more on in game UI and in game systems. As I mentioned in a wave 1 post, I am eagerly looking forward to the fleshed-out UI coming. Processing in static set amount batches feels archaic.
I’m fairly certain that gatherable spawns rotate through the tiers. To clarify, on Vyra currently we have had a rush in the past 72 hours to harvest bluebell. I’ve spent three different two-hour sessions yesterday running across nearly the entire map to find a total of 18 bluebell plants over all play sessions. There are a ton of tier 3 flowers where I’ve seen bluebells before tier 2 harvesting was available on the server. This is another thing that feels bad. I don’t know that locking static tier spawns should be the solution, but perhaps tier spawns being locked to the highest available associated building in the node / adjacent nodes may be a better solution? To clarify, if say Halcyon has an apprentice Agricultural Supply building, then the adjacent 1-2 nodes unlock tier 2 plants available for gathering, where all plants cycle between tier 1 and 2. Only when the Agricultural Supply reaches journeyman (or another node constructs a journeyman Ag building instead) will tier 3 plants spawn and be available for gathering + two adjacent nodes to it. Likewise for mining and other node spawn professions.
I’ve danced on the edge of this point as well, but there needs to be some guidance / game tips / other informative message board in game which educates players on working together to build nodes up and subsequentially artisan buildings within those nodes. Being short a Hide Works building while all other buildings have been up for a few days feels bad. Alpha and Beta players will potentially have a massive leg up on new live players come the day of live servers because we’re figuring this out now!
It's become readily apparent how critical Freeholds are. Tier 2 seems to be hard limited by willow trees. Being able to plunk 50+ willow trees down on a freehold is a massive boost to whoever owns them (at least for this juncture of the game). I’m assuming there will be more “rare” materials as the tiers progress which farming on Freeholds will drastically offset for the Freehold owner.
The following are my opinions:
• Different recipes which require more materials to craft should also give more crafting xp (ie. a chest piece should give more xp than bracers). Perhaps higher rarity crafting should also give more xp?
• Novice and Apprentice tiers should take less experience (change to a more pronounced logarithmic curve compared to the current line / curve) to get through. Journeyman perhaps is where the current quantity requirements should kick in.
• Freehold resource generation on rare resources seems insane. Seeing 50+ willow trees on a freehold when it’s a rare resource in the world which limits apprentice progression server wide will make an oligopoly or monopoly on the markets for materials. Is this the intent?
• I’m betting this will be a thing, but I’d like to be able to process and craft things from my node storage rather than having materials in my personal inventory every time.
• I’d like a way to queue multiple common crafts. Having to manually add two linen and one grem skin 250 times over for profession XP isn’t great. Let me put in 50 linen and 25 grem skin and have the tailoring table make 25 bracers in a row when I click the button please.
In summary, there’s a lot here that needs to be iterated on and re-examined so that someone taking a one-week vacation from the game isn’t behind the 8-ball. I want to feel useful as an artisan, but being hard limited by node building construction while other gameplay elements have other groups of players vastly ahead of what we can craft feels really bad.
Thank you for taking the time to read this!
I want to start from a real high-level view, and then dive more into detail. For added reference, I am a level 12 bard on Vyra, playing since the launch date of A2 wave 1. My path was reaching level 10 quickly to become a node citizen (specifically to Winstead for this wave), and then divert nearly all gametime to artisanship since then. I did not spend too much time with artisanship in wave 1, but presently in wave 2, I am an apprentice in Tailoring, Farming, Weaving, and Harvesting. I have some levels into hunting and lumberjacking, but fortunately have other guildmates primarying those professions. The server state as of this timestamp does not have an apprentice Hide Works (though I imagine it will in the coming couple of days). We do have most other apprentice buildings which is allowing for some throughput of finished crafted apprentice tier products.
The first thing I want to draw attention too is the gulf we’re seeing between artisanship and levelling. This is something that must be reconciled in any MMORPG. I haven’t been tracking my playtime precisely, but I’ve had at least 3–6-hour gametime days for nearly every real world day (save for perhaps Christmas Day) since wave 2 went live. The guild I’m part of which has a mixture of artisans and PvX & caravan players as of this post’s timestamp has a large chunk of the PvX players into the level 20’s, or just shy of it.
Because we still do not have a Hide Works constructed, we can not process tier 2 carcasses, and we are still limited (at least for tailoring and leatherworking) to tier 1 gear. Meanwhile, the non artisans are acquiring green and blue rarity level 20 gear off group content world mobs.
There is such a huge jump in the stats on the gear tiers that for a good chunk of the PvX player base, they have minimal need to turn to crafted gear at or below blue quality, with perhaps the exception of a small amount of gear pieces to fill out the rest of the gear slots on their character.
This then presents the following problems to crafters:
• There is such a huge quantity requirement to process and craft gear to level through to the next tier, alongside a large currency amount the game destroys to process and craft gear.
• The bulk of the crafting experience we will gain will be from mass producing common and to a lesser extent uncommon gear which then meets reduced demand in the marketplace due to both:
• The tier of gear artisans produces is behind what PvX players are equipping from mob drops.
• The rarity of gear artisans mass produce is largely of equal or lesser quality (common, uncommon, or rare quality) to mob drops.
Crafters can likely turn a profit selling blue (perhaps the floor will be yellow – heroic quality) or higher quality gear, but because the probability breakdowns of higher quality gatherables are what they are, heroic or higher quality gear will have to see large price increases in the marketplace to offset the reduced market demand for lower quality items as well as offsetting the currency the game destroys during the creation process of mass produced crafted gear (crafting XP gains). If gear then is only valuable at blue or higher quality to the world market, then white and green quality gear as well as raw materials are no more than a time and money sink for artisans to gain artisan XP, and that feels bad.
I mostly want to highlight this as there isn’t an easy solution to this problem. Slowing down player XP is not a suggestion I want to make, and speeding up the artisan process flies counter to the current design goal of the game. I understand crafting should be a journey, but this segues into the next point I have which is the psychological impact of the current artisan structure.
Personally, the artisan path I’ve taken does not feel good. I stated in a prior post I made that I do not want to feel like being an artisan is a second full time job, and it’s hard to say it’s not at least a part time job from the hours I’m spending nearly every day in the game dedicated to it to date. Some of it for sure can be attributed to FOMO, but this absolutely ties into the psychological aspect. As the server artisan bell curve moves along with the completion of world artisan buildings, so to does supply and demand. The highest supply of goods will be with the bulk of the current crafter tiers on the server, and demand will always be front loaded because of the leading PvX player levels being ahead of what is available to craft. Also, because gear is not bind on equip (and to be clear I’m not suggesting it should be), there will eventually be market saturation for gear especially at the lower quality and tiers very quickly. This then makes it more challenging for crafters who are not keeping up with the curve to eventually reach grandmaster (once implemented). They will need to find a way to make enough money to offset crafting XP gains while taking a net currency loss on crafting common and uncommon items because they won't sell in the marketplace as easily if they are behind the curve. On a parallel thought, how bad will it feel if a node with needed artisan buildings is sieged and destroyed in the early game thus regressing artisan progress at a critical time like this?
In addition, we also must somewhat take today’s real-world view into account. This itself can easily be a contentious topic, so I’ll dance along the edge a bit by not diving too deep into it. We live in a world today where time is money like it never has been before in modern ages. The player base today is vastly different than the player base from Lineage 2 days. We live in an era where metas are a thing, and even being 0.1% out of the top potential is enough to be excluded from group play. Tutorials are everywhere instantly online. And if something is deemed too much work or too hard, and then is reinforced in the community or elsewhere in an echo chamber, players will quit the game entirely. That said, I’m not advocating for an easy button, but rather somewhere in the middle needs to be achieved, and this is not an easy thing to do.
I agree that more time spent in the game should get an individual further along, but we need to be careful about those who are not part of the leading bell curve of supply and demand. In Lineage 2, if you weren’t part of the larger alliances or joined a server a little bit after it launched, it was exponentially harder to catch up, and I think it would be a mistake to totally emulate that here.
The rest of this is focused more on in game UI and in game systems. As I mentioned in a wave 1 post, I am eagerly looking forward to the fleshed-out UI coming. Processing in static set amount batches feels archaic.
I’m fairly certain that gatherable spawns rotate through the tiers. To clarify, on Vyra currently we have had a rush in the past 72 hours to harvest bluebell. I’ve spent three different two-hour sessions yesterday running across nearly the entire map to find a total of 18 bluebell plants over all play sessions. There are a ton of tier 3 flowers where I’ve seen bluebells before tier 2 harvesting was available on the server. This is another thing that feels bad. I don’t know that locking static tier spawns should be the solution, but perhaps tier spawns being locked to the highest available associated building in the node / adjacent nodes may be a better solution? To clarify, if say Halcyon has an apprentice Agricultural Supply building, then the adjacent 1-2 nodes unlock tier 2 plants available for gathering, where all plants cycle between tier 1 and 2. Only when the Agricultural Supply reaches journeyman (or another node constructs a journeyman Ag building instead) will tier 3 plants spawn and be available for gathering + two adjacent nodes to it. Likewise for mining and other node spawn professions.
I’ve danced on the edge of this point as well, but there needs to be some guidance / game tips / other informative message board in game which educates players on working together to build nodes up and subsequentially artisan buildings within those nodes. Being short a Hide Works building while all other buildings have been up for a few days feels bad. Alpha and Beta players will potentially have a massive leg up on new live players come the day of live servers because we’re figuring this out now!
It's become readily apparent how critical Freeholds are. Tier 2 seems to be hard limited by willow trees. Being able to plunk 50+ willow trees down on a freehold is a massive boost to whoever owns them (at least for this juncture of the game). I’m assuming there will be more “rare” materials as the tiers progress which farming on Freeholds will drastically offset for the Freehold owner.
The following are my opinions:
• Different recipes which require more materials to craft should also give more crafting xp (ie. a chest piece should give more xp than bracers). Perhaps higher rarity crafting should also give more xp?
• Novice and Apprentice tiers should take less experience (change to a more pronounced logarithmic curve compared to the current line / curve) to get through. Journeyman perhaps is where the current quantity requirements should kick in.
• Freehold resource generation on rare resources seems insane. Seeing 50+ willow trees on a freehold when it’s a rare resource in the world which limits apprentice progression server wide will make an oligopoly or monopoly on the markets for materials. Is this the intent?
• I’m betting this will be a thing, but I’d like to be able to process and craft things from my node storage rather than having materials in my personal inventory every time.
• I’d like a way to queue multiple common crafts. Having to manually add two linen and one grem skin 250 times over for profession XP isn’t great. Let me put in 50 linen and 25 grem skin and have the tailoring table make 25 bracers in a row when I click the button please.
In summary, there’s a lot here that needs to be iterated on and re-examined so that someone taking a one-week vacation from the game isn’t behind the 8-ball. I want to feel useful as an artisan, but being hard limited by node building construction while other gameplay elements have other groups of players vastly ahead of what we can craft feels really bad.
Thank you for taking the time to read this!
7
Comments
I think the solution isn't super apparent but it starts with linking the systems together. Players leveling should help push artisanship and artisanship should help push leveling. The 2 should progress in tandem and friction should be introduced when they are out of alignment.
I also feel this should be the case for when the world regresses (node is destroyed). As artisanship progression goes backwards, so should leveling/world progression.
I honestly feel like I'm spending the large majority of my time in game running around looking for resources and usually not getting vey much which basically makes me feel like i wasted my time after i was done with my play sessions. Not a great feeling..
Meanwhile everyone who just ignored gathering / crafting, and focussed on grinding mobs are much further ahead and completely geared up in rare gear. This completely undermines the point of gathering and crafting gear.
Some could argue that heroic, epic and legendary gear will make it worth crafting.. and they would be right.. but I simply don’t see the point of such high rarity gear until we reach max level.
With the current bottleneck in certain resources such as copper, zinc, carcasses, leveling most crafting professions just feels terribly tedious and by the time you can craft some decent lvl 10 weapons or gear, ppl already have better gear from grinding mobs..
I know it’s alpha and tweaks will likely happen. I just hope that they do because this gathering / crafting cycle has been nothing but exhausting and un-rewarding for me.
If you want crafting to be viable, you need to have all items crafted. No mob drops of finished items. They can drop rare materials to make more unique variations of items, but it should have to go through a crafting step.
Also, limiting crafting progression seems odd to me. If one is willing to do the grind, there is no good game design reason one should not be able to grandmaster everything.
With the current design, my main play character(s) (PvE & PvP) would be gatheres only. Processing and Crafting would be done by town bound characters, that do not level normal leves at all (besides what xp they get from crafting). Sure if they keep trading between you own chars as hard as it is now, I'll need a second account, but that would probably be the case anyways, as long as they limit the pr. char crafting leveling.
If I had only 1 or 2 gathering options and 1 or 2 processing options, it would already feel much more manageable. This would also leave more resources available for others. A proper auction house (world wide with a good search engine) would then be essential, allowing me to sell my materials and find the ones I need. This way, you’d also support the economy and ensure that lower-XP items could still have value, as they might be required for other processing skills.
This is partly due to lack of communication, cooperation and organization on the part of the mayors selecting which buildings to build where, in conjunction with other nodes.
But it's also due to a lack of certain key, base-level resources used in many buildings (common tools) which is copper and zinc. These metals are already quite rare and the supply has to pull double-duty, so-to-speak, with item crafting along with ridiculous amounts needed for building these buildings as well.
tl;dr
base-level metals are few and far between and on top of that they are spread far too thin, across many different needs.
Agreed on the first point. But, that's also a huge factor in of itself. If mayors don't work together then the whole server suffers. This will be alleviated somewhat on a larger map, but as is right now, if the probability aligns on a live server for a lack of coordination for months, then I can't imagine how upset the artisan groups will be!
Between resourcing from my husband who is focused on gathering and funneling items to me, some help from guildies, and myself I've made it to level 5 in scribing. I've made sure I'm leveling scribing with full xp node buffs, xp scrolls, and a scribe shirt. Yet my alchemy, for processing scribing materials only, without buffing it in anyway or paying attention to xp node buffs is level 14. My gathering skills are around 12/13. So crafting definitely has some pain points that needs to be addressed in it's xp rate gain, amount of money, and/or mats it takes.
With all of the various economic systems (one of those systems is definitely artisanship) that are in play here, Intrepid should really have someone on their team that is either an economist or a behavioral economist. Having an economist will help them more appropriately identify the pain points in the game's economy while a behavioral economist will do the same but also have more understanding of human psychology of what people are doing, why they are doing it, and how to nudge people or the game in the correct direction for a healthy economy and happy player.
Just because people are screaming for more copper in the game doesn't mean the best route to fix the problem is for them to add more copper to the game like they are doing. They may seriously need to change how much copper is needed and how far it is getting players in all of the other systems it is involved in to balance it out. Eventually, people aren't going to want that copper as much and then there will be too many copper spawns taking place of move valuable mining spawn points. They may also need to consider that people have to choose their first 5 Artisanships starting at the beginning and you just can't do the other ones. So if you don't choose mining then you don't mining, freeing up resources to the people that are.
Players can go and buy lvl 10 common gear / weapons from the vendor right now.
I believe the example provided was the copper sword which only costs 7silver pieces from the vendor but requires 20 copper fragments if you wanted to craft that same common sword.
How much would buying those materials cost if you wanted to have an economic system where some ppl gather and crafters buy their mats and craft the items and sell for a profit? That same common copper sword would have to be sold for over 1g considering material scarcity and the amount required..
I’m sure this will get addressed as the alpha progresses though. Afterall, this is why we are testing things..
This is vital for a good economic system. I'm hoping that the full gear drops are only in place now as a stop gap, while more testing/systems are put in place for the overall economic system.
This.
There must be an actual need for artisans at all stages of the game. It could be as simple as allowing crafters to repair gear and gain XP by doing it.
100% this. Having an economist and a behavioural economist on staff is / would be a huge boon.
basicly non existent
Mobs drop up to blue gear in quality and there for any resources blue or below are almost usesless and heroic+ quality resources are quite rare especially in wood and hunting therefor very little items are being crafted cause it usualy cheaper and easier to buy the blue drops that are quite abundant on vendors or easier to farm if it a named mob drop.
not to mention we cant make journeyman stuff atm due to building taking so long to get up and going due to lack of resources in the world especialy wood due to willow respawning as journeyman tree that no one can even hit so this reduces the speed of node progression even further
either mobs need to drop white quality only items and anything coloured is crafted or heroic and higher resources need to be more common to actualy have enough mats to craft thing to sell
Please keep this at the top of the discussions page and please, dear devs, take the time to really read this. This IS the problems artisanship has at this stage and we want to address them. The system as is feels completely unrewarding since we are so far behind / so disconnected from the gear progression of players.
For reference, I’ve still been playing nearly every single day for 2-4 hours since the last post, and I’ve hit a couple of new milestones since then. As of January 21st (32 days after wave 2 started), I was a level 13 bard with level 20 Tailoring, Weaving, and Herbalism, and level 18 farming on January 21st. It’s not going to take me long to get to level 20 farming, but I’ll come back to this a little later in the post. Since the 21st, I’ve set out to acquire gold currency such that I could fill in the missing pieces to craft myself a bunch of level 10 gear and engage with my guildmates for their professions to round out the equipment slots (jeweler, weaponsmith / arcane engineer). Today, I am now level 15 with a full apprentice set of gear, mostly crafted blue quality (75% of the slots give or take), some greens, and three yellows.
Let me start by saying I am floored as to the massive power difference going from what I had equipped prior to this week to today. I didn’t go out of my way to put intellect on everything, but I did hone in on quality where it made sense to do so (and what I could also afford) to open up “extra” base stats on gear. There are level 20 players running around in my guild with some world drops of level 20 gear (green and the odd blue quality piece), and my base stats are nearly equivalent to theirs. I am very curious to see what level 20 crafted gear will compare as, bearing in mind I’ve been able to tweak my gear more on demand rather than RNG drops from the PvX players in my guild.
Getting a bit back on track to the point of this topic however, I want to highlight a few more pain points that I feel are problematic. I was fully expecting to slow down a bit with the levelling process through artisan XP to get from 10-20 because of resource scarcity. Willow trees are such a bottleneck for multiple professions across the board. I’m aware there’s been some glitches with the freeholds (and lord help you if you don’t have access to one – sadly which I did not), but since early January, I believe with our guild of ~80 people, ~10 are apprentice lumberjacks (and some millers). I may have received about 80 willow boards to date. There were a few more willows that came in, but our leatherworker needs willows just as much as I do for tailoring, as well as other professions requiring them elsewhere in my guild.
So, the way then I had to level through artisan XP from 10-20? Flax. It feels so bad to have to collect an ungodly amount of novice level herbs to power level your way through the apprentice levels (including novice herbs to level herbalism to journeyman). I mentioned previously that there’s basically no point for white or (to a lesser extent) green crafted gear other than for grinding artisan XP because of world drop equivalents, but to then compound needing even more white and green quality flax just to level through to journeyman is an added layer of “this doesn’t feel good”. This then becomes an exponential problem if the same is required for journeyman through to master, and then grandmaster (once implemented).
Tying into my earlier comment with farming, the next compounded problem to the prior paragraph is the node crafting / processing / gathering buff. The reason I am not level 20 farming yet is because I have not seen a processing buff go up on a node for the last ~10 days. The XP gain that buff gives is so black and white. I’m not asking for it to be nerfed necessarily, but the way it is now, I can either process and craft ~900 flax and ~100 grem carcasses, and then make ~450 pieces of novice tailoring gear to get to level 20 (from 10) weaving and tailoring with the buff up, or double the resource amount without it. That has made that buff a requirement to power through artisan XP, and you’d be a fool to start anything without it for the purpose of levelling up.
I’m not saying the base idea of a node buff is bad, but the sheer difference it makes right now makes it a requirement. So then completing node quests to get that buff is just busy work which perhaps detracts from elsewhere in the game.
I think the whole “get 900 flax to level up to the next tier” needs to be reworked at its base, and then node buffs adjusted so they don’t come across as being required to get you there. It should be more focused on needing apprentice stuff to level up to journeyman, and not requiring 450 pieces of white/green novice gear to do so. It feels like busywork to get those artisan XP values up, and the artisan leveling system is just not engaging at all in its current form.
But this then is a bit of a double-edged sword, and I recognize that. Because while apprentice level buildings did come on relatively quickly, journeyman buildings are taking a lot longer to roll out, especially with only one station in a tier 3 node’s artisan building type being able to be upgraded. I was concerned about falling behind to get to apprentice as I mentioned in my first post in this thread, but now journeyman has the opposite problem of “hurry up and wait”. It’s likely going to be at least three more weeks before our server has all base buildings up across all nodes, and then also journeyman levelled.
To put this a bit into perspective, we were at apprentice level crafting about two to two and a half weeks after the launch of the wave, but we will likely be closer to 8 to 9 weeks before we have journeyman professions rolling out to the point where multiple professions can be engaged to make a final product (more plainly for example, tailoring also needs weaving, herbalism, and tanning for the bulk of its recipes, so all 4 stations on the server need to be journeyman to then actually make finished products which is what is taking more time to coordinate and do).
In retrospect, the fact that it took me a month to get my own artisan XP to journeyman levels felt like a bit of a marathon, but taking two + months just to unlock journeyman crafting capabilities on the server is slower than I’d like to see. And this again doesn’t take node sieges into account where you burn a node to the ground and add even more time to try and rebuild it thus potentially adding more time for crafters to do their thing!
As an artisan, I don’t want to be repeatedly punished because of node politics. If for example a scenario arises where two or more factions are constantly destroying each other’s nodes? Initially I’ll be more than happy to go outside and touch grass. But if I’m prevented for months at a time from progressing node stations to higher tiers of crafting because of it? I’ll be honest, I’ll put the game down, perhaps permanently.
This ties back into my first post’s comment about the psychology aspect. It’s fine to have conflict, but there’s a fine edge between conflict and griefing. Everyone’s definition and threshold for griefing is going to be different, but the base point here is games are supposed to be fun. My kind of fun is being able to craft powerful gear for others, and myself. If I can’t do that for months at a time because of game mechanics combined with game politics, that’s just not fun anymore. And, if the problem becomes large enough to affect the economy, then that starts to erode other areas of the game away. Everything regardless of if it’s a video game or real life needs to have a good economy to provide a good foundation. Without it, things will suffer, and I will once again comment that having an economist and a behavioural economist on staff is going to help here (if Intrepid hasn’t already done so).
Beyond that, nothing more really jumps out as much for me beyond what I’ve said in all posts within this thread. While I’ve been critical of how long things are taking, there is immense satisfaction getting those powerful base pieces of gear out now and seeing the impact they make. I think if it required less drone work to do, that would alleviate a good chunk of the aforementioned. I am still eager to see systems come online and then iterated on, and I look forward to seeing how much more powerful journeyman crafted gear is going to be. I am lucky in that the guild I’m in is super supportive of one another, because without them and especially our gathering crew, we wouldn’t be anywhere close to where we are now capability wise.
Thanks for putting all the effort into both the testing and the report.
Could you clarify if the issue is moreso the 'monotony' of the busywork for leveling, or would you have done that anyway 'for the cause'?
Like, leveling via all that Flax, would you say that was necessary (either because there is no other reasonable way within your guild, or because you absolutely needed to reach 20 even if the method was tedious), 'most efficient', or 'just your preference'?
"For what...?"
"Just about everything, really."
Happy to clarify! The monotony for levelling was very much so just for that. As common and uncommon are both cheap and plentiful both in the wild and on the marketplace, they are the go to materials to gain artisan XP in significant quantities. There really was zero need for that rarity and tier of gear that was made within the guild / alliance, and items often were in my own marketplace shop for multiple days before someone possibly bought the finished products (my prices were very low, quite close to only making back input costs the game destroys for processing and crafting). I would hazard a guess that if I could make common and uncommon apprentice gear in sufficient quantities, that too would have a fairly low demand.
Node buy orders are pretty well the only thing where you can take some of the processed goods to, but since I needed my processed goods to make tailoring gear to level tailoring itself, no node buy orders required finished product and it was vendored en masse.
It was not required of me to level as quickly as I did to journeyman as the server still does not have journeyman nodes up for tailoring, and a host of other artisan tracks yet. However, the sheer bottleneck of willow allowed me to utilize 80 willow boards to date of varying rarities. That contributed perhaps up to about 15% of one single artisan level for processing and tailoring, as those went into shirts predominately. I know I would not get the other 985% needed to gain the remainder of the 9.85 levels to 20 in the next two weeks when I expect journeyman stations to come online. So to that end, yes, the flax was 100% necessary to ensure I can remain at the front of the curve to start producing journeyman items as soon as possible, before market prices fall there too which will in turn reduce profitability. Lower profits make it harder to then save up again for a subsequent tier upgrade, and make it harder to provide more gear sooner for within our guild / alliance.
I think we're also still in the phase of development where you can't actually perform the repairs for durability loss for your guild and get any exp that way, right?
If that's already active in some way, I'd like to factor for it. Anyway, appreciate the response.
"For what...?"
"Just about everything, really."
Ideally it would return some of the mats involved giving crafters a material return on goods they have created and also take unwanted goods out of the economy. Have it as an independent ability, but maybe being a crafter of that item type will present a better return.
Another thing a lot of games do, make an item bound to the character/account once equipped. Again it takes it out of the economy at that point. Given Steven mentioning making mounts die eventually for economic reasons, I am surprised this hasn't been mentioned. Personally I was kind of surprised to see that people could sell gear they enchanted.
Just another option/direction they can go that impacts both crafting and economy.
To my knowledge, there's nothing in for repairs yet other than individuals talking to the NPC's and clicking the button to repair all. Happy to hear that's a thing coming though!
On the topic of XP gain and where I am now no longer needing it, I will again say with more certainty, common and uncommon quality tracks really are solely for gaining artisan XP, and there is next to no need for them in the economy due to PvE drops. I'm not saying to nerf the PvE drop rate, but having two of six qualities in the game essentially dedicated to only being busywork to make the artisan progress bars go higher is not engaging gameplay to me. I can appreciate the comment Steven made where crafting will be pinnacle gear and you can do all content with PvE gear, but I don't think it's a good idea to just throw away two qualities of resources to a progress bar and then never use them again. Common and Uncommon resources still should have a use and a beneficial boost of some kind to crafted gear no matter the rarity level to make the resource qualities not vendor trash once the initial push of the game is through.
I also agree with other posts on this board that gathering is very tedious and time consuming with the overwhelming majority of the time spent running around compared to actually gathering. We also seem to need a ratio of 10-12 dedicated gatherers to one processor and then one crafter. I don't know if that's the intended ratio or not, but it seems like a large number of gatherers.
One thing I've heard feedback on from a large majority of my guildmates is some kind of infographic or encyclopedia to show our gatherers which crafting and processing professions make use of what resources. The community will make this if there is nothing in game, but it would be nice to have a UI in game which helps organize the economic flow of goods. I realize this would require a lot of time dedicated to coding this up properly, but if the UI allowed guild or alliance leadership to put names into a flow chart such that players could see from a simple menu where goods need to go, that will really help with flow / organization.
As a quick aside, I'd like confirmation on if the artisan XP levels add any stat boosts or not?
I feel like I've run a marathon here! Now, it's time to turn my attention to getting my player level to 25 while I continue to try and stockpile Heroic or higher quality Journeyman materials for the gear push to harder content. Vyra still does not have journeyman processing + crafting stations as of this timestamp for most if not all non gathering professions.