Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our 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!
4
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!