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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.
Let's talk about crafting in Ashes as it currently works.
Wandering Mist
Member, Founder, Kickstarter, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
TL:DR - Do you believe the crafting system is working, and if not, why?
Most mmorpgs have some kind of crafting system and we can argue back and forth about which game has the best crafting system. But no matter what, it's important to keep in mind why the crafting system exists in the first place. In my opinion there are 3 core reasons:
1. You want to make items that you can use yourself.
2. You want to make items that your friends/guildmates can use.
3. You want to make items to sell to others.
So the question is, does Ashes achieve the purpose of a crafting system? In my opinion it doesn't because by the time you have crafted your first set of basic armour, you would have been better off just power grinding to level 10 and getting the next tier of armour, and beyond. Yes, crafting armour can give you better quality pieces, but is that worth the extra time and effort it takes to make it? And how about the amount of time it takes to make apprentice or journeyman level gear? Not only do you need to get the insane amount of materials required to level up, but then you need to wait for the nodes to have the buildings required to make the gear.
In short, by the time you reach the point where you can physically make level 10 gear, you could have grinded to level 25 and gotten tons of drops from mobs. At which point we have to ask ourselves, what's the point of the crafting system at all?
Most mmorpgs have some kind of crafting system and we can argue back and forth about which game has the best crafting system. But no matter what, it's important to keep in mind why the crafting system exists in the first place. In my opinion there are 3 core reasons:
1. You want to make items that you can use yourself.
2. You want to make items that your friends/guildmates can use.
3. You want to make items to sell to others.
So the question is, does Ashes achieve the purpose of a crafting system? In my opinion it doesn't because by the time you have crafted your first set of basic armour, you would have been better off just power grinding to level 10 and getting the next tier of armour, and beyond. Yes, crafting armour can give you better quality pieces, but is that worth the extra time and effort it takes to make it? And how about the amount of time it takes to make apprentice or journeyman level gear? Not only do you need to get the insane amount of materials required to level up, but then you need to wait for the nodes to have the buildings required to make the gear.
In short, by the time you reach the point where you can physically make level 10 gear, you could have grinded to level 25 and gotten tons of drops from mobs. At which point we have to ask ourselves, what's the point of the crafting system at all?
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Comments
It doesn't hurt adventure players, and they end up controlling the town. Like the fiasco with Halcyon on Vyra.
Crafters have the tough road and get the short end of the stick.
We only just got the most basic change to the way mining works, and both gear and currency drop from mobs in amounts that match and even exceed some single player themepark games.
Building such systems takes long, though, so I'm not sure how to take the discussion any further without just 'babbling about how I personally think it should be done in Ashes given the base state'.
I'd then ask if we think even the base state is currently active, though? Sure, if it were me, I'd design the economic flows first and then use those to place the mobs, but even if that is what the econ team is doing, we wouldn't notice it until probably around April anyway, considering the number of iterations that would be required.
So uh... yes, crafting isn't good right now, but they've only just started, so...
You're right that the crafting system isn't fully fleshed out yet, but we have the foundations of it and those foundations already have issues, the biggest of which (in my opinion) is having a player's individual crafting proficiency directly tied to node progression. At the start of phase 2 if you tried to focus on gathering or crafting you were just wasting your time. Sure you could get to level 10 in certain professions but then you were stuck until the nodes were developed, whilst in the meantime players who did the power levelling very quickly outpaced you and didn't need anything you crafted anyway.
Even now with the nodes developed enough for journeymen crafting to be available, there's no point. Max level parties are farming the dungeons and flooding the market with drops that are usually far better than anything you can craft.
I personally don't like the fact that apprentice and journeyman crafting can only be done at specific apprentice or journeyman stations that not all nodes will have. It adds extra steps to the crafting that is already very long and tedious. Here's an example:
I am an Apprentice Tailor, Weaver and Tanner and I want to make a Bluebell Cloak (Apprentice-level piece). Let's assume I have all the base materials already (bluebells, river-otter carcass, weeping willow logs) and I'm a citizen of Winstead so we'll start there. To make this item I first need to go to all the way to Sunhaven to create the Tanned Otter Hide. Then I have to travel all the way back to Halcyon for the Weaving and Tailoring stations to to create the rest of the items. That is a huge amount of distance to cover just to craft a basic item.
I don't know, it just feels really off-putting to the point where I don't even want to bother, especially when I can just grind mobs in dungeons and get similar gear there for a fraction of the effort.
It's obvious to anyone that having a game where crafters are supposed to be very important but mobs drop usable finished gear is just a mess of hot garbage.
But that's kind of what I'm getting at, the current implementation is so obviously bad and full of holes that the most reasonable assumption would be that they're still just testing other things.
I understand that the thread is about discussing crafting as it currently works, but it doesn't work. It'd be great if they explained why it's like this for the time being, but if they don't already know that it's terrible, there's not much point in having any hope for it at all.
We're probably supposed to just grind in dungeons and run caravans until they overhaul it all. I'd say that I kinda 'don't agree that these are the foundations', because when you have the feedback from literally dozens of players all repeating the same obvious flaws in your systems, practically 'in passing'...
It would mean that whoever is designing it either knows this is temporary, or did not even have the skill to deal with foundational problems that probably a hundred people have told them long before we even got this far.
'Logically', therefore, this is all just gonna be irrelevant entirely in a month or something when someone updates a bunch of drop tables and Node Progression... this isn't 'not fleshed out yet', it's effectively 'not even actually started yet', Crafting made more sense in A1, yet nearly none of that remains. That too, was just 'here have something that looks like Artisanship so you return to town at the right times'.
I actually really loved the gathering system in Amazon's "New World" which this system kind of feels like, where the nodes are built into the landscape and seem to mesh right into the world. I wonder if with this system you could put in a mini map "tracker" similar to LoTRO for profession specific nodes (i.e. mining you can see on mini map where ore nodes located). It should be said that in LoTRO it is mini map only.
As for the crafting itself I really how Lord of the rings has a base set of recipes at each tier and you can gather rare recipes from mobs or chests throughout the world and they can be either one time (Super rare top tier items) or multi use (Higher than default crafting items, but not top shelf). IDK, but I think Crafting is a big part of the mmo experience.
If you couldn't tell LoTRO was my first and most important mmo i played.
Honestly, IDC I'm a solo player so I am not allowed to craft anything past Journeyman without permission.
You are right though. Probably a result of it being Alpha.
I actually like what Intrepid are going for with the crafting in Ashes, whereby you can get basic gear from vendors or mob drops, but crafting can give you better quality versions of those items. The main problem, as stated before, is the amount of time it takes to make those higher quality items which makes it impractical to do. By the time I've either gotten the mats or gold together to acquire a full set of rare level 1 gear I could have hardcore grinded my character to level 10+ so why even bother crafting in the first place?
And the third comment: who came up with the idea of putting everything in a bag by 20 and processing by 10/25... What kind of genius is this?
The crafting system I like the most is the one they already outlined they will do.
You can find the half-implemented version of that crafting system in some of the 2000s-era MMOs, and a different more advanced, but still half-implemented (maybe 3/4?) version is currently live in Throne and Liberty.
So I just want that, as it is among the cleanest, easiest to understand, yet fulfilling systems that I believe can exist in a persistent modern PvP+PvE MMORPG.
My first MMO has a little of what TL/Ashes are doing, but that game had a somewhat stronger economic focus than TL currently does, and a different economic style than Ashes currently does.
Short version of what I want:
Gear with obvious, visible 'slots' or 'variants' that players can customize.
Optimally 3. Present in TL now, well tuned there. I have nothing to say about this in Ashes at this time. Was implemented in FF11 but abandoned for later gear due to it not being a core system, unfortunately (doesn't even hold much importance on private/Legacy servers).
Limits and 'trends' on those slots to distinguish gear pieces a bit from each other and help with various forms of 'rarity'. Present in TL now, seems well tuned so far. I have nothing to say about this in Ashes at this time. Was also implemented in FF11, loved it there, obviously still love it in TL.
Ability for Crafters to influence the slots using specialized material variants. Not yet directly present in TL (no idea if it is ever coming because they handle this a different way, but looking forward to it), there was at least some mention of this in Ashes. Was implemented in FF11, a bit more strongly, but overall abandoned when that game's crafting-economy fell off. Still meaningful and important on private 'Legacy' style servers for that game.
Careful control of balance using the above by making the 'easy', 'meta', or 'default' stats that go into those slots have various forms of diminishing returns in PvP (and sometimes even in PvE), e.g. making Accuracy more accessible than anything that enhances attack power. This is present in TL now, tuned fairly well in Global version. In the case of Ashes right now I mostly hope that their entire system doesn't stay the way it is because it's terrible for me by comparison. FF11 was a mostly PvE game so this basically didn't matter, and they handled it differently in lategame PvE.
Relatively small increments of growth for effort, focusing on increasing economic pressure on top players and increasing economic velocity when they get obsessive about things. Working well in TL (slowing down now as we go through the third 'rise and fall of guilds' at least on my server). Ashes currently seems to do the reverse so I don't like it as much. FF11 didn't have this type of growth system at all for at least the first 10 years of its lifetime and I didn't care about the progression after that phase (I still play, I just stopped using the progression paths and might as well move to a private server but I just don't).
I don't think I can cut it down any shorter than that, probably. I just want either or both of Ashes of Creation/Throne and Liberty to 'do what TL has done but also give me a bit of a chance to personally craft something like 'a Flamewrought Bindings with Max Health Trait' somewhat 'on purpose'.
I know that for both these games, developing a sensible economic system to give me that crafting option will take some time and effort, so I'm just patiently waiting for the devs in both cases, and I wish them luck.
For me, I like managing the whole mats > item flow, so I distributed my skills accordingly to maximize involvement and minimize dependency. But if I only elected to be a crafter to create items - it's boring AF. I think the assembly needs to be more than a button click, maybe not a full minigame, but something closer to EQ2 territory where different abilities & passives can sway the probability of a highly valuable outcome.
I think crafted legendaries need the highest quality mats gathered by the most expert gatherers, processed perfectly by the most expert processors, and crafted perfectly by the highest skilled crafters. We're not even close to that yet.
Also, this.
If Ashes does not do something about this and relies on the Caravans thing for 'material specialization', TL will beat them out for most people in one move.
"Boonstones generate specialized materials for their occupying guilds which must then be delivered to a storage by mini-caravan which can be attacked like the Tax Delivery".
Done, instant 'loss' to a more engaging system with 90% of the pain removed. Obviously there should still be a game for those who 'enjoy the pain' and 'live for the thrill' and all that, but I'm mostly pointing out that if Ashes isn't properly delivering on even those points, there would be no difference after just this addition. TL would just immediately be a more solid experience when it comes to crafting content of this type.
Ashes needs to utilize the promised 'variation and types of outcome' at a level we haven't seen in years, tuned better than we have possibly ever seen it, because crafting-econ is one of the few places in games where 'no system of this type' is strictly better than 'a bad implementation', at least for me.
I will absolutely choose a game that 'knew they couldn't do this but did everything else they could properly' over a game that 'tries to do it and screws it up painfully every time' with bottlenecks, fiat monopolies, and lopsided outcomes.
Yeah, like when the Lumbermilling and Carpentry have both gone T3, but Lumberjacking hasn't. You can't lumbermill or carpent....ise the T3 wood cos you can't chop it.
Hopefully once the systems are fleshed out more, it'll make more sense.
Yeah Alchemist and Scribes get really screwed over by the vendors. The only thing really worth making with those professions if the guild creation scrolls. Everything else of worth can be bought from the vendors.