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] Initial Experiences with Artisanship
AirborneBerserker
Member, Alpha Two
The starting area isn't conducive to positive experiences across multiple areas, but I will focus on Artisanship in this post. I will be covering different facets of Artisanship broken down by the problems I noticed.
The first problem lies with the complexity of Artisanship so early on in the game. It should not require 4 different professions to make a pair of boots you wont wear past level 3.
The second problem is the conflicting message the game sends. The game tells you that you can process 50 things at a time which takes 50 minutes, but if you spend that much time running around gathering things you are likely to find someone who is willing to train a few mobs into you to kill you, causing you to lose half of your gathered mats. The natural response to this is to lower the time spent gathering, which the game responds with by taking more of your time due to more trips from your farming location to the processing bench. This leads to either forced inefficiency, or unfun efficiency, and gamers being gamers will choose the unfun efficiency.
The third problem lies with the blatant disrespect of my time. There is no reason to have the different Profession Benches separated by so much. Especially when you have them interconnected the way you do.
Problem four is Processing professions add nothing to the crafted product. The quality and amount of crafting is determined by gathering, the end product is created from crafting professions. Again wasting my time.
The fifth problem is the unrewarding nature of crafting. It's hard for me to be motivated about crafting things when it costs me 2 hours of farming plus 24 copper to craft a thing, when there is a vendor next to the bench that sells the item for 9 copper. Healing Salve comes to mind, among other things.
Sixth Solo players have no incentive to participate in any crafting as they will be unable to craft anything past Journeyman due to not having access to freeholds. Which makes the entire crafting process not only a money and time sink, but one that projects an empty promise, for solo players at least.
This is the first interaction people will have with Artisanship, which creates the baseline emotional state for each interaction people will have with Artisanship. Tracking the emotions you would probably get, Frustration, confusion, irritation, and anger not exactly a great first impression.
TL;DR
It's effect on my gameplay? It makes me not want to participate in any kind of Artisanship at all. The early complexity is annoying but manageable, the risk of losing things is fine now that I have a better mount and know to keep it close, the wasting of my time and gold can be argued as an investment in future gains, all of that falls flat knowing that Journeyman will be the highest rank I could ever achieve.
As a side note this is a perfect example of how this game is aggressively anti-solo player. Normally in a game like this I would circumvent the inability to craft everything I could as a solo player by leveling up multiple characters, which is usually a fun experience. This game goes out of its way to make sure that I not only cannot craft the highest skill items by locking the best crafting materials in areas I can never farm, dungeons and raids, which I am totally fine with, but by also saying you can't even max any of your professions because you're not in a guild. Curious.
The first problem lies with the complexity of Artisanship so early on in the game. It should not require 4 different professions to make a pair of boots you wont wear past level 3.
The second problem is the conflicting message the game sends. The game tells you that you can process 50 things at a time which takes 50 minutes, but if you spend that much time running around gathering things you are likely to find someone who is willing to train a few mobs into you to kill you, causing you to lose half of your gathered mats. The natural response to this is to lower the time spent gathering, which the game responds with by taking more of your time due to more trips from your farming location to the processing bench. This leads to either forced inefficiency, or unfun efficiency, and gamers being gamers will choose the unfun efficiency.
The third problem lies with the blatant disrespect of my time. There is no reason to have the different Profession Benches separated by so much. Especially when you have them interconnected the way you do.
Problem four is Processing professions add nothing to the crafted product. The quality and amount of crafting is determined by gathering, the end product is created from crafting professions. Again wasting my time.
The fifth problem is the unrewarding nature of crafting. It's hard for me to be motivated about crafting things when it costs me 2 hours of farming plus 24 copper to craft a thing, when there is a vendor next to the bench that sells the item for 9 copper. Healing Salve comes to mind, among other things.
Sixth Solo players have no incentive to participate in any crafting as they will be unable to craft anything past Journeyman due to not having access to freeholds. Which makes the entire crafting process not only a money and time sink, but one that projects an empty promise, for solo players at least.
This is the first interaction people will have with Artisanship, which creates the baseline emotional state for each interaction people will have with Artisanship. Tracking the emotions you would probably get, Frustration, confusion, irritation, and anger not exactly a great first impression.
TL;DR
It's effect on my gameplay? It makes me not want to participate in any kind of Artisanship at all. The early complexity is annoying but manageable, the risk of losing things is fine now that I have a better mount and know to keep it close, the wasting of my time and gold can be argued as an investment in future gains, all of that falls flat knowing that Journeyman will be the highest rank I could ever achieve.
As a side note this is a perfect example of how this game is aggressively anti-solo player. Normally in a game like this I would circumvent the inability to craft everything I could as a solo player by leveling up multiple characters, which is usually a fun experience. This game goes out of its way to make sure that I not only cannot craft the highest skill items by locking the best crafting materials in areas I can never farm, dungeons and raids, which I am totally fine with, but by also saying you can't even max any of your professions because you're not in a guild. Curious.
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Comments
Agreed. To pile on, the not-fun aspect of processing is made worse by the forced batch sizes (1,5,10,25,etc). It’s cumbersome, pointless, and so easy to fix. Ashes has a number of little constraints that erode fun, while not having any real value or meaning.
Well said. I’m ambivalent, I like that Ashes is sticking to its guns on ‘bringing the multiplayer back to mmo’, though at a practical level most of my personal playing is solo. It may be that the best way for solo players to experience the full breadth of Ashes would be to join the server uniguild just for access to master / gm processing.