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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.
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.
[Suggestion] Gold Income and Node Upgrades
kerrai
Member, Alpha Two
Raw gold income is hard to come by. Selling glint directly feels pretty bad. The primary source, instead, is caravans. This has led to some frustration from PvE/crafting/gathering-focused players who lack a meaningful avenue to generate raw gold. This post isn’t about the caravan situation that has been discussed ad nauseam. Instead, it’s about two things: raw gold income and node upgrades.
Node upgrades are great, and it’s great that they require coordination and hard work by the community. Yet players are still hoarding resources rather than turning them in. Why? It’s a freeloader problem. This comes up often in economics. Why pay for it themselves when they can wait for others to pay and reap the reward?
There are two solutions. The first is to limit access to the good to people who contributed to it. This is a bad solution in Ashes. The second is to permit meaningful rewards for people who contribute. I think you should do that.
Let mayors use the node treasury to incentivize turn-ins directly with raw gold or, alternatively, let the mayoral tickets be exchanged directly for gold. This creates a PvE/gathering/crafting flow of raw gold creation.
Second, please increase vendor sell prices for crafted items. The low vendor prices are just silly on gear.
(Alternatively, and this probably deserves its own separate post, but has the Dev team ever asked themselves why raw gold/silver/copper is even in the game? I’m not sure it adds something meaningful instead of just making glint not a “material” and replacing the gold/silver/copper with glint and letting you buy commodities that then unpack into valuable materials once delivered.)
Node upgrades are great, and it’s great that they require coordination and hard work by the community. Yet players are still hoarding resources rather than turning them in. Why? It’s a freeloader problem. This comes up often in economics. Why pay for it themselves when they can wait for others to pay and reap the reward?
There are two solutions. The first is to limit access to the good to people who contributed to it. This is a bad solution in Ashes. The second is to permit meaningful rewards for people who contribute. I think you should do that.
Let mayors use the node treasury to incentivize turn-ins directly with raw gold or, alternatively, let the mayoral tickets be exchanged directly for gold. This creates a PvE/gathering/crafting flow of raw gold creation.
Second, please increase vendor sell prices for crafted items. The low vendor prices are just silly on gear.
(Alternatively, and this probably deserves its own separate post, but has the Dev team ever asked themselves why raw gold/silver/copper is even in the game? I’m not sure it adds something meaningful instead of just making glint not a “material” and replacing the gold/silver/copper with glint and letting you buy commodities that then unpack into valuable materials once delivered.)
2
Comments
Caravans are indeed the other main source of earning gold. There are ways to minimize exposure to pvp. Different routes you can take to avoid people. Have friends/guild mates volunteer to help guard it, use better caravan parts (sturdier frames, faster wheels, bob's, etc.)
The potential problem with the proposed solution is that it would undermine the focus on the existing methods, which are the intended ways to earn gold by the developers. If you make an easier way to make gold that has less risk and requires less effort, no one (or not many) would engage with those existing intended mechanics (caravans, market).
Alternative methods of generating raw gold don’t need to be equivalent (and they shouldn’t be if you want to incentivize PvP as Ashes does) but they should exist. The problem is that they currently basically don’t.
The related problem is that nodes are stalling out due to free riding problems and will continue to do so. I don’t think that’s healthy for the game. Mayors don’t have a meaningful way to incentivize players to contribute resources beyond the desire for the building. Let’s give mayors a meaningful way to incentivize that while also creating a new modest avenue for raw gold generation outside of PvP.
For what it’s worth, this would need substantial constraints to prevent abuse. There are easy options to do so—announce buy orders 6 or 12 hours in advance, limit the amount one person can fulfill, limit the amount of money the mayor can offer, limit the gold value of mayoral tickets, whatever.
I've never run a caravan, I just sell glint to vendors and drops in the market. I could run a caravan and make more gold, but that 1 hour caravan ride just sounds so boring. Along with the risk of losing it all to bugs/raiders