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Alpha Two Phase II testing is currently taking place five 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.
There's no risk in moving crafted goods, and that needs to change.
DroneTheMask
Member, Alpha Two
My interest in this game focuses largely on running caravans - and I have a concern about the fact that crafted gear / items don't risk being looted / deleted on death like gatherables / processed goods.
As it stands, I won't stand to gain any profit by moving crafted items, because there's simply no risk in doing so.
I also don't think intrepid currently intends on changing this, because they treat this strictly as a risk of corruption.
I believe this will create an environment where gear floods the market and becomes extremely cheap as crafters sell at a loss in order to gain crafting experience. This in turn will make leveling crafting professions even more expensive than they already are, and create an impenetrable barrier for anyone who doesn't get into the crafting early enough. World of Warcraft has this same market environment and I find it very uncompelling.
If intrepid wants to follow their "Risk v Reward" model, they need to change this.
If intrepid wants a game that allows people to devote themselves to crafting, they need to change this.
Some people might complain that its 'too hardcore' to risk losing gear on death. Perhaps they're right. But I didn't put my hopes in this game for it end up like World of Warcraft.
Albion Online has a great economic model, and I would advise the devs to take some lessons from that game.
As it stands, I won't stand to gain any profit by moving crafted items, because there's simply no risk in doing so.
I also don't think intrepid currently intends on changing this, because they treat this strictly as a risk of corruption.
I believe this will create an environment where gear floods the market and becomes extremely cheap as crafters sell at a loss in order to gain crafting experience. This in turn will make leveling crafting professions even more expensive than they already are, and create an impenetrable barrier for anyone who doesn't get into the crafting early enough. World of Warcraft has this same market environment and I find it very uncompelling.
If intrepid wants to follow their "Risk v Reward" model, they need to change this.
If intrepid wants a game that allows people to devote themselves to crafting, they need to change this.
Some people might complain that its 'too hardcore' to risk losing gear on death. Perhaps they're right. But I didn't put my hopes in this game for it end up like World of Warcraft.
Albion Online has a great economic model, and I would advise the devs to take some lessons from that game.
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Comments
This still doesn't address the Risk v Reward concern.
Also, seems like a great way to smuggle basic resources to other locations as gear, since they are impervious to PvP.
This used to be done in EVE Online. People found the right ships to craft, then would pilot them to the region needed, then recycle them for minerals.
You still risked losing your ship in EVE. Not the case for the crafted gear in Ashes.
Imo i think gear should slowly loose max durability when repairing and enchanting will reset the max durability so eventually gear will get 0 dura and then they can try and fix it via enchanting it once eventualy it will break via enchanting and need to be replaced.
That said, we're years away from needing to be concerned about stuff like this, though I agree it needs to shift, I just also believe it will.
"For what...?"
"Just about everything, really."
You also said it yourself, people already hate that corruption penalties lead to full item loss. If normal people started losing full items on death - the game will be waaaay too niche. Iirc Albion has separation of region types, that go from "you lose nothing" to "you lose everything" (or at least something close to that). Ashes won't have that, because you can be killed any time any where.
You presented your issue as one of a "weak item sink". I presented a few way that make that sink better. I agree with Veeshan and Azherae that the decay/decontruct sinks could be tuned even further, but we've got 0 clue what kind of facets will have on release, so it's difficult to say how tuned those sinks gotta be.
Yes, there are seperate zones for these. But those safer zones are incredibly inefficient and meant for new players to learn the game. Steven has spoken about adding such noob-friendly zones. But such zones will not be where the serious progression is at.
Additionally, I could imagine a less serious loss scenerio: perhaps it takes a few deaths before gear is destroyed. Either way, I want it possible to make distribution a true focus in the game that some guilds would prefer to rely on others to satisfy a supply chain issue.
Game is dead in the water if its too care-bear. EVE and Albion are proof such a decision would not kill the game.
At face value I don't think it's a bad idea, I just don't think it's going to work. You want inventory items to drop, not just material items. Or inventory style items to drop out of caravans if they're raided. I mean who's this mechanic for? The bandit players? Who would run caravans? What's the reward for the caravan run what would justify this risk? Don't the attackers already have a large enough incentive to attack?
I like mortal online, I'm okay with full loot. But here. I don't see it. Even if you call Eve and Albion successful, the level of "success" Ashes will probably need is going to require a lot more players. Is Steven trying to make a niche game or one that appeals to a larger player base? Will he adjust one way or the other? Who knows.
The game is far from care-bear. I think the game has enough layers of contention for the players to fight over, adding anymore is just going to turn off a even more people. Tuff challenge to please pvp'rs and pve'rs. I don't see the game being "successful" if they only (or more so) please the pvp'rs.
I would add an Arena where there are tiers where you can gamble 50% or 100% of your own gear
EVE and Albion prove that this kind of thing is niche.
Keep in mind, those games have populations in the tens of thousands, ESO, WoW and FFXIV have populations in the millions or tens of millions.
Now, Ashes isn't aiming for the popularity of those three games with millions of players. However, Ashes is planning on supporting an Oceania and Brazil server. Since Oceania players are usually about less than 10% of the EU population of a given game, and 5% of the NA population, that means in order for Ashes to achieve the success Steven has said he wants, and is starting up servers based on attaining that success, Ashes would need to support 10 NA servers and 5 EU servers all at full capacity, just to statistically have a single half population Oceania server.
That actually puts Intrepids required total sustained, long term player population at significantly over a million.
Saying "this thing is proven to work" and then pointing at 2 games that each have 5% or so of the population Ashes needs in order to meet the expectations Steven has set isn't an overly good argument.
Albion (steamcharts) 11k last 30 minutes. 27k all time peak.
Eve (steamcharts) 2.6k last 30 minutes. 10k all time peak.
That's not many players, I'm not saying their bad games, but they aren't popular. By no means am I advocating for a WoW clone to get the mass appeal. Intrepid seems to what to innovate the MMORPG genre which is good. But this innovation hinges on mechanics deeply embedded in "PvX" mechanics. One being the Caravans, which aren't finished and aren't working as intended. And it seems players don't like them being money printers, I think it's cheesy personally and I have no interest in them, or at least running them. Guild wars were heavily exploited, Node wars are laggy, Node upgrades? gathering is exploitable, crafting is a huge time sink. I haven't seen anything innovative yet, in fact I see mistakes made that should have been avoided because they were lessons learned from other games that already made the mistakes. I guess what I'm saying is they haven't done a good job copying the good from other games, I doubt that'll change if they start pulling ideas from niche games.
Ashes is taking Archeages farms and turning them in to freeholds. The problem is, Steven ignored what made farms in Archeage so good, and as a result freeholds in Ashes will not be a shitstain on farms in Archeage. They just aren't in the same ballpark.
Same with glint. It is a copy - essentially - of Archeages coin purses. A basic drop you get from mobs that you then process in some manner to get coin. The problem is, all the added shit with glint means it is trying to be more than coin purses, and as a result is functionally less. The need to transport glint means it will never be as liked as coin purses in Archeage were, it's two systems hiding in a trenchcoat, trying to be one system.
I could go on with a number of other things - but the point remains that in most of the things Intrepid are taking from other games, they are failing to understand what made people like them originally.
Honestly, this even extends to fast travel. People like a lack of fast travel because it makes a small world feel bigger. However, if you have a big world, you don't need to make it feel bigger.
As for the adding more risk - Per the PVPer. Lets get some risk for attacking Caravans and losing
✓ Occasional Roleplayer
✓ Maybe i look after a Guild sometime soon
Well, the suggestion there would be 'become a crafter so you don't need to spawn a Caravan', in terms of the discussion in this post.
"For what...?"
"Just about everything, really."
These games' success isn't in the membership alone. It's in the micro-transactions as well. Steven isn't banking on subs alone to meet his mark either. Neither do any of the games you've mentioned.
Steven is also betting that his game will succeed due to his focus on the games integrity (Anti-gold buying / botting / p2w / etc), which we don't see in any other MMO on the market. You can't measure how this will affect his success, but he's making that gamble knowingly. If he's confident enough to forward $40+ million into his game, we can assume he's not going to sacrifice his core tenants to avoid being 'niche'. He's stated already this will not be a game for everyone. He's entirely focused on risk and reward game design, which I've already argued is why they should consider my OP.
He's not here to compete with WoW, ESO, or FFXIV. So bringing them up is entirely irrelevent. This game will not be even similar to those games.
I think you need to pay better attention to what you are replying to.
Steven has stated a population expectation for Ashes. This has no relation to a microtransaction revenue stream.
My comments above were based on Steven's expectations for population, and thus only comparing to population of other games is 100% appropriate. Microtransaction revenue is a different topic entirely.
Since the games that are closest to Ashes in terms of the population expectations Steven has set out for the game are the likes of WoW, ESO and FFXIV, discussing them in this thread is actually more appropriate than discussing EVE or Albion. If Steven wasn't here to compete with WoW or ESO, he should not have put himself in a position where he needs a sustained 50k+ Australian population - as that is (by all accounts) more than either of those games has right now.
You never really explained why Steven needs a specific # of people to play the game in order to get Oceania and Brazil servers. Your correlation of "Oceania / brazil servers MUST account for 10% of the playerbase" is an arbitrary number, and is not strictly necessary for the game to support such servers. It could be 3% of the playerbase, and Steven may still support those servers for reasons not strictly related to finance.
Steven gave a population expectation believing in his 'niche' game design. That is to say, because his game offers something that the MMO genre hasn't really gotten at all in decades.
Lastly, my point wasn't that Ashes should be everything that is "EVE" and "Albion". It already simply isnt; neither of these have the traditional Fantasy MMO style. One plays like its League of Legends and the other has the reputation of playing like a spreadsheet. Of course these games don't meet WOW, FFXIV, or ESO; they are a different style of gameplay.
Ashes on the other hand, will have a similar kind of gameplay that promotes immersion into a fantasy setting - and that's about as far as a comparison between ashes and these games will get. And it's really the only important one, and its something that Albion and EVE lacks.
It isn't an arbitrary number, it is both a historical and statistical number.
Oceania has never made up 10% of the population of any major MMORPG. We have no reason to assume Ashes will break from the norm. This makes my comments perfectly appropriate from a historical perspective.
From a statistical perspective, Oceania has a little less than 45 million people, North America and Europe combined have a little over a billion. Without any reason to assume there is a higher percentage of gamers in Oceania than North America or Europe, we have to assume the in game population would be a similar ratio.
As such, I don't need to give a reason why my stated numbers are what they are. They are the default assumption/expectation.
If you disagree, explain why you think Ashes would appeal to the average Australian or New Zealand gamer more than the average US or Canadian gamer. If you don't have a reason to assume that, then the only assumption is that the numbers that match both historical and statistical data are accurate.
If Steven does support a server that only has a third of the population the game is designed for (your 3% population comment), then that would be a dead server. There would be no PvP for resources, no fighting over caravans, no sieges because everyone thet wants a castle or freehold will have one.
Essentially, it would play like a broken game. This isn't a matter of finances, it is a matter of the game itself being viable to play on the regional servers Steven has said the game will support.