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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.
Node upgrades for gathering tools
Raptin
Member, Alpha Two
in Artisanship
I dislike the current system of how we upgrade our gathering tools and think it could be made a bit more transparent and accesible for all.
I've never been a mayor so I don't know everything about building management, but if I understand it correctly, the node have to first build a buildning to get access to apprentice tools and then upgrade it again to get access to journeyman tools.
This leaves the node and the players at a big disadvantage. The node will not benefit i the long term from have a building upgrade that players only use once to make their gathering tool compared to a node that upgrades a building to have some sort of crafting or processing wich players come back to regularly to process their materials or craft items, and thus paying a tax to the node.
This will incetivise the guild that runs that node to demolish the upgrade that gives journeyman tools as soon as its own gatherers have the tools they need. In part because it opens up a building slot for a more profitable building and in part because it makes those gathering tools very rare and less people can gather those resources. And as people get bored of the game or take breaks for other reasons, those resources will become more and more unobtainable.
This will be very detramental to new players entering the game once they realise they can't get gathering tools for journeyman resources because those building no longer exists in the world.
In my opinion, a better way to do it is to have any building that belongs to a certain proffesion, i.e. stoneworks for mining, lumbermill for lumberjacking etc, have the ability to create gathering tools of the level of that building. This would ensure that the resources are availible to the realm since new players can pick up what ever gtering proffesions they feel like doing and it will give a better distribution of wealth to the nodes.
All crafting and processing is based on gathering, but for a nodes progression it is detremental in the long term to choose to support the gatherers.
I've never been a mayor so I don't know everything about building management, but if I understand it correctly, the node have to first build a buildning to get access to apprentice tools and then upgrade it again to get access to journeyman tools.
This leaves the node and the players at a big disadvantage. The node will not benefit i the long term from have a building upgrade that players only use once to make their gathering tool compared to a node that upgrades a building to have some sort of crafting or processing wich players come back to regularly to process their materials or craft items, and thus paying a tax to the node.
This will incetivise the guild that runs that node to demolish the upgrade that gives journeyman tools as soon as its own gatherers have the tools they need. In part because it opens up a building slot for a more profitable building and in part because it makes those gathering tools very rare and less people can gather those resources. And as people get bored of the game or take breaks for other reasons, those resources will become more and more unobtainable.
This will be very detramental to new players entering the game once they realise they can't get gathering tools for journeyman resources because those building no longer exists in the world.
In my opinion, a better way to do it is to have any building that belongs to a certain proffesion, i.e. stoneworks for mining, lumbermill for lumberjacking etc, have the ability to create gathering tools of the level of that building. This would ensure that the resources are availible to the realm since new players can pick up what ever gtering proffesions they feel like doing and it will give a better distribution of wealth to the nodes.
All crafting and processing is based on gathering, but for a nodes progression it is detremental in the long term to choose to support the gatherers.
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Comments
This idea goes against the core of what Ashes wants to do. Currently the major decides on which building gets built, thus incentiving players to live in that node, this will also become more apparent in level 4 - 6 nodes.
Your idea would basically ruin this entire system and dumb it down for no reason. Its fine the way it is.
It's all about server politics and player behavior. As Tahiti said, this is exactly what the design is about.
It's always a negative when a game introduces a thing that restricts comfort logins and positive feelings for no reason (or fails to add an obvious one). So it makes sense to assume there's a reason, as the two posters above me do.
But that doesn't make sense for this one.
Comparisons:
Elite Dangerous
Colonization System, at least it makes sense when you can't build a facility in your colony due to not having the slots, and while it has many flaws related to player behaviour that hasn't been thought through fully, it starts with the capacity to travel to get whatever you want basically as soon as you can engage with the playloop, while still having the regional pressures.
Black Desert Online
Contribution Point Houses and Workers are not community-defined, so even though this is anchored to location, the player still has their own agency in what to do about it, and much shorter travel times. If anything, BDO is the closest to what Ashes is 'in the world the OP is referencing', and therefore doesn't feel so great either, but it shows how small changes like 'the equivalent of Freeholds' flip the player experience. More importantly, it caused their Econ designers to make the obvious mistake of 'letting higher tier tools be more powerful but also simple to get'. This would unfortunately take way too long to explain as usual, a whole history lecture, so I guess I'll just hope someone at Intrepid has the experience enough to explain it on OP's behalf.
Final Fantasy XI
You can just make them yourself, wherever you happen to be, because that's just how that game works. But even if it had 'levels' of these tools and you had to make them at a specific location, this would just lead to stockpiling and trading. That wouldn't be bad in Ashes, but it would probably feel bad. And since gathering tools must obviously count as items that don't drop on death, it creates a huge economy problem where one way to make money is to provide something that is essentially a consumable to people who lose benefit if someone else kills them even after they use it correctly. I agree/understand why players in Ashes can't just do Crystal Synthesis wherever they are, but then we're back to 'Can't Freeholds do this?'
Throne and Liberty
Canina Village specifically lacks certain workstations/vendors despite specifically having the spots/models where they would go. I'm sure most people can understand how annoying that is. (It's probably to affect player congregation behavior or the game originally used this location as the Starter Zone or it's not time to unlock/upgrade that Village yet, dev-wise). Simple extrapolation of adding any Ashes-type implementations on top of what TL is would immediately make this disparity ten times worse. And note I'm not saying 'every player gathering point should have these. Again, this is about world-fit and world design.
TL;DR World-fit MATTERS. I don't wanna see the Intrepid World Design team get screwed over as hard as the BDO ones. Design holes like this can make a good world design feel bad, driving away (subconsciously even, which is way worse) players who would like to be invested, leaving only the echo chamber of those who never cared enough in the first place, which is doubly bad for a studio trying to foster a cohesive team.
Jeremy if this gets to you, plz 'yell at somebody on the Nodes team'. I don't like to 'address Devs directly', certainly not by name, but I feel like letting a colossal fuck-up tarnish your work is really bad. (and ofc if this is your own fuck-up then I'm 'yelling at you' to not sabotage yourself).
"For what...?"
"Just about everything, really."
You're missing the point. Why would I live in a node, or even return to it, if all it offers is the ability to make a gathering tool after I've already made that gathering tool?
This also makes no sense. Why would a node keep a building that only is used once by every player that engages in that gathering proffesion?
The politics of nodes and guilds come into play in so many other ways in this game. But if there is no reason to return to an upgraded building, that costs weekly upkeep to maintain, the node that has that building will be at an economic disadvantage against the nodes that have buildings upgraded to facilitate crafting and processing. This will incetivice guilds that already have their gathering tools to demolish the buildings that allow players to make gathering tools just so they can make more revenue from their nodes buildings.
This most likely wont be an issue in the first weeks or months of a new realm, but as time goes by and the dominant guilds settle in, it will block new players from a huge part of the games experiance. And that will be a problem in the long term.
I do not agree with the solution the OP came up with but I though of possible solutions
1. Journeyman tools and higher can only be repair at the nodes that have these tool shops.
2. Tools can be built at Freeholds
With the current system it only makes sense to destroy the Tool Shops at a point to reduce the competition for that new tier of resources.
I think that having tools in freeholds would go directly against that though, unless Intrepid make those freehold shops accessible by anyone at any time.
With the way gathering 'stats' work in AoC now, that would, imo, be another colossal Econ design mistake.
It's just not the way to do it in a fantasy MMORPG. Positional access to a service in a competitive system with only one recourse for change is fiat. (This doesn't apply in Elite Dangerous because you can contest every facility even if it is locking you out of something, and the 'number of nodes' is closer to 10,000).
Placement-access to specific stuff is so powerful as an incentive that Devs can and do use it to put players where they want those players to be for reasons like 'making the game feel alive for the players'.
Since Ashes currently decouples Node Maintenance from 'casuals' (I don't think it will be this way in the final version) there's no way to even test it in the Alpha, though, so unfortunately I can't really explain it properly without us ending up in the 'but they could do this thing to solve the problem the last thing in the chain of discussion caused' loop.
So yeah, I guess this is just another 'for whatever it's worth'...
"For what...?"
"Just about everything, really."
Say there's an npc that sells fishing rods near Winstead. If Winstead is in a node vassal system with a lvl4 node at the head - this npc has rods up to Master tier. Let's say Miraleth is that lvl4 node. If either Winstead or Miraleth get wardecced by an "artisan war" scroll - people can take some actions to either reduce the tier of those rods or remove the npc completely for a time (time could depend on the scroll quality). And obviously the defending side would have their own countermeasures to take.
This would uncouple the general service from the direct influence of mayors, while still having it tied to node progression and keep it a subject of war goals, which would keep the player friction, but the friction would be externally motivated rather than internally controlled.
Would this be better?
If we assume that the type of player at the 'Top' of TL and BDO now is the type of player that will be at the top of Ashes, and that when you say 'sells fishing rods' you mean 'provides the capacity to craft high tier fishing rods':
In that case I would say it could work, but it's still fiat. There would need to be protections placed on when and how players could interact with this (the 'artisan war' scroll mostly), but the problem doesn't actually lie in the protection part when it comes to player friction.
Right now, the idea is that setting up the station is a 'specialization cost'. If you remove the 'specialization cost' you have made the game flatter and less interesting, but the type of player I referred to at the start of the post doesn't care about this.
The problem with a game that allows players to cause 'trouble' for others of this type is content density, so there would be no way to say if it's better until we know if Ashes can reach the required content density.
The simple example I have is that in both Elite and TL, people spend large amounts of time and even RL money just to move around to 'annoy' other people. I remind of the example of 2b2t, a MineCraft server with an entire culture of griefing and countergriefing that also has RMT. I believe a game that incorporates politics as much as Steven envisions is possible, but 'gathering tools' definitely does not seem like a good place to be spending the amount of effort in balancing expectations that would be required for it to work.
"For what...?"
"Just about everything, really."
Yeah, pretty much entirety of Ashes will highly depend on how far Steven's willing to implement protections for certain groups of players and/or add stuff that would be an alternative to the unprotected content, while the dudes who only want to mess with others are simply not at all interested in going to that alternative source of content (for whatever reason).