New Worlds Gathering/Crafting system is "S Tier" and should be replicated.

I wanted to start a discussion about the influences that AoC should be taking from to develop and implement regarding their resource gathering and crafting system.

Background: I first began playing MMORPGs in 1997 and have had time in most every major/minor MMORPG to hit the market since then. I have NEVER enjoyed resource gathering nor crafting. This displeasure also bled over into most game market/trade systems.

Disclosure: I don't love New World. If you pull my steam profile, I have only amassed 62 HRs of play time.

My point for discussion: When first playing New World's beta, the thing that stuck out the most to me was their gathering and crafting system. I genuinely ENJOY this part of the game for the first time. After 62 hours, I still have not maxed out my one character. I have only done a group "dungeon" once. And have only had a few open world PVP encounters to speak of. Still, I like playing New World because the gathering and crafting systems are so engaging. FOR ME, a game that gets my play time because of those systems truly means they must be "S Tier." Below are a few of the systems that I believe AoC should not only tale influence from, but possible just straight up copy.

GATHERING
1. You can gather/harvest almost everything you see/kill.
2. The number/type of resources (logging, mining, harvesting, skinning, fishing) is complex enough for robust crafting, but minimal enough to remain enjoyable.
3. The resource gathering action is enjoyable. The animations are well thought out. The resources don't just disappear when consumed (ex: trees falling when cut is really fun).
4. The time it takes to gather a resource is well balanced.

CRAFTING
1. The UI is immediately recognizable and user friendly.
2. Access to "recipes" comes based off of skill tier and is not tied to open world exploration/loot generated.
3. Everything you need to be a "good crafter" is outlined within the crafting station. All information about how and what you will gain as a result of crafting is in a one stop shop.
4. Crafting randomization is present, but much of it can be "tuned" out by including additional tweaks/pumps of resources to get what you want reliably.

I am curious as to the communities thoughts on the direction AoC should take for resource gathering/crafting and what other game's systems you feel should be heavily influenced.

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Comments

Ludullu

Sathrago wrote: »

What some people seem to not understand is that making all trees gatherable doesn't "break" the economy by itself.
It requires balancing on the crafting and refinement side. Because there are an unlimited amount of basic trees, or t1 trees, they would make the bulk of crafts that require tons of wood in addition to all of the basic low tier/lvl crafts/refinements. Then you scale up the rarity of t2 trees and lower the quantity needed for crafting with those, and you keep scaling up rarity and scaling down quantity until you are at a point where the highest rarity of material is very rare and low in quantity. All of this can be achieved within a world where every tree can be chopped, but most trees are not of this higher rarity that is required for the higher quality crafts.

It brings an imbalance to the overall system of gathering. Or it would make Intrepid overpopulate regions with other t1 resources to keep up with the trees.

A tree should give a fair bit of wood cause it's a whole fucking tree. While a single flower is still just a flower. And a single rabbit hide is still just a small piece of rabbit. The same applies to small rock formations.

You could have any of those things be abundant in a few locations, but only rocks could come anywhere near the trees' volume and even then it should require a ton more work to farm an equally-valuable amount of rocks than it would be to cut down some trees. And unless you have exactly as many mines as you have forests or you limit tree respawn - trees would still be more abundant than rocks, let alone ores.

And due to how the gathering system is designed in Ashes, a lumberjack will most likely not be able to mine rocks as efficiently. The alternative could be to let literally everyone to gather t1 resources, but at that point you'd really have to make them all equally valuable and equally abundant.

And if you have 10k people farming overly abundant resources - there's no scarcity. You'll just have recipes that require thousands of basic resources for just one thing, because there'll always be thousands of those resources on the market. And iirc people complained that once players stopped farming the t1 stuff (mainly to level up their gathering faster afaik) - all those recipes that required insane amounts of t1 things became super annoying and tedious.

Having all resources scarce right from the get-go not only shows new players what the endgame gameplay loop will look like, but also introduces them to pvp for resources from the very start too. And it removes the "I need to get several hundred wood to make a sword and shield" situations from the game, which imo would discourage new players from farming things.

Ludullu

WHIT3ROS3 wrote: »

It's relative. It depends on crafting and refining. If, for example, a single level 1 axe takes 1 wooden plank (refined from rough wood) Then a Galleon Should take 10000+ wooden planks (plus other stuff) to craft.

And let it take 10k+ wood. And it'll be super costly which will make owners of the ship think twice before going out to sea in it. While in a "every tree is choppable" 10k wood will be literally nothing, because that can be farmed by one guild within a few hours, if that.

And if you can make the priciest most valuable piece of "gear" in that short of a time - there's no real risk in losing it.

WHIT3ROS3

Nobody is suggesting that you should need several hundred wood for a sword.

Take a look at Albion Online. The game has an S-tier gathering/crafting/economic system in a sandbox PvP (with a little E) game. (In the last 6 weeks the game has had over 1+ million individual accounts engage in full loot pvp and is all on one mega server which has seen highs of 200k+ concurrent players.) You can gather everything and there is always a demand because there are so many sinks.

I'm surprised the game isn't mentioned more in regard to amazing systems. As the games share so many of the same principles relating to risk and reward.

Sathrago

WHIT3ROS3 wrote: »

Nobody is suggesting that you should need several hundred wood for a sword.

Take a look at Albion Online. The game has an S-tier gathering/crafting/economic system in a sandbox PvP (with a little E) game. (In the last 6 weeks the game has had over 1+ million individual accounts engage in full loot pvp and is all on one mega server which has seen highs of 200k+ concurrent players.

I'm surprised the game is mentioned more in regard to amazing systems. As the games share so many of the same principles relating to risk and reward.

im convinced that new world copy-pastaed the entire crafting/gathering system from albion online and then retroactively ripped out the mechanics that let it function such as full loot pvp.

WHIT3ROS3

Sathrago wrote: »

im convinced that new world copy-pastaed the entire crafting/gathering system from albion online and then retroactively ripped out the mechanics that let it function such as full loot pvp.

Exactly! There needs to be significant sinks, otherwise, you do end up with endless amounts of worthless resources. That is the same whether every tree is choppable or just one tree is choppable. If there aren't sufficient sinks, all resources no matter how "rare" won't hold any of their value.

Dygz

Sathrago wrote: »

im convinced that new world copy-pastaed the entire crafting/gathering system from albion online and then retroactively ripped out the mechanics that let it function such as full loot pvp.

But... Ashes is not full-loot PvP...

WHIT3ROS3

NiKr wrote: »

And let it take 10k+ wood. And it'll be super costly which will make owners of the ship think twice before going out to see in it. While in a "every tree is choppable" 10k wood will be literally nothing, because that can be farmed by one guild within a few hours, if that.

There obviously would be other resources, some of which would be super rare, that would also be needed.

An example for a large ship.

You need 4000 Wooden Planks (refined from rough wood) 1000 Metal Bars (refined from metal ore) and 50 cloth (refined from flax) as a baseline.

Then you would also need small amounts (say x100) of super rare refined metal, wood and cloth as well as special unique crafted parts and items (such as a rudder, wheel and armaments)

That means it would take a coordinated effort of a group of people, from noobs to established players to all work together. A Brand new level one noob can contribute to the construction of their guilds fleet by chopping tier 1 rough logs. The advanced gatherers can focus on getting the rare materials and the crafters on the other parts.

This provides a multi-dimensional, dynamic approach to crafting that allows for players of all levels to contribute and work towards refining and defining their skills over time.

Ludullu

WHIT3ROS3 wrote: »

Take a look at Albion Online. The game has an S-tier gathering/crafting/economic system in a sandbox PvP (with a little E) game. (In the last 6 weeks the game has had over 1+ million individual accounts engage in full loot pvp and is all on one mega server which has seen highs of 200k+ concurrent players.) You can gather everything and there is always a demand because there are so many sinks.

Checked out this video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YI_XidiFI1o

The very first thing I see is this

I finish the video and go into the comments and see this

Yeaaaah... Sounds like an amazing and appealing system.

I was the guild's crafter in L2 for several years back when I was still playing it. I was crafting things for, sometimes, over a hundred people. I never needed spreadsheets and the whole process wasn't tedious. And what's the most important in this context is that I often bought low tier resources from casual players. Especially from lower lvled ones.

You know why I could do that? Because the resource requirement wasn't in the hundreds per item and resource acquisition was somewhat hard even for specialized gatherers. But if you were just a random player farming your own stuff and was lucky enough to drop a few rarer resources - you could always sell them for a good price.

And L2 had resource sinks both in the form of 60% chance of a successful craft on any given gear piece and a 30-40% chance to completely destroy an item during overenchanting, so those resources kept their value throughout multiple game updates.

And Ashes will have even better value generation because you'll need mats for repairs, OE will burn items (at least in the current design), caravans sink mats if destroyed, sieges will most likely be huge sinks and mats move hands through pvp. And with scarce resources all of that will be that much more valuable and even a casual gatherer will be able to sell a bit of their farmed wood for a nice price even if they don't farm for days to do so.

Sathrago

Dygz wrote: »

Sathrago wrote: »

im convinced that new world copy-pastaed the entire crafting/gathering system from albion online and then retroactively ripped out the mechanics that let it function such as full loot pvp.

But... Ashes is not full-loot PvP...

Ashes has a sink in the form of caravans, death, Over-enchanting, and mounts all deleting or using up materials.

A non-combatant (green player) who dies suffers normal penalties, which include:[6]
Experience debt (negative experience).[9]
Skill and stat dampening.[6]
Lower health and mana.[6]
Lower gear proficiency.[6]
Reduction in drop rates from monsters.[10]
Durability loss.[11][12][6]

Item decay does not destroy items, but it acts as an materials sink.[9][3][2]
Zero percent durability will unequip an item, significantly increasing its repair costs.[10]
If you allow it to get to certain stages, or to get to a destructed stage then it requires a lot of material components in order to return back to its former glory.[6] – Steven Sharif
Over enchanting an item comes with the risk of durability loss if a safety margin is exceeded.

Mounts can be killed by players, but can be resurrected after a certain cooldown period.[9][26][33]
Potions obtained from the Alchemy profession can be used to reduce the cooldown.[9][34][26]
Mounts that die a certain number of times within a set period might gain a debuff that requires a different material component to assist with their resurrection.[34]

WHIT3ROS3

Swolebenji? ok. A toxic content creator hated across the game and its community. The worst possible example of someone to refer to. Dear oh dear. Never mind. We fundamentally disagree on how gathering and crafting should work. Let's see how it pans out. I sincerely hope it's not a system that you seem to want.

Ludullu

WHIT3ROS3 wrote: »

This provides a multi-dimensional, dynamic approach to crafting that allows for players of all levels to contribute and work towards refining and defining over time their skills over time.

And how many t1 items would you get for one instance of gathering? Is it 1? 10? 50?

If it's 1 - that noob ain't providing shit, because it'd take him ~5h to farm that amount of wood himself (that is if it takes 5 secs to cut a tree and move to another one). So most likely the guild would just buy that wood for super cheap from the dedicated gatherer guilds who've been farming that shit for days/weeks/months and have millions of them.

If it's 10, or let alone 50, then the whole guild should already have way more than 4k on them just through cutting wood here and there or from their personal storage. Well, that is if everyone is able to gather t1 stuff.

While if it was 1 wood per cut down tree with choppable trees being rare and a requirement of 400 wood, that noob would be able to provide a fair chunk of the overall amount (assuming one tree each minute of uncontested farming). That gatherers guild would have a higher price on each piece so it would be more viable to farm the trees yourself, utilizing your noobs/casuals while giving them a bit of protection if needed. And the ship building guild wouldn't really have too much wood in their storage because they most likely weren't going out to high volume forests to specifically farm trees, so, again, actions of casuals/noobs would be more valued.

Ludullu

WHIT3ROS3 wrote: »

Swolebenji? ok. A toxic content creator hated across the game and its community. The worst possible example of someone to refer to. Dear oh dear. Never mind. We fundamentally disagree on how gathering and crafting should work. Let's see how it pans out. I sincerely hope it's not a system that you seem to want.

Yep, we'll just have to see who yells their feedback louder

WHIT3ROS3

NiKr wrote: »

I was the guild's crafter in L2 for several years back when I was still playing it. I was crafting things for, sometimes, over a hundred people.

I'm a gatherer/crafter in Albion and I craft things for thousands of people. I literally, craft 10's of thousands of items every month. Very different scales. I'm talking about a proper crafting system designed for thousands of people which can be scaled massively and includes everyone from day one.

Ludullu

WHIT3ROS3 wrote: »

I'm a gatherer/crafter in Albion and I craft things for thousands of people. I literally, craft 10's of thousands of items every month. Very different scales. I'm talking about a proper crafting system designed for thousands of people which can be scaled massively and includes everyone from day one.

And your scale doesn't seem to match what Intrepid's going for. In Ashes a crafter doesn't seem to be required to craft for thousands. At most you'd maybe craft for a few hundred, if that's how many people live in and move through a metropolis. Though even that is somewhat unlikely because some of those will be in guilds with their own specialized crafters and far from everyone who moves through the city would want to craft something.

And considering that one player can only master 2 specializations from the whole crafting tree, your choice of crafting will be even more limited which leads to an even smaller scale.

The same applies to all gatherers and processers, and if Intrepid wants to have all of these professions to be at least somewhat equally appealing - they'll need to balance the amount of resources, that any given gatherer can get per hour, with the amount of resources required in each respective branch of other artisan trees.

And on top of that, they'll need to have at least somewhat logical values of carriables in order to justify mule and caravan use. If I can chop every tree and get several pieces of wood from each one, I'll end up with hundreds of pieces after just a bit of farming. Do I carry that on myself or on my mule? How fast would I need to return to the nearest point of storage?

And as a comparison to that, what about a plant gatherer or a hunter. Plants and hides should weigh less than tree pieces which would mean that those gatherers can spend more time gathering their stuff while a lumberjack would have to spend a fair bit of time going back and forth between the forest and the storage. Which would probably lead to those gatherers having a much more valuable yield of resources than a lumberjack would for the same amount of time. Especially if we consider that the recipes would have to account for all trees being choppable so the requirements for wood would be higher by default.

If I was a lumberjack I'd feel bad about my time being less valuable than that of some other gatherer's. Especially if my few hundreds of wood pieces sell for 1 cent a pop (because everyone can chop wood), while rabbit hides sell for way higher (because there's only so many rabbits that could be killed at any given time).

All of these interdependencies and feelbad moments seem like a huge con rather than a benefit to me.

Sapiverenus

WHIT3ROS3 wrote: »

Not all resources should be limited. High-value, rare, and enchanted resources should be limited and they should spawn in dangerous and difficult-to-navigate places.

Having base materials for Wood, Stone, Ore, Hide and Flax would give players a choice when it comes to gathering. Do you want to take a broad and basic approach and farm large amounts of relatively common materials? Or do you want to be super selective and search out the rarest examples?

How do people think Ships should be crafted? Ships that can be destroyed and some of which are big enough to hold entire raid groups? The amount of Basic Lumber, Iron and cloth needed for a single ship should be massive.

Then you have caravans, buildings and furniture. (Never mind gear which could use basic materials as well as specialized materials)

You just need to make sure that you have a sufficient matrix of materials that provide interdependencies between different locations. To have a strong crafting economy there needs to be many ways in which stuff can be lost, so there is continual demand.

Wood in real life has a low range of quality once you meet the minimum for construction. There is better than Oak, Pine, Ash, Fir, et cetera but it tends to be rare and unutilized due to scarcity and/or difficulty of using it and/or biome specificity that may be far from where you want it to be. The benefits just aren't great enough to most in the business.

In game there could be a few more tiers of tree that would be difficult to chop and process; requiring better tools for Gatherers, Processors, and Crafters to gather, process, and craft with it.
Luckily it's a game and the 'difficulty' wouldn't stop the motivated.

Stone could be enhanced with magic type crafting making it less brittle; engraving symbols and imbedding something would be cool to look at and possibly do. Killing then carving stuff out of Rock Elementals could be cool I guess. . . morbid but it makes sense. Maybe they need to have their 'ley lines' powered shortly after dying to keep their structural integrity greater than stone. Hence Crystals and Mages are intertwined with stoneworking.
And the more blunt damage to it or 'ley line' damage the worse quality [which could be magical damage]. Some sort of crit to the Head would be best. . . or? Head might be good for something on its own too.

Harvesting crystals will probably be a big thing and part of most crafting. They've been in many demos of the world and part of some caravan skins.

Why is everyone talking like an alchemy of tiered eco needs to be achieved? Or whatever it should be called.

Variability in availability is part of Geo-politics.

I like long whole trees being required for Ships. Don't give me 10, 000 planks give me 100 trees that have to be hauled lol come on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YI_XidiFI1o

Potato salad is worth 168 thousand silver? What?

That is a poorly designed game.

Remove arbitrary values and give everything proper weight and meaning lol. That's all you have to do. Reality does it better than some random game dev team ---> learn from reality.

And being a bee flying from resource flower to resource flower is dumb. It makes the world small and is a shit gimmick.
Stand in place and hit the tree till it falls. Process the whole tree; planks or keep it whole for a Log Wall or Ship.

NO GIMMICKS FFS

WHIT3ROS3

This is completely off-topic. All trees should be choppable. I'm not even going to dignify the SwoleBenji nonsense. Completely irrelevant.

WHIT3ROS3

Sapiverenus wrote: »

Potato salad is worth 168 thousand silver? What?

That is a poorly designed game.

How much benefit does it give you? You don't know. You have no idea about the game, its systems or mechanics which are far from perfect. All of that is irrelevant anyway. It was an example of a game with a thriving economy with over a million active accounts that has trees that you can chop down.

Sathrago

WHIT3ROS3 wrote: »

Sapiverenus wrote: »

Potato salad is worth 168 thousand silver? What?

That is a poorly designed game.

How much benefit does it give you? You don't know. You have no idea about the game, its systems or mechanics which are far from perfect. All of that is irrelevant anyway. It was an example of a game with a thriving economy with over a million active accounts that has trees that you can chop down.

Just because I know, potato salad is extremely valuable because it temporarily increases the speed of your crafting and increases the chance that you craft higher quality items.
Needless to say this is a must have for any serious crafter because it increases the potential profits you make.

Sapiverenus

WHIT3ROS3 wrote: »

Sapiverenus wrote: »

Potato salad is worth 168 thousand silver? What?

That is a poorly designed game.

How much benefit does it give you? You don't know. You have no idea about the game, its systems or mechanics which are far from perfect. All of that is irrelevant anyway. It was an example of a game with a thriving economy with over a million active accounts that has trees that you can chop down.

It's lazy design. Laziness isn't random, it's systematic. So yeah it can go in the bin and burn! Far from perfect as you say: NO SHIT!

It's for player-owned vendors that craft for whomever what they need and they get paid by said players; and these vendors are 'owned' by someone so that person gets paid.

I watched the video enough to hear that. This had an obvious exploit that used up said Potato Salad. Then they stop working.

Over a million accounts includes every botter, every alt, and possibly exaggeration by developers to make themself look better
[because who gives a fuck just add some #s on there Bill; and no you shouldn't believe such exaggeration is rare and choose to be more suspicious of business # claims that are easy to lie about].
Developer Bots are not uncommon either lol; even if you don't believe it there's often no way to know either way unless you are rather good at figuring these things out. The less likely they are to be found-out the more likely they are to be there.

Why it's bad:

Dumb design is what leads to hyperacceleration of value that isn't tied to anything fun or interesting. It means there's a lack of ecology (game isn't designed for rise & fall, death and new opportunities; not talking economy but ecology); a lack of GAME; and most definitely arbitrary numbers and design that can break simplistique gameplay and undermine all signifigance to player engagement.

Why would an MMORPG have slightly higher crafting speed & quality be tied to food? Did they run out of ways to balance the game and needed something significant under the [Food] category?
Why do people have 167k silver to spare on a crafting boost and how do they still manage to make a profit?
Why is money so useful yet inflated in this MMO? Why is crafting? Is it overpowered? Why is money so easily gotten and thrown at something while still making a profit?
And apparently there are many more people with much more money than that. If it's simply food just make it remove starvation debuffs/ "Getting Food" interruptions and be used up faster when active rather than passive. Differentiate active & passive but still have stuff 'used up'. Take some designer enhancement potion if you want a short boost with possible drawbacks and resistance to the potion building up with repeated use.
Life is much more interesting than the pointless grind lol

Fiscal currency is just a mechanic and shouldn't be universal or relied on; that is relying on a vacuum and devalues itself while also becoming REQUIRED.
If players want to try and fuck the economy and create fiscal currency let them. Keep gold and such as physical objects though. . . lol why do people and devs want something 'physical' then throw that out the window right away? Sword and Shields then introduce hyperinflation modern econ instead of just having Gold and Silver or Iron coins. At least Iron is always useful.

I can bet with great odds that this MMO is a huge time sink for very little actual gameplay and fun; and I won't waste my time on it or have much in common with those that do.

Fantmx

New World's gathering system was in a very good place at release. It's crafting system was and still is a pain and a bore that I do not want to see replicated. As a crafter improves their skill they should have more control over what they make not continued randomness.

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