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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
How to solve the problem of levelling the Economy and Adventuring at the same time.
RedLeader1
Member, Alpha Two
1. Levelling professions is very slow, and doesn't yield much adventuring XP. That is by design.
2. Levelling adventuring has to be a lot faster.
3. You need players levelling professions at roughly the same rate as players and nodes level, in order to have a player driven economy.
The only way you can do this is make people focus on one profession at a time. It should be possible to level a single profession to max level in the time it takes to level adventuring to max level, alongside the adventuring. You should need to do that, even if it is just 1 gathering skill, to be able to afford adventuring.
I think you need to change the paradigm of MMO crafting, in which you do everything and slowly specialize, to one where you have to specialize, and then slowly expand. You end up at the same place, with a maximum number of professions at each level but you get there a different way.
It also establishes an interdependence of professions, and specialization, right from the start of the game. There is no hope that a player is going to be able to gather, process, and craft their own gear, and keep up with levelling.
I think if you do this you need to turn commissions around. If I am holding 20 rubies, and I want a jewel-crafter to cut them to go into jewelry, I need to deposit them at a crafting station, and make an offer to an artisan to cut them, paying for it in material or money. That commission sits there until a jewel-crafter comes along with fuel and does it. Any individual can then "craft their own gear" by employing the services of all the craftsmen and processors, right from gathering/buying that heroic gem or fabric or whatever material.
Of course if the processor is paid in material, they then get some rubies or whatever to cut for themselves and turn into gear, for them. If it is a 3 step profession, the process continues up the chain.
If you don't make the professions self-contained right at the start, you are not going to be able to make them self-contained at end-game. And if you don't force people to specialize, they are going to want to level everything at the start, and nobody is going to get anywhere, because specialization is what makes an economy efficient.
It should be possible to work out mathematically: if you have 22 players spread evenly among the archetypes, and each took a unique artisan class, how much output would be required from each artisan in order to meet the expected demand from the group over 10 levels (say getting a new set of gear every 5 levels etc.). You should then be able to create an artisanship system that might meet that demand, even if that entails gathering 200 copper from every node of copper, processing 200 copper fragments from a single copper ore, or being able to craft 100 copper rings from every copper fragment. Or at least balance it to meeting that demand at maximum efficiency.
You could even program it into your node log monitoring thingy and create a feedback loop during Alpha2 measuring supply and production efficiency for each artisan class, and see where it settles.
Of course this may be what you had in mind all along...
2. Levelling adventuring has to be a lot faster.
3. You need players levelling professions at roughly the same rate as players and nodes level, in order to have a player driven economy.
The only way you can do this is make people focus on one profession at a time. It should be possible to level a single profession to max level in the time it takes to level adventuring to max level, alongside the adventuring. You should need to do that, even if it is just 1 gathering skill, to be able to afford adventuring.
I think you need to change the paradigm of MMO crafting, in which you do everything and slowly specialize, to one where you have to specialize, and then slowly expand. You end up at the same place, with a maximum number of professions at each level but you get there a different way.
It also establishes an interdependence of professions, and specialization, right from the start of the game. There is no hope that a player is going to be able to gather, process, and craft their own gear, and keep up with levelling.
I think if you do this you need to turn commissions around. If I am holding 20 rubies, and I want a jewel-crafter to cut them to go into jewelry, I need to deposit them at a crafting station, and make an offer to an artisan to cut them, paying for it in material or money. That commission sits there until a jewel-crafter comes along with fuel and does it. Any individual can then "craft their own gear" by employing the services of all the craftsmen and processors, right from gathering/buying that heroic gem or fabric or whatever material.
Of course if the processor is paid in material, they then get some rubies or whatever to cut for themselves and turn into gear, for them. If it is a 3 step profession, the process continues up the chain.
If you don't make the professions self-contained right at the start, you are not going to be able to make them self-contained at end-game. And if you don't force people to specialize, they are going to want to level everything at the start, and nobody is going to get anywhere, because specialization is what makes an economy efficient.
It should be possible to work out mathematically: if you have 22 players spread evenly among the archetypes, and each took a unique artisan class, how much output would be required from each artisan in order to meet the expected demand from the group over 10 levels (say getting a new set of gear every 5 levels etc.). You should then be able to create an artisanship system that might meet that demand, even if that entails gathering 200 copper from every node of copper, processing 200 copper fragments from a single copper ore, or being able to craft 100 copper rings from every copper fragment. Or at least balance it to meeting that demand at maximum efficiency.
You could even program it into your node log monitoring thingy and create a feedback loop during Alpha2 measuring supply and production efficiency for each artisan class, and see where it settles.
Of course this may be what you had in mind all along...
3
Comments
Lumberjacking + Mill
Mining + Metalworking
Mining + Stonemasonry
etc
Therefor the Crafters will need to buy ingredients from multiple processors. And sometimes Processors will need to buy mats from other gatherers.
not everyone should be able to mine, lumberjack, fish, herb and hunt. Should be specialized.
It's gonna take a community to work together and the community to build the economy.
No. The original plan was you can be _only_ Gatherer or _only_ Processor or _only_ Crafter. You'd pick any 2 skills in that one branch (ie: Mining + Logging _or_ Metalsmith + Stoneworker _or_ Weaponsmith + Armorsmith). This creates a dependency between each layer.
They've now allowed you to pick any 5 to get better in (but only 2 up to Grandmaster), which allows some amount of 'do it yourself'. You can toally be miner+metalworker+stoneworker+weaponsmith to get a very large amount of the chain all by yourself (but not truly everything - and you'll get capped when you have to select your 2 Grand Master skills)
There was never a time when it was 1 gather + 1 processor. That's Wow's thing.
Yeah, that is exactly what I'm talking about. If I gather or acquire material(s) to make my "awesome wand of slaying", I'm going to have to employ processors and craftsmen to do all the steps. I am not going to be able to rollup to the crafting tables and do that myself. Surely I need to place my mats at the crafting table, select the recipe, and then have the artisan that can process the job roll up with the fuel to do it. Then I collect the completed job.
As the customer, I have to control the transaction with each artisan in turn. If you want a working economy, you have to facilitate supply as well as demand. The economy is never going to be efficient enough otherwise.
it kinda works this way at max level
you get 2 grandmaster skills 1 Master 1 jounryeman 1 apprentice
So u can pick any combination but at lvl 40 harvestables u will only be able 2 harvest 1-2 types if you do 2 u can process anything or craft anything if you take 1 u can harvest amd process them but wont be able to craft with them and so on.
lvl 30 resources u can do all 3 gather/process/craft with them however u will need to buy the components from the other profession required to craft the piece since u typicaly need items from 1-2 other processing professions too which u wont be able to do
at lvl 1 level u can do it all urself but at lvl 10 u need to start looking for outside help since some items can be done via 5 apprentice levels but some cant but after that u 100% need atleat 1 other person stuff to craft with
But make the item stat change with your lvl of the profession will help more.
Lvl 1 Item give for example 10 Armor, if I craft it at lvl 1 I have 10 armor, but if the crafter can make the item of the lvl he wants? I have lvl 10 armorsmith ok I can procude item from 1 to 10 and let me choise witch lvl I want to put and the item and the item will have that lvl like minimun lvl require.
CLICCA QUI PER UNIRTI ALL'ORDINE
But, I think that if you're killing humanoids for gear and not gathering then artisan level shouldn't match adventuring level.
Personally, I think that hours invested (adventuring vs gathering) should be roughly the same. Processing and crafting are tough to figure out in an "hours".
I meant that if you want a player driven economy then the primary source of gear will have to be artisanship. You are not going to want adventurers unable to level because the supply of gear is inadequate. Gear drops have to be reduced greatly as we move towards release, or it isn't worth the development time for a player driven economy, because it will be irrelevant.
Nah, player driven economy doesn't actually require that the primary source of gear is artisanship. That's 'gear-crafter-driven' economy.
And generally, people don't lose the ability to level because of lower gear supplies anyway, they work around it, or devote more energy toward gearing up instead of gaining Adventuring Exp.
It's true that this isn't how Ashes works right now, but we have many examples of games where the developers and designers just started from first principles (or got lucky) and built out a whole system where things work even with the gear source being about equally split between Quest/Story Reward and actual crafting.
In fact, a 50-50 split is just about the easiest way to do that and control it, because it allows players the freedom of spending half their time 'earning money to pay crafters or personally crafting' and the other half 'earning gear by being out in the world'.
It would work fine in Ashes too, I'd bet you 10k gil/10 Lucent.
This is a recipe for game-death by New World. If I can level my gear and adventuring, by adventuring, then there is no point in levelling my gear by crafting and falling behind in adventuring. It is entirely sub-optimal.
Don't waste time creating an artisan system if it provides no advantage or don't have any artisanship except gathering until level 40. Just balance it for endgame crafting. If it is neither fun, nor essential, then it is worthless.
New World has/had a relatively poor economic design and a fairly short leveling phase.
Many games don't like to put obstacles in front of players that actually require them to use resources that the game does not basically give them. For multiple reasons.
Many games don't have the wealth of content you can find in TL (which I use as the modern example because Ashes will definitely not be less than that if they go as they intend) while still making any real attempt to keep things relevant.
This has already been 'solved' many times. I am crafting low level stuff in Throne and Liberty, to sell to other players, daily. Ashes does not need to solve it the same way, but you can't discount these systems just because games with different structures/less experienced developers, don't know how to do it.
There is a live modern game, right now, doing this correctly for its underlying design, with the capacity to make Artisanship work the way it should/will work in Ashes with only one change required.
So unless you're claiming that Ashes' demographic will be only 'meta-tryhards' who only care about endgame, I'll have to continue to disagree based on my experiences. (and if that IS what we're expecting from Ashes, Artisanship isn't going to matter for regular players anyway).
You are pretending that utter contemptible failure = success. It isn't going to fly like any of the hundreds of games that have tried to cash in on WoWs popularity, but be more "PvP oriented".
You can't create a "Player driven economy", without demand from all players. Artisanship, for Artisanship sake, wont work.
Artisanship needs a reason to exist, other than being fat sheep for PvP players to kill. This game will succeed only if PvP players, have a reason to defend PvE players. If it doesn't do that, it will be dead before it goes live. An economy cannot exist without security.
It doesn't matter what content you have if you gate all content behind PvP. All the PvP players will ignore all the artisanship get to max level and into the endgame long before the artisans have. At that point it doesn't matter how much content there is, the artisans will never see it.
I suspect you are crafting on T&L after you did end game content and got ahead, Anyone starting playing the game now is SOL.
~sigh~
Prove this. I'll wait.
I just googled it, New World had 65K, T&L 56K. or something like that. I'm just brainstorming here and echoing the Intrepid vision of the game. They are the ones that keep citing a player driven economy.
A player driven economy does not have gear dropping magically from PvE generated mobs. That is the opposite.
I want your concepts to be taken seriously.
Therefore I want to help poke at it so that you can refine it.
If all you do is grab whatever data supports your current feeling, you won't be taken seriously. I know it doesn't come off this way, but even if I'm arguing with you, I'm trying to help. Throwing out baseless data won't help because then there's nothing to engage with.
I understand not wanting to just trust my 'nuh uh!' argument, but at least doublecheck your own.
I think a Node will have to excel at both to get to level6 and stay there. If you don't have artisanship levelling at the rate of Adventuring, then presumably the adventurers will have to go back to artisanship when they get to 50, and spend six weeks levelling artisan skills, before they can get the node to level 6 and do end game content.
If they don't need artisans, then why waste that 6 weeks? I really don't understand what you want. Are you saying that players will do artisanship even if it doesn't get them ahead in any way? That it is just cosmetic?
Id really like you to offer some sort of positive statement on what your impression of the vision is, not just be wholly negative on what I am offering.
Ok, I think I see what happened here, and some of the fault lies with me so I'll resolve my end, hopefully.
You made a broad claim about how Artisanship would work if players couldn't keep up with their gear requirements due to their adventuring level going up faster than the general Artisan level, and I 'countered' by saying that's not actually what happens if you split it 50/50.
But I didn't explain all of the specific mechanics and methods you'd need to use, in the design, to make the 50/50 work (tbh I didn't expect you to engage with me at all, I was just pointing out my perspective on it).
I don't really 'want' any specific thing other than what Intrepid said we should get. Artisanship being important, and the economy being basically player-driven. I'm saying that the economy does not have to be entirely Crafter-driven to count as player-driven. There are ways to do this.
Don't get too caught up in trying to imagine what I want the system to look like, I'm good with all sorts of things, as long as they're done correctly.
In Ashes of Creation, I expect that players will join Nodes or Guilds that have dedicated Crafters, and those Crafters will spend most of their time Crafting. It won't be the ones out adventuring that are making the top gear, so the problem doesn't come up. Those people who are out adventuring will sometimes get gear drops, maybe.
I guess that could sound like PvE and PvP being separated, but if you wanted to absolutely make sure that they have to be combined, then you really have to use the TL design (EDIT: but with the Ashes owPvP ruleset).
This makes no sense to me. The objective of the game is to complete escalating end game PvE content. If the artisans are essential in the raid passing the gear check of raid content and opening it up by building the node, then they are going to want to be in the raid, doing that end game content. And they are probably going to take a dim view of the PvPers playing with themselves (pun intended), while they are grinding out required artisan levels.
I honestly think someone not willing to put in a shift on the artisan system isn't going to be part of an end game guild or node, because it will never get to end game level in a reasonable time, or make enough gear to pass the end game gear check.
And that is where I think the game may have a problem. If they make the Artisanship system as much as a grind as it seems to be, the hardcore PvPers will be required to do far too much PvE.
Well now we're getting back into philosophy of the game. In a PvX game, how much is 'too much PvE'?
Obviously there must be a sweet spot for where everyone is interacting more-or-less well and generally happy, but I don't really see the problem there, because Hardcore PvPers don't usually need the absolute best Artisan-tier gear, and the power curve is smoother if it takes longer for them to get it.
So 'the node taking long to level up' is fine, because it caps everyone at once. The 'power curve' levels off at the Node's function level for everyone, the only thing you'd have to worry about is a rival node whose players have a stronger PvE capacity, right?
your processors should be able to do 'trade swaps'. I flat out trade shards/ingots for the metals and molds for the materials (+ service fee unless it's someone in my guild)
I'm not going to do 5 one-minute steps to make your slate weapon mold on the spot for you - it takes 2 shards, 1 sand base and I have to make two secondary products before I can make the mold (the secondary products require thread, wood, and animal fat). I don't want to do all that and trade with you twice. Not to mention the travel time to go to the one city in the region where I can even do the craft.
To be honest, though - I don't think you are going to get away in this game with 'I have the raw mats can you make this for me?'. You are probably going to have to sell the raw mats and buy the final processed material with gold from the processor (or whatever item replaces gold if gold is as worthless as it is right now).
The final crafter might be able to make them with the final goods - but there's so many in-between steps for processors we simply aren't going to do them to order.
I've even set a personal policy from my experience in phase 1...
I will not process a stack of less than 10 for anyone.