"Professions are not for everyone"

Xeeg wrote: »

My complaint is when people say "nah this is the game design, professions aren't for everyone"

I can more than assure you that even once the game releases - this will still be the case. Artisanry simply cannot be for everyone. It was never meant to be for everyone. Hell, fucking processing will be literally cockblocked by freeholds, so only the ones with access to those will be able to progress.

Even if Intrepid come up with the best artisan mechanics in the industry (they will not) - it will still not be for everyone, because not everyone likes to do repetitive tasks, and no matter how intricate the minigame for gathering is - you'll still need to gather thousands of trees/rocks/etc, so people who dislike that would not even touch it.

The game is built on grind. And I highly doubt it'll ever not be built on grind, because if it's not built on grind - that makes it an "everyone gets a prize" game and Steven never wanted that.

This brings us back to the point I was actually trying to make, but I can make a Splinter Topic for it if you prefer @Xeeg because it wouldn't really be about professions, it would just be me Friday-ranting about Economy.

MMORPG 'wealth' is tied almost directly to Time, and from the player side, for the game to be good, it has to be Time Spent Having Fun (or afk busywork).

In games where players have too easy access to afk busywork (BDO) or games where 'all economic options are pushed to be as engaging or fun as possible to their demographic (Technically FF11, definitely FF14, EVE sorta now that it is Under New Management), a certain relatively large subset of players immediately ditches the social part of the game and do the Locust transformation thing.

Which makes the economy itself frustrating chaos.

New World still has this problem, but at least that game's approach was never meant to really make Artisanship important and Amazon was still learning. Throne and Liberty has a much better basis but have to go through their growing pains even with that mostly-correct basis installed, I wish Amazon and NCSoft good luck with that...

But Ashes of Creation is a whole different ballgame with much stricter requirements. TL doesn't 'need to stop' the type of player I'm talking about mainly because they don't have anything super important yet (they're about to get their first big acid-test of their economy) and they don't allow fully free Player Trading/Price Setting.

FF11 had both of those things, and the eventual outcome of that is not a thing I wish for either AoC or TL to endure. Just as people often ask to not let this game become a Themepark, not let it become a game where there is no true PvX, I too, am literally begging Intrepid not to let this game fall into the same econ-traps as late stage FF11 or Dark-Period New World.

It's not as simple as "professions are not for everyone", but this game must by definition have a pretty serious dose of 'we're not having fun trying to find copper nodes', for it to not end up like them.

Ludullu wrote: »

Even if Intrepid come up with the best artisan mechanics in the industry (they will not) - it will still not be for everyone, because not everyone likes to do repetitive tasks, and no matter how intricate the minigame is for gathering - you'll still need to gather thousands of trees/rocks/etc, so people who dislike that would not even touch it.

Well we don't even need a "minigame" per say. Even the idea I just randomly thought of while typing the post (every 5 trees you hit in a row while ability is active, increases the drop rate) is not a minigame, but it does make gathering more interesting. If the timer is something like 20s, you are then looking for groupings of trees that you can get 5 down within the time. That alone adds some element of interest because not only are you looking for the trees to chop, you are also searching for specific groupings of trees to optimize this ability.

The devs are smart people. They did a great job on the classes. Surely they can come up with better ideas than me sitting on my ass raging in forums posts randomly.

Ludullu wrote: »

The game is built on grind. And I highly doubt it'll ever not be built on grind, because if it's not built on grind - that makes it an "everyone gets a prize" game and Steven never wanted that.

Grind is fine as long as it is enjoyable.

I can play combat on my bard all day, if the combat is interesting enough. If I am just standing in 1 spot grinding the same mobs, with the same rotation, in 1 corner of carphin all day then yeah that gets old after an hour and i'll leave the group to go do something else. On the other hand, if there is a variety of mechanics and mob types and things that we need to do throughout our combat grind, I don't even notice the time fly by.

I have no problem with how "long" it takes to accomplish something, I just want there to be enough variety in the gameplay experience that the "grind" still means you need to use your brain and react to things from time to time.

That's not me asking for "everyone to get a prize", thats me asking the game devs to put more thought into the gameplay loop so that the most "efficient" thing to do is not repetitive, monotonous, boring tasks for hours on end. Like might as well go get a job in an assembly line and call that "fun".

Azherae wrote: »

In games where players have too easy access to afk busywork (BDO) or games where 'all economic options are pushed to be as engaging or fun as possible to their demographic (Technically FF11, definitely FF14, EVE sorta now that it is Under New Management), a certain relatively large subset of players immediately ditches the social part of the game and do the Locust transformation thing.

Maybe I still don't understand the problem you are getting at. I mean first of all, I dont even know what the "social" part is that everyone keeps talking about. I went in the game guildless on purpose, and people called me anti-social for that. But then I was chatting with random people and grouping up and making friends, chatting in global and citizen chat. So I guess I am social? I'm here in the forums yapping with you guys and we aren't even paying a game. "Social" has more to do with the person than the game. Maybe the reason the "Social" side of WOW sucks is because all the "social" people left the game years ago and the only people left are anti-social guildies in their cliques?

I don't see what is more "social" about spamming "23 bard LFG" in global chat, or "2 rare tin for sale". I don't see what's more "social" about hitting w on a horse for 15m to go to a player stall. Especially in a game where everyone tells you to get a guild or stop playing because the game isnt for you. Why even have an economy if everyone is supposed to be in guilds and just trading and grouping inside their guilds?

People will still do the locust swarm of gathering professions whether it is fun or not. Yes, if it isn't fun, less people will do it, which means less people will play the game and servers will merge until the minimum amount of people who still want to play the game are still around. That can't be the desired outcome here.

CROW3

Lumberjacking western larch is an example of something I enjoy about gathering. The Apprentice axe and pick both use western larch as their base material, so I basically want legendary larch to maximize the effect of the tools I use most (this also applies to my bows - but carpentry is a whole other deal).

Since the highest probability of legendary wood drops from adult trees, I need to find adult western larch.

Western larch looks pretty similar to a giant sugar pine, very tall with a spear shaped crown, and no foliage as you get closer to the ground. The adults stand significantly taller than adolescents, and have less foliage at the bottom half of the trunk.

If I climb the tallest peak near me, the view distance (which is epic btw) gives me the ability to spot the exact trees I’m looking for. So I just mark the general location on my map, and orient my way to those trees.

Along the way, I’ll choose two ores to prioritize - typically copper (to improve my current gear) and halcyonite (to vendor and make some silver).

Rinse and repeat until either my bags are totally full, or I farmed the legendary larch I’m looking for and don’t want to push getting hunted down.

Now, I find this loop fun, but it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. Which is great for a healthy economy - if gathering was always fun for everyone it would either deplete Verra of all resources, or it would require the respawn rates to be incredibly low. The obvious impact would be inflation across the board.

Actually I think you do see the problem, you just have a different view of it and I don't wanna make any assumptions about why.

Let's look at the idea of guild/player friction for a moment.

If a decently sized guild (let's say 50 players) needs lots of Larch, and gathering Larch is almost universally engaging and fun to most/all players, it is much easier to just 'designate someone who isn't normally interested' and that person will handle it, for the good of the guild.

You don't have to think about their personality much because they're not going to get 'bored', you don't have to worry about their professions because they weren't planning on that much to start and there's no friction so they just default to 'help guild'.

This is the 'guild' version of the 'solo player' problem I was talking about, forgive me (and doubly so if even this comes off as condescending) I'm too used to talking to people with a lot of shared priors on this topic.

What @CROW3 describes above is 'exactly what I expect a Lumberjack player to be thinking about'. I make no assumptions about CROW3 specifically on the matter of Lumbermilling, but you can imagine a player who likes doing the above loop but not the Processing or Carpentry parts, and vice versa.

At some point you need to 'incentivize' people to buy stuff from other people or Verra will be overrun with alts and/or bots. Ashes has none of the standard design protections against this and in many cases explicitly does not intend to implement them.

That's why it 'needs' this, it's part of the package deal.

New World doesn't need it because it's supposed to be a 'single player game' and doesn't have any profession limitations in the first place and there was a bunch of stuff related to that (like how they handled alts).

TL doesn't need it because it doesn't have unrestricted player-to-player trading and uses things that are similar to Labor Points.

Intrepid says, about their game:
"It will be social and require interdependence between Artisans."
"Players will be able to trade freely."
"We do not intend to add systems such as Labor."

This is a hard-ask combination at the best of times, pushing something like 'Crafting your own Bow' to the point where someone like you (in the sense that you don't enjoy the loop as much as CROW3 does) fulfills it, is gonna bring that house of cards tumbling down...

CROW3

Well, said @Azherae. Looking at the product vertical (i.e. ‘I want to make my own bow’), even limited to five skills, I still have control over most of the production chain. So the mini-game of crafting my own bow factory involves: maximizing the work I enjoy doing ‘gathering’ and end ‘crafting’, mitigating the work I control but don’t enjoy (processing), and minimizing my external material cost for components outside my vertical (e.g. thread, molds, etc).

A guild incorporates (from a business perspective) other crafters with other verticals to increase overall production & mutual benefit. More solo players will rely on ‘friending’ preferred vendor stalls where they can reliably acquire sub-components while being relatively free of the social overhead that comes with a guild.

CROW3 wrote: »

Now, I find this loop fun, but it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. Which is great for a healthy economy - if gathering was always fun for everyone it would either deplete Verra of all resources, or it would require the respawn rates to be incredibly low. The obvious impact would be inflation across the board.

And, to address this more specifically (making at least two assumptions that might not go live), the reason why this is the obvious impact comes from two things, but I must use my main games as the counterexamples again so bear with me.

It makes almost no sense to hoard anything in TL (most of the time). There is no 'profession restriction' and I doubt there ever will be, it's the pure distillation of the good aspect of FF11 for this. If you try to hoard something to drive the price up, people will go get it themselves.

Ashes will not work like this. There will come a day where CROW3 is Master Lumberjack, and the game's systems say to me, Master Alchemist 'if you need Hydalea Sap (made this up) you have to wait for someone to feel like selling it to you, you have no option to get it yourself'.

At no point am I weighing my time spent against CROW3's time spent (I am not asking for this to change). But more importantly, CROW3 has a form of leverage that isn't available in most games. The ability to slow down the relevant economy (in conjunction with other Master Lumberjacks) to maintain their prices, knowing that the barrier to entry for others is high.

The 'intuitive' answer for this, for most people, is to increase the number of lumberjacks by making it more appealing, but this is 'solving the wrong problem' because if you have more Lumberjacks, at some point you have 'the same amount of Lumber spread out more' and what usually happens is that the Devs step in and have to fix it and that takes a long time.

https://youtu.be/JtrEdKqGmbo

The above shows briefly the level on which that sorta-happens (this is not a dig at Amazon's approach to New World, but that's a whole other post/thread which I just made I guess), point is that then they start controlling spawn rates and whatever else. They get away with calling it a player-driven economy the same way EVE does, but it's more like 'the players drive us, the Devs, to control them but we do our best to make them feel like that's overall control'.

This article literally contains the paragraph:

It’s particularly fun to analyze economic health following big updates such as our expansion, Rise of the Angry Earth. Following speculation on items like Golden Scarabs jumping up in price only to fall back down to normalized prices once the expansion went live was an exciting short-term economic shock. We have a talented team of people keeping a close eye on our economy to make sure it remains healthy.

Very player-driven.

If they theoretically don't want it to work like this, at Intrepid, they have to factor for that. If one thinks they don't, then one would have to assume that Amazon Games is just 'wasting time' with all those unnecessary analytics and controls (they are not).

If you desire this game type, or 'desire for Artisanship to be fun and are willing to pay the cost even if you don't much like this game type', then I totally understand, but as a person who doesn't take this game type as seriously as I would like to take AoC, I'd always choose to pay the cost the other way. Lumberjacking 'fun for CROW3' and not for you.

And yes, I think there are a bunch of inconsistencies and flaws in how Intrepid has represented their plans for Econ so far, which is kinda my point in bringing up the AGS thing. People can use the words 'player driven economy' whenever they want, it doesn't tell the players anything in particular about what to actually expect, apparently.

I currently dislike processing and crafting because it's not active in any way. I love the overall process, cause, my god, crafting that caravan from my screenshot was enjoyable as hell. But you know what I did to craft it? I chopped the same trees in the same location for 1h to fill out my 3 apprentice lumber bags. I then put that wood into 3 processing tabs (4h each) and went to do other stuff. I then repeated this several times to level up my milling and carpentry to apprentice.

Outside of me chopping wood, the entire process was passive as hell. But even at this stage it's still rewarding, because I saw my work have direct positive consequences (i.e. a nice caravan). I also did the same thing about the western wood that Crow described, while waiting out my 4h. I even attempted to pylon that shit up, but westerns are so fucking slow on their growth that I only managed to get a few adults into the pylon.

And I also always have my head on a swivel, because I need literally any non-rock mining gatherable for all my other professions. And when I see that bright silvery glimmer of zinc on the horizon - ohhhhh boi my dopamin shoots through the roof. Even more so if it's the spiky triangular silhouette of copper.

To me, all of that is already fun cause the reward is what's fun about it. And the masochistic fuck that I am, I don't think I'd find it as fun if I could simply do a minigame properly and get the super rare wood that I need immediately. The payoff would just be too high, for the low amount of work I'd be doing.

And as Azherae likes to point out, majority of minigames would just be bottable to perfect results, so you'd either be shooting yourself in the leg by not using a bot, while everyone else does - or you'd use a bot and we'd come back to the "artisanry is boring, cause all you do is press a button".

Ludullu wrote: »

I currently dislike processing and crafting because it's not active in any way. I love the overall process, cause, my god, crafting that caravan from my screenshot was enjoyable as hell. But you know what I did to craft it? I chopped the same trees in the same location for 1h to fill out my 3 apprentice lumber bags. I then put that wood into 3 processing tabs (4h each) and went to do other stuff. I then repeated this several times to level up my milling and carpentry to apprentice.

I was thinking this same thing in a response I was about to make to Azherae and Crow.

No one is choosing "processing" because they "like it" at this point, it's just a necessary step in the chain. That being said, I am starting to see some of the synergies and ways that processing could be utilized. Basically, it is good if you plan on staying near your processing node a lot and not traveling too far away for too long of time. You don't really need a mini-game or anything for it, because it allows you to just go play whatever other content you want during the timer window. It acts more like a passive income source, which a lot of players may like about it.

CROW3

Xeeg wrote: »

You don't really need a mini-game or anything for it, because it allows you to just go play whatever other content you want during the timer window. It acts more like a passive income source, which a lot of players may like about it.

Exactly, I set 3x 50 min timers just before I spent the next hour outside the node gathering, leveling, and exploring. When I get back the components are done (leveling my processing), and I can change from my gathering clothes to my processing clothes and spens the next 30 min working through provessing different rarities. At the end, I package material for carpentry and focus on leveling crafting, or reset the provessing timers, put on gathering clothes, and go for another gathering loop.

Xeeg wrote: »

Ludullu wrote: »

I currently dislike processing and crafting because it's not active in any way. I love the overall process, cause, my god, crafting that caravan from my screenshot was enjoyable as hell. But you know what I did to craft it? I chopped the same trees in the same location for 1h to fill out my 3 apprentice lumber bags. I then put that wood into 3 processing tabs (4h each) and went to do other stuff. I then repeated this several times to level up my milling and carpentry to apprentice.

I was thinking this same thing in a response I was about to make to Azherae and Crow.

No one is choosing "processing" because they "like it" at this point, it's just a necessary step in the chain. That being said, I am starting to see some of the synergies and ways that processing could be utilized. Basically, it is good if you plan on staying near your processing node a lot and not traveling too far away for too long of time. You don't really need a mini-game or anything for it, because it allows you to just go play whatever other content you want during the timer window. It acts more like a passive income source, which a lot of players may like about it.

The 'interesting'/frustrating thing here is that you actually can get away with it being like this for me and probably a lot of people who play those FaceBook style multi-station management games.

Thankfully they've indicated that it won't be so 'inactive' so I'll gladly wait to give feedback on it, but I can say that we might not get as much 'complaints' about it even from people who want to be Processors because of a true enjoyment of it.

I can actually try to detail it since it's relevant to the thread, but the short version is that even as it is now, the main thing that would make Processing 'boring' and 'not a thing one can like' is actually the abundance of resources and the weak upward correlations, if that makes any sense.

"Get 50 Zinc, make 50 Zinc Shards" - just an afk activity.
"Get 50 Zinc, parcel out that 50 Zinc into 4 or 5 different orders for different things/alloys that people requested." - More active, sort of its own minigame. Add more rarities and it's 'enough'.

I don't think the above 'only works on me because I'm also an Econ person', based on my data from other games, but there's no way to check in Ashes yet.

I'm no fan of the 'afk processing left to NPC', but if one was going to solve this, you have to 'do it this way' either way, because 'actively' making 50 Zinc Shards is even worse.

tl;dr minigames for the Processing itself, though they wouldn't be bad, don't address the 'issue' to me.

Zehlan

The profession system is pretty bad whoever made it obviously is stuck in 2003 it is tedious to do. The gathering system is fun although adjustments to resources need to be done. With the idea of player made stuff is the best to have they have put too many hurdles for crafters to keep pace with levelling unless your in very large guilds and the attitude of "maybe this is not for you" is fine until your down to one server and it closes because Steven can't afford to keep it open.

A few simple fixes would change the experience

When crafting make it that you can preload a stack of items i.e, a stack of 10 boots more like with processing making it not such a grind in crafting.
Get rid of the stupid "you need a apprentice level axe to chop apprentice level trees" bullshit! If i wanna take twice as long with my legendary novice axe to chop down an apprentice level tree that's my business. This one thing bottlenecks crafters not allowing them to preload items for the next stage while waiting for a node to be able to process them.

The one biggest problem I see will be at the top no one will be a grandmaster of anything because too many hands are involved. If i am a grandmaster armoursmith then I should be able to make the entire suit on my own but that is impossible and not just for one component but multiple. So to be a Grandmaster Armoursmith you would need to be a GM miner, GM hunter, GM Tanner, GM Metalsmith, GM Stonemason and GM Armoursmith but you can only have two! What makes this worse is you can't use lower material to higher end items making master level worthless for contributing to you chosen GM profession. Now if they have it set that when you become GM in your crafting profession that all feeder professions can obtain GM too then forget this whole last paragraph because that would solve the entire problem.

Zehlan wrote: »

The profession system is pretty bad whoever made it obviously is stuck in 2003 it is tedious to do. The gathering system is fun although adjustments to resources need to be done. With the idea of player made stuff is the best to have they have put too many hurdles for crafters to keep pace with levelling unless your in very large guilds and the attitude of "maybe this is not for you" is fine until your down to one server and it closes because Steven can't afford to keep it open.

A few simple fixes would change the experience

When crafting make it that you can preload a stack of items i.e, a stack of 10 boots more like with processing making it not such a grind in crafting.
Get rid of the stupid "you need a apprentice level axe to chop apprentice level trees" bullshit! If i wanna take twice as long with my legendary novice axe to chop down an apprentice level tree that's my business. This one thing bottlenecks crafters not allowing them to preload items for the next stage while waiting for a node to be able to process them.

The one biggest problem I see will be at the top no one will be a grandmaster of anything because too many hands are involved. If i am a grandmaster armoursmith then I should be able to make the entire suit on my own but that is impossible and not just for one component but multiple. So to be a Grandmaster Armoursmith you would need to be a GM miner, GM hunter, GM Tanner, GM Metalsmith, GM Stonemason and GM Armoursmith but you can only have two! What makes this worse is you can't use lower material to higher end items making master level worthless for contributing to you chosen GM profession. Now if they have it set that when you become GM in your crafting profession that all feeder professions can obtain GM too then forget this whole last paragraph because that would solve the entire problem.

You're definitely more in the camp of 'kinda want a different game' which I respect but... probably not gonna happen in this regard.

Especially since that doesn't even parallel to most real-world-ish versions of this.

Zehlan wrote: »

The one biggest problem I see will be at the top no one will be a grandmaster of anything because too many hands are involved. If i am a grandmaster armoursmith then I should be able to make the entire suit on my own but that is impossible and not just for one component but multiple. So to be a Grandmaster Armoursmith you would need to be a GM miner, GM hunter, GM Tanner, GM Metalsmith, GM Stonemason and GM Armoursmith but you can only have two! What makes this worse is you can't use lower material to higher end items making master level worthless for contributing to you chosen GM profession. Now if they have it set that when you become GM in your crafting profession that all feeder professions can obtain GM too then forget this whole last paragraph because that would solve the entire problem.

Or, you know, you can just trade and get all the things you need to craft the GM armor piece. And if you happen to be one of the very few GM armorsmiths on the server - everyone will be giving you the mats to craft.

I saw this happen in L2 with crafters that managed to get recipes for new tier of gear first, so anyone who wanted to craft that gear would have to come to them.

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

Ludullu wrote: »

Zehlan wrote: »

The one biggest problem I see will be at the top no one will be a grandmaster of anything because too many hands are involved. If i am a grandmaster armoursmith then I should be able to make the entire suit on my own but that is impossible and not just for one component but multiple. So to be a Grandmaster Armoursmith you would need to be a GM miner, GM hunter, GM Tanner, GM Metalsmith, GM Stonemason and GM Armoursmith but you can only have two! What makes this worse is you can't use lower material to higher end items making master level worthless for contributing to you chosen GM profession. Now if they have it set that when you become GM in your crafting profession that all feeder professions can obtain GM too then forget this whole last paragraph because that would solve the entire problem.

Or, you know, you can just trade and get all the things you need to craft the GM armor piece. And if you happen to be one of the very few GM armorsmiths on the server - everyone will be giving you the mats to craft.

I saw this happen in L2 with crafters that managed to get recipes for new tier of gear first, so anyone who wanted to craft that gear would have to come to them.

Yeah but you gotta understand, there's a bunch of psychology behind why this is super important to people and it isn't actually as simple as 'I wanna do everything myself!'.

There were definitely some games that created some bad experiences for people when it came to the idea of restricting professions or 'making sure class identity mattered' and all that.

That's not even considering all the people who know that games like New World absolutely turn into 'people rushing to exploit the basic needs of the niche-less casuals'. So there will always be people who are very wary of the system Ashes is proposing to use, especially combined with some of the other features of the game.

Freeholds anyone?

EDIT: Remember that this is the tier of economy in games people are used to.

This is funny... turns out they already fixed some of the stuff i was bitching about. And this happened last time I was complaining too!

If you type P and look at the crafting you can see all the items that can be made. I would have seen here that i can only make a copper and tin bow, and no "bronze" bow. Dunno how long it has been like this tho, did they just change this?

Veeshan

Artisans skill do get easier when shops become a thing, it a bit of a pain atm trying to get the items you cant craft due to no shops
we also have the bare bones system atm suppose to get skill tree and thing in phase 2 i beleive, i do like how need other people for crafting though too for economy we just need the economy side of the game like shops which should be phase 2 it seems too