Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
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.
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.
Comments
Making professions fun "for their own sake" is a bandaid solution to distract players from the fact that the competitive parts, the economy, and the combat in the game aren't interesting and challenging enough to make the *actual* game interesting.
Whether the minigames are good shouldn't be a consideration in whether you want to log in to spend your time in an MMO. If you want to play minigames, go play minigames.
Longer, is not fun, hard can be fun so long as its not stupid, by stupid I will use a example from T&L, they just introduced tier 2 Dungeons, their idea of making it harder was just give the final boss, 1m more hit points, so its just long slow and boring burning them down, that kind of 'harder' loses players.
Same with crafting, make it fun, easier is almost always better than harder, the point of any MMO is to keep players, and not try be elitist! it just does not work, nor will it ever.
Though its nice to see a lot of people have said playing their characters are fun, which is good but that will only carry a game so far.
MMO to survive must carry the casuals once you lose them, its just spiral to death
I doubt that Ashes of Creation specifically would retain more players by making specific smaller things easier, considering the rest of the game.
This forum has, for years, been full of people talking about how they got bored, lost interest, and stopped playing easier games because they were easy.
Maybe if they wanna change target audience, but that doesn't seem sensible at this point.
Well you can have all the interesting systems in the world, but if a player logs on for a 3 hour session and the actual gameplay for that 3 hours is boring, they will eventually play something else. This is why i quit playing Mortal Online 2. I thought the game and the systems were cool, i just didn't enjoy the minute to minute gameplay. Apparently I am not the only one, as that game currently only has a couple thousand users.
Everything you do in the game that takes player time is a "minigame" whether you call it that or not.
Traveling is a "minigame" where you press W or auto run, aim the mount, and press the boost button on cooldown. (Don't even get me started on this aspect, waiting desperately for interesting mount abilities)
Gathering is a "minigame" where you scan the landscape for the resource then go up and click F on it and wait for the circle to finish.
Character skill selection is a "minigame" where you change your skills to suit the party and monsters you are fighting.
Combat is a "minigame" where you try to use your character skill toolkit and mobility to kill monsters and not die, based on the current situation you are in.
The point is, the complexity and fun of the "minigame" should be proportional to the amount of time a player is expected to be doing it.
The reason so many people love the combat is because there is a large variety of situations that you run into during your time spent doing it. Whether you are solo, small group or large group... Whether you are trying to create an AOE farm, or single target strong monsters, or just finding content appropriate for the group you have at the time.
So yeah, the "minigame" that is provided for us when engaging in different systems absolutely matters. It is what we are actually doing with our time in Verra.
Even if one is given a minigame for chopping wood, if your goal when you set out for the day is to find a very specific tree, the minigame is things like surveying, understanding world conditions, observation, avoiding mobs, etc.
Finding that one tree and hitting a few buttons differently won't change that (and again, I don't have any problem with hitting buttons differently, it's just not the thing that needs to change in order for it to be engaging).
Well i think the point he is making is that making something "time consuming" without adding interest doesn't make something "harder" or "easier". It's completely fine that they make these systems time consuming. The argument is that the more time we are expected to spend on a system, the more interesting, complex and dynamic that system should be. As well as being more beneficial to the player engaging in it.
His example of just adding 1m HPs to a boss is right. This doesn't make the fight "harder". What would make it "harder" would be more boss fight mechanics that that players have to react to that have the effect of making the boss fight longer.
Let's say you have 2 boss fights that are both designed to be about 20m long.
Boss fight 1 has 1 ground slam attack... that's it, but a million hps.
Boss fight 2 has 4 stages, each with 5 different attacks, adds that come out, mobility/movement mechanics, raidwide buffs/debuffs to gather, and the boss has 100k hps.
Would the Ashes community really prefer boss fight 1? At least its "harder" than if the boss only had 500k hps...
I don't know what the Ashes community is like when it comes to bosses.
The problem with the claim made by that poster is that it's a strawman, because that's not really what is happening in boss design, it's not even true for the example they used.
MMOs have been doing that sort of thing for years, claiming that TL or even WoW is 'just adding HP' is, I would hope, obviously wrong. Adding more HP to a boss that is a higher tier is almost never about 'making it take longer' in that sense.
So I was addressing only the crafting part of that post without accounting for the boss part, because the boss part makes no sense.
The problem with this example is that you aren't just looking for 1 tree. You are looking for thousands of trees, and you will spend 20 hours chopping them. How this "feels" for 20 hours of gameplay absolutely matters. If you are spending more time watching youtube videos while chopping than actually engaging in the game, the game sucks.
That being said, it's still fine for the game to have some time sink systems that are like this. But not for all the professions. OR at least give us some options so players that want to be more engaged while doing the professions can be, and those that want to be on autopilot can do that too.
If Ashes of Creation's artisanship is intended to be 'chopping down thousands of trees over 20 hours', then we've gone full BDO and then yeah, sure, we might as well go all the way and make it easier, but then, someone will bot it.
If chopping down thousands of trees is ever a 'generally good use of someone's time' in Ashes, even 20h worth of time, the whole system is already well outside of the realm of its level of engagement mattering, because it will be sacrificing long term satisfaction of engagement for shorter term, as with most games.
That said, if they wanna go full New World style, that's up to them. I think I've ended up in the painful space of this sort of thing, where one 'bad feeling' has a solution that just starts the domino effect, so I guess I might be switching to your side soon, in this discussion. Better to let the whole thing suck for me/people like me, than to have it be boring for you/people like you. No sarc.
If anything I'm not asking for it to be easier, I'm asking for it to be harder. Again, time spent != difficulty.
I'm fine with 20 hours of chopping thousands of trees. Just like 20 hours of killing mobs.
The difference here is the 20hr of killing mobs, I level 10 times and changed skills around and went to 10 different areas with different groups fighting different mob types and combat situations.
My bad, this happens because I have a really different definition of what the challenge is.
To me, the actual chopping of the tree is absolutely irrelevant in the process in every sense, but almost invariably when designers make something like lumberjacking more of a minigame, the other aspects of it become easier, to 'respect players' time'.
Right, I guess we are mixing up "easier" with "enjoyable", and "hard" with "not enjoyable". We could just as easily mix up "easier" with "simpler" and "hard" with "more complex". Or we could take "easier" to mean "less time" and "hard" to mean "more time". And now we mean almost opposite things, especially if we want the game to be "hard".
Typically i think of things being "hard" when there is a greater chance of failure and the person requires more concentration and accuracy to achieve success. But you can be equally right, "hard" can be a state of mind where you really don't want to do something but force yourself to do it anyways.
Maybe if the lumberjacking was an action combat axe swing, with like 4 different ability cooldown, a skill tree, and various tree defenses that you encountered and adjusted your abilities/swings it would be more "enjoyable" for me. Shrug. Could still allow for a "click and wait" option for people who want to zone out. If you action combat the thing right its 3s per tree to chop, if you click and wait its 4s per tree.
I dont really like the current idea of upgrading lumberjacking equipment to decrease the time it takes to chop the tree. It's basically admitting that this part of the game is boring and sucks and is only there to waste time.
For clarity this is what I meant by going full BDO, and they're already halfway there, much to my distress. But all this stuff could be easy placeholder, I think an AI could make the system we have now, at least, based on my experiences in Quinfall...
So to be a bit more helpful with this if you care, the issue here is simple enough. Different people have different subsets of the interaction matrix that they enjoy, and a game with a sufficiently robust artisanship system should leverage this correctly.
For you, chopping trees is not matching your preferred interaction matrix, so you would, in a fleshed out game, probably be a Processor of timber and occasionally a crafter of wood things, rather than a Gatherer of wood. You would then ask CROW3, who has the matching interaction matrix, to gather wood for you, and in turn, offer to handle the part of it that doesn't match.
Everyone wins.
Trying to force your interaction matrix preference into CROW3's gathering will make someone unhappy.
Some examples below:
Lumberjacking: Visual/Scouting, Discernment, Preparation (small)
Mining: (depends on game but usually) Awareness while Moving, Route Planning/Optimization, Preparation
Woodworking (processing type): Visual Timing, Goal/Priority Selection, Reaction (small)
Herbalism: Memory, Preparation, Route Planning (small), in some games Visual/scouting
Alchemy: Sequencing, Memory, Visual Timing
There are tons more of these, most correspond loosely to real life analogues of the activity. Classes/Archetypes can often be similarly sorted by playstyle, that's why there's often correlation between a dedicated 'main' of a particular class and their Artisanship.
OK well fair enough i suppose. I'd hate for them to change every system to match the same playstyle. And for sure they need some calm gameplay loops that are relaxing and people can listen to podcasts or watch some videos while chilling, or chatting with the homies.
I suppose this argument would go back to the "why lumberjacking speed as a progression then?". If the gameplay for this profession is supposed to be chill and relax, wouldn't upgrading the speed of your axe be the opposite of that style? If someone enjoyed lumberjacking in novice, why would they want to change the gameplay? And if they didn't, why would they want to grind out the slow chop to begin with?
And really, at this point, all 3 main gathering professions (mining, herbalism, lumberjacking) are pretty much the exact same playstyle and feel. So maybe make one of them so I can be a gatherer and enjoy it? I like to be active in the open world and gathering is a good profession for that.
Eh, it's just a thing people throw on when they're less experienced with it.
Understanding who, and how, to appeal to, is a whole 'thing' after all. I'm just picky about it because "Market Research Business Intelligence and Databases" was literally my job for a while.
None of my current group/devs actually 'know' how to make these types of decisions, and Intrepid hasn't actually taken down their Economy Designer posting even now, so I'm still a bit worried that they don't have their 'me' so I'm helping(?) as I can.
Point is, it takes many years to get where I am, and it's possible they don't have anyone who knows why not to do/mix certain things.
If it's any help, Intrepid, don't mix large scale gathering with tool speed. Just focus on designing the materials 'ladder' better. From my parses, your general audience up until this point wants that more than they want the BDO style, but of course that includes me, so bias potential.
I was even more upset when i saw just what having 6 copper (8 hours of RL time spent) did for raising my weaponsmithing skill.... that's correct.... Nothing. Unacceptable. Here is a thought... disable that portion of the game until it is really ready to be tested. the only game i saw was lets see how many gathers / crafters we can piss off this weekend.
Gathering is a problem... sure maybe it is an alpha problem or maybe it isnt. I should be able to use my Novice tools to harvest higher lvl resources just more slowly. they have even said so in the videos... is it broken? ... has the plan changed? ... is it an alpha problem?
Copper and zinc are still a problem unless you are willing to get up at 3am USA time to look.
what we have is almost nothing like shown in this video