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Alpha Two testing is currently taking place five days each week. More information about Phase II and Phase III 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.
Resource gathering (copper) in AoC vs my time in New World - you are doing it wrong.
SmileGurney
Member, Alpha Two
I really don't understand how Intrepid thinks that the current state of mining is acceptable. In this phase I saw literally ONE copper node.
I have seen one copper node and dozens iron and tin nodes. I get it copper is the only node which is likely gatherable atm, but maybe its time to rethink the approach to how resource nodes work?
Coming from games like GW2 and especially New World I genuinely enjoyed going out to gather resources there. In New World gathering felt just right and I felt like I'm making progress. In GW2 crafting was also satisfying in general. Here I feel I'm getting robbed of my time and just do not want to interact with those systems. At all.
How are we expected to test the economy and crafting and actually ENJOY those systems? People have personal life outside the game and limited free time. I'm not wasting hours of my time on a wild goose chase. As much as I'm enjoying many other aspects of AoC, gathering, and by the extension crafting and economy are easily the worst I have experienced in all MMOs I have played since Ultima Online, and games have evolved since.
Learn how to respect free time of your testers and soon players/customers Intrepid, or they will become as rare as copper.
- metal nodes (copper, zink, tin, iron etc) are too small, this makes finding them a pain a world full of detail and terrible viewing distances for many objects
- I would like to see what is their respawn timer atm, but I suspect they are way too short
I have seen one copper node and dozens iron and tin nodes. I get it copper is the only node which is likely gatherable atm, but maybe its time to rethink the approach to how resource nodes work?
Coming from games like GW2 and especially New World I genuinely enjoyed going out to gather resources there. In New World gathering felt just right and I felt like I'm making progress. In GW2 crafting was also satisfying in general. Here I feel I'm getting robbed of my time and just do not want to interact with those systems. At all.
How are we expected to test the economy and crafting and actually ENJOY those systems? People have personal life outside the game and limited free time. I'm not wasting hours of my time on a wild goose chase. As much as I'm enjoying many other aspects of AoC, gathering, and by the extension crafting and economy are easily the worst I have experienced in all MMOs I have played since Ultima Online, and games have evolved since.
- increase the size of metal nodes. They should be at least 2 meters high. All of them. Make them darker and easier to spot from distance. Especially during winter
- substantially decrease their respawn timers
Learn how to respect free time of your testers and soon players/customers Intrepid, or they will become as rare as copper.
My lungs taste the air of Time,
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Comments
And I don't think they've said that they've decided not to go with that, so, for now, I consider the current system to simply be a "bug".
Are the mining nodes respawning as a random mining nodes?
As far as clarity of the spawns I firmly disagree. They are clear enough and they should not be a giant shining beacon calling to the players.
This was most noticeable deep into P1, because there was a ton of iron around, but because no one could farm it - it'd just sit there, taking up space.
First time hearing this but it seems to be my experience so far.
the 2 that i find need more clarity are copper nodes and flax nodes. They look too similar to iron and the bluebell/other bush i dont know the name of respectively. Like the bluebell isnt even blue for some reason, its purple.
Because of lighting and distance it can sometimes be difficult to differentiate so I would prefer it if they did add more of a color difference or something else to make them stand out from each other.
At the end of the day though they just need to get the actual mining survey system with rocks acting as lootboxes and the mining veins you can find in the world. They showed off this system around 2 years ago if not more and its not in for us to test. Kind of stupid if you ask me.
I really don't understand how this has been missed at the design stage, as surely no one would be that bad to consider this intentional.
Fix this Intrepid, we are supposed to be providing you with data regarding crafting and economy.
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Well, I mean, technically, that is what you're doing.
As Alpha Testers, we must, at times, be subject to 'Devs pushing the limits of what is acceptable design to see what happens'.
I'm absolutely not saying you shouldn't 'demand they change it', just pointing out that there could be somewhat valid reasons for it still being this way other than 'the devs missed the mark'.
We'll know in January either way, but for now, always remember that 'choosing not to engage with a system' is also feedback (atleast, I hope they have the tracking for this too).
In an effort to be maybe helpful, I'll give my 'feedback' on this part more directly. The problem isn't with the availability of Copper. It's a basic Game-Econ issue that shouldn't be boiled down to the precise availability of any given resource:
1. Either gear or enough materials to make some amount of reasonable gear for each player must drop within some reasonable period of the player attempting to obtain the gear
2. A droprate of this type will result in some players getting more of these drops while leveling, after getting the gear
3. Players will not have the same incentive structures after outleveling an area, but the droprates can't be allowed to change overly, due to new players (other than any droprate reduction from being overleveled)
I'll provide the viewpoint via Throne and Liberty example as usual, since FF11 has long past the stage where there is a 'live' version of this issue to reference. (Hopefully this will avoid whatever concern there is about solutions offered since the TL thing can't apply directly to Ashes, other than the above).
Every Overworld Dungeon in TL has one gear drop that 'drops too much' or 'no one wants as much of'. Don't worry about why, it could be meta, it could be mob distribution, it could be intentional, it could be a result of how they set up certain world boss drops. The point is that they exist. Alacritous Invoker Hood, Soul Mirror Turban, Viperstrike Arbalests etc.
So the Auction House in that game is full of Extracts for these items. Generally you dissolve them for magic powder but in the end, there's too much of 'em and 'no one wants them'. This is a ratio issue, so it lines up with the original feedback of this thread, I hope.
The answer to this is not to even out the drops (assuming there was any good reason for the way it turned out), it's to attempt to increase demand for the oversupply, because that's the most linear positive solution when you're doing game Econ. Almost no one is made unhappy by this in a live development game. TL's problem is that it doesn't have an easy path to this other than the unfinished Housing system. It's gear, the problem exists because gear-based systems already 'don't work' relative to it. Those are all in place.
So they should 'look for an alternate use for the thing that there is too much of'. Hoods become throw cushions, turbans unravel into curtain frills, leather pants become the leather parts of chairs, metal gloves become the iron parts of lockboxes, etc. The overall experience is expanded and players have more to interact with and enjoy without any of the dev-worries about having to collect data on rebalances all over again. Money flows from top players who are busy doing PvP or something to newer players who are trying to gear up but 'occasionally getting too many' of the thing that the game needs to be a common-ish drop. To be clear, there's almost always an answer to this for any drop, in a game in active development, precisely because you can just make new purposes for things and entirely new items. You can make crossbows into money scales and chandeliers for all most people care and they will go 'take my money!' at the AH, casuals and 'hardcores' alike. Most people just want more stuff to interact with (granted, this works better in TL because their monetization structure incentivizes devs to raise econ velocity, and Ashes might not want as much of that, but I can't imagine why Intrepid would be against it).
Making Copper more available is messing with a start-point, with a ripple effect, and a big one. Making Basalt/Granite more consistently desirable, particularly if you tack it onto a mid-desirability end-point economic item (similar to an item sink but not required to be one, since that might raise the velocity too high) would have much less serious ripple effects. It's too much work to 'confirm' the resultant effects of minor changes to Copper availability anyway.
If the correct number/densities of spawnpoints are available (my feedback on this is yes) and the randomization is intentional, then all that would happen if they made copper spawn more is that we'd eventually have a problem with too much copper and they would still need to do the same process and find extra uses for Copper, or people will complain that there's too much Copper and they aren't having fun with that.
tl;dr we don't absolutely need more Copper, we need like, Granite Flowerpots and Basalt Fence Posts and ofc, for more Freehold/Housing stuff to be working. I agree that they could reset the tiers/rarity of ores to be more realistic, I guess (the fact that Granite and Basalt are T1 but Tin is T2 is still messing with me, but the Mohs scale does not need to apply on Verra and even if it did, the Essence means they can do whatever they want).
The thing about life skills is that they are not in a vacuum. Based on what some respondents have said in response to your post, it sounds like there is definitely an amount of copper out there to do something. The question is of course how much is really necessary, how many things need it, and how fun is it to level the skills required to get it and go beyond it. In a game with geographic distribution of minerals like Ashes, it has a similar problem Minecraft has we will call 'streakiness'. Algorithmically distributed nodes will always cluster and leave players having dry spells and wet spells.
In order for what you say to be true, there must be both not enough things to do with the copper and also too much streakiness, but streakiness in RNG makes it possible for economy to happen. It creates 'necessary excess' that inspires and stimulates trade and creates positive play loops for players. If every player experiences abundance then the play loop is weaker. If there is not enough to do with the materials or an easy way to see the material you DO get as an economic activity, then you probably will 'have rarer players' as you say.
I distrust that particular way you make this argument. In order for a players time to believe it's being disrespected, there must be some intent in the COMPLETED design or the specific INTENTIONAL execution of the current design to be 'putting players through unnecessary misery' rather than it simply being a player demanding something outside what is currently possible to test or out of alignment of the developers wish for testing or play loop design in a way that 'disrespects the DEVELOPERS' time.
In this case the real questions I'd expect the developer would be more interested in are 'when you DO land a streak of SOME material do you gain economic activity'? Is there a way to make going from one node cluster to another more fun between those times? That's the real questions I think intrepid actually needs feedback on at this stage. And I say that because I too want players to be 'not as rare as copper nodes'.
If we want to absolutely maximize the "feel good" of aimless travel - make the cosmetic node points independent of nodes. So gathering basalt in Joeva and getting its points would still let you buy a cosmetic in New Aela (I don't remember if the current system is like that, maybe it is).
This isn't economic though, so for me, at least, this absolutely doesn't feel good.
It's a fetch quest, not an actual econ incentive. Maybe I'm just overthinking it/selfish, but I don't play games that claim to have Economies to do what the game 'tells' me to do. Feeling like you're contributing to something is important, isn't it?
Maybe buildings could require an upkeep material cost, and THAT could be tied to and based on local/regional unfarmed mats.
I do agree that having a fully meaningful economic design would be better, but I feel like majority of people could not care about that shit if the reward is not worth it for them, and just "doing something good" is not enough of a reward for those people. And that's why I suggested just a direct reward for these kinds of actions. But if there's a way to connect the two or just to have a proper economic reason for this, which would also encourage people to clean up overabundant mats - I'd be all for it.
This is absolutely true and is, of course, the reason why the average fantasy MMO Economy is borderline garbage. Can't blame the average dev for not putting in work for something 90% of their playerbase doesn't care about.
But:
1. That applies to nearly everything that isn't 'I'm winning, this feels good!', for some people
2. There's definitely some more low-effort stuff that is tied to stuff people do want, hence the explanation.
Sure, most people don't want to go out and gather stuff for making bookshelves, far less 'go out and get this specific Wand/Spellbook to put in it' or like FF11 where only one thing in the game dropped Kaolin or Tufa or whatever it was...
But that doesn't mean adding it doesn't do wonders for the 10% of us that care, and in an MMO, are you really ever pleasing more than 10% of the playerbase with non-combat systems anyway?
What Intrepid has come up with so far is broken and doesn't respect my time. I can understand functional bugs, but not such basic design flaws. I would rather have plentiful resource nodes and introduce a limit on how many times you can repair an item before it finally breaks than the current system which feels like something from a extremely grindy Asian MMO from early 2000s.
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I mean...
Also, fun 'fact' that a lot of people don't seem to know (though it's probably just the way the term has been used interchangeably), you might moreso mean 'Korean' here.
But yes, if your primary issue is that you can't gather the nodes that do spawn, and not the rarity of Copper itself, then hopefully they do something about it soon.
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Those conditions need to be built into the resource node respawn logic.
This would be balanced by Node. If there are a total of, for example, 1000 resource spawns in a t1 node, only 200 of those resources at any time can be t2, and only 100 can be t3. If these two numbers are capped, there is no chance that either tier of resource spawns until space is opened up via gathering it.
As the Node itself levels up higher tier resources will become apart of the split with their own set rarity. I think this makes more sense with how unlocking higher tier gathering, processing, and crafting professions work. It doesnt make much sense to have a bunch of higher tier materials in a zone sharing spawns with lower tier materials when no one can actually gather it, process it, and craft with it.
It seems like the gathering of wood is way better balanced, so somehow change the other recourse systems to that.
I'm actually surprised that the game doesnt have mines, which could be used like caravans as pvp contested content.
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