Hey Ashes Friends,
Here are some thoughts (and proposed fixes in bold) from a larger-sized organization on things we think may need looked at sooner, rather than later:
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Time-to-kill adjustments in PvP - the enchanting system is a good start, as Steven talked about... but balancing PvE and PvP metas will be challenging without a
secondary stat or debuff (similar to WoW's "resilience" stat, or a game-wide debuff that reduces dmg taken from players)
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Processing changes - processing materials is in a tough spot. Having people walk across the map to process something is one thing (I know we have some more options coming down the line)... but then making them wait hours for it is a bit limiting. This combined with our next point can make the system tedious, at best.
We think halfing processing time would be a start.
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Gathering rarity adjustment - set gathering node rarities isn't a good option.
All of the nodes should be random within their tiers in our opinion. It's tough to even get ahold of legendary mats, as those specific nodes are ALWAYS legendary (and therefore always camped).
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World bosses and best-in-slot gear - with Tumok still turned off indefinitely, and Firebrand not spawning or bugged, there is an obvious lack of end-game content for people to utilize. Other than "farm glint until your eyes bleed" for enchanting and materials, there isn't other options for gear progression currently, and even with the bosses we are lacking. I think this also is exacerbated by the level 10 gear meta, since none of the current best pieces are level 20 drops from end-game PvE.
We really need more options, or fixes to current bosses, at minimum.
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Guild Leveling System adjustments - obviously I had a post on this before, and the price for commodities was reduced by ~75% which helped a ton. That being said, the cost to level a guild to level 2 or 3 is just astronomical.
We think the guild exp needed to level from 1-4 should be reduced by about half to give more casual guilds a chance to at least test the systems. A 15-20 person guild should be able to get ONE skill point in a week or so. Currently that couldn't be further from the truth.
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Caravan risk versus reward - this one is tough because it is basically the single source of consistent income and content that the game offers in alpha. We think that smaller groups and solo players get disproportionately punished for losing a caravan, as they take a bigger risk at the same reward as other group. Losing 10-50g in caravan parts to potentially net 15g is a tough investment. Again, we understand that all of the systems are intertwined, so fixing gathering makes higher tier parts more accessible, etc. But ultimately, we think
making a set caravan recovery cost (where you get your van back), or maybe only destroying 1 of the caravan parts on destruction (instead of the entire van) could help.
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Node development - the major issue currently is that populated nodes are leaps and bounds ahead of unpopulated nodes. It's a very unforgiving system for all of the servers currently. You are relying on node mayors to work together to even get benches up to be able to test systems that are in the game... when in reality, it shouldn't be benches that are holding up people from testing content.
We think each node should have a buy order that citizens can use to funnel gold to other nodes. So for example: Winstead mayor could put up a commission where their citizens could kill X amount of bears to funnel 5g to the node currency of Azmaran, or whatever node is selected. It would help close the gap a bit.
Thanks for listening! We would love input from everyone on this!