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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.
WHAT is this INSANITY??? 400+ Flax to make a simple set of Level 0 Light Armor!!!!
GrumpyOldKnight
Member, Founder, Kickstarter, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
in Artisanship
I will keep this short, because I like you Devs and I think this is just a stupid mistake that wasn't really thought through.
WTF is the point of tripling the amount of Resources for processing, then x5 + the amount of resources needed to make a finished product. A full set of Light Armor will need over 450+ Flax. By the time I have farmed that much, I will be way over level 10. This is a massive mistake. I don't mind End products needing a little more to make (perhaps more different items instead of just more of one item) but Processing should actually be the other way around because it is the lease fun part of the game when it comes to Crafting and gathering. Having to Harvest 10s of thousands of wood etc just makes people want to end themselves.
I really hope this is just a mistake. I know Steven said it on the stream, I must have initially misunderstood his meaning.
Crafting should always outpace Leveling, otherwise WTF is the point of it?
WTF is the point of tripling the amount of Resources for processing, then x5 + the amount of resources needed to make a finished product. A full set of Light Armor will need over 450+ Flax. By the time I have farmed that much, I will be way over level 10. This is a massive mistake. I don't mind End products needing a little more to make (perhaps more different items instead of just more of one item) but Processing should actually be the other way around because it is the lease fun part of the game when it comes to Crafting and gathering. Having to Harvest 10s of thousands of wood etc just makes people want to end themselves.
I really hope this is just a mistake. I know Steven said it on the stream, I must have initially misunderstood his meaning.
Crafting should always outpace Leveling, otherwise WTF is the point of it?
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Also make it make sense, why would I cut down an entire forest to make 1 bow?
I just don't get how this went live?
For example, extrapolating for lvl 20 gear. To get 20 dried wood planks, you'd need 540 raw timber! 540!!! For 20 dried planks!!
This has to be a mistake?
I feel sorry for phase 3 people who have joined today, and had been keen to get into artisan focus play. (after hearing how artisanship is important in this game).
I do (did) armoring up to now. Who thought it was a good idea to make a BP take 18 metal? And now ingotsd take 3 frags each? So, 54 ore to make 1 BP now. That is indeed insane.
They've broken the artisan path.
Not sure what your pointing out Ludullu. This is still terrible. I put a post response to this on the Discord Artisan Channel.
To me that seems like a normal scale of things in the crafting cycle.
People will fill the bank with resources like hamsters. At the same time, there was not enough space in the bank even with the old scheme. This in turn will lead to a decrease in trade.
I don’t understand why it was necessary to create such crap at all? Maybe it would be better to fix hunting first? Rework animal husbandry so that it doesn’t eat up a lot of gold? Deal with the bottleneck of willow and bridewood? Make at least one biome, except for the Riverlands, suitable for a crafter?
I'm really angry about this change. I know no one cares, but I'm so angry that I'm ready to quit the game.
I can't just grind mobs endlessly. It bores me.
I also don't make a lot of gold to pay for items (when item costs skyrocketed due to amount of gold in system). So in previous builds I just worked at a few professions to gather and make some particular items.
It would give me something to work towards, and I could then craft for my guild as well.
Since finding out the insanity in how many resources are required, and even considering how many would be required at higher level under this 3-2-1 supposed 'correction', I just decided to step back.
Maybe it's time for a break, and revisit the testing in a later phase. This is just so insane, I don't understand what problem they were even trying to overcome with this change.
Yeah, but it does a 'good' job of communicating the current flow/effort level, which I consider to be good.
If they're mostly just using a blanket formula for progression and recipes at this time, it helps them gather quick data with less investment.
Though I absolutely agree that 3-2-1 doesn't work either, it's not really supposed to 'work' super well, it's about the same as Questing, Nodes, or Archetype design (Bucky going above and beyond on stuff does not count).
I share your concerns, but for whatever my experience is worth, this takes a long time to do, for a game this complex, and they're still looking for the person to really jump in and do it. I can only hope that the game doesn't 'die' because of it just being Alpha.
I think it would be much better to do things the other way - cut the requirements by a lot compared to your aim while still keeping the ratio, so that people engage with the system and you get to see what player behavior is, and then ratchet it up to whatever feels like the correct state for your audience. There will always be people for whom requirements are too much, and it's much easier to decide whose feedback you can ignore when you deliberately make it easier than intended, instead of what we have now where even the most basic gear is an ordeal of tremendous magnitude.
It was supposed to be a Saturday morning fix, so probably went through already. Hopefully OP will have time to say how they feel about it now.
The T2 and T3 are still inflated, though by less. Instead of x3, they are now x2.
Which I think is still a problem, because the multiplicative nature of the processing means you end up needing x4 to x8 of the resource depending on tier etc.
For example. Bows and Two handed weapons now need 35 main resource (wood for bows, metal for weapons).
So for a T2 weapon, you'll need:
35 Raw x 2 (first processing step [into fragments]) x 2 (2nd processing step, into Ingots)
= 140 raw materials for that one weapon component
(if it's bronze ingots, that'll be 140 copper, 280 tin)
The problem is even worse for things that need more processing steps. Dried wood for instance, and the armour plating recipes.
For those you multiply the final number of raw inputs an additional time.
<required #> x 2 (frags/timber step) x 2 (molten metal / 1st milling step) x 2 (armor plating / dried milling stage). = 8 x # needed
So that lvl 20 bow:
35 x 8 = 280 raw material to make
This to me is still insane.
Let alone storage space to hold all this 'pre assembled' mats. Are they incrasing storage capacity x8 (or higher for higher tiers) to accomodate? of course not.
This change is still just ridiculous.
Like, what other reason can there be, when you literally decrease item drop amounts (though funnily enough I dropped 5 full items yesterday
If you're trying to encourage crafting, this kind of design change suuuure seems to be a bad one.
The reason I say this is related to how one balances these things to create variety. If you want a formula for a good play loop, you can easily calculate it by game if your 'Progression designer' has certain values clearly defined, but it will result in something 'flat' and give your World design team some difficulty.
Especially in Ashes, where we have to remember that they are being pushed, by our feedback, to move from a concept of 'static resources and conflict at temporarily-known source spaces' to 'people have the ability to spread out again'.
If players have the ability to spread out and collect raw materials, these constraints make sense to an extent, the issue is still the same. Mobs don't drop raw materials. Therefore Artisans and Adventurers don't interact enough. This is compounded by the fact that Processing costs money.
But we need to give them a bit, since we more or less asked them to up-end the entire Econ Incentives stack and 'start over'. And for those who value my opinion on these things, I assure you, just changing the spawns from Static to 'anything better than that' is starting over.
'But' 280 raw material is still 'only' two bags/trips worth of effort, and from my perspective this still isn't even the part that matters.
What matters is how long it takes to do it all. Ashes putting Processing on a timer causes the whole thing to become slow, and having so much of it with a cost makes it expensive. But we're still probably in the space where we should be asking, if you started from scratch with no help, but basic knowledge of where to find Materials in the world, how long should it take for you to 'end up with a 2H sword/good longbow'?