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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.
Suggestion: replace quality (common, uncommon, rare, etc) on materials with a Quality Rating stat
Gimblewald
Member, Founder, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
Handling resources of various different qualities is annoying in terms of bagspace. A single resource, droppings, will take up to six separate bag slots even if you don't fill a single stack solely due to harvesting resources of different quality. This gets worse for items that are bigger, such as rocks. It's also exceptionally tedious to manage at low levels where bag space is at a premium and quality resources are much more scarce. In fact, I mostly just want 20 common linen or something for an item, giving me one copy of a higher tier means I have to farm more and now I have what's essentially "useless junk" sitting around until I'm lucky enough to get another 19 copies of it.
In my opinion, a simple work around for this would be to replace discrete items (uncommon, rare, etc granite) with a single item for each resource (granite) with a numerical quality rating attached. The higher the rating, the higher the quality of the resource. The rating could be a decimalised value between 1-6 representing the six current qualities, where 1 represents "uncommon" and the text would be in white and "6" would represent legendary with orange text. Decimal values, e.g., 2.12 would indicate that most of your material is between uncommon and rare quality on average.
Quality of gatherables would depend on the player gathering skill and artisan equipment. Quality outcomes when processing or crafting would depend on the quality of the input materials as well as player gathering skill and artisan equipment. Quality can never be downgraded and there would always be a 90% chance of quality sitting between the two closest integers to your quality rating, modified by the difference between the upper and lower end.
For example: a quality rating of 2.12 has a 90% chance of the material quality being of uncommon or rare quality. The material we can guess is on average 1 - 0.12 * 100 = 88% of uncommon value and comprised of, on average, 12% rare quality goods (or higher).
Thus, the chance of obtaining rare quality processed items should be 0.12 * 90 = 10.8% and the chance of obtaining uncommon goods would be 0.88 * 90 = 79.2%.
That leaves 10% chance for higher quality than rare and should follow a logarithmic pattern:
With a: 9% chance of proc epic (+1), 0.9% chance to proc heroic (+2) and 0.09% chance to proc legendary (+3).
As you improve your gathering ability the chances of you finding higher quality stuff will improve and the average quality rating will increase. If you're harvesting at a base quality of around 4 then 9% of your resources will be heroic, and 0.9% legendary. Quality indicated as an item, not a rating, would be available at the crafting stage for consumables and gear, but not for any raw or processed materials. For raw and processed materials, you would get a rating only and rating would be increased between the raw and processed stage (thus, you add a small amount of quality when refining your granite into ashlar blocks). When making a wand, however, the percentile chance for each quality would translate into a green/blue/purple etc.
This system is simple, effective, reduces item bloat and is easy to understand. At the end of the day this won't really change your gameplay as you'd still be mining ten thousand granite for the chance at a legendary block.
In my opinion, a simple work around for this would be to replace discrete items (uncommon, rare, etc granite) with a single item for each resource (granite) with a numerical quality rating attached. The higher the rating, the higher the quality of the resource. The rating could be a decimalised value between 1-6 representing the six current qualities, where 1 represents "uncommon" and the text would be in white and "6" would represent legendary with orange text. Decimal values, e.g., 2.12 would indicate that most of your material is between uncommon and rare quality on average.
Quality of gatherables would depend on the player gathering skill and artisan equipment. Quality outcomes when processing or crafting would depend on the quality of the input materials as well as player gathering skill and artisan equipment. Quality can never be downgraded and there would always be a 90% chance of quality sitting between the two closest integers to your quality rating, modified by the difference between the upper and lower end.
For example: a quality rating of 2.12 has a 90% chance of the material quality being of uncommon or rare quality. The material we can guess is on average 1 - 0.12 * 100 = 88% of uncommon value and comprised of, on average, 12% rare quality goods (or higher).
Thus, the chance of obtaining rare quality processed items should be 0.12 * 90 = 10.8% and the chance of obtaining uncommon goods would be 0.88 * 90 = 79.2%.
That leaves 10% chance for higher quality than rare and should follow a logarithmic pattern:
With a: 9% chance of proc epic (+1), 0.9% chance to proc heroic (+2) and 0.09% chance to proc legendary (+3).
As you improve your gathering ability the chances of you finding higher quality stuff will improve and the average quality rating will increase. If you're harvesting at a base quality of around 4 then 9% of your resources will be heroic, and 0.9% legendary. Quality indicated as an item, not a rating, would be available at the crafting stage for consumables and gear, but not for any raw or processed materials. For raw and processed materials, you would get a rating only and rating would be increased between the raw and processed stage (thus, you add a small amount of quality when refining your granite into ashlar blocks). When making a wand, however, the percentile chance for each quality would translate into a green/blue/purple etc.
This system is simple, effective, reduces item bloat and is easy to understand. At the end of the day this won't really change your gameplay as you'd still be mining ten thousand granite for the chance at a legendary block.
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Comments
I'm trying to say this in as nice a way as possible, basically I don't know what kind of game diet the average AoC fan grew up with, but I wish it taught them to love immersion more. I genuinely think the only reason people come up with ways to make MMOs more abstract is because they never really experienced being immersed.
As for the goal of being easier to understand, at least for newbies, I'm afraid this isn't achieved.
Unfortunately I'm caught up today and it's late so I'll just let @Azherae explain.
I don't find that having multiple different rarities/grades of e.g. granite does much for my immersion, and it adds a whole layer of complexity to crafting. Optimally, crafting systems should feel like they make sense within the context of the game's world, but having a ton of different tiers of material just ends up feeling artificial and "gamey". Plus, it makes actually understanding the system harder.
As a point of comparison, everyone's favorite mining and crafting game, Minecraft, doesn't have any equivalent concept. Materials are made more or less rare based on how often they occur in the world, and how much effort you need to put in to get to them. This is a lot more intuitive, and allows the actual crafting system to be very straightforward.
I don't think MMOs really have any innate excuse for having crafting systems which are less functional or fun than single player games, beyond the need for balance.
Rarity Grade in Gathering is actually a design element intended to make certain players feel worse and spend more money/time. So I can totally see why OP would want to remove it.
Most of the more fun games don't have it. They have 'rarer stuff that comes out of the same gathering points', to give the dopamine hit that so many crave. The OP would solve the artificial problem of 'some people feeling so much worse that they stop playing'. But this is really important for MMO designers to get. If they think 'we need this system to make the world competitive and alive', no, it's just 'you grew up on an older Korean-style MMO infused with that aspect of their culture and are copying one of the cheaper ways to cause the feeling'.
If Ashes is doing it for that exact reason, they have no reason to change it. If they are more like Quinfall or Throne and Liberty and they want people to feel good playing even if they aren't hardcore competitive, they could remove rarity altogether.
Most games like that just don't have proper Artisanship and everything is just a blob, because their first target audience is 'people who want to PvP or people who want to play a Massively Single-Player Online Game' and those people don't care about interactions of this type. We assume Ashes cares, so.
Basically you need an amount of realism to be immersive and no more than that. Extra realism gets in the way of gameplay, but ditching it destroys immersion. Walking the line, blah blah. The OP suggestion is a valid solution to the problem of too many bag slots being taken up with Rarity, but it is replacing it with a more complex (and more 'realistic') thing that only even matters if we assume the Rarity Grade is very important. My point in this post is that it isn't. I'm not saying 'it should be removed' but it's nuanced. If the main reason we need Rarity is to make people who 'only get Common Rarity' feel a competitive push, then adding 'granular, complex rarity' fizzles out a lot while also not being very fun.
You can only feel good about getting a Rare until the moment you realize everyone else is also getting the same or more.
Without the specialization and other aspects, it's just an illusion, and we should moreso feel sorry for the people it works consistently on (there are actually very few of these people, in my data). As soon as you start to feel 'disappointed' in 'only getting Common Grade' (or in some games, even Uncommon if you're later in the path), the positive is lost.
The bigger problem is that Rarity Grades make designers more likely to tie progression to that instead of different items. This works to make advancement streamlined, which many MMO players in the convenience age 'need'. The 'no one wants to memorize 50 different materials' problem basically. Except that people do this sort of thing all the time, across many games, if they're eased into it. So it's mostly just 'disrespecting your players' intelligence', and I'm even referring to the ones that aren't very intelligent to begin with.
Adding a Quality Rating wouldn't actually streamline things, or if it would, multiple attempts at reading the OP have still left it unclear exactly how. The best I can guess is that the quality rating is applied to 'the stack' and accumulates or averages out? But then you have 'a number that changes when you get more Granite in your Granite stack, but you don't control? I don't want to put words/systems in OP's 'mouth' so I will leave my guess at that.
Many modern games don't have even the basics of gatherables that people would know just from natural knowledge of history or fantasy world stories, but at that point, who are they really appealing to? It's possible that there is a large number of people out there who really want to play a Fantasy MMO but their reaction to Electrum Alloy (for example) is 'idk why you have all these weird metals I just wanna play the game', but there are likely just as many who wish that you could even find actual Silver in TL.
The OP's suggestion didn't appeal to anyone in my group in any way, and I hope I've explained why, as clearly as possible.
Regarding storage space: Yeah, we definitely need something. Just not sure what it would be.
Making all Tier types the same across all biomes? So that T1 wood from each biome stacks together and is the same for any/all recipes?
Increasing slot capacity?
More/Cheaper Storage space?
Better cross-Alt trading/storage?
Or we just have Donkey Alts whose sole purpose is to sit there holding things. Inelegant and crappy, but that's what people are having to resort to.