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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.
crafted items as buy orders?
Xeeg
Member, Alpha Two
Instead of vendoring 1000 stupid wooden boxes to level up your professions, why not make the buy orders out of crafted items?
Then, instead of the buy order system working AGAINST the crafters and competing for mats, it is working WITH the crafters and helping them unload all the useless shit they need to craft in order to level up.
Then, instead of the buy order system working AGAINST the crafters and competing for mats, it is working WITH the crafters and helping them unload all the useless shit they need to craft in order to level up.
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I believe we've learned across most games that this needs a daily limit.
From BDO I've personally concluded that it must only grant special points/currency with whatever association, and not raw currency (because why multiply complaining?).
I liked interacting with this sort of thing, but it desperately needs a proper limit or it will become a combination of 'Daily Chore'+'Eternal Grind'. Still, as with all MMO 'soft/downtime' activities, anything that makes me spend 10-15m by choice feeling connected to the world is just padding the metrics correctly in my book.
I don't actually do my Cooking Contracts in Throne and Liberty most of the time, but I will take a look at the contracts if I am not doing anything else for a bit, and for me, that's a win.
I'd guess the buy order system is this way to generate additional 'soft friction' though, so I'm not expecting a change, and if we stop believing that 10 minutes of the 'soft friction' feeling is a positive for the game (compared to the 10 minutes of basic, unopposed connection to the world I mentioned above), we might as well stop believing in Ashes itself.
Instead let's hope we get to the point where 'useless shit they need to craft to level up' isn't a perception held by most Artisans.
And of course, if you take out mats from the node and then don't return the crafted/processed item back - you get kicked from citizenship. And I do think this would have to be only a citizen-based thing, cause I'm not sure what kind of punishment would be good to avoid people just taking mats from nodes and not doing anything with them.
I guess this could just be a "mats are at the node and you simply provide the service of pushing a single button" with no trade being made at all, but I dunno what would be harder to implement code-wise.
Well, for anyone who cares to know how the equivalent of that is going for us spacefarers...
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/elite-dangerous-system-colonisation-beta-details-feedback.634055/
I won't give my take on it (the thread) since I think it'd be biased.
Would enjoy it but also be against it in Ashes, based on my interpretations of these (and some other) responses. But it's precisely because I've already come to a conclusion myself that I won't say anything about the thread.
(For anyone who doesn't even check it, it's 340 pages as of this post, so don't assume that it'd be easy to discuss either way).
If I understood the info here correctly https://www.elitedangerous.com/update-notes/4-1-0-0?utm_source=forums&utm_medium=community&utm_campaign=ed_trailblazers it's kind of a "you can start building up a node in a faraway place and others can help you do it".
Can other players become "citizens" of the system that was colonized by another player and then use mats that were submitted to buildings within that system to progress their own skills (or the ED's version of that)?
My point mainly being "do you disagree with this in Ashes because it might benefit citizens a bit too much or is there another reason?" Cause to me it kinda seems like what we might already get with AoC's node system, where some guilds might run fast to their preferred node on release, level it up quickly, block out other nodes and then other players would kinda have to level it up, simply because overflow from other nodes would go to the guild's node by default and cause regionally-speaking it would have the best content available.
And if I understand the ED's system correctly, people who manage to colonize a lucrative faraway system (be it due to good transit or as a place of its own) would also benefit from other players by default.
"Can other players become "citizens" of the system that was colonized by another player and then use mats that were submitted to buildings within that system to progress their own skills (or the ED's version of that)?"
But in terms of the spirit of the question the answer is 'absolutely yes'. Which leads to 'why I don't want to see it in Ashes' (again, even though I'd really like it).
People who are very into these types of games but not sweats sometimes think that this sort of thing will end up being interesting, social, and player-driven. That is a very small subsection of what actually happens.
What actually happens is that most players follow their absolute 'base instincts':
"I will get recognition/my name on something."
"Number will go up."
"I will do better than everyone else cause I'm sure I'm smart."
"Someone will like me more if I do something a lot of other people are doing."
In Elite this is fine, actually, because in Elite you are not subject to anything but the system, and you can at least delude yourself that you're doing better than others (or just keep your focus only on those below you). There is no 'Mayor who can negate your work halfway', and no super-specialization.
Basically with 20,000 'Nodes', everyone gets their own and they rise and fall on their own merit and don't complain or dogpile/snowball the first thing they see seemingly succeeding.
As we all know, that ain't Verra.
There are at least 13,000 'Nodes' started since this system. More than half of them could be successful. Only 10% are (some of this is because the gameplay isn't very engaging solo), and a lot of that is because of how player reactions and incentives work.
If you attach that to crafting, now you're starting what people will perceive as a 'race', but that 'Race' is technically controlled by a Node 'government' which is almost certainly a Guild group, so the odds are stacked against them.
And, just in case I haven't said it way too much already, I don't mind this personally and I don't think my group does either. Guild Gameplay is good gameplay, even (or especially) if smaller guilds have to band together. I'm just offering 'data on how it turned out in Elite' (this also matches my data from how the FF11 equivalent of Node Exp worked back during the glory days of that).
Remember that Steven has explicitly said on a prior stream that 'the Mayor being able to manipulate prices for goods the node buys to mess with players or reward their allies' is basically intended. Until I hear that changes, I won't want to sit through the complaining that would be caused by the direct application of what you said.