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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
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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.
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Artisanship feels useless in early stages.
Armoredmonkey
Member, Alpha Two
in Artisanship
I think the problem with Artisanship is that it just can not keep up at the early stages of the game. Even the casual players seem to out level the pace that the buildings become available through node progression. How does development intend to address this? From somebody who has leveled Jeweler to Journeyman last phase and had only gotten station after the rogue launch this seems frustrating. I know that it depends on how people want to construct the nodes but i would love to see people to be able to craft some viable gear from multiple crafting artisans before everybody hits level 20 and then have to wait ages it seems to be able to craft the next tier of items because node needs to level up and construct. I'm really hoping that unlocking the next tier of node progression will help out with this. The way that i look at artisan right now is that it is just catchup crafting for alts. I hope you take this into consideration as this is just alpha feedback.
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Comments
Note that this is also a failure-tier stopgap because it doesn't 'answer the question'.
For an example of what I mean by 'answering the question':
The Question: "How do we get people to want Crafters/to Craft but not absolutely need them?"
Starting from the bottom, other examples, from 'weakest' to 'strongest':
FF11: No real effort to solve the second half of the question other than to have a large variety of gear. Top tier, powerful gear was crafted-only sometimes and if you wanted it you had to get a crafter or camp the AH. The difference was the organization of the Artisanship skills (Ashes could only take this approach probably if it split out Weaponsmithing and Armorsmithing into their 'components', there's probably a joke there) and the lack of durability.
Black Desert Online: Crafting is not done directly by the player but even if they choose to view the abstraction as if they're doing it when they specialize into their workforce, it's needed for the process of repairing gear that is damaged by attempts to upgrade it (not regular usage), so a constant supply of full crafted items (to be used as repair materials) are needed.
(the above is, as usual, a mess, but it kinda-does succeed at 'answering the question' even for picky people like me, to a point)
Throne and Liberty: The player is given materials and told to craft their first Green weapon themselves. The system for improving the traits on that weapon by putting in effort to repeat this (by combining with other copies) is not directly explained nor necessary, but a Crafter who does it gets a benefit (this is particularly obvious if the trait is something like 'Max Health' or 'Max Mana').
(the above is also still not a solution for the uninvested player because it doesn't explain about why they can only sell 10% of their work, but it solves that whole 'optional crafting something for yourself that helps' really hard)
FF11 solves 'bots' by resource scarcity and a wide variety (and again, different Artisanship categories).
BDO solves 'bots' ... well, it kinda doesn't actually, for this, but it has really weak gearing and gear options, lower than most single player games, I think technically lower than MineCraft for a while.
TL solves 'bots' by having that 'can only sell Great Success' and 'can't sell upgraded items' combined with 'will hit a limit on improving the item so no benefit to just making these things constantly/forever (I don't know the psychological effect on other random crafters, it's not full discouragement tier for people I know, though)
Note that I'm only saying that for an Econ person, and for most crafters/Artisans I know, the info given on the LiveStream is not sufficient to shift their feelings, much more is needed.
Whether Intrepid has long term plans or the skill to apply this already is unknown, and whether or not they intend to expand on this information is entirely up to the answer to the first unknown. I'm just pointing out that the tidbit of information from the LiveStream might not be an answer that inspires confidence, I haven't encountered anyone that felt that way yet (it's on the tier of 'not yet even an upgrade or demonstration of understanding' for most).
It's 'concepts of a plan', and the rest comes down to faith in the team.
On that note, though, most of us still absolutely have that faith in the team. Go for it, guys, we eagerly await P3.
They've now went from Steven's statement of hating upwards cross-lvl dmg nerfs to "we're trying to make higher lvl mobs thicker and hit harder, while your dmg is literally weaker against them" as a way to prevent people from fighting stronger enemies.
In other words, so far it just seems like a yet another way to avoid a difficult-to-balance design and going against Steven's own preferences in order to do that...
Sweet.
https://youtube.com/shorts/hOuVhhOcCR8?feature=share
And yesterday's theme for PTR testing was "mob lvl scaling. Enemies above your lvl do more dmg to and take less dmg from you. Lower lvl mobs are not affected".
That's my bad actually, I didn't mean that, level scaling and pDif style calculations are separate things, I am just hoping for the latter to follow on from the former, because it would be an improvement in the stats the game uses, for me (and imo a drastic improvement in artisanship and economy would follow naturally).