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Alpha Two Phase III testing has begun! During this phase, our realms will be open every day, and we'll only have downtime for updates and maintenance. We'll keep everyone up-to-date about downtimes in Discord.
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.
No Loot, No Fun — What's the Point of Exploring?
Podgnil
Member, Alpha Two
I really hope the current loot drop settings are just part of the testing phase and not a core mechanic planned for release.
I want to believe this is just a temporary stage meant to focus testing on the crafting system — and that once it reaches a more polished state, loot will be brought back.
Right now, it honestly feels like a joke.
We have these big, juicy dungeons... and after spending a couple of hours in them, maybe — just maybe — we get a single useful recipe? And that's if we're lucky. I won’t even mention gear — there’s practically none.
Basic open world content should at least occasionally drop white/common gear.
Pocket dungeons and places of interest like Ursus Cave should sometimes reward us with greens. Named mobs in places like SB, Karphine, or The Forge should have a chance to drop rares — and even heroics, albeit very rarely.
There would still be plenty of reason to craft epics and legendaries — I’m not saying remove crafting’s importance.
Maybe you could make dropped gear un-upgradable, while crafted gear can be enhanced? Just throwing ideas here — but having no meaningful loot absolutely kills the motivation for most players.
At this point, I’m roaming the world purely on enthusiasm. I find an interesting spot and tell my friends:
“Hey, let’s check this out, I found a pocket dungeon in the jungle that matches our level!”
And they just respond:
“What’s the point?”
Spending 20–30 minutes (or even an hour without a full group) just to gather, travel there, wipe a few times learning the mechanics — and in the end, what’s the reward? Some glint? Which we can farm from mobs near town anyway?
It’s gotten to the point where, even if I find something cool and explore it, I don’t even suggest it to anyone anymore.
Because it honestly feels pointless. And if I do convince someone to come, I just end up wasting their time
I want to believe this is just a temporary stage meant to focus testing on the crafting system — and that once it reaches a more polished state, loot will be brought back.
Right now, it honestly feels like a joke.
We have these big, juicy dungeons... and after spending a couple of hours in them, maybe — just maybe — we get a single useful recipe? And that's if we're lucky. I won’t even mention gear — there’s practically none.
Basic open world content should at least occasionally drop white/common gear.
Pocket dungeons and places of interest like Ursus Cave should sometimes reward us with greens. Named mobs in places like SB, Karphine, or The Forge should have a chance to drop rares — and even heroics, albeit very rarely.
There would still be plenty of reason to craft epics and legendaries — I’m not saying remove crafting’s importance.
Maybe you could make dropped gear un-upgradable, while crafted gear can be enhanced? Just throwing ideas here — but having no meaningful loot absolutely kills the motivation for most players.
At this point, I’m roaming the world purely on enthusiasm. I find an interesting spot and tell my friends:
“Hey, let’s check this out, I found a pocket dungeon in the jungle that matches our level!”
And they just respond:
“What’s the point?”
Spending 20–30 minutes (or even an hour without a full group) just to gather, travel there, wipe a few times learning the mechanics — and in the end, what’s the reward? Some glint? Which we can farm from mobs near town anyway?
It’s gotten to the point where, even if I find something cool and explore it, I don’t even suggest it to anyone anymore.
Because it honestly feels pointless. And if I do convince someone to come, I just end up wasting their time
4
Comments
Crafting has little value during leveling right now still as it is. I had no issues gearing without crafting. Just zerg group grinded each day, got more loots that way than crafting given the same time spent. All the items were white/common though. But that works fine until you're 25. Once you're 25 you can spend time crafting and you won't need to worry about getting killed as much, and you'll save SOO much time.
Recipe were dropping about every 20 or so kills. maybe the dungeons loot table hasn't been worked out yet.
I do agree there has to be a reason to go into the dungeons, if people are wondering what the point is, then it's just a dead area. I don't agree with gear drops, or gear quest rewards, or even exp quest rewards.. But dropping recipes, materials, (exp too). Still you're right, why take the risk in a dungeon if it's safer and faster outside the dungeon. The dungeon has a higher risk, and should have a higher rewards.
But, regardless of the way they choose to go, loot gear vs crafted gear. I think they'll find a balance, and I'm sure they'll fix the rewards for the dungeons too. "roaming the world purely on enthusiasm" is kind of the point of testing on the production realms. Just do what you want to do, report bugs, complain on the forums, ect.
I think it'd be really useful if you were to put down the dungeon you went to, the time you spent, the challenges and experiences you and, and the rewards you received. Lot of work I know, but bring those specific things to light for the devs could be really helpful. Then they'd have specifics to work on, which is better than your more generalized complaint.
Cause at this point I'm not. We've spent a year (several years btw) thinking that solutions to all these problems are soooo obviouuuus. Yet not a single fucking one has been even tried.
There is a difference between what a team is capable of doing, and what a team is allowed to do.
At the Start of Phase 1 - i also roamed the Riverlands purely on enthusiasm. And since i was a Solo Ranger, many Area's were off-Limits for me. Several Stars/Elite Mobs ? Off-Limits. Too many Mobs close to each other ? Off-Limits.
Now i hear (read) a worrying thing here.
If there is not "extrinsic Motivation" in Verra - the Game will be like +75% more likely die in the long run.
You - NEED - things, to bait People with and keep them interested to stay in the Game. Things you can work either Realtime Hours,
or Days,
or WEEKS - to farm and collect.
Verra is huge. But at some Point -> People " WILL " have seen everything they wanted to explore and discover all the neat Corners of the World they want to visit.
I don't like to say it -> but a few things Ashes of Creation WILL have to do like Worst of Warcraft - or else the People won't be interested in the Game long term.
✓ Occasional Roleplayer
I am in the guildless Guild so to say, lol. But i won't give up. I will find my fitting Guild "one Day".
Odd to put crafters outside the player category.
I'll have to disagree with your sword drop idea, the gear steps in 10 level increments, even without that it'd not work well for crafters.
1.You're level 11.
2.A level '11-20' sword drops
3.Now you don't really need a sword till 21.
4.You've gone 2/5ths of the leveling process without needing a weapon from the player market.
I'd never worry about crafting or crafted weapons until I was max level. It's just the path of least resistance. Lets also not forget that gear isn't BOP/BOE. So hand me down gear will steal reasons to craft away from players too.
Even if they increment weapons by 1s not 10s, it'd still be an issue.
1. You're level 11.
2. A level 11 weapon drops.
3. Sure you could upgrade it, or just keep grinding for another drop.
4. At level 15 you'll have killed thousands if not tens of thousands of mobs, you'll likely get another one.
5. If you do happen to get to 20 without a drop or a handme down, then maybe just maybe you'd look towards the market. But I'm sure this is what you're complaining about, you didn't get a weapon from the world or a gift, and you feel stuck. Check the market, if the market is dead, that's because it's alpha and crafting is still very much a work in progress.
The only way I can see making crafting matter from 1-50, (gear wise) is lowering drop rates. Maybe creating a 'damaged' or 'rusty' tier type that is lower than common. So ANYTHING that is crafted is better than those drops, also a 1s increment not a 10s to stagger gear upgrades more often, and also implementing BOP and BOE gear items. I'm still for VERY rare drops of whites, greens, blues, maybe even some Legos from raid like bosses.
I think Ashes is still trying to decide what type of game it wants to be. A fast pace leveling MMO, which is what leveling feels like now, or a slow pace progression game, which is what crafting feels like now. At some point they'll need to decide, does progress feel like an old school game like L2, EQ, UO, or does progress feel like a new mmo like WoW or T&L.
Fast or slow it has to be fun and rewarding, it's alpha, so it's just not there yet. I rather have an old school feel. The journey to the end game needs to take a while, if I can reach it in 2 days then all the content that was created to facilitate that is basically wasted and the character becomes disposable in my mind.
AoC has an amazing world unlike anything we've seen before. It's genuinely beautiful. Yes, it's raw and buggy — but it's beautiful. And it has its own system. Sure, it looks like a mix of different games at times, but it's still its own thing.
Now about the drop system — come on, this is nonsense.
I was leveling in Steelbloom after the drop nerf, and I didn't get a single piece of the bard set (Rossethorn). Not a white one, not a green one, nothing.
I chose herbalism. My plan was to gather herbs, turn them into thread, and craft my gear. But the more I played, the more I realized: I'm never going to get that set through drops. So I’ll have to craft it.
After running the numbers, I figured out I need around 800 wolf hides just for that one set — and that’s not even counting the other materials. 800!
I’m not a hardcore grinder, but not exactly a casual either. Still, if I don't want to farm wolves endlessly, my only option is to buy the hides from the auction house.
So what now? Either I set up camp at the AH and monitor it constantly, or… what?
Either I accept that I’ll spend a week skinning wolves, or I give up.
But what if I’m not a skinner at heart? What if I’m a minstrel, on a journey — why should I waste a whole week grinding hides just to get decent gear?
So here's a rough idea (obviously just a draft, needs polish):
Let dungeon mobs drop gear more consistently. For example, from 100 mobs you could get:
10 white items
3 green items
1 blue item
Then allow crafters to synthesize higher-tier gear like this:
2 white → 1 green
2 green → 1 blue
2 blue → 1 heroic
3 heroic → 1 epic
4 epic → 1 legendary
This way, players who don't want to grind gathering nodes still have a way to progress their equipment.
Want a legendary? Cool — go farm dungeons, collect 64 white versions of the same item, and turn them into a legendary (or use other combinations).
Collect "trash" → upgrade it with a crafter → eventually get solid gear.
It’s still grindy, sure — but at least it’s not about chasing resources at fixed spawn points.
Even with low EU population, all the profitable gathering spots are always camped.
And another major frustration:
Why are there fixed legendary resource spawns?
Seriously? People are parking alts across the map just to grab legendaries and log off.
Is that the kind of gameplay you want? The "spirit of adventure"? No RMT, sure — but instead we get legendary spots camped by alts 24/7. Great.
Why not make legendary drops random, based on:
your gathering skill
your gathering stats
how long the resource has been sitting in the world
That would actually encourage exploration. Make people run around the world looking for opportunity, instead of just following known fixed spots.
I really hope all of this — everything I'm unhappy with — is only in place because it’s still alpha, and that you already have proper systems and ideas for launch.
That what we’re seeing now isn’t your final vision, just placeholder stuff to avoid spoilers and give everyone a roughly equal starting point.
BTW, Intrepid — I’m an economist and currently job hunting. 😉
That'd make crafting pointless until endgame. I'd never stop grinding mobs until I happened to get enough items to 'combine' into a higher tier, if it's even relevant at that time. I'd probably just sell any extra weapons on the AH, farther reducing the value of crafting. And crafting isn't even crafting at that point it's combining. Crafters will still have to grind days away on the current system to be able to combine Journeyman level items. This idea doesn't fix crafting it fixes getting gear while grinding. It's a lazy mechanic you'd see in a mobile game.
The material requirements are not close to where they need to be, the hunting is basically broken, those two things stunt if not stop leatherworking. What you're running into is you clearly progress your character level way faster than your crafting level, partly because the two things above, also just the crafting system is tedious and coded to be slower. How they choose to balance those two things will determine the entire feel of the game.
Everything in the game is built off the character it's ability to a thing, which is why this focus on the top systems (settlements/nodes, ect) is confusing to me. It's a shaky foundation as it is. I'm sure they can walk and chew bubble gum at the same time, so I try not to be too harsh, but from my perspective priorities are out of order. If they patch the character with simplistic fixes than it'll just be another one loop game. Not many will stick around for long. Those looking for in depth RPG mechanics are already looking else where.
Anyways, there's no way to have drop rates high enough to gear players as they level and provide value to crafting as it levels. Naturally the source of gear that is the most fruitful will be the one 99% of players opt to pursue. End game crafting is a different story, but then it's just like every other mmos crafting system.
Attack and defense types.
The only thing that drops is white gear. This white gear has no additional stats on it. Anything else is crafted and has proper stat boosts for elemental attacks and all kinds of atk types (stab, slash, pierce, etc). Same for armor and defense stats against those things.
Mobs and bosses in the world have high atk and resistance values for those things and you literally CANNOT fight them w/o crafted gear. So your choice is to either grind the most basic low-xp mob, or go craft yourself proper gear.
Though obviously nothing is really "easy" about this solution, because it would require Intrepid to build their systems more, instead of adding endless empty regions, POIs and copypasted nodes. We'd need working atk types and resistances, we'd need proper crafting recipes, proper gatherables design, proper mob redesign, proper leveling progression on those mobs in relation to the resistances, enough mob variance to avoid strict lvling meta of "there's only lava lvl15 mobs and nothing else, so you HAVE to have fire resist and water atk on you if you wanna lvl up".
In other words, even if some of that stuff is planned (which iirc it kinda is) - we're shit out of luck for months if not years, cause we're nowhere near that kind of upgrade to the game's systems. We're about to get the corruption (genocidal pvp) zones which will be DOA cause POLAR-likes will just kill everyone who's trying to progress the event, while everyone else just stops even attempting to do that, just as is the case with the lawless zones (to my knowledge).
That’s exactly why my idea aims to create a connection between crafting and grinding gear.
Drop rates and the ability to craft gear should be balanced in terms of time investment — so that players can focus on the type of gameplay they actually enjoy.
Allowing players to upgrade dropped gear would make farming legendaries during leveling nearly pointless — both in terms of time and profession progress.
You’d have to be insane to grind yourself a legendary set while leveling, then pay 20 gold just to repair it every time.
If the goal is to make players craft their own gear while leveling, then the early- and mid-game crafting progression needs to be massively simplified — at least up to Grandmaster level.
In the current system, if leveling were extended and the servers were full (not 1,000 players online, but say 15,000), it would be total chaos.
Points of interest and dungeons would be constantly farmed for XP, and every single resource node in the world would be wiped out.
You shouldn’t confuse why people play.
There are goals, and there are ways to reach those goals.
Right now, the path is more important than the goal.
But the path is endlessly long — and leads nowhere.
Come on, it shouldn’t be like this.
Why the hell would you even bother killing a boss then?
Why kill mini-bosses?
What’s the point, what’s the purpose?
An MMORPG has to reward you for going into dungeons with your friends…
For killing bosses — especially when you wipe several times, finally beat it — there absolutely should be a chance to loot something useful from it.
And if I’m being totally honest (no offense to anyone), but the devs are just being lazy here.
There should be a separate loot system for dungeon gear — maybe with its own rarities — and separate gear for crafting.
Both systems should be equally viable, both in terms of power and effort required to obtain them.
Rater than asking what the team are capable of, the question should be focused on what they are allowed to change.
The staff have a deep background. Some on the team i have been fans of since everquest. Im sure this team could give us a working game that would be mostly Steven's vision. IMO that would be a big win for the MMO community.
Yes, bosses should be dropping proper gear. I agree that it is their entire point and should be the end-goal for pve. On top of that they should be dropping mats that make crafted gear even better.
Same for named mobs and/or mini-bosses, but on a smaller scale, and imo those should be respawning way longer than what they are now.
I am down with Steven's vision. An old school grind with lots of chase items.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
I played old school. I was at EQ launch back in 1999. No one here is asking this game not be a focuse on a deep old school game. DAoC, EQ, RS all had healthy economy driven by players but also had a balance of drops that left you feeling rewarded.
IS has many options to keep crafter in need and not make it that players feel naked and useless, especially at launch as crafters and stelments level up and get the economy going. New player experance sucks. Playing a game for 4-6 hours and you have nothing but glint and two bubs of experience. That was my last two play experience. Game launches like this, you will not have a thriving game. You need people to have an economy.
AOC in it's current state reminds me of L2 and I have nothing but good memories of L2.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
I feel ya.
The lack of meaningful stats is a problem. I'm not a fan of the "power" stat. Physical power should be based of attributes like Str and maybe a secondary synergy attribute, like dex or end/stam. If they wanted to calculate the physical attack power based off the players full stats/attributes, then that'd make more sense. I haven't run across resistances or anything but my play has been limited lately. I guess it's safe to assume there are none. But those would not be too hard to add. Moving away from "power" stats will take some more work. Either way the more complex the character stat/skill design the harder it is to balance for PvP, but still not hard.
If feels like they got the character in the game, moving around and attack then were just like, hey it's good to go. Without a clear direction of how they wanted the actual numbers to be ran. This is beyond the loot/crafting issue but everytime I think of the actual numbers in the game it irks me. It's as simple as tic-tac-toe...
Almost any time spent making a system complex enough that an above-average player needs to think about it must be balanced by probably an equal amount of time making a way so that a below-average player can manage without needing to think about it.
At this stage of Alpha, that's a big time investment (I'm not saying they shouldn't have a plan, I'm saying there might not be any point in showing us the plan).
I'm not at all a coder/dev, but wouldn't it be EVEN HARDER and take EVEN LONGER to implement any wide update to the combat/mobs/gatherables/etc when you have a ton of them in the game? Wouldn't it be better to stop adding shit now and instead work on it to see what works and THEN start adding stuff on that basis?
The biggest recent example of that is the crafting stuff. They had issues with the system, so they decided to "fix" it. But they already had a shitton of recipes so "fixing" it required them to literally rework THE ENTIRE RECIPE LIST (well, allegedly).
Won't it be the same damn case for everything else, once they need to do new big changes? Seems kinda assbackwards to me tbh, and like a massive waste of devtime later on.
I absolutely adore MMO Devs who know how to squeeze the absolute maximum out of every system, how to save time, cut corners, and skip steps. Because if they know what they are doing, those are the Heroes delivering us hundreds of hours of content for sometimes maybe dozens of hours of Dev work.
I find their current development style/path confusing and I hope to someday learn why they chose it compared to the ones I understand.
But for Combat/Skills/Stats, I think the usually mentioned "Minimum Viable Product" is fine, the only concern I have is a 'wait why does the base look like this, though?'
If we give them the benefit of assuming their baseline has a purpose, I fully support 'not worrying about it' (and yes, I totally understand that the way they talk to us sometimes implies that this is all they can do/their actual intent).
I'm just out here WhiteMaging until we're sure it's a bust, really.
Yes and no. Generally adding zones/areas/pois, will have not slow down the fixing/building of the features we're talking about. Devs working in UE world build will not have much impact on the devs working in VS writing the code.
I guess think about it like building a house. You lay the foundation, then frame, roof, run wiring, plumbing, ect. I see settlesments as the framing, wars as the roof. Critical things, but not as important as your foundation. In this case and every rpg the foundation is the player characters. Big difference between writing software and building a house is you can swap out the foundation if you need to without having to tear everything down. I just worry about how many times they've 'swapped' stuff out. Or rather how much code will get written during its development that doesn't get used at launch. Why? Well that's wasted time, waste resources, and that's on leadership. Wasting someone's effort will lead to burnout, then people will be showing up for the pay check, not the passion. Maybe that's the nature of this open development strategy.
Which is my entire point here.
If you create 30 "MVP" mobs, with basically 0 functionality or difficulty or other mechanics and then later you're trying to add all those things to all your mobs - you'll have to go to each of those mobs and add those things in one by one, right? Because you want different mobs to have different abilties and specialities and drops and mechanics, and behavior logic, and whatever else.
And at some point you'd get to a situation where you're pretty much making a whole new mob and the only thing that didn't get a rework is its 3d model. Though I feel like even those will have to be changed if design decides to implement new elemental attributes or weapon attack types and now this particular mob doesn't fit with their tribe/group and has to get their weapon or parts of its visuals changed.
So, to me, adding new stuff in when you're not even sure about what you wanna have later on, that can directly impact what you're adding right now - seems kinda dumb. And proper layout of design would, supposedly, let you avoid doing that.
And that situation becomes even worse when your devs have to be shifted around to fix the shit that got broken because you only added an MVP version of a thing. Last stream is a direct example of that, where several people were shifted around to work on triaging other broken systems, instead of continuing their previous work that they might've been used to and knew exactly what they needed to do.
I feel like this is a "gardener and architect" situation that R.R. Martin uses for books, but in gamedev. Instead of planning everything out ahead of time, Intrepid seem to be just doing things and then figuring out where to go after each step. Previous devstream was example of THAT, where one of the devs said "well yeah, we gotta pull Steven's ideas out of his head and then work on them", in the context of the fucking Harbinger update that was 2 months away at the time (iirc).
Like... HUH?! How in the hell are you in the DESIGN process of a massive update 2 months away from its supposed release, that's also meant to be advertised to the broader audience?! "Moving train" and all of that, but holy fuck, man.
i've seen so much feedback on how to make a good stat/gearing system that is easy to understand but complex enough to have depth and diversity in them ever since the start of phase 1 and they have took 0 things out of the dozens i saw, same thing with economy and artisan and many other systems, whenever they changed something they made it more complex and over convoluted and added 30x times the grind to them...