Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
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.
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.
Comments
And to add to this, 'being able to manage your farm in a mobile app or otherwise not be present for harvesting your plants' achieves this same issue. No Intrepid I haven't forgotten that weird line from ages ago. If you put that in the game every person who actually likes farming as a lifeskill will avoid your game given all the additional issues you've presented us with (Freehold nonsense, clunky and meaningless processing ques, etc). You might as well just not have farming in the game at all if you are going to do that.
I like farming in mmo's because the act of planning and managing my field are fun. I don't mind harvesting my crops as they are the fruit of my labor. When done right they have some of the most planning depth in the game and have systems that hard wire the outcome to the world state in ways every other gathering and processing skill can only hope to achieve.
When you have autoque and worker bots autoharvesting you take away all of that from us and give us something that is just a crappy afk arena. Immersion is important for a lot of lifeskills and farming is pretty high on the list of ones that can be really easily ruined by the type of design Azherae explains in the post above.
And with all that said it's easy to bot. Even if you magically somehow detect and ban people automating it, you have to PLAY like a bot to 'be the best' at it. There are definitely some lifeskills where that is possibly acceptable and there is a player niche that 'likes turning their brain off' for these things. But they are not all players and most players appreciate a spectrum of content types so they can pick and choose their preference. Designing a core system that is all turn off brain, therefore, pulls everything to one extreme in a way that threatens the idea of 'having fun' for any one who doesn't feel like interacting with that at any point in their session. Especially if it is remotely tedious.
I guess my big takeaway is that I know it's hard to get retention while making systems that have enough natural friction in them to shape an Economy. I 'get it'. And Ashes absolutely doesn't seem to be aiming for that, it technically goes too far in the other direction.
I'm fine with 'putting in work' to try to have immersive experiences because Devs 'can't afford to increase rarity of moments' or 'can't expect people to have to run around with their limited time'. I can handle some amount of working around the results of 'can't I just do everything from one menu? I only have an hour to play'.
But I still have to more or less desperately beg Devs, particularly Econ Design Devs, to stop making systems for people who don't really want to play an MMO. We can get there in this decade, I know we can.
Here's a material that's used in a ton of items. It's the highest stage of a craftable mat (but used from lvl40 to lvl80), and it can also be dropped but only from super high lvl mobs. In order to be able to craft this item, the crafter class needs its recipe. Recipe is fairly easily gotten through drop/spoil on mobs, but usually you'd need to wait a bit before crafters have this recipe on them en masse.
Same for some of the craftable mats that are required to make this top material
And so on the start of a server, if you're not yourself a crafter, but you need this material to craft an item - you're waiting for "processors" to come online. You were able to farm the "basic gatherables" that you can put together into higher tiers of mats, but unless there's a person with that ability - you're shit out of luck.
And quite often people who'd go out of their way to go collect all the recipes for these kinds of mats super early on (instead of pushing lvls, for example) will get an early start on econ boosting themselves, which allows them to play the market earlier and snowball from there.
Later on in the server's life you'd just be able to "gather" these mats yourself (as Azherae suggested as an option for Ashes), but the acquisition speed wouldn't be as fast as getting these mats through "processing" of lower tier mats.
edit: I got no damn clue why pictures are being messed up today. Here's the link to the item https://l2j.ru/highfive/index.php?p=2&id=1890
Here we have a gamer running a company with a really good vision that had gamers excited for. Testing, we can see and feel that vision and that is exciting. Inexperience management that has no checks and balances is the problem here. The vision guy cant also be the guy running the business. This game needs a reality check. Most problems that come up with Ashes are handled with knee jerk reactions over a solid plan. Steven needs to find a business person who has experience with MMOs. This will cost us some of the vision but we will have none of it if Steven dose not start adjusting how he is running this business.
I don't think Steven will like his next round of testers. Yet another knee jerk reaction that sounds like a good idea in his head but the reality of it is just another broken idea for so many reasons. I really hope Ashes finds a real footing.
didnt warhammer get a private server where players fixed the whole game and made it fun and made like all or most of the classes viable...like this is so funny , might be the only way ashes get fixed if it flops by not listening to feedback and fixing the terrible execution of the systems they made
Several years ago I asked a question whether Ashes should keep their versions saved, so that creating a "classic" one was easier, because people will always want the "first" experience. People laughed at my request back then, but god damn I'd already prefer a P1 build to whateverthehell we have now
Alpha 1was way better in most things if it had the current combat and i guess the gathering working everyone would be playing that in a private server lol
Everything sounds good in Concept phase because game companies don't like/need to go into detail about incentives, and players obviously default to imagining 'incentives that appeal to them', or in the case of all those games that turn out to fail later, we at least imagine 'the forms of the incentives that make any sense'.
But most developers don't know how to wrangle Motivation or Incentives, and usually 'shareholders' don't either. Even someone like Steven gets a lot of negative responses because he 'grew up in' game environments where he was subjected to (and caused) Perverse Incentives and somewhat Manipulative Motivations.
When a game doesn't understand the relevant Incentives or Motivations of its potential audiences, it doesn't matter how 'good the Vision is' or how 'nice the Concepts sound'. It will either get a mismatched audience, or basically none at all.
That's why the Private Servers mentioned in other posts are successful. Players, even if they fracture the community a bit in their efforts, obviously have to understand their own Motivations and Incentives for any game that they're willing to spend time modding or fixing.
But yeah, since Concepts != Motivations, Open Development is only as good as the Designers' understanding of the latter.
More examples!
Pax Dei is going to have a Sub model! It is going to be tied, however loosely, to ingame plots of land you can build on! This sounds familiar!
But what's the Motivation a person has for playing Pax Dei? Is it to build? To Trade? To war? Which of these Motivations is the thing that decides if a person 'pays the sub fee/the part of the sub fee that allows them to have the plot'? Because the game is going to turn out incredibly different based on which subgroup has the primary Incentive to own land. And the Concept of 'owning land, building on it, and having a living world' doesn't, in itself, tell us anything about how that will turn out, not more than 'Players will be able to own their own Freeholds, with effort' did.
Or for a more precise, directly reference-able Live, we go back to Throne and Liberty again, Housing Update:
Aside from decorating your own House(s), one other Motivation for engaging with the system is to do those 'daily' Contracts I mentioned before. The system is even set up pretty well! If you are a high level Miner, the Gathering Contract might ask you for Rare Ores. If you are a high level Tailor, the Processing Contract might ask you for Rare Cloth.
But there's a 'bug', where if you are a high level Furniture Crafter (the endpoint where those all converge), it will basically only ask for Furnishings that involve Wood, right now.
And since not every player is a good enough Carpenter/Woodcutter to actually make high level Lumber, and you can't trade for it right now, this 'bug' is actually saving them in a roundabout way. Because 'people who make things out of wood' are at least the most likely group to be interested in Furnishings. There is more furniture made of mostly-wood than other stuff. The contract 'flavor text' is easier to write. 'Fixing' this bug would currently be more trouble/annoyance to those with the highest Motivation to engage fully.
The Concept is still correct. The Incentives are still mostly correct (Social Org style things might be better, but that's just my opinion), the Motivations are currently 'optimized for' until things improve.
But it's hard to argue that the Implementation is 'Correct'. Not even the Devs are saying that. They're saying 'hey there's a bug here'. They're saying 'hey we know this is wrong right now please be patient'. If you tell someone the Concept of 'you can go out into the world and gather materials and come back and process them and make them into things', nearly no one will have a problem with that vague Concept.
It might 'break' at the Motivation/Incentive part of design though, not Implementation, and players often focus on the Implementation while focusing only on the failure of the Incentives to line up with their Motivations. Fixing that is the thing a 'Principal Econ Designer' is hired to do. Pulling together all the people who are Motivated in different ways.
I'm a 'Blacksmith', or technically a 'metalworker' who 'can't' make Belts, Armor, Jewelry, or most requested Furniture. Is this because the Implementation sucks? Or because some other player type/game constraint is 'in the way' of the devs getting to give me Incentives that match my Motivation?
That's one relatively simple system with minimal moving parts. Ashes is like 40.
That player focus has been an issue in my recent reddit thread. I posted a ironic clip of Steven from ye olden days
https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxneKr_HA3_CID-3eOfh0Q21WHI_Uc6p6S?si=ca-y2z8xwEVgVCVM
And a ton of people (with a ton of upvotes) just answered "well of course it's broken, it's still alpha". Even though the issue is not just with exploiters ruining the economy or recipes being broken as hell (though those are obviously issues too), but with the core design itself.
With what Azherae was saying the processing side of things feels like a mobile add on to look like gameplay but actually not have any. I think a lot of this comes with processing not having the true feeling of impact during the crafting process. Outside of animal husbandry, alchemy and cooking the rest of process classes are just go between to get gathering to crafting. Having more rare procs or making a higher quantity out of raw materials doesn't really give personality to what a processor does.
Might be why most crafting systems include the processing skills inside the crafting themselves. The need to me seems to be I want a specific reason to go find a processor. The same thing I see with a lot of AOC right now a lack of skill expression.
On another note the biggest failure to address feedback in a reasonable time was the phase2.5 fiasco. There was a lot of agreed upon thoughts that the material amount hike in P2.5 was ridiculous. We then were told it's being fixed and P3 will be better, only to end up with Novice being a little better but App and JM recipes mostly the same ridiculous material counts. On top of that the reagents which do nothing but create friction in the system right now caused the prices of crafting to sky rocket.
If they want massive material costs to be able to finely tune stats during crafting sure but a few things need to be done. The reagents actually need an effect, if you wanted something to control crafting costs benches already had attached prices just adjust those. Raw materials when processed need to make more materials though processing that way the cost isn't nearly as astronomical as right now. Also fix bags and storage, I don't even know if for some of the T# radiant crafts people can hold all of the mats for them.
Let's talk about Economic Pyramid Evolution.
Today we skip the preamble, since this post is only gonna make sense to people who actually paid so much attention to everything before this, that if they need incentives and stuff explained they're probably patient enough to wait until after:
MMO Economies are unlike real ones because they are a Pyramid that you can keep chopping off the bottom of, but doing so is only as useful as a random meta shakeup in a competitive grouping game.
I'll just start listing things and assume that by now, they make intuitive sense given my prior logic, or can be taken as small sample datapoints, depending on what they are. If everything in this post from here all seems really obvious to you, great!
So what do I mean by 'current' above? Well, it's a Pyramid, so you can move it.
Many game 'Suits' ask the wrong question when it comes to these players. This is anecdotal but I've definitely heard them ask it (via a proxy, pay close attention to Community Managers, people).
"How can we get players to play more and stay in our game?"
If your game has a Sub fee, this is the wrong question for Time-Casuals. They should ask 'how can we get players to join and enjoy our game enough to keep giving us money?'
Designers and Devs have come up with many, many answers to this question over the years, I'm not gonna go into most of them. I only care about the Economic Pyramid Evolution today.
One answer you often see used is to chop off the bottom layers of the Econ Pyramid because the less casual players have advanced to nearer the top. Catch-up mechanics. If you understood the Macro-Slots rant you can maybe see what is actually happening here.
Adventurer Progression Slot #1 changes from 'go out and fight a few low level monsters and meet some people' to 'follow this sped-up growth path to some new point'. I am not going to judge or claim that this is right or wrong for any given game. Deep-divers can check the ecosystem for Boosting and such on OldSchool RuneScape.
The question is if it is fun, and if it helps 'retention'. Who exactly 'quits because you didn't chop off the bottom?'
If we accept that games must sometime chop off the bottom, then all we care abuot is "Does it spark joy?"
If you built your game for AdvP1-Macro to be fun for Time-Casuals, and you chop it off, you lose some of them. Perhaps if you don't chop it off, you lose some Time-Average or Time-Hardcore players who are bored of engaging with it somehow. If you do it wrong, you might lose them anyway because you need proper metrics to understand if those players were somehow enjoying your AdvP1-Macro or AdvP2-Macro in their downtime activities. You also care if the content you have brought down from AdvP3-Macro to AdvP1-Macro (the usual chop) is fun or accessible enough to the Time-Casuals you did this for, or they'll jump back in for a bit and then quit quietly instead of 'complaining at you for not boosting them and the dreaded Not Respecting Their Time (just in case, this isn't meant as mockery of anyone, this is a real thing obv).
For an Econ player, if you force EPE but by doing a full cut instead of a Compression, or if your Pyramid is particularly non-homogenous, you've probably also done the dreaded Niche Invalidation.
That's 'simple enough', replace/upgrade the Niches as best you can. Heliber->Karnix->Lucien.
Another good option is to take advantage of the fact that the more 'vocal' of Time-Casuals often also don't have the Time to know that you haven't given them that much. You can move them to the bottom of the new Pyramid and they probably won't notice that much. You can 'fake it' (the Econ Designer in the back knows what I'm talking about, amirite?) for AdvP3-Macro pretty easily sometimes. If you didn't remove much Complexity in the lower sections, you probably achieved Compression instead of 'rising sands' and maybe invalidated less Niches.
But, summary takeaway!
Summary of the Summary:
Stop trying to retain 5h-a-week Casuals by throwing stuff at them because if this was seriously the most likely thing to work, your Economy was wrong from the start.