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.
Seems clear to me that crafters have no place right now
Trikki
Member, Alpha Two
Ridiculous pricing - triple dipping with double silver charges from basic ingredients and crafting costs, plus fuel
Broken resources
Missing recipes
Broken recipes
Missing apprentice bags
Node storage broken
Guild storage broken
Node progression broken
Wars allowing low levels to get ganked at crafting stations, losing tons of mats. Miraleth/Joeva war is now more than 24 hours, guards useless as reds stand in the middle of Joeva killing noobs
STILL an abomination of crafting UX after 3 phases. You changed one slider bar for quantity; now it's very slightly better than terrible
Gear frequency from mobs makes most novice and apprentice crafting redundant
You want testing? I say make it worth my time coz right now you're just wasting it
Broken resources
Missing recipes
Broken recipes
Missing apprentice bags
Node storage broken
Guild storage broken
Node progression broken
Wars allowing low levels to get ganked at crafting stations, losing tons of mats. Miraleth/Joeva war is now more than 24 hours, guards useless as reds stand in the middle of Joeva killing noobs
STILL an abomination of crafting UX after 3 phases. You changed one slider bar for quantity; now it's very slightly better than terrible
Gear frequency from mobs makes most novice and apprentice crafting redundant
You want testing? I say make it worth my time coz right now you're just wasting it
4
Comments
It has improved but its still a mess. Thing that killed me was spending 6hrs roughly to gather, process and crafting. We made two weapons, one for my wife's mage and a shortbow for my Bard. I cried when I saw my bow on the market for 22 silver. Thats less then an hour of grinding to earn that much glint. Also cost me way more then 22 silver to make lol
this is a good fix, you can still keep the RNG but at least its RNG within the specific type of preferred crafting.
Trade them with the other members of your guild for the ones that you want. Our level-grinders have been dropping recipes on our crafters since the start. A bit of teamwork, and you should get what you need.
That only goes so far. IS needs to design this to support casuel players. Week days I get 1-3hrs of game play. If im to keep up with my guild. I dont want to take 1/2 my play time trying to trade things. Unless IS has options that make that easier from the get go, with guilds having shared banks from the start. Most of the feed back being given is not for 2 years after launch. Its what the early game will be like, better that's laid out for all player types, the more will stick around over leaving from these frustrations. Gamers are big on quality of life in there games. Many coming from MMOs that have polished their QoL for 10-20 years.
Right now we are in a gear chase, been watching the markets. Not a very good situation right now, not seeing much in the way of new crafted products. Right now crafters are pushed to grind for cash to craft and yet drops happen during the grind session and then your faced with the question "Why am I trying to craft something that no one will need?" Grinders drop their excess into the market, but right now guilds are consuming most of their grind and are now halfway through their first round of alts to 25.
My major concern, if this is a test of active systems then let us know, otherwise certain expectations are being created that can undermine the success of a Beta launch next year. Crafting was one of those systems that I suspect was being tested, the problem is there is no economy to market products that are made, this is the "Chicken and the Egg" problem of what comes first, Economy markets or crafting?
Some of us are older gamers that go back over thirty years in MUDS and MMO's, we are still looking for that realm that has a balance to it where everyone can thrive. Right now get your grinding shoes one and put your shoulder to the grindstone.
Luck and good Hunting
I'm pausing my testing for now. Phase 3 wasn't ready. I'll wait. If we keep testing in these environments we're all going to burned out when the game launches.
Crafting has no value with drops so high at least until you're max level and start the gathering/crafting game loop.
Crafting is being being tested, (and it's better), but many players complained about the drop rate and they upped it. Good or bad? I say bad, but that's just my opinion. Crafting needs to come before the markets. Crafting progression, recipes, material balances, ect all need to be functional before an economy can even be balanced. This will also include gear drops by mobs or quests... Early game crafting still has little to no value, which makes your overall progression slow or stop. Trying to balance an economy on unfinished products would be a waste, they'll be chasing problems in circles.
I'm an older gamer who has many hours in MUD/S and MMOs. And I crave a game that gives that same feel of some of the MUDS, but this game is no where close to those right now and won't be even. So far the game is still light on the RPG mechanics as a whole. The stats are too basic to be meaningful. It's like they had no idea what to do, but a basic "Gear Score" or "Power Level" to gauge a characters overall strength is hardly even FPS levels of depth or complexity.
Start grinding away to get some gear that you can get from a drop or buy from the market? Why? It's a test, even if it wasn't a test why would I waste my time making an item when it can be obtained so much easier via another route? Because crafting is fun? It's not in this game right now. It's a UI clickity activity.
This is a genuine question; why would Intrepid need to support a playstyle it knows has no long term future in the game?
That's an opinion that's outdated. Currently, any MMO that's doing well has about 80% of its subscribers are casuels. No MMO is making it right now without them. This does not need to make the game dumbed down, or easy. Its making it possible with short play time progress that's meaningful and feels rewarding. Make the early game teach you the game by adding layers of depth over throwing someone in the deep end, requiring hours and hours of reading to figure out small things like how to craft or processs. Making the progression of these things add layers as you progress. Giving tools that support that play style, LFG tools, auto starting people in starter guilds, making simple pug groups at PoI have the recipes you need for the first 20 levels of your crafting, 20+ starts to point you in the direction of where to get the harder recpies to earn. There are so many ways to make Ashes casuel friendly without breaking the game. IS is a skilled team and can sit down and work this out, including QoL things, like markets that point you where to go to get what you need. Over guessing what settlement to randomly try next. Casuels need their time respected a little more. Early game should be easy to figure out with complexity added slowly. Over random drops you could give people options to pick recpies that would be helpful, maybe even have some smart options that detect what skills you are working on and give you a 10-20% higher chance to get something that makes sense.
I dont disagree.
However, look around.
Ashes is not designed for casuals.
I think that's the concern. Without additional casual support the game will limit its potential playerbase, but there's plenty of development time left to address that.
The biggest concern I have is that Ashes is a MASSIVE game with a massive world.
It will feel lonely and small and miserable with just a few thousand dedicated players.
While I agree that the game will feel way too large if a realm only has a couple thousand people on it, the casual players need to realize that if they want to play a game like this, they're going to need to be able to learn to plan their play time accordingly. By virtue of being casual, you are going to be behind the sweats no matter what. The game needs systems in place to keep the sweats engaged for longer and the casuals who will inevitably take profession skills as a way to stay caught up will be the backbone of the economy that allows the sweats to keep sweating.
Implementing mobile game gacha mechanics to appease the casual playerbase will not be healthy for the game overall. If you want a game for swipers then go play a game for swipers.
Yes, the game will feel empty.
This is a reault of wanting 500v500 sieges. The notion of getting more than 10% of a servers population involved in one fight is unrealistic. If you want those kinds of numbers, you need 10k people online on that server. If you have 10k people online at once with minimal instancing, you need a very large game world. If you have a very large game world and don't have that 10k people online, you will have an empty game world.
It's just a series of decisions that taken individually all make sense (wanting large sieges, not wanting much instanced content etc), but the consequences of the combination of these decisions leaves the game in an unfortunate place, with no viable way out.
I don't think they need to do that. This is game where depending on other players and others depending on you is at the core of gameplay. By the way.. why is cooperating considered "hardcore" now?
because there is a difference between a healthy amount of force cooperation like being able to progress with quests where you can do it by yourself even if they are tough you can join others around to do quests together as it would be more convenient and faster but not necessary and some quests where you have to be in a party to either fully do it or do one of the quest steps like killing a boss or something compared to FUCK YOU YOU CANT DO ANYTHING UNLESS YOU START THE GAME WITH A FULL GUILD AND PLAY 24/7 TO ACHIEVE OR CRAFT ANYTHING, I SPIT ON YOUR TIME TOFUU, THIS IS A SLAVE JOB NOT A GAME SO GET TO GRINDING LIKE A MINDLESS BOT.
see its a big difference
Time investment, costs, storage issues, travel time and grind expected to achieve anything at higher levels are just silly. Intrepid has been told about this weeks ago.
Blown past falling sands…
With all these additional reagents Intrepid keep pushing - those could come from harder mobs and only required if your mats will bring the item over the common rarity. So literally everyone has access to the basic white gear through crafting, but if you wanna go higher up - you gotta work with others or pay good money to them.
I believe there's an Economy Lead job going. Just saying.
They need to remove ALL DROP GEAR, or just make crafting /Gathering super easy. Already see people skipping gathering and crafting and just grinding. Crafting/Gather Skill set should be as important as primary Dps/healing or tanking stat on your toon. It is heading that way , which I like. Do not like crafting? Farming Rocks, Do no like gathering, Go Fishing or Hunting, more interactive (soon). Just want to grind mobs , get drops and out gear others people in PVP, so you can gank and very few challenging fights,,, WOW and many other games have that in place, find a new home IMO
I stopped looking - is that position still not filled?
It's been half a decade...
I dunno, the requirements are pretty high. How many people in the world would fit them, be able to move to San Diego, and not already be settled in another company somewhere else?
Nope.
(people can assume this is mostly an answer for Ludullu, you don't need to 'challenge my proof or credentials' here, just 'don't believe me' if you prefer).
Because pay close attention to what daveywavey said.
Most people who have ever built an MMO Economy on the scale and of the type Ashes is hoping for live in Korea or Japan.
The listing asks for a type and level of experience that basically doesn't exist, if you believed I could do it for example, you'd have the problem that my work experience is in Business Intelligence and MMO Economy study is effectively my 'hobby'.
You'd assume given the type of person I am, and my interests, that I would 'know/know of a lot of people who could do this'. The number of people I know (again, or just know of) that I believe would be able to do it for Ashes, and would be willing to either move West Coast or leave their current jobs: 0.
In all arrogance, a lot of my ranting is because I'm not sure some days that I'm not the most qualified person Intrepid even has any access to who will even entertain the idea of trying to fix their current mess.
Multimillion-dollar companies, for those who aren't familiar, definitely feel very different from the inside. Sometimes what seems like a massive undertaking of an incredibly complex system is just one person (and ofc in this case that's the problem).
But how many MMORPGs within the last decade have even had that person, for this goal? Western ones? People not retired who could keep up with the way gaming is now?
Count is probably still 0.
At this point Ashes is doomed then, cause unless someone has been "studying the blade" for the past 5 years for THIS EXACT PURPOSE - I guess we won't get a good economy in the game, cause gdi does it seem that the currenet econ leads cannot (or are not allowed to) solve the issues in a pretty way.
The issue for Intrepid is that just getting a random economist for an mmo in this day and age could either delay the progress even more or could create an econ that's not related to all the other gameplay well enough.
Especially when you want that person to be the Principal designer who's supposed to pretty much create/oversee your entire economy and bring it all together. Intrepid supposedly have several leads already, but obviously none of the design so far has been brought together in a cohesive way (at least from what we have/know about the game so far).
Econ Design in MMOs comes from the backgrounds of Psychology and Data Science combined with one specific aspect of understanding gaming 'climate'.
It used to be easier, mind you, like, much easier. Because games used to have different base parameters.
I can teach someone the basics of MMO Econ design using MineCraft only because it is MineCraft, so it starts from the bottom and you can teach all of the historical game design lessons.
But the gaming climate is very different now than it was back when things like the first MMOs and MUDs were doing economy things because of the differences in communication options. If things go poorly enough I'll surely end up ranting about it at some point.
Intrepid doesn't really need to look outside of gaming, I don't think. People already in gaming/game design have more of the priors needed to not make certain mistakes without 'needing to be taken all the way back to MineCraft for lessons' (and for those who don't, I am willing to talk foreverrrr).
I hate to be negative/cynical about this but overall this is the way it is either because Steven wants it to be that way (even if indirectly) or because AI was involved and it doesn't have all that data yet.
tl;dr gaming has a timeline that basically goes "Arcades -> LAN Parties -> P2P Consoles -> MUDs and RTS-> MMOs -> DreamCast -> Better PC/Console MMOs -> Online Gaming -> Mobile Gaming -> Gaming as a Service -> Worse/Shallower MMOs -> MineCraft -> Arcade Integrations -> MMO Renaissance(?).
Each step influences the expectations and social functions of MMOs within the wider gaming community, and most of those steps raised the bar for what is required.
Back in the pre Mobile Gaming era you could make a good enough Economy almost 'accidentally' by trying to be realistic but not too realistic and then getting lucky with some fun game loop. Then Facebook games blew up and MMO Designers, particularly Econ Designers, had to git gud.