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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.
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.
Questions to the Developers
Volgaris
Member, Alpha Two
Questions for the developers.
These are some of the issues I've seen rotate through the forums that I've been interested in. Feel free to add some more questions, or correct any mistakes I made. If there's an answer please link the source, lets not go off rumor. If this makes it to the community managers or devs maybe we can get a 'press release' or a more indepth q and a done. My self I'm more curious about how features are intended to be at release. Something with a little more detail than what I could find off the wiki.
Lots of multipart questions, because the features are interwoven, and you can't really answer one without affecting another.
1. What is the games progression pace supposed to be?
Ashes has several progression features.
Character leveling
Artisan leveling
Gear leveling
Settlement leveling
Guild leveling
Religion leveling (?)
The character leveling outpaces everything else, is this the intended design?
Or is artisan intended to be able to keep pace with leveling?
If artisan can't keep up and people need artisans for gear then you're stopping leveling progression.
If enough gear drops to keep leveling progression go then artisan is just a endgame activity (at least for gear).
2. What is the planned leveling time to max level?
Should the game feel like L2 for character leveling or something more like NW/T&L or any new age MMO?
3. For artisan is it intended to need materials to the Nth degree?
For example needing 20 cows to make a beef sandwich or something.
4. Is artisan processing costs intended as a gold sink?
The gold cost takes away the value from crafting.
Example.
It can take 1 hour to make a salad and you only save 1s.
You can farm glint for 1 hour and out pace any profits you could make from crafting.
Even if you just intended to craft your own salads it's still faster (there for cheaper) to just buy from the vendor.
Foods should probably be removed from the vendor, aside from rations.
This bleeds into all crafts though, the costs are quite high.
5. With no official BOE or BOP, how does Ashes intend to avoid gear oversaturation?
Guilds will be passing gear down to new players after they used it.
There will be so much gear in the world it will have very little value, this will farther devalue any crafter, especially any new crafters
6. Is corruption working as intended right now? Is it having the effects you designed?
Corruption allow will not be enough to deter griefing.
There are too many ways around it right now. It seems to have the effect of completely deterring PvP, or abusing a mechanic to circumvent the penalty.
7. How do you deter players from the same settlement attacting each others (packs/caravans/ect)?
Are the players expected to police each other? We know that has no chance of success.
Steven spoke about updating the Nameplates for caravans for better identification, but that will not be enough.
I understand there should be internal fighting, between just about everything, but there will need to be something in place to keep it in check. Corruption won't work here. So is anything else planned or are players expected to police each other?
8. Loot, how much is too little, how much is too much?
MMOs have changed since the 90s, players expect quick rewards for little effort (comparitively).
What is the end design or vision of how loot is balanced with crafters?
We already know "crafters make the best shit". But does that mean crafters make everything? And we know some higher quality gear drops from some mobs very rarely.
Gear is still dropped by mobs quite often, negating the need for crafting atm for leveling progression.
So how do you plan to find a balance between the players that want gear loot, and those who want crafted gear?
1. If there's enough gear loot to progress then crafting is endgame, as I said earlier.
BUT
2. If there's no good loot then players will have less insentive to explore and try harder content as they progress.
I suppose this is a mute point if max level is reached in 48hours though.
9. Beginner zone crafting.
Why are the crafting tables spread out in the beginner zones?
Riverlands is worse in this case than Anvils, is this inbalance by design?
Why not put all the crafting stations at each starting area?
This eases players into the complex crafting system without the tedious running around.
10. Storage and bags.
Are bags and storage met to be this limited? Many players are dropping white and greens while gathering.
Could there be a change in the future?
materials take one square?
larger stack counts?
more squares/space?
11. Why have common materials purchasable from processing? Oils, seeds, ect.
Why not just make those gatherable and/or craftable materials?
If a player were able to gather cotton and get a seed to plant later would this break anything?
12. Is farming a placeholder?
If so what will farming be later?
Will someone without a guild, freehold, or land in be able to farm?
13. Hunting is holding back leather artisans, why hasn't this been addressed yet?
Will hunting get a overhual like fishing? (can't wait to try out the new fishing system)
14. Will crafting (not processing), become more interactive, or will it stay a UI button exercise?
15. How close are the classes to the end vision, scale 1 to 10, 1 = not at all, 10 = is at final draft
Is the level 20 cleric today going to be the same as a 20 cleric at lauch?
Will classes have branching trees like we see in other MMOs, or the archtype the intended branch?
16. How many skills will each class have? Will they have the number of options?
17. Travel. Many players have complained about the travel time, and the time it currently takes to make meaningful progression.
When can we expect the planned 'fast' travel features to be added?
Can we get an example (in the current world) of some these features in a where to where?
Airships will go from where to where?
Flight paths will go from where to where?
Teleport will go from where to where?
The settlement building will provide a service to travel the road to another settlement.
Will this be instant?
If not, can you be attacked? Could I safely go AFK?
Will there be limitations on family summoning distances?
Can I summon a family member to my location from anywhere?
If I'm summoned does that trigger my cooldown?
If not then the summon one by one cooldown of 30minutes is just an arbitary number.
You'd just have a casading summon, Player 1 summons, 2, then 2 summons, 3, and so on.
If I'm summon and my cooldown is triggered, then summoning isn't going to be very useful for more causal players as it's intended for them.
Could we make the cast time and cooldown based off the distance?
That would balance summoning and allow for casading summons.
Could make summon and cooldown timers longer if you're in a larger guild, it could be a guild skill to lower it.
As this is intended for causals, the large groups of players will absolutely be taking advantage of this as well.
18. What is the focus in the game? Is my character my main focus or is the settlement/guild/religion/gear?
The feel of the game is that the character once max level is a slave to either the settlement, guild, relgion(?), or gear chase.
Your character progression is done by day 2 or 3, then you're fall into the category of progressing your artisan, settlement, guild, relgion(?), gear
With a constant stream of grindy activities to progress the settlement/guild progression bar.
The settlement needs to serve the player more than the player serves the settlement.
If feels like I'm shackled to something limiting the freedom and agency a player should have.
Why do I spend more time progressing a settlement than I do progressing my character?
Is this intended?
19. Stats. Are player stats close to a final state?
Are the power levels of physical power, magic power, healing power, here to stay? Will there be more?
I don't know the math behind the hits and damage, but it is obvious power level is the main variable.
Could there be a crit power in the future, or a physical ranged power?
Could we not use powers but calculate that score from the attributes of STR, DEX, INT, ect?
With players aiming for 3 (2 really) different scores, there's a lot of gear compitition, but more importantly it limits diversity of gear.
These are some of the issues I've seen rotate through the forums that I've been interested in. Feel free to add some more questions, or correct any mistakes I made. If there's an answer please link the source, lets not go off rumor. If this makes it to the community managers or devs maybe we can get a 'press release' or a more indepth q and a done. My self I'm more curious about how features are intended to be at release. Something with a little more detail than what I could find off the wiki.
Lots of multipart questions, because the features are interwoven, and you can't really answer one without affecting another.
1. What is the games progression pace supposed to be?
Ashes has several progression features.
Character leveling
Artisan leveling
Gear leveling
Settlement leveling
Guild leveling
Religion leveling (?)
The character leveling outpaces everything else, is this the intended design?
Or is artisan intended to be able to keep pace with leveling?
If artisan can't keep up and people need artisans for gear then you're stopping leveling progression.
If enough gear drops to keep leveling progression go then artisan is just a endgame activity (at least for gear).
2. What is the planned leveling time to max level?
Should the game feel like L2 for character leveling or something more like NW/T&L or any new age MMO?
3. For artisan is it intended to need materials to the Nth degree?
For example needing 20 cows to make a beef sandwich or something.
4. Is artisan processing costs intended as a gold sink?
The gold cost takes away the value from crafting.
Example.
It can take 1 hour to make a salad and you only save 1s.
You can farm glint for 1 hour and out pace any profits you could make from crafting.
Even if you just intended to craft your own salads it's still faster (there for cheaper) to just buy from the vendor.
Foods should probably be removed from the vendor, aside from rations.
This bleeds into all crafts though, the costs are quite high.
5. With no official BOE or BOP, how does Ashes intend to avoid gear oversaturation?
Guilds will be passing gear down to new players after they used it.
There will be so much gear in the world it will have very little value, this will farther devalue any crafter, especially any new crafters
6. Is corruption working as intended right now? Is it having the effects you designed?
Corruption allow will not be enough to deter griefing.
There are too many ways around it right now. It seems to have the effect of completely deterring PvP, or abusing a mechanic to circumvent the penalty.
7. How do you deter players from the same settlement attacting each others (packs/caravans/ect)?
Are the players expected to police each other? We know that has no chance of success.
Steven spoke about updating the Nameplates for caravans for better identification, but that will not be enough.
I understand there should be internal fighting, between just about everything, but there will need to be something in place to keep it in check. Corruption won't work here. So is anything else planned or are players expected to police each other?
8. Loot, how much is too little, how much is too much?
MMOs have changed since the 90s, players expect quick rewards for little effort (comparitively).
What is the end design or vision of how loot is balanced with crafters?
We already know "crafters make the best shit". But does that mean crafters make everything? And we know some higher quality gear drops from some mobs very rarely.
Gear is still dropped by mobs quite often, negating the need for crafting atm for leveling progression.
So how do you plan to find a balance between the players that want gear loot, and those who want crafted gear?
1. If there's enough gear loot to progress then crafting is endgame, as I said earlier.
BUT
2. If there's no good loot then players will have less insentive to explore and try harder content as they progress.
I suppose this is a mute point if max level is reached in 48hours though.
9. Beginner zone crafting.
Why are the crafting tables spread out in the beginner zones?
Riverlands is worse in this case than Anvils, is this inbalance by design?
Why not put all the crafting stations at each starting area?
This eases players into the complex crafting system without the tedious running around.
10. Storage and bags.
Are bags and storage met to be this limited? Many players are dropping white and greens while gathering.
Could there be a change in the future?
materials take one square?
larger stack counts?
more squares/space?
11. Why have common materials purchasable from processing? Oils, seeds, ect.
Why not just make those gatherable and/or craftable materials?
If a player were able to gather cotton and get a seed to plant later would this break anything?
12. Is farming a placeholder?
If so what will farming be later?
Will someone without a guild, freehold, or land in be able to farm?
13. Hunting is holding back leather artisans, why hasn't this been addressed yet?
Will hunting get a overhual like fishing? (can't wait to try out the new fishing system)
14. Will crafting (not processing), become more interactive, or will it stay a UI button exercise?
15. How close are the classes to the end vision, scale 1 to 10, 1 = not at all, 10 = is at final draft
Is the level 20 cleric today going to be the same as a 20 cleric at lauch?
Will classes have branching trees like we see in other MMOs, or the archtype the intended branch?
16. How many skills will each class have? Will they have the number of options?
17. Travel. Many players have complained about the travel time, and the time it currently takes to make meaningful progression.
When can we expect the planned 'fast' travel features to be added?
Can we get an example (in the current world) of some these features in a where to where?
Airships will go from where to where?
Flight paths will go from where to where?
Teleport will go from where to where?
The settlement building will provide a service to travel the road to another settlement.
Will this be instant?
If not, can you be attacked? Could I safely go AFK?
Will there be limitations on family summoning distances?
Can I summon a family member to my location from anywhere?
If I'm summoned does that trigger my cooldown?
If not then the summon one by one cooldown of 30minutes is just an arbitary number.
You'd just have a casading summon, Player 1 summons, 2, then 2 summons, 3, and so on.
If I'm summon and my cooldown is triggered, then summoning isn't going to be very useful for more causal players as it's intended for them.
Could we make the cast time and cooldown based off the distance?
That would balance summoning and allow for casading summons.
Could make summon and cooldown timers longer if you're in a larger guild, it could be a guild skill to lower it.
As this is intended for causals, the large groups of players will absolutely be taking advantage of this as well.
18. What is the focus in the game? Is my character my main focus or is the settlement/guild/religion/gear?
The feel of the game is that the character once max level is a slave to either the settlement, guild, relgion(?), or gear chase.
Your character progression is done by day 2 or 3, then you're fall into the category of progressing your artisan, settlement, guild, relgion(?), gear
With a constant stream of grindy activities to progress the settlement/guild progression bar.
The settlement needs to serve the player more than the player serves the settlement.
If feels like I'm shackled to something limiting the freedom and agency a player should have.
Why do I spend more time progressing a settlement than I do progressing my character?
Is this intended?
19. Stats. Are player stats close to a final state?
Are the power levels of physical power, magic power, healing power, here to stay? Will there be more?
I don't know the math behind the hits and damage, but it is obvious power level is the main variable.
Could there be a crit power in the future, or a physical ranged power?
Could we not use powers but calculate that score from the attributes of STR, DEX, INT, ect?
With players aiming for 3 (2 really) different scores, there's a lot of gear compitition, but more importantly it limits diversity of gear.
1
Comments
Since you guys have done a great job of purposefully ignoring these forums for far too long, how about answering all of them, properly?
At this point probably all of them 🤣
Genuinely just any answers you can provide to all of them. Even an IDK is better than what we’ve been getting.
VV--Original Reply--VV
@Vaknar Thanks for the response. I do care about them all. I think the questions are more aimed towards expectation management for myself (and others). As development gets farther along myself and others have noticed things that are falling behind or being out right neglected (from our perspectives). There is a lot that has been done too. And alpha is alpha true, but shedding some light on these questions by providing details will go a long away, top that off with an updated feature testing timeline would be awesome. The A2 timeline is already out of wack, which is okay, but it should be updated. I'm sure there's a Project Manager somewhere in there keeping track of milestones and goals for the project.
Really it's about expectation management. We want to know details about the features the games will have and we want some details. Knowing when to expect things is nice too. I'm not saying a bad job of that is being done, but the above does have lingering issues/questions that have echoed on the forums for a long while. Maybe the forums have been a blind spot for IS?
These questions have been circulating here in some cases years. I think answering them all would be best. If they're not answered the natural reaction will be one of the following.
1. IS has no plan for it
2. IS doesn't care about it
3. IS didn't know about it yet
4. Or the worst. IS is too busy working on bigger issues, possibly game breaking issues. Our imaginations will conjure things much worse than reality.
Besides it's open development, lets be open about it right.
1. ) The game doesn't even have the core leveling method, or it's max level yet. There is no way for the company to actually know this at this state of the game.
2.) See 1.
4.) They already said it was supposed to be.
5.) Steven had said in dev interviews that should it be a problem he would be considering having gear degrade to the point where it's not worth (or allowing the player to make that choice) repairing it in lue of just replacing items
6.) Steven has said MULTIPLE times that Corruption is not in it's intended state, it's specifically ramped up to desentivise people from going corrupt, so that people aren't being griefed while they test the game
8.) That's part of the point of testing in phase 3. They've taken feed back on it already with their changes as to how much/little gets dropped and made changes on it early on. In their last dev stream they even talked about changes as the phase progresses.
10.) We are only testing the beginning of the game right now. People are treating it like end game. Storage and Bags are in a good spot for this level of the game, we should be waiting to see what the more, actual, end game looks like before changes on this happen. (Yes my own personal opinion but one people seem to keep forgetting)
11.) It's a gold sync, they already acknowledged they went too far on it. Expect changes
12.) It's not (or they haven't said it was), providing feedback on gripes with it would be useful.
13.) It's place holder.... don't expect much changes on it until it's not.
16.) Steven didn't answer this specifically but shed a lot more light on it with his interview with Copium Clinic and partially answers this question to the point where you can get a good idea on the answer. Getting a specific number probably isn't reasonable to collect at this stage of the game's development.
17.) <<< My bias claim for what question should be answered as it has effected me and my groups the most personally >>>
18.) That's a personal question they won't be able to answer. They have stated on numerous occasions that this game is meant to provide people with enough avenues where there will be many people who play the game in many different ways.
If I didn't address them it's not an answer I believe they have addressed already. Hopefully this helps you narrow down your decision as to what question you'd like them to focus on like they asked you to do. Answering them with "please answer all of them" when they actually responded to your thread... not something they do for almost anyone.... is kind of a slap in the face. >_>
I appreciate your response and answers, but please link any answers with the source. There is a lot of bad and old info going around. If you can't find the source then it's rumor still as you are not an official source.
I stand by my list of questions and by my response. They are welcome to answers all of them, none of them, or somewhere in between. My questions are not out of malice or anger, maybe a hint of frustration at most. By far it's mostly curiosity.
The questions are pretty clear. If they answer them awesome. If not people will continue to think IS doesn't care, or doesn't have a planned, doesn't think it's a problem, or any number of things. And sentiment will continue to drop, that's just nature. And even if sentiment drops to zero, if they release a great game it'll be successful. So the devs can feel free to ignore me and keep working too.
If no one at Intrepid knows what the target progression speed is, then this whole game is fucked.
Same can be applied to the rest of your non-answers.
And yes, my reply that they should answer all of them was intended as a slap in the face. It is one that Intrepid absolutely deserve, and would do well to heed the meaning behind.
Telling Intrepid to stop ignoring their own forums is not harassment.
Pull your head in.
It'll be a week tomorrow. Just saying!
The question wasn't answered correctly is probably why.
Answering questions with a question isn't really fair. I don't feel a single answer to one question does the other questions justice. ( I did edit my reply and added in a single one, to see if we can get anything though. ). Should I have opened a thread for each question? That'd be dumb.
@onewingedangelo1 What I'd rather this thread be is everyone post up your questions, then @Vaknar could collect them all and do a poll, then he could ask the @StevenSharif and post a reply to that poll with the answer, then the wiki could be updated. No rumor, no outdate data, straight answers from the devs on the forums top question. And repeat week by week, a running Q and A if you will. They could do the same from reddit and discord. Then it's not just 20 questions all at once but the ones we voted on. That's serves us all a lot better than trying to gatekeep what type of questions we should be asking and how we should respond.
It’s too good of an idea I don’t think they’d like it.
It's pretty simple. You are demanding them to do something and then when they try and meet you half way... you demand to have them meet you all the way. And now wondering why they are unwilling to work with you?!
Why? Because you feel entitled to get answers out of them because you don't pay attention enough when they do give us information? As I've stated a lot of your questions already have answers ... YOU just weren't paying attention when the gave the answers.
If you aren't willing to put forth the effort when they were reaching out to the community, why should they put forth the effort when you are reaching out to them.
That's totally not what's happened in this thread. You're still very new here. Some of these questions have been ongoing for a very long time, and should have had at least some sort of answer by now, even if the answer is simply: "X is the current plan, which is likely to change once we work through Y"
I get that you don't like that people want answers to their questions, but it would be helpful if you'd stop trying to de-rail the thread. What you're doing here isn't helping anybody, us or Intrepid.
*edit*
And, I work in Customer Support for a Software Developer. Having customers asking questions and telling them: Fuck that, we don't want to answer all those. Why not just pick your favourite one and we'll maybe have a think...
That's unacceptable.
Definition of Insanity
Answering one question out of 10 isn't half way. Most of these questions have been unanswered for a while and asked many times. They can answer or not. Either way you are NOT helping.
Entitled or not, the result of neglecting your own community forums isn't good.
Prove to me they gave out the information. I miss news, which is why I ask questions I couldn't find answers to. I clearly stated I didn't want thread rumors so provide a source.
You didn't answer a single question. You half answered partial questions with half baked shower thoughts. Unless you provide a link it's rumor. Please read that sentence twice.
I have put forth the effort, as have many trying to answers about these questions and many others. And we get nothing, or very little. This adds to why people are turning against them.
They should and could answer these questions. Why? Because it's in their best interest, not because I asked them to.
How other choose to spend their time shouldn't be a concern for you. Why is this a big deal to you? Just pass up the thread. You are NOT helping. Go shit on your own couch.
If you actually want to help go look up the sources of the questions you attempted to answer and provide them. I can't find them. I'll gladly update the original post with the answer and the source.