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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.
The changes you're requesting to make the Alpha more fun and rewarding would hurt the game.
Laetitian
Member
There have been a lot of calls for the alpha to make things easier and more accessible, demanding less time and work, and making rewards less gatekept by competition (that might push some players out of the race entirely.) This concerns crafting skills, resource distribution, mob farming accessibility, solo gameplay viability, etc.
The general request is roughly "Make the game more fun. Either make everything that's fun more available to the average player, or add more placeholder fun things until the real fun things are in the game."
Here's the example comment on YouTube that I'll use as a placeholder for many of the requests I've seen around the forum:
[Edit because it has become clear that the intention of my criticism has not been communicated very clearly:
I am not criticising profession initiation systems on their own merit. I am criticising the problems they tend to bring with them down the line, and that I believe most people who request these types of changes in the alpha right now (more resource access, etc.) are really implying when they are asking for things like initiation systems. For more details on these ideas and where they come from, you'll need to read on.]
The problem with this is that it feeds into the "everyone does everything" mindset that ultimately just promotes the type of meaningless time waster gameplay that WoW and its infinite copies consist of.
This is neither better nor worse than the "meaningful time waster" (I used "meaningful" in the sense of: you're building towards something) that is pure grinding gameplay. Neither of these are a good thing, but at least the grinding gameplay leaves room to turn into the holy grail that is meaningful, worthwhile, enjoyable engagement in the long run.
Why do you need to craft mediocre items? What is the desire you're filling there?
- If it's gameplay variety, why do you need the game to reward you with mediocre rewards for the variety? You can already enjoy engaging in the artisanships of your choice if you choose to do so, why don't you just do it?
Isn't it immediately obvious that if the game starts meaningfully rewarding you for low-effort time investment, the efforts of passionate crafters will become meaningless, because you already get enough of your rewards for your own activities not to need them? If you like running around engaging in simple artisanry, just to take in the scenery and enjoy a simple task, why do you need the game to hold you by the hand and make you do it; why should that be something the game needs to do for you?
- If it's for the sensation of pursuing readiness for battle, why do you want the game to impose that need on you? Why not just head out there to engage in artisanship as long as that's what you want to do, and then do other things when you no longer enjoy it for the low reward it yields?
- Or if you feel that the need to have strong gear is already in the game to pursue the type of content you want to pursue, why do you need to make it yourself; especially if you'd be okay with mediocre gear anyway? Why can you not use the currency you've saved to spend on worthwhile gear other people have crafted?
You shouldn't need to craft mediocre items, except to practice the skill that will eventually allow you to craft sensational items. If that's not what you aspire to do, why do you need the game to force or persuade you to start pursuing it anyway? If that is what you want to do, why do you need the game to reward you to do so much as get started, and why do you want it to persuade you to try out everything else?
I think a big issue here is a lack of vision for where "meaning" in the game could come from, if you'd declare your own purpose for your pursuits.
If your purpose of doing things in Verra breaks down to "get stronger for its own sake" and "complete more difficult quests and take down more difficult encounters for its own sake", you're missing so much potential of what a PvX game can be.
You're bound to get disappointed and bored on that path; it's a boring path.
The vision for a PvX game is to have a long-term vision of how you want your actions to shape the world. Collect resources to rule territories/nodes (or aid their leadership that you support), plan what the node should look like, what its objectives should be, and how the node should be constructed (buildings, hierarchy) to facilitate those goals. The vision is to siege, shape the story of the world quests, build guilds, and generally unite other players for shared objectives in how those plans should pan out.
If you expect to be wowed by the world without building your interest on these pillars, you're wasting most of the potential of the game. If that's all you want to do, then single-player RPGs and daily-driven MMOs - with solo quests and artisan professions that everyone who puts some time into can use to create anything they want for themselves - already exist. You're not supposed to be able to get yourself everything you want in Ashes. You're supposed to be required to cooperate with others, and accept that there will be some things you just won't have access to, unless you specialise in them and gather enough supporters around you. The upside is that when you achieve something, or help someone else achieve something, it's actually meaningful.
Some of these visions can't be experienced in the game yet. You can't experience the reshaping of the world yet, because the story arcs aren't set in place to make it meaningful, quests and dungeons in general aren't complete and numerous enough to let you immerse in the world yet, the node control and building options are limited in how they affect gameplay... You can't experience the full benefit of shaping your node to your vision yet, because the rewards and some of the content don't quite exist yet.
Asking for additional rewards and more accessible gameplay would be an empty band-aid solution. You'd own more and do more, but there still wouldn't be any profound connection, so you'd just spend more time on a superficial shell of a game because the rewards are more addictive.
If you're not having fun because you aren't immersed in the purpose of your gameplay, wait for the immersive features to be completed; don't just ask for the devs to entice you to waste more time on non-immersive, purposeless gameplay. No one needs you to sink 50 hours a week into an alpha. No one needs you to reach max-level at everything in an alpha. Focus on the fundamentals, and if you get bored from a lack of immersion and rewards, go play a finished game.
I think the devs should be better at instilling that vision in you.
Giving you a better idea of the options that will influence your decisions in the long term. The things that can be enticing about the game, that can spark your creativity.
But they shouldn't change the vision just to entertain you more in the alpha. They shouldn't speed up gameplay, so you feel more achieved or entertained when 80% of the content and player competition of the finished game simply don't exist yet. that would only distract from your agency in envisioning your own purpose for your gameplay; it would make the alpha experience less representative of the final gameplay, and thus lead to bad design and balancing decisions for the real game.
Instead of appeasing you by giving you more things to do and easier rewards for what you get to do, they should paint the picture of what you're not yet able to do. The things that will be added that will fit the puzzle together and make it a cohesive, rewarding gameplay experience.
Until that happens, either focus on growing your guild and planning your vision together, or just play something else.
*That's* what you should be asking for. Not a better chance to compete or more rewards. Just more insight on what new systems/quests/dungeons will be released, how it will fit into the systems that already exist to make them feel more meaningful, how it will be developed, and how long it is expected to take until you can see more of it.
The general request is roughly "Make the game more fun. Either make everything that's fun more available to the average player, or add more placeholder fun things until the real fun things are in the game."
I will make my case by addressing a common comment I've seen in the wild, and then tying it back to the greater vision for the alpha. I know it's not very popular to argue an opinion through proxy by creating a thread about a YouTube comment, but I've really seen this sentiment repeated *everywhere* over the last 2-3 months, and I think providing an example makes it a little more clear that I'm not just arguing against a made-up opinion. I'm choosing a YouTube comment instead of a forum comment, because it's untainted by the back-and-forth about insignificant details that a lot of forum comments tend to suffer from.
Here's the example comment on YouTube that I'll use as a placeholder for many of the requests I've seen around the forum:
[Edit because it has become clear that the intention of my criticism has not been communicated very clearly:
I am not criticising profession initiation systems on their own merit. I am criticising the problems they tend to bring with them down the line, and that I believe most people who request these types of changes in the alpha right now (more resource access, etc.) are really implying when they are asking for things like initiation systems. For more details on these ideas and where they come from, you'll need to read on.]
The problem with this is that it feeds into the "everyone does everything" mindset that ultimately just promotes the type of meaningless time waster gameplay that WoW and its infinite copies consist of.
This is neither better nor worse than the "meaningful time waster" (I used "meaningful" in the sense of: you're building towards something) that is pure grinding gameplay. Neither of these are a good thing, but at least the grinding gameplay leaves room to turn into the holy grail that is meaningful, worthwhile, enjoyable engagement in the long run.
Why do you need to craft mediocre items? What is the desire you're filling there?
- If it's gameplay variety, why do you need the game to reward you with mediocre rewards for the variety? You can already enjoy engaging in the artisanships of your choice if you choose to do so, why don't you just do it?
Isn't it immediately obvious that if the game starts meaningfully rewarding you for low-effort time investment, the efforts of passionate crafters will become meaningless, because you already get enough of your rewards for your own activities not to need them? If you like running around engaging in simple artisanry, just to take in the scenery and enjoy a simple task, why do you need the game to hold you by the hand and make you do it; why should that be something the game needs to do for you?
- If it's for the sensation of pursuing readiness for battle, why do you want the game to impose that need on you? Why not just head out there to engage in artisanship as long as that's what you want to do, and then do other things when you no longer enjoy it for the low reward it yields?
- Or if you feel that the need to have strong gear is already in the game to pursue the type of content you want to pursue, why do you need to make it yourself; especially if you'd be okay with mediocre gear anyway? Why can you not use the currency you've saved to spend on worthwhile gear other people have crafted?
You shouldn't need to craft mediocre items, except to practice the skill that will eventually allow you to craft sensational items. If that's not what you aspire to do, why do you need the game to force or persuade you to start pursuing it anyway? If that is what you want to do, why do you need the game to reward you to do so much as get started, and why do you want it to persuade you to try out everything else?
I think a big issue here is a lack of vision for where "meaning" in the game could come from, if you'd declare your own purpose for your pursuits.
If your purpose of doing things in Verra breaks down to "get stronger for its own sake" and "complete more difficult quests and take down more difficult encounters for its own sake", you're missing so much potential of what a PvX game can be.
You're bound to get disappointed and bored on that path; it's a boring path.
The vision for a PvX game is to have a long-term vision of how you want your actions to shape the world. Collect resources to rule territories/nodes (or aid their leadership that you support), plan what the node should look like, what its objectives should be, and how the node should be constructed (buildings, hierarchy) to facilitate those goals. The vision is to siege, shape the story of the world quests, build guilds, and generally unite other players for shared objectives in how those plans should pan out.
If you expect to be wowed by the world without building your interest on these pillars, you're wasting most of the potential of the game. If that's all you want to do, then single-player RPGs and daily-driven MMOs - with solo quests and artisan professions that everyone who puts some time into can use to create anything they want for themselves - already exist. You're not supposed to be able to get yourself everything you want in Ashes. You're supposed to be required to cooperate with others, and accept that there will be some things you just won't have access to, unless you specialise in them and gather enough supporters around you. The upside is that when you achieve something, or help someone else achieve something, it's actually meaningful.
Some of these visions can't be experienced in the game yet. You can't experience the reshaping of the world yet, because the story arcs aren't set in place to make it meaningful, quests and dungeons in general aren't complete and numerous enough to let you immerse in the world yet, the node control and building options are limited in how they affect gameplay... You can't experience the full benefit of shaping your node to your vision yet, because the rewards and some of the content don't quite exist yet.
Asking for additional rewards and more accessible gameplay would be an empty band-aid solution. You'd own more and do more, but there still wouldn't be any profound connection, so you'd just spend more time on a superficial shell of a game because the rewards are more addictive.
If you're not having fun because you aren't immersed in the purpose of your gameplay, wait for the immersive features to be completed; don't just ask for the devs to entice you to waste more time on non-immersive, purposeless gameplay. No one needs you to sink 50 hours a week into an alpha. No one needs you to reach max-level at everything in an alpha. Focus on the fundamentals, and if you get bored from a lack of immersion and rewards, go play a finished game.
I think the devs should be better at instilling that vision in you.
Giving you a better idea of the options that will influence your decisions in the long term. The things that can be enticing about the game, that can spark your creativity.
But they shouldn't change the vision just to entertain you more in the alpha. They shouldn't speed up gameplay, so you feel more achieved or entertained when 80% of the content and player competition of the finished game simply don't exist yet. that would only distract from your agency in envisioning your own purpose for your gameplay; it would make the alpha experience less representative of the final gameplay, and thus lead to bad design and balancing decisions for the real game.
Instead of appeasing you by giving you more things to do and easier rewards for what you get to do, they should paint the picture of what you're not yet able to do. The things that will be added that will fit the puzzle together and make it a cohesive, rewarding gameplay experience.
Until that happens, either focus on growing your guild and planning your vision together, or just play something else.
*That's* what you should be asking for. Not a better chance to compete or more rewards. Just more insight on what new systems/quests/dungeons will be released, how it will fit into the systems that already exist to make them feel more meaningful, how it will be developed, and how long it is expected to take until you can see more of it.
The only one who can validate you for all the posts you didn't write is you.
1
Comments
I'm here to tell you that from my perspective, the comment you chose is absolutely correct and you're currently doing the thing that most people in my circles hate when it comes to talking about games.
Excluding people by inertia based on either nostalgia or potentially worse 'nothing in particular'.
It's also possible, however, that you've just never played a game that actually did the thing correctly, and therefore just don't understand at all what it is about the request in the comment, that feels good. The thing is, low level artisanship items are not inherently mediocre, and it's a Role Playing Game.
Not understanding why others enjoy something is common. Don't take it all the way to 'I don't understand your feelings therefore they are wrong/will not lead to what you want'. For some that's true. For others it just isn't.
Do you just mean "worth the time compared to not crafting it"?
I would still consider that mediocre. If it's an item everyone's going to want, why put in the extra step of heavily incentivising everyone to make it themselves, instead of just leaving making the item to the dedicated crafters, and allowing the players who wouldn't want to spend more than 10% of their ingame time on crafting to forego the crafting in the first place, if that's not enough time to achieve results?
(And then, if you still want to, you can casually spend those 10% crafting {and spending the additional resources} anyway, until you've done it long enough that the results are worth something - just a lot later than dedicated crafters. Which should be expected.)
That's where my questions come in: Why do you want the game to further incentivise you to do that yourself and instead of doing something else you like? And if it's already in the game and you consider it necessary for what you're trying to do, but you don't want to put in the time, why not just pay someone else for the item, if it's not interesting or efficient enough for you to pursue the skill?
Why do you WANT the game to make it inefficient for you to focus on doing the things you actually like about the game?
Forcing everyone to pay a crafter or dedicate themselves to crafting is how you even the playing field. Either commit, or pay the same cost as everyone else, or accept being severely out-geared for a while (This is the option I would choose 60% of the time.)
No short-cuts of everyone going through the same themepark and getting the same rewards, and anyone who wants to focus on their strengths being punished for actually doing what they *actually* like.
The evidence that this is what's happening is so obvious: If the person asking for the game to make entry-level crafted equipment more accessible actually *liked* crafting, why would they need to ask for the game to make everyone put in the same amount of time into it, just so they don't feel disadvantaged for doing what they like? If they like it - just do it and enjoy it; appreciate the advantage of being a crafter while others aren't.
Or don't do it, because it's not worth the time for you, and just do something else, like everyone else who doesn't enjoy crafting enough to do it.
Isn't that addressed by pointing out that you can already do it, you just shouldn't expect it to be worth it until you've put in the time and resources?
Have I directly implied that? I feel like my comment leaves sufficient room for people to enjoy the WoW game loop because it's what they prefer...
It's certainly not subtle about the fact that I think there's more depth to the version I prefer, but I'm not sure that's suggesting the alternative is "wrong" or not what others want.
I mean, I've made a bunch of points. Bit dismissive to call that "nothing in particular" without going into why.
If you don't want to repeat WoW, you have to do things differently. The games I've played did things differently and created an experience that wasn't like WoW. Sounds to me like there's more to it than nostalgia.
Which is it? Do you want to do it, or not?
If you don't enjoy this voluntary work in your pastime, have you considered...just not doing the work? And focusing on the parts of the game that you care about instead?
Has anyone even read the thread? Not saying you have to respond to the parts I care about, but the parts about "purpose" seem to be going completely unanswered, and they were the whole point of my post...
Appreciate the responses, it just seems a bit like you're sidestepping the main point.
The thing is I agree with you for the most part. I just feel like “right now” with the lack of systems there are things that seem unnecessarily difficult for the sake of just taking more time. Maybe this will get better the more systems come online but maybe not. Also a huge part of this game is the communities willingness to participate. Without others engaging the game stalls out. This is why you need to Apple to more people. I promise I’m not advocating for making another participation trophy mmo but I also realize it takes more than 10 people to progress through the game. I just want people to feel engaged and invested in the systems they chose before it gets too confusing or difficult.
You "just want to feel engaged and invested" and my thread is saying - you can't ask for that, if 80% of the quest content and long-term progression, territory control, and node shaping that will allow you to do that don't exist yet.
If you want the 20% shell that the game makes available to you now to be engaging already, then those 20% of crafting and grinding wouldn't properly serve their role anymore when the other 80% are in the game. They would be too dominating.
(Clarification: I'm not saying the game still has 80% of its development outstanding before it's completed, but it's common knowledge that a vast part of the playable final content is developed in the final push, because it only involves a small subset of the designers.)
That's why you have to approach an alpha with a different mindset. You have to imagine more of the engagement, and be okay logging off more often. Or playing more boring gameplay while imaging what it will be like in context. Which ever you feel like.
I honestly don’t understand why you can’t have both. I’m more so talking about crafting than grinding as well.
I fear you'll have to address my points if you want to challenge that connection...
Game experience difference, mostly.
Afaik you and I played 'the game that makes us think this way', and OP hasn't.
Probably not much that can be done there, so to save 'time' I'll pull back here.
Intrepid, as FF11 players, my group disagree with OP and agree with the comment OP chose to make the point, and yes, this is explicitly considering development path in the Alpha.
I made low level stuff in Throne and Liberty today, before even being 'sent' to this post, and in Artisanship terms, I'd say the two games/experiences are at around the same level of advancement at this time. Well, our opinions are probably well enough known already.
So, to try to have a reasonable conversation, I'm gonna lay out a sequence of stuff and you can tell me where you think the progression of the sequence goes wrong/moves away from what would make the game good.
I perceive that what players such as the one in your post are asking for, is:
"I want to be able to get Sheep Leather through my own playtime effort in some form."
"I want early recipes to be simple and their onboarding information to be clear."
In neither the Comment nor the Reply in your screenshot, does anyone ask for anything beyond this from my perspective as a person who plays games that work like the above.
Yes, everyone can learn to make and repair their own leather gloves and specialization only starts after that. That's what I read those comments to be asking for. Neither seems to care about or reference anything about 'beyond Novice', so if your first post was a concern about 'allowing people to do too many things or level too easily at Journeyman (or similar), then I misunderstood you and may have focused the response incorrectly.
It's a blend of things. Yes, if there was truly no spillage of the initiation systems into the full-fledged economy, I wouldn't take much issue with those in particular. (This makes the comment I chose a potentially imprecise example for what I was arguing against; perhaps you can see my connection better after the rest of this comment.)
But 1) I don't believe that most of the people asking for these types of changes would actually be satisfied with that - I think they're at least implicitly asking for much more - , and 2) I think even if you were to introduce the system like that, it might still encourage too much unnatural behaviour. More on "unnatural behaviour" below.
In general, yes, the comment I replied to was just a placeholder for a larger issue concerning the value of maintaining specialisation commitment and time allocation.
I really appreciate the practical example, unfortunately I don't think the points I take issue with really get brought up in there. Maybe I'm missing something. Perhaps you can point it out if you read the rest of this comment and I can come back to it (I'd totally get it if not.)
For now, I think there are other parts of your comment that get closer to the issue.
I also don't want to get too caught up in what's possible in the game right now. That might have been a major concern of the comment I quoted, but I'd hope the rest of my response makes it clear that I don't care so much about what's possible as what's encouraged.
That is: You can make it more or less possible to learn everything in the game on one character. I don't care all that much about that. I care about dailies, I care about introductory quests with excessive rewards that decentivise trading and specialisation, and I care about market conditions that make it overly desirable for everyone to do everything.
Why does the crafter want to do that?
- Do they enjoy crafting,
- or do they want to prepare themselves/their guild for an adventure/challenge,
- or do they want to enrich themselves?
Only for the first reason of those 3 would I consider it a viable choice to make all parts themselves. And for that 1st reason, there's no need for further incentive. The reason itself provides the incentive to do what it takes to make it happen. And the more uncommon this reason is in the market, the more the market demand will reward them all on its own.For the other 2, they should carefully weigh their disinterest in doing the thing themselves against the cost of having someone else do it, or their alternative options in making money doing something else, respectively.
Then put in the time to learn and do those things. (Across different characters, etc., whatever initial investment it might demand...) If it's not worth your time to learn to do those things (whether out of lack of interest or economical viability) then do something else with your time? Why do you need to make everything yourself, but also have it be easy enough to do it even when it's inefficient for you by some of your evaluations?
(Unless you consider paying players from other professions for parts to comply with "in some form" - but then what are we disagreeing about?)
To me, the only real underlying motivation I see for this desire is the delusion of staying ignorant of the value of your time that we've talked about in the past.
The player is chasing the dream of being wealthy in Ashes, but they're unhappy with the rate at which they are gaining wealth, so they try to pick up new sources of income. They want to make 1000 gold an hour, but all the avenues they know and are capable of only yield 100 gold an hour. They try to pursue crafting, because it's fun to them. But they realise that all the resources are too expensive to them to make anything valuable out of them. And harvesting and selling the resources themselves only yields 90 gold per hour.
But by doing all the steps of creating the full final product themselves, and staying blind to time sunk into the initial skill acquisition, and the time lost hopping between the individual steps, they manage to convince themselves that they're able to come out on top making 110 gold per hour, being that much closer to their goal. Meanwhile all they would have needed to do to maintain their sanity is do things they actually enjoy and be okay with their potential - if you want more wealth, work longer and save more; don't try to cheat the system. And they would have kept the market an honest representation of supply and demand in the process.
In my eyes, the perfect analogy is a grindset bro trying to make it in the world who gets frustrated at not being a millionaire after 3 years in their profession, and starts dropshipping or hustling for an MLM, and telling all their friends how much "passive income" he's making, while he's spending 25 hours a day tracking prices and trying to market his "products."
You not knowing that your time is worth something doesn't make your job more efficient.
The entire world would be better off if you did something you cared about instead.
- Actual crafters/merchants wouldn't have to compete with people selling their own time at a negative value.
- Average players wouldn't exist in a system where nothing is worth their time because anything they could think of is already being done by someone whoring themselves out for it.
- You wouldn't hate your life.
(And no, I'm not mainly describing what I've done in the past, though I've certainly not been immune to it. I'm describing what people in other MMOs do, perceivable on the market.)
I still think this behaviour is at the core of why the markets don't function, and it's up to game designers to
- make cost-versus-benefit analysis transparent enough (by making initial investments so severe that players only pursue them if they *want to*)
- and make various avenues of gameplay equally rewarding enough that players don't feel compelled to spend most of their time in the game doing shit they hate just to keep up with the competition.
Do the thing you enjoy, let everyone be an expert in their little niche and benefit from it, only branch out into doing everything if you're *seriously* committed to making above-average profit, or you don't care about profit and just do it for your own enjoyment of the versatility.Note that my suggestion doesn't make it impossible for people who *want* to slave away their time grinding money doing things they don't enjoy by doing everything themselves. (And while my language is dismissive, I think some of them are probably happier people than myself. But there's serious emphasis on that "some.")
It just doesn't allow them to hide from themselves what they are doing. It forces them to actively decide: "Money in this game is worth more to me than most other things I could spend my time on right now." If they make that decision, they'll probably make substantially bigger profits than the average. But they'll also confront more personal limitations where they have to consciously ask themselves: "Do I really want to do this?"
And because some of them will recognise that the mindless grind isn't actually how they want to spend their lives, there will be less oversupply, which will make prices more representative of what things are worth, which will force people to be more content with having to choose between buying one thing (e.g. resource investment into nodes/sieges/upgrades) or the other (equipping themselves and their whole guild with the best of the best equipment). Which will again serve to make supply and demand more representative of reality, because it becomes more apparent to people that they can't just slave harder to have everything.
There will still be no-life guilds and stunningly efficient self-supplying guilds that will swim in wealth and buy what they to want when they want it, and I think that's perfectly fine, but they will have to face more committal decisions along the way; which means the average player won't have the luxury-and-curse of expecting that to be the default.
Basically I think what we're seeing is misguided frustration. The system is much better than most other games right now, and players would realise that if they kept adapting to it for a little and seeing that others don't get to have everything either.
The main reason players don't have the patience to arrive at that realisation is that the game isn't a game yet, so nothing else is fun/rewarding/purposeful yet either, which means they're analysing the situation from a flawed premise.
Sorry for the wall of text, I know these are rabbit holes with a million assumptions to disagree with, I just don't think there's a way to get my point across without laying them out.
The problem with where Ashes is now (which I agree we don't need to discuss) is that it's very hard to tell the difference between people who are put off by the 'discomfort' of the Econ/Artisanship and trying to tell Intrepid that it needs to be brought up to near 'standard'...
And those people who want to press buttons and have the game tell them "You Did Good Today. 5 Stars For You'.
However the system is not better than most other games right now, unless you explicitly dismiss old games (understandable, but if Ashes is trying to bring back some semblance of that era, and appealing to players from that era, they will get the feedback of 'this isn't as good as it was back in my day!'
And for some who are less studied on the matter (or less patient with development), one could conclude 'and it won't become that good', because we definitely don't always get a proper implementation put on top of any similar looking foundations lately.
That said, I have new data from the Throne and Liberty side, and things are working there, so I have no doubt that there is still a reasonable audience for what Ashes is doing in terms of Econ (you can consider TL's Econ transparency to be good enough that the 'average' game-IQ player either doesn't get completely lost, or doesn't seem to notice in a way that bothers them, at least that's my anecdotal data).
(And yes, for those who like to hate on NCSoft, there are also people out there just swiping to buy stuff, but there are also a lot of people out there earning Lucent in game and then spending it and the Economy is working, even within the limited specializations they have managed to get in so far).
I think what I'm holding on to is the hope that, even if it might seem very questionable whether Ashes can deliver on its ideals with the richness they require, it will still be better to stick to principles now in terms of direction/ideology, and see if we can shape up in terms of quality and depth as the game grows.
Because if there's one thing I think we all know has failed too many times, it's making compromises in order to appeal to the mainstream - no matter how well-intentioned it might be in the theoretical long-term perspective of turning things around once the money is there. And so while I see both the potential for things to end up failed or mediocre, the one mistake that I can just about guarantee needs to be avoided is giving up on the identity of the game.
I guess a final follow-up question to round things up might be: Is there something that Throne and Liberty isn't delivering for you that you could imagine Ashes could find its specific advantage in for you? (Specifically realistically, with the way things have developed so far, given realistic changes from here.)
Because at this points it sounds a bit like Ashes for you is practically just in a Throne and Liberty that hasn't delivered on as many of its promises, and whose economy isn't quite as well-organised.
And then to put it into context: How would those strengths be affected if Ashes went 60% harder on appealing to the mainstream and making things cozier for those who demand guaranteed success and "being able to keep up competitively" (which I think translates into higher and higher expectations as the months pass) in spite of mediocre performance?
Basing only on my data collected from my time in Throne and Liberty:
Ashes can still do better at their economy than TL, and TL is a game made by 'combat-first' designers, so by their own admission it takes them longer to design economy things. There are quite a few 'low hanging fruit' for them, but much like Ashes, they would need to have someone who could quickly verify that it was safe/ok to add those things.
Aside from that, Nodes and the resultant gameplay do sound like a winning-tier source of content, if delivered as proposed, and I explicitly mean 'for less invested players'. Seeing an area you helped build, unique in its combination of layout and architecture, with a population you might be able to assume was invested in it, would be a feeling that most MMORPG players on this side of the 'mainstream' have never had.
I don't like to try to be 'realistic' about Ashes development, because I bring in too many of my biases from my career, and those biases tend all the way towards 'this game will never release except as a sandbox for Steven to run RP-sessions in from his Dev Console'.
But as for 'appealing to the mainstream', both games suffer somewhat from not knowing how to do that, plus a problem of data collection, namely, the 'it's hard to get data from people whose interest you didn't manage to maintain'. As a simple TL example, they recently-ish held a Q&A style thing and got way more questions about Fishing than they were expecting. They 'don't think about the players out there waiting for them to improve Fishing or the connection between Fishing and the economy' because those players are just not receiving their engagement point so they play less.
I think Intrepid is facing a similar thing now, but that's speculation.
Ashes combines too many niches at once, perhaps, and I don't think it's possible to have a particularly productive conversation about it because I'm gonna say 'well they need to pull back somewhere but they keep pushing it further out of the stream', but afaik you want them to go in the direction they are going.
In the end though, neither game is even four steps on their path to potential greatness. TL is just staying on the 'riverbank' whereas Ashes looks like it's wandering off into the forest. TL gets the complaints of 'why can't you just come into the water' and Ashes gets either 'wait where are you even going?' or ignored entirely. The difference right now is that TL will keep functioning even if it's mostly PvP players and I think Ashes won't (underlying design structure).
Are there any recommendations on what I should harvest, process, and create that you think displays the crafting system well? I'd love to try again this week.
I wouldn't be surprised if the answer to your request is: nothing. But that's been my point - Even that would not mean that anything should change about the underlying system. You shouldn't expect to feel fulfilled by sytems of an alpha that are meant to be fun in the context of a greater experience where they serve a purpose to help you fulfil long-term goals.
If there's something you want out of crafting in the long run, you don't need it to reward you along the way. If you're supplying a few mediocre items for clan-members when you reach level 30, and ~bespoke~ perfect items a few monhts into reaching level 50, then *that's* what you did it for. That was always the goal. Others with access to more resources might get there faster and be a bit more relevant at earlier stages. That's an essential quality of the competitive factor.
If you would need additional incentives and encouragements to keep you invested in the short term, you don't enjoy the crafting for its own sake and the long-term benefits enough and perhaps should consider spending your time doing something else that feels more internally rewarding for you in the first place. Because then it sounds to me like you don't want to do crafting because you care enough about the prospect of being a master crafter.
One caveat here that I mentioned in my post is that I think Intrepid could be better at *communicating* this future vision to you. Giving you a long-term vision of the best thing you can get out of it if you start sinking resources and time into crafting now.
If right now what *you* really *want* to do is quest, farm, clear dungeons and kill bosses, and the primary reason you want to craft is because you want to have more wealth to buy more powerful equipment - then you should instead keep doing what you enjoy doing and eventually pay a crafter for the equipment. Are you really honest with yourself that you want to craft because you care about it, or do you just want to be richer and you feel like crafting should add to making you richer/better equipped, without "wasting" time you could spend on "more efficient" progress in the game?
You just want as many rewards as you can get, ideally efficient ones, without thinking about the meaning behind the competition for those things; the fact that competition is what makes it rewarding in the first place.
If everyone gets constant guaranteed rewards for everything they do, regardless of how much long-term benefit they also get out of it, competition gets watered down because everything is easy and rewarding. No trade-offs, no risk, no personal preferences, because everyone can just do a little bit of everything to collect all the guaranteed rewards. And therefore also no long-term reward for you for being a crafter - because so is everyone else.
This type of request always starts out as "just a pat on the back to reassure me that I'm making progress," but then a week later you're already asking why the reward can't be a little more satisfying. You can argue all day about the level of compromises that could be made without threatening this system, and in fact I am sure some of those compromises will be struck, if only as a show of good faith and willingness to listen to casual players.
I still maintain that fundamentally, the system remains more honest/transparent/representative of reality, the fewer incentives players are given to pursue goals that they don't actually care enough about to commit to them for the long term purpose on its own.
And I realise all of this sounds depressing, but my point is not that you're not allowed to ask to have fun: It's that all of this will be more motivating in its own right, once it's experienced in the context of a full game, where you can more vividly feel the underlying motivation for wanting to be a crafter in the long run. Or whatever else you pursue to make things happen for your node/community/character.
The base system doesn't need to be changed and incentivised to serve this purpose. The rest of what you do in the game will be the incentive.
'Long term purpose' isn't the point. Serving a long term goal isn't the point. Artisanship is supposed to be fun in and of itself and it can be judged on it that way. If you view it as a primarily competitive activity, it's impossible to get a result that is appealing to anyone except those who 'just drudge through it so that their group can be competitive', which is certainly a design option, but not the one that has been pitched so far afaik.
But more importantly, the part that matters to the concept of changing it, is related to 'why is it so unpleasant in the first place?'
Some amount of effort, however tiny, had to be put into coming up with the recipes we have in game now, for testing, and for setting temporary incentives for players. The issue is that what we have is so unappealing that it comes off as purposeful.
It looks and feels like someone did work to try to make it good without understanding it. (or did work to explicitly try to make it bad).
But, again, if you view Artisanship as 'a thing that someone is assigned to do for the sake of competing' and therefore they shouldn't seek for it to be an innately rewarding experience, especially if you think this design type is normal or good for the game, that's why you don't understand the requests for changes. At that point it would make sense for you to say 'the game would be hurt by changes' because you'd essentially want the Artisanship to be less fun on purpose to keep people out of it.
Note though, that this isn't necessary. The game forces specialization, and more importantly, the only thing these games need is a structure where available time/resources is the limit. Granted, Steven has already said 'I hate and don't want the system that's normally used for this', but even then, that system was only vital because of the economy type of the games he's familiar with.
Would you say the same thing about Tanking or Healing?
We've met people, a lot of people, who do something similar, for those roles in games, and it's pretty clear by now that those people aren't just being selfish or egotistical (at least not directly), and just genuinely don't feel that there's anything wrong with basically suggesting, in a team game:
"Why should the Devs make Tanking or Healing more fun or varied though? People have a perfectly good single Tank/Healing function-character and they should just learn to play that for the sake of their team if they really like Tanking/Healing."
I would greatly appreciate if you could make it clear that you are one of, or similar to, those people, cause it's weekend and my group members have time, and I don't want them assuming you are in that group when you're not and wasting time (or vice versa).
I know you're very experienced, but you don't seem to acknowledge just how insubstantial it can feel to engage in trading or improve your crafting skill in a game where pretty much everyone makes all their own shit for themselves until the absolute end of lategame. Where you're only doing it because it's part of what you have to do. You might enjoy the process, but it's insignificant. you're not adding anything by crafting something, you're just meeting the baseline of what must be done.
The current system, as far as I can tell, is a way of demanding time and resources. You don't get useful results until you've massively increased your skill. It's an up-front cost before you deserve the good stuff.
Yes, the mechanics of it should be fun. Perhaps the inventiveness and the planning and experimentation. I'm unconvinced that the complaint here is really about the mechanics of it though; I mostly read complaints about not making enough progress and not receiving enough rewards.
Basically: Would you be happy with the current system staying as rewarding as it is or even becoming less rewarding, as long as the long-term payoff is worth it, and the mechanics are inspiring and fun?
Hm. I don't know if I can judge that, but I'll give you some pointers and you tell me where you'd classify me.
I think it's a good thing that largely offensive healers tend to be less efficient in group fights than defensive healers, because that's how the holy trinity works and becomes the balance-defining group-play feature that it should be. (Specialisation, and division of responsibilities.) But I also appreciate when a healer knows which offensive flexibility is worth the skill points, and demonstrates mechanical skill in switching between defensive and offensive targets.
When it comes to levelling up support/tank characters, yes, I do think it should be a bit more of a challenge than levelling a DPS class. The most efficient way of doing it would be to coordinate the perfect party that's able to maximise your usefulness by fighting at the edge of depleting the resources you can restore/soak.
Alternative ways of levelling that involve changing your skill sets, or grinding with a suboptimal mixed skillset, should also be viable, but noticeably less efficient.
So you should be encouraged to consider whether you have the time to assemble a group to farm with, and exercise your ability of doing the things you'll ultimately do in the endgame - but without making grouping so efficient that farming becomes free as soon as you trail after some other guy who barely needs your heals.
I just needed to verify it because the general attitude you are currently showing is one that, if taken poorly, tends to cause my group members to make assumptions.
As long as the conversation continues to hinge on 'you not believing in the existence of the thing people want' and therefore concluding 'they must want something else', there's no way for me to put in a 'reasonable' amount of effort explaining, so I'll stick to 'keeping my guild from making assumptions'.
As for the Tanking/Healing thing, I can actually cut it down further based on an experience I had in TL between the last post and this one.
A Crusader (a high HP Bruiser tank with high innate Health Regen and more CC) called out someone in World Chat for not using the 'right' healing option.
The Healing option that is primarily superior when used on a Crusader (multiplies their Health Regen). This person joined a party (to fill in, at off-peak hours) that as far as I can tell already had someone filling in as healer as one of the 'less standard' Healing Spec... and then considered it worth their time to tell that person that they should change their playstyle/apply additional effort to level up a secondary playstyle.
If you agree with the Crusader in this case, then you fall into 'that group of people', for me. That's neither here nor there, what I'm trying to say is that my group (who I would prefer not try to argue with you in this thread, though they want to) want to assume that you and that Crusader are the same.
If that Crusader chooses to insist on only playing with people with a particular setup, I don't mind either, as long as he announces his preference. That could be something I might do, if we're grouping for a difficult encounter, and I'm not sure whether what I'm trying to do can be done with a setup that deviates too much from what I know how to play around.
Pretty much.
Can't you at least answer this question from your own perspective? Seems like a concise one.
If I want to craft earrings, I want those earrings to be worth wearing or have a different occasional use (for example, in Throne and Liberty, I crafted Green weapons sometimes to get trait upgrades for more powerful weapons, and in FF11 I crafted weapons because the Goldsmithing Guild requested them).
This is a reward. It is a small and inconsistent reward, but that means I can feel good whenever I notice it's time to do it.
If we stop considering this type of reward (but assume it continues to exist) then I don't care if the current system remains as rewarding as it is.
The joy of Artisanship for many people is immersion and feeling connection to the world. The 'long term payoff' doesn't necessarily apply and I can illustrate easily in Ashes why (and reference something FF11 related too).
I expect to spend more time making low level materials and potions than high level, in Ashes. I doubt that the skill I actually Grandmaster would be the one I would focus my time on using. This is exactly how I experienced it in all other strong-Economy games. Every one that I played, the 'long term payoff' was minimal because Artisans did not have the opportunity to spend a lot of time on the top level items. There simply isn't a point at which you are churning out 'the best items' simply because they are rare.
So you produce upper-mid and lower level items.
If that counts as long-term payoff, then I think your question is answered.
Ashes currently does not make this rewarding because of the combination of resource scarcity, NPCs selling Novice items, and leveling up a craft even past the Novice stage feeling like a grind due to the time and resource requirements. Even considering "realism", the amount of effort to get past even the initial stage is very much out of place, and discourages a lot of folks.
So, to answer this question:
No, I would not be happy, because most of my happiness is in the continuous production of these "small" eternally needed crafts, and not having it seems wrong. Right now in Throne and Liberty I have a nice loop of fishing up Aurora Starfish and then cooking those into Aurora Seafood Platters, which are a mid level fish and a mid-level cooking dish, and it works out pretty great. That's the sort of thing I want from Ashes, and it doesn't seem to be a priority to reproduce this in Ashes at this time.
I'm surprised to see someone who hasn't even played the game feel entitled to nullify my experience as a new player. You can agree with the idea of how a system should work, or specifically how it challenges the community. When I listen to Steve and hear his ideologies about the difficulty and how important crafting should be to the game, I agree. Playing and experiencing it is different. There are very few people in this world wealthy enough to ignore the monetary value of 40-hours. If I can make a paycheck in those 40 hours but I can't craft a single item, no matter how small it may be, there is a problem.
Once again, I will use Throne and Liberty because it's closer to what Ashes is, than FF11, but you can assume all the same things apply, though you may need to do some abstraction.
In TL you can be 'everything'. A Fisher, a Cook, a Weapon Crafter, etc... sort of. The specialization is not inherent to the final product:
If you are a Cook, you have a certain amount of easily available materials per day, and in TL specifically you can't really buy materials from other people (not even Fish), but if they did introduce a method to let this happen, they would make sure to limit it (by using a different Econ-slot, something called Precious Omnipotence Parchment, you don't care about this for the explanation but I mention it now because it is possible it will matter later especially when we start talking about players wanting things to be easy/not specialized).
If you are a Weapon Crafter, you need to gather, at minimum, 'enough materials to actually craft the weapon', and this is not cheap/simple in the sense that you could churn this stuff out, you would need to stockpile and use some other limited sources, get lucky, or gather for quite some time (to make Epic gear you need Epic Materials and the open world gathering points only drop up to Rare). Then you need a Recipe (Lithograph) which you basically have to buy from someone else who got a drop. There isn't even a required skill level, but by Material Specialization alone, you'd tend toward certain ones (you don't have to, but in terms of actual production, you would).
My understanding of your concern, Laetitian, viewed through the lens of the above, is below, please correct it:
Because everyone can fish, people are not incentivized to rely on other Fishers.
I can only say that this has never been my experience in any game, and I add FF11 to my datapoint here because whereas all other Artisan skills in that game have a 'limit' that they share between them, Fishing is exempt, yet I only know Fishers who like fishing, but there were entire trade deals between Fishers and Cooks and other people, to the point where strangers would make deals on forums, in world chat, etc.
Because everyone can cook, the value of food will be generally low/mediocre foods will be ignored.
Discounting the fact that in both games I play, the concept of truly 'mediocre food' was less than 50% of what cooks could make (in TL it's arguably 5% and that's only for players who are max level and meta), we can look at the idea that the value of food will be low because everyone can make it.
But in TL Cooking has levels, and materials for cooking good food are harder to get. They have room to expand on this soon as well. The thing that is probably preventing what you are referring to, though, is something unique to TL. Since they don't have as many non-fish type 'rare cooking ingredients' yet, they use a simpler method, you can only sell High Quality outcomes of cooking (about 15% chance). So your specialization is contained in something else. A person would tend to cook things they will use themselves, and sell this excess, rather than trying to cook everything.
Even as a Cook in that game there are at least 3 foods that I buy from other cooks simply because I don't want to spend ingredients making them (and not because they are higher level than I can make).
Because everyone can make gear themselves and gather anything, people will just flood the market with mediocre gear and no interreliance will happen.
Firstly, Gear is subject to the same thing as Cooking, you can only sell High Quality, but I will also say that I truly believe that even if this was removed and not even replaced with an Artisanship Skill Type System, people still mostly wouldn't just try to make everything (but they might flood the market a bit).
I believe this because it takes 10 Epic Grade materials minimum to make 1 Armor piece, and the primary sources of these are a Passive source that generates about 1 of those per week, with specialization, so I can get only two of (Gold, Steel, Thread, Leather, Wood) in bulk for any 'harvesting block'...
One Active Source, which is 'you running around gathering it yourself' which generates maybe 2-3 an hour with minimal other benefit if no one else is around (Devs set this type of value to whatever they want)...
And one 'Reward' type Source which has a limit of 3x per day and requires somewhat meaningful Guild Activity.
So a Weapon Crafter can make 1-2 items per day (but can stockpile), or can make multiple lesser items, the ones I assume you would class as Mediocre.
Ashes and TL diverge here, in terms of how their systems work, but I can tell you that because of a certain thing about how TL is set up, a player would still need about 10-15 minutes to make a low-level, Green weapon, and one would still have a reason to make them. In a game like Ashes where Repairs are a thing, this would be equivalent.
This same principle can be applied to all Artisanship, mind you, and that's what I'm familiar with. Games where a Crafter makes 1 full 'big ticket' item per day (usually takes just over an hour), or multiple smaller ones when no one is asking for that 'big ticket' item. Also, where making more puts them in competition with others in a way that reduces their effectiveness (usually due to outstripping their own demand curve).
Getting to do your Artisanship meaningfully at least once a day by investing an hour or so, is part of the fun.
There are multiple things I've glossed over for the sake of 'brevity' which I may end up going into if you want, but I considered many of them 'equivalent'. You can let me know if anything in the list below registers as 'definitely not economically equivalent' to you.
(hopefully my group is satisfied with this writeup if you still care, lmk if you'd either prefer I discuss FF11, or would rather talk to them directly)