Discussion about grinds

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That just sounds like a bad crafting system then. Especially in the context of what Ashes is planning for their crafting. Make all those resources used somewhere on the crafting ladder so no material becomes useless or unwanted. This would also keep people fighting over mobs because they'll always stay important.

Yes, some prices will fluctuate, but that's the case with anything in a free market.

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I meant that example in particular. If when you killed a cow you got milk, meat, skin, horns, hooves - I'd expect all those items to get used somewhere in the crafting system and be fairly valuable. With maybe one of those being used in some important recipe so its price is higher than others, but you don't feel bad for not dropping that exact item because everything else has a good price too.

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It's a double-edged sword for me. On one hand I want there to be limited sources for things so that players have to fight each other over it, on the other hand I understand how monopolies can kill the game's economy and lead to a ton of people leaving. Have definitely seen a few monopolies in L2 back when you had some resources farmable only in one locations (or at least meaningful farm in only one) and big guilds would lock it down and control said resource.

And I don't really know how you'd balance those things out.

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Yeah, and those supplies can be controlled by a guild. So I'm not confusing things. But I've already seen some people complain about the potential of big guilds taking over some parts of the map/nodes/resources and setting their own super high prices on those things. That is if they even decide to sell them.

Now I'm completely fine with that cause I'm used to fighting against stronger and bigger foes, but I can already see people leaving the game because they can't get some piece of gear because some huge guild is controlling all the ways of acquiring that gear.

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Its pvp was good exactly because pve was super basic though. Yes there were sieges, but those are every other week. But daily pvp only worked because you could pvp around mobs w/o being scared shitless that you'd both die.

I can already see people complaining a ton if Ashes has challenging pve in the open world, just because they keep getting attacked by other people and die because of it.

Dunno about the very early days, but from what I've heard L2 was ridden with bots so of course the economy would be in utter shambles.

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I mean, it was definitely not the biggest and best thing since sliced bread like WoW was, but that's mainly due to the reasons of WoW being way more casual-friendly and NCsoft being utter shites at promoting/developing/admining their game in the west. And then it all just snowballed down a mountain.

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Crafting window from alpha1 and the so far explained crafting system is really similar to L2's, except for the dials.

Classes function differently, but the separation of classes is quite close to L2's. I thought about making a video showing some potential similarities, or at least the ones I saw.

Humans/elves/orcs/dwarves - all in L2. Tulnar is the obvious outlier, with Py'Rai coming close second, but tulnar were a kickstarter stretch goal, right? So they would've probably came later in the game's life and not be the base race if Intrepid didn't reach that goal.

Copying lore/world design would be a big oof that would show that they have no idea how to make the game their own. Though open world dungeons and bosses in some rooms and at the very end in a semi-instance (like the volcano dragon from alpha1) is straight out of L2's design book. Now I'm sure that L2 wasn't the first game to use that design, but saying that L2 only inspired pvp is a bit weird imo.

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Iirc L2's design took a lot of inspiration from EQ, but instead of improving on it as how, I imagine, EQ2 did NCsoft probably just copied it, as a ton of other mmos did with WoW's design later on.

Now I could be completely off base with that assumption, but we'd have to have someone here who has played both EQ1 and L2 to draw some parallels.

And as we've seen with WoW and its clones' example, anyone, who tries to copy another game's success and who's not the OG team that made that original game, is destined to fail. Once WoW got newer devs and control from above - it became shit, so you can even fuck up the original game by just changing the team. L2's lead designer left and the game went to shit after that (in the opinion of all the people who still play on the private servers), so even the small good parts that it had went out the window.

Also, I'm pretty sure that L2 took their pvp system from L1 (and added a few things I think), so this is just another parallel that taking mechanics from the previous installation in the series and making them better is the way to. L1 had huge success (still does) with its pvp system being one of the great things about it. L2 took that and made it its own and it was the best part about it. EQ1 had its own cool stuff and I'm sure that EQ2 took those things and made them better and changed for the better.

So your friends pretty much went from a copy with one redeeming point to the "original" with way more improvements to the OG formula. I'd assume people whose first game was some failed WoW clone would have a similar experience if they went to play WoW and saw all the systems that might've been in their first mmo now done much better. Though I dunno if current WoW would really have that effect, but I think you know what I mean.