A suggestion for crafting/decay/enchanting system

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I'm here because Ashes has dead horse systems. And so far I haven't seen indicators of Steven wanting to change them. What I do see though is a ton of people trying to change his mind with every single post and dissuading anyone, who might agree with Steven's pov, from ever voicing their opinions.

Like I said, the game might change completely, but at least I'll know that I tried to stop it from doing so. And I was doing it because I believed in the original vision.

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Everything I've stated can still be a part of the game w/o alienating other people. Corruption will prevent hardcore players from touching lowbies, while allowing them to still PK a dude who's holding a grind spot (if there even are any). I believe Steven has accounted for the casual playerbase in his current design, and I'm completely fine with all of those changes. What I'm personally against is the casual players pushing those changes even further, usually because they're either afraid of a system they don't know (that mainly being Corruption) or because they've seen it done in some other mmos in a horrible manner (all the faction-based pvp mmos where you can freely genocide the other faction).

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Here's a reddit post I made about hardcore players having to not only interact with time-casual players, but even paying them, in order to support their node. I'm all for casuals enjoying the game to the fullest in their own way. But I'm against making this game only for casuals.

Also, Asmon hate ~80% of AoC's features. He hasn't stated that directly while talking about Ashes (outside of a few specific things), but, when watching vids about other games, he has described highly disliking features that are core to the Ashes experience (at least currently). And a ton of his viewers agree with him. So I'm pretty sure that Ashes will either change completely or will die if it can't garner enough hardcore players to sustain the development. I personally don't want it to change it's current design, but if Steven decides to save his money and the only way to do that is to appeal to the predominant masses - I'll be fine with it cause I'll just stop playing and move on.

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I'm after that simplicity exactly because of where the genre is at right now. Any pvp mmo is ridden with p2w or just bad designs, while a lot of pve mmos are flourishing. I'm glad that people enjoy the genre in their own way and that the studios manage to pay their employees good money because of that, but none of the pve mmos appeal to me in any way. Ashes did. If Ashes fails or completely changes, I'll just know that it's time for me to move on from mmos (as I've kinda already done).

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The pve/pvp side of FF14 is definitely more of a semi-singleplayer game, but the community potential is very big. It's just that this potential is only realized for those who're ready to go out there and connect with other people, while older games made you find people because you wouldn't be able to progress w/o them.

But that kind of hardcoreness is frowned upon these days, because it's "inconvenient". And we get all the auto-partyfinders and easy pve content and no owpvp, so there's no push to talk to other people. Imo that's bad, but obviously that's where the genre has been moving towards for the past decade or so.

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I mean, that kind of thing is always subjective. Obviously the game should give the option to progress towards those goals (and Ashes claims to have those), but every person decides their winstate for themselves.

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Yeah, I need to explain it in a better way, but we've got too little info about the nodes. Though I doubt we'll get too much of innerworkings of that system either way, so that suggestion might not apply at all.

But assumption was that hardcore players would be playing for way longer which would lead to uselessness of casuals (at least that's been the case in L2 for me), so I wanted to come up with a system where casuals would not only have the same amount of impact on the world (be it through their own actions or by selling the time that they couldn't play out) but would also earn some money while doing whatever they like in the game.

I used analogy of trickle down economics in that post, but afterwards I realized that this system would be closer to universal basic income. People would be doing things they enjoy w/o worrying that they won't have enough resources for survival.

I hope that Intrepid comes up with a system where casuals manage to enjoy their time in the game and have enough resources to progress towards whatever goal the set for themselves, but, from what I understand of the node system, that might be a difficult thing to balance.

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Yeah, pvp is definitely one of the bigger issues, but there's also the no fast travel, no party finder, open world bosses, open world dungeons, the whole "selling fomo cosmetics before release" and the overall "player friction" design doesn't lend itself to convenient gameplay which has been one of the main desires of Asmon and his chat's.

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True, but the sheer mention of "open world pvp" sends people into all-out panic. And all the dozens (not even) of L2 players across all social media can't say enough to calm down those screaming people. Obviously the values of corruption gain and removal and all of that will have to be tested, but I can already imagine that any person that gets attacked even once (not even killed) would complain that they can't play the game like that. Which would most likely lead to owpvp removal or the game dying due to all the complaints snowballing out of control. I hope I'm wrong in that assumption though, but only the time will tell.

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Those fiestas can be done in the form of an event, like caravans or sieges or guild wars. And I see the stat dampening as the main deterrent to all those people who loved using a dagger/archer class in L2 and just went around genociding lowbies for no fucking reason.

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I assume augments will be closer to real broadening of gameplay, while enchantments will prop those augments up and maybe give some additional effects/powers, but nothing too substantial. Though we obviously know nothing outside of "horizontal ench might give you some elements and vertical will give you some power", which tells us nothing. So we'll have to see what Intrepid has planned later on.

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Casuals would suffer from any non-casual system though. As they will with a lot of currently planned system in Ashes. So unless Steven has accounted for that and has made most of the systems in the game friendly and appealing to someone who plays 1-2h a day (if that) - those people will suffer.

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Any form of gear decay does that and if AoC's system is basing their decay on activities, then casuals will be directly punished for any activity they do in the game and the potential attacks they receive from other players. The system in this post would give them not only ample time to learn about the system, but also have the time to get prepared for the repairs.

And if the system that I suggest on reddit would've been implemented - they'd even have the in-game money to do those repairs so they wouldn't have to worry about anything at all. But most likely neither of these will happen and we'll just have to hope that Intrepid manages to make a game that appeals to casuals.

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And in my experience it's either party vs party, because farming locations are hard so you're always farming in a party, or it's 1v1 or at worse 1v2 in those locations where solo farm is available. Yes, there might be a few times where you get attacked by a much bigger group, but out of 12 years of playing with this pvp system, I could maybe recall a few dozen situations like that.

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Faction-based owpvp is never good. Exactly because you're never punished for genociding the other side. You might get smaller rewards for it or might even get none, but I haven't heard about a faction-based pvp game where you'd get punished for killing your enemies.

In the system that Ashes wants to have, there's a very strong punishment for those who kill random people. And if you just harass people w/o killing them, you'll have a bad reputation. And that reputation will matter only because Steven's trying to bring back the feeling of community in an mmo. Now whether he'll succeed in his attempt is a whole different story, but he's at least trying, while all the other mmos have just completely abandoned that notion.

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You'd only need to look at the color indicator on the gear you're wearing. That's it. There's no need to keep track of anything else. The gear pieces being comprised of 4 parts only comes to play at the end of the decay timer and even then, before enchantment, you'd only need one of the part's materials to fix your gear piece. And you'd be able to see that at a crafter stall.

Again, from what I understand, the current design is already complex when it comes to repairs, and according to the currently presented state of the system it's even more punishing than what I'm suggesting, where you constantly need to monitor your gear for repairs because if you let it get to 0 durability - you'll have to pay way more to repair it. While my system only makes you do that once you've enchanted the gear to its maximum.

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But the depth could be added. I just gave a basic example of my concept. The verticality could come in the way of empowering the horizontal enchantments.

Say you added fire element as one of the enchantments on your weapon. When you overenchant that part of the weapon, the elemental effect could get an additional proc function. Maybe it's an aoe on hit, maybe it's a dot, maybe it's a resistance decrease, maybe it's a ice buff prevention, etc. You could have those function come in the form of rng, with an ability to remove the OE with a fraction of the mats returning to you, or you could have it as just an option when OEing the gear. It'd depend on how much "risk v reward" Intrepid wants.

Oh, and the elemental attribute itself would increase in power no matter the option you get. This way the "verticality" of the enchantment could be preserved.

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You can just post your own discussion, like I did.