Remove leveling up or make it harder and fun

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That could be true.

Right now, I could be much more effective in my other 'game with nodes' if I had four or five 'additional newbies' at 'low level'.

My 'Node'/faction doesn't need any more high level people right now. And those low level pilots would definitely have a large and meaningful effect on 'my Node's ZoI' while they leveled up. Then they could be rewarded by the levels themselves, and anything 'I' chose to give them as extra.

We're currently more than a year in, and this won't really change either. I think it would be difficult to design Ashes in a way that would entirely make this useless.

It's not really that 'a high level player wouldn't be just as useful', it's that they wouldn't be much MORE useful, the task doesn't require them to be high level, so their time is better spent elsewhere.

I said in some old thread that L2's low lvl gatherers (and sometimes even other classes) were valuable because mobs on lower lvls would have better low tier mat drops than on higher lvls. And considering how crafting worked in L2, even after a year those same low lvls would be valuable. Maybe a bit less so, because new mobs appeared and gave another way to farm the same mats, but considering that most people usually just leveled up instead of trying to stay at the same stage of progress - the low lvls were still appreciated.

Now this was mainly supported by the inability of high lvl players to get any drops from lower lvled mobs. Iirc it was a 9 lvl limit. So high lvls physically couldn't just go and farm what they wanted and had to either trade with others or have a low lvl guildmate/alt.

So with that mechanic in mind, I'm curious how Intrepid will design the game that will supposedly allow players of all lvls to have equal "fun" and relevancy.

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Do people actually hate the 'option to fight the same mobs at many levels', in this context?

I hear it referred to as a negative, but mostly relative to blandness.

Like... you beat up a level 5 Toucan and get Bird Meat for cooking, when you're level 20 you don't get that anymore and have to go into the jungle to find Macaws IF you really don't want to use the Auction House for it. The 'main/better' level 20 content isn't Macaws, but you have the OPTION.

Extrapolate to Terrifying Toucan and Murderous Macaw which live on high level islands or something at level 44. Again, not 'the best spot to farm drops' and probably 'out of the way' but certainly 'enough that the Bird Meat Market doesn't collapse when there are no lowbies around'.

I'm not sure if the complaints I have seen are 'I don't believe that high level versions of low level mobs should ever exist in a game' or 'I don't want to grind Macaws for half the game'.

Here's one of the best examples of low lvl "gathering" against just drops in L2. Left side is just dropping a t1 mat, that's used in a ton of recipes, and right side is L2's gathering that only one class can do.


As you can see, there's ways to farm the resource at pretty much all lvls, with the best mobs being at higher lvls, but it is waaaay better to just Spoil mobs at lower lvls because they bring in so much more of the resource.

This way even low lvl gatherers can make a ton of money, because the resource is required throughout all crafting tiers and top lvl players don't really get it in huge numbers while farming.

I really hope Intrepid can manage a system similar to this. It mainly works if high lvl players always have something valuable to do and get money from it, while low lvl players can concentrate on gathering and make a ton of money from it.

This is also the reason why I'd prefer for gatherer professions to have a similar setup, where high proficiency artisans have "better" things to do, so the low tier mats are left to the low proficiency players. Though this has other implications for the longevity of the game and potential design workarounds required for this type of system to work.

NiKr wrote: »

Here's one of the best examples of low lvl "gathering" against just drops in L2. Left side is just dropping a t1 mat, that's used in a ton of recipes, and right side is L2's gathering that only one class can do.


As you can see, there's ways to farm the resource at pretty much all lvls, with the best mobs being at higher lvls, but it is waaaay better to just Spoil mobs at lower lvls because they bring in so much more of the resource.

This way even low lvl gatherers can make a ton of money, because the resource is required throughout all crafting tiers and top lvl players don't really get it in huge numbers while farming.

I really hope Intrepid can manage a system similar to this. It mainly works if high lvl players always have something valuable to do and get money from it, while low lvl players can concentrate on gathering and make a ton of money from it.

This is also the reason why I'd prefer for gatherer professions to have a similar setup, where high proficiency artisans have "better" things to do, so the low tier mats are left to the low proficiency players. Though this has other implications for the longevity of the game and potential design workarounds required for this type of system to work.

Yes and no.

L2's crafting and itemization is pretty limited/simplistic. I'd go so far as to call it bad, with my bias.

It's a really long explanation how, but doing this in the way you pointed out leads to poor PvE.

That's why I asked about the specific case I did. It is one of only two ways I know of to make this actually work. L2's works because it's a 'PvP game' with ONE 'crafting class'.

Not gonna fly in Ashes, they have to do better than that, and by 'better' I mean 'don't do that'.

Azherae wrote: »

Not gonna fly in Ashes, they have to do better than that, and by 'better' I mean 'don't do that'.

Yeah, which is why I said that they'd need to design the system in such a way that conceptually it could work like that, but be deeper and better.

In other words, I just want any potential newcomer to be able to get some early money through whichever means they prefer. If the only way to make money on a well-established high lvl server (both artisans and adventurers) is to just do quests and maybe farm mobs - I feel like the whole design of the artisan system will have failed.

Do you agree with that kind of design or do you think it's just not as big of a deal as I think it is?

NiKr wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

Not gonna fly in Ashes, they have to do better than that, and by 'better' I mean 'don't do that'.

Yeah, which is why I said that they'd need to design the system in such a way that conceptually it could work like that, but be deeper and better.

In other words, I just want any potential newcomer to be able to get some early money through whichever means they prefer. If the only way to make money on a well-established high lvl server (both artisans and adventurers) is to just do quests and maybe farm mobs - I feel like the whole design of the artisan system will have failed.

Do you agree with that kind of design or do you think it's just not as big of a deal as I think it is?

I'm referring specifically to 'Spoils on low level ones'.

Low level characters don't need any incentives to stay low level, right?

Low level mobs often die faster, are closer to towns, etc.

So I wasn't really addressing the point of 'low level artisans gather low level materials because high level artisans have better things to do'. I completely agree with it, I was pointing out that L2's system, to someone looking at it with a very critical econ-eye, doesn't actually seem to do that, so the example might be confusing.

But I will give a bit more context.

Economically, games are only really fun for artisans when they get niches. I thought for a LONG time that this was just my bias, but I've since revisited my priors enough to conclude it's just true. There's a sort of 'phantom fun' that people have while leveling up, or dopamine hits, but eventually those wear off and they become increasingly aware of the other, 'better' ways to make money that everyone else is 'using whenever they can'.

This is different from 'having a niche market as your main and the standard market as your fallback'.

If items that are available to low level players are particularly important, niches form much more slowly or not at all. Like I said, this would be another LONG essay. I'm not saying you should 'just trust me on it', but maybe think about it a bit more. The low level mats market should usually be just 'annoying' enough that any new player can make a killing because yes, higher level artisans just rejoice to 'not have to do it themselves'.

But it should also be 'open' enough that there are periods where there's no lowbies around to do it and high level players have to decide 'is the current market supply bust enough to justify me going to do something that is NORMALLY not as profitable, that has another side benefit?'

Because then the people who have a niche that matches the side benefit go first, instead of 'everyone going at once'.

EDIT: Eh, I've realized that this is much less coherent than usual and not really 'answering' anything, so can just be ignored. I'll leave the post in case it helps me sort the thoughts later or becomes relevant.

Azherae wrote: »

If items that are available to low level players are particularly important, niches form much more slowly or not at all. Like I said, this would be another LONG essay. I'm not saying you should 'just trust me on it', but maybe think about it a bit more. The low level mats market should usually be just 'annoying' enough that any new player can make a killing because yes, higher level artisans just rejoice to 'not have to do it themselves'.

But it should also be 'open' enough that there are periods where there's no lowbies around to do it and high level players have to decide 'is the current market supply bust enough to justify me going to do something that is NORMALLY not as profitable, that has another side benefit?'

Because then the people who have a niche that matches the side benefit go first, instead of 'everyone going at once'.

But wouldn't AoC's artisanship already be niche? I'm sure that anyone and everyone would be able to "just cut a tree" or "just pick up a plant", but I'd hope that the system would HIGLY encourage those kinds of actions to be done by specialized artisans because the benefit would be higher.

And so you'd have the most basic stuff getting value from the sheer amounts of demand for it (basic trees/rocks used for sieges in huge amounts, and stuff like that), while anything of a bit higher quality would require specialization. And your progress within the specialization would also dictate the resulting quality of the product.

And as for the openness, I think that could be controlled by the world manager. At the start of the game there will be a ton of newbies farming all of the low tier stuff in huge amounts. This would put a high requirement for those resources within the overall system. In the process of farming most of those newbies would overlvl the abundant sources of those resources and move onto "better" things.

The world manager would see that there's only a few lowbies left and there's only a small trickling of newbies. Seeing that, the WM would increase the yield per resource instance, so that each newbie can get way more resources than the OG could at the same lvl. If the amount of appearing newbies increases, the WM can decrease the yield or the abundance of the resources.

And if there's no one farming some low tier resource for some time (maybe a season or two), the WM could "move" those resources up the chain by one step.

So smth like this:

• day1 all flowers X get picked daily, each flower giving 3 petals and a stem. Every day for a few day period the amount of respawning flowers grows, to meet the demand. If on the last day of the period all flowers still get picked - the flowers "die out" for a day or two, making players move up the chain or onto other types of flowers.
• day30 60% of flowers X get picked daily, each flower giving 4 petals and the stem is longer now and can be broken into 2 parts
• day 100 no lowbies to pick flowers X. The flowers overgrow, become a parasitic invasive species and combine with flowers Y, who're at 50% daily picking. The new XY flowers give 4X petals, 4Y petals and 2 different stems. There's 1 flower X per 10 flowers XY. It gives 10 petals and has a huge branching stem with 4 parts
• day 180 there's an expansion and a ton of newbies. They pick up all flowers X for several days in a row, completely resetting their population by triggering the "die out". Those newbies have pushed through the picking lvls faster. Flowers X are now back to being super abundant but also back to their OG form. The lowbie flower pickers have moved onto flowers XY.
• day 185+ any newcomers will only be able to pick a fraction of the overabundant flowers X, which will trigger their evolution again.
• The cycle, theoretically, repeats

Now there's probably some holes in that suggestion, but my point was mainly about the WM being able to control the resource flow across and within tiers, while also adapting to the player population/actions. And ideally this would also be interlinked with the other branches of the gathering tree (the rabbit/wolf example for the dev stream).

Would you consider that a system that addresses your concerns or did I miss a huge hole in the design that would lead to immediate falling apart of the system?

@NiKr to address this one I need to make sure we both have the same understanding of a particular thing...

You will be able to take the 'low levels' of ANY Artisan Profession, right?

Literally everyone in the game will probably be able to hit 'basic rocks'.

Lowbies aren't required. Everyone can hit rocks. Bored people hit rocks as long as hitting rocks is profitable. Those bored people don't necessarily have 'something else to do' or 'a higher artisanship to work on'. They just hit rocks.

Do we disagree on this part?

Azherae wrote: »

Do we disagree on this part?

No, we agree. I'd assume that what I described would probably best apply to low tiers and above, while everyone would only be able to do basic tier of gatherables, if not specced into that tree/branch.

Though, I guess, that goes directly against the "lootboxiness" of rocks, because if anyone can hit most rocks and some of those rocks can have more valuable resources - you have yourself a ton of people that could potentially mine a ton of valuable resources, even w/o leveling up their artisanry.

And if you don't give those people the valuable part of the lootbox, you're not only encouraging the griefing potential of overfarming, but also discourage all of those bored people from hitting rocks.

From there you get to 'balancing profitability by skill'. Fortunately we have a game where this has been observable in many iterations for many years. Good ol' BDO.

All of the outcomes on the BDO side are bad, as I see them. Why? It's not exactly a mystery, but it's very complicated.

If specialists gather rocks way better than newbies, they undercut the newbies if they can, to the point where the only reason newbies gather rocks is their lack of other options. This is fine, except that it leads to long periods where they don't make any money because they're being undercut. So they put in a lot of TIME, and get a very delayed reward. In a game where you need to buy tools, this starts to get troublesome.

At midlevel, you're still at the mercy of people above you. Nearly ANY system for this gets stupid pretty fast. Example:

A player hits a tree and gets 4 wood. A more specialized player hits the same tree and gets 6 wood. They spent the same amount of time.

Player A wants to sell that wood for 25 Cu each to make it 'worth their time.

Player B sells it for 20 Cu each, it's STILL more worth it to player B, and Player A often has to come down to that, 'losing money'. If they persist, and Player B really wants to make their life hard, they just go down to 18 Cu.

Still make slightly more than Player A was going to make. Player B can push Player A out of a market WHILE still making more profit than Player A was hoping to make. This leads to games where people just tell you 'might as well level to X level before you even start trying to make money with this'.

Maybe the 'time' of Player A is 'worth less' in general, but Player B is always incentivized to have money funnel to them rather than to spread out. And they're already specialized for lumbering. They don't WANT to do anything else or they'd have chosen that.

The result is a massive surplus of resources because those with less 'valuable' time are 'fighting against' those who generate more value per unit time.

For clarity BDO has solved this issue, but it was by creating four more, so there's solutions. They're manipulative and antisocial as usual, though.

Azherae wrote: »

For clarity BDO has solved this issue, but it was by creating four more, so there's solutions. They're manipulative and antisocial as usual, though.

Did those solutions include the "high specc dude literally can't farm low tier mat or it's so inefficient that only griefers would try" one?

Because I feel like if the artisan system just consisted of a bunch of L2-like vertical lines, with high lvls having either no access or worse yield to the low tiers, the inherent nicheness of artisan classes would work in favor of such a system.

And the basic resources could be farmed by all, but they'd also give the smallest return on time investment, because they'd be literally "a thing you do while you're bored".

NiKr wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

For clarity BDO has solved this issue, but it was by creating four more, so there's solutions. They're manipulative and antisocial as usual, though.

Did those solutions include the "high specc dude literally can't farm low tier mat or it's so inefficient that only griefers would try" one?

Because I feel like if the artisan system just consisted of a bunch of L2-like vertical lines, with high lvls having either no access or worse yield to the low tiers, the inherent nicheness of artisan classes would work in favor of such a system.

And the basic resources could be farmed by all, but they'd also give the smallest return on time investment, because they'd be literally "a thing you do while you're bored".

Which would then be inherently counter to a lot of the structures the game uses.

I think we've reached the point where any discussion on this would be better in the other thread, though.

I'm still trying to figure out if it is just my bias for FFXI that causes this reaction, but I HAVE played other MMOs and even liked some of their systems too, so I can't be sure, and honestly, FFXI's GATHERING is too restrictive and usually sucks (killing mobs for drops is ok but would never work in a PvX game).

Still, this is another case where I am constantly surprised where other people's experiences come from. This is all solvable easily by an Economy Designer, not even a super experienced one.

Generally, if you see that something that feels like a problem isn't solved, it's because the devs don't see it as a problem.

Azherae wrote: »

FFXI's GATHERING is too restrictive and usually sucks (killing mobs for drops is ok but would never work in a PvX game).

I meaaaaaaaaan, unless we go the Dygz/Noaani route and completely disregard even the probability of L2 being called a PvX game - L2's "gathering" was exactly that The "spoiler" class was gathering its mats off of mobs and mobs only. I'm guessing FFXI's gathering was available to more classes than just one, so L2's system is even more restrictive than the one you're used to from ff.

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Nah, don't think there's any mmos that have tried a purely pvp gameplay approach. Or at least I've never heard of one.

NiKr wrote: »

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Nah, don't think there's any mmos that have tried a purely pvp gameplay approach. Or at least I've never heard of one.

Isn't this entirely the reason why we just label PvP-centric MMOs as 'PvP MMOs'?

There's always Mortal Online tho.

Azherae wrote: »

There's always Mortal Online tho.

Doesn't mortal have mobs?

But yeah, pretty much any mmo that has open world pvp would be a pvx mmo. Oh wait, I guess Planetside 2 is the closest thing to a really pvp mmo, cause iirc there's no environmental stuff there (unless I'm forgetting or they've changed smth).

Foxhole might be seen as a pvp mmo too, cause it's a completely player-created world and any environment hazards come directly from other players.

But neither of those are rpgs, even though they have ranks and "classes" which could kinda be seen as parts of an rpg gameplay. And, if anything, Foxhole's roles are waaaay stronger than your standard pvp mmorpgs (especially recent ones). Medics were mostly purely medics (sometimes even w/o guns), logistics people could not even interact with enemies and would just play their own particular role.