Minor suggestion to make low quality resource still useful

After finally working out a separate thing, I can finally articulate why I really don't like this system in games.

It squashes or removes the distinction between the three 'tiers' of item I mentioned in another post and effectively squashes them all down to having a 'high' Intent to Acquire, higher than is even useful or necessary, and that has a cascade effect (which I'm sure I'll end up ranting about in huge detail at some point).

But for my simple singular example, I'll use an old FF11 game 'loop'.

Fire Crystals, which drop from certain enemies and were used in cooking and metallurgy, were always rarer and therefore more expensive than Earth or Water Crystals. But it's not because of any difference imposed by the devs other than the fact that for most people/groups, things that drop Earth and Water crystals are easier to beat.

Fire Crystals are a thing that you attempt to get Opportunistically whenever you find yourself in a good situation for it, because they're more valuable, but they're only more valuable because they're opportunistic items for some.

By contrast, Light Crystals aren't used for much, but are still important, and drop from even fewer things. But they're Niche, not Opportunistic. One doesn't 'go out of their way to farm them' because the supply will become too high relative to their (somewhat inconsistent) demand and their value will be lost.

Earth/Water, literally dime a dozen (1k gil, to be precise). Demand is pretty stable, supply depends on what others think the competing supply is.

If you added a way to 'trade 2/3 Earth Crystals for a Fire Crystal based on the current value of Fire Crystals', you have to write a lot of code to control when this stops being possible, you have to control and explain it to newbies, you don't give them the chance to explore or learn Econ things slowly. You've just 'given them a quick solution to their immediate lack of something' and 'frustrated your merchants/screwed up your econ chains'.

I hope this post helps explain something, but honestly I'm not sure it does since brevity might have left it too abstract.

tl;dr - since 'Rarer' items are more desirable but also sit in a specific 'slot' in the EconSystem, giving an easy way to convert 'something that is in another slot, into them', is bad because it squashes that system into a smaller space and that can be bad.

@Ludullu lmk if this was too obscure or didn't seem to connect back to the main point so I know to rant more.

Azherae wrote: »

tl;dr - since 'Rarer' items are more desirable but also sit in a specific 'slot' in the EconSystem, giving an easy way to convert 'something that is in another slot, into them', is bad because it squashes that system into a smaller space and that can be bad.

Ludullu lmk if this was too obscure or didn't seem to connect back to the main point so I know to rant more.

My main issue (at least of understanding here) with this particular example and premise is that I don't see rarity tiers as separate slots of econ, while the example seems to have given a range of items that are applied differently.

If Ashes had smth like "you can only craft this bow if you have a particular rarity of wood - no other rarity tier will do", then yeah, the examples would match and I'd probably agree with your dislike. But right now (and seeeemingly in the plans as well) the rarity itself doesn't change what the item becomes. It could be argued that additional stats that come from rarity tiers "change" the item, but imo that's somewhat of a weak argument.

And another point is the opportunism of gatherables in Ashes. We don't see rarity of gatherables, so, by deafult, that factor cannot be opportunistic. Yes, the gatherable itself can be (shout out to my girl COPPER from P1!), but we got 0 clue about its rarity, which goes back to Veeshan's point of "you spend time gathering useless items in hopes of getting something good".

We also don't really have any proper sinks for basic mats. The closest thing is node building requirements, but even those are mostly a one-and-done deal until we get full node sieges with destruction. I'd imagine that once we get boats, siege weaponry, siege defensive upgrade requirements, more node buildings (i.e. higher node lvls), maybe some better implementations of war types (both node and guild) that require some grand scale gathering - with all of those things in place, gathering basic mats would still be valuable enough for the process to not feel useless.

I'd still argue that having rarity upgrades as a yet another mat sink would provide a better econ gameplay, because it would create more options for item usage, but if I'm wrong in that assumption do point it out.

Thanks, I skipped some stuff personally and I wasn't sure if it was a mistake to do so, you've confirmed for me that it is.

In Ashes, with the current system, it will be difficult to not have Rarity take up separate Econ slots.
Comparing to TL:
Rarity in TL explicitly has separate Econ slots on purpose, but we have one example of a place where it doesn't, cooking. Cooking also lacks the conversion, though, partly because they know this to be true for cooking (I hope that's why, I feel like their Econ designers are quite good and I really want to believe it's not by accident).

If I have a Blue grade Freshwater 'oily' Fish in TL, and I make food with it, I will get 3x Green Grade result, each lasting 30m long. This used to be implemented as 'increased chances of getting 1x Blue grade result lasting 1h long'. This was the FF11 method, but FF11 didn't have the Rarity options on input .

If you used White grade fish for the same dish, you would now make 1x result, and before, you had nearly no chance (or no chance) of the Blue Grade result, and a chance of a White Grade result (which you no longer have, if you do it this way now you will get 1x Green Grade result).

But economically this doesn't make any sense for many reasons, the RNG was obviously part of it, but it's not super important. Right now it's basically saying '1 Blue Grade fish is worth 15 White Grade Fish', because of the difference in amount made .

This is the illustration of what I'm talking about because it creates the same sort of inconsistency that would exist in Ashes, but at least here it is factored for, and I'd say implemented well, actually.

Even if Intrepid attempted to tune every Gathering/Input Artisanship to prevent this, they will all end up weirdly different if not unintuitive, and more importantly tightly developer controlled in the same space because:
1) They would have to make sure that every conversion was either equal in terms of time, or in terms of focus
2) They would have to make sure that the jump between grades was numerically 'balanced' properly in terms of its desirability.

Using the above, not saying that Ashes would have to turn out like pre-fix Throne and Liberty cooking, but hopefully Corey and the others crunching through this madness get what I mean...

No one needed a 15m duration White Grade Fish Steak usually. Maybe for bosses. But you had no reason to make them on purpose. It cost 5x as many casts of your rod to make this.

It can't be left as 'White Grade Fish x1 makes White Grade Fish Steak x1' because that would instantly make White Grade Fish 'more efficient' at least when not factoring hugely for other ingredients (which is then a massive battle to make this work for all ingredients of every synth - forgive me for calling them that, I am leaving it, in this case, cause I know I'll do it again too).

It definitely can't be '10 White Grade Fish -> X White Grade Fish Steak' combined with '1 Green Grade Fish -> X White Grade Fish Steak', this is Market Oversaturation.

It can't be '1 Green Grade Fish -> X/5 White Grade Fish Steak' without requiring you to clamp and control fishing itself to ridiculous degrees, even moreso than New World.

This goes back to 'Artisanship Team working too hard', but it applies to other things. it's a system that basically puts a massive strain on the Econ team and constantly develops new holes, even with formulae and probably even with AI (I have both of these myself and I still would not do this, that might be bias but remember, this post is about moreso explaining why I hate the system as an Econ Designer , I never have another direct reason which is why I don't have visceral rage at it in TL... yet.)

Not even BDO does this, exactly. They have their own whole 'way that works' which is an even longer explanation than the other two.

The reason Ludullu does not have the perception of different rarities having different Econ slots is precisely because he comes from L2 where they don't, and the L2-tier economy that goes with that. TL is the example of 'a developer trying to use the L2 approach a bit, to Cooking, and throwing in the FF11-style Output Result'. It did not work because the two need a System type effort to mesh them. This was done correctly by their designer.

But I'd bet they are over there struggling on how to do this somewhat for other materials, because the 10->1 Grade Higher, L2 style 'ladder' that is implemented for Gold, Manasteel, etc, is a balance nightmare. This is probably 'why' their Econ options haven't expanded on that yet. There's a simple solution, but that's getting into 'solution' territory, and the solution that TL needs is the same one Ashes needs so...

I will only mention the hypothetical, therefore.
Throne and Liberty has Weapons made of 'Silver'. This isn't 'true' in the sense that when you make these items they are actually possible to make from 'Rare Manasteel' or even 'Rare Mystwood'. No one is paying attention to this, it's just a shoddy abstraction layer that no one is thinking of as Artisanship and therefore won't actually complain about . That is, I give TL a pass because it's so jank as to be ignored whereas Ashes would not get that pass, and BDO doing the same would be 'constant irritation, but not enough to bother saying anything'.

If TL were to introduce a new gatherable 'Silver' with the same intention as Ashes to eventually create an FF11 tier Artisanship system, then it would make nearly no sense to have Silver be converted into Manasteel. It would be fine to have Silver replace 'Rare Manasteel', but then there would be some weapons that would not make sense like huge Iron-type Greatswords that appear to be the same as relatively smaller Daggers of Undead Severing (Silver-type).

So they're in that situation of 'we need Blue Grade Iron/Manasteel, and Blue Grade Silver, to elevate our Artisanship from ignorable jank to presentable, but we shouldn't convert the Silver 'up' to Epic Manasteel.
Now, you either have the Silver only drop in a few specific places or from Gathering (because Silver Weapons aren't that needed) making it 'Niche' (or useless) or you have Silver share all the Rare manasteel drop spots (this would be worse).

In Throne and Liberty this is easy. It would absolutely work, I doubt anyone would even complain, long story. But they don't have 'Gathering' as a profession, it works like FF11 again. We do it, and some people really are (and would be) 'Gatherers', but it means something different and has no levels (and in this game type, it should not)

In Ashes, you have to consider 'whether to even add Silver'. A robust Artisanship system where Gatherers have variety in their experience and outputs is not supported by a 10->1 grade system.

Yet again I'm 'cutting it short, assuming that the Econ/Artisanship team has already had all the conversations that are the prerequisites of the above, so it's probably still unclear', but that's enough essay for this specific post. Might write yet another 'reply' in a bit, regardless of if this clarified for my 'bias checker' or not.

Thanks for that, Ludullu, if you read all of this one too.

Ludullu wrote: »

If Ashes had smth like "you can only craft this bow if you have a particular rarity of wood - no other rarity tier will do", then yeah, the examples would match and I'd probably agree with your dislike. But right now (and seeeemingly in the plans as well) the rarity itself doesn't change what the item becomes. It could be argued that additional stats that come from rarity tiers "change" the item, but imo that's somewhat of a weak argument.

And, separately, why is this one 'a weak argument'?

Basically, if 'only the Blue Grade of this item ever sells, and you need Blue grade materials to consistently make Blue Grade result', from the econ designer perspective (this one ISN'T just me), those 'aren't the same item'. They have the same name, that's it.

We have proof of this in Throne and Liberty as well because of the massive gaps in cost between different Traits for specific items, but even that still works like FF, it's not 'directly dev controlled'.

They just figured out the sensible workaround of not changing the name when the traits change and expecting the average player to not care.

Early FF11 would probably have made the 'mistake' of calling my current body piece something like "Enlightened Infused Swift Divine Justiciar Attire", perhaps even making a whole annoying system to change the names when the Traits change (I can't say for sure because FF did have a system that is equivalent to Traits just not as good, and they didn't do it there).

But the cost of the trait that gives 'Swift' is double the cost of what gives 'Enlightened' or even 'Infused' on AH right now. So for an Econ Designer these 'are not the same item' (this is why I am not explaining the traits and just using made-up names, to emphasize this point).

The thing is, though, the players are the ones who 'decided these aren't the same item'. Why is "Swift" more valuable than "Enlightened"? Playstyle requirements of 'the sort of person who actually wears this body piece. Those could change tomorrow .

Note, I'm not criticizing how Ashes works in the related way, as I understand it, they just 'add more traits for rarer gear'. I have criticisms of this, but the above is not meant to be one. That's a question for the Combat team. If they want to 'put in the effort to make it so that people ever bother making Green versions of certain body pieces by making sure that the gap between 1 'Trait' and 2 Traits is consistently good, they can drag the Artisanship team up that mountain (again, super biased). In that case I would say 'I can see how you can get here but I envy neither team, good luck'.

But it's when they start going up to 'we're going to do all that and assume that once we do, we can also add the 10->1 Gathered items conversion, and it definitely won't feel jank', I call it there. No way.

Azherae wrote: »

The reason Ludullu does not have the perception of different rarities having different Econ slots is precisely because he comes from L2 where they don't, and the L2-tier economy that goes with that.

There is kiiiinda an example of this from L2, but, as I see it, it was used more as a catch-up mechanic rather than a pure implementation of "making the econ better".

In L2 you can put elemental stones/crystals into your gear to either get that element as an attack attribute or as a defense one against the opposite element (weap and armor respectively). In earlier versions you only had Stones which would bring you up to 150 value on a weapon. You'd get stones from mob drops and you could also trade stones within their pair for free (fire-water, earth-wind, holy-dark).

In a later update Crystals were added, which would take you from 150 to 300 value (in steps of 6, same as stones). You could only get crystals by gathering a specific item in a very specific place at a very specific time window (12h of it after a certain dungeon was cleared 45 times on the server).

In a yet later update we became able to trade 5 stones and some money to 1 crystal.

I thought about giving this example because on paper it's a similar principle of "you use items that effectively have the same effect, but have drastically different acquisition methods", but, as I said at the start here, I disregarded it because economy of Stones/Crystals was wildly different by the time the trade became available. Well, I assume it was, because I didn't play official servers that would've been permanent through all the updates, so if you want more info James would probably be the guy for that.

BUT

Azherae wrote: »

And, separately, why is this one 'a weak argument'?

I think I was wrong in this statement, mainly because I concentrated to much on the Stones/Crystals part of things.

It kinda avoided my mind at the time, but I should've been thinking about additional stats from rarity in Ashes as additional effects from Soul Crystals in L2. While the acquisition of those things differs immensely, the result is pretty much the same: you have a basic weapon w/o SC/rarity vs you have a weapon with valuable stats if you have SC/high rarity on it.

And Ashes takes it even further by letting us increase those stats through enchantment, while in L2 SC's effects were static.

And I think you fish example made me understand the overall point better, especially in the context of non-gear artisanry. And considering that the entire artisanry in Ashes is so damn interconnected, if you changed stuff related to gear - you'd fuck up non-gear things as well, which means that direct upward trade is not the solution.

But it did bring up another idea in my mind. What about upward rarity crafting (so just at the last stage of the process) through the help of an item acquired through deconstruction of a lower rarity item of the exact same kind?

So let's say you're trying to make a Blue Sword. You have a ton of green mats because you were lucky enough to get a ton of them, but you don't have any blue. What if you could craft those Greens, deconstruct them, get a special item from those deconstructions and then use it to boost the rarity of a new Green craft up to a Blue craft?

If I'm not mistaken, this would simply increase the demand for lower rarities of mats, but it would do it across the board rather than just "I just need a shitton of trees and I'll be able to get super rare trees", which would've impacted all the other gatherables that are either not nearly as abundant as trees or are not used in as big of quantities in crafting recipes.

And, at least to me, the process itself seems straightforward enough to explain to a newbie players. "You want a higher rarity item? You can either craft it directly with proper rarity mats or you can craft it by making several of that item on a lower rarity and "combining those"".

Right, that's partly how TL works now.

There's a whole subsystem.

You don't 'Trait Up' common Traits on your Purple gear by constantly trying to get another Purple (it's def faster, but you don't need to). You get or make (in Ashes case or in a hypothetical TL with artisanship) Blue gear with the desired trait and fuse it in, for a chance to Trait up.

Then you have Blessing when you fail, which is basically 'Failstacks but sane'.

I have no issues with that part actually, I know there's a way it can go poorly if mishandled, but I would give a dev the benefit of the doubt when it came to that (and in TL this has paid off, but that's another long story about them and their skill).

If TL introduced Artisanship and disabled the up-trade on certain things we wouldn't all suddenly 'be stuck'. We'd switch to making Blue Gear, which they actually make very DIFFICULT and unnecessary to do right now.

But the slots for it are all there.

Technically, TL specifically makes sure that you can't do the last thing you said, though, to maintain the competition and 'gear chase'.

You have to earn the Purple yourself, but once you've done it, the 'Artisans' put in work in other ways toward your improvement of it. If they added Jewelry Making, I would still need to go fight bosses or use the AH to buy one of the low supply of Purple Rings, for example, but once I have it, I either 'only need two more' or need something else I can farm, and then after that I only need Blues and Greens with the same qualities (Traits) to min-max it.

Honestly I barely use the up-convert as is, I use the down-convert more often (except for progression type items, which I think Ashes doesn't even have, and Throne and Liberty doesn't even need - they're about to drastically reduce the requirement for most of them, I think they realized this too).

I've had enough time to gather data on this actually, since game start. The number of people who 'expect to be able to upgrade their Green Gear into Blue gear seems to be about 10%. The number of people who I've seen be confused about the inability to combine Green Gear directly into Blue gear is about 20%-ish.

The few I've seen get the actual explanation of 'it wouldn't be much of an MMO if you didn't have to group up to get good gear and could just upgrade into it', and then reject this explanation, is pretty high, true... but Ashes isn't really marketing to that subset anyway.

Azherae wrote: »

Technically, TL specifically makes sure that you can't do the last thing you said, though, to maintain the competition and 'gear chase'.

This could be addressed with crafting dials, once that feature is in.

Say, a blue item has 2 substats. A normal recipe would give you those 2 substat dials as long as you provide the blue items. But if you deconstruct Green items, you'll get a piece of an "incomplete recipe of that item". Number of pieces is a balancing thing for later, but the incomplete recipe would just give you one substat, but it makes the blue item even if you put in green mats.

I think my explanation here is a bit too convoluted, but I think it could be streamlined enough for people to understand. The core gearchase would still be there, but unlucky people would at least be closer in power to the lucky ones.

Ludullu wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

Technically, TL specifically makes sure that you can't do the last thing you said, though, to maintain the competition and 'gear chase'.

This could be addressed with crafting dials, once that feature is in.

Say, a blue item has 2 substats. A normal recipe would give you those 2 substat dials as long as you provide the blue items. But if you deconstruct Green items, you'll get a piece of an "incomplete recipe of that item". Number of pieces is a balancing thing for later, but the incomplete recipe would just give you one substat, but it makes the blue item even if you put in green mats.

I think my explanation here is a bit too convoluted, but I think it could be streamlined enough for people to understand. The core gearchase would still be there, but unlucky people would at least be closer in power to the lucky ones.

It's convoluted only in mild ways, but it's also troublesome unless we're talking about the Green items here only coming from drops and then being deconstructed, rather than 'made by players for the purposes of constantly rolling for a chance to get the Blue Item Litho/Recipe'.

There's another essay of reasons why this doesn't work without them being primarily drops (which is, again, probably how TL got to where its design is).

However, I would still expect that for 90% of people the TL version of this would be both easier to understand and more comfortable. Devs have to be very careful about 'the way their game feels when the population/activity is lower, and this implementation would be a bit of a negative on a low pop server and a huge negative on a 'dying' server'.

So, obviously biased, but if asked I would do what TL did and not this, because this also changes the filter for 'the type of thinking that succeeds at the game'.

TL players have a lot of economic restraint and sensibility compared to most. We're on Day 2 of Talandre update, people are selling entirely will-definitely-be-pretty-common-in-a-week Purples for stupid prices on AH and... no one is buying.

Whereas my guild/group are all trying to figure out how to get Lucent to buy cosmetics, and all the older gear is moving around/selling because that's the 'correct thing' to buy. There's no 'maybe if I do this thing 10,000 times I can beat out everyone who isn't willing to do it that many times'.

Azherae wrote: »

There's no 'maybe if I do this thing 10,000 times I can beat out everyone who isn't willing to do it that many times'.

On this particular topic btw. TL doesn't have item destruction or deleveling on upward "enchantment" failure, right?

Ashes supposedly will, so any minmaxer will be trying to OE their gear as much as possible (even P2 is an example of that) and that process will require refarming of the same mats for crafting of the same items over and over and over and over again.

Mainly exactly because of what you point out in other comments today - legendary will be truly rare. Which means that if people want to get close to the legendary stats/power, they'll try enchanting their lower rarity stuff up to it, while the legendary stuff itself won't be OEd by the absolute majority of people simply because remaking it would be near-impossible.

This was the main "artisan" gameplay loop in late-game L2. Once majority of people have gotten to a roughly same spot in their gear progress, the ones who OEd their gear have a slight edge above others. And I know that we've discussed this particular topic before, but rn I'm more interested in the economic comparisson of "you gotta craft a ton of items so you can craft a more rare one" vs "you gotta craft a ton of items so you can OE one successfully".

Outside of the obvious "you'll need enchantment scrolls, which is its own economic lever", how big is the economic difference between those 2 situations? I'd imagine in both cases majority of people would simply not have the time/willingness to go through with that kind of grind. At least that was usually the case in my experience. Whole guilds would only have 3-4 people that would go super hardcore on OEing their stuff, and it would usually be the people who can play the most.

OEing will also be way more rng-based, so I assume the "crafting upwards" case would have more people attempting it, right?

And ultimately, is it just the case of "if we have both of these, the pressure on the system is too big so it'll collapse more often than not"?

Any system could be made to work, depending on the game.

As it is now, Ashes' problem would only be that it's (possibly) still trying to appeal to 'too wide' a playerbase.

If looking at specifically 'Craft a ton to get higher' vs 'Craft a ton so you can OE', those are the same except that OE with deleveling or destruction is a deeply hated mechanic.

If an entire group of players that I was making a game for were to declare 'we want OE! We want losses! We want randomness to partially determine who is stronger!' and I believed them, I would go ahead and add that type of system, the economic difference is relatively small.

BDO's reports generally indicated that they don't actually have too many people with maxed out gear, but then they kept giving people more because it was too ego-crushing. Ashes is a largely 'ego-crusher' game, so I'd expect them not to do that and just leave the bruised egos to find something else to do, either in game or outside it.

I believe that the TL Devs are, right now, trying to 'figure out what they can use as a sink without just getting bombarded with complaints about losing progress'. Having a working Cooking system is helping, for now, but their goals of 'making gameplay somewhat accessible to players without a massive amount of time' and 'making the game fun to farm for hours at a time when near-max' are directly opposed, for now.

I don't like having both in Ashes because it increases market volatility beyond what I consider a safe threshold for a competitive MMORPG, but that's just my opinion (this one isn't about preference, exactly, though I do prefer lower volatility, this is me moreso saying 'yeah I don't think this can work at all ).

Some people just want to grind 10h a day and some players don't/can't. There's (almost) nothing designers can do about that.

Oh, also, to clarify, the reason why TL doesn't have or need those things is actually because the goal of the Economy Designers of TL is 'make players want to trade and use the Auction as much as possible, or use an internal system for Guild Lucent'.

But the 'failstack' system works the way that James (for example) would have wanted. You can build up only a relatively smaller amount of blessing on an item and then choose to use it, the item doesn't delevel or similar but the Blessing can be lost (or, you can play it super safe and stack the blessing all the way up to the max or near-max).

Ashes doesn't actually have an incentive to increase player-to-player economic velocity, so it is more likely to turn into 'one player just doing the same thing as a grind simply because no one else wants to do it'. Whereas TL works like what I'm usually talking about. You farm the thing you want and sell it to other people, then buy what you want. The more often this happens, the more money NCSoft makes, but also the more generally fun farming is, and the less likely it is for even the more successful players to spend time on things they don't like doing 'because everyone else is also trying to do it themselves'.

That's what I was referring to with that line you quoted.

In Ashes:
You, as a person who has an open Artisan skill slot, also want a really good Sword. You're incentivized to make thousands of swords, deconstruct them for recipes for better swords, and continue doing this, because you 'see how you can make a number go up' (not you personally, Ludullu, though you've admitted to being like this). At the end of it all, you might 'discover everyone else had the same thought and now you can't make more money, but you at least got a Sword.

In Throne and Liberty:
Even if there were Artisan skills (let's assume they match the FF11 ones for simplicity). You have a slot open and want a really good sword. You know, however, that the Sword you want to make is generally going to be sold often and you can't make as much (the main point here is that it's much easier to know this beforehand by the game's nature), so you decide to focus on what you like doing or can use for yourself, and just sell the result of that, because you only need to get the good drop once.

The main difference is that with OE systems, literally no one has any idea of what a specific period's supply and demand curves are. So you could make 100 swords and someone buy all and not get their OE finished, or they could buy 2, get super lucky, and now you have 98 swords you can't sell to that person.

Sure, this balances out over time statistically, but the driving force of player economic behaviour in this case is their personal view, and they can't see all the statistics as easily. It's subtle sometimes, but it cascades fairly strongly when something shifts.

Azherae wrote: »

Sure, this balances out over time statistically, but the driving force of player economic behaviour in this case is their personal view, and they can't see all the statistics as easily. It's subtle sometimes, but it cascades fairly strongly when something shifts.

I think this is where L2's super limited gearing/build design played into its own economy well.

If you are a mage there's pretty much a single BiS weapon/armor per tier for you, no matter what kind of mage you are. So if someone's doing a big haul of OEing, both crafting a ton of items and getting a ton of scrolls - they'll always be able to sell any stage of that process. If they got lucky and OEd their own weapons super high super quickly - they got scrolls and mats leftover. They can OE those to sell them to people that haven't OEd their own gear. If they fail OE, they'll get a universal crafting material, which can always be sold and/or used in future crafts.

In Ashes it'll definitely be near fucking impossible to do the same. We'll have dials that will be used to specialize weapons to very particular builds. We'll have additional stats that might not fit particular classes/archetypes. We'll have "anyone can use any gear" design so your seeming good slightly OEd leftover will get completely lost in the sea of other items that might fit players way better.

I do wonder how they'll end up balancing any/all of that, if at all. Wouldn't be surprised if we just end up with some form of horizontal enchantment that simply helps make more builds, or a very limited vertical one that doesn't destroy the item itself.

I'm still, obviously, super partial to my ooooold suggestion for decay-based diagonal enchantment design, but I doubt Intrepid's going for anything similar.