Questions and suggestions on the new Artisan material requirement changes

I guess I'll just throw on that I hope I contributed a bit to the pile of 'people suggesting more mobs drop materials'.

Also, in support of the work put in by your Guild's equivalent 'spreadsheet person', I can say:

"Intrepid, the point at which we become vitriolic and don't play is when a single useful body armor piece for a guild member takes/costs over 150 man-hours, 3-4h a day over 8 players in the appropriate location for building up toward it, over 5 play sessions."

(I've attempted to encode as much 'data' as I could into that without another essay, but it shouldn't be taken as 'this feels good/about right', it's definitely 'this is the limit').

I'll also add a personal point here. The "decreased amount of full loot from mobs" seems to have been a god damn lie or it is completely broken. In the past 2 days, over ~2-3h of overall gameplay, I've experienced ~15 full item drops. Majority of them uncommon and a few rares. This was from plain mobs and 1*s. I can't even imagine how much stuff the 3* farmers were getting.

I don't remember it now exactly and I'd need to sift through my P1 vods, but I'm almost sure that I didn't even see that much loot drop back in P1. And what's even weirder is that a third of the drops I experienced came from mobs 3+ lvls below mine. I thought they were supposed to have EVEN LOWER chances to drop anything, let alone a full item.

So this kind of drop rates in the context of insane material requirement increase sure makes things feel like crafting is still useless.

My personal main suggestion to resolve this would be this:

• mobs only drop parts of gear (i.e. crafting materials relating to the full item)
• crafters need to combine those parts into a bigger part (not yet a full item)
• and then use those big parts to craft the full item, while adding other general mats

Both crafting actions should give crafting xp.

This way mob grind will directly generate crafting work, directly give crafters xp w/o requiring other general mats, and would slow down the meteoric rise of hardcore players.

Like, after my 2h of farming HH today, I feel like any attempt to even try and craft something for myself is utterly useless, cause I could simply spend more time farming those mobs. Especially considering that the rarity of drops would be definitely higher than what I'd be able to get through current crafting. And, on top of that, the items I was getting were lvl10, while we can't even craft that shit.

The problem with that is that it's really unintuitive compared to what is necessary for the sort of game Ashes is. It's actually much better to have some more integrated concepts/ladders than that, which is why I don't think that what they have now is built to do anything other than facilitate and help them test PvP.

It's also not necessary to have mobs drop zero gear, the important thing is to have them only drop certain types/slots of gear, so I'd actually have to ask you what exactly you've found them to be dropping.

I feel like discussing crafting at this time is just repeating the entire design stack due to the fact that none of it seems to be implemented, and if the droprates genuinely haven't changed much, we're just gonna have a lot of players coming by to tell them the same things again.

I'm just glad to hear that they at least want to go in the direction of what they originally pitched. I find myself missing the OG playloop more and more lately as I play more of other MMOs and really feel that missing aspect.

Eh, I'll just repeat as always:
Goblins drop Earrings (7% droprate, -1% for every level over them), Deconstruct Earrings, get metal fragments/nuggets, use 5x for one ingot.
Goblins drop 'scarves', deconstruct into thread, use 6x for one cloth or similar.

A 7% diminishing droprate across two items (i.e. they can share it) leads to the average player/group getting 1 drop every 10-15 kills, which makes it so that 1h of play probably leads to being able to make SOMETHING, but not so strong that you'd always choose to grind mobs instead of gathering.

Well, I hope they figure out something...

Azherae wrote: »

I'd actually have to ask you what exactly you've found them to be dropping.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyKHuX8GE8o

Arcane Mind's Helm from Arsonist 17:45
Snactus Skulker's Bracers from Archer 21:28
Uncomm Bracers from 1* Aggressor 51:37
Brass Wand from 1* Cleric 1:03:11
Uncomm Tin Long Spellbow from 1* Ranger 1:05:17
Uncomm Forsaken Blades Pauldrons from 1* Aggressor 1:22:12
Uncomm Forsaken Blades Mace from 1* Aggressor 1:27:29
Uncomm Forsaken Blades Shortbow from 1* Aggressor 1:36:52
Uncomm Sanctus Skulker's Boots from 1* Ranger 1:55:22
Rare Copper Long Spellbow from Lvl7 Raider 2:36:33
Uncommon Copper Short Spellbow from lvl7 Raider 2:40:31

Looks to me like the Glint drop reduction wasn't fully implemented either.

Maybe we just misunderstood something about what was said?

That said, I didn't watch the whole thing, and I don't think anyone feels like writing a screenparser for just Glint drop frequency for something we can just ask, so yeah, what's your feeling on if less Glint is dropping?

Azherae wrote: »

Looks to me like the Glint drop reduction wasn't fully implemented either.

Maybe we just misunderstood something about what was said?

That said, I didn't watch the whole thing, and I don't think anyone feels like writing a screenparser for just Glint drop frequency for something we can just ask, so yeah, what's your feeling on if less Glint is dropping?

Imo I'm getting more glint than I did in P1 But I haven't properly tracked it either, so can't say for sure.

And on the topic of gear drops. I just raided Dusty, because of the servers going down, and he was talking about looting 40 items in ~4h, as a party.

I really got no damn clue where they reduced loot chances. Dusty explained it as "mobs outside of your direct lvl range (+-3) have become way worse in terms of loot", but imo that's barely a damn change then. Only hardcores went for 6++ upward lvl difference during farming, so while it might be a good thing to slow them down a bit, the fact that we literally already have lvl25 (since, like, 2 days ago too) - it's obvious that those loot decreases didn't do shit.

And considering that I dropped a few items even from mobs that were outside the 3lvl range, I feel like even that side of drop rates is poorly controlled. I'm sure I might be somewhat lucky (cause today I got big drops as well), but I'm not THAT lucky.

But... isn't that really bad?

That's just a clamp on skilled players with no real economic ...

No... what?

My head hurts.

Azherae wrote: »

But... isn't that really bad?

That's just a clamp on skilled players with no real economic ...

No... what?

My head hurts.

Dusty is just a streamer, so don't take his words as gospel, but he reasoned that thoughtprocess as "we tried farming mobs way above our lvls and barely got anything, but today we farmed at our lvl and got 40 drops in just a few hours".

And I've seen people say that all the lvl25s have gotten there "naked", because they obviously fought upwards and would've probably not gotten any real loot for that.

And my example would fit his reasoning as well, cause I either fight weaker mobs or ones within 3lvls of me and I've gotten mad loot. Several people literally told me to report my loot, because "that's waaay too much".

Well, whatever, I'm not in the mood for playing the guessing game of 'what does Intrepid actually understand about MMO design?' for this pass so I guess I'll wait for the next one. Thanks for the data as always.

To Intrepid, or any other designer:

Do not punish skilled players for fighting strong creatures, even if you do not reward them for doing so. Forcing us to fight only mobs that are too easy relative to our skill and preparation is just asking us to get bored and leave. Explicitly punishing us for doing so is just telling skilled players to fuck off.

We don't need more drops per hour. We don't even technically need better drops. We will find a way to make our game experience interesting, if you let us. But if you punish us for seeking challenge and succeeding (especially relative to those who don't), nobody who seeks challenge will play your game.

I tend to wander into areas way above my level in MMOs and then try to make it work. I often succeed. I like that Ashes doesn't "talk down" to me by having a level scaling formula so aggressive for evasion that even something a little above my level is completely unhittable no matter what I build, but if those lowered drop rates are real then it just feels like another point where I'm confused about the philosophy that Ashes is going for. Do you want this to be hardcore PvX or not? X includes the E here. You should expect that if you market yourself as a game for hardcore players, that said hardcore players will go hit the biggest thing they feel confident in and do it, and not rewarding them properly just seems like an insult.

It also brings into question economic design, because if this works both ways that means stuff *below* your level by a lot also doesn't drop anything, and eventually you'll make a situation where if a server's population is stable with not a lot of noobs coming in, that people would have to make alt accounts to keep lower-level crafting going.

I really hope I'm wrong. All I want is to hit mobs, get some kind of leather or "gear meant for monsters that I can't wear" that I then need to disassemble, and go glue those bits together with ore to make armor or weapons. I hope you can deliver on that.

GrilledCheeseMojito wrote: »

It also brings into question economic design, because if this works both ways that means stuff *below* your level by a lot also doesn't drop anything, and eventually you'll make a situation where if a server's population is stable with not a lot of noobs coming in, that people would have to make alt accounts to keep lower-level crafting going.

That was in fact the L2 design, though it was more about the efficiency of your farming. Lvl70 might be getting 1-2 steel from a mob that's somewhat hard to kill, while lvl40 could get 3-4 steel from a relatively easy mob.

I personally liked this, because it meant that newbies would always have a way to make good early money, but I do understand that "just make an alt" is a disliked approach to when the newbie faucet dries up.

So a few assorted thoughts on this.

I think that breaking down lower-level items into crafting materials for stronger gear is one of the better systems for handling this kind of thing. It means you can give low-level players easy access to weaker gear (they just need to grind normal mobs for a bit), while still giving them an incentive to continue fighting in the same areas after they get it.

I really, really dislike games where players are disincentivized from trying to fight monsters stronger than their level range. If skilled players are capable of working out strategies that let them take on very strong enemies, they should be rewarded for it, not punished. I'm a bit more ambivalent about reduced droprates from mobs that you've leveled past. I can see scenarios in which this is both a benefit and detriment.

This is definitely becoming a derail, and a derail based on speculation too, but I'll try to bring it back.

Let's think briefly about high level play rather than low.

Ashes is balanced around parties of 8. Which means if you're going into a dangerous area to collect, and possibly fight over, materials or mob drops, you will be expected to be in a group of 8. If you aren't, you will probably die (at least, this is what happens at night in reasonably profitable locations in Throne and Liberty and what I've experienced in other games a little).

So you need to go to a place where you get the correct droprate on most mobs, in a group large enough to defend itself, and then those mobs would need to also be challenging while being 'only' a few levels over. They could expand the range as you hit level brackets like other games, but then it's back to band-aids that people have to learn.

But then, thinking about the OP, how do you actually gear up and is this just going to create the huge gap we see in nearly every Korean-styled MMO? Because those situations are 'unfavorable' for us at minimum. Basically, if you say 'grind gear', and then you can feel the gear, but then you also have to upgrade it, and enhance it, and have 10+ slots, and customize, across all players...

The level of the mobs is going to have almost no meaning relative to the level of the players. Sure, a lot of this is because Ashes is obviously at this point missing all of the other progression spaces and liminal experiences that take up playtime, but I'm only talking about the fact that 8 players with 'Ok' gear unenhanced will either be 'entirely unable to meaningfully fight mobs 3 levels over', or '8 players with great gear will experience no challenge from anything but still farm them super fast'.

This is a problem in TL now and that game has at least 3 stopgaps against it, along with smaller parties and instanced content, and minimal Artisanship.

In Ashes this would be much worse. Artisanship grind + enhancing power grind + (SPECULATIVE) gear drop limits is another disaster recipe. That said, this could just be someone spreading misinformation that Intrepid will unfortunately now be forced to clear up, so there's that.

Azherae wrote: »

But then, thinking about the OP, how do you actually gear up and is this just going to create the huge gap we see in nearly every Korean-styled MMO? Because those situations are 'unfavorable' for us at minimum. Basically, if you say 'grind gear', and then you can feel the gear, but then you also have to upgrade it, and enhance it, and have 10+ slots, and customize, across all players...

Steven likes the word "dynamic", so what if we had dynamic loot tables? Assuming mobs will in fact get material drops in them, how about smth like this:

• mobs have 3 types of loot groups
  1. materials (both specialized and general)
  2. full gear
  3. horizontal enhancement items
• when killing mobs at your lvl - gained xp is normal, gear drops are normal (normality figured out through testing), materials and enhancement are lessened
• when killing under your lvl - xp is higher, mats are higher, gear and enhance is lower
• over lvl - xp is lower, enhance is higher, gear and mats are lower

At release people are farming mobs of roughly their own lvl and get gear for that. The gear allows them to fight above their lvl, so they can now enhance their gear. Enhanced gear makes the fights easier, so they level up to those mobs faster, enter their lvl range which enables their gear drop tables. Any unfilled slots of gear can be filled by fighting weaker mobs solo (i.e. on people's additional time) and crafting it.

Depending on the finalized leveling speed (cause it sure still feels insanely fast), skillful players could use the enhancement they got for killing stronger mobs on the gear they get from said mobs once they get into their lvl range, rather than on the previous tier.

This suggestion might heavily rely on proper horizontal mob difficulty. So, say, your group is lvl15. You're fighting low 20s lava mobs. They're giving you fire resist enhancements. While you were getting enough of them for your entire group, you've reached lvl18-19, so now low 20s is the "gear drop table". So now you have a choice, do you use the enhancements, make the fights easy as hell and grind the higher tier of gear real quick, or do you keep up the challenge by fighting low 20s ice mobs, who'll still be giving you gear, but now you don't have proper resists against them.

And so, that kind of situation could only exist if switching mobs horizontaly is a viable difficulty choice, rather than saying "well, the only challenge for us is when the mobs are several lvls higher than us". Ideally this would depend on party's skill builds, which would in turn need to be fairly limited in their switchability (so, none of the current "I can switch my entire build on the fly for no cost"). So if your mage is a fire one, your summoner chose an ice elemental (which is weak to fire) and your bard has earth-based buffs (if we even get that kind of granularity in our buffs) - lava mobs would be somewhat difficult for you before you get resists to them, but, after those resists, switching to smth like "wind mobs" would still keep the difficulty relatively high, even if the mob lvl is now not as higher than yours as the lava mobs' was when you started fighting those.

I'm not sure if I'm making any damn sense with all of that, cause I feel like I got lost in my own thoughts along the way But my point is, would a dynamic loot table system work for this? Has any other game tried that?

I'll maybe go into that separately, because it is sort of a thing in Onigiri but it would take long to explain. The issue is with crafting, though. And demand-crafting doesn't work like that at all. So while your thoughts are very solid (as usual for FF, TL, etc), they have trouble in Ashes.

Because the choice isn't 'use the Enhancements', it's 'craft gear with the enhancements'.

And the OP is about an econ thing. If we are skilled and beating up the Lava mobs without Fire Resist, we won't put in any effort to ever craft Fire Resist, or to ask for it. There's no way we'd detour to do over 80 man-hours of work to get a Fire Resist for the grind/leveling part of that mob experience if they weren't posing a challenge, especially in a PvX game.

tl;dr works in 'The Fence', not in AoC as we understand it now (this is probably still unclear but obv explaining it would take so long ).

Azherae wrote: »

tl;dr works in 'The Fence', not in AoC as we understand it now (this is probably still unclear but obv explaining it would take so long ).

But we're supposed to get the horizontal enhancement stuff, which should in theory work just like the current vertical scrolls, but for horizontal effects. Or, at least, that's my usual assumption based on usual reasonings.

But I get the point. Even if there were fire mobs on later lvls, it would simply make the current farm useless, cause the reward would have no function for a long time. And if there's several alternative paths through lvling, the economic impact of fire resist enhancements wouldn't be big enough to justify the time spent.

Would doubling down on horizontal effects be too much (both in terms of economic impact and the build balancing side)? So, say, you could use "drop of lava" as both a crafting material, that would give you a fire resist dial, and as a direct enhancement material that gives you fire resist directly. So, in theory, you'd be able to craft an item with FR and then add even more FR to it, if you have 2 drops of lava.

I'd imagine it wouldn't create more use-related confusion for people, cause we already have items that have several uses with branching craftability growth. And the economic value for drops would, at least in part, come from PvP too, cause it would help you fight a fire mage. Which could kiiiiinda work for my lava/ice example, cause if your group uses fire resist enchancement and then goes to fight the ice mobs, theoretically, groups with fire mages would be present there (cause it's easy for them) and now you'd have PvE difficulty, while also having PvP ease, so in a way this kind of approach would serve as a PvX tuning tool.

This was kiiiiinda how some private L2 servers worked on release. The easiest elemental stones to get were Divine ones. And a lot of mobs would have divine weakness, so people would just use these stones to make their attacks have divine attribute, at the start of a server. This would then mean that boosting divine defense (by switching stones to Dark ones) would help you in pvp. And then, anyone who'd go out of their way to farm some other elemental stones to change their attack attribute would have a bigger advantage in pvp, cause others wouldn't have as big of a defense agaisnt them.

Sure, but the problem is still the same.

According to OP's data, it would take around 130 hours with the types of numbers we'd see, to even try that "Double Fire Resist Set", probably more on a Tank.

So, definitely worth it, but then the 'correct' thing to do is 'only farm them when they have the most drops' (which would be true no matter what, but IF the limit is above also, it means you can't get a specialist head start).

So, maybe Double Fire Resist gear would help in PvP, but in terms of 'I would like to fight mobs while they are still a challenge and still profit', nah. It would just be the usual modern 'You're too good at this so we have to nerf either your rewards or your fun'.

Which, btw, is fine, because in most games, people like that have the option to choose fun and still get to keep pushing, but if there's one thing Throne and Liberty has absolutely confirmed for me, it's that PvP games don't let players do this for long, and grindy PvP games multiply that, probably about as much as they multiplied the resource requirements for crafting (TL somewhat gets a pass because its econ design is worlds better than anything Ashes is even capable of being).

We have not received permission from lamina5432 to share the quoted post.

The concepts from the wiki are solid, but the implementation has been 'all over the place' for quite a while now, and I don't think anyone outside of the Dev team and maybe Phoenix Initiative knows why it's like this.

It's definitely one of those confusing things in the AoC design space where most people read the above things you mentioned, imagine or visualize the relatively obvious ways they would be implemented (or just have historical perspectives from other MMOs) and then get what Intrepid serves up and wonders what's happening.

That's part of what makes so many aspects of the game hard to discuss (unless, again, they're getting tons of positives from PI and the dominant guilds, but for some things, even that hasn't been true). They say X, a lot of the playerbase seems to think 'oh yeah that sounds good/makes sense, everyone knows how that should work', and then get... stuff like this, with no clear understanding of why it happens.

(If any Phoenix Initiative knows why this material requirement change even had a chance of going live with the original 3-3-3, plz tell us, the commoners are dying out here).

Azherae wrote: »

(If any Phoenix Initiative knows why this material requirement change even had a chance of going live with the original 3-3-3, plz tell us, the commoners are dying out here).

From what some PTR people have said, lately things have barely had any PTR testing and mostly just went live asap. Dunno if PIs have an even deeper access to dev clients, but even if they do - that shit would be under very strict NDA.

Also, how's this for a radical idea. Any lootable gear should only have a single substat. And when you deconstruct that item - that's gonna be the substat that the resulting material will transfer to the crafted item. So if you wanna have a sword with +con and +str - you gotta get 2 swords with the respective stats.

I just dunno whether this should be a full alternative to the general materials impacting your substats or if it should be a required part. I'd imagine that people would complain about too much rng in crafting, if this was a required part.

Ludullu wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

(If any Phoenix Initiative knows why this material requirement change even had a chance of going live with the original 3-3-3, plz tell us, the commoners are dying out here).

From what some PTR people have said, lately things have barely had any PTR testing and mostly just went live asap. Dunno if PIs have an even deeper access to dev clients, but even if they do - that shit would be under very strict NDA.

Also, how's this for a radical idea. Any lootable gear should only have a single substat. And when you deconstruct that item - that's gonna be the substat that the resulting material will transfer to the crafted item. So if you wanna have a sword with +con and +str - you gotta get 2 swords with the respective stats.

I just dunno whether this should be a full alternative to the general materials impacting your substats or if it should be a required part. I'd imagine that people would complain about too much rng in crafting, if this was a required part.

You already know where to find this implementation, don't you?

We have not received permission from lamina5432 to share the quoted post.

What if we had this for rarity decrease? Say you have an option, you either get one Epic frag from one Epic copper, or you get 3 Hero frags or 6 Rare or 12 uncomm or 24 comm.

This would probably require an adjustment to the recipes where high rarity results don't require as many mats in them, cause otherwise we'll never craft a super high rarity item, but this particular feature could come from the "recipes leveling up" thing they mentioned. A crafter makes several items from the same recipe and their skill at executing on that recipe lets them make the thing at a higher rarity with a lower mat requirement.