Re: Econ-Friday Ranting (a Reference Post)

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How in the hell 🤣

Also, there's a funny (not really) link between fishing and mob ecology (more so player direction) in L2. In earlier versions you could buy lure from an npc, but w/o consumable shots that lure didn't really let you catch the fish (or at least required a ton of skill maybe). And you could get the shots by taking a quest from the fisherman npc and farming specific mobs that would drop the quest items, which you could then trade in for shots. So if you were interested in fishing, you had your leveling path all laid out for you, because the npc could point you towards the mobs you should be killing for the quest.

Obviously Ashes has its professions fully separated from adventure leveling, so the closest thing we could have to that is fishing-related commissions that could reward you with lures or maybe even just fishing buffs. And in turn, those commissions could be pointing people at mobs that spawn around bodies of water, so that the "theme" of fishing was present throughout the entire process.

Same could apply to other gathering professions too. People will inevitably level up their adventuring, so might as well help them with their preferred gameplay while they're at it.

That's basically what I would expect, given this 'family' of games.

I was going to 'leave' the related post until Friday but since you bring it up and I may be unavailable then anyway, I'll mention it now. Flat ecology also limits the potential for some of the type of Quests my group thought Ashes was going to have. Your confirmation that these are in L2 just gives me more hope. I've been worried lately (though I guess it's moreso for the past decade) that MMO Devs lost their understanding of this when they switched to 'loot grinder' gameplay, and then because the talent/knowledge 'skipped a generation' of Devs, they wouldn't know how to adapt it to the modern gamer. Then Ashes mentioned the solution and I was relieved, but I slowly started to worry again because I haven't seen any sign of it yet.

So just in case anyone needs to hear it, I'll once again be the arrogant know-it-all and lay this out. If you don't know why your Social Orgs were important for you, Econ Team, this is what they are supposed to do:

1. Social Orgs keep track of 'Contribution', to allow you to decouple Quests from specific Rewards, a thing that commonly ends up implemented in modern games anyway.
2. Social Orgs can keep track of 'Enmity', to allow you to disincentivize behaviours you don't want to be universal, a mild help against the way bots interact these days
3. Social Orgs can be placed in opposition to one another, to create soft friction and meaningful choices, to prevent the 'boredom' that players seem to feel when they don't feel any benefit to even their own chosen daily gameplay
4. Social Orgs allow you to convert basic telemetry into gameplay loops that have identity points, which in my experience massively saves on time and increases bug-report quality (i.e. if your player is paying attention to if their rep goes up, bugs in telemetry get reported more)

@Ludullu's example is good but might actually be 'too complex' in terms of specificity since it would require a lot more considerations within Ashes , so I'll give a simplified one that could probably go in any game (and if it seems unrelated to Econ or Ecoogy the reason is because I don't want to get into the weeds on it unnecessarily).

Let's assume a Vegetable Field or Vineyard, considered to be 'not owned by the player, but under the control of a Social Organization that they can affiliate with'. The Vegetables or Grapes are always technically harvestable by anyone, so the gameworld doesn't need to worry about specific spawn functions.

When a player gathers in this area, if not on a quest (or even if on a quest, this will make sense momentarily), their Favorability with that Organization decreases. If it is too low, NPCs may react or other things may occur depending on how bad it is. Low Favorability means you basically get treated as a thief even by just entering the area.

A related Quest could give back double the Favorability you lose from the gathering. No restrictions, everyone can be part of the $WhateverTown Grape Growers' Association, because in this example, probably it's just not a concern, but from there you can branch out and add quests given by them which put the player in 'conflict' with other Orgs, except not strongly, i.e. you could be friendly with both the Grape Growers and the Wildlife Conservationists who think that killing the birds that try to raid the fields is bad, by simply making sure not to favor one over the other. No 'maintenance quests', no 'infinite loot', no 'twisted up incentives that wreck your ecology a-la Ultima Online' necessary.

All for the price of the occasional player that hits the wall of 'Why are these people mad at me for picking all the Vegetables/Grapes? I thought they were free!'

I kinda hope that Ashes would be a game that accepts that you can't please players who never want to be subject to anything going on around them, given what type of game it is. There are so many ways to tie this into things like 'soft Corruption' (lose favorability with Org by PK-ing or even just initiating attack on one of their Favored people while that person is on a quest or similar), but none of that fits into a rant about Economy, so to stick to that:

You can worry less about easily repeatable or exploitable behaviours in the open world by tying the related gains to a Favorability loss somewhere, perhaps making certain NPCs unhelpful or hostile, and you can make better use of your NPC and area design work by giving players more reason to keep caring about doing certain small things long enough to notice changes. If you make a Dynamic world but don't have a 'carrot' to make your players care about watching for that dynamism, you've wasted development time and more importantly for this post your economy will narrow itself and push out more players, unless you do immense amounts of Economic Design work, most of which will probably amount to 'controlling the markets and player behaviour directly'.

This post is long enough without going into how this lets you do more with POIs or random spawns that need to exist but you don't want people to constantly be fighting for the drops of.

Wow it's Friday again already.

Last time I said:
"This post is long enough without going into how this lets you do more with POIs or random spawns that need to exist but you don't want people to constantly be fighting for the drops of."

So guess what I'm ranting about this time! If you don't think PvP games need Ecology structure or aren't convinced that the Economy Structure and Ecology Structure are deeply connected, you can definitely skip this rant. This one isn't about 'convincing or teaching' that, it's 'making the assumption that everyone reading agrees with and understands that' and addressing some things I've learned over the decades about how to save Development Time. Obviously, your Mileage may vary and this stuff is anecdotal, but I've come this far so let's go!

Players expect/demand Open World spawns to be infinite, accessible, and sometimes even rewarding. Early in design, it is good for games to find their ways to test many different spawn mechanics, usually via Progression Quests. If everyone must/wants to do them, you'll get a lot more data about edge-cases. Once confident, you can try using those spawn mechanics in other places to flesh out Ecology, which then allows the game to have more Ecology via open-world encounters. Better still, depending on the spawn mechanics, these encounters can exist in lower level areas because lower level players wouldn't be able to trigger the spawn, and most of the time you can put them in out-of-the-way 'mini-Arenas', etc etc.

Since good MMORPGs almost always generate content at high speed by absolutely pushing the limits of skeleton/rig re-use and ability shuffling, it's important to be careful about making sure mobs spawn appropriately, but escaping the complaints will never be possible, obviously. Specifically, I'm referring to the complaints of someone who encounters content that has a challenge level above what they are comfortable with or expecting. My guild Member JustVine once gave an explanation about how this can actually bring MMO fans together in certain ways. A player might spawn something too strong for them, then request help. Since most spawn mechanics these days are easily capable of 'instantly spawning the mob with the claim or first hit bonus set to the person spawning it', this should work out. I would go into the concept of Content Denial (from people who spawn a mob which can only spawn one and then refuse to kill it) but this situation nearly never comes up in modern 'PvX' designs so let's skip that.

So if we assume 'avoiding that type of complaint is pointless' and we accept that 'players expect spawns to be infinite, accessible, and rewarding, but the Devs have multiple spawn-control tools, then we get to the balancing act of challenge vs drops, and a concept that works well in old MMORPGs but is on a bit of a decline for the last decade or so. The concept of a mob type that acts as a 'Favored enemy' to a particular build type. To repeat: limiting design by trying to avoid these is unnecessary, but now finally, Econ reasons why!

In a 10K model game, you only care about the time required to get the spawn and the droprate of whatever it rewards, not the difficulty of the mob. If you are reusing a rig, sometimes you barely need new animations. Here are some simple FF11/TL/Onigiri examples (some speculative) with the related Economy ties.

Throne and Liberty - Azhreil ~= Lord Embergourd
I think most people could easily notice that the world boss Ahzreil and the Halloween Dungeon boss Lord Embergourd are 'the same rig' and even share many abilities, but no one I know personally thinks this feels like that or is even remotely disappointed. A weaker open world 'mini-Ahzreil' style mob could take the form of a Golem, a Turret, a Plant, and take some abilities from other mobs based on intended difficulty. When placed in the respective locations, the calculation for how to decide Rewards and Droprate would be a function of (Area Threat Level(The Favored Enemy Design Gap) * Spawn Conditions) - (Area Level Range Gap to Mob * Allowed Spawnrate)). All that made no sense? Will in a bit, I hope. This was the 'vague' one.

Final Fantasy 11 - Bombs/Snolls/Djinn ~= Ahriman (evil Eyes)
FF11 uses a slightly different approach due to the constant use of 'Ability Shuffle' and ofc being one of those more limited, older games. A Bomb and a Djinn feel fairly similar, but because of the mild differences in which statuses they put on the player and buffs they use, Snolls feel a bit different Ecologically and are, more importantly, placed in a different biome. Even if a player were to think 'I have seen these before, whatever', the most likely outcome if they are fighting a challenging version is that this misconception might lead to defeat. The Ahriman mob is very similar to the other three (in the sense that because it's an old game, any floating mob with AoE and cripples seems similar), but more importantly, Ahriman have powerful spellcasting which makes them equivalent to the more powerful versions of Bombs/Snolls/Djinn, which receive this ability type because the 'main threat' posed by the 'regular versions' (Self-Destruct) isn't a thing you want on bosses. So 'regular' Ahriman are pretty rewarding, and 'Notorious' Bombs/Snolls/Djinn are similarly rewarding, for any given Area Threat Level, but both these mobs are 'favored enemy' to the same type of player character, i.e. melee users with decent quick CC. Which brings us to the first weird term in that 'function' from before, ecologically. The Favored Enemy Design Gap. Snolls appear in cold places, Bombs usually in hot (at low levels Bombs appear during Fog weather as the 'high end introductory threat, there's a parallel here to the Ahriman). If you were in those places you probably already have resistances to Ice or Fire, etc. Ahriman can be placed anywhere, and that means you can place them in areas where the normal enemies for that region are the Favored Enemy of Rangers without Silence/other spell interruption CC. This is the definition of the 'Gap'. I trust that PvE designers understand this without me stretching it out even more.

Throne and Liberty - Chaos Archwizard/Pumpkin Captain (this name might be wrong) ~= 'An FF11 Slime/Clot mob'
Trying to keep this within just the Halloween Dungeon so that anyone who cares can just watch maybe one video and get all their info at once. Chaos Archwizard is a simple thing to find though finding a video of it actually being challenging to someone might be harder.
The reason for the reference to the FF11 Mob is to illustrate something else. The Chaos Archwizard is a simple mob in terms of what it personally does, and the challenge is based around the arena, mostly. I.e. you 'couldn't just take that base mob out into the open world and spawn them in random spots and get a good fight'. Which would then mean a low Threat Level even relative to an Area, and it would be fodder tier like most enemies in these games these days, resulting in no potential for a Favored Enemy Design Gap. Trying to make it harder by making it spawn in only one spot via the Spawn Conditions might work, but that messes with the Allowed Spawnrate and limits where you can utilize its design.
Turning it into the equivalent of an FF11 Slime however resolves a lot of the 'weaknesses' in its kit. Slimes have AoE with pretty good damage, and an attack that drains HP (and very occasionally buffs) from their target. This would align easily with the Pumpkin Captain style of this mob (change pumpkins to slime, make sure it has a stun and stacking Movespeed down somehow, etc). This would also give the option to increase or decrease the Favored Enemy Gap as needed, as well as helping to manipulate the threat level of facing it in certain 'rooms'/areas. Again, not gonna go too much into this, the key takeaway should be:
"This mob is simple and weak, relies on mechanics and instanced dungeon spawns, but with only mild tweaks that would probably make it look-feel like a new mob anyway, it can be used in Open World Ecology in multiple places with varying difficulty even with the same level ranges."
(place it in the swamp with the Frogs and it becomes strong in one way, place it in a dungeon with spellcasters and it becomes dangerous in a different way, place it in a Forest and now it's probably easy, tune the drops accordingly).

Onigiri: 'Sticky' Mob Family ~= Gedoumaru (sorta)
So, keeping with the theme of 'things that could sorta be viewed as slimes'/nondescript shapes...
These have very similar concepts to the above, except that they are more equipped to be mobile and fight at both melee and range as needed, a capability that is apparently so complex for new players to learn that modern games prefer to avoid it for overworld mobs! PvX games obv should not do this, one of the main complaints of TL PvP is that nearly nothing in the game actually prepares you for this PvP (not really true, but kinda valid if you limit yourself to Open World single mobs only).
It's because of this 'difficult' that the 'function' looks like that, because you can't actually do it by 'difficulty'. No one knows what 'difficulty' is to any given player. However this mob type is a good example because when you are over its level, it is weak, and when you are not, it is strong. So why does that result in a subtraction in the function? Because it means that high level players can go back to the low level versions of mobs like this and bully them for drops. Similarly, you don't really want low level players to feel like they need to kill these to progress. They're there to be a mild challenge that you avoid and then feel good about overcoming, so if the gap between their level and the level of other mobs in the area is small, you make them less rewarding. The larger the gap, the more rewarding you can make them, and this increases even more as they get closer to power/level caps (for those games where Open World has any stat-check style challenge at all, their versatility matters). Another reason for this specific example is that 'versatile' mobs like this are often the 'Favored Enemy' of Duos and groups, but can be quite dangerous to soloers (or can even be given mechanics that make them basically impossible to solo in any reasonable timeframe, I am confident most PvE designers know the mob type). That means you get to play around with the Favored Enemy Design Gap even more, i.e. if the area is meant for solo players/easier to navigate solo, then this mob would have a high 'Gap', and if it is already meant for groups with no mobs that really 'punish you for having more people' then this mob type can be considered to have a low 'gap' (and by comparison even if FF11 slimes had more long range options, they'd still rely on AoE or conal HP Absorption to maintain their 'difficulty' in those areas).
Most Humanoid and Plantoid mobs can fall into this category fairly easily, with great variation in the specifics of their charging attacks, repositioning attacks, and long range attacks, and you can be even more creative if you keep the attacks really simple (TL for example has Wraith Brutes, dogs that breathe fireballs at range but also rush at you).

All: Spiders
I mentioned at some point that Spiders and Slimes are interchangeable enough in most games that you can use Slimes as the stand-in if you were the type to care about arachnophobia mode, but you can also just use this for Dev Cycle gains. A spider that jumps on you is not particularly different from a Slime that bounces on you. Webbing and fluid can be equally constricting/slowing. Spiders regaining health by draining you isn't very different from Slimes digesting you. Even a Sickle Slash is just a Body Splash or similar with a different on-hit effect. In many games these mobs could be exactly the same save for their weaknesses (blunt vs Slashing, pierce vs Magic, etc) and if your game system has a certain type of depth, their reactions. When a Tank taunts a Spider and when that exact same tank taunts a Slime are generally different (again, if you've never played a game where this difference type comes up, just assume this level of PvE depth isn't one you are familiar with). Even that difference in timing changes things like the Favored Enemy Gap, assuming the 'we might need a group for this'.

Final Fantasy 11: Bugards/Beetles (~= Boars in nearly every other game but Bugards are technically stronger because they can tail attack as a separate stun/prone, and Beetles get all sorts of random things)
These get a special short mention simply because the tanky self-buffing survivor mob with the knockback/charge attack is so easy to build and yet when placed in the correct spots is so easy to make good use of. When you encounter these early/by themselves, especially in a game with an Active Block (or at least the TL type) they're just normal enemies that happen to smack you around. If you encounter them in narrow spaces with other enemies where you don't want to randomly aggro other things, they are more dangerous. Pair them with Ground-AoE type Spellcasters and they're almost helpful, pair them with retreaters/bind users and now they have a change in Favored Enemy Design Gap. Not to mention that they help prepare people for Tanks in PvP a bit.

All: Worms
Depending on how the game allows Worms to express their 'mobility options' and which long range attacks they are given, they can be anywhere on this spectrum (in terms of the output of the Drop Reward Function). Give them magic like FF11 does and now you can do almost anything with them. You can put them nearly anywhere that you can justify the ground being burrow-able. You can entirely alter their Favored Enemy Design Gap at will by just changing minor aspects of which attacks they have available. Defense down acid spitting? Bind spells? Sandtraps that they use to retreat to the corners of a bounded region? Or even that movement-retreat implementation that most games need anyway where 'the further the mob moves from its spawnpoint the more likely it is to retreat toward that spawnpoint when retreating if possible'. This post ended up being 'vague' and never mentioning 'what the mobs should drop exactly' because that's not what any actual designer needs. It's your world, your game. If you figure out something that 'matches the concept of worms' but 'isn't visually a worm', great! If your world already has so much diversity that you don't even need worms? Awesome, can always add them later if you need to pad content since they often have such easy Spawn Condition options.

In the end, all you need is to pump that content pipeline with everything you have available to you, and I'm just offering the quick Econ-related shorthand I know for all the people who then have to assign rewards to all that content. Sometimes you will roll a Nat 1 on this and the mob will be either too rewarding or ignored, but in the end, novelty is also a content type, patches are a thing you can just do, and padding out your world with minimal-effort mob experiences is only a negative when the suits get greedy/your coworkers get lazy and it ends up being the whole game.

Don't work harder than you have to, MMO Devs, Time is Money.

Niche Equalization and things like content padding described last week can give the impression that they are competing priorities. This week I'm gonna rant about how that's a misunderstanding.

The seemingly 'standard' practice in modern MMORPGs is to 'make sure that all players who want the same rewards can eventually get them'. This often opens a blind spot where one or two developers in the team are put in charge of this and they then ignore playstyles they don't think of or understand. This should be viewed as different from 'they understand them but choose not to target them'. That would be 'working toward the game's goals'.

Rather than over-rant I'll just tell the usual story-type.

Throne and Liberty has an area called the Sandworm Lair, and another the 'Forest of the Great Tree'. Sandworm Lair has 'good' ecology. The forest 'doesn't', despite both having decent enemy variety. Economically, this shows somewhat, but it could have been worse.

Modern MMORPG design, particularly PvP MMO Design, would do things like 'make an area called Sandworm Lair and populate the entire thing with only Sandworms'.

The Devs might not even get as far as 'thinking about whether or not players would actually mind this'. It might just never enter their thoughts that filling a large open world area in an MMO with one enemy type, would be a negative. This then leads to similar outcomes in economy/drops. This, unfortunately, makes sense, because honestly, some players are really discouraging when it comes to the design of longer-term games like Ashes/TL/BDO.

"I want more gear faster." → "Ok we gave you a thing where you can go get some quite good gear for minimal participation once per day" → "No wait not like that now everyone else will get it too."

Niche Equalization, in short, means 'making sure that different people have reasons to go to the Forest of the Great Tree'. Mainly so that you don't have to then make entire new physical zones to put the 'equal hunting ground' in, especially given how much clamp most games need to put on their Open World progression, doubly so if mobs are easy and tend to be AoE'd down. That's the actual competing priority. The same goes for chase items. If World Bosses drop Best in Slot gear , building situations where 'more casual' players can get lesser gear only works in a PvX game if you equalize the Niches a bit. Strong players snowball their friends toward BiS constantly, but solo or loose-affiliation players rely on related content.

Even in games that offer that type of content and offer good rewards for it, can't escape from the fact that stronger players will find that content to be easier, clear it faster, get their rewards sooner, and move on, which in turn skews the economy for any solo/loose-affiliation player who is trying to earn money by getting items to sell.

Games have big issues when they perform Niche Invalidation, but too much stagnation when it comes to homogenization eventually seems to wear down the playerbase, and unfortunately it seems to wear down the less invested more quickly, of course. The Forest of the Great Tree contains only Ogres. Variants in fighting style, surely, but the important thing here is that they all have similar drops. To change this will not be intuitive probably (drops would then be unrealistic and mess with Knowledge Paths). This happens in the Open World because unclamped Progression limits the types of things these thousands of Ogres can be allowed to drop.

Ashes is dancing around this right now, trying to find ways to pull people away from the placeholder(?) systems for open world farming and giving other avenues for money making, but those are not a solution because they will either end up being Money Printing, or like Sport Fishing rewards (currently). The entire base premise is wrong (relative to the original implication). It's taken me a while to gather enough data to become confident in that, but now I think I can say that the economy is even worse than before. It's the blind spot again. Players not complaining because they have enough gold right now via whatever money-printer they have access to, isn't a sign that the economy is good. It's not even a sign that the progression is good. It's only a sign that the illusion is working, or that the rose tinted glasses are still on.

The sort of person who thinks 'The Sandworm Lair didn't need anything other than Sandworms I just go there to PvP/gather X item' isn't going to leave a game like Ashes of Creation, that's true. All those people who complain about how the world is bland, the grind is repetitive, or just quit quietly because they can't make any relative role-progression solo, are the ones who need the Beetles there, and they need Devs to pay attention to 'why' the Beetles are there economically.

Sadly since I am still stuck only experiencing Ashes through videos and written commentary, these rants continue to end up like this. I hope you're still getting your feedback through whatever other channels you have open, Intrepid, and I hope it's better there than 'out here'.

Professions and Progression

People obsessed with Progression want to see numbers go up forever. People obsessed with Professions often want to feel purpose in whatever they make or do. These are the people likely to talk or complain the most. As Devs, the struggle is real. 'Casual' readers, worry not, you can just stop at the 'And Now, The Numbers' heading of this post, since this is all so we can reference 'things AI probably should and shouldn't do'. The examples in that section are just so people can equate stuff ingame to them.

Devs don't have time to create infinite engaging content, the best they can often do is randomize and connect things to the world and hope the player's imagination does the rest. The 'worst' they can do is pad it out with timesinks, because the obsessed Progression player won't complain as much, but normal players do. Another 'bad' option is to turn in products to NPCs for basically the same currency every time, because this turns one's Profession into a grey homogenous blob, especially without additional tweaks. This is all very hard.

Things Analytic AI can do to help

Analytic AI can sometimes do some basic number crunching in the spreadsheet to ensure that no particular profession is being overly rewarded compared to others., and this works in both 10K and UBI style games, though complex UBI games will have some issues if they don't commit fully to it, since the use of things by players or quests is a bit rough.

Example: In FF11 there is a quest that is triggered by having a particular bed in your Mog House, and requires a Shrimp Lure among other things. Neither the bed nor the Lure is super easy/nonspecialized to produce. This works because it is a 10K game and the Devs don't have to worry about every little piece of the Econ puzzle. With enough dedication, as I remember it, almost everyone could make that Bed, or that Lure (both certainly take meaningfully more dedication than 'just dabbling', but not clamped/restricted).

In a UBI game, the Analytic AI might miss this because the bed doesn't require more materials than other similar items but the player demand is a bit higher, so the 'reward' is higher (really, 'dependent on how many people see this and go for making them, making it a 10K style thing within a UBI game, which might sound good, but I assure it is not).

Things Generative AI can do to help

Mini Quest/Contract/Commission writing, obviously, also keeping things 'fresh' by tweaking the quest dialogues a bit on updates, allowing players to have new experiences akin to World Events and similar. For Ashes, Throne and Liberty, and FF11, these could all tie to various world states (FF11 has 'who controls which Regions this week', TL has 'which Dimensional Trial threat or event is active this week', Ashes has both Region control and Story Arcs as options).

Example: A pair of NPC Commissions that normally ask for a Rocking Chair and a Reading Lamp during 'whatever equivalent of Peace time' might change or swap around to ask for Hanging Lantern and Outdoor Chair of some kind during a Conflict period, precisely maintaining the overall balance of progression for the Carpenters and Lampmakers.

Things Devs Probably Have To Do Themselves

Niche Equalization mentioned earlier in the thread. Throne and Liberty has now completed their Niche Equalization on certain parts of Fishing (through another system that they overhauled, just think of Amitoi Expeditions as similar to FF11 Gardening I mentioned before, and now considerably moreso). The missing ArtP2 slots for gathering from Soil and Rocks, along with some related ArtC1 (technically) which somewhat equalize the 'professions' (assume they added 'House Construction/Repair Person' and it matches the approximate level of 'Lampmaker').

Analytic AI could handle things like 'how much exp should this give, how many materials should this cost, how much do we expect the players to want these items that have limited total use for any given player, how much do we think people will actually specialize in this based on time/progression telemetry?'. Generative AI could handle the 'writing of the Commissions for repairing NPC houses or installing windows so that the Econ segment keeps flowing without relying entirely on player Demand'.

But it's the Devs that had to trigger the initial Profession changes. It's the Devs that have to decide how much to include or exclude the Niche/Profession of 'Adventurer' or 'Dungeon Delver' from the process of "House Construction/Repair". The AI Agents can't 'see the world' as clearly as the World Design Team or 'see the intended Narrative' as well as the Narrative Design team or even 'see the player behaviour trends' in the same way the Econ Design team can.

And Now, The Numbers

I was going to just leave this part off, because the entire point of the prior half of this post is that it's different for every game. TL doesn't have 'specialized Bed-makers' on the same level that FF11 does. FF11 doesn't have Lampmakers to the level that TL does (speaking as technically one myself), blah blah. Hopefully speaking abstractly is still 'helpful'. To reduce some of my tendency to over-abstract I've asked some guildies to help me from their perspective so hopefully it won't end up being the usual.

Assuming the specific Equation of (Supply/Risk vs Demand/Reward), and yes, those slashes are 'divide by'…:

Fish Dishes Made With Mostly Specialty Fish

Fishing in many games is a pure time investment with a knowledge gate and occasionally a preparation gate (which is in itself almost always just more time investment). Supply therefore is 'infinite' relative to time and only needs calculation if a Clamp is involved. Risk depends on the game, or the fishing spot within the game. Demand is dependent on game type. UBI games use NPC demand, 10K games usually lead to the section title, fish dishes. These can still have some NPC demand depending on the game, again. You can increase Demand by increasing Dependence on this item, and in 10K games this automatically increases Reward, but Supply will rise to match it almost automatically. Final outcome is a profession of 'Seafood Cook' that is 'always in business' but can have 'slow days', and ofc all those Fishers who provide their fish, who are in a Competitive Loop with each other in the profession which is mildly decoupled from the Actual Demand. Not very easy for AI to handle.

Mushroom Dishes Made With Rare Mushrooms

Gathering Mushrooms is a time investment with competition at the source point in most games. Rare mushrooms are also moreso Luck than preparation in many. Supply may or may not be 'infinite'. Games where Mushroom mobs exist can keep it 'infinite but with a relatively known flow', while having some control over Risk (when the mushroom is gathered from a point in the world, control over Risk is not as clear). Demand matches the above example. Outcomes are 'Mushroom Cook' that is probably 'always in business' and Gatherers, depending on the game, sometimes 'Adventurers' or 'Dungeoneers' who specialize in Mushroom Gathering, but the Competitive aspect is clamped more directly by the amount of spawns available, meaning that Supply has at least a Rate Clamp (as opposed to fishing in most games other than BDO, where the Total Supply is unclamped (number of Fishers x Time investment gives a theoretically infinite amount of fish, infinite players would result in infinite fish, Infinite players does not result in infinite Rare Mushrooms). AI can do better here, if it is given some rough ballpark of 'total possible spawns (and droprates, if mobs are involved)'

Lamps And Similar Decorations

Making Lamps and similar decorations (we are counting 'similar decorations' as 'things players need more than one of, for a nice house, but almost never need any of, to get started, even if they care quite a bit) is a bit trickier, because there is no serious lever the designer can pull to force Dependence, nor do they want to, most of the time (TL actually tried a little, but it spreads out across all decor). A player will sometimes need food to do cutting edge content, but they will not need a wall lamp. Supply varies by game but is almost always tied to some explicit production skill, which may cut off some players from pursuing this and result in two things. First, the social aspect, why go through hours of work to make a Lamp when you can find a Lampmaker? Second, general enjoyment and pride in work for some, usually based on the other side of that interaction (but not always, NPCs could ask for lamps). Supply, though lower, might match either of the above. Demand is based on cost, and Reward therefore tends to cap out. NPCs requesting Lamps are almost certainly clamped in some way to prevent nonsense and botting. Obvious results are 'Lampmakers' and possibly 'Glassblowers', though most games have outcomes where one player does both things. Specialty lamps are where Adventurers tend to get involved. You can 'need 8 lamps' without 'needing 8 aweome/amazing lamps', and therefore Supply for the latter can be allowed to be much lower. Bargaining Power is the name of the game here, and AI therefore is less effective, basically being able to just do what it does for the Mushrooms at best, and write up some NPC stuff for 'why they want a lamp today'.

Cloaks and Similar Gear

Making Cloaks can be simple at low levels and complex later, but unlike lamps, in most games people only need one cloak, but often when they need it, they need it as soon as they can afford it. This causes most players of modern games to want this decoupled from any crafting, but I'm treating TL's success in this matter as a 'proof' that this isn't absolutely required (though their Trait system might be, since it changes the 'only needs one cloak' aspect). Supply therefore aims to always match Demand, a give-and-take that isn't quite the same as the Lamps. People might 'wait' for Lamps to be available when the Lampmaker is ready without contacting them to ask for regular Lamps. The social contract appears for Specialty Lamps. This is more likely to be the 'common occurrence' for Cloaks, except in games where leveling your Artisanship is much more grind than 'knowing material sources and having social interactions'. Basically if leveling Artisanship is too tedious, this tends to break. No one needs the number of cloaks that people have to make, to level. NPC demand often has to get involved. There is a pacing that can work out here (Guild Items and NPC Contracts work decently for the midlevels in FF11 and TL) but it depends on the material requirements and leveling speed in the game. AI effectiveness is low, it can't predict 'how many players will need this exact cloak enough to care' except for endgame cloaks and even then. Problems abound. AI ends up about as useful as for the Lamps, and the professions end up being 'Weaver', "Tailor', and ofc 'Adventurer' for those games where specialty cloaks are from mob drops. Gatherers are not counted here for the same reason as the Fishing/Mushrooms. They're too decoupled from the Demand to know with certainty what to do, and if the Reward is too high even with low Demand, someone will make a business out of negating the Risk. Low Demand makes this unlike the Mushrooms. Supply would always outstrip Demand so much in nearly any fun game, that NPC offers of reasonable Rewards will just make the whole thing crazy. One thing that helps is adding a different Supply clamp (FF11 Crystals, TL's 'Decoration/Furniture Scrolls' and 'Additives'), but then you're playing with fire at least a little bit.

Beds and Similar Decorations

The combination of the above two is the hardest. Players want beds but don't need them. Players only need one. No games I know of make you wear out and repair your bed's main function (BDO kinda). On the upside, this is great because no one can complain about RMT or P2W in the usual way. Even when not entirely cosmetic, the Reward for being a Bedmaker is tied to the health of the game/server, or to NPC requests for Beds, which generally would be rare for higher quality ones. Beds are often the most demanding in terms of total materials, in games, even if not requiring a huge amount of 'Artisan skill at Bedmaking', and almost never 'a direct path to leveling your Artisanship'. Specialty beds often require Adventuring to be involved, to avoid it just being way too luck dependent, but it can also be 'just a grind'. Beware of this though, because some players are truly obsessive. Often without reason (we have seen a screenshot of a player whose house contained multiple Gigantrite/Minutrite beds, there is no benefit to this, we almost hope this was just a proof of ability to dupe things or something). Bargaining Power is weaker here, unless something forces Bedmakers to be even rarer (in FF11 for instance, it wasn't enough to just be a Woodworker, to make Beds you also needed to level Clothcrafting quite high for the better wooden ones, without the combination skill, you couldn't succeed). AI can do almost nothing for design here, this type of item is almost entirely a function of the social health of your game, because Demand is low, and without involving mob drops from Adventurers, the designer has almost no control over Risk or Supply, twisting this into an item where economic decisions are made entirely based on Obstacles vs Reward, and if nothing else from this section is memorable, at least remember this… in a reasonable MMORPG, unless we are talking about 'did this boss drop the thing', Obstacles Aren't Real.

I miss my text colors and spoiler tags a lot this week.

It's Friday!

I've decided to put my final (probably?) 'take' here since making a whole new post just doesn't seem 'right' somehow. For those who somehow don't know, as of this post the general assumption is that Ashes of Creation is done, and won't be developed with the same principles going forward, if it is developed any further at all.

This isn't directly about Econ, but honestly everything I talk about tends to come back to that, right?

If anyone is out there still interested in making a PvPvE 'sandbox' MMORPG, I don't think you should take the outcome experienced by Ashes of Creation as a sign that this sort of game can't work at all. On the contrary, I think you should take it as a sign that it can. No matter how patient and encouraging we've been over the years to Intrepid, and technically still would be, looking from the outside you have to understand how bad/dire things were, gamedev wise, at the point where this came to an end.

Yet people were still willing to play this. This is a game that basically delivered almost nothing except the promise of Open World PvP and a rickety scaffolding of stuff that was so barebones as to be mocked by outsiders. People know what they want to play (in this space), they just can't seem to get anyone with money to scope and actually deliver it. Every game targets a spot in that spectrum, and the spot Ashes was supposedly targeting is still empty.

Maybe Throne and Liberty will expand into that slot since it's close on one side. Maybe The Quinfall or Pax Dei will manage to expand into the slot from the other side. But none of them can quite do what Ashes was trying to do because that 'spot' is hard, and full of friction, toxic players, bots, and poorly understood requirements. A trimmed down Ashes still works, technically Ashes wasn't even truly that ambitious compared to many older offerings, it was just so poorly scoped/cobbled together that the 'ambitiousness' became multiplied.

To every former Ashes Developer who was busting their ass to get a few steps forward and is now going out into the world with 'nothing' to show for it but years of experience with a game type that some will claim 'no one wants to play', remember that. From our perspective, you didn't fail, yet. Many people were sorta-happy and waiting for the next thing you could offer them. You probably know, at least tangentially, the point where whatever you were working on stopped being 'a thing you got to listen to the potential playerbase, about', or when 'just do it this way' became an answer you could receive. More than we probably ever will unless someone releases those meeting recordings/transcripts.

You know you were working towards something that eventually, someone might genuinely want to play a lot, and y'all know at least somewhat, the reasons why things weren't getting there. Yet even without them actually getting there, someone still cared.

So in case you needed to hear it, especially now, we appreciate you.

We have not received permission from RonDog98 to share the quoted post.

We'd never know from just looking at Ashes, since they didn't manage to implement literally any of the things that would actually have had a chance of balancing it:

1. Reasons for Dominators to split up into different groups and stay there
2. Things that would make big PvP groups cooperate with smaller PvP groups or even PvE players
3. Progression systems that tied into reputation that could diminish in any way.
4. Diverse class and role structures that would lead to PvP being interesting at the tier of at least Guild Wars 1 or Throne and Liberty
5. PvP objectives that took advantage of the world's design and lack of fast travel
6. PvE encounters that properly handled PvP players with requirements other than 'do big damij, also don't stand here'

So, really, can we say that they actually spent any development resources at all on the Open World PvP part?

That's why I encourage Devs who intend to actually do any of that stuff to not lose hope yet. Writing off a dev path because someone else 'claimed to intend to do it and then didn't actually' seems unnecessary.

Steven wanted this game to be like EVE at some point and then Intrepid did almost none of the things required for that. I don't think this was 'yeah we spent all our time on that and then didn't finish' but maybe we'll know in a few years.

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

The Phoenix-Down thing is only mostly a joke, but who knows if the industry is even going to still be here or care in a year.

Either way, spinning up a random blog is pretty low effort, yeah.

Sure but the things I'm talking about are largely PvE foundation/scaffolding.

Stuff that many people find engaging enough to play without any PvP actually being involved. That's why it is so weird. They had 'stuff they promised, that works for PvE players', and also has the benefit of 'helping with PvP incentives' and all the stuff that Roleplayers of all 'engagement levels' tend to get into… in an MMORPG… and delivered so little of it that they didn't have appeal to even some of the PvPers after a while.

So I'm saying to 'other Devs out there', it isn't a waste, you build a PvE foundation-type and then drop the PvP on top of it when everyone is invested in their 'role' in the world and now have reasons to PvP beyond 'warm body in front of me make dead'.

The 'Fantasy version of EVE Online/Elite Dangerous' slot in the MMO genre is still not filled.

Also I personally 'know' they would actually work because I absolutely don't believe that Space Sim players are so absolutely different from Ashes type players that they would refuse to play that game type, and the things in question work in both (technically all three) of the Space Sim MMORPGs.

Intrepid just gave us none of it.

No, I doubt we are.

I'm talking about a very specific, 'low hanging fruit' style of metrics usage that exists in the type of game I am now fairly certain Ashes wanted to be (or at least sold itself as, hard to say given how Steven is).

Example: Throne and Liberty is literally full of practically useless Achievements. The difference between 'a metric that counts how many times you have crafted Food' and 'a metric that counts your standing with the Cooking Guild', from the code side, is relatively small.

Elite Dangerous does this the 'correct' way. If you complete 1000 missions for the Empire, you get a high rank in the Empire. This has effects when you want to go into a conflict and need to choose a side, but you aren't forced to do it. It's just as ignorable as the Achievement Metric if you want to ignore it. But it's also a good reason to not suddenly join the Federation side of that conflict just because they happen to be winning.

It's not even 'PvE Gameplay', it's just converting the standard 'gotta give people props for making a number go up' into an actual soft game mechanic for once. You don't even need to 'not join the Fed side', but psychologically, many people are less likely to do that if they are 'staunch Imperials' and 'not Feds', because that's the game. The game is about managing the way your numbers go up. Without this, the game is a loot grinder. People who try to play these games as loot grinders don't stay, because they have no reason to.

But you could do all this from PvP alone, which is what TL does. Guilds get Guild Reputation from situations where there is conflict. Imagine if those Guilds had metrics other than 'We have the biggest number when you add everything together so we are the best'. If there was such a thing as 'Extra Reputation with the Farming Association for all members of the guild that holds the Boonstone in the farming area', then you get PvP 'between farming Guilds' for that objective.

You didn't add any PvE, you just took a number that was in the game already anyway and going to go up to make people feel good, and moved it to a place where it also helps control what they PvP over. In this example there wouldn't be any difference. A new, guildless player joining TL doesn't have 'Guild Exp'. Their situation is exactly the same, except now maybe they have a Guild they want to join, and a reason to maybe learn to PvP a little, they might know better who their opponents are, they might feel accomplishment when the number goes up while still feeling something when it isn't going up.

If we think that people don't feel something when those numbers go up, we'd have to conclude that all the time Devs spend putting 'Achievement Points' in their games is also a waste of developer time. I also believe that most people are not so hollow that they come to MMORPGs to see the numbers go up with no actual stakes involved. Sure, there are people who will try to play these games and just go 'My numbers aren't going up at the exact speed I want them to therefore your game sucks' but is that really the target audience of this genre?

I'm saying that Religions content, Social Orgs content, better Node/Settlement relations content, better Trade content… all those things would have been pretty easy PvP driver content. In Alpha, even if they were unbalanced or didn't work right all the time, who'd care? You could just fix it with each wipe, monitor it on different servers, etc.

I didn't care much for Ashes PvE, but I barely count the thing I'm talking about as 'PvE', most games let you get these metrics in very 'braindead' ways, there is no 'v' anything. If a Boonstone in TL is unopposed when you declare you want to take it, you just get it. Then for the next 3 or 4 days you just passively get points. Number go up. There's no 'PvE'. It's PvP content, it's 'diplomatic'/'social' content.

Right now, we have 'people we swipe Abysstones from' because we are soft-opposed to their guild, and 'people whose Abysstones we leave alone because we like their Guild'. Ashes didn't even get that much. Instead we got Harbinger event which was, once again 'everyone go try to kill each other in this spot over here in an activity that technically we should all want to succeed at'. They spent energy on that.