No Ember Essence From Gray Mobs

[Sintax]

I'm not seeing any ember essence rewarded when killing gray ashen mobs around ruptures.

I don't know if this is intended, but given that at some point every mob turns gray (especially the closer you are to Newhaven City), players would have to travel further and further away just to harvest more essence. And worst of all, if you're ever out of essence completely, you would have to walk to the very ends of the map to get more — that's walking the entire way.

Bit of a problem that, isn't it?

 

[Undone]

I'm not seeing any ember essence rewarded when killing gray ashen mobs around ruptures. I don't know if this is intended, but given that at some point every mob turns gray (especially the closer you are to Newhaven City), players would have to travel further and further away just to harvest more essence. And worst of all, if you're ever out of essence completely, you would have to walk to the very ends of the map to get more — that's walking the entire way. Bit of a problem that, isn't it?

You are correct, Ember Essence is not awarded for gray mobs. Resource management is a large part of the game; which includes health, stamina, aggro, reagents, coin, and Ember Essence. If gray mobs awarded essence then it would likely become the default method of filling up your Ember Stone since it would carry a much lower risk when compared to fighting mobs of a comparable level.

 

[Sintax]

I get the point you're making, but the flip side is that this implementation is punishing players for investing time in the game/characters by giving them fewer sources of essence. Ordinarily, things aren't made more difficult as a consequence of earning levels and becoming stronger. If I'm level 50, shouldn't it be easier to harvest essence than if I'm level 20?

 

[MarcusFromOz]

I get the point you're making, but the flip side is that this implementation is punishing players for investing time in the game/characters by giving them fewer sources of essence. Ordinarily, things aren't made more difficult as a consequence of earning levels and becoming stronger. If I'm level 50, shouldn't it be easier to harvest essence than if I'm level 20?

Have you seen the following in the QA patch notes?
- Flatworms now award 20 Ember Essence when caught. Yes, we know their behaviour needs improvement; it's on the list of things to do.

 

[Sintax]

I didn't see that, no, but it's really tangential to the point/concern.

In terms of the system mechanics as they are, if gray mobs never give you essence and mobs invariably turn gray as you level, then eventually alchemy specific content (ie essence) becomes less and less accessible as players level out of zones over time. This is not true of any other materials in the game.

If we take this design to its logical conclusion, then most if not all EVs will simply stop serving any purpose in the game and eventually only exist to consume server resources. It's not reasonable to assume that an infinite pool of new players will exist (it doesn't) to keep using the lower level EVs for harvesting essence. But if gray ashen mobs would drop at least some essence, then EVs would always have some purpose and value to players, regardless of where they are in the world.

That, I think, would serve the interests of both players and the studio better. The studio will certainly get more mileage from the content it adds this way.

TLDR
Easier mobs awarding less essence is a good and fair formula.
Easier mobs awarding no essence just creates dead ends for content that cost time and money to put into the game.

Just my own thoughts and observations on the matter.

 

[Undone]

Essence is not awarded for gray mobs for similar reasons that gray mobs don't award experience. We do not want Essence to be trivial to acquire. Sources of Essence (veins, ruptures, etc) theoretically should become more prominent the further away from the city you get, hence the opportunities to earn Essence should increase as you level. As you suggest, this could be an issue for some players if they find themselves in a location with no Essence and not immediately near a valid source. While I do agree that this is something we would like to avoid, I don't want to "fix" the problem by creating another (trivializing Essence gathering).

We are working on making Essence less of a pain to acquire in a number of ways. On QA right now we have the following changes implemented:

• Flatworms when caught give you +20 Essence
• Ember Drifts (Ember Vein entrances) now spawn creatures around them, and can directly spawn ashens
• Any non-gray mob that would typically turn Ashen in the presence of a Rupture has a chance to award you 1 Essence

None of these fully "solve" the problem you are describing, but we are working on easing the pain. At the end of the day this problem should be avoidable with a bit of planning ahead by players before they head back to a low level area. I have yet to receive any real feedback on these so I'm still not sure if they will even make it to live at this point. Feedback anyone?!

One of the other issues with allowing gray mobs to give essence is that we would somehow need to reduce the amount awarded. But we can't give less than 1. Keep in mind that a white cons gives +10 Essence. So if we look at the extremes a level 50 would only have to kill 10x level 1 Ashen creatures (at +1 EE each) to get the same amount of Essence as 1x level 50 mob. Which to me, doesn't work. We could multiply all of the values by 10, which would make each white kill give +100 EE, while each execution costs -100 EE for Alchemy I, -500 EE for Alchemy II, and upwards of -300 EE for travel. At that point I would be much more willing to consider allowing grays to give EE, but in the time it takes a high level player to kill 100 low level Ashen they could likely have ran to a high level zone and killed one white con mob. The other end of this is that we try to keep the numbers low and easier to digest. Multiplying all Essence values by 10 gives us a bit more flexibility at the cost of readability and ease of use imo.

 

[MarcusFromOz]

Would capping the daily essence from gray mobs to say 50 per day be a reasonable compromise?

Help some new players, get 50 EE then get out of there.
Enough to port, not enough to Alchem.

 

[Shadewe]

I figure this is already known to all parties, but my thoughts:

If I knew there was a mechanic where I could 'farm' grey mobs for essence, I would. I wouldn't care if it was reduced or whatever; to a lvl 50, farming lvl 10's is trivial and your only bottleneck is the available mobs with which to farm. I would do this until it got changed, and if I would, so would 98% of the player base.

I understand why the dev's have made it not-easier (by this, I mean you can still farm green's, but it might be lvl 45 greens to a lvl 50 char vs. lvl 5 greens to a lvl 10 char) to farm the essence as your level increases. To be honest, I don't think there is a "right" answer here is OP is correct; technically it becomes not-easier to farm essence as you go up in level. However, the dev's theme is consistent with the other ways they are building the game (e.g. xp), so it's not like the player's don't know what to expect.

Take that for what you will.

 

[Sintax]

What is missing from the math though is time.

Does finding and killing 1 level 50 ashen mob take more time than finding and killing 10 gray ashen mobs?

Given that mobs don't always convert, and given that a white 1 chev is very easy to kill, in my experience I'd say unequivocally no. Harvesting essence from 10 gray ashen will be much slower at a rate of 1EE per mob. And that creates plenty of disincentive to resort to farming gray mobs. Time has value to everyone.

But this analysis also ignores other, bigger problems with the design of the system. Since mobs don't scale to level:

a) will there actually be enough things to farm at 50?

b) doesn't it encourage players to stay at the farthest reaches of the server thereby segmenting the player population, compounding grouping challenges, and ultimately creating a server with lots of empty/uninhabited regions?

That question probably deserves a thread of its own.

 

[Undone]

a) will there actually be enough things to farm at 50?

Yes, at the end of this month we are adding a zone dedicated to levels 45+ which will be very heavily steeped in Ember sources.

b) doesn't it encourage players to stay at the farthest reaches of the server thereby segmenting the player population, compounding grouping challenges, and ultimately creating a server with lots of empty/uninhabited regions?

This is already the case and is not a problem unique to our game. I don't think allowing high level players to farm low level mobs to acquire Essence is a long term solution to this specific problem. It could be considered a solution, but I don't consider it the right solution. Mainly because it comes with its fair share of problems; such as when high level players farm low level mobs it reduces the amount of those mobs available to players of that level. It's not so cut and dry which is why we opted to treat earning Essence similar to earning experience.

Now with all of that said - we are certainly keeping a close eye on this and listening/responding to feedback. We tend to start conservatively and dial them up as we see appropriate. This helps us avoid having to bring too large of a nerf bat to the party, which in turn reduces the detrimental impact our actions may have on such a small community.

 

[Sintax]

This is already the case and is not a problem unique to our game.

This is why I noticed it and mentioned it in the thread, tbh. It is a very common problem and complaint.

For as terrible as so many of the mechanics were, one of the things New World did get right was to give zones value beyond specific level ranges. You still had to go back to starter zones to gather low tier materials because you needed them to craft. Hopefully, you can tackle this problem with your own creative ideas.

 

[Meladry]

To add on to this. I find myself very frustrated by not getting anything at all for grey doubles or triples. Okay, don't give us anything for the singles. But for two- and three-chevs...these are more difficult. We should get something XP for them, however minimal. Same goes for two- and three-chevs in other colors. The number of chevrons really should be a multiplier, however small, for XP. We should not get the same amount of XP for a single as a double and triple. Especially for the triples - I find myself skipping them because they're just not worth my time. And in dungeons, they just become a slog (and no, I don't play solo).

To the point about fearing people will farm greys, people will farm for efficiency. Best bang for your buck. Folks won't farm single greys because they get nothing. Folks won't farm double or triple greys even if they give minimal xp because it's not worth the effort. Make it not worth our while to farm, but don't make it a complete waste of time to help lower level players or farm for items. Not to mention, there's no point in coming back to say, Northreach because everything is grey. What's the point of making such a beautiful world if it's just an XP factory to churn players in and out based on level? Make it appealing in some way to everyone, but separate what lower and higher levels need like I described above.

 

[Undone]

To add on to this. I find myself very frustrated by not getting anything at all for grey doubles or triples. Okay, don't give us anything for the singles. But for two- and three-chevs...these are more difficult. We should get something XP for them, however minimal. Same goes for two- and three-chevs in other colors. The number of chevrons really should be a multiplier, however small, for XP. We should not get the same amount of XP for a single as a double and triple. Especially for the triples - I find myself skipping them because they're just not worth my time. And in dungeons, they just become a slog (and no, I don't play solo).

To the point about fearing people will farm greys, people will farm for efficiency. Best bang for your buck. Folks won't farm single greys because they get nothing. Folks won't farm double or triple greys even if they give minimal xp because it's not worth the effort. Make it not worth our while to farm, but don't make it a complete waste of time to help lower level players or farm for items. Not to mention, there's no point in coming back to say, Northreach because everything is grey. What's the point of making such a beautiful world if it's just an XP factory to churn players in and out based on level? Make it appealing in some way to everyone, but separate what lower and higher levels need like I described above.

See my response here.