Player Professions and possible implementation idea
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People have been complaining alot about the tanning tubs especially lately and I had an idea of a potential way to solve the issue, if the devs are willing to potentially scrap some of their work, and put in effort towards this. It has long been a discussion of what people want to do in the game and what they want to specialise in. Some want to be merchants, others want to be warriors, some want to be hunter/gatherers (like myself).
With the Town/City buildings the way they are, anyone is able to do anything, so long as they are a citizen, which isn't what at the very least, some of the players wanted. Why should I be able to make pristine clothes, if I want to specialise as a blacksmith? They are two completely different jobs! What merit does someone have becoming a crafter and selling their wares, if any Joe Bloe can do it? How would they be able to sell anything?
My idea is this: Player Professions.
At the moment, Personal Player plots don't have much of a use, besides a place to put personal chests and a little fancy decoration, building a house and a bed and a table. Why not change it up and depending on what profession a player chooses, the available items to place on the plot changes. For example;Players with a Tailoring profession can make tanning tubs.
Players with a Craftsman profession can carve furniture and wooden objects out of wood (maybe they can have a buildable woodshed on their plot, and ofc, it would mean furniture would have to be carryable in the inventory , at least temporarily).
Players with a Blacksmith profession can make metal weapons like swords and maces.
Players with an Apothecary profession can make powerful medicines or devistating poisons.
Players with an Anchanter/Enchantress Profession can enchant player's gears.
Players with a Merchant Profession can't build anything on their plots, but instead get a 20% move speed bonus when carrying a resource cart behind them, containing all their wares (if a resource cart actually becomes a thing)
or some other, misc. ideas, like a 'Talented' Profession, where the only bonus is an increase to knowledge gain from enemies, requiring them to kill fewer (for a more casual player - or hardcore if they choose it first, only to change later on when they have mastered everything)
or a 'Miner' Profession, where you dig up mineral resources twice as efficiently.
a Lumberer profession, where you chop down trees or harvest twigs twice as efficiently.
a Scribe profession, where a player can document things on paper and make their own books. As a result of this, a town/city could have a library.
Possibly have some combat professions as well, for the warriors, mages, clerics, assassins, sabateurs and archers (sorry if i missed any combat classes).
And maybe even a profession that increases the chance for rarer loot to drop.What does everyone think? I personally feel that this would be the best way to take the game for a player based economy game, in a way that can make, and keep it interesting for everyone for longer. Feel free to suggest any ideas any of you have!! Please @Prometheus , consider this, especially if alot of players end up loving this idea ^c^
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Keep in mind that there is also a tech tree coming for professions. We don't know what that entails yet. Maybe you need to put points in Leatherworking to use Tanning Tubs and being to tailor anything above primitive armor. That we have access to "everything" now is just for testing and they will probably add blacksmithing and perhaps husbandry etc. before they put the tech trees in.
It's going to be interresting to see what they come up with actually
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Not sure if they've changed their minds, but it was supposed to be that you had to learn crafting recipes through knowledge gain and that crafters had "skill" which would allow a higher skilled crafter to create somewhat better items.
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I definitely see some merit in this idea, with a caveat.
I still think people should be able to branch out and do everything, but, your generalist, like in real life, generally has to work twice as hard to get all their ducks in a row to produce things because they are dabbling in so many things, and thus, rarely exceed a certain level of proficiency with any one discipline because of it.
Want to make your own Tanning Station in the wild, all the things that go into that tanning station need to either be bought or made there as well to make it work. Special chemicals produced through the alchemy skill and an alchemy workbench need to be produced to 'finish' your tanned goods. special metal frames need to be ordered and carried to your plot for assembly to finish making your crafting station, etc...
A single self-sufficient 'prepper' type hermit could still thus exist, but they would find reason to come into town occasionally in order to special order something they can't easily make themselves, or they would spend all their time making their infrastructure work out.
A farmer may harvest veggies, wheat, flax, etc..., then carry any they don't use into a town to sell off what they have extra and use the funds obtained to buy what they do need, like meat for the fire, good charcoal, paint and stains, medicine for sick plants, etc...
A nearby rancher could have an agreement with said farmer to take his leftover food veg to feed his own stock. Horses and cattle eating wheat/hay, pigs eating a mix of various foods, carrots, apples, etc... and in return, gives a portion of the meat and dairy they produce back to the farmer...
in other words, just how real world economics of such industry work.
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I would agree with something like this. I HATE that everyone can do everything in an MMO and wish that we were limited in points to be able to get around 33% of the skills and that's it. So we need to decide and build smarter.
It makes jobs important and choices matter.
Z
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I both agree and disagree with somethings in this thread.
Namely locking people into a trades does not seem effective in games.
People will make alts to get around mechanics- ie to do all the trades.It would defiantly be better if we had a system inplace where you would need to put time and effort into any profession you're doing.
Research, Quest, Blueprints/recipes, protostypes, rare resources, and so on.
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@maze I agree with specialization, and there should be a system that preventa everyone from doing everything. I don't think You should choose one profession though, because people will just make alts. I think there should be some level of "grinding" to be really good on one profession, so it has real value for the gatherer/crafter to actually be one. The logic behind should be, it's better to invest my resources and time in only one activity, as it will be more lucrative in the short and also long range.
Good idea is that one of needing knowledge points to learn about crafting, being it recipes, better the quality, or lessen the amount of resources needed to craft certain items.
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As pointed out already, limiting what players can do on a single toon will simply result in players making other toons (I think I'm going to get eight or nine toons on one account alone, and I could easily make other accounts).
That's also a problem with the attribute system, and one reason I think it's an ineffective approach. Instead of trying to arbitrarily enforce player limitations, thus resulting in toon spam, I'd embrace players doing everything they can on one toon, and look for ways to reward specialization.
The geographic distribution of resources in the game, for instance, may promote specialization.
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If you want to develop a system where players have to interact with each other and cant do all their own crafting (which is good, games where everyone just crafts everything for themselves may as well not have elaborate crafting at all and just npcs you hand resources to) you need to limit the player to having to focus.
As stated above, if you make this a character limit people will simply make alts so its pointless to do it and potentially drive away players who dont like having to make crafting alts in games (as its immersion breaking honestly)
It needs to be player limited. How to accomplish this? You might try to make it account limited but people can still get around this and make entire alt accounts. It does reduce the general community trend of total self crafting sufficiency but it doesnt feel good as people will always have this nagging feeling that they aught to just get more accounts for crafting alts.
The tried and tested solution, the only one that ive seen work so far, is to limit things by time. It just physically takes a lot of direct player time commitment to level crafting. To the point that many players dont even do crafting at all. The crafting dedicated players slowly grind their craft. This gives you something to work the game economy off of now. In such a game most people will gather materials, and need to buy from crafters.
People will of course complain about this, because people want to do everything with out restriction. But there is no neutral and isolated point from which to simply decide to add or remove features like this - they shape and affect there rest of the entire game and there is no solution with out some drawbacks. I think the most important thing is to pick the solution that makes the game world feel the most real.
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@Flet said in Player Professions and possible implementation idea:
It just physically takes a lot of direct player time commitment to level crafting. To the point that many players dont even do crafting at all. The crafting dedicated players slowly grind their craft. This gives you something to work the game economy off of now. In such a game most people will gather materials, and need to buy from crafters.
Ya, time does work, but it's usually implemented as repetition.
I'd rather see it implemented as a goal tree, very like the knowledge system, in which doing many different things related to the craft progresses the toon, but it's impossible to become the best by doing just one thing over and over.That seems, however, to contradict the goal of the developers, in allowing new players to be nearly as powerful as old players right off the bat.
In that case, the only way I can see to limit toons (or the effectiveness of alts) is by limiting resource distribution. Sure, you can theoretically craft everything, but it will be impossible to get the resources in your area to craft everything.
So, someone -has- to transport goods: either you go and gather/buy them, or someone comes to you and sells them. And in that case, it may be much more convenient to buy finished goods from a traveling merchant.
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It will take a combination of things to incentivize crafting without incentivizing making several alts.
1st. Limit the number of Alts on an account. If players have to shell out real world money for that 3rd+ character slot, they aren't paying to win, but they are going to make it a judgement call as to the value of that 3rd+ toon. I mean, once you own the game, you could make multiple free to play accounts, with your crafter alts on those other accounts, but this would depend on how you manage the free to play logistics. I know the game is buy once, then play forever, if you have to buy each account, again, it becomes do you buy another account, or just buy additional slots.2nd, Limit geographic availability of materials. Because materials are going to have to be physically transported from area to area, not just deposited in a bank somewhere, then withdrawn somewhere else. This will make it so your crafter will either have to make certain major caravan runs to get rarer (to their area) materials, or will have to pay someone else for doing the same.
3rd. Time constraints. If some part of the crafting process has a longer than a few ticks time 'cost' it will also limit how often people try to specialize in multiple crafts and such, because we only have so much time to invest, period. Some can play 12 hrs a day, 7 days a week, others are lucky to fit 2 hrs a day, 2 to 5 days a week into their schedule, and some may be able to do like 8 hrs, 2 days a week, Saturday and Sunday, which also happens to be usually the busiest time on most game servers by time zone. Another time constraint besides crafting steps, is material refresh rates for non-mob related materials. How long does it take for that dandelion to grow back? and that mandrake root? how about that iron node?
4th. Linking some crafting steps to only in-city finalization. This would allow cities to tax this final step, and would incentivize the solo'ist player to sometimes come into town for more than just simple trading. That regular trip to town might also be to finalize 6 or 7 projects they've been working on at the 'polishing' centers for that craft.
5th. The durability system will encourage constantly recreating some of the same things over and over again, as their older projects get used and worn out, and old customers need to come back and re-purchase that armor set they liked so much from a revered crafter. Crafters thus would have to balance their time between redoing some of the same old recipes they've been doing over and over again, and attempting new recipes, or even trying out experimental 'create a recipe' segments in later game crafting.
6th. Certain recipes need to be purchased/unlocked using knowledge points, and certain steps in the crafting process may be augmented or even unlocked using the Talent tree system.
the above steps would technically allow all characters to attempt any craft, and refine any craft, but only to the amount of time and effort they wish to spread out between those crafts they do. Do you gather your own materials, or pay other players for them to save time. Do you make all parts of a project, even if different parts take different craftings to complete, or do you pay someone to supply certain pre-fab parts, so you can focus on the craft you really like. Theoretic example: Say Tanning requires certain alchemical concoctions in order to complete advanced tanning. A player then has to decide, do they train up Alchemy to make the chemical themselves, or just buy the chemical ready-made from an alchemy specialist.
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@Roccandil I think there could be recipes for crafters to buy from treasure hunters. Old knowledge lost in ruins, found by these guys and then passed to crafters. This could endorse a healthier ecosystem too. More people out there, more risk of pvping. Maybe even the crafter might go out there and look for these recipes, accompanied by other talented warriors.
Maybe you even need some skills to find this knowledge, relics, books, recipes or whatever, so theres even more diversity and other specialization branches to make a living off
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I has a solution I like!
Implement massively time-consuming crafting leveling, not on player toons, but on NPC crafters bound to a city.That solves several problems at once:
- Specialization would be easy to implement (I could see leveling the city NPC crafters requiring the combined efforts of all citizens for years and massive amounts of resources), so a city would have to decide what they wanted to focus on: whether a specific kind of crafting/enchanting related to nearby resource nodes, or a generalist approach
- You can't alt-spam cities to easily bypass any restrictions
- A brand-new player who is accepted to an old city can instantly get access to high-level city NPC crafters, so new players aren't disadvantaged by joining the game years late
That also provides the following twists:
- Cities with high-level NPC crafters become even more valuable and attractive, both to new players of the game, and to enemies
- Provides interesting, organic PvE missions to level the city crafters, something even new players could be useful doing
- Specific cities would become known as the best places to get certain gear/items
- Innate trade routes would form between such cities
- The city crafting specialties and resulting world effects would outlast any one player or guild; cities would be more likely to have their own character (instead of being carbon copies)
And I could go on.
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Thing is, sandbox games aims to push the most possible content to players. Use the least NPCs possible.
The more NPCs come into play, the more themepark-y the game becomes.
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@Roccandil said in Player Professions and possible implementation idea:
I has a solution I like!
Implement massively time-consuming crafting leveling, not on player toons, but on NPC crafters bound to a city.As a main crafter in most mmo's I play, I would be looking for another game if the devs went this route.
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@Roccandil said in Player Professions and possible implementation idea:
Ya, time does work, but it's usually implemented as repetition.
I'd rather see it implemented as a goal tree, very like the knowledge system, in which doing many different things related to the craft progresses the toon, but it's impossible to become the best by doing just one thing over and over.That seems, however, to contradict the goal of the developers, in allowing new players to be nearly as powerful as old players right off the bat.
well the thing is, any sort of system like that will just get 'solved'. there will be guides to walk people through the fastest way to obtain everything and thats that. Repetition and bars filling and stuff is the only way to make a time based system work. When games tried to get around it somehow, like with a labor point system, it just gets you back to crafting alts again.
When crafters are rare due to this and most players just gather resources and interact with crafted goods through the games economy, this is quite new player friendly. A new player can simply gather materials for what they want crafted and find a crafter to craft it. When we look at games that use this sort of system it typically works out that crafters will craft you things for a certain resource payment. You can either pay crafters to craft in a currency or by giving an extra amount of resources. Typically this is a way that up and coming crafters level. When some mid-level crafter is skilling up they take orders for lower tier gear and so on. Its important in such a system to let all crafting contribute to skill gain, even lower tier things, however. this ensure its worth the time of the crafter.
@Gothix said in Player Professions and possible implementation idea:
Thing is, sandbox games aims to push the most possible content to players. Use the least NPCs possible.
The more NPCs come into play, the more themepark-y the game becomes.
Just make it the cities workshop level/specialization then and have the players interact with tools. Building up things in the game sounds pretty sandboxy to me
Ultimately if crafting is something easy for everyone to do it loses meaning because it then just becomes a necessary hassle you level up to become the same as everyone else and then it may as well not even exist. If crafting has some considerations though. If you need to locate crafters, or cities, or whatever, with the proper craft ability for what you want - then that thing becomes more limited. You have to make decisions and consider whether its worth your time. The specific place you find yourself in the game world modifies what you consider optimal to do, and the game rather than having strict linear progression of whats worst to whats best, you have contextual optimums that then go on to modify how you approach other situations in the game.
At the end of the day i think DAoC had the best mmo crafting system. It solved all problems. Item degradation kept crafters relevant, but it was slow enough that it wasnt a huge constant hassle. Most people did not craft because it took a lot of time and effort to level it up, those who did became important economic pillars of the games economy.
When you try to make everyone happy you just end up with something so watered down that nobody really likes it and often you are left with a shadow of something that becomes tedium to everyone. You dont want mechanics in a game to feel like the game would be the same if they just removed them. Systems where everyone just crafts everything for themselves end up just that. A mechanic should be something that when you interact with it guides your game experience. Being a crafter or needing something crafted should alter your entire approach to what you are doing and how you are playing the game for that period. This is how you create unique experiences.
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@Flet said in Player Professions and possible implementation idea:
Ultimately if crafting is something easy for everyone to do it loses meaning because it then just becomes a necessary hassle you level up to become the same as everyone else and then it may as well not even exist.
Based on what I'm seeing now, that's what crafting will be: something everyone can do for themselves, with an optimized alt if needed. The bottlenecks will be resource gathering and enchantment gambling.
Making crafting hard to master, and thus unique to a subset of the population, seems counter to the developers' design principles, which is one reason I suggested tying crafting leveling to the cities.
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@Roccandil said in Player Professions and possible implementation idea:
@Flet said in Player Professions and possible implementation idea:
Ultimately if crafting is something easy for everyone to do it loses meaning because it then just becomes a necessary hassle you level up to become the same as everyone else and then it may as well not even exist.
Based on what I'm seeing now, that's what crafting will be: something everyone can do for themselves, with an optimized alt if needed. The bottlenecks will be resource gathering and enchantment gambling.
Making crafting hard to master, and thus unique to a subset of the population, seems counter to the developers' design principles, which is one reason I suggested tying crafting leveling to the cities.
A shame. This is just copying the generic 'survival sandbox open world' formula thats been tried time and again. Less is more, if a major mechanic in a virtual world does not serve to help define a character and their place in it then it simply shouldnt exist.
This is not going to make real hardcore 'mmo crafters' happy either, because they cant even be 'a crafter' in such a game, since everyone is crafting.
You define things by removing everything they arent, not adding all possibility. Then you just get a nebulous blob identical to all the others.
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@Flet said in Player Professions and possible implementation idea:
You define things by removing everything they arent, not adding all possibility. Then you just get a nebulous blob identical to all the others.
Hmm. I think philosophically I disagree on some level.
But, from the Fractured perspective, there are more quantifiable factors:- Opportunity cost. Even if one toon can potentially be everything, it can't be everything at once. If a toon is being used as the best crafter, it can't simultaneously be gathering or fighting.
- Player enjoyment and skill. Even granted potentially identical toons, players will gravitate to different gameplay that they enjoy, and become uniquely skilled at implementing that gameplay (even if the toons are identical).
In that regard, I think the best way to guarantee uniqueness is not to put obstacles or straightjackets on toons and players, but to provide as many options as possible.
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@Roccandil said in Player Professions and possible implementation idea:
@Flet said in Player Professions and possible implementation idea:
You define things by removing everything they arent, not adding all possibility. Then you just get a nebulous blob identical to all the others.
Hmm. I think philosophically I disagree on some level.
But, from the Fractured perspective, there are more quantifiable factors:- Opportunity cost. Even if one toon can potentially be everything, it can't be everything at once. If a toon is being used as the best crafter, it can't simultaneously be gathering or fighting.
In the event that the solution to this is to simply make more characters then effective everyone is everything, and changing characters becomes the equivalent to 'changing stances'. Its not really a difficult thing to change characters in game. If you have a game where you can freely switch like this then you may as well have every character simply doing all things at all times because you effectively have that anyway with a trifle of a technicality.
In that regard, I think the best way to guarantee uniqueness is not to put obstacles or straightjackets on toons and players, but to provide as many options as possible.
Options are when you pick between things. To choose a thing requires not choosing something else. You weigh the pros and cons. In reality there is often no real choice, and correct consideration leads you to an obvious path you are obliged to go down. In a game we desire balance, which is a form of escapism. In a balanced game there are not bad choices but just different experiences.
It is restriction that really gives you those experiences. When you are restricted you must approach any given situation from the perspective of those strengths and weaknesses. The skill and strategy becomes one of figuring out how best to take what you have available to you and 'solve' the problem at hand. In such a game then the correct approach to a situation will vary based on the options you have available to you. One player will not only approach a situation differently from another in a soft sense, but in fact be facing an entirely different situation, because the situation is a combination of those restrictions and the problem at hand interacting generating a different optimal for each player.
The skill in a game with out restrictions simply because a single encounter, and the considerations are not 'how to approach this with my strengths and weaknesses' but 'how to make a character optimized for this'. This dilutes the pool of situations by effectively making them not the number of restrictions * the number of situations, but simply the number of situations.
This is a little more abstract than crafting however. In the end if crafting is a thing everyone eventually maxes, either on a single character or on crafting alts, then crafting simply stops existing. The difference in outcome is no different from if you just gather materials and there is no crafting specialization or leveling at all. Before that point however, you are presented with a crafting system you must grind not to actualize some character ideal, and thus motivate you, but simply as a checkbox you must tic as you are setting up your basic capabilities in the game. Grinding which furthers your character vision is rewarding and satisfying, you enjoy the steady increase in progress towards your goal. Grinding which is a prerequisite however is tedious and painful, because all that effort is not to carve out something, but just to prepare the baseline.
