I hope the game mechanics encourage community interaction and dont narrow things down to the guild-microcosm of modern mmos. Ive been playing mmos for over 20 years now - guilds used to be a thing you joined after a while when you made friends with people, and by that point your friends in the game were just as much in your guild as other people you had met and interacted with and because of this you spent most of your time doing mundane activities with friends or friends of friends and not your guild specifically. In modern mmos they are something you join right at the start because the games tend to be more 'activities for guilds to do' rather than virtual worlds. It has the effect of simply closing off the rest of the community from the players rather than being a social element.

Yes, alts are bad for MMOs. I automatically do not play games that have any kind of mechanics that encourage alt making.
Its not as simple as saying alts are bad in and of themselves. I certainly think alts break immersion and i play mmos in order to experience a virtual world - but there is more to it than that. If a game has benefits to making alts it signals fundamental design problems.
In some MMOs - typically themeparks - alts are blatantly encouraged even to the point that there are mechanics in the game based around making alts. These are always present in games where the games experience, its 'content', is consumed and you would run out of things to do even on one character. A good MMO does not give you time to play lots of characters.
In other MMOs alts become more of a strategic asset, throwaway characters for certain purposes. A game where this is advantageous becomes a game that people will do it in, and a game that people will do it in becomes a game that you must do it in to remain on an even playing field with everyone else. The issue here is that this is subverting the multiplayer nature of mmos firstly. If everyone has a scout alt, then the player role of 'scout' stops existing. But secondly and perhaps more importantly, if something CAN be handled by such a throwaway character then that thing is obviously too basic and not an engaging thing to start with, meaning the game itself is designed badly in that regard. If you have a game where people are making alts for a certain task then you have a game where that task needs to either be made to require more than an alt to do, or removed entirely.

Players will make an use alts if it is sensible for them to do so. Universally this occurs when it is not sensible to play your character in the game world. Alts indicate flaws in game design.

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.

@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.

As far as multiboxing goes, In my experience IP based measures do lower how common it is. Thigns dont need to be stamped out entirely, just decreased to a point that it does not disrupt the normal game experience. That said IP based measures are not the best solution, both because it does disrupt people who want to play from the same location and because if the game is still encouraging it through its mechanics its just going to give you a huge work load to police any attempts at circumvention - and if you dont at least make a show of doing that players will simply circumvent it, rules that arent enforced dont exist.

Games that tend to have multiboxing are games full of simplistic tasks. You can taken an extreme like dofus and wakfu which are turn based and thus people can easily multibox an entire party. In these games where it is easy to multibox almost everyone does it (and the fact that dofus' IP restricted anti multiboxing servers are so popular should show that there are a lot of mmo players who do not want to deal with muiltiboxing being a thing as it negatively effects the games community by decreasing viable player interactions through automating various elements of group play).

But there are many other games that do not have such a huge multiboxing trend that do not have to block IPs. These are games where playing multiple characters simultaneously is simply not worth the effort for most players. Simply actively paying attention to the game and its play trends and targeting things that do end up getting multiboxed by adding things that make them less amiable to multiboxing should suffice. Ultimately what causes a multiboxing explosion is when people feel they have to multibox to be competitive. When that happens everyone who refuses to do so just quits, leaving a smaller population of nothing but multiboxers.

@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.

Yes, alts are bad for MMOs. I automatically do not play games that have any kind of mechanics that encourage alt making.
Its not as simple as saying alts are bad in and of themselves. I certainly think alts break immersion and i play mmos in order to experience a virtual world - but there is more to it than that. If a game has benefits to making alts it signals fundamental design problems.
In some MMOs - typically themeparks - alts are blatantly encouraged even to the point that there are mechanics in the game based around making alts. These are always present in games where the games experience, its 'content', is consumed and you would run out of things to do even on one character. A good MMO does not give you time to play lots of characters.
In other MMOs alts become more of a strategic asset, throwaway characters for certain purposes. A game where this is advantageous becomes a game that people will do it in, and a game that people will do it in becomes a game that you must do it in to remain on an even playing field with everyone else. The issue here is that this is subverting the multiplayer nature of mmos firstly. If everyone has a scout alt, then the player role of 'scout' stops existing. But secondly and perhaps more importantly, if something CAN be handled by such a throwaway character then that thing is obviously too basic and not an engaging thing to start with, meaning the game itself is designed badly in that regard. If you have a game where people are making alts for a certain task then you have a game where that task needs to either be made to require more than an alt to do, or removed entirely.

Players will make an use alts if it is sensible for them to do so. Universally this occurs when it is not sensible to play your character in the game world. Alts indicate flaws in game design.

@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.

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.

Dividing the population is never a good idea. If the game doesnt play well with higher ping it is more sensible to rework the game than to divide the players. Be realistic here, this game is not going to have a huge population at launch. The only hope that it might have one ever would be if it puled an EVE and did a steady continuous grow over a decade. When mmo player populations fall below a certain density that kicks off an exodus and thats it, game over.
There is no point in starting an mmo if you are not hoping its something you will play for years. MMOs are not for instant gratification. Anything that looks like the game is being set up as a short term cash grab with out long term sustainability in mind will repel any serious mmo player.

dpaoislty

The opposite of solo is not 'joining a guild'. One can say its unreasonable to expect to play an MMO with out interacting with other players, but interacting with other players comes in many forms. The complaint here as im interpreting it seems to be the following:
To do certain things relevant to general progression you need to be a member of a city. Cities tend to be guild controlled and so to be a member of the city you must often be a member of the guild.
The developers no doubt wanted to encourage people to join cities, but by making cities themselves heavily guild-centric and not a completely separate layer of community, they have tied guild and city together to a point that expecting players to join a city is in effect expecting them to join the controlling guild.

The problem then does not seem to be one in the relationship between players and cities, but rather the relationship between cities and guilds.

dailies, bulk and no substance