I fervently disagree.
It is an ability just like the healing herbs and has huge advantages over other abilities as it is not restricted by mana, knowledge points, or having to farm monsters to learn how to make, and the bandages have a very low cool down. The only balancing mechanism is to require it to be in the hot bar and take up one of the 8 slots.

In the current system farming is necessary for city ranking and upkeep.

Frankly it is extremely easy to do this what with only having to worry about 2 crops and having 60 free fields outside of (most) towns. Alone it takes at most an hour a day for watering, harvesting, and rotation of these fields. I know, I have done it every test the last 4 tests and am doing it currently in Zenith. Yes you have to up this time commitment if you plant rice, but lets leave that aside. As long as there are no outside influences, and you dedicate the time, then there is no problem.

Introduce the outside influences - citizens.

Cities -require- citizens for them to exist. Both a minimum of 20 or face de-ranking and practically for placing houses in town to up the prestige of the town to then rank up. Because houses outside of town don't count, duplicate city buildings don't count, and even some city buildings just don't count... which is totally sustainable and reasonable what with everyone only getting 1 plot per account -sarcasm-.

Citizens get full access to the crafting facilities inside of town and at a seperate tax rate than residents or transients. This is great and a good incentive to join a town in of itself. They are also allowed to buy a plot in town at a special rate with no rent, also good hurrah hurrah.

But then we get into the marsh.

Citizens get access to all chests/smelters/tanning tubs/ and fields. And this is where the trust problems come in.
Ever since city population requirements went from 5 to 20 there has been the required need to make unknown people citizens, just to make things possible. And ever since then there have been people who steal from chests, replace -your- tanning warg hide for -their- animal hide, and replace the wheat growing with cotton (cuz they want cotton armor and this is the only way to get it).

The consequences of this theft and undermining activity have been felt by just about every group. Bussy infiltrated multiple towns and stole grain, opportunists take city resources and sell them in the market for personal profit, crops that are hours away from harvest get replaced thus wasting -days- and causing a town to loose ranks. We have been begging for activity logs for these stations in order to help separate the good people from the asses. It seems this will never come.

Instead I propose that access to these very sensitive and necessary functions of towns be limited to the lieutenant governors.

This way cities can be more generous with their recruitment, creating bigger and better communities, while also being secure in their huge investments. It is much simpler and more reasonable to scrutinize 5 than 25. By removing the temptation the environment will also be more pleasant. By raising the bar it makes the successful infiltration and betrayal all the more satisfying for those who are motivated by that stuff.

Thoughts?

Any solo or small group can seek out a city with the tech they want and join it to get access to that tech by simply buying a residential plot outside of the city.
Valhalla, Duath, sproketon, were all large successfull cities made up of solo or small groups.
Right now there is no activity or player presence which is what you are runing into.

Valhalla was specifically created by a number of small groups who decided to join together into a larger group just for the purpouse of claiming a city for small groups like them.
They got one of the first 4? city spots on the map and by many scales, the best one for conducting pve activity in the shadow vale while also being very close to one of the starting locations.

In playing this last alpha I and many others were happy to help numerious new players with their questions in general chat.
Of the many questions there were two that really could use some more help from the tutorial section; What a fleshing beam looks like and how to change the resource in the crafting station.
Here are my 'give me a sec' versions.

A tutorial for catching a horse would also be good as that was another very high frequency question. Really just giving the players a link to the video in which Prometheus shows us would go a long way to helping the new players.

As of the last alpha pvp mostly happened in hot spots which covered about 20% of the map, so long as you did not go afk or go alone (best with 5 friends) in those zones you were safe from pvp (mobs still could spawn / wander into you if you were afk and kill you but that's another matter)
If you were pk'ed you lost your gear. With the exception of metal plate armor or highly enchanted armor this loss was a minor setback.
There was a 'sherif' presence in the game (good pvp'ers who could only pvp evil people) but not enough population in the server as a whole for a good idea how the ballance worked. Call outs in chat letting sheriffs know of a evil pvp group resulted in the evil players running away, or the sheriffs arriving and killing em, or no effect. (attributed to low server population IMHO)
I played the vast majority of the time solo and was able to gather all materials and get to 100% knowledge on all mobs while only getting pk'ed 3 times in the 45 ish days I played. And always at known hotspots.

TLDR- it is very doable at the moment but changes in population may affect that either way.

Total agreement with Spoletta on this.
Due to travel, harvesting, and crafting times there will be a corresponding price for the goods compared to how much gold coin they could have earned farming mobs in the same time.
I have, and will continue to, work on data acquisition for just that conversion. If a player decides my prices are too expensive, they are welcome to do it themselves and then find my prices were not as I did my homework and based my prices off of the time it took to harvest and create the item.
Other players who put goods up for lower prices will see their time devalued, and likely stop. Those who put them at higher prices will not get it sold, and lower. This is the nature of the open market. The best part is that because all markets are local there is the addition of travel and opportunity costs. so while you could look at another market from this market and see there is a better price two towns over, is it worth the trip?
As a moderate crafter I had no problem selling ingots when I wanted to at good prices (1.5k-3k each) since those more interested in PvE or PvP had more access to coin than interest in crafting, and they were more numerous.
The only place where this has not been the case is food goods... and that is mostly because of bugs -sigh-

@ShadowLaw said in Problems with everyone being able to gather, craft, tame, etc...:

"Selling leather armor set, 500 Gold"
"Nah I'll just spend 30 min farming, earning KP, earning abilities and craft my own. Thanks"
they most likely will anyway just to learn the spells from the mobs or at the very least earn KP.

And when you are maxed on KP with that mob? When you would have to travel 20 min to get to where that mob is to farm it? when there are more than 500 people on the island and so there is actual competition for farming the mob? When traveling to the mob location involves risk of PK due to popularity of the area (shadow vale prime example)? Do you have private access to two tanning tubs (or 32 hours to use one twice)?

"Enchanting mana regeneration - 250 gold per item!"
"Yeah, I think i will just walk over the enchanter table and do it myself.">

Do you have the right gem stone on hand? the right imbuing materials? is the enchanting table taxed? Is it even available to you as a non citizen? Is your one house allowed placed at a town which offers the tech?

each ingot would be priced like 1500 gold per, again, because the ability to farm that material was so damn rare.

Yea... I was selling my ingots at 1500 gold coins each for copper, 2000 for iron, 3000 for exotic alloy. And I'm not a 'master gatherer', I just was willing to spend the time to gather and smelt while others were not. The fact that they sold at those prices also shows the point.

"Selling tamed horses! 50 gold!"

"Yeah I have 6 in my backpack from when I was riding to X area on the map to mine ore. I just stopped and cast a net on them. It took like 20 seconds each."

Good for you ! That is not the norm as shown by the fact that horses are bought sold in the market (I sold my extra horse for 100g this test) and all the posts in global of 'where are the horses'.

All in game examples of barriers and market conditions that have been consistently stable for the past tests where the thing in question was implemented (eg imbuing gems).

In the beginning there may be increased incentives to do your own farming - kp and skills- but shortly those will dry up for you, while remain for others who are new or just have not gotten to that mob yet. So after your first three weeks of game play you will be looking at competing for mobs that would only net you materials and no kp alongside players who are there for the kp and materials vs just paying gold for the materials.

In addition after playing a few weeks you will likely have some 'favorite mob' to fight for gold coin supply due to an excellent counter build or just the lower competition for the mob. Thus it makes business sense to go with the sure gain and trade it in for assured return of desired item via market, instead of chasing a riskier chance with multiple barriers to self sufficiency.

Final point is that you are not the norm group, I am not the norm group. The norm group are the casual players who make up the majority of the gaming population who want instant gratification and take comfort in knowing that their gold coins (which they get from doing the 'fun' activities of adventuring with their other casual friends) will provide that in the markets and likely also feed a underground black market of using real money exchanges for items, because they would rather spend their time adventuring instead of harvesting and crafting.

Oh and something needs to change with chests and crop stacking...
A large chest has 45 slots. Grain/beans/meat stack to 100. So you can put 4500 into one chest. That is 225 bags.
Meanwhile a warehouse holds 192 bags.
So a single large chest can hold more (potential) bags of grain/beans/meat than a warehouse.

I believe that the desire to make higher quality equipment rarer and more costly can be done without RGN and with more resource sink and player satisfaction.
The current system has 3 RNG levels for crafting.

Basic is 80fine/20good, and stays there for residents despite tech.

Craftmanship+ specialty shop:
80good/20 exceptional
This roughly means that every third item will be exceptional

Engineering + specialty shop:
40good/60 exceptional
This roughly means that every other item will be exceptional

All these odds are fine and appear fair.
But because of RNG it is entirely possible to have a run of 15 items with none being exceptional.
(I have experience with this from making hundreds of cotton cloth armor)
This is quite frustrating and produces lots of worthless unwanted good equipment which floods the market with little demand when exceptional goods are also available.

My suggestion is to switch from RNG to resource costs.
Instead of one craft button you have two.
One with the base resource costs that produces the lower quality option.
The other with twice (for the 40/60 ratio) or three times (for the 80/20 ratio) base resource cost that produces the higher quality option.

So with Engineering and a tailors shop you would have two buttons-
One that will cost 5 cotton cloth and produce a good quality cloth armor piece.
Another button that will cost 10 cotton cloth and produce a exceptional quality cloth armor piece.

This maintains the over all odds of getting a piece while increasing the resource sink but letting the crafter know what they will get instead of having them roll the dice to see if they are lucky or not.
This reduces the issue of crafting unwanted good items and prevents the market being flooded. In addition with a reliable way to get exceptional items it is more likely to see them for sale in the market instead of hoarded as rare event pieces.

This same base idea can be extended to enchanting.
In the enchanting case the first enchant on an item requires one of each reagent, the second requires two of each reagent, the third requires four of each.
Even if you keep the RNG odds of loosing an item the loss is quantifiable in its cost to replace without having to worry about more cumulative RNG gambling.

Ok, so just hype and fluff, no content. Sigh.

Another question:
Are forts and sieges a set number of glory divided up between all the winners? or is the glory a fort gives depends on the number of participants?

A: static (minimum effort for max reward)
200pts if you win a fort. if you won with 5 players then each player gets 40 points for their glory and contributes that 40 to the guild or alliance.
But if 20 players take the fort each player only gets 10 glory.

B: scalar (numbers for the farm)
Winning a fort gives 10 glory per person on the winning side.
5 people take a fort and get 10 glory each making the fort worth 50 glory in total.
or 20 people take a fort and get 10 glory each making the fort worth 200 glory.

C : Scalar total (skill over numbers?)
Team A brings 10 ppl to the fort and fights team B who also brings 10 people. 20 people participated in the fort event so the wining side divides 200 points between the 10 members in their team.

I anticipate that the answer is A as that is easiest for the system to calculate. B would be bad and C would be an odd medium.

But which is it? @Prometheus ?

What I want to know is why Glory points are split on things other than forts and raids.
Just ease of programing?
I do not see how the glory I get for making an artefact should be split up.

Some people seem to be having trouble understanding the Alliance system and the splitting of points so I will try to lay it out here.

Scenario 1: two smaller guilds team up.
Guild A has 5 EU timer players.
Guild B has 5 EU players.
Guild C has 10 EU players.
A fort is worth 200 points, divided between 10 players is 20 points.
All 3 guilds go after the same fortress.
Guild C wins as guilds A and B are split. Guild C gets all 200 points.
Guilds A and B ally creating the organization AB.
All 3 guilds go after another fortress but now that A and B are allies they match and beat guild C and take the fort together. The system recognizes that the organization AB has taken the fort and members of the organization can both access the fort. (use the doors, loot the chest, etc...)
Organization AB gets 200 points for taking the fort. there were 10 players involved, since each A and B contributed 5 players Guild A and Guild B both earned 100 points and now those two pots of 100 points gets put into the alliance equation: 1/2A + 1/4A+1/4B = Guild A's share (1/2 of 100) + (1/4 of 100) + (1/4 of 100) = 50+25+25=100.
So by allying guilds A and B get 100 points where otherwise they would get 0 as individually they could not compete with Guild C.
So: If both guilds work equally hard they can get a slice of a pie they otherwise would get none of and share that slice equally.

Note how a guild that is all EU players and another that is all NA players could also benefit from an alliance as together they can hit all the forts and get a piece of each while holding them from other guilds and being able to support each other in defense should schedules align ( like on weekends or holidays)

This is the ideal but not likely to be the case in game.

Scenario 2: Un-even contributing alliance

A has 7 players. B has 3 players. C has 10 players. Fort worth 200 pts.
Alliance AB wins fort. A contributes 140 pts, B contributes 60 pts.
A's Share = 140/2 + 140/4 + 60/4 = 70+35+15=120
B's share = 60/2 + 140/4 +60/4 = 30+35 +15 = 80
In effect A pays 20 points for the alliance which allows it to get 120 points and the fort where otherwise it would get 0 and Guild C would get 200.

As the season plays out A will pull ahead of B if things continue but instead of the end rankings being 1st C, 2nd A, 3rd B the alliance allows A to get 1st place, B 2nd, and shuts out C who gets 3rd.

TLDR: Alliances allow smaller groups, or groups in different time zones, to compete with larger groups.

Any update on the alliances? The week has come and gone. Even just a mention of what the sticking point is would be nice.

Are we going to get blocks on easily abuse-able abilities while you are in fortress events? or will we still be having to record, report, and wait?

If city raids give season points to players and guilds how will you fix raid mechanics to prevent abuse? no show auto resolve? increase costs/rewards?

With the new cool down timer on dismount hand carts have a new possible use as you can transport goods in pvp trial areas and not risk the cool down affect.
Yes this is very very niche and incredibly unlikely to be used and I would also like a way to carry heavy inventory items other than high strength and hauling potions but thought it was worth mentioning that in a possible future Tartarus pvp world the current hand carts may have their day.

The new legendary equipment is huge change and will open up many new builds,
. I am looking forward to it.
The city change less so. NPC's? Resource sink quests for RNG reward? Not selling it for me at the moment but will see.
I do appreciate that the legendary reagents will now have more use but I am slightly concerned about accessibility to legendaries for small groups and the low drop rate of legendary reagents from the summoned. We summoned 5 of the elemental legend and got zero reagents.
It is nice to see the house skins and I hope to see more such things in the future ( cart skins?)

Great news about carts, will make Aerhen more interesting
thank goodness the walls got fixed, towns have been off of 5 day protection for a day now XD

Very impressive patches!
It is so encouraging that you are hitting these so quick and effectively.
Thanks!

Great stuff !
I just wonder how a cart will know it's user is hostile or not, and what about a good player adding a hostile player to the carts friend list and then could the cart be unstealable?