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.

you dont -need- 20 ppl comitted to the town to start a town... you can have anyone fill out the roster who is willing. It is more like a petition than a real comitiment.
now. you do need 20 ppl minimum or you will derank every 3 days.
This can be held off by upgrading the town and resetting the 3 day timer.

Cats Drools is in a special GM created 'no go zone' for them to do video for the trailer they just put out.

Logging out in a corrupted data region (like serenity) will cause problems. Move to a different region, log out and back in and it will be fixed.

The only reason a wipe at this time would be remotely acceptable is if they are; brining in vegetables and leafy greens, alchemy, imbuing, AND changing the item crafting / durability system. thus the need to remove all the older stuff we have stockpiled.
If these things are not all done then it will just be a repeat of the start of beta all over again with the same mess and problems.

Page 1 of the news is the same as page 2,3,4,5... the page never actually updates to show the other pages despite the change in the address... thus no way to look at older news posts...wtf.

Unlearning the tech points for walls should reduce the durability of the walls. You are not paying for it so you should not get the extra benefit from it. Due to the one point per day unlearning of tech points a city can easily re-allocate points in the 3 day window before a siege into stone walls to get the hp increasing effect.
60 stones to take down a wood wall is good, but it should take -at least- 90 for a stone wall, if not a full 120.
This also assumes that catapults have object collision and people cannot hide in them and thus be un-targetable.
I have both attacked catapults and defended against an attack on my teams catapults and the hp seemed reasonable, what was unreasonable was the ability to hide in them -=AND=- the fact that lemming like behavior of suicide rushing the catapults over and over again was a valid tactic.... -WE NEED SOME EQUIPMENT LOSS- death needs some meaning, the war chests need to have their purpose restored (extra gear for the side as was the intent).
I have not been able to test it, but catapults should be deployable after the start of a siege. An attacker should be able to bring in X catapults and hold x-1 in mobile form in their tent as replacements should the ones they deploy earlier be destroyed. It will take extra resource commitment and time which seems appropriate and allows for the -possibility- of battle to continue after the first suicide rushes are able to kill a catapult.

As far as player abilities able to damage a wall... If players can attack from on top of the wall then I guess it would be ok for other players to try to use specific abilities (like the short ranged summon big stone above your head and smash it into ground thing) to damage walls.... but defenders -need- to be able to retaliate from the top of walls... which they cannot do.

the light mace, axe, and wooden club are all rather pointless.
You can use the Morningstar battle axe for concussive strike, so no reason to use the light mace.
Hypothetically they -along with dagger- are there for assassins'... but since crit damage, stealth, and assassins' armor are not working well there is very little point to them. And dagger is just better.

Bare fists are uniquely under powered as they: cannot take enchantments like any other weapon, sometimes do not count as light weapons, are necessary for elemental fist attacks but the damage scales off of it not dex or str, and the final talent switches damage to dex... but that is a penalization since you cant use most dex skills without a weapon and many good martial artist skills (battle jump, flurry of blows, etc..) are str based, not dex based so you end up in a bad position. AND in the first few weeks of game play before T2 weapon recipes drop the unarmed brawler talent tree is the go to place for higher damage, but only then. The introduction of fist wraps would greatly help this imbalance. You could make str based fist wraps (steel gauntlets), int based wraps (cloth + crafting material), or even spiked brass knuckles for dex and piercing. Having fist wraps would remove the perceived need to buff 'unarmed' melee with the talent tree causing this unique oddity and also allow 'unarmed' melee martial artists to finally have enchantment options on their weapons, like everyone else.

Wands. Single hand, lower damage/range (maybe aoe like light weapons?) int based weapons. give mages some variability and a build that allows use of shield other than bare hands.

Hand crossbow or throwing daggers. Same idea as the wands, something more limited but gives more flexibility to dex melee.

Stones. a ranged str weapon for melee. It can be slow, and suck, but at least give them the option.

It would be cool if your book page showed the quality of the item you will be making, like this:

The same as how the item looks.
The current halo system is unique and separate, which is just confusing and not as informative.

It would be very nice if the food/stone/wood storage buildings and food packing station worked like the market. Just ride up and fill your cart with a slider or deposit bags the same way.

I think the tanning tubs are at a good place right now. They can hold a lot and most dont see a need for having more than two on their property.
It would be nice if smelters also increased their capacity (even at the expense of taking more time).
I see the ability to fill a tanning tub with 40 hides then leave for the day and come back to 40 tanned hides 16 hours later as a nice feature. While having to checkup on smelters every 4 hours for 1 ingot is just a hassle. I would be very happy with having the smelters take up to 4 stacks of 4 fuel and a stack of 20 ore and produce 4 ingots after 16 hours.
It is very rare that I harvest less than 30 ore at a time, so why not have the advanced smelters eat all of that at once (3x current), cost 3x more fuel, and take 3x more time? It would be very convenient.

Yes, this is a know bug. Sadly the programing behind it is apparently not something that can just be hot fixed : /

From the discord:
summarized by Doc
On the subject of Recipes, there are several issues not already mentioned(at least before I stopped reading)

1st, as Spoletta said, Recipes need to maintain a value in the game. rank1andy asked why: for 1 thing, as a rare drop, they represent a significant time investment in the game. Anything that rare needs to be able to maintain a value.

2nd, rank1andy asked why not reduce the drop rate of Recipes? Because players are already upset about how extremely low thier drop rate already is. Lowering it further would cause even more of an outrageous, and make their eventual drop in value even more jarring.

3rd, players have pretty adamantly lobbied against limited use Recipes, so making each recipe only let you make X of a given craft is a major no go.

4th, Recipes do affect the in-game economy. They don't create a gold sink, but they are currently the most hotly traded items out there until they reach saturation levels.
They could become a gold sink once tge market starts taking a small cut of every sale, bit until then, they are mainly a gold motive force, not a sink.

Recipes, however, don't fit much of the spirit if Fractured. Mainly, how mobs are only supposed to drop items that make sense for that mob. Recipes currently drop with no real rhyme or reason. You can't even target a specific recipe you need by mob, as it's effectively random.

Recipes, however, could become treasure chest drops, and also limited to mobs that can drop gold as well. This would make more sense, and also revitalize treasure chests if they have even a chance of a recipe drop.

bump for visibility as it is still a live topic of discussion.