PROFESSIONS
Introduction
Professions are one of my favorite aspect of MMORPGs and I love to spend time also with activities related to gathering and crafting. Those are really good counterbalance to all combat activities what games can usually offer. That great interest related to professions and desire to be a mastercrafter has driven me to prepare this comprehensive suggestion.
Below is my matrix how professions could be implemented in Fractured. I divided professions to three main category without actually knowing how this is planned to implement.
- Gathering
- Refining / Processing
- Crafting
If DS has planned to include refining/processing to gathering and/or crafting that is of course one way to do this.
Now please consider this as my vision, which bases on my experience how professions have been implemented successfully in other games and how I wish to see things to be done to cater all players interested of different life skills. I don't say this is how professions should be done, this is more like how things could be done. I just hope this post gives devs some ideas what they can consider to use in development.
I tried to gather information from forums and news, and I mixed those with my own ideas and experience. That lead to matrix like this:
I know there is a good amount of different profession, but some of them can easily be combined if wanted. I did not list all the things different professions can make, I just gave some meaningful examples.
Gathering
Gathering is usually and generally speaking very grindy activity, which can also lead people for boredom quite fast. I personally like to gather now and then, and especially in mind to collect more crafting materials. I am sure that most people are fine with decent amount of grind, because it goes well with spirit of gathering. Still I hope we will see progression implemented way like abilities are generally planned (using task system). And I guess this is developers intend as well.
Creating gathering more interesting is not only about making it less grindy. Adding more content to gathering itself is one good way to do this. Craftable gathering gear, tools and items are standard options, but on top of that gatherers deserves something more. Hiding rare drops and other rewards to resource nodes is something which keeps people going. Also unlocking special abilities to help with gathering would give people wider progression.
Crafting
Crafting will be really important part of Fractured, because we have player driven economy. That is why I hope we can see more focus on individual item crafting and less in mass production. So, I want to see more complex, but at the same time more rewarding system. At the sametime DS wants basic gear set crafting to be quite simple, so i am interested how they will balance this? Because, if crafting will be really easy (only few materials needed) and mass productive, this will lead items to overflood the markets. After that it is hard to make profit with anything. Also if crafting system allows mass production, this will lead guilds to centralize all resources to specific/shared alts. I hope this will be avoided with some mechanics like task system or recipes, so we will actually see crafting as meaningful career choice. This is where Albion Online went really wrong and I do not want to see Fractured making same mistake.
Summary
This suggestion was about different profession possibilities and what the structure could look like. I did not wanted to go too deep in gathering, crafting or specific professions. I guess I could get back to those topics a little bit later.
So it's time to end this post and hear othersβ opinions. Did I miss something relevant? What kind of professions you would like to see in Fractured and most importantly why?
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