Probably Been Brought Up But......

[Rurrar]

What about allowing characters to take on a trade. Similar to EQII, you can do woodworking, armouring, brew potions, etc. Make this a 1-50 level system as well and people have to get ahold of componants to make items.

As an example, a 50th Level Blacksmith needs the following items to create a Glimmering Mithril Greatsword:

A Bar of Purified Mithril (4)
A Bar of Purified Gold (2)
A Pristine Side of Leather (1)
A Pristine Ruby (4)

Right there you have involved 5 skillsets in your process

Mining
Smelting
Tanning
Gemsmithing
Blacksmithing


Just a thought, this could create another level of gameplay to Toril and allow you something other to do then just hack and slash and RP.

Just a thought

[Ezwar]

i think that trade skills would be quite fun, it would give lower level characters the ablilty to collect something that the higher level charactes could use, and or give them something to do while there are no lower level groups. shrug.

[kiryan]

"it would give lower level characters the ablilty to collect something that the higher level charactes could use"

its interesting that you say that. I think this is critical, but the question is how do you implement something like this on toril.

In order for low level characters to acquire these resources, they have to be able to kill the mobs they drop off of. If a low level character can kill a mob in 1 minute a high level character can kill in it 5 seconds...

In everquest, mobs were separated by great expanses, so while a high level character could kill a mob in 5 seconds, it might take 3 minutes to find the next mob. Since the majority of the time was in finding mobs, and travel time is virtually identical between high and low level players, and low level players have to do it anyways (for exp), you had the basis of an economy.

I haven't come up with any really good ideas on how to recreate a similar dynamic on toril. Any high level vigger could churn through mobs more effiicently than any low level character to the point that the "resources" would be of trivial cost, or so insanely rare and valuable that no low level character would ever actually get one. I fear the only way to implement the dynamic (through killing) where it favors the low level player would be some sort of artificial construct that could only be poorly implemented...

One of the few ways to do this that I have thought of would be some sort of non combat type action. Maybe something like "gardening" where you can only grow so many plants at a time and you have to "tend" them daily... with zones being at least 45 minutes, tending a garden every 12 or 24 minutes would be too costly of a time investment for most high level players (who are actually playing and not idling).... but then your taking low (and possibly high) level players away from group oriented activities and the "main" game...

i can't quite figure out a good way for low level players to "have/earn" something valuable to high level players.

[amolol]

who said you had to kill anything? what if you wanted to be a miner. no killing there just swinging a pick at a rock face. or say you wanted to make food. no killing there just pan food knife and cook. (there may be killing in getting the food to cook but you donot need to actualy kill anything to cook it)

or what about say harvesting plants for potions or something not much fighting there.

it is actually a very effective way to add something new to the mud and i support it 100%

now im not saying all skills should be as thus. say you wanted tomake leather armor or something. well you would first need a hide ( so need to fund a player with the "hunting" trade or do it yourself) next you need to have someone with the tanning trade (or do it yourself) and finaly you need a leather crafting skill (find someone or do it yourself)

a smart way to imprive the economy is make all of the trades take at least 3 seperate skill sets to accomplish the end product and then make it sothat a char could only have one or 2 "professions"

i realize that a person could easily have 3-4 chars that work in the professions needed to make the final products. but before you say anything about it theres nothing to do about it and this is just a way to "help" make the game more interesting for everyone. if they want to do all of the work and sell the end product for their own personal gains it doesnt affect you in any vast way and it pay pay off to have seperate people in the production sothat you may mass produce and "flood" the other guy out of buisiness. mmm economics.

[Naled]

SWG has a solution for this. As your skill progesses you can't make low level things. For example if you're a level 1-10 weaponsmith you can make screws, a level 50 can make blasters, but can't make scews, he needs a level 1-10 weaponsmith for that. Of course SWG works with skill levels so it makes more sense that way. It would be a bit weird to unlearn the skill to make a screw, but game-wise it works.

[Rurrar]

First off let me start by saying that as a programmer myself, I understand the ungodly (no pun intened) amount of code this would take to implement.

That said, I think a system similar to the SWG thing would probably be the best way to do something along these lines without making the system "broken". The high levels might rely on the low levels for the basic componants of a finished item because come on, who really wants to mine and smelt ore, I have played several games like that and that shit is boring.... I would much rather give a level 10 miner 100 plats to do it for me so I can make my finished product and sell it for 500 plat, it's just good business. This does however create the same dilemma as EQII has and thats that money is worthless, if I can mine 500 ores and make 100 plat in 2 hours, you encourage botting. This having been said, make it similar to the normal fighting skills, if your skil level is low, you might actually fail in your attempts and therefore find nothing. Something else to consider on this would be to put "High Dollar" ores such as mithril and adamantite in dangerous places, while putting iron ore and broze or copper in relatively safe zones. This would create a huge delimma for anyone who though botting might be fun. Also, there are all kinds of nasty things that can happen to inexperienced miners including rockslides, cave ins, and gas poisoning.

I could go on all day, but, my boss would probably get a little miffed ;)

Anyway, that was my idea, I am digging the discussion.

[kiryan]

I absolutely agree that the game needs more depth and I have posted several times about tradeskills and alternative advancement in the past, but I haven't been able to come up with the foundation for a good implementation for toril.

the reason you would want players to kill for tradeskill resources is that this game does not currently have an abundance of players. If you take players and put them into a time intensive activity for tradeskills then your in danger of hurting the group zoning/exp portion of the game. In my opinion, you want to implement tradeskills in a way that complements zoning and exping not replaces them. You want to increase player interaction at all levels... high level buying stuff from low level, zone elite going to old easy zones with zone newbs, ect....

Since we allow people to have multiple characters and there is virtually no level limited equipment, any kind of level restrictions will be circumvented by alts specific for the task. If you make character specific time limits then you will again be circumevented by alt characters. So the primary way of slowing down people and encouraging them to use other players as resources is through time sinks.

I've been thinking about tradeskills on toril for at least a year, but I haven't been able to come up with a good framework.

--

I don't like the swg implementation. There is no reason you shouldn't be able to make low level items that you used to be able to make; its phony. Masters should not make low value items, because its not the best use of their time... not because they "cant".

This is the heart of the everquest implementation, sure high level can go around and kill lions for lion skins at a rate of 2 or 3 per hour, but a low level exping on them will get 1 per hour and actually benefit from his time.

[Rurrar]

Players circumventing the need for lower level players will never end. We have unlimited characters and with people being able to power level a new character by giving them god equipment and people to help them out, it cannot be stopped. The only way to curb it would be to disallow characters to trade equipment in the Inn with their alts, and even then, you run into the problem of people just getting someone to help them out with the old "Here hold this" routine.

I do however agree that people would twink the system, hell I have played here forever off and on and I have seen people twink the system since day one, (See Trade and Trade Carts), I was a very small character at that time and made a killing off the trade system all by running diamonds from WD to MH and I believe rubies back to WD. I did it because it was easy to make alot of money in a short time. This in my opinion is broken system because as a 15th level character with Zmud paths, I was able to make thousands off of something so easy.

Incidently, I miss the trade system :)

A true tradeskill system would require a lot of thought, I think it could add depth and problems at the same time, but, then again what update doesn't (See Justice Code) ;)

[Llaaldara]

Think WoW method handles it just fine. Sure when you get your skill up you can make the little stuff still and go out and gather the lesser materials in low level zones to make the lesser items, but it becomes a waist of time.

Why?

Because you're only going to make a few silver profit. A few silver for a low level is big money since items they need cost about that much, but for a highlevel its not.

Where as if you make more complex higher level items as a high level, you make drastically more profit. You make gold profit. And you need that bigger profit to buy the higher level items that cost more.

It supports the little guy and the big guy. The big guy buys basics they might need from the little guy, because it's peanuts for the big guy, but is a fortune for the little guy.


The only problem I see is with movement. One reason highlevels don't go farm noob zones for noob materials is because you have to travel to them and run around collecting it all. That takes time. Sure a lot less time then a noob because you're mounted with mount speed enhancements, but still takes time nonetheless. Time that would be better spent on gathering highlevel materials. On the MUD, movement can be done in a blink. I'm not sure how to get around that.

[kiryan]

yes, movement is the big problem in implementing the same system found on wow, eq or any of several other games.

But movement is really just a dynamic in those games that does not scale as fast with level like raw killing power. Because movement is trivial on toril for high level players (and low level characters with fly), you have to come up with a replacement dynamic if you want to implement a similar system.... something that sinks time for high level and low level players rather equally.

[Botef]

Heres an idea from another mud that Ive always liked:

It was a trading system. The MUD had a list of general goods (Mithril, Platinum, Gems, Timber, etc). The quanitiy of theses goods within a particular city directly and indirectly effected the sale/price of similar items in shops...for example, if players stopped moving mithril from MH to WD, anything that was mithril cost a lot more to buy, but sold for a lot more as well. Further more, the 'levels' of these items contributed to the prices in other areas, creating a constantly changing econominc system.

The players controlled this economy by buying/selling goods and moving them from one local to another. In addition to this, there were wandering/global merchants that did the same thing...As a result the economy was not constant, and profits required not only a pre-existing knowledge of what the values were from one area to another, but also an up to date understanding of where current values sat and how you could turn a buck at any given moment in the muds economy.

As for transporting goods vs. time, etc, the 'carts/wagons' which had to be used to transport goods, had limited movement capabilities...Again though, nothing that a slow/speed walk system couldn't work around...So to further combat this your 'cart' was subject to random spawned attacks from local theme'd enemies...i.e. bandits, etc of what ever race is native to the zone. Not only would you have to fend them off (They also generally only attacked people who owned), but you ran the risk of some of them stealing your goods and thus being out money.

In essence, it was a down time activity that could be done to make money that still had combat/risk elements...There was player to player competition for controlling the market (limited #'s of supplies to buy/sell), and it also required player cooperation to defend and move things around.


Adapting something like this for here would be fairly easy, with the exception that random crashs would disrupt the concept:

The market shouldn't 'reset' after a crash, and people shouldn't lose money to a crash...under our current scenario though, I see a lot of headache.



All in all I like professions, and economy and all those side details that add to solo/small group play -particularly because it gives added purpose to a game that is almost 100% about eq right now. Integrating a trade system like this in future quests/zone access would broaden gameplay in some respects, but as the saying goes you can't teach an old dog new tricks, and I really dont know if something like this would really take off and thrive as a major part of gameplay, and not just some random quirk (like tinker machines).

However, given the current work load and new features in the works, this is back burner and probably would disrupt game dynamics more than it would add without a lot of pretesting/planning......and since its implementation would intially only add to the solo/small group element (untill new zones that utilize the dynamics could be created), it would likely never happen, at least not on the glorious level some of us invision.

[kiryan]

the game is all about eq, but im not sure how a tradeskill system would make it less about eq? tradeskills generally produce equipment... the only way to make the game less about eq is put in something else players can use to gain power.... some sort of alternate advancement system.

--

I'm not sure what the benefits of moving prices based on buying and selling would do except create put profits at risk. It would probably be far simpler to just make it random if you wanted to put profits at risk. Changing prices of services like armor potions in cities that everyone has access too really doesn't do anything unless your only talking about trade supplies. Just like how you get a barb to buy vit potions for you and an elf to buy tinkers bag...

I'm going to get off topic now, away from tradeskills more towards something I conceptually call kingdoms.

I did always think that if we could implement several "kingdoms" and make it so that you could only buy stuff in your kingdom with your kingdom's currency you might be able to establish some sort of inter kingdom competition. Say if your kingdom's citizens participated heavily in trade, nice items are available for purchase in there and would only be available to citizens of the kingdom (using that kingdom's currency). That would create some competition I thought, but again runs into the same problem of being about eq at the end of the day.

So I thought if you created some sort of ranking system between kingdoms and then between citizens of that kingdom you could confer some sort of character "power" based on that... For example, maybe the top kingdom's citizens get really cheap "services" like !rent heal potions and stone wands or teleporters. Maybe the top 3 citizens in the kingdom gets +5 to all stats and hit/dam.

You could start this system with something as simple as trade and expand it later to include things like "farming" (kingdoms with more acres of farm land would tend to be "bigger") or offensive/defensive activities (mini raid instances that impact the "security" of the kingdom).

I thought about trying to use this same kind of system centered around associations, but I thought that the guild concept wasn't as flexible as a city/kingdom.