TL;DR at bottom for those not willing to wade through my rather long winded thoughts. :P
I will admit that PvP looting is a big issue for me as well. I've been reading this thread for the last few days before I posted to see if what I'd thought about had been totally covered, but it didn't come up at least fully in the form I'm writing about.
I totally agree with the frustration of being someone else's mining mule - spending an afternoon of my time collecting whatever, to have it gone in one time being killed by a jerk. It concerns me that even if what I collected isn't won in the 'loot the player' lotto by the PvPer, it will (apparently) still be destroyed by the act of the PvPer looting my body. Whether the killer gets it in the lotto or not is immaterial: my collecting time is still wasted, my collected items are still gone, and I had no control over it. As soon as I collected that first crafting consumable, if I get killed, I'm out of luck.
So the big issue to me is allowing PCs to manage the risk to their items - all of them, at any time. If you can choose what to risk and what not to risk that, I think, goes a long way to removing the angst from losing items. So I was very happy to hear of the threading idea from the devs.
So I was pondering the use of threads as described in the Dec 12 blog to tie items to your body to reappear with you at respawn. And then wondered whether or not you can change what is protected by these threads while out in the field to protect your newly collected items. At the time you got that new crafting consumable you'd need to decide what to remove a thread from (unprotect that pair of steel toed boots) and what to put it onto (that pile of hides you just spent two hours collecting, or maybe that rare albino hide you just got?). Then if you get killed, your stack of hides shows up with you at your bind spot.
But then that brought to mind the stated goals of GW:
a) to act as a drain on goods in the world
--> This would still act as a drain, just let gatherer types managed what they are risking to a drive by killer.
b) add to the tension
--> You still lose some items, you just get to always manage which ones are at risk.
c) to give value to goods being transported from high availability areas to low availability areas
--> Ok this is an issue. Most people talk about the solo gatherer, but for the sake of discussion, they are a caravan of sorts. If a caravan is an actual wagon (ie a separate entity from the PC), and is going to be filled with stuff too heavy for any one pc to carry (either in whole or in part), then yes the caravans are still at risk. If the load could be broken up into pc-carryable portions, then for really valuable cargos Pcs would do so and thread protect these stacks, so we have to take that into account as a reverse tactic and whether or not that is a legit use of the system. (Option 2 below helps address this tactic).
Whether or not crafting goods can be threaded, I'd say a compromise is in order, to try to both allow the devs goals to be met and allow the PC to mitigate their loss / manage the risk. Neither of these compromises will make those who get frustrated and angry by any loss at all happy, but in order to meet the goals of the devs, either some inventory destruction/loss has to stay in or another equal drain on the economy has to be added.
Option 1: If you can't thread protect crafting goods at all: If the PvPer didn't win it in the lotto, then crafting goods are returned to the player by the gods once the Pvper releases the body. You'd still lose your other unprotected items on the husk, to contribute to the drain. This presupposes that items have tags and can be tagged as crafting goods by the devs to make it easy to determine what to transport. Possible maintenance issue: items mis tagged will need fixing.
Option 2: (My preference) If you can thread protect crafting goods: a thread only protects a portion of the stack (I'd suggest at least half to three quarters protection, rounded up). The remainder can be won in the lotto by the killer or is destroyed along with the other left behind items when the corpse is released. In this option the risk is partly managed by the player (they choose what to protect in the field as they collect it). Breaking a caravan up into pc loads (if the weight permits) is now another valid decision to make to manage risk. One caravan with 20 alert fully kitted guards or 20 lightly kitted easily killed runners that flee in all directions if the convoy is attacked?
Now, if the majority of consumable crafting goods never resided in a PC's inventory that would be another kettle of fish all together. If the goods went from camp storage (medium risk) to conveyance storage (largest risk) to craft building storage (low risk) then the whole issue of losing the items to random asshat pker types from personal inventory is gone. In order to get goods from any of the three storage types should (hopefully) require a heck of a lot more effort on the part of the raider (ie grouping) than just a drive by ganking would. And presumably the raiders would need a conveyance to move their ill gotten gains since it doesn't go in inventory, which opens up the possibility that someone else will come along and take it from them before they get it home.
The only crafting items I can think of that is tough to keep out of PC inventory, would be items collected from monsters. Those items could be covered under partial thread protection (if stackable). Note: Animal part collecting could be covered under the 'build a camp to collect' dynamic rather than the 'PC kills the deer and loots it' dynamic if the developers want to go that route.
I guess it all will come down to what the developers want to do, and how far they want to go on the manager-crafter vs hands-on-crafter route. But I thought I'd throw out my various and sundry ideas for discussion. And also, of course, in case I've had thoughts along lines the developers haven't and have given them some new ideas and food for thought. :)
TL;DR - Allowing non-PvPers to manage risk to all their items, even newly collected crafting goods out in the field would go a long way to mitigating concerns. Its all about having it in your control as to what to protect. Stacks of crafting goods could be partially protected rather than wholly, to allow for some resource loss on death without full resource loss as it (might be) currently.
But, if the majority of crafting consumables are never in PC's backpacks in the first place, but instead in a storage of some sort (camp, conveyance, building), then that removes the crafter's worry of personal inventory loss except for crafting consumables that need to go in in personal inventory: ie monster parts. And partial thread protection of field gathered items would help with that.
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Lady of the LazyLeopards
Goblin Squad Member
