One thing that has always bothered me in games, even Theme Park ones, is that my characters learn many simple things many orders of magnitude slower than a real human does.
The normal person learns how to function at 80% efficiency in a non-knowledge based activity very quickly, and then gains less and less proficiency after that so that it could potentially take years to fully "master" something.
Allow me to elaborate:
1) My sister had never fired a gun until February or so. She went to the firing range 3 times, I went with her the third. She rarely missed the target's vital areas and could proficiently take the gun apart, clean it, and reload. Now, she's no Roland of Gilead, but she took to the activity naturally and she's good at it.
2) If you have never rode horses before, you could go out today and ride horses, with about 10 minutes of instruction. Now, you probably couldn't handle the situation well if the horse spooked, and you'll probably end up with raw thighs; but you can do it.
3) If you are willing to do back-breaking labor you can go help farmers in your area during harvest season. It takes about 10 minutes of instruction for each crop type. It's unskilled labor. After about a day of doing it, if you're not a slacker, you are just as fast as someone who spent 30 years doing it every day.
4) Most all mining of gold and diamonds is done in Africa. Look it up, it's completely unskilled labor. There may be some engineering skill that goes into digging a hole in the ground and making sure it doesn't collapse, but actually using a pickaxe to dig ore out of the wall takes a bunch of sweat and labor, not "skill".
5) If I grab a botany book, I can go out to the woods and harvest anything I see. If I had an instructor on how to best get at and find what I was looking for, within a matter of hours I will be 80% as efficient as the instructor at harvesting plants. Even without knowing anything, no magical force exists in the wild that would keep me from picking a rare or distinctive looking flower.
6) As a teen I did construction work one summer. While the architect and foreman may have been skilled labor, I wasn't.
It makes sense that an archetype could take 30 months to master, yeah? That's about how long Navy Seals get training in reality. That training turns a regular guy into an elite soldier.
It also makes sense that it might take 30 months to become a master swordsmith (if not even longer if we're being realistic).
However, it doesn't make sense that it would take even a week to become an extremely proficient farmhand, or berry picker, or medieval style miner, or rider.
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One of the things I expressed concern about in another thread is a lack of activities for characters to do because of specialization time sinks.
Well, lets go back to a low-tech world and ask what "skills" do every non-aristocrat already have just by virtue of having grown up? They know how to ride a horse, operate a plow, drive a wagon, barter for goods (not as well as a merchant), etc.
I guess the point of this thread is to brainstorm about no-brainers. If an activity in the real world takes less than a day or hour of training to efficiently engage in it should not be a skill handled by the skill system. It should just be something any player can do by figuring out what to do.
Rationalizing the skill system in such a way would allow developers to maintain tight control over character progression without making characters feel very limited as they do in Eve.
Unskilled labor in a world without mass production is very economically viable. Incorporating it into a game would also allow newer players to quickly become involved in sandbox activities because the unskilled labor needs of settlements would always exceed their skilled population.
So, what are your thoughts? What should be unskilled labor? What types of activities would you like to see in a game that can be economically viable but require no "training time".
/edit: As a side note, as the game matured the economics of unskilled labor would automatically make it more valuable since all the "mature" characters would be inclined to be doing more profitable things, easing the entry for new players who can immediately jump in and make money and a difference in the game world.