Goblin Squad Member
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Potential Problem Statement: Crafting is a limited path, usually dominated by the first players to rush up the crafting tree. In a game without soul-bound items, the game will eventually fill up with low-level crafted items, making it difficult to become a successful crafter later.
Possible Solution: Make crafted items able to be 'Soul Threaded' only once. After the first threading, any subsequent owners (either through trade or looting,) cannot thread that item.
This would have the effect of ensuring there is an ongoing demand for crafted items, as un-threaded items can be lost (out of the game) upon death. It is a nice item-drain for crafted items!
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Goblin Squad Member
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I think this is covered by item durability. Stuff breaks and you need to get new stuff. People will also want to carry a variety of equipment for various situations, and I'm pretty sure there will be fairly localised economies due to the risks involved in transporting items. I think there will always be demand for new items.
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Goblin Squad Member
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As long as item repair doesn't make it better to just keep it good and then sell it 'used'. Either way, the more I think about it the more I like the idea of an item only being capable of Soul-Threading once. After that, you can own it but not Thread it. It will keep twinking down a bit too...
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Goblin Squad Member
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The more I think about it the less I like it.
As Jameow said, unless the pvp askpect of the game is a complete bust, items will be disapearing from the economy at a rapid rate.
Also, there is no plan for a universal auction house, your items will be sold in a shop in a village and people will have to come to the village to buy it.
If you want to expand your market you have to ship items to neighboring villages, with a certain percantage getting lost along the way to bandits. (including the ones YOU hire to cut down on the competition)
As such players have the tools to affect supply and demand via meaningful player interaction, not an artificial system designed to limit payers options, flexibility, experimentation and fun.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I'm not sure this is an issue. I could be wrong. I'm not seeing the big issue here. How is the game filling up with low-level crafted items stopping you from becoming a better craftsman? At worst, you may not make as much with lower level items, but if you are better than everyone and can make higher quality items, then you will most likely make a profit. This also assumes of course you try and outsell the competition.
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In the game I played, however, there is a few blacksmiths of the highest rank, but I've only seen one being popular, and that's due to how he did things: Made a lot of things, and made them cheap. The other guys charged 1.5 million or so for one suit of armor, while this guy offered multiple (and in varying colors and stats) for around 500 thousand to 900 thousand. I did the math, he was still turning a profit. New ones pop up a lot, they just generally do it wrong: charge a lot for the armor, even though there was cheaper options.
This was in a game where while you could lose items upon death, you could pay a lot less and retrieve the armor (usually with your good enhancements and enchants on it.) (And there's an item that prevents this, and has a market as well.)
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Goblin Squad Member
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Must be just me, then. I never felt it was worth it to start crafting once the market was saturated with low-level items (before the advent of soul-binding in MMOs solved the problem.)
Without soul-binding (read: PfO) items and some type of item drain, things will just circulate.
Yes, the 'normal' low-level items will fall out of circulation since no one will bother Threading them. But the 'nice' low-level items could well stay in circulation longer, as owner after owner Threads them.
Eventually, there will be enough 'nice' low-level items being passed down (twinking, trading, theft) that the demand for both 'normal' and 'nice' low-level items falls significantly.
I'm working under the assumption that crafting should be meaningful and rewarding along the whole path. If we are assuming that a race to the top is the only viable path for crafting success, then forget about it. Crafting is busted anyway.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Low level items would likely be the necessary maintenance consumables like whetstones, repair chainlinks, and leather pads. These are perhaps what your hirelings will make while you are offline. The crafter's skills come through time, not quantity produced, so the crafting character would largely only make exceptional items (or try) while actively crafting.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I'm working under the assumption that crafting should be meaningful and rewarding along the whole path. If we are assuming that a race to the top is the only viable path for crafting success, then forget about it. Crafting is busted anyway.
I guess it comes down to your definition of "meaningful and rewarding"
The rewarding part is you make some gold, the amount of gold going up as you accept more and more risk.
The meaninful part being the choices you make on how much risk, the interactions you have depending on the risk you've chosen to take.
If you chose to play it safe, grab low level mats and sell at your local market, i.e. put the bare minimum into the game, you deserve the bare minimum reward, think burger flipper at McD's.
If you chose to embrace the game a bit more, explore a little farther out, maybe run into some hostile forces, grab some better mats, maybe expand distribution to neighboring towns with better markets and run the risk of bandits, i.e. embrace the game a bit more, you deserve to be rewarded at a higher level, think regional manager for McD's.
If you chose to go into whole heartedly, accept all the risk, gather a company, found settlements, fight off competitiors, establish destribution nationwide, you deserve the greatest rewards, think OWNER of fricken McD's.
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Goblin Squad Member
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...If we are assuming that a race to the top is the only viable path for crafting success, then forget about it. Crafting is busted anyway.
There really is no race because everyone gets skill training at the same pace.
OK, but I guess you don't want to spend all your skill training on crafting skills 24/7 for the first year making you a sock puppet on everything not related to crafting.
You don't need to. People will want your stuff, daily, because, unlike WoW, stuff breaks and gets stolen. This means people do not want/can afford/need the best gear only (again unlike WoW).
If you want you can make yourself a name as someone who sells to everyone and asks no questions or you can affiliate yourself to a kingdom and do your craft for the betterment of the kingdom.
Your choice.
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Goblin Squad Member
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If you want to know about crafting and the viability of items in a sandbox game and the viability of crafters, please look at eve online and darkfall online.
If you are a good crafter, and you pay attention and you get the rep of being trustworthy, you can become rich beyond your dreams. Items will always be needed for crafting.
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Goblin Squad Member
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...People will want your stuff, daily, because, unlike WoW, stuff breaks and gets stolen...
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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I direct your attention to Burn Jita. Nothing stops a late comer highly PvP focused now turned craftsman from initiating a player driven event that pillages and decimates the status quo. Or at least significantly disrupts it. While Jita wasn't truly burned, the destruction of so many goods often results in in-game market disruption that can be beneficial to people in the know and who have prepared to capitalize off it.
For example, a new craftsman who's been quietly massing "wagon wheels" can now make a good chunk of coin selling "wagon wheels" to wagon makers. Who are selling new "wagons" to replace all the "wagons" put to the torch. And that's just one subset.
Evil yes, Chaotic yes. But a prime example of how a Player driven partly open Sandbox PvP system can regulate itself where Theme-parks can't. Even if something on the scale of Burn Jita can't be done in PFO, mass and prolonged bandit activity between basic crafting goods and crafting zones could also result in shortages of a similar nature.
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Goblin Squad Member
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On the subject of repairing stuff, will repairs require a qualified craftsman or will we just pay some NPC vendor a flat rate? I would imagine doing those repairs would be the bulk of the low-level craftsman work, rather than trying to mass-produce enough swords to equip everyone in the game 10 times over.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Gold sinks can come in the form of upkeep costs.
For example, Have the settlement have an upkeep cost you have to pay every month, have the cost dependent on how advanced the settlement is. So a tiny one might need 1 ton food, half ton timber, half ton stone, and 500 gold to keep going (just making numbers up). An advanced settlement might need 10 tons food, 5 tons timber, 5 tons stone, and 5000 gold.
If you dont keep the upkeep cost you will slowly start to lose benefits of your settlement. Have player nations require a cost, this would be in addition to each settlement having its own cost.
If you own a shop, have a gold upkeep cost for having it.
require a cost for starting up those extended gathering operations. I mean the NPC miners need to get paid.
I dont think you should just have costs because, BUT if you are doing something that provides a benefit then there should be a cost for doing so.
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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On the subject of repairing stuff, will repairs require a qualified craftsman or will we just pay some NPC vendor a flat rate? I would imagine doing those repairs would be the bulk of the low-level craftsman work, rather than trying to mass-produce enough swords to equip everyone in the game 10 times over.
Repairs will be done with various repair kits. Swords will likely use whetstones, Armor get armor repair kits. These are needed to keep gear at 100% effectiveness which degrades over time with use. Making and selling repair kits will obviously be a big bulk of basic crafting.
If you haven't played a PvP territory conquest games like EVE its hard to appreciate the amount of materials that get expended during an all out or even week long War.
Then there is the possible costs to actually running and arming settlement guards. Imagine if every time a Guard was killed and re-spawned you had to provide it with basic gear. Or rather have the basic gear available in a stash to even make the guard spawn in the first place. Lots of basic weapons and armor consumed there.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Perhaps well-equipped settlements should have armories that will purchase basic crafted gear from players at roughly or slightly less than fair value in order to provide them with a market for stuff no one wuld buy and to equip the soldiery. Perhaps the character also originally gets his starting gear from said armory. This would encourage crafting, probably give the crafter good rep with the settlement, and put cash into circulation.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Repairs will be done with various repair kits. Swords will likely use whetstones, Armor get armor repair kits. These are needed to keep gear at 100% effectiveness which degrades over time with use.
That would be one way (boring, but efficient) to do it, though I imagine you'd have to have multiple tiers of kits so that you can't repair your Dull Letter Opener with the same kit as your +8 Sword of Awesomation - that is, equipment that requires a master craftsman to make should require a master craftsman-level repair kit for repairing, as well. Atmosphere-wise, as a crafter I'd rather deal with repairs directly than sell kits, but I can imagine that the logistics of doing it that way could be unwieldly.
Maybe a mix between the two, where you can use kits for regular maintenance but the kits also reduce the maximum durability slowly - to fix an item fully to its original state you'd actually need to take it to a craftsman.
If you haven't played a PvP territory conquest games like EVE its hard to appreciate the amount of materials that get expended during an all out or even week long War.
I have, but I guess I was thinking more historical medieval, rather than fantasy medieval where everything is disposable. You're right, in the "stuff disappears mysteriously into the void whenever you die" model, replacement gear for mass combat is going to require some pretty anachronistic mass production capacity.
Then there is the possible costs to actually running and arming settlement guards. Imagine if every time a Guard was killed and re-spawned you had to provide it with basic gear. Or rather have the basic gear available in a stash to even make the guard spawn in the first place. Lots of basic weapons and armor consumed there.
That's a pretty cool idea, I like that.
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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Repairs will be done with various repair kits. Swords will likely use whetstones, Armor get armor repair kits. These are needed to keep gear at 100% effectiveness which degrades over time with use.That would be one way (boring, but efficient) to do it,
That is the way they are doing it :P . There are repair kits.
At least for field repairs while adventuring. It is possible they'll add more costly repairs for more powerful items beyond simple swords and armor.
I also don't see why this wouldn't act like any other fantasy setting where stuff just poofs away over time. After all monsters just somehow magically have all kinds of Coin and lootz they get out of no where. :P
The "fueling" guards with basic items comes from days for being a fuel runner for Player owned Stations in EVE. If you had gun emplacements you had to put ammo in them along with other "consumables" the station needed. Why not make simple items being a requirement to have Settlements spawn AI guards. If EVE let you spawn AI ships as guards out of a PoS or even full 0.0 Station or system police then I'm sure it would either have taken the same amount of credits to buy the ship on open market, or require those actually ships be in stock for station to "consume."
Worse then in EVE, in PFO I could see AI guards getting into trouble with AI monsters and being killed. See Majesty: Fantasy Kingdom Simulator. My guards were always getting killed by Ratmen invasions for the sewer outlets. It was often left to my guard towers to Arrow them to death. Which in PFO could require bowmen (armed with bows you provide) with a sufficient supply of arrows.
See, no end of opportunities to create need and drain the market of basic resources that lower end/stater crafters could help fill.