tradeskills and high/lowmagic

Aeldra

Hey,

I just thought  I'd bring this up once more as it is something that personally frustrates me somewhat. Aside of me feeling that highmagic is the short straw compared to lowmagic in some ways (which is an entire different topic in on itself), I wanted to bring up the lockout of trades, in particular (but not limited to) in regards to economy and earning money.

From  what I can discern, these are the current bindings of  trades to the respective classes/magic-flavour:

artisan, cooking, tailoring, bookbinding, jewellery: none

poisons, herbs, alchemy: lowmagic

alchemy/lorecraft: wiccans

alchemy/brewmeister: bards

enchantment: highmagic

enchantment/tinkering: bards

enchantment/cosmic: guardians

enchantment/elemental: mages

enchantment/brewmaster: bards

forging: warriors

tattoos: monks

class associations to high/low magic:

monks, warriors, bards: free choice
wiccans, druids: lowmagic

guardians, mages: highmagic

That should highlight an disparity: choosing lowmagic grants the non-class-specific user access to herbs and poisons, which both are well sought-after and generate a good deal of  money on top of the general trade skills, whereas a highmagic user, you gain nothing that lowmagic wouldn't gain as well (for someone who likes crafting, another discouragement from being highmagic if you don't have to).

In terms of pure 'money generation', I feel also that having access to alchemy is a a much better option then having access to enchantment. Sure sigils and enchantment recharges are a thing, but compared to having alchemy, poisons and herbs? I personally feel you lose out a lot by ending up locked in highmagic. So, from a pure crafting analysis, your best choice if you're a crafter in a city, is to be a bard with both high and lowmagic. The only thing you lose out on is forging and tattoos, which aren't that high-demand anyway.

Why am bringing this up? Well, I kind of feel that at least herbs and poisons shouldn't be locked upon lowmagic. I'll agree that there's some merit in not every person being able to make everything, however it feels a little odd to have to become a warrior, monk or bard to be able to pick some flowers off the ground.

I always had the feeling that needing enchantments especially the forests draw the short draw, as getting those enchantments are always a major hassle for them.

What is people's stance on this? Am I overrating this and it's fine how it is ? ( i mean, I realize it's a rather specific problem, as a good deal of people only have one or two trades at most ) or do people agree with me? How could a possible solution look like?

I'll add, if classflexing wouldn't lock me into that class for the day, it would a lot less of an issue for me generally too. But, as someone who  participates also in PK, if I switch to a class, I also need to be somewhat okay with using it in a PK situation or sit out PK for that day just because I decided to restock my shop on e. g. herbs.

Eritheyl

I'm very big on divorcing tradeskills from magic altogether. I currently flex four classes with all of the relative trades, and having to sacrifice PK viability (note: I'm already pretty unviable already) or survivability for endzone just for the sake of doing some tradeskill work just irritates me. I've already spent the thousands of credits on class skills, artifacts and the trades themselves, I shouldn't have to shoot myself in the foot because I can't serpent and also enchant something in the same span of 12 hours.

Saran

I mean, it's among those economy issues that people have been flagging for years heh.

Tradeskill lockouts are meh and kinda based on the old way IRE handled trades. (back when they were the tert skill for specific classes)
But also they're one of the only real restraints in the system left and removing them without addressing the broader issues is kinda a bandaid? i.e difficulty acquiring necessities is problematic for the game but resolving that for the high end (i.e by removing restrictions) doesn't inherently help those who can't afford to throw lessons/credits at the issue.


Personally, I think we could be looking more at something like the model used in Aetolia. 

Consolidate all the necessities down into a small selection of trades ("mercantile" in Aet) you get one slot for that, you can expand to two at a cost. No skillflexing but everyone can pick one of the five trades.

Roughly I guess... Alchemy, Enchantment, Forging, Herbs, and Poisons. Necessities from other trades could be moved, shuffle some stuff around with the end goal that they're each as valuable as the others.
They also might not look quite the same even if the end effect is. Like maybe to compensate for not using high magic neo-enchantment requires reagents on top of power. Or maybe things shuffle so instead of like mercy, kingdom, beauty, perfection you have pills that herbs makes for the same effect but herbs role as generating comms for other trades is distributed a bit. (Also steal scrollracks from aetolia, omg, they're good)

Then make the other trades a separate thing (design trades for ease of discussion), potentially strip out a lot of the functional benefits and possibly drop the lesson investments but adopt the license costs. Likely no restriction on how many you could have.
Like... you could have bookbinders actually just create books, make a separate skill for language learning (we've got examples now of skills you learn by doing in-game actions, could be neat to earn the ability to read divine), scrolls could be worked into the mercantile trades as needed.
Maybe jewellery doesn't need the scaling on how many charges something can hold. Perhaps gem/powerstone generation should be handled differently. 

Could even go further and strip actual designs out of forging so it just generates simple versions of the items and then expand sorcelglass as a concept so people can design stuff for forging without being locked to a mercantile trade.


Except for having the lessons needed, there wouldn't be much reason for everyone to not have one of the five mercantile skills and you'd probably expect a lot of players to have two. Which should help with general availability rather than people being spread across thirteen trades over significantly varying use. 



That said, I also think it'd be kinda neat to have guild specific abilities in the mercantile skills that are unique within an org but only usable by that org. Kinda like the org potions but like... maybe only Wodewoses can make Moonwater but the Listeners have an Ancestor themed variation of unholywater, etc.
Could even do stuff like... give design trades have a special skill that is unlocked with BeauteousWorkings to allow some special character customisation. (like an ambient when worn for example)

Sapphira

As a bard with a tam and all the trades available to me, I have to agree, and I am often reluctant to flex out of low magic just to tinker for 10 minutes. I also lament that lorecraft is only available in 2 orgs (at least cosmic/elemental enchantment is 4), though thankfully there are less 'vital' needs in it than before due to less cures being needed, or i lament how few tattooists exist (can we sell temporary tattoos in shops yet please?).

I assume the balance perspective is surrounding the trans skill more than access to the other abilities. Would it really break the game if everyone had access to every trade, regardless of their class or org? I know the flavour doesn't support this, but what would actually be the real downside? Is there one? Can it be fixed?

Saran

Sapphira said:

I assume the balance perspective is surrounding the trans skill more than access to the other abilities. Would it really break the game if everyone had access to every trade, regardless of their class or org? I know the flavour doesn't support this, but what would actually be the real downside? Is there one? Can it be fixed?

It depends on what is intended by everyone having access to every trade.

If everyone can pick any trade but there are limitations in the system then it's really only a "downside" of players having to actually interact on some level with other players in a multiplayer game.


If it's "everyone can learn every single trade at the same time / readily flex between them with minimal delays" then yes it would break things/have downsides.

It's become easier and easier to have more trades over the years, yet the issues/complaints that it's difficult to get stuff has stuck around. Likely because, realistically, the more people that have any given trade the fewer customers there are for it and, in turn, the less worthwhile it is to bother stocking shops with the items from that trade. Which then leads to difficulties getting the stuff from that trade and people picking up the trade so they can craft it themselves continuing that cycle.

While I don't agree with limitations on what trades you can select, other limitations that require you to trade with other players seem way more likely to have a broad positive impact by pushing people spread out their trades and stock shops.

Aeldra

Saran said:

Sapphira said:

I assume the balance perspective is surrounding the trans skill more than access to the other abilities. Would it really break the game if everyone had access to every trade, regardless of their class or org? I know the flavour doesn't support this, but what would actually be the real downside? Is there one? Can it be fixed?

It's become easier and easier to have more trades over the years, yet the issues/complaints that it's difficult to get stuff has stuck around. Likely because, realistically, the more people that have any given trade the fewer customers there are for it and, in turn, the less worthwhile it is to bother stocking shops with the items from that trade. Which then leads to difficulties getting the stuff from that trade and people picking up the trade so they can craft it themselves continuing that cycle.

I'm not sure this mixes with my observation. A rather significant amount of the playerbase doesn't wish to go through the hassle of having multiple trades or the credit setup involved in learning them and just prefer to simply buy things. Heck sometimes, I will prefer to just go and buy something instead of flexing to the trade skill, if its cheap enough. Plus I think, it's more often then not that the ideal of 'interacting with others to get what you need' is met with the lack of people who are enough into crafting to supply what you need. I remember very much in my early Seren day hunting for OOC weeks for certain enchantments that required guardians, as those were few and far in between. Tattoos are another really nice example of this as Sapphira mentioned. I know more or less every time am monk, I get asked if I do tattoos because there's so few people with tattoos around.

I don't think that everyone having necessarily having every trade skill will be the best choice here, despite really wanting here, but I think the current solution is simply too lopsided, which is my main gripe with it. I feel it should be somewhat equal distributed amongst the classes with somewhat equal accessibility for each class and a somewhat equal chance to earn money with it.

edit: grammar fixes

Saran

Aeldra said:

Saran said:

Sapphira said:

I assume the balance perspective is surrounding the trans skill more than access to the other abilities. Would it really break the game if everyone had access to every trade, regardless of their class or org? I know the flavour doesn't support this, but what would actually be the real downside? Is there one? Can it be fixed?

It's become easier and easier to have more trades over the years, yet the issues/complaints that it's difficult to get stuff has stuck around. Likely because, realistically, the more people that have any given trade the fewer customers there are for it and, in turn, the less worthwhile it is to bother stocking shops with the items from that trade. Which then leads to difficulties getting the stuff from that trade and people picking up the trade so they can craft it themselves continuing that cycle.

I'm not sure this mixes with my observation. A rather significant amount of the playerbase doesn't wish to go through the hassle of having multiple trades or the credit setup involved in learning them and just prefer to simply buy things. Heck sometimes, I will prefer to just go and buy something instead of flexing to the trade skill, if its cheap enough. Plus I think, it's more often then not that the ideal of 'interacting with others to get what you need' is met with the lack of people who are enough into crafting to supply what you need. I remember very much in my early Seren day hunting for OOC weeks for certain enchantments that required guardians, as those were few and far in between. Tattoos are another really nice example of this as Sapphira mentioned. I know more or less every time am monk, I get asked if I do tattoos because there's so few people with tattoos around.

I don't think that everyone having necessarily having every trade skill will be the best choice here, despite really wanting here, but I think the current solution is simply too lopsided, which is my main gripe with it. I feel it should be somewhat equal distributed amongst the classes with somewhat equal accessibility for each class and a somewhat equal chance to earn money with it.

edit: grammar fixes

Hm, to me that's symptoms.

Some trades, such as tattoos and enchantment, have issues with being able to effectively sell their products which is an aspect of trades which should have a huge priority on it.
You can resolve that with stuff such as stealing scrollracks from Aetolia for enchantment. Which would then let people buy specific enchants and apply them to whatever they like. Arguably cubes(+regulators) in comparison to scrollracks exacerbate the issue as they bandaid over the maintenance side of enchantments without addressing the acquisition side so mages and bards can cover the need for a guardian enchanter, etc.
For tattoos, you'd kinda need two things, one item group that lets you apply a design and a second which lets you specify a power? Which have to be used together, probably along with some mob tattoo removalist.


On the more broad scale, yeah, we should expect that not everyone is going to invest in trades and of those that do not all of them are going to invest further into shops, but if the number of people that do is so low that it's problematic for the game then that's a symptom there's something deeply wrong with the trading economy and why that's the case needs a long and hard look.
Realistically, people will engage with aspects of a game if they're worth their time and something like stocking a shop could also give people in quiet times a reason to stay logged in while they wait for others. And arguably, given trading is time spent in-game that is effectively dedicated to generating money it being worthwhile basically should mean it gives more gold per min/hour than pretty much anything else you could be doing.



So yeah, I think the easiest solution is to just make/pick five mercantile skills and distribute every single necessity between them with a focus on equivalent profitability, but trying to do so for thirteen trades is unrealistic IMO.

Also kinda seems a bit straight forward for the most part for the trades that wouldn't be "mercantile"
You get rid of two by consolidating the trade specs. Bookbinding and Jewellery as above. You could move the buffs out of cooking and make a denizen in each org as a backup leaving cooking primarily about designing food to eat. Instruments out of artisan. Knots out of tailoring and maybe robes aren't considered armour any more or move.
Tattoos could be the most complicated but if you separated powers you could make something like wondrous items (probably in enchantment) that you attune to slots like d&d, could even combine stuff like the influence knots and tattoo powers.


I think that would resolve the things you mention. The five would be available to everyone so no class issues. With one free slot and one expansion slot you'd just need at least two other players to be able to access every trade with even distribution. While working on it you can slip in things to make sure every necessity can be sold in a shop ideally nixing the issues around tracking down someone with a specific trade that's online at the same time. And they should be set up so that when a newbie asks "which trade should I pick?" we can point them to the mercantile skills and say they should be able to turn a profit with them.

Orael

This is all good feedback and this is something that will be looked at when we look at the economy.