Salem

There was a pretty good exange in hob about buying selling seed purity and a bit of strategic implications.

for a game that promotes hardcore, and intricate leveling ideas i've always felt given the time and complexity of purifying seeds it was so out of whack with how easy it is to transfer that work to someone just starting out.

I wish somehow crop purity was somehow tied into the actual field it is grown from. so here's my idea.

Tilled fields act as an elemental sink to some degree. Meaning if you were to freshly till a field and plant high purity seeds, the field would dilute the purity to some extent. As you raise your crops and purity not only do your crops gain purity but so would the field itself.

You could still rotate crops, but if you wanted to ensure high purity you would have to rotate crops of the same element adding yet more skill to farming.

selling high purity seeds would still hold value over virgin seeds however players using high purity seeds on freshly tilled fields would not get such a drastic boost.

Just a note here. In HnH quality of farming products was capped by the farming skill. So even if you gave noob high quality seeds he would get lower quality products. Although it was still much easier to raise farming skill that seed quality.

Well, this would make raiding more potent, for better or worse. Since quality would be linked to fields, killing off the fields of your enemies would hinder them more than currently, since high purity seeds can be vaulted.

The good is that it hampers vaulting. The bad, however, is that it ruins guerilla warfare against larger factions, since you cannot really escape their raids without losing significant progress.

I don't really feel that giving large factions a stronger dominance is a good idea, at least not with the current time it takes to purify your seeds from 0% to 100%.

I suppose this could work if purifying the field would take significantly less time than the time it currently takes to purify seeds, while at the same time also up the price of fields / fertilizers. This would allow a person who got raided to recover faster than in your suggestion (while still slower than the current system). The increased price of fields and fertilizing should also somewhat prevent ridiculous spamming of fields to exploit the lower purifying timer. Another additive to increasing the "price" of fields, is having a down time of a few days, representing leaving the field fallow / awaiting the appropriate season for replanting. Also, the field could have decreased plenty depending on each other field within x tiles, making more space required.

Selling higher quality seeds is one of the ways to shortcut the "leveling" process of brand new players. Otherwise you end up with a giant gulf between the more advanced players and the newbs. This is a good thing we have. Let's not ruin it.

This would work pretty swell, imo. Example:

Buy 100% seeds, drop them on a 0% field. Your field raises to 50% orso and you get the random seed harvest of around 50% pure.

Buy 100% seeds, drop them on a 50% field. Your field raises to 75% orso, and you get some random number around 75%.

Keep on keeping on, until you got top tier fields using 100% seeds to replant everytime and it wouldn't take much time to get a field up to consecutive 90-100% harvests like we have now...yet destroying the fields of an enemy might set them back a week or two depending on if they use coal or not to speed purify their tilled fields.

edit: I just made up numbers to simplify my train of thought, true numbers would obviously be an issue of balancing.

Very much along those lines. Thanks stax.

staxjax wrote:This would work pretty swell, imo. Example:

Buy 100% seeds, drop them on a 0% field. Your field raises to 50% orso and you get the random seed harvest of around 50% pure.

Buy 100% seeds, drop them on a 50% field. Your field raises to 75% orso, and you get some random number around 75%.

Keep on keeping on, until you got top tier fields using 100% seeds to replant everytime and it wouldn't take much time to get a field up to consecutive 90-100% harvests like we have now...yet destroying the fields of an enemy might set them back a week or two depending on if they use coal or not to speed purify their tilled fields.

edit: I just made up numbers to simplify my train of thought, true numbers would obviously be an issue of balancing.

Nice concept, only it seems so... redundant.

Considering what a royal pain in the ass it is to bring a field to produce tier 3 crops adding this would be barely noticeable, on the other hand forcing hard purity grind in fields on top of the current system would be an overkill even by Salem standards.

Unless they change how fields can be destroyed, no thanks. You already need weeks if not months to raise influence, while all a raider needs is a couple of seconds to destroy it. And making them related to purity is a surefire way to make them an important target. If they change how they get destroyed (maybe something like have to use salt to damage them) then we can talk about it.

MagicManICT wrote:Selling higher quality seeds is one of the ways to shortcut the "leveling" process of brand new players. Otherwise you end up with a giant gulf between the more advanced players and the newbs. This is a good thing we have. Let's not ruin it.

i'm not going to argue how vast the gulf between new players and advance players should be, except for stating that shortcuts is akin to truncating content.

i'm sure however that most people who played or experienced the early stages of the purity grind race would say that it was indeed a fun element in the game. one experience that seems to come to an end once someone reaches high end seeds and then spam them in trade or gifts.

maybe there is no way to relive that experience except with a new server.

logan wrote:

MagicManICT wrote:Selling higher quality seeds is one of the ways to shortcut the "leveling" process of brand new players. Otherwise you end up with a giant gulf between the more advanced players and the newbs. This is a good thing we have. Let's not ruin it.

i'm not going to argue how vast the gulf between new players and advance players should be, except for stating that shortcuts is akin to truncating content.

i'm sure however that most people who played or experienced the early stages of the purity grind race would say that it was indeed a fun element in the game. one experience that seems to come to an end once someone reaches high end seeds and then spam them in trade or gifts.

maybe there is no way to relive that experience except with a new server.

I agree, forcing new players to grind their own purities up teaches them how this game is. You can't just have everything given to you.