Professions as Trade & Economy drivers

[Potjeh]

There'd be horrible, horrible skill inflation, to the point where a newcomer will never be able to make a half-decent frikadel.

[iambobthepirate]

i think allowing stolen items to be sold at the stalls will hold back any real attempt at professions as well as merchants. if the stall owner could only sell items that he has made it would go a long way towards helping a semblence of professions.

currently it seems most stalls are owned by raiders, who will always have a large stock of stolen items flooding the market. i don't want to take the raiders ability to sell or trade their items only that i think they should have to do it in open player player trades rather than stalls.

[Dallane]

i think allowing stolen items to be sold at the stalls will hold back any real attempt at professions as well as merchants. if the stall owner could only sell items that he has made it would go a long way towards helping a semblence of professions.

currently it seems most stalls are owned by raiders, who will always have a large stock of stolen items flooding the market. i don't want to take the raiders ability to sell or trade their items only that i think they should have to do it in open player player trades rather than stalls.

That will never happen

[DangerousLee]

Personally, I like the idea of purity/quality coming into effect. It gives incentive to be good at a certain profession, perhaps even gain fame across the server from it (that one baker from the village a few miles yonder makes AMAZING apple pies! Or that blacksmith who lives out in the woods by himself, his swords are legendary, kill a bear in a single blow!). However, I feel grading relative to a standard (the highest skill on server) to be confusing, illogical, and can scale out of control wildly. Why should my lumberjack fricadel be worse simply because some other guy in the middle of nowhere is slightly better at grilling than me?

It makes more sense, in my mind, to have the standard be the minimum skill to make said sword or lumberjack fricadel, with any skill above it adding a bonus. If you have the minimum skill required and high quality forges or smelters and materials, you make an average quality weapon, say, a quality of 1. Improve any of those and you improve the weapon quality, thus, a sword forged in the heat of the largest and best forge in the land with epic quality iron from across the Great Mountain by the legendary swordsmith xxBobxx should be VASTLY superior to the average tinkers toy blade from scrap metal, and quality alone demands a premium price. But, said tinkers blade isn't worse just because xxBobXx exists, its worse because tinker isn't as good as xxBobXx.

This would incentivize players to specialize so that their product is in demand, there's no.disincentive to follow the same path as some other player (but.of course you can still compete for the title of best smith!), there's now a drive to improve your materials and tools (other professions are now in demand! Calling all miners and architects and carpenters!), and it even drives economy and business. A town known for its smiths will need a lot of iron ya know.

This system would still need basic changes though to function. removal of boston travel, maintenance repairs on buildings or tools that lower their quality, etc. But those changes alone would make players flock to the towns, if nothing else because a good repairman would be needed, materials would suffer decay and thus new raw materials would need gathered, etc.

It could work as you propose it, that is by providing a bonus instead of my proposition of affecting it by decreasing a penality, it would basically end up being the same thing (It all depends on the balance the devs want to achieve at the end.) Reducing a penality with higher skill or giving a bonus is all the same if you think about it. The important things to make it correct are:

- Make it in such a way as to provide an incentive to make better items and that some players will see enough benefits to engage in that activity (specialization)
- Make sure that the newcomer will be able to find his place when put in the system. (The bonus should not be too high)
- Provide a way of achieving a "never perfect" status. That is avoid 100% proficiency to be reachable so that people won't be asking after 4 months for 100% experts and neglect everyone else that has not achieved 100% proficiency. (Hence, the relative rating to best on server for a given recipe)

I think that such a system is possible and the example I gave sums it up pretty nicely. The system proposed fits those criteria.

I think the ideal profession system will provoke the following dilemma in players head. Players have to do a cost/benefit analysis, that is if they work 24h to increase skill by 1000 and that their recipe is a mere 2-3% better by that, well we could call it a soft cap. Especially with the perma-death feature of salem, nothing is gained forever so players must perform that cost/benefit analysis and ask themselves is it really a good idea to push my skill further than what is already achieved? Only the very best and most stuborn grinders will work their way to be the best on the server and I think that should be rewarded, but again not too much as to penalize the newcomer.

[DangerousLee]

There'd be horrible, horrible skill inflation, to the point where a newcomer will never be able to make a half-decent frikadel.

If you read the post correctly and tried some math example I don't think you would have came up with this. Let me convince you of the contrary.

Lets keep with the Buddies on a branch recipe. (600 H&G + 600 F&W)

The formula for the recipe quality score is (0.5 * H&G/600 + 0.5 * F&W/600)^(1/2). Let's suppose that a given player will raise both H&G and F&W equally. I will post a table with the proficiency achieved, skill quality score and recipe purity (based on 100% purity ingredients as inputs).

System1 is when the purity of final product is affected at 100% by player quality score
System2 is when the purity of final product is affected at 50% by player quality score (The other 50% is purity_of_inputs/2). (In this system, the purity of the ingredients contribute 50% to final quality regardless of skill)

We suppose the best crafter has 50000 of F&W and H&G (100%).

[Proficiency (H&G=F&W)] || [quality score] || [purity of crafted item (System1)] || [purity of crafted item (System2)]

1000-------------------------||1.29-------------||14 %-------------------------------------||57 %
2000-------------------------||1.83-------------||20 %-------------------------------------||60 %
3000-------------------------||2.24-------------||25 %-------------------------------------||62 %
5000-------------------------||2.89-------------||32 %-------------------------------------||66 %
10000-----------------------||4.08-------------||45 %-------------------------------------||72 %
15000-----------------------||5.00-------------||55 %-------------------------------------||77 %
25000-----------------------||6.45-------------||71 %-------------------------------------||85 %
35000-----------------------||7.64-------------||84 %-------------------------------------||92 %
50000-----------------------||9.13-------------||100%------------------------------------||100 %

This numerical example clearly proves that the horrible inflation you are speaking of does not exist.

Note : I think the proficiency system should be made in such a way that the order of the inspirationals consumed do not affect the result. That is, the learning ability should not reset to 70% every time you study a new inspirational. I would prefer that each new inspirational studied provide 100% of learning (As it is now). But that the penality for studying the same item cannot be reset when changing to a new inspirational. Changing the order you study the inspirationals would not change the final score this way and would provide a well defined cap based on the current inspirationals available. The penality would be assigned for each different inspirationals studied. Ex: Study 3 times tumbleweed (Penality is now 35% for any other tumbleweed in the sequence), study devil's wort (Penality is now 70% for devil, but still 35% for tumbleweed), ...

[Potjeh]

Uhm, what was that supposed to prove? Because there's worlds of difference between 100% pure and 72% pure (100 in two proficiencies is quite a bit of work to get). Don't have the exact numbers because the % purity is a ****** measure that doesn't tell you anything useful, but I reckon it's 2-3x higher gluttony values plus higher reliability.

And what's this supposed top proficiencies? That's the whole point, that this bar constantly keeps moving up, proportionate to server age.