by Niding2 » Sun Feb 17, 2013 2:34 am
Not sure why you would consider H&Hs system better. Sure, it had more quality modifiers and quality affected mostly every aspect of the game making it motivating and worthwhile to hunt for, but at the same time, it was incredibly bottlenecked by your availability of natural quality nodes of soil, water, clay and (before you had enough strenght) ore quality.
Now, the good part about the H&H system is that you never really finished your crafting. Made a bone saw from bunny bones? Great! Now get better bones, you nubcake. With Salem, once you've built the tool and crafting stations you need, that's pretty much it. Sure, you can refine quality for some inspirationals, but past getting the skills, higher proficiency caps are pretty useless, even with their passive bonuses and influences on artificing, in end making inspirationals pointless past a certain point. Pointless for anything other than feeding alts.
The problem in H&H was that, as quality was linked to natural nodes for clay, soil, metals and water, the location of your claims was the most important for your quality grind. Now, this system worked just fine for the larger factions, and honestly, it gave them a purpose to fight and raid instead of just sitting on your patootie cooking / botting / griefing all day. That said, the system pretty much ruined any chance for anyone not related to the main production senters to be anything but speedbumps for any whim of the power holders. I suppose this isn't all that different from the current situation in Salem, but the difference is that while Salem allows you to fight back and, with luck / enemy lag / divine intervention, you're able to drop enemy characters with ten times your humours, while H&H, your attacks would simply not do damage, due to the way quality scaled with armour / weapons.
Also, living anywhere near any tier 3 or higher nodes would pretty much always get you killed, due to power factors wanting to monopolize high quality nodes.
So basically, what I'd like, would be something like H&H's quality system for most items in the game including crafting stations and tools, to make upgrading tools and crafting stations purposeful. Quality, however, should not be linked to quality nodes directly. Instead, perhaps you could enhance your existing material quarries and nodes, increasing the quality of your own land through some sort of process differing from what quality of base material you wish to increase? Player-enriched base materials would make bases important and raiding equally so, but not force people to move or be eradicated simply because of accidentally spawning by or finding a good node. I suppose the area with increased quality would become more vibrant or something, to signify to surrounding population / scouts / raiders that there was something going on, or some other visual queue to help potential raiders spotting good targets.
Also, if you do plan on implementing quality on weapons and armour, please do not give any of the tier armours higher soak than armed attacks. Allow the players to fight back. Also, being one-shotted by high-tier weapons even with moderate to high humours would be advised against.
