Forums » General Pantheon Discussion

I hate QoL Features

    • 521 posts
    July 15, 2019 6:50 AM PDT

    Chanus said:

    HemlockReaper said:

    Vandraad said:

    Chanus said:

    Entertainment and challenge are not mutually exclusive.

    Their definitions are also entirely fluid.

    So very true. I wish more people understood that fact.

    Sorry but your both wrong, Entertainment is the action of providing or being provided with amusement or enjoyment, and challenge is a call to take part in a contest or competition, but more specifically challenging is testing one's abilities.

    Individuals can find entertainment in challenging ones abilities, but their not fluid, as in interchangeable. I find entertainment while watching a movie, theres nothing particularly challenging about it, I find it challenging to “bite my tongue” around certain people, but its certainly not entertaining to me.

    I'm not sure you understand what mutually exclusive means.

    A thing does not need to be entertaining to be challenging.

    A thing does not need to be challenging to be entertaining.

    A thing can be both entertaining and challenging at the same time.

    And we all disagree on what is entertaining and what is challenging. 

    I'm not sure what your disagreeing with, you just rephrased what I said.

    • 145 posts
    July 15, 2019 7:02 AM PDT

    What I would consider QoL is anything that shrinks the game or makes it easier. In Vanguard they implemented rifts because the game was so massive, this to me was QoL. Much like teleporting. Where you started, and the race you played was no longer that much of a factor because of how easily it was to go anywhere, It made it a lot easier to play with friends who started something different, but it shrnk the game and made the massive world much smaller. 

    One could argue that simply being able to swing a weapon and kill a foe is a QoL but for the sake of not going overboard, there are certain things that make the game easier that are mandatory for a decent game. I don't want a game to just be hard for the sake of being hard. But all the little features they add lessen an experience. Dungeons and groups should be hard, they should be very scary and intimidating. They should make you worry about whats around the corner and the consequences of just aggroing any mob.

    I lost a corpse on my level 16 monk in upper guk one time looking for raster. Didn't know where I was going or what I was doing. Never got that corpse back. Started a new character, a wizard and it became my favorite character and now it's mostly what I play. That very moment changed me in gaming. I went on to play a Wizard for the next 10 years in EQ because I lost a corpse on a monk.

    • 3852 posts
    July 15, 2019 7:18 AM PDT

    ((I would disagree with that. I gave two examples of QoL features that I do not think break the game from a gameplay tenent perspective (modable UI and shared bank). Would you say those two features make the game easier in context of the game tenents?))

    Both of these make the game easier to play so they fit into the first part of my suggested definition.

    I agree neither one of them is necessarily inconsistent with the basic tenets of Pantheon. 

    Moddable UI to me seems to simply let us set things up the way we want while we play the same game in essentially the same way as the default UI. I don't see this as a quality of life part of the game design at all - I don't see it as *any* part of the game design at all. It merely affects the interface through which we get to play the game.

    Will people argue that it is too modern for me to have a larger font because my vision has gotten worse since 1999? Or for me to change things around so that I use "r" to reply to a whisper as I have since well before 1999, even if the game prefers another shortcut. Or so that I use the number pad to move instead of wasd - again as I have for many many years. Or so that whatever quickbars are allowed are vertical not horizontal or vice versa - or are on the side of the screen not the bottom or vice versa. I hope not.

    Shared bank really depends on so many other things we do not know. It may allow one character to pick up items only at the same branch where they were depositied. This would not in any way make the world feel smaller or detract from the importance of traveling from place to place. Or it may give one character instant world-wide access to anything another character deposits. This would be a horse of a very different color.

    Similarly if the mail system allows instant world-wide transmission of coin and items, all a shared bank will do is save us the cost of mailing (slight oversimplification but not much of one). It will not make the world feel smaller than the mail system already does. Whereas if there is no mail or very limited mail a shared bank with world-wide effect would indeed make the world seem smaller.


    This post was edited by dorotea at July 15, 2019 7:22 AM PDT
    • 228 posts
    July 15, 2019 7:42 AM PDT

    bigdogchris said:

    For shared bank, that doesn’t take away from the gameplay of managing a bank, or encumbrance, or inventory, or trading with other players. It just makes moving items between your own account more secure. I think it's unreasonable to expect us to be required to trust other players to move an item to another character on our account.

    One reason I have spoken against banks shared between alts is that I think the game should encourage trading with other players, which I think you do too? In other words, it will be good for the game community if you rely on other players for the necessary materials and components that your character cannot produce itself.

    Moving items and money between your alts is essentially trading with yourself instead of with other players. Shared banks makes it easier to do that and therefore reduces the incentive to trade with others. I realize that people will move items between alts, regardless, but that doesn't mean shared banks are harmless in this respect. How harmful, exactly? I don't know.

    But if there absolutely must be shared banking, please, please make them local. Make it so that what you put into a bank must also be picked up there.


    This post was edited by Jabir at July 15, 2019 7:43 AM PDT
    • 313 posts
    July 15, 2019 11:05 AM PDT

    Jabir said:

    bigdogchris said:

    For shared bank, that doesn’t take away from the gameplay of managing a bank, or encumbrance, or inventory, or trading with other players. It just makes moving items between your own account more secure. I think it's unreasonable to expect us to be required to trust other players to move an item to another character on our account.

    One reason I have spoken against banks shared between alts is that I think the game should encourage trading with other players, which I think you do too? In other words, it will be good for the game community if you rely on other players for the necessary materials and components that your character cannot produce itself.

    Moving items and money between your alts is essentially trading with yourself instead of with other players. Shared banks makes it easier to do that and therefore reduces the incentive to trade with others. I realize that people will move items between alts, regardless, but that doesn't mean shared banks are harmless in this respect. How harmful, exactly? I don't know.

    But if there absolutely must be shared banking, please, please make them local. Make it so that what you put into a bank must also be picked up there.

     

    I disagree completely that you need to inhibit moving items between alts in order to encourage trade.  If I have invested a lot of time to make my main character a tailor, forcing me to seek out a different person to tailor something for an alt is complete BS.  

    • 193 posts
    July 15, 2019 1:42 PM PDT

    Moloka said:

    *snip*

     This whole new experience every day was almost like a drug. I couldn't wait to get back on and see what I was going to encounter next.

    *snip*

    I'd like to thank you for this post, and these two sentences in particular. This, imo, is what hooked all of us. All of the other stuff - QoL, hardcore, handholding, etc. ad nauseum - is pretty irrelevant if these two statements hold true for Pantheon. So, again I say, thank you.

    • 3852 posts
    July 15, 2019 1:47 PM PDT

    I agree that encouraging interaction between crafters is a good thing. The well established way to do this is to have major items and maybe even minor items require parts that different crafters make. Sure someone can have a top level crafter in every craft - may all Gods bless someone that wants to invest that much time in Pantheon. But in general having items require a combination of crafts to make works well.

    Making it hard for people to craft for their own characters just makes crafting less attractive. It makes the *game* less attractive for many crafters. This is the prime reason many people craft in the first place - a lot of crafters do it to help alts and guildmates not as a revenue source.

    I agree with Zoltar - there may be reasons why shared storage is bad but this isn't a good one.

    I agree with Jabir - make banks local and make shared storage local and there are probably *no* valid reasons to object to shared storage.

     

     

    • 2419 posts
    July 15, 2019 2:04 PM PDT

    dorotea said:

    I agree with Jabir - make banks local and make shared storage local and there are probably *no* valid reasons to object to shared storage.

    While I am a proponent of shared storage for all characters on a given account, there is just one big problem:  It adversely impacts those people who like to play different races.

    If you're really into crafting and want to maximize the access of all your characters to the shared storage (if banking is non-global) you make all your alts of the same race.  Simple.  But for those people who prefer to play different race/class combinations and also want to do a lot of tradeskills, they do not enjoy the same benefit.

    So while some, like myself, want the shared storage and the QoL it gives me (even though I do not intend to do multiple tradeskills and will probably have alts of different races), I'm also very much aware it is not a feature everyone will be able to enjoy equally.

    That said, this thread has really gone off the deep end, quickly devolving into a circular arguement which will reach no conclusions, will not in any way affect or alter any decision VR has either made or will make.  Frankly, this thread needs to be locked.

    • 2752 posts
    July 15, 2019 2:08 PM PDT

    This whole thread is incredibly silly, a blanket "QoL = bad" is more than a little absurd. A vast amount of quality of life improvements/implementations do not alter the difficulty or challenge of the core game in any truly meaningful way. 

     

    For example shared banking being an issue doesn't make the most sense to me.

    In EQ your options were find someone trustworthy to transfer items for you or park an alt in a hidden away location and drop bags full of stuff with your main only to race back and hope they weren't found/the server didn't crash/they didn't despawn/etc. I'm sure some people relish that (I get it, there was a certain thrill to it) but did it really make the game better? The risk of this system wasn't only placed upon the player as it carried a very real (and needless) risk for the company when someone had a failed drop transfer for any reason. Some might say good riddance if someone were to cancel their subscription due to a loss of potentially massive amounts of time investment in items for the crime of wanting to share their earned goods with an alt, but again, is that honestly worth it? Does it make the game that much more meaningfully challenging or engaging? 

    • 1281 posts
    July 15, 2019 3:30 PM PDT

    Jabir said:

    One reason I have spoken against banks shared between alts is that I think the game should encourage trading with other players, which I think you do too? In other words, it will be good for the game community if you rely on other players for the necessary materials and components that your character cannot produce itself.

    Moving items and money between your alts is essentially trading with yourself instead of with other players. Shared banks makes it easier to do that and therefore reduces the incentive to trade with others. I realize that people will move items between alts, regardless, but that doesn't mean shared banks are harmless in this respect. How harmful, exactly? I don't know.

    But if there absolutely must be shared banking, please, please make them local. Make it so that what you put into a bank must also be picked up there.

    You make points that are hard to argue against.


    This post was edited by bigdogchris at July 15, 2019 3:30 PM PDT
    • 1584 posts
    July 16, 2019 1:45 AM PDT

    You increase trading between players but having a cap of how many tradeskills you can do on that account, like if there 9 Total tradeskills but you can only preform 3 on an account you will dramatically increase trading especially if you do that and have all the tradeskills be part of other tradeskills, it's really a simple fix to a problem.

     

    Now I know people will be like "but I want to learn and master all tradeskills" and I would say this is part of the problem, you shouldn't be able to, and it kills the community as a whole because than most people start doing it.  

    But if you limit it than this situation never happens and than therefore the communtiy stays alive and interactive.

    Yes you could get multiple accounts to get around this feature, but you could literally have multiple accounts and get around any limiting factor of the game, but that doesn't mean they should just let it run rampant and let anyone get all tradeskills just because "they want to master all tradeskills".

    • 297 posts
    July 16, 2019 4:39 AM PDT

    I don't know that being able to do all tradeskills on one character as opposed to just rolling two alts so I can do them on three characters does much harm to the community. People still need to either farm or trade for the materials they use. There's still an economy there whether I am participating on one character or three.

    If you're suggesting locking my ability to do all tradeskills for my entire account, that's just ridiculous.

    • 297 posts
    July 16, 2019 4:41 AM PDT

    The problem with tradeskills isn't the economy around them, it's that they usually end up worthless to pursue outside of a few items that are marginally useful. There has never been a problem in any game maintaining a trading economy around tradeskill crafting materials. The problem is the first person to get their skill high enough to make the useful item corners the market and then it's pointless to do them because you're just throwing good money after bad.

    • 228 posts
    July 16, 2019 5:38 AM PDT

    Vandraad said:

    dorotea said:

    I agree with Jabir - make banks local and make shared storage local and there are probably *no* valid reasons to object to shared storage.

    While I am a proponent of shared storage for all characters on a given account, there is just one big problem:  It adversely impacts those people who like to play different races.

    If you're really into crafting and want to maximize the access of all your characters to the shared storage (if banking is non-global) you make all your alts of the same race.  Simple.  But for those people who prefer to play different race/class combinations and also want to do a lot of tradeskills, they do not enjoy the same benefit.

    Globally shard banks equals instantaneous item- and money-teleportation for all and would mean a farewell to international trade routes and many other interesting business opportunities. Local banking means that players will have to figure out how to get their hands on that rare raw material rumored to be plentiful on another continent. That's why we oppose globally shared banks, not to make life cumbersome for individuals who want to craft in many parts of the world. We want the world and the distances in it to be real obstacles that must be overcome to succeed.

    • 1315 posts
    July 16, 2019 5:58 AM PDT

    Anything that can be circumvented just by having a second account might as well be included as a quality of life feature (my wife and I will both play so we will be able to circumvent it no problem anyway so the playing field might as well be leveled).

    Anything that can be circumvented just by making an alt might as well be included as well unless there is going to be a server that only allows one character per account. (kinda like this idea, back to the old SWG way)

    Anything that forces you to sit around doing nothing should be redesigned to make it interactive in some way (camping a mob is not included in this as you are technically hunting and just failing to find your target).  Things like boats just need to be on a dependable schedule, it’s your fault if you miss the boat due to poor timing.

    There is still a lot of room to make a gritty game outside of those three where time matters, choices matter and interactions with other players matter.

     

    Trade Skill discussion:

    I’ll throw this out there again.  The primary reason crafting is worthless in most games is because trade skills are a value reducing process.  You take highly sought after and traded raw materials and sacrifice them to your crafting station to get a piece of junk and a little experience.  To create anything of value usually requires high levels of skill which in turn requires a truly astronomical amount of in game wealth to gain.  Any value the high value items have will need to be amortized against the cost to gain the skill in order to make it, most of the time it would be better to just buy a higher value item for less money.

    The only way to make trade skills value-able is to make it cost more time than money to level a trade skill.  In fact leveling a trade skill should actually earn the player cash, but less than if they had spent the time adventuring at an equal level.  Trade skills would be the slow and steady way to earn money.

    To achieve this balance though we need to change our expectations on what pursuing a trade skill really entails.  Rather than spending 3 play sessions harvesting raw materials to spend half of a 4th play session turning a mountain of raw materials into a smaller pile of finished goods with no market to sell them, you spend half a play session picking up crafting requests, half a session trading finish goods for raw materials or harvesting the raw materials you need and 3 play sessions making 3-6 orders worth of items.  Leveling a crafting skill would require roughly 10 orders of equivalent skill at each level to advance to the next level.

    A whale would not be able to dump a ton of money on the market to buy all the raw materials needed to spam their way from 0 to max crafting skill in a single afternoon.  Likewise a “crafting alt” basically disappears.  If raising a second crafting skill is a huge time expenditure and not a way to spend your in game cash then players will only pursue crafts that they actually want/need rather than covering all their bases with their item mules crafting class.  If you follow this thought further then there is no reason to limit a specific character to a single craft, they will just need to spend yet again more time to learn a new trade.  I could even see future trade skills requiring to be a certain level of skill in more than one craft to even begin to learn the new trade skill.

    To make this concept work though we need to abandon the inventory shuffling/ combine button crafting system.  The only way to make that type of crafting system time dependent is to add a timer bar to the crafting and that is just a terrible game play experience.  The two ways I could see a compelling crafting system that is time dependent would be a many stage choose your own adventure decision tree with chances for “inspiration” or a very authentic crafting sim that mimics many of the actual stages of crafting that a player must actually gain game playing skill at as their characters gain system mechanics bonuses to make the game easier and in turn move onto harder recipes.

    Neither version will be too easy to create but if we want a crafting system that actually matters it NEEDS to be time bottlenecked and not material bottlenecked and NO harvesting is not where that time comes from as harvested materials are tradeable and therefor have no relevancy to the crafting limitations.

    • 297 posts
    July 16, 2019 6:02 AM PDT

    Jabir said:

    Vandraad said:

    dorotea said:

    I agree with Jabir - make banks local and make shared storage local and there are probably *no* valid reasons to object to shared storage.

    While I am a proponent of shared storage for all characters on a given account, there is just one big problem:  It adversely impacts those people who like to play different races.

    If you're really into crafting and want to maximize the access of all your characters to the shared storage (if banking is non-global) you make all your alts of the same race.  Simple.  But for those people who prefer to play different race/class combinations and also want to do a lot of tradeskills, they do not enjoy the same benefit.

    Globally shard banks equals instantaneous item- and money-teleportation for all and would mean a farewell to international trade routes and many other interesting business opportunities. Local banking means that players will have to figure out how to get their hands on that rare raw material rumored to be plentiful on another continent. That's why we oppose globally shared banks, not to make life cumbersome for individuals who want to craft in many parts of the world. We want the world and the distances in it to be real obstacles that must be overcome to succeed.

    With Druid and Wizard teleportation, which they have said will be in game, the difference between having a global bank and not having a global bank for these purposes will simply be a miniscule amount of time. I don't think this will have the world-building immersive effect you intend it to, as it is easily trivialized and avoided.

    Even more so if there is a mail feature. 

    I know that the goal is to make the game as tedious as possible so that people are forced to look at the world around them a la the eye clamps from A Clockwork Orange but that's not something you can insist players engage in merely by willing it to be so. They will either take joy in these experiences or not, but if you force it on them, many will simply choose not to play.

    The game needs more players outside a few dozen grognards in order for it to be successful and stay running.

    • 228 posts
    July 16, 2019 6:12 AM PDT

    zoltar said:

    Jabir said:

    One reason I have spoken against banks shared between alts is that I think the game should encourage trading with other players, which I think you do too? In other words, it will be good for the game community if you rely on other players for the necessary materials and components that your character cannot produce itself.

    Moving items and money between your alts is essentially trading with yourself instead of with other players. Shared banks makes it easier to do that and therefore reduces the incentive to trade with others. I realize that people will move items between alts, regardless, but that doesn't mean shared banks are harmless in this respect. How harmful, exactly? I don't know.

    But if there absolutely must be shared banking, please, please make them local. Make it so that what you put into a bank must also be picked up there.

    I disagree completely that you need to inhibit moving items between alts in order to encourage trade.  If I have invested a lot of time to make my main character a tailor, forcing me to seek out a different person to tailor something for an alt is complete BS.  

    You just proved my point. Why go through the trouble of trading with other players when you can be self-sufficent. Right?


    This post was edited by Jabir at July 16, 2019 6:13 AM PDT
    • 1315 posts
    July 16, 2019 6:26 AM PDT

    I think it is a big assumption that wizard/druid ports will be very convenient or inexpensive.  If there are only 3 nodes on each continent of each type and it takes 30 minutes to run from a portal to a major city then traveling between bank zones will not be insignificant.  If there is a costly reagent or even some actual danger to the transportation process then teleports moves from a commerce utility ability to an adventuring utility ability.  This obviously becomes less relevant the more nodes there are and the closer they are to capital cities and the cheaper the actual spell is.

    As to the mail system I do not believe it has ever been confirmed that there will be a parcel service.  I am sure there will be some form a letter/email system as it is just too good of an RP and player to player communication tool not to use it.  A parcel service that is easily accessible seems to be counter to a lot of other choices VR appears to be making.  The most I expect to see is a parcel service that allows you to ship a box from one bank/warehouse to another at a slow rate of travel and significant expense.

    All of this though is relative to the total size of the world and the shortest possible paths between major cities.  If you can get from anyone one city to another in 5 minutes then yah it’s kinda pointless. If travel from one major city to another is more of an hour total journey using all the fast travel available and traveling from one raid zone to another might be more of a 2 hour journey unless they are geographically very close to each other then localized game zones will be significant.

    For this to be fun though the world needs to be HUGE.  Individual zones need to be measured in 10s if not 100s of square miles and those zones will still need to be fairly dense with content (an opportunity for clever procedurally generated content that the building blocks are hand crafted).  Each continent will need to have dozens of zones to create the true existence of space between cities and give a reason for players to make a certain area home.  Each racial shard should include content from level 1-Max so that a character never NEEDS to leave home to level.  That in turn is also a lot of content.

    • 1921 posts
    July 16, 2019 6:45 AM PDT

    Chanus said:

    I don't know that being able to do all tradeskills on one character as opposed to just rolling two alts so I can do them on three characters does much harm to the community. People still need to either farm or trade for the materials they use. There's still an economy there whether I am participating on one character or three.

    If you're suggesting locking my ability to do all tradeskills for my entire account, that's just ridiculous.

    This has come up many times over the past 4-5 years.  It comes down to the difference between a customer or player, versus a character.  What do I mean by that?
    Can a player have more than one crafting profession?
    Can a customer have more than one crafting profession?
    Can a character have more than one crafting profession?
    And ultimately, is there any meaningful distinction between player, customer, and character?

    Is the design goal to limit the customer to only one crafting profession?  Then it should be an account wide limit.
    Is the design goal to limit the player to only one crafting profession? (same as above) Then again, it should be an account wide limit.
    Is the design goal to limit the character to only one crafting profession?  Then alts are intended to bypass this limit.
    Similarly, many pledge rewards offer "an additional" or "additional" character slots.  As though only one character per account was, or is, the launch day design goal.
    That may no longer be the case, or it may be, it's not answered in the FAQ that I can see, today.  They may have said you'll be able to have enough alts so you can be self-sufficient, for crafting professions.
    Yet, if the intent is to limit customers to one character per account by default, then the design goal would appear to be: sell the multi-character account perk or sell more accounts.
    In any case, as a customer, if I can have either many accounts or many characters, then as you've mentioned, I can be self sufficient.  Just like every other game that has ever tried to artificially create interdependence.  It's kind of a shame, really, because within our guild, we give away all the interdependence items freely.  Yet, outside the guild, everyone charges 10-100 times what the interdependent item is worth in time, mats, or currency.  So, what's the real emergent behavior?  Does it increase friendly happy social interaction outside of guilds?  Or does attempting to force interdependence create or encourage negative, unfriendly toxic interactions?  Historically, I've seen several examples, and they're not the former.
    From what I've seen over the past 23+ years of MMO's, all the attempts at artificial interdependence do is strongly encourage alts or multiple accounts, and punish players unwilling or unable to participate in that 'meta'. (pay-2-win, that is, using RL cash to permit one customer to have access to all crafting professions)

    • 1584 posts
    July 16, 2019 6:48 AM PDT

    Chanus said:

    I don't know that being able to do all tradeskills on one character as opposed to just rolling two alts so I can do them on three characters does much harm to the community. People still need to either farm or trade for the materials they use. There's still an economy there whether I am participating on one character or three.

    If you're suggesting locking my ability to do all tradeskills for my entire account, that's just ridiculous.

    But is it?  Think about it, you can only do so much for yourself, and have to rely on the community to help each other out, that would lead to the trade market also have a strong WTB and WTS system in place for the simple fact you will always need something you can't make.  You can not like it and I honestly could care less but the system works.

    Like I said not everyone would like it, but honestly I would rather have a strong and wealthy community with a strong WTS and WTB system that as to rely on each other to get things done, than have the ability to where you can have all tradeskills and slowly but surely kill itself like eq did.

    Remember #communitymatters 


    This post was edited by Cealtric at July 16, 2019 6:51 AM PDT
    • 1584 posts
    July 16, 2019 6:58 AM PDT

    vjek said:

    Chanus said:

    I don't know that being able to do all tradeskills on one character as opposed to just rolling two alts so I can do them on three characters does much harm to the community. People still need to either farm or trade for the materials they use. There's still an economy there whether I am participating on one character or three.

    If you're suggesting locking my ability to do all tradeskills for my entire account, that's just ridiculous.

    This has come up many times over the past 4-5 years.  It comes down to the difference between a customer or player, versus a character.  What do I mean by that?
    Can a player have more than one crafting profession?
    Can a customer have more than one crafting profession?
    Can a character have more than one crafting profession?
    And ultimately, is there any meaningful distinction between player, customer, and character?

    Is the design goal to limit the customer to only one crafting profession?  Then it should be an account wide limit.
    Is the design goal to limit the player to only one crafting profession? (same as above) Then again, it should be an account wide limit.
    Is the design goal to limit the character to only one crafting profession?  Then alts are intended to bypass this limit.
    Similarly, many pledge rewards offer "an additional" or "additional" character slots.  As though only one character per account was, or is, the launch day design goal.
    That may no longer be the case, or it may be, it's not answered in the FAQ that I can see, today.  They may have said you'll be able to have enough alts so you can be self-sufficient, for crafting professions.
    Yet, if the intent is to limit customers to one character per account by default, then the design goal would appear to be: sell the multi-character account perk or sell more accounts.
    In any case, as a customer, if I can have either many accounts or many characters, then as you've mentioned, I can be self sufficient.  Just like every other game that has ever tried to artificially create interdependence.  It's kind of a shame, really, because within our guild, we give away all the interdependence items freely.  Yet, outside the guild, everyone charges 10-100 times what the interdependent item is worth in time, mats, or currency.  So, what's the real emergent behavior?  Does it increase friendly happy social interaction outside of guilds?  Or does attempting to force interdependence create or encourage negative, unfriendly toxic interactions?  Historically, I've seen several examples, and they're not the former.
    From what I've seen over the past 23+ years of MMO's, all the attempts at artificial interdependence do is strongly encourage alts or multiple accounts, and punish players unwilling or unable to participate in that 'meta'. (pay-2-win, that is, using RL cash to permit one customer to have access to all crafting professions)

    Really mention one game that has done this, EQ you can have all tradeskills, WoW same thing, every single mmo I can possibly think of you can have all professions so what mmo have you played that where it has led to toxic behavior and leading people to buy multiple accounts and shaming the people who didnt?  Seriously I want to know because right now I'm calling your bluff, and thinking your just not liking the system I mentioned and fabricated a story to make it sound worse than it is.

    And btw just so we're clear you know a game where you can have all professions and they shame the people who dont? All of them every single mmo I've played EQ included, so if you think that having all tradeskills in one account fixes it it doesnt, of anything it makes it worse because than like I said everyone does it and than the market dies cept for raid loot or high end gear being sold, which is honestly nothing short of sad.


    This post was edited by Cealtric at July 16, 2019 7:02 AM PDT
    • 228 posts
    July 16, 2019 7:11 AM PDT

    Chanus said:

    Jabir said:

    Globally shard banks equals instantaneous item- and money-teleportation for all and would mean a farewell to international trade routes and many other interesting business opportunities. Local banking means that players will have to figure out how to get their hands on that rare raw material rumored to be plentiful on another continent. That's why we oppose globally shared banks, not to make life cumbersome for individuals who want to craft in many parts of the world. We want the world and the distances in it to be real obstacles that must be overcome to succeed.

    With Druid and Wizard teleportation, which they have said will be in game, the difference between having a global bank and not having a global bank for these purposes will simply be a miniscule amount of time. I don't think this will have the world-building immersive effect you intend it to, as it is easily trivialized and avoided.

    Even more so if there is a mail feature. 

    I know that the goal is to make the game as tedious as possible so that people are forced to look at the world around them a la the eye clamps from A Clockwork Orange but that's not something you can insist players engage in merely by willing it to be so. They will either take joy in these experiences or not, but if you force it on them, many will simply choose not to play.

    The game needs more players outside a few dozen grognards in order for it to be successful and stay running.

    It goes without saying that a free-of-charge, instantaneous mail system would be equally harmful from my perspective. So would player teleportation as accessible as you seem to envisage it. Hopefully, VR are smarter than that.

    Sarchastic misinterpretations of what some of us want is silly, and repeating again and again that the game has to be designed for the masses for it to survive, does not make it true.


    This post was edited by Jabir at July 16, 2019 7:12 AM PDT
    • 1921 posts
    July 16, 2019 7:19 AM PDT

    Riahuf22 said: Really mention one game that has done this, EQ you can have all tradeskills, WoW same thing, every single mmo I can possibly think of you can have all professions so what mmo have you played that where it has led to toxic behavior and leading people to buy multiple accounts and shaming the people who didnt?  Seriously I want to know because right now I'm calling your bluff, and thinking your just not liking the system I mentioned and fabricated a story to make it sound worse than it is.

    And btw just so we're clear you know a game where you can have all professions and they shame the people who dont? All of them every single mmo I've played EQ included, so if you think that having all tradeskills in one account fixes it it doesnt, of anything it makes it worse because than like I said everyone does it and than the market dies cept for raid loot or high end gear being sold, which is honestly nothing short of sad.

    I'm not fabricating anything, and wasn't trying to make anything sound worse than it is.  This is the current public design for Pantheon.  Attempted forced interdepedence.
    But, to answer your question, the most popular example of attempted forced interdependence is EQ2.  Another example is Vanguard.

    • 1315 posts
    July 16, 2019 7:53 AM PDT

    The only real way to force interdependence in a positive way is to design a group based crafting system where the mini game requires participation of multiple crafters at the same time and interactive and unpredictable enough that it is extremely difficult to multi box.  The crafters could be of the same craft or different crafts.  If done right it could be a pretty cool system but you are pushing to a crafting sim level play style and I am not sure that is a good target for VR as it would require a huge manpower investment to create that is on top of the base game.

    • 3852 posts
    July 16, 2019 7:54 AM PDT

    This thread has moved in a direction that probably belongs in the crafting forums - where it has been discussed more than a few times.

    vjek - I agree with some things you say and disagree with others but nice detailed argument.

    Riahuf22 I think you are confusing a few different points vjek made. Understandably given all the different points made in one long paragraph. 

    Many games have attempted to force interdependance between crafting *professions*. As vjek correctly points out EQ2 and Vanguard were among them. So was LOTRO for a while. To be very specific to reduce the risk of confusion - what we mean by this is that profession X needs items made by profession Y to craft items. It cannot simply use raw materials and things purchased from a vendor. Simple example - a weaponsmith being unable to craft a sword without using a hilt that has to be crafted by a woodworker or tailor. 

    To encourage interdependance between *characters* as distinct from professions many games limit the number of crafting professions any one character can have. In fact this is the typical approach whether or not the developers of a particular game do it for this reason. 

    Interdependance between *players* is a different matter. Getting every craft to maximum level often requires quite a few different characters. Often one character per manufacturing craft (as distinct from harvesting crafts) though that varies game by game. This makes it harder for one *player* to avoid interdependance but it is far from impossible to get a sufficient number of characters to maximum crafting levels and indeed maximum adventurer levels - current MMOs being so easy.

    In Pantheon far more than in current games getting a large stable of characters to maximum level will be quite time consuming. This probably will be true for maximizing all the crafting professions as well but we do not know that yet. Thus total interdependence is not forced but it is very strongly encouraged if the alternative is to get e.g. six characters all to high level.

    Riahuf22 while your point was made in an overly accusatory manner it is essentially correct. No MMO that I know of tries to limit the number of crafting professions one account can have other than by limiting the number of characters that one account can have. But vjek wasn't claiming anything inconsistent with this.

    vjek I took the liberty of trying to rephrase your points in a slightly different way to facilitate agreement and collegiality (chuckles) - if I got any of them wrong you are more than welcome to correct me.

    Trasek - I agree with both the approach you mentioned and the conclusion that it probably wasn't worth trying. On the latter point I add that in Pantheon there will be a limited number of things we can do when we log in and don't have time or desire to join a group. I would much prefer crafting being one of those things - I do not want to have to find someone else leveling the same crafting tier I am in order to craft if I log-in for 30 minutes to craft.


    This post was edited by dorotea at July 16, 2019 7:58 AM PDT