after playing Archeage I feel like I should be able to plant anything I want, almost anywhere I want. I covered the Rookbourn moutains with a forest, and orchards. I filled every square inch of Ynyster with Lemon Trees.
All those empty places no one had time to fill with stuff... they should be filled with player planted temporary stuff. And little critters that spawn from that temporary stuff like bugs and birds and squirls...
I agree with Evoras.
When I spoke about the risk in fishing, I agree where you fish provided danger. I think the same thing will happen with gathering for raw materials in Pantheon. I just think farming could be a similar activity within crafting. I have no idea what it would take programming wise, but it feels like it could be real to me.
As someone who enjoys housing systems in games that have them, I can totally see the appeal of having a farm/ranch, especially if the goods you produce are tied into crafting.
I would like to see this as a component of a much larger set of systems though, something that gives players the housing options they love and actually acts as a content generator for the game. This is something I've wanted to see in an MMO for a long time, but no one has really done. Since it would be an "expansion" type feature and something that would certainly happen post-launch, I am just putting it here as an idea for everyone to pull apart (or maybe make their own). Here is a super-quick outline of what I'd really like to see. I honestly could write pages on this topic if anyone is interested :)
What Neph envisions/wants:
- Scattered around the world, in unpopulated areas, are "marker stones" or something similar. Someone with enough resources (money, materials, etc) could "claim" a marker stone and start a settlement. Neph calls these settlements "Freeholds".
- Claiming the marker stone establishes a set of central buildings with NPC services. There's a town hall, an inn/tavern, and whatever other buildings make sense. In addition, around the local area, housing plots become active where player houses can be built by players who have the appropriate materials/money/etc.
- In addition to the housing, various resource sites spawn near the Freehold. These resource sites are things like mines, logging camps, farms, and so on that are worked by NPCs and serve to sustain/grow the Freehold itself. Players can interact with something in the town hall to see the status of these resource sites. Resource sites may periodically be attacked by bandits/monsters, and when that happens they will stop producing resources. Players will need to intervene to restore the resource site back to a functioning state. If resource sites aren't functioning, the Freehold may gradually decline - shops close, fewer NPCs are walking around, the town hall falls into disrepair, etc.
- Players can invest in and upgrade various aspects of the Freehold. For example, they could invest in a guard barracks and tower, which would provide NPC soldiers to protect resource sites from attack. They could invest in a smithy, which might add some NPC vendors to the Freehold (and better equip those NPC soldiers). Expand the tavern. Add a stable for fast travel. Upgrade the town hall itself, which makes the Freehold larger and activates more (and larger) housing plots and more resource sites. Resources can be contributed directly by players, and the "mayor" of the Freehold can spend resources from resource sites on projects as well. Starting off, the mayor would probably be the person who established the Freehold initially, but (at least in my head), I'm imagining that there would be some sort of periodic election process amongst all the residents of the Freehold.
- Freeholds can trade resources with other freeholds and can have faction standings with NPC groups and cities. High faction might open up trading options to help Freeholds expand, or change the type of NPCs that spawn within the Freehold. Low faction might make the Freehold an enemy of that NPC group, and they might get attacked or raided from time to time (in addition to random monster and bandit attacks). Deciding whether and how to align your Freehold to NPC factions would be an important part of the system.
I think a system like this makes player housing not only a fun thing, which it arguably is just on its own, but actually makes it a content generator and helps keep people invested in the world. It could easily be expanded to allow players to run their own shops, farms, and so on, which would be the social equivalent of what SWG had in terms of player cities. Mechanically, I'm envisioning house construction working a LOT like Vanguard did (and I think Archeage), but instead of the housing area just being a collection of housing plots, the shared Freehold buildings are there to give residents a reason to work together and contribute to their community.
Anyway, that's my 200gp for this thread. :)
Nephele said:As someone who enjoys housing systems in games that have them, I can totally see the appeal of having a farm/ranch, especially if the goods you produce are tied into crafting.
I would like to see this as a component of a much larger set of systems though, something that gives players the housing options they love and actually acts as a content generator for the game. This is something I've wanted to see in an MMO for a long time, but no one has really done. Since it would be an "expansion" type feature and something that would certainly happen post-launch, I am just putting it here as an idea for everyone to pull apart (or maybe make their own). Here is a super-quick outline of what I'd really like to see. I honestly could write pages on this topic if anyone is interested :)
What Neph envisions/wants:
- Scattered around the world, in unpopulated areas, are "marker stones" or something similar. Someone with enough resources (money, materials, etc) could "claim" a marker stone and start a settlement. Neph calls these settlements "Freeholds".
- Claiming the marker stone establishes a set of central buildings with NPC services. There's a town hall, an inn/tavern, and whatever other buildings make sense. In addition, around the local area, housing plots become active where player houses can be built by players who have the appropriate materials/money/etc.
- In addition to the housing, various resource sites spawn near the Freehold. These resource sites are things like mines, logging camps, farms, and so on that are worked by NPCs and serve to sustain/grow the Freehold itself. Players can interact with something in the town hall to see the status of these resource sites. Resource sites may periodically be attacked by bandits/monsters, and when that happens they will stop producing resources. Players will need to intervene to restore the resource site back to a functioning state. If resource sites aren't functioning, the Freehold may gradually decline - shops close, fewer NPCs are walking around, the town hall falls into disrepair, etc.
- Players can invest in and upgrade various aspects of the Freehold. For example, they could invest in a guard barracks and tower, which would provide NPC soldiers to protect resource sites from attack. They could invest in a smithy, which might add some NPC vendors to the Freehold (and better equip those NPC soldiers). Expand the tavern. Add a stable for fast travel. Upgrade the town hall itself, which makes the Freehold larger and activates more (and larger) housing plots and more resource sites. Resources can be contributed directly by players, and the "mayor" of the Freehold can spend resources from resource sites on projects as well. Starting off, the mayor would probably be the person who established the Freehold initially, but (at least in my head), I'm imagining that there would be some sort of periodic election process amongst all the residents of the Freehold.
- Freeholds can trade resources with other freeholds and can have faction standings with NPC groups and cities. High faction might open up trading options to help Freeholds expand, or change the type of NPCs that spawn within the Freehold. Low faction might make the Freehold an enemy of that NPC group, and they might get attacked or raided from time to time (in addition to random monster and bandit attacks). Deciding whether and how to align your Freehold to NPC factions would be an important part of the system.
I think a system like this makes player housing not only a fun thing, which it arguably is just on its own, but actually makes it a content generator and helps keep people invested in the world. It could easily be expanded to allow players to run their own shops, farms, and so on, which would be the social equivalent of what SWG had in terms of player cities. Mechanically, I'm envisioning house construction working a LOT like Vanguard did (and I think Archeage), but instead of the housing area just being a collection of housing plots, the shared Freehold buildings are there to give residents a reason to work together and contribute to their community.
Anyway, that's my 200gp for this thread. :)
I like some of your ideas but in some areas I think you take it too far for my taste (just another opinion)
The markers are a great idea. This is how VR could dictate what sort of housing went where so guilds houses and farms were in the right place baced on lore.
Your Idea on resource spawns would take from the world I think. This would be a start to removing the need for people to venture out into the world and that would be detrimental to the overall game.
Same problem with adding Tavern Stables, Town Hall's, that's way beyond housing and your getting into full blown cities and forts now.
Monsters mobs bandit attacks... these would be cool to implement into a farm, houe or Guild Hall, not devastating on first attack I would think, but if a farm went unattended ignored for days or weeks at a time yes.
I think some of your larger ideas could be implemented is a Guild Hall version of this. Of course if the Guild wanted NPC workers or solders on duty then they would need to be paying them a respectable wage. But even then I'm not keen on moving all the standard resources (bankers, merchants etc) to a guild hall and effectively draining a city of patrons (removing players need to go to the city). I think housing and guild halls would need a different set of workers for hire, Guards, Gardner's, Sheppard's, Cleaners, Farm hands, Maintenance People. And all of them need to be paid by the hour or they would quit.
Overall good ideas to add to the mix
Oh no worries, they're just ideas after all :) The goal of the resource sites thing was twofold: First, to add something that makes the Freehold "matter" to players a bit - if they want their new little town to thrive/grow, they need to protect the NPCs that make it go. And second, to allow the Freehold to generate some kind of good that could be traded with other Freeholds or NPC cities for faction standing. In my head, I was thinking that maybe some areas could be richer in some resources than others. And so if you had a Freehold that had a bunch of mines and quarries, you might have an excess of those resources, but you'd need to import wood for building. Sure, players could go collect wood, but if there's another Freehold in the forest that has a ton of wood and could use stone, you could just set up a trading arrangement with them to get it.
But yeah, totally other ways to accomplish the same goals - mainly, I just want to see housing areas "matter" a little more to players than just being "the place where all the houses are". I have super fond memories of player cities in SWG. Bonus points of they serve as a way to dynamically generate content as well.
Vandraad said:DuckofDeath said:No joke I would love to be a chicken farmer. Raise little chickens then take them to market or sell them as food to player cooks or as pets to other players.
Be cool if titles were tied to different farm styles, I could be known as Chicken Chaser.
MMOs are, at their core, about risk vs reward. Where is your risk being a chicken farmer? You mention selling them to players. So your reward is money for zero risk at all, a fountain of infinite gold essentially Not unbalanced or harmful for the economy at all. If all you need to do is spend a few minutes a day chucking seeds on the ground then the reward should be a pathetically small as the effort put into earning it. You want more money, introduce more risk. Let me steal them when you're offline. Put your farm out in the middle of a zone full of wandering hostile mobs and let them aggro onto your chickens. Better yet, make you adventure out with other players deep into dungeons, killing NPCs like everyone else to obtain uncommon/rare No-Drop items that you then can craft into chicken feed..provided your chicken feed crafting skill is 200. Then you can make a bigger profit...or just stick with Farmville.
Risk, dont feed chickens, chickens die, stop growing eggs, cant get more chickens, have no more chicken you dont have a chicken farm, until you get more chickens the same way you had to start, and lets be honest i dont see a ton of "risk" in tradeskilling in general, you collect ore, maybe kill a few mobs in the way, collect more ore, smelt them, make something, sell it to vendor or someone, rinse repeat.
Granted you could make it to where you could fail at making the item, basically the same way the chicken could die of old age either way the risk isn't all that high and so therefore risk in mininum at best.
I think it's more appropriate to say that MMOs are fundamentally about shared social experience in a persistent online world. Any sytem or mechanic that's added should advance those shared social experiences in some way. In the case of crafting/farming/etc, the things produced need to have value to other players.
As far as the value of what gets produced, that should be determined by a combination of time invested and risk. The riskier something is to make/grow/kill, the more you should get from it. The more time you have to put into making/growing/killing something, the more you should get from it as well.
This general valuation should apply to both crafting and adventuring (and any other activity that a game might have, like vanguard's diplomacy system).
Nephele said:I think it's more appropriate to say that MMOs are fundamentally about shared social experience in a persistent online world. Any sytem or mechanic that's added should advance those shared social experiences in some way. In the case of crafting/farming/etc, the things produced need to have value to other players.
As far as the value of what gets produced, that should be determined by a combination of time invested and risk. The riskier something is to make/grow/kill, the more you should get from it. The more time you have to put into making/growing/killing something, the more you should get from it as well.
- So something with little to no risk that you can do quickly should yield very little.
- Something with little to no risk that takes a lot of time/effort should yield moderate rewards.
- Something with a high amount of risk that you can do quickly should yield moderate rewards.
- And finally, something with a high amount of risk that takes a lot of time/effort should yield high rewards.
This general valuation should apply to both crafting and adventuring (and any other activity that a game might have, like vanguard's diplomacy system).
This is true, but on the flip side of it all is the demand of it as well, like lets say the eggs can be made fast but is needed in a ton of baking tradeskills the value will go up simply becuase of demand regardless of how easy it might be cuase some people still wont do it if they can simply just buy them.
You could build renewable resources around a fixed absolute value regardless of demand or type. You just have to make the process the same risk/time/cost across the board for all the basic resources. And manage the crafted output either with a time restriction, or a cost prohibitive model that makes the final result worth less than the combined materials. I would also probably make raw materials decay into less valuable, or possibly more valuable materials depending on the specific item. Maybe aged cheese is better, but aged eggs... that's a recipe for a colon cleanse. Maybe fish will rot after a day or two, if you don't preserve or freeze them. That sort of thing.
Food, textiles, compounds, and raw materials... these things would all decay over time unless preserved in some way at a cost that should exceed the value of the final products they make. This would prevent people from hoarding long term stocks and keep prices fixed for the long term on raw materials. The supply market would have to carefully match demand over the short term. This would heavily benefit new player participation in the crafting market and encourage skilled crafters to seek out material suppliers from among those new character populations. Win/Win
I'm super not a politics person so the whole political side of freeholds switched it to not interested for me. At least as long as its the standard political power structure. If it's decided that politics is a vector of the game Pantheon wants to spend resources on buildling, I'd find it more interesting if there was a 'community proposal system', where, instead of having one big super serious guy just gets the reigns to all the power of community resources, everything would just be transparently voted if people cared enough to make it happen. Perhaps the most influential people make the best proposals, but any resource deployment/power is put to votes. It would be a slower system than one person in power, but it would also be more balanced and less political, and the opposite of corrupt. It would actually be owned by the community at that point, rather than being owned by the guy who convinced everyone that he should get all the power.
Still, I could see freeholds being an interesting generator of/for crafting community. I just don't see the need for it to have a political component, because politics divide people literally, the opposite of bringing people together. With a lot of political power, in a way I don't see tenet 1 being true. Content not king, freehold lord by voted in is king. If the freehold content was enjoyable, couldn't you just group up to build stuff out? I don't see the value add in freeholds. It just seems like an unnecessary political power structure so a couple people get a ton of power if they invest enough in it. So my .02c, as a non political person, as someone with zero interest in even hearing about politics and things that divide people, I say put the resources to developing new dungeons, epic quests, legendary lore, nice horizontal development, raid building, weaving factions and stories, and other things that bring people together, rather than drive them apart.
Benonai - In my experience - farming has mostly been a very limited activity tied in with cooking if the MMO had that as a tradeskill. A tradeskiller could have farming as a craft and could plant and harvest food that cooks could use. This is a very different thing indeed from the far more elaborate systems discussed in this thread. Which I hasten to add I am almost entirely unfamiliar with, never having played MMOs that used them.
I would expand upon the ideas proposed by Evoras, oneADseven, and Nephele. Allow for farming on owned, non-instanced land. Make the crops be only found via farming and not gathering, but make it a social, collaborative effort by allowing everyone to harvest (and splitting the haul). And area (climate) should matter.
For example, my character wants to grow apples. He owns land, but the area isn't the best climate for apples. He plants a tree and after one week IRL (becausetrees take time), the tree matures and starts producing apples. The normal drop rate is one apple every 1.5 - 2 hours, but because the climate my farm is on is only marginal for apples, there's an added 1 hour delay to each drop. Every time an apple grows, if I pick it, I get two apples. If anyone else picks it, I get one apple and the picker gets one apple. So if I'm tending my farm, I get a harvesting bonus. But if I'm out adventuring (or logged out), I still benefit, I'm just 'paying' for someone else to harvest.
This would encourage everyone to at least walk through the farm areas and it keeps everyone engaged. Also, the impact of climate will help drive regional differences as well as give farmers the choice to either try to maximize yield in an area where the crop is common and will sell for less, or, like my character in the example, try to grow something in an area where it would be more valuable to sell. Plus, locations with more foot traffic will also matter.
One further addition could be that the crops could be purchased directly from the farm. You set a price and all crops harvested are eligible to be sold (by a NPC). You still can take your harvest to a market, but if you price competitively enough, you might not need to. So someone who needs apples and is in my example character's area could go to my farm and hope to get lucky and harvest an apple. But if they are all already picked, that person could instead buy them from my farm at the price I set.
dorotea said:Benonai - In my experience - farming has mostly been a very limited activity tied in with cooking if the MMO had that as a tradeskill. A tradeskiller could have farming as a craft and could plant and harvest food that cooks could use. This is a very different thing indeed from the far more elaborate systems discussed in this thread. Which I hasten to add I am almost entirely unfamiliar with, never having played MMOs that used them.
I love you guys!
Dorotea, my sarcasm has slipped past the guards at the gates once again. Totally talking about "farming" in old school MMOs: xp, plat, items, etc. Just a pun, bud, but it was dangled in hopes of being alluring bait...