Potjeh wrote:What do you mean pick one? There's no conflict in the statements. It's just that unlike crops which uses raw days, metal uses man-days, but it's same shit.
And yeah, I'm offering a solution right here, I don't see how it can be made any clearer: infrastructure and tools should only cap, never increase quality. High-quality items should be exceptional, not mass produced. If everything is special, nothing is. Even if you're a solo just working on pushing numbers (and there's not much of those left these days, virtually all of us borequit), wouldn't it feel more impactful to make a better sword if you poured rare materials into that one specific sword, rather than upgrading your smithing infrastructure and then making an unlimited number of swords at that quality? High q items should feel special and valuable. Losing top end gear in PvP should hurt almost as much as losing stats.
Also, Tool, Weapon, and Armor decay need to be a thing. On the surface, this may seem like tedium, but what it is is a resource sink and a drive to trade. As it sits if a group trades with a faction that can produce higher quality stuff than they can, they need never trade for that tool again. This seems suboptimal to me as it makes every tool in the world essentially infinite and it utterly invalidates lower Q tools, whereas this makes you make decisions about tools. "This shit is soft as butter, I don't want to use my good pick on it."
Crop decay and maintenance need to be a thing for the same reasons. New resources to fight blight and infestation on crops, decay of quality on crops that aren't properly maintained (weeding/watered/pushing off pests/etc).
What we need is resource sinks and management routines that make having something high Q both special, and make things reclaimed by the wild become sub-standard and pointless to reclaim (after sufficient time).
And the Quality Grind? I agree, more things need to hard cap Q than soft cap it (Anvil/Hammer for example), including certain ingredients in a recipe.