Master crafters

[ven]

After you reach a certain value on your stats, further progress no longer pays off. As has been argued before, at that point there is literally nothing else to expect from the game - you've reached your character's peak condition, and you're staying there forever. Pvp'ers can still compete with others since their stats are more directly comparable and they have immediate feedback for their grind, but that's not the case with most others trades. How does a crafter or a cook compete?
Moreover, a player's personal style is important in pvp, but equally-statted crafters are exactly the same: they are not unique in any way.

The suggestion is that crafters become of more strategic value in the game as a whole.

After reaching their endgame status, a further list of skills should open up to the players. These skills should be limiting and mutually exclusive, that is: they should require a very large amount of XP and LP (as well as high lore, carpentry or smithing etc, related to the selected skill), and choosing one of them should mean the player forfeits all the others. In essence this is a specialization that represents the result of a lifetime of work.

Purchasing them would give the character the ability to craft unique items, as well as to give them names. For example:

Master armorer: craft silver and golden armors
Master cook: fancy cakes, shewbread or some such
Master builder: build variable texture stone walls (for aesthetics only)
Master painter: ability to mass produce simple sketches.
Toymaker: recipe for one new curio
Weaver: craft clothes in unique colors (yellow, red, purple)
Shieldsmith: different shield formats (norman, square, buckler, tower)
Swordsmith: silver sword, etc.
Gardener: once a week, plant a seedless purple/black/rainbow-colored flower
Treeplanter: once a week, plant a seedless exotic tree.
And so on

The goal with this is to make an endgame crafter's products a bit more valuable and unique, hopefully creating minor industries in the process and also improving specialized trade. Another point is that this would give non pvp'ers a reason to keep grinding.

[Trev]

this is actually a pretty cool idea

[2d0x]

A slightly similar topic about post-production: viewtopic.php?f=48&t=57418

[MrPunchers]

aka alts

[ven]

A slightly similar topic about post-production: viewtopic.php?f=48&t=57418

Not really. I'm not talking about numbers and item stats, but rather about making late game crafters and their masterworks unique in a meaningful way.

aka alts

The expected long list of crafter specializations and the high XP, LP and skill+attribute combo required for each one of them would hopefully make alts impractical. If that's not enough, whatever realm that manages to create endgame crafter alts for everything should be personally congratulated by jorbtar.

[SacreDoom]

Thing is alts are inherently better at specialising than a single character. I'm not of the notion that every cool idea needs to be weighed down by the fact that people will alt-abuse it, but it is a factor one should definitely consider.

[ven]

I have no idea know how XP is being botted today, but it is really that easy to make an alt with, say, 150k experience?

I suppose the devs are able to access the XP amount of people who have been playing actively for a long time and therefore know what's the average XP value this late in the world. That value could then used to determine what would be an acceptable XP cost for such endgame skills in order to minimize use of alts.

[Avu]

The entire competitive aspect of the game is pointless if alts and bots are allowed.*

* for the purpose of this assertion we're ignoring that games are pointless, individual human life is pointless and humans as a species is pointless

[jorb]

Aren't credos kind of this?

[ven]

Not really, the goal is to make dedicated crafter players valuable in that each one is able to bring something unique for their realm and for the local economy, represented by the ability to craft something special after a lot of gameplay. Right now endgame crafters are all the same. And crafters should be able to compete among themselves too.

Credos seem to be more QoL-oriented. They don't improve industry or specialized trade significantly.