Adjustment vs. Advancement

[Haba]

When you have a closer look at every big and sucsessful town in game, you will see that there is a huge variety of crafters who all are specialized in one or two fields to achieve the best possible work for the whole town.

I disagree. There really isn't a huge variety at the moment. As an example, the same person can take care of the silk, farm best quality crops (all of them), plant the highest quality trees and breed the best quality animals. The only limiting factor at the moment is time; usually the person with the best stats/most LP simply doesn't have the time to do everything. But the fact remains, when he does, it's the best quality.

I do like the idea that you will be able to be self sufficient, but the current system provides very little room for specialization.

The diversity of the game at the moment does show a great potential though. Maybe some branching in the high tier crafting trees or additional skills/stats would help the diversification.

[burgingham]

Well I agree that there is room for more variety, but if you have no specialized crafters in town you are doing it wrong. We have a taylor, several bakers, smiths and ofc fighters. Ok tbh that is about it, but no dedicated player or town is able to unify all those skills in one person. Also localized ressource hotspots help to support trade. I am just mentioning this because I want to show not the whole system has to be overthrown to improve the game. Basic mechanics to make it work are there, you can use them for improval.
There sure are several more professions you can think about, the question is if you might need or do want a more detailed skilltree/-system for this!?

[sabinati]

When you have a closer look at every big and sucsessful town in game, you will see that there is a huge variety of crafters who all are specialized in one or two fields to achieve the best possible work for the whole town.

I disagree. There really isn't a huge variety at the moment. As an example, the same person can take care of the silk, farm best quality crops (all of them), plant the highest quality trees and breed the best quality animals. The only limiting factor at the moment is time; usually the person with the best stats/most LP simply doesn't have the time to do everything. But the fact remains, when he does, it's the best quality.

I do like the idea that you will be able to be self sufficient, but the current system provides very little room for specialization.

The diversity of the game at the moment does show a great potential though. Maybe some branching in the high tier crafting trees or additional skills/stats would help the diversification.

that guy, having high farming, can do all those things. but can he actually make high quality silk goods, if he had, lets say q200 filaments? i'm guessing not.

we have one guy with crazy high farming (he doesn't do the silk, btw), a few guys with sorta high farming, one guy (me) with good sewing/dex, one guy with good smithing/psy, one guy with really good carpentry, one guy with crazy high cooking, one guy with 200 survival and the best cutting tool we could get, a couple guys with crazy combat stats, etc. i'd say there's plenty of specialization.

[Chakravanti]

I like being able to do anything. If I had to choose between, say, farming or fighting, or doing both badly, I would have quit long ago. In my opinion, there already is as much specialization as there needs to be, and the vast majority of threads suggesting ways of promoting specialization would make the game less fun. (Credos, as suggested by Jorb, would be an exception.)

Ridiculous. As it stands the more you invest into a mooner the less likely you are to PvP with it. I'm not suggeting splitting up the mooner aspects any more than they are. If such were considered I'd have my opinions there but I am talking about making mooners an entirely separate class anyway. You may choose to farm on your PvP character but even so you must concede that this is a less than optimal investment of your efforts than spliting balance FEP development into your mooner and training it withcrafting skills and making Combat no more than 200 (for easy bear kills). If you have access to good thanes you can skate by with about 80 or so melee instead.

The only thing that really contradicts this is that the only half decent CON food available is piros but even those are far too valuable to waste on a combat character you can just feed str food past 200 con or so and get the HP you need and the strength for significantly less time:HP result.

As it stands, Character class already exists, Mooner & fighter. Fighters make excellent miner alts. With decent macros it's a easier and more productive way to make him hungry than plowing. The strength, with a pair of forge rings (which most players dealing with 100+ metals can get access to) is more than enough to pound wrought.

I'm only suggesting diversifying the combat tree and making it easier to develop. Cheaper PvP means it will happen more often. I'm not saying permadeath should be worthless. But as other have pointed out...an excessive disparity between player time and investment to combat competence is currently undesirable.

And to those in WV, I'm not suggesting this because I want a way to kill you. If I wanted to I could invest the time into griefing you. However, in the current game structure...I just can't be arsed to give that much of a fuck about you. It's far more investment than I consider you to be worth. What I *WOULD* like to see is a viable method for people to reasonably assault you however. The ability to do so is only available to those players so far into end game content that most of them just don't play enough to give a fuck, much like myself. You should be held accountable by the community for your actions. Not just you, but anyone. PvP will be balanced when this is feasible. PvP will not occur be losses will be equal on both sides give or take for strategic measures, countermeasures, etc. NOt months of character investment. I should not be settling a vendetta 3 months later becuase that' how frikin long it takes to develop a character (and that's giving access to end game content).

But the dev's may have a different plan.

[Jackard]

personally i feel we should set up a rigid caste system

[Chakravanti]

Idk, i like a system that encourages diversity and maybe marks class, but I'd like to see a lot of customizability. It is one of the things I really like about SB. THere are specific races, classes and professions and their purpose in PvP and GvG were well known, but the debate on what is the most effective spec toon builds both rages hotly within clans and are even closely guarded secrets amongst some.

[Jackard]

the only thing deserving of being hotly debated is whether people that use the word 'toon' should be baked in an oven or roasted over an open fire

[ImpalerWrG]

Some might argue that this standardizes character development and removes the sandbox aspect from the game but I would argue that the opposite is in fact true. Combined with a list of a dozen or so tasks a character may choose to preform, each which will advance a character uniquely between each stage of development to achieve a certain IMBA. The purpose here is that this teen-trial sort of ordeal gives a player a chance to achieve a particular IMBA more quickly than simply scarfing down a shitton of food. In fact, Scarfing down a shitton of food, while possible even for an optimally developed IMBA will not provide significant returns.

I like ware your going with this, what if the 'trials' are linked with the skill tree and actually part of it. It would work like this each time you acquire a skill the 'child' skills are not unlocked, instead several new 'trials' are unlocked which relate to the skill you now posses. In addition the player will unlock 'generic' trials with each advancement which are not heavily dependent on specific skills but rather on their overall level and any class they have if such a thing is implemented, the player can use all the trials interchangeably and completing any trial allows a new skill to be taken which will add new trial options to the players pool. This ensures that players can immediately use a new skill to advance themselves, or do a generic trial if they prefer and that all trials are doable. Difficulty would be balanced by dropping the lower level generic trials after a few levels so a player can't 'bottomfeed' easy trials, skill dependent trials might unlock only child skills if deemed appropriate. The nature of the trials will probably be very 'grindy' (kill/make/find FillintheBlankx10) but so long as it's not too much it will be an improvement and people won't bog down in it.

[Chakravanti]

the only thing deserving of being hotly debated is whether people that use the word 'toon' should be baked in an oven or roasted over an open fire

ROFL. I quite disagree actually. There is a, quite possibly, a distinct psychology between referring to it as a toon or a character. The former being far less invested and personal. In fact, looking back, you can gauge how much I was playing by whether or not I was calling it a toon or a character. I would argue that toon is all that much applicable here in H&H than Sb where it's pretty standard not only because of the 2d aspect but because quite a few people could stand to dissociate themselves just a bit from it.

I find it appropriate to remark here that despite my numerous references to SB I really don't want this game to ever end up like SB at all. There are aspects, such as diversity of development that could be had from it but the truth is that my suggestions, in fact, come from wesnoth. There is litteraly no battle attrition from dying in SB. Unless you were farming (as in: WoW style Mob farming, something I REALLY don't want to see here, it's what make this game remarkably special) or disc/vorg hunting because you only lost your inventory.

Rather I would like to see GvG and PvP reflect Wesnoth a bit in that character death remains a permanent loss but expected form of battle attrition. Where unit cost is something to consider before mounting an assault/defense and you have a decent array of units to choose from when doing so. Unit sacrifice can be done to achieve a larger victory and doesn't represent a ragequiting amount of investment but rather just enough to make doing so a very calculated decision. I'd like to see mooners seperated from combat characters and investment not require significant amounts of time on the part of the actual toon so that players can spend time creating stuff on their mooner and feed it to their PvP toons because there really is no point in playing a PvP toon unless you're PvPing because it makes no sense for a PvP toonn do do anything but PvP or train.

That's just my rationale and I'm not saying it's unbiased at all but rather revealing my influence and bias. Make of it what you will.