Timeskip Additions Wishlist

[Theori]

Here it is! 

Consider this your one stop for making suggestions of things to be added during and after the timeskip. Lets avoid lore and races here; spells, mechanics, crafting, etc!

My wishlist:

• Tailoring crafting tree. Please, let us make clothes. (T1 having custom sprite ability?)
  
• Some changes to NPC Merchants: make regular merchants offer reagents/ores for more expensive prices (say, two/three times their sell price) to add a coin sink for merchants and a way for unlucky crafters to actually acquire materials.
  
• Separating Runewriting and Blacksmithing back into two trees instead of just Artificing
  
• Big one: 'Specialisations' that serve as smaller crafting trees with a bigger buy in; ie: once you hit T1 Blacksmith you can buy for 10 rpp 'Armourer', which is a smaller tree with more armour/ring crafting/add 'pristine' like bonuses or with bunch of materials increase quality tier (from common to uncommon, for example) or 'Weaponsmith' that allows attackgem crafting, small bonuses to weapons stats. For Alchemy, 'Potioneer' (Mixtures to make potions a little reagent cheaper, new recipes, longer duration, etc) and 'Transmuter' (Recipes to turn copper into iron, iron into adamantine, adamantine into orichalcum, etc). They're all mutually exclusive.
  
• Barns -finally.
  
• Ability to make tillable land for those poor people without homes with tilled land
  
• The implementation of some form of the Strategic Map idea.
  
• The addition of a Wiki maintenance team or more effort put into keeping wiki up to date.
  
• More drugs than Sylvanum, with differing pros and cons.
  

Post yours! Maybe Chance'll see some value in them and add them in!

[Chance]

- I'm not sure if I enjoy having different artificer specializations (tailoring, armoring, etc), as it makes the 'grind' of kitting out a fresh character more challenging. Not bad to have in a more traditional RPG where characters aren't temporary, but here it strikes me as over complicating things without any real gain. 

- Merchants selling ore/reagants would decrease map interaction and exploration, so I'm not sure I like that. Don't think it's necessary either with how straightforward it is to gather ore or collect herbs.

- Being able to till the land again would be nice, so long as tilled land expires if it's not been interacted with after X amount of hours to avoid map ugliness (and the same 'untill' feature we had in Spires). Chicken coops/barns fit into that. In the long-term this and other sandbox elements are something I want added.

[Enginseer-42]

So this is going to be something of a big effort post where I try to explain my thoughts behind WHY something should change in addition to what the changes I think should be made.

Economy Stuff
- Set ALL items to have an NPC sell value of zero. (IE no infinite gold from selling lumber anymore.)
- Set all NPC shop clothing to have a cost of zero. (IE you can dress yourself for free.)
- Luxury Goods/Agriculture merchants should dump their profits into the guild coffer of whatever guild controls the settlement they're in.
- Enable Guild rents on settlements. (IE, the system where a given guild can set prices for lots and receives the money for the rent.)
- Dump initial sums of money into each starting guild, and give players some starting cash. But other than that allow cash to circulate rather than be endlessly generated. With the only real influxes being the starting sums for each new character.

Map Stuff
- Separate the map into two regions, much like the start of this time-skip prior to the mapping changes. Each with 1 Major City, 2 minor towns, and about 3-4 sites of interest for guilds to fight over.
- Remove personal houses in favor of guild complexes with various themes (Church, Tavern, Farm, Etc.). Have Taverns have rooms you can rent for cheap for the day so people can have their secret meetings but require obscene upkeep so nobody rents them indefinitely.
- Make the only means of passage between the regions boats with a cooldown of 24 hours, so no more popping on over to the other side of the country for five seconds to spy only to immediately run 10000 miles to report back.
- While not necessarily a hard limit, make one of the two 'small towns' on each side the 'newbie' town for that region. Where lowbies and newbies can duke it out and grow without needing to worry about picking a fight with Joe-McBleeds Uniques the 230+ ancient sorcerer.
-Create a vaguely separate 'wilderness' spawn that connects to both sides for demons and such to spawn into for a total of 3 spawns.

Guild Stuff
- Something Chance already mentioned at some point, but restrict people to one guild rather than allowing several. Perhaps have a hidden called double agent that allows membership in multiple?
- Cap Guilds on Members to 10. That's 1/10 of 100 users, which is the regular high point.
-Prevent guilds from controlling more than one world location. If your guild controls the major city, they're going to have to rely on another guild to take control of the nearby towns for them and maintain good relations.

War Stuff
- Make it a sort of gambling system. In order to make an attack, you have to put up X amount of coins per fighter you intend to send. A Defender can either put up X/2 Coins per fighter, or offer up 1 point of Strategic Advantage. Whoever wins, collects the pot assembled by both sides wagers. Strategic Advantage can be used to FORCE a defender to place something up for wager in the next battle, with a cost depending on the thing, If it's an attempt to arrest someone, or rescue someone, you need 1 SA per 100 RPL of the target. To conquer/seize control of a location on the map, it's 1 for a site of interest, 2 for a minor town, 3 for a major city.
- Require outside parties to anty up double attacker price, regardless of side they're intervening on, All Awards go to the primary victor, who can then dole it out as desired.

So, I said I'd explain why. Part of the issue with Esshar I've noticed that early spires lacked, was there is no in game motivation to do things. In Spires it was a constant battle for turf and territory. Not just in big battles but in a thousand small raids and skirmishes. I can't tell you how many times we had Gehennans in the Grey Reach back in early Valmasia, not to mention the infamous Tax Fort.

Esshar lacks that scuffle for resources almost entirely. Hell, until recently I was literally the only person who even bothered to guard the Therian Mine. There's nothing to strive for that isn't either guarded by one of three/four Mega Factions or sits in the ethereal realm of Admin approval. Which, while I'm sure you guys are reasonable, is just an inefficient and daunting system for something that's meant to drive daily movement. People need things to strive for that isn't in the realm of apps or in the realm of convincing a full 4th or more of the playerbase to follow you.

This is also why I think we should remove the infinite generation of coins, because it gives merchants and coins a certain amount of meaning that's just lacked otherwise, and we already have the system for setting rent controls to pump money into player guilds. This gives ruling guilds a steady supply of money they can use for wars/diplomacy with other guilds and gives them a level of agency that's currently lacked, because anyone can just go outside and cut 1000 trees down. Or mine ore for a couple of days. Money is a lever, and right now it's utterly useless, this gives it back some meaning.

I think I pretty well explained my reasoning for the two regions with a time lock on transit between them, but I as for the rest, this leads into the need for things to drive conflict and goal-setting. Things like a neat base and neat bonuses gets people off their butt and out of the town square, and that is in and of itself a good thing. This also encourages fighting over unique real estate and the stories it brings. The Holy knights driving the Necromancers out of their tower and consecrating the crypts within. Demons visiting a reign of terror over a small farming village. Etc Etc.

I... think that's most of my reasons. Though if something is still confusing I can explain more later.

[Mouse]

@Enginseer, You asked me to look over this and give some critiques. With that said, and given I'm a little stretched for time, this is what I had to come up with as 'holes' in your ideas.

map stuff
removing personal houses is a bad idea because there are people who may want to be more solo oriented(not strictly rping alone, but..) and if a guild doesn't fit your gimmick/aesthetic, you'd be SOL. guild housing in general is a good idea though.

locking 'regions' sounds cool until you're stuck in an enemy region with nobody around to rp with and the potential to get fucking murdered at every corner bc of a misclick or something. metagaming is handled on a case by case basis anyway and we already don't allow people to run away, get a group,and come back.

newbie town sounds cool, won't work. if moonfall and theria was any indication, the moment the option for people to buy homes or property shows up, people will flock to them, or high rpls will circle around it. theres no graceful way to keep higher rpls out of a place and it's kind of an odd disconnect anyway.

guild stuff
restricting people to one guild sounds fine, but doesn't work when there's a CITY guild or what have you. guild caps also suck because at some point you'd have to be choosing who you want in and who you don't. remember, 100 players online does NOT equal 100 total players.

war stuff
I don't have a big dog in this one but I do like the idea that Prego had put up, that they used for the BR server. Every week certain factions send x amount of players to a location and then they fight there.  If a faction sends nobody and another faction did? The faction with players gain that location. If the two factions show up and there are an equal amount of members? They can fight and the winner gains that section. Carve up the map into these 'sections', set people to fight, and make those areas considered the territory of the others for cap rolls and stuff(obviously, not as intense as if they were inside of cities or whatever.)

[Enginseer-42]

@Enginseer, You asked me to look over this and give some critiques. With that said, and given I'm a little stretched for time, this is what I had to come up with as 'holes' in your ideas.

map stuff
removing personal houses is a bad idea because there are people who may want to be more solo oriented(not strictly rping alone, but..) and if a guild doesn't fit your gimmick/aesthetic, you'd be SOL. guild housing in general is a good idea though.

locking 'regions' sounds cool until you're stuck in an enemy region with nobody around to rp with and the potential to get fucking murdered at every corner bc of a misclick or something. metagaming is handled on a case by case basis anyway and we already don't allow people to run away, get a group,and come back.

newbie town sounds cool, won't work. if moonfall and theria was any indication, the moment the option for people to buy homes or property shows up, people will flock to them, or high rpls will circle around it. theres no graceful way to keep higher rpls out of a place and it's kind of an odd disconnect anyway.

guild stuff
restricting people to one guild sounds fine, but doesn't work when there's a CITY guild or what have you. guild caps also suck because at some point you'd have to be choosing who you want in and who you don't. remember, 100 players online does NOT equal 100 total players.

war stuff
I don't have a big dog in this one but I do like the idea that Prego had put up, that they used for the BR server. Every week certain factions send x amount of players to a location and then they fight there.  If a faction sends nobody and another faction did? The faction with players gain that location. If the two factions show up and there are an equal amount of members? They can fight and the winner gains that section. Carve up the map into these 'sections', set people to fight, and make those areas considered the territory of the others for cap rolls and stuff(obviously, not as intense as if they were inside of cities or whatever.)

Thanks!

Map Stuff

I think that's kind of the point. It's an RP game, and therefor you should be encouraged to find a group because RP by necessity is a group activity. There's never going to be enough solo houses for the entire playerbase, so it seems counterproductive to devote so much map space to stuff that most people won't see. Most player homes end up as either family affairs or guild halls anyway.

I still think getting stuck on the other side won't matter as much as you think it does. The goal is that each side is subdivided and mostly fights amongst itself, with full regional wars being rare, big occurrences. With town guilds fighting city guilds, mostly.

I honestly was thinking of Newbie towns as basically just a place for newbies to gather. Basically a spawn point with some houses and stalls and an admin nudge to make things welcoming to the new players if you're in control of it.

Guild Stuff

That's the thing I want to put city loyalty out to pasture and make it more about the guilds. If the Thunderlords are a Barsburg themed guild that takes over New Osrona then New Osrona becomes Barsburg Town, if the Magma-Drakes fireblooded guild kicks them out, it's suddenly dragons this, dragons that. Kind of like old E1 where cities were a prize, rather than really having too much personality of their own.

War Stuff

I kind of like that, but at the same time, feel like War should have a cost to start. And rewards beyond the obvious for those who defend. Plus I worry it might be open to weird gambits like sending one guy to every available region in the hopes your opponent forgets one, and also encourages as mentioned the big glob guilds.

[Seraph]

Sarradian, maybe they could be a religion/race that worship the spirits of the fourth elements.

[Lloyd Durages]

Please no more drugs.

[Moloch]

Please no more drugs.

shut up

[heartanthems]

i agree with the above

[Shadovarn]

I think we should have an agility drug that takes a hit to your vit and/or mana.

Maybe out of a highly toxic metal known to cause paranoia and shakes.