Tradeskills Changed to ProfessionsFollow

Durability will not be added, Bliz has confirmed this. Crafting failures makes crafting tedius to the casual gamer. FFXI proved that over and over. Besides, if your gathering the majority of your materials, failures will not cost you alot of money.

BTW, not flaming or saying your ideas are aweful. Just trying to get a conversation going on the forums that is relevant to the game's development.

Edited, Fri Sep 10 23:51:32 2004 by StumpyWSF

What was tedious in FFXI was the method of crafting, not the failures.

I hated crafting in FFXI, loved it in UO. Both had failures.

What happens with failure is it becomes a time thing. Do you have time to go out and gather your materials or do you go buy the materials so you can make and sell the finished product?

Everyone seems to be assuming that the casual gamer will want to craft. What if they're only interested in the fighting/questing aspects and don't want to do tradeskills? Also seems to be assuming that even given the chance, the casual gamer will want to do all the tradeskills.

I wasn't planning on doing all the tradeskills, even when given the chance.

There are casual gamers that will do nothing but craft.

People seem to be assuming that the blacksmiths will want to mine also. What if someone wants to be a smith and a leatherworker? They don't want to take the time to mine, or they don't like mining.


Yes there needs to be a way to lose money. Limiting the number of tradeskills is one way of doing it. There is never any money lost if everyone can do everything.

edit: actually, where you have to buy the skills from trainers, WoW has a built in way of losing money.

Edited, Sat Sep 11 00:05:14 2004 by SeomanP

Here are my 2 golds (yeah I'm that important).

Ways to take out money in the game:

When you level up, prices go up. (This IMO makes a lot of sense, when you're a kid IRL buying a pack of gum is just a buck, however, when you get older, paying the bills and buying a pack of gum is 401 bucks.) What I mean by "prices go up" is, e.g., the stamps cost 30 copper at say level 5, then level 10 they go to 2 silver, and so on, they cost more for every say five levels. This would make it so by level 60 you would be paying something in the gold for just a stamp. Also, they could make it so when you put something in auction, make a deposit of some amount of money, scaling as you level.

Make professions (or tradeskills) cost a sufficient amount of money, and a higher level. (Just as StumpyWSF says, "The levels are too low IMHO") So, in english, make the professions (or tradeskills) be at higher levels, i.e., Apprentice level 10, and Journeyman level 25, and so on.

Give me your opinions.






Ah, just a thought, maybe they should have stockmarketing, and great depressions in WoW too? :P

Edited, Sat Sep 11 07:13:39 2004 by Creamed

Real life economics don't work in MMORPGs. Name one game that actually had a balanced economy that didn't have some sort of other nasty problems because of it. And as I listed earlier, there were some real problems with tradeskilling this change addresses, none of which revolve around the economy, except insofar as the crafters are getting screwed by the gatherers who have pure profit and still charge whatever they want.



These can actually be pretty significant. Vials ARE minimal supplies, btw, and rather expensive ones at that when you start buying crystal. These however are NOT reflected in any sale price because players only pay what they think an item was worth. They don't care if it took 100g to make, they'll still say, "eh, it's only worth 10g. That's all I'll pay." -- THIS is one of the major problems with tradeskilling.




Considering you get...8? 10?...characters per server per account, it's not like they have to pay extra. Maybe someone who starts off on a warrior wants to try a priest, too. You're of the assumption that the casual gamer is intent on being right alongside the powergamers at the end. Most casual gamers are not, and accept this fact. In fact, I'd say most casual gamers I know have MORE alts than powergamers because they aren't as committed to driving one character to the top. Powergamers will just sometimes level a second character when they feel they are done, or that their class isn't optimal.




This is so wrong I don't know how to attack it. A player who manages to get all artifact items - which aren't even in the game yet and will be INCREDIBLY rare - will be spending so much time dedicated to the single purpose of farming equipment, that is it realistic to assume they can just be a master of alchemy alongside that? Not unless it directly relates to their class...there's no chemist class in this game.
You should NOT be able to be an expert in all trades. People that are a jack of all trades are a master of none.




Preposterous. Warriors don't NEED blacksmithing. Nobody NEEDS any skill. The only tradeskill that it is even remotely argue is necessary is engineering, and even then mostly for paladins and pvp players.
How has first aid actually ruined the game again? It's been available to everyone since day 1. It's not like when this change occurs, everyone is going to magically be physicians all of a sudden. And not being forced to form balanced groups, in some effect, is a good thing because it doesn't lock you into "I must have one warrior to tank and one cleric to heal and one enchanter for CC and one monk to pull and one wizard for evac and one...well, one of something else...one rogue for DPS."
I'll grant you, your example, where people just form the optimnal supergroup without any consideration for the other classes is a step in the wrong direction, but you're trying to pigeonhole everyone into having that one perfect group.

If they want to make a monesink make it to where you can craft armor but theres better armor at a different lvl only on npcs

Example at lvl 30 you can craft a so and so of coolness. well at lvl 31 or 31 the nps has a so and so of even more coolness.

Seeing that I'm horrid when it comes to economics, I kinda shy away from these discussions. Then again, remembering the hell that was FFXI economics, I see only good when it comes to this economy. Why? Simple: It encourages trade between players. Trade is always good, its the blood of any economy.

As it stands, the professions are: alchemy, blacksmithing, enchanting, engineering, herbalism, mining, leatherworking, skinning, and tailoring. What if every player was a skinner and a leathercraft? How about a blacksmith and a miner? Alchemist and herbalist? When it comes to this, who needs to participate in the market if you can supply yourself with everything you need? Its a good move Blizzard made to restrict all these tradeskills because as you can tell, there are sets that support each other and will result in the player simply ignoring current economic events. If every player can do their thing, why bother having a economy at all? As said, economy is all about trade but if no one trades, there is no economy.

The opposite can be said about the all tradeskill mastery that was in before. I haven't been to an AH just yet but I'm afraid of what I will see. I will see items getting undercut, no one will make money and the AH will be cluttered with worthless items. This is what I would like to call the "FFXI" version of an AH, minus the NM gear that seems to be the main pillar of the FFXI economy. By cutting down on what people can make will clean out all that excess items no one buys and makes previously worthless something of value. Instead of 15 leathercrafts selling armor kits, we will now have 2-3 selling leather kits. Less flooding, more money for the seller and a more demanding buyers. In other words, everybody is happy. Thank the gods Blizzard made all rare items soulbound otherwise we would be dealing with another economic problem.

Anyways, those are my thoughts. I'm not an excellent student of economy so try to be gentle when killing my thoughts. I'm still tender from the "WoW in the eyes of a Former Red Mage" thread I made in the FFXI forums...

I see it as unlikely. Blizzard is NOT going to character wipe at this point - they need people at upper levels, and while half of the upper-end community might be there within 6 weeks, the other half won't, and that's still 6 weeks wasted. Item wipe...*maybe*, but what good would it accomplish? No, really. It wouldn't do anything except force people to start over on refarming everything.




Depends on how you look at it. I don't see casual/power as a black and white issue. As far as I'm concerned, casual players are the players who don't have the time to devote to getting to the endgame, and don't care - they simply enjoy the game casually. There are the in-betweens though: the people who don't have time, but want to be uber anyway. They don't view the game casually, so I don't treat them as such. Of course, there is the other side, with a small minority of people who play 24 hours, but don't drive themselves to get anywhere. These are the people that will be most affronted by the tradeskill changes since they are the sort that bum around doing a little of everything. Of course, they also have 10 level 20+ characters, so they can afford to mix it around a little.




I wouldn't use Blackrock armor as the model for tradeskills and tradeskill necessities. When the level cap goes to 60, it will be all-but-forgotten about as a total PITA to get.




The powergamer will be in a guild. They won't need to level alts to do tradeskills. My guild has one main person who does blacksmithing that we all consider the guild blacksmith. There are a few others, but we all know who the first person we turn to is, provided they're on-line. For a while, I was the guild alchemist - if somebody needed a potion for a quest, they usually brought me the herbs to make it.




Why? I can understand for real production tradeskills, but smithing is more of a pastime than anything else, unless you need water breathing potions. As far as I'm concerned, for skills that don't involve sitting in town doing combines, let 'em try. A level 10 isn't going to last too long in level 40 zones trying to mine.

On the character wipe, even if I was in the stress test I would feel this way, they should wipe all stress test characters.

It's the closed beta that comes next, which from what I understand is a limited beta, those characters will be the ones not to get wiped.

You do need some high levels when retail comes out, those are the ones that supply the low levels and medium levels with equipment to begin with. But you don't want a ton of them either.

I'm implying nothing, just responding to a general feeling I've gotten from alot of posts. Alot of the posts I've read seem to indicate the opinion that the casual gamer doesn't want everything that the powergame does.

Which is false.

Endgame, high level content, all of it should be available an anyone that wants to do it. If it takes someone a year to get to level 60, they should still be able to enjoy all aspects of the game. Same as someone that takes a month to get to level 60.

A casual gamer is just someone that plays casually, not having that much time, not in a hurry to get anywhere. Just because they don't play alot everyday doesn't mean they don't want the "endgame".

IMHO, the current closed beta and the server stress beta that ended cannot correctly forecast how the ecomony will actually be when the game comes out for retail even with the changes that will be taking place to professions.

My reasoning for this is because WoW will have the most unique playbase for the get-go. Players who are leaving games like FFXI, EQ, CoH, DAoC, L2, and others will be playing this game. This much is evidence from all the other gamers posting in these forums. Not to mention all the b.net players who STILL play D2 to this day will be joining us for a some WoW action.

I personally like the changes to the profession systems, but I am only concerned with Enchanters....because they dont really "have" a gathering skill. With the old system I had a friend tell me that he had to have at least 3 other skill trades to make enchanting easier on him. While he likes the changes as well, he had a lot of questions as to how Enchanting would work after the changes.

I only focused on leatherwork because I got tired of seeing dead bodies on the groun that could be skinned. Everywhere I looked I saw something I could skin and I didnt even kill it! Just skinning alone made me money, not to mention I could make armor kits right off the bat. To any FFXI players who will be playing but dont want to focus on skills, this was easy to do and took almost ZERO effort or time. Because of this I see a LOT of "casual" gamers focusing a small amount on crafting as it would be pointless not to. From what I have seen in the small week of play I got, professions make money in this game from the start (unlike FFXI where they dont begin to show fruition until late game).

Y'know, I...er...umm...I really don't know what to say to that. It's true, but I don't want to admit it explicitly, because I'm sure there's something I'm not thinking of that explains this behavior.