Fun for Non-Combat Classes - What we want?

[Ramsey]

At the overwhelming request of fellow ZAM posters, I am copying the partial contents of a thread I created over on the ZAM boards titled: Fun for Non-Combat Classes - What do you want?

The topic of what would make non-combat classes, particularly crafting, has been on my mind a lot lately.

This thread is not about what would "fix" crafting (assuming as some people believe, it is broken), or make it "better." Balancing crafting recipes, recipe levels, working more on the player economy, etc. are not really what I want to discuss. But rather gameplay and content that would make non-combat classes, as a whole, more enjoyable to play.

Many games have attempted to create crafting and gathering classes that are not merely "professions" that exist only to compliment the combat classes. It's obvious that the Final Fantasy XIV team had bold ambitions to make their own attempt. With each passing update, it seems that the failures that coincided with the launch have caused the development team to scrap many of their grand ideas that they half committed to. I'm not here to argue whether or not these changes are bad or good. But one thing that seems to be presently on the chopping block is crafting as a mode of play just as valid and supported as combat.

Many of you may be happy to see that potentially change. Many of us would not be happy. Whether or not it happens isn't really what this is about either. So with that introduction out of the way, the question I am raising with this thread is:

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What would make non-combat classes more enjoyable to you?

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My responses:

• Customization - Store Fronts and Workshops

  Give us workshops and store fronts! We're merchants and tradesmen, our progression is our business. Allow us to customize, construct, and purchase additions to our workshops and storefronts.

• We are not Adventurers

  Stop making us deliver things into the middle of nowhere! Let us send our retainers out on chocobo-back to make delivers, and receive the reward when they return. Let us hire NPC adventurers. Anything, really.

• Don't be Afraid of A-Symmetry

  Making each craft more unique won't hurt anyone, add something to spice it up. Make the gameplay for each craft more unique. We won't complain.

• We are Townspeople, and that's OK

  It's okay for a majority of our time to be spent in the city. It makes perfect sense. Just liven up the town, add more NPCs, make us interact with them more. Make them do more than just stand around. Add more things to do, and more details. It will only add to the immersion for combat players as well.

• Notorious... Merchants!?

  Why are NMs only for adventurers, and not for us too? Add Notorious Merchants, traders from far away lands that appear on occasion. By bartering (parley) with them, trading one material for another, we may succeed in striking a deal and receiving some rare and unique materials for special synthesis.

• What's Parley Again?

  First of all - make parley more fun. I don't care if you just make it bejeweled, just imagine you're trying to get people to buy it, and make it fun. Then - add in merchants, all around town, that come and go, and can be traded with. Perhaps I have an abundance of ore, and need leather. Yes, it's great to have a player-driven economy, but a lot of stuff gets thrown away or vendored. Strike a balance, and give crafters things to do other than sit in the market wards all day.

• Item Exodus - The NPC economy?

  There's lots of things to do as an adventurer that don't involve other players. Give crafters a few things to do too. Guild tasks are okay, albeit far too simple to be compelling. Have us repairing things around town, providing materials, make NPC supply chains that have supply and demand, and crafters can anticipate the NPC economy. (Balance! It creates a good item sink while allowing a sense of mastery for more players.)

• Raiding... the Kitchen?

  Give us a reason to play with other crafters beyond the "I need your straps for my armor, you need my buckles for your jackets." Group crafting is on the way? Super! Let's see on top of that, "dungeon" equivalents crop up for crafting. Instanced events, a team of chefs cater a noble's wedding? This should be far better SP than grinding. (Just as with combatants)

• Money, Money... Money!

  It's okay for us to have more of it than the average adventurer. Making money is our job. As long as the average adventurer can get by, and the treasure hunters are on par with us. It's difficult and unwieldy to make gil sinks for merchants. Instead, give us reasons to spend money on adventurers, and give them ways to sink that gil. To that end...

• Gambling

  This is self explanatory. Open the platinum mirage, the Colosseum, let us bet on matches, let us bet on chocobo races. What have you. Gambling isn't specific to us merchants, but if we have more money, we're more likely to gamble with it. On that note...

• Sponsored Adventurers!?

  As I said, give us reasons to give money to adventurers. Whether we're sponsoring a Colosseum team to take on some monsters or other adventurers (creating opportunities for others to bet!) or we're funding an expedition of adventurers into a raid or dungeon, giving them a chance to obtain gear, and us a chance to obtain rare materials. Gil sunk, but we're still making money if the expedition is successful.

• Notorious...Minerals?

  Okay, now I'm just being a bit silly. But the same idea applies to DoL as it does to DoH. Rare spawns shouldn't be limited to Adventurers. Exotic bushes, endangered trees, rare mineral nodes and legendary fish. The excitement of spotting one (visual distinction please!) and obtaining the rare resource, and the reward. No reason not to add this!

• Can't We All Just Get Along?

  Levequests, missions and public events that involve all two or more different disciplines. This is self explanatory, but special leves where gatherers are escorted by adventurers, when they gather enemies attack, adventurers must defend. Faster gatherers gather, faster they can move on? This is just one simple example, there are lots of opportunities here.

[Ramsey]

Continued:

[SIZE="5"]Workshops... Detailed! [/SIZE]
I mentioned workshops in my OP, to expand on that: provide a number of unique floor layouts for rooms, the room itself can be simple, so this shouldn't be terribly difficult, re-skinned for each nation. As we level, and can afford it, (charging on a curve per number of rooms) allow us to expand our workshop with additional rooms. These simple rooms can be customized largely by the placement and addition of a variety of furniture pieces and decorations.

• Storage is King!

  Right off the bat, the number one thing that players should be able to add to their workshop is additional storage. Both generic storage, as well as unique item storage. A box of rings to store large quantities of metal rings, a pantry to store spices, and what have you. Much like the Archer's quiver, these furniture pieces could have visual indications of how stocked they are, providing a cheaply implemented sense of immersion. More importantly, the player could cater each room of their workshop to the needs of a specific craft or type of synthesis. While in that room, players could directly access materials from each storage space during synthesis, and synthesizing any material compatible with a storage unit would drop it directly into the unit. Merely targeting the storage unit would allow the player to have direct access to add and remove items. This kind of functionality alone gives players enough reason to use their workshop for long haul synthesis sessions, which is what they should use it for. Our inventory is like an adventurer's action bar, we need more as we level.

• Tools of the Trade

  What smith's workshop would be complete without a forge, what weaver's without a loom? A craftsman is only as good as his tools, right? A sewing needle and a hammer comprise only a fraction of the tools each of these professions uses. We have crystal synthesis to abstract crafting, allowing us to carry around only these small tools with us. But when we are in our workshop, as the NPCs do in the guilds, let us make use of more tools! There's already loads of animations for using various tools in the guilds, and new animations are always in the works for combat classes, so it's not out of the question to toss some our way as well. Various types of tools can provide various benefits, some may allow us to mass produce simple materials more quickly, while others may be meant for improving success on finished items. Start simple, let us have common support whenever we use our basic workbench. As we rank up and can buy new upgrades to use, enhance the bonuses little by little.

• Tools need upgrades Too!

  Let us make additions and attachments to our tools, there's no need to constantly replace them. Each "workbench" (Using this as a generic term) could have a number of attachment slots, that increases as we rank up. Each attachment could provide a minor bonus, nothing too amazing that we never want to craft outside of our workshop again, but a lot of minor things and convenience features that give us a reason to craft there for long sessions of creating raw materials, or for creating very difficult and rare armors and weapons (etc.) Perhaps adding new bellows to our forge reduces the change of causing our fire element to go unstable, just simple bonuses that we'll be more than willing to shell out the gil to acquire.

• We can still Craft Elsewhere!

  The key with our workshop is convenience, we don't want a workshop to become such a boon that it feels wrong to try to craft anything beyond its walls. That said, as I mention above, if we're in for a long grinding session of churning out raw materials, or attempting to high-quality a particularly difficult item, it makes perfect sense that we'd want to do so from our own workshop. One great way to prevent "Oh my god I need to go back to my workshop to do this"-syndrome, is to provide a special item for crafters that reach higher ranks, we can attune the item to a certain room in our workshop, and once activated we will be able to gain all the bonuses of that room in the workshop for the next 30 minutes of synthesis. If we're stuck out in the field needing to make something, instead of feeling like it would be a waste to bother without our workshop, and either heading back at tremendous inconvenience, or waiting to make the item, we have this emergency method of gaining the bonuses we've spent our hard earned time and money accruing, even when we're not at home.

• Crafting Parties! Come on over!

  Nothing would rub me the wrong way more than having the chance to build a workshop and then not being able to invite others over to see it. It's a display of our wealth and hard work, and our friends should be able to not only see, but to benefit from it. Allow us to invite friends and party members into our workshops to use the facilities. This creates even more reason for crafters to befriend eachother, it should be possible, but absurdly expensive and time consuming to create and maintain a workshop for all of the crafting professions in one. On the other hand, merely befriending someone of another profession would be a great way to promote player interaction and crafting guilds. Using another person's workshop would of course have some drawbacks, (mostly related to storage) but it's a BYOM (bring your own materials) affair. Let us give out "workshop keys" so our good friends can access our workshops even when we're not around. Heck, perhaps we can even rent out workshop space for profit! Regardless, if my friend has a great weaving workshop and I have a great smithing workshop, we should be able to use eachother's shops, and gain many of the benefits of doing so. It wouldn't hurt to allow us to purchase and upgrade group crafting equipment, either!

[Lubriderm]

Some great ideas. I hope someone is reading this.

[LuxLex]

I love this thread and the ideas in it.

[odette]

sound very interesting

[Vergil_Renata]

I also like those ideas. +1

[ChocoMog]

This was really well thought out. One of the hardest admissions for Yoshi-sama to admit early on in the letters, was that his predecessors had gotten a few of the game concepts completely wrong.

I feel terrible, in the current game design, for the players who chose hand at Character Creation. There's nothing to DO. Between the leve system's holes, and the lack of world content, they're glorified farmers. The overhaul to the system will take time, but many of the above ideas are intelligent, and even inspired.

Well done •KUPO•

[Perrin_Aybarra]

I must say, I dreaded the wall of text when I clicked on this thread but you have some really good ideas there. I am not a crafter myself but I would most likely try it out a bit with these additions.

•We are not Adventurers
Stop making us deliver things into the middle of nowhere! Let us send our retainers out on chocobo-back to make delivers, and receive the reward when they return. Let us hire NPC adventurers. Anything, really.

For that, maybe there could be a posting board where crafters can put up delivery notice or adventurers can list themselves available for duty. The crafter could then hire the other player to go do his errand. They could kinda use the Leve interface but it would be player create : The crafter would choose the gil/item rewards upon completion.

So it would be kinda of a 2 step quest for the crafter. 1st accept the delivery "quest/leve" from the counter, deleguate the mission to the adventurer. The adventurer comes back to the crafter, gives the "receipt" to the crafter and gets the reward listed by the crafter. The crafter gives his quest back to the counter and gets his reward.

^^

Also, to be fair, maybe crafters and gatherers could start doing things like that on their own. Gatherers should shout for adventurers to come defend them while they gather around high level nodes, things like that, for a fee/hour. no?

[Ferth]

Some of these ideas are pure gold... Adventurers guarding gatherers? Please!

You could take it even further; A dilapidated mine has just been acquired, a team of carpenters, miners and blacksmiths are needed to repair the structure, but it's infested with monsters, now you need a team of adventurers to accompany them!

Great ideas... I hope some of these see some use.

[Perrin_Aybarra]

Some of these ideas are pure gold... Adventurers guarding gatherers? Please!

You could take it even further; A dilapidated mine has just been acquired, a team of carpenters, miners and blacksmiths are needed to repair the structure, but it's infested with monsters, now you need a team of adventurers to accompany them!

Great ideas... I hope some of these see some use.

DoM/W + DoH/L alliance raids ^^