Quote Originally Posted by moatcarp View Post
Re: "you could code this in under a day" - I'm not sure what your experience developing is but I work day to day with code bases that are several million lines of code written over 20+ years and something I can whip up in 20 minutes in Ruby or Java might take me the better part of a week in legacy C code once I get down to putting it under unit test to make sure I don't break anything and even finding the right place to put it and tracking down what invariably does break because the code is brittle and so on. I'm not sure if you were making a serious point with this or not but I figured I'd respond.
I've been involved in development for 16 years now, and have done work with just about every programming language available - except for Ruby, haven't really had time to sit down and learn it.

Coding time != End to end development cycle

The coding for my solution is as easy as it comes, and I do feel pretty strongly that they could bang it out in under a day. The testing for a system like that, of course, will take much longer.

Quote Originally Posted by moatcarp
Basically - in order to keep HQ goods rare someone needs to sit around forever doing something and no matter how you slice it it's not fair to someone. I prefer NQ mats = NQ goods and HQ mats = HQ goods because then it means something to a DoL / DoW when they get HQ mats and it means something to a DoH when they are able to acquire HQ mats.

In the proposed solution you are putting all the power into the hands of the DoH I think. There is no incentive to pay a premium to DoL/DoW to be able to make a HQ item. I don't think that seems really fair & balanced.
Well, to be fair, that's what those classes are for.

If you want free materials, you are forced to do DoL.
If you want free repairs and free items, you are forced to do DoH.
If you want to be able to farm mobs and get HQ drops from them, you are forced to do DoW/M

Let me first state that my opinion on this comes decided from lack-of-self-interest and more from my sense of what's right and fair. If you notice, I have no DoL jobs above R21. If this was self-interest, I would say the opposite:

I cannot support or agree with any opinion or option that would allow a DoH to completely bypass having a DoL job from gathering mats, or from supporting people with DoL jobs. If you need a hundred oak logs, you should either have to get them yourself or pay someone to get them. Not enough people do DoL, currently, however, because the reward for doing so is so small. This would add incentive for doing so.

In practice, you are not putting all of the power in the hands of a DoL, though. It's supply and demand and market equilibrium in practice - right now you are free to charge whatever you want for whatever you want. I routinely see people selling iron chain +3 for 500k - nobody buys it. You can only get as much money for something as someone else is willing to pay. If all of the DoL classes price gouge on basic materials, DoH classes will just level DoL classes and the DoL people will never, ever be able to sell anything, as the people who would consume what they're selling can do it themselves.

Thus, again, there is still incentive for selling things at a fair price. Not only that, but goods final price will invariably based off of materials prices. If the price of oak logs went up 10x through this change, then the price of final items should ideally go up 10x as well. Again, if the price of lumber goes up, the price of housing goes up, too. Believing that things will work any differently is like believing that if the price of lumber goes up, the price of housing goes down.

Quote Originally Posted by Linnear
Free roaming NMS is a throwback to what I consider bad game design and prevents your players from playing the game.
You do have a point - however, this is only the case if that is the only place where these high end gear materials come from, as they are currently. If you had instanced dungeon bosses, even if they were hard and required 15 man r50 groups, that dropped similar level gear, would go a long way to not FORCING people to deal with NMs.

I think it's a bit too early in the game's lifetime to base any long term decisions off the content (or lack thereof) that we have now. There should be multiple ways to obtain good gear. Hopefully they realize that; I would be surprised if they didn't.