[damycles]

So I've been thinking. I know RP and mechanics are supposed to be separate, and some of us even follow this, but there is an undeniable fact that the game systems and mechanics are the main ways we interact with the world and as such are what implicitly encourage various behaviors both in combat and out of combat. I get the idea of keeping these two realms separate but at the end of the day it's always been unreasonable to expect players to intentionally kneecap themselves and play sub-optimally for the sake of immersion rather than making the systems they're using immersive in the first place.

In the end, the Meta is a concept that no game no matter how RP focused will ever escape. Even Neverwinter Nights 2 servers are beholden to the meta when it comes to combat. However, there methods to encourage optimal play in areas that are not combat and as such able to support a more diverse builds and play-styles that can cater to different kinds of players.


The first thing on the Agenda in my opinion would be FIXING THE ECONOMY:

The economy of SL2 is frankly... fucked. Everything is too plentiful and there are not enough places to spend money and resources in an effective way to curtail this. Cooperation or conflict based on scarcity might be a concept in the roleplay world at large but in present it is not at all represented in a tangible way and as such there is this dissonance between the plentiful of certain resources that regions ought to have versus the near endless mounds of stuff that players actually possess. This might also be alleviated if the regions as a whole experienced certain resource based struggles that require player intervention to solve but that currently requires an increase of GM staff intervention and a development cycle for updating map features that, based on current personnel, seems unsustainable. Other games manage this but they also have many more people to pull this off.

My suggestion would be to implement the concept of a resource pit.

Many MMOs already implement these systems to curtail economic inflation. We have a few of them in vendors but it's nowhere near enough to keep up with current money/resource generation techniques.

Bind on pickup items is a way of doing this but given that item trading is a core part of the economic activity of SL2 I don't think this would work either.

So, to steal from other existing games, there is the idea of maintenance costs for cities

In other words, make it so that cities require a certain amount of money and resources to be donated to them for them to continue functioning effectively. It's a tax, in essence, but given that the resource pit is a communal one it would be up to the player base to decide who contributes what to this pit. There are interesting opportunities for interaction that are made via this system and it also means that through expansion the costs for maintaining the newly achieved standard of the city would rise in conjunction with it.

There are two ways of implementing this. Either, you have a single NPC Tax Collector that takes in resources from the players to contribute to a total required amount every month or two weeks, the timings can be adjusted. This method, whilst a bit less immersive, is overall more convenient, but does put the system in a sort of ALL OR NOTHING mode which does not offer flexibility.

Or, you can have these costs spread out across the cities and tied to specific structures. This is less convenient but is a bit more immersive. It also allows the opportunity to budget and determine which structures are worth keeping maintained and which ones you can do without for a little while. Maybe the walls are a bit more worth it than the inn, for instance.

A means of incentivize to keep this mechanic compelling aside from a change in NPC interactions and visuals would also be (And this would be a long term mechanical goal as are all of these proposed changes) to make it so if maintenance costs are not met continuously eventually the city goes down a maintenance level, with the bottom level being mobs being able to spawn within city borders. In addition, it would also be required so that to regain a level after losing one you would have to continue to maintain the city consecutively for the next few checks.

Regardless, whether this exact method is used or not the general idea remains the same. We need things to make people give away their stuff into the void willingly.  With a more effective economy non-combat interactions have more a place in the game and whilst this idea is one of the solutions the most important fact is that we need a solution.


The next thing on the agenda... is ENCOURAGING SPECIALIZATION:

This isn't about combat. You know what, combatants can be allowed to do everything. Why not? I mean obviously I'm not advocating for that kind of game balance but what I'm saying is that... right now you can have a god tier build but also be a crafter and a gatherer without any sort of sacrifice. Combat, Crafting, and Gathering, are the three pillars of interaction that this game and a lot of other games like it are built upon. Being able to be good at all three at the same time is excusable in an MMO because MMOs have inherently different goals than RP games but for an RP based environment, specialization encourages interaction.

If you have to choose between being the BEST at combat, crafting, or gathering, you'll have to start working with other people to get everything you need to get done accomplished. But how do you do this? Well, like it not... the problem lies in the Talent System as well as the current state of the crafting system.

Talent points are a completely separate resource that are used on various things that, in my opinion, maybe should be more stat driven. We have an existing framework with the stat system to decide how good someone should be at various activities. Sure Talents could provide a boost but I don't think they should be the sole driver of skill.

For example, lock picking. You can invest into the talents to be the best at it whilst still maintaining an effective build. However... I would suggest that it would be better to tie down one's ability to lockpick to your Luck and Guile instead. And... if you want to be the best at lock picking, you need to invest into those stats well past diminishing returns. This is a tax. A skill point tax. But it's a tax that brings new value to the action of lock-picking by making it require sacrifice to fully invest into. Ideally this would be balanced so it wouldn't completely kneecap someone's PVE abilities but it would be enough to highly discourage soloing and make lockpickers and the like actively search for armed escorts.

Similarly speaking, crafting, which does have a bit of limitation in regarding investment but is only really locked behind time and a legend extension... should also be stat driven. A different stat for each different craft and one that follows a similar philosophy to the gathering skills. Now, admittedly, the stats required for some crafts could and maybe should overlap with some of the stats required for some gathering activities, but this is getting into a much longer balancing discussion that should only happen if this course is truly invested in to begin with.

Truthfully, it is honestly a shame how underutilized the state system is in regards for interacting with the world of the game. Having special interactions or even integrated skill checks with bonuses derived from stats would also make running events or encouraging build diversity a hell of a lot easier since it would mean that maybe the best build for a detective is not the same thing as the best build for a sword wielding anime protagonist.

THE CONCLUSION:
None of these changes are easy. It's gonna be hard. Really fucking hard and take a really long ass time to implement even one of these. And honestly, maybe it even isn't gonna be enough at the end of the day. It's probably not gonna be popular either. Giving up power is hard, and we've had this much power for so long that I can understand some people aren't going to be keen on losing it. But at the end of the day, I'd like to think that not everyone that goes into this game does it for the combat and I think some key restrictions on the power budget of combat oriented characters towards non-combat oriented tasks would make the overall environment more welcoming to those players whilst also making them more inherently valued parts of the community.

[damycles]

Addendum 1: The entirety of the encouraging specialization section

So I've had some talks, had a bit to eat, got my head in order for a bit and I'm not just typing this purely as a spur of the moment thing anymore. And yeah, honestly, making it so crafting and gathering require literally kneecapping yourself a little bit combat wise is probably a bad call.

However, the essence of the idea that was germinating in my head I still think has some legs so hear me out.

I still think more things in the game should actually interact with your stats proper outside of combat. Skill checks, things like that you know? I get it that we can already sorta half-way do it with the in game dice and an honor system but I think having in game interactable options to flash rolls using various scaled stats (Maybe a +1 every 10 scaled or something like that in addition to any relevant talents) TTRPG style would make playing to a lot of people's IC a lot easier to do and have a way of easily settling disputes without breaking out the combat option or just defaulting to pure random rolls.

By that point, if you have these options it'll still achieve the intended effect of "If I really wanna go and be the best detective-man in the world without actually caring too much regarding how much I can fight back" then people will still make really weird and wild builds to suit their tastes without making it a requirement.

[Snake]

Oh if only. But I think it's too late to fix the economy now. Kind of pathetic how cutting seeds is the highest money-making scheme in the entirety of Korvara. Renewable, 'certain', doesn't require you to go around chopping trees or mining ore.

Still kind of hate how that is more lucrative business than literal minerals or wood, which are expected to be "wanted resources" in IC terms.

The only solution I could find for this is being able to have LV1 recipes that allow you to convert any wood type into "Processed Surplus Wood", which can be sold by 10 Murai (5 Murai when cut in half) each. And the same for minerals, into. "Processed Surplus Ore".

It would at least make the Seed barons have a slight competition over their wares.

[firehawk11]

Don't put in economy pits, that just upset people. While the rich stay rich and the poor get poorer.

Well for the seed problem. I have a way to solve it which would make the Seed Barons upset - Seeds now are worth 0 murai, simple and done.

[Shadbase]

Mans is going for the torch nerf technique!!
Realistically, I don't think that just nerfing it is really gonna do anything but make people go for the next best thing, and now that's the big moneymaker. (And dear lord if you heathens make Dev put back in the money tax for cutting seeds I will end you.)

But I think that in general, most items could be actually buffed to create worth for them, and then actually have some sort of sink you can funnel them into beyond asking for maps (which... not everyone needs a map made!!) or just selling them to a pawn shop; table scraps of money for your ACTUAL DIAMONDS, and things like that. At least then people can somewhat diversify their assets!
Or, hear me out... if possible, Dev could create a unique worth system for selling items to merchants. You could sell seeds, sure... but say you want to sell them in Geladyne? They could be worth more there - or even the fruits and vegetables they grow could be worth more! And then in Telegrad they're worth less than dirt.

But I still really love Damy's suggestion. It's highly unlikely we'd ever get it, sure, but god would it make non-combative jobs and skills actually kinda worth something? Not to mention, it's not like it'd HAVE to be 1:1 taxation that you have to pay as a player. Maybe more like making large donations to cities to fund projects done by the cities. Donating weapons you made to Duyuei to help with the defense on the wall, donating food to Geladyne that you were able to grow (because to be fair, growing food at max yield makes you an INSANE amount of excess food). You could even have those donations change little things around the city, as a visual queue of how things are going!! FUCK.

[renowner]

Every time we find a good way to make non combat money that isn't farming, Dev nerfs it in the next update.
Its happened so many times in Korvara. . .