[MUD-Dev] trade skill idea

[Batir]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Matthew Mihaly" <the_logos at achaea.com>
To: <mud-dev at kanga.nu>
Sent: Sunday, October 08, 2000 3:53 PM
Subject: Re: [MUD-Dev] trade skill idea



> EBAY 'em!

Tried, got up to $600, buyer backed out.  Haven't gotten around to putting
them back up, so I am now one of OSI's favorite cusomers (pay my bills, two
accounts, but only log on long enough to keep houses refreshed).

> This just requires you to do more pre-determined things. It doesn't change
> the trade skill "problem" at all. Look, cooking, for instance, is a rote
> exercise. You do the exact same thing, you end up with the exact same
> result (providing your ingredients are identical, etc). What makes a great
> chef irl is innovative recipes that taste good. Pretty tough to replicate
> that in a game (although I should mentioned that I once designed a
> vineyard system for a mud that generated random tasting notes for the wine
> when finished, based on grape type, and quality of the wine (which was ,
> in turn, based on a slew of factors such as temperature, soil type, how
> much rain they got, how long the grapes were allowed to stay on the vine,
> how long the wine was aged for and in what type of cask, etc etc)).
>
> The point, really, is that skill in real trade skills is _very_ difficult
> to replicate in a game, because they tend to involve creativity and
> subjective sensual (as in using the senses) judgements. For instance, it'd
> be quite difficult to replicate the experience of Alice Waters jaunting on
> down to the Berkeley farmer's market to buy the freshest veggies for that
> day's cooking at Chez Panisse. It's not like there are signs on the wall
> saying "THESE VEGGIES FRESHEST!" (or maybe there are, but such signs are
> to be ignored as nothing more than hype). She's gotta smell them, and
> touch them, etc.
>
> When it comes time to actual cooking, there are recipes that one follows.
> You know what temperature you need the oven set to in order to make bread.
> You know how long to cook it, and so on. The parts of cooking that involve
> skill on the parts of a chef are not parts that can be replicated
> virtually very well at this point.

True.  But it's the same with combat, just more choices in the mix, and you
can alter things during the process.  Why not add a little time critical
events, such as having to let the dough rise?  This wound not require more
play time, if done correctly.  Log on one day, make your dough, log on next,
bake bread, get dough ready for next day.  Your vineyard system sounds
really interesting, and could fairly easily (from my point of veiw anyway)
be implemented for all foodstuffs.  Players will try for the best, and buy
the best, even if there is no *real* difference.  In UO, alchemy skill does
not increase the strength of potions, but a lot of players insist on GM
alchemist potions.

What I'd really like to see for a blacksmithing skill would be various
materials, with different weights, and strengths, along with various
techniques in using them, that can produce stronger weapons (don't break as
easy), or lighter weapons (swing faster), or serated, or weighted weapons
for more damage, but are not compatable with each other (no indusctructable,
super light, serated long swords with crit weighting, please).  Players
would not really favor one over the other, if they were balanced so that
neither trully seemed superior (such as the balancing you must already do
with the weapon types).


> Because players want it. As was explained at, I think, the GDC lecture on
> "The In-game economics of UO" at last march's GDC, UO didn't always do
> this, and it pissed off the players. The players would produce swords, try
> to sell them to an NPC, and get quite pissed that the NPCs didn't want
> them. The expectation was that "We do work, and now we want money for it."
> Players don't care much about macro issues like whether there are "too
> many" longswords in the land. They just want to sell the sword they made
> and get money for it.
>

Do they really?  How many blacksmiths in UO resmelt (turn the items back
into a reduced number of ingots) all their items made until they get to GM,
now that they can?  I moderate the Smithing BB at uo.stratics.com, and can
tell you at least 90% of them there do, if not more.  They also resmelt
anything that is not of Exceptional quality after reaching GM.  Exepctionals
get sold to players.  Only if they are strapped for cash will they sell to
vendors, and if they are GM, they are not strapped for cash.

UO has always had NPC's buying stuff (well, at least since December 97, a
few months after it came out).  They only bitching players did about selling
items to NPC's has been for the *few* items that NPC's would not buy.  It
wasn't consistant, and they wanted consistancy.


> --matt

Batir,
Strat's & Stat's, UOSS
http://uo.stratics.com




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