ok, seriously now...

[stud]

dunno if we already have some topic like this, if we do, i missed it, and let some mode close this one....


so, the point of this topic is that, since there`s so many topics with remarks, praise and different impressions, that we put it all in one place, so that it`s easier for game admins to get our thoughts on the matter.....

the rules of the topic are:

1. this is strictly seriously topic, so no spam whatsoever i know it`s hard, but try to control urself

2. everyone can post his/her remarks here, but need it needs to include a valid reason why he/she doesn`t like sth, or would like to see it changed

3. after that all are invited to comment on the subject, and to vote if they think the request is valid or it`s ok the way it is, and it doesn`t need to be changed...

4. at the end of the week, i`ll sum all the votes for all discussions, and post it in a new topic, where there`ll be only the results from this one... and if some proposition gets enough votes, admins can decide if they want it changed or not...

i think this way, we`ll be more effective in evaluating the game, `cause it`s creating less traffic and unwanted spam material and it`s easier to track than hundreds of different topics...

hope you`ll go along with this 

[stud]

ok, i`ll go first 

AP takes long time to generate, so i think it would be better when we`re processing several raw materials into a real ingredient to lose only 1 AP, also applies when crafting several types of the same item...

just to craft 1 simple copper dagger u need 8 or 9 AP (2-3 AP (depending on ur luck) to gather 6 Copper Ore, 1 AP to gather 1 Coal, 3 AP to craft 3 Copper Ingot + 1 AP to gather 1 Soft Sharpening Stone + 1 AP to craft the dagger)

or maybe we could have 0.5 AP (u`d lose 0.5 AP when digging resources but 1 AP when attacking). or just double the speed of AP generation

so, what do u guys think?

[chegewara]

i thing all is ok.

1st we havent all futures yet, but after 3 days we have 7th level.
2nd in one day (24 AP) we can craft 3 pcs weapon, armour or other items and we know recipes on tier 1 by now. should we see what happened when we reach 100 points of crafting? then we will be make more resources from raw material and sometime rare items.



EDIT: to not spam, crafting item take 1 AP, info when U chose item to craft is how much crafting point U gain after crafting this item


EDIT: for me should be some kind points like crafting point, which give bonus to good diggers

[Polymeron]

I think we need to see the game more completed first; for instance, one of the very first impressions me and others had was "there's not much to do before level 5, we want quests" - but this is apparently in the planning, so.


I do agree that AP for crafting is quite prohibitive at the moment. At very least mass crafting should take less time. I'd also suggest items that increase AP regeneration, as well as new "Crafting Points" that would also regenerate and would be used first for crafting - AP would be used only when you're out of crafting points.
BTW I'm pretty sure the dagger takes 3 AP to craft, so it's 2 AP more than you said.

Another beef is with balance and quality of crafted items.
Quality: It stands to reason that the quality of items you can make will get better with time; also that possibly you will have a chance of crafting a slightly better item than the basic one the recipe offers, with the chance depending on your skill. The crafting screen should show you the possible outcomes and their chances.
Balance: A jeweler can use 2 copper to make a ring that gives +2 vitality. Or they can use 2 copper plus a gem to make one that gives only +10 health, which is either x2 or x4 worse than the cheaper ring, depending on your class, but in any case it's just plain not as good. This calls for re-balancing.

An amulet that gives me +1 AP per day, now that I'd toil for.

[stud]

i thing all is ok.

1st we havent all futures yet, but after 3 days we have 7th level.
2nd in one day (24 AP) we can craft 3 pcs weapon, armour or other items and we know recipes on tier 1 by now. should we see what happened when we reach 100 points of crafting? then we will be make more resources from raw material and sometime rare items.



EDIT: to not spam, crafting item take 1 AP, info when U chose item to craft is how much crafting point U gain after crafting this item


EDIT: for me should be some kind points like crafting point, which give bonus to good diggers

u can craft maybe 3 pcs of weapon per day, but that`s only if u do the mos simple one. what will happen when we reach higher tiers, and need more material for higher stuff? i suppose at tier 5, it`ll take u min 1 week to make sth

but i like the idea with crafting points.. maybe it could be done like a skill, which u improve when using skill points after a level-up, which gives you certain amount of CP per hour  :-\

I think we need to see the game more completed first; for instance, one of the very first impressions me and others had was "there's not much to do before level 5, we want quests" - but this is apparently in the planning, so.


I do agree that AP for crafting is quite prohibitive at the moment. At very least mass crafting should take less time. I'd also suggest items that increase AP regeneration, as well as new "Crafting Points" that would also regenerate and would be used first for crafting - AP would be used only when you're out of crafting points.
BTW I'm pretty sure the dagger takes 3 AP to craft, so it's 2 AP more than you said.

Another beef is with balance and quality of crafted items.
Quality: It stands to reason that the quality of items you can make will get better with time; also that possibly you will have a chance of crafting a slightly better item than the basic one the recipe offers, with the chance depending on your skill. The crafting screen should show you the possible outcomes and their chances.
Balance: A jeweler can use 2 copper to make a ring that gives +2 vitality. Or they can use 2 copper plus a gem to make one that gives only +10 health, which is either x2 or x4 worse than the cheaper ring, depending on your class, but in any case it's just plain not as good. This calls for re-balancing.

An amulet that gives me +1 AP per day, now that I'd toil for.

totaly agree with u

[chegewara]

u can craft maybe 3 pcs of weapon per day, but that`s only if u do the mos simple one. what will happen when we reach higher tiers, and need more material for higher stuff? i suppose at tier 5, it`ll take u min 1 week to make sth

but i like the idea with crafting points.. maybe it could be done like a skill, which u improve when using skill points after a level-up, which gives you certain amount of CP per hour  :-\

you dont see the point. if you reach higher level to make better items then you will see dungeons from which you gather more raw resources, and if you reach 100 crafting points you will make more materials from same amount raw material, which means you will be make items faster

[Starbuck]

you dont see the point. if you reach higher level to make better items then you will see dungeons from which you gather more raw resources, and if you reach 100 crafting points you will make more materials from same amount raw material, which means you will be make items faster

yeah, that's one thing

at the same time, current rules prohibits players from changing profession, less they lose ALL their craft mastery points. Which means only 2 developments for players :

1) Guilds where players specialize themselves into 1 career (no matter if the current AP scarcity problem is resolved) and will naturally evolved into high-production centers
2) Guilds/Players that do whatever they want on the spot ... where current system will get them ages to do any item (basically a full day between digging, attacking and processing)

in both cases, having low AP regeneration or relatively "high" craft processing costs is certainly slowing down the game and act as firewalls against Taylorism.
heck, have you reached the 1st level of mastery for any craft mastery ? how much is the efficiency bonus ? ... 10%? 20% ? .... that is certainly the easiest way to "regulate" too much production capacity resulting from too fast any AP regeneration rate

but more APs also means more player's activity (and ultimately interest) in the game

It's only my personal opionion, but the concept of IH so far, is not much different from many other games developped by Gameforge like Bitefight and BattleKnight. And those games are dumb-minded coz little (if at all) tactical/strategic sense is required : any hardcore internet-user can play and will evolve through the time spent playing.
Most casual players will not stay, and are unlikely to buy diamonds through credits.
Some ppl like the Diablo-lite "click-and-kill" repetitiveness. I don't.
Which leaves the interaction between players ... and it's not with a 1 AP per hour policy that you'll get a lot of them to be very active ...

Have fun,

[IrishFairy]

I agree with you, Starbuck.
AP are very slow generated, we barely earn some gold. This gold is not enough to pay for health and spirit. Now I have most of time to work in the Tavern and in this time i cannot communicate with people. When my health is low, i can craft something, but i don't have AP... If we can have enough AP, we can combine crafting with fighting.
As about professions: now you cannot seriously craft something if you are not in a Guild. But I think in the Guild we need each profession and each kind of warrior, ranger and mystic. In this case the first level of Guild should have not 5, but 8 members. It will make a Guild balanced.

[Polymeron]

Actually, a level 1 guild contains 6 members, which is precisely enough to have each of the primary-secondary combinations. And we just proposed giving extra AP for crafting only (call them CP - Crafting Points)

[Xaoc]

To shine some light on things, since I see a lot of confusion and misunderstandings mainly about the crafting part:

AP will not be split. A player chooses whether to fight or craft - cannot do both at the same time - basically you have the AP resource and you decide how to spend it. Crafting 1 item takes 1 AP. Everything in the game takes 1 AP. If you order 5 bronze bars in a row it is 5x1=5 AP spent. Higher level items do not require much more quantities of row materials but higher level materials, therefore the speed with which items are crafted will not get much longer. (unless it is something that requires a rare component and it takes awhile to find it, which of course would mean is more valuable and worth the effort)
It will be possible to dedicate longer time for crafting in order to increase the chance for better results (1 AP only will be taken still).

Item crafting professions will get chances to make better items at the following steps:
crafting points:
100 - opens up the higher Tier item crafting
200 - chance for Rare items (crafting points are given only when a Rare item is crafted)
300 - chance for Legendary items (crafting points are given only when a Legendary item is crafted)
400 - chance for Epic items

Later crafting of Set items will be added as well. (right now we only have Rare sets planned)

As you can see it will get progressively hard to master a Tier, but once achieved it will be worth it - there are very few places where Legendary and Epic items can be found. It will be virtually impossible to master all 5 Tiers... so players should choose one Tier and master it.

Being a crafter is a whole different game than leveling up, so it is a personal choice. (me personally enjoy seeing other people wearing my items rather than beat bosses and etc.., for example)

Gathering professions will increase the quantities of resources dug on a single mission (hence saving AP) -
100 - 2-5
200 - 2-6
300 - 2-7
400 - 2-8 (for ore, wood)

For Leather and Bone will increase the chance of getting it when you kill a monster. (also all players get the hides, so there should be an abundant supply on the Auction house)

The final version of the game will have a limit of the resources, so the forests where wood is 100% will run out of wood rather quickly (since everyone will be chopping there) and until the resource re-spawns players will have to go chop to places with lower % until it runs out there as well. (only the province of Hope village will not run out of resources since it is a Noob area and only Tier 1 resources are available)
The resources will be global, so all players will dig them out together - the more mining the faster resources will disappear, hence it will be handy to be a good miner since you will be able for the same amount of time to get more resources than the others. (this feature will appear very soon after the launch of the beta, or even sooner) Finding large quantities of deposits with high chance for digging will be handy. Deposits will re-spawn at different quantities, so sometimes there will be a lot of golden ore with 50% for finding and sometimes there will be very few..

About exchange of resources: The Auction house will allow it, unfortunately we are having some issues with it right now, so it is not necessary to be in a Guild to have access to different resources. 

Items will be bound to the players (after they have been used in 1 battle, the items become bound to the player and his/hers mercs), which means they will exit the game and not return to the Auction house. This right now is not working - it will next week. There would be higher demand for newly crafted items since once you get yourself a better weapon, you cannot sell your old one to another player)

About the rings - most likely it is a bug, I will check all the jewelery items.

When the Premium is launched it will be possible to buy 24 extra AP once per day with diamonds... and since you can sell items for diamonds, good crafters that make good stuff would be able to sell them for diamonds to other players and use them to have more AP.. (or if they are good fighter go defeat multistage dungeons and hope for cool drops..)

A lot of the menus that we lock right now when you do stuff will be unlocked - we just need to sort out the places things can go wrong and will unlock them.

There will be messenger, Arenas that let you compete without losing your "real" health so you can do that while out of AP and many other things.

Quests will be important, not only for gold and experience, but also to be allowed in the Multistage dungeons (I guess you can call them "instances", since they serve comparable role), where the really interesting rewards are.

The current Jobs system will be changed - this is a substitute, until the real one is ready - it will depend on the skill of the profession you have chosen and jobs will vary from place to place - you may have to travel around to find the perfect job for your master armorer... unless someone beats you to it (yes, the job market will be global, so another player could "steal" the job before you see it).

Basically the content that we have prepared is quite massive  with more being already planned for the next expansion of the game. (this is the beauty of persistent worlds, that don't need restarts - you can have ever expanding gameplay) We had to cut out a lot of stuff at the planning stage so we can launch the game in a reasonable time... however the ideas are not gone forever - they will be appearing on the next stages of development..

[Starbuck]

That sounds very nice, and with enough gaming possibilities for players to be entertained for some time

[HerrSchultze]

i have one doubt, if it never gets resetted, then a noob won't ever be able to be the stronger player since the older ones will be way more developed 
and in the end, there should be like a major quest, a final goal or smt, that moves the players to reach it.

[Polymeron]

This does clarify things, but a few caveats remain.

In order to advance tiers, the only option is to fight - unless crafting will give experience.

Also, would a tier 1 Legendary item match up with tier 4 items? The higher level items are innately better. In addition, to gain access to more provinces with more raw material, higher levels are needed, again favoring the fighters over the artisans.
Lastly, an artisan advances by improving their harvesting or crafting skills, but that makes profession change impossible - to change profession is to reset your entire advancement up to that point, more or less.

A reasonable solution would be to give experience for crafting. An even better, though more complicated solution, would be to make separate experience and levels for artisanship and for adventuring, where the two are cumulative for purposes of accessing dungeons and provinces. But choosing neither of these would get the artisans screwed - since they spend their AP on crafting rather than fighting, they will very soon lag behind the fighters who would have access to more areas and better item drops, rendering the artisans' merchandise inadequate.

EDIT: Forgot to mention this but, adding insult to injury, the players' statistics list (high scores really) can only be sorted by Experience and Fame right now. While it's conceivable that artisans may have a slight edge in the latter, the former very clearly and strongly promotes the fighters.

From my vantage point it's impossible to clearly see all the relevant parameters, but I know one thing: This will require delicate balancing.

[Repr]

ok, here goes:)

1. at first, at the moment the game starts at lvl 5. until then you can only attack, wait, and attack again. after that the game starts for real
2. The guilds are nice. hope the party option will work soon. Also id like to be able to send pm's to the entire guild at once....havent found it
3. I dont need more AP to be honest. now i can play 2 hours a day and still keep up with the rest of the realm. when youd get more AP you would need more time to play. thats fine if you play this the entire day, but the casual player will like it better this way
4. crafting = great. but the tiers make it kind of pointless at the moment. Tier 1 isnt really useful since you can find most items rather easy or buy them. Tier 2 could become a lot better, but to do so you would need to spend AP gathered in 2 days until you reach tier 2. this means no XP for 2 days. This is, in my view, simply not worth it. If Tier 1 would take like 20 points to pass it would be a lot nicer, and then you can also see if its worth doing it when seeing the Tier 2 items. However since it costs an insane amount of AP to get both the resources, make raw materials into usable materials and then craft something i doubt itll be worth it
5. The auction house, im kinda not sure about this one. Now its all great since everyone playing is around lvl 5-8. so if i find 1 good item i use it, if i find 2 i sell the other. however if the realm was already started some time and id try to sell stuff at low lvl noone would want it. maybe make the auction house tier dependent?

edit because of Xoac's reply.

if you can become a crafter and have to make that choice between crafter and fighter (i like it!!!), will there be a separate ranking for crafters? because the way i see it is that every guild needs 1 or more crafters, and lots of fighters. the fighters get the (ultra)-rare resources and the crafter uses them. this way there would never be a reason to get above lvl 5 with crafting (maybe a bit considering the quantities of raw materials are limited)

continuing this line of thought you could get crafter guilds. you would need all professions together in an alliance that can be hired by other players. if you do nothing but crafting your Tier will go up fast enough. For this to work though you would need to have everyone see what is possible at the different tiers so that they can actually place orders. deals could include people getting the resources and pay you then to craft it. however for this to work the crafted items must be better then anything that can easily be found. after all, why spend time finding resources and paying a crafter if you can also find it yourself or buy it easily at the auction house. The crafter would need a serious edge on everything you can find to have a function in the game that isnt removed by the fighters looting

[Xaoc]

The players have level caps - 50th level is the highest allowed right now, so you cannot develop infinatelly. This will be unlocked slowly when new content is added on regular periods. New players can catch up at that point, of course being first will always be an advantage.. but imagine how we restart your character just as you reached Grand master armorsmith level or have aquired some extremelly rare items.. And yes quests will have important bosses, epic arches and so on - there just won't be an end winning game boss..

Yes, there will be ranking by crafting points.

Items from Tier 4 will be stronger than Legendary items from Tier 2 (but they also give you bonuses to atributes and etc)... however, Tier 4 items can be used by players level 40 and above... therefore Tier 2 items are just as valuable to smaller players - there will allways be much more smaller level players than big ones, so the market is larger. (very important detail is that Mercs wear equipment from their tier only - Tier 1 Merc can only wear items Tier 1, no matter how many levels they gain - they can gain 50 levels but they will still be regarded as Tier 1 mercs, therefore you need equipment for them from that tier - that is the trade off for being with low wages - higher tier mercs cost more per mission) The choice to specialize in a particular Tier is up to the players, could be more profitable to sell Tier 2 items than Tier 5, or not... never know. If you a rich player you don't have to go dig the resouces yourself - you can buy them from others - as Repr mentioned. (I believe top players will never bother to spend AP on digging coal, when they can buy it from lower level players)

Also within the player guilds there will be such thing as Crafting guilds, where if you have 5 or 10 armorsmiths they will be using a mutual bonus when crafting armor. (getting higher critcal chance for creating special items..)

There are many question marks that cannot be answered from now... but the core engine is built around the idea that if players have the right to choose what to do and are given the necessary tools to excersice effectivelly supply and demand the economy will balance itself out. We have prepared very extensive data mining tools with which to follow the ingame economy and do corrections if necessary. I am far from the thought that everything is balanced from day one - this is impossible because humans are unpredictable, we will see the real picture when we have couple of thousands of people playing activelly with all the esential parts of the game working.