Collectively useable but privately held tools.

[Songthrush]

Think of how much this relatively simple change, facilitating player-run factories and resource collection organizations would promote trade.

It would not affect at all any character who doesn't want to use it.

[Nick]

Do you know any other good tunes, Marketing Department Nick?

What's that supposed to mean?

[Sunni Daez]

A used shovel [Borrowed from Agar]

At this point the person can start or join any project requiring a shovel as usual.

Meanwhile, Agar sees in his inventory:

[On loan to Satai] A used shovel

A note in the loaners inventory would serve the pupose of knowing who has the tools.

I don't like the 'stop loan' button idea. It just doesn't seem to be appropriate in a society which is trying to develope interaction between players.

Now..as an alternative...(even tho I still think an inventory note is best) There could be a... loan to... button, (much like the give to button) Which could lable a tool as.. [Borrowed from Agar]...so if the borrower dies, the tool on the ground says...Shovel [Agar].(much like an engraving)...Which would let the town know who the tool belongs to...this label would disappear when it is returned to Agars inventory.

[jeslange]

I think Satai's argument is valid, based on the existing way repairing a tool can be done. So, I don't think the opposing arguments that are "it's stupid" or "it's unrealistic" hold weight in the context of Cantr, when we already have something that functions like that.
But, I also disagree with this suggestion, because giving and retrieving things should be done consciously each time by the chars, as others against this idea have already said. I also don't think it would promote trade.

[Okud]

I say: don't lend any tools. It's not that necessary, hey, I'm the guy who owns a bone knife in this vilage, sure I'll make that bone shield for you if you are my friend. Or you can return the favour and kill me a pair of rabbits with your steel sword, I need fur.

[Nick]

Or an unlimited ammount of other VERBAL proposals, Okud.
But I shouldn't be able to borrow your bone knife without your consent.
What if you're in the middle of using it, and I decide to borrow it?

[Songthrush]

This depends entirely on the implementation we envisage.

In my case such a problem would never occur. As soon as one clicks a "Share this Tool" button in their inventory, the tool is immediately dropped on the ground and appears as "[Loan from Satai] A brand new shovel" to everyone in the area. When somebody picks it up, an entry in my inventory is created that says "[On loan to Nick] a brand new shovel", with an X button for stopping the loan at any time.

While Nick simply has "a brand new shovel" in his inventory now, which is internally tagged by the game, so Satai can at any time cancel the loan and get the tool back, so long as he is in the same area.

If Nick leaves the area, all his current tool loans are cancelled and get returned to their owners, not on the ground, so owners have to "share" the tools again if they want them to become available to somebody else.

We already have a system quite similar to this in the game, in the way repairing items works. I would like see a similar implementation for a handful of the most important tools: pickaxes, shovels, forks, harvesting knives etc.

Again, the goal of this is NOT to make life entirely safe in Cantr or anything of the sort, but to let player-run factories get off the ground, out of their current "can't really be done very effectively for OOC programming quirk reasons" rut.

[Nick]

Or you could just lend people tools and *gasp* ask for them back when you want them back.

[Songthrush]

That is what (I assume) everyone has been doing up until now, Nick.

The problem is that we are not very satisfied with doing it this way for reasons which have been told and reiterated many times over in this thread and others.

Therefore the idea with some kind of new gameplay feature which would make us more satisfied came up.

Do you catch the gist of it now, Nick?

I am certain that it's simply not within your personal jurisdiction to tell people to be satisfied with something that they explicitly do not find very satisfying.

[Nick]

It's going to cause more problems than the convenience is worth.

[Sho]

I have several objections to this proposal. These are the ones I feel confident in expressing - there are others that I don't think I understand fully enough to state, but have been used or hinted at elsewhere.

Incomplete: I have not yet seen a statement of this proposal that would be sufficient to define an implementation. For example, what happens when the borrower goes to a different building or takes a road out? What happens if the lender dies? Do the borrowed tools appear in the borrower's inventory in the normal way? It's hard to make specific criticisms when so much is undefined. I realize there are multiple ideas of how this could be implemented, but please set one out for us to look at.

Hard to code: Also, the mere fact that so many cases need to be considered is a strike against this proposal. Most likely all of these situations would need to be considered and coded separately. Furthermore, this proposal is, as far as I can tell, completely unsupportable by anything that currently exists in the Cantr software. It would mean creating a whole new game mechanic, essentially from scratch.

Insufficient demand: It is claimed that the uncertainty of lending is a major cause of an alleged lack of collaboration. I do not believe such a problem exists. Large workshops and small businesses are quite common. In my experiences running workshops and businesses in Cantr (four or five of my characters were involved in such organizations), I have not encountered any problems in getting tools back. Common sense, caution and a reasonable amount of generosity are enough to keep tool-sharing at a functional and realistic level. You wouldn't lend, say, your $100 graphing calculator to a random person on the street, would you?

Oh, and Satai, please try not to troll people who argue with you, even if they don't go into numbing detail about their reasons. No offense to you, Nick or anyone else.