Item Quality - Original

[Zanthos]

aye aye! try being awkward in the kitchen IRL, you'll never feel sorry for your charries again!

[Doug R.]

I support this in concept. I really think that we need to make skills more marketable in order to encourage characters to use their strengths and rely on others to boost their weaknesses.

[SekoETC]

How about when people work together, they can reach the quality level of the most skilled worker because you can assume the most skilled worker doesn't let the awkward ones mess up the job, but the work effort done by the less skilled workers was smaller?

I drew a picture of one possible way of setting the categories. The per cents stand for time spent compared to the list values.


I hosted it in the wiki because I can't load my photobucket.

Numbers based on noticing that an expert can farm 250 grams of potatoes in an hour, while an efficient person gets 200. 200/250 = 0.8 so I'm assuming that for an expert it takes only 80% of the time listed in the wiki to complete a project. I go on to assume that it's the same thing in the other end, and an awkward person spends 20% more doing the same thing. So not only does the expert do the job faster, they only get better quality with the same price. So lets say everyone starts producing items with a quality in accordance to their skill level. But everyone deserves a chance so by devoting 10% more time (per cent units, not a percentage of their current work effort) everyone can produce items that are one point above their skill level. Just thinking maybe 10% is not enough, maybe it should be more but this is just the first model. And also the experts can't do anything above their skill level unless we implement a sixth quality group with would be super-fine. Also everyone except the awkward person could choose to work below their level to create crappy equipment. But this would mean that the expert only spends 30% of the listed time when creating a crappy item. And there's also a chance that my expert that I used for figuring out the numbers is just a low expert or a medium expert, and those points are not capped, so there might be people spending only 20% of the listed time to create an item, while the awkward person would have to put 120% into it and still be producing crap.

[Yömyssy]

I think everyone should have a chance of making an item of at least medium level, even if they were awkward. They just need to put more time into it.

Disagree :] Don't feel sorry about awkward people - they are masters in something else. This idea is about increasing diversity and improve economy as someone wrote before.

I had a char that had the best skill (hunting) at efficient, and I tried out at least 8 different types of activities. At least digging, drilling, farming, building and manufacturing tools & weapons were awkward.
Getting that kind of characters plus the fact that they can only make crappy items equals even more suicidal newspawns. IMO.

[SekoETC]

Option 2: Everyone is producing medium quality with their current work effort. This flattens it out a lot, experts do not get a huge advantage. (EDIT: Looks like everyone would produce the quality that corresponds to their skill level when contributing 100%.) The disadvantage is that even efficient people could produce expert level quality if they just contribute 20% more time, and novice people could produce skillful level quality. So everyone could perform two categories above their level.



I'm thinking that something which gives experts more room to perform while awkward people would have the quality dropping with 5% less effort would be a good option. So the lines wouldn't all go neatly in the same angle.

[formerly known as hf]

I hope this is seriously being discussed, as I do love this idea...

Of Seko's options - Option 2 seems to have less differentiation - The expert still has to work at least 60% of the time, rather than 35%...

[SekoETC]

Oh, about repairs, only experts could repair up to brand new, skillful ones could repair up to new, efficient up to used, novice up to often-used and awkward up to old. So awkward people would have to be either repairing their items more often or hiring others to do the job. You could maintain your items by bumping them up to old so they would never crumble if you keep busy, but they would look poorly maintained - a good reason to hire someone to polish them.

[lacki2000]

Nice work SekoETC. My cruel version on chart looks like this (for a single character):


Im not sure about time percentage - it is not important at this stage of discussion.
And what if different people works together - it is always an average of skills rounded down. If there will be 100 experts and 1 awkward - they will make no better than level 4 item - because of that 1 not very talented person waving his hammer like a drunken pinguin.

And if we want even more diversity we should make different skills for manufacturing melee weapons, ranged weapons, tool weapons, tools, shields, and of course different clothes and jewerly manufacturing skills (hats making skill, jackets making skill, etc)

I had a char that had the best skill (hunting) at efficient, and I tried out at least 8 different types of activities. At least digging, drilling, farming, building and manufacturing tools & weapons were awkward.
Getting that kind of characters plus the fact that they can only make crappy items equals even more suicidal newspawns. IMO.

I suppose he was good in singing, bargaining , entertaining or maybe writing romantic notes. Not everyone has to be a crafter, there is a lot of different profitable activities to take which doesn't require any system-coded skill.

[DELGRAD]

I do not like it.
If a graph is shown. Big nono.

Let's make Cantr so complicated that only we older characters
can understand how to play.

What about the lowly laborer? Going out and gathering resources? HMMMMM
It really does not matter if they can gather more. They have no choice of spending more or less time in regards to quality.

You can not get higher quality resources.
NO!

Code: Select all

I am waiting for the next suggestion.

[SekoETC]

Speeds do matter. If it was made so that experts had to spend more time than they do now if they want to create high quality items, that would balance things out. In other words, see example 2. The skills system was implemented as only affecting work times because quality of items would be hard to add. But if quality is added then production time can have less of a meaning. Example 2 could be modified so that awkward people still produce awkward or novice products with their current level of effort but experts would only produce efficient, or skillful, with the 80% work effort and would need 100% or more to create expert quality.

And it's not a very complicated suggestion. It wouldn't take much understanding from the players. Everyone would automatically work as hard as they can, making people work slower than usual but when you are engaged in a project, you could have radio buttons to choose your work effort. Maybe they could be together with the project progress bar, then people could see it.

[DELGRAD]

OH thank you.

An expert weapon smith starts a project and a awkward weapon smith joins in then a efficient weapon smith.

How would the weapons quality be determined then.

You can no longer just rely on the project initiator. You have to consider the participants, their level and their time spent on the project. Formula gets a bit more akward now.

Let's see.
Expert weapon smith starts a steel saber at expert level, but never works on it. Only awkward weapon smiths do.

Woops. Awkward can't. Great thinking there.

It just seems so wrong to have different levels of tools, machines, clothing and weapons. ooooo wait buildings too. OH. And vehicles. Shit. Shields too.

Too many things that would have to be dealt with to implement this.
And many things that could go wrong.

I will say one thing.
If this is implemented. Everyone in every skill goes to awkward.
All newspaws will have all skills awkward.
Only way I can see it being fair.
But you can't do that. You have 100 year olds that busted their asses increasing their skills.


Most suggestions I see anymore will complicate the game, make it more micro managed and discourage roleplaying.

Seriously. What next? Flesh eating bacteria?

Let us wait for the Prog Dept to respond. I'm sure they want to have the opportunity to program 5 different levels of tools, weapons, shields, clothing, machines, buildings and vehicles. Not to mention needing to program in the the diferent level capabilities of other characters working on those projects. Then the programing for the combat and defence of different levels of the characters and the levels of the weapons and shields. Then the different degrees of rot for EVERYTHING. Usage and nonusage. Crapy vehicles surely cannot travel as fast a expert built vehicles. More programming there. The programming of 5 different gathering rates for each tool. Some tools do have attack and gather values. With this suggestion it would need attack*5 and gather*5,
It just keeps getting so much better. Doesen't it just keep getting better?

Seko. You want to take a crack at it?

Seriously again. What next? Measuring penis length and vagina depth?

Two last things I have to say.
I have thought about the programing. You have no idea. I have no idea.
It would be a huge rewrite of nearly everything.
This is not an RPG!

Edit: 2 hours and 51 minutes, yawn.

[T-shirt]

If item quality was implemented, the quality should be set when the project is initiated. Any character should be able to work on a project regardless the quality of the item.
A skilled character finishes a project qiucker as an unskilled character. A high quality project takes a lot of time. For a highly skilled character it will take quite some time, but for an unskilled character it will take ages.

[SekoETC]

My suggestion:

The person dedicating the biggest amount of skill to the project will set the quality. The other participants contribute less. They won't reduce the quality because the most skilled worker doesn't "let" them do that, but the work effort of an awkward person would be very low, maybe 10% or lower.

However, they would learn from the project just as much as they would from messing up something on their own. How much they learn depends on the percentage they dedicate to the project.

Every hour the game will check who is contributing the most (skill*dedication_percentage) and this will define the quality. The other participants do not affect quality, only speed. So two experts working on a project would produce the same quality as an expert and an awkward person, the only difference is that the two experts will use only about half the time that it would take the other team to complete the item.

When the biggest contributor changes, the quality will start rising or falling accordingly. But it's not strictly so that when the expert leaves, the quality would sink to a lower category. If the expert has contributed long enough, their effort will be visible even if they didn't stick around throughout the whole project. You see from the charts that there is a lot of empty white space above the expert range, well, if the cap is at 120% then the expert could "overload" the project with their skill.

EDIT: If everyone could create expert quality items without an expert being present then people WOULD spend what ever time it takes to do that, if the item is supposed to last or supposed to look pretty. Only if they were making something that's only used once and then left to crumble (*cough*mallet*cough*) then they would do a half-assed job. There would be a lot of grumbling but people still wouldn't agree to making lesser quality items just because they can do better. And there would be no particular effect to trade. But if people can produce high quality items only if they have the necessary skill or are working together with someone who has it, that would make this have an effect. There wouldn't be this case that a person can't make some item because they don't have the necessary skill, I hate that in games, but just because you know how to make something doesn't mean you could do it well.

[lacki2000]

An expert weapon smith starts a project and a awkward weapon smith joins in then a efficient weapon smith.

How would the weapons quality be determined then.

In my proposal (a little different from SekoETC's one) weapons quality will be between level 2 and 4 - depends how late did awkward smith join.

You can no longer just rely on the project initiator. You have to consider the participants, their level and their time spent on the project. Formula gets a bit more akward now.

True (maybe except last sentence ).

Expert weapon smith starts a steel saber at expert level, but never works on it. Only awkward weapon smiths do.

Woops. Awkward can't. Great thinking there.

No, he can do it. He will make weapon level 1, or maybe 2 - depends on adopted mechanics (either include skill level of initiator or not).

It just seems so wrong to have different levels of tools, machines, clothing and weapons. ooooo wait buildings too. OH. And vehicles. Shit. Shields too.

No one said anything about buildings or shits. For me it just seems so good to have different levels of everything else.

Too many things that would have to be dealt with to implement this.
And many things that could go wrong.

'Too many' is not an argument - only one big effort is to describe different levels of clothes and jewerly but we can divide this task to every player

I will say one thing.
If this is implemented. Everyone in every skill goes to awkward.
All newspaws will have all skills awkward.
Only way I can see it being fair.
But you can't do that. You have 100 year olds that busted their asses increasing their skills.

Another 'fair way' defender. When everyone is awkward then there is no difference - even worse than it is now! Let's do not change this.

Most suggestions I see anymore will complicate the game, make it more micro managed and discourage roleplaying.

Very strange way of thinking - if game is more complicated (i will say abundant) than there is more rationally roleplaying (you now cant say 'my axe is wonderful dragon slayer incrusted with diamonds' when others can see some rusty common axe in your hands).

Seriously. What next? Flesh eating bacteria?

If it your proposal make a proper topic for it

Let us wait for the Prog Dept to respond. I'm sure they want to have the opportunity to program 5 different levels of tools, weapons, shields, clothing, machines, buildings and vehicles. Not to mention needing to program in the the diferent level capabilities of other characters working on those projects. Then the programing for the combat and defence of different levels of the characters and the levels of the weapons and shields. Then the different degrees of rot for EVERYTHING. Usage and nonusage. Crapy vehicles surely cannot travel as fast a expert built vehicles. More programming there. The programming of 5 different gathering rates for each tool. Some tools do have attack and gather values. With this suggestion it would need attack*5 and gather*5,
It just keeps getting so much better. Doesen't it just keep getting better?

Put some ice on your head This is very easy to implement, even I can do it. It is only a matter of balanced level percentage to actual equations.
For example: weapons:

Code: Select all

dmg=actual_dmg+actual_dmg*(weapon_level-3)*5

It will make level 5 weapon 20% better than normal (lev 3) weapon. Is it really so complicated?
Lets do it for roting:

Code: Select all

rot=actual_rot+actual_rot*(level-3)*20

Seriously again. What next? Measuring penis length and vagina depth?

Make new topic and seriously proove sense of this interesting idea.

Two last things I have to say.
I have thought about the programing. You have no idea. I have no idea.
It would be a huge rewrite of nearly everything.
This is not an RPG!

You probably have no idea about programming so let others think about that. Abundant computer-based RPG needs abundant programming but in this case there will be only tiny rewrite of few things (IMHO).

lacki2000

[T-shirt]

How is project progression calculated currently when characters with different skills are working together?

I don't like the idea that you cannot determine the quality of your project before you start a project.

If the quality determines the amount of work (time) needed to complete the project, a highly skilled character might start a low quality project, because it will take him less time.