Let's all pitch in ideas...

[Rageburst]

Here\'s something a famous EQ guild member said about World of Warcraft. I posted this to show some examples of how trade skills such as blacksmithing, alchemy can be made fun and not be just some mediocre game elements as seen in many of today\'s boring MMORPGs.

I definately agree that trade skills should be implemented for planeshift. However, rather than having many, many skills, would it be easier and better to focus only on a few... and polish them so that they are fun as possible? Perhaps someone here can offer innovative twists to trade skills rather than something you can do by holding a button for hours?

http://www.fohguild.org/html/index.php

Here are a few examples I came up with on the whim:

Fishing: Allow fishing boats. If a big fish bites, then it will drag the boat like in \"The Old Man and the Sea\" by Ernest Hemingway. Have a variety of fish such as monstrous squids and whales.

Mining: After a long time, the faces should turn black from coal... until you expose yourselves to light again. There might be chances of a cave-in... forcing you to dig yourselves out.

Farming: You must chase away birds from your crops... counts as leveling albeit low level monsters.

They don\'t sound to spiffy at the moment, but they\'re just to get the suggestions rolling. Put in yours.

[Mehallie]

I\'m sorry, but that would really be annoying...

The reason there are a wide variety of tradeskills is because there are a wide variety of people.  Everyone enjoys doing something different.  The goal of crafting isn\'t to master in everything like it was in EQ so you could be your own one-person mini-mall, but to choose a few things and be very good at them, and then trade with others, and *gasp*  interact with them.  That\'s a very big point of crafting that the \"Another-Game-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named\" completely forgot about, which is why most people loathed EQ tradeskilling.

It wasn\'t the fact that there weren\'t any silly little effects to tradeskilling that made tradeskilling boring, but because tradeskilling in EQ was completely flawed from beginning to end.  When you become master in a skill, there is no reason whatsoever why you should fail making a trivial item.  There is no excuse for making someone click combine a million times in order to raise skill.  And of course, the biggie:  crafted items should be useful.  There was no point in crafting anything in EQ because the chances were that something better would drop off a mob anyway.

And, thankfully, this isn\'t going to be a problem, as I\'ve already posted something similar on this thread and received confirmation that PS will be nothing like that.

So, I think things are sorted.

[Rageburst]

My concern is really comes from the fact that whenever a game becomes too ambitious and try to have everything, it will probably come short in the end. I\'d expect it will simply have too many mediocre elements that seem to have been thrown in for the hell of it.

If there\'s going to be say 100+ skills, I doubt that they would be as fun as 10 skills that were polished and/or innovative. Really polished or really innovative design elements is usually what makes a game \"great\" and not mediocre.

Of course, having 100+ skills may also be something that will attract gamers. I don\'t expect it to be significantly more fun than what\'s already been done.... unless there is an incredible amount of polish on them. Maybe an easy-to-use interface that will reduce carpal tunnel syndrome for example... or perhaps make the trade significantly rewarding if they\'re not going to be very fun. I\'d usually be pulled in by rewards.


.... you know... 10 skills can also be made to be very interactive. IF you\'re gonna have 100+ skills, you\'ll probably not find a person specialized enough in a skill to interact with.

[Mehallie]

I\'m not sure why you brought the example of having hundreds of jobs, because PlaneShift won\'t.   They have a finite example of jobs and they will concentrate upon them and make sure they\'re not \"meaningless\".  And even with a game that would have a hundred skills, you\'d still find someone specialised if, and only if, they concentrated on ONE skill and didn\'t try to be the minimart, as I previously stated.

I also don\'t understand how having 20 jobs or so can be considered \"everything\".  I\'m sure the devs have had the same problem with crafting as in the past, and they seem to have a clue about how to make things less boring and yet more interesting for people that really want to craft, not merely people who think it will bring in lots of money.  This has been addressed in another thread...and probably several others.

I think they\'ve got a handle on it, mate.

[Urzaskategoku]

I think a cool feature would be having an archer go into a fps when shooting his bow. In other rpgs you just point and click or press a button. having this feature will spice things up a bit.
Voice chat could be possible in a messenger type way where one player would host it and other player could connect to his chat.
jobs would be a nice feature
And having pets would be pretty niffity too

[Xandria]

It seems like from the char creation page on the current version of Planeshift, that there are several tradeskills mentioned (and I doubt there will be too many more added).  It seems as if they have most of the areas covered, although there may be some type of sub-specialization of some sort.  I expect that most people that want to do tradeskills will only use 2, maybe 3, skills.  Any more than that, and you won\'t be good enough with any of them to be useful.

I really don\'t see what the bow bit is about (in a thread about jobs), but it won\'t work because this game is an RPG.  And there will be pets, just look up the Planeshift entry on \'empathy.\'