Blacksmith NPCs can offer to repair Weapons/Armor

[Trikitiger]

This is more one of those "Last ditch effort" kind of things that players can turn to, Blacksmith NPCs can repair your weapon/armor for you, but there are setbacks to prevent a player from using the NPC over the player:

1) Players need to give the armor/weapon to the NPC, thus resulting in not having the weapon/armor on hand (unlike when you do it yourself)
2) The NPC takes multiple amounts more time than a player doing it (They are busy doing other things after all). I'm thinking along the lines of 6 to 24 real-time hours.
3) The Player -NEEDS- to pay Tria, I would keep the price high but reasonable (like 1000 Tria or something). There's no kindness of strangers in that negotiation.

I'm just putting it out as an option. Sometimes characters are unsociable (like mine, but it gives me a challenge), and they would rather not talk to anyone. And sometimes there isn't a player available that can do the task (depends on the time a player's playing though, I've found 0 players around the forge for a good hour once O.o) Not sure how it would be scripted out, but I think you can use the Talk panel (for quests) to do it. I'm just thinking of it for being a fall-back plan. (I can't repair my battle axe, but neither can anyone else. My character loves axes and can't find a replacement)

The main thing is, the NPC repair method needs to cost more than a player doing it, that way a player can fall back on doing so, but if they do, the cost for doing it that way would be greater than having another player doing it.

[Geoni]

I think the idea of a weapon taking a long time to be fixed makes a great deal of sense when it comes to being realistic. A weapon can't be repaired instantly, and it could take a few days to a few weeks to repair a weapon. I think that it shouldn't cost that many tria unless it was something that would take the repairer a good amount of work to fix it. The prices for a repair should also vary upon weapon. 1000 tria would be a crazy amount of tria for somebody to pay because in the game that is a difficult amount of tria for the usual person to make and then spend all on just a repair.

When it comes to people at the furnace not being sociable they are just being too lazy to RP along with the leveling/powerleveling. I'm not going to stereotype any character that works at a furnace can't RP, because I've seen quite a few who actually can. The npc's shouldn't cost more or less than any player who can repair unless their skills at repairing are perfect or horrible.

[Trikitiger]

I only suggested 1000 tria, I'm just thinking that using an NPC would be a fall-back plan, and because you want to push Roleplaying (especially in the IC server), you don't want the players to rely on the NPCs.