Was having a long chat with our game dev today as we are tackling gathering professions currently, so thought I'd re-hash some of the discussions and decisions we're going with for the alpha of our game here for anyone interested.
Gathering professions are going to be a bit "harder" than in regular mmorpg's you may be familiar with. In those it's usually first come, first serve, i.e. you find a flower that can be picked and you usually do the work and you get it, there's no "cost" to this action, it just takes a couple seconds and you're off looking for the next flower. The only effect this has in those games is that in online multiplayer ones, that flower now won't respawn until some time later so another player trying to do the same thing as you may have to wait a bit longer or look somewhere else for a flower to pick. Another factor is the time cost, you're out there picking flowers and it may take some of your game time away from doing other things, but that flower can be turned into a potion or elixir to help you with certain parts of the game, like leveling up faster or defeating a difficult monster. This is usually where bots come into play, people don't want to do this "boring" work of running around looking for flowers, so they set up bots to do the work for them while they are afk or sleeping and then they come back and find their inventory full of materials while they haven't done anything.
In Holozing, the initial gathering professions will be quite limited since early on in our beta the wild creature encounters will be limited as well, to prevent someone cheating/finding glitches being able to farm a lot of rare and sought after nfts such as creatures or items before we manage to squash the bug. However later on we will of course want players to be able to play as much as they want, look for wild creature encounters to their heart's content and same goes for gathering professions.
The way we have it set up now is that at the end of the battle, when a creature has either been captured, defeated or has fled, you'll have time to attempt to extract some gathering materials from the battlefield. You can obviously look for them during the battle, but you won't be able to extract them while the battle is ongoing and honestly, you wouldn't want to either cause that may mean it'll cost you one turn. (We may experiment with gathering materials popping into existence for a short while where you can decide if it's worth attempting to capture it at a cost of one game-turn, but not in the initial beta) So when the battle ends and you may have found some materials, you'll be able to shoot a laser beam at them with your capture device to attempt to extract them. The cost here comes from laser ammo being spent when you attempt to gather materials. So let's get into the logic behind that in a bit more detail now.
Certain materials, based on weight/frailty/rarity will only allow you to attempt to gather them a certain amount of times, let's for instance look at our first testing herbalism gathering material, a holo flower. You want to extract petals from the holo flower but your skill may be too low, after 4-5 attempts if you're still unsuccesful at extracting the petals, the flower will burn out and become unextractable. On the other hand, if you're looking at a big rock and trying to extract any minerals from it, you'll be able to give it a go for many more times before it "melts" too much and turns out it didn't have any holo ore or something valuable you could use for crafting. Thus, depending on what the material is you're attempting to extract through gathering skills, it'll have a certain amount of attempts it'll allow you to try.
Now when it comes to leveling up your gathering professions, it'll be quite difficult as well and require a lot of capture ammo. The numbers we've been playing with currently have been something like a 10% success rate and extracting materials per attempt at the lowest gathering level. Keep in mind that certain materials that are rarer may make your success rate even lower. What this does is make the time it takes to level up your gathering professions take longer and more importantly, it places a base cost on these materials from the get-go, since capture ammo itself costs materials, time, some zing and someone with a crafting profession that can craft them.
Let's for instance ignore items and consumables from the alpha vials, even though they will kind of be crucial when starting out with your gathering and crafting professions. Let's say we have an alchemist crafter at level 10 who has now learned how to craft capture ammo that works on gathering materials at level 1 to 10. To craft capture laser ammo, he may need 50 holo flower petals, 10 "other flower petals", drinking water, some laser juice, etc. Then depending on if you want to refill your potion or need to create a new potion you may need materials to create the flask itself which only the blacksmith profession can craft. Then, when doing crafting professions, this will cost your healer some energy/mana and during the craft they won't rest/generate mana nor will they be able to take a break for a wild encounter, so it needs to occur when players won't be playing the game. These crafting skills can take time; the less experienced the crafter is, the longer it can take to successfully craft the item. The less experienced the crafter is, the smaller the output, i.e. you won't get as much laser ammo as you hoped for. The less experienced the crafter is, or not specialized into crafting laser ammo, the bigger the odds that you'll get the least rare capture ammo (green/uncommon rarity).
As you can see, early on things are going to be quite hard and most healers will have to either skip even learning a gathering profession or rely on buying consumables from the market (consumables from alpha vials or crafted consumables from other players). Deciding to become a gatherer and crafter may be quite costly to start out until you get to a high enough level where your extraction success rate is decent and won't waste too much ammo or you're getting more bang for your buck when extracting to then use those mats to craft more ammo to keep at it while potentially also set aside some materials to craft other things you need, or if you wanna level a different kind of gathering profession on a different healer or to attempt to trade some of those materials for something else with other players.
While alpha vials and their consumables and items will give players starting out an advantage, we fully aim to also make it possible for players in the future to play the game without having bought an alpha or beta vial but mainly rely on leasing creatures and healers and buying consumables from the market that players are either actively crafting daily or selling some consumables from their alpha vials they may have extra.
Keep in mind also that no alpha vial items will be stronger/rarer than crafted items, with enough time and skill in gathering and crafting professions, you'll be able to craft items on the same rarity and level as items from the alpha vials. This is also done on purpose because while alpha vials may get enough advantages and higher odds at better rarities, players who don't want or can't purchase items for themselves to own, should be able to have an equal footing at competitive pvp and pve even if they're only leasing or borrowing creatures and items from other players.
Anyway, I hope this gave you some insight on the whole crafting and gathering system we have planned and are currently actively working on. I kind of wanted to touch on item attributes as well in this post but it already became quite long and my hands are tired, maybe next time!
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