Continuing a bit with the post from yesterday but with a focus on professions here today.
How do you learn professions?
Learning them will be easy, however your healer will be limited to only two professions, one for gathering and one for crafting.
There will be 3 gathering professions, names not fully decided yet but to give you an idea of them:
- mining (ore, minerals, gems)
- herbalism (flowers, plants, fruits)
- scavenging (environmental finds, battlefield leftovers).
For crafters there'll be professions such as:
- Forging
- Alchemy
- Engineering
There will also be a lot of combinations of all professions to encourage players to trade and exchange materials with each other. For instance, let's take a look at an Alchemist who also has Herbalism: While he may find the correct flowers and plants to create a mana potion for their level, they're still in need of a new bottle/flask which only Forgers can craft.
As mentioned in the previous post, many crafting materials will be non-nft's and generated through the game. Since we also want players to actively trade and exchange materials they will need a way to easily trade with each other through trade requests. There will also be some trading restrictions on certain accounts to prevent people having "bot accounts" do all the gathering for them and then simply trade all the non-nft's to their main account where they have the crafting professions on a healer.
Proof through Escrow.
To prevent scams and thievery we will make the trades work in a certain way where trade windows will request the person who wants something crafted to input the non-nft materials in its window, and the crafter won't get access to them but confirm and verify that the trade has the required items for a craft and once the crafting is completed the player who added all the materials will get the crafted item directly. Profession XP will go to the crafter and the crafter is able to input a request of charge for the craft in the trade window as well. The trade window basically acts like an escrow for both players and prevents the other party from stealing the materials while at the same time ensuring the initial trader receives their crafted item while the crafter also gets their fee/charge. There will be some additional restrictions applied here to again attempt to prevent and minimize bot activity but that's not something we're going to make public for the time being.
Profession Specialties
There will be different branches that both gathering and crafting professions will allow the healers to specialize into, both in terms of crafting quality, crafting quantity and crafting scope. This means healers may have to choose which items they want to specialize in becoming good at crafting, for instance empty capture cards. From then on forward they can still craft items they've been able to craft upon reaching the required level of specialization but further level ups will only occur when they're crafting their specialized item. These crafters are going to become the best at crafting capture cards and will also get to pick between optimizing quality or quantity. The former means that the crafted cards will be of higher quality in terms of cosmetics while the latter means they'll be able to craft more than one card for the same materials or leaving some materials leftover for another craft - giving their profession a higher demand from other players and potentially bigger tips if the crafting does well.
Similarly for gathering professions there will also be specialties, some herbalists may become really good at picking flowers over picking fruits which means some fruits that may require a higher level to be picked may stay blocked for these herbalists since they've chosen the flower specialty, however this more than makes up because they'll be able to pick flowers better to give them a bigger yield a higher quality flowers.
Profession for upgrades
As we mentioned in the previous post, there will be different item restrictions in our game, some items are bound to a healer as they're found or crafted while some are only bound to the healer when they are equipped or used a certain amount of battles while some items will be bound to a specific account which means that you can equip them on any healer you have but you can't trade the item or healers wearing the item away.
In crafting professions there will be some crafts which once crafted can't be traded. These items will have better odds for RNG and quality but require the healer to have that profession and level to craft them. They will be bound to the healer which however means you may still trade these items to other players as long as you trade the healer to them since the healers are the ones with the profession and items.
Gathering and Crafting energy
Healers will have certain energy parameters to them, even if you as a player could easily spend hours a day roaming around our open world to pick flowers your healer may not have as much energy for it. Energy will be based on level requirements of the materials you're gathering and the items you're attempting to craft, they will also take time to gather and craft based on your skill and the level of the materials and items. Some crafts may even place a cooldown on the healer to not be able to craft it again for quite some time due to the difficulty and workload involved.
While we have all this planned out quite well but are far from starting to develop, there may be an instance where crafting energy will use mana instead if. Just mentioning that this isn't something that's written in stone yet.
Friendly bots
Your favorite engeers are also going to be able to create bot helpers for your healer, these come with AI and will attempt to replicate your gathering skill for you when you're low on energy/afk. This means that players who never want to spend time gathering after they've already leveled up their profession once will still receive some materials on a daily basis from their bot helpers. This is mainly to prevent people from creating bots to do the "boring tasks" for them on accounts where they do nothing but gather, rather than implementing captchas and other filters that may impact gameplay for real players to protect them from bots flooding the markets and lowering the prices as they extract all the value. This is also not something written in stone and will still require quite some thought behind it to find a fair and safe balance where bots are disincentivized to thrive while players who like to gather can still come out on top than bot helpers in-game. Keep in mind also that bot helpers will have a much lower efficiency at quantity and quality of gathering materials, they may be AI but they lack the human touch.
In beta
Since the game in beta will start off quite simple with mainly PvE and PvP battles and without an open world, players will mainly collect ingame materials after defeating creatures and then look around in the field of view of the game to see if they can spot any herbs, fruits, rocks, items, etc to gather, mine or scavange.
While we definitely have an open world planned for the game, we have to be realistic that that's going to take quite a lot longer and is planned after the beta upon where we'll also remove the limit of daily encounters so players can go a bit crazier with hunting rare holozing creatures.
Anyway, that's it for today. I hope this helps give you a better overview of the game we have planned. Thanks for reading!
In the next post we'll be talking a little bit about storage and all the different XP points for accounts, healers and creatures and how they work with each other.