seanxlol wrote:Hi Rynea,
I'm curious will there be any incentive for someone who focuses primarily on gathering to donate all of their resources? I'm just used to games where you sort of do everything for yourself, not games like this where there is massive collaboration so that is why I am wondering. Not to be rude or anything =)
Yes and no sean .. lets put it this way .. in the beginning, especially as a crafter who wants to specialize, as a single crafter of any sort, you will have to learn and specialize in a lot of different professions in order to be successful, you will need to mine ressources, you will need to make sub components of the things you want to craft. You will need to do a lot of different things. Working in a big group is a huge boost.
What takes the longest in AA is to get enough profession skill in your specialized crafting skill. Having a group to help you with that can help a considerable amount. So for actual crafters, the answer is pretty easy .. you get free materials to work with so that alone should be worth it. Many of the things we craft will be used in one way or another by our whole community. We will gather ore for enough proficiency in metalworking so we can even create farm wagons in the first place. It's like an unlock that we can then use to make however many farm wagons we have materials for.
While for gatherers (not just the profession, but in general people who collect ressources mainly) it's essentially the same, they will level their profession skill.
There will always be the question for gatherers, why they would need a guild in that case. You could probably even argue that you don't need the whole castle / community stuff and you could just gather on your own as well.
There are several different aspects I would say to the whole problematic:
I never said, or intended for gatherers to ONLY gather for the guild. As a gatherer you decide on your own how many of your ressources you want to donate. Some gatherers might also level a lot via quests and don't exactly need these ressources to buy their basic needs, so they might spend more. For others gathering will be their mainstay goal in the game, they won't have other income options and will likely have to keep a lot more of their ressources to themselves.
The guild as a whole doesn't require you to spend all your labor points and then give away all of your materials for free. At the very beginning of the game when we start out, we won't be high level, we likely won't have lots of gold or other things to trade, so it will be more focused on the whole, lets just get to the top fast mentality no matter the cost. Later on when we are more settled, people will very likely have the option of "trading" in their ressources for other things they want or need, we might think about paying them if there are good ways to make money with crafting later on, we might think about trading other guild products, we might think about having vehicles dedicated only for people who give us some sort of donations to use them. There are many many ideas on how to solve this.
For the beginning, right now I expect our gatherers to give however many ressources they want to give and keep everything else to themselves. For some ho couldn't care less perhaps this will be most or all of their gatherered ressources. For others this might just be a random donation from time to time, for yet others it might be 10 or 20% of their total gathered stuff.
We will have too many crafters to figure out one good way for all and I won't even try to regulate it. As a gatherer you're one of the first in line who initially produces all the ressources, as such you will have to decide on your own how much you "donate"
Currently how I for example handle it, is that I have people specify in their mails with the ore they send me, if they want the ingots back or if they want to donate the ore. That way they can decide on their own if they just want to benefit from having ingots made (and believe me I daily use up ALL my labor points just for smelting, so its a definite advantage if you need ingots as a gatherer to let me melt them down for you and have more labor points to gather more ore instead)
If everyone just donates 10% of their gathered ressources, we will have a well working guild as long as we have a big enough gatherer to crafter ratio. Thats why I'm being so picky about crafters in the first place. In an ideal world we will have 10-20 gatherers for every single dedicated crafter, who all only need to spend like 10% of their income ressources for donating to the guild, and still our crafters will be able to work full time with that. Our crafters will easily be able to skill up their profession and won't be bothered to have to use their labor points for gathering just so they can skill up. Everyone including gatherers will benefit from having a crafter around who uses up labor points for them in order to make things.
Whenever you need something crafted, you should head to a crafter even if you can make it yourself. Say for example you're a gatherer for cotton. You want a ship. A ship needs a certain amount of fabric, made from cotton. Say you have 2000 cotton harvested. Lets give a ballpark number here and say the fabric for this ship will take up 500 of your cotton for fabric to make.
What you do is the following:
You take 500 cotton, send it via mail to your tailor and tell them in the mail that you please want it back as fabric.
You then take the fabric the tailor sent you and now have enough fabric for your ship.
Next you send me or anyone we will later set up who's in charge a whisper and tell them that you have 1500 cotton and the fabric for your ship already done, and would like the other materials for it. What we will then do, is trade 500 of the 1500 cotton for lumber, 500 for the metal ingots and take 500 and stash it into the Guild Stash for the guild.
We then build whatever it is you want to have crafted (or in some cases send you all the materials for you to build it, not sure if you can have others build a ship for you)
You now have a ship, even though you never harvested a single ore vein or a single tree. You didn't have to run around finding trees, you didn't have to expensively buy lumber from the auctioneer and you didn't even have to inform yourself about where to find or harvest trees or ore veins. You just kept happily sitting at your cotton farm and farmed your cotton and let the guild deal with everything else.
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First benefit for the gatherer: you wont need to use up your own labor points to make the fabric for your ship
First benefit for the crafter: you can skill while making fabric for your guildmates, for the small price of a few coppers for the mail transaction fee
Second Benefit for the gatherer: you don't need to inform yourself of where or how to get certain materials that are not in your profession
Second benefit for the crafter: you don't have to bother setting up farms, or running around finding materials on your own
Benefit for the guild is obvious, we keep donations and a share from trading so we can enable others to also fulfill their needs.
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Obviously we might have more of one material than of another. In that case I might callout to gatherers and tell them we need more of material X and have too much of material Y please consider this...
I will also try to encourage people who don't care what they gather to take up positions that we might need more than those we don't need. In the end its their choice but yeah, i will try to encourage them. For example we have a leatherer who is currently using his own farms. I talked to one of our gatherers and asked if he doesn't want to turn one of his 3 gardens (he made 3 chars with 1 farm each) into an animal farm for our leatherer. I had our leatherer get in contact with him and maybe that gatherer decides to setup animals in one farm. i can't directly influence what people want to produce, but I can offer them some insight to what we might need and just hope enough take the hints and we have a well rounded production overall.
In the end if things work out fine, I'm sure we can not only stockpile most items to some degree, but also sell off surplus and that way balance our overall ressources out more. We might be able to offer a sort of wage for crafters, who only craft for others and don't keep materials for themselves, we might offer gatherers a wage or some price for their materials they don't need or help them with other things they might want. We will not be able to pay market prices for guild members materials of course to stay competitive, but you won't have to care about selling it yourself and will on the other hand get pretty good deals if you need other materials from the guild too.
But all of that needs a lot of time and work to do, first we need to see that we have all positions filled and enough gatherers, we need to get more members to 50 so we can offer our people safe traderuns, we need to get crafters to higher proficiency so we can build vehicles and all the nice things, we also need to set up fields properly.
Also don't forget its alpha, many of our achievements we try to gain for now are testing. We are preparing so we can start fast and without issues once release hits and have things already organized at that point.
Sorry for the long post, I hope that explains some of my ideas I have so far
