Skills, Crafts, and the Trade Meta

[DMKW]

@tony Liberatto Great points there.   Everyone should be able to obtain and ride the best possible horse in the game but you shouldn't just be able to buy it from a merchant.  It should take work.  Your point about needing a special item from a tree that grows rarely and in one area is important.  This is where Minecraft falls short and games like Terraria excel.  Terraria is a collectors paradise.  Many of its items could only be found in chests or in rare drops from certain monsters in certain biomes and even at certain depths.   And then you could combine these powerful and very useful items into one ultra epic item to save on inventory space, but only if you managed to find all the peices required.  The Cellphone is a great example of this

stopwatch + dps meter + metal detector = Goblin Tech 3000

Goblin Tech + Fish Finder + GPS + R.E.K. 3000 = PDA

PDA + Magic Mirror = Cellphone 

All this tech individually takes ages to find in chests or on special rare spawning merchants but when you combined into the Cellphone you have access to information on how many oh what monster you've killed, what monsters are in the area, when a rare monster is around(REK), players current depth, latitude and time(GPS), DPS, movement speed, rare ores nearby(Goblin Tech), weather and moon phase(Fish finder) and with the Magic Mirror it teleports you back to your spawn point.   Now thats an artifact worth a month of work.

@Stroam Yeah you are absolutely right, my ideas are mainly intended for a single player experience.  I think the focus for MP is the ability to highly customize your servers and how they play.   Luckily this game is intended to be very modable too so hopefully the "sky is the limit" when it comes to SP and MP.  I perferred TES3: Morrowind as they did actually limit you to what houses and guilds you could join within reason.  What I didn't like is that if you can't join the guild you will miss out on certain items.  Those of us who are compulsive collectors are ok with missing out on quests but don't want to miss out on juicy collectible items.

[tony Liberatto]

Even though I love exploring I extremely dislike the idea of having to find one or several special items in dungeons. In the end, it is just pure chance and luck. I prefer hard work and dedication to learn a skill.

When I talked about different trees, I was referring to the idea of having trees only grow on certain latitudes and maybe other conditions, as Humidity, type of soil, proximity to the ocean.

The idea is that it would encourage exploration and trade.

Suppose as in real life you can make a bow with many different kinds of wood, but some are superior to others. That in addition to the kind of string and the skill of the bow maker would create a unique item that is many times better than the common bow the even the new player should be able to make.

This kind of reasoning and mechanic should also be easy on the developers, as they can introduce general weapons and tools that all players are able to make with commonly found materials. But if a player wants to go the extra step he/she would need to travel to different parts of the world or trade for the materials.

I never liked the idea of hunting for special artifacts in dungeons and suddenly obtaining the most powerful sword in the game, just because you were lucky.

[Stroam]

[moved to discussion]