[MUD-Dev] trade skill idea

[Jeff Freeman]

This is what I've done:

People use tradeskills to make money.  They used to do this by hammering
out ten billion widgets and dropping them on an NPC merchant for cash.

Now they say "job" to a vendor and he tells them what the wants them to
make.  They stand there making work-noises with this stuff appearing in
their pack, and when they're done the npc gives them gold.  Main advantage
for me was that I was able to make all the tradeskills equal in terms of
"if you spend x hours doing this, you will make y amount of gold" - given
the same skill level anyway.  Never could get it balanced before -
tailoring was more profitable than smithing but lumberjacking was more
profitable than that but mining actually resulted in losing money, etc.
Now it's 100% balanced, because the "job" script is the exact same script
for all tradeskills.  Only the graphic changes.

And it is mind-numbingly boring to do, but the players either a) want
something mind numbingly boring to do (so they can chat with each other
while they do it) or b) they want free money, which I don't really want to
give them in the first place.

Anything they craft with their tradeskill (as opposed to using the "gimme
gold" feature), can't be sold to npc merchants.  So when they make a
widget, it's because a real live player somewhere actually wants a widget.

It's worked out pretty well.  When they make things, they are making things
that people actually want, and they like that.  It can even get fairly
complicated, in terms of making something, upgrading it, coloring it,
enchanting it, etc.  But that's always something someone else wants to buy
from them, or something they're making because they intend to use it
themselves.

Yet there's still the repetitive boring gold-manufacturing aspect (and it's
"balanced" no less) for the people that prefer to do that.  Some people
prefer to do the tedious boring thing, and some folk NEVER do it, and other
folk just do it when they are standing around chatting, waiting for a
friend to login, etc.

--
  http://home.swbell.net/skeptack/




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