Best Of

I don't think forced guild participation is a good idea at all. Yes it's unfortunate that guild populations are very feast or famine, and yes, it's unfortunate that there's a pool of people that opt out of guilds entirely, but tying mechanical benefits behind guilds so that players feel forced into a guild for those benefits wouldn't necessarily create more guild engagement, it'll just mean that the apathetic people are apethetic but with overhead now.

Please just remove Brewmeister at this point rather than gutting Cooking. Keep the drinks for cooks, Brewmeister is already a lot of combat utility under the shoddy disguise of being a bonafide tradeskill. Hate the idea of losing out on proficiency by being a flexer, I invested credits so I wouldn't need to rely on other people because of the problem created by limited tradeskills in the first place - feels like a slap in the face on that note. Also how are comms from a designer's perspective going to work when it scales on proficiency?

In all honesty, I think the best way to handle this is a staggered rollout. There are a whole lot of moving parts in this thing, and I think it was made pretty clear in the conversation on Discord that it wasn't planned to all be dropped at once. 

What I'd like to see, and what would probably be more palatable for everyone, would be to release things like the new gathering skills, the shop changes, removing mechanical benefits from tradeskills, and the gold drop changes first and follow the impact those have on the economy. 

If, after all that, we see things moving in the right direction, but not enough, it might be time to look at limiting everyone's trades (still disagreeing, but just for the sake of argument). But if none of that moves the needle at all, then I don't think taking an axe to everyone's trades is going to help and you'll just be taking things away from everyone without adding any benefit.  

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On a side note, I think one of the big reasons this is really hard for me to accept is that designing/crafting has always felt like one of the most accessible outlets for people who are more interested in RP and set dressing and creating instead of endgame, pvp, combat, etc. Now it feels like the RP folks are getting a bite taken out of their half of the pie in order to work on mechanical stuff, but we aren't getting anything RP-related in return. 

Adding an idea discussed on Discord in relation to an artifact for proficiency: I'd be willing to even buy 1 per trade. Buy artifact, let's call it a seal, then SEAL ASSIGN TAILORING. Now when I flex out of tailoring, I won't lose it. I'd be willing to buy multiples so I can pick and choose what trades I don't lose proficiency in, instead of a blanket one like aethercraft has. This would allow those of us that have favoured trades to flex out of them without losing all the hard work to build that proficiency and into a trade we don't use as often.

Uilani said:

Here is an alternative proposal to the "losing all proficiency if you switch" issue. 

Have only 2 skills active at a time (as before) but also have the ability to lock the proficiency of 2 skills. In this scenario, you don't lose proficiency in these 2 skills even if you switch out of them back and forth. You cannot gain proficiency in the skill you switch to as one of your actives, not unless you choose to abandon proficiency of the skill you have it locked to at the moment.

That way you could still switch out and make the things you need, but not lose your proficiency to do so. The things you made in the skills you have 0% proficiency in would still be worse than if someone specialising made them, of course, and if possible it would be a good idea to seek out a specialist to help you with the more difficult/advanced things you wished to make. You would not be forced to rely on that though. 

Uilani said:

Here is an alternative proposal to the "losing all proficiency if you switch" issue. 

Have only 2 skills active at a time (as before) but also have the ability to lock the proficiency of 2 skills. In this scenario, you don't lose proficiency in these 2 skills even if you switch out of them back and forth. You cannot gain proficiency in the skill you switch to as one of your actives, not unless you choose to abandon proficiency of the skill you have it locked to at the moment.

That way you could still switch out and make the things you need, but not lose your proficiency to do so. The things you made in the skills you have 0% proficiency in would still be worse than if someone specialising made them, of course, and if possible it would be a good idea to seek out a specialist to help you with the more difficult/advanced things you wished to make. You would not be forced to rely on that though. 

As Kailanna kinda noted in response to this. 

It seems potentially more user friendly if we have two "professional"/"proficiency"/whatever slots and whatever is in those can gain proficiency.

Then with just free access to all other trades without needing to switch. My suggestion here is having a variation of AB so that AB can show you your professional trades while CRAFTS or something shows all other trades (mostly cause my ab is so long right now)

It would arguably obviate the need for catalogues cause everyone could just make everything so they'd be able to check out all design sketches. And TRADEWHO could work off your professional trades.

So, like, I'm not exactly a huge fan of the proficiencies concept either.

But.

I feel like people are knee-jerking over it and perhaps considering parts of the proposal in a vacuum.

Proficiency isn't necessarily going to stop you from swapping around trades as you like - it's just going to make it more expensive to do so (generally via commodity costs, but in the case of herbs it would be time to invest in harvesting, etc).

If you have to drop and swap, it's totally doable. But if you really care about making as much money/profit as possible, it is going to give you pause for thought. Those willing to make the sacrifice and stick to their trades of choice only will harvest the benefit of competitive edge in producing profit, but people who just want to casually make their own stuff aren't stopped from doing that. They just won't make as much bank with a shop, and someone who wants to really roleplay merchant/shopkeeper will be inclined to look for those who are most proficient and build a proper network.

We don't know how commodity costs or whatever will scale, so it's hard to judge whether or not the difference will be too punishing. We have room to spitball thoughts over that if we care to.

It should also be pointed out that removing aethertrading is part of this proposal, and that would free up a lot of stress on the current rate of commodity consumption. If that goes through, then the biggest commodity sink per year will easily be research upkeep unless commodity costs scaling to proficiency is truly dramatic.

People really only care about aethertrading as a means for obtaining goop, from what I've seen. No one appears to actually be attached to the refinement process and the mechanics behind it - just the end reward of goop or aethergoodies you don't want to melt down. If we come up with some other means of getting those, like a secondary daily system, then that just sorts itself out, yeah?

Then agriculture and prospecting gets added on top of that, so hey, might have some potential.

I think there's also one unexplored avenue here - the potential for wanting tradespeople with low proficiency versus high proficiency.

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Let's consider jewelery, for example. Right now jewelers don't really make much money by actually making and selling jewelery - they get it from gemcutting (this might be liable to change if enchantment motes are added and people can slap them on whatever finished jewelery pieces they like, but that's another discussion entirely). High proficiency jewelers might get more than 3+ gems per gemcut even without the hammer (hammer itself might need to be changed tbh, it's too OP) while the lowest proficiency only ever gets one variant of cut gem per gemcut. HOWEVER, they have a much, much higher chance to roll for sulfur or salt. Now, if aethertrading goes the way of the dodo this might seem useless, but there's still a chance to implement some other item or object that can utilise them - at this point, a high proficiency jeweler who really wants more salt and sulfur might be inclined to seek out a low proficiency jeweler to trade with, rather than dropping their proficiency to do it themselves. Good? Bad? I'm unsure, but as a flight of fancy it seems like it could be potentially interesting.

Could apply similar features to obtaining tawdry and lower grades of bad prestige of clothing in tailoring (though, again, if mob drops disappear entirely then no one might want to beg, then who cares about tawdry clothing?)

Perhaps another alternative is we might look to ship proficiency - while I don't like ship proficiency either, it has a more interesting sliding scale sort of mechanic, wherein you can globally amass X% of proficiency across chair, turret, and grid, but getting too high across all three might ultimately result in decay in one. That said, ship proficiency also has an artifact to negate that penalty entirely, so I am very sympathetic to those who cynically wonder how long it would take before we end up with an artifact that ignores trade proficiency.

I feel like there are ways to do this right, but also lots of ways to do this wrong, and the vague nature of the proposal in its current condition makes it easy to run away with every last potential negative endpoint.

Is there really no way to bend this to make it work? I feel like there might.

Just to toss in my two cents here as well, these changes seem not only unpleasant for crafters and designers, but really convoluted as well. I had to read the initial post several times just to understand what was going on, and I'm still pretty sure I'm still missing a point or two. 

Speaking just for myself, creating designs and sets of designs, and being able to craft all those designs myself is really important. I worked hard to be able to have four active trades and others that I can switch between as needed, and it seems like a slap in the face to have all that taken away, refunds or not. Additionally, a very high percentage of those designs are all in family restricted cartels, so this would mean I would either lose access to most of them, or have to invite other crafters to private cartels every time I wanted a new bed. 

As far as proficiency goes, I really hate the idea that (even after I decide which of my beloved trades I have to give up on) I'm going to lose access to a large majority of my good designs, all of which tend to require rare or hard to get materials until I spend 20 straight days getting myself back to max through a system that's both grindy and time-gated.

I think the proficiency system does have some merit (and I love the concept of families getting bonuses for literally anything at this point), but it should be something that begins once you trans the skill. After that point, sure, toss in some grinding and time-gates and make it a sort of 'crafting endgame' where the very best crafters make longer lasting items with higher prestige or any number of neat bonus effects (maybe you can craft things with extra enhancement slots, or add ambients, or maybe you get access to rare and previously unknown materials). What it shouldn't be is something that takes us way below what we're currently capable of doing just because we're not grinding every day.

And, just to prove I'm not entirely negative, I do like the removal of restrictions, the updates to shops and what you can sell, and the additional tradeskills (even though Kailanna would never stoop to mining or working a field.)