Artisan Mastery Cap

Shenan

Alright, I was recently scrolling through the Ashes Wiki, and I came across this interesting tidbit on the "Artisan mastery" page:

Based on testing, it may be decided to limit profession mastery certificates to a capped value.

For me, at least, here's a list of the general pros and cons:

Pros:

• A cap prevents the economy from getting oversaturated with all the goods that a master artisan can produce. Presumably, a master artisan can make the same good as a beginner in either less time or for less cost, and this would prevent that.
• It ensures that master artisans remain a rare resource: their help seems needed for some amount of endgame content, but if every other person in the raid group is a master of something, it diminishes their value.
• Furthermore, the cap keeps the value of master-artisan goods stable; if there's plenty of master artisans, the goods that only they can produce are worth less.
• Mastery is more special instead of something that every player who's been on for three months has.

Cons:

• This would presumably restrict being a master artisan to earlier players, which is one of the largest cons for me. A cap implies that the number of masteries would run out, so if you come in three months late and they've all been snapped up, there's no way to become a master artisan.
• If, again, the artisan masteries are all getting taken by the earlier players, what happens if those earlier players get bored and stop playing? Or what if they don't stop, they just play less, and/or when they do play, they're not making artisan goods, they're clearing dungeons and other stuff they now want to do?
• Either these can or can't be traded/sold/etc.: if they can, players at launch have a great motivation to get masteries on their alts, wait for the masteries to run out and sell them for insanely high prices; if they can't, there's no way to get masteries to newer players.
• Mastery-restricted quests, items, and bargains can only be achieved by a small percentage of very lucky, very early people; the titles are less of a concern because there are other number-capped titles, but these other three seem worrying to me.
• Would artisan professions, ex. Mining, Smelting, Blacksmithing, etc. also require a second profession mastery certificate to achieve mastery in them?
• What happens if there's not enough of a certain artisan path/profession who have mastery in it? For example, let's say there are 300 certificates, but only 25 of them are in Gathering, 25 in Processing, and 250 in Crafting, making it that much harder to get master gatherables and processed goods. Additionally, even if there's 100 in each branch, there could be no master scribes, carpenters, etc., and therefore, no way to get master-crafted goods from those professions.

Personally, I'm leaning towards no cap, but a long and difficult process so that they're not exactly common, but I'm wondering what other people think. Responses, agreement, and/or solutions to the points above would be appreciated because this is something that concerns me.

mcstackerson

I'd imagine if there was a cap that players wouldn't permanently keep their mastery certs and there would be some way they could transfer to others. I could see this being a timed thing as well as being tied to nodes. Looking at scientific node blog, it looks like you can only get them from a scientific metro. If that metro gets destroyed, i'd imagine that people who got there certs from that metro would lose them(or have them timeout), creating an opportunity for another scientific node to become a metro and new certs distributed.

I would be interested in seeing how this would interact with gathering and processing professions if at all. I could see both sides and not sure how people play those roles. If there really are people completely dedicated to havesting then i could see a reason for it.

I'd at least like to try it this way. Surface level, this seems like a great thing for people who actually care about crafting to work for. I could also see this being one of those things that would further encourage people to trade instead of stubbornly trying to be self-sufficient. I know I'm one of those people who stock piles resource in games with the thought that i'll someday need it for crafting. For me, this further pushes me to participate in the economy and sell what i collect as i probably will never be this dedicated of a crafter.

I think it's important to remember that we don't know 100% what mastery means as well as what a crafter can do without it so i'd be careful assuming what the lack of it locks people out of.

Dygz

Yeah. I would think that would be tied to citizenship in a Metropolis, so... there would be incentive to siege a Metro in order to open up opportunities for new Masters.