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Caravan system does not work well with crafting
neuroguy
Member, Alpha Two
For the caravan system to be a major part of the gathering-processing-crafting pipeline, the crafting system would need to be really weird and annoying. The amount of resources that a (land) caravan is meant to move is ~10x the mule carry capacity (or ~100x the player carrying capacity). This means that players need to have incentive to move volumes of resources that is 10-100x what they can maximally gather on their own in 1 gathering session. This has terrible implications for crafting and would be best implemented with a different game mechanic in mind. But first, how would the caravan system be implemented with gathering in the first place and why is it bad?
Well, there are a few variables that make a difference where your resources are located. For instance, depending on the node (it's level and buildings) different crafting stations may be available. You may need to move resources to properly craft/process them. However, the other place where crafting/processing can be done is your freehold where caravans cannot travel to/from... This means you have to transport goods to/from your freehold without caravans. Not only that, but the local biome-specific resources you gather (one of the most likely candidates for caravan transport) may be spread across multiple nodes' local storage in that biome which need to be amalgamated in 1 node for optimal caravan use. This amalgamation will likely be done using your mule and not the relatively expensive caravan. But your mule cannot be too good at its job or it would invalidate the caravan so mule efficiency is capped by caravan efficiency.
You may instead find a way to fully craft items without having to move your resources (if you have a nearby freehold or the node has the right crafting stations). In such a scenario, you will not longer need caravans as finished crafting products are not dropped on death (by non-corrupted players). This may push Intrepid to make the transportation of fully crafted goods in player inventory restricted, adding global inconvenience for the sake of the caravan system.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, we need to start asking questions about the volume of resources required to craft items and how quickly we expect item decay to require us to replace our items. There needs to be enough demand that many players are incentivized to gather for ~100 to ~10 sessions if they are dedicated gatherers (minimum), to make sensible use of the caravan system. To create this demand, I can think of 2 bad options. First, gathering carrying capacity needs to be small such that gathering sessions are either short or low yield. Second, combination of crafting recipes & repairs must require a very large volume of resources. Now these resources may not be necessarily for equipable items and may instead be used for creating ships and node projects/buildings. However, if this is the case, then the immediate local area would be the best place to gather for this purpose (and not risk the caravan loss), or there needs to be sufficient incentive that more distant resources be used.
In summary, to push the current vision of caravan use...
I think in order to make caravans more widely used, they need to be partially de-coupled from gatherable resources and crafting. Specifically, I think doubling down on the use of the caravan system for hunting certificate sale is the way to go. If the primary use of caravans was to move local hunting certificates/resources to distant nodes for guaranteed profit, it would engage more players (non-crafters) and justify their use much more frequently. I think nodes should have ~weekly rotating resource/hunting certificate requests to support node projects and provide amenities for node happiness. These requests would have large bonuses applied to them based on (1) the trade status with the origin node of the caravan, (2) the distance between the origin and destination nodes, and (3) the amount of that resource already provided. Nodes requests are paid for by that node's taxes if they are delivered through caravans (proper due process) while bonuses should be generated by the game. Players will then have a baseline economic value of their resources, even if they are not high quality resources, and a resource sink that does not constrain the crafting process. This will dynamically change supply/demand of even common resources weekly and tie together multiple game systems with the caravan system producing high profit (warranted by the high risk). In summary, shifting the focus on caravans from gathered resources for crafting to hunting certificates and gathered resources for profit will free up design space in crafting and create large incentives to engage with the caravan system for everyone.
Well, there are a few variables that make a difference where your resources are located. For instance, depending on the node (it's level and buildings) different crafting stations may be available. You may need to move resources to properly craft/process them. However, the other place where crafting/processing can be done is your freehold where caravans cannot travel to/from... This means you have to transport goods to/from your freehold without caravans. Not only that, but the local biome-specific resources you gather (one of the most likely candidates for caravan transport) may be spread across multiple nodes' local storage in that biome which need to be amalgamated in 1 node for optimal caravan use. This amalgamation will likely be done using your mule and not the relatively expensive caravan. But your mule cannot be too good at its job or it would invalidate the caravan so mule efficiency is capped by caravan efficiency.
You may instead find a way to fully craft items without having to move your resources (if you have a nearby freehold or the node has the right crafting stations). In such a scenario, you will not longer need caravans as finished crafting products are not dropped on death (by non-corrupted players). This may push Intrepid to make the transportation of fully crafted goods in player inventory restricted, adding global inconvenience for the sake of the caravan system.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, we need to start asking questions about the volume of resources required to craft items and how quickly we expect item decay to require us to replace our items. There needs to be enough demand that many players are incentivized to gather for ~100 to ~10 sessions if they are dedicated gatherers (minimum), to make sensible use of the caravan system. To create this demand, I can think of 2 bad options. First, gathering carrying capacity needs to be small such that gathering sessions are either short or low yield. Second, combination of crafting recipes & repairs must require a very large volume of resources. Now these resources may not be necessarily for equipable items and may instead be used for creating ships and node projects/buildings. However, if this is the case, then the immediate local area would be the best place to gather for this purpose (and not risk the caravan loss), or there needs to be sufficient incentive that more distant resources be used.
In summary, to push the current vision of caravan use...
- players need to make effort to always deliver their gathered goods to the same node (forcing travel back to the same node's storage and/or gathering around the same node)
- mule effectiveness is capped by caravan effectiveness (capacity, speed, loss upon death)
- crafting/processing needs to be prohibitive in its spatial location
- transportation of fully crafted goods needs to be artificially made difficult (weight limits etc) or will always be the best strategy
- large resource sinks need to be available in game
- requires high crafting engagement (if some nodes don't have many crafters/gatherers, there is little reason to see caravans there).
I think in order to make caravans more widely used, they need to be partially de-coupled from gatherable resources and crafting. Specifically, I think doubling down on the use of the caravan system for hunting certificate sale is the way to go. If the primary use of caravans was to move local hunting certificates/resources to distant nodes for guaranteed profit, it would engage more players (non-crafters) and justify their use much more frequently. I think nodes should have ~weekly rotating resource/hunting certificate requests to support node projects and provide amenities for node happiness. These requests would have large bonuses applied to them based on (1) the trade status with the origin node of the caravan, (2) the distance between the origin and destination nodes, and (3) the amount of that resource already provided. Nodes requests are paid for by that node's taxes if they are delivered through caravans (proper due process) while bonuses should be generated by the game. Players will then have a baseline economic value of their resources, even if they are not high quality resources, and a resource sink that does not constrain the crafting process. This will dynamically change supply/demand of even common resources weekly and tie together multiple game systems with the caravan system producing high profit (warranted by the high risk). In summary, shifting the focus on caravans from gathered resources for crafting to hunting certificates and gathered resources for profit will free up design space in crafting and create large incentives to engage with the caravan system for everyone.
6
Comments
Why are you assuming that the crafter is the one moving the goods? The gatherers and processors will be the ones burdened with that responsibility if they want top dollar for their wares.
As the 'Econ player' this has been one of my most massive concerns and red flags for this game from day one.
I don't want another BDO. I'm definitely not doing that again.
But either I can't carry 99 Iron Ingots in my inventory, or I have a good reason to travel somewhere with 9,900 Iron Ingots because... someone somewhere needs that level of supply.
Please no.
(To be clear the reason why I didn't think of this as a big deal is because I come from a game where larger items stack to 12 for this reason, Economy works with 12-stacks, I think it can work with 20 too)
I would like to like your suggestion, but I"m very concerned about the large currency 'source' that would be involved in making it viable. I don't see "node requests" being player-originated for certificates, for the obvious reason that they're not valuable to players except artificially (the gold source problem again), but can sorta see how a node might occasionally put out requests for resources that would be required for a large number of their crafters to support some upgrade process.
I definitely also don't want another BDO with absurd material counts, crafting 50 bars of iron into one pot, or making 500 of a given food item in one session.
I mean, it doesn't change my arguments really but I am curious what the norm will be (edit: I was not saying the crafter is the one moving the goods, I meant someone involved in the crafting system which could be gatherer, processor or crafter). I think because of the inherent risk in moving resources, whoever is willing to take it will make much more profit if successful. If the gatherer ships, they will sell for more at the destination, if the processor ships, they will pay less at the original node. I think independent of who ships the goods, the main dilemma and why I think caravans and crafting should not be married together as systems is as @Azherae says: These are constraints on crafting that do not have to be there to making the caravan system relevant and exciting for the game.
It all depends on how frequent IS wants players to engage with the caravan system, but independent of the frequency, there still needs to be a reason (demand) to move that much resources.
The currency source needs to be balanced for sure, but keep in mind that in what I propose, the node's requests are player tax money (so that part is not a source) and the bonuses are contingent on the game state. The trade status of the node is the most static one but the distance the caravan travels increases the risk of losing the caravan, in which a % of the goods are simply lost, and I would propose that recovered goods would not be able to be sold to any node at the same price as 'on a caravan' goods would (there is less risk in attacking a caravan that running one so it seems fair). And there would be diminishing returns for the last bonus for delivering goods as more of the node's quota/request is met. All in all, it will absolutely still act as a gold source, but it needs to in order to have a place in the game not related to crafting demands.
In regard to the "node requests sponsored by players", either we are spending their tax money without them getting anything out of it, or Mayors need a reason to ask for Caravan scale deliveries of materials, which brings us... perhaps half-way back to Azherae's point. Someone needs to WANT 9900 iron, even as a node effort. I don't doubt that's possible, but you then get into the fact that that whole multi-player effort wherein a node's players will somehow USE that 9900 iron they requested (presumably to build up the node) only managed to spawn a single caravan. I don't feel like that's necessarily solving the problem on a scale where it remains a major gameplay element, even if it does get us up to "occasional cool thing some guild does once or twice, whenever some node's citizens organize a whole big upgrade push". 50 crafters using 200 iron each definitely gets you that one caravan-full of 9,900. I don't think it will be rare specifically, but it might still not be as common as one would hope.
I will say that having it tend to be focused on being a big event for a node upgrade push, and then that drawing in opposing factions from rival nodes could make for some pretty cool gameplay though.
I'm not sure I quite follow. In terms of the node requests, as the mayor and citizens vote/decide on what projects to build up, the request for certain resources will be placed, for example 9900 wood and 9900 metal ingots. But those would not be accessible to use outside of that project, similar to how mayors cannot use the money from taxes. In terms of amenities, they will be randomly selected for that week, for example 9900 'leather' or even finished goods like 9900 candles or something. This makes the node projects item/resource sinks and a gold source without interfering with player crafting (it only changes supply/demand). And whatever the volume of resources required should be able to far exceed what a single caravan can carry. This way, a high level node (city or metro) can act as a large sink and source for players from all over the world who try to make a profit and those caravans prey for those who want to make a quick buck.
The important part is that even with all of that, you could still have a plat armor cost only 5 metal ingots to craft without invalidating caravans. Crafting does not have to be constrained by caravan stats if caravans have another primary role to play in the game. Also, this would make higher quality ores very valuable for crafting without removing demand for low quality ores.
Sorry if I didn't understand your argument or didn't address it.
I see no issues with your suggestion. It will probably do what's intended.
If you want multiple caravans required, I start to wonder how the supply side of this will keep up, but that's not a mark against the concept.
The caravan system as I understand it is simply to move goods around in bulk. That's it. The caravan isn't directly a crafting related system, but rather a logistics system. Caravans can be used by a crafter, but most likely the main usage will be by the people who need to transport lots of things at once: Mayors (node stuff), guilds (relocating guild inventories) and merchants (trying to profit on margins).
I suppose there's no reason a big enough crafter won't eventually craft in such volume that they need to use caravans, but at that point they are already indistinguishable from a merchant. I imagine the day to day small to medium size crafter will mule their stuff around back to their home node or freehold for crafting from a nearby node/auction house/merchant player/buying from local gatherers/trade deals with other players.
In any case, I don't think there were any plans on forcing crafters to use caravans to begin with. So far it looks like the caravans are just for logistics in general, and are beneficial in the way that they can be insured and seem to be faster than the alternatives. If crafters decide to use a caravan is up to what is profitable for them in the moment.
As long as the crafting amounts stay in the realm of 'Not BDO' I admittedly don't care as much if the Caravan system doesn't draw much.
I just definitely don't want 'a supply and demand curve based around getting people to use Caravans' that then leads to such heavy crafting.
The Crafting I saw in Alpha-1, which (though subject to change like everything else) seemed to use reasonable amounts of materials for what it was, is fine with me, if 'Caravans are decoupled from that', that's acceptable to me.
As you say, caravans are used for people who want to move lots of things, but for what purpose? Players also will only engage with a system if there are no better alternatives available. For example, why would anyone use a caravan to transport fully crafted goods which do not drop on death normally? Well, it would only make sense to do so if there are carrying limits on said fully crafted items.
You gave some examples of why caravans may be used: 1. mayors (node stuff), 2. guilds relocation inventory and 3. merchants trying to profit on margins.
1. Node stuff is very vague, where does the mayor get these resources being sent? And for what purpose are they being sent out? I'm going to assume you refer to the wiki which mentions 'mayoral caravans' but reading the little that is written on it suggests that either the resources will be created by the game ('obtain resources') or they will be for 'establishing trade routes' which suggests no actual players may need to risk their own stuff.
2. Guild relocation is valid but likely an infrequent process. Also, as mentioned in the OP, there is no caravan stop at guild halls, so resources need to be moved to/from nodes via mules anyways
3. This needs to be worth the payout. If you have a buyer somewhere, you will likely want to sell your resources without risking transporting them (the buyer can move them). And if you are the buyer, you would rather fully craft your items so you don't have to risk losing anything in a caravan. Again, the rationale for their use by players is weak (unless a large number of 'quest generated' caravans exist, which is much less interesting of a mechanic).
For crafters to need resources from caravans (each with ~100x the player carrying limit) there, as always, needs to be.a reason. There is either a very high demand for that many items (fast item decay), item recipes are very expensive, or leveling up crafting requires a very high number of items to be crafted.
I am much less worried about crafters being 'forced' to use caravans and much more concerned that the caravan system will create constraints around which crafting will be designed to promote the use of caravans. I hope that all made sense.
Wouldn’t resources for node buildings be one of those reasons for 1000 iron? Maybe you can sell them to node npcs to cash out.
Rather, Caravans are for transporting the reources needed to progress Nodes to the next Stage or construct buildings and to prepare Siege defenses.
If you don't want to progress or defend your Node, you probabaly don't need to care about Caravans.
We'll have to see whether Artisan quests encourage Artisans to use Caravans.
And, yes, most things related to resources and Crafting are vague because the devs have not shared those details. By that logic, I guess no one will be using augments, either.
Worrying about designs just because they haven't been explained yet seems rather useless.
Let them show their initial design, then point out problems, rather than imagining up fictional problems based on barely any information
im like a pvp/merchant type player when it comes to games :P
L2 had very limited amounts of items required for crafting, but those items required several stages of lower tier items to be crafted, so in the end you needed hundreds of tier 1 mats to craft a high tier piece of gear (and you needed 4-5 pieces). With 16 gear slots per person, I'd assume you'll need literal thousands of tier 1-2 mats to craft gear for your raid/guild.
I personally see that as a nice system. Especially in the context of gatherers using mules to carry more mats from their gathering sessions, and that being seen as a piñata for potential corrupted players. And imo mules have to give the same amount of corruption as a player, so you'd have to get x2 the amount of corruption in order to loot the piñata.
Add some difficulties and rarity for acquisition of high tier mats and you have yourself a long gear treadmill that requires a group effort to run and needs caravan runs for the highest tiers of gear because it requires a ton of low tier mats, which would most likely have to be sourced from different places.
Well, at least that's how I see it going down, until they show us their planned design.
But we have a lot of recent detailed info on the caravan system. Just because we do not have all of the final details does not mean we don't have enough information to discuss implementation direction. Plus, I'm not saying no one will use caravans, I am more discussing their use within 1 context (crafting). I have made no arguments around quest-driven caravans for example, precisely because we have too little information. All I am saying here, to summarize in one sentence, is I hope they do not balance crafting around caravans. My arguments around why feel sound. Feel free to point out any errors in my logic or discuss 'if X then Y' regarding crafting and caravans, but I get bored of 'not enough information'... we won't have 'enough' information until the game is out.
I didn't play L2 but that sounds interesting. I do have a few questions, maybe you can clarify how L2 did things. Also I'm curious, were there any resources that HAD to be crafted up and could not be gathered naturally? I think that this system would still be subject to a few of the problems I stated in the OP. For example, it would still be most efficient to have a processor/crafter 'craft up' low tier resources before shipment for 1. having more space on the caravan (more bang for your buck) and 2. perhaps minimizing the total resources to carry enough to carry with a mule/player (with an entourage) instead of a giant moving PvP zone. For the second point to be resolved, you would NEED to prevent 'down crafting' resources or otherwise you would always 'craft up' for transit and 'craft down' at the destination if possible.
The other unresolved issue that I brought up in the OP is having to amalgamate resources from multiple places. If you do require a lot of low tier resources which can't be up crafted for whatever reason, it still is a logistic nightmare to have them split up in a ton of different nodes' local storage. Let's say you need 9000 low tier ore so you buy 900 from 10 different sellers (because no poor sap should be expected to gather 9000 anything into a single node's storage). Does that mean you need 10 caravans? It was not quite clear in the livestream if you can chain caravan stops without having to go through the same process in each one (not that this would always be the most efficient thing, but still). If they implement 1. the ability to pick up as you go from nodes from the same caravan launch and 2. the ability to pick up/drop off resources from freeholds/guild halls on your path, that would help resolve some of the issues I foresee.
"Does killing the mule of a non-combatant incur corruption?" is a great question for the livestreams haha. I know I'll post it for the next one ;D.
I see a ton of fun in that, a ton of pvp and a ton of socializing, because it'd be almost impossible to do all of that alone in any reasonable amount of time. And that was the exact question I asked in this last stream
I'm against your argument and don't think we should cut out a whole use for caravans, especially before we played the system and understand it.
We don't fully understand when and how this will impact crafting.
We don't know at what stage of crafting you will become more reliant on resources that aren't local to your area. I'd think that most low tier resources will be common all around the world and it's only the higher tier resources that are regionalized and need to be moved around.
We also don't know how much crafters themselves would need to do the moving. If there are other people who enjoy the system and run the goods around for your, then you wont have to use it. With how much caravans carry, It seems plausible that you could load one up with enough goods to supply multiple nodes.
To me, it isn't as much we don't have enough info as it's we don't know how it plays and i don't think we should start cutting out uses of a system prior to playing it.
Which will be cheaper?
- ( gather ~100 inventories (assuming high demand) + have sufficient crates for all gatherables + hire a personal guard for the caravan + insurance + (cost of a decent caravan / lifetime of a caravan) for 1 leg of a caravan trip) ) * number of legs between source and destination * (1 - chance of having the caravan pillaged)
- post 100 jobs for people on mounts to deliver the goods to your node guaranteed
*sips tea*I'm also interested in:
Alpha 2 gonna be juuiiiicy
Please explain what 'use of a system' you perceive would be getting cut out, here.
Personal caravans for the most part, but its not my thread and im willing to wait and see till A2.
I believe that neuroguy's point is that it SEEMS at the moment to be a CHOICE between 'meaningful personal caravans' and 'meaningful crafting'. Or, in my case, I can see 'a choice between meaningful economy from drops' and 'meaningful personal caravans'.
So IF we were forced to make such a choice, the preference would be 'Crafting' not 'Caravans'.
But again, this is all pretty much irrelevant. Don't make gatherables/processed goods stack to 99. Solved.
Caravans are not limited to carrying just one player's inventory.
My problem with this is, that either you make the inventory so small, that personal caravans will be a common thing, but takes away from player enjoyment through added inconvenience or you make the inventory large and see personal caravans rarely used to to the sheer quantity of items needed to fill them up and make them worthwhile.
For example an iron node that got depleted does not respawn on the same position but elsewhere on the world map.
That means that your region may completely lack any kind of iron ore nearby.
You had it for the first 2 weeks.
But afterwards a silver mine spawned.
You got your silver but the next iron mine is 5 nodes away.
However you need iron to craft the silver blades.
So what do you do.
Go out there get a mule load and come back?
Or go out there farm the iron mine to depletion (or hire someone to do it) Put all the resources into the next node to the iron mine and form a caravan to move the iron to you?
Question remains why ship the raw iron ore and not a finished product.
It could be that higher tier crafting stations have higher yield.
So a tier 4 node smelter could be better then a tier 3 node one
Even if its the same.
Now you got iron ingots.
To make swords out of them you need a ton of other materials.
These need to either get to the iron or the iron needs to get to the crafter hub where all the other resources are gathered.
So i see caravans constantly driving large bulk of either raw or processed resources to crafter hubs from all over the continent.
Maybe even the sea.
Hell maybe gold ore only appears in the west continent while silver ore only on the east continent.
I can see a ton of ways to force players to use them.
Offcourse they need to be cheaper then hiring 100 players.
That brings me to another question.
It was sayed here that multiple people can put items into the same caravan.
And that the caravan has 100x the space then a player.
Does that mean that 10 people could place 10x their inventory space into the caravan or that 10 people could place 100x they space into the same caravan?
Not sure why you think I did not take that into account. I explicitly talk about it:
"...local biome-specific resources you gather (one of the most likely candidates for caravan transport)..."
I'm not sure why you think this fact nullifies all of my concerns or how it addresses what I discussed here.
So that's my concern here, being forced to engage with caravans through design decisions in crafting and other systems to 'force' its relevance. I'm not trying to be nit-picky here, I understand they need to create a purpose for the caravans but as I've mentioned, I hope they don't do it to the detriment of other systems (i.e. crafting). Obviously we need to see it in action and test to see how it feels, but I just preemptively wrote out some possible conflicts with a vision of crafting that would appeal to me.
With regards to caravan limits, I think there will be significant customization that will adjust carrying capacity, but the very rough numbers we were given which should be taken with a grain of salt is that caravans can carry ~100x a player's carry capacity. This means that the theoretical maximum carrying capacity of a player (which we know will vary by gathering specialization for example; I also don't know if this carry capacity is shared with non-gatherables) x100 is the TOTAL carry capacity of a caravan, which can be shared by multiple players (i.e. 5 players each with ~x20 their carry capacity). Again, this is my understanding of what we are told.
Another approach would be to have items take up more than one slot. Say a catapult boulder takes up 4 slots and stacks to 3. With some adjustments here and there this could balance out the carrying capacity issue for caravans and personal inventories.