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Freeholds and NPC
Balthazaria
Member
I have been formulating over the past few days on the idea of Freehold owners being able to hire / lease / purchase (yes slavery is bad, but for fantasy sake) NPCs to help manage the players freeholds. So my idea is that a player at freehold lvl 1 can obtain 1 x NPC and a lvl 2 free hold can have 2 NPCs etc.. The idea would be that the NPC essentially have a work roster and you assign the NPC to the task you want carried out. Hiring an NPC means paying them a wage (for realism), but also that the NPC has some skills that make them best suited to the given task, such as herding, farming or blacksmithing. Hiring could be done through a building such as workstation or maybe even just walking around the city and asking NPCs if they need a job. Basically adding more realism and connection to the world and building it bit by bit.
I've always found the idea of immersion and realisme inside an MMO to be the main draw factor for me and i feel that AoC could implement this idea in a way that adds to the world and servers history. While i am aware that slavery and the like may be frowned upon, it still has the impact of driving a story forward in a direction. Cities could enact anti-slavery policy or the legalisation of slavery thereby influencing an image of a city and creating tension among slave holders and non-slave holders and slave holder and non-slaveholder cities.
I wonder what AoCs thoughts are on a system such as NPCs within the freeholds?
I've always found the idea of immersion and realisme inside an MMO to be the main draw factor for me and i feel that AoC could implement this idea in a way that adds to the world and servers history. While i am aware that slavery and the like may be frowned upon, it still has the impact of driving a story forward in a direction. Cities could enact anti-slavery policy or the legalisation of slavery thereby influencing an image of a city and creating tension among slave holders and non-slave holders and slave holder and non-slaveholder cities.
I wonder what AoCs thoughts are on a system such as NPCs within the freeholds?
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But AoC is also very pro player interactions, I am not sure if this fits the game, having workers in the freehold and such. I am not sure how much investment Intrepid wants in NPCs.
You will probably have to resort to an alt living in the freehold and do the job for you while you are away
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Hired_NPCs
Enjoy.
Also thanks for bringing it up because I didn't actually pay attention to how exactly this works.
For my 'watchers':
This is a 2022 July Wiki update that uses 2017 LiveStream data as its sources for Farmhands NPCs, so no, you did not miss it and get all invested in something that had a defined easily available datasource.
I hate this type of thing with a passion, so one step closer to my 'refund request'! But I guess this is now a 'feedback' thread, so...
Here is my feedback... (EDIT: Clarifying that this is relative to the Farmhands specifically and their functions)
Thank you as always for the opportunity to be involved in the process, Intrepid, no sarc.
Congrats, this is looking like an even less engaging farming system than BDO. I didn't think I'd see the day.
Not feeling this one bit.
I'm not sure it would be related, but I suppose people could roleplay how they deal with their workers/serfs however they prefer.
As a person who plays two games that already touch on this in multiple ways, I can't say I'd really have a problem with the idea, but I'd definitely prefer if it was more explicit as suggested. Though I don't see how it would work out really?
You'd have to 'define' it and also make it somehow specific in the player perspective towards something, if you were making it some sort of ingame policy?
In Elite you don't actually do anything with Slaves as a player other than trade or 'free' them (they handle this fairly poorly in certain ways, but quite decently in others if you want to either engage with it or avoid it).
In BDO it only comes up because one particular city's 'Hireable Workers' are definitely slaves in the worldbuild, but you don't interact with them any differently than workers that you hire, and I think they can still 'level up out of it', but I'm not sure as I don't have slaves in BDO.
Do you want a 3 page discussion on why this doesn't work?
If this thread gets to 3 pages of actual feedback and tapers off I'll gladly expound.
They do something like this in BDO. You have farms that you can invest in ('buy') which are similar to freeholds, except that you can get a bunch of different ones. You then have workers that you can hire to work on the farms for you. This is how they do all their other forms of crafting, but I can NOT approve.
This is the worst, unimmersive style of production management I've ever seen. The only thing it grants me is that I can never personally do anything related to my farms.
Now, those "farms" are just resource collection points, so player Gardens are probably closer to what you're thinking about. I can plant crops, and then water, prune, maintain them, etc. Except workers can be assigned to handle the maintenance tasks on Gardens too. And... it has the same effect. I never interact with my gardens except to collect the resources at the end. As someone who would like to be a gardener, this makes me miserable.
All in all, having employees of this sort sounds like a good, immersive idea, but it's always either:
1. The only option
2. Optimal, and you have no excuse to NOT do it.
3. Sub-optimal, and you have no excuse TO do it. (In which case the system might as well not exist.)
What this tends to result in is that you can never be a farmer, a (freehold-type) crafter, or anything else your workers are good for. That 'class fantasy' is denied to you, either because you're forced to be economically noncompetitive to do it yourself, or because you literally can't. The only 'crafting class fantasy' you get is "NPC Resource" Allocation Manager.
It's miserable. I didn't think it was going to be that bad when I was starting out in BDO, but the difference in immersion and the availability of crafting/gardening/farming related RP experiences between games that use this system and games that use the better ones, is horrifying. I am eternally salty that I cannot be a Woodworker in BDO.
I can manage Woodworkers, though.
Just no. Please don't, Ashes.
Also, this being a 2017 thing, there's quite a big chance that something might've changed since then, though I do think they mentioned these npcs back in the character creator update, so it's probably at least still on the table.
101% loopholable
And then IS briefly mentioned possible functionality relative to farming and their proposed 'companion' app after I had gotten invested in the project.
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Companion_app
This was what originally sent me to 'I want a refund' territory, especially combined with IS's incredibly neglectful silence on their various cosmetics. When you combine 'npc farmhand' and 'mobile app' it quickly becomes a damnable higher definition mobile game.
When IS announced their updated policy to PVP on freeholds I did a very dramatic eyeroll. I had been calling for a similar system before that announcement, but what they gave me was a bandaid. I don't care if you can kill the npcs and steal from the property at this point, 'control your farm hands via a mobile app or a simple log in to your freehold' was really all I needed to know about this games terrible economic direction.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Yhr9WpjaDzw
In BDO, the equivalent system felt really heavy on micromanagement, and was kind of immersion breaking, because you're basically just moving stuff around in menus and not actually interacting with any of your NPC workers. In practice it was mechanically a lot more like one of those grindy F2P farm management Facebook games than anything I'd associate with MMO gameplay.
I also think it would also make gathering/farming professions feel a lot less meaningful for players (why would you grow crops yourself when you can hire an NPC to do it?), which I strongly dislike.
I don't think this is a good system, and I wouldn't enjoy it in Ashes.
Yeah I'm definitely not 'going to make some snap decision on a rant about this', sticking squarely in the 'feedback' section for this. I expect this one to be divisive, so I really hope it changes.
This is one of those things where I 'get why Korean games do it given their gaming culture', I sort of understand why most JP ones do not default to it, and I don't see the purpose of it for a Western Audience game.
But I don't really claim to understand the demographics, so I guess this thread might give us a slice.
But AoC won't have easy teleportation... this is a reason for having NPCs in the freehold, I think, otherwise you will have to travel all the way back to the freehold
Right but isn't that the point?
Your farmhands can harvest and sell crops.
Can people kill them and take them?
Can your farm be raided at all? Is your level at farming going to be about what you can and can't plant? Or what you can and can't apply to do with your plants? Does your farming level apply through your mobile app?
BDO forces you to harvest and plant yourself, and you can't put a Farm in a safe zone, even in a game where you don't get anything for killing others, I've been killed on a farm more than once (because BDO also has that stupid system where you put on your 'Farming gear' to optimize this and then get oneshotted).
Wouldn't 'having to travel all the way back to the Freehold' be the point?
Maybe smth like "control your npcs to prepare the land for your online actions while you're offline"?
Why Steven opted for regular pvp flagging at freeholds when there's NPCs working on the farm?
How many harvests can you do in a week?
Well, if the farms yeald one crop per week, then you should have no NPCs at all, there is no excuse for that
But in a game with no teleportation, plus daily farm yeald, then maybe its fine having a npc that auto harvests
It is complicated, because we don't have the data, we don't have the numbers, many game design decisions are made but we don't know the reasons behind them
So now they're a pure maintenance requirement? You've effectively added a step to the process just so you could be required to hire NPCs to do it. (Or waste time on it yourself. See my earlier discussion of 'optimal' vs 'suboptimal')
I don't personally see a way to do it that's not either 'arbitrary maintenance buff requirement', or denying players the 'crafting class fantasy' for the portion of the job they cover.
It's an entire Econ design error with either implementation.
Either crops have minimal value because everyone can overproduce them, or it works as you say and the 'random rare drop' happens because of the Farming level, and the Farmhands are useless.
There's obviously also the 'Just get your farming Alt level up and then use the Companion App to gather the mats' which gets you back to minimized value. All MMO economies are based on 'time'. You convert your time doing something you like into a tradeable resource because other people don't have the time to do it themselves or don't enjoy it.
It... it's just bad. There's no way to make the Farmhands work well. BDO gets the closest (I don't actually have many complaints with their farming system) because the workers can only Prune and Weed the plants to ensure they keep growing at optimal speed.
But that would mean they would have to implement the entire 'crops suffer over time if you don't do this' which then...
Well, this is still mostly my 'arrogance'. If they make it work somehow, fine. I just would strongly advise against it. Why take up so much time of your Economy designer for a 'feature' that is more likely to make actual farmers UPSET?
Let me add a simple layer to this discussion. How do you detect the difference between someone logging in with their alt account to do basic farm work given all of the 'automated' factors to production in this case, and someone writing a script to control your alt account for you.
I'm no expert but I'm going to guess the answer given everything I do know is 'you cannot'. And that's why this is a big deal to me, as someone who actually wants to farm and values the possible game play.
It's not just bad econ design, it's literally creating a problem that doesn't NEED to exist relative to boting.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Yhr9WpjaDzw
I definitely understand the points your group have brought up. I'd hope for a good design in the end, but I ultimately don't care so whichever is the best way for the game is what I'd prefer.
And just as with corruption balancing, these kinds of systems influence everyone in the game, but only a fraction of the playerbase would go really deep into them. And just as I want a very specific balancing with corruption, I'd definitely support what farmers want for their own system.
Isn't the natural solution to this something else?
"If you don't like tending to a farm, don't be a farmer."
What these sorts of NPC management games do, specifically, is let everyone be a farmer, even if they don't like to spend their time farming. That means that everyone who can will produce crops, because there's no reason to leave it to someone else. That anti-specialization is not great for the economy.
If you don't like the gameplay of actually farming... maybe you're not a farmer. Maybe you're a hunter, or crafter, or just straight up adventurer. Go do those things instead. Making sure "the masses" can all grow crops without having to actually personally do that gets close to 'login reward' tier.
EDIT: It's fine to tune farming so you don't have to be there every day. It's not fine to make it so people who hate actually farming can just be farmers anyway.
Granted. But it's important to realize that economies in games are built on
1. Time invested (because that is all you have TO invest, as a player)
2. Specialization (or everyone will just always do the current most profitable thing)
If you get rid of either of those things, you literally don't have an economy anymore. You have what BDO has. At best.
The other issues will probably need to be clarified too...
Maybe it applies to Freeholds but not In-Node House Gardens.
Maybe most Farming will be done that way. Maybe your Alts won't have certain abilities. I mean, BDO already has the problem where if you spend all your time raising your Farming level on your 'main' you're probably not serious or you don't really do other content.
The Community Managers of that game just 'accepted what the game turned into', so they all accept the 'Farming Alt', the 'multiple World Boss Alts', the 'Bartering and Sailing Alts', the 'Alt whose only purpose is to have stuff so you can boost your season character faster', the 'Family Inventory so that you can share items made by your Cooking Alt directly to your main without actually having to go back to storage'...
There's really no way to know what type of gameplay Intrepid will want for this sort of thing. It's quite possible that they will be in the 'Everyone should have a Farming Alt if they have a Freehold or House' camp of design. In which case, it would seem like a no-brainer to make sure the Companion App works this way.
Completely serious, I am oferring my services as part time lead dev, salary negotiable, my main responsiblities revolving around keeping ideas like this out. Other attributions negotiable before signing.
More to the point, this kind of farming system is exactly what I would recommend a team who has never played or properly experienced an immersive MMO if what they wanted was to give players who ALSO never in their life experienced proper immersion a dopamine hit off just clicking some buttons. I think it can be further optimized with blockchain somehow... be right back.
You can travel around the world with your main, then click your slave alts and play as them and work in your houses. Then do all the things you had to, then click your main again and keep playing.
This is a good ass solution, but you would have to actually control every alt, even be persued by other players and be killed.
All these characters are all alts, not companions... they are alts. At anytime you can control them individually and even travel alone one by one. You can build your house and even a city, leave your alts there working on stuff, but you gotta control them and assign tasks, once done then you have to click them and control them again
The idea of choosing specific NPCs with different stats and then assigning them to roles that you feel best befit them is an interesting conversation topic and might be worth forming as a question for the Q&A section of the next livestream!
I have been big in industry in another game, if I didn't play for a few days it was a chore working in my industry, it felt like a second job, many times I joked about my desire of having slaves (npcs or players).
Somtimes in the game I traveled so far that I couldn't go back to my home to restart my industry
But if you have npc workers when you log on you are free to enjoy the game instead of doing chores, you can travel around the world without worrying about going back just to restart production
Industry being such a cumbersome chore is what made me have industry alts, so my combat characters are free to go on adventures. Also, having a second face in the lets me hide my carebear character from retaliatory actions
I don't mind that, it's a way to slow development of products until the world develops and more freeholds are leveled up