Freeholds and NPC

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?

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Ludullu

Azherae wrote: »

Why take up so much time of your Economy designer for a 'feature' that is more likely to make actual farmers UPSET?

I know this was rhetorical, but the answer is probably "for the masses". As Arya says, people won't have time to walk back and forwards each day to just farm their plants, so the game provides an automation for it.

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.

SongRune

NiKr wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

Why take up so much time of your Economy designer for a 'feature' that is more likely to make actual farmers UPSET?

I know this was rhetorical, but the answer is probably "for the masses". As Arya says, people won't have time to walk back and forwards each day to just farm their plants, so the game provides an automation for it.

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.

Ludullu

SongRune wrote: »

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.

That's true. And it goes against the "not everyone wins in Ashes" part of the design, but it's not like this is the first contradiction in the overall design so far. I definitely hope they clarify their current stance on this. Maybe this thread will help with that.

SongRune

NiKr wrote: »

SongRune wrote: »

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.

That's true. And it goes against the "not everyone wins in Ashes" part of the design, but it's not like this is the first contradiction in the overall design so far. I definitely hope they clarify their current stance on this. Maybe this thread will help with that.

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.

Azherae

NiKr wrote: »

SongRune wrote: »

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.

That's true. And it goes against the "not everyone wins in Ashes" part of the design, but it's not like this is the first contradiction in the overall design so far. I definitely hope they clarify their current stance on this. Maybe this thread will help with that.

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.

SunScript

... offline companion app? So people don't even have to pretend to be playing the game or immersing themselves anymore? Are you okay Intrepid?
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.

Arya_Yeshe

Who else played Kenshi around here?

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.

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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

Vaknar

Looks like the wiki link to farmhand NPCs that can be hired was posted.

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!

Arya_Yeshe

I found a great reason why NPCs doing the heavy lifting is good, it is not different than having industry alts

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

Spif

My impression was that there are crafting tasks (farming, animal husbandry, some refining, others) that are going to be world-time-gated, and not player/character-time-gated. IE, it will take hours or days for the product to finish.

I don't mind that, it's a way to slow development of products until the world develops and more freeholds are leveled up

Nerror

While this isn't a dealbreaker for me, I am definitely in the camp of making the player log in and do the stuff manually ingame, rather than using an app to start a worker doing it.

I have zero problems with a system allowing players to make alts that mainly stay on the freehold to do farming or processing or whatever. From the Q&A yesterday we heard that players actually have to play the alts and level them up (to around 30-35 for example) and do quests in order to reach max level in a profession.

As long as they are ingame and playing manually, I don't care which character the player is on though. Artisan alts are completely fine IMO.

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