Advice on making a hard shard...

[Voran]

Well, having fiddled about with Test for a while, I'm now ready to start seriously designing a shard of my own. Here are the current ideas I have:

NPCs: Will be limited. Bankers will exist, as well as some of the simple essentials. There will be NPC jewellers who will buy jewels, but most NPCs will not buy from people.

Modifications to resources:
Oak trees will produce oak logs. Yew will produce yew logs (spot the cunning pattern emerging here...). Miners will be able to mine rock and granite by using a special pickaxe, and sand from a beach as on OSI. (none of this glitchy nonsense the true OSI shards have). Hemp will be available (for rope), as will hops. Bee hives will produce honey, and a modified version of my fruit trees will exist. Mining ore will give a tiny random chance for gems.

Modifications to existing skills:
Carpentry Powerscrolls
Mining Powerscrolls
Fishing Powerscrolls

Carpenters: At 90 skill, a carpenter can make a small ship deed. At 120 skill, a carpenter can make a large ship deed. Other deeds will, of course, be based on skill. Each ship requires Oak logs, rope, cloth, and iron ingots.

Miners: at 90 skill, a miner has a chance of unsing the stone mining tool. At 120, he can get 5-10 stone from a spot.

Fishing: At 101 and higher, a fisherman has a chance of pulling up a Kraken. At 105, the fisherman can catch an Elder Sea Serpent. At 110, the fisherman can catch a Deep Sea Kraken. At 120, the fisherman is capable of pulling up an Elder Kraken.

Other changes:

Land contract.
A player can buy a blank land contract from an architect, and select which house to build. Each house requires wood, iron, stone, sand and water.

My questions:

Approximately how much should a land contract cost?
Should I modify any of these ideas in any way? Are they too hard/about right? Is there anything i could add to them to make them nicer?
What do you think?

[Jediman]

Your turning the game into more of a reality kinda thing, but then again, hey, the world is yours to mold

Id say set a pretty stable value on the gold, lumber, and all other materials, weighted on how easily or how hard it is to obtain it. If gold is an easy assett to aquire, then raise the prise and also put in a mid range requirement for the ammount of building materials it takes. If gold is hard to find, then lower the prices, and also determine again how easily resources are gotten, and adjust from there.

Say Gold on a shard is easy to come by, but mining and such runs dry and lumber becomes scarce for long periods... ok, with gold inflation..the land deed could be like, oh, say, 120k, like in the real world, but lumber and other resource cost should be lowered and possibly even included in that price... or say 1000 logs is necessary (for something like a small wooden house), about 20 bails of hay for the roof, and maybe oh i dunno, 40 ingots for the nails, sign, etc

That may give you a good idea on how to set it up.

[Voran]

Ah, awesome! That's just the sort of thing I was looking for!

Many thanks

[Armany]

This all depends on the type of shard you intend to set up.
I would say that removing most NPCs might be an interesting idea for a large shard, but if you have a restricted amount of players or intend to make a smaller shard then vendors are a necessity since players won't always meet.

Otherwise removing vendors is a nice idea since it will reduce the amount of gold in play and thus keep the game balance reasonnable.
But gold will become less important that way also, perhaps you would consider setting up an economy based on other things (harvest of reagents, food and other every day usage ...).

I would suggest placing a skill cap and a certain way to control developpement on characters to maintain economy, otherwise the players will simply make mules instead of doing what you intend (trading)

As for players making ship and house deeds I would not recommend it unless you found a way to impose a limit on it. Otherwise you will rapidly have a map flooded by multiple deeds.

The advantage to vendors is also that it slows the process of acquiring items, if you do not find a way to slow the players in their crafting of special and other less common items you will rapidly have players with everything they might want and thus nothing to do with no use for your economy. (we have all seen shards where rich players don't care anymore about money and give away important items since they can craft them easily, vendors don't do that, if you center the economy on players you have to find a way to regulate this on a long therm basis)

Removing vendors implies you have something to balance it, and that is no small mather.

[Kinetix]

Yeah, it sounds good if you have a limited bandwidth/large playerbase. But dont go too far with those NPCs, most merchants need them to survive

[Alkiser]

I simply picture a Mafia taking over your shard and controlling all aspects of your "economy"

Lacky: Where do you want the logs boss?
Boss: Put them over there in the chest idiot.
Lacky: Right away boss.

:evil: I cant even make accounts you.... [/img]