What about Tradeskills?

mrjimorg

I'm a bit concerned about the tradeskilling- specifically the lack of discussion of them. I don't want tradeskills to be a tacked-on system that is rushed into place to satisfy a check-mark of required features for an MMO. Tradeskilling can really add to a game if it becomes an alternative to adventuring. No matter how good the adventuring is, people will eventually want to do something different, and tradeskilling can provide this alternative- if done right.

I think this presents an opportunity for SOE to try something really different. Instead of assigning one of their current developers, or hiring a new one to invent a tradeskill system, I think they should open it up to the community. This could be done in 2 (overlapping) stages-

Stage 1 - Ask the players to create videos or concept screenshots and/or descriptions that would present what we think tradeskilling would be like. These should be specific and detailed (Not "It should be awesome"). They could use pieces from other peoples proposals, thus helping to refine existing ideas.

Stage 2 - Involve the horde of developers who've always wanted to work on an MMO by creating an open-source portal for development- with several git repos for alternative projects. Various people could submit changelists which would be considered for acceptance to various branches by a Sony developer who would be responsible for judging the validity of these patches. As these projects become refined, Sony can choose one to be included into EQNext.

In addition, Sony would need to provide the community with artistic resources and a development environment which would eventually be used integrate the tradeskill system into EQ Next. This may be an API which could be in a scripting language or C/C++ and which provides interactions such at timer ticks and functionality such as createWindow.

 

Victor_Kruger

A lot of info is being held back for Gamescon and Pax Prime, one more week tell we get some new stuff to fight about on these forums.