In EverQuest Next, should one character be able to learn all types of crafting?

I don't want to create alts, but as michael said, I don't want to see crafting become trivial and worthless either. I think he hit the nail right on the head. "To master all crafts should require (a) tremendous amount of work". That being said, anyone who wants to put a tremendous amount of work into mastering each craft should be able to master them all. People are going to circumvent a limit on how many crafts a character can learn by making alts anyway so why not just make them all available on one character but only for those that are dedicated enough to put a tremendous amount of time and effort into it. I would like to see crafting that really means something and is worthwhile in this game; maybe more along the lines of SWG then EQ1. Clothing, furniture/housing, weapons, armor, food/drink, gizmos and gadgets. The more the merrier!

I feel that the more you allow everyone to be everything and do everything you take away from the community and make it more like a game of clones. After a while, we will all be the same point in progression, with the same choices of abilities, all able to craft the same things. Sounds awful to me. That's just my opinion.

At least make it tiered through xp to the point that a player could only ever master a few of the abilities at any one time. No respecs to just flip flop in between either.

I fully understand your reasoning, and I'd be upset if I couldn't build my own design in EQN as well. Sadly, this is a mere micro-economic gain and what helps the individual doesn't promote a community. By finding a player to build your castle you are pushing the economy, not hampering it.

Imagine in RL you are a carpenter. If everyone was as equally skilled as you, there would be no need for your skills and you'd have to find a new job. We're seeing this happen in RL with college degrees - high supply and little demand.

This design would be great in a single player game, but in a MMORPG it just gives players little reason to be inter-dependent.

I can agree base skills shared by all would be a good idea, and perhaps a specialization would be a far better middle ground. If everyone has a PHD level in all known topics, what makes anyone special?

Perhaps just allowing everyone to be a carpenter for their own building pleasure would be even more in line with the game design, but I fear years from now we'll all be the exact same - all classes, all trades, no differences. We already can all have the same name, may as well all have the same classes and trades too.

I was going to vote no originally, but then I realized that even if they put limitations on how many crafting professions a character can take people will just make an alt to bypass that limitation. That's what I have always done, and that is what many of us do. So going along with their current character philosophy, it only makes sense to allow a character to learn all crafting. However, they could make it so that while you can learn all crafting, you can only master maybe one or two professions. Specialization is definitely something that I want to see in crafting again, and I feel this is the best way to satisfy both crowds that the question refers to.

I don't mind if everyone can learn everything. However like combat classes, you would need to dedicate yourself to it. A dedication to a profession should not only take skill, but math and work.

IN SWG if you wanted to be an armorer you needed to master the armorsmith system which took algebra and other skills to experiment. You also needed special expensive taped gear that added more specializations, also you had to know how the stats bended and worked as you melded them. Truley an amazing game. Even if you learned all the classes you could only really dedicate yourself to one.

Re: Profession Guide - Armorsmith

It's hard to say but i think it would be better for crafters if this was limited. It increases the chance of them being able to sell stuff for at least mat cost if people are limited.

I'm not a crafter so my opinion probably isn't the best but i don't think the fact that people can unlock every class should be used as a reason that people should unlock every craft. This could decide if crafters can make a profit off what they make. If everyone can unlock every craft then I think there is a greater chance of them not being able to sell there stuff. This would hurt dedicated crafters.

When crafting is not restricted i feel I should level it so i can be self sufficient which is impossible if crafting is restricted. If it is limited then i think there is a greater chance of me not doing it and relying on a dedicated crafter instead. If i'm going to have to rely on someone for most of my stuff why not rely on them for all of it and focus on gathering materials.

Can you be everything in the real world too? Some may want to be everything but it still pretty much unobtainable for everyone until we are either all stuck in Groundhog Day or until we can all be immortal and have all the time to become everything you can think of.

What do you think about making it increasingly "expensive" to pick up additional skills as you collect them. Ramping up slowly allowing experimentation at low levels then spiking in cost as the player approaches mastery in each, with a cumulative effect.

Possible for the super dedicated / insane crafters looking for "end game" content, but not likely to become super popular amongst the masses?

-Bongo

I vote yes, .. To a point. My fear is that with everyone having the ability to know and do everything how it will impact the trading community. Now to know everything is good it think it would be great to only become a grand master of one trade with the chance to be able to freely change or "unlearn" and become a master of another trade. Possible becoming a master of trades could also have certain master recipes to a certain race or class ?

If I had my way this would be a skill based game where you can learn anything you want. It would just take you a very long time to master any one thing. Therefore you *can* do everything, but it also pays to work with others.

I'll take a line from the Matrix: "The issue is choice." One of the key aspects of MMO's which bind us to the experience are the choices we make in developing a character. Eliminate the need to choose a path and the game will be that much blander... another cookie cutter MMO that will fade after the initial launch hype. Choice needs to have meaning in game play. Meaningful choice...what a novel concept?

Yes!! Dev's have already said that they intend for us to "do it all" in Next on one character without having to play alts. I am an alt-aholic and will, if necessary, make multiple characters so that I can do it all however, I really hope they stick to the plan of not having to play alts.

Kind of an axillary point here, but something I feel is relevant: Make sure crafting isn't self-focused. My only past MMO is Guild Wars 2 and they went down a route somewhat similar to this (each character can master all crafting disciplines, but has to pay to switch out their two actives) but new content recently has removed the ability to trade what you make. Which creates a problem for a couple of my friends as they just don't like crafting and annoyed me as well since I was one of the master crafters of the group and couldn't help them get the best gear.

As far as the actual question goes: It just seems odd to me to go "You can be all of the classes, but you can only master one or two crafts." I'm more of a mind that only having one or two would be a better idea overall, but it just doesn't make sense to me in the context of what I've heard about the rest of the game.

If we are bringing back a focus on community and are trying to accomplish that EQ1 community of self plicing by needing each other then we should go with crafting dependent on each other.

Personally in the 2 mmo's I have played for the last 14 years eq1 for 5 and wow for 9 I have made alts to gain all crafting options.... BUT IF not being allowed to do that will help self police and force a non jerk face community to play with then I am all for not being allowed to do all.

So many things made EQ1 special but one of the things I did not know what I had till it was gone was the self policing of community. After spending 9 years in WoW I am just tired of trolls, childish behavior and people whose actions cause no negative affects. I am willing to give up whatever I need to so I can have that great community again.

You seem to be making two major assertions here that I dispute.

One is that the reason the MMOs that have followed WoW failed. The first thing that has to be established is the definition of failure. Tabula Rasa Failed. It is no more. It was nothing at all like WoW. APB failed. It is back open under a new publisher, but it failed. It was NOTHING like WoW. I can't think of another big name MMO that has failed. I can think of several who did not compete with WoW. Maybe even a few who had that as a goal, but they are still up, they still have customers, they still make money and create new content. Not meeting expectations is not the same thing as failing. The other side to this coin is, nobody really knows what Blizzard did with WoW that made it popular, and nobody really knows why nobody since has done as well.

The second thing is you seem to think that poor content and lack of content can somehow be made up for by more DIFFICULT content, and that lack of hardship is why people don't play the way they did in EQ. I believe EQ was magic because it was the first of its kind. People looked past the weaknesses of the product because of that. Again, there is no proof why it did as well as it did any more than there is for WoW, but I didn't play it because it was hard, I played it because it was an entirely new experience. Nobody I played with played because it was hard either. Long corpse runs, repeated HATE wipes due to a bug, having your group who was hunting level 13-15 dervishes ambushed by a level 35 invisible sand giant, were not things we looked forward to, they were necessary evils. In my opinion there is no reason you can't build a game that successfully incorporates solo and group content and allows the user to choose the path they wish to take. Just because nobody has chosen to do it, doesn't mean it can't get done. Allowing someone to do the core grind and story content of the game solo doesn't prevent grouping. Additionally if you make everyone group from level 1 and still have only 2 weeks of content, that doesn't make a better game, it only makes one fewer people want to play.

If you are a social person, I find it very difficult to believe you have a hard time finding other social people. I run into them all the time, however, being an introvert, I generally find it annoying. If I get back home after a hard day at work, and I want to blow off some steam playing a game, I am probably not the dude you want to socialize with. So your choice is to simply make a game that people like me wont play and wont help pay for? Do you think most gamers are extroverts? You think that is going to lead to a successful game? Good luck with that.

Well it's not necessarily the way I'd want it personally, but I'd have to say let one character learn all crafts. However, that is solely based on the fact that one character can already learn every class in the game. If I can already be a mage, warrior, rogue, ranger, and bard all on one character.. then I sound be capable enough to make my bags AND bake pies too.

Besides even if it's possibly to train in all crafts, I don't think most people would actually use all of them. Where would I keep all those mats? Typically in the MMOs I've played 1 or 2 crafting professions are enough to completely use all of my bank and bag space storing materials. In EQNext, unless we're given a extremely high amount of storage space, I'm already wondering how much space will be left over after having to store a complete set of gear for every different class I choose to train as well as storing all the materials for crafting.

I voted no

If I remember correctly its been stated that the first four abilities are determined by our starting class right? the class that cant be changed?
So we would create alts anyway.....

I personally like not being able to do everything myself, it forces me to look for people who are dedicated in making their crafts and actually be social in a mmorpg.
In WoW, my alts know every profession,
In GW2, my alts knew every profession
In ..... wait a minute............ something needs to be fixed here so I don't feel like I can do everything in a game based around playing with others.

Yes! I don't want to have to create alts just to do other types of crafting.

I like this one the most. We'll only be playing one character as opposed to multiple characters as we can unlock every class in the game. So on that one character I'd like to unlock all the crafting abilities as well.

What if it was progressively more difficult to level up the next tradeskill though? So the first one takes you a week, the second one takes you two weeks, the third one takes you four weeks etc... That would force you to pick which one you want to be right now and only the hardcore would level all of them.

Yes, but it must be impractical to have all crafting classes, and impossible to master all of them over the lifetime of the game. There has to be an exponential difficulty to maintain more than one, without being simply a question of grinding time. There should be diminishing returns. I mean, jack of all trades master of none, regardless of the hours spent grinding.

It could be limited by resources, travel, throttled by the day/night cycles, chances of finding non-tradeable stuff, etc...

Idea #1: I was thinking about something like a pool of crafting experience points which progressively shifts towards the class you craft the most with. These points are divided among the classes. When you craft with a new class, it steals points from the others, until it's maxed out. Since the number you have is limited, you might have only enough experience points to max out 2 classes, but you can still slowly shift your expertise toward another class. Being an exponential bar, it would be easy to craft everything, but mastering would be very intensive and limited to one or two.

Idea #2: Something similar to the combat classes, you have a limited number of crafting slots, and you populate them with crafting classes. The limitation would be that you can only change the slot at a certain rate (only once per day/night cycle?), you can set all four slots to the same class, and it gives significant bonuses and crafting buff. Maybe the only way to craft legendary stuff, or it gives significant bonuses over time the longer the slots are occupied.

Absolutely, if I can learn every class on a single character, it's natural to be able to do the same with professions.

I think GW2 handles it really well. One character can learn all crafting professions but can only have a limited number of active ones, while not losing progression in the inactive ones. Switching between them could involve a fee (in-game currency), or some quest. I could even see a possible cash shop item that would increase the number of skills that can be active at once!