Caravan system does not work well with crafting

Short opinion:

As the 'Econ player' this has been one of my most massive concerns and red flags for this game from day one.

I don't want another BDO. I'm definitely not doing that again.

But either I can't carry 99 Iron Ingots in my inventory, or I have a good reason to travel somewhere with 9,900 Iron Ingots because... someone somewhere needs that level of supply.

Please no.

(To be clear the reason why I didn't think of this as a big deal is because I come from a game where larger items stack to 12 for this reason, Economy works with 12-stacks, I think it can work with 20 too)

I sortof expect Caravans to be moreso shared operations, used for either higher security than a mule (pool funds to hire a bunch of defenders) or for traders doing larger-scale arbitrage style operations.

I would like to like your suggestion, but I"m very concerned about the large currency 'source' that would be involved in making it viable. I don't see "node requests" being player-originated for certificates, for the obvious reason that they're not valuable to players except artificially (the gold source problem again), but can sorta see how a node might occasionally put out requests for resources that would be required for a large number of their crafters to support some upgrade process.

I definitely also don't want another BDO with absurd material counts, crafting 50 bars of iron into one pot, or making 500 of a given food item in one session.

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In regard to the "node requests sponsored by players", either we are spending their tax money without them getting anything out of it, or Mayors need a reason to ask for Caravan scale deliveries of materials, which brings us... perhaps half-way back to Azherae's point. Someone needs to WANT 9900 iron, even as a node effort. I don't doubt that's possible, but you then get into the fact that that whole multi-player effort wherein a node's players will somehow USE that 9900 iron they requested (presumably to build up the node) only managed to spawn a single caravan. I don't feel like that's necessarily solving the problem on a scale where it remains a major gameplay element, even if it does get us up to "occasional cool thing some guild does once or twice, whenever some node's citizens organize a whole big upgrade push". 50 crafters using 200 iron each definitely gets you that one caravan-full of 9,900. I don't think it will be rare specifically, but it might still not be as common as one would hope.

I will say that having it tend to be focused on being a big event for a node upgrade push, and then that drawing in opposing factions from rival nodes could make for some pretty cool gameplay though.

I took a step too far. I was too enamored by the idea of a node working together to place a bulk order of materials to be crafted and used through a cohesive community effort, to produce the actual requirements for a node upgrade, that I didn't consider the less interesting, more practical option of the node's "upgrade mechanic" just directly consuming the bulk quantity of iron.

I see no issues with your suggestion. It will probably do what's intended.

If you want multiple caravans required, I start to wonder how the supply side of this will keep up, but that's not a mark against the concept.

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As long as the crafting amounts stay in the realm of 'Not BDO' I admittedly don't care as much if the Caravan system doesn't draw much.

I just definitely don't want 'a supply and demand curve based around getting people to use Caravans' that then leads to such heavy crafting.

The Crafting I saw in Alpha-1, which (though subject to change like everything else) seemed to use reasonable amounts of materials for what it was, is fine with me, if 'Caravans are decoupled from that', that's acceptable to me.

I'd assume the lowest tiers of resources will be the crazy abundant ones, while the higher tiers will be rarer and super limited. And if Nodes require higher tiers with higher stages - you'll need insane amounts of lower tier resources to craft them upwards to support the node.

L2 had very limited amounts of items required for crafting, but those items required several stages of lower tier items to be crafted, so in the end you needed hundreds of tier 1 mats to craft a high tier piece of gear (and you needed 4-5 pieces). With 16 gear slots per person, I'd assume you'll need literal thousands of tier 1-2 mats to craft gear for your raid/guild.

I personally see that as a nice system. Especially in the context of gatherers using mules to carry more mats from their gathering sessions, and that being seen as a piñata for potential corrupted players. And imo mules have to give the same amount of corruption as a player, so you'd have to get x2 the amount of corruption in order to loot the piñata.

Add some difficulties and rarity for acquisition of high tier mats and you have yourself a long gear treadmill that requires a group effort to run and needs caravan runs for the highest tiers of gear because it requires a ton of low tier mats, which would most likely have to be sourced from different places.

Well, at least that's how I see it going down, until they show us their planned design.

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Yep, highest tiers of mats could only be crafted.

We have not received permission from neuroguy to share the quoted post.

You could just make it so that you lose a fair chunk of mats when downcrafting. So you'd have a choice, do you want to transfer your stuff safely and quickly, but lose some portion of profits or can you protect your caravans and reap the biggest rewards from it. Risk vs reward.

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I mean, imo that's the whole point of the caravan system. You want to have a huge craft session or need a ton of resources for your node? You gotta work for it and plan for it. And that includes the logistical question of "how in the living fuck am I supposed to transfer thousands of resources from multiple nodes into one?"

I see a ton of fun in that, a ton of pvp and a ton of socializing, because it'd be almost impossible to do all of that alone in any reasonable amount of time.

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And that was the exact question I asked in this last stream My assumption is that it does give you corruption equal to what you would've gotten had you killed the owner of the mule. It worked that way in L2 with pets so I don't see why it wouldn't work that way here, especially considering that mules have resources on them (and a fucking x10 of resources compared to the owner's inventory).

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Please explain what 'use of a system' you perceive would be getting cut out, here.

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I believe that neuroguy's point is that it SEEMS at the moment to be a CHOICE between 'meaningful personal caravans' and 'meaningful crafting'. Or, in my case, I can see 'a choice between meaningful economy from drops' and 'meaningful personal caravans'.

So IF we were forced to make such a choice, the preference would be 'Crafting' not 'Caravans'.

But again, this is all pretty much irrelevant. Don't make gatherables/processed goods stack to 99. Solved.