Dev Discussion #45 - Gathering and PvP

I find this question hard to answer because it feels like even considering this option is shifting Ashes away from what it has been implied to be.

So many systems seem as if they would lose value in this case, and social requirements would be reduced.

To me this is much less a question of if you drop things, and much moreso about 'being attacked just because your opponent thinks you have things'.

But if I had to give a suggestion or request, it would be this:

A player's inventory should have a subset of slots, probably 5-8, of 'things that they have not packed away yet' or whatever explanation you like. When gathering or transporting goods, raw and processed materials and some 'basic loot drops' go into this inventory first, and after a time, they move into 'main inventory'. The player can never PUT things into these slots personally, and the timer counts for the whole stack.

So if I am gathering mushrooms and they are stacking up in inventory, every time I gather one of a specific type of mushroom, that stack 'refreshes'. I would need to stop gathering mushrooms in order to have the timer tick down to get them into 'main inventory'.

If I find something rare, therefore, and I run out the timer, I get to keep it most of the time. Or not, the question is about mitigating chances, not removing them. So it could be that I still have a chance to drop that one Perfect Mushroom even if it is in main inv, but it's not as high as dropping the other stuff.

I feel this would retain most of the risk without making too many of the TYPES of meta-gameplay loop that come from other methods of mitigating 'loss of materials on death', and could also allow a more nuanced approach to 'what sorts of things players can drop'.

But overall, I don't like the idea of alternative play loops that would change the standard flow of 'go out into world, get materials, move materials to sale point or having the buyer come and have to transport them', so anything that starts to give players 'a way to avoid doing that', I think I am opposed to.

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

I'll also just throw on my opinion of this specific part, as I have noted it somewhere long ago before.

Fighting bots that do extremely simple tasks like gathering herbs or making potions seems counterproductive to me. Low level artisans don't usually do this for profit, or if they do, they often level into more complex things.

A constant supply of weak potions, common ores and logs, etc, at just $15 a month (from each Bot) is a problem that is hard to fight without hurting a specific player type. But we can just kill bots and take their stuff if we are willing to pay the Corruption cost of doing this.

Any method that allows mitigation, even if an Artisan has to level quite high, is just asking for trouble I think, by incentivizing botters to aim higher.