Suggestion Consolidate the 9 Professions into 3.

[monkeymonk78]

mystic is very under powered. It has the lowest of everything except for hp.

 

[maxmaxm]

Honestly, I do agree that it would be much more fun to have more abilities. This being said, I do not think compiling the nine current classes into three is the best way to go about giving players more abilities. In order to promote choosing a certain profession, I think that it would work well if the player was awarded a few very unique, specialized abilities at around level 50. This would give the player a reason to choose a certain class over another, and would also motivate them to level. Currently, for some classes, you play for one ability. In example, most farmers play for the leather. If farmer were given some more unique abilities at a higher level, they would have more of a reason to play this class, and feel more useful and accomplished.

 

[Dazureus]

I think this has a funny sort of potential. Maybe make it 4 or 5 and blend the abilities more from the distinct roles we have now.

Quick note about one of your justifications, Lib:

RPG JUSTIFICATION: Hyper-specialization is a fairly recent invention that has come from industrialization and later, the computer age. Heroes takes place in a relatively low-tech setting, with its analogue more likely being in the Middle Ages or very early Renaissance. In that timeframe, most non-combatants had to have very diverse skillsets to live. You made your own clothes, you built and fixed your own house, barn, etc. You raised your own food, you mended your own fences, etc, unless you were of a merchant class, in which case, you had as broad a skillset as possible for your type of chosen profession because you were more often than not the only one of your type for miles and miles, and the vast majority of inhabitants lived their whole lives never travelling more than 10-20 miles from the place where they were born (unless they went to war, of course).

This bleeds into Player Justification... The case described is not how Herocraft actually runs. There are lots of people in reasonable proximity, with nothing keeping them home, with relatively few choices of profession. Not that the change itself is necessarily bad but this bit of reasoning doesn't click with me.

 

[TheTXLibra]

mystic is very under powered. It has the lowest of everything except for hp.

It could also be argued, though, that they have the most powerful game-changing abilities of any profession. That said, tables can always be tweaked to make them less underpowered if it proved to be a problem.

I think that it would work well if the player was awarded a few very unique, specialized abilities at around level 50. This would give the player a reason to choose a certain class over another, and would also motivate them to level.

Abilities can be toggled and moved about to make them more unique to each Profession, however, I absolutely disagree with making players have to wait until Level 50 before they get anything good. Think of LP games like Superman, Batman, and Spiderman prior to recent years. They sucked. Why? Because here you were, a HERO (hint hint) who couldn't do jack squat. In one of the Batman games, Stephen Hawking had more athletic ability.

Now compare it to Arkham Asylum, Arkham City, and The Amazing Spiderman. All three of these very recent games start you out as already being a total badass, but you still get to gain additional abilities after playing awhile to make your character still uniquely your own and end-game characters feel like the natural progression of an evolved superhero, and less like a miscellaneous bucket of dubious rewards handed out too late in the game.

I'll be bluntly honest here: I don't play Minecraft to level, and a lot of people feel the same way. Level grinding stopped being "fun" once I had to get a job in the real world, go to college, and raise kids. A lot of other gamers feel the same way. That doesn't mean I want to abolish levels, or make everyone have to play on my schedule, but it does mean I've very much come to appreciate efficient game design, where levels are a REAL reward each time, and not just arbitrary padding to stretch the game out.

The best game companies out there, churning out the most memorable games have figured out the Trinity of Game Design Enlightenment:

* Make it LOOT-TASTIC - Diablo, Borderlands, World of Warcraft, and AnythingthatendswithVille. These games are centered around the same part of the brain that makes gambling fun: the instant gratification reward of clicking or killing things, to get more stuff, so you can click more things or kill more stuff. Minecraft currently lacks the mechanics to make this possible. Sure, I might get a gold nugget for killing a zombie, but I will NEVER see a "Hat of Brazen Soul-Stealing" that allows me an extra 50% mana, +10 to intelligence, and ups my spell damage by 20 points.

* Make it REAL - Mass Effect, Fallout, Silent Hill, Resident Evil, etc... Give it a great storyline, great plot, great acting. Get your characters hugely involved in the game world to such a degree that it elicits Sensawunda. Minecraft currently does not have the ability to do this, really. There's no talking heads. There's very few MMOs that ever manage to pull off this type of great game because it's really hard to get immersed in a world when people keep trying to squat and teabag your face during a crucial dialogue. Most MMOs will straight-up murder your ass if you try to roleplay.

* Make it SANDBOX - Skyrim, Arkham City, Amazing Spiderman, Crackdown, Grand Theft Auto, Saint's Row, Sim Anything, Minecraft Vanilla, etc... You begin the game already a badass with great powers that only get better and better as the game goes on. There is no forcefully driving plotline you have to stick to. You could do sidequests till the end of time, or just mess with the poor goombahs in progressively more and more sadistic ways, or you could build micro-empires... all the choice is left to the player, with the game serving more as a framework. Minecraft Vanilla already does this and does it well. Let's be honest, if you had all the abilities of the Vanilla game, on a server of just you and your gamer friends where you knew for a fact none of them would "cheat" against whatever house rules you set up, you'd probably never go to any other server. Because it's your friends, and you have full choice of what you want to do with your MC-Time at that point.

Now the unfortunate reality is that in SMP Mode, assholes still get whitelisted, people still cheat, exploit, etc. So you pretty much have to figure out how to lock down certain aspects of the game while keeping it fun at the same time. Heroes does this pretty well at the moment, while building a great RPG around itself. But going in and setting it so no one got any good abilities till Level 50, and then only giving them a handful of abilities, would straight-up ruin the server for me. There's no fun in that. It's restriction for the sake of restriction, and I'm firmly against that.

Instead, what I am offering with the Consolidated Professions is a way to keep the Sandbox feel, while removing some of the restrictions, making the individual Professions more interesting and fun to play, and cause less of an outcry when one ability breaks or has to go offline till an exploit is patched.

 

[maxmaxm]

"Abilities can be toggled and moved about to make them more unique to each Profession, however, I absolutely disagree with making players have to wait until Level 50 before they get anything good. "​

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This isn't what I meant, and I'm sorry that I made it sound like that. To reword things, I think that we should keep the nine professions that we have now, but add additional abilities to them, that make them more unique. Having them at a higher level just motivates players to work towards a goal, which is pretty much absent in Minecraft. Sure, it may feel a bit "grindy" at times, but if you play the game and don't concentrate on just leveling, you will be able to level up fairly easily.​

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I like the idea of having to work together, as it helps to strengthen the community. The feeling of interdependence is entirely more realistic than having three professions, each of which can almost rely on itself. Also, the new system you have described could (possibly) allow one player to invade an entire town.​

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-Sorry for the fail quote at the top, could not find a way to do it without taking your entire post.-​

 

[whitemagehealu]

Oh, the infamous GrandMaster titles... I remember dmil was the GrandMaster Warrior

Back to the original topic... what I think should happen is that we have "trees" like the combat classes have. Currently the starting Profession is Crafter, and only Crafter, branching out into a wide variety of specs. Unless another profession tree is going to be added, we should probably split the tree stemming out from Crafter into, say, three trees.

Wasn't texteo grandmaster warrior?

 

[TheTXLibra]

I think I might add a survey vote to see whether or not people would rather:

a. Consolidate from 9 Profs down to "fewer"
b. Keep 9 Profs and add more skill-freedom to them.
c. Scrap Professions, just have "Crafter Skills" and buy any ability you want with coin or xp.
d. Make no change at all
e. Do something completely different from any of these.

 

[MajorasMask]

I don't think anything should be changed. I'm used to professions now, and it has enabled a much greater economy than in Zeal (whereas anyone could make a lot of money, regardless of class, in any way).

I think you may be new to such changes, TheTXL. It's like how you said you can't build when players keep attacking you, I presume you remember the Sanctum days too much? Ha ha

 

[Zaspar]

Wasn't texteo grandmaster warrior?

Dmil mustve been master Rogue then

 

[strongholdx]

Dmil mustve been master Rogue then

This is corerect, he was rogue. jwplayer0 was GM Healer

 

[malmenca]

This is corerect, he was rogue. jwplayer0 was GM Healer

NBD Ironpass had 3 of the 4 bitches! oh, and Look_out and I

 

[TheTXLibra]

I think you may be new to such changes, TheTXL. It's like how you said you can't build when players keep attacking you, I presume you remember the Sanctum days too much? Ha ha

I'm not new to them at all. I was here during Zeal for a while till I got tired of getting killed too often to build and found some other game to play. To be honest, I did like Sanctum a lot better. Being able to build in peace while chatting with friends and having full use of all the normal abilities Minecraft intended me to have, suited me just fine. What keeps me coming back nowadays isn't the restrictive gameplay, it's the people. Just because I'd rather the game be one way as opposed to the way it is now doesn't mean I'm new to the changes. It means I'm not thrilled with them.

That said, I don't consider it unplayable except when assholes camp my building spot and keep attacking me even after I've been killed. I get it... they want to kill me...they killed me. Yay them, now let me get back the fuck to work. No? Going to keep attacking me again? Fuck it. Run away. Eventually log. Come back hours later when asshole gets bored and moves on. Then I come back, maybe I get an hour or two at best before some other asshole comes along and kills me, then camps my building spot. Great fun.

So now add to that the restrictions of "You can only do this very narrow range of abilities when not getting murdered," and you might begin to understand my frustration, as well as the frustration of others in the same boat.

 

[MajorasMask]

I've been camped plenty of times before, and i've never had restrictions through professions as an issue. Sanctum was boring because there was nothing to do, you could do EVERYTHING by yourself. You didn't need to talk to people. You could wear the best armour, make the best traps, make the best shops, ect, all by yourself. That's why donors, with their unlimited LWCs and regions, were so OP.

 

[TheTXLibra]

I've been camped plenty of times before, and i've never had restrictions through professions as an issue. Sanctum was boring because there was nothing to do, you could do EVERYTHING by yourself. You didn't need to talk to people. You could wear the best armour, make the best traps, make the best shops, ect, all by yourself. That's why donors, with their unlimited LWCs and regions, were so OP.

I disagree. I made many, many friends on Sanctum, and interacted with people all the time. And I don't consider being given the skills the game intended you to have as being OP, so I certainly don't see being allowed 1/3 of those abilities as being OP.

 

[Danda]

I disagree. I made many, many friends on Sanctum, and interacted with people all the time. And I don't consider being given the skills the game intended you to have as being OP, so I certainly don't see being allowed 1/3 of those abilities as being OP.

Though I think the main reason sanctum was like that was because of the No-PVP regions on towns and the excess money so there was a lot of trading for basic resources like cobble, stone, wood, etc.

People also had a different mind set back then

These changes are also too big to implement in the middle of a map.

 

[Kwong050]

I dont like this because if this were to happen, then many prices of goods would drop tremendously thus causing trouble

 

[Algsa777]

Yeah i dont like this at ALL. I havent been here long but i know this is a bad idea. Having 3 proffs instead of 9 ruins the need of allies. I mean all i want to do is brew potions and maybe do some transmuting, not everything bloody possible. I will admit your idea is HALF correct, but instead of just merging make those 3 profs you thought of and use them as stepping stones and make the current tier 2 tier 3 with more robust and centralized/specialized skills.

 

[leftovers5]

I like the specialization aspect of going into a crafter spec too much to consolidate the 9 into 3...

 

[look_out]

NBD Ironpass had 3 of the 4 bitches! oh, and Look_out and I

Awww The good old days

 

[bluejack404]

If I could be a mason/engineer/merchant... I would die happy.