Posted By Adam Burrfoot at 11:32 AM - Wed Apr 25 2018
@snipehunter
There are still plenty of exploitable content in that system that negates or completely metas away a few designs you yourself have discussed in the past.
We know to be come a master or grand master in a profession you need to learn the techniques native to the other tribes areas. Doesnt the ability for a large, organized, very influential group (in fame in game) to utilize the game SP mechanics to generate extra SP on their alt accounts (giving them inflated titles, having them do high yield SP tasks) allow for that group to simply take that alt's spark, NTC into a higher cost SP person in a particular profession in a general regional area targeted for that alt (and utilize more alts for the other regional areas) then just caravan themselves back to their point of origin effectively removing the need to actually interact with / trade with the communities of those areas and effectively stealing their higher skilled crafters leaving them with a form of loss? Is that the intended design? Is there no other way to prevent that from happening?
Well, OK, a couple of things: You still have to earn your SP. If you give someone an important title, you aren't necessarily giving them fame to go with it. They have to act in that role to earn that fame, which means they aren't going to be earning SP any more quickly while wearing the title unless they actually perform the role. By implication, this means that when they spark-out to go capture some NTC you're losing someone important too.
Another thing to remember is that you can't earn SP as an OPC. You have to be actively online, engaged and doing things that are contributory to the world in some way to gain SP at all.
But the mechanic of NTCs isn't one we want to get rid of. There are lots of good reasons to want the feature in the game, and many of them are in service of the community itself. For example, it should encourage retention: A player who has contributed massively to the world and loses it all, say a king who is assassinated or a master smith who dies of old age the day after their heirs are killed in a raid, is going to be faced with starting over from scratch, but with the NTC mechanic, their prior contributions are at least rewarded somewhat by allowing them to cut out of some of the process. Likewise, someone clawing their way up from the bottom might look at jumping the social ladder via an NTC to get closer to the seat of power they want. Given that in some cases they may literally not be able to get any closer in a lifetime based on their circumstance, that ability might be the only reason they come back for another lifetime. And we, and I'd hope the whole community, want people to come back.
So, for us, the question isn't "do we include NTCs" but "how can we include NTCs in the most useful, least corruptible" way, which is definitely a challenge. I mentioned it in the Q&A, but we have many strategies in place already to deal with "casual" NTC griefing. You can't jump into an NPC in a "critical" situation such as a castle siege, a battle or a similarly singular challenge and the SP cost of sparking into an NTC scales pretty dramatically based on the evaluated "criticality" of that NPC. A master smith, for example, would be an expansive NTC take over, and not something that will be possible with a new account that's played only a single life. The same is true of a journeyman smith who happens to know a wide variety of techniques, recipes, and/or patterns.
That said, all of that just means the run up to executing your example is long and pulling it off is expensive, it doesn't mean what you're suggesting is impossible. I don't feel like we're done here, by any measure. Far from it. NTCs are here to stay, we need to keep thinking about this stuff.
Couldn't a valid solution be to region lock accounts to where their characters are? IE if in the first life I spawn into the north as a Brudvir, that character and my 2 alts are locked to that region unless I actually move my Brudvir character in game to another region so that I can NTC into that region? The lock would only apply to NTC spawning or in other words spawning outside of your bloodline. Family you have sent to another area and you have the child code for would still be a viable option. Or doing a simple exponential increase in SP cost based upon the distance from where you have active characters, where your last character permadied, or where they were born? I am approaching this with the view point that I have a very large, very organized community and I fear what we would be able to do with that if the game mechanics allow for us to do it.
So, a part of what I mentioned above actually makes this not work, I think. It's a great functional solution to the specific problem, but it invalidates part of the reason we want NTC sparking in the world: If we were to lock your NTC choices to the region your first character was in, we'd likely remove one of the motivations for folks to spark into an NTC, specifically I would imagine that folks want to see the whole world and sparking into an NTC after a long career in your "hometown" makes things easier for contributing players to do so. We like that and want to preserve that, if we can.
But yeah, I suppose that's all a really long winded way of saying "hey we're worried about this too and still thinking about it." I'll uh, try to use less words next time. ;)
Hope that helps! :)
