Board Thread:Suggestions/@comment-25178962-20150615142220/@comment-24108228-20150702165529

This post is pretty big, so I'm using to hide it by default (if someone could teach me how to use the collapse function on text, that would be nice too). Hidden= Shown= DoubleNegativeBanana wrote: An Observer wrote: Correct, there are methods of killing people who would forage/drag your compost. Yes, they are cost effective. But draggers can still cause significant damage to your farm before you can stop them. Not everyone has the skill to use bows well. Not nearly as much as you claim. If you can't use a bow on a player that doesn't even expect you to have a ranged weapon, then you're pretty bad. Walls (both cacti and palisade) are brutally effective at slowing a newlyspawned enemy, if not stopping them entirely; and with the jump nerf, they can't scale walls like they used to be able to, giving you plenty of time to fill their empty head with arrows. Sure, if they're prepared and bring a ladder or some explosives then they can get over, but that cuts out a huge portion of players, and an even larger portion of the players who go around pulling apart farmland. Again, they'd have to go back home, make some armour and iron weaponry, craft themself a ladder, then come back, and again, that means they've earned the kill, and can wreck your farmland in peace. And quite simply, there IS no balance. Metal-seekers can completely ignore survival, multi-wielding buckets and getting cooked beef to sustain them for hours on end. Giving farmers this advantage at least BEGINS to repair the disparity these two groups, metal-seekers and farmers. I think I see the issue here. I see this game as a survival-pvp game, where the only civilisation is the groups you make with friends, whilst you seem to view this game as some sort of survival-economy game, where PvP is just another profession. You however, are clearly mislead. Let me explain.

If this truely was a survival-economy game, there would be multiple professions, which are all individually useful. No single profession would have the ability to produce all forms of goods with a single skill. This, as we all know by this point, is not the case. There is such a skill. That skill, is the way of the blacksmith.

Let's look at the skill list, and see which ones could be considered a profession rather than a helper: Foraging:No. Swimming:No. Smithing:Well, duh. Masonry:Supplement Skill Shipbuilding:Yes. Architecture:Yes. Crafting:Supplement Skill Engineering:Supplement Skill Chemistry:Yes. Cooking:Yes. Farming:Yes. Fishing:Yes.

And now, we can categorise these skills into potential professions:

Food Production: Cooking, Farming, Fishing Metal Production: Smithing Boat Production: Shipbuilding Building Production: Architecture Misc. Warfare: Chemistry

And now, I explain why each of these professions is surpassed by smithing. Let's start from the top: Food Production: Well, this is fairly obvious. Run towards mainland and start stabbing cows. You've stated this yourself, a high level smith can make more food than any farmer. Boat Production: Slightly less obvious, but equally easy. Just build a crossbow, or some other ranged weapon with a base damage of over 50, and fire at a player who has a better boat than you. This is actually built into the game, notice how there is no boat retool button? That's because boats are meant to be stolen by the smiths. Heck, you don't even need a crossbow and a good aim, just nabbing it while they're not using it is fine. When they chase you, you can just line up a clear shot and take them out. Building Production: Excluding aesthetic buildings, buildings are either for shelter/storage, baking, or water production. All buildings fall under one of these categories. Shelter/Storage is replaceable with Nature/Inventory, both of which work just as well, if not better. Baking buildings are covered under food production (laughably useless), and water production? Well, take a guess at why the top three water containers are all smithed. That's right, smithing is the master skill. Misc. Warfare: Poison and herbal remedies? Sword and carrot work just fine, if not better in the case of the former. Explosives? They don't actually need chemistry as of such, you'd earn the levels by just making them. It's a bit like saying that a handle is the produce of a woodworker. Sure, it raises carpentry, but it doesn't mean it's something you would sell to others.

And so, with this Master Skill, that means that the game is one of two things: Clearly, it's option B.
 * An economy game with such terrible balancing that it ought to be burnt.
 * Or a PvP game, with skills just so the other bits of the game don't seem silly.

And so, I can finally get to the point I was trying to make in my earlier posts. PvP is the core skill. Farmers don't need to have their profession's defence balanced against the other ones, because they're not a profession, nor a valid playstyle. They're someone who forgot to play the rest of the game.