by JR Cook - 10 years ago     show comments

A number of extant issues in the Garrisons system seem to have been managed to a certain extent in Tuesday’s new alpha build:

• The Work Order pane at the Alchemy Lab now functions and does not throw Lua errors. (More on that later.)
• The follower abilities and threats in the mission pane now just do nothing on hover, instead of throwing Lua errors.
• The followers UI now properly shows classes and specs for followers, both from text labels to class icons.
• Followers now also have their unique names showing instead of the PH names they had before.
• The icon and name for Material has changed: it’s now called Garrison Resources and has an icon that isn’t just lumber.
• The clipping issues in the Barracks have been resolved, so it doesn’t look like it’s Matrix-glitching it’s way through the terrain.
• Missions can now potentially reward a quality increase for followers, though it doesn’t appear to actually do anything.
• The Mine’s specializations have been changed:
  • Blackrock Mining Cart became Mining Carts: “Additional miners will fill carts for you that are full of ore and other strange things.”
  • Gemfinding became Rock Crusher: “Creates bonus material by crushing the waste rocks from mining for use in roads, concrete, etc.”
  • A third specialization, Mine Guards, was added: “Garrison guards patrol your mine, keeping it clear of hostile Goren.”

While most of this is cosmetic and plenty of issues are still in play (the Enchanter’s Study straight-up doesn’t work, for example) it does give us a lot to talk about.

One assumption I made about profession buildings given earlier information was that they’d make their products with no investment from you, and upgrading the building and/or building a Storehouse would increase what they produced each day. A high initial investment of resources in constructing the building would result in you getting a steady flow of refined profession materials to use as you will.

Also, no idea how you actually get a follower to work in a building, since there’s no way to do it in the UI.

The reality, at least as it stands right now, is that this is not the case. Now that the Work Order pane is working, it’s easy to see that you need to provide raw materials to generate an Alchemist’s Cauldron. Increasing the building’s capacity (whether through increasing the building level or through the Storehouse) increases the number of work orders that can be done simultaneously and the number of results that can be housed at one time, but you still need to put in the raw materials for each order.

I don’t currently have access to the Farm, the Barn, or the Mine, so I’m not able to determine if raw materials (herbs/skins/cloth/ore) behaves the same way, but it would make sense for all the production professions to work similarly to how Alchemy is currently implemented. All told, it makes plenty of sense to require the player to invest the time/effort to acquire raw materials, even if that’s just a function of getting them from the gathering buildings in the garrison.

This also gives a stronger indication of how the profession buildings will interact with player professions, but that requires a bit more detail:

Currently, building the Alchemy Lab gives you two NPCs: an Alchemist and an Alchemist’s Assistant. The Alchemist has your Work Order pane (as well as the tutorial quests demonstrating how work orders work) and the Assistant sells you Alchemy recipes using Secrets of the Master Alchemist, a currency you can only acquire by having your followers complete Alchemy-related missions.

So if you have Alchemy, you don’t really need work orders, because you can craft the Cauldrons yourself and then refine those products into your actual potions and flasks. However, you need the Assistant in order to get the recipes you want to make. Whereas if you don’t have Alchemy, you need the Work Order to turn raw materials into refined materials; how you turn those refined materials into your end products is still up in the air, since the Alchemist doesn’t seem to do that innately at this point.

This raises some questions for how professions your character doesn’t have will work; namely, if they’re intended to give you similar access to someone who has the profession, it’s not clear how you get the end products. And if you have to spend one of your four small plots in order to advance in your professions, then it’s unclear exactly what other benefit you get from the building aside from being able to circumvent daily cooldowns.

Of course, one has to question the value of using your small plots for professions you don’t have,  and without knowing exactly where the Salvage Yard and Storehouse come into play in terms of usefulness, their value is questionable too.

The bottom line is that we have a lot more questions about profession/garrison interplay than we do answers at this point. To which Rewards System Designer Russ Petersen (@nite_moogle) had this to say:

@unlimitedBLACK @Muffinus I suspect you have an incomplete picture as much of the tradeskill stuff in the garrison is WIP 🙂

— Russ Petersen (cohost dot org nitemoogle) (@nite_moogle) June 11, 2014

Keep in mind that alpha is alpha: there’s  plenty about this entire implementation that could shift dramatically as we get closer to a more feature-functional beta test and the release candidate. So watch this space.