by JR Cook - 10 years ago     show comments

Since my post yesterday about garrison and profession changes, some of the lingering questions were put to the developers. They were kind enough to answer, meaning we’ve got a window into some the future iterations coming to the garrison/profession interaction.

Of course, how much of that is evident in today’s upcoming build remains to be seen.

Let’s get into it:

On the Necessity of Profession Buildings

In response to my question about whether profession buildings will be required for learning recipes, Rewards Systems Designer Russ Petersen had this to say:

@unlimitedBLACK @mumper @Muffinus you will be able to get your recipes from trainers at some point.

— Russ Petersen (@nite_moogle) July 23, 2014

Meanwhile, Lead Game Designer Cory Stockton followed up to say that there’s a design in the pipe that just isn’t in the builds yet. In some other discussions I had yesterday, a workaround did get floated that worked like this: build the level one version of a profession building so you can learn all the recipes, then replace that building with another one. That feels a little awkward to me, but depending on what the design for recipes will be, it may still be a solid solution.

As an addendum to that, the question came up about whether build times would stay at the one-hour mark we have in beta currently. Stockton states that it’ll scale with building level, which implies that upgrades will take longer than the original construction.

On Mining/Herb Nodes Granting XP

I asked about mining nodes, since I had hinted that it would be unlikely for them to continue giving free XP, but was surprised to hear this response:

@unlimitedBLACK @nite_moogle @Muffinus Intended. They are essentially the exact same as nodes in the world but for non-miners. — Mumper (@mumper) July 23, 2014

On consideration, it makes sense. Picking up another 10-20k XP for walking around your mine and tapping nodes sounds like a lot, but in the grand scheme of things, when a single monster kill in the world would give you the same amount, it’s fairly negligible. And overall, XP gains in the garrison won’t mean anything at max level, which is where players will be spending the bulk of their time. So hey, free XP you guys!

On the Resource Cap

In the current build, you have a maximum amount of 1000 Garrison Resources. Also, recent builds have re-enabled the passive resource generation, including when you’re not at your garrison, at a rate of 1 Resource every 10 minutes. A bit of math shows that it takes a little under 7 days to reach 1000 Resources. (Aside: it’s fun to log in after a couple days, stumble into your garrison and see your chat log suddenly report that you just got a couple hundred Resources because reasons.)

Another intrepid user asked if that 1000 Resource cap was finalized, and Stockton responded:

@FunkFreshHill @Muffinus We will have a cap at launch, not sure if it will be 1k though, could change during beta.

— Mumper (@mumper) July 23, 2014

Now, the bottom line here is that where the cap sits is only impacts players if they have a lot of ways to spend resources. Constructing/upgrading buildings should logically be costs that don’t take place super-frequently, and missions that have a resource cost seem to be balanced out by getting resources as rewards. So it’s hard to tell what exactly we’ll be spending all of these resources on, or if we’re going to be spending a lot of time at max-level being resource-capped. Until we see what the end-game design looks like, it’s hard to say.

Aside from that, a lot of fixes for extant problems have been promised for the upcoming build, like being able to test the garrison invasions, or being able to finalize construction on certain buildings that bugged out. Also, apparently our followers will be doing more than just walking around the garrison and occasionally eating.

All told, there’s a lot to this system that’s still in flux. We’ll keep you posted.