Concept: Jobs

Suggestions
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Ok, so @Zouls reminded me of [this post][1], and I had a few ideas about how Jobs could work in Oort in the future.

First, let me go over a few goals for my concept.

  1. Players should be able to craft anything they need to, at any time. You should not be restricted by a choice you made before on what you can make, especially if you are playing solo.
  2. Players should be rewarded for keeping the job title they choose for long periods of time, rather than switching titles every time they need to craft something else.
  3. Jobs should reward the player for doing things in game even if they can not find other players to market their skill to.
  4. Job titles should have meaningful progression to show a players dedication to their job as well as validate the player as an “expert” in their field at later levels.
  5. While rewarding, jobs should only help you be successful, not not be required for it.

So, now let’s look at a simple way to execute these goals while sticking to what we know about upcoming planned features such as the token system and currency.

Tokens will be a tangible meta-data type system, and players will be able to craft tokens as well as leave meta data on items they create that can be read by other players. This is important for the first part of my concept.

[“As you progress through the universe of Oort Online, you’ll collect (currency). (Currency) can be traded with other players for resources, items, tools and weapons.”][2] The dev’s have also mentioned before in a video that you’ll likely passively gain currency by doing things in game such as mining, farming, killing mobs, etc. This is important for the second part of my concept. (Heck, it may be similar to what the devs were thinking at some point)

So, now to my actual concept.
Firstly, to select a job title for your character, it’s as simple as placing your player token into a “job title” slot in your own GUI. Once you’ve done this, you become a novice in which ever field you’ve chosen. We’ll say for the sake of this example, you’ve chosen to be a farmer.

Havok40k
Novice Farmer

Now that you’re officially a farmer, put on your straw hat and get to farming! (Hat not included.)
While anybody CAN plant and harvest crops, when farming crops as a novice farmer you passively gain a small amount of currency at the end of every crop harvested. This fills goals 1, 3 and 5 for my concept. Yes, anybody can farm, and no, it won’t instantly make you successful, but by taking the title “Novice Farmer”, you’re already gaining a small reward for performing farming duties. This can be especially helpful when you attempt to take your crops to market! Since you’ve already earned a small sum of currency by harvesting your crops, you gain a competitive edge in the food market. You can charge slightly less than non farming competitors and still turn a nice profit for yourself!

So you’ve been a diligent farmer, you’ve gathered a number of crops and for a full 24 hours (in game time!) you’ve not changed your job title. Your knowledge as a farmer has improved vastly! You now progress to the next level of farmer, Adept Farmer! (Edited- added requirement to gather a number of crops too, not just wait for a time period)

Havok40k
Adept Farmer

Now, as an adept farmer, you gain a little more passive currency per harvest than a novice farmer. Additionally, your crops are healthier and more delicious! Crops you produce now carry your meta data when harvested, and provide a slight bonus when consumed! They may appear like this;

[Carrot]
Harvested by Havok40k, Adept Farmer
+5 Nutrition!
-They’re great for your eyes, too!

Here now we see where goals 2 and 4 are satisfied. By keeping your job title into the next tier, you now see benefits to becoming a more proficient farmer. Your meta data is attached to the products you sell, so other players can see the benefits of your proficiency, while also giving validation for your higher prices at market. Those carrots are premium organic! Havok40k sure makes the best carrots!

Now, let’s say that the carrot business just isn’t the life of excitement you’d really dreamed of. That’s ok, because you’re not restricted to being a carrot farmer for life! Simply move your token in your GUI to a new profession. Soldier sounds exciting!

Havok40k
Novice Soldier

Time to take up arms and do battle with the protectors! You’re so excited to start your new life as a soldier, you have unlearned everything you know about carrot farming. You can still harvest carrots, but you no longer passively gain currency or attach your meta data to your carrots. They’re just regular ol’ carrots. But now you know a thing or two about slaying protectors! Upon slaying a protector, you gain a slight amount of currency! Sound familiar? You now have a slight advantage over civilians when fighting protectors in that, in addition to regular drops from slain foes, you also make a little money on the side. Sure, you can sell the spoils of war at a slightly lower price and still make a handsome profit as well! This is great! Just like when you were a farmer, keeping your job as a soldier for 24 in game hours teaches and slaying many monsters teaches you much about combat. (Edited- added requirement to slaying a number of protectors too, not just wait for a time period)

Havok40k
Adept Soldier

Toughened in combat, you are starting to see physical benefits! You gain a small amount of bonus health, not much, but enough to possibly make a difference in clutch situations. You also take a larger bounty from slaying protectors, as well as occasionally take trophies from your enemies!

[Protector’s Hide]
Slain by Havok40k, Adept Soldier
+5 defense when consumed
The hide of the protector is thick and light, great for patching weak points in armor

Now, as a soldier, you can either use these for yourself, or trade them to civilians to defend themselves in the event of attack. You may not have as much to sell as a farmer, but your passive health benefit balances that out.

Edited- Late game progression: After you have completely mastered a profession, you can keep the knowledge of it up to the second tier, (Adept) while still learning a new skill! However, you will only gain passive money on the skill you currently are mastering. So, if you master farming, but want to start training as a soldier, you revert down to Adept Farmer while beginning your training as a soldier. You still harvest adept crops, but you don’t gain passive currency from them. You now gain passive currency from your active skill as a soldier only. After reaching the max tier in your second profession, you now permanently unlock the skill bonuses in that profession up to tier two (Adept) and may begin mastering a third skill. In this way, you can be a Master of one particular skill, but no higher than Adept in any other skill. This rewards players that master everything without making them too powerful at everything at once. Your primary active skill is the only one that grants passive money and the only one that can advance past tier two.

So, to conclude this concept, let’s recap on a few things.

  1. Anybody can do anything in the game they want, but professionals gain a bonus for making it their focus.
  2. When doing your profession, you make a small sum of money up front! You can still sell carrots as a soldier for a profit, but it’s not as profitable as if you were a farmer already.
  3. You can change your profession at any time, but you’re rewarded for remaining in a profession for longer.

Any thoughts on what may make a better profession system? Is there a better way to determine a player’s profession?
Naturally, I did not cover all the possible professions in game or possible way’s they could gain currency, these two were just quick examples of the diverse ways it could work. Please don’t nit-pick at my given examples, as they’re just examples. If you think there are better ways professions could reward the player though, let’s hear it!

Edit notes:
1) @Thorbjorn42gbf’s suggestion to negate just waiting for the next progression level was added in bold.
2) @Predatoxic @Thorbjorn42gbf idea to allow learning multiple professions (up to a point) added in "Late game progression
[1]: http://oortonline.com/have-your-say-early-inventory-crafting-gui/ “about tokens”
[2]: http://oortonline.com/#features

10 Likes
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I really like the concept though i think that the upgrade should be based around amount of work and not time. (I hope that is not too much nit-picking :slight_smile: )

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I agree with Thorbjorn
:turtle:

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No, that’s a very good point, @Thorbjorn42gbf. I originally thought about doing it by amount of work done, but I really did not want it to feel grindy! While you can grind your job and make decent sum of money over time, I would want to occasionally be able to go do other things in game like build my base or explore for Oort temples as well. Some of the more farm based professions like farmer may feel absolutely boring if you had to grind out 1000 carrots before advancing to the next tier, and if you had that massive carrot farm built before becoming a farmer, you could simply switch professions, gather a few carrots and rank up in a matter of minutes. The time limit is a way to combat exploitation of that and keeps the player from switching professions every few minutes.

To clarify, please dissect this idea as much as you want, just don’t get hung up on the given values like +5 defense or what ever.

2 Likes
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The problem with making it solely time based is that you could basically run around killing monsters and then come back and harvest godly crops.

I don’t know how hard this would be but maybe make it so when you harvest lets say 20 fully grown crops in a row you will start counting upwards towards 24 hours but it will only count for an hour and then it will stop until next time when you harvest.

2 Likes
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I dislike the idea of being able to do/craft erverything and soloing :confused: I think it would be epic if players would get better at what they do (Crafting armor, brewing potions, performing rituals etc.) and ‘create’ their jobs and classes by themselves. I think trading would be way cooler with that concept because you are kinda forced to trade(like irl)

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Maybe everyone is able to create lower tier or less effective armor, but someone that has reached a second or higher level in that job would be able to create/harvest far better items.

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There is a lot of propositions on how make both the solo and team players happy but i don’t really won’t to track them down right now.

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Edited to reflect this suggestion. Progression now has the requirement of harvesting crops AND keeping your profession unchanged for a set time period. I can’t believe I overlooked such a simple fix.

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The reason I suggest being able to craft anything and soloing is because this game has two core elements that need to be considered. The first is that it is a Sandbox game. In a sandbox, the only limitations on what you can do should be your own imagination! The game should not dictate what toys you can and can not play with based on classes. However, in an RPG, classes very much define what the player can do! These two concepts are not mutually exclusive, however, and I feel that this jobs concept balances both worlds. By focusing on a profession, you’re producing better quality products or gaining advantages in some way relative to your profession. It can be frustrating if you can’t acquire armor as a farmer if you don’t know any blacksmiths. This system lets you still craft good armor as a farmer, but you’ll never be able to craft armor as well as a professional blacksmith. You can still trade for the best quality armor of course, but you’ll not have the health bonuses of a soldier when wearing it! This way, your profession acts as a bonus to your play style rather than a restriction on what you can do.

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Here i posted one of the old compromises that still makes it possible for the player to do everything alone:
https://forum.oortonline.com/t/marketing-trading-and-economics-why-we-need-it/209/9?u=thorbjorn42gbf

Actually i think these two could combine together rather nicely.

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That’s kinda where I’m going with this. While I don’t want to say something like “only a blacksmith can craft heavy armor” rather a blacksmith’s heavy armor has added bonuses like +10 additional defense. Additionally, only the blacksmith is rewarded with money upfront when crafting that bonus armor. The farmer can still craft heavy armor, but it won’t have the bonus defense and they won’t get paid for it unless they find a buyer.

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I could see this, provided you had to reach the max tier in a profession before switching professions, or else you would lose all progress toward that profession! I don’t know how it would affect the late game economy if a large percentage of players were masters of all trades, however. I feel players may start to feel a sort of identity crisis after mastering everything! How does a player with no mysteries compete with a player who has mastered everything? There is no longer any cost/benefit to the class concept.

All in all, I am very skeptical of being a master of all trades at once, no matter how hard or long it takes to acquire each skill.

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I agree, I think that you should be able to get to a certain skill level in everything, but the top couple skill levels are locked to a certain number max per character.

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16

This may be more do-able. “Jack of all trades, master of none” kind of concept. If your money bonus was only tied to your primary profession, but you were able to gain small bonuses from being an adept in
everything else, that may not be too overpowered, and very rewarding for players that invest time in every profession.

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Maybe a player could only fully master one skill and could only be adept (or something like that :smiley: ) at the other skills

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18

Precisely what I was thinking.

19

Well then I agree with you :smiley: I wonder what the rest of the community is thinking about this

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You have seen me around and my thoughts on crafting and progression should be pretty clear by now, i do not want to use 2 months on leveling up crafting just to see a newb who just started being able to make the exact same stuff. no go.

it also greatly bothers me that you refer to anything including doing the same thing again is grinding, practice makes perfect, you might think it as grindy but it shouldnt be done in a way where people get what they dont deserve in terms of skills.

saying that every sandbox is about doing anything you want is kinda stretching it, by far, but it is not my area of expertise so i cannot comment too much other than my own feelings. i just dont want everybody to solo everything, some people focus alot on the sandbox aspect, i prefer to focus on the MMO and RPG elements of the game which gives me strong opinions, (sorry about that) i just dont see the point of having an MMO when you can solo everything.

The thing about getting gold from doing random stuff bothers me, greatly, tbh. i made a post talking about having realistic loot from enemies so animals only drop crafting mats and stuff or to have normal drop like wow where a pig can drop a 2hand axe (for whatever the reason)

i see your point with it, it would just annoy me and mess me up to be like

‘‘You have harvested 10 carrots, here is 50 gold’’

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Ever played wildstar? they had a pretty neat system with ‘‘paths’’ you could 4 different paths which unlocked special missions and abilities for your character which i find cool.

I say give us 2 jobs we can do at once, doing those 2 would level them up and give bonuses as you mentioned, but only those 2 can be mastered. you are allowed to switch, but that would ocmpletely reset any progress you had in the skills, to stop jumping.

so say i pick soldier and light weaponsmith, i can now get passives from combat and from crafting light weapons, only those 2 would be giving me passives that would increase my ability to craft light weapons and soldier,

so i can make 2hand weapons, staffs and armor whatever, if i level them enough on the side, but when i reach a certain point they will take ALOT of exp to level unless i have the required job token. so assuming the skill cap is 525 (to take a number) i can do all of these things as normal up to tier 100. when i reach that point i would get ‘‘inexperienced’’ message everytime i try to craft something, reducing the exp down so i only get 10% of the exp i could get for having the skill. to not get the inexperienced message i need a certain level of the given job token, so if i do light weaponsmith and have the token at apprentice i can make items with normal exp rate up to level 175 and after that i need to increase it further.

that way you have people who will specialize but for those who refuse they can still ‘‘unlock everything’’ (sorry, i get a bad taste in my mouth whenever i write that >.<)

that is my suggestion of a compromise.

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Or maybe giving the players a maximum amount of progression points to acquire. For example, focusing on your progression can allow you to totally master 2-3 professions. For others, they can only be “good” on all profession if they plan on progressing on all professions.

e.g
maximum amount of progression points per player - 15pts
progression points needed to fully master a profession - 5pts

This gives a simple solution that would result for a wide variety of choices for the players.

The only problem here is that a limitation exist which some of the people here in the community doesn’t like. Although making the progression to be time consuming can be a rough solution.