Dear AGS,
I personally think you guys are on the right track. I like this concept for the expertise system, and it has the potential to breathe life into the endgame for many players, but…
!!!NO ONE WANTS TO PLAY A GAME THAT MAKES CHOICES FOR THEM!!!
Let them CHOOSE what they want to do to raise their Expertise. Don’t time gate each activity by locking them to once a day. That makes this awesome idea incredibly boring. It’s like a gorilla (super cool) but it’s hair is shaved off (totally not cool)… fortunately you have many ways you could put the hair back on:
1.) You could potentially make gypsum harder to get, by say you loot 1-3 gypsum shards from an activity, and you need 4 to craft a “gypsum core”. With this idea it would be beneficial to remove any time requirement. Have higher cost activities like dungeons drop 3 shards, with perhaps a chance at more if you’re lucky, or complete it in an exceptional time. Give rewards if no one in the group died, or if someone did 1 million damage, etc. Shorter, easier activities like outpost rush, or easy trading quests give 1 shard. If a quest involves high tier mats, like say Tolvium, 2 shards. You get it.
2.) Why not limit to 6 or more total gypsum crafts a day, of a players choosing? The increases one could gain would be limited, but still gives the player freedom to choose. Locking it to once a day is extremely boring. This way players may choose what they want to participate in. PVP players, PVE players, and crafters all get what they want. Give higher rewards for doing something you do the least of, if your aim is intended to have more players experience more of the content offered. Like if a pvp player who has only played OPR the last 100 hrs decides they want to start baking cakes, and works on their cooking, the system would reward that.
3.) This could work with either 1 or 2, but is aimed to ease the 200 crafters woes. You could offer a questline that appears AFTER 200 that pertain to crafting high tier items, of all differing types, to turn in for gypsum rewards. Make this a quest line, not random quests like a town board. These quests should be able take people all the way to max expertise in that field. Or have 2 options, an actual questline, and random dailies like - “Craft an Epic great axe between 580-588 gear score with the perks Death Bore and Gate of Time”. Or maybe crafting a war hammer out of a giant turkey bone.
There’s a lot you can do to fix it, and if you at the very least remove the limit of 1 a day of each, the reception of this update will be much better. People would probably WANT it. I know I would. If you need more ideas, let me know…. I’ve got plenty of em. whispers wilderness areas, maybe even boats and pirating…
Sincerely,
AGS_fanboy69