Ultimate Star Trek Online Crafting & Economy solution
 

This is all of it, all in one. This is a skill-based economy, around building up our characters. Rather than crafting physical "stuff" like phasers, or ship components, it's about getting and earning (and selling/trading) skills and skill credits. It's a possible wet dream for crafting the scope and nature of your character. Once implemented, this would later extend to a second level of Crafting where you could build, and design, actual skills and training programs for others.. but that's secondary to the core system, which is here. The final crafting solution would be a driver to this.

In ******** terms, you're a blacksmith or a tailor. Here, you'd design Combat training. Or Science training. The ones below--that do one thing, at about 0.25% per rank, are the "Commons". Player builts would be "Greens" and either do two things at 0.25% or one per rank at 0.5%. Rares would do 3 or more at varying percentages. Ultra-rares, or epics, may go as high as as 1% per rank.

Short highlights:

1. Every character can learn 10 skills; 3 primary, 7 secondary.
2. You buy Common skills at Starbases.
3. You get Merits and Rare drops from normal play; Merits bump your skill points.
4. Anything in this system--merits, skills--can be traded or sold. Knowledge effectively is money.
5. Once this baseline system is live, the 2nd half would be for players to craft their own skills and sell them.
6. BOs could also learn skills, but a much smaller number, such as 1 primary and 2 secondary, and BO abilities count only for 1/2 effect.

It's very simple. First off: this is only tier 1 of a possible economy; there's other stuff that can come up later like dilithium, latinum, and any number of other things. This is just one part of it.

The most important thing is -- money, for most societies that aren't Ferengi, has never been shown to be a driving force in Trek. It's not for the Federation, or Romulans, or Klingons. There are financial concerns on the capital/faction level, of course. They outright talk about the Klingon military economy often, for their fleet.

But that's over our heads as players and a lore thing.

This is a solution for us that actually may not be that hard for the Devs to implement, relatively speaking.



That Ultimate Star Trek Online Crafting & Economy solution

What:

Skills and knowledge as an economy. Skills to flesh out and customize yourself. Each character can learn up to 10 skills. Each skill is ranked from 1-100.

Three skills will be Primary and can level from 1-100, and seven will be Secondary that can only level from 1-50. You can change a Secondary to be a Primary, which demotes a Primary to Secondary. Any change of a Primary to a Secondary WILL permanently lose any points above 50 in it. Any skill can be in the Primary or Secondary, even Rare skills (for the truly mad/time invested).

All bonuses from these stack.

Limitations:

You need to chose a Primary Family. The families are Physical, Sciences, Engineering, Combat, and Social. If you choose Engineering as your Primary Family, all your Primary Skills must be engineering skills. Your Secondary Skills can be anything, so you can take ten Engineering if that is your Primary.

Each skill can only be learned ONCE at any given time, as either Primary or Secondary.

How to advance:

Skill Credits will randomly drop as a part of normal loot (rare) or as uncommon random rewards (for mission completions). Each merit can apply 1 Skill Point to a Primary skill or 2 Skill Points to two different Secondary skills.

Suggested Skill Credit drop rate:

5% per loot opportunity for ONLY equal-level kills. If you're Captain 5, you have to take out at least a Captain 5 enemy. PVP kills also will grant them. For each at-least -5 mission completion, you will have a 20% chance to get a Skill Credit drop.

Effectively, your skill advancement and customization is a direct reward for playing the game however you see fit. Mathematically you are guaranteed over time to advance and make money by putting in time, rather than by just hammering Boss X or Dungeon/Raid Y.

Can I trade or sell Skill Credit tokens or rare Skills?

Yes. Knowledge and experience is the real economy in Trek; this reflects this.

Can I trade or sell spent Skill Credit tokens or equipped rare Skills?

Never. Once used, they are yours only.

How do I obtain Skills?

Go to a Common Skills vendor in the core, major Starbases. However, some skills are World Drops. Each time someone earns a Skill Credit token, there is a 5% chance of one of these randomly dropping.

What would this economy look like?

Like whatever the players set it as.

How will this grow in the future?

New general skills should be regularly added based on real martial arts, real diplomatic things, player suggestion threads (like this one), real sciences, real changes in-game, and any amount of cribbing from places like Wikipedia and Memory-Alpha.org. Three years after such a system launches, since Skills are basically text and attribute modifiers, we could have hundreds of such possibilities and limitless character combinations.

Top-level categories for skills:

• Physical
• Sciences
• Engineering
• Combat
• Social

(All of these will be expanded as the thread grows)


Physical skills:

1. Weightlifting: +0.5% melee damage per rank, +0.25% chance of knockback with melee attacks.
2. Track and field: increase your sprint speed by 0.5% per rank.
3. Melee weapons: +0.5% accuracy and +0.25% melee damage per rank with melee weapons (swords, bath'let, etc).
4. Boxing: +0.5% close combat accuracy and 0.25% chance of knockback per rank.
5. Martial arts: +0.5% melee non-weapon accuracy and 0.25% chance of knockback per rank.
6. Endurance training: +0.5% sprint duration and -0.5% cooldown time on sprint per rank.
7. Defensive training: +0.5% root/stun/hold resistance per rank.

Rare physical examples:

1. Worf's Calisthenics Training: +0.5% melee accuracy & damage, and -0.25% root/stun/hold duration per rank.

Sciences skills:

1. Stellar cartography: Ability to find anomalies in Exploration areas at a greater range of 1% per rank.
2. Tribble breeding: increase tribble spawn time by 0.5% per rank.
3. Terrestrial forensics: 0.5% increased likelihood of causing a loot spawn on the ground per rank on each kill.
4. Spatial forensics: 0.5% increased likelihood of causing a loot spawn on in space per rank on each kill.

Engineering skills:

1. Warp core engineering: +0.5% warp speed increase per rank.
2. Impulse engine optimization: +0.5% impulse speed per rank.
3. Ship design: +0.25% hull recovery rate per rank.
4. Equipment enhancements: various small abilities on your gear. 1-10: tricorder ground scans leave visible waypoint on nearby targets for 10 seconds. 11-20: Basic weapon cooldown, -0.4 seconds, and so on, etc.
5. Replicator efficiency: 1% reduced replicator cost on purchases per rank.

Rare engineering examples:

1. Scott-style Miracle Worker: +0.25% power systems recovery per rank.

Combat skills:

(To be done)
Ship combat/piloting, firewarms...





Social skills:
(To be expanded)

1. Diplomacy (once we have diplomacy missions, which are coming): 1% more likely to succeed/get favorable response per rank.
2. Salesman: 0.5% increased sales price of all gear sold to non-replicator vendors per rank.
3. Haggling: 0.5% reduced cost of purchase from all non-replicator vendors per rank.

Please reply below with suggestions and feedback, and ESPECIALLY suggestions for skils.

Keep them in the same ballpark league. Only the melee ones you'll note generally grant two small bonuses; see how the Rares otherwise grant multiple bonuses. That would be their value. Focus on suggesting regular ones, at first. Real Trek things, IRL skills, military skills, anything and everything. Don't skimp on the Social ones.

Eventually, I was envisioning at least 20 general skills under each category at least 5-10 rares under each.



Originally done up loosely in this post: http://forums.startrekonline.com/sho...d.php?t=120448

Reserved for later expansion of Combat skills to here.

Reserved for later expansion of Engineering skills to here.

Reserved for later expansion of Physical skills to here.

Reserved for later expansion of Science skills to here.

Reserved for later expansion of Social skills to here.

I don't see how this is crafting at all - one of the key points of crafting is that you make stuff both to use and to trade with other players.

As for the economy part of it, at best, I think you just create a parallel economy where skill credits become the SoJ for STO.

So I don't think this is the Ultimate solution for anything.

That's the old definition of crafting. This is something totally different, in crafting yourself. This could also expand later (which was going to be a separate push, if something like this went through) to let people design skills themselves as crafting, and sell them. Think of Glyphs in ********. Everything economically would filter down off of this, rather than the classic "I BUILD PHYSICAL STUFF" model. You're still building ultimately, but yourself and knowledge.

Interesting, but only if they do another game.

This idea is nothing for Cryptic though, its too complicated for them to understand or implement.

Cryptic is simple, shallow, easy.

You should really take this idea to a different company that creates a new game.

As long as it's just yourself, it's not crafting, it's a skills system.

So this is a skill system, that might lead to something vaguely resembling crafting later. Given that we already have a skill system in place, Cryptic should focus on refining and improving that rather than implementing a parallel one.