Alts and Brewing: The Economy, Metagaming, and You
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Lately we (The Team) have seen an increase in players creating Brewers/Wand Makers as Alt characters, and then these Alts are crafting supplies for the friends of their main characters for at or near cost gp.
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This is unfair to the people whose mains characters are Brewers/Wand Makers, because these alts are undercutting their costs, thus harming the "player economy".
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This is also unfair to players who might actually create a story with these alts if they were mains. For example:
Brewbot #214 makes a sending to come to spire to make brews.
Exiled Criminal goes, "Well, I'd gank her, but she is an alt and I'd never see her, but she is supplying my enemies even if it's inadvertent. There is no way for me to fight against this alt." -
However, the biggest issue with this is:
Several ideas have been discussed by The Team of how to address this issue.
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One idea was to make a rule that Brewers/Wand Makers could only be main characters.
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Another idea was to increase the costs (gp) of brewing/wand making…
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…Or return the xp loss for both
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…Or increase the weight of potions from .1 to .2 or even .3
In the interest of community involvement, we've decided to open this issue to discussion from you.
The rules for this discussion:
Be civil. No personal attacks on any player will be tolerated. Period.
Be constructive. Don't just complain - offer a solution.
Stay on topic. Do not derail this thread. -
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Increasing the weight of potions will PUNISH brewing mains, as they still go out and adventure, whereas alts won't.
Increasing the costs of brewing removes some of their RP power, if people would rather go to an NPC brewer to get en masse.
XP loss WOULD favor mains, but it'd also punish any brewers who enter the high levels as active adventurers, making them unable to brew.
I'd say make it so brewers can only be mains. That's really the only reasonable solution to me.
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As one of the aforementioned brewing alt, I intended for the character to brew for everyone.
I was not aware that evil PCs wanted to engage in conflict with the character.
I can retire it immediately if it is actually causing this much of an issue. I do not want to see punitive measures against crafters for my chronic altoholism. :P
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Make the crafting stations require a pass only given out by a DM. It can be for free, but DMs will then be able to track who can use them.
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simplest solution: One idea was to make a rule that Brewers/Wand Makers could only be main characters.
problem solved. -
Could make it app only to brew without xp loss, maybe. As well as making it much cheaper to do either.
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As someone who was dying for a divine brewer for over a month, I would like to have a capacity to buy pc-brewed potions if there isn't a brewing main on the server.
While I think it is rude when the are active brewing mains, I think a simple friendly warning by the DM team to stop while there are active brewing pcs would be sufficient. The other concerns I feel are transitory and fall under the same reasoning as to why we don't punish people for questing alts.
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Please not more apps.
Out of the offered choices i would pick make it mains only.
I also agree with Hellzyeah a simple warning to the player should sort it out. -
To provide some data for this discussion, in case anyone wants something to refer to:
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A potion brewer can make 10 brewing 'attempts' per rest cycle. In the event that the brewer is close to a cauldron, such as those located in the Spire or those crafted, a probability of additional potions per attempt is added. In my experience, this lucky roll can produce up to an additional 5 potions ((edit: I have been told by Strife that you can actually get an additional 7, up to 8 in one attempt)). This is exceedingly rare, however. This means that the range of possible potions per session is 10-80. In practice, however, I have only seen 10-15 per cycle.
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One hour in CoA is 4 minutes. A PC can rest every 8 hours, which translates into 32 minutes.
Hopefully that provides some context for the discussion and encourages insightful discourse.
As for the suggestions put forth:
- I agree that more applications is not the way to go, especially for something that is effectively a feature of the game, not a perk.
- If you increase gold costs of wands/potions, they would still need to remain below NPC costs. Otherwise, this invalidates the need for PC crafters.
- Removing the XP costs of crafting was quite probably one of my favorite changes since coming back to CoA. It made the crafting system far more approachable.
- Weight additions to potions sounds like a nightmare. There is already a stigma in CoA that no character should have less than 12 strength if they want to be able to function.
- Enforcing a soft rule of crafters as mains sounds like the most reasonable solution. This prevents the metagame-ish aspect of alts helping their own characters through crafting for allies.
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I'll address the main issue, the other two are issues with alternate characters in general, and not specifically brewing :
The brewing/crafting alts sell stuff to the allies of their mains, which gives their own main an advantage. This is functionally the same as leaving it on the ground, picking it up with your main, and then passing it to your ally. It's item transfer, and it's metagaming.
I think the main reason that this exists is the huge cost difference between NPC merchants and PC merchants in terms of consumables. It's 'worth' spending the time on an alternate character to brew potions for the entire server, just because you save hundreds if not thousands of gold on essential things such as Cure Serious Wounds on a daily basis.
my solution to this problem would first be to decrease the incentive to spend time brewing by decreasing the general costs for NPC potions - saving a ten or fifteen gold per a potion isin't worth spending 10 hours leveling an alt, at least in my own opinion, though it would be worth taking the feat on a main character for your own faction . . . Or if you just want to spend that extra time, you do you.
Second, I would enforce the issue of metagaming / item transfer on a case by case basis. If a dm sees a alt character that is exclusively selling potions / items for his allies before logging off, the dm can then forcibly retire that character, and if the issue persists, take up the issue with the player.
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@Fey:
Second, I would enforce the issue of metagaming / item transfer on a case by case basis. If a dm sees a alt character that is exclusively selling potions / items for his allies before logging off, the dm can then forcibly retire that character, and if the issue persists, take up the issue with the player.
This is essentially my viewpoint on the issue.
it IS an issue, and it IS cheating to do this, as, as stated, it's functionally the same as passing one of your own characters an item from another of your own characters - It's granting you a direct advantage via a separate one of your characters.
However, I personally hate any form of limiting people to playing what they want to play, when they want to play it.
I've enjoyed playing a crafter alt, just to fiddle around with, and learn about the crafting systems (before I became a DM, and actually fiddled with them directly! then it was testing things) and I think others can, and should be able to enjoy that playstyle as well.
I personally think, that people should keep this factor in mind, and make sure they aren't being obviously metagamey by supplying a bunch of people they absolutely know are going to be using those items to help their own main character progress.
Creating a direct rule limiting play styles, or implementing some kind of "mechanical fix" for this seems counter productive to the actual issue at hand, which is people making sure to keep the rules, and fairness of the server in mind.
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Make the crafting stations require a pass only given out by a DM. It can be for free, but DMs will then be able to track who can use them.
In the v2/v3 days all crafting stations had a pass that characters had to pay a fair amount of gold for, perhaps it's time to reintroduce this. I'm surprised this issue didn't come up back than either at least not to my memory and there were plenty of wand makers/potion brewers back then too.
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However, I personally hate any form of limiting people to playing what they want to play, when they want to play it.
Creating a direct rule limiting play styles, or implementing some kind of "mechanical fix" for this seems counter productive to the actual issue at hand, which is people making sure to keep the rules, and fairness of the server in mind.
I strongly agree with this sentiment.
Selling potions to allies of your main character for the purpose of helping your faction - that's just cheating. It's like making a rogue alt to spy on your main's enemies. Mechanically possible but cheating. DMs should simply mete out punishment.
Sidenote:
Please do not increase weight of potions - Encumbrance is quite literally the WORST thing about NWN. There are a number of times when I've gotten so frustrated with encumbered characters that I have trouble enjoying them. I understand that it's immersion breaking to have characters running around with 20 sets of fullplate and 72 greatswords - But encumbrance is bad enough as is.
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If I may suggest a reason for this,
On FB someone asked why this is now a problem since v3, as I was around back then there was a higher player count, with more players playing brewers, now as coa starts to get smaller some people want to play other things, so less brewers which means players make alts for brewing, and so the problem begins.
I'd say make it clear that the dm's frown at such behavior and that players who make a habit or use this way to essentially cheat be dealt with on a case by case basis for forced retirement and perhaps other actions as deemed necessary by the dm team.
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1. Brewbot Alts just brewing for their friends is bad for their enemies.
2. When there are NO brewbots at all, it is bad for everyone.
3. I do not think there is an easy solution to this, but having a blanket ban that prevents ALT Brewbots might be counterproductive.
4. I would suggest that if you have an alt-brewbot, you must be neutral and unaffiliated with any groups and, within reason, sell to everyone who asks. -
The first step, probably obvious to most people but worth mentioning, would be to publish a ruling on this. Since this is a practise that has been commonplace for the duration of CoA and always been okay in the past I would imagine deciding on what the actual crafting-alt policy is and posting it would clear a lot up.
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I think that is the point of this thread, to discuss the implementation of either a rule or mechanical limitation on crafting alts so that they do not actively affect plots.
I still think that crafting alts should always take a backseat when there are crafting pcs active. The distinction should be made between "active" "online" and "available" where the only real situation in which those crafting alts should be proliferating is if the first does not apply.
But I think that rule should be enforced with simple warnings that should be easy to enforce with a quick perusal of The A&S forum.
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That is my opinion as well, but it is clearly impossible to police.
Having alts with the brewbot feat is just as impossible to police, tbh. -
More required apps is, from my perspective, always a bad thing. I've seen multiple people I've introduced to the server in the past leave due to the perceived high focus on apps (and inability to understand how apps worked and what got an app accepted). I've had the same issues, in the past. It really kills the momentum to wait a week or two for an app to be looked at and getting no response whatsoever, having to poke at DMs to know if it even got sent the proper way. This is stomach-able for an actual concept like being a lycanthrope or a noble or whatever, but "just" to be able to brew potions? It's a bit much.
Just warn people, explain the issue to them. Maybe an ingame warning in the new-character zone.
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Mind that if we do consider some form of limitation it likely wont be an App, but rather the requirement to be wanded by a DM in order to be able to craft. The lack of wanding can then have one of the following effects:
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Prevent the non wanded PC from crafting at all.
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Inflict heavier penalties on crafting without said token: Double/Triple the production cost and/or xp penalties.
The second option will still allow alts to craft but at a much steeper cost that it will be much more worth it to craft on a main.
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