Tradeskill Ideas

Nathaniel

So, i'd love to broach an idea that I've had come up in conversations more than a few times, and would personally love to see come into Starmourn, and hopefully get some feedback from you guys on.

Weapon Crafting:

The -very- rough idea i have thus far, is that much like other trade skills that have you submit an item design, this could be done as well for class weaponry. For example, a Scoundrel might get into weapon crafting, with PIECEs in mind, and submit a design for a new PIECE, either specific to the character, or for general use for game injection. This would also allow for some additional options as far as non-combat skills, and could perhaps be a general tradeskill, or more particular and being based on one type of weapon. I.E., PIECEs, Kithblades, etc.

Anyway, like I said, -very- rough idea, and i'd love to get some outside opinions.

Ikchor

Designing a class weapon (or even armor) is already possible through the class customization system. Granted there is a 100 credit charge for each design, and requires a genelocked weapon of your own (which you'd already have, obviously). If you want to learn someone else's finished design, you require said customized item and 25 lessons to spend. The lesson cost is small, meaning that you could feasibly try and get someone else to shell out for the design if they've got the credits for it or if you have equivalent marks on hand, but when you're still needing to master your class skills this may seem like a silly investment. The reason you don't see these items on trade networks is cause you cannot sell genelocked gear, and the credit cost often mean that the design is likely personal and would be weird to see in the hands of another. You could just grind the credits through the dailycredit system, for both designing and learning but this isn't what some people want. They wanna go arms dealer.

The upside however, is that this current method of doing weapon designs are not restricted the same way that a traditional tradeskill design would be. You can get a little more creative with your design, go a little more off the map with it than a standard design. Putting this as a normal tradeskill wouldn't be nearly as fun, even with Starmourn's relatively generous design standards.
Credits fuelled designs have always had an even broader acceptability range by default. Though maybe I'm off my rocker. 

As for messing with the stats by actually forging or otherwise manufacturing said weaponry, it wouldn't take that long for some people to crack the RNG involved with it and we'd either get into a situation where only one person knows the way to make a 9999 power piece with v. sturdy durability and 3 or even 4 modslots and it'd be pretty much game over for competition OR weapon drops from mobs would be more or less worthless. Injecting designed weapons into the drop table would be a good way to get around this but anyone who'd get into weapons manufacturing in this game would be largely getting into it to make money and/or RP being an arms dealer. So having their designed weapons drop from creepers, rockhoppers and ventrats could be a massive turn off for them. Granted there will be those who do it for the sake of doing it and that's fine, but they'd be the exception not the norm.

Not trying to be doom and gloom about this idea you have, just providing my thoughts.

bugbo

What about some sort of technology design trade skill that lets users design various gizmos or tech type stuff?