Alts and craft skills

[Murk]

By Alts I mean alternate characters.

I currently have 2 characters which I play and 1 which I don't really. Those being:

(1) A "main" with a bunch of skills, fire/ice, knife/animal mostly
(2) A druid, that likes arrows, and barding
(3) A Lycan that don't do much right now.

The problem I have is this. It would seem that I need to get most of the same crafting skills on (1) (2) at to be practical, since either:

a) they give +1's to skills in question, or
b) I need to make a knife, which needs blacksmith, which needs carpentry, which needs toolcraft, which could do with surveying
c) I need to make arrows which needs carpentry, which could do with surveying. a Bard, which needs everything it seems from flowers to whatnot.

So, I see that you don't *have* to get all the craft skills on each character, but it has serious downsides if you don't. I don't really want to learn the same crafting all the time, so therein lies my problem. The skill dependency (+1 or utility) tree is rooted in crafts skills ultimately.

In my case I want to keep the druid away from the wolf away from the mundane man, as I don't want to be a wolf druid at the same time particularly, otherwise I'd have one character only.

[zirker]

maybe the lvl bonuses from skills could be shared across characters?

[Erthiel]

I don't get it, what are the serious downsides beside few synergy lvls? Craftable items can be bought from other players. You can even transfer items between chars using the storage chest so if you have the skills on one char you can transfer resources or the items. No need to be a completionist :P

Skill dependencies seem like a reasonable approach. However, I would agree that some of synergy lvls may be unreasonably placed, which might be revised once all the skills are added to the game.
Skilling multiple combat skills on multiple chars which results in skilling all their dependencies seems as a play style decision.

[Oxlazr]

I think the larger problem here is that it doesn't leave room for an alt to easily become a main, so it takes away from the roleplay aspects and pushes the game towards technical reasons for sticking with a character.

While it's true that you don't technically *need* all the skills, some skills (like cooking, fishing and alchemy) seem to be fairly core to most characters regardless; it's tricky to play without them and actually remain competitive. Coupled with the smaller playerbase, finding someone who can craft what you want at any given time without a dedicated auction house can really push players to just level the skills themselves.

I constantly find playing new characters to be more bothersome than I'd like entirely because of crafting professions, and it really limits the replayability of the game. Most other games mitigate by limiting what you can level - Project Gorgon doesn't, so inevitably you'll feel inclined to level basically everything you can, and that tends to shove players towards finding ways to optimise their game-time in a way that isn't fun.

While I disagree that account-wide crafting stats is the solution - insofar as I'd like a newly created character to actually be a novice smith, I wouldn't mind seeing some of the synergy levels & power/gourmand bonuses pulled away from crafting skills so they at least feel more optional - or at the very least, there should be multiple paths to unlocking those bonus levels so you've got some options to play around with.

There's a lot to be said for character customisation and, despite all the options in Project Gorgon, it actually feels rather lack-luster by comparison to other games.

It's somewhat disappointing trying to get "alt challenges" up and running with the community when people are so heavily attached to their mains, though at this stage I can completely understand why they would be.

[Daguin]

Personally, I enjoy the need to focus on one character. The main benefit of PG seems to be that alts are completely unnecessary since you can learn all skills on one toon. Your wish to have different "style" characters (ie: lycan, druid, etc.) means that yes, you will have to play the game multiple times, including leveling craft skills. This is a personal choice, and in the end should encourage players to focus on a primary character. Like Erthiel said, it really takes no time at all to favor/level up skills on alts when you have a main to do all the resource collecting.

[ShieldBreaker]

From https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?653-End-game-level-caps-what-to-expect Citan said

At launch we expect the combat skills to scale to 100, plus 25 points of synergy bonuses, for a "max level " of 125. (There will be more than 25 available synergy points for each skill, so that you can pick and choose which ones you want to earn. But only the first 25 synergy skill points count.)

pretty sure somewhere else he also said the extra bonuses are about letting you pick and choose what to level.