Lifeskill 2.0

The present state of Lifeskilling isn't terribly bad but it is something that neds to be looked into just as much as the combat "rebalance" of last year. Simply put, lifeskilling has become stale over the years because nothing has changed and there is very little incentives to do anything but what makes you the most money. I will suggest a few changes based on experience and while I understand my ideas may not be the best, I am opening this as an open conversation for people to make their feedback known.

Price Adjustments

Presently the cost of materials is far greater than the finished product for most crafts. Certain things such as food buffs ie: Calpheon Meal, are not like this. However every single furniture in the game costs more to craft than the materials are worth.

Proposal: All items could be manually adjusted, however what if there is a dynamic adjustment element? The higher the value of the materials to craft the end-product, the more expensive the end-product can be? For instance, if you require 10 iron ore and 2 rough ruby, but the end product's min price is lower than all the items combined, then why would anyone sell that?

Math:

Current price of materials = minimum price of crafted goods + 20% (the percentage is to give an incentive to craft)

Caravans

With the price of good going up in price as previously requested, there would be a greater need to have workers, work and perhaps even transport goods from one place to another. Perhaps imperial delivery through caravan trading would even be possible.  How can a new gameplay element be added to lifeskilling? Let me introduce Caravans!

Proposal:

You have a stable for horses, donkeys etc... That's all fine and good but Caravans would require their own setup. Caravans are based on wagons you build and require you to upgrade your wagons so that they can survive the journey to their destination and also carry more and perhaps move faster. When shipping goods, you can ship multiple wagons together making a caravan. They would traverse the world as you require them to but they could encounter bandit raids etc... The farther they go, the more treacherous it becomes. You would have to upgrade your wagons progressively as you become better at caravan trading and you could even join the caravan to protect it.

You could upgrade for faster wagons at the cost of defense or have better defense at the cost of speed. Sometimes you would want one more than another just depending. The caravan shop would be with the stables but "separate" meaning it would be its own menu or perhaps its own building. Caravan goods could be procured by Trade, Imperial Delivery, Guild Missions and personal crafts but keep in mind personal gives less than imperial and it's not intended/cannot be used for storage.

Caravans must be driven by the player an NPCs, the NPCs are workers like the ones you would hire for ships, but they are not sailors they are gypsies. Caravans can exist in each town and if you need to traverse the desert you could have caravan camels or elephants. Guild caravans would require guild items to be purchased and each caravan would be guild-managed not player managed. Anyone participating in the guild caravan would be assigned to a caravan. XL would require more players and it would be a longer distance but the reward would be worth it.

Workers 2.0

Currently workers are doing their job just fine but unfortunately it is very buggy and the UI is terrible. If you try to build a Frigate for instance, it's time consuming to manually select a single part, pick the amount of times you want the worker to work and then click on START.  Instead, the UI should be made in such a way that you can easily select multiple workers and set the amount that they should work on what part. I could draft up a concept but I don't even know if anyone will read this. Multiple workers could be assigned to the same node given that the node reaches the appropriate node investment.

This would apply to all nodes, including trace nodes and stars end. I cannot think of other things to improve workers.

Underwater Gathering

Presently underwater gathering is like working at Mc Donalds at minimum wage with the qualifications of a Doctor. It's just not worth it. It takes time to get to the location (perhaps 30 minutes) and there is very little that you get as a result. Either the prices must be adjusted to reflect the time spent gathering underwater or more expensive things should be added. Anywhere else you could gather meat or whatever and make at least 200mil / hour without processing it. Gathering underwater should be rewarding but unfortunately it isn't.

Horse / Camel / Donkey / Alpaca / Elephant Balancing

At the present time there isn't much purpose to owning a elephant, Alpaca or Donkey. Camels are useful in the desert but once you have a Dine, there's no need for it. I'm not proposing anything that would put Dine to shame but I do think mounts can have their purpose.

Proposal:

Horse: Keep as is, nothing needs to be changed. Can be used for trading in winter zones, cannot be used for desert caravans / trading.

Camel: Can breed, become faster in desert, have higher HP, stamina etc... Can wear more barding. Cannot drift but can walk over quicksand (if quicksand were ever implemented). Caravan would be supported. Dream Camel would prevent all desert debuffs within range. Cannot use in winter zones.

Donkey: Can improve like horses and can also fly at T9 like the dream donkey april fools joke. Can pull more weight for caravans and trade wagons at the cost of being slower. Can be used in winter zones for trading / caravans but not in desert.

Alpaca: Can be used for Caravans in the winter taundra (when available). T9 can give debuff resistance from cold effects within range (basically snuggling with the alpaca to keep warm lore-wise).

Elephant: Can be used for trading and caravans, doesn't work in winter zones but works in desert. Can pull more weight, much slower than horses but the amount that it can pull is significantly more. T9 could carry a tremendous amount more and would be intended for trading.

^ There's some balancing issues with my recommendations but they can be sorted out. It's a start anyway.

Musicianship

This isn't exactly lifeskill but it may as well be. We are stuck at C grade and there's nothing to do with instruments other than roleplaying.

Proposal:

Complete questline to grade A musicianship. Once grade A is reached, it would be possible to unlock Shai Touring which would be done on a weekly basis. You would get a Shai Touring rank each week that it is completed (as well as rewards) and when you reach the highest tier (after say 3 months of touring) you could get let's say a new set of instruments or something. Maybe it could even be related to gathering or crafting similarly like a infinite potion or something, I don't know exactly what the rewards would be but it could be something fun.

Sailing 2.0

Currently there's nothing you can really do with sailing other than bartering.

Proposal:

Delivery quests: Delivery goods from point A to point B. These quests would be dailies and they would give the player a good amount of money based on the time it takes them and their sailing level. The higher the sailing level, the better the quest can be unlocked. But, the higher the level, the more difficult they will be as more enemy ships will appear in your path trying to thwart your efforts. Delivery could also include bringing passengers to a location.

Mercenary quests: If you're a blue player (good karma) then you could kill a red player. If you're a red player you would have to kill a blue player. The problem with this is people would probably create an alt and organize with their guildmates to clear this quest. This could only happen if there is a better balance to the PvP red vs blue system.

Treasure quests: A treasure map is given to the player and they need to go find it somewhere in the ocean. The reward would be for building better ship stuff. There would be a requirement of Artisan 1 to start these quests.

Naval Karma: There isn't much of a purpose to naval karma but being able to convert your karma into your ship's permanent stat increase would be great. You could buy upgrades and the upgrades would be in a shop with one-time purchases. For example, you could use 10000 karma to upgrade your ship's durability by a small amount, but there could be like 10 of those upgrades. Cannonball upgrades etc...  I'm not sure how this would work in the balance of PvP red vs blue. Need ideas for that.

Training (Mounts)

Currently the only thing that's worth training are horses but mainly you capture them and sell them as-is. Otherwise it's not worth your time and you often get disconnected in the middle of the night due to some server hiccup. Training a horse isn't worth the money compared to fishing.

Proposal:

Price adjustment: Increase the cost of horses so that trained horses are more valuable. A maxed out T8 horse should be worth twice as much as it is being sold for right now. Every skill that it has 100% of, it should add to the value as well since each skill can take up to an hour to train.

Breeding: Breeding of everything that isn't a horse. It's time, we all want it. It doesn't matter if it doesn't add much to the game, it's something we want to do. We want a T8 camel just because we can. The stats may not be that much better but heck, it's something to aim for.

Farming

Farming is fine as it is but there are some improvements that could be made to make it even better and a lot more worthwhile to engage in.

Proposal:

Better farm borders: Make the farm borders taller so we can actually see them in tall grass. Perhaps even mask grass wherever a farm is placed. There are so few places to actually farm but it's difficult to see anything due to the tall grass. It would be a big QoL improvement if something were to be done for this.

Improve prices: Presently you either farm for money or you farm for XP. There's very few in-betweens. It would be nice to have many different choices on what to sell on the central market. Ingredients that are really high in demand with a big pre-order should increase in price if they can be obtained through farming. Ideally the price should be reflective on the effort for growing the crop. Growing and gathering time > processing time > refining time > cooking / alchemy time > end product time. These should all be considered in the final cost.

Conclusion

I made a lot of suggestions and I'm sure there are many things that aren't thought out completely or people here many disagree with. The purpose wasn't to create an absolute outline of what needs to change and how to change it but to open this as a discussion on what can be done to make BDO the ultimate lifeskilling experience. Please feel free to chime in on what would make lifeskilling a better experience.

I can attempt to edit this thread as needed and credit people for their suggestion if it's well received.

Step by step,

Id like them to rework horse training 1st but its fair to start with farming, I think many would agree.

i dont want to see any new classes untill they fix all life skills