Crafting why not like Combat?

Has it been discussed to use a combat like bar as a gathering / refining / crafting mini-game? This is a little half baked but here's the gist of what I'm thinking...

Let's say you start mining a node. Instead of a percent chance the node has X hit points. You get a mining deck bar same style as combat with all cards unlocked. A pickax card pops up, you use it costing focus and doing damage (or maybe this is called "work"). Meticulous pops up if you use it, it increases your chance of getting rare returns but costs more focus.

 

It would have to be a separate focus and hit point system.

As someone who does a fair amount of mining, I often mine and gather in between combat, allowing focus and hit points to regen.

Some form of minigame would be sweet though, but it would have to be quick, since we can currently swift gather as fast as a half second here and there.

 

Crafting+harvesting+refining mini-games have been discussed on the forums...

So far the devs have been kind of noncommittal on it because they think some players wouldn't like being made to do it. But I think it would make the game a lot better, and there are even a lot of ways to do it where it would be optional -- though with an obvious bonus to players who attend to them. I'm not sure that optional is the way to go with every one, but it could be hashed out I think.

 

More willing that it might seem, actually, but out of scope for Episode 1.

 

@Lifedragn

Oh yes I forgot they added that to the post-E1 plans. Before that, whenever they talked about it they seemed unwilling. But this was a good change in direction to see IMO.

 

Like combat if you were leveled up you could quickly defeat the node.

I meant more specifically using the combat bar / deck as the mini-game.

I would think doing something very similar to the combat deck would significantly reduce the programming required.

 

I'm not sure the deck format would work for everything. First, you'd have to be able to flesh out a decent number of skills that you could activate during the crafting process, and my sense is most of these skillsets would probably only have a handful of actions you could apply. Second, you'd need an interactive experience to which you could apply those skills to, and, because there won't be any "opponent" in the world that you have to respond to, you'd likely need to create another UI for the mini-game anyway.

Maybe if you have some idea of how this could work for a particular crafting skillset, you could draw out a scheme for it... but my sense is you'd have trouble making it work.