Repairing Items -- (Dev) Replied

How exactly is this going to work? Is it going to be that you just magically pay x to the game and the item is repaired? is it going to go to an NPC? or is it going to be that you have to find a PC blacksmith to repair your item because I see some issues with that

a PC blacksmith who makes a sword and gives it to there vendor to sell is fine because that is an instant transaction but how would repairing work? If you come to vendor and say "I need this sword repaired" give it to them and then wait however long it takes for that PC to come back to get the sword back, they might have gone inactive or even just on holiday so how are you going to get your gear back? And how do you get it back anyway, when they finish repairing it does it just magically reappear in your inventory or will you have to periodically check back with that blacksmith to see if they have fixed it?

 

In UO there were forges in towns were many Blacksmiths would hang out and do repairs for you at a nominal cost.This worked well as UO had a very good community spirit

 

It seems that there would have no be some way to repair items without having a specific crafting skills or having another player do it, otherwise repairing equipment would force players in Single Player to take specific crafting skills.

 

There will be NPCs that will repair for gold if you cannot find a player blacksmith to repair. It is our goal for player blacksmith repair to be the most efficient form of repair.

 

Excellent. Might I recommend being able to repair items within the open trade window? As much as I'd love to trust my fellow brethren to not log out with my sword, not completely handing the items over gives me the warm and fuzzies!

 

With Lord Slack's comment, could a similar thing be done with crafting materials to allow commissions without either forcing the craft to provide all the materials or the commissioner to hand over potentially rare and valuable items?

 

@B, may I suggest that the game keep track of the prices charged by player blacksmiths and have the NPCs adjust theirs accordingly?

LordSlack raises a good point. But rather than having repairs occur within the trade window (which would be hard to code), perhaps some sort of repossession mechanic could be added where you could borrow an item and then recover it (or anything it is converted to) later.

 

B how is that going to work? As I understand it you probably wont even see the crafter your dealing with because of the way the game shards, only there vendor so how do you know they are actually online and how do you interact with them in order to get them to do the repairs?