...a sophistication implementation that would be actually meaningful but I am not seeing that coming anytime soon.
Traditionally, Sophistication in Mortal Online games is so slow to build and so easy to lose through simple ignorance. There may be a Title for it, sooner or later, but any other result may come later than that. Maybe substantially later.
- Being allowed to interact with certain NPCs? To purchase certain items?
- Being told something like 'Your breath stinks! Get out of my establishment!'?
By the time any consequences for high or low Soph stats arrive, improving them will take some kind of work within the system of Food & Reserves. Traditionally, that stat-improving work has been fussy, not fast, and could easily make you fatter than you wanna be unless you fight the system.
- I think the guys at Star Vault enjoy giving out this kind of challenge, occasionally changing the rules as they go along.
If the system stays like this I would vote to just remove cooking and have the grocer vendor sell proper food until they have a working system.
Why not just let the Taverns feed folks?
Sit down, open a Menu UI, pay, enjoy the Food
There, or To Go.
Remove
depth? No matter if it's not yet working (yet), or dysfunctional at times, it takes a lot to make Star Vault revert or remove 'features.'
Also, the Devs at Star Vault want your choices to matter: selling you really proper food might mean showing you what proper food should be like, instead of pushing you to try a variety of things, even raw.
- Unless they remove the effect of food on Reserves & Weight entirely... and they're not gonna do that.
But they could remove Cooking and make Vendor foods that would be proper and good for you and not give away anything about ingredients. It would at least be a gold sink.
- They wouldn't want you stocking up on those for the rest of your Mortal life. (Not even for a week, probably.) Vendors (TRADITIONALLY) ended up having limited quantities of food.
- I don't think modern MO2 towns & cities are going to have spots where you can hide from the Guards and snipe a Food Vendor (who, conveniently, would not react) to death with arrows just so that his stock would refill when he re spawned.
- Some food that was really easy to buy was (TRADITIONALLY) the worst of its kind for Soph and also not the best for Stamina (Rye flour, anyone?)
Amazing how SV makes one good change for cooking and in the same patch makes a bad one. Pig are not the best hp food but hey here are crabs , just cook crab meat without anything and it will even be more op the the pig was before. SV just don't care about cooking and cooks
Last thing first: Anyone who eats Ambrosial Raw Crab should have a whopping big chance of puking for a solid half hour, with occasional random death.
In Mortal development history, Star Vault's attitude toward Cooking has been ambivalent, but at this time I won't beat that particular dead horse with more details that I'd be repeating from where I've supplied them elsewhere.
Cooking does seem to have kind of a stigma in this community as being useless (not for lack of patience & perserance on the part of Cooks), and I can politely explain this only by saying that it requires more diligence than skill, and none of that skill needs to be in martial pursuits, so of course some players look down on it.
the main problem is that no one push cooking to be looked by the dev , everyone will say "there is more important to fix" or " they will make it better later"
Not everyone will say "there are more important things to fix". Just a number, probably a small number, of people who resent the way the development feedback process actually works. The stigma that Cooking suffers under has a little to do with it, as well.
…and release is in 3 months and this what we will have on release and maybe even a year after or more. but cooking is a core system but not enough people voice the problem on here or streams or discord so it will die with this post and maybe (doubtful) it will get some love.
You're right.
Cooking is a Core System as long as there's a need to eat something other than food in a Raw or barely processed state, I don't know what Star Vault actually foresees as the optimum for food in that regard, but the stats of various cooked foods, present & past, in MO games kind of speaks for itself.
Cooking, however Star Vault envisions it, is foundational to the Reserve System and some other systems. Ultimately, MO1 development came up with Inns, places to 'go to sleep' (lie down) despite being hungry and refill your reserves that way. That was blatantly self-contradictory and should have been embarrassing to SV.
Cooking is also meant to be fun. I had some small armount of fun doing it for individuals & groups, but that was despite the process, and the results of complicated dishes (or you could call them 'formulas'). Star Vault, please note: People who would prefer to spend a gaming session preparing rations for an army to being at a battle don't need the Cooking and prep work to be as hard as possible nor for Cooking to take as few of the Cooking Skills, Tools, and Appliances as possible to be reminded that they're not as important to you as those who prefer Combat.
We already know we're doing the work of the worthless & weak in a martial society.
Cooking is one of those Open World, MMORPG activities that Star Vault would like to brag about, to be able to say proudly that Mortal Online offers, and not have that pride humbled by the vocal, public complaints of those who've tried it. When players can complain truthfully that Cooking is a shell, a sham, a placeholder the place of which is never filled, full of Tools that don't get used,
it doesn't look good. It shouldn't look good.
Cooking has to be a System unless Star Vault wants to feed everyone and feed them right. Through Vendors. Forever.
They don't want to do that. Right?
