Right now there is not explicit difference between NPC’s workbenches and home’s ones.
If I need to process some wood, for example, I just load all kinds of benches running from one to another. It makes 2 problems:
- I have no reason to develop my home production as the main way of working with resources. I usually use NPC’s workbenches due to high speed, and home’s ones are perceived as decoration Home becomes a place I don’t want to visit
- If a user would prefer home over NPCs, he has fewer reasons to develop NPCs because there is no explicit strong advantage of using NPC’s workbenches
Eventually, home production and NPC production don’t work together and make a gap in crafting experience.
What I recommend: working on 3rd level workbenches should be more risky and lucrative at the same time. You could introduce chance to spoil a resource, but user will get higher speed. Even if a user doesn’t want risk, there will always be cases when speed is preferred.
But there may be users who don’t prefer risks at all. For that case, you could introduce a new type of rare resources(needed for crafting something) which can be received only if a primary resource was broken while processing on a NPC workbench. That would make NPC workbench unavoidable to use.
Im not sure if you are talking about refining (like woodcutting or smelting ore) or if you are talking about crafting tables. For the resource refining I agree that there is a slight problem, but I would argue that it’s not the speed of production but rather the amount of resources that you can ”cue up”. Usually you go out and farm resources and return to town and start processing your wood and ore but you are limited to 8 resource slots, so if you collected 20 wood you would either have to wait or just continue to stockpile wood on your next adventure. Therefore I think that its the amount of resources that you can process that should increase rather than the speed of production.
My point is that I treat NPC’s workbench as one of available workbenches along with benches from my home. That is the problem.
I, as a player, want to see difference between those and make a decision to use one or another based on something. Now I don’t base my choice on something, I just use what is closer to me on the map.
And I don’t want to chose only basing on amount of the resources. I want to see a qualitative difference
Hmm it feels like an arbitrary difference between crafting stations that you place in your home and the ones in the town would be an unnecessary implementation… The only reason really to have them in your home is for convenience, being able to have all of them in your home instead of running between them in the town. What kind of qualitative difference would you want? Better stats on weapons crafted in your own home? To me it doesn’t really make any sense to make crafting different depending on where you do it…
By qualitative difference I imply different user stories/flows which will make me use ONLY home workbenches or ONLY workbenches on the market in different cases.
I don’t want to see them completely interchangeable. If they are interchangeable, they feel redundant.
If I like to use ones on the market, I will have no reasons to put workbenches in my home.
If I prefer to use home ones, I will have no motivation to develop the market vendors (selling items expansion may seem enough though)