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I also think that houses/workshops outside guarded areas should be safe only if you remembered to lock the door!
There comes a point where having too much reality in a world destroys the fantasy, and for me, this is one of them. A player's personal assets must be completely protected while the player is offline. Granted, it's all virtual and it's just a game, there are still many people who have deep emotional investments in their character and whatever ingame wealth (large or small) they've managed to accumulate. Statistically, it is safe to assume that these players will make up the majority of whatever playerbase we manage to build, so if the game ever makes it possible in any way for an offline player to lose life or ingame assets, we'll accomplish nothing more than shooting ourselves in our collective feet.
The illusion of personal safety is one of the major draws fantasy has over real-life. Let's not destroy the fantasy by making it too realistic.
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I am not sure I support offline resource gathering.
Other than mining, neither do I. And, let me also add, if we implement mining in a manner that requires a constant search for small pockets of minerals/metals, then not even mining needs to be available as an offline task.
Any task that requires decision-making, searching, exploring, experimenting, constant comparison and matching, or other conscious intervention definitely should not be available as an offline chore, and the game system itself should require enough player awareness and diverse inputs that such tasks are nearly impossible to script anyway.
Buying/selling from a personal store such as in Lineage II or Ragnarok Online = boring
Mining in a fixed location with an ingame macro such as in RF Online = boring
Crafting small items in large quanities in almost every game = boring
If there is any task/activity ingame where a player might as well be watching televsion with the game running in the background, then that task needs to be either removed, redesigned, or enabled as an offline activity.
I would rather every bow came complete with unlimited arrows then have some poor crafter spend six hours repeating the same half-dozen keystrokes in order to meet the needs of the arrow-buying market. Of the two, unlimited arrows is far less damaging to the ingame experience of the majority of players.