Nice video. Funcom could have made the way the tavern works clearer by themselves, though.
Maximum or no maximum?
So… a maximum of three guests is supposed to be recruitable .
If all guests had a chance to be recruitable , that would give an incentive to build huge or multiple taverns with lots of seats, which is probably bad for public servers.
Limiting the number of recruitable NPCs solves that problem, and it even gives an incentive to build small - there more guests, the more effort is required to find the recruitable ones.
Building huge or multiple taverns is fun, though. And at least in single player, the game can support quite a huge number of guests without suffering any performance problems.
Crafters and fighters
Also, I’m confused what the new purge as well as the tavern only seem to give fighters, archers and dancer NPCs, but no crafters. Would have been nice to have these system complement each other, e. g. crafters at the purge, fighters at the tavern.
Maybe, that’s because they want to implement walking crafters later. But from the current state of affairs, this is weird.
Rare NPCs
It’s understandable that the chance for T4 thralls is low. However, it is very, very low, and I doubt that this is balanced. Once could build a tavern at level 20 or so, and with luck, a Dalinsia Snowhunter might appear, which would be a bit broken at that level in my opinion.
On the other hand, at higher levels, the tavern recruiting system is pretty much useless. Over a sane period of play time, one might recruit maybe 1 to 3 T4 thralls from the tavern. That requires building a tavern and checking it regularly for thralls, also a bit of luck.
It would be less of a hassle to knock out Cimmerian Berserkers the conventional way instead.
So, this needs some sort of balancing.
Taverns could be given tiers, or they could recruit higher tier guests if build on higher tier building materials. Build with T1 sandstone, get cannibals or low level thralls. Build with T3 materials, and higher level factions and higher tier recruits show up.
I think it would be nice to have something to enhance the chance of higher-level thralls to appear.
For example, higher level food and drink could increase NPC turnover or levels: Throw a lavish party, get more or better guests. That would introduce another gameplay cycle: hunt, cook, party, recruit.