Crafting

[Slamz]

I've never really thought much about crafting, but wanted to jot down one idea...

Currently most craft systems work like WOW: you get a bunch of recipes with particular skill levels and you grind your way through them. You may have never made any Brass Buttons but you're an expert at them because you made 150 Silver Cords on your way up the skill tree.

I think that rather than skilling up "tailoring" you should instead skill up individual recipes. If you made 150 Silver Cords, they would be trivial to you but Brass Buttons would still be difficult.

Recipe difficulty would be decreased by your familiarity with the components.

Example:
Widget - 50 difficulty
5 brass gears
2 steel cases
1 cotton string

The actual difficulty of the widget will be modified by your skill in making other items that also use brass gears, steel cases and cotton string. If you've never made anything with those components then making a Widget will be a real experimental item for you and it will be difficult. If you've been making, say, clocks, which use brass gears, then your familiarity with that component will make Widgets easier to build.

Note that you don't need to understand how to make a gear and in fact that knowledge is useless for making widgets; it's the use of the gears in constructing other items that will help you make Widgets.


This should make for some interesting specialization in crafting. Instead of someone having "300 weaponsmithing" and being an expert at making rifles even though they've only ever made pistols, they would instead just be a pistol expert. Since rifles use some of the same familiar elements from pistols, a pistol expert would be better at trying to make a rifle than, say, a tailor, but they aren't just a "weaponsmith" who knows how to make everything requiring "200 weaponsmithing skill".

But this is more than just breaking it down by type. Someone who has made 500 "Bart's Special Pistol" isn't quite as good at making "Slim's Special Pistol" as someone who has actually been making that exact pistol. The components would be very similar so they'd have an easy time building any type of pistol, but you're only really good at what you've actually been building.

[Hoofhurr]

I have an idea. Screw crafting! JK. Sounds to me like you are applying a classless system to crafting. It's sort of a skill based system but skills are recipes. Works for me.

[Slamz]

I do think there's a lot of room to say "Screw crafting!" as well.

But my idea would be something like anyone can make "Slim's Special Pistol" but how much experience you have at making that exact pistol impacts your odds of making a good quality one. e.g., maybe similar to Aion's enchantment system, an item would be of quality 0-10. If you have no familiarity at all, you can build one, but it'll almost certainly be bottom quality. This would be similar to someone going on the internet to learn how to make a pistol. They can buy their own smelter and forge and machining tools, etc, and probably make a pistol, but it probably won't be very good (or cost effective). To make a really good one, you'd have to work your way up to being an expert.

Maybe it could steal an idea from Eve and basically you would "tinker" with an item over a period of RL days at a certain cost of components and the end result is that you improve your ability to make them.

So you could start the game and immediately begin construction on a battleship but it would be a really shitty battleship. To get good at it, you would have to spend a lot of time tinkering with designs and improving them before you felt confident in your ability to roll out an actual battleship that wouldn't immediately roll over and sink.

[Crice]

Crafting = poop... It takes forever in MMO terms. Throw the stuff in Legion Warehouse and look back for stacks of something you can use.

crice

[Hoofhurr]

The thing though about crafted items is no one wants to buy anything from 0-9. They all want 10 when they find out that someone can make it. So you end up in the same situation economically.

[Slamz]

The thing though about crafted items is no one wants to buy anything from 0-9. They all want 10 when they find out that someone can make it. So you end up in the same situation economically.

That's why everything should be destructible.

Kinda like EVE. You can buy a higher quality battleship than normal, but nobody ever uses them in PvP because the multiplier in cost doesn't reflect the multiplier in quality.

Say, Q10 is 10x more expensive than Q0, but it's only 2x better.

Most people would try to find a price point for what they can afford to replace.

Obviously if the thing is glued to your hand and you can never lose it, you'd look for Q10 but when death means you drop your gun on the floor, you start thinking more about lower quality, lower cost alternatives that you can purchase by the box. Rich people have an outlet for the money to give them higher performance but it's a case of diminishing returns.


That's one thing I like about EVE. With high quality gear you can make a ship that costs three times as much but is only 20% more effective. It's worth doing if you can afford it but the Tie Fighter approach can cause rich people to lose a war of attrition.

[Kakarat]

You can also put durability on items.

Your Q10 has 50/50 durability.
Your Q1 has the same 50/50 durability.

But because you have a Q10 it costs 10x as much to repair than the Q1.
This would also balance out the use of items. Because if you can not afford to upkeep the durability of a Q10. You may want to use a Q6.

[Vllad]

Crafting equals PVP.

You guys just forgot why it is important because games have turned crafting into an Elf fest.

The rules to PVP crafting:

Dump bind on equip rules. Those are for pussies.
Every item breaks and is gone for ever. No item last forever. (See Below)
Part of a crafters skill is fixing things
Crafting must be as detailed as players classes and skills
NO GOLD
No Auction House
Rare Resourses in fixed locations
Rare Recipies

Dump bind on equip rules. Those are for pussies:

Everything must be tradeable. If you can't decompose or trade an item it has no real worth.

Every item breaks and is gone for ever. No item last forever:

Every item must have two ratings. Endurance and Quality.

For example: My Sword of God has two ratings. Endurance of 10 and a Quality of 10. Everytime I die I take 1 Endurance hit. When it reaches 0 Endurance the Sword is broken and can not be used. I must have it repaired in order to equip it again. Everytime I have it repaired it loses a Quality point. When the item reaches a Quality of 0 it no longer can be repaired.

Part of a crafters skill is fixing things

The only way to have gear fixed is by PC's who have the required skill to fix things. NPC's can no nominal stuff or better yet when NPC's repair shit it takes more quality hits.

This also means that one must be able to decompose and get parts off of old broken gear. The higher your skill the more useful parts you get.

Crafting must be as detailed as players classes and skills

As Slamz said earlier. You need specialist as crafters. You don't have weoponsmiths you have people that make swords, pole arms, axes and daggers. If you want to be able to repair and make the best weopons in a game you must specialize in that weopon.

You must have tiers. The higher up a tier you get and the more specialized you become the most menial traits you forget. For example:

The Great Sword maker doesn't do everything. He only makes and repairs swords. He doesn't go out and mine his own metal, he doesn't smelt his own Iron and she sure as hell doesn't work with un-finished parts.

i.e., This leaves room in any game for the person who doesn't want to craft. There is always room for a collector, a guy who makes raw goods, a guy who works in early finished goods. In other words while the Great Sword maker can make the best sword in the game, he can't collect his own goods, he can't smelt the basic goods, he cant even make the finished goods. He can only turn Finished goods into the final Sword of God. This is how a real economy works successfully.

No Gold and No Auction House

Let the players decide on how to move goods. Provide them lots of containers to move them accross the world that can be stolen or high jacked. Provide them the ability to store goods that can be raided. Let the players decide how the econ works. Not gold farmers and a player built store.

If you want a store put the items for sale on an NPC that can be attacked and raided. If you don't want your NPC raided then built guard and walls to protect him.


Resourses

They need to be a thing we fight over. You also need thousands of them. Not 30 like in WoW. You want an abundance of resourses that are all over the world in order to create pvp. You need water of Illithium? You need to go to Illithium to get it. When you get there hopefully you find trouble.

Recipe's

You need as many recipe's as you do resourses. This is the designers key to pvp. You make the components you need be set on different parts of the map. This makes peole work harder and have to travel and/or invade in order to get resourses. If you do your recipe's correctly it should lead to plenty of pvp.



Crafting really does go well with PVP as long as you build it with PVP in mind.


Vllad

[Diggles]

not having an in-game currency is retarded, there is a reason why humans invented it. unless we are taking about a prehistoric MMO, it should have a game currency.

However that doesnt mean money should be easy to get and dropping off monsters. It should be rare but treasured. I think of D&D where we're given gems as loot, but they're always have a rough 'gold' amount associated with them (think tooltip).

[Arsilon]

I think there are elements of the SWG crafting system where you had to hunt for minerals with the correct (and high quality) attributes. You then had to set out collectors for it.

You then made a schematic that was only good for as long as you had that specific combination of minerals. The higher quality the mineral combination, the better quality the result.

Unlike other games where you just find a node of Iron, in SWG all iron wasn't identical. It had attributes -- I don't remember exactly what they were but for example iron might have 356 malleability, 435 strength, 938 conductivity.

Using that particular iron would give you better damage (high conductivity) in a laser but your chances of success in crafting would be low (low malleability) and the durability would be average (strength).

That item then degraded over time and had to be replaced. That specific Iron(356/435/938) would not be available forever so you would only be able to use that schematic for a period of time.

Now combine this with the skill level of the crafter. Take elements from the Eve system with research and training and skill levels for certain type activities. You then have the basis for a very dynamic crafting system. I do like Slamz's idea of skill areas that don't tie you just to weapons, but to anything that uses 'gears' in them.

Now you have a sustainable crafting system that isn't all about whoever can grind it up first. You have a system where yes, quality 10 is better than quality 1 but finding quality 10 isn't automatic, even if you've been crafting longer. You have the basis for PvP. You need to find the mineral areas (which are random and deplete), then defend your harvestors. The reward is you have access to better gear.

[Kakarat]

I was sitting here reading through Vllad's reply and it dawned upon me that the one game I have played that has a 'daggersmith' a 'shieldsmith' an 'axe smith' is Shadowbane. They are NPC's but are player controlled. They have a specialty craft. That is a system that could be elaborated and turned over to PC based.

[Vllad]

not having an in-game currency is retarded, there is a reason why humans invented it. unless we are taking about a prehistoric MMO, it should have a game currency.

However that doesnt mean money should be easy to get and dropping off monsters. It should be rare but treasured. I think of D&D where we're given gems as loot, but they're always have a rough 'gold' amount associated with them (think tooltip).

Name one thing you need money for?

It doesn't matter how little money you put in the game. The denomination is irrelevant. The value and inflation will still occur. Money in MMO's is like saying you need a middle man to do all transactions. Skip the middle man and just move to what is important. In-game gear.

Vllad

[Hoofhurr]

The only thing it really lets you do is to adjust value more incrementally between items that aren't of exact value so that one side of a transaction isn't taking a loss.

[Arsilon]

The only thing it really lets you do is to adjust value more incrementally between items that aren't of exact value so that one side of a transaction isn't taking a loss.

I would think there would be some sort of consumable that could fill that void if there was not currancy whatsoever.

[Hoofhurr]

Maybe but again that value is really hard to determine without a lowest common denominator. Nothing I can think of converts time into value as accurately as math which is best expressed in economic terms through money.

[Arsilon]

Inevitably the "value" of currency ends up being equated back to the time it takes to farm that amount. How is that any different than baselining that "value" at the time it takes to farm some consumable?

At least this way, you avoid the inevitable inflation since the item goes away and needs to re-farmed since there never are enough money sinks or bots throw that balance out of kilter.

I'm not a big fan of bartering personally, but I don't view the ideal of a "coin" or whatever sort of "token" that represents value is necessarily any different and just as arbitrary as picking one unit of any other item in game. As long as there's a way to equate it to time/effort to obtain other items it still works.

[Diggles]

not having an in-game currency is retarded, there is a reason why humans invented it. unless we are taking about a prehistoric MMO, it should have a game currency.

However that doesnt mean money should be easy to get and dropping off monsters. It should be rare but treasured. I think of D&D where we're given gems as loot, but they're always have a rough 'gold' amount associated with them (think tooltip).

Name one thing you need money for?

It doesn't matter how little money you put in the game. The denomination is irrelevant. The value and inflation will still occur. Money in MMO's is like saying you need a middle man to do all transactions. Skip the middle man and just move to what is important. In-game gear.

Vllad

You need money to SPEED transactions, not spend half your game time haggling or trying to find some way to barter items. Expecting people to go collect all the items and craft them themselves is a fantasy world. There is a reason why currency was invented, and if that currency is actually worth something in game, like it used to be in real life, then it WILL NOT ever inflate.

Ie...let me melt down 100g of my own gold coins to make gold jewelery....same goes for copper/plat/silver, etc

Eve has more than proven that inflation can be countered/controlled if done right.

[Hoofhurr]

Inevitably the "value" of currency ends up being equated back to the time it takes to farm that amount. How is that any different than baselining that "value" at the time it takes to farm some consumable?

At least this way, you avoid the inevitable inflation since the item goes away and needs to re-farmed since there never are enough money sinks or bots throw that balance out of kilter.

I'm not a big fan of bartering personally, but I don't view the ideal of a "coin" or whatever sort of "token" that represents value is necessarily any different and just as arbitrary as picking one unit of any other item in game. As long as there's a way to equate it to time/effort to obtain other items it still works.

I guess the difference I see between coin and consumable is that coin usually drops from every single mob you kill while consumables are usually more intermittent in that you can kill several mobs and maybe only one consumable will drop. So it comes down to whether you might get 5 consumables per hour (if not every mob drops the consumables) or you might get 5.9993467 coins per hour. Per this example, and in most mmogs, coins are just a more accurate reflection of the time you spent because it drops from every kill. You might hit a bad run, kill 10 mobs in a row and never get your consumable to drop. I suppose that in this day and age where every weapon has its dps expressed to the millisecond and every game has an auction house so you can see exactly what your unit of currency can buy then it doesn't matter as much whether it's coin you're spending or not.

It is a convenient way to escalate value from level one to max level though where most consumables you find at level one have little value at max level.

[Slamz]

The standard way to prevent inflation in MMOs is to make sure that money leaves the world as fast as it comes in.

In real world terms, it's like every NPC is a printing press who prints money and the faster you kill them, the more money you're printing.

Things that take money out of the economy, like purchasing crafting supplies, resurrection fees, whatever, are meant to keep inflation under control by destroying money.

So while a real world economy wants to limit the amount of cash in circulation by limiting how much is printed, an MMO seeks to do a simpler version of the same thing by making sure something is destroying money as fast as it's being created.

Creating a real simulation of a real economy is probably a bit much to ask for in an MMO.

[Hoofhurr]

POTBS did try it though didn't they? The developers had to step in frequently as the acting federal bank when the economy spiraled out of control.

[Slamz]

No?

POTBS was pretty standard, I thought. Interesting crafting system but nothing terribly exciting economically. You killed ships and they basically printed money, then you destroyed money by setting up production facilities to produce goods.

The one interesting thing that came out of POTBS was that real-life time was introduced as a limiting factor, since one player could only produce a set amount of construction materials per day.

[Dustie]

Creating a real simulation of a real economy is probably a bit much to ask for in an MMO.

I disagree. If you're going to have an economy in a game, it needs to be real or you better not have it at all. All the games with economies based on some arbitrary set of inputs disconnected from outputs are uninteresting and prone to failure. The economy doesn't need to be complex, but it does need to be real imo.

[Slamz]

I don't know how you can make it real without making it more complex. Someone or some process would have to actually print money in the game and somehow manage it in a real world fashion. It would certainly add complexity to the design if not necessarily in a way the player sees.

e.g., you go kill some hobgoblins and they drop gems and you take the gems back to town and sell them for 23 Kinglets each, and those Kinglets didn't just appear out of nowhere but rather, the NPC vendor had a finite supply of them which he got through the usual routes and somewhere there is actually a central government manufacturing Kinglets in addition to collecting taxes and redistributing wealth.

And then if you're talking about a factional game, who is the central authority that prints Kinglets? Or would every faction develop its own money?


It's easier to just have money fountains and money sinks...

[Crice]

Crafting is costly and takes mucho time!

That being said, I am almost a level 199 cook, which gives some really nice food buffs. Check the legion warehouse for goodies. I have alchemy as well but that is around 99, and I use that for mana,health and flight time mostly.


Karnz (Karne) is the armorsmith so see him about armor.

Is there a Legion Bank for gold donation or whatever they call it? I would like to get that warehouse expanded so we can add different craft items so the people that are focusing on crafting for the Legion can level up and get what they need.

[Dustie]

I don't know how you can make it real without making it more complex. Someone or some process would have to actually print money in the game and somehow manage it in a real world fashion. It would certainly add complexity to the design if not necessarily in a way the player sees.

e.g., you go kill some hobgoblins and they drop gems and you take the gems back to town and sell them for 23 Kinglets each, and those Kinglets didn't just appear out of nowhere but rather, the NPC vendor had a finite supply of them which he got through the usual routes and somewhere there is actually a central government manufacturing Kinglets in addition to collecting taxes and redistributing wealth.

And then if you're talking about a factional game, who is the central authority that prints Kinglets? Or would every faction develop its own money?


It's easier to just have money fountains and money sinks...

Economies do not need to be complex. By definition, economy really just means the management of resources. It's not like I'm suggesting that these games implement lending (not a bad idea though) and set central bank fund rates to be "real." I'm simply talking about matching input with output. Having money fountains and money sinks does not mean the economy isn't real unless the fountains and sinks are based on something arbitrary and are disconnected. The only reason you need the "central bank" in these simple economies is to increase money supply to meet the demand for money and maintain stable price levels (i.e. I'm glad there were fairly stable price levels in EVE so that when I came back after a year, my 20 million was still worth something).