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Do developers still try to balance crafting with adventuring in modern mmo's?
Dzone
Member UncommonPosts: 371
Lately I feel like crafters have been given a back seat to adventuring, why?
1. Because crafters can't keep up with the pace people level in these games
2. Gear mainly comes from questing and dungeons
3. Mobs so ez that you don't need potions/food to kill them
4. Taking away the need for restoking arrows/bullits
Now my previous mmo, ffxi that I played back in 2003-2006, crafting was a really big part of the community, why?
1. Peaple didn't level extremely fast, crafters were able to keep up wth them, and gear sold very well on the AH.
2. Gear did not come from quest's that much. Gear mainly came from mobs and crafters, and group instances.
3. Mobs were tough and eating foods like sole sushie, and mithra mithkabobs helped people hit and do more damage to mobs. Even drinking juices helped replenish mp for mages, came in very handy, since mobs took awhile to kill.
4. You needed to keep your ammunition stocked and crafters would craft a ton of those to keep the supply up.
Nowadays I don't even want to craft anymore or use the AH much. Back in ffxi I used to use the AH everyday, and crafters seemed so much more important back then.
Do ya think that crafting and adventuring have become completely imbalanced like I have?
Comments
Leveling fast is completely irrelevant. A developer can easily put crafting recipes in every tier of content it offers, with better recipes found in tougher content. WOW has already done this at many points in its development (and still does, sometimes in a balanced way, sometimes a few steps short of the mark.)
Gearing mainly coming from dungeon content is an issue of Challenge vs. Reward. Crafting is as simple as pressing a button in most games. Beating a dungeon isn't. Although certainly (and WOW occasionally has done this) you can have the crafting components be rare drops in high-end content too, which ensures the player must beat a certain challenge to earn a reward.
Challenge vs. Reward is also why BOE craftables are tightly controlled (in a well-designed game.) Because earning money can be done with some of the easiest content in the game, and so it doesn't really deserve good rewards.
The problem with ammo was twofold: first, it was shallow (increases complexity without increasing depth) and second it was an imbalanced tax for playing the game (these classes need to pay for ammo just to be able to play the game, these ones don't.)
But again Challenge vs. Reward is the core thing. To have crafted gear which was on par with the gear found in the toughest dungeons, crafting would have to be equally challenging.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Crafting is a big part of what makes MMO's good and not a single MMO has a proper crafting system these days, which is weird.
Mobs and even raids should never give gear but instead give the materials to craft the gear.
If you want the uberman chest from the uberman raid you should kill him until you get the uberman mustache and get one of your awesome guild crafters to make it for you.
There you have it, raids not pointless and crafters in high demand.
And I don't think that just crafting has taken a back seat. Everything that made MMO's feel like a virtual world has taken a back seat. MMO's these days only put the focus on raids.
P.S raids suck.
I think your whole post is completely irrelevant.
ESPECIALLY in games like WoW you generally don't buy shit until you're max level. It's not worth it to spend money on something you only use for a few hours.
And secondly, WoWs crafting can hardly be called crafting.
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
Good crafting has always been rare in MMO's, old and new. So the question, "Do developers still try to balance crafting with adventuring in modern mmo's? is a bit faulty. As a genre devs have never tried to balance them, it always favored adventuring.
Again good crafting was always rare. This isn't a new concept.
Depending on your pov it might be a bad concept but not new. Pretending that this is yet another issue with new mmo's is a a faulty premise.
Eh, throughout most of WOW's lifetime buying BOEs (many crafted) has been worthwhile for leveling characters. It's only heirloom gear which renders them useless, and if the criticism was aimed at heirlooms I'd agree they make leveling less fun.
It didn't matter that you'd only use them for a few hours, because it only takes you a few minutes to pick up gear which lasts for many hours (and you generally earned enough gold during that time to afford the next set of gear -- nevermind that you could have a high level character who could easily afford BOEs.)
And of course it's crafting! Are there better crafting games? Absolutely, crafting is only a side feature for WOW (part of WOW's success is their focus on core gameplay, not allowing themselves to split focus much). But it's pretty typical of crafting in MMORPGs (certainly there are few MMORPGs whose crafting is significantly better; they exist, but few in number and/or not all that much better crafting.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
My guess is development teams are given assignments. "You, dev2819 go make a pvp arena!" "You, dev712, design a class!" And whoever was in charge of crafts got pissed because they wanted to be with the really cool devs meshing stone sentinels so in a heated fit of rage they f*cked crafting up. The cure is obviously for the other devs to pat the crafting assigned dev on the back every day and tell him/her/it they are an important part of the team so don't f*ck it up!
Aion almost had good crafting but some dip shit decided better items should be sold for very cheap at NPC's.
EQ / Vanguard thought it wasn't truly crafting until your brain hurt and your eyes and fingers bled a little.
FFXI didn't think anything should be sold on Auction House for less than 500,000,000,000,000 gil except maybe a fish.
I never played that Star Wars game, SWG?, but I guess the company got greedy pants and ruined their perfect system from what I'm told.
TERA decided to make every recipe including the beginner's tutorial recipe cost game coin and we'd need a recipe every time we crafted a single item.
Mabinogi has the best crafting system I've seen since FFXI. To bad no one has enough inventory space to haul mats from one end of the world to the other.
Neverwinter has the easiest crafting system ever designed to make completely useless unsellable uncolorable crap.
When everyone and their mother can level every single craft to max easily, then crafting means little, much like it currently does.
For it to mean something, it should be very difficult to level and only seriously dedicated individuals should be capable of being proficient at it. Couple that with a system that puts a huge emphasis and reliance on actually needing crafters, then you'll have a recipe for success.
Now this is easier said than done as no one wants to be held hostage by crafters. It can make for a very unfun experience.
No. No one wants to take the time to craft. Even the easiest craft is time consuming. Time is what makes crafts valuable. It does NOT have to be hard to craft something.
A poor economy for crafted goods can be a sign that the crafting minigame has become more fun - more supply, less profit.
Random poster: WE WANT MEANINGFUL CRAFTING!
Community: YEAH!
Random poster: AND WE WANT IT NOW!
Community: YEAH!!!
Developers: Ok, we'll put it in games were it makes sense to have a deep crafting profession, namely in virtual worlds where PVP and PVE is enabled and both are equal and crafting has a crucial spot due to item loss/destruction on character death and item decay.
Random poster and Community: FUCK YEA...WAIT WHAT!??!
And the sad truth about the above is that developer is right. In a themepark game or PVE only sandbox there's only so much levity to crafting without either punishing item decay or loss of player death and/or PVP (though the best games find ways to mix all those 3 in less severe forms).
Item destruction is what causes constant demand, and there can only be so long until crafting becomes obsolete as most of the server already has whatever they wanted manufactured.
I guess people have a hard time realizing that.
Item destruction and decay is a wonderful beautiful thing. Unless the item is a cosmetic cash shop purchase.
A bad economy is caused by war with gold sellers. A real life to game currency Auction Exchange along with my suggestion of reducing the AH to five or less digits would fix that. Also realistic drops off mobs. Bunnies should not have armor and coins in their pelts. They should have fur, tails, ears, and meat. Dragons scales. Orcs spearheads. Goblins coins. Dungeon chests would be where the stuff was.
I would allow Personal Cash Shops but they would be subject to an auto log out timer of 60 minutes (same for all chars) with a Cash Shop Item that would pay for extra time.
A fair F2P game will have few if any gold sellers because the game is monetized in a fair way and the few that would be around would be easily caught :P. Also decay on a cosmetic cash shop purchase could work if it can be repaired, by crafters
.
No real life to game currency AH though and no AH at all, make it player/NPC vendors only and in lieu of a cash shop item to extend log out timers for vendors why not just have the option to buy up to two NPC vendors to sell things in your shop while you're away? In a fair F2P game you can earn cash shop currency (or purchase it from other players) ergo it would still be fair.
IT is mostly an afterthought, tacked on to say they have it, not in every mmo, but a lot of them.
Warhammer was the worst tack on I can remember, and Rifts harvesting system was very generic/bland, it felt like it was done at the very end, in a hasty patch. TOR's crafting was bad too imo, I had never easily went from 0 skill to max skill in a crafting profession, in a day, in a mmo.
Vanguard was the best crafting/harvesting system I have played in a more recent mmo, I do not try everything, so I am sure I am missing some good systems, but mostly they seem to disappoint in games I try.
I think if your crafting is going to suck horribly, you might as well just leave it out, and put the time into other systems. Do it right, or don't do it.
Nah, it is about loot, not the combat in itself.
Most modern MMOs have raid based endgames and allowing people to craft as good gear would severely hurt the popularity of the endgame while getting pre-raid gear is a fast process in the game.
With gear progression and gear that can be repaired as many times you want the only crafting worth the trouble is for consumables so most companies makes a half hearted crafting system.
If you make a crafting centered game you need to have a different endgame but few MMO devs bother to try something different.
Another way of solving it is to make higher level crafting materials actually hard to get. Because crafting tends to force you to make useless vendortrash for a long time (made a 100 tin greatswords in EQ2 which I couldn't give away for free even).
Each item you make should be useful at least to some players and making mats harder to get while crafting in itself not so grindy solves the problem better.
Themepark gear treadmills have gear obsolecence rather than gear decay. Meaninful crafting in that setting means having a large number of tiers of gear and needing to restrict the tier of gear you can make/use until you've passed through the next gate (whether levels, raids or just waiting for the next patch seasons).
( as a non-raider, crafting in those types of games tends to end up being my endgame and I've found it acceptably entertaining if I have enough alts trading amongst themselves )
sorry but this is one of the things which is wrong with todays mmorpgs and its players - if something is just a little bit difficult, they start whining to get it made simpler.
if you dont like like the crafting in some game - dont do it and let it to those who do like it - i myself consider vanguard crafting process best (together with current FFXIV one) i ever saw.
it is like me saying "gee, combat in most mmorpgs is too hard, lets just make it tab-target+press 1 button, then wait"
there is no reason (ok there is, because most of players would whine about it, since they for some reason HAVE to participate in game activities they dont like) for crafting to be any less challenging then combat.
in eq2 they gave in and made crafting easier. result? lets say it this way - i was lately crafting some quest items (which is more or less only time you get to craft items which can be higher craft level then you, since otherwise you can learn and try to craft only recipes up to your level) which were red difficulty to me (classification "very hard", cca 20-25 skills above mine).
was crafting about 25 of those and guess what - all of them i finished with 100% of durability, without using any crafting eq or buff, because if you know what you are doing, crafting is F*ING TOO EASY!
i disagree - i would say they way of solving is to let progression to be unlimited, but with significantly diminishing returns. let person who spend time crafting instead of adventuring to be actually better in crafting.
You still face the diminishing demand issue lest the developers launch tiers every few weeks or have a hellishly difficult game.
Like it was in EQ1? I would've given my left nut for banded armor when the game came out. I even made some of the unique maces for later levels.