The problem with mini game crafting is in some game you need to craft large among of junk
Whether you're required to craft a ton of junk in order to level up your crafting is an entirely independent question of whether crafting involves minigames.
I always thought they could have have solved the junk crafting by having guild owned fortress or castles have a bunch of guard npc's that had to be geared. So all the crap crafting would be used to equip the cannon fodder guards of the castle or guild hall or whatever
Catch me streaming at twitch.tv/cryomatrix You can see my sci-fi/WW2 book recommendations.
Well i do not mind minigames like EQ2. But then again i do not mind mindless grind either. I am werid like that.
I am a scizo misanthrope. So one day I may go BANZAI on your post. Have not yet though. Maybe there is hope? Nah there is really none for me or the human race.
As using a minigame seems to have its followers and enemies, let's try to scope the other parts of crafting.
Some features myself as a not-dedicated-crafter really liked are: - Vanguards quest system where you could learn new recipes by going to certain places. - ESOs crafting stations which are sometimes at interesting/hidden places (although showing them on the map is bad again) - Mortals resource system where you had to decide between few materials (fast) and many (heavy hitting/defense) for each part ( handle, blade,...) combined with the different materials.
People don't want to grind and don't want a minigame, but still want to be a unique master crafter and not everybody should be one too to easily. How to accomplish this? With the three systems mentioned above. (With a few tweaks)
1. Use Mortals material system. 2. Have certain styles learned from master crafter spread around the world. (Maybe some hermits who live in hidden/dangerous places) You have to do long quest lines for them to earn their respect) 3. Have some mystical crafting places. A forge inside a dungeon where better swords can be crafted. A well where a fresh crafted plate armor gets extra sturdiness during cooling. 4. Have mysteries. Have recipes not everybody has. Ignore balance. Everyone being able to craft everything is boring. Some people might be dedicated enough to find a magic material, to learn the legendary recipe from the unknown master crafter. Bring the uniques back to roleplay games.
And with this especially: learn to accept that you cannot have everything, because that's what made games boring nowadays.
We dream of worlds with well known crafter but destroy it ourself because everyone wants to be able to achieve it leading to every guild existing having at least one guy who can craft everything. Everyone being that special snowflake has killed MMORPGs, not only for crafting but overall.
Oh god no, on the mini games. I remember Vanguard having something like that, and it got BORING after the first hundred times of going through it.
I'm with Kano's suggestion; make crafting relevant. Don't make it more convoluted just for the sake of it.
One huge problem with Vanguard's crafting is minigame singular. Rather than having a bunch of different things to do, it had one thing to do and asked you to do it an enormous number of times. That gets very repetitive.
The other glaring problem with Vanguard's crafting is that it was more about grinding than crafting. Rather than asking you to learn a minigame and then use it to craft something, it asked you to craft a zillion of something stupid that you didn't want in order to grind levels so that you could eventually craft the one thing that you did.
Its been a while but I thought you could do crafting quests in Vanguard to level up crafting?
I very rarely craft anything. Now that auction houses have become so popular, players will undercut each other to point of losing money just to improve their crafting skill, which means I can buy that crafted item cheaper than it would have cost me to make it myself.
Plus leveling up is so fast in modern games, you're changing gear every few hours, spending time crafting something is a wasted effort. At max level, the good gear is locked behind raids and dungeons with five difficulty levels so crafting is long forgotten.
The road that mmorpg's have gone down doesn't leave much need or reason to craft. I'm not a fan of this trend but it is what it is.
The 'undercut(ting) each other to the point of losing money' just flies in my face. It's terribly unrealistic and makes me think 'this is a game' every time; immersion be damned. A real craftsman wouldn't survive long with a business plan where it cost them more to make something than they could get selling it. They'd pack it in and do something else, pretty quick.
Which maybe explains part of MMORPGs' low population issues; they packed up and went home.
I think that games should simply skip the crafting and focus on the other aspects of the game, like the RPG elements that are the root of the genre. Let the people buy their gear from NPC vendors.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
I always thought they could have have solved the junk crafting by having guild owned fortress or castles have a bunch of guard npc's that had to be geared. So all the crap crafting would be used to equip the cannon fodder guards of the castle or guild hall or whatever
Shallow vertical progression is the answer to a lot of the problem in the genre. Making a crafter competent from the start seems logical.
Just assume when you take a trade you start out competent already. Then have time released + requirement of completed task to get to the next level. Quest, missions, NPC orders, drops to learn new skills.
Mini-games? No thank you. I do agree that handling crafting is a tough cookie to crack
For me, it is a question of me vs my characters. I don't need to use my skill in some mini-game to craft. I'd rather use my character'sskill to craft.
I understand why people desire interactive crafting. It does get boring as a game player. Especially making 100's or 1000's of the same item. That's not good either. Simply clicking repeatedly on 1 button also is terrible design. It could be interesting to bring in character's abiklities to see if they learned anything new, or have that involved in the crafting quality.
I've seen some good ideas here. Personally, I miss EQ's "chance to fail" mechanic. This "auto-everything" in today's MMOs is boring to me. I also like the idea that NOT every item is 100% identical. I think that having differing degrees of "quality" is a great idea.
To take that idea (differing qualities) a little further, make the process more intricate. Instead of throwing raw ore and a pattern in a forge to make an armor piece, make the refining of said ore make a difference. Make differing pelt qualities for leather armor vary by critter, similar to EQ. Have more steps involved instead of "just one."
It is tough to make crafting viable to lots of players. Seeing the replies here, I can see why. Making crafting "fun" is like trying to grab a cloud
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse. - FARGIN_WAR
Oh god no, on the mini games. I remember Vanguard having something like that, and it got BORING after the first hundred times of going through it.
I'm with Kano's suggestion; make crafting relevant. Don't make it more convoluted just for the sake of it.
One huge problem with Vanguard's crafting is minigame singular. Rather than having a bunch of different things to do, it had one thing to do and asked you to do it an enormous number of times. That gets very repetitive.
The other glaring problem with Vanguard's crafting is that it was more about grinding than crafting. Rather than asking you to learn a minigame and then use it to craft something, it asked you to craft a zillion of something stupid that you didn't want in order to grind levels so that you could eventually craft the one thing that you did.
Its been a while but I thought you could do crafting quests in Vanguard to level up crafting?
Quest 1: play the crafting minigame to craft this item Quest 2: play the crafting minigame to craft that item Quest 3: play the crafting minigame to craft a bunch of this component
Crafting quests did spare you from having to spend most of your time out gathering materials. They didn't spare you the grind, though.
I very rarely craft anything. Now that auction houses have become so popular, players will undercut each other to point of losing money just to improve their crafting skill, which means I can buy that crafted item cheaper than it would have cost me to make it myself.
Plus leveling up is so fast in modern games, you're changing gear every few hours, spending time crafting something is a wasted effort. At max level, the good gear is locked behind raids and dungeons with five difficulty levels so crafting is long forgotten.
The road that mmorpg's have gone down doesn't leave much need or reason to craft. I'm not a fan of this trend but it is what it is.
The 'undercut(ting) each other to the point of losing money' just flies in my face. It's terribly unrealistic and makes me think 'this is a game' every time; immersion be damned. A real craftsman wouldn't survive long with a business plan where it cost them more to make something than they could get selling it. They'd pack it in and do something else, pretty quick.
Which maybe explains part of MMORPGs' low population issues; they packed up and went home.
I think that games should simply skip the crafting and focus on the other aspects of the game, like the RPG elements that are the root of the genre. Let the people buy their gear from NPC vendors.
In some cases, the lose money by crafting effect is due to leveling. Suppose that in order to level up your crafting to get access to the things that you actually want to craft, you have to craft 100 of something stupid that no one wants. They each cost you 100g to craft, and you can sell them to a vendor for 10g. If you can get another player to take it off of your hands for 20g, that's better than selling it to a vendor. But it's fundamentally a problem of crafting being something stupid to grind levels in.
If crafting is get materials, press a button, and then you have a completed item, and everyone can do it, then why should the crafted item cost any more than the materials? The crafter hasn't added any value. If anything, he's subtracted value by making the materials less versatile than before because now they can't be crafted into anything else.
A crafted item shouldn't be worth more than the materials unless the crafter has to do something to add that value. If it takes ten minutes of doing something active to craft the item, then the crafter has added 10 minutes of labor, and if the crafted item is useful, then it will probably be worth more than the materials to compensate for the labor--at least if the materials aren't worth vastly more than 10 minutes of farming so as to make the value of the labor into a rounding error. If crafting is instant, but you can only craft one thing per day, and an average person would craft more than that without the limit, then the crafter has added value by selling his crafting process for the day.
Suppose that a game implemented combat as follows. You talk to an NPC, you get a quest, and you go to a dungeon. There's one mob in the dungeon, and you kill it to complete the quest. Then you talk to another NPC, get another quest, and go to another dungeon. The second dungeon is identical to the first, except that the mob is a different color and has a different name. You kill the mob to complete the quest.
You keep going and see that every single quest sends you to the same dungeon to fight the same mob. The mob changes color schemes and names. As you get to higher level quests, the mob has more health and hits harder. Nothing else about the fight changes at all.
So you get sick of fighting the same mob in the same way a zillion times in a row. You propose that the game fix this repetitiveness by making a fight just be a single button click to check whether your level and gear are high enough to win. If so, you win instantly. That makes combat less tedious than before, so you regard it as an upgrade.
See what's wrong with this? For games that have a single crafting minigame, the first two paragraphs are basically how they implemented crafting. People who say that it shouldn't be interactive like that are calling for the modifications of the third paragraph. But all of that is just awful as a combat system goes.
In order for combat to be interesting, you have to have more variety than that. You have to have a bunch of different mobs that use different skills and require different strategies to kill. With combat, we get that.
But with crafting, a lot of people don't seem to. A game that had a hundred very different crafting minigames just like it has a hundred different mobs to fight wouldn't feel nearly so repetitive as just doing one minigame forever. Maybe you wouldn't like such a game; there are a lot of games where I don't like the combat, either. But it would at least have a chance of being good. If most MMORPGs tried to implement combat on the same budget that they allocate for crafting, combat wouldn't have any chance of being decent, either.
One of he old MUD's I used to play had a very interactive crafting system.
You would take raw mats (Often weapons, armor, and the like) from mobs, other mobs you could skin and salvage from. Then you deconstruct the armor, get various mats, like plates, rivets, straps, padding. You could than Smelt the Plates, or Weapons down for Ingots, which could than be mixed to make alloy plugs, and plugs could crafted into Various Armor components and weapon parts. IE: Armor: Plates, Scales, Rings, and weapons, Hilts, Blades, etc. All of which than could be crafted into a single piece of equipment, with various stats.
Since this game did not use Magic in everything the stats were realistic, like Some allows would be lighter, offering less hindrance, and greater dodge and evasion bonus, some would provide better resistance to weapon types, like Blunt, Slash, Pricing, which would also be determined by the armor itself. IE: a Chainmalle shit, which has "good" resistance against pricing and slash, but "poor" blunt, could be outfitted with Additional Padding to offer "decent" blunt protection, or made into Double-Linked, to offer "Great" Protection against Slash, and made with an Adamantium allow to be given "Amazing" resistance against Slash, but would now weight twice as much as a normal Chainmalle armor.
So it was complex, also, you would get quality levels on what you made. IE: Poor Quality Ingots, are trash, and would have a higher chance to fail in the allow making process.
And it was not a Crafting Skill, either. Your chance to make something good was built off several skills. Like Smithing, only affected how well you could smelt an Ingot, but, your ability salvage things like leather straps off armor, was based on your skinning skill, and your ability to assemble a good suit of chainmalle was based on your own Armor Skill and Appraisal skill, so.. you needed to be a more rounded character to make good armor, not simply max one skill and call yourself king.
This resulted in people writing entire programs to go though the steps to craft things, as it was that involved, literally, they would spend hours upon hours building various scripts just to make one kind of armor, or one weapon, and then build another script to make another weapon, IE: One script makes a Long sword. with a fixed ratio of traits, that they know works and have a better than good chance to make, another one for a Scimitar, with different traits for that weapon, that they can make.
Even things like Arrows were complex, and involved many steps, so much so, that again, scripts were used to make them.
It was very complex and involved, and some people loved it, some hated it, but it made the best quality player made items in the game rare as hell and expensive as hell.. because no many had the patience to do all the work to make it happen. It was far easier to just be a warrior swinging an axe and getting loot, than build the diverse portfolio of skills to make a good axe.. which also required (among many other skills) you be good at swinging an Axe as well.
Just saying.. the best Weapon Makers.. where also very, very, good weapon users, same with armor, same with anything in that game. Want a leather bag, that comes from someone really good at skinning, wanna guess how they got good? Killed Tons of things they could skin.
And the way it worked, skinning was linked to combat, IE: harder mobs gave more skill, and required more skill to get a hide from, so if you wanted to keep the skinning going up, you needed to keep facing harder and harder mobs, which meant all your combat skills would also be going up at the same time.
So yah.. that light weight, max holding, masterwork bag, made from balrog hide, that is for sale at the market, in the trader booth, the player that made it has a crap ton of combat ranks, and not someone that anyone would say "You're just a crafter" given that tanners were commonly rangers, they would put a dozen arrows into you, before you drew your sword.
So that was really.. really.. complex crafting... and very involved as well, and not for beginners.
Egotism is the anesthetic that dullens the pain of stupidity, this is why when I try to beat my head against the stupidity of other people, I only hurt myself.
I very rarely craft anything. Now that auction houses have become so popular, players will undercut each other to point of losing money just to improve their crafting skill, which means I can buy that crafted item cheaper than it would have cost me to make it myself.
Plus leveling up is so fast in modern games, you're changing gear every few hours, spending time crafting something is a wasted effort. At max level, the good gear is locked behind raids and dungeons with five difficulty levels so crafting is long forgotten.
The road that mmorpg's have gone down doesn't leave much need or reason to craft. I'm not a fan of this trend but it is what it is.
The 'undercut(ting) each other to the point of losing money' just flies in my face. It's terribly unrealistic and makes me think 'this is a game' every time; immersion be damned. A real craftsman wouldn't survive long with a business plan where it cost them more to make something than they could get selling it. They'd pack it in and do something else, pretty quick.
Which maybe explains part of MMORPGs' low population issues; they packed up and went home.
I think that games should simply skip the crafting and focus on the other aspects of the game, like the RPG elements that are the root of the genre. Let the people buy their gear from NPC vendors.
In some cases, the lose money by crafting effect is due to leveling. Suppose that in order to level up your crafting to get access to the things that you actually want to craft, you have to craft 100 of something stupid that no one wants. They each cost you 100g to craft, and you can sell them to a vendor for 10g. If you can get another player to take it off of your hands for 20g, that's better than selling it to a vendor. But it's fundamentally a problem of crafting being something stupid to grind levels in.
If crafting is get materials, press a button, and then you have a completed item, and everyone can do it, then why should the crafted item cost any more than the materials? The crafter hasn't added any value. If anything, he's subtracted value by making the materials less versatile than before because now they can't be crafted into anything else.
A crafted item shouldn't be worth more than the materials unless the crafter has to do something to add that value. If it takes ten minutes of doing something active to craft the item, then the crafter has added 10 minutes of labor, and if the crafted item is useful, then it will probably be worth more than the materials to compensate for the labor--at least if the materials aren't worth vastly more than 10 minutes of farming so as to make the value of the labor into a rounding error. If crafting is instant, but you can only craft one thing per day, and an average person would craft more than that without the limit, then the crafter has added value by selling his crafting process for the day.
There's very few, if any, real world crafting skills where the crafter sells their 'training' work. Certainly, historical crafts worked completely differently. Things were made to order, few things were made to put in a store's stock. That didn't occur regularly until the late Renaissance. Even places were there were large crafting endeavors (bakeries in Egypt, mines in Syria, urns in Greece/Rome) were created on commission, usually from the government.
Gaining skill in a craft by making finished products may be something that is accepted in games. It just smacks of 'being a game' to me. That undermines immersion and a virtual world feeling that I look for.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
Mini-games? No thank you. I do agree that handling crafting is a tough cookie to crack
For me, it is a question of me vs my characters. I don't need to use my skill in some mini-game to craft. I'd rather use my character'sskill to craft.
I understand why people desire interactive crafting. It does get boring as a game player. Especially making 100's or 1000's of the same item. That's not good either. Simply clicking repeatedly on 1 button also is terrible design. It could be interesting to bring in character's abiklities to see if they learned anything new, or have that involved in the crafting quality.
I've seen some good ideas here. Personally, I miss EQ's "chance to fail" mechanic. This "auto-everything" in today's MMOs is boring to me. I also like the idea that NOT every item is 100% identical. I think that having differing degrees of "quality" is a great idea.
To take that idea (differing qualities) a little further, make the process more intricate. Instead of throwing raw ore and a pattern in a forge to make an armor piece, make the refining of said ore make a difference. Make differing pelt qualities for leather armor vary by critter, similar to EQ. Have more steps involved instead of "just one."
It is tough to make crafting viable to lots of players. Seeing the replies here, I can see why. Making crafting "fun" is like trying to grab a cloud
I would tread lightly with the "chance to fail" mechanic. If you've every played BDO and lost a few billion silver enchanting boss gear because the RNG gods frowned upon you that day, you'd start to hate that system.
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own. -- Herman Melville
Mini-games? No thank you. I do agree that handling crafting is a tough cookie to crack
For me, it is a question of me vs my characters. I don't need to use my skill in some mini-game to craft. I'd rather use my character'sskill to craft.
I understand why people desire interactive crafting. It does get boring as a game player. Especially making 100's or 1000's of the same item. That's not good either. Simply clicking repeatedly on 1 button also is terrible design. It could be interesting to bring in character's abiklities to see if they learned anything new, or have that involved in the crafting quality.
I've seen some good ideas here. Personally, I miss EQ's "chance to fail" mechanic. This "auto-everything" in today's MMOs is boring to me. I also like the idea that NOT every item is 100% identical. I think that having differing degrees of "quality" is a great idea.
To take that idea (differing qualities) a little further, make the process more intricate. Instead of throwing raw ore and a pattern in a forge to make an armor piece, make the refining of said ore make a difference. Make differing pelt qualities for leather armor vary by critter, similar to EQ. Have more steps involved instead of "just one."
It is tough to make crafting viable to lots of players. Seeing the replies here, I can see why. Making crafting "fun" is like trying to grab a cloud
I would tread lightly with the "chance to fail" mechanic. If you've every played BDO and lost a few billion silver enchanting boss gear because the RNG gods frowned upon you that day, you'd start to hate that system.
BDO's crafting sucked.
Egotism is the anesthetic that dullens the pain of stupidity, this is why when I try to beat my head against the stupidity of other people, I only hurt myself.
SWG is still my gold standard for crafting. Eve comes pretty close though. It's less "crafting" and more a logistics management mini-game.
Camelot Unchained will have equally complex crafting and an actual dedicated crafter class that is integral to the game (along with a unique, non-direct combat scouting class). SWG is the stated influence of the system along with Mark Jacobs clearly loving complex crafting in his games historically.
As with any system in any game, it has to fit. Not all games can support a SWG-like crafting as a synergistic mechanic.
I think that games should simply skip the crafting and focus on the other aspects of the game, like the RPG elements that are the root of the genre. Let the people buy their gear from NPC vendors.
I've always thought that should be true of a lot of features. Either make it integral to the core game and do it well or leave it out completely. Crafting and PvP are the biggest offenders. They usually feel like half baked attempts at adding a feature after the game is already built.
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own. -- Herman Melville
SWG is still my gold standard for crafting. Eve comes pretty close though. It's less "crafting" and more a logistics management mini-game.
Camelot Unchained will have equally complex crafting and an actual dedicated crafter class that is integral to the game (along with a unique, non-direct combat scouting class). SWG is the stated influence of the system along with Mark Jacobs clearly loving complex crafting in his games historically.
As with any system in any game, it has to fit. Not all games can support a SWG-like crafting as a synergistic mechanic.
This intrigues me.. a Crafting Class. I will have to check this game out again, as I didn't see a "Crafting" class the last time I looked at their site (which was like a year ago to be honest) .. so might be time for a stop in again.
Egotism is the anesthetic that dullens the pain of stupidity, this is why when I try to beat my head against the stupidity of other people, I only hurt myself.
Mini-games? No thank you. I do agree that handling crafting is a tough cookie to crack
For me, it is a question of me vs my characters. I don't need to use my skill in some mini-game to craft. I'd rather use my character'sskill to craft.
I understand why people desire interactive crafting. It does get boring as a game player. Especially making 100's or 1000's of the same item. That's not good either. Simply clicking repeatedly on 1 button also is terrible design. It could be interesting to bring in character's abiklities to see if they learned anything new, or have that involved in the crafting quality.
I've seen some good ideas here. Personally, I miss EQ's "chance to fail" mechanic. This "auto-everything" in today's MMOs is boring to me. I also like the idea that NOT every item is 100% identical. I think that having differing degrees of "quality" is a great idea.
To take that idea (differing qualities) a little further, make the process more intricate. Instead of throwing raw ore and a pattern in a forge to make an armor piece, make the refining of said ore make a difference. Make differing pelt qualities for leather armor vary by critter, similar to EQ. Have more steps involved instead of "just one."
It is tough to make crafting viable to lots of players. Seeing the replies here, I can see why. Making crafting "fun" is like trying to grab a cloud
I would tread lightly with the "chance to fail" mechanic. If you've every played BDO and lost a few billion silver enchanting boss gear because the RNG gods frowned upon you that day, you'd start to hate that system.
Oh, I did my fair share of screaming while crafting in EQ
In my mind, there are 2 types of RNG. 1) The totally random number picking from an array, ignoring the law of percentages, as XCom 2 does. 2) A more intelligent formula that accounts for skills/levels, attributes, quality, and "what occurred before."
[edit] Just wanted to use that edit button!
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse. - FARGIN_WAR
I enjoyed Vanguard's crafting. It was not perfect. I spent a lot of time failing to make a dagger...
I also enjoyed EQ2's crafting. I even remember when crafting failures could kill your character. My character died making watery coffee!
Part of the issue is gear. What makes one sword better than another? Why am I throwing away this sword for that sword? MMOs these days are so built around gear.
I like the craft a hundred widgets quests for leveling and reputation and even moderate income like in EQ2. I could also see durability being a better used mechanic. Even the best swords break, eventually. Every time it gets hit, armor needs to be repaired.
Some of it has to do with the gambling mechanics that seem to rule most MMOs. I am pulling the slot-machine lever to get the good boss-drop. In the old Pen and Paper games the gamble was the fight itself. Now we kill the boss scores of times and hope for the epic loot.
So the combat and the crafting are made irrelevant.
I very rarely craft anything. Now that auction houses have become so popular, players will undercut each other to point of losing money just to improve their crafting skill, which means I can buy that crafted item cheaper than it would have cost me to make it myself.
Plus leveling up is so fast in modern games, you're changing gear every few hours, spending time crafting something is a wasted effort. At max level, the good gear is locked behind raids and dungeons with five difficulty levels so crafting is long forgotten.
The road that mmorpg's have gone down doesn't leave much need or reason to craft. I'm not a fan of this trend but it is what it is.
The 'undercut(ting) each other to the point of losing money' just flies in my face. It's terribly unrealistic and makes me think 'this is a game' every time; immersion be damned. A real craftsman wouldn't survive long with a business plan where it cost them more to make something than they could get selling it. They'd pack it in and do something else, pretty quick.
Which maybe explains part of MMORPGs' low population issues; they packed up and went home.
I think that games should simply skip the crafting and focus on the other aspects of the game, like the RPG elements that are the root of the genre. Let the people buy their gear from NPC vendors.
In some cases, the lose money by crafting effect is due to leveling. Suppose that in order to level up your crafting to get access to the things that you actually want to craft, you have to craft 100 of something stupid that no one wants. They each cost you 100g to craft, and you can sell them to a vendor for 10g. If you can get another player to take it off of your hands for 20g, that's better than selling it to a vendor. But it's fundamentally a problem of crafting being something stupid to grind levels in.
If crafting is get materials, press a button, and then you have a completed item, and everyone can do it, then why should the crafted item cost any more than the materials? The crafter hasn't added any value. If anything, he's subtracted value by making the materials less versatile than before because now they can't be crafted into anything else.
A crafted item shouldn't be worth more than the materials unless the crafter has to do something to add that value. If it takes ten minutes of doing something active to craft the item, then the crafter has added 10 minutes of labor, and if the crafted item is useful, then it will probably be worth more than the materials to compensate for the labor--at least if the materials aren't worth vastly more than 10 minutes of farming so as to make the value of the labor into a rounding error. If crafting is instant, but you can only craft one thing per day, and an average person would craft more than that without the limit, then the crafter has added value by selling his crafting process for the day.
There's very few, if any, real world crafting skills where the crafter sells their 'training' work. Certainly, historical crafts worked completely differently. Things were made to order, few things were made to put in a store's stock. That didn't occur regularly until the late Renaissance. Even places were there were large crafting endeavors (bakeries in Egypt, mines in Syria, urns in Greece/Rome) were created on commission, usually from the government.
Gaining skill in a craft by making finished products may be something that is accepted in games. It just smacks of 'being a game' to me. That undermines immersion and a virtual world feeling that I look for.
Certainly, I wasn't arguing that games should make you craft a bunch of stupid stuff to level. Rather, I was arguing that a lot of games do that, and when they do, it tends to lead to losing money by crafting.
Well if people don't want any real;ism or immersion why are they playing rpg's?
When you first learned to craft something in school did they start you off crafting a 440 wedge?No you ere likely crafting a round piece of wood on a lathe.Any and every trade in life is learned through trial and error and become better at it through repetition. The arguments by gamer's just often sounds like whining to get to end game faster.RPG"s should be an adventure,a long lasting one at that,somewhere around the time of Wow gamer's turned rpg's into end game loot grinds.
What i want to see is more developers making SENSE of ideas.Primitive type beings should be wielding primitive weapons and dropping the weapons they use and NOT dropping from some fake loot table. The exquisite crafts should be done by the master craftsmen,the intelligent beings who know how to forge the best metal.If Lore has it that Dwarves are the master race of forging metal,then so be it but a Dragon should not be dropping a l33t sword of one shot kills.
So let's put some sense and adventuring into our rpg's and quit scoffing at games trying to improve on the nonsense i see in most.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Well if people don't want any real;ism or immersion why are they playing rpg's?
When you first learned to craft something in school did they start you off crafting a 440 wedge?No you ere likely crafting a round piece of wood on a lathe.Any and every trade in life is learned through trial and error and become better at it through repetition. The arguments by gamer's just often sounds like whining to get to end game faster.RPG"s should be an adventure,a long lasting one at that,somewhere around the time of Wow gamer's turned rpg's into end game loot grinds.
What i want to see is more developers making SENSE of ideas.Primitive type beings should be wielding primitive weapons and dropping the weapons they use and NOT dropping from some fake loot table. The exquisite crafts should be done by the master craftsmen,the intelligent beings who know how to forge the best metal.If Lore has it that Dwarves are the master race of forging metal,then so be it but a Dragon should not be dropping a l33t sword of one shot kills.
So let's put some sense and adventuring into our rpg's and quit scoffing at games trying to improve on the nonsense i see in most.
Dragons in some high fantasy hoarded great mounds of treasure, some collected magical items some collected both. So it makes sense that they would drop really good equipment. Unless you have luck like mine and you kill a broke dragon.
I personally play games to escape reality I don't want to craft 300 picks just to level a crafting skill. If you want a job, go get a job. There is a reason WoW is not considered the cornerstone of MMORPG crafting. I would rather get my immersion adventuring, not crafting. I never once crafted anything in D&D and I get plenty of immersion in that hobby.
It has to strike a balance. There should be an adventure to acquire rare materials to craft a high-end piece of equipment.
For the record, all I ever did in Woodshop was make bongs for my buddies. I took welding and auto seriously, but woodshop was too easy.
If you want a new idea, go read an old book.
In order to be insulted, I must first value your opinion.
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You can see my sci-fi/WW2 book recommendations.
Have not yet though. Maybe there is hope?
Nah there is really none for me or the human race.
Some features myself as a not-dedicated-crafter really liked are:
- Vanguards quest system where you could learn new recipes by going to certain places.
- ESOs crafting stations which are sometimes at interesting/hidden places (although showing them on the map is bad again)
- Mortals resource system where you had to decide between few materials (fast) and many (heavy hitting/defense) for each part ( handle, blade,...) combined with the different materials.
People don't want to grind and don't want a minigame, but still want to be a unique master crafter and not everybody should be one too to easily.
How to accomplish this?
With the three systems mentioned above. (With a few tweaks)
1. Use Mortals material system.
2. Have certain styles learned from master crafter spread around the world. (Maybe some hermits who live in hidden/dangerous places)
You have to do long quest lines for them to earn their respect)
3. Have some mystical crafting places. A forge inside a dungeon where better swords can be crafted. A well where a fresh crafted plate armor gets extra sturdiness during cooling.
4. Have mysteries.
Have recipes not everybody has.
Ignore balance.
Everyone being able to craft everything is boring.
Some people might be dedicated enough to find a magic material, to learn the legendary recipe from the unknown master crafter.
Bring the uniques back to roleplay games.
And with this especially: learn to accept that you cannot have everything, because that's what made games boring nowadays.
We dream of worlds with well known crafter but destroy it ourself because everyone wants to be able to achieve it leading to every guild existing having at least one guy who can craft everything.
Everyone being that special snowflake has killed MMORPGs, not only for crafting but overall.
1997 Meridian 59 'til 2019 ESO
Waiting for Camelot Unchained & Pantheon
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
Just assume when you take a trade you start out competent already. Then have time released + requirement of completed task to get to the next level. Quest, missions, NPC orders, drops to learn new skills.
For me, it is a question of me vs my characters. I don't need to use my skill in some mini-game to craft. I'd rather use my character's skill to craft.
I understand why people desire interactive crafting. It does get boring as a game player. Especially making 100's or 1000's of the same item. That's not good either. Simply clicking repeatedly on 1 button also is terrible design. It could be interesting to bring in character's abiklities to see if they learned anything new, or have that involved in the crafting quality.
I've seen some good ideas here. Personally, I miss EQ's "chance to fail" mechanic. This "auto-everything" in today's MMOs is boring to me. I also like the idea that NOT every item is 100% identical. I think that having differing degrees of "quality" is a great idea.
To take that idea (differing qualities) a little further, make the process more intricate. Instead of throwing raw ore and a pattern in a forge to make an armor piece, make the refining of said ore make a difference. Make differing pelt qualities for leather armor vary by critter, similar to EQ. Have more steps involved instead of "just one."
It is tough to make crafting viable to lots of players. Seeing the replies here, I can see why. Making crafting "fun" is like trying to grab a cloud
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
Quest 2: play the crafting minigame to craft that item
Quest 3: play the crafting minigame to craft a bunch of this component
Crafting quests did spare you from having to spend most of your time out gathering materials. They didn't spare you the grind, though.
If crafting is get materials, press a button, and then you have a completed item, and everyone can do it, then why should the crafted item cost any more than the materials? The crafter hasn't added any value. If anything, he's subtracted value by making the materials less versatile than before because now they can't be crafted into anything else.
A crafted item shouldn't be worth more than the materials unless the crafter has to do something to add that value. If it takes ten minutes of doing something active to craft the item, then the crafter has added 10 minutes of labor, and if the crafted item is useful, then it will probably be worth more than the materials to compensate for the labor--at least if the materials aren't worth vastly more than 10 minutes of farming so as to make the value of the labor into a rounding error. If crafting is instant, but you can only craft one thing per day, and an average person would craft more than that without the limit, then the crafter has added value by selling his crafting process for the day.
You keep going and see that every single quest sends you to the same dungeon to fight the same mob. The mob changes color schemes and names. As you get to higher level quests, the mob has more health and hits harder. Nothing else about the fight changes at all.
So you get sick of fighting the same mob in the same way a zillion times in a row. You propose that the game fix this repetitiveness by making a fight just be a single button click to check whether your level and gear are high enough to win. If so, you win instantly. That makes combat less tedious than before, so you regard it as an upgrade.
See what's wrong with this? For games that have a single crafting minigame, the first two paragraphs are basically how they implemented crafting. People who say that it shouldn't be interactive like that are calling for the modifications of the third paragraph. But all of that is just awful as a combat system goes.
In order for combat to be interesting, you have to have more variety than that. You have to have a bunch of different mobs that use different skills and require different strategies to kill. With combat, we get that.
But with crafting, a lot of people don't seem to. A game that had a hundred very different crafting minigames just like it has a hundred different mobs to fight wouldn't feel nearly so repetitive as just doing one minigame forever. Maybe you wouldn't like such a game; there are a lot of games where I don't like the combat, either. But it would at least have a chance of being good. If most MMORPGs tried to implement combat on the same budget that they allocate for crafting, combat wouldn't have any chance of being decent, either.
You would take raw mats (Often weapons, armor, and the like) from mobs, other mobs you could skin and salvage from. Then you deconstruct the armor, get various mats, like plates, rivets, straps, padding. You could than Smelt the Plates, or Weapons down for Ingots, which could than be mixed to make alloy plugs, and plugs could crafted into Various Armor components and weapon parts. IE: Armor: Plates, Scales, Rings, and weapons, Hilts, Blades, etc. All of which than could be crafted into a single piece of equipment, with various stats.
Since this game did not use Magic in everything the stats were realistic, like Some allows would be lighter, offering less hindrance, and greater dodge and evasion bonus, some would provide better resistance to weapon types, like Blunt, Slash, Pricing, which would also be determined by the armor itself. IE: a Chainmalle shit, which has "good" resistance against pricing and slash, but "poor" blunt, could be outfitted with Additional Padding to offer "decent" blunt protection, or made into Double-Linked, to offer "Great" Protection against Slash, and made with an Adamantium allow to be given "Amazing" resistance against Slash, but would now weight twice as much as a normal Chainmalle armor.
So it was complex, also, you would get quality levels on what you made. IE: Poor Quality Ingots, are trash, and would have a higher chance to fail in the allow making process.
And it was not a Crafting Skill, either. Your chance to make something good was built off several skills. Like Smithing, only affected how well you could smelt an Ingot, but, your ability salvage things like leather straps off armor, was based on your skinning skill, and your ability to assemble a good suit of chainmalle was based on your own Armor Skill and Appraisal skill, so.. you needed to be a more rounded character to make good armor, not simply max one skill and call yourself king.
This resulted in people writing entire programs to go though the steps to craft things, as it was that involved, literally, they would spend hours upon hours building various scripts just to make one kind of armor, or one weapon, and then build another script to make another weapon, IE: One script makes a Long sword. with a fixed ratio of traits, that they know works and have a better than good chance to make, another one for a Scimitar, with different traits for that weapon, that they can make.
Even things like Arrows were complex, and involved many steps, so much so, that again, scripts were used to make them.
It was very complex and involved, and some people loved it, some hated it, but it made the best quality player made items in the game rare as hell and expensive as hell.. because no many had the patience to do all the work to make it happen. It was far easier to just be a warrior swinging an axe and getting loot, than build the diverse portfolio of skills to make a good axe.. which also required (among many other skills) you be good at swinging an Axe as well.
Just saying.. the best Weapon Makers.. where also very, very, good weapon users, same with armor, same with anything in that game. Want a leather bag, that comes from someone really good at skinning, wanna guess how they got good? Killed Tons of things they could skin.
And the way it worked, skinning was linked to combat, IE: harder mobs gave more skill, and required more skill to get a hide from, so if you wanted to keep the skinning going up, you needed to keep facing harder and harder mobs, which meant all your combat skills would also be going up at the same time.
So yah.. that light weight, max holding, masterwork bag, made from balrog hide, that is for sale at the market, in the trader booth, the player that made it has a crap ton of combat ranks, and not someone that anyone would say "You're just a crafter" given that tanners were commonly rangers, they would put a dozen arrows into you, before you drew your sword.
So that was really.. really.. complex crafting... and very involved as well, and not for beginners.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.
-- Herman Melville
As with any system in any game, it has to fit. Not all games can support a SWG-like crafting as a synergistic mechanic.
You stay sassy!
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.
-- Herman Melville
In my mind, there are 2 types of RNG.
1) The totally random number picking from an array, ignoring the law of percentages, as XCom 2 does.
2) A more intelligent formula that accounts for skills/levels, attributes, quality, and "what occurred before."
[edit]
Just wanted to use that edit button!
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
I also enjoyed EQ2's crafting. I even remember when crafting failures could kill your character. My character died making watery coffee!
Part of the issue is gear. What makes one sword better than another? Why am I throwing away this sword for that sword? MMOs these days are so built around gear.
I like the craft a hundred widgets quests for leveling and reputation and even moderate income like in EQ2. I could also see durability being a better used mechanic. Even the best swords break, eventually. Every time it gets hit, armor needs to be repaired.
Some of it has to do with the gambling mechanics that seem to rule most MMOs. I am pulling the slot-machine lever to get the good boss-drop. In the old Pen and Paper games the gamble was the fight itself. Now we kill the boss scores of times and hope for the epic loot.
So the combat and the crafting are made irrelevant.
TSW, LotRO, EQ2, SWTOR, GW2, V:SoH, Neverwinter, ArchAge, EQ, UO, DAoC, WAR, DDO, AoC, MO, BDO, SotA, B&S, ESO,
When you first learned to craft something in school did they start you off crafting a 440 wedge?No you ere likely crafting a round piece of wood on a lathe.Any and every trade in life is learned through trial and error and become better at it through repetition.
The arguments by gamer's just often sounds like whining to get to end game faster.RPG"s should be an adventure,a long lasting one at that,somewhere around the time of Wow gamer's turned rpg's into end game loot grinds.
What i want to see is more developers making SENSE of ideas.Primitive type beings should be wielding primitive weapons and dropping the weapons they use and NOT dropping from some fake loot table.
The exquisite crafts should be done by the master craftsmen,the intelligent beings who know how to forge the best metal.If Lore has it that Dwarves are the master race of forging metal,then so be it but a Dragon should not be dropping a l33t sword of one shot kills.
So let's put some sense and adventuring into our rpg's and quit scoffing at games trying to improve on the nonsense i see in most.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
I personally play games to escape reality I don't want to craft 300 picks just to level a crafting skill. If you want a job, go get a job. There is a reason WoW is not considered the cornerstone of MMORPG crafting. I would rather get my immersion adventuring, not crafting. I never once crafted anything in D&D and I get plenty of immersion in that hobby.
It has to strike a balance. There should be an adventure to acquire rare materials to craft a high-end piece of equipment.
For the record, all I ever did in Woodshop was make bongs for my buddies. I took welding and auto seriously, but woodshop was too easy.
If you want a new idea, go read an old book.
In order to be insulted, I must first value your opinion.