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Crafting- Player Invention, Player Creation, Crafter Personalization
AccountDeleted12341
Member Posts: 351
Setting yourself apart to be entirely unique as a Crafter-- unlike any other.
How is any of this possible in a MMORPG?
If a game developer could focus on an incredibly extensive and robust crafting system-- making it as focused ($$$, time, programming, update importance, & art asset assignment) as any other part of the game (Combat, PvP, PvE)-- what would you want? How would it be done?
Honestly, I can't even fathom how one would take a MMORPG and allow player customization in crafter.
Let's say the game has all the works for items-- Cooks & Alchemists who supply important consumables, Blacksmiths, Leatherworkers, Woodworkers, Siegemasters-- the works.
How do you make it so that one Cook's Food is different from another Cook's Food-- to the point that someone can become famous as "The Bread Guy" or "The Pizza Master" or "The Strength Cook"?
How would you customize player-created gear to allow for someone to place their Armor or Weapons on the marketplace with a hallmark as to why they're so different? Different visuals for the gear? Different stat augments? Different custom marks? Dyes? Legendary Weapons? Extremely Cheap Prices?
"Buy from 'Player43' he has the cheapest prices on Axes!"
"Don't buy from Player43, his axes break easy! Buy my durable Axes-- they may be more expensive but they are worth every penny!"
"Forget those guys, my axes look the best and give a special enchantment!"
Sorry, but what separates these different players from all eventually being capable of making cheaply made, highly durable, specially enchanted axes?
Obviously rarity of recipes won't do much, as even with rare recipes everyone and their mom in WoW have the most desired enchants or recipes. Granted WoW is a horrible example, but still.
Comments
Star Wars Galaxies...enough said
Gonna go ahead and ignore the details of how difficult it would be to implement such high-quality crafting systems and just be out with it.
In terms of quality
I like your idea of individual-dependant durability. Advanced crafters could make more durable swords because they know secrets of the trade or are higher level and can earn the materials through dungeons whereas lower levels cannot due to high morality rates.
We could even go as far as to say they strike deals with higher-levels to fetch them these materials because they cannot themselves. Which gives birth to another idea: Player-created quests. Wow, this is becoming big.. Anyways, for a system like this to work, the amount of durability that can be given to an item must be almost limitless, but only truly great crafters should be able to create durable masterpieces.
In terms of customization
Some crafters give dark tones and evil themes to their crafts. Others may give them light, holy qualities. Some could make their sword overcompensating and joyously generic whereas others could make them dapper and subtle. This would be what draws in specific customers to certain crafters and keeps them coming. Customization, again, must be almost endless in variety. From the hilt, to the jewels encrusted to the blade.
That really tells me nothing, except "Star Wars Galaxies".
Alright, then my response is... "The Matrix Online". Rebuttal ftw!
I've got it! To allow your crafting to be different than others...a crafting talent tree. You specify which areas will be your specialty, swords, axes, helms, bread, boats, bows, furniture, etc. Then you specialize further from there, swiftness, mass, durability, flexibility, style, etc.
This way you'll have reason to do crafting. You can customize your own crafter to create what you'd like while others will not be able to create exactly the same items as you. The deeper the talent tree, the more unique your crafter will be.
A big part for this to work would be the variety of attributes the crafted items could carry. You can't just have this profession craft this item. They're all the same that way! They need individual attributes.
So basically, depending on how you've chosen your crafting specialties, you'll have the ability to create something with specific attributes that others might not be able to duplicate. You don't craft a predetermined item, but rather a generic item with customized attributes unique to your characters crafting build.
A whole crafting class within each character.
What an amazing idea, thank you!
I have an idea now for how this system will work.
Your post really inspired me to create a great system, thank you.
I dislike systems that put the burden of distinguishing between two crafters on the customer. If every blacksmith has their own unique sword design and a customer needs to decide which one to get, you don't end up playing a crafter (something I love playing), you end up playing a salesman (which is something I despise playing). That's not to say I'm opposed to customization or specialization, just that in the end a buyer should only have to worry about price.
Although its a great idea I think it would be too difficult to implement into an mmo with loads of players in it.I do despise the crafting systems of gathering 200 tin clusters,clicking on a forge and turning those into 100 tin ingots and then making 25 pairs of tin boots.This to me isn't crafting at all,especially the ones where you can just go and make a cup of tea while your toon stands there hammering away:).
I am happy to just have my name on any item one of my crafters makes so anyone buying it then wearing it who is inspected can see thier gear was made by me.
Here's another idea. What if your character got skills, maybe through your crafting tree. When you went to craft something, a mini game would come up where you would use your skills to get a "high score" (some sort of benchmark to determine low, average, and high quality), and the higher your score, the better crafted quality the item could be. That's just a surface idea. Maybe you can build upon it?
I do think you should get some special crafting skills, not too unlike your combat skills, and you'd use those skills in some way to create the item rather than just click "create" and it's done. Crafting needs to be more involving and fun.
The principle of that crafting system was, like other systems, that you needed a recipe and some ingredients to make an item. The main difference however was that the recipe only specified the type of ingredient, say, as an example you needed 6 leaves, 4 tree branches, 4 medium sized bones and 2 pieces of rope to make that item. (Forgive me that I use a hypothetical example, it's many years ago that I played the game.)
Now, for that above example, in the game you could find 20 different leaves, from different plants, 10 different branches, from different trees, and likewise with all other ingredients. Those actual ingredients (not the class of it) determined the actual colour and the actual stats of the final item. It needed a large amount of experimentation from the crafters to find out what mixture of actual ingredients gave the most favourable stats for an item. Accordingly, these recipes, especially the ones with rare ingredients (either hard to find or only obtainable in dangerous areas or from boss-mobs) for high-end items became a closely guarded secret of the crafter and his guild.
The system was good - and still is I assume.
I maintain this List of Sandbox MMORPGs. Please post or send PM for corrections and suggestions.
And yet again, this tells me nothing.
SWG is...how many years ago?
You guys do realize that 2003 was..........8 years ago.
Almost a decade...
I realize that, unfortuanly atleast for me it has never been matched or even come close with MMO's that have crafting. And no EVE even though it has some very nice crafting again it doesn't come close to what SWG offered/offers
http://swg.wikia.com/wiki/Resource
http://www.swgalaxies.net/playerguides/chef/index.htm
Read the links and it explains allot about crafting and harvesting.
Yeah SWG was kind of special when it come to crafting (and the social professions like dancer,musican and image designer was really special). It sure broke some molds. It was kind of impressive to see people build these big names for them self without even touching a gun.
In the beginning all crafters hand sampled minerals and chemicals from the ground for hours only to gain some xp and to build the most basic stuff and all stuff was built one and one by hand. After awhile some got enough xp to build harvesters and factories and the industral revolution was a fact. And as soon crafters started to mass produce wall modules they could start to build houses for players to buy and place. The crafters opened their own shops in player made houses and decorated them and really made big names for them self.
Exprementation points had a big impact and so did the quality of the resources too how big a crafter was. A planet could have 10 weapon dealers, 6 who was cheap-low quality-huge quantity(perfect for players with little money to spend), 2 who was above average weaponsmiths and 2 who was master crafters with unique stats on weapons, even though all 10 were the same level.
To explain it all would take hours. These videos are from NGE but the basics are the same as Pre-NGE(watch your volume in some of those clips, the mic is really high) .
Surveying and Crafting Basics
Resource Harvesters
Crafting Experimentation
Factories
Housing & Lots Part 1
Housing & Lots Part 2
Despite of the NGE, SWG had some of the coolest crafting and social professions I have seen in a game. Heck there were even dancers and musicans ingame never touching a gun and still making a name for them self and earning the big bucks by entertaining others.
SWG: Astromechs & Friday Features and Guides from SWG O-forums (2003-2005) (Read last post first for clarity)
Thank you both VERY much. It is great to FINALLY have valid information on what made SWG great! This will help me a lot.
While reading about the Chef idea, it popped into my mind a great addition (which builds commonality and rarity among food types). My game boasts over 40 races, with most of the graphics and animations 90% complete (I've been working on this for a long time).
I wanted some great ideas to add the crafter of a Cook / Chef. Everquest did a good job, but from what I read about SWG Pre-CU, it is simply phenominal.
In addition to all sorts of combinations, I realized that each individual race could have favorite food types, which benefit them greater, as well as disgusted food types. Not that they cannot eat ANYTHING, but that they may suffer or benefit from specific foods better/worse.
For example, a werewolf will enjoy Meats much more than Plants, while an Elemental may require a much different food type, being a spiritual element embodied. Dwarves as a special trait can eat poisonous additives (ex. mushrooms) without harmful effects, gaining all the positives these bring without the negatives. Humans who try to eat a food with this additive would get sick.
Then there are the Entertainers. Part of my design centralizes all players inside their local city's hub, which is a Bar, Inn, or Tavern. This is where players meet for a bucket load of reasons, including finding groups, acquiring adventures, or just socializing with an elaborate assortment of mini-games which they can bet on.
Adding an Entertainer type of character which players can specialize in, as a form of crafter, is a great idea and just what I wanted to add! Knowing about the SWG Entertainer will help me start with a good base for this character type.
I greatly appreciate everything, thank you very much!
It's not just a matter of adding an entertainer or cook to make it like SWG use to be. You also have to:
-Not allow anything useable to drop off of mobs or be in chests, or be found anywhere except from another player
-Equipment decay from use, to keep you coming back buying more from players
-Decorate houses/shops, to attract customers to buy from your NPC vendors
-1 character per server, so you can't make all components for finished product, you have to buy some stuff from other players
-Limited skilset, again so you can't do it all.
-Non centralized auction house, forcing player to go from planet to planet hauling, selling, stockpiling, or buying wares.
-Auto-miners (thumpers), this frees up player's time from having to manually mine, although it could still get pretty intense trying to navigate around fighting MOBS while trying to put a thumper down, but it's nowhere as lame a grind as Eve Online.
Been meaning to reply to this for a while now and never got around to it so sorry for the semi-necro post.
To answer the question:What is a crafting system that works and is fun requires 3 basic things. Items, harvesting, crafting. I'd include all three of these in any sucessful crafting system.
First off for the sake of disclosure and because I will refer to them below I have played the following games past their tutorial phase, I haven’t bothered to list all the ones I’ve tried for less than a month/week:
Ryzom, SWG (pre-NGE), UO, LOTRO, Knight Online, Silkroad, Perfect World, FEZ, Rappelz, Xyson.
Items: At the basic level there have to be 2 things items have to do to make crafting work. Crafting items have to be in high demand. They have to be VARIED.
· Demand: There has to be a REASON for crafters to make items, ie: someone has to actually want them. To me this means two things, items MUST degrade over time, and crafted items must be the best in game. This means that the crafters will always have a steady supply of customers. There is a reason that the only really 'in demand' profession in most non-degrade games nowadays seems to be the consumable maker. ie: potions, scrolls, etc. I haven't seen a game yet that has created a viable crafting economy that didn't have item decay. A second idea would be to make ALL crafters consumable makers. Where say the weapons and armor do not decay but 'bonuses' on them do. So that say weapons can constantly get speed or damage or armor piercing enchants that wear off over time, where armor would get the same, (defence, move speed, damage reduction etc). ALL crafting classes would have to be able to create at least a few different 'enhancement' items. I honestly don't know how well this would work though and really it seems like just a bandaid solution to having no item decay.
Good: SWG or Ryzom-Items decay and are constantly replenished by needing crafters. SWG had a 2 tier system where items could be repaired but lost max durability with each consecutive repair, and ryzom has no item repair. Almost all items in game were player created and ‘loot/npc’ items were by far inferior.
Bad: LOTRO-They actually do have item decay. It is NOT a crafting feature though. Since it can be repaired at any NPC to 100% durability an infinite amount of times it has become a money sink and actually has nothing to do with crafting at all. Yes I have glossed over their legendary weapon system but that is quite a unique game feature and I’m not sure how to have that fit into a crafting system I would like. Currently it makes weapon crafters obsolete at worst and limits the demand to basically zero at best. Also none of the best items in game were crafted. They tried to bandaid this by making a 65 2nd age crafted but I don’t think it has worked mostly because it’s an outlier and the rest of their crafting system isn’t much fun either. It’s an attempt to make people want to craft, but unfortunately it’s an attempt to make people use an unfun system.
· Varied: Say I am a crafter and I am making swords. I have the mats required and make 10 swords in a row. Every single sword should be unique unless I choose for them to be identical. Crafters make items because they like creating things. They are not assembly line workers, making 1000 swords and having all 1000 swords all identical is bad bad bad in my books. Using the sword example again the stats on it are going to be something like, attack speed, durability, max/min damage, reach, etc. Each sword should be different by letting me AND the mats used determine levels of each stat.
I’ve seen a lot of games that gate you recipes as you level up. Toy sword, longsword, knights sword, magic sword, sword of uberness, etc. I would change that to simply having ONE recipe, ‘sword’ and then as I level up give ME the ability to increase the stats on that sword more and more. So at the start say I can make a sword with 1 1 1 stats. Then at max lvl I can make a sword with 3 10 3, stats or 5 5 6 stats. What those stats are are unimportant but you can see that each weapon can be very different simply based on MY choices. Crafters want to CRAFT items not ASSEMBLE them.
Good: SWG, Silkroad online, Ryzom-Silkroad online is the one worth mentioning here as I think it has the best item descriptions and item variances I have ever seen. Using swords again each sword has a base damage, durability, speed, reach etc. When you get a weapon by a drop it actually tells you what each stat is. Ie: Iron sword, damage 5-10 (+10%) speed 2.5 (-57%), reach 1.0 (+29%). No two weapons were the same. Ryzom and SWG did much the same but they didn’t tell you how it compares to other weapons other than a straight #.
Bad: LOTRO (crafted items only, drops are pretty varied), Knight Online, Rappelz, FEZ- Having set weapons and just having to code entries rather than an item system is apparently much easier as most games tend to go this route it seems. All items are just entries in a database and if you get an ‘iron sword’ you know it will be the exact same iron sword each-and-every-single-damn-time. There’s no sense of adventure with getting loot and almost every char ends up being exactly the same wearing exactly the same gear as only specific make ups end up being feasible. LOTRO’s costume system is a direct attempt to counteract this without addressing the actual issue. The legendary weapon system was an attempt to address this issue that actually worked and worked well to a degree.
Harvesting/Resources: In my opinion good harvesting requires exploration. I also HATE static resource nodes. Resources should also vary. See the comments on items. Resources should also follow those rules. Ie: Mining ore should net me different qualities of ore. Picking mushrooms should net me different types and quality of mushrooms etc. Where resources are and what type of resources are available should change with timer requiring me to constantly have go find them again. When I do find them DON’T make me watch a progress bar as I mine. Just tell me ‘you have found x amount of quality y’ and be done with it, the mini game is the finding/exploring for materials not the pick axe swinging. Leveling up would allow me greater range to track and ability to get more/higher quality items. Alternatively make a mini game with harvesting that involves some sort of exploration or ‘searching’ quality to it rather than the dull progress bar as the pick axe swings.
Good: SWG, UO, Ryzom-UO/SWG had a no node system that worked very well. Space limitations in SWG really hindered harvesting since you had to drop a miner type building before anyone else found it… enabled people to really monopolize materials which was bad. Ryzom has an excellent harvesting system with regards to quality/amount but it’s rather tedious and the nodes don’t move around at all, only node game I’ve played that nodes were tolerable though. Also Ryzom had a system where certain nodes were only present in specific situations (weather/season/time etc) was quite fun at first but once you learn all the situations it’s just tedious again.
Bad: LOTRO, Perfect World. Node resources that were all identical with no quality to them. The ore I mine at lvl 1 is exactly the same as the ore a grandmaster gets provided he is using the same node as I am. Nodes were in set locations and never moved. VERY tedious to gather mats as there was no ‘game’ to it.
Crafting: The key word here is ‘control,’ players must control what they craft and feel like they are having some sort of input into the final product. Making players feel like they are assembling items rather than crafting them is the mistake most of the bad crafting games I’ve played have made. What I mean by this is that my skills as a crafter should determine the quality/style of the item created. Give a player ‘points’ or attributes to assign to the item so that they are crafting it with a focus in mind. Using a sword as an example again when I assemble the materials to create the weapon show the base amounts for each stat based on the materials (speed, damage, durability, weight, etc) then give me x amount of points to increase/decrease each stat. As a crafter levels up give them more ‘points’ to use so that the final product becomes better and better meaning no two crafters items are the same. This is added on TOP of material stats too btw. For example say I use the worst materials in the game and have an item with 1,1,1 stats. I then add my crafting bonus to make that item 3,3,3 or 1,7,1 etc, instead I could use the best materials in the game and make an item with 10,10,10 and then add my crafting bonus to make it 12,12,12 or 16,10,16 etc. Yes I am ignoring all balance/stat cap issues and simply focusing on crafting so that the main idea is clear. Crafting bonus’ could improve other things that materials do not or they could simply add ‘enchantments’ it isn’t really important. The important part is that crafters have INPUT into the item they are making to make them feel like they are actually CRAFTING something rather than ASSEMBLING it.
Good: SWG, Ryzom- Both games have items that are effected by not only the materials used, but by the level of the crafter themselves. Both let you feel that you as a crafter have an influence on the final product. SWG more so than Ryzom due to the more dynamic ‘experimentation’ system that they had to increase each stat. Whereas Ryzom simply lets you add set bonus’ to each item based on the crafting level.
Bad: LOTRO, UO, Rappelz-I’m not sure I should include UO here as the crafted items did vary depending upon skill, but when I played it it didn’t actually tell you HOW they varied unless you could examine the item in detail which was rather tedious. LOTRO and Rappelz both turn crafters into assembly line workers where each and every single damn item is identical. LOTRO has a critical success system but each of those is identical each and every damn time too so it’s not a crafting feature it’s a gambling feature.
Final: I realize it kinda sounds like I am ragging on LOTRO, I kind of am but only with regards to the crafting system. The game itself is quite polished and well thought out for classes/skills etc. Their crafting system leaves a lot to be desired though.
check out xsyon. read about it. You'll find it has a decent bit to do with swg (in terms of crafting)
Ryzom, SWG, UO, EVE Online. You're really not familiar with any of these, Emergence?
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
I would craft more if the items I created were original in their own way. It would be brilliant if an MMO didn't have the different "recipes" archived so you might just start mixing a bunch of reagants to discover invent a new potion and you might become the famous epic potion seller creating your own brand in game and owning a business; this would work well in a sandbox environment.
Crafters should be scientists rather than factory workers.
FEEL THE FULL
FREE-TO-FLAME
FANTASY.
The problem with discovery of new formulas is it happens once. When you think of the number of people playing an MMO and the lifetime of an MMO (several years or more), it's just not a sustainable design. However, creating original items is present in several MMOs. In a very basic and useful form, you have things like the enhancement system of World of Warcraft, but there are also several more advanced systems, such as the Tinkering system of Asheron's Call which allows players to alter almost every property of an item.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Oh please I want a game like that !!!
No I don't want to play Eve Online for my own reasons.
Game like above I would pre-order in a blink of an eye.
It's what SWG was like the first 6 months it came out. Believe it or not it was ruined by the developers. *shrugs* What can you do.