There are two theories in this subject one I personally think is bonified ridiculous and the other to me seems more interesting and yes that is just my opinion man..
1. recipes are interesting. what components go into what and in what order, what is a pre-prerequisite build as a component to a more advanced item. where the materials are and how to get them.
2. the actual method of how one hammers a nail or stirs a pot.
say cooking for example, I think most cooks are less interested in how to stir something and more interested in what goes into the pot.
having said that, watching progress bars is not interesting either but that is a method of crafting that is already fallen out of favor in most crafting focused games but clearly not all.
thus I am not interested in mini-games of stiring pots. having said that taking LIF for example I do find making sure the forge is hot enough to be somewhat interesting but as nearly a 100% crafter myself I find it less interesting then complex component tree.
many people who think crafting needs improvement have not played games that are (for the lack of a better word) hyper focused on crafting.
case in point, I actually quit EQ2 as mostly a crafter and went to Darkfall (back in the day) instead because I found the crafting more interesting. I found the ability to have an entire guild commited to building a boat more intresting then tier 2 gloves
If you're relying on recipes as the way to make crafting interesting, then that just moves the question to one of where to the recipes come from. That's not to say that your answer is wrong, but only that you're not done yet until you say how to make acquiring recipes interesting.
If it's get one recipe and then use it to make 100 of item X, that's going to get boring awfully quick. If recipes can be arbitrary combinations of things that give different stats, then you're closer to what I proposed in my first post above. If you do a Tree of Savior like system where a recipe can only be used to craft an item once, then crafting really just becomes an alternate way of dropping loot from combat, not really a major activity in itself.
the problem is nearly 100000% of the people who do not understand what I am saying very simply and concretely just have not played games that are not heavy on crafting so they basically have no fucking clue.
In the games I play 'one recipe and then use it to make 100 of items X' is NOT THE STORY!!!!!!! if you have to make 100 items its because the NAVY SHIP you are building requires 100 wood, or the house you are building requires 100 stone. Or because the 100 bricks required to build an oven to cook meals in, requires 100 clay and 100 sand in order to make.
you NEVER make 100 items just to make 100 items, it almost always leads to a 1 count or something you are going to need to stay alive
In a lot of games, crafting is make 100 of item X. And then vendor them all because no one wants any of item X. Not all, of course, but I'm saying that it's something that you have to avoid.
But even if what you're doing is building a navy ship by building 100 of item X, that can still get boring. One hopes for more variety in building that navy ship than just doing some simple thing a huge number of times. If you need to craft 30 different things to build that navy ship, and crafting each of those items is substantially different from crafting any other, then you're onto something.
but what I have been saying like a broken record is that games that are focused heavy on crafting do not do all these things people are complaining about.
Please do not respond to me, even if I ask you a question, its rhetorical.
Our guild needs to make a boat, we need that boat to sail our crew on the water so we can do various things like checkout new lands with plenty of storage space or attack another guild.
To build a boat we need lots of materials, some of the materials are even exotic. Some come from common places gatherers can find, some really need to be grown like in a farm, some only come from mobs, some come from high end mobs in which the entire guild will need to help with.
All those components are not enough even, some of them are used to make other components which are parts of another component which is the final part that is added to the boat. Some of those items that are components of other components needs special tools to make.
Not everyone can make those special tools, and there are multiple tools of different types, those tools have different skills to use as well. some tools are made to make other tools.
and finally, now that we have the boat we can sail to a land that is hard to get to and gather up some rare resources we need and sell the rest.
getting the picture yet?
Please do not respond to me, even if I ask you a question, its rhetorical.
SEANMCAD = crafting is important when it is interrelated and requires organized cooperation but not in regards to "stirring pot" or "hammering" as no ones cares.
Everyone else = I think how you stir the pot matters and could be made into a mini-game.
Why not just combine both.
I like crafting to be interrelated and need organized groups, not a one stop shop, and I think that you can make a mini-game out of it. For example, remember basketball games where to shoot a free throw you'd have the ball move quickly between two sets of parallel lines and a good free throw shooter it would move slower.
Do the same in crafting, you can craft everything from the start, however, more difficult things have something similar that moves really fast making it almost not worth it to craft because of how hard the mini-game is. Once you level up in skill, it becomes easier to complete the mini-game.
Also, I like the crafting where different metals give unique attributes. Like if you a hypothetical MMO, in the North, your ore gives you + to cold dmg but it is useless in the north because all the mobs have high cold resistance, but in the south, where there are fire mobs, who have low cold resistance, it works.
I'd do a crafting system where each item would require an equal amount of material or ingots or whatever. But each ingot has a separate attribute or value. So you want a sword that only does cold dmg, craft the sword from the ingot that only gives cold dmg, you want to an all-around good weapon, make it from equal types of ingots. That's what I would do if I won the lottery and could make my own MMO.
I'd make all weapons decay as well and everything craftable.
Cryomatrix
Catch me streaming at twitch.tv/cryomatrix You can see my sci-fi/WW2 book recommendations.
SEANMCAD = crafting is important when it is interrelated and requires organized cooperation but not in regards to "stirring pot" or "hammering" as no ones cares.
Everyone else = I think how you stir the pot matters and could be made into a mini-game.
Why not just combine both.
I like crafting to be interrelated and need organized groups, not a one stop shop, and I think that you can make a mini-game out of it. For example, remember basketball games where to shoot a free throw you'd have the ball move quickly between two sets of parallel lines and a good free throw shooter it would move slower.
Do the same in crafting, you can craft everything from the start, however, more difficult things have something similar that moves really fast making it almost not worth it to craft because of how hard the mini-game is. Once you level up in skill, it becomes easier to complete the mini-game.
Also, I like the crafting where different metals give unique attributes. Like if you a hypothetical MMO, in the North, your ore gives you + to cold dmg but it is useless in the north because all the mobs have high cold resistance, but in the south, where there are fire mobs, who have low cold resistance, it works.
I'd do a crafting system where each item would require an equal amount of material or ingots or whatever. But each ingot has a separate attribute or value. So you want a sword that only does cold dmg, craft the sword from the ingot that only gives cold dmg, you want to an all-around good weapon, make it from equal types of ingots. That's what I would do if I won the lottery and could make my own MMO.
I'd make all weapons decay as well and everything craftable.
Cryomatrix
My Summer Car is a perfect example of that.
It could work however the weights matter. By that mean should 80% of your effort be stiring the pot, 70% or 30%? I think it should be low. In my Summer Car I would qualify the 'stiring the pot' to be 'turning the nuts and making sure they are tight' which makes up about 10-20% of the entire crafting experience.
Please do not respond to me, even if I ask you a question, its rhetorical.
No mini-games. I would rather approach an MMORPG as a simulation rather than a game, and that includes crafting. Multiple steps to represent processes.
One craft per character. Make the craft skills rely on interdependence, and try to encourage that to be other people as opposed to alts. If you are a carpenter building a wagon, you should need to buy the hinges from a blacksmith, and the seat cushion from an upholsterer, not build it all yourself.
Cumulative success. Success in creating intermediate steps builds a product's success. A wagon with a superior axle but a splintery seat is not going to be as good as a wagon with average axle and seat.
Correction of failures. A failure isn't always the end. In many cases, it should be possible to correct mistakes my salvaging the components and retrying the assembly.
No instant results. All processes take time. A finished product should never be the result of a single click / process. Characters can't be running off to fight a wolf invasion and expect to be able to make progress on their craft.
Limits to merchants. A character should not be able to make a hundred helms and expect to sell them to a convenient merchant for cash. Speculative crafting didn't become a thing before the late Renaissance, everything was made to contract.
Skill .NEQ. product. Never has any craftsman attempted to learn their skill by making finished goods. Craftsmen practice their processes on scraps that will never sell. Making a final product should never have a chance to improve a skill.
Just some condensed ideas I've had on crafting over the years.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
One craft per character. Make the craft skills rely on interdependence, and try to encourage that to be other people as opposed to alts. If you are a carpenter building a wagon, you should need to buy the hinges from a blacksmith, and the seat cushion from an upholsterer, not build it all yourself.
that would be the deal breaker for me. nope.
I get the desire for interdependence but when it comes to crafting my appetite is strong then most developers can fulfill.
I need to be able to make a F TON of different things, like in the hundreds and in different families as well
and regarding merchants as soon as people start talking about merchants like you have i know they dont have experience in something like Wurm.
Selling goods is fine, but it really should not be the primary focus of crafting in my opinion, unless you have your own shop
Please do not respond to me, even if I ask you a question, its rhetorical.
"A Tale in the Desert" had the best crafting I have ever seen in an MMO. Not surprising really, seeing as it was a central pillar of the whole game design.
Making a high quality spade was so difficult that only a handful of players mastered it. And that's despite the fact that macro'ing was completely legal.
In ATITD, everyone was a crafter. You didn't make things to sell, you made them to trade for items from other players, but primarily to contribute to the great projects that were being completed in the region you lived in. That was the whole point of the game, different regions competed to get projects done before the others. It was a very social game.
I fear that any crafting-heavy game in today's market will be overrun by RMT activity.
In my opion EQ2 and Vanguard did crafting very well.
Those are both examples of having only one crafting puzzle and having players repeat it a zillion times. It was a decently nice crafting puzzle in Vanguard, at least, but still extremely repetitive. In EQ2, it wasn't even a decently nice crafting puzzle to begin with. That's not my idea of a good crafting system.
No mini-games. I would rather approach an MMORPG as a simulation rather than a game, and that includes crafting. Multiple steps to represent processes.
One craft per character. Make the craft skills rely on interdependence, and try to encourage that to be other people as opposed to alts. If you are a carpenter building a wagon, you should need to buy the hinges from a blacksmith, and the seat cushion from an upholsterer, not build it all yourself.
Cumulative success. Success in creating intermediate steps builds a product's success. A wagon with a superior axle but a splintery seat is not going to be as good as a wagon with average axle and seat.
Correction of failures. A failure isn't always the end. In many cases, it should be possible to correct mistakes my salvaging the components and retrying the assembly.
No instant results. All processes take time. A finished product should never be the result of a single click / process. Characters can't be running off to fight a wolf invasion and expect to be able to make progress on their craft.
Limits to merchants. A character should not be able to make a hundred helms and expect to sell them to a convenient merchant for cash. Speculative crafting didn't become a thing before the late Renaissance, everything was made to contract.
Skill .NEQ. product. Never has any craftsman attempted to learn their skill by making finished goods. Craftsmen practice their processes on scraps that will never sell. Making a final product should never have a chance to improve a skill.
Just some condensed ideas I've had on crafting over the years.
One craft per character is fine for crafting as a minor side activity, but not a major component of the game. Otherwise, it's like building a big game world in a combat-heavy game and saying that each character is only allowed to kill monster in one zone. You never get to play most of the game that way.
For me, the holy grail of crafting systems is Wurm Online's crafting system, done with materials being as important as they are in Mortal Online, in the style of the above video.
I picture 50 people all hovering around that equipment as they all proceed to craft essentially the same thing.
But I do agree, it is more true to the real aspect of the craft. Did the game make the process of gathering materials just as deep? Such as mining and the like. I laugh how minerals are usually mined at rocks out in the real world when in most cases they are found deep within a mine... something which has to be built first I might add.
I'm not picturing a Themepark. At least in Wurm each player village tends to have it's own smithy and if that gets to crowded people put them inside their personal homes or make the smithy a bit larger with more forges.
Anyway, make it a sandbox and any set of facilities that get crowded will get replicated.
For me, the holy grail of crafting systems is Wurm Online's crafting system, done with materials being as important as they are in Mortal Online, in the style of the above video.
I picture 50 people all hovering around that equipment as they all proceed to craft essentially the same thing.
But I do agree, it is more true to the real aspect of the craft. Did the game make the process of gathering materials just as deep? Such as mining and the like. I laugh how minerals are usually mined at rocks out in the real world when in most cases they are found deep within a mine... something which has to be built first I might add.
I'm not picturing a Themepark. At least in Wurm each player village tends to have it's own smithy and if that gets to crowded people put them inside their personal homes or make the smithy a bit larger with more forges.
Anyway, make it a sandbox and any set of facilities that get crowded will get replicated.
I think people who are really interested in seeing what games can do should invest time into Wurm. Even if they find it slow and not really into it at least by getting a solid overview of crafting, building, terraforming and how land ownership works they can see what the big developers could do if those developers were inclined.
Around property management I always read arguements about how 'building anywhere' just cant work or how crafting is so limited in games. but they say these things without the experience of what I should more often call 'a homesteading game'.
Please do not respond to me, even if I ask you a question, its rhetorical.
For me, the holy grail of crafting systems is Wurm Online's crafting system, done with materials being as important as they are in Mortal Online, in the style of the above video.
I picture 50 people all hovering around that equipment as they all proceed to craft essentially the same thing.
But I do agree, it is more true to the real aspect of the craft. Did the game make the process of gathering materials just as deep? Such as mining and the like. I laugh how minerals are usually mined at rocks out in the real world when in most cases they are found deep within a mine... something which has to be built first I might add.
I'm not picturing a Themepark. At least in Wurm each player village tends to have it's own smithy and if that gets to crowded people put them inside their personal homes or make the smithy a bit larger with more forges.
Anyway, make it a sandbox and any set of facilities that get crowded will get replicated.
I think people who are really interested in seeing what games can do should invest time into Wurm. Even if they find it slow and not really into it at least by getting a solid overview of crafting, building, terraforming and how land ownership works they can see what the big developers could do if those developers were inclined.
Around property management I always read arguements about how 'building anywhere' just cant work or how crafting is so limited in games. but they say these things without the experience of what I should more often call 'a homesteading game'.
Based on my experiences in Wurm I would say there are some pretty legitimate downsides to the "Build Anywhere" thing. People really do tear up the countryside and leave ugly structures everywhere. All the older Wurm servers are just, less visually appealing than they were before people got to them.
ArcheAge presents housing zones but they are huge areas that end up looking like cluttered shanty towns.
I personally like the idea of very, very, small zones for building (Like enough for a single player's construction area) seeded throughout the game world, and any terraforming done to them "erodes" away if the zone becomes unclaimed. So you can claim your zone and build your house and a workshop, maybe terraform some farm fields or a lumber/mining camp but the you can only do it in locations that having a player homestead will actually enhance the visual appeal of the world and if you abandon it, when people come out there later they aren't going to find a bunch of ugly terraforming with the structures long since decayed away.
The game should be mainly focused on crafting and selling items.
You will have to pick one, you can't have both.
Why not? They are complementary features.
A meaningful and enjoyable crafting system means a high emphasis on the use of player crafted goods. If people aren't using your items there is little point to making them.
A high emphasis on the use of player crafted goods means a high emphasis on the exchange of goods. If the best goods are player made, you need to trade with other players to acquire any goods you don't make yourself. You can't just buy your crap at a vendor or loot it off a raid boss.
So good crafting and good trade systems go hand-in-hand. It's not worth implementing the former without the later.
No mini-games. I would rather approach an MMORPG as a simulation rather than a game, and that includes crafting. Multiple steps to represent processes.
One craft per character. Make the craft skills rely on interdependence, and try to encourage that to be other people as opposed to alts. If you are a carpenter building a wagon, you should need to buy the hinges from a blacksmith, and the seat cushion from an upholsterer, not build it all yourself.
Cumulative success. Success in creating intermediate steps builds a product's success. A wagon with a superior axle but a splintery seat is not going to be as good as a wagon with average axle and seat.
Correction of failures. A failure isn't always the end. In many cases, it should be possible to correct mistakes my salvaging the components and retrying the assembly.
No instant results. All processes take time. A finished product should never be the result of a single click / process. Characters can't be running off to fight a wolf invasion and expect to be able to make progress on their craft.
Limits to merchants. A character should not be able to make a hundred helms and expect to sell them to a convenient merchant for cash. Speculative crafting didn't become a thing before the late Renaissance, everything was made to contract.
Skill .NEQ. product. Never has any craftsman attempted to learn their skill by making finished goods. Craftsmen practice their processes on scraps that will never sell. Making a final product should never have a chance to improve a skill.
Just some condensed ideas I've had on crafting over the years.
One craft per character is fine for crafting as a minor side activity, but not a major component of the game. Otherwise, it's like building a big game world in a combat-heavy game and saying that each character is only allowed to kill monster in one zone. You never get to play most of the game that way.
The 'one craft per character' idea was my attempt to make MMORPGs more simulation than game. Historically, people could not learn more than one craft because knowledge was hoarded. A master/teacher would not teach a student without a commitment from the student or their family. That commitment usually involved years of dedicated work, and frequently a substantial payment up front to 'choose' the student. Students who did not complete their obligations to their master were viewed with suspicion, and rarely found a second tutor to teach them a second craft.
The practical purpose of this kind of restriction is to promote players depending on other players, not being able to do everything themselves. Given the opportunity, players tend to try to do everything for themselves in a game. This tends to reduce the opportunities for players to interact with others. In real life, people are more than happy to buy bread and beer from a grocer, buy furniture from a store, or cars from a dealer. They don't try to make everything themselves, even though the knowledge of the crafting processes are far more widely available.
The final reason for the general difficulty for my approach to crafting was to support an actual market in-game. In a game where there are 1000 players on a server, all capable of doing everything for themselves, there's no real customer. I was hoping that restricting the number of craftsmen would increase the number of consumers, allowing normal market factors such as supply and demand to operate normally. (In most games, S&D seems to operate on the material level rather than the product level -- the finished product sells for X, but the component to make that product costs 100X. That pretty much guarantees that crafting can never be a profitable situation). I was counting on the difficulty of crafting to weed out (or prohibit) the non-serious craftsmen, leaving only the dedicated to pursue crafting and leaving a number of customers to buy their goods. I was aiming for 10 craftsmen for every 1000 characters, so it wasn't an everyone does for themselves thing.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
For me, the holy grail of crafting systems is Wurm Online's crafting system, done with materials being as important as they are in Mortal Online, in the style of the above video.
I picture 50 people all hovering around that equipment as they all proceed to craft essentially the same thing.
But I do agree, it is more true to the real aspect of the craft. Did the game make the process of gathering materials just as deep? Such as mining and the like. I laugh how minerals are usually mined at rocks out in the real world when in most cases they are found deep within a mine... something which has to be built first I might add.
I'm not picturing a Themepark. At least in Wurm each player village tends to have it's own smithy and if that gets to crowded people put them inside their personal homes or make the smithy a bit larger with more forges.
Anyway, make it a sandbox and any set of facilities that get crowded will get replicated.
I think people who are really interested in seeing what games can do should invest time into Wurm. Even if they find it slow and not really into it at least by getting a solid overview of crafting, building, terraforming and how land ownership works they can see what the big developers could do if those developers were inclined.
Around property management I always read arguements about how 'building anywhere' just cant work or how crafting is so limited in games. but they say these things without the experience of what I should more often call 'a homesteading game'.
Based on my experiences in Wurm I would say there are some pretty legitimate downsides to the "Build Anywhere" thing. People really do tear up the countryside and leave ugly structures everywhere. All the older Wurm servers are just, less visually appealing than they were before people got to them.
ArcheAge presents housing zones but they are huge areas that end up looking like cluttered shanty towns.
I personally like the idea of very, very, small zones for building (Like enough for a single player's construction area) seeded throughout the game world, and any terraforming done to them "erodes" away if the zone becomes unclaimed. So you can claim your zone and build your house and a workshop, maybe terraform some farm fields or a lumber/mining camp but the you can only do it in locations that having a player homestead will actually enhance the visual appeal of the world and if you abandon it, when people come out there later they aren't going to find a bunch of ugly terraforming with the structures long since decayed away.
Archeage is a disaster when it comes to building for multiple reasons.
Anyway, I like how Wurm does it with parameters that people can not build on. The only challenge I feel was abandoned property, which if you make it decay too fast its not fair to the owners who where just on vacation, but in the meantime its a mess
Please do not respond to me, even if I ask you a question, its rhetorical.
When in games where with alts people can craft everything themselves by far the majority doesn't which still leaves many people buying things.
The games I play dont have alts. In many cases its not even possible.
EDIT: I take that back, maybe about 1/2 of the games i do and it being fairly common.
That is what is nice about a no class based system. people WANT to play every aspect of the game and why should they not experience every aspect of the game? So one way or another they will do their best to experience what they want, in a class based system that means alts, in a classles system it usually means one character.
Please do not respond to me, even if I ask you a question, its rhetorical.
Everything I stated still applies. Even in games that allow it the majority the doesn't do it.
the reason I jumped and this happens DAILY. People make an assertion like 'games today have no complex crafting' or 'everyone is creating alts' or 'whats a good solution to the class problem' or 'why are all these games casinos'
and yet for me DAILY..I dont experience ANY of it. and no, I am not a special snowflake there are many others like me.
So when I see things like that it makes the back of my hair stand on end. Its like I am living in a different universe then the rest of you
and to make my jaw drop is most of the things I read are complaints yet the people who complain have zero intrest in exploring the universe I live in that has none of those things they complain about..
Please do not respond to me, even if I ask you a question, its rhetorical.
Comments
Please do not respond to me, even if I ask you a question, its rhetorical.
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MAGA
I thought people would craft items and then use those as commodities to sell on the market?
JUST MMOs:
Fallen Earth
Zxyson
Wurm
Life is Feudal
EVE
all do it much better
The list of non-MMO that do crafting better than EQ2 is too long for me to list at the moment but it is possible
Please do not respond to me, even if I ask you a question, its rhetorical.
Please do not respond to me
Please do not respond to me, even if I ask you a question, its rhetorical.
Please do not respond to me
Our guild needs to make a boat, we need that boat to sail our crew on the water so we can do various things like checkout new lands with plenty of storage space or attack another guild.
To build a boat we need lots of materials, some of the materials are even exotic. Some come from common places gatherers can find, some really need to be grown like in a farm, some only come from mobs, some come from high end mobs in which the entire guild will need to help with.
All those components are not enough even, some of them are used to make other components which are parts of another component which is the final part that is added to the boat. Some of those items that are components of other components needs special tools to make.
Not everyone can make those special tools, and there are multiple tools of different types, those tools have different skills to use as well. some tools are made to make other tools.
and finally, now that we have the boat we can sail to a land that is hard to get to and gather up some rare resources we need and sell the rest.
getting the picture yet?
Please do not respond to me, even if I ask you a question, its rhetorical.
Please do not respond to me
SEANMCAD = crafting is important when it is interrelated and requires organized cooperation but not in regards to "stirring pot" or "hammering" as no ones cares.
Everyone else = I think how you stir the pot matters and could be made into a mini-game.
Why not just combine both.
I like crafting to be interrelated and need organized groups, not a one stop shop, and I think that you can make a mini-game out of it. For example, remember basketball games where to shoot a free throw you'd have the ball move quickly between two sets of parallel lines and a good free throw shooter it would move slower.
Do the same in crafting, you can craft everything from the start, however, more difficult things have something similar that moves really fast making it almost not worth it to craft because of how hard the mini-game is. Once you level up in skill, it becomes easier to complete the mini-game.
Also, I like the crafting where different metals give unique attributes. Like if you a hypothetical MMO, in the North, your ore gives you + to cold dmg but it is useless in the north because all the mobs have high cold resistance, but in the south, where there are fire mobs, who have low cold resistance, it works.
I'd do a crafting system where each item would require an equal amount of material or ingots or whatever. But each ingot has a separate attribute or value. So you want a sword that only does cold dmg, craft the sword from the ingot that only gives cold dmg, you want to an all-around good weapon, make it from equal types of ingots. That's what I would do if I won the lottery and could make my own MMO.
I'd make all weapons decay as well and everything craftable.
Cryomatrix
You can see my sci-fi/WW2 book recommendations.
It could work however the weights matter. By that mean should 80% of your effort be stiring the pot, 70% or 30%? I think it should be low. In my Summer Car I would qualify the 'stiring the pot' to be 'turning the nuts and making sure they are tight' which makes up about 10-20% of the entire crafting experience.
Please do not respond to me, even if I ask you a question, its rhetorical.
Please do not respond to me
- Skill .NEQ. product. Never has any craftsman attempted to learn their skill by making finished goods. Craftsmen practice their processes on scraps that will never sell. Making a final product should never have a chance to improve a skill.
Just some condensed ideas I've had on crafting over the years.Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
and regarding merchants as soon as people start talking about merchants like you have i know they dont have experience in something like Wurm.
Selling goods is fine, but it really should not be the primary focus of crafting in my opinion, unless you have your own shop
Please do not respond to me, even if I ask you a question, its rhetorical.
Please do not respond to me
Making a high quality spade was so difficult that only a handful of players mastered it. And that's despite the fact that macro'ing was completely legal.
In ATITD, everyone was a crafter. You didn't make things to sell, you made them to trade for items from other players, but primarily to contribute to the great projects that were being completed in the region you lived in. That was the whole point of the game, different regions competed to get projects done before the others. It was a very social game.
I fear that any crafting-heavy game in today's market will be overrun by RMT activity.
Anyway, make it a sandbox and any set of facilities that get crowded will get replicated.
Around property management I always read arguements about how 'building anywhere' just cant work or how crafting is so limited in games. but they say these things without the experience of what I should more often call 'a homesteading game'.
Please do not respond to me, even if I ask you a question, its rhetorical.
Please do not respond to me
ArcheAge presents housing zones but they are huge areas that end up looking like cluttered shanty towns.
I personally like the idea of very, very, small zones for building (Like enough for a single player's construction area) seeded throughout the game world, and any terraforming done to them "erodes" away if the zone becomes unclaimed. So you can claim your zone and build your house and a workshop, maybe terraform some farm fields or a lumber/mining camp but the you can only do it in locations that having a player homestead will actually enhance the visual appeal of the world and if you abandon it, when people come out there later they aren't going to find a bunch of ugly terraforming with the structures long since decayed away.
A meaningful and enjoyable crafting system means a high emphasis on the use of player crafted goods. If people aren't using your items there is little point to making them.
A high emphasis on the use of player crafted goods means a high emphasis on the exchange of goods. If the best goods are player made, you need to trade with other players to acquire any goods you don't make yourself. You can't just buy your crap at a vendor or loot it off a raid boss.
So good crafting and good trade systems go hand-in-hand. It's not worth implementing the former without the later.
The practical purpose of this kind of restriction is to promote players depending on other players, not being able to do everything themselves. Given the opportunity, players tend to try to do everything for themselves in a game. This tends to reduce the opportunities for players to interact with others. In real life, people are more than happy to buy bread and beer from a grocer, buy furniture from a store, or cars from a dealer. They don't try to make everything themselves, even though the knowledge of the crafting processes are far more widely available.
The final reason for the general difficulty for my approach to crafting was to support an actual market in-game. In a game where there are 1000 players on a server, all capable of doing everything for themselves, there's no real customer. I was hoping that restricting the number of craftsmen would increase the number of consumers, allowing normal market factors such as supply and demand to operate normally. (In most games, S&D seems to operate on the material level rather than the product level -- the finished product sells for X, but the component to make that product costs 100X. That pretty much guarantees that crafting can never be a profitable situation). I was counting on the difficulty of crafting to weed out (or prohibit) the non-serious craftsmen, leaving only the dedicated to pursue crafting and leaving a number of customers to buy their goods. I was aiming for 10 craftsmen for every 1000 characters, so it wasn't an everyone does for themselves thing.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
Anyway, I like how Wurm does it with parameters that people can not build on. The only challenge I feel was abandoned property, which if you make it decay too fast its not fair to the owners who where just on vacation, but in the meantime its a mess
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EDIT: I take that back, maybe about 1/2 of the games i do and it being fairly common.
That is what is nice about a no class based system. people WANT to play every aspect of the game and why should they not experience every aspect of the game?
So one way or another they will do their best to experience what they want, in a class based system that means alts, in a classles system it usually means one character.
Please do not respond to me, even if I ask you a question, its rhetorical.
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and to make my jaw drop is most of the things I read are complaints yet the people who complain have zero intrest in exploring the universe I live in that has none of those things they complain about..
Please do not respond to me, even if I ask you a question, its rhetorical.
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I'm not sure who you are addressing now because even though you quote me you are not actually addressing my points.
Please do not respond to me, even if I ask you a question, its rhetorical.
Please do not respond to me