Some ideas about crafting.
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I know many players asked for more intricate crafting, but the current setup seems complex for the sake of complexity.There is also a huge leap between tier 1 and tier 2. There also isn't much difference between white, green, blue, purple, and gold. I get that there is enhanced durability, but it feels bad. There is also no reason/way to create lower tier versions. Eventually the only thing to buy is gold, making it hard for new crafters to get involved and it makes all items a commodity. The commodity aspect leads to a race to the bottom in pricing once the game spins up and people can farm equipment. The only way to avoid that is to make the items so hard to get that it isn't worth it. This is the direction we saw in the last test.
I would like to propose a few changes. Most of these work together so it would be hard to take a single item out and implement it to get the effect, but take what you will.
First, make the various colors mean something other than a step up in durability. First, the crafter must be able to choose the crafting level of the item, so they can choose to create a green, even if they can make a gold. To do this, we must make a reason for them to do so. More on that later.
Make each level require the previous level and an additional item and/or process. For example, a grey bow can be made from sticks and fiber, but a green bow requires a grey bow and some oil made from an easy to obtain item like animal fat. The blue may require a green and molded wood. To make the molded wood you take a log from a tree split with an axe, creating bark. This bark is used to help shape the bow. Each step has a new item/step. You would mirror this idea with tier 2/3 but with much harder to obtain items. This would mean a green bow would do just fine if you don't want to go through the process/time to upgrade to blue. Town tech can go hand in hand with this and you may need certain tech to do this for tier 2 items (I think restricting tier 1 items to tech would frustrate players).
There needs to benefit to doing this as well. Since it appears the idea of increasing the stats is a no-go, how about having slots for enhancements. So a white/grey item could not be enchanted or upgraded, but a green one may has one slot to upgrade. Blue would have 2, etc. Each type of enhancement would be a slot. Level of enhancement could also be worked in; so a level 2 imbuing could take up 2 slots.
Adding in my previous idea of special enhancements individual crafters could make via a trophy systems, you have a system that encourages a large variety of items and combinations. The variety and complexity (useful complexity and not complexity for the sake of complexity) creates a stronger economy and makes players makes choices about costs, benefits, and time. Adding "created by" would help foster a crafting environment as it helps boost the crafter's ego and tell people who to talk to for more items.
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I completely agree that crafting will become a, "race to the bottom." I only half agree that making items easier or harder to craft has an effect on the "race to the bottom." I think the race to the bottom is caused by two main reasons:
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People that want to grind out levels as soon as humanly possible instead of crafting -> selling and leveling skills as the market demands more goods.
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The balance of how easy it is to craft new gear versus how frequently that gear is removed from the economy.
The first reason has happened in every similar game that I've played with similar crafting. It happened in this game a year ago during the Gamigo EA. It will take very little time before someone is spamming, "will craft for mats." I would love to see some kinda change that would prevent this from happening, but other than, "you can only get exp X times a day," I don't see the devs coming up with a system to stop it. Players can stop it, but it takes everyone deciding not to do it/buy from those people.
On the second point, the balance, This last test bad a big bump in the difficulty to make T2 items, but not a corresponding change to how quickly they degrade. As of this last test, items were too hard (time consuming) to make and or degraded too quickly. I think they might be able to find a good balance here without needing a major overhaul. (Reason 1 is still an issue.)
More on your specific ideas shortly....
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First, I too want a name on ever crafted item. This could even open up political stuff. i.e. "why is X using your crafted items, you were only supposed to craft for us.) Maybe the politics wont go that way, but it is an option that having crafter names encourage.
On making the different qualities (colors) mean more than durability... I'm on board, but making those items more or less powerful is super tricky and might lead to more "race to the bottom" than the current system. But... You did say all these go together...
If crafting was changed to where each quality required the previous, you could end up with newbie/lowbie crafters making what would be considered "throw away" items due to their lower power, but those items could be sold to the better crafters that would want them to "skip crafting steps" when making the better items. White crafters feeding Green crafters, feeding Blue crafters, etc. Best case, you end up in a system where there are no "throw away" items because the newer people are always feeding the older ones.
I don't know that this is "less complicated" than the current system. Worst case you end up having to make and store a bunch of stuff all on your own just to make the same items as the current system - and that certainly sounds like more of a pain in the ass to me. I think the idea is worth considering though. Might take a while for it to get added since it's such a big change and there's definitely other stuff needed more.
One thing I do like in the current system is that different materials have an effect, I'd like to keep that.
I am dead set against any town tech being a limiter to crafting. i.e. City must have bow tech 4 to make gold bows. A limiter means that crafters either need their own city or they're totally and completely at the mercy of wherever they live. It was not fun during the Gamigo EA when I helped build up a city in exchange for them unlocking certain crafts and having them just ignore me later. (A city that started after my house was totally complete.) I want city techs to matter and for them to give a bonus, not be limiters.
Rather than, or maybe in combination, item quality could also impact the imbue/enchant quality able to be applied to the items. i.e. Whites can have one T1 imbue. Greens could have one T1 and one T2. (I think it's a good option, but also makes it much more complicated for newer people.
I have no idea what you mean by the trophy system. >.< Do these give buffs to your crafting? Are they just prestige items for your house?
TLDR: I think it could be a good system if the devs wanted to change it all.
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@Yalah The idea of city tech defining what can be crafted has not been something the devs are willing to budge on yet, so I was working within some of the dev defined requirements. I agree that the materials affecting the outcome is actually a good idea, but there needs to be more variety. We also see a ton of craft and dumps happening just to be able to craft better items. This makes crafting just a grind and not fun. The idea of making each level useful at some point is a compromise. Complex systems need to have a reason and not simply being complex to slow down the game or complexity for the sake of complexity. It is a game and needs to have that fun factor. You need some way to give the player a sense of achievement.
One can use economics to decide how tech works as well. By making an upkeep cost for each tech that is purchased, you can limit power while growing an economy. But, there must be a system in place for towns to make money, be it taxes of selling materials. This has to be more than begging players to help keep the town running so such a system would have to be implemented along with the tech.
The trophy idea was that players could find a rare trophy as some form of drop. Most likely from Legends, but it really doesn't matter. The trophies could be places in a crafter's house and apply a bonus to certain things crafted in that house. Limited trophies could be put up at one time, limiting its power.
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I share a few of the concerns presented, and what I would like is a system based on crafting points which works like this:
- Each player has 100 crafting points.
- Crafting an item of quality higher than white costs some of those points. Something like green 1 point, blue 3, purple 9, orange 27. Double for weapons and necklaces. 50% more if the weapon is 2handed (similar to the costing system we have for enchanting).
- The player restores 10 points per day, plus 1 point for each tile covered by his house, so a 2x2 is 4 bonus points, a 4x4 is 16 and a 5x5 is 25. The larger your working area, the more stuff of higher quality you can craft and creates a tradeoff between more external space for refining and more internal space for crafting.
- City techs can lower the crafting cost of specific crafts in the crafting stations of the city.
- Specific decoration items (like trophies, yes) can provide bonus points per day.
- Crucially, you advance your mastery xp only by crafting the last tier you have access to.
The effects of this, is that crafting items of higher quality comes at an opportunity cost, so the market does not get flooded by high quality ones as soon as players have access to it. Instead, since an advanced crafter can craft one set of orange armor only by spending all his points, it will make that product have an higher value.
It creates a value in having a large house, and guilds will want to reserve 5x5 plots for their dedicated crafters.
It makes it inefficient to dump all your crafts onto a single person. That persons has always the same amount of crafting points. If you make a person your designated crafter for 10 different items, those items will not be high quality. There's a limit to how many high quality items a player can pump out. Instead you will want to get as many crafers as possible if you want more industrial power.
This system does not come at the cost of the single player which is just crafting for himself cause he likes to play that way. Those points are more than enough for personal use.
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@spoletta said in Some ideas about crafting.:
- Each player has 100 crafting points.
I fully agree that we need some sort of a system to allow new players/non-guild crafters to exist in the game. Unless we have any such constraint, it becomes just a few characters to do all the crafting in the game.
Bu I also agree that we need more tiers/depth in terms of crafting. Maybe as the game progress, we will see more tiers of equipment and also we may have city tech based crafting bonuses to armor/weapon stats to encourage crafters visit other towns
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@spoletta While this does solve some of the issues, there is still no way to craft lesser tier items and no reason to do so anyway. This means you eventually get limited to 1 item a day. Considering how long it takes to get there, and this would slow the progression down even more, you are looking at months before the first tier 2 can be produced. And since there are much fewer crafters out there, there would be a shortage of anything over green, and again, once you hit a higher tier, you cannot go back and "fill in" with lower tier items.
It's a step in the right direction, but needs to be adjusted for population. You also don't need to make gathering items so difficult if you artificially cap crafting.
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Another idea to go along with the original post:
Allow crafters to pick a bonus as they go up in tier. Each tier may have a set of 4-5 bonus options to choose from. The crafter would choose which bonus they put on that type of item and cannot change it later. This prevents the idea of a guild crafter, which Spoletta seems to hate, and creates a variety of item types.
the down side of this is that there is usually a meta in game. Most crafters will pick the meta at the time and would become useless as the meta changes. This means the latest generation of crafters would always be the in-demand crowd and discard the veteran crafters. However, if the coices are balanced, you could end up with people creating items for a particular play style, with defensive vs. attack or even a specific type of elemental protection.
Another option (and granted a much more complicated option to implement) would be to allow players to create their own allows/material combinations. This has been done on other games whereas you choose a slider or set of sliders to determine how items are combined. This creates a much wider set of options when crafting and leads to a great deal of experimentation. If a crafter hits a really good set of options they could keep such a combination a secret and be in high demand until someone else replicates it.
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I have one fundamental concern with any idea that puts a direct limit on crafting:
My concern is that legitimate dedicated crafters will be directly negatively impacted by attempts to limit the mythical, "one guild crafter does literally everything," fear. If someone wants to no life craft for 12 hours a day, they should be allowed to do so. This game has no explicit limit on any other activity, why does crafting need to have one? Imagine adding a limit to how many monsters you could kill/loot in a day, how much knowledge you could gain in a day, how many people you could kill/loot in a day. Heads would explode.
"It's a sandbox for everyone but crafters," is not a game philosophy that I would support and I honestly don't think the developers want that either. (As seen in their three world design.) Again, imagine saying, "this guild feeds all the best resources to these 5 people and they can dominate everyone else because of it. We need to limit <insert any aspect of PvP> to prevent them from pushing out others."
To be clear, I'm not saying there should never be any limit. I'm also not saying that it is good to be able to feed everything to a single crafter (though I don't think this will be as bad as some seem to think). I'm saying that if a limit is introduced it should not directly hamper legitimate players solely for the fear of preventing otherwise legitimate play. For example, if a legitimate crafter hits a progression wall (i.e. the limit, running out of points, etc) in 90 minutes of gameplay, that's an f'ing terrible system and it should never see the light of day. I can't think of anything that would make me that sort of cap would be ok.
(This isn't meant to be a direct response to anyone's suggestion(s). I just happen to feel very strongly about limits to crafting.)
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Overall, it's an interesting idea. Maybe more importantly it is standalone and could be added on top of other systems. Meaning you could use this with the current system or say the one proposed by Goreth (or whatever new system the devs came up with).
The one big change I would like to see with this idea is that, in addition to the passive regen, there should be some way for active players to restore their crafting points by in-game play so that their entire progression system is not just passively controlled/limited. Without time to really think about it, some things you could do would be:
- Require a player to gather and then turn-in X amount of resources to regain Y crafting points.
- Require a player to go to a location, do B, get C item, bring C back to restore Y crafting points.
- Require a player to use J skill to "gather life force" from a target that must be killed in K seconds. After L gathered life force, restore Y crafting points.
Any of the in-game means of replenishing crafting points should require active play of some kind. i.e. Not anything that would allow a group to just feed more points to the crafter. The crafter should need to be active in the world to recover the points. (p.s. i don't think the devs should allow account sharing.) The starter quest system shows that the game has the ability to track some of the suggest actions (kill, gather, make) already.
If you take the above idea, you could tie these "active regen methods" into player cities. Make them start/stop in the cities, give the cities some kind of bonus to the city for people doing these events, and create some kind of city tech that has an effect/bonus on these events. There are several options that could allow cities to become, "hey we do this, come to here instead of there."
This idea or some kind of active crafting regen method prevents dedicated crafters from hitting an artificial wall in their progress. Guilds or groups can still help a crafter by helping the crafter complete their active regen method, but they cannot just feed materials to force advancement. It requires a real person being a real player in the game. Let crafters no life if that's what they want to do.
Some questions and comments about the suggestion:
Under this system would increasing proficiency with T1 still give a mastery bonus for T2? Or how would this change, if it was kept at all? Would you need to fully master T1 before moving on? (My concern is with feeling the need to burn crafting points on T1 just to be more efficient at T2.)
Would crafting experience/mastery gained be directly proportional to the crafting points used? Weapon smiths would probably be upset that they get half the progress.
On restoring points, I think it would be a lot better to have points restored every hour or every X minutes rather than at a set time (once per day). So rather than you get X points at server restart, you get X/24 points every hour. That way you're not waiting for an arbitrary time of day. (I also think you should be able to remove resources from processing as they're completed rather than only at the end - under the same logic.)
I am a little concerned that a 5x5 city plot would give more crafting points regen than a 4x4. A 5x5 has ~50% more area as a base value and then you have to figure the extra room you have to place other bonus effects). You can make an argument that it rewards people for the risk of being in a city and gives more benefits to be in a city, but that's a pretty big difference.
I don't have any idea, but since cities on Arboreus do not require walls is their size reduced to make up for the difference? If not, you could be giving a passive crafting bonus (by allowing more 5x5 plots) to all Arborean cities because they just have more room (read as opportunity) for larger crafter houses. I'm not sure I like giving Arboreus more incentive to be "crafting central" over Syndesia.
Overall I like the idea and with my suggested "active crafting point regen" idea added in, I kinda love the idea. You can prevent the "one person does everything" scenario while still letting people really dedicate themselves to pushing their skill. You also give a distinct choice between more house or more processing. (And in the best way that I've seen anyone suggest.)
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another way to get some crafting back might be to use your "primal power" if your on the carebear world
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@Yalah I like the idea of tying those points to actual crafting/gathering activities in game.
