I'd like research-based crafting, in which you have an immense number of variables to tweak (given the proper tools), and thus have to do a great deal of trial-and-error to optimize what you're making, but I suspect that would also be hard to implement.
And I hear you on the RNG. 
I could also see allowing players to study potions or items others have crafted, to learn something about how they were made (though never everything). Thus master crafters might save their best for themselves, and only sell or trade the second-best.
I'd also love it if crafting were not simply about crafting the best of the best (assuming access to all resources in the game), but also about crafting to the best possible effect with locally-available resources. Given a limited set of resources, what's the most efficient and effective use of them?
That kind of local pressure is one aspect of unique cultures, and I think it would be cool if that could spring up organically.
I assume potions will be consumables, so I don't see an issue there. If a percentage of crafted gear is destroyed in PvP (like Albion), that would be an awesome sink, and should take care of the rest.
One thought this topic did trigger was that realistically each race would have multiple names: that which the race calls itself, and that which the other races derogatorily call it.
For instance, as I understand it, the Indian tribe known as the Sioux were actually named that by an enemy tribe: "Sioux" meaning "Worm-people". The Sioux called themselves Lakota or Dakota, simply meaning, "the people".
So, the Beastmen might call themselves Beastmen, but it's hard to see disrespectful Humans and especially Demons calling them that.
I also wonder if the Demons would call themselves Demons. Biblically, demons identify as angels, and I think a case could be made the Demons would consider themselves the "good guys"! 
(Or, at least not the bad guys.)
In short, each race would tend to consider itself the "enlightened" ones, and look down on the others:
I imagine any names given to other races might reflect the above.
But I like emergent complexity from deterministic rulesets (like chess). The rulesets themselves don't even need to be complex to become humanly impossible to know all outcomes!
@Jetah said in Real Crafting:
if everyone is following the same rules is it truly art? art is about being free. Sandbox games are about being free too.
Who said everyone would be following the same rules? Music is about creating your own rules, and then following them to see where they take you.
i know the whole video game system is built around rules but RNG helps the 'roll a die' type thing. sometimes you have a seasoned mechanic make a mistake, sometimes its a really bad mistake. I'm not talking ArcheAge RNG where you'll break an item at tier 10 thus losing it. but items that are crafted could have a small range, lets say for Fractured, just 10 points. It could use the tenths decimal as well to get 20 options. It makes the higher numbers worth more but doesn't mean you'll never get a high roll.
I'm with Gothix: I hate RNG. I consider reliance on RNG lazy development, and really, lazy gaming.
For instance, I played an 80's game called Super Boulderdash, in which there were two kinds of mobs: fireflies, and butterflies. The fireflies always followed the left hand, and the butterflies always followed the right hand.
Those were two very simple rules, but depending on obstacles and player actions, could result in human-unpredictable movement of emergent complexity. That's brilliant, like chess. It leaves a great deal of headroom for player skill and experience to exploit the complexity, instead of the gameplay being dumbed down by RNG.
Imagine, on the other hand, if chess were RNG-based: everything had HP, chances to hit, ranges of damage, etc. The rules would be more complicated, but less emergent, less deep. The gameplay would no longer be about seeing many moves ahead, and would be dumbed down.
RNG is a mask, and games that rely on it are hiding a lack of real gameplay on the part of the game, and real skill on the part of the gamers. Which, no doubt, is why it's so popular.
@Tuoni said in Real Crafting:
I was wondering, how loot drops can be done without any RNG? Critical hit chances? Parry chances? Dodge chance? Damage scale? Resist chances? So without any RNG involved you can make the most boring and static combat seen ever.
Oh, I've seen interesting combat and loot drops done without RNG. My favorite loot drop system is probably Gothic 1/2s. You got the weapon the enemy was using, and for animals, what you had the skill to butcher.
As I recall, chests weren't random, either; special gear could be found in secret locations. In that case, it was the difference between a hand-crafted world and a procedurally-generated world.
As to combat, Hero Academy had deterministic combat, including buffs/criticals/armor/attack/etc. (sometimes involving teamwork, using a consumable, or standing on a special location), and I thoroughly enjoyed that. Of course, I like chess, too.
I've also thought about a system of sliding combat variables to replace RNG (since RNG is a kind of kludge to represent the massive numbers of real-world variables): so, say, if your final dodge number is higher than the enemy's final attack number, you will always dodge: but stamina, armor, number of opponents, terrain, wounds, your own chosen attack type, etc. could all combine to lower your final dodge skill. AoE would bypass dodge (so a rock, paper, scissors effect there), and so on.
I think that could be a robust combat system, if well-balanced.
@Tuoni said in Real Crafting:
@Roccandil with secret chest and treasures has the problem, that those are secret maybe once and it totally excludes rare drop mechanics. With RNG there can be several random spawning locations with random loot, so why not use system like that if it works about 1000 times better?
Also RNG is a core element of RPGs, so I would leave chess away from this.
Finally, I am sure that most of the MMORPG players wants to see RNG elements in the game. Without that the game will become really boring and predictable pretty fast.
Yeah, I'm with Gothix: I'd rather not see random loot drop.
@Farlander said in Real Crafting:
Have you ever played a game where there was nothing in loot drops but resources? I have and it is extremely boring to hunt. So much to the point you don't even want to go hunt. What is the point of combat in a pve area if you have no loot to look forward to when you kill stuff? What would even be the point of raising your combat skills if you live in pve land? Everyone goes out to kill things for the possibility of what will drop as treasure. That's the thrill that keeps you going for hours on end. So you are suggesting we camp a spawn entirely for some special resource that may drop so you can maybe craft something with it? I like special loot dropping even if it is purely cosmetic decorative items for your house or special blueprints that let you craft one item.
Loot drops in Gothic always made sense: no random gear, just what the enemy carried. I really liked that. Rats dropping gauntlets, on the other hand, never made sense to me.
I would imagine, however, in a game where some mobs dropped every type of loot, and others only dropped common resources, no one would farm the latter kind of mob.
Hmm. I was able to tank and mage-kill a huge spider, while wearing nothing, so the mage armor plus strength bonus seemed impressive, notwithstanding!
Also, the mage armor tooltip says it doesn't stack with armor, so I assumed it wasn't supposed to.
@Alexian said in What challenges should guild alliances face?:
@Roccandil said in What challenges should guild alliances face?:
Logistics!
AO's attempts to offer smaller alliances opportunity to rise through the ranks have been... honestly, quite lackluster. During my last run, which was April - June 2019, my guild was part of TBI, a newer alliance sponsored by SUN. We did extremely well... but mostly because of a hired mercenary GvG team. Once they left, we lost all 34 territories in the span of a week or two and the whole thing more or less unraveled.
Ya, I was part of TBI when that happened. Highlights how important GvG teams are versus zergs! A huge zerg won't do you any good unless you have a GvG team to back it up.
The effect seems to be that the top alliances compete for the best areas, leaving room for up and coming alliances to compete for the less valuable regions.
The realmgate addition has certainly helped, but not very much. It's been my experience that it was a case of too little, too late. Outside of repelling mage raids for siphoned energy and showing up during territory reset, there's little maintenance involved in holding territory, so alliances are free to sweep the countryside with little to stop them. And in many case, many of the major alliances have nonaggression pacts so they don't have to try to compete with one another.
Hmm. That hasn't been experience since TBI, but my current alliance is in the newer area, and competition seems to be good there. (By good, I mean at least it exists between two alliances!)
"Room" is relative, of course; I think Fractured will have a lot more of it, and I'm hoping the logistics of covering that much space will make it difficult to project power.
Yes, that's my hope as well! That logistics, maintenance, and geography will be far more daunting challenges in Fractured than AO.
Incidentally, the way to betray an alliance in Albion is simply to feed an enemy information: locations and targets of zergs, for instance. That's why alliances won't reveal a zerg target to the zerg until you hit the realmgate (opsec!), and "spy questions" in discord are routinely laughed at.
Sure, but that's a single and highly limited means of undermining enemy alliances.
When there's relatively little effort and energy required to maintain an alliance and keep alliance territory, when game mechanics and UI protect alliance zergs from friendly fire and thus you can afford to spam AoE attacks against your enemy with impunity, and attempts to spy and undermine alliances from within are fairly ineffective... you risk chilling the game IMO.
Both sides, however, benefit from lack of friendly fire. Any shotcaller who thinks a zerg is simply throwing people at the enemy will be defeated quickly. I can see a cadence and order to a well-called zerg battle, and I'm new to it.
Also, enabling friendly fire enables a mass of griefing and exploitation that I think would be more costly than keeping it disabled. I don't like the idea of friendly fire.
That's what AO's done, to the point that they've had to add increasing checks against alliances: realmgates, alt restrictions, planned hideouts in the BZ for smaller guilds to seize because taking territory is nigh-impossible for all but the biggest guilds and alliances, etc. And even then, it's not had a strong effect as far as I know to upset the boring status quo.
Hideouts haven't been implemented yet, nor has the black zone rework. Also, in some cases, the changes are new enough that I think the effects haven't fully filtered into the meta.
Hopefully Fracture's alliance system has very little in common with AO's, because theirs is a bad one.
If I see a problem with the alliance system in AO, it's that it's unlimited without cost. On the other hand, that -does- allow newer guilds to get into alliances and experience the endgame content.
If alliance expansion were costly, the big alliances would be much less likely to accept newer guilds and players, and the power gap might well be even bigger.
Actually, what if friendly fire were up to the players? That is, you could have AoE stances: wild versus controlled. Wild AoE would do more damage, but damage everything, whereas controlled would do less damage, but only damage enemies.
@Bardikens said in What challenges should guild alliances face?:
@Roccandil said in What challenges should guild alliances face?:
@Alexian said in What challenges should guild alliances face?:
@Roccandil - you raise some good points about the considerations a zerg might make before the fight starts, but that doesn't quite refute @Bardikens' point that when the battle actually commences, it usually becomes a numbers and AOE game.
Take away AoE entirely, and it's still a numbers game. If I wanted to improve Albion's alliance system, the ability to mass numbers is where I'd hit it. I'd leave AoE/friendly fire alone.
It's a numbers game in the sense that numbers are the difference with all things being equal, but this obfuscates the fact that without AoE, things like hemming and bridge defenses and bottlenecking would be more than just initiation tactics. We know there will be AoE in the game, so we can't assume these fully, but making people consider unit positioning, movement, logistics and when and how to use reinforcements and their AoE abilities SHOULD be an important part of a hardcore game that is horizontal on the power scale.
I see this in Albion already; I don't think friendly fire is in any way integral to the value of positioning, logistics, reinforcements, tactics, etc.
Also, the more I do zergs, the more it looks like friendly-fire AoE would primarily affect tanks, since they have skills specifically designed for them to deliberately jump into piles of enemies to pull them together and lock them down for AoEs. (If your DPS or healers are in AoE range of your tanks, you're probably doing it wrong!)
This is really a fault in game design that revolves around mobas. While Fractured has an isometric perspective, it will utilize a more action-based combat and would hopefully negate the need for the traditional triad in that regard. There's nothing that i know of that says the game will focus heavily on CCs either, which is another gameplay flaw that mobas tend to over-utilize.
The traditional triad is traditional because it works. I'm not married to it, but Fractured is clearly heading that way with the varying race affinities and attribute caps (bears excel as melee tanks, deer excel as ranged DPS, etc.).
What we need in Fractured is more regimental style play that relies on lines and movement (since there may and SHOULD be unit collision) that mirror battles moreso from antiquity than a dogpiling mess where tanks can run through opposing lines with little thought to their own safety.
I like the concept of unit collision in principle, but that has two huge issues for me:
)I also realize that while the zvzs in Albion seem like a dogpiling mess, I'm increasingly aware of order within them: a kind of law of the storm.
Friendly fire simply doesn't make sense to me in that context (all griefing aside). You'd need to rework the roles of tanks, which would have a cascading effect on the entire game balance.
And friendly fire is the only thing that makes sense to me. Ive played Albion since beta, played Archeage, played LoL, Smite, Heroes, etc., so I understand where you are coming from.
Albion is a good example here because it is forced to do what it does because of poor decisions made in development. Say what you will about their Alliance system, but their Alliance system is pretty much the sole reason why the game died twice, why the Outlands were expanded, and why seasons were implemented with catchup mechanics to help smaller guilds. Nothing else could break the monopolies and nothing still has to this day (though now new ones form in the expanded areas). You can enjoy the system and it is not wrong to do so, but it should stay faarrrrrr away from any other game that purports itself to be hardcore. Having an alliance should be hard. You should have to deal with people and ideas and tough decisions. It shouldn't always be a vassal relationship like it is in Albion. It shouldn't dictate who you can or can't kill or betray in-game arbitrarily (I'm willing to concede this up to the guild level, but no further).
In conclusion, I feel that friendly fire is the only option, at least when it comes to alliance members (you could probably argue for protection in a group if the group had a fair cap). There's simply no need to copy a failed system and just see if it works when we can instead demand people to think harder, do more, and really fill the niche of field generals. This will both utilize your idea of limiting battle size by making people deploy their units strategically and have them ready (since allies cant just mob in) while also still allowing AoE to be a tool utilized by the groups (with more caution being exercised).
I think you had the better argument when you were discussing griefing, because at least then conceits and considerations would need to be made when implementing friendly fire adjustments.
Calling Albion's system failed seems an oversimplification. As far as I can see, Albion is doing well, despite flaws and DDOS attacks, and they're making steady (if incremental) improvements.
Again, if there's a problem, it's simply that alliance size is unlimited; there's no penalty whatsoever to just stacking more and more guilds into an alliance. Experimenting with a maximum alliance size could help tremendously.
Maybe alliances could get around that by having unofficial members, but then players in those guilds could (and would) be ganked by the main alliance and vice versa (which seems to be what you're after). Plus, the big advantage to an alliance is protection from territory guards, and that wouldn't extend to unofficial members.
(That's actually another Fractured consideration: I want to be able to control whom my NPC town guards attack.)
And on a less serious note, I hope you are having a great start to your week.
Thanks!
@Alexian said in What challenges should guild alliances face?:
Fractured purports itself to be a hardcore sandbox game that avoids many of the conveniences and shortcuts of other “sandbox/sandpark” MMOs.
What are you basing this on? My impression was that the developers were designing a range of experiences. So, sure, Tartaros is hardcore, but I wouldn't class Syndesia and especially Arboreus as hardcore:
Honestly, I could see alliances working differently on all three planets. Since Arboreus players can't attack each other anyhow, I imagine alliances there would primarily be defense or trade related.
Since Tartaros is a free-for-all, maybe only the most simplistic alliances are possible there (suzerain/vassal).
On Syndesia, I'd love to see guilds able to negotiate guild-to-guild treaties and alliances with other guilds, as equals, more like real diplomacy. Interlocking webs of treaties could then be a thing.
The benefit to claiming fiefs doesn't need to be money; it could also be prestige. Nearby claims would thus be a kind of suburbs of a town, contributing to its prestige gain.
If money were indeed the object, I imagine an appropriate money sink would be guild/alliance upkeep. That would need to be balanced, of course, to prevent snowballing, but one way or another, the fundamental idea here is to make active claims worth fighting over on Syndesia (without directly affecting the actual claim owner/builder).
That would make guild territorial ownership more than simply owning towns, and thus territorial warfare would have many soft points to contest, instead of the much harder (and rarer) fortifications of a town.
I see an ever-shifting territorial map, for instance, in which you can see guild ownership of towns and house claims, and in which house claims on the borders change hands frequently. I think that would be really cool.
@Gothix said in What challenges should guild alliances face?:
@Roccandil said in What challenges should guild alliances face?:
Dude, that's -you-. If his posts are a demand to make the entire game his way, so are yours.
You should consider that writing lies isn't a strong argument.
What I wrote is that I like the way this game is developed atm. 3 planets with different rules, allowing everyone to play how he likes in a certain zone. Nowhere have I asked for changing rules on Arboreus, to turn the safe zone off (even if I would personaly prefer to play without safe zones completely, but I respect the whole gaming community enough, to not ask for a full PvP world).
So please, don't write an obvious falsehoods as an argument. I respect the current plans of developers to make different planets with different rules so many people can play same game together, and still be able to enjoy it.
As I see it, you're conflating rejecting friendly fire and collisions in PvP with wanting carebear PvE rules everywhere. I suppose I could also call that conflation a lie.
I want to play on Syndesia and Tartaros, and I -don't- want friendly fire or collisions in PvP. Ever.
@Alexian said in What challenges should guild alliances face?:
@Roccandil said in What challenges should guild alliances face?:
That's an all-or-nothing argument, but this is a question of risk management. Friendly fire and collisions represent mechanics at high risk for griefing in an MMO.
Personally, I don't believe the cost is worth any benefit they might provide.
It’s not an “all or nothing argument” lol. It’s merely a fact.
There is absolutely no way to completely prevent griefing as long as Fractured is multiplayer and includes PvP content.
As I see it, you're arguing that because griefing can't be eliminated, there's no reason to not have friendly fire (or collisions). That's an all-or-nothing argument.
Simply saying, however, that griefing can't be eliminated is irrelevant to my argument. Perfect is the enemy of good enough, and you'll spend the first 30% of your time solving 70% of the problem, and the remaining 70% of your time solving the remaining 30% of the problem.
Friendly fire and collisions are low-hanging fruit. They're in the first 70% of the problem, and not using them eliminates a great deal of potential griefing (as well as development time and cost).
Again, this is risk management basics.
Now, as regards your spat with @Gothix, I’m sorry to say he’s right: no one on OUR side of the debate has insisted that their “rules” apply to all three planets. I share his respect for various play styles and also don’t want to impose my views of PvP onto Arboreus.
I reject your premise; at best, it's an assumption and a strawman. I'm planning to PvP on Syndesia and Tartaros (and Arboreus if need be), and I'm arguing for what I want to see in PvP.
Farlander and I have just as much right as you to do that.
Trying to manipulate us into the perception of being "PvE-only players wanting to impose PvE everywhere", well, let's just say, that's not true. I hope that wasn't deliberate.
I'm used to Might and Magic's age system (and it's been a while, so maybe I don't remember all the steps!):
@Jairone said in Opinion on Monsters after the alpha:
@Roccandil One problem with the rare resource thing is that many PvE focused players aren't really looking for just a gather and sell type deal. Too many games have already shown that to be a rather small niche overall within that demographic (one that exists, certainly, but small). Further, the competition aspect there would be a direct turnoff to many of the people who I would expect to go toward Arboreus.
Fractured has a unique chance to say "Sandboxes don't have to relegate PvE to this tiny little box". It is something I have personally heard from a fair few people. The better they can do at allowing a wider variety of play styles within Arboreus (exploring, crafting and interdependency mixing crafts and combat goals for both groups and solo will be important for actual town style groupings, and so on) the more likely they will be to get recognition for doing exactly that... the more they do what every other game has done the more such people will dismiss it as a disappointment.
It cannot be all grind either, of course, because that is indeed as you noted
I agree that one focus of PvE endgame needs to be cooperative play. Otherwise, you've just got "soft" PvP or a single-player game (neither of which is inherently bad, but excluding cooperative is I think bad).
And Albion lacks that for PvE: anything cooperative and endgame is done in the context of hardcore PvP.
