Forums » Crafting and Gathering

Crafter's Roundtable: What made your favorite crafting awesome?

    • 1785 posts
    July 30, 2019 9:02 AM PDT

    While we wait for Visionary Realms to finally unveil what they're doing for crafting, many of us have been talking about our favorite crafting from other MMOs. But why were they our favorites? What aspect made them really stand out for us?

    That's the question for this Crafter's Roundtable.

    What was the aspect that made your favorite crafting system(s) from past MMOs so awesome? What's that one little piece that they did, that other games (like Pantheon) could learn from?

     

    (Note from Nephele:  If you haven't seen these before, Crafter's Roundtables are discussion questions that the staff at Pantheon Crafters post periodically for the community.  Our goal with these is to start discussions that might benefit the game's development and allow us to all learn more about each other.  We post these both on the Pantheon Crafters site itself as well as here on the official forums.  You can find a complete index to all of the past discussions on our site here.)


    This post was edited by Nephele at July 30, 2019 9:03 AM PDT
    • 2419 posts
    July 30, 2019 9:22 AM PDT

    Nephele said:

    What was the aspect that made your favorite crafting system(s) from past MMOs so awesome? What's that one little piece that they did, that other games (like Pantheon) could learn from?

    In EVE Online you can take a blueprint and through research you can increase the material and time efficiencies so that when you build off that improved blueprint your materiald costs are lower and the construction time faster than the un-researched blueprint. You can also reverse engineering Tech2 blueprint copies by taking a Tech1 item (ship, module), combine it with some other materials and depending upon your skills you can get a limited-run Tech2 blueprint copy. (In EVE Online, original blueprints can be used an infinite number of times, but copies have a limited run on them and once used up the copy vanishes)

    The ability to reverse engineer off existing item would be something I would love to see in Pantheon.  You find a good sword that drops off a named NPC, a sword that is better than what can be crafted from known recipies. You invest quite a good bit of time and effort to create from that dropped sword a blacksmithing recipe to make decent copy of that sword.  It would not exactly match the stats of the original, but it would be quite close, better than existing recipies in some stats at least.

    This would require a system similar to EVE Online where recipes (or blueprints in EVE parlance) are actual physical items that can be lost or destroyed, not just some text in an immaterial book.  You could build off your original recipe and risk losing it or you create copies.  You could perform research much like in EVE Online to improve your recipies and sell the copies on the market if you so chose.

    The selling of recipe copies would allow players with only basic skills in a tradeskill to make items they would not normally be able to make by the use of the recipe.

    • 1315 posts
    July 30, 2019 11:21 AM PDT

    Not going to make any friends with this but . . .

    Item decay

    Without items leaving the game world there will eventually be no market for new crafted player quality goods (there could still be demand for items to be directly sacrifices for buffs or quest turn ins).  This is true even if player crafted items are always the best option, if mob dropped items are as good or better than crafted gear then crafting will wither even earlier.

    SWG and Darkage of Camelot both had item decay that didn’t feel too punitive and kept you coming back to your favorite crafters when one of your pieces of gear finally wore out or dropped below a quality level you were comfortable with.

    Both DAoC and SWG also had crafting that needed to be thought out and designed for the best quality results.  SWG had different stats on each of the materials and multiple materials in each of the material types.  Getting the best item would require mixing and matching the best attributes on the best materials and the targeted stats defined what would be best each time you made something.  DAoC was much more about balancing stats and statcaps with your gear.

    • 1479 posts
    July 30, 2019 11:30 AM PDT

    I really don't know. Crafting that were too complexe were interesting to me but I ended finding them as a chore more than anything else.

     

    The truth is : I allways used crafting as a mean to something I wanted but never really enjoyed it. What I would say is simply I appreciated the "active crafting" of EQ2, but not the terrific interdependancy and the cookie cutter use of your MP to make the best results following a recipe. I think I want crafting to involve the player during the crafting process, and make him take decisions when needed, but decisions that you can't predict.

    • 168 posts
    July 30, 2019 3:00 PM PDT
    Will just shorthand this over the phone. Challenge that always has chances at a few levels of failure. Opportunity to change stats on gear and maybe even overcharge stats on gear with a chance of massive failure and loss. Item wear and degradation are always good to have as it ensures a NEED for crafters instead of crafters being a redheaded step child. Variable quality results from the recipe ( cant recall a system of variable quantity results outside of gatjering but that would be cool). I can point to too many basic crafting systems that were too easy and simple. WoW, Rift, ESO, Warhammer Online, SWTOR, ...all trash.
    • 624 posts
    July 31, 2019 12:19 AM PDT

    I am not an avid crafter, so take this answer with a grain of salt.

    I rather perversely enjoyed the killer crafting aspect of early EQ2 days before it was toned down. Designed to punish the macro-bot-crafters it caught many a young tradesperson by surprise. If you missed certain reactions you would lose health, sometimes in a spectacular fashion when it was a critical failure. Urban legend had it that early on The Forge had the highest number of player kills followed closely by trapped chests (something else I always get a kick out of, but that is another story).

    Bottom line, I prefer a complex mini-game when constructing any hand made instruments, and enjoy some real risk to life and limb, not just ingredients, when reaching too far above my current skill level. Risk / reward!