So I have been trying to think for a while now of a way to build a compelling and interactive crafting experience that is worthy of Pantheon. Many of us are hoping for something innovative and far removed from the “inventory management + combine button” style of crafting. Exactly what that solution will be is still up in the air.
In my opinion one of the things that make crafting systems the most interesting is variation in results based on a combination of raw material quality, player design, and active player skill. Additionally punitively expensive crafting training is also not desired. If you need to put more than 25% of your character wealth into developing a trade skill equivalent to your level then that is too much. Mastering trade skills should be more about time and effort than money expended, though obviously money will be needed for materials.
As much as I liked SWGs 5+ sub properties on all materials with variable qualities and how those properties could directly affect the results of your crafting or not at all it ended up being very cumbersome. My master architect shipbuilder friend kept warehouses full of stored material for years, waiting for the right time to use it and was absolutely addicted to managing his harvesters. That level of variation just makes inventory management too hard on both the players and the server database. If we get to have raw material quality I would restrict it 5-10 grades. I would then give each sub combine also that same 5-10 grades, and you guessed it the final product having 5-10 grades.
I would also include some way to improve the raw material quality level up to the second to highest quality level, the very highest should be something special and only used by very skill crafters to make sought after items. This way we will have lower quality materials to practice our skills on without blowing huge quantities of cash as the final results from these materials would be very low regardless of how skilled a crafter used them.
Now the Sim Mini-game bit. I would put forward the idea of each crafting sub processes having some form of mini skill game full of knife scrapes, hammer blows and needle strokes. The system would have a choice assist and click tolerance based on your current skill level, a master would know exactly where to click and could still be pretty far off to get a perfect result where as an apprentice might be given a really vague area with significant penalties toward success if you get it wrong. All mini-games would give experience regardless of your crafting skill but the amount for low level material would be so little for a high level crafter that it is negligible.
Mini games I can think of:
Smithing:
Smelting – add ingredients, scrape off impurity slag, temperature control, pouring into molds.
Forging- welding and cutting stock to the correct size, fullering (thinning and lengthening by clicking on the changing surface.)
Finishing- Tempering/ quenching- Edge grinding
Leather Working:
Hide Processing- stretch mounting and scrafeing- salting or tanning ( the quality of the processed hide dictates the maximum leather panel size and total yield relative to animal size)
Assembling: Pattern Cutting, sewing, laminating
Finishing: Tooling, Surface treating
Tailoring:
Weaving: Thread Spinning, Dyeing, Loom work
Assembling: Pattern Cutting, sewing, layering
Finishing: Embroidery Beading
Woodworking General:
Lumber Preparation: Tree Felling, Milling ( heart wood, Crosscut, bulk studs), ageing/ pressure treating ( weapons will use small trees and carpentry will use large trees)
Carpentry:
Lumber Prep: Thickness Planning, Lathe turning, board cutting
Assembly: Joining, Drilling, Pegging, Gluing
Finishing: Sanding, inlay, staining, varnishing
Bower
Material Prep: Plucking/ veining, String braiding, steam bending
Shaping: Form carving, composite gluing, Lathe turning, Arrow head casting( smithing?)
Finishing: Grip, Resin Strengthening, Arrow assembly
Stone Working:
Material prep: Quarrying, rough cut for purpose, raw gem harvesting
For buildings: Squaring blocks and forming key stones, cutting tiles, polishing marble
Assembling buildings. Drilling, masonry pins, mortar
For Jewelry and trinkets: Stone shaping, Gem cutting, treatments for soft minerals
Finishing for Jewelry and trinkets: Polishing, setting, beading/stringing
Pottery:
Material prep: Clay harvesting, forming clay mixing, glaze mixing
Forming: Hand sculpting, mold forming, pottery wheel
Finishing: Firing, Glazing, Painting, Embellishing.
These are all general processes that could be turned into fairly simple mini-games where the players performance could shift the outcome up or down from the starting quality of the input items. Making a final level 4 quality results could be possible from level 1 quality material if you exceed the target in the preparation stage, assembly stage, and the finishing stages. Conversely you could turn a batch of level 4 raw materials into a lowest quality final product if you do poorly on all tiers of mini games.
The crafting experience would be earned based on if you exceeded, maintained or degraded the starting quality regardless of the initial quality, though I could see the argument for adding a bonus based on the starting quality. This way training can be done as easily on poor material as on good material so you might as well practice on garbage. Additionally this will allow VR to increase the availability of training materials without flooding the market with desirable goods.
When a crafter sets out to build a true masterpiece each and every raw material must be of top quality. Secondly the crafter must also exceed the target at the mini game for each tier of the process. The preparation stage will be less painful as you can keep working on the sub combines until you get perfect results but the assembly and finishing stages will be all or nothing mini games.
I would tie creating master craft items into the “right of passage” for the crafting professions. It may be that you need to make x number of master crafted items of one material before you can learn another material or you need to make x number of master craft items of different materials till you can advance to a higher crafting tier. This would possibly mean that Smithing, Weaponsmithing, Iron Working, and Mithril working are all different skills that need to be raised but also interact with each other.
Finally I would tie salvaging into the raw material quality system. Your average salvager can only break down a combine into a select % of the materials from the previous stage and those components are of 2 quality levels lower than the original. As salvaging improves your quantity yield and your chance for only one quality level drop improves. Each tier of material has a harder salvage skill requirement. If though the item is craft able by you it checks against your crafting skill for a higher yield and only one level degrade with a small chance to not degrade at all. This way crafters will be the best at salvaging their own craft. It may also be the only way to get perfect quality materials of rare or unique materials.
Thank you for reading this wall of text. Hopefully I spurs thoughts other than just “TLDR” or “mini-games suck”.
Trasak
I believe that crafting mini-games are entirely the wrong approach.
The fun in crafting should come through experimentation with recipes, search the world for hints, discovering recipes, perhaps learning skills through an apprenticeship with a master crafter (PC or NPC). The success of a crafting combine should factor in ingredient quality, player skill and the number of times the player has made that specific recipe. I really don't want to play bop-a-mole to make a piece of armour or at the other extreme, to be totally at the mercy of the RNG gods.
I'm not a big fan of having many grades of every material. I'd rather see a limited variation such as low quality, medium quality, high quality and some sort of rare (dependent on how rare high quality is, of course). I don't want inventory management for crafters to be overly complex
Otherwise, I like where you're going with the comments regarding salvaging and rights of passage. I'd like to see skill based on the range of crafted components you've made, not simply repeating the same recipe ad nauseam as was the case in classic EQ.
Celandor said:I believe that crafting mini-games are entirely the wrong approach.
The fun in crafting should come through experimentation with recipes, search the world for hints, discovering recipes, perhaps learning skills through an apprenticeship with a master crafter (PC or NPC). The success of a crafting combine should factor in ingredient quality, player skill and the number of times the player has made that specific recipe. I really don't want to play bop-a-mole to make a piece of armour or at the other extreme, to be totally at the mercy of the RNG gods.
I'm not a big fan of having many grades of every material. I'd rather see a limited variation such as low quality, medium quality, high quality and some sort of rare (dependent on how rare high quality is, of course). I don't want inventory management for crafters to be overly complex
Otherwise, I like where you're going with the comments regarding salvaging and rights of passage. I'd like to see skill based on the range of crafted components you've made, not simply repeating the same recipe ad nauseam as was the case in classic EQ.
The main purpose behind the mini-game idea is to have some way to have a variable crafting result that is not purely a RNG system. I also considered that the mini-games might put the physically or visually impaired at a significant disadvantage or outright excluded them. I guess the only real solution would be to have an option to let the random number generator decide or to participate in the mini-game to have your personal skill improve your results over the average RNG result.
Additionally the mini-games will also increase the time it takes to practice a trade skill. Increasing the time to complete an item also increases the amount of progress to mastering a skill designers can grant for completing a single recipe due to the increased cost vs reward. If a combine and in turn experience gain is instant for crafting then you need to tone crafting growth rate to resource cost rather than to a time cost like adventuring. In that way a rich person can train crafting very quickly while a newbie is better off just combat leveling and let high level resource gathering speed pay for catching up your desired trade skill, you will max out both your combat level and your crafting level faster that way.
Unless a crafter can realistically make at level gear from the resources they can gather while combat leveling then crafting is honestly irrelevant to game play other than at max level and max crafting level.
As far as quality tiers and their effect on inventory that is going to be highly dependent on the final inventory system, an EQ or diablo 2 system will get bloated by just too many variations of the same thing. A hybrid Mass/Volume list system with a few active slots could handle it though without blinking an eye.
Personally I would limit the system to 6 raw material qualities and 7 final crafted qualities as everything that is made can be made masterwork. A sample would be Poor, Fair, Good, High Quality, Excellent, Flawless and Masterwork or Grey, White, Green, Blue, Purple, Red, Orange.
As a nod to D&D I would consider suggesting that a crafted item needs to be a masterwork in order to enchant it. This would also make Flawless raw material far more valuable and could be the control point for item flux into the economy.
Either way thank you for responding. Even disagreeing we might come up with a good idea based on which portions we do agree on.
Celandor said:The fun in crafting should come through experimentation with recipes, search the world for hints, discovering recipes, perhaps learning skills through an apprenticeship with a master crafter (PC or NPC). The success of a crafting combine should factor in ingredient quality, player skill and the number of times the player has made that specific recipe.
This is very simmilar to what vanguard had. Their was a tier based system that for each contiental style you had to work with a master crafter (NPC) and complete a crafting questline that taught you the recipes. I enjoyed it as it added more to the lore or story of what you were crafting. It gave a sense of involvement to what you were doing
Celandor said:I'm not a big fan of having many grades of every material. I'd rather see a limited variation such as low quality, medium quality, high quality and some sort of rare (dependent on how rare high quality is, of course). I don't want inventory management for crafters to be overly complex
In vanguard for any item you made it had a quality grade to it. If you were refining raw mats the end product had a grade that affected the finishing stage (turning the refined materials into a useable product). The starting quality of the product would be higher if your quality grade on the refined mats was higher. It just made sense to shoot for the higher grade, and usually you didn't use anything that was too low because it just setup the finishing step for failure if it was too low.
In vanguard, to gain crafting levels you had to gain exp in crafting. This could be done by making items as well as doing work orders from cities and outposts that had a crafting area. Not only did you gain exp but you also gained faction by doing work orders. With regards to the overall quality of the product, if you completed the work orders with higher quality items you got more experice out of it.
I can't speak about SWG, but VG in my mind did crafting perfectly. It was engaging, there was extremely minimal interaction from a random number generator. It felt like your actions directly affected what you made and the quality of it. Certainly made you proud with that "made by soandso" on each finished item.
I would prefer to allow no "Twitch" aspect into the game and certainly not into the crafting aspect. I would do it if it was incorporated but I would rather see craft results vary in quality or some other attribute based from a less speed sensitive system.
Using better or worse quality raw materials appeals to me if we are not needlessly encumbered on our storage abilities. That could even be tied into the weather system in a few ways. Maybe some flower yields higher quality raw material when picked during cool damp conditions at dusk. It's been a cold season in a given zone and skinned animals yield a better chance at a more robust quality leather. There is nothing wrong with harvesting leather in a sub tropical Elven forest but if you want a better opportunity (higher % chance with RNG) to get higher quality leather, you may have to travel to a cold snowy zone.
You are right that the devil is in the details, lots and lots of details. There should be a challenge to crafting so that every Tom, Dick, and Harry isn't doing it all, but I hesitate when that challenge is based around RL reaction times or good latency. Now if you make it more strategic action where you have a window of oppurtunity then I could climb on board with this idea. You are making soup, the next ingredient is a packet of spices that is to be added in the first 3 seconds of it coming to a boil, you stir, then have 3 seconds to take it off a fire to simmer and that yields a higher quality soup than if you added the spices before boiling or long after its been boiling for too long.
Crafting systems should lead to more interaction with the world than simply pushing a button, watching a bar fill for 3 seconds, and you have succesfully made an item.
Dashed said:I would prefer to allow no "Twitch" aspect into the game and certainly not into the crafting aspect. I would do it if it was incorporated but I would rather see craft results vary in quality or some other attribute based from a less speed sensative system.
Using better or worse quality raw materials appeals to me if we are not needlessly encumbered on our storage abilities. That could even be tied into the weather system in a few ways. Maybe some flower yields higher quality raw material when picked during cool damp conditions at dusk. It's been a cold season in a given zone and skinned animals yield a better chance at a more robust quality leather. There is nothing wrong with harvesting leather in a sub tropical Elven forest but if you want a better opportunity (higher % chance with RNG) to get higher quality leather, you may have to travel to a cold snowy zone.
You are right that the devil is in the details, lots and lots of details. There should be a challenge to crafting so that every Tom, Dick, and Harry isn't doing it all, but I hesitate when that challenge is based around RL reaction times or good latency. Now if you make it more strategic action where you have a window of oppurtunity then I could climb on board with this idea. You are making soup, the next ingredient is a packet of spices that is to be added in the first 3 seconds of it coming to a boil, you stir, then have 3 seconds to take it off a fire to simmer and that yields a higher quality soup than if you added the spices before boiling or long after its been boiling for too long.
Crafting systems should lead to more interaction with the world than simply pushing a button, watching a bar fill for 3 seconds, and you have succesfully made an item.
You make a good point about avoiding twitch mechanics. I personally far prefer turn based strategy games over RTSs. There is no reason the mini-games cannot be turn based decision trees with thematically appropriate UIs.
I did not get a chance to play VG so I am not certain how the crafting system felt. I think what you guys have described sounds like an interesting and interactive way to acquire recipes and even how to use them other than for player used items. What I am hoping for is some way to make the actual crafting process fun and not just push a button and wait. While I think the idea of a Fruit Ninja Sewing game is entertaining I agree that it’s not good for an MMO crafting system.
I can't even remember what game it was, but one I played basically had you using crafting 'abilities' much like one uses in combat. The crafting process was started, much like you engage in a combat, then you used your abilities at appropriate times.
I don't see that that makes crafting a 'twitch' activity any more than normal MMORPG combat makes the whole thing a 'twitch' game.
Getting a better result from quenching your hot steel at the right moment is little different (it was actually much less pressured) than getting a quicker kill from poking your sword into an Orc when his guard is down.
You could, if I remember, simpy let the process go on without you or mash the abilities without caring for timing, but you got lesser results much like if you just auto-attacked or button mashed during combat.
Also, much like combat, if it is a lesser recipe (a weak opponent) then a skilled crafter would get good results just with their 'auto-attack'.
There's no reason this whole thing couldn't be extended to have recipes that require a 'party' of crafters to 'kill' a particularly tough recipe. Crafting 'raids' where a large group of crafters bring their best tools and coordinate to make complex and difficult 'boss' recipes!
When you have combat mechanics that MMORPG players presumably find entertaining why not apply them (obviously with some tailoring - excuse the pun) to crafting?
Trasak said:
I did not get a chance to play VG so I am not certain how the crafting system felt. I think what you guys have described sounds like an interesting and interactive way to acquire recipes and even how to use them other than for player used items. What I am hoping for is some way to make the actual crafting process fun and not just push a button and wait. While I think the idea of a Fruit Ninja Sewing game is entertaining I agree that it’s not good for an MMO crafting system.
Vanguard Crafting Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyocqJ_8vks
Vanguard Crafting Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_W5snx6pcHg
I loved Vanguard.
I really like the idea of a Non RNG crafting system. I also like the realism idea. You get well known for making weapons based on the skill and quality of the items you make. This said I feel that crafting must be an on par quality to pre-raiding gear. Like Everquest 2 you had Master Crafted armour every 10 levels that were not Raid quality but was able to get you to through raids so that you could get upgrades.
Cipherdec said:I really like the idea of a Non RNG crafting system. I also like the realism idea. You get well known for making weapons based on the skill and quality of the items you make. This said I feel that crafting must be an on par quality to pre-raiding gear. Like Everquest 2 you had Master Crafted armour every 10 levels that were not Raid quality but was able to get you to through raids so that you could get upgrades.
I personally hope VR considers using rare/raid items as salvageable cores for player crafted items of equal power levels but optimized for the character with the visuals that player desires. An example would be a rare material sword with a proc could be salvaged as an enchanted bar of that rare metal. When a crafting recipe is followed using that bar as a primary component a perfect result would create a dagger, axe or fist wraps with similar dps, the proc and the damage reduction penetration appropriate to the special material.
This isn’t crafting being “better” than raid loot but rather it allows the raid bosses to have a smaller, less varied, loot tables. Many raid bosses loot tables become bloated with different class variations of effectively the same item i.e. a DPS weapon or a Breastplate or a Cloak. If the raid items can be broken down and reconfigured through crafting masters wasted drops are minimized, massive amounts of new itemization art is avoided and in theory content can be more easily shared. A few items can still have recognizable art and if you happen to be the right class for the raid drop then you get to show off that art. Otherwise your item art is based on crafting patterns.
I could see a strong argument that an item made from a raid boss drop will have its benefits suppressed until it is present for a kill of said boss while in the possession of the player is going to wear it. If that player later trades the item then it will be once again suppressed until it is present for an appropriate kill.
For security purposes it might be possible to have a salvaged material be player locked so that a crafted item made from that salvaged material can only be used by the player who provided the crafting materials. Maybe even more fundamentally all crafting items can be player flagged. A recipe can only contain player flagged materials from one player in addition to unflagged materials. When the item is completed the resulting item is flagged so that it can only be traded back to that player. It cannot be traded to someone else, salvaged, vendored or destroyed for the first 14 days after creation by the crafter. After 14 days it can be destroyed but nothing else. A player can remove their own flag from items and they can hand flagged items to other players. Its possible that some items will be flagged to the looter forever.