Porygon said:Deadshade said:Just to quantify the bit about what rarity means . I'll use as example the rarest drops in classic EQ which were the category of SMR and FBSS .
Interesting is that raid drops (like CoF) were not really much rarer than the SMR category for the simple reason that the mob who dropped it had no PH so that the probability that a PH spawns was 0 . In non raid camps the probability that one gets the drop was (probability that the named spawns x probability that it drops the item) .
So now the probability to get an SMR was around 5 % of the spawns . As the spawn timer was 20 minutes , in average over many camps an SMR dropped about every 400 minutes e.g around 6 hours . Of course as the camp was running 24/24 , in average 4 SMR dropped per day .
Towards the release of Kunark 1 year later , there were about 1 200 SMR on the server . Basically almost every high level caster had his SMR or a planar drop robe (same was true for melees and FBSS) . So the OP is perfectly right , there is really no rarity value and even drops as rare as 5 % probability are being worn by everybody a few months down the road .
Would a 1 % probability item be rare ? Well 5 times rarer than an SMR but it would still make a few hundreds after 1 year . However here the point would be that a camp to get the item in average would now last 30 hours instead of 6 . And that's simply ridiculous because who would have the time or even find it fun to grind without interruption the same mob during 30 hours ? Right , RMTers :)
This makes no sense. RNG doesnt work like that. I've spent weekends at Efreeti Lord and ended up with bags full of GEBs. When the average spawn should have been much less frequent.
That aside... EQ was to new a game to look at what happened and base your ideals from it. When the TLPs launch. Noone cares about SMRs other than to bank one for the epic. Because everyone knows that planar robes were better.
Also. FBSS is not a BiS item. CoF is, so looking at how common FBSS became is silly. Ofcourse everyone would have one. Its ridiculously easy to get, and only defined as rare if you look at the % likely to drop.
The question shouldn't be phrased entirely on how many of an item exists on a server. The question should instead be on the perception of the collective playerbase, because that's what "rare" means to most players.
It doesn't really matter if there are 1200 on the server. Particularly when half are in the hands of a couple of hundred players and their horde of twinks. What matters is that your average schmoe with a couple of regular friends in game, who plays predominantly during peak hours had about as much likelyhood of actually getting a spot at the perma-camped frenzied spawn as they did getting there hands on 2000PP to buy it from another player. It didn't matter if 5 FBSS dropped a day. What matter to them was that it might take 2-3 weeks to get a shot at the item, and on that amazing day, in the 3 hours they had to play they never even saw it drop let alone won the loot. For those people (the majority of players) the thing was ****ing tough as hell to get.
Yes, there might be many of the item on the server. But the people that had them often had multiples, and they weren't just giving them away to anyone that wasnt a dedicated guildmate or close friend. Probably both. As much as those who were in that hardcore crowd like to think thats the way everyone played, the reality is far different, and probably much the same in Pantheon.
@Porygon, @Deadshade, and @Feyshtey
SMR and FBSS are pretty good examples of what I was aiming for when referencing “when the rare become common”. This is more referencing the fact that the really good items for their risk vs reward will be perma camped. Another way to look at them is similar to BiS from group content vs Raid content. Fungi Tunic is also an example of a group content item that actually eclipsed almost all raid drop content in value. Only the rich had access to Fungi Tunics but if you had the resources, you had one on at least one of your toons, and as Feyshtey said likely they had multiples squirreled away if they could hold the camp.
Now if there were 4 different dropped versions of similar properties to FBSS at launch of Pantheon then exactly which one you had would depend on what became available. Additionally if there were already 4 dropped versions having a recipe for tailors available to make an item with similar properties but requiring rare components from several different areas and needing to reverse engineer several if not 10 haste items to be able to learn to duplicate it would not really muddy the waters or over flood them. Ideally those rare components would have lots of different uses and so their value will remain high and there by will keep the value of the crafted haste belt high.
Some times its hard to see the difference between RNG, probability and statistics. In theory over enough time/spawns a specific spawn point will be the named mob x out of y times. Then each time the mob dies it has an w out of z chance to drop the desired item. Over the time it takes for y*z place holders to spawn you should see x*y of the rare items. As the RNG can be rather fickle either for or against you it may take 10 cycles of y*z spawns to get 10*x*y rare items. Eventually the programmed probability will over take the spikes of the RNG and become a statistic, but it might even take as many as 100 cycles to create the proper bell curve though 33 cycles should do it.
@chimman
I concede that there should be some items that should not decay but they still need to be removed from the item economy. You could choose to keep it tradeable and know you need to keep it repaired or it will drop in value. Or you could spend some extra resources to bind an item to your soul which would make it untradeable but also indestructible. Many major quest items would by default be soul bound when received. This way even raid items could be tradeable but no one would really want to use them till they were soul bound for risk of damaging them.
I would make the cost to soul bound an item non trivial so that you only soul bind the items that are really important to you.
@Parascol
I would put forward that most crafted gear, even raid quality, should be fairly generic in appearance which is based on the materials used to make that item. In its own way you will be able to tell when someone is wearing masterwork armor made from raid harvested materials but they would not have the high bling effect of some of the boss drop items.
The second benefit of having crafters be able to make gear from raid content is ease of itemization. The devs could make fairly narrow drop tables for both the trash and bosses. If the cultural weapon for that raid was an obsidian katana then that is what would drop. A crafter would be able to salvage all the non enhanced swords from the trash into workable obsidian shards. That crafter could then make daggers, axes, short swords, punching gauntlets and the like out of the workable obsidian shards. Likewise the boss mobs could drop a narrower range of items and that could include exceptional material weapons which could be salvaged and reforged into different weapon types.
This way the devs do not need to painstakingly make sure that every class has a fair number of drops from a specific raid zone, they just need to make sure they have equal access to the crafted results from the raid content. This would do away with the concept of huge portions of the drops going to waste if the content is on farm and would help speed groups through certain content to allow others a better chance to experience it.
The raid dropped items could have unique looks or magical combinations that cannot be normally achieved through Mr. Potato Head esk crafting but would be relatively the same or even slightly lower powered then the items crafted from the drops. The benefit of the drops is that there is no chance for crafting failure and it is usable immediately after you acquire it.
@Trasask
It doesn't really matter what mechanism you put in place to make it difficult to get the item(s). People will do what it takes to get them.
Make 4 different items with slightly different stats drop from 4 different places: Players will consume the content that happens to be most available at a particular time and get the one that will hold them over till they get the chance at the one that's really the one they want. Not only have you not increased the "rarity" of the items, you've also introduced 4x the comparable options, you've also reduced the value of all 4 both in economic and personal achievement perspectices.
Make it possible for crafters to create rare items from "reverse engineered" rare drops : The novelty of "rare" dropped items will be non-existence because people will just farm them indefinately to get components for more "rare" crafted items. And whats worse, the places in which the rare dropped items that would be usable by many players will be overrun by guilds farming just to get components to make mroe rare items. Not only will the crafted items not be that rare when all is said and done, you'll also greatly reduce the ability of the majority of the player base from even getting the now mid-range dropped items that woudl be valuable to them. The guilds that have conglomerates to gather rare components will horde them as much as possible in order to extort large amounts of money to sell them and their crafted products, and players will just farm massive amounts of meaningless crap in order to try to get enough money to get what they actually want. Turning the game into a tedious money grind and ultimately un-fun.
Make each drop randomly assign stats so that items are varried and the really good stats are "rare": You will have people constantly farm the places that drop things, wasting the lower value stat configurations by vendoring them or breaking them down for subcomponents until they get what they want. Again, you're negatively impacting the majority of the playerbase in order to give some sense of "rarity" to a minority of others?
And none of this solves the fact that over time more and more and more of a particular "rare" item will enter the gameworld as the game ages. After expansions are released, after smaller groups or even solo's gain power sufficient to get "rare" items or components needed to make them more easily.
It kind of sounds like what you want is for an elite few to be the only ones that get certain things. I personally don't really care if that's the case because I have no desire to be among the elite. I have a real life that consumes far too much time to obsess over any thing in any game. Nor does a game give me nearly the same sense of fullfillment that life does. But what I can say is that such a system fosters resentment, anger, jealousy and pettiness. It becomes a cancer in a gaming community that encourages back-stabbing and prominence of self-indulgence over community. It is the root of a "do whatever it takes to be the one that gets the win" attitude, rather than a "be a good teamate and neighbor to total strangers" attitude. It's toxic, and it's directly counterproductive to a game who holds a primary tenet of community interaction and cooperation.
I personally enjoyed the way that WoW handled crafting. In early expansions there was always 1 or 2 items from each profession that were best in slot for quite a while.
I don't think that crafters should be able to craft entire sets of gear that is equivalent to raiding (unless the items require raid drops). Raiding is supposed to be the endgame of MMOs. It's supposed to be the most difficult content. I'm perfectly fine with "pre raid" bis being mixed heavily with crafting as alternative options. To be honest. This creates the impact on crafting that you desire. Most players in the game will always be striving for pre raid BiS. Only a small % of players will ever replace those items.
As for having 4 different items ... all this will do is create a situation where you need to have an item with 21% haste, does it matter if it's an fbss or some other item that's 1 of 4? You creating the same market in essence, just focusing on the stat as opposed to a single item.
@Porygon
Vanilla WoW had bar none one of the worst crafting system ever used in an MMO from an actual crafters point of view. It was all about clicking a single button to grind through mountains of materials just to skill up. None of the items had any value after the first 6 months other than the few BiS items that were your reward for wasting enormous amounts of material leveling up pointless trade skills. I made most of my AH money on selling raw materials to people mindlessly grinding up their crafting skills. Depending on the material I would even some times buy up all the reasonable priced materials and relist them for stupid amounts and they would always sell.
We are on the same page that crafting raid gear should require raid dropped or raid zone harvested materials. For game balance reasons its a must.
FBSS was important and popular because it was the only haste item that you could get in a group. All melee characters were considered unfinished until you had one or one of the later raid replacements. If there were 4 different belts around the game that had 20ish haste and other secondary stats different classes may have favored one or the other but all would have filled the melee characters need to get a haste item. Having 4 different haste belts alone would not have decreased the value of FBSS but having 4 times as many belts on the market, assuming they all dropped at the same rate as the FBSS, would have. From my perspective the FBSS bottleneck for haste items was a stupid design and it made almost all other melee belts useless until you had raid haste.
@Feyshtey
I think we might have had some miss communication. I am actually not in favor of named items be they rare or common. The one exception being important lore items or epic class rewards and even then the epic items are just a non named item that is available only to one class.
The reverse engineering as I would implement it would be broken down into three parts. Design, enhancement and enchantment. The design would be the combination of mundane materials to make a general object of the same shape and item type. The enhancement portion would be learning how to use advanced materials or alloyed materials (standard raw material with an optional magical material) in standard sub components to make enhanced versions of the design object. Lastly would be the enchantments on items which would have nothing to do with the base object. Haste would be an example of an enchantment, using mithril rather than steel to make a lighter and faster weapon would be an enhancement and an elven quickblade would be the design object.
You would need to learn the elven quickblade pattern before you could start deducing how to work mithril. Then you would need to know how to work mithril before you could figure out the haste effect. Conversely a crafter focusing on enchantments may be able to learn the haste enchantment as they destroy the base item. Reverse engineering any elven quickblade could teach you the design, reverse engineering any mithril weapon design you know could teach you mithril and you could only learn the enchantments of an item you could already make.
@Feyshtey
I truly emphasize with your position regarding the acquisition of rare items (be they wearable or craftable) and the response from players the activity produces. I've seen it in every game. It's always there and it's uncompromising. It's a strange, and seemingly "required", snag in the gaming world; a double edged sword that both promotes awe and wonder and resentment and pettiness in the community. The premier carrot on the stick in MMOs. At least, (I believe) for many. Still, some folks refuse to get caught up in that rat-race. They find that simply the experience of playing the game without the idea that there is some type of existential 'failure' attributed for not having all the best items is the more deisrable outcome. That the hallmark of a game isn't obtaining world firsts but maintaining that varied experiences are equally valuable or even moreso. I would say, much of it is determinant on the social psychology elicited by the haves and have-nots. It's wierd, and it's a shame if it negatively affects the overall community. And then, one might say, if you find a way to negate the phenomena of BiS items and world-firsts, how many players would choose not to play that game at all? And this too would have a negative consequence both from the perspective of the players and from the creators of the game.
I don't have an answer that solves the dilemma. But perhaps creating, and promoting, a game to more equitably endorse all aspects of MMO gaming is a start.
The concept you mentioned about randomizing stats for dropped items is enticing to say the least.
:D
Yeah, my personal value in an item I've obtained isn't effected in the slightest by how many of them exist in the game. It's based entirely on how much effort I personally put into getting it. It's a goal that I achieve (or dont), and completing that is enough for me.
Others obviously feel differently, and that somehow someone else putting equal or even greater effort to get the same thing somehow diminishes it's value to them.
I just don't get it.
Personally I feel that item degradation can add additional layers to the world.
It will give crafters a additional source of income and chance to showcase their crafting mastery.
It also provides the opportunity for more epic quests to be added for crafters for them to track down crafting masters to teach the player how to repair the different tiers of equipment.
It can give a true meaning to soulbinding equipment. Once a item is soulbound the item no longer suffers damage. This allows folks that do not want their items to become broken to make sure they get to keep their BiS item for as long as they want. But soulbinding will come with a cost that some players may feel is to costly.
The cost for soulbinding a piece of equipment is a % lost of health/mana/stamina and xp. For example purposes only lets use 0.1%. Now the % lost is lvl based and retroactive. This means that if a player soulbinds a sword of doom at lvl 10 then they lose 1% of their health/mana/stamina and xp as soon as the item becomes soulbound.This can lead to deleveling and death. They will then continue to lose 0.1% of their health/mana/stamina and xp gained for each lvl they keep the item soulbound.If a player waits until max lvl(for now say lvl 50) to soulbind a item then they immeditately lose 0.1% x 50(lvls) = 5% of their health/mana/stamina and xp.This can lead to deleveling and death.
Now if the player decides to destroy a soulbound item whether through sacrificing the item or simply putting it into the trash bin then the player recovers 95% of all health/mana/stamina and xp that had been lost.
This can add additional choices for the player through the players choice of how important their gear is to them. This also can add choices to guild members as well. If you are the main tank for your guild perhaps your guild makes a commitment to you that they will help you farm your BiS items every time you break them. That way you are more prepared to be the main tank since you will not have lost health and stamina by soulbinding your equipment.
This would also help in making almost every player different from every other player of their same race and class based on their choices when it comes to equipment.
Once a player soulbinds a item for the 1st time it will also open up a quest line for the player to track down and learn a ritual that allows them to summon all of their soulbound equipment to them in the event they die. This will help ease the problem of necked corpse runs. The summoning could add a debuff to the player that lasts for 5 minutes per item summoned.
From a player perspective buying items crafted by a player is much like buying items sold by an NPC, even including limited stock sales on certain NPC’s. It shifts the goal from questing, exploring and rare mob killing for items to finding the fastest way to farm money to buy upgrades, which is not the kind of game I want to play.
I am sad that games fail to find ways of making trade skills feel meaningful; I used to enjoy trade skills but haven’t bothered with them much since they became so futile. You either get artificial systems to make them useful (see prayer shawl / ring quest in EQ) or how WoW gave each trade skill a personal use perk to make sure you had to have one.
The primary issues I see with crafting is that supply is limited by materials in most games and not effort. If it were limited by similar mechanics that mob camping was then it might be more viable. Say a crafter had to spend 15 minutes of active time to attempt one combine (at the higher skill levels) and that there were various tiers of success. Failure would result in some materials returned, basic success would give a lesser item that vendors would buy for a moderate profit, greater success would make a useful item for alts or something a vendor might pay handsomely for and rare success would yield a boss level item with this last category being 30+ hours of active effort + material. This high time investment is there to offset that a player camping an item will often have to be part of a group to do so. It should represent a comparable amount of time and effort and risk as if you had camped an item of similar power. Traders should be able to earn money with their craft, ideally at a rate that is better than most trash farming as it lacks the experience element.
I’m not saying this makes for good gameplay, but it’s the reason crafting systems in games don’t work. Combines are always instant or near instant and so advancement limits have to be based on materials or random chance.
OakKnower said:@Feyshtey
I truly emphasize with your position regarding the acquisition of rare items (be they wearable or craftable) and the response from players the activity produces. I've seen it in every game. It's always there and it's uncompromising. It's a strange, and seemingly "required", snag in the gaming world; a double edged sword that both promotes awe and wonder and resentment and pettiness in the community. The premier carrot on the stick in MMOs. At least, (I believe) for many. Still, some folks refuse to get caught up in that rat-race. They find that simply the experience of playing the game without the idea that there is some type of existential 'failure' attributed for not having all the best items is the more deisrable outcome. That the hallmark of a game isn't obtaining world firsts but maintaining that varied experiences are equally valuable or even moreso. I would say, much of it is determinant on the social psychology elicited by the haves and have-nots. It's wierd, and it's a shame if it negatively affects the overall community. And then, one might say, if you find a way to negate the phenomena of BiS items and world-firsts, how many players would choose not to play that game at all? And this too would have a negative consequence both from the perspective of the players and from the creators of the game.
I'm confused by your statement. No game ever forces someone to play a different way. No game forces someone to adopt a BiS mentality.
I have played WoW in alot of different aspects. From very high end raiding, to casual grouping and pugging. There is always a like minded group of individuals that are ready to play the game at your level. The only time a player may be "forced" into playing a different way, is if they are trying to join a competitive guild. But i would argue that by doing so, that player is actually making that decision for themselves, since it's pretty well known that in order to be competitive you must adopt some form of min max / bis mentality.
The sheer act of a game developer creating items that are the obvious best choice for a specific class doesnt force any player to go out and obtain such an item. The player weighs the pros and cons and determines if it is worth it to them and in their scope of playing the game.
Also, while removing BiS items (which in not sure how. Because there will ALWAYS be an item that is considered best) would be interesting, I'm not sure how you can remove "world firsts". Since theres no way to prevent someone from doing something first. Before anyone else.
Melamber said:
*snip*
The primary issues I see with crafting is that supply is limited by materials in most games and not effort. If it were limited by similar mechanics that mob camping was then it might be more viable. Say a crafter had to spend 15 minutes of active time to attempt one combine (at the higher skill levels) and that there were various tiers of success.
*snip*
I really hope that Ceythos reads this and sees that I am not the only one who thinks long crafting times are critical for making crafting an actual part of the game and not just a hole you dump material in and get one or two good items that are immediately outdate at the first expansion.
I was further dividing crafting into mundane crafting results, enhanced crafting results and enchanted crafting results. Mundane crafting would only use basic raw materials and would still take 5-15 minutes to make. Rather than having grades of materials dictate the item level I would either have the base amount of raw materials increase or the sub combines need to be reprocessed for each tier adding a minute or two per level range you are attempting to create.
Enhanced crafting would use rare magical base materials in addition to mundane base materials to make items with some properties. The item level would be about the same as a normal named mob in the area the rare magical materials were harvested from. Enhanced items would also have additional steps required if nothing else to make the optional sub components in addition to the mundane portion of the item.
Enchanted items would be much more powerful and would require enhanced items from multiple crafts to assemble. These items would include raid drop or dungeon boss ingredients either from salvage or harvest nodes protected by the boss. A single enchanted item would represent many hours of work from multiple crafters as well as high difficulty adventuring.
Additionally I had hoped that there might be crafting quests where a crafter could make mundane items for npcs. These NPCs would reward the crafters with either credit to purchase rarer resources or randomly give them to the PC. The amount of crafting to receive enough rare materials to craft one enhanced item would represent around 4 hours (two of VRs targeted gaming sessions). In some form of limited availability I would also like to see some of the enchanted gear materials be available as well but at a closer to 20 hour commitment.
This all hinges on the primary point of this thread. If only Named Items are allowed to look cool and be considered competitive gear choices then crafting will always be second fiddle or worse.
I feel like you're going to be disappointed. I look at crafting the same way I look at PvP. It's a nice addition to the game. But shouldnt really impact the core gameplay. If you speak to people who are heavily invested in PvP they would disagree. And argue that a game with a robust pvp system opens up alot of possibilities. Well that's great and all, but it still wont ever make a huge difference to me.
Because they are designing this game to be a group centric pve oriented game. I doubt you will see an innovative crafting system.
Also, when I referenced that I liked WoWs crafting system, I referred to how they had BiS items available from crafting until you reached the 2nd tier of raiding. Imo once you hit anything beyond intro raiding you shouldnt be able to craft an item comparable.
@Porygon
I imagine you are correct that I will be disappointed. The current itemization model and how items are gained match the EQ model which is not compatible with a meaningful crafting system. Until we hear officially from Ceythos I and other crafters are holding out hope that crafting will be a meaningful pursuit and not just a cash and time sink for achievement sake.
I keep hoping VR has the perfect innovation to combine the two styles of itemization Recognizable Named items and robust crafting.
Porygon said:I look at crafting the same way I look at PvP. It's a nice addition to the game. But shouldnt really impact the core gameplay.
I agree with this. If crafters want to make items that are equal or even better than epic drops it should require *at least* as much investment as the epic drop. Getting a particular drop could take a player months IRL and many, many often frustrating hours in-game to acquire and that assumes they're the only player in the raid that needs/wants the drop. Are crafters willing to put in that kind of time and risk to *maybe* produce an equivalent item?
Once that equivalent item is crafted why should it be sellable to someone who is otherwise incapable of trying for the dropped version? Why should a fresh $MAX_LEVEL be able to acquire gear that someone who level capped ages ago is still working hard to acquire? Isn't this a form of P2W, even if only via in-game gold? And if crafted gear is just as good as dropped why would anyone bother spending so much of their life trying for the dropped gear instead of just farming up some gold (or buying from a gold seller)?
No, crafting has to remain a secondary function of the game, existing solely to supplement what can be found in the wild. It's fine as a source of pre-epic-drop equipment, even to gear up slots that may be hard to find good drops for, e.g. belt, earring, etc. But crafting's more useful purpose could be consumables (food and drink of various tiers, effects and durations), containers, housing items and the like.
Akilae said:Porygon said:I look at crafting the same way I look at PvP. It's a nice addition to the game. But shouldnt really impact the core gameplay.
I agree with this. If crafters want to make items that are equal or even better than epic drops it should require *at least* as much investment as the epic drop. Getting a particular drop could take a player months IRL and many, many often frustrating hours in-game to acquire and that assumes they're the only player in the raid that needs/wants the drop. Are crafters willing to put in that kind of time and risk to *maybe* produce an equivalent item?
Once that equivalent item is crafted why should it be sellable to someone who is otherwise incapable of trying for the dropped version? Why should a fresh $MAX_LEVEL be able to acquire gear that someone who level capped ages ago is still working hard to acquire? Isn't this a form of P2W, even if only via in-game gold? And if crafted gear is just as good as dropped why would anyone bother spending so much of their life trying for the dropped gear instead of just farming up some gold (or buying from a gold seller)?
It's entirely possible to have such a system that crafters could craft epic/raid equivalent gear by using drops from the same mobs that otherwise drop top notch gear. Such as having it so crafters can craft using other peoples no-drop materials from the trade window that in turn places the end product directly into the customers inventory, so no one who hasn't personally been to/killed whatever raid stuff would have access and at the same time crafters who don't even raid would still be desired. Then crafters don't even need to put in that kind of time and the burden of time/effort remains with the person who wants the item.
Likewise there are ways to allow crafters means to create equivalent items to most mob drops provided there is high cost. As a rough example: if a tailor could make a Flowing Black Silk Sash equivalent but first had to destroy 4 or 5 of them just to learn how to make something similar, and then still would need to salvage/destroy two or three roughly equivalent level/rarity cloth items for materials just to make one, it would be expensive and very tedious yet would also help remove items from the game and give an avenue for players who might find themselves hard locked out of certain camps/areas by other players/groups/guilds.
Iksar said:It's entirely possible to have such a system that crafters could craft epic/raid equivalent gear by using drops from the same mobs that otherwise drop top notch gear. Such as having it so crafters can craft using other peoples no-drop materials from the trade window that in turn places the end product directly into the customers inventory, so no one who hasn't personally been to/killed whatever raid stuff would have access and at the same time crafters who don't even raid would still be desired. Then crafters don't even need to put in that kind of time and the burden of time/effort remains with the person who wants the item.
Likewise there are ways to allow crafters means to create equivalent items to most mob drops provided there is high cost. As a rough example: if a tailor could make a Flowing Black Silk Sash equivalent but first had to destroy 4 or 5 of them just to learn how to make something similar, and then still would need to salvage/destroy two or three roughly equivalent level/rarity cloth items for materials just to make one, it would be expensive and very tedious yet would also help remove items from the game and give an avenue for players who might find themselves hard locked out of certain camps/areas by other players/groups/guilds.
If they go with no-drop raid gear there will need to be some form of keeping the items exclusive for those who have completed the content. The joined crafting inventory system is a good idea on how to do it. Would be especially funny if it took 10+ minutes to do the final step of crafting the piece and the raider just had to sit there while the crafter worked.
The other two ideas I had was something along the lines of unsocketed gear is made by the crafter from raid harvested raw materials and the raider inserts the final piece to activate the item using a no-drop mob drop. The other idea I had was that an item containing body parts of a dragon would need to be dipped in fresh dragon blood to become active, insert any other raid tier content item bases and triggers. That way it could be crafted after the raid and traded but would not be the item until the next time the raider participated in the kill.
Like wise to the raiding, the group content crafted items would need to have a significant boundary learning to make the enhanced or enchanted gear.
Using the FBSS as an example I would have the following requirements:
Tailoring requirements:
Materials needed
200 good quality or better silk cocoons
Other crafter supplied items
Large Mithril belt buckle (smith)
Journeyman or higher Elemental caustic binding agent (alchemist)
Tools needed:
Spinning wheel
Treatment tank
High quality loom
Journeyman quality or higher Elemental Etching scribe (stone cutter)
Processes:
Spin 10 silk cocoons into a spool of silk thread (30+ second processes) x 20
Fill a soaking tank with purified water and Essence of shadow. Let sit for X number of seconds until the essence of shadow is full dissolved but has not dissipated more than 10% and add soda ash to stabilize the tank.
Soak each spool until fully saturated but has not begun to dissolve. Each will take 20-40 seconds semi random. Transfer to stabilization tank then remove to dry. Multiple threads can be stabilizing and drying at the same time.
Once the spools are all dry set up the loom for a 4 thread wide, 16 thread long pattern and weave tightly.
Feed the time essence to the elemental etching scribe tool, etch the time rune onto the buckle.
Feed the wind essence to the elemental etching scribe tool, etch the wind rune on top of the time rune to create the haste rune.
Combine the Shadow silk belt to the Mithril buckle inscribed with the haste rune to complete the belt.
Final haste value is limited by the lowest value ingredient used or the lowest quality of the base item.
Haste 1 4-8% Apprentice quality or Poor quality (cannot be made)
Haste 2 9-12% Journeyman quality or Normal quality
Haste 3 13-18% Master quality or High quality
Haste 4 19-24% Grand master quality and Pure quality
The different essences are harvested/salvaged or dropped from appropriate sources with each quality level being from successively higher tiers of content. The total time to craft the haste belt at any quality level will end up being at least an hour. There will be plenty of opportunities to fail if you do not play the crafting mini games well wasting time and material. The Time Essence would be very hard to get but wind and shadow essences will be more available.
A belt is relatively a simple pattern so would not require as many steps as a cloak or full robe but the maximum enchantment is also lower. Shadow silk is also a fairly low level enhanced material and the belt does not contain braided thread which is an entirely additional step which will be required for top end items.
This over all is pretty close to what I think a good crafting system would include with many different unlinked skills that would need to be leveled in order to make good items.
@Trasak - While I like the general ideas here (and actually I really do), the final outcome being a variable quality is something that was attempted in EQ2. The problem that the devs realized fairly quickly was that the shear volume of items being generated created a massive amount of data that had to be maintained in the databases. Every item had potentially many slightly different entries. It overloaded the system, and performance for crafting dropped to such horrible levels that the idea had to be scrapped.
Edit: To be fair the issue was compounded significantly by the fact that they were also attempting to create a maker's mark on every item. So every crafter's name existed on every item they crafted. This likely exponentially increased the load on the system.
To be honest. I dont know how many people will want to sit around for 20 minutes in order to craft 1 belt. Not to mention the amount of time it takes to level up to that.
While having an innovative crafting system would he great. You dont want it to deter players from using it. And honestly, what you described, I would never take part in that.
This is similar in essence to creating a system of raiding that will at least allow players the opportunity to attempt raid bosses. And not be locked out by a higher end guild.
You want your gameplay systems to reach as many people as possible.
Porygon said:To be honest. I dont know how many people will want to sit around for 20 minutes in order to craft 1 belt. Not to mention the amount of time it takes to level up to that.
While having an innovative crafting system would he great. You dont want it to deter players from using it. And honestly, what you described, I would never take part in that.
This is similar in essence to creating a system of raiding that will at least allow players the opportunity to attempt raid bosses. And not be locked out by a higher end guild.
You want your gameplay systems to reach as many people as possible.
Agreed, which is why I say that crafting should never produce epic raid drop quality gear. If it's easier to craft an item than go kill an uberboss for an equivalent then there is little to no motivation to go kill that uberboss.
If it takes just as much work to craft a +10 Blade of Swording as it does to kill Lootpinata3486 for his +10 Sword of Blading umpteen times until it finally drops and you win the roll/dkp check then nobody will ever craft that weapon. Crafting becomes just another unused part of the game and a waste of dev resources. But if it takes nothing more than acquiring the materials and clicking a button then raiding is devalued. The effort/risk : reward ratio needs to be kept in balance.
Porygon said:To be honest. I dont know how many people will want to sit around for 20 minutes in order to craft 1 belt. Not to mention the amount of time it takes to level up to that.
While having an innovative crafting system would he great. You dont want it to deter players from using it. And honestly, what you described, I would never take part in that.
This is similar in essence to creating a system of raiding that will at least allow players the opportunity to attempt raid bosses. And not be locked out by a higher end guild.
You want your gameplay systems to reach as many people as possible.
You can have a crafting system that is quick to complete, no player skill required, or content relevant but you can only pick one. Quick to Complete is tied into both the crafting activity and the harvesting activity. As this is a crafting class and not a harvesting class then the bulk of the time should be crafting not harvesting and therefor the process needs to take time.
As far as 20 minutes to craft an object I think that is totally fair for a highly valued raid prep item. Now your common no or low stat belt would end up taking significantly less time but still several minutes as you wouldn't have all the secondary stages.
While I appreciate the concept of having all game play system be accessible and there for crafting should not be time intensive I am going to turn around a commonly stated focus on this form. “The game should not be quick or easy. Not all players should expect to be able to do all raids (insert all recipes). Pantheon is about the Journey not the destination.”
All these statements, or some variation of them, are commonly used to describe what Pantheon adventuring should be. Why can not crafting be as meaningful as adventuring and adhere to the same level of game play.
I actually like the idea that you would skip participating in the crafting system because it takes to much time. That immediately tells me that crafting will be MEANINGFUL, at least if its itemized meaningful again no word on that from VR. This way only players who are passionate about crafting will craft and there for everyone who puts the time in will really get something out of it.
I could even see an argument for making each crafting class a general base class in addition to the adventuring classes but you never leave the main cities unless guarded by adventurers. I would totally make a crafter in that kind of game and say bugger off to an adventurer class.
In short if crafting can be leveled in a few afternoons, with enough materials on hand, then the results will have to be garbage or it will make dropped items worthless. If there is no actual game play to crafting, just resource consumption, and the items are worthless; Then why even put crafting in the game? A crafting system like Eq1 or WoW is just a waste of precious developer time that would be better spent making more content and better combat systems.
Akilae said:Agreed, which is why I say that crafting should never produce epic raid drop quality gear. If it's easier to craft an item than go kill an uberboss for an equivalent then there is little to no motivation to go kill that uberboss.
If it takes just as much work to craft a +10 Blade of Swording as it does to kill Lootpinata3486 for his +10 Sword of Blading umpteen times until it finally drops and you win the roll/dkp check then nobody will ever craft that weapon. Crafting becomes just another unused part of the game and a waste of dev resources. But if it takes nothing more than acquiring the materials and clicking a button then raiding is devalued. The effort/risk : reward ratio needs to be kept in balance.
Raid quality crafted gear will ALWAYS requires raid dropped materials. Uberboss equivalent gear will require sacrificing Uberboss drops. This will effectively increase the bosses drop table without increasing the number of random items on the boss. This way after 20 kills of the same boss that drops 4 items every time at most there will be 80 crafted items and no as dropped items. Most likely a fair number will be still usable in as dropped conditions but many will be recrafted to fit the guilds item needs rather than just rage at crappy RNG dropping the Paladin sword for the 8th kill in a row when you only have one Paladin.
Following the above statement making an item is a combination of the crafting process and the material acquiring process. The +10 Sword of Blading would have some ingredient from Lootpinata3486 or one of its siblings which will still be quite time consuming and difficult to get. The crafter will need to have spent the time to develop their crafting class to be able to make the base item of the +10 Sword of Blading. The actual time to create the +10 Sword of Blading will only be a little bit more than to make a Masterwork Folded Starmetal Sword.