Developer feedback request, Crafting and mining: What are the essentials?

[Pr0fessional]

I personally like the L1 crafting systems
but i also think if there's to be a crafting system

items stats should be semi randomly generated within certain perameters based on some stat or something of that sort, but thats just my 0.02

i think if items are more randomly generated, a crafter can end up making something uber if he excells in his art, and if they're just a i craft once a day to make a quick buck person they're useless as they should be ^^

pure n simple, crafters all suck~!!!!
L1 craft system ftw~!

[Carpface]

I personally most likely will not be putting a lot of stock into crafting. My focus will be on PvP. But I would love to see RvR combat over areas with invaluable resources that only one realm can control at any time. That way you are bringing practical meaning to the PvP other than the lore. I guess in saying that, I'd be against a Lineage 2 style of gaining resources from monsters strictly.

[Cynthe]

Not much else I can add, besides making crafting and harvesting a fun thing to do!! I love Ryzom's system, it's complicated but not over the top either and the fact that resources might blow up in your face if you're not paying attention is a definate bonus

As long as crafting is not repetitive but a sort of mini game then it'll be great. Otherwise it's just what everyone else has.

[pate1515]

Craftig System is necesary in all mmorpg. Therefore in Aion too
But the Items by Crafting (Potion or anything else) didnt must to be Fun-Stuff, what neverone wanna use. It must give possible to Craft Items what have Unique Status or so

[Anuxinamoon]

I think also that the cost of materials shouldnt be more than the resulting item.
Perhaps making the item unique in some way like what pate said. Say I crafted an Iron Sword, from the store, drop or NPC its does a base damage of 12-23 but when you craft it depended in your craft level it will gain bonuses. Like now it does 13-25. or if you had a high lvl craft 20-37 with +1 to a random stat.

Another way to make the item unique is to make it glow in a different and unique way than just regular stuff when enchanted.

[kairi]

they did that in runescape.. it sucks. but if your gonna do crafting like in guild wars then thats ok

[Tysis]

Originally Posted by Darkbishop32

I think Star Wars Galaxies had one of the best crafting and overall economies in MMORPG. No grinding involved just maintaining of harvesters.

I agree except for the harvesters part. I hated not logging on for a week and coming back to a broken harvester. At least, that's what happened back in the day when I played SWG. They may have changed things after I quit.

In all MMOs I've ever played, my game has revolved around crafting. I make it as useful as I can. I enjoy it in almost all MMOs I've tried.

I played SWG while it was in its infancy, i.e. the first three months or so. I enjoyed that you could harvest your materials from anywhere in the world, some places better than others. The crafting itself was very repetitive, and grind...ey(?). But the class system supported it well, and I enjoyed my tailoring.

I also played Asheron's Call 2, which had two crafting systems during it's life. Crafting v1 was my favorite. I will describe them since pretty much nobody was exposed to this system. The recipes worked as such: racial armor, racial weapons, and after 10 successful crafts, a new tier of better items was available to you. Mining materials was standard, boring. Five different types of mines (iron, stone, wood, crystal, acid) throughout the world, you could purify and work with mined materials, and it wasn't hard to gather enough. Each looted item also had a rating in two of the different materials (iron, stone, wood, crystal, acid) and if the loot met a requirement for the recipe, you didn't need to mine that part of it, you could use the loot instead. (Say, you're making a short sword, needs 15 iron, and you have some boots with 20 iron in them, you can craft the iron in the boots into the sword.) I enjoyed that system, while it wasn't revolutionary at all.
They made crafting 2.0 an experience based thing where the higher the level item you made, the more likely it was to fail. And they made mining a hot-cold type scavenger hunt. Which made mining irritating and long.

Anyway, I'm not sure where I'm going with this. Gathering materials by any means necessary is fine by me, but I liked the idea of reusing loot as components in recipes. As for the crafting system, making crafting complete for all levels and useful is most important. Balancing the power of loot with the power of crafted items is important. I've seen too many games where crafting is a pointless thing that people can choose to do, but most do not. Crafting can do some amazing things to MMO economy when done right. Item durability also irritates me to no end, as an end note.

I know I wrote a lot and didn't add much, but it's what I'm thinking, so I guess it won't hurt to post this.

[AdaminteDawn]

Personally I LOVE crafting systems it helps bring the community together because players begin to depend on each-other.....having said that personally I'm a soloing player and in most MMo's I played I prefered the Blacksmithing/mining part(not so much the mining). The best kind of Blacksmithing system is not one that has unique or easy to get mats. it's one that allows custimization. For example:

let's make a sword:
1.You get ore.
2.You smelt ore.
3.You then look at models of different parts of the weapon(3 handles, 5 blades, 7 decals)
4.You put together the ones you want.
5.You craft it and now you have a completely unique sword.

And instead of farming the same weapon or piece of armor to get to the next tier you can find new parts. Then you can really make a unique item and it's really simple.

[Mark]

Well, not completely unique. 105 possibilities there, I think. Unique enough not to see the same thing every five minutes, I guess.

[Tysis]

That idea sounds really nice AdaminteDawn. I'd like to see the same sort of thing for armor, keep customization more interesting. But it seems, to me, to be a more of a technical challenge than it's worth.

A dyeing system within the crafting system at the least, perhaps?

[Ithium]

So I am all about the mini-game idea. But being that the devs would have to make an entirely new game, it might be a little hard on them. Still my favorite idea. I think that anything that requires "skill" in the game should have some sort of actual skill involved. Even if it just means clicking at just the right moment, or hitting the right keyes in the right succession like that old 80's button pushing game "simon". If this is too much to ask for in a game, i would really like some other way to advance skill levels than just clicking away for hours on items that you will just sell to vendors for more material. Having that as a possibility is nice, but adding an alternative where you maybe quest for crafting skill. Harvesting may come into the equation at this point. You go out and harvest items and take them to the tallest mountain to be forged or something. Kind of like the Karate Kid. He painted and washed cars to get the techniques down for karate. just my $.02

[Nightblighter]

A diverse and complex crafting system is nice, however


if its not fun, I'm not doing it.

Period. I don't know how to make it fun, but somehow.

[AdaminteDawn]

Originally Posted by Tysis

That idea sounds really nice AdaminteDawn. I'd like to see the same sort of thing for armor, keep customization more interesting. But it seems, to me, to be a more of a technical challenge than it's worth.

A dyeing system within the crafting system at the least, perhaps?

That's what tester's are for. they help. to find balance besides the art guys should have fun with make the various models and the dye system can eb the same as say...MC3 where you can chnage the colour of that one thing or the entire object(this means using only a certain amount of dyes or no dye).

[Jarevin]

Well these are at its essence two seperate questions. One in regards to gathering, one in regards to crafting.

I'll take a stab at gathering first.

I think the best thing for gathering is to have a variety of options. You want a gem? You can do any of the following things to try to find the gem you want.

1) Mine it out of nodes that spawn in the world.
2) Kill mobs that might have the gem (say mobs in a mine)
3) Purchase the gem from another player or npc (though the npc's should have limited amounts that refresh over the course of time.
4) Perhaps there is a way to tie in a fishing/sieving (is that the right word?) option that could be used also.

You want lumber? Same idea.

1) Resource Node
2) Mob Kill
3) Vendor
4) Minigame that can gather various types of resources. (Another example fishing you catch some driftwood etc).

I think by giving options for how items are gathered will give the best chances for people not finding it annoying or boring.

Now for crafting.

Personally I really like crafting in games where it is actually useful. Some games the items you can make are easily outstripped by the items that can be found in the world. Balancing the two becomes very difficult.

I think an active crafting system is very important to capture people's interest. Games like SWG and EQ2 had a very organic and involved process by which you created your item.

I think crafters and the people who buy crafted items look for the following things when deciding to buy or create for themselves or quest instead.

1) Reusablility, each succesful crafting proffession needs to have some sort of consumable item people will want to use so that they have a continual income even after all the "best" gear is earned.
Examples: Potions that buff or heal characters are always needed, sharpening stones or something similiar to buff weapons armor or shields with. Temporary enchantments or adornments added to caster weapons and clothes are equally needed. Basically you have to have a resuable source of income for each type of proffesion.

2) Useful. There is no point to having craftable items that are easily beaten out by drops or quest rewards. There is no point to having drops or quest rewards that are outstripped by crafted items. Combing these two seems to be the best option. Drops of or gathering of rare items used by crafters to make upgrades to existing items is one way to handle it. Or its possible that you can simply have some items more often better when crafted (say weapons) while other items (armor in this example) are better as drops.

3) Custom Creation. I think a big draw for crafters or people who buy from crafters is the aesthetic value. Sure you could be an awsome and powerful warrior with the most epic drops, but its kind of crappy if you look silly while you are eating your opponents for breakfast. Some people will use slightly inferior gear (not terrible gear) if it all matches over a single gaudy more potent item.

Perhaps the idea of crafting can be worked into something like this which may satisfy the best of both worlds:

Make the items in the game like weapons and armor etc all drops, while crafters can then augment or customize the appearance of different pieces of gear based on their proffesion.

What is better than a + 5 Uber Sword of Uberness (as mentioned by Leo in another thread), the answer? a +5 Uber Sword of Uberness that glows with white light and matches your +5 Shield of Uber sword blocking, which also thanks to your friend the crafter matches your swords color/material scheme.

Using a system like this (even if the custom appearance is to difficult, you can insure that crafters are needed and have fun because they can augment existing items with their unique skills, but no competition is created by the idea of a drop being better than a craft.

Everyone gets their items the same way, and everyone gets their buffs the same way.

Just some food for thought I guess.

[Ipmia]

Hello fellow developers or just people with imagination. I have an idea if not for an entire mmo concept, but significant selling part of it. I... get ideas at times which I amaze myself "Wawaweewa!" I say and rush to put it here, but let me start.

Are you tired of MMO's with same boring drops, crafting systems, items? How about an mmorpg with unlimited number of items which players can design based on certain rules of w