Crafting Project

[Rhaegar]

Speaking from powerplayer perspective. There's no time to play tricks when there's grind to be done

But seriously, how many people do you know who've joined tricksters lately (last couple of years) for the pranks and not sneaking?

[Tive]

Speaking from powerplayer perspective. There's no time to play tricks when there's grind to be done

But seriously, how many people do you know who've joined tricksters lately (last couple of years) for the pranks and not sneaking?

I was a trickster for a few years ;P And not just for sneaking...

[Tarax the Terrible]

Barl was quite the trickster.


Sent from my VM670 Using ForumTouch for Android

[Rhaegar]

Well, back then merc sneak bounce was pretty damn strong

[Zar]

They give you autosneak no? The only thing AA lacks.
Not that people ever used them for anything else than sneaking around...

Oh.... nostalgia for shinkick

[Rhaegar]

True nostalgia would be this worshippers of whatshisname (Gork? Bonk?), Disciples instead of just Minstrels who accept evil aligned guys, Shadowwalkers and their toys (smokebombs ftw!) etc.

[Laurel]

I asked for shinkick to be returned a few times before. Seems like it's easier to code completely new guilds out of the blue, than returning something fun.

[Strider]

Without disparaging the ideas so far, most of which I like, I am not sure any of them really take advantage of the opportunity that introducing an entirely new system into the game offers. So, let me start off by offering 3 radical goals for a new crafting system:

• Offer a rewarding play style for those who are usually available for short sessions several times a week.
• Provide an incentive for players to get others to log into the game.
• Keep things easy enough that a player can perform at least as well as a client.

So, let me start off by arguing that crafting should be able to produce equivalents of the most powerful equipment in the game and that imbuments should be included. On a related topic, arcon stated, “Risk, not time” should determine the magnitude of rewards, and if we reconsider the discussion in terms of crafting, it is clear that while it should be possible to harvest minor rewards and crafts, one should be able to wrest great rewards and significant setbacks when one is willing to engage in risky ventures.

So, it would seem that this all breaks down into three basic spheres, gathering, economy and transformation:

Gathering

While I’ve written specifically about herbing, I believe it holds for any type of crafting component, that gathering should be team friendly and require only one command to clear a room. That said, it may be incorrect that herb locations would not need to be changed, as the best or most powerful crafting components will need to be underneath suitably sized and aggressive NPCs, as an element of the risk that justifies the reward.

Economy

I don’t have a clear image of a reasonable or comprehensive system, but found this thread very interesting.

Consideration will need to be given to the supply and demand intersections between crafting components and other uses, especially spell components, quest items and gear for lower level characters.

I do think that NPC-side pilferage may provide risk, be an important tuning element inside the economy, and allow for some quest hooks and non-recovery, but therapeutic combat.

Transformation

Transforming components to personalize, improve or create new items should not take a lot of character time and it should be in small discontinuous portions.

In order to do a craft project, the character will need to rent a dedicated workspace “into” which the character will deposit the required components and which functions like a bank account, including such things as daily upkeep fee and the 90-day inactivity limit. Once the project is completed the character should be able to send the item directly to auction/market or pay any outstanding fees and claim their items.

Depending on the complexity of the transformation, a project should require no fewer than three steps to complete, and there should be intermediate stopping points available, perhaps something like: raw component, usable material, form, crude item, item, quality item, empowered item, amazing item.

Each step of a project should require one command, some short amount of character work time, and then a significant minimum amount of time before the next step can be attempted. During that wait, at some reasonable minimum intervals, the character, or more usefully other characters can check-in on the project in a way that increases the odds of success, lowers the personal risk to the character and/or increases the potency of the resulting item. Naturally, factors like the size, age, and skill of the character will increase the check-in bonus. A character can purposefully put off the next step of a project in order to maximize these bonuses.

While each crafting action should be visually interesting, the goal is not to spam the screen, so the messages should be limited and “see crafts off” should be made available. That said, the emotive action field, or whatever you call that line of the character description field, should be updated during the process.

In order to make crafting costs, time and risk rational, bulk craft projects should be normal, even for higher end items.

The risks of transformations should include simply failing the step, ruining all or part of a batch, health loss, mana loss, long-lasting temporary stat decreases, and of course, death, factored against rewards of customized or improved equipment, general experience gained, and that the character's first successful attempt of each sufficiently different and powerful transformation should be considered a minor quest.

There should be many factors to determine the level of failure (success) of a step, including major ones like character level vs. finished project “level”, intox, skills, bonus points, and less direct ones like number of past successes.

A few other things…

We should actively encourage craft guild hopping. To the extent that it matters, any tax paid to any craft guild should count towards retardation effects for any craft guild. Further, when you leave a craft guild you should only lose any incomplete projects, the guild trappings, and any guild special abilities, as well as access and eventual skill decay, and if you rejoin you should reinvest all your advancement, accumulated success totals and reputation. It should only be possible to belong to one craft guild in any one sphere at a time.

I could not agree more that craft guild advancement should not be based experience gained while in the guild, but primarily by actually successfully completing projects, although I could see stocking related supplies or donating funds to the guild could provide some boost.

General Experience should be reintroduced and should be the usual non-monetary/equipage reward for craft activities. I think the implementation is an interesting discussion, but I’ll start off by arguing GE acquisition should be filtered by brute but accumulated GE should have less (and possibly no) impact than CE in brute calculations. Differentiating between CE and GE should allow using CE as a positive success factor when doing transformations, as a stand-in for determining that the character generally acquires their own components, rather than simply receiving them or buying them at market.

Lastly, domain lore should flavor crafting, and the location of the workspace that any transformation is attempted can and perhaps should impact the end result and “recipes” available.

[Zhar]

Dear Strider,

why I generally agree with your way of thinking there are a couple of other factors you must consider:

@ making herbing a social activity:
Be it by the way of "assisting" someone in gathering herbs, thus reducing the required time for herbing, or placing powerful NPCs around more desirable herbs you would need to battle to get to them (risk vs reward factor).
While it's a great idea it comes with a couple of flaws I'd like to point out (note: I am not dismissing the idea, I just think it needs more polish and thought to be succesful):
1. If assisting in herbing would just reduce the time you spend on herbing, and even if it would improve the amount or quality of gathered herbs it would not solve the "solo and scriptable" part of the problem. People would still go about it solo and scripting, just for longer periods. For that to really work you must think of a real incentive for people to a) want to assist in herbing (what kind of reward do they get apart from person's that's doing the herbing gratitude?) and b) provide benefits to herbing with assist that can't be matched simply by herbing solo longer.
2. Placing powerful enemies guarding the treasured and valuable herbs is also a sound idea. The only problem arises when some guilds require this herbs in large quantities for their spells/potions or whatever really. You're then severly limiting the guild (especially its smaller members) which is already handicapped by its members having to spend valuable time on gathering them instead of doing something that others consider productive.

Note: I used herbs in my statements but it really affects all the things you need to gather.

@ making crafting available to people who log in infrequently:
That is also fine, but then we come to a point where you want to treat people who spend a lot of time in the game on equal basis as those who don't. It's a nice idea but completely futile from the perspective of someone who wants to not just attract players but keep them. Crafting is a time consuming process, there are ways to make it almost impossible to script, but --- even according to your previous statements --- allowing people who log in once a week to craft 2-3 items to be just as proficient and succesful at crafting as people who spend 3-4 hours a day, every day on that would be ridiculous. I'm all for disconnecting crafting from combat and quest experience and only basing it on actually crafting things, but still someone who has more time will craft more and thus be better at it than a person who doesn't have as much time to spend on it.

Don't understand me wrong here. I fully support making the game as accessible as possible, both for powerplayers and people who haven't got a lot of time to spend on it. Unfortunately, there are things that can't cater to the "casual" side of it.You can still play and enjoy the game in its fullest by playing it casually, but things like crafting are something that usually require a large amount of time investment and dedication.

Of course, I might be wrong, in which case I'd like you to point me to a MMO or other game that has successfully implemented a crafting system that doesn't benefit time investment.

[Strider]

Zhar, thank you for your kind note and for scaling that wall of text so quickly.

In regards to your points, I don't actually care to break “solo and scripted” herbing any further. The simple fact is that it is so incredibly boring that even herb-bots contemplate suicide. I would think offering an alternative, and I hope mild improvement overall, would be enough.

As for rewards, General Experience for everyone! From there, gratitude and obligation, especially weighed against collective good and imposition are actually valuable things, as they provide context in which characters interact. Given your feedback, it is probably most interesting if the initiating character recovers all herbs, leaving a minor social issue for teammates to resolve.

I do agree that some combination of crafters, casters and coders are going to end up dealing with the introduction of a crafting system. The easiest solution would be to simply have no overlap between crafting components and spell components. I think the best solution might be to introduce graduated components for spells, such that a caster can reasonably acquire their full complement, or waste mana and produce lesser effects with lesser components, or waste more valuable components to no greater effect. This might also provide a useful ladder for those cases when a caster starts out without a stockpile of components.

As for my crafting system mechanics proposal, you have it exactly backwards. I want to make Genesis available to those who cannot usually devote long periods of continuous time to playing, by making crafting a short session, high frequency proposition. I could try to rattle off names, but I am sure either you, or someone you know, have had to pop on to water your crops, put up some zombie fencing, serve something at your restaurant, visit a friend's city or whatever; but the point is that it only takes a moment but you do it all the time.

Further, while it's not like the whole rest of the game isn't geared for longer sessions, I doubt my suggested mechanics would actually put longer session players at a disadvantage, as they're already in the game.