Forums » Crafting and Gathering

Crafting obsolete

    • 159 posts
    May 29, 2019 10:26 PM PDT

    Forgive me for my ignorance,but I got tired of looking at so many post to try & find the answers to this myself & after about a hour of looking & wanting to pull what little bit of hair I have left out. I was like forget it I'll just make a new post & ask.

    I like to craft,but my personal preference is armorsmith & weaponsmith. However every MMO I have played that added these craft professions "always" at some point made them obsolete. Totally useless.

    Has VR address this issue? What is VR going to do to make sure that no craft profession they place into the game ever become obsolete & a total waste of time to invest in "x" craft? If you can post links that'll be greatly appreciated.

    I'm a little hesitant to put the time sink into a craft profession out of fear that I'll get burnt again. 


    This post was edited by Vander at May 30, 2019 9:10 AM PDT
    • 297 posts
    May 30, 2019 5:55 AM PDT

    There does seem to be a trend in MMOs of making Crafting a giant currency sink with no actual benefit outside of maybe some nice backpacks.

    It would be nice to see Crafting elevated to a level where a Master Crafter could produce gear and items that would be viable at the top of the Group-level game at least.

    This is one thing Classic Everquest did right and I think was lost for a good number of years. Apparently the Tradeskills in that game have become viable again with the newest expansion or so and I think that's a good thing.

    It's one thing to do Crafting just because it's a fun side project, but it seems like a whole lot of wasted development to include Crafting and then have it be useless.

    I do believe it has been mentioned on at least one of the gameplay streams, I think by Brad McQuaid, that crafting is something they want to be useful, but I don't recall any real specifics about how that would work.

    • 1785 posts
    May 30, 2019 6:20 AM PDT

    Chanus, the quote you're thinking about from Brad is from the March developer roundtable here:  https://youtu.be/Kl-IxcCNNBw

    Chris (Joppa) also addressed it in the April roundtable here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31VedSD8-2k&feature=youtu.be

    Vander, many of us have experienced the same thing you're talking about and we all share that fear.  However, I think the team at VR has committed to trying to do better.  Definitely give that roundtable a listen, it may help to at least show what the team is thinking.

    • 1315 posts
    May 30, 2019 7:53 AM PDT

    The only true way to guarantee that crafting never becomes obsolete is to have all drops upgradeable through crafting.  This can be done through reforging stats, custom fitting the items to the character (if you trade the item it needs done again and maybe can only be done a limited number of times), outright salvaging for parts and rebuilding a new item with those raw materials, or some form of temporary buff that craftsmen can apply to items.

    I personally do not want to go the route of temp buffs as that becomes a chore but the other three I think all have healthy possibilities.

    Over all though we still do not have any clue what the true design philosophy of the crafting system is.

    For example:

    1)      Will crafting be based on one recipe and one set of ingredients only make one possible output or will recipes be more of Mr. Potato Head templates that can be mixed and matched for the desired result.

    1. Named single output recipes very quickly become obsolete through item progression.
    2. Mr. Potato Head can have new options added for horizontal progression without invalidating the rest of the recipe.

    2)      Where will crafted items fit into the game wide itemization? Will it be the occasional BiS item (very easy to become obsolete), lesser quality than dropped items but easily available (in a game without item decay these items are obsolete almost immediately), equal parity with dropped items requiring ingredients from the same content as the dropped items, or the final stage of all items is as a crafted/modified item.

    3)      Will the crafting process and in turn crafting skill progression be material limited or time limited?  In simple terms will you spend more time crafting or harvesting in order to level crafting?  To my knowledge all games have had crafting material dependent rather than time dependent.  Material dependent crafting systems all become cash sinks and the only difference between a novice and a grandmaster is how much cash you have sunk into it.   Only if crafting requires a significant amount of time spent dedicated to crafting and requires play skill and knowledge to master it will crafting become a standalone play style. (Economics wise crafting an item from raw materials needs to be a value added process to the raw materials, if the raw materials are more valuable than the end product then the system has failed)

     

    There are many other questions and it’s not hard to read between the lines of which options I think are clearly superior from the three I passed.  Until we here from Cythos we are just spinning our wheels in the mud.

    • 297 posts
    May 30, 2019 8:39 AM PDT

    The end result can be more valuable than the parts on the player market, but if it is more valuable than the parts on the NPC vendor, it just becomes an easy exploit to duplicate currency. This is something that has to be balanced for.

    Most crafting systems aren't ones you can just sit at a vendor and max out. You usually have to go out and farm materials of some sort in order to progress, which is where the time component comes in.

    • 1315 posts
    May 30, 2019 9:06 AM PDT

    Chanus said:

    The end result can be more valuable than the parts on the player market, but if it is more valuable than the parts on the NPC vendor, it just becomes an easy exploit to duplicate currency. This is something that has to be balanced for.

     

    This is only a worry if crafting is effectively instantaneous.  Each player has a level dependent amount of cash they could be generating while adventuring.  Likewise raw materials already have a cash value as well as any secondary consumables.  So long as the vendor sell value is similar to the combined cash value + the amount of cash you could have earned in the time it took to craft the item then there is no currency duplication factor.

    The real issue though is that in an item economy where no item decays then the players will gravitate toward the best items available and very rarely would that be items used to level crafting classes.  Then combine in the fact that it traditionally takes around 2 hours of farming to facilitate 10 minutes of pure crafting then the raw materials are usually several orders of magnitude more valuable on the player market than the final results would be due to the total demand to level crafting.

    I am hoping that leveling recipes will take around 5 minutes a piece to complete all the steps to the final item and use only about one harvest node worth of material.

    • 9 posts
    July 4, 2019 6:03 AM PDT

    I Have been a high end trade skiller in every game I have ever played. Everquest did do a lot right with the Tradeskills, but they did a few things wrong as well. I really think the multislot gem upgradeable armor they had was a great idea and worked really well. One of the issues with upgradeable items in crafting is that you need x to make z this too can become tedious and redundant. Maybe have alternative recipes for all items when they incorporate newer areas. Instead of having multicomplex required components from all areas expansions and levels, maybe they can keep the older components more simple like an uncommon drop. This also provides a way for lower toons to have a way to make money in the game and strengthens the economy and community. But Making it so you get over 100hrs of real time invested forone item on lower end drops is too much. maybe some Vanity items are worth all that extra farm time in multiple zones I know a lot of people that would do all the extra work depending, and that would certianly keep some people happy that don't mind spend 100 hrs of real time on tradeskills, but maybe only for Vanity items.


    This post was edited by omarahtopaz at July 4, 2019 6:05 AM PDT
    • 168 posts
    July 4, 2019 6:21 AM PDT

    Chanus, you are mostly correct but I do not think citing EQ was the correct direction. However if you cite DAoC, then you could say that they got it correct in that your best gear was crafted gear. Which leads me to the rare disagreement with Trasak. There is another way beside the "gimmicky" way to appease those unusedto worthwhile crafted goods by making crafting augment raid gear. That is to make crafted gear better than raid gear (DAoC) or reverse the equation and make crafted gear upgradable by gaining attributes via raiding. Make crafted items gain via raiding not the currently suggested way.

    What needs to stop is the crafting systems being a late beta add-on that really just throws more sub-optimal loot into the system. The premise of the OP is correct in that crafting is hugely neglected as a viable way to create BiS items by numerous game devs.


    This post was edited by Dashed at July 4, 2019 6:25 AM PDT
    • 1315 posts
    July 9, 2019 6:45 AM PDT

    Dashed said:

    Chanus, you are mostly correct but I do not think citing EQ was the correct direction. However if you cite DAoC, then you could say that they got it correct in that your best gear was crafted gear. Which leads me to the rare disagreement with Trasak. There is another way beside the "gimmicky" way to appease those unusedto worthwhile crafted goods by making crafting augment raid gear. That is to make crafted gear better than raid gear (DAoC) or reverse the equation and make crafted gear upgradable by gaining attributes via raiding. Make crafted items gain via raiding not the currently suggested way.

    What needs to stop is the crafting systems being a late beta add-on that really just throws more sub-optimal loot into the system. The premise of the OP is correct in that crafting is hugely neglected as a viable way to create BiS items by numerous game devs.

    *Looks through his own wall of text in this thread, oops there are two* . . .

    I don’t think we are specifically disagreeing.  I listed “reforging” as one of the ways crafting could stay relevant then didn’t bother to expand on it.

    To me reforging included taking a base dropped item and upgrading it through a combination of additional materials and character crafting skill.  There can be a ton of different ways to implement this throughout the level and power scale including augmenting or creating raid drop items.

    My main point was that “named items” item design is very restrictive and very prone to aging and can be very difficult to balance when a dev wants to make a “lore item” of extreme power.  Each dev wants to make the most desired item so they end up competing with each other and even their past selves to make better and better items.  If they are forced to start with a mix and match template then they will know the items “build points” such that it can match their lore without jumping the shark stat wise.

    I was also trying to cover the value of both end game and early game items in the same system.  End game items will always have a relatively high value but early game items still need to have some base line value or the system breaks down and raw materials are more valuable than finished products due to whales buying up the commodities market to spam leveling a craft.