Forums » Crafting and Gathering

Some thoughts on a much harder system of crafting

    • 1468 posts
    April 9, 2017 1:35 PM PDT

    OK. So, this post is going to be my ideas on crafting. I’ll try and keep it short so that it is easy to read and digest.

    The first thing I see when reading this forum is people think that something that takes a long time is hard. This is not true. I could say I was going to read every children’s book ever written in English. It would take me quite a long time but it wouldn’t be hard. The same is true of trade skilling in EQ1 and crafting in Vanguard.

    What we want is a system of crafting that is truly difficult. It should take a minimum of one hour to craft an item and there should be multiple ways to fail at creating that item during that one hour period. So, if you’ve been working on the item for 50 minutes and you fail a skill check then all your work for that hour will be for nothing.

    To make this system difficult rather than relying on a crafting random number generator to say whether you succeed or fail. It is based on pure player skill. A crafter should have to learn the entire process of making a sword over the full hour it takes to craft it and if you fail a skill check your work is lost.

    The fact that it takes a minimum of one hour to make a sword will have two effects on the economy. The first is that it will drastically reduce the number of crafted items on the market and the second is that it will push up the prices for crafted items. To make sure that crafted items are still desirable they should be much better than dropped loot which would be much easier to get in comparison to a crafted item that might take multiple tries to make and each try taking one hour or less.

    I don’t see the need for a levelling system as such because in a player skill system, much like in real life, if you know how to do something like the back of your hand you will rarely fail while when doing something brand new you will fail a lot. I hope crafting is more like this rather than the EQ system where you just press combine for hours on end hoping for a skill up. The Vanguard system was much better but I think we can even do better than Vanguard.

    There should also be quests and raid recipe drops for crafters that will enable them to make even better items.

    I believe that crafters should be desired by all players on a server and that becoming a crafter should be extremely difficult and that only the best should be able to be high level crafters.

    If you have any comments or anything I'll try and answer them. I truly believe we must have a much harder crafting system than has come before.

    • 25 posts
    April 9, 2017 2:31 PM PDT

    an hour for an item....... thats just too much. I would prefer the crafting to be with deph but not that hard on producing. 

    EQ2 did decent at the beginning with involving gathering and other tradeskill to play a good role in crafting and then having the result to play a good rol on economy. The problem was that time made it kinda obsolete. So it's key to think on continuity when builting the foundation of the Tradeskill-Crafting-Economy ingame.

    I would start the foundation by Housing and surrounding the housing would do the crafting, storage and productivity to ensure the roll can contain a solid continuity. Similar to Archeage, without the Cash shop. 

    For jewerlry, armor and weapon. It would made the crafting gear key and according to loots on mob the gear would become more ubber. But would ensure that the Baddass armor come from Crafting, that way the system does not detach from the adventuring piece of the game.

    I am not sure on how would it work Pack Runs, to be a source of funds for players, while having them gathering and producing in houses, then doing pack runs to turn out for money. That archeage method would be nice to be an add on for guilds, to ensure competitions on the PVE enviroment.

     

    • 1468 posts
    April 9, 2017 2:44 PM PDT

    yunke said:

    an hour for an item....... thats just too much. I would prefer the crafting to be with deph but not that hard on producing. 

    EQ2 did decent at the beginning with involving gathering and other tradeskill to play a good role in crafting and then having the result to play a good rol on economy. The problem was that time made it kinda obsolete. So it's key to think on continuity when builting the foundation of the Tradeskill-Crafting-Economy ingame.

    I would start the foundation by Housing and surrounding the housing would do the crafting, storage and productivity to ensure the roll can contain a solid continuity. Similar to Archeage, without the Cash shop. 

    For jewerlry, armor and weapon. It would made the crafting gear key and according to loots on mob the gear would become more ubber. But would ensure that the Baddass armor come from Crafting, that way the system does not detach from the adventuring piece of the game.

    I am not sure on how would it work Pack Runs, to be a source of funds for players, while having them gathering and producing in houses, then doing pack runs to turn out for money. That archeage method would be nice to be an add on for guilds, to ensure competitions on the PVE enviroment.

    Thanks for your reply. I never played ArchAge so can't comment on anything you said about it.

    As for one hour being too long to make an item I actually think it would be better that way. It would make it harder because there would be numerous checks along the way that would make sure that the player knew how to make the item and if they didn't know then there would be a chance of failure.

    I know a lot people here like the EQ1 system but it really did suck. There was absolutely no skill involved in it at all. I think Vanguard had the best crafting system of any game I have played but I'd love to see that improved and made harder. Like EQ1, Vanguard was just about grinding for hours on end. It wasn't really that hard to craft items. We should aim for something much more difficult.

    I'm open to hearing other ideas about how this could be reached. I'm sure that we all agree that crafting should be as hard as possible and that only the most dedicated crafters should reach the highest levels. I'm just throwing ideas out there about how we can achieve that goal.

    • 1468 posts
    April 9, 2017 3:26 PM PDT

    Oh and just another thought. The skill in crafting should come from actually making the items and not from finding items (which again is just another time sink that requires no skill unless you are farming raid bosses which drop crafting loot that does require skill) you should be able to level up on bad quality items with resources bought from venders. The developers should (in my opinion) make the act of actually making the item the difficult bit rather than just farming items from low level mobs in order to level up your crafting skills.

    Of course if you actually want to make the good crafted stuff you'll have to go out and kill (or pay someone else to do it) but for the poor quality items that are just used for leveling up you should be able to buy the ingredients from a merchant. You could do that in Vanguard and the system worked reasonably well.

    • 633 posts
    April 10, 2017 1:32 PM PDT

    I liked Vanguard's crafting system, I just didn't like the way they determined stats.  You had like 5 choices and they determined which set of 3 stats you got.  It would be nice if you could have more control over the stats, effects, abilities, etc of the end product.

    • 70 posts
    April 10, 2017 4:30 PM PDT

    I loved Vanguard crafting as well.  The thing I didn't like was how much bank space it took to keep all of the dusts and resources you'd need to make a good cloak or weapon.

    Crafting should be challenging until player and character skill get high enough to craft it without failing.  Like in Vanguard, you had to start out failing at crafting things for quite a time until you were actually able to create Grade A works of art.  It was rewarding.

    It got more challenging with higher level items and enhancements.  That is were the system really started to shine.  I don't mind a long amount of time to craft an item as long as my character is getting better at crafting along the way.  Making it take longer just to make it take longer does not add to the fun of crafting.

     

    I'm really glad to see we are at least talking about Vanguard crafting in this game.  I'm so tired of watching yellow lines and instant craft done crafting in games that I could scream.  I will be a pure crafter if this game has even 1/2 of what Vanguard had.

    • 523 posts
    April 10, 2017 5:37 PM PDT

    I'm more concerned with fun and challenge than pure tediousness or difficulty.  I agree gateway'ing crafting so that top tier crafters are relatively rare and renown is the correct way to go, but that can be accomplished in a lot of ways other than making the crafting process for one item excessively tedious. 

     

    What I really enjoyed about crafting in Vanguard was the intellectual challenge of the mini-game in how to prepare your crafter, build your crafter's stats, outfit your crafter with gear, and then react to the complications within the individiual crafting process.  Each time was different and random, and you could always screw up if you got unlucky with procs or made poor decisions.  There was a simplicity in the crafting mini-game which was nice, but there was also a layer of complexity as well that the top crafters really could learn and understand.  At least in beta and at launch, not sure how it turned out down the road. 

     

    I think Vanguard was the best crafting system to date.  If they can take that general concept and build on it, I'm on board.  I'm fine with crafting becoming more difficult and exclusive, but not at the expense of it being fun.  The line for me is tediousness.  EQ2 was tedious at launch.  Vanguard was fun.  WoW, Rift, Wildstar, and a million other "click to combine" are not crafting oriented MMOs, those are harvesting oriented MMOs.  I am 100% against that.  I want an indepth, fun, and challenging system of crafting, and I want a seperate indepth, fun, and challenging system of harvesting. 

    • 1468 posts
    April 11, 2017 2:03 AM PDT

    Baldrith said:

    I don't mind a long amount of time to craft an item as long as my character is getting better at crafting along the way.  Making it take longer just to make it take longer does not add to the fun of crafting.

    Yeah that is the basis of my idea. It might take an hour to create an item (or fail to create an item) but you might get multiple skills ups / XP gain from doing so. The idea is to reduce the number of items a crafter can create in any given time so that the value of crafted gear remains high so that the profession of crafting remains viable for the length of the game.

    I agree on your second point. It is not about making it longer just for the hell of it. It is about making it take longer so that it requires real skill to complete that item you really want to craft.

    • 1468 posts
    April 11, 2017 2:07 AM PDT

    Mathir said:

    I'm more concerned with fun and challenge than pure tediousness or difficulty.  I agree gateway'ing crafting so that top tier crafters are relatively rare and renown is the correct way to go, but that can be accomplished in a lot of ways other than making the crafting process for one item excessively tedious.

    I wouldn't want the hour long process to be boring or tedious. The crafting process should draw you in while you are doing it and it should be really exciting. Thank of it more like many steps to complete rather than just one hour to make one item. So you have to make the blade first, then the hilt, then you have to make sure they fit together. There are plently of stages that need to be completed in order to complete one item and if that took one hour it would mean that it would reduce the amount of crafted items on the market and would push up the value of those items.

    Thank you all for the responses. You brought up some good points.

    I to really enjoyed crafting in Vanguard but I'd love it if Pantheon made it even more complex and challenging. Crafting should be a skill that takes many weeks / months to learn to be a top end crafter rather than you just sit there hitting combine to make items. I think we all agree on that :).

    • 5 posts
    April 11, 2017 10:57 AM PDT

    As you said in the OP, longer does not equal harder. You could have the same amount of "mini games" in a 3 minute craft that you would in an hour long craft. I am all for individualism and expertise in crafting, but I think an hour long session to make an item is excessive. If i have 45 minutes before I need to leave somewhere, I know i could just hop on, craft some stuff because I couldnt do any xp grinding. With the 1 craft=1 hour thing, I know i couldnt log in.

    In order to combat the "too many items on the auction house" argument(which i agree with btw), they could do a work order system. I really love this type of crafting system. I could make 25 sets of horseshoes for the local militia, they give me the materials and a commission, and I do not have to worry about the bank space or the auction house. They could really make this immersive by tailoring the requests to the local economy, and have them be finite. They only need 25 sets of horseshoes, they dont need 1000 sets. so when i fulfill the 25 sets workorder, that workorder is gone for a few in game days, but replaced with armor, bags, sheets, arrows, etc. They could use this system for the bulk of the leveling, and when a character learns something they would use, or sell, they can craft that item with their own materials. These items would be the 3 or 5 minute combines with the extensive mini games.

    But i agree, crafting needs to mean something, and not be something i can do while Netflix is playing on my other monitor.

    • 1468 posts
    April 11, 2017 11:47 AM PDT

    Josua said:

    As you said in the OP, longer does not equal harder. You could have the same amount of "mini games" in a 3 minute craft that you would in an hour long craft. I am all for individualism and expertise in crafting, but I think an hour long session to make an item is excessive. If i have 45 minutes before I need to leave somewhere, I know i could just hop on, craft some stuff because I couldnt do any xp grinding. With the 1 craft=1 hour thing, I know i couldnt log in.

    In order to combat the "too many items on the auction house" argument(which i agree with btw), they could do a work order system. I really love this type of crafting system. I could make 25 sets of horseshoes for the local militia, they give me the materials and a commission, and I do not have to worry about the bank space or the auction house. They could really make this immersive by tailoring the requests to the local economy, and have them be finite. They only need 25 sets of horseshoes, they dont need 1000 sets. so when i fulfill the 25 sets workorder, that workorder is gone for a few in game days, but replaced with armor, bags, sheets, arrows, etc. They could use this system for the bulk of the leveling, and when a character learns something they would use, or sell, they can craft that item with their own materials. These items would be the 3 or 5 minute combines with the extensive mini games.

    But i agree, crafting needs to mean something, and not be something i can do while Netflix is playing on my other monitor.

    Good point about not being able to log in if it takes an hour to craft an item and you don't have the time. I hadn't really thought about that as I tend to game for a minimum of 1 hour at a time anyway. I forgot that not everyone can do that :).

    What if rather than it taking an hour to craft an item the item was split up into different parts that had to each be crafted and then they were assembled at the end? Each piece might take 5 minutes or less to craft and then when you have crafted all the pieces you could assemble them together. Each piece could be failed if you are not skilled enough as a player to make that piece but the assembly process should always work at the end. I'm just throwing ideas out there.

    I agree with you on the rest of what you have said as well. I do think it is very important not to let crafters flood the market with items as that just lowers the value of crafted items.