Forums » Crafting and Gathering

Harvesting vs Purchasing

    • 259 posts
    August 9, 2018 3:08 AM PDT

    To start out this week’s article I want to thank Visionary Realms for the great newsletter. The last of the classes that will be available at release are now in game, outstanding. With the release of the latest newsletter there was a reference to what will be upcoming in Pre-Alpha Phase 4. Quote: Finally, PA4 will include our first pass at harvesting. This is exciting news for all crafters out there. Tradeskills are beginning to be implemented and tested.

    Let’s talk a little bit about harvesting and the concept of harvesting vs purchasing crafting items. In most MMO’s there are items that can be purchased from a merchant instead of being harvested. While this allows for speed and convenience it really takes away from the depth of the game. I would personally rather go out, search and harvest these items myself. Harvesting is a skill that you can perform while you are out adventuring and leveling your character.

    For the adventuring and crafting aspects of the game to work co-operatively there needs to be a limited number of purchasable items. In my opinion, I believe we need more player harvested items and less merchant purchasable items. I believe that this will help to build the community between player crafters and harvesters. I hope to see a lot of adventurers spending at least some of their time harvesting in one way or another. Whether it is harvesting nodes and items, or just scavenging for items while adventuring.

    Harvested items should always be wanted and needed by your local crafter who would hopefully rather give their hard-earned coins to you than to a merchant. I feel that in this way it will help to build a robust and thriving player driven economy system. Because of the way tradeskills have been implemented in other MMO’s we crafters have felt very left out when compared to the adventuring side of the game’s. Other crafters and I have our hopes on Visionary Realms and Pantheon to implement a viable and needed crafting system.

    Would you rather purchase your items from an NPC merchant or from a player character who has spent the time to go out and gather the items that you need to craft?


    This post was edited by Shyin at August 11, 2018 2:11 PM PDT
    • 557 posts
    August 9, 2018 10:03 AM PDT

    I'd rather see the entire crafting advancement system be about the diversity of what you've crafted, rather than about the quantities.  If that holds true, then I would be harvesting widely diverse components in small numbers.  I'd expect to find a mix of vendor supplied items and those that were only found through actively exploring and adventuring across Terminus.  There should be added rewards for those who seek the items out themselves, but purchasing materials from another player should be an option.  I would only expect to find very basic items such as glass bottles or twine to be available on NPC vendors.  If I'm adventuring and harvesting my own materials, I should have the possibility of finding rare items (reagents, components, recipes).   I'd even be in favour of having a small subset of no-drop crafting components so that special recipes could only be created by those who put real time into their craft.   There's going to be players who want to just buy all their mats and speed craft.  This path should have an effective cap.

    In EQ you could skill up brewing by making 200 heady kiola.  They would eventually become trivial and you could no longer advance your skill.  You'd switch to another tier and mass produce the next item, rinsing and repeating perhaps 5 or 6 times to max out your skill.   Somehow you're a master craftsman, but you've only ever made 6 different recipes.   In that world, it made sense to have mostly vendor supplied components.  In particular, pottery and brewing were very fast to skill up as you could go to certain towns where the components were all available next to the crafting station.   Need 180 skill in pottery to make travel potions?  No problem, spend an hour in Thurgadin and buy your materials as you need them from the vendors in the room.  (Hopefully, this repetition-based crafting model is far from what the Pantheon devs have in mind.)

    • 1315 posts
    August 9, 2018 11:17 AM PDT

    I would avoid having too much other than maybe mini-game skill reagents vendor purchased, with the exception of player stocked commodities vendors.  There is really no reason to make crafting even more of a cash sink than it will already be.  I could see an argument for certain high faction venders having some limited quantity no-drop optional ingredients but that’s about it.

    I do like Celandor’s idea of encouraging doing more than one type of recipe.  In other areas and on Pantheoncrafters.com I posted a general idea of how to go about it.  Boils down to each recipe has its own mastery tracking.  As you successfully complete the recipe your mastery goes up, your chance to fail goes down, your chance for a higher quality goes up and your experience for making it goes down and levels off at half the original amount of crafting experience.  This way it’s more efficient to work on new recipes that you haven’t mastered than make the same one endlessly, this is assuming you can rework your own failures back to the original materials with little to no loss.

    • 557 posts
    August 9, 2018 1:17 PM PDT

    Trasak said:

    I do like Celandor’s idea of encouraging doing more than one type of recipe.  In other areas and on Pantheoncrafters.com I posted a general idea of how to go about it.  Boils down to each recipe has its own mastery tracking.  As you successfully complete the recipe your mastery goes up, your chance to fail goes down, your chance for a higher quality goes up and your experience for making it goes down and levels off at half the original amount of crafting experience.  This way it’s more efficient to work on new recipes that you haven’t mastered than make the same one endlessly, this is assuming you can rework your own failures back to the original materials with little to no loss.

    Great idea, Trasak, but I think it's a bit heavy data-wise and might not get implemented by the devs.  I'm assuming your suggestion is to track the number of times each player successfully completed each recipe and reward subsequent attempts with diminishing returns.

    A simpler solution would be to give a bonus each time a new recipe was successfully completed.  This would be a binary toggle, so you could track 64 recipes with a single database byte.  It's unlikely that any crafting tier would have more than 64 recipes, but for very little cost data-wise this could be doubled, trebled...

    You could also tie advancement to the next crafting tier to a percentage completion of available recipes.  If all you ever made were lanterns, what qualifies you for advancement?

    • 1315 posts
    August 9, 2018 3:55 PM PDT

    From a pure data standpoint having a cell with a 2 digit integer value and one having a binary value is exactly the same. The same is true for an exp reward based on passing a 2 digit integer value to do a simple function(X(1+1/(integer))) vs an If then of If (binary=00 then X*2, else X). This is of course using my massive experience based on my C++ class more than 5 years ago, I'm sure modern games have significantly different data structures and object oriented programming methods. Either way we should ask for the sky and see what VR can deliver rather than assume they cannot do something and short change ourselves from a much more in depth system.

    To me though what I want to know is what is going to count as a recipe? How will the crafting choices be structured? What type of outcomes will come from the crafting process, just success/fail or will their be tiers of results? Will there be optional ingredients both to effect the chance of success and the final result? Will leveling be more about the grind or the discovery?

    I am personally hoping that crafting is not a bunch of named item recipes. Rather that primary crafting recipes are all templates that have a range of ingredients that will fit in each slot. The item stats are based on the combination of which ingredients you used and the appearance is semi generic or customize-able in a simple understated way or set looks based on your style ingredients. The sub-combine ingredients become the true recipes you look for while you may only have a much smaller selection of primary recipes.

     

    I would expand more but until we hear something from Ceythos anything I propose may be totally not applicable to the system.

     

    • 557 posts
    August 9, 2018 4:18 PM PDT

    Trasak said:

    From a pure data standpoint having a cell with a 2 digit integer value and one having a binary value is exactly the same. The same is true for an exp reward based on passing a 2 digit integer value to do a simple function(X(1+1/(integer))) vs an If then of If (binary=00 then X*2, else X). This is of course using my massive experience based on my C++ class more than 5 years ago, I'm sure modern games have significantly different data structures and object oriented programming methods. Either way we should ask for the sky and see what VR can deliver rather than assume they cannot do something and short change ourselves from a much more in depth system.

     

    Aye, what you say is true, but you could use a single binary to track all of the recipes for a level if you just want to know whether the player has completed a given recipe - one bit for each recipe.   Since you're probably only tracking one tradeskill tier for experience at any given point, that's one byte added in total to the character data set.   Knowing how many times for each recipe means adding integer trackers for every recipe and increases the stored data set.  Every time you add a new recipe, your characters need a tracker for it, whereas the binary method only needs to grow in multiples of 64 and only by a single byte.  It's probably so cheap that it would be worth just over-designing from the outset.  I'm not sure how game engines work, but from a pure CS perspective going old school and just flagging is very efficient.

    I'm always cautious about asking for the sky.  Sometimes the end result is your request just gets dismissed by the developer as "too much".  If the request is small, elegant and accomplishes a positive goal towards the game's design, it's likely to get accepted.

    Given that the net result for both approaches is the player gets better exp by diversifying their tradeskill efforts, do we need the added complexity of individually tracked exp curve recipes?

    It will be great when they tear back the covers somewhat on the crafting system, however, I'm not in until alpha and it looks like their plan is to have most systems in place before then.  It's all speculation and wishful thinking at this point.

    • 259 posts
    August 10, 2018 8:13 AM PDT

    Thank you for the lively and very civil discussion. This is how the forums should be used.

    I see the good possibilities from both of your perspectives on the design of the experience, recipe and rewards system associated with crafting. We have so many unanswered questions as of now about the type of system that the development team has chosen to use.

    With the release of the latest newsletter we now know that the first pass of the harvesting system will be in place for testing in pre-alpha 4. This is great news and raises the possibility of some new information being released sooner than later.

    You may find one of your ideas partially in implementation or even a combination of both of your ideas. We will just have to continue to wait and theorize about what we would like to see used in the tradeskill system.

    We old school crafters have all put our hopes and faith in the development team at Virtual Realms and I don't think we will be disappointed.

    • 168 posts
    August 11, 2018 11:02 AM PDT

    Celandor said:

    I'd rather see the entire crafting advancement system be about the diversity of what you've crafted, rather than about the quantities.  If that holds true, then I would be harvesting widely diverse components in small numbers.

    Just a quick few comments. Leveling up crafting based on diversity of crafted items instead of pure quantity sure would be a significant change from the historical and current MMO landscape. In most games, upon a successful craft, you gain XP which gets you eventually to the next tier. By implementing a diversity element you are basically reducing a bit of vertical progression by introducing elements of horizontal progression. I think I like the concept (once I get past the old dog/new tricks roadblock).

    The second sentence concerns me only if they punish crafters with very restricted bagspace and bank space. Widely diverse components is code for "no room for anything" without the presence of crafters bags/pouchs. Also in regards to the second sentance; I may not get on board with base materials being widely diverse, but, if there were diverse "condiments" to a base item that's a different story. Let me explain; I would rather not see an iron node, a low grade iron node, a high grade iron node, or a rusty iron node. Just give me the iron node (takes up 1 spot in my bag vs needing 4). Now let's add widely diverse harvested condiments for crafting such as pixie dust, orc snot, banshee vapor or something else that is a 0.1 weight item and goes in a crafter pouch. Just think of potatoes; you can add any combination of salt, pepper, butter, bacon bits, sour cream, or cheese to get the effect you want. None of those condiments really take up much cabinet space, are relatively light, and they last for a good long time before they run out. Potatoes OTOH are bulky, weighty relative to the condiments, and run out after a meal or 3. Just saying that harvesting widely diverse components in small numbers is great if they weigh nothing and take no space.

    • 24 posts
    August 13, 2018 9:52 AM PDT

    i see several good points above, in regards to purchasing over harvesting, i have what i feel is an interesting suggestion and propose the following.

    1: Gathering Groups: while grouped, gathering could be done one of 2 ways,
    ---1: have the player that starts harvesting be the looter, for each person that helps him gather gets Gathering EXP and the looter get +25% of the loot per person helping gather, so effective if it's a full group, the looter would get alittle over twice as much. since resources are relatively scarce and are not shared because they want resources be In-Demand as stated in one of their videos. this would be a way to help friends to cooperate to all level gathering togather and provide a slight bonus to the total loot which could be destributed later or just rotate who the Looter is between themselve.

    ---2: when one person starts gather it takes 10 seconds to gather the node, anyone that helps get a full loot table and shared experience. personally i'm more for the first option.

     

    2: Market for resources: so as most MMOs go, eventually the most common of copper ore becomes as expensive as all but the rarest of metals. so a level 5 metal, costs the same as a lvl 50 territory metal. i feel this causes a bit is a handicap on the lower level players and allows the long term players to manipualte or completely control the market. most MMOs simply let this happen and ores are tossed around as a 1 to 1 ratio. so basically we can let that happen which most people are fine with, or we could have an NPC known as something like a Resource Manager, which works as a Vendor for recourses for that zone or city. when a player sells to the resource manager he gets a set ammount of money, and another player can buy the resource for that same amount. and once a day, week, or month, have certain amount of the gathered resources be removed for "city maintenance" or something similar. that way the market doesn't get flooded or manipulated, and people needed more then a reasonable amount will have to go out themselves, or contact a player/friend/guildee to assist them in getting the resources they need prompting more social interaction. the main fault i see with this is the less common or dropped resources, which would go to the market i suppose since they wouldn't be as likely to be in enough bulk to collapse the market.

     

    • 29 posts
    November 9, 2018 1:36 PM PST

         I believe that if a player can influence prices the better off the economy becomes. If a merchant sells items at a flat rate there would be no need for that item to be on an auction house or a local marketplace limiting trade. I also find it important that all materials required for crafting are gatherable. This creates more avenues of revenue for players and it encourages trading.  Having players put up certain materials to buy on merchants or in a marketplace would be a cool alternative to having flat rates for materials. Another great idea would be to decentralize auction houses and maybe have materials that require carts or packs that can be dropped when killed that way it brings a new perspective to the meaning of economy in Pantheon. This idea would create new roles such as traveling merchants, paying bodyguards or establishing moving services. I am a very well seasoned veteran of MMO's in the best economy in a game that I have seen so far is Eve online and I would like to see something very similar to this in Pantheon rise of the Fallen.



    • 2419 posts
    November 11, 2018 10:33 AM PST

    DOOMCHUG said:

         I believe that if a player can influence prices the better off the economy becomes. If a merchant sells items at a flat rate there would be no need for that item to be on an auction house or a local marketplace limiting trade.

    Unless a player can craft an item which costs less (materials +markup) than the same item sold by a vendor.  Then there are the secondary issues related to buying off NPCs, namely faction and charisma.  It very well may be profitable to craft items that are sold by NPCs and sell them in areas where some races/classes face stiff faction/charisma penalties.  Plus who is to say that what is sold by NPCs in one area is also sold by NPCs elsewhere?  There very well could be gaps in the markets.

    • 2 posts
    November 11, 2018 2:32 PM PST

    Here's an off the cuff idea that just came to mind:

    How about we have the option to set up an alt that can man a section/corner of the player housing, as a shop. That way each player is interacting with a character that was created by a human, but that isn't necessarily online playing at the time. They'd be behind a counter, as it were, while the player was off adventuring with his/her main character. The adventurer's harvestables could be sold in this way, along with everything else they'd like to sell. 

    A patron would interact at the entrance of the player housing complex, and choose among all the available housing vendors (from a drop down menu, or something similar), and proceed to enter that players shop/player housing. 

    It could be seperated from player housing altogether and implemented as a vendor complex as well. 

    • 168 posts
    November 11, 2018 6:32 PM PST

    electrofried said:

    How about we have the option to set up an alt that can man a section/corner of the player housing, as a shop. That way each player is interacting with a character that was created by a human, but that isn't necessarily online playing at the time. They'd be behind a counter, as it were, while the player was off adventuring with his/her main character. The adventurer's harvestables could be sold in this way, along with everything else they'd like to sell. 

    A patron would interact at the entrance of the player housing complex, and choose among all the available housing vendors (from a drop down menu, or something similar), and proceed to enter that players shop/player housing. 

    Welcome to the forums Electrfried. You have pretty much nailed how DAoC did things. There was no AH and if you wanted a personal vendor NPC, you needed a house. Other than the term NPC vs the term alt at least. It was a good system but was a bit clunky on the front end where you looked up the item you wanted and which house addresses had it for sale, the principle worked well enough though. It also kept lots of PC activity in the housing zone as everyone was riding horse routes back and forth to go shopping.

     


    This post was edited by Dashed at November 11, 2018 6:37 PM PST