Crafting (Your Definition)

axe_hero

I always hear about how people love to craft and crafting is an important element to MMORPGs, but then at the same time I hear about popular games with bad crafting. So I was wondering, what is good crafting? Is it finding items from mobs or the ground and then going some where to put them together. Is it having to go to the far north to get ice then back to the south to rocks then hitting certain buttons to combine the too? Or is it just how good/useful the armor/items crafted are?

Also, what games do you think have "good" crafting, I am very curious to hear what you have to say.

---axehero

dikky

Good crafting to me means a few things:

The first is the economy, 'good crafting' has to have an economy that is player controlled. Best items come from crafters etc.

Also good crafting is the ability to create items that are unique, so that means you can really customize your items and they greatly affected the quality of the resources you use. In SWG excellent crafters became very rich and everyone knew their name because they could create items with stats that noone else could. Finding a metal in one part of the world, should not have the exact same stats as a metal in another part of the world.

Decay, 95% of people hate it, but I feel it's an absolute necessity along with the eventual removal of the items from the game.

Resources that you don't have to have a group to get. A crafter shouldn't be out swinging an axe against a tree or a pick against a rock, that's so fricken boring it's not even funny. The economy should be so complex that crafting can take up a players entire time, if they so wish. Resources should really be gathered by an automated process.

There should be room for casual crafters and very hardcore crafters who want to dominate their trade.

Housing where a player can set up a shop and have a vendor, to me this is incredibly vital.

 

Ohaan

Ditto on the economy. There needs to be a demand for crafted goods and a method for buying and selling goods. That means that equivalent 'tier' crafted gear need to be superior to NPC sourced or dropped gear. Also something like an auction house or hireling vendors is needed so that you dont have to be online 24/7 to move merchandise.

 

However I think that manual collection of the materials can be part of the fun if it is productive and not tedious. DAoC was a game with horrible crafting. You simply bought increasingly expensive mats from NPCs and then pressed a button: Yay, stand in one place and watch the little progress bar move from left to right, what fun.

 

Meltdown

Hmm... a very good question. I think the economy does have a large factor in whether the crafting system is good or not. Also I would say crafting must have a focus.  Think about a crafting system like UO. A player must sacrifice his ability to fight/cast spells in order to be a great crafter. This compared to something like WoW where someone could be both a great crafter and a great dmg dealer or healer or whatever takes the focus off crafting and makes it an obvious afterthought.

To date Vanguard's system was the most fun for crafting in my opinion.  Just from the leveling standpoint that is. You don't have to spend hours harvesting to get a level, and you don't flood the market with "leveling up" items.

Ozmodan

Eve has good crafting, SWG used to have good crafting, UO had good crafting.  EQ II's crafting is not bad.

Wow's and DAoC both have mediocre crafting systems. 

To me a good crafting system generates needed items.   In UO many of the crafted items were better than what was found off of drops.  Made it necessary.  In Eve almost everything except basic ships and equipment is made by someone.  Until NGE removed item decay, SWG had a very active crafting system, most things were only available from crafters.

melynna

The economy aspect is the most important to me. Also, the fact that there's a lot of things you can use to  to create certain items, but it depends on what resourses you use to know whether it's  good or not

smg77

As much as people are tired of hearing about how great SWG *used* to be it's true that it had an amazing crafting system. You know a game has a good crafting system when you can play a crafter full time and feel like you're just as important to the rest of the community as the combat characters. SWG was that game for a lot of people.

Crafting in WoW is very, very shallow. It provides your character with some nice perks but you can't play as a pure crafter.

My generic description of a good crafting system is any system that allows you to play your character as a crafter or tradesman and not something tacked on to your combat character. It allows you to participate and compete in a player driven economy. It also allows you to do something to improve your finished product (in SWG you could search all the planets for resources with certain characteristics that would improve whatever you were crafting).

From what I'm seeing on the horizon there is not much in store for crafters. It's too bad.

Tatum

Originally posted by smg77


As much as people are tired of hearing about how great SWG *used* to be it's true that it had an amazing crafting system. You know a game has a good crafting system when you can play a crafter full time and feel like you're just as important to the rest of the community as the combat characters. SWG was that game for a lot of people.
Crafting in WoW is very, very shallow. It provides your character with some nice perks but you can't play as a pure crafter.
My generic description of a good crafting system is any system that allows you to play your character as a crafter or tradesman and not something tacked on to your combat character. It allows you to participate and compete in a player driven economy. It also allows you to do something to improve your finished product (in SWG you could search all the planets for resources with certain characteristics that would improve whatever you were crafting).
From what I'm seeing on the horizon there is not much in store for crafters. It's too bad.

I agree.  A good, deep crafting system means that, for one, you can actually play full time as a crafter.  For this to happen, IMO, you need a skill based system where crafting isn't on a separate advancement tree.  The best craftsmen would be the ones who have built their character up as a craftsmen.  This is one of the places where a class/level system falls flat on it's face.

Another big point is, like others have said, the economy.  There needs to be an actual player driven economy and the game should revolve around this. 

MR-Bubbles

EvE definatly has one of the most stable and best crafting systems out there [i say one of the best as best is objective]. EvE is recognised as having the best ingame market economy around and its player driven [as in 90% of the items are player made out of over severall 1,000 items of at least 3,000 items of gear and ammo and guns etc.]] and the prices are player made as well.

The items range from the simple to make [one person making 1500 in 5 minuites] to the complex [that can take Months for say 500 people to make 1 such item but it can be destroyed by PvP'ers anytime]. And because of the games coperate structure [guilds] it can lead to trade alliances with severall guilds working togther to make a single product [each guild makes a single component for example and one guild puts the parts together while others defend the product during construction].

 

As a result crafting gets very involved on many levels in EvE.

MR-Bubbles

Double post.

Death1942

crafting:  the gathering of resources (both material and otherwise) and combining them to make a new object or thing.

 

games with good crafting:  SWG (no matter how crap the gameplay is crafting is still fun)

nothing else comes close but i have heard of some 2d MMO's and F2P ones that have great crafting too

Ozmodan

A good crafting system needs the option of combining combat and crafting.  If a character needs to harvest resources he must be able to defend himself from the local fauna.  

I do agree that the rigid class system pretty much makes a good crafting system quite hard. 

Coman

I highly disagree that combat and crafting should go hand in hand. Infact someone who want to to focus on crafting should not be forced to level becouse else he can not get the resources he need to his level of crafting skills. Becouse this system is in every game. Every person can craft and crafting just become an secudairy thing. Offcourse some poeple are more into it then others, but most poeple can gather resources.

I belive Fallen Earth will have an good system, where an combatant can not become as good of an crafter as an person who focuses on this. Offcourse he still can figth, but that will cost him AB (ability points) he could spend on Crafting orientated skills.

On the SWG matter, It has an interesting harvesting system. However I do belive the crafting part is just to much of an grind.

batolemaeus

Imo crafting only works if the stuff you can craft can get destroyed. Otherwise there will be no sense in crafting 100 standard chainmails, because the only one buying them will be npcs.
So what you need is not only several different ways of crafting, (elves craft with wood, dwarfes with iron and steel etc.) but also a way of creating demand for the things the players create.
Then a good crafting-system needs aomething that forces the players to specialize in a specific direction, so there will not only be demand, but also fewer people who can actually produce the items.

Tbh i found the crafting WoW quite relaxing (i was fishing ~50% of my trial and only leveled when i reached skillcap), but the lack of demand for those beautifully cooked fishes was extremely low. So low that i actually ate them all by myself..yummy. even worse it was for armor, there was absolutely no demand for newbish armor, because eiher the players crafted them themselves or bought them once and never again, because there was better gear for them soon after.

The way i see it, the only way to integrate good crafting is to let people who craft gain xp by crafting and to increase demand even for basic stuff. And that can only be done by a harsh deathpenatly (the stuff getting destroyed that is).

But my perspective on crafting is a bit off, as im playing eve and crafting for profit very often..

nurgles

Good crafting is when players want what you make. There has to be a demand and this will lead to competition amongst the crafters. Which introduces a diferent type of PvP, an economic version.

After a couple of years in EVE i have started exploring the crafting. the suplly chain is very long with multiple stages of skilling and resourse management. To construct a tech 2 module from beging to end as a solo player is impossible due in part to the moon mining and complex reactions part of it needing corporation support. So there is plenty of the MMO part going on. The single server structure means that evrey player in the game interacts with the supply/demand yielding a vibrant economy.

I would have to say that 90% of the gear in the game is player made. There are harsh death penalties, you loose a ship an it needs to be replaced (iirc all ships are player built except shuttles), when your ship blows up, some of the fittings are destroyed as well. This means that there is always a demand that needs to be filled.

 

Samuraisword

Combine Horizons, not only do you craft items but construct/repair buildings that have a direct impact on the environment, with classic EQ pre Planes of Power, and you have the perfect system.

Harvesting needs to be an integral part of crafting, with individual skills and tools and realistic graphics of both the items being harvested as well as the character animations to harvest them. Crafting should consist of harvested materials and constructed items mostly with few NPC purchased items. Recipes should mostly be discovered through experimentation.

The skill raising process should be painfully slow, so slow that most will quit in frustration so that those who have the patience and endurance and work ethic will reap the benefits of being one of the few master craftsman and not one of the many.

All crafting ingredients should be available to all playstyles, solo and group, but the ingredients for the best crafted items should be rare, and coupled with a high fail rate where they  become damaged and thus lost. That is how you maintain the value and rarity of items, not by limiting them to boss mobs that require a raid to acquire and thus alienate soloer and small group players. Crafting needs to be a pursuit that all players can enjoy, regardless of playstyle choice, and make all items even the very best, without dependency on others.