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Crafting in MMOs, how I believe it can be improved.
TeliaX
Member Posts: 15
I was thinking about how World of Warcraft utilizes crafting and dungeon items.. when I thought, hey wait a second. Why can't they both be equally important? I believe I have an idea of going about making it possible -- not necessarily just for WoW, but other MMORPGs as well.
Basically, instead of having a pool of armor and weapons that share the same equipment slots for your character, and merely differing in worth by their amount of stats... why not have different slots for crafting, and different slots for dungeon items? For example, dungeons would drop equipment for the main hand weapon, chest, legs, helm shoulder, neck, ring, and trinket slots. But, crafting would create equipment for the off-hand, shoulder, feet, hands, cape and shirt slots. But both would be able to provide equally rewarding items, bringing new worth to crafting.
Just to give you an idea of what I mean, let me give you another example:
Say, a tailor could craft a shirt, tunic, doublet, etc. For Lv. 80 Characters, with a +stat of their choice (like say, +55 Stamina, or Agility, Intelligence, etc) Now, crafting would be the only way to create this item type. The item could be sold on the Auction House, and everyone could benefit on an equal level.
Ideally, I would like even more options, like elbow, knee, shin, and wrist slots. Of course, I mention World of Warcraft because it would probably take a company with really good funding to produce such a game, and who is better off in that department than blizzard entertainment right now?
Crafting is usually just a stepping stone and past a certain point, useless in some cases. Which is really sad -- it has so much potential to be a very fun gameplay element. But usually, it just turns out to be a distracting gold sink. Slightly curing boredom for players becoming burnt out on other content.
I still remember playing my mage in The Burning Crusade for World of Warcraft. By the time I had gotten around to getting the expansion, guilds had progressed in the game to a point where if I raided, there was almost no reason to spend gold and time leveling a profession like Tailoring, because in a night or two I could probably get items way beyond what I could craft. It was pretty disappointing, since I just happened to have spent the gold and time leveling my professions!
What do you guys think? Would separating crafting from dungeoncrawling, while maintaining an equal sense of reward help make it a more worthwhile endevor?
Comments
To make the best crafting, you need a very good system. If you ever tryed out a free trail of vanguard or everquest 2 and try out their crafting system, you will be pretty amazed on how well they develop it and how challanging it is. You see, I dislike it how you craft and just stand there and wait for the bar to finish, it get's boring sometimes, that's why I perfer puzzle games or a different type of crafting to be able to have fun crafting.
On the market, I wish there was some compatition involved with making the best items besides your competator. I wish we could from Trading Guilds, or Corperations and go against other corperations or trade guilds that are in the same specialty that we are at. If some company be able to pull off on making such a system of competition, we chould earn ourselve some money and bonus equipment that could help us craft faster or to overcome some difficulties when we are crafting. I also wish how well coperations will transform a certain town, to make a great town look busy and expanding due to our success or boring and desolated town for our failures.
In some sense, this is ALREADY happening in WOW. The crafted waist/feet item in the new 3.1 patch is BIS or close to BIS for cloth casters, at least for some specs.
I think you idea should be expanded. Essentially, crafted items should be BIS for *some* slots and decent equip for other slots. Same for dungeon/raid drops and badge items. WOW char has 17 slots to play with and can do this effectively.
It also might help to have more endgame items craftable. Instead of having rewards from a BG or arena be better than crafted items, or items from a dungeon/instance. Just create a level playing field for players in the endgame. Different items satisfy different classes and sub classes.
But so far, this would only pertain to WoW in the sense that your talking about.
I agree, I thought the crafting system in EQ2 was actually quite enjoyable.
I also think that crafting should be a more involved experience. I mean, what if to make some rare armor you had to do what was essentially a quest? Like go to the forge of blahblah, get this reagent from a mob and then craft the item in the forge at the heart of the dungeon (or something). I mean, make it interesting other than just having to farm mats, make item, done.
I do think that making some rare crafts that not everyone has is worthwhile. Of course from a practical experience this would be difficult to do, but it would be very cool.
Finally I think there needs to be more of player choice in crafting. Instead of choosing a recipe and then getting the materials why not be able to try out various things with materials? Like try and craft some materials into a certain item and see how it does.
Crafting has been hit or miss in WOW.
During BC, I used BOP crafted epics for a huge length of time on my raiding shaman (who often topped DPS as elemental) and they were really strong.
During WOTLK I leveled an engineer resto druid and there was zero stuff worth making.
So it's had its ups and downs. Overall I would still agree that Blizzard needs to be a bit better about making crafted gear viable. And since it has to fit into a progression I've always felt the no-brainer solution is to drop the recipe from a boss, and have the crafted item from that recipe be a good step above the normal item drop from the same boss.
Either that or give players the recipe for cheap but have the materials only available from raiding (ideally in a way where the guild doesn't have the ability to say "we're taking all these crafting mats to distribute to the people who matter most". BOP items everyone gets from certain bosses would accomplish that.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I think that is because these items are added slowly. In patch 3.2 (i dunno abt druid & engineering) but there are almost best-in-slot tailoring items (waist & feet slots). I think blizzard understands the need to have good craft items, though not in all slots. They have them in BC. They are having them in WOTLK.