Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
How should gathering be done?
Stupersting
Member Posts: 31
Hey guys, you might remember me from my thread "What would YOU like to see in new mmos"
All the feedback was great, and my team has a pretty good idea on how we are going to make most things work. However there is still one thing we aren't quite sure how it should be done, and that is gathering.
Crafting itself is going to be a fairly important gameplay aspect, and be a driving force behind the economy, but how should the materials to craft be gathered?
Any feed back is appreciated 
Thanks in advance.
Comments
I know it is a dirty word, but SWG had best gathering and crafting system. If you can make it anything close to that you are a star. What made gathering good was that you had to compete to get the good spots. First you had to find them located on some far off planet, and then get your harvesters as close to the good spot as possible. Not everyone was going to get an equal share, and then the resource locations moved around frequently. Yes, the locations were eventually posted on the web so the dedicated harvesters would get their harvesters there, but mining/harvesting became an industry in itself, and with any industry, they strive for efficiency which is why the mega corps began taking over. That didnt stop the little guy from getting their harvester right over the prime spots first however.
I found harvesting and crafting in SWG a game within itself. The economy was great for a time, but like economies in the real world, get screwed once all the money ends up in the hands of the top 1-5% (us economy anyone?). You just need better safeguards to prevent super corps from covering maps with harvesters, if you go some sort of machinery route. Or just make it clear that once and a while the economy will go through a "depression", and then whipe everyone's credits to reset economy. I have no interest running around with a pick ax (lord of rings for example) or similar such things fighting shit bags over nodes that they steal while you fend off mobs.
good luck!
Just dont make it simplistic or one-dimensional, there have to be secondary things regarding the gathering for the player to play with, scarcity, speed, logistcs.
It also does not help when the whole idea of resource gathering is a afterthought of a endgame activity, special nodes in raids for example or drops from boss monsters just requiring someone in the groupt to have gathering.
Flame on!
Death is nothing to us, since when we are, Death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.
Right I would start there. Everything was supposed to decay over time in swg. The economy in the top 5% was just a snapshot in time, there was no real way to monopolize anything. Prices were at rock bottom for anything but loot.
A new person had to play for a week to make money to become gods and do anything they want, how horrible. It was another excuse as was shown by the nge were prices rose x1000.
"If the Damned gave you a roadmap, then you'd know just where to go"
One gathering system I saw, that I thought worked well was in Zentia.
Resource nodes for gathering did not vanish. The time required to gather was significant. If a character wanted to gather a large amount of herbs, they'd find a node and farm it. The higher level resources were in higher level zones where reaching the nodes was difficult for low level characters.
A variation on Zentia's system would be that higher level skilled gatherers could pull more resources from a node, more quickly.
The advantage to this design is that there is no competition for resources.
Farming nodes and level restrictions?
Pass on the unbelievable and artificial harvesting ensuring the status quo.
"If the Damned gave you a roadmap, then you'd know just where to go"
While I know there are a lot of options and the greater majority of players have been...spoiled with auto harvesters and companion gathering and the like but, for me the main and most important part should focus on the emersion of the gathering. That means if I am gathering red berrys for a heal potion my char is bent over a bush and a picking animation is playing and if I am chopping logs I am swinging an axe at a tree.
This to me is the difference between making gathering an abstract idea or action and making it a part of the game experience. What we have been subjected to with both SWG and ToR is the exact opposite of a good mechanic for gathering. It divided players from the actions and that breaks the -crafting process-!
Now that doesn't mean that in SWG the mechanic was wrong. It was -game specific- correct. And in any sci-fy based game I feel it is a good way to go but...the act of gathering in THAT game was very hands on even though the player was basically removed from the process. If you have played it you would know what went into gathering a high quality material and a player couold spend all their time working on just finding then and managing hoppers.
Meaning if you remove the players time consumption from gathering you remove the value of the gathered materials and that leaves us with a hollow experience. Like with ToR this was where things went very wrong.
I am sure there has been and will continue to be players and posters alike raving about how good the quality method in SWG gathering was and how much it meant to making the crafting in that game ....
-The Best There Ever Was-
And I wholeheartedly agree with that notion and I wont spend pages here just to let you know that was the best part. But what I will again state is the fact that yes the player had devices that make it -seem- like they were not actively gathering but finding the spot and the right type and quality was in fact as time consuming if not -More- then gathering in other games that presented a good crafting based economy. It was NOT like you just dropped a harvester -bot- down on the ground and forgot about it while you quested or explored or wtvr. It took skill and know-how to get good materials and much player ado and that is the best part.
Not sure what you are saying. Harvesting in swg was great because of it's depth. You could spend as much time an become as successful as any other playstyle. 8 hours a day 7 days a week if you wanted. That's why people loved it. The actual act of harvesting just needs to fit the lore.
"If the Damned gave you a roadmap, then you'd know just where to go"
Out of all the MMOs i have played and crafted in i liked the way Asherons Call did it the best. I will try to explain in a short post.
First the game has random loot, wich means anything can drop off mobs and no 2 items are the same its totally 100% random generated loot. each piece of loot is made from a material such as iron, steel, mahogany, and so on.
If you dont want to keep a item you can break it down ( called salvaging ). each item also has a quality number 1-10. so depending on my salvaging skill when i break down a copper ring ( 5 ) i would get a bag of quality 5 copper. and the amount in the bag is determined by my salvaging skill. so if its really low skill i might get 15 copper if its really high i might get 50 copper but the quality would still be 5.
and quality matters because when you use it on another item to improve the stats the better quality the more chance for success when applying it.
personally i found this system nice because i didnt have to camp a node and click to watch my dude mine rocks. i was getting materials off mobs from actually playing the game.
the down side of it, there are ALOT of materials that nobody ever uses so whats the point of even breaking it down other than to just sell to vendor because its a easy way to make money. but for the stuff that is needed its nice to find off killing mobs instead of chopping a tree or hitting a rock.
Ryzom was (is?) good. Not to get too far off topic, but the AI is great, like real roaming animals, if you stayed in a spot too long a bunch of critters may happen upon you. Was fairly complex, but like swg surveying, you had to sit there and click buttons in that kneeling position, lol. Also, to get the high quality stuff you had to go into hard locations and have another watch over your toon, not sure if that changed with reserection or not. Either way, it was a decent game. I just didn't like sitting there on a node. As I mentioned, SWG was cool, because you could survey, find good spot, drop harvesters, go do other shit like use previously gathered resources to experient, get good result, put in factory and make shit to sell for good credits...I have yet to run across another game with such complexity. And other poster mentioned, it took skill to get just the right resources with just the right qualities to make a good blaster, but different qualities were required to make armor for example.
I know, I know, but shit, I miss SWG for its complexity...I know it exists...in the place that shall not be spoken, but not the same.
I think the SWG system was great and had a bit of set and forget but having to make another character just for crafting was not fun for me.
For me you can not beat Dragon Prophet for gathering. You can go out and farm and you can train up dragons to do it for you. It keeps you from having doing the boring gathering if you want to craft.
Firefall is great also.
Whatever you do avoid Eve and Darkfalls gathering. I don't get the people who like to pay for games just to read or watch a show while they farm. But whatever.
Oooo, this is a nice subject. Walks hand in hand with crafting. Nodes you are my dream lover whispering to me to come and pick and pluck and tap-tap-tap with the pickaxe. Seriously, Skyrim (not mmo but good example). Only game I've ever played where I could not stop picking shit. Bleak colored world except for the aurora borealis sky and those nodes always calling out to you, "come and get me big boy."
Nodes really cannot be done wrong. Maybe lots of variety. It's the crafting that makes the node. The great crafting systems cause you to hum in delight when harvesting because you know you are going to get a kick ass potion in the end or build armor and weapons everyone will enjoy to the hilt (FFXI).
I think swg harvesting was a little better than..nodes. The great harvesting system cause you to hum in delight because they're great. You didn't even need to craft. There was no leveling to harvest better resources either. Yet people played for years doing nothing but. It was possible to do that.
"If the Damned gave you a roadmap, then you'd know just where to go"
Hirelings. I have no intention of playing a Heroic Fantasy game and spending time plodding around gathering assorted crap, so let me hire NPCs to do it. I don't care if it's costly - I just don't want my gaming to be a mundane chore.
I think gathering should be the slowest most
frustrating most mind numbingly boring task in a game. That way there will be a market for it andwill IMO provide fora great economic foundation. Also it should notbe able I bedoneafk like Eve
No matter how cynical you become, its never enough to keep up - Lily Tomlin
Another vote for Pre-CU SWG's gathering mechanics. And an honorable nod to Asheron's Call 1's 'tinkering' system as well. In my opinion what made these great were:
- Random location generation. Dear God static nodes 'ala WoW are such a spectacular bore. This mechanic on the other hand spurred thinking and exploration. But maybe it's all too much for the hamster wheel generation?
- Random quality generation. And with each resource having various sub qualities that would affect different aspects of crafting as well (durability, damage, etc.). But again, you had to keep your eyes on current conditions, know how various crafting mechanics worked for different items, and do some real thinking. I found that great fun. But maybe most people don't?
- But some degree of predictability can be fun too. For example in AC1 a certain type of hide (hoary mattekar) could only be gathered in the winter. Or drops of certain special items (motes, chest keys, crystal shards and such) were more common on some creatures than on others. You had to learn this stuff to be successful, and then figure out where to find those types of mobs. Also, I wouldn't be averse to things like gold being found more commonly in the mountains, and oil in the plains etc..
The basic jist was that while the gathering was great in SWG it wasnt because the player was removed from the process.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
These are fundamental game designs that you should probably take a look at yourself before asking the community what to do. You need to make a gathering system that works with the rest of the game you are making and since we don't know that, you're going to get bad advice.
As much as people say they want xx feature from some game and yy feature from another, it doesn't work unless the systems are made symbiotically.
Without some kind of idea of what game you're looking to make, the back story and all that jazz it seems kinda self defeating to suggest gathering methods yet.
For example, in fantasy/historical type games I fully support the idea of my toon standing there with a good ol fashioned mining pick chipping away at some rock for ore (or capturing some slaves and chaining them up in my recently captured mine
).
In a modern-ish type game I could see something similar with the possibility of upgrading to some kind of automated harvesting such as robots/hiring a mining corp/dynamiting a hill side for the previously mentioned ore.
Futuristic can include all of the above but usually it's some form of automation or player managed automation. Think EVE's mining barges with mining lasers and drones and such. Again, it should be scaleable though.
Depending on your economy model too, gathering becomes either less or more important. In a game such as EVE (with it's player run economy) gathering is or at least can be a full time game occupation.
Other games, gathering is more of a secondary activity or after thought.
Oh, and just to tie into the whole "link it to your economy" bit... If you have a gathering system that supports a crafting system that is completely eclipsed by every piece of dropped loot (I'm looking at you Neverwinter and MANY other games) you invalidate your whole gathering/crafting system so don't bother.
And just as a PPPPS...gathering and resources can and should (in my opinion) be used as potential conflict generators. I.E. in order to craft X, you need item Y. Item Y can be harvested (more effectively but not exclusively) in Player conquerable zone A. Get to conquering.
**I went and took a look at your other thread. Just some advice. It sounds like you guys have at least some guiding ideas about the type of game you want and the systems you want in it. I am going to assume that your team are mostly gamers or have at least played a few MMOs. I HIGHLY suggest doing some good reading about the games that you guys like (and want to borrow some ideas from) and find out what folks liked about them and what they didn't like. Obviously keep the good and chuck/remake the bad.