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Write up for those who doubt the GW2 crafting
romanator0
Member Posts: 2,382
in Guild Wars 2
http://tap-repeatedly.com/2011/03/15/crafting-a-future/#more-13622
Lewis B at tap-repeatedly made a nice write up about the crafting system in GW2 and how it might effect the economy and how it fits in with the rest of the game.
Comments
Write
;-p
I can't say I read anyone here who wish that GW2s crafting was a minigame. I guess people here are more experienced than many people Lewis talked to and know that minigames gets freaking boring after a while.
The issue everyone here have is the discovery system (Lweis seems to have missed that some are drops or quest rewards).
I don't think it is optimal myself but at least it don't force me to craft 35 tin long swords no one want to buy (EQ2).
The gathering system is actually pretty neat, particularly since material both can be drops or salvaged as well.
I still wonder if you can get rare materials from nodes and if in that case it is the same nodes as regular materials.
The blog writer is rather clueless about what people want and don't want. Personaly I would rather be crafting SOMETHING to advance my skill even if it is pretty much useless than have to waste hours doing useless combos of mats to find ONE recipe. I don't want a mini game for crafting at all. I do like the gathering system as I have spent WAY to much time wanding around in mmos only to find someone has nicked all the mats I wanted.
Top 3 MMO's PRE-CU SWG GW1 GW2
Worst 2 wow and Lotro Under standing stones it went woke
If you're spending hours doing combos, you're either doing it wrong, or you're trying to explore and find something unique.
If the idea of spending that much time experimenting doesn't appeal to you, then you should probably give up on finding something unique.
Look at it this way... it's not any harder/rarer than getting some ultimately rare crafting recipe that drops randomly, the difference is that if somebody wants to share the recipe with somebody else, they can.
... and wikipedia if you want the rewards without the effort.
The author romanticising a feature that will lose it's luster a few months down the line is kind of quaint, yet sad.
All the discovery system will do is drive a bigger wedge between the invested, results oriented gamers that know exactly what's available up front and the sentimental/clueless/roleplayers/noobs that waste their time on "discovery."
Every single argument he lists will cease to be relevant in the first two months of release. The notion that ANet will stealth in totally free items to discover is laughable. How often should we expect something like that? Every 6 months when they hold a design a weapon contest? Why would they even do that when there's a financial benefit to release such items as part of a paid expansion? How long will it take for the community to discover the 5 or so items that get added?
I also doubt the author ever actually played or understood the TF2 crafting system. It works primarily because it's random. recipes you discover give you a a random item for a specific class and character slot. Meaning that if you have your mind set on a certain item, you'll be crafting the same recipe over and over until the game stops giving you the football helmet and finally spawns the fuzzy hat. I doubt that anyone would want a system that randomized in GW2, but the only alternative is something overly simplistic.
Another thing that hasn't been taken into account, is that the discoverables are essentially free. Same problem as GW1, such skins will be overly common and nobody will buy them. Players will just add extra value to the lootable recipe items in the long run.
Why not? It's exactly the sort of small content updates you would expect. But I would also expect some to be added as part of paid for expansions or micro-transactions (perhaps you could discover them, but they are locked until you buy some widget as a micro-transaction, etc). Sure, they would only remain secret for a short while, but that would be part of the fun. New recipes could reflect the new content in expansions. I would think there would be a mix of new free and mini payment types of recipes and crafting related stuff.
I don't understand why the discoverable system is bothering people. I won't be doing it, but does not mean there are 2 other guys who may want to do it...
I don't see how nodes being available to everyone will create a better econmy. I think best crafting system was in FFXI. Once maxed level you could start making +1 items and even low level gear would be good and sell for a good price.
Guild Wars 2's 50 minutes game play video:
http://n4g.com/news/592585/guild-wars-2-50-minutes-of-pure-gameplay
Everything We Know about GW2:
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/287180/page/1
The sollution for the Wiki recipes database is simple...
Make all/most/some recipes character based... which would mean that while you and me could create the same item, we would need different ingredients because our creation process is a little different...
Next to they could have/make a minigame that allows you to discover new recipes... and have the actuall crafting process as it is..
Best MMO experiences : EQ(PvE), DAoC(PvP), WoW(total package) LOTRO (worldfeel) GW2 (Artstyle and animations and worlddesign) SWTOR (Story immersion) TSW (story) ESO (character advancement)
That's why the Puzzle Pirates approach to minigames was invented. You play a minigame a bunch of times to get good at it, and it keeps track of how good you are. Then after that, it will let you continue to craft goods based on your rating of how good you are at the minigame, if you've played it in the last 10 days. If you play it once per week, you can keep crafting goods at that skill level forever.
If you quit for six months, then as soon as you play it once again, it lets you continue crafting goods for the next 10 days at that skill level. Of course, if you quit for six months, you might not be so good anymore when you come back.
My, that's an awful article. Let's start with the obvious howler:
"Guild Wars Wikipedia (GWW)"
It's hard to imagine anyone familiar with the concept of a game wiki saying that.
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"RIFT and World of Warcraft are two examples of MMOGs where nodes are used as a valuable commodity, often more so than the product they produce."
So far so good...
"A greater abundance of raw materials immediately reduces their value, creating a new market for the products produced and thereby placing greater emphasis on creation as opposed to wholesale of raw goods."
No, no it doesn't. If the cost of the raw materials is 10 platinum, and the cost of crafting is 3 seconds, then the value of the item is essentially entirely in the cost of the raw materials. If the cost of the raw materials is reduced to 1 platinum, that isn't changed meaningfully. If the cost of the raw materials is reduced to nothing, then the value of the crafted item is likewise reduced to nothing. It's easier to spend 3 seconds to craft it yourself than to find someone else who did.
Furthermore, while it's likely that ArenaNet will make raw materials fairly plentiful, it's hardly guaranteed. They could easily make more nodes spawn or fewer, or make each node give more materials or fewer, or make crafting items require more materials or fewer. Any one of those effects could, by itself, overwhelm the decision to make it so that everyone can harvest from the same node.
And then later...
"While the physical creation may be uninvolving, arriving at this stage would not have only took time (through creating the components and discovering the recipe) but fundamentally the method remains quick and entirely functional."
Right. He's finally conceded that crafting itself is completely trivial, but still expects players to value the crafted item far more than the materials from which it is crafted?
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"Not only will this encourage the distribution of weapons and armour to all players but also a greater motivation to share what we gather, in order to help others."
Perhaps there's a greater motivation to give things away if they're so common and cheap as to be worthless. But it's perhaps more salient to say that there's no motivation to ask for things to be given to you if they're so cheap as to be worthless.
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"The final benefit that this creates is the natural encouragement to craft. By creating nodes that are abundant for all, players will realise they don’t have to spend countless hours scouring zones for resources, but will instead be willing to craft freely and in abundance without fear of a time-sink."
Making crafting add no value whatsoever encourages players to craft? Really?
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"But what these individuals are failing to understand is the prospect of discovery. Although for many the temptation to utilise GWW will be too great, there will be countless who enjoy the prospect of finding recipes for themselves."
So here, the writer is trying to comment on something that he knows absolutely nothing about. It's something that most games don't do, so he hasn't seen it, and how would he know how it works?
First of all, most people don't find it terribly interesting to pick some items at random and see if they'll combine to something that you don't want, when you could have looked on the wiki and seen. Maybe people try it a few times, but virtually everyone will get bored very quickly.
Second, trying things at random will be a tremendously inefficient way to discover recipes. This is the sort of thing that basically has to be macroed. Someone writes a macro and lets it run for a week and systematically tries hundreds of thousands of combinations and sees what works. Anything that will work within the first million or so most obvious guesses will be found very quickly. There will be so few things outside of that that the odds of actually discovering something new will be infinitessimal.
"Imagine the excitement at discovering a recipe for a stunning bow and the realisation that having visited GWW, it isn’t there. Think of the adoration, the begging from others and riches you could earn."
Umm, yikes. "Adoration" is the wrong word. Try "flame wars", and you're closer to the truth.
If one person knows a recipe and won't give it away to anyone who wants it for free, he'll get flamed, blacklisted, and so forth. Actually, if he knows the recipe and does share it, he might well still get flamed if he doesn't explain it in a sufficiently accessible way to people who just learned five minutes ago that the game actually has crafting.
Does that sound cynical? Well, I've got the scars to prove that it happens that way in practice. Or at least it did in the ruby glue incident in A Tale in the Desert. And the community for Guild Wars 2 has exactly zero chance of handling the situation in a more mature manner than that of ATITD.
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"What these people are failing to understand however is that crafting of this type is not only tiresome after a short period, but players often create work-arounds through external modifications that strip back the process and make it simpler."
If it's bad that a process can be botted, then combat should be removed from most MMORPGs. That gets tiresome, too, doesn't it?
Now, it's certainly possible to make a bad minigame, or to require it to be played too much. But that's not an argument against having minigames, any more than that it is possible to have badly designed combat is an argument against having combat at all.
There are other, more serious arguments against minigames. But the author of that article doesn't seem to be familiar with them.
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"Although players who craft almost exclusively within MMOGs may object entirely, we cannot expect a developer to create a crafting system that is laborious or overly time consuming, when the vast majority of players only use crafting to compliment their play."
This amounts to arguing that Guild Wars 2 should not have a good crafting system because most other games don't. The latter is the reason why most players don't like crafting much in most other games.
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"By altering the way resource nodes are gathered, creating discoverable recipes with potentially limitless combinations of items, coupled with a streamlined yet simple method of crafting, we will see more players than ever encouraged to craft. This is surely a good thing, isn’t it?"
If the problem is that crafting is boring, making it mandatory but still boring is a downgrade, not an upgrade.
Thankfully, ArenaNet doesn't look likely to go that route. Quite the opposite, actually: they'll make crafting completely optional, and if you want something crafted, it will likely be a fairly trivial matter to get someone to craft it for you, even if you can't craft yourself. That means fewer players crafting than in a game that actually pushes players to do so, not more.
=====
Now, there are some serious arguments in favor of the way ArenaNet is handling crafting. I might have to write that up sometime. But they aren't anywhere to be found in that article.
@Quizicalls long reply. I can't judge the reasoning because I don't know that much about crafting in games but I have to say that was an entertaining post (im not trying to be ironic, I actually enjoyed reading the post).
I have to think that nodes will be pretty scarce, or have extremely long reset timers per person. Not only because sharing nodes would otherwise increase the output of a zone 100x over, but also because I think it fits with their philosophy of not wanting other people in the group to have to wait for people to constantly have to stop to gather. So I think raw materials are still going to fetch a good price.
I would also expect creating the goods to be about the same as in other games, a small tip above the cost of mats required. It does take effort to raise the skill level after all.
I don't think that the discovery process is going to be a bad thing. I think as long as ArenaNet puts in a sufficient number of recipes, then you'll have a very good chance of finding a combination that works. I think also especially if the recipes follow some intuitive rules.
For instance, if making a bow always requires lumber and string, then you're really mixing and matching the two other slots. If there's a clear way to keep track of what zone an item was found in, then it's even easier. If Lumber/String/Gem/Mechanism from zone A makes a bow, then probably the same combination of item types from zone B will make a bow. If each of these components provides a certain amount of a certain stat, then it's even easier than that. Any lumber from any zone plus any string plus any gem etc etc will make a different bow with the composite stats. That would certainly ease upping your crafting skill and allow you to use up extra lower level raw materials you have laying around.
Quizzical, you have a good point about potential flame wars from withholding recipes, but similarly, I hope that if the recipes are intuitive enough, if the item names are descriptive enough, just knowing an item exists and what level the crafter is will put people on the fast track towards being able to discover it themselves.
"Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true you know it, and they know it." -Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, 2007
You still don't get it SIGH. Ok lets try another way. You can do one the following 2 DE's Which would you choose.
One is you have to kill a random amount (say 20 to 50) of a random creature in a random location. All the info is hidden from you. You only know you have done the quest when it says quest complete. If you leave the area or log out before you finished then any progess is reset. This is the discovery DE.
In the other one the objectives are also random but the number you have to kill is five times as many BUT you know ALL the info AND you can quit at anytime and it will SAVE your progess and you can complete it later. This is the normal DE. I would take the normal one every time. As I can see I'm geting somewhere everytime I kill something. IF I get bored I can go do something else and know I can finish this later. I CAN NOT do that in the other DE.
Makeing the recipes a world drop is VASTLY different for makeing it a discovery option. As I can do other things while waiting for the recipe to drop. Where as I can't do that with the discovery option. If I spend 2 hours out in the world doing stuff and the recipe does'nt drop I will still of got all the xp, gold, mats, and karma from all the stuff i did even if I don't get the recipe. Where are I will get NOTHING from the discover methord if I don't find the recipe and then only the recipe if I do.
As I have said before several times IF all the recipes are as simple as you seem to think they are. ALL but the rarest WILL be on the wiki before the game even goes live. Thereby rendeing the whole process pointless.
Top 3 MMO's PRE-CU SWG GW1 GW2
Worst 2 wow and Lotro Under standing stones it went woke
... and so? That's like saying that puzzle games are pointless because all the answers to the puzzles will be up on a wiki almost instantly.
If you don't want to do the puzzles, then don't.
For those who want to do the puzzles, it sounds fun. The answers being on wiki don't have anything to do with the enjoyment those people will get.
So far as this crafting system goes, ideally, they would create a sort of 'language' out of the item crafting, so you can understand how doing one thing will lead to you figuring out how to do other things. Like if you learn how to make a poison axe haft, you can translate that into making poison sword hilts, poison staff wrappings, and so on.
The only thing you've ever managed to convince me of with all your arguing is that they've created a feature I'll enjoy and you won't. (Unless you ruin my enjoyment by stalking me and keep messaging me 'Hey Meowhead! Here's a recipe you might not know, now you can't find it on your own!'. Which would be creepy.
)
That's just the way it is. I'm not trying to convince you that you have to enjoy the feature, just explaining that it is possible for other people to do so, and trying to explain how they would do it if they were going to.
It is highly unlikely that any game will have every feature perfectly tuned to a person's tastes. I'm sure there's something you like about GW2 that I find less than ideal. In this case, it's the other way around.
Since the crafting won't get anybody items any more powerful than any other method of getting items (Like buying them, going through dungeons, or PvP), it doesn't seem like some horrible tragic crime to me if they ended up creating the kind of system you won't enjoy.
That's one problem with crafting. No matter WHAT system you care to name, there's going to be a large amount of people who don't like it for one reason or another. Too simple, too hard, too many minigames, not enough minigames, too straightforward, too cryptic, too pointless, too important, not enough effect on the economy, too much...
With many other features, it's a little easier to target the fun, but people are severely divided on almost every aspect of crafting.
Yes, the blog writer is clueless about what people individually want. Who isnt? This is also completely besides the point if the next thing you write is all about what you want.
They already wrote that not all recipes are obtained through the experimenting. Its a mix of different ways to obtain.
That actually sounds pretty damn good system. Damn I really wish this becomes cornerstone of future crafting. It's not too easy, yet not too hard. I really like how it mimicks realistic skill system where you actually need to do stuff to be good. I'm sure there is features that could be adjusted like losing skill lvl or losing materials in process but damn that sounds good. Post of day, week, maybe even month.
Personally, I think the crafting system sounds like it could be fun. It has some elements of the Asheron's Call original magic system, where you had to discover spells by combining different spell components, or you could learn them from a scroll if you found one. Then of course SpellPea came out and basically negated any reason for discovery, but the first month or so of the game watching all of the mages in town standing around fizzling spells and the cheer when a new spell was found was a really neat experience.
As with all things, I'm not going to pass a judgement until I actually see it in action, or get to try it myself to see how well I like it.
to keep it short and simple. Remember the Bartle test. There is different kind of gamers
And if you havent got the picture yet, ArenaNet does alot for explores. Discovering recipes by eksperiment is for explores. And they enjoy that even when outwited by wiki. And alot of casual gamers (wich GW2 will have because its F2P as GW1 had) will enjoy the feature.
Achivers goes to wiki, and loose very litte by having to do that!
It's been known forever that crafting was not going to be an overly complex or essential part of the game. Combat, the dynamic world and personal stories are thier primary focus.
As the author of the Tap-Repeatedly.com editorial, I would just like to thank all those who read the piece (and the person who enjoyed it enough to link it here), whether you agreed or disagreed with it. As a writer, anything I do put into the public domain is free to receive criticism, whether good or bad and I appreciate it all.
To allay some initial fears, I have been playing MMOG's for 14 years and have played TF2 for over 200 hours, so I feel I have reasonable credentials to write what I did.
I have attempted as best I can to address some of the remarks from some users below:
Originally posted by Loke666
I can't say I read anyone here who wish that GW2s crafting was a minigame. I guess people here are more experienced than many people Lewis talked to and know that minigames gets freaking boring after a while.
There is a wealth of very experienced players within different communities and many I have spoken to were certainly seeking something more than "craft all" and a mini-game of sorts was certainly mentioned various times. Within my article I havn't personally recommended mini-games within the piece, quite the opposite. They do get "freaking boring"!
Originally posted by Loke666
The issue everyone here have is the discovery system (Lewis seems to have missed that some are drops or quest rewards).
I did state within the article that some items through the discovery system, could be found from drops or quests, perhaps you missed this
Originally posted by ircaddicts
The blog writer is rather clueless about what people want and don't want. Personaly I would rather be crafting SOMETHING to advance my skill even if it is pretty much useless than have to waste hours doing useless combos of mats to find ONE recipe.
Bar the personal attack, I think you've hit the nail on the head. Crafting is something that is very personal to many and ArenaNet as I said, are treading a fine line. Many prefer a sledgehammer approach to leveling tradeskills by simply generating large quantities of the same items to level, others may prefer a more calculated approach. ArenaNet it seems prefer something with a little more finesse.
Originally posted by Gennadios
Every single argument he lists will cease to be relevant in the first two months of release. The notion that ANet will stealth in totally free items to discover is laughable. How often should we expect something like that? Every 6 months when they hold a design a weapon contest? Why would they even do that when there's a financial benefit to release such items as part of a paid expansion? How long will it take for the community to discover the 5 or so items that get added?
This may be the case Gennadios, and it would be sad to see this come to fruition. There is great scope to be had in a discovery system whether your a "sentimental/clueless/roleplayers/noobs" or other. Dependant on the success of Guild Wars 2 it would be impossible at this stage to question what ArenaNet are or aren't capable of. I see no reason why they couldn't implement unknown recipies regularly. It's only a matter of resources.
Originally posted by Quizzical
"Guild Wars Wikipedia (GWW)"
It's hard to imagine anyone familiar with the concept of a game wiki saying that.
While to you and I terms such as "Wiki" are familar, many who may stumble across Tap-Repeatedly.com may have never encountered an MMOG or are unfamiliar with such terms. Plain English never hurts
Originally posted by Quizzical
"A greater abundance of raw materials immediately reduces their value, creating a new market for the products produced and thereby placing greater emphasis on creation as opposed to wholesale of raw goods."
No, no it doesn't. If the cost of the raw materials is 10 platinum, and the cost of crafting is 3 seconds, then the value of the item is essentially entirely in the cost of the raw materials. If the cost of the raw materials is reduced to 1 platinum, that isn't changed meaningfully. If the cost of the raw materials is reduced to nothing, then the value of the crafted item is likewise reduced to nothing. It's easier to spend 3 seconds to craft it yourself than to find someone else who did.
Furthermore, while it's likely that ArenaNet will make raw materials fairly plentiful, it's hardly guaranteed. They could easily make more nodes spawn or fewer, or make each node give more materials or fewer, or make crafting items require more materials or fewer. Any one of those effects could, by itself, overwhelm the decision to make it so that everyone can harvest from the same node.
I think you miss-read what I wrote. I stated that a greater quantity of raw materials creates a new market for the products produced which in turn leads players to creating items, as opposed to selling raw materials. I never stated such produced goods would have value simply players are more likely to now craft items. World of Warcraft is a prime example of where it was easier, quicker and more efficient to sell raw materials (certainly in herbalism) than following through and crafting potions. This is surely wrong, and the change will undoubtedly fix this.
Originally posted by Quizzical
"While the physical creation may be uninvolving, arriving at this stage would not have only took time (through creating the components and discovering the recipe) but fundamentally the method remains quick and entirely functional."
Right. He's finally conceded that crafting itself is completely trivial, but still expects players to value the crafted item far more than the materials from which it is crafted?
Again, I believe you have misinterpretted what I wrote. Crafting itself within many games is a trivial act. To watch a progress bar and have a game undertake it all for you is like driving hands free. I havn't stated players should value crafted items more than the materials, quite the opposite, materials will no longer have value (ArenaNet have confirmed this is the method they are taking) which by deduction means the only items within the crafting process that have value are those created (whether worth little or lots).
Originally posted by Quizzical
"The final benefit that this creates is the natural encouragement to craft. By creating nodes that are abundant for all, players will realise they don’t have to spend countless hours scouring zones for resources, but will instead be willing to craft freely and in abundance without fear of a time-sink."
Making crafting add no value whatsoever encourages players to craft? Really?
You may see crafting as having no value, but to many the prospect of self sufficiency through crafting (making your own armour and weapons as you level, without counting on others) is certainly something to look forward to. There's no reason why crafting should be an exclusive club for those who only have an abundance of time on their hands. Again, I believe this is ArenaNets intention.
I havn't gone on to disect the rest of your responses Quizzical, your evidently someone who not only loves to craft but is highly disapointed in the proposals ArenaNet have put forward. Much of my article is inevitably based on speculation as there is very little we can actually work with at this current time, based on the limited blog post. However, I do still stand by that the crafting system designed by ArenaNet (and inevitably heavily influenced by other MMOGs on the market) balances on that fine line between accesibility and reward. I do however look forward to reading your crafting proposals
I'll be happy to cover those in an article.
Best,
Lewis B
www.tap-repeatedly.com
Unfortunately, this crafting system does nothing for me. Sure I could ignore the wikis and just discover stuff on my own. someone here made a reference to puzzle games online where you can look up solutions. thats all fine and good for a single player game, but in an mmo its a lot different.
the social aspect of crafting and discovery is messed up when all the recipe combinations are available on wiki. lets say i ignore the wikis and discover stuff on my own. a few months later i discover a recipe for a powerful sword. i craft a few and put them up for sale only to find out that everybody that could possibly need that weapon has already bought one two months ago and in fact my rare new recipe is actually quite common.
discovering recipes is not a very good focus of mmo crafting imho. you need to be able to make things that are unique, in demand, and rely on the collaboration of other to achieve the best results.
crafting professions needs to mirror combat professions in many ways. too many devs just completely miss the boat in that regard. sadly anet has as well.
It takes some guts to show up and defend an article after it has been aggressively skewed. I respect that. Please don't take it personally.
"I stated that a greater quantity of raw materials creates a new market for the products produced which in turn leads players to creating items, as opposed to selling raw materials."
It's unlikely that materials will be cheap to the point of being essentially free. They certainly weren't in Guild Wars 1. Guild Wars 2 won't have WoW's silly mechanic of forcing you to choose between crafting or gathering materials. But for people who aren't terribly interested in crafting, auctioning what they gather and buying what they want will still be the simplest way to get what they want.
Suppose that the materials to craft an item cost 10 platinum, and let's suppose that this is a substantial sum. Suppose further that 10% of the players on the server can craft that item, and if you can craft it, actually doing so from the materials is a trivial matter. How much can the crafters charge for the completed item?
Suppose that one crafter wishes to charge 20 platinum, and take a crafting profit of 10 platinum for a few seconds of work. Another will see this and undercut it 19 platinum, and take the market for himself. They'll continually undercut each other until the completed item sells for barely over 10 platinum, and little enough that there's no real profit in crafting. If it only takes a few seconds to craft the item, then a single person could fill demand for the entire server, so the profit will be whatever the lowest price offered is out of potentially thousands who could craft it.
Or the price may even be less than 10 platinum if someone crafted too many of an item that too few people want, and is just trying to get rid of it. If it costs you 10 platinum to craft something yourself, or 8 to buy it, are you really going to craft it?
Now suppose that the materials are basically worthless. The logic of why crafting should not add much value still holds. If all you care about is the easiest way to acquire the goods you want, buying them off the auction house, or asking a friend who is a crafter to make it for you for a nominal fee, will still be easier than leveling crafting yourself. That ends the practice of gathering raw materials to sell them, but why bother to put in the work for a gathering system if there's no point to gathering the materials, as they're basically free anyway?
"materials will no longer have value (ArenaNet have confirmed this is the method they are taking) which by deduction means the only items within the crafting process that have value are those created (whether worth little or lots)."
Except that, as explained above, if a considerable fraction of the server can craft an item in unlimited quantities and basically for free, then the value of the crafted item cannot be significantly more than the value of the materials used to craft it. If the materials are worth nothing but a nominal fee, then so is the crafted item.
Now, there are some ways around this, in the conditions of the above statement. If only a few people can craft an item, then they may collude to force a high price on it. If only one person can craft it, he has monopoly pricing power. That might be fun for that person, but not for the rest of the server, so I don't expect ArenaNet to go this route.
Another way is to make the crafting process expensive in itself, such as by a time commitment. ArenaNet definitely isn't going this route.
There's also the possibility of sharply and artificially limiting how much each person can craft. If you can only craft one item per day, then you can't meet the entire server demand for a given item all by yourself. That could allow for some complex economics, and some games have kind of gone this route with labor requirements for crafting. But I don't expect ArenaNet to do that, either.
"You may see crafting as having no value, but to many the prospect of self sufficiency through crafting (making your own armour and weapons as you level, without counting on others) is certainly something to look forward to."
If people want to be self-sufficient, are there really people who strongly prefer crafting items in a system where there's really nothing to the crafting system, rather than buying them from an NPC, getting the items as drops off of mobs, getting them as quest rewards, or the various other ways to obtain gear in games?
Now, there is a considerable contingent of people who like crafting and want to craft all of their own stuff, even if it's an inefficient way to keep themselves properly geared. But does that really hold if a game doesn't have much of a crafting system? You could get crafted gear in Guild Wars 1, too, but not many people were terribly excited about getting crafted weapons.
"I havn't gone on to disect the rest of your responses Quizzical, your evidently someone who not only loves to craft but is highly disapointed in the proposals ArenaNet have put forward."
Not entirely. While I do like crafting if done well, it looks like crafting in Guild Wars 2 will be about what I expected: not much there, but at least not a nuisance. And that's a lot better than a crafting system that doesn't have much there, but does manage to make itself into a nuisance with mandatory grinding, and opting out of crafting entirely gimping you.
There are some substantial arguments against a complex crafting system. One is the cost of implementing it. Apart from that, they mostly boil down to, don't ruin the game for people who don't like crafting. If someone only wants to do combat, and doesn't like crafting, he's probably not going to be terribly thrilled about having to track down a crafter to make something for him every time he wants an armor upgrade. Designing a deep crafting system that won't bother non-crafters is actually pretty hard to do.
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Please don't take this as a personal attack, as it may look like one. It really isn't intended that way.
Suppose that you go to an online forum where players are discussing combat mechanics in online games. As you read the replies, it becomes clear that none of the participants in the discussion have ever played a game with reasonably complex combat mechanics. Most of them seem to talk of combat as something where you enter 1 on 1 combat with a mob, you auto-attack for a while with no further interaction, and then eventually either you or the mob dies.
Discussions of making combat more complex and involved sometimes center on things like removing the auto-attack, but instead, attacking every time you click the mouse. People argue that that gets tiresome, and so combat should be kept simple. Another proposal is to allow you to retreat from battle if it looks like you're losing, which some favor, but others oppose on the basis that it would make it too easy to never lose, and that would dumb down combat by making you no longer need to figure out if you'll win before attacking.
One proposal that seems to be pretty popular is to say that, since combat is boring anyway, all fights should end within three seconds, so that you don't have to sit there and wait 30 seconds to see how it plays out.
The participants in the combat discussion seem to be unable to conceive of having a number of skills on your skillbar with different effects, or of having multiple players fighting multiple mobs all at once. Indeed, they mostly seem to say that they don't like combat in general, because they didn't like it much in any of the games they've ever played. Now, maybe some of the people in this discussion wouldn't like combat as it is in most MMORPGs if they tried it. But they don't know, because they haven't tried it--and they don't realize that they haven't tried it.
Sounds absurd, right? Well, many discussions of crafting online are about at that level. The problem is that very few games have tried to do much with crafting, and so most players really have no idea of what a complex, well-done crafting system could be like.
To cite what you said above, echoing your remarks in the article:
"Within my article I havn't personally recommended mini-games within the piece, quite the opposite. They do get "freaking boring"! "
Have you ever played a game with complex and varied mini-game based crafting? The only such game that I'm aware of is A Tale in the Desert. Puzzle Pirates does some in that direction, though doing the mini-games is really only a relatively small part of the crafting system there. EverQuest II and Vanguard: Saga of Heroes have exactly one mini-game, and that one game can well get boring, for the same reasons that a kill 10000 rats quest can get boring, even if you like well-done PVE content.
How about the defense of your experience:
"To allay some initial fears, I have been playing MMOG's for 14 years and have played TF2 for over 200 hours, so I feel I have reasonable credentials to write what I did."
I haven't played Team Fortress 2, so I had to look up the game's crafting system. Here's the game's wiki article on it:
http://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Crafting
It's conceivable that that's merely a woefully incomplete article that completely ignores nearly everything that matters about crafting in the game. Or perhaps TF2 doesn't actually stand for Team Fortress 2, the way Google thinks it does. But apart from that, it sure looks like there's virtually nothing in the TF2 crafting system. And that's certainly not the sort of thing you'd cite if you'd played a game with a substantial crafting system.
Not having played a game with a good crafting system would hardly be unique to you. It's true of most MMORPG players, and indeed, of most who will enter a crafting discussion. But it does make a lot of discussions seem rather detached from reality.
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Now, this still leaves open the question of, then what should they do? And that is, in itself, a long post. This post is already long enough, so I'll stop here for now.
Whew! I won't block-quote you, Quizzical
, but just wanted to address this:
If people want to be self-sufficient, are there really people who strongly prefer crafting items in a system where there's really nothing to the crafting system, rather than buying them from an NPC, getting the items as drops off of mobs, getting them as quest rewards, or the various other ways to obtain gear in games?
Now, there is a considerable contingent of people who like crafting and want to craft all of their own stuff, even if it's an inefficient way to keep themselves properly geared. But does that really hold if a game doesn't have much of a crafting system? You could get crafted gear in Guild Wars 1, too, but not many people were terribly excited about getting crafted weapons.
I don't know how many of us there are, but you've just described my husband and I. We both just want to be self-sufficient, making items for ourselves, each other, and any friends we desire, for free. We don't care about making a profit and, if I understand the crafting information correctly, we won't have to sell much of anything - if at all - because we won't have to create 360 tin swords in the process of leveling up our ability to finally make one we can actually use.
We genuinely enjoy the act of gathering items (which is why GW1 did not appeal; drops aren't as "fun" for that purpose as chopping down a tree or mining a rock); hopping off the beaten path because we see an ore in the distance is fun gameplay for us. We enjoy the act of standing/sitting over a loom/forge/stove and creating things (as opposed to turning in gathered goods to an NPC and clicking "buy"). Not for hours, no; but just being able to do so is fun and immersive for us.
Now, I don't know if ANet is gambling on people like us making up the majority of those who might be interested in a crafting system (as opposed to the size of the groups of those who enjoy crafting as means to economic dominance, etc.), but I feel like GW2 crafting was designed explicitly with us in mind.
Small problem with that, even with the best balanced crafting system, some rare mats will be worth more than other rare mats, same goes for the mundane ones.
There's a very good chance that such a system would leave certain players with a massive economic advantage when it comes to crafting extremely sought after items with extremely cheap mats.
Of course in the long run this would cause the worth of everything to bottom out as the cheaper crafters over produce, items are no longer sought after, and the rarer mats drop in demand because they're not as economical.
Iether way, I can only see this playing out as an imbalanced luck of the draw system, or it reliving GW1's problems all over again.8 crafting disciplines, but each character can only operate in 2 at a time. So you could gather stuff you can't use ie cook collecting cooper, then sell it to someone else who can use it.
Did you miss that there are crafting stations characters have to visit? I don't see that mentioned in the article.