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Why can't crafters make money by vendoring goods anymore?
Creslin321
Member Posts: 5,359
I remember back in UO, if you wanted to make money you could just repeatedly craft a certain kind of shirt and sell them to a clothing vendor for profit. You didn't make an extreme amount of money like this, but it could definitely help you get back on your feet if you died and it was a good break from MOB farming.
In almost all modern MMORPGs though, you take a massive loss when you try to vendor crafted goods. In addition, players are generally only interested in the "top of the line" crafted goods, so these two facts make crafting an extremely expensive proposition to raise. You may make a profit eventually, but it takes a hell of a long time to get there.
I personally would like to see a game that let you make a small profit selling your crafted stuff to vendors. Sometimes I like to just take a break and craft, but I hate the fact that it's such a huge money sink. And maybe that's the root of the problem...that games are looking to crafting-grinding to be a huge money sink for the economy.
Personally, I would prefer them to find something else to be used as a money sink (vendored consumables or something?) and let crafters actually make some dough from vendors while crafting. Thoughts?
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Comments
I completly agree, this is something I used to do aswell, but is basicly useless in present day MMOs, also if you played Ragnarok Online, their merchant class was able to put points into skills that lowered the prices NPCs sold them stuff, so they were able to buy potions and such and still sell them to players for lower then the vendor price but more then what they got it for, this is something I'd like to see again in alll current MMOs, but they seem to neglect crafting and merchantile stuff in a massive way, using it purely as a secondary addon to the game.
Mess with the best, Die like the rest
I also love to craft, losing money on it takes away some of the fun if not a huge chunk of it for me. Don't NPCs wear use things? Why not have an NPC only market that buys these vendored things so crafters can not lose money while crafting. Eve online is a good example, (still operates at a loss for some items). It has a thriving NPC market.
I would guess the intent is to discourage crafting. I seldom take anything other than gathering professions anymore.
I support this.
This makes me think back to when I was playing EQ. I remember there was only one trade, and specifically one item in that trade that you could craft to make money from vendors; it was pottery making pie molds or some such thing. Each sale was a small profit, around 5gp at best if I recall. This was an extremely benficial trade for a young player who didn't have access to an older character with money or items to hand down, and I was able to keep myself modestly equipped through the levels if I devoted a few days at a time to crafting.
For some reason the devs decided they didn't want any item in the game that resulted in a profit to the crafter without them having sold that item to a player. So after a few weeks they released a patch that increased the purchase price of the pattern from a few silver to a few platinum.
Here's where the players get smart... those of us who were using this pattern (and paid attention to upcoming patch notes) made a bunch of mule characters and filled them with bags, then proceed to load up on these recipes a day before the patch. After the patch we sold all our recipes back to that vendor for MASSIVE profits that far outweighed what we could have made making the item over and over for about 6 months straight. So those of us SOE considered to be 'abusing' a broken item got to have one last hurrah.
Back to the topic at hand, I think dedicating any amount of time into a craft should get you a fair monetary reward, enough to at least sustain continued crafting, with the possibility of a small profit.
Yeah, and this is ridiculous. Why would you want to discourage crafting???Are you team Azeroth, team Tyria, or team Jacob?
Completly agree. In most modern MMO, crafting seems to be nothing more than an afterthough...
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Which game are you talking about? Aren't there still some games where you can sell your trade goods that nobody wants to a vendor for profit?
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I remember when I was playing RuneScape at level one I could made big profits from fishing, collecting bones that are dropped from level 1 creatures, collecting cow hides and I could made HUGE profits from mining or runecrafting.... I could had made money from everything related to crafting.
Now I sometimes play WoW which supposed to be advanced mmo (compared to RS), but items I craft are pretty much useless most of the time. Even I dont use items I craft, why should I use some crappy crafted peace of cloth when I can jump to random dungeon and get blue items. Thats sad
Crafting in, for example, WoW IS useless, unless you are an endgame provider. And even then it's only stuff that people need to start things like heroics.
No, if you want usefull crafting, you need to look at sandbox games, like EvE Online, where equipment (etc) can be lost and needs to be replaced.
I would assume to prevent an over supply of crafters at the top.
In UO, crafting was designed as a profession. It is a career path just as viablle as any other. In most MMOs, crafting is intended as a time and money sink, nothing else. Since the only path of progression is murdering things in most MMOs, reducing the importance of it by removing one of the few actual reasons for running around murdering things (to make money) seems counter productive. Why create a way to bypass your game's only 'content'?
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Almost all of the recent MMO games I have played will not let you purchase materials from an NPC, craft an item and then sell it back for profit or breaking even. This makes sense, especially with bots and automation, otherwise it would be a free ride for crafting or an endless money machine.
Getting materials from players, then making an item to sell to the NPC is also normally a huge loss. This is because those who gather or obtain the materials know the demand is high from crafters, so they can charge large amounts and still sell the items. I am totally fine with that, as the money filters down the ranks.
The other option is to not purchase all of your materials and get them yourself. Then the end result is just profit without loss of game currency.
Could you give a few examples of MMOs where you puirchase materials from an NPC, craft an item and sell it back for a profit?
I'm not doubting you, I just want to check out those MMOs.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
The problem is that in a lot of games, crafting is really easy. For lower level recipes, which is what you are refering to, players simply have to stockpile a bunch of easy to find mats, and click.
There would be two problem with making crafting items give you more gold. First, it would drive up the price of the mats (on the AH) in order to match the new selling price. Mats as a whole would be much more expensive to buy. Prices on mats could either be the same as the final selling price (which would mean leveling crafting would be essentially free, but more likely, mat prices would be much more expensive, due to demand, so that leveling would in fact not be free)
The second problem would of course be inflation. Vendoring always brings new money into the game, and any new source of easy to get money means that prices for everything else increases. So while players could make more money this way, everything would eventually be more expensive as a result due to the flood of money.
Granted, I never played EQ, but I'm assuming that crafting was more complicated that most of today's MMO, which in part negates these two problems. If crafting as a whole is harder and more complicated, less players take part. This means less demand for mats (cheaper mats) which solves the first problem, and of course, less inflation since there are less crafters participating in this.
-edit- added last paragraph
A few people posted some good arguments against allowing crafters to sell goods to vendors for a profit. Some of them being:
1. It would be very easy to create a bot that just crafts and sells all day to make a lot of money.
2. Vendoring goods for a profit could cause inflation to soar since it would be another "money faucet" into the economy.
I can't really dispute these arguments, so I concede that it may not be a good idea to allow crafters to vendor goods for a profit.
That said, I still think it's a problem that the vast majority of crafted goods are absolutely useless to players and basically just there to grind. Which turns crafting into a gigantic expense for anyone who wants to do it.
Maybe the solution is that instead of vendoring these items, the game system could be designed so that players actually have a need for these items. For example:
1. Make the outputs of one crafting skill the input of another. A good example of this is enchanting in WoW. Enchanting is great because it actually created a market for lower level magic goods. Problem was that it was only limited to enchanting and many skills couldn't benefit from this. For this system to really help fuel the market, the outputs of every skill should be able to be "broken down" somehow to be the inputs of another. A key here is that there has to be some "entropy" whenever an item is broken down to prevent someone from just making and breaking down a sword over and over and over again.
2. Allow multiple "lower level" crafting materials to be combined into a single "higher level" crafting material.
3. Make it so crafted goods are actually very useful to players and make it so they require replacement every now and then.
These systems, if implemented properly, could create a consistent demand for crafted goods. The end consumer would want the goods because they decay and need to be replaced, and crafters would want to buy crafted goods so that they could "melt them down" into raw materials and make other things with them.
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I did this in WoW actually. I remember Id buy runecloth in the AH, turn them into bandages, then sell them to the vendor for a profit.
I did it while chaattying n stufff~~ ^_^
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I had (pre-cu) together with my guild a whole town, had our own store's, cantina, guildhouse, homes. We didn't need NPC's to buy our crafted goods, almost anything could and was sold regardless the level due to the complexity of crafting/harvesting. My master professions could still server the newbie in his wants and needs of items/gear/houses/decoration/furniture/weapons/pets/spaceships/vehicles/clothing/potions/buffs/meds/foods/droids...did I forget something.
Now while I am enjoying Age of Conan and even doing crafting it's very limited, gain a new tier in crafting and gone are my lower end craft recipies and able to only craft items that are in my lvl range and so far havn't seen or made crafted items/gear that are better then what I already looted in the gameworld and didn't even have to do some raid or high end dungeons for these items. Well the only thing I feel so far is worth anything is alchemy and unfortunaly mainly mats sell well on the trader/auction and mostly looted rare items. So there is allot and I do mean allot room for improvement in crafting in AoC.
It's a more general problem with crafting. Thing is, many modern, post-WoW MMOs just don't have any reasoning behind crafting other than "because players like it" and "to fill gaps in end game gear". Because progress on 1-max level is so fast, crafted goods become obsolate just hour after you make them if you play "efficiently", and maybe will last you day if you play "casually".
Untill game developers can find a way to actually bring back usefulness for all types of crafted stuff, making it proftiable to vendor will only create inflation, and since those games usually have plenty of much easier ways of making money (quest rewards, repeatable quests, mobs dropping more money, money rewards for instanced PvP, etc.) it would be another blow to already weak MMO economy.
Things worked in UO because UO had no levels and you could loose your gear on death if you weren't fast enough on retrieving it from your corpse. These days there is no risk, gear is "permanent", it doesn't get lost, every character only needs single chestpiece, sword or helmet at any given moment, matching their level, and with those widely avalible through quests which offer new version every about 5-6 quests there is no gear sink in place.
The way stat meta-game is designed also doesn't really lend itself too much to gear choices. There is usually something you will use and something that is useless. There is no choice in what equipement to pick. Sure a healer will use slightly different cloth than say offensive caster. But in the end the items are pretty much categorized in a way that clearly tells player - USE THIS ITEM NAU.
Well - I cant complain about that.
In Vanguard you can do both - sell people crafted goods and sell to vendor.
Also, leveling up a crafter gives money in Vanguard, not spends it.
You have to spend that money again though, to get the really good and important recipes.
Vendoring? I thought Auction house is where its at
I do like to see crafting become more prominient, making them useful and be able to sell their equipment to Auction house.
But gosh I hate all those people sitting on the floor constantly yelling advertising phases.......really annoying in a city.
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As much WoW as a WoWhater would, if a WoWhater could hate WoW.
I'd prefer there was no vendoring of goods whatsover. I'd hope in the future the games are run by entirely player/guild owned shops that buy products. These products can then be broken down into resources and recycled to create more useful gear.
Wouldn't it be great if you had a "White Silk Shirt" with +10 Armor and you were outleveling the piece of armor but your next item you were aiming at was a "Black Silk Shirt" with +15 armor but it required you to craft it for "1 Black Dye and 3 Silk Fabrics" Well what do you know, that "White SIlk" shirt can be broken down into 1 Silk Fabric. So you find people selling two shirts of similar grade or someone with a stock of Silk Fabric and find another player merchant selling Dyes and you go ahead and make your Black Silk Shirt.
There is really no need for NPC vendors. Even the Auctioneer because it dumbs down the whole economic cycle of the game. In Lineage 2, which I used to play there is no Auctioneer, you chose who you bought from and you knew if you were buying from a friend or an enemy or a gold seller. If you wanted the "best deal" you had to LOOK FOR IT and not filter an auctioneer UI. Also earlier on before player crafting shops you would have to give your items to a Warsmith in order to craft, if they were untrustworthy they could just log off with your stuff. So it made the system more complex in that you had to find a Warsmith you trusted.
But every game is the same now, dungeon queues, auctioneers and instant leveling. What reason is there to talk and socialize in MMORPG's nowadays? Everyone I talk to is already a friend and they are in Ventrillo and Skype. Half the time not playing the same game and even more rare is in the same party.
Having a useful and practical crafting mechanic is very difficult to implement, it simply doesn't fit into the whole new McDonalds mmo philosophy.
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Actually when you gain a new tier your older recipes are not gone, they are just not displayed in your crafing recipes until you zone again.
In most systems, there are 2 major reasons why crafting isn't worthwhile and / or profitable.
1. Loot / Quest Reward Based Gaming - The game centers around a Vorpal Sword +5 dropping out of a hare's a$$ or some little princess telling you how you're the greatest hero this land has seen (she says the same to all the guys that came through there) and gives you a little trinket. With this style of gameplay, crafters have little reason to exist because the game gives away what they'll need. I've played MMORPGs where you could literally go from Lv1 to Cap with nothing but quest reward and looted items.
2. Other than consumeables, nothing breaks and is lost for good. The vast, VAST majority of MMORPGs offer permanent items that will never, ever break and need replacement. This really means no repeat business at all. Once you sell that Plate Mail Armor to someone, they pretty much will never come back to you. Most especially high level / level cap situations.
I can get into more specifics, but they're towards my tastes. But these 2 are huge reasons why crafting is meaningless in 99% of MMORPGs out there.
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