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Where does Vanguard's crafting system rank?
Llars
Member UncommonPosts: 40
Of the best fantasy MMORPG crafting systems, where does Vanguard rank to you dedicated crafters out there?
The entry on GW2's crafting system has me wondering. I'm one of those people who love the idea of crafting but have never quite been able to stick with it. I did get pretty close to maxed in DAoC but that's about it. The most I was ever into crafting, though, was as an armorcrafter in Vanguard. For whatever reason I LOVED the ability to travel to different places, some of which were well off the beaten path, and craft away. If the game hadn't been so buggy it probably would have been my first max crafter. Do y'all consider that to have been a good system or was it just my love for the game in general rubbing off?
This begs the obvious follow up... What was/is the best, in your opinion?
SoW and Invis please! 
Comments
Vanguard's crafting system scores high on the annoying and tedium scale. I don't know how crafting works in GW2 but it would be hard to do it worse. I like the sort of crafting that is automatic. Put materials in, get stuff out. Maybe wait a little, but certainly not griding some god-awful minigame over and over.
Horrible... just horrible.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
SoW and Invis please!
Do you think that minigame crafting is somehow tied to fantasy theme? No, its not. There's no reason why an automatic crafting system found in Eve and Fallen Earth couldn't be implemented in a game with high fantasy setting.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
Everyone's idea of best crafting experience is definitely going to be different. I don't like the automatic crafting like you see in WoW and Rift. Push a button and go afk for a few minutes. I just won't bother because everyone is doing it. I do like it to take some effort, whether time or buttons like EQ2.
Since you're just wanting specifically fantasy and not sci fi, for me personally I like EQ2's system, followed by Istaria (Horizons), DAOC, and then Vanguard. Vanguard's system frustrates me quite often so I just can never stick with it for long. But I still prefer it to most of the newer mmo's crafting.
Another Vanguard topic......sigh..
[Mod Edit]
he asked "dedicated crafters" which you appearently are not, since you like "crafting that is automatic"
i rank vanguard's system as nr. 1 as far as crafting process itself goes
Generally when a player wants in-depth crafting, they want something with lots of control and detail. Automatic crafting systems generally don't appeal to the crafting heavy crowd. You essentially just came into a thread that's asking what the best restaurant is, and said McDonalds because its quick and dirty.
It's not a "mini-game", it's crafting, a side element that many fans enjoy. You are quite clearly not a crafting enthusiast, thus I don't understand why you'd reply with something like this.
Thanks for the replies. You guys pretty much answered the "auto-crafting" issue. The only thing I'd expound upon for anyone who might be reading this thread is that part of the appeal really is that the process makes success a reward. Add in the RP (rp in the purest fact that you really are fulfilling the role as a supplier of weapons... etc, not necessarily "thee" and "thou") and player interaction aspects and that's where folks find the apeal. It's very much like the appeal to the old mmo's method of leveling. The grind may be less popular today but don't forget there were tens of thousands of people enjoying EQ at it's peak, not to mention AC, DAoC, AO and others that were rolling at the time.
EQ2 did have a good system. At the time I thought they had changed the crafting game forever with their mini-game aspect of it.
SoW and Invis please!
Thats what she....
No seriously, VG and Mortal Online are my favorite crafting system games. VG because the actual crafting process and gear/crafting levels and quests, and MO because of the multiple materials that can be used producing a different final product look and performance and the resource refinement.
I loathe gathering and crafting in most other MMO's where you just click the shiny node to gather and hit create.
lol Whut?
I have no idea what that means but it does look fun to say lol
SoW and Invis please!
VGs crafting is indeed tedious to level, but has one of the more interesting item creations out there.
For MMORPG crafting though there was SWG (even post NGE) than there is everything else.
The system is nice.
But every craft is soooo boring in VG. I love the crafting system...and I know they were aiming for realism. But I greatly dislike all the professions. I guess the only ones I like are tailoring and carpentry. Actually, carpentry was pretty cool, especially cause I enjoyed making boats.
But I enjoyed alchemy, engineering, cooking, enchanting in WoW and all the professions had fun stuff...the craft system sucked balls...but the professions were tons of fun.
But since the title is crafting system....
It sucks balls too. Mostly cause of "events" that happen. In VG, you get random...I forgot what they are called now..."debuffs"...so you may have a quality 90 item, but RANDOMLY...out of your control...you get a...ah...a complication...and it lowers your quality every 5 "turns"...granted, you can get rid of it after a couple turns...but that is fail. And all the complications just made it annoying. Well maybe not all of them, but that particular one just pissed me off. And it was rather common, too...
Granted, items are pretty customizable. You get gems or whatever they are, that you can put into an item...and it gives various buffs, depending on the type of gem and resources you use. So that is a neat feature to the crafting system. And there are different quality items, that add differences to different items.
The only crafting system I've experienced that can actually stand up to EVE is Mortal Online. If you think it's simply "automatic crafting" you've never actually done it or couldn't look beyond the fact that it has no tedious, carpul tunnel inducing, mini-game tied to it.
Some people just want to play a mini-game.
Some want to be able to make their own stuff as simply as possible.
Others want a system that involves an actual level of depth and understand of what it is you're making, and it's value. This is what EVE and MO's crafting system gives you. It may be "crafting that is automatic" to people who don't like that other aspect of crafting, an economy.
Just because a system doesn't make you do 50 clicks before you get an end result doesn't make it inferior. Especially when the only difference between VG crafting and WoW crafting is those 50 clicks. Even more so when the items you craft, with the exception of boats and houses, don't have any real impact on the game. IE: crafted items aren't the best items in game, they sit side by side on the AH or broker with items dropped off mobs, often times aren't as good as quest rewards, and if the crafting system didn't exist it wouldn't have an effect on the game.
How good can a crafting system possibly be if it doesn't actually provide any benefit to the game aside from giving people who like to craft the ability to craft. In the end it's just like WoW, take it out, and it doesn't matter. Try and say that about EVE.
(yeah... I messed up the block-quote trying to be clever.. My bad)
I get that. The only experience I've had with the auto-type is the SW:TOR model. I didn't hate it but it seemed like it was guaranteed to suffer from your last point. It seemed like a lot of the stuff that was made was doomed to just be sold back to vendors. (It was kinda hard to tell though because things were going pretty good. There's always a rush on everything at the beginning of an MMORPG. Pretty lucrative to even the marginally savvy crafters. It seemed as is things were tapering off when I stopped playing though). I could be wrong there but either way...
...my question for you or anyone else who mentioned MO's crafting is, what made it stand out to you, specifically? I've gathered it's an auto-craft type of system? Are there like apprentices you hire or something? How does it provide more benefit to the game than most other systems? What's to stop everyone from doing it and diluting the markets?
(I know I'm leaving out EVE. It's not out of any disrespect. Obviously, its a quality, successful game. I just can't get into it. I tried but I'm an escapist gamer and I just can't seem to get that out of EVE)
SoW and Invis please!
While MO uses the autocrafting stye, have mats click ok, and the game makes the item without using any kind of mini-game mechanic ala VG or EQ2, it requires you to experiment with your materials; at least in so far as if you don't want to search onlne for what combinations to use.
If you want to know how to craft a bow, check online about how dif. types of bows are made. That's pretty much how you'll make a bow in MO. It's been a while sinse of played, and I can't remember the specifics. You don't have recipes that you magically learn when you gain a set amount of levels in your crafting proffession, in fact a crafter in MO is a crafter; not a mage whith a crafting proffesion. If you're a weapon smith, then you're a weaponsmith, and you probably specialize in a particular type of weapon. You have to decide what materials to you, how much of each material will go into each part of the item, and you'll have to test (if you didn't cheat and look online for someones guide on weaponsmithing) that weapon to see if it's any good. You could make a dagger out of gold, but that not going to be a very good dagger, gold is heavy and not very hard, so you want to use a metal that is more durable without being to heavy. You have to craft the handle, botht he core and the outer grip, and that's going to have an effect on the weapon. Make the handle out of cheap materials and it'll be to light, to heavy, maybe it'll brak easy.
Were just about every MMO says you need this amount of this item and that item to make this weapon, MO says you can make this type of weapon, here are all the materials at your disposal, now combine them and see how it works. And you're not just limitted to using metal to make a blade, how about trying bone, or maybe wood?
Unfortunetly MO had a poorly implimented economy. I'm really not a fan of standing around spamming chat to sell stuff, and getting a house with a vendor was no small task when I played, in fact personal vendors didn't exist for most of my time there. Plus bugs are kind of a feature of the game.
EVE is deffinetly not for everyone, most people want to be a person in an virtual world, and yeah...you're a ship. The crafting isn't so much about actually crafting as it is about knowing what to craft given your location.
For me, the best crafting systems are the ones that are an integral part of the game. Darkfall doesn't count. It's WoW crafting, and even if everything in the game is player made, you make so much of the same thing, can do every crafting, and need to grind, grind, grind, grind to make the good stuff, and has such a horribly implimented economy, that it completely nullifies the fact that everything is player made.
To me, EVE is the best. I wanna sell what I crafft, that's for me is the point of crafting, it's everything that happens after I make an item that matters, and not so much the type of clicks I have to make while crafting. Plus my nerves are bad and I can't click a mouse 50 times to make a single item, that hurts to much. I also enjoy being challenged, gamey mechanics aren't really challenging. manipulating a market, or trying to figure out the best materials and composition to make a bow that will shoot something 100ft away for good damage is fun.
This.
+1 to the guy that said "There's SWG and then there's everything else."
SWG gave you both a mini-game and automatic crafting. You could experiment to your heart's delight, applying materials with varying qualities to standard recipes and make items with varying properties. And you could turn a great design into a schematic instead of an item, then plug it into a factory to make many copies. Nothing else really compares to that...
When i look at a crafting system, i look at a few things:
1. Ability to make rare items that not everyone can make
2. Ability to customize the heck out of items you make
3. Flexibility in approach to the crafting process ( i.e stats )
Vangaurd has all 3 of those and is for me the 2nd best crafting system I have ever seen. SWG I would say was the best however it was done a bit differently ( not so much about stats and crafting gear ) but more about resource aquisition.. which is a neat problem in itself when you are dealing with a real living breathing world-system.
Any crafting system taken seriously needs to look/feel like adventuring, something everyone can enter, but certainly not everyone can be "the best at".
All of the other systems ( wow, rift, etc etc etc . . . ) are really just tacked on and have no real depth/complexity to them at all. I think you can look at it like this:
Can people just craft with said crafting system in said MMO and have that be their gameplay ? If yes, they you may have something..
Otherwise its some half-baked shallow system to say hey sure, we have crafting <check off that box>
I actually really liked that mini game. I did get a bit burnt out but I wanted to be able to craft boats as quickly as possible. You had to do different puzzles to create different items, and you had to build all of the components to make an item. I think the minigame and component crafting in Vanguard was great but the game did force you to play that mini game a lot to raise crafting level. Ideally, a game would have a similar minigame but not require crafting level. You would get the fun of the puzzle without having to do it literally 1000's of times.
Best game for crafters is still EVE though, since it is the only game where people actually use crafted equipment. In EVE people need to buy crafted stuff constantly since they lose it often. In most games once you get some awesome drop you never ever need a piece of crafted gear to go into that slot, ever.
Are you a Pavlovian Fish Biscuit Addict? Get Help Now!
I will play no more MMORPGs until somethign good comes out!
LOL
This thread is funny.
Vanguard crafting is pretty engaged. You have to solve a minigame. You have to keep track of utilities, action points, etc. You have to get good crafting gear, quest for certain recipes, other recipes cost tons of money, again other recipes need special crafting drops, and so on.
And Vanguard offers a lot of options about what you can craft.
I would say Vanguard ranks pretty high, except of course if you want a trivial crafting system, as apparently many people in this thread do. Then obviously theres a ton of games with more simple crafting.
This says it all really..
http://wiki.silkyvenom.com/index.php/Crafting
Crafting in vanguard is grindy and irritating at times but somehow in a good way.
This kind of grind (skill level increase, work orders, sigils farm, reputation farm, finding rare resources) is memorable and strangely addictive.
This general feeling of accomplish something worthy after hours on hours of "hard work" is IMO a feeling that missing from newer mmos.
Star Wars Galaxies is the pinnacle of crafting with EVE Online and Everquest 2 following up right behind it.
Like many have posted, I found Vanguard to be annoyingly tedious. The mini game seemed less concerned with your stats and more concerned with random, terrible happenings.