Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
The core of crafting is customizing or gather materials grind ?
iixviiiix
Member RarePosts: 2,256
In my opinion , crafting interest because it allow player to create they own item , customizing , make the item difference than the original .
But in most MMO , crafting is only about gather materials grind .
So , what do you think ?
The core of crafting is customizing item or just about gather materials grind ?
Comments
I don't know what you mean by core.
Epic Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAigCvelkhQ&list=PLo9FRw1AkDuQLEz7Gvvaz3ideB2NpFtT1
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos?&sort=-downloads&page=1
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you playing an MMORPG?"
The point of crafting is of course customization.
How is the point of crafting customization? Crafting, implemented as a feature in many MMORPGs, is usually not just about customizing an item as crafting is usually about making an item. I've never in my life played an MMORPG which implements crafting as a means to customize an item. I think by customizing an item or making the item different than the original, you mean to say "refining", "socketing", or, "upgrading", no? Anyways, I would define crafting as "making an item" and not about customizing an item.
Crafting for me was about creating wealth so I could purchase the most expensive mounts/gear, support my guild and friends and try to control a part of the market.
I always purchased materials through an auction house or other players and never gathered.
I found it less profitable/hour to gather.
So, the core of crafting for me was wealth creation.
My personal opinion and experience..
Star Wars Galaxies
had the best crafting system I have ever had the pleasure of playing. For me it was all about gathering ever changing resources, that will effect the end product that I craft.. It was the best of both worlds in both gathering and customizing.. It was a true shame and a sad moment that SOE was unable to fix the *&%^&^%&*&*%$$)*@ damn bugs.. Anyone with an IQ over 100 that was impartial to attitude would of fixed the problems.. Anyways I digress, sorry..
I would like to see a similar system like SWG, maybe not as complex, but similar.. BUT, in any case, the only way a true fun crafting system will thrive is if the products being made are EQUAL if not better then loot drop.. If you treat player made items as nothing more then vendor trash or just a useless hobby, why bother?
Originally posted by laokoko
"if you want to be a game designer, you should sell your house and fund your game. Since if you won't even fund your own game, no one will".
I agree.. The leveling up requirement to have access to new recipes is just stupid.. I actually enjoyed what EQ1 did.. You can attempt any recipe you wanted, but the result of success and failure was directly tired into your skill level.. I look at real life crafting, rather it be cooking or building a bookshelf.. Anyone can attempt those, but the results will vary.. LOL However, I don't want the results too complicated.. Let me give you an example:
Player A with a skill level of 1 has a 50% success rate of creating a tier 1 recipe. Step 2 in the process will check to see what quality of product it is.. Maybe have 5 outcomes from poor > excellent.. Using a food item maybe the poor quality burger gives you +1 pt of dexterity, whereas the excellent burger gives you +5 pts.. The chances of making an excellent burger at skill level 1 is 10% after the first check of success/failure.. So basically 5%.. Player A has the right to attempt to cook a Porterhouse steak, but since that is a tier 10 recipe his odds are 5% success on the first check and 10% on the second check.. So basically a 0.5% chance.. Even a blind squirrel can find an acorn once in awhile.. LOL A 1 in 200 chance is a lot of wasted resources to get lucky.. LOL
However, Player B with a maxed out skill level may have a 99% success rate on tier 1 recipes, and a 60% chance on excellent.. And his ability in making that tier 10 Porterhouse is much better as well.. Ya'll get the idea.. But yes, the more you craft the better you get at your trade and easier things will become (leveling)..
I find crafting systems funny, actually. The OP is right, that the primary focus is generally material gathering. So the assumption is that as long as I can get my hands on some copper, I can bang out like 1000 of the same copper sword. I never really get any better at making that copper sword. I never innovate. I never create anything that's so amazing and rare that I'd never sell it to anyone. Nope, just like a "Master Craftsman" working on a production line, mass producing the same thing over and over.
They really do need to make crafting more meaningful. Period.
Crazkanuk
----------------
Azarelos - 90 Hunter - Emerald
Durnzig - 90 Paladin - Emerald
Demonicron - 90 Death Knight - Emerald Dream - US
Tankinpain - 90 Monk - Azjol-Nerub - US
Brindell - 90 Warrior - Emerald Dream - US
----------------
These days I would agree, that crafting has really turned into a resource grind. Whether the end goal is to create wealth or anything else, the route to that is through resource grind. Whether that's grinding money to buy mats through AH or literally going into the world and grinding as many resources as possible, it's all pretty much the same. In the recent future I have yet to see any game really make crafting an interesting and fun activity except if you wanna include Minecraft or even Trove. Even then though, it was still find mats, click button, wait for item. No real "Process"
I think the OP is trying to get that crafting "should" be more about customization. Meaning that a player not only can craft that Copper sword x1000 but can also make them different than say someone else. I have yet to find a game that really allowed a player to do this, although it has been awhile since I really hardcore played a recent AAA game, so I can't speak for all. I have enjoyed crafting systems in the past but typically never really got to max skill because either it didn't seem worth it in the long run (already multiple high end crafters on the server for said craft) or if I did get max it was for something specific (Wow enchanting comes to mind, or tailoring for the different enchants). This really makes the crafting mini game pretty lack luster IMO, especially since I'm not a "market control" person. Although in most games these days I forgo crafting, cause it's all pretty much the same and unless you are a market control person or have tons of gold/time to invest, you'll never really become that top end server crafter. Most of the time, the crafting is so grindy that many people get to high end crafter, and you don't have those specific people per server that were the only 2-3 high end crafters, so takes some of the point away there too cause so many people get to high end crafting when it's only a grind. (just need the time n money to do it)
Although I would love to see a crafting system more about customization and focused on players. I would agree with what I think the OP is trying to get at, that some devs really need to try and make crafting more important, more customizable, more fun and interesting than what we have seen in the past couple years and not to mention, the place where you get the BEST gear. I know games like SOTA, Albion Online, Trove and a couple others are going for more important and interesting crafting systems. I look forward to what they are going to give us, but I agree in the end that crafting really needs to be a more interesting activity then what we have seen in the past. I agree with the above poster that EQ1 crafting was quite fun, and a system that I would absolutely support. Being able to craft anything but success based on skill is a great way to do crafting, it's just how do you create the item:
(ie what mats, is it just gathering or do you have to craft multiple items to get the items needed to make a item or adding items to add customization whether it be stat customization or look customization)
The last crafting system I played was Age of Wushu, which was fun but more of the same. I think the one thing that did make it stand out was to increase skill in crafting for the daily, you played a mini game with a trainer, which made it a bit different but after playing the game a bunch of times, it felt lack luster once more. I think that hard parts of all of this is:
1.) How do you make a crafting system that is fun and interesting?
2.) How do you make a crafting system that will allow for customization of items without making the same customizations for every player?
3.) How do you make a crafting system with less resource grind but still takes a long time to master?
4.) How do you make a crafting system that is skill based and not time/gold based?
5.) How do you make a crafting system that allows for unlimited creativity by the crafter but without making items OP or barely different from others?
6.) How do you make a crafting system that is the best place to get top end gear without flooding the market with said gear?
7.) How do you make a crafting system that is extremely complex but easy to manage by the devs?
8.) How do you make a crafting system that is complex but not too grindy or frustrating? (How do you keep the fun in it but make it meaningful in time and in result)
These are just some off the top of my head, but I think if we could answer some of these questions we could see some more interesting crafting systems in our games. I really think some of these questions could be what devs have been struggling with when trying to make truly meaningful crafting.
This is an interesting list of questions, I'm glad you took the time to write them up.
I'd like to take a stab at answering them, though I'm going to rearrange the order a bit.
7.) How do you make a crafting system that is extremely complex but easy to manage by the devs?
I think this question is the one to consider first because it will underlie a lot of the rest of the design. The first step IMO is to make the ingredient system completely orderly. That means there are, say, 30 types of ingredients that can be found in the world, period; no more may ever be added. At least one of each ingredient type must be in the beta version of the game. All future updating (which is the main source of dev management difficulties) would be limited to new recipes and new instances of each ingredient type.
2.) How do you make a crafting system that will allow for customization of items without making the same customizations for every player?
This one, I disagree with it unless I'm interpreting it wrong. Every player should be able to craft the same full array of customizations. There is some possibility of randomizing the recipes a bit such that each player has to discover their own instead of just looking them up in a wiki - A Tale in The desert's paint-mixing system is the only successful example of doing this that I've seen. The general problem with this is that some ingredients are more expensive or more time-consuming to obtain than others, and you get situations like one player can craft an item with 5 quartz but the other needs 5 diamonds, and a situation like that can be really unfair to the second player.
So either way, I'd like to ask for clarification on this question.
5.) How do you make a crafting system that allows for unlimited creativity by the crafter but without making items OP or barely different from others?
This question is asking two very different things, so I'm going to leave the question of overpowered items for later. Many craftable items have no power; items that affect the character's stats are a special case that requires extra balancing, which will need to be heavily playtested; it's not relevant to the early design of the crafting system. As far as "barely different from others" don't forget that players may very well want to craft items that are very similar to others', and should be able to do so. I think the 'unlimited creativity' part covers allowing players to craft items that are very different from others'.
So let's combine the remains of question five with this:
1.) How do you make a crafting system that is fun and interesting?
To get:
X.) What kind of crafting system is fun, interesting, and allows for unlimited player creativity (or as unlimited as much as is practical)?
The currently existing crafting systems that allow for a lot of creativity all give the player some kind of canvas, grid, or fishtank to work within. (Though these same systems can create a moderation problem in terms of allowing players to create content unsuitable for children or young teens.) Systems that allow a medium amount of creativity (which might still be a good choice for some types of crafting) are more like algebra - the player is given crafting processes (mathematical operations) which have slots (variables) where the player can plug in any ingredient (number) they have available. It's possible to combine the two - canvas or fishtank systems are ideal for crafting appearances of things, while grids and algebra are ideal for crafting functionality of things. A player can craft a semi-standardized functional item then use a second crafting action to give that item a unique, artistic appearance.
As far as fun goes, it's actually important not to make the crafting system too complex or mysterious. Ryzom is a sad example of a crafting system which is interesting but fails to be fun due to the difficulty of figuring out what any given ingredient is contributing to a crafted item, and thus the near impossibility of figuring out what ingredients to go gather to craft an item with desired traits. (Ryzom's crafting system suffers from multiple problems, but this one is clearly visible in the first 10 levels and remains a problem to high levels.)
4.) How do you make a crafting system that is skill based and not time/gold based?
This question is wrong, IMO. You don't want a crafting system which is entirely skill based and not at all time or gold based. You want a system which is about half time base, 1/4 skill based, and 1/4 gold based. Individual recipes within the system can require less of one thing or another, allowing players to find things to craft even if they are weak in one of these three areas. I'd rather ask a slightly different question: How do you balance crafting such that low level crafting isn't just a money pit because low level crafters can't compete with high level ones? Slanting low-level crafting projects towards 1-time crafts used by the player instead of salable items is a good start, but not a complete answer to this problem.
3.) How do you make a crafting system with less resource grind but still takes a long time to master?
8.) How do you make a crafting system that is complex but not too grindy or frustrating? (How do you keep the fun in it but make it meaningful in time and in result)
These two questions seem basically the same to me. Depends how you define both resource grind and mastering the system. Personally I think the ideal kind of crafting system is the kind where you have to craft appliances to unlock new crafting and new tech tree branches. I don't see resource grind as a huge problem, instead the problem is mostly pacing the player's gathering so they can spread it out over a variety of gameplay actions instead of just doing one thing over and over. Also, making those gameplay actions inherently fun (i.e. like a good minigame) rather than boring (click, wait, click, wait...). The difficulty with this solution is the main difficulty with developing a good crafting system, or a good game for that matter - it's expensive in development time.
6.) How do you make a crafting system that is the best place to get top end gear without flooding the market with said gear?
There are a lot of assumptions in this question - that the game has gear that affects player stats at all, that players are allowed to sell this gear to each other, that players agree on what top end gear is, that there is a non-crafting source of gear, and that players themselves won't compensate for a temporarily flooded market by shifting to crafting something else. Many MMOs work fine without a non-crafting source of gear; this seems to be the ideal way to begin answering question 6 with one exception - if it's a cash shop game, convincing the monetization committee not to put any top end or overpowered gear in it might be challenging. But, at that point it's no longer a design issue, so it's somewhat off-topic for this question.
I think I've covered all the questions, so I'll sum up. A good crafting system should be designed according to the following principles:
A.) Establish all ingredient categories early in the development process; new ones are not permitted to be added in expansions. Individual ingredients should not be limited to a single source within the game, so that players who want that ingredient aren't forced to repeatedly kill one kind of monster or gather with one method. Monster drops should be available from different levels of monsters, and ingredients that can be drop-hunted by low level players should not be useless to mid and high level players.
B.) Make all ingredients of a type interchangable in crafting processes, and the results should be predictable and logical based on the ingredients chosen. This requires that for every ingredient there should be a complete and standard set of properties. All items resulting from a crafting process should also have similar functionality in the game. For example, every article of clothing should have three colors (main, accent, trim), which can be changed by dying the item. Also, a dye type should exist for each color in the game's standard color palette.
C.) Implement a standardized fishtank or canvas GUI allowing players to customize the appearance of crafted items throughout the game; might also be a good development tool, especially if player-created content can possibly be promoted to official content by mods/devs.
D.) Control the player's pace in terms of both grinding and mastering the crafting system by means of the unlock requirements for branches of the tech tree. These unlock requirements should not be tied to combat levels, but instead should require crafting appliances and/or completing gathering or crafting quests. This pacing system should encourage players to craft one of each item for their own use, never batches of the same item unless the player can use many (e.g. consumable items, items used as ingredients in further crafting, or appliance parts that regularly wear out and must be replaced). This pacing system should encourage players to divide their play time between combat and gathering/farming to prevent boredom leading to the feeling of grindiness.
E.) Crafting should be the only source of gear, with 2 exceptions: minimum quality per level gear may optionally be available from a different source, and costumes that don't affect stats may optionally be available from a different source. Any gear available from a non-crafting source, such as an NPC shop, a monster drop, or a cash shop, still need to have functionality consistent with crafted gear (e.g. dyability). All of this also applies to pets and mounts if these are craftable (breedable) within the game.
F.) As much as the development budget allows, gathering and crafting processes should involve minigame or sim style play with an element of skill; though each skill-intensive method should have an alternative low-skill method which take a lot of time or money instead.
What do you think?
My ideal crafting system would have some connection to the real world process of crafting the thing. So alchemy may involve certain chemical reactions while tailoring may involve some basic stitch combinations or something. The challenge would be to make this actually challenging and not just something people could look up on a wiki so maybe some procedural or random element. I would love if you were forced to learn a bit of the theory of crafting in real life to craft in an MMO (not a huge amount but enough to make it time consuming and challenging without being overly repetitive.) I don't know if it would be even possible to design something like I have in mind that would work in a game but if so it would be very cool.
As far as materials. I think basic materials should be easy to obtain but if you want to make your uber dragon scale armor you probably need to actually go kill a dragon for that or pay someone else to do it.
I *hate* crafting where you can go AFK or macro it and just have to make thousands of the same thing over and over. That's so stupid...
There are a couple of reasons why crafting is mainly about gathering materials or the way it is. I pretty much devoted an entire blog to MMOcrafting and MMOEconomics which if you wish to read about it, just click on my signature below.
But the problem with crafting is that it has no value. The gear you make isn't utilized by players simply because crafting gear is usually subpar than drops, especially at end game. Also players don't take the time to find crafting gear on the AH while leveling because quest gear and drops provide enough gear for their needs, not to mention gear quickly becomes outdated during the leveling process.
The solute to fix crafting is too make it more valuable and demanding. Remove gear from quest rewards, greatly reduce drop rates or remove it entirely, increase the barriers to entry for crafting as in make it a huge time and money sink, make gear and especially materials valuable for all levels, meaning copper is still needed for high end recipes. Personally I think MMOs need to switch from a level base to skill base game that way gear and materials isn't obsolete or at least have a much longer life span. I also think a player's crafting skill should predict better results such as high quality items or more than one consumable being made. Finally, players should be able to pick up more than one tradeskill per character, if not all but one main tradeskill while the rest are secondary skills and with secondary skills tied to the main skill players are capable of crafting items that are required by both skills for more variation.
Check out this article on Why Crafting Sucks
Nice post OP. I think it would help a lot of developers if they made customization the core aspect of crafting.
I BS you not you just described the Age of Wushu crafting system in detail. For the reasons you listed it's the best crafting I've experienced. I wish a Western Dev would just clone that game on a 2015 engine w/o a cash shop
.
Enjoyed crafting in that game. Enjoyed buying from great crafters.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
The system I created you have exploration, customization, research and uniqueness. Subjective if that's fun.
Use ability cards that can be found, researched and learned for special crafting sets. Each ability card can be researched further to your choice with random results. Crafting chains where the more specialist and more processes used yielding better and unique items.
Your ability card choices, research choices and manufacturing choices make more difference than you grind out materials.
Time and gold will generally always be a part of it. I really don't see how you do it another way with trade.
Research and manufacturing choices allow uniqueness. If focus on durablity your armor will last longer. You can could do a minimum step build for armor or you could enchant or you could buy your pieces from specialist who may forge special metals, gems or etc.
Rare loot to make rare gear.
Ignore balance to a degree and make gear situational. Nothing is over perfect for every location or situation.
Subjective.
I kind of agree. I would be MUCH more apt to craft if I could have some input into the item I am making. But gathering bits to make more bits so I can then combine them into uber bits so I can make the same item as every other crafter, is to my taste, tedium incarnate.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
Input such as increased chance of making a higher quality item based off your skill? Or literally assembling them cosmetically? Or maybe both?
Check out this article on Why Crafting Sucks
Double post.
Check out this article on Why Crafting Sucks