Useful and meaningful crafting system

[oldmandennis]

Kandrathe, in the expansion delay thread, wished for a useable and meaningful crafting system.

I was wondering what sort of system people would would like to see, perhaps based on some ideas from other MMO's that got it right.

I personally think the way they handled the Thorium Brotherhood is pretty cool, where it takes a group effort to get several skilled crafters the tools they need to put you over the top in the dungeon the materials come from. Also on the horizon: Zul'Gareb where to get the set bonuses from items you apparently need to be a crafter.

[Kevin]

Kandrathe, in the expansion delay thread, wished for a useable and meaningful crafting system.

I was wondering what sort of system people would would like to see, perhaps based on some ideas from other MMO's that got it right.

I personally think the way they handled the Thorium Brotherhood is pretty cool, where it takes a group effort to get several skilled crafters the tools they need to put you over the top in the dungeon the materials come from.  Also on the horizon: Zul'Gareb where to get the set bonuses from items you apparently need to be a crafter.
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Horizons had the best crafting system I've ever seen in an MMO. It had flaws and the fact that every item in the game had to be crafted or bought from a vendor (all that dropped was trash and crafting mats) and that they fired their economist during development and didn't put in checks against inflation, collusion and market problems that were recommended also led to demise of the game.

Horizons allowed you to be a crafter and nothing but a crafter and still progress your character. Sure you might still not be able to fight all that well if you were an L60 crafter but you got enough fighting skills to be able to get most of the mats you needed to craft (and like in WoW crafts got to a point where they didn't help you) without having to go out and kill something to craft (though getting things like tainted essence or lumber meant you needed to group or train in a combat profession to do it solo).

And what was the point to being only a crafter? Well there were player built towns. Crafters built every structure in the town. There broken bridges that needed a server wide effort to repair and when they were repaired it meant you could venture into a new zone or that a playable race was unlocked. When I say server wide effort I mean it too and it was done so that a L1 could contribute just like a L100 could. If all the low level mats and work were gathered you could at least become a mule to run the mats to that location while all the big fighters were killing the mobs along that route. Of course there were other world events that required hundreds of players to tackle it. It wasn't some little 40 man Molten Core raid. Of course their networking and servers weren't up to spec to always handle this either so that hurt the game.

You could progress any crafting you wanted to and you needed to get some skills high enough to get the next level of crafting. This wasn't just 200 skill in smithing. You need 200 in lumber harvesting, 100 in metal working, 150 in quarrying and maybe something else before you could become a mason say (I don't remember all the details). However so that you couldn't be the best in everything you had an overall craft level as well as a specific craft level. There were subsets of skills that got progressed at various rates as you leveled the specific craft level. So an amorsmith would get +6 to mining, +8 to metalworking, +4 to leatherworking per level say (though it was usually 6 skills), while a miner would get +10 to mining, +4 to metal working and +6 to stone quarrying. You could only have one profession at a time, though you never lost your skill in the other professions you knew, but if you got to be a L10 gatherer and a L10 armorsmith you would be like an L13 crafter making it that much harder to get crafting exp to progress whatever profession you were in. So you could advance several things but it got harder and harder. But this would allow you to do more and contribute more.

The crafting system was supposed to have customization of items, though this was NYI when I played. But the idea was if you were making a sword that did 100-120 damage and had a 2 second attack speed (numbers out of my ass) you could use one of 5 different blade designs with 4 different color choices and 3 different hilt choices. There was social clothing that you could make (lots of it) that looked cool but served no real purpose.

But imagine if you could damage the structures in Stormwind and a crafter could repair it and get rewards for it! Or that could build bridges in Dustwallow marsh, or build a road. Make it so that an L60 crafter gets no reward for working on the Dustwallow stuff but that an L30-45 would. Your character is now more a part of the world and gets rewards for it.

As far as equipment goes if you make crafted items too good and too easy to make you now have a market where a few people who got lucky can control the entire market and this crushes the casual player. So you either need an economy that relies more on crafting or have other outlets for it. Let my armorsmith change the look of that damn MacDonalds hat paladins are wearing. Let a swordsmith change the look of the 2 handed sword of uberness. Give more customiztion on this current system.

I'm actually not as made about some of the armor stuff as I had been. Dark Iron stuff is helpful and I don't mind that you need a group effort to get it. But the effort to get most crafted items is still higher than to get a drop item and not nearly as much fun to do for most of the game.


There are things in Saga of Rhyzom that I liked. The stuff you crafted wasn't always perfect. A perfect craft was generally better than a drop or vendor item but you had to have some luck and sometimes a friend helping you to get a perfect craft. Imperfect crafts would be worse than or equal to drops/vendor items. Crafting items were gotten from kills or from harvesting. Harvesting was dangerous. You could kill yourself you weren't careful. So having a friend who could say stabilize the ground while you were going after something so that you could focus on just harvesting as much as you could instead of harvesting some then stabilizing some, was helpful. However you could harvest successfully on your own but it was faster and better in a group. I liked this a lot. It meant you could go out and kill stuff for a quest and then when you were in a good resource area the whole party could be involved in getting material. Nodes were not obvious and if you didn't have the skill you couldn't track them. It was fun trying to push a node with Treesh to try and get a higher quality mat and risking blowing it up so you couldn't use it again right away (and where you would take damage so if there were mobs in the area you might have signed a death warrant) or taking it easy and just waiting a bit to hit the node again right away. Multiple people could get items from the same node but you risked blowing it up more that way but you could get more mats that way too. The node would only stay open for so long so when leveling you had to determine if you wanted to gather faster or more safely. Treesh and I since we had different skills at different things would often have one of us "heal" the node while the other power harvested from it. I've never had more fun harvesting mats than in that game.

Oh yeah and I mentioned quality of harvested materials. Mats for crafting had a quality value. So I could make armor with any type of glue, cloth, and hard item, but depending on what I used the total protection might be higher or lower or the special bonuses might be better for casting or melee but it would be the same piece of armor. And yes that meant I could use either iron bars, or pieces of wood, or a bug shell as the "hard" component of armor. It was pretty cool. Lots of room to explore and try stuff. And since classes weren't strictly defined you might want +spi and +agi over +stam and +str because of what they could do for how you specialized so it wasn't exactly easy to min max it either.

[Shriek]

Horizons had the best crafting system I've ever seen in an MMO.

Amen. It really felt like, "Here's a hammer and a mining pick. Go build a world." The apprentice tools and starter weapons were the only equippable items not made by players. Unfortunately, it lacked the diversity of WoW. Every lvl 45 2H Sword was exactly the same, barring techs (read: enchants). Until they added armor dye, every Tier IV set of plate looked like every other, and had exactly the same stats. And grinding resources was more boring and took longer than grinding faction in WoW. :blink:

But I loved being a crafter. People sought me out, once they knew what I could make, because they really needed my wares. I made equipment for my guildies that did more than just hold them over `til the next drop, it made them more powerful adventurers, more efficient crafters. I was hoping for some of that when I started my first WoW character and picked up leatherworking--I kept hoping as I ground trolls and turtles to specialize in Tribal--now I make armor kits with all my leather. :( (okay--I'm exaggerating a little...a little.)

The construction projects, like many aspects of Horizons, had a wealth of potential, but a fatal flaw, in that there wasn't much motivation to do them (excepting the unlocking of additional races). The housing and storage didn't work, and several of the bridges weren't useful due to the instant teleport system. My wife wanted, desperately, to see the bridge to Lesser Aradoth completed, but we could never convince anyone to work on it.

Oh--and you didn't want to go to the capital city there, either :P

And I'd trade an epic mount for a cargo disk, cargo armor, and road bonuses anyday :D

[Brista]

I joined Horizons quite late. At that point the game had become a little pointless since there were far more crafters than demand so all you were was a lowbie who would take an hour to make something a level 100 could make in 20 seconds. Because of the general lack of demand the level 100s did make low level items

Basically the equation is simple. The ability of high level crafters to provide goods need to approximately match the demand

Horizons failed to provide a satisfying economy because everything was glutted except buildings and people couldn't be bothered to build buildings as they weren't exciting enough. Building a castle to stave off an orc invasion that would have a realistic chance of winning would have been fun. Helping someone build a Large House because they fancy having one but can't be bothered to build it themselves because it takes ages isn't fun

WoW fails to provide a satisfying economy because it's so adventurer-oriented. Most adventurers much prefer to get a good item from a drop than from a crafter. Secondly it has standardised items. Arcanite Reaper may be fairly hard to make but all Arcanite Reapers are the same quality. If it was as hard to make but the stats varied then people would want many more made so they could get one from the top 10%. This would (to continue this example) mean that the price multiplies by 10 which both customers and suppliers would see as a nerf, even if the average stats remained the same. From the suppliers point of view it means you make some good some bad and some average ones and can only sell the good ones. From the customer's point of view the average price goes up.

They could introduce variable stats to new uber items but even so it only matters if crafted items are better than drops. If they did allow crafters to make an exceptionally high stat Uber Atomiser of Uberness then the end game becomes about who has access to a high level Swordsmith, enough access so that if the smith makes 10 swords he puts the best aside for you. This means being the king of end game pvp depends not on player skill, not on pvp ranking, not on successful raiding but on who you know. I don't expect them to do this in WoW for the simple reason that none of this is new information to the game designers, it's all old considerations that they reviewed and discarded as part of making WoW an incredibly easy game to excel in. Since they are in the business of satisfying egos it's important to the business that people don't become discouraged

SWG remains my favourite mmo for crafting, even though it's a long time now since I played. Basically each resource had variable stats. You used the best possible resource to make your uber item. And crafters who assiduously surveyed for resources and stockpiled them made better items than anyone else. Adventurers could find uber loot which was essentially a really good resource for a crafter to use. And stuff fell apart after you had had it a while, especially if you died a lot (pvp exempt from decay though)

[kandrathe]

Kandrathe, in the expansion delay thread, wished for a useable and meaningful crafting system.

I was wondering what sort of system people would would like to see, perhaps based on some ideas from other MMO's that got it right.

I personally think the way they handled the Thorium Brotherhood is pretty cool, where it takes a group effort to get several skilled crafters the tools they need to put you over the top in the dungeon the materials come from.  Also on the horizon: Zul'Gareb where to get the set bonuses from items you apparently need to be a crafter.
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Assessing the current system, let me be critical by craft;

Alchemy - Very useful, and very consumable. It should be harder to achieve mastery, with difficult quests and back story and such. There is a lack of high end recipes. I've never even seen a black lotus, so making an extremly rare BOP (soon to be BOE) herb is currently what reigns in the craft. I'm glad to see they added more recipes in Zul' Garab and I hope it is a trend. :-)

Blacksmithing - OMG what an undertaking. It is the one crafting I have not taken, due to the lack of appropriate utility of the items. It is the craft to take if you are really into crafting and consumes vast amounts of materials. There are a bazillion recipes, and specializations in Armor, Blunt , Axe or Swords. And, it takes a bazillion hours to master, do the quests, go everywhere to get the recipes, get all the reputations, to get the materials, and all along the way you keep thinking if only I can get my mastery maybe I will craft something useful, only to find that 95% of what you can do is useless. Along your way you will find the "Mega-UberSword", or "InvincibleArmor" drop off the boss who is guarding the chest that might contain the crafting recipe you *really* needed. Blacksmithing should be able to create items useable by lower classes that are mostly better than what they can find, or get from quest rewards. It is a hard balance between offering phat lewtz to motivate people to run instances, complete quests, or purchase from crafters. Currently smithing is unbalanced, and instances and quest rewards are THE way to equip.

Enchanting - First, to be fair, disenchanting and enchanting items really should have item level requirements. Otherwise, it is really pretty balanced, although hellaciously expensive to level since you need to destroy items (a source of income) to gather materials for enchants that nobody wants (to pay for). For most people they take another crafting profession (Tailor) to produce more useless items that nobody wants from grinded cloth, and then disenchant the crafted item for enchanting materials. That is until you get to higher levels of enchanting skill when people will pay you for an enchant when they change an item. Like alchemy, there should be more quests and back story. Making the master trainer in an instance is a tad cruel.

Engineering - is by far the most useful craft for personal use. Most of the items are only useable by engineers (who would rather make it themselves than buy it from you). This really is not so much a profession as a hobby. A profession is a way to earn money, and engineers do not really have much they can produce to sustain themselves. Luckily, most engineers take Mining where they can sell ore and smelted bars, stone, and gems to other engineers or smiths who require vast amounts of materials. My suggestion is to add more high level engineering items that are useable by non-engineers.

Herbalism - is way too easy to skill up. They should add quests and the need to learn to pick herbs by herb. Maybe even a herb preparation skill, similiar to smithing/smelting picking raw kingsblood is one thing, but prepared and bundled is another. Go ahead and make Black Lotus BOE, but make the skill to pick it and prepare it require an extensive quest line. If it is harder to get the skill to gather dreamfoil, then it is balanced to lower the number required per potion. The trend I'm going for here it to require the players to inculcate themselves into the game before they can "farm" it. You don't see gold farmers selling potions of Chromatic Resistance, or Dark Iron Helms at the AH.

Leatherworking - Pretty well done until level 225, and has some quests built in. Needs more leatherworking quests, like perhaps a scorpid armor quest from Taneris, a turtle scale quest from Hinterlands. This craft becomes abysmal after specialization, for the same reason that smithing fails, but also in that there is a dearth of recipes after level 225. Leatherworkers should be able to create and entire set or three within their specialization catering to Druid, Rogue, Shaman, and Hunter.

Mining - Like I mentioned with herbalism, the problem with mining skill is that it is too easily acquired. I really think the only solution is to immerse gathering skills within the quest reward/instance boss killing PVE system. If you make getting the ore more difficult, then you can reduce the amount of ore needed per item and make the crafted item have value, not the raw materials. How messed up is it that we have an economy where by crafting ore into a finished good you devalue the item. The problem is that there is more demand for the raw materials, and zero demand for the finished goods.

Skinning - See above regarding gathering skills. Skining skill is too easily leveled, with no quests and one objective (Finkles Skinner) at high levels. Require more quests, and learning skinning and hide preparation on different types of beasts. Make more types of hides (e.g. shadowcat, yeti, bear) which can be used to differentiate from the 30 stacks of heavy leather. Maybe in the wild leather items, rather than random Wild boots "of the Monkey" require gorilla hides, and "of the Bear" require bear hides. I dunno about "of the Eagle". :D

Tailoring - This skill, like smithing has many very useful items. Useful for disenchanting if nothing else. Smithed items are too expensive to disenchant, but hey, cloth falls from humanoids like leaves in fall. I resent the cloth hierarchy, but I understand the need for some "level" system. It would be nice to see more specializations in tailoring (holy, shadow, arcane).

Cooking - This is done very well. Lots of cooking quests and many useful eats. I'd still like to see more recipes (savory deviate delight style would be nice too). What's the harm in finding a way to cook most anything in the game? Rotted bear carcass soup anyone? Anyone?

First Aid - It's done ok up until the quest in Theramore, then *yawn* boring after that. Make this more intricate, require more than just cloth to make bandages. *broken record* More quests, more story line, yadda, yadda, yadda.

Fishing - I'd like a little more adventure and a little less drudgery here. Again, more quests like the Nat Pagle one, at lower levels as well. I've suggested before that I think there should be the off chance that "THE BIG ONE" takes a bite on your line and you have to fight a zone appropriate battle (with a nice drop of course).

Also, in general, more work should be made to make the crafts interdependant. There is a good amount of this and it makes everything have more value if it can be used by another profession.

[Tuftears]

Actually what bugs me about WoW and what I really liked in CoH is that you could customize your character appearance in CoH - and that was the way your character would look. In WoW, you are what you wear, and there's no customizability in that. You can't dye your armor, you can't choose the way your weapon looks... Your gear doesn't get more powerful along with you, you can only replace your gear with new items.

To fix that, I'd introduce a new function: armor customization. You talk to someone, he or she can customize the way your armor looks. Coloring armor is easy and just needs dyes, changing the shape (model) requires crafting materials. Give armor several 'slots' for crafter-added modifications similiar to how slotted items work in Diablo II.

So, for instance, you just got the Lightforge Helm, but it clashes horribly with all your nice silvery armor - so you take it to an armorsmith. The armorsmith colors it silver, adds a visor front, and now you're styling.

[Rinnhart]

As far as equipment goes if you make crafted items too good and too easy to make you now have a market where a few people who got lucky can control the entire market and this crushes the casual player. So you either need an economy that relies more on crafting or have other outlets for it. Let my armorsmith change the look of that damn MacDonalds hat paladins are wearing. Let a swordsmith change the look of the 2 handed sword of uberness. Give more customiztion on this current system
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Any common, super-good weapon is a bad idea. The Unstoppable Force is terrible. If it's a sign of things to come, I'm not looking forward to it, especially when their spellcaster itemization is so awful.

Customizable armor models would be awesome (though I kinda dig my turban). I'd really like white and gold Lightforge over the current Lawbringer graphics.

[Kevin]

I joined Horizons quite late. At that point the game had become a little pointless since there were far more crafters than demand so all you were was a lowbie who would take an hour to make something a level 100 could make in 20 seconds. Because of the general lack of demand the level 100s did make low level items

Basically the equation is simple. The ability of high level crafters to provide goods need to approximately match the demand

Horizons failed to provide a satisfying economy because everything was glutted except buildings and people couldn't be bothered to build buildings as they weren't exciting enough. Building a castle to stave off an orc invasion that would have a realistic chance of winning would have been fun. Helping someone build a Large House because they fancy having one but can't be bothered to build it themselves because it takes ages isn't fun

WoW fails to provide a satisfying economy because it's so adventurer-oriented. Most adventurers much prefer to get a good item from a drop than from a crafter. Secondly it has standardised items. Arcanite Reaper may be fairly hard to make but all Arcanite Reapers are the same quality. If it was as hard to make but the stats varied then people would want many more made so they could get one from the top 10%. This would (to continue this example) mean that the price multiplies by 10 which both customers and suppliers would see as a nerf, even if the average stats remained the same. From the suppliers point of view it means you make some good some bad and some average ones and can only sell the good ones. From the customer's point of view the average price goes up.

They could introduce variable stats to new uber items but even so it only matters if crafted items are better than drops. If they did allow crafters to make an exceptionally high stat Uber Atomiser of Uberness then the end game becomes about who has access to a high level Swordsmith, enough access so that if the smith makes 10 swords he puts the best aside for you. This means being the king of end game pvp depends not on player skill, not on pvp ranking, not on successful raiding but on who you know. I don't expect them to do this in WoW for the simple reason that none of this is new information to the game designers, it's all old considerations that they reviewed and discarded as part of making WoW an incredibly easy game to excel in. Since they are in the business of satisfying egos it's important to the business that people don't become discouraged

SWG remains my favourite mmo for crafting, even though it's a long time now since I played. Basically each resource had variable stats. You used the best possible resource to make your uber item. And crafters who assiduously surveyed for resources and stockpiled them made better items than anyone else. Adventurers could find uber loot which was essentially a really good resource for a crafter to use. And stuff fell apart after you had had it a while, especially if you died a lot (pvp exempt from decay though)
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Yes Horizons had failings that ruined the idea of the crafting system and many other things. However many of the ideas could have worked if there weren't so many fatal implementation flaws.

SWG sounds like it did some of the same stuff as Rhyzom. You could spend time looking for better mats but the stuff that was made with the lesser mats was still good enough that you wouldn't just turn it down. I really enjoyed that a piece of armor needed a lining, a binding agent, a hard armor substance, and something else (most crafted items took 4 things) and that if I needed a total of 10 binding agents I could 3 different ones that were either the same quality level but differnet types or even different quality levels of the same type. And again everything you used affected color, armor value modifiers, shape, etc. If you used bug shells it looked different than if you used wood. But I didn't play the game past a lot of the early stages so I don't know how bad it fell apart.

But yeah it's hard to find a game with a worse crafting system than WoW. :)

[Drasca]

I was wondering what sort of system people would would like to see, perhaps based on some ideas from other MMO's that got it right.
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I loved Earth and Beyond. I was a Terran Trader (crafter) in that game.

You had three levels of crafting. Mining, Components, and actual creation item design prints, and many were interchange-able. The best ammo always came from crafting from mining mats to ammo components to actual ammo creation itself. Many people took up weapons crafting just so they can make their own ammo. Plus, you gained exp for crafting, and a hefty chunk.

Every item had a quality value to it that's actually meaningful. Current durability and overall quality. Overall quality affected stats, weapon, duration, etc, and could be up to 200%, but only from the best of crafters.

The most important part? You could deconstruct items for components or components for their ore, and possibly learn its blueprint in the process. It was expensive, but sometimes demand was so high that was profitable.

Most of the attainable best items were crafted ones, learned from analyzing the best dropped weapons. Vendor items could be analyzed, and reproduced at lower overall cost and better quality.

Mining, components, and crafted items were always in demand. Some items could not be analyzed or traded, but the game was built on crafting the best of items. The supplies to the best were always a bit limited or expensive, but was damned worth it when you finally saved enough money to buy.

So yes. Crafters were meaningful, their items were superior to what was dropped by mobs because... well, they could analyze and reproduce them. Sometimes that meant destroying the original drop several times for its component parts, but crafted items were clearly superior.

There were other elements to crafting higher quality items, like faction, what favorite stations to use, near-impossible to attain million to one chance dropped +crafting items, timing and luck to prngs. Everyone wants that magic number 200%.

Mining was always plentiful somewhere in the galaxy.. just a matter of where... and not completely spread out. There were clusters of mining, sometimes guarded, but being a miner was profitable and useful at all levels.

[Walkiry]

I was wondering what sort of system people would would like to see, perhaps based on some ideas from other MMO's that got it right.
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Actually, all I'd like to see was the crafting process being more fun than watching a bar move. Take fishing, in WoW you click to drop the lure, wait, wait, wait, wait, right click when the fish bites, and repeat.

Now, take the Breath of Fire games. Those RPGs happened to have fishing as a side thing you could do, and just like WoW the fishes could give you a bonus when you ate them, and you could even cook them in some of these games to obtain dishes with different properties. The cooking part was as boring as combining a fish with something else (a potion, a random component, whatever), and giving them to the cook in your hometowm, but the fishing was fun because you had to actually try to drag the fish out of the water. You had to pull or let go depending on what the fish was doing; the stronger the fish, the smaller the reaction window you had, but if you had a better fishing pole this reaction window was bigger.

Now, of course, fishing is simple. Doing something like this for crafting an armour or a weapon may be a tad more complex...

[Rinnhart]

But yeah it's hard to find a game with a worse crafting system than WoW.  :)
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Not really: EverQuest.