Useful and meaningful crafting system

[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.