09-01-2005, 12:05 AM
oldmandennis,Aug 30 2005, 06:08 PM Wrote: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.