Idea for Crafting and Stabilizing the D3 Economy

[MongoJerry]

Hi, everyone. I have an idea that I think would be fun and help stabilize the economy in D3. I mentioned this idea in the "A few ideas of how to save D3," but I think it got drowned out by the side discussion in that thread, so I'd like to repeat and expand on the idea here. The idea is this:

1. The very best legendary or set class specific items should be the result of crafting recipes.

2. The class specific items that result should be account bound. (The mechanics for this are already in the game. For example, all of the materials for the Staff of Herding are account bound).

3. The items should have a lot of randomness in terms of their stats, so it may take a number of crafts to get a decent item, dozens to get a very good item, and perhaps hundreds to get a nearly perfect item.

4. These crafting recipies should take a large amount of materials both in terms of gold and crafting supplies.

5. All other items for all other slots will continue to be non-account bound and purchaseable on the auction house.


The reason I believe that this proposal would work well is because:

1. It would be a huge gold sink both in terms of literal gold used and in terms of items that get salvaged for crafting supplies rather than being sold to the vendor. This would help keep gold a valuable commodity.

2. This would give the blacksmith continued viability at the late stages in the game.

3. This would create a large commodity market in the auction house for crafting materials.

4. At the same time, it maintains the viability of the auction house to sell the best items in all non-class specific equipment slots.


What do you think?

[FireIceTalon]

I like the idea of Legendaries being crafted only. I mean, the drop rates on them are very, very, very low anyways, so making them craft only would probably make farming more satisfying and seem less tiresome since you know you HAVE to craft them to obtain them - therefore you just have to farm the resources to do so, and those drop plenty. Yellow items would still be well covered by finding them or using the AH. Outside of making Legendaries "craft only" though, I am not sure the blacksmith can ever match the AH - since an upgrade through the AH is likely simpler and cheaper to do almost always.

I think your idea has potential. Would need to see it in practice though to know for sure.

[MonTy]

As I said over Mumble, I think it's a brilliant idea, especially having it be your class specific gear. At the moment they seem underwhelming, when instead I think they should be the highlighted item of each class, as they would be with your system after some hard work with crafting. If only Blizzard was listening

[Ell_man]

I think this would feel similar to the status quo. Now, you farm items to sell for gold on the AH so you can buy stuff on the AH. With your proposed system you farm gold and materials so that you can click combine at the blacksmith and get something good. I'd rather see the average quality of blue and yellow items you get from monsters improved or at least have them skew their stats towards the class you're playing. For example, if you're playing a barbarian strength has a much higher chance of occurring on the item. Also I'd like to see a system for improving the drops of the hardest champion/rare packs. Have battle.net calculate which combinations of champion/rares are most "skipped" and have the most kills of players and increase the quality of their drops accordingly. It would be like having more magic find on when you kill the hardest champion/rares.

Finally vendors should only have a limited supply of blue items for sale not an infinite! If you happen to roll a perfect blue weapon from a merchant you shouldn't be able to buy 100 of that item and put them up on the AH! I think this is the cause of blues on the AH beating legendarys because its so easy to find excellently rolled blues in large quantities.

[Brista]

First, a general point: I don't think the D3 economy is broken, it's just different. Very different from anything we've seen before in online games.

We're all going through a cognitive shift where we pick up an item and think it's amazing then discover we can't even sell it for vendor price on the gold AH. We also have a cognitive bias towards green and gold items from our days in earlier games. I'm afraid those are not flaws in the system, they're flaws in us.

Onto specifics, the system seems to be forcing everyone to be a crafter. There are many players who are quite firmly against that idea. So you risk spoiling some people's enjoyment by imposing a playstyle across the board.

Also how would people find these recipes? If they're rare drop that will suck, it would be like trying to complete Griswold's Set in D2 by finding every piece. (As a WD I'd need to find my Ceremonial Dagger, Voodoo Mask and Mojo). If they're bundled in with level 10 Blacksmith then everyone gets the best item in the game, potentially without much effort, and could get it without even finishing Nightmare.

Lastly the classes don't have parity of specialist gear. I get head, weapon, offhand. A Barb gets weapon and belt. Not really as good.

[MongoJerry]

First, a general point: I don't think the D3 economy is broken, it's just different. Very different from anything we've seen before in online games.

When items are selling for 10 million+ gold after the game has been released for less than two weeks, it shows enormous gold inflation is around the corner, if it's not already here. There just aren't enough gold sinks in the game, which means if something doesn't change, it won't be long before gold becomes as worthless in D3 as it was in D2.

Onto specifics, the system seems to be forcing everyone to be a crafter. There are many players who are quite firmly against that idea. So you risk spoiling some people's enjoyment by imposing a playstyle across the board.

I'm not exactly sure how it's forcing a person to do something. They don't have to use the best class specific items if they don't want to. But if they want to, then they need to spend the gold and materials crafting them. Many people don't like to use the auction house to find their items, either, so by enabling the blacksmith to do something useful at the end game, this will enable them to create a few excellent pieces for their character without having to using the AH.

Also how would people find these recipes? If they're rare drop that will suck, it would be like trying to complete Griswold's Set in D2 by finding every piece. (As a WD I'd need to find my Ceremonial Dagger, Voodoo Mask and Mojo). If they're bundled in with level 10 Blacksmith then everyone gets the best item in the game, potentially without much effort, and could get it without even finishing Nightmare.

I don't think they should be too difficult to find. Perhaps they could be farmable drops. The difficulty will come from the sheer volume of crafting materials needed to create a good version of the item. As I said, the crafts should be expensive to create and have a lot of randomness in their stats, so one should be expected to make a large number of them to make a good one and perhaps hundreds to make a near "perfect" one. Thus, you could see having to craft for your class specific gear, expending enormous sums of gold and crafting supplies, for your entire character's career just to get that one perfect item. (And then a new upgraded recipe will be released and it'll be time to start over again).

Lastly the classes don't have parity of specialist gear. I get head, weapon, offhand. A Barb gets weapon and belt. Not really as good.

That's true. Barbs should get helms or specialized shields imho. That's something that should be fixed separate from this.

[Taelas]

Not all Barbarians use shields.

[MongoJerry]

Not all Barbarians use shields.

Not all Wizards use Wizard off-hands, either. I'm not sure what your point is. However, I did make the suggestion to add helms for Barbarians as well.

[Taelas]

The wizard's off-hand is primarily to partner his wizard-unique wand. Barbarians already have the functional equivalent; we can dual-wield one-handed Mighty weapons. Giving Barbarians shields as well seems to give us a benefit over other classes.

[FireIceTalon]

Come Inferno time, I bet 1-handed weapon and shield will be a must for Barbs. I don't know for sure but this seems to be the consensus among Barbs who are in Inferno already. Which is unfortunate, because dual-wielding is quite fun.