Crafting System

ArchivedUser

Hello all, I would like to discuss my idea on a crafting system that I hope Ashes of Creation will use all or some of the ideas.

Lets start with harvesting. I will focus on one resource to save space. Its time that we no longer just find pieces of trees, roots or ore just laying around on the ground. Picture this, you are looking for wood? Well you come upon a stand of trees whip out your trusty axe and chop one down. You see the tree actually fall, yes fully animated harvesting, but your work is not done, time to buck up the tree into usable pieces to bring to the sawmill. This is not a solo only event, yes one person chops the tree down, but multiple people should be able to cut the pieces off they want. until the tree is exhausted. Trees will regen of course so the land will not look like a gigantic cut block.

Next is the sawmill! You are loaded up on wood more than you can carry, but need more. You can either head to the nearest sawmill (crafting station) or out of all the wood you harvested, build one in the world, in the forest right beside the action! Now these stations will require resources/fuel to keep going. Whats the fuel? Wood of course. A basic sawmill will be relatively easy for one person to build but it will only be able to refine/produce basic items. It must be leveled up, how? More wood! Nearby players will need to chop down more trees to fuel and level up the sawmill. Players will deposit their wood and in return be rewarded with crafting xp as well as the ability to refine and produce higher level items. The benefit of building a sawmill and leveling it up near the forest will be an increase in refined materials and faster production of items. A max level sawmill will yield more refined materials than a level 1. What about the people not interested in building and maintaining the sawmill? Well just head to your nearest node with a station like other mmos.

This opens up all sorts of exciting possibilities, and works well with the Node, caravans and seiges. A node can have a permanent max level station making it easy for max level crafters to just bring back their wood and refine/produce items. Maybe some nodes have high volumes of trees compared to others. Making it a perfect spot to build and maintain a max level sawmill. Caravans and pvp? Well what better to fight over than and real resource that matters? Your group is hiding in the forest watching the unsuspecting crafters build and level up a max level sawmill without protection......perfect. Now is the time to strike and claim that sawmill as your own and reap the benefits. Or wait until the caravan is loaded and attack while it has little to no defenders. The opposite is true as well, want something to fight over? Go defend your factions/groups/guilds sawmill from the enemy! Protect the caravan as it moves from your sawmill loaded with precious materials to its delivery location. Lastly the seiges, you hopefully will require tons of wood to build siege weapons and to level up the castle walls, doors and repairs from battle. Planning on attacking a castle? Set up a sawmill in the nearby forest to build your weapons and mount the attack!

The tired old fine resources in the world goto the station and make something needs to change! lets add some addition steps that don't add additional useless steps but make crafting exciting and have some risk vs reward element to it. Should I just get my resources and get out or should I build this sawmill and be able to produce more items faster, or delivery a huge payload of resource to my node via the caravan.

I have all the info for how all the other resources and crafting stations, like mines, farms, and gardens will work, But I hope you get the picture I am trying to paint here. PM if you have more questions or want me to create a point form version with all the resources and stations.

Lets discuss!

ArchivedUser

This seems like a great idea but, it seems really tedious if your asking me. It would de-motivate me if I have to do such a protocol just to get wood. What about the other items?
Just throwing my opinion out there!

Cheers!

ArchivedUser

I think the whole concept is really nice. But there are just a few points where I would have some concerns.
What about casual players? If someone can't play for more than an hour at most per day, how could they ever be able to craft anything if the whole process is so extensive.
And what about those sawmills that get conquered? If you get attacked while at a sawmill you could just go offline to save your materials and come back an hour later to take back the sawmill.
And I get that gathering ressources would be more fun if we had to do it in a group but if even gathering ressources needs a whole party, what can one single player without a party even do? You can't gather and by that definition can't craft.
I really like your idea and I wanted to play the role of the devil's advocate, just to get the discussion started and for people to really look at that concept and think about it because it really is worth to think through in my honest opinion.

Have a great day

ArchivedUser

That was basically what I was thinking Drakwin, casual players wont be able to go through that whole protocol.

ArchivedUser

Hey guys, I guess I should have clarified a bit. You can still do everything solo, harvest by yourself, craft by yourself and to max level without needing a group and without taking forever. All you would do is chop down a tree, harvest it and head back to town to craft! I guess I didn't do a good job explaining that you don't need to set up a station if you don't want to, or need a group to harvest or craft, in fact you don't need a group to make a station either, it can be done solo, all extra people will do is speed up the time it would take to level up a station.

What building the crafting stations do is give crafting bonuses for doing so (increase in harvest, refining speed, success chance boost, just a little extra bonus for going through the effort). But mostly is the convenience of having a station right near the harvesting area rather than going to town, where a crafting station is permanently set up. It would have to be upto the devs if they would want the city stations to be able to be leveled as well or if its always max level and maybe minus some of the bonuses that the field version would have.

I think it would be best if you were in the middle of crafting something and someone attacked you, all your supplies are returned to you and the crafting UI is closed. What happens to the conquered station? Well use it, its now under your control!

The other resources well you would have mines for ore and gems, farms for food, gardens for alchemy ingredients, butcher shops for skins and leather. Imagine being able to build a farm have people donate food and watch it level up and provide extra bonuses! As with each level of station the actual farm/mine/sawmill etc would get bigger and look better!

ArchivedUser

Now that seems like a great Idea! And it fits even better since we have "nodes" in the game, so most of the game is player-driven.
I like this idea a lot, and would love to see it in game. It gives Crafting-Driven guilds more incentive, and could potentially be OP!

ArchivedUser

[quote quote=1807]
I think it would be best if you were in the middle of crafting something and someone attacked you, all your supplies are returned to you and the crafting UI is closed. What happens to the conquered station? Well use it, its now under your control!


[/quote]

This would be the only bit i would change, if your partially through a job, then for me if the node/sawmill *an other crafting station* is conquered then any partial job should be destroyed.
I would also like to see crafting jobs take time, for me its unrealistic to make the "holy armor of OMG" takes same time as "basic armor of pants* , each item should have a defined time to build for realism.
Why should something that would take hours / days /weeks in real life take same time as something that would take minutes, this then changes the game play to define things like, i want to build a siege weopan, is my crafting station secure enough, that if im attacked i can defend it whilst its crafting, rather than plug in > get result straight away.

For me the best crafting is what we see in eve, where small items can be built in 2-3 minutes, but the largest objects can take weeks of real time gameplay, it gives the finished object real value, and then the value of item is built into time to build. If you can make the strongest armor in matter of minutes, you ccan almost farm the armor (forgettinig time to collect mats for second), but if this armor takes 24-48 hours you have to plan the project thoroughly, and then should dyou be attacked you risking losing any partially built items.
Risk -/+ = reward

ArchivedUser

I don't know Eve well, but I think with weeks it would be bad. This would need you to stay the same spot for weeks in this game. Eve is a space game where you can think that it is a building or forging corporation that does the building for you. but here you have just you own two hands to do this. There would be something when you have a creating job like tailor or blacksmith and can hire NPC smith as some sort of apprentice or so that can work wile you are playing.

Correct me if I am wrong and you need to stay at the station in Eve while it is building, then my whole comment is invalide. But this would hold you whole progress in this game. I don't say it should not take time to make something but having NPCs making things that take longer then a few minutes would be better. Lets say you need to start the crafting and need to take 15 or 20 min at the end of crafting to put the parts together and NPCs make the jobs in between that maybe take longer than this lets say. YOu start crafting an armor piece that takes 3 weeks to make. At the beginning you chose what model/design it should have, maybe when you can decide what stats are there and then make sure that you have the materials and then you start the crafting process. Now you come back after the 3 weeks and most of the job is done by the NPCs you have employed. Then you come back and decide to finishe the job this can take 15 to at best 30 mins. this way people with limited time don't loos to much time for a single piece of work but still feel like they need to do something.

ArchivedUser

[quote quote=1833]I don’t know Eve well, but I think with weeks it would be bad. This would need you to stay the same spot for weeks in this game. Eve is a space game where you can think that it is a building or forging corporation that does the building for you. but here you have just you own two hands to do this. There would be something when you have a creating job like tailor or blacksmith and can hire NPC smith as some sort of apprentice or so that can work wile you are playing.

Correct me if I am wrong and you need to stay at the station in Eve while it is building, then my whole comment is invalide. But this would hold you whole progress in this game. I don’t say it should not take time to make something but having NPCs making things that take longer then a few minutes would be better. Lets say you need to start the crafting and need to take 15 or 20 min at the end of crafting to put the parts together and NPCs make the jobs in between that maybe take longer than this lets say. YOu start crafting an armor piece that takes 3 weeks to make. At the beginning you chose what model/design it should have, maybe when you can decide what stats are there and then make sure that you have the materials and then you start the crafting process. Now you come back after the 3 weeks and most of the job is done by the NPCs you have employed. Then you come back and decide to finishe the job this can take 15 to at best 30 mins. this way people with limited time don’t loos to much time for a single piece of work but still feel like they need to do something.

[/quote]

aye with eve you 'plug' the job in, then can carry on about your work, for this game im not suggesting the length of time eve takes, but certainly minutes > hours depending on the job.
My issue is around the 5-10secs whilst the build bar carries on and bingo done, so lets theory craft say 2 items, 1 a high level staff /

NB
All mats are just my made up names/items to give idea

So the Staff

This staff has a material cost of 10 Inhibited Wood - Each Inhibited Wood requires 10 Forlorn Plants, and each plank Takes 10 planks, which in turn takes 10 pieces of wood.
Plug
1 Gem of Death/healing (class dependent) which requires 5 Soul Gems, which take 10 Plane Opals (which need be grounded to make usable)

So, to craft this you will need an upgraded Sawmill (for the wood) and upgraded Gemstone polisher (for the gem) the time frames would be as follows

Per unit time

Wood > Planks 10 secs
Planks - Forlorn Plants 20 Secs
Forlorn Planks > Inhibited wood - 1 minute

Breakdown of units required

Wood > Planks - 10000 = 165 Minutes
Planks - Forlorn - 1000 = 333 Minutes
Forlorn - Inhibited 100 = 100 Minutes

so just for the wood would be 600 minutes (10 hours)

Then similar times on the gems.

8.5 minutes to get opals ground
166 Minutes for Soul gems
1 Minute for Gem of healing giving about 3 hours to craft the gem

Finally after 13 hours you have the completed mats to build the weapon, which itself takes 12 hours, so total building from scratch would be 25 hours. - Of course the gem could still be upgraded as this example only uses a tier 2 gem, and tier 3 gem which is generally used for Jewelry

Of course this could be built over various stages and days, but then it replicates real life, taking it onto armor, the only difference would be stages of metal / cloth work but the tier of the material would be equivalent across all materials, so basic wood, cloth, metal, leather etc would all take 10secs, tier 2 - 20secs, and tier 3 (highest) 1 minute

This way then as a crafter you could choose to take the risky route and install all items to build, thus risking your crafting station getting destroyed and losing your work, or you could do single items and take more time (plugging in jobs etc) but have less risk to loss of material

Of course all this is just theory crafting, but hopefully gives an idea what my suggestion is. But shows the sort of timeframes involved, because like real life you dont get from a tree to dining table in 5 minutes, each stage can take longer etc...

Then finally if you want to build siege weopans, the might not need tier 3 wood items, but lots of tier 2 and the final build of trebuchet would be 24-48 hours after wood has been crafted, because its easier to make wood than the finished product

ArchivedUser

I just wanted to spark some more discussion on this idea. Has there been any confirmed crafting info released?

ArchivedUser

This is it so far.

ArchivedUser

To minimize frustration from having to continually to take back and loose the crafting station or in this case the saw mill, there would be a daily or hourly or whatever time the community will choose "Guild war for the (location) Sawmill" event where guilds would play "Control the zone" gamemode for the control over the sawmill. The guild that wins will take control of the sawmill until the next battle and the circle repeats. 

This would minimize frustration and give peace to the minds of those farming wood in the zone.

ArchivedUser

I do believe crafting stations will be in town/city/metropolises and on freeholds, so there shouldn't be any worry about a crafting station being destroyed unless someone sucessfully seiges the node you reside in. And I think it goes against Steven's vision to have farmers ever being 100% safe from other players while farming (he seems pretty emphatic on risk vs reward). The corruption system should be adequate enough to decrease the chance of being killed while farming. Making a system that makes it impossible to get attacked while out in the world would go against their design for pvp, economic, and pve risk.

ArchivedUser

I think it would be great to have that level of immersion whilst crafting @Doddie. Nice idea indeed, but with everything, it's down to the implementation. I can imagine that in time crafting will become somewhat repetitive and tedious so the devs would have to make sure that level of immersive crafting doesn't require an age of time to undertake successfully.