Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Comments
Although i also agree with only legendary items being recipes or ultra rare drops.
if you have soft crafting the community can still "creat" recipes for the new players but it will be impossible the other way round so soft crafting is way better in my opinion
btw. how can I vote?
There is no difference between soft or hard crafting.
With Soft Crafting: After the initial growth period of the game, people will just post wiki's outlining all the different bonuses. Crafters will make what ever the meta says they should make and it becomes the defacto Hard Crafting.
By mixing and matching stuff to make an item, you change the look of the item, requiring the devs to try and make artwork to match the myriad of ways you can make an item. (as well as fit the different races). Which the devs won't do. For obvious reasons.
So in the end, it will be Hard Crafting anyways..so why waste all the time and energy doing it differently?
I always thought this would be a cool way to go about it for a couple of reasons.
1) It promotes the idea that a quality craftsman and their items are valued.
2) The better you become the better your crafts turn out,
3)It prevents people just setting a number of items to be completed in the craft menu and walking away.
4) It could be incorporated into a mobile tie-in so that people have a fun way to interact with the game while away from their primary pc.
Allow the customization items to come from crafters though so that they’re still involved in the process.
I have a few other things that I think are equally important to maintaining crafting stability and interest. For instance:
1.) Limit RNG and emphasize skill. Sure, you can have some rng (chance to HQ an item let's say) but have some control over it. Archeage ruined crafting and made it a HUGE money sink for crafting players because the RNG was so over the top that crafting because nearly useless unless you were a streamer or full time gamer.
FFXI was pure recipe's and you could basically AFK but leveling required a mix of risk vs reward: try to level a skill close to you, you get less skill ups but also less material loss if you fail. Try to level a recipe that's too far away from your skill level and you'd always break the recipe and lose materials with no skill up gain. To HQ a skill you had to be x levels over the recipe's skill cap. I thought this system was very clever but has a lot to improve upon.
2.) Make the best items in the game a mix of pure drops vs crafting materials for crafters to make into equally as powerful or even slightly more powerful drops. Many games make endgame crafting useless by making the hardest raids and bosses drop pure final products(armor/weps/etc.) instead of recipes or material. If you actually want your crafters to invest in getting their skill up and feel satisfied and well known in the world for those shops Intrepid has talked about, then this is crucial to implement and balance in some way in my opinion.
3.) Make skill matter - touching on point 1, a lvl 10 smith and a lvl 100 smith should be able to not only produce different items but that lvl 100 smith should be able to produce higher qualities of all lower tiered items within reason. Maybe the chance for a lvl 97 recipe or super rare legendary material has a tiny chance to HQ while that lvl 100 smith can easily produce high quality or legendary versions of a lvl 70 recipe or tiered material.
4.) Make player skill matter: this is the crux. this is where it's so hard to find a system where it matters and where making that mini-game can really come into play. Mini-games can get tedious if leveling a craft is based solely on quantity produced but if you can make leveling a combination of quantity and QUALITY (determined by skill, accuracy, and critical thinking in a mini-games) then you have something pretty interesting on your hands. If you allow people to level crafts by queuing them like in ESO or EVE you appeal to super casuals but take all the skill out of it and I'm pretty sure that's the total opposite of what it seems the community wants out of this game.
The question is whether the community would like something fancy and hands on. A lot of players might just want to chill out after some intense dungeons/raids/pvp and do something productive but relaxing.If you make all of your crafting or gathering systems too involved people can't wind down.
I'll be very curious to see what Intrepid comes up with and hopefully they'll nail some of these points head on.
If I was to picture my ideal crafting system, it would look something like the following:
To start with it would have an in game editor that will allow a player to take a basic template, such as a one handed sword, and customize the shape, size, weight, and composition of materials. This will allow players with low skill to still make strong items due to the templates but also allow higher skilled players to set themselves apart and provide custom items that only they can make. I picture this editor as something similar to character creation editors in games such as Black Desert Online.
With this as a base, you could have a save blueprint feature to ensure research progress isn't lost. If you wanted to take it a step further you could even enable the player to sell the blueprint to others. In addition, in raids, you could make blueprints drop that could allow players to craft items that had bonus effects or even set pieces. That way, you could still go with pattern drops and set items while giving more freedom for customization. This would also make sets more flexible so if a player really liked a specific set, as long as you have better materials, you could keep the set relevant as new sets come out, allowing for more end game gear choices.
Going back to material composition, allowing players to mix different materials together will add a level of depth to crafting that few other games within the genre have. Instead of all Iron swords being the same, you could show a percentage of purity for each type of material used to enhance the blade. Sure, it might be an iron sword, but if 10% of the weapon was silver, it might augment the sword with extra damage vs a specific creature type that other iron swords would be missing. Slotting in precious stones into the hilt such as a ruby might add extra fire damage on every swing or increase the damage of fire based abilities.
I have a heavy background in "divine" classes such as Paladin, Warrior Priest etc from various MMOs and tabletop. So lets say you want to craft a specific type of item that enhances your class, it would stand within reason to do something special to the crafting materials before you use them. Like what if I wanted to "Lightforge" a sword that is normally made through Steel and Silver, perhaps I do something with the Steel and Silver to bless it somehow before crafting. The same rule could apply to even casters, what if I were a Mage and I wanted to enhance my spells through my staff or wand. What if I were to "Fireforge" a focus into my staff or wand?
The comments above are amazing and frankly one thing that is missing from most games is viable crafting and the importance of a crafter. Most games have your crafters left in the dust because all the best stuff is from end raid content or high ranked pvp. But what if a crafter could farm hard to get materials and go further with the materials in order to make even better items that they made specifically tailored to them.
So honestly in a Hard vs Soft craft scenario I would like to see both in this sense. Hard crafting to gain skill and soft crafting to utilize that skill to go further and on top of that the ability to manipulate materials to better suit what you are trying to build if at all possible.