Interesting and Implementable Twists for Crafting

ArchivedUser

Basically, I want crafting to be fun and interesting and not boil down to 99% of my time chasing minerals and resources, scroll through an absurdly long recipe list, and dragging a slider and pressing a button to craft dozens of items at a time. That's unsatisfying for the lifestyle gameplay of someone wanting to be a crafter. 

Aside: My personal opinion is of that this kind of process isn't crafting, rather it's mass production. And when you have hundreds or thousands of players all crafting in bulk like that, it doesn't matter if you take that caravan trip to sell tons of weapons, because the next person after you with max stacks of the same thing is going to undercut you with a lower price until we are barely profiting at all. I'd rather see a system where it takes a long time to craft a single thing so that the value is immensely higher and there are fewer items in the market — which will further be benefited by the fact that crafters will allegedly be able to leave a custom signature or mark of some kind on their goods. It lets you establish a brand, which is going to be super awesome.

So! My desire for this thread is to discuss interesting twists on crafting mechanics that are viable in the sense that it shouldn't be impossible for the AoC team to consider a genuinely good idea here and be able to integrate it in to the system in some way.

Let your imagination flow! 

ArchivedUser

Instead of just —
Collecting raw resources
Processing raw resources 
Select your recipe and click "craft"

I think there could be a fourth step in here. 
Collecting raw resources
Material augmentation
Processing materials
Material augmentation
Craft

Material augmentation — this feeds into my preference for having a low number of processed goods and brand building — would be the process of altering the outcome of your weapon. 

For example, in a generic MMO you might craft an enchanted sword by collecting the materials for a sword, but some ingredients are things like soulstones dropped from some sort of elemental creature. 

Instead of that, you have to process the materials for a long period of time at your crafting station in your homestead. 

For example, instead of fighting "underworld" creatures and collecting some vague "essence" as part of a simple formula for a blade that deals "dark" damage, you would instead collect a magical ore which you would leave out at night on a special bench or pedestal. It would need to "absorb" the moonlight over the course of a few in-game nights to obtain a "dark" elemental property, which would then let you process it into a new material like "moonstone" which could be smelted down and made into a blade. You could even take in the the angle of the moon and moon phase as bonus points that get added to the weapon or enhance the quality of the weapon instead, which would be another kind of material augmentation. Or perhaps a magical word you discovered from a special event engraved into the fresh blade would add an additional effect.

With that kind of process, you create more value for crafted items. It would allow for crafters to prioritize when, where and how they go about crafting. It places an upper limit on how many items can be generated by an individual, which makes each of the individual crafters immensely more valuable. If the day night cycle were 1 hour each, and the devs set a requirement to get moonstone by processing this magical ore for "7 nights" it would require 14 hours of processing. So I might only be able to make a couple of these swords in a weekend. If devs make it so crafters have to invest tons of time and resources to add experience to crafting a certain type of weapon like swords or augmenting with a specific kind of element, then that will let players better establish their own brand and produce a recognizable sigil if they become known as the best guy in the nearest 20 nodes for producing swords with dark properties. 

I think having a heavy time investment and a really high threshold to increase your crafting skills will create a great barrier to entry with crafting. If anyone can start collecting resources and build their own gear within a couple hours, there's no point. The time investment required for crafting should balance out the choice of choosing to go hunt mobs to level up your character — meaning your character's level and combat skill development should suffer relative to your peers if you go down this route. Just like how a tank needs defense but lacks offensive power or how a mage is a glass cannon, I think the devs should consider crafting as a counterbalancing element to combat, i.e., a player who really wants to become a crafter means he'll have to sacrifice combat development, but in exchange he might become the foundation upon which his guild stands because he'll be capable of making top tier weapons for his guild which will be invaluable for recruitment and sustainability.

There should also be a value beyond weapons production for a crafter. Going back to that "dark" enchanted blade idea. If there's item durability, maybe the weapon wears down, but so does it's damage in "dark" elemental damage. You could go to any crafter and have the blade repaired for it's sharpness, but if you want to re-maximize your dark damage, you would need to find a crafter with either a moonstone production specialty or a purchase special moonstone hammer from the market that can only be produced by such a crafter.