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Mico

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Asgerr

I would say try to follow the following steps:

1. Be one of the first Artisans to master one of the classes of artisanship (only one can be mastered)
2. Establish a steady supply of high/rare/epic quality materials
3. Establish an efficient and constant way to acquire rare and epic recipes
4. Partner with some high level players that will be in the public eye (leaderboards etc.)
5. Have your freehold and store in one of the prominent nodes on your server
6. Understand the stat needs for the various pieces you'll be crafting
7. I believe you can add your "signature" to the items so that it says who crafted what

The rest will be good old sales and marketing campaigns you run in game. So get acquainted with some of those.

VmanGman

I think that there are three (more like two and a half) main systems that are needed to allow for crafter repuation:

1. Crafters have to choose what they specialize in. This way you know that when you need a sword, you have to go to so and so swordsmith.
2. Rare recipes that players will have to find/buy before they can craft a specific item. This ties in with the first point by allowing some crafters to provide items that others cannot (another way to "specialize").
3. Having the crafter's name on the item.

A bonus point would be to have a game that is not very alt friendly by requiring a significant investment to progress your character. If the game is very alt friendly you will have lots of people who just get various crafting alts and will therefore oversature the crafting market (this goes hand in hand with point #1).

Mico

@VmanGman i agree with you in the alt aspect. If everyone just has their "crafting alt" then it makes the crafting easily accessible to everyone.

I thinking having like a extended crafting quest chain that is extremely involved would help. That way less crafters at end game will have completed it, making those items and the people highly sought after.

Dygz

I expect fellow citizens of your town/city/metro will know who you are and where you live.
A major reason why people don't know who crafters are in other MMORPGs is because those games only have instanced housing. If you want an item you either stop by a known NPC shop or use the auction house.

Also...these days... I would expect there to be Discord channels for servers and towns/cities/metros.

Recluse74

Would be cool as an Artisan to have a crafting stall that allowed you to display a certain number of items of your choice to show up on the stall walls. That way, players walking by can see the range of weapons/armor you craft. The stall should also let the crafter be afk, but let them set prices for the items they can craft... player enters items into crafter window, and hits the craft button and the Artisan gets paid for his services.

Then allow players to give a point to a recommendation system, and those points can be used to upgrade the stall with fan fare (visual upgrade) that attracts more players their way. Just throwing stuff out there, not sure what is viable or not.

Dygz

There is supposed to be a way to have stalls that partially show some wares, IIRC.
Player stalls come with a bulletin board which advertises ware and services. Might be possible to display some items, similar to saddlebags.

tautau

I think that there will be boards in Taverns where you can post things for others to read. So the crafter could post their skills, location and contact information at taverns in nearby nodes to increase their reputation.

TheHiddenDaggerInn

Asgerr wrote: »

I would say try to follow the following steps:

1. Be one of the first Artisans to master one of the classes of artisanship (only one can be mastered)
2. Establish a steady supply of high/rare/epic quality materials
3. Establish an efficient and constant way to acquire rare and epic recipes
4. Partner with some high level players that will be in the public eye (leaderboards etc.)
5. Have your freehold and store in one of the prominent nodes on your server
6. Understand the stat needs for the various pieces you'll be crafting
7. I believe you can add your "signature" to the items so that it says who crafted what

The rest will be good old sales and marketing campaigns you run in game. So get acquainted with some of those.

Asgerr makes all good point's , treat your customers fair and be reliable with products and services in a timely manner.

If you try and gouge a customer, odds are they will look elsewhere.

Of course prices must rise as gathering materials will fluctuate a good deal so you just convey that when asked.

Good topic though OP

Tyranthraxus

Shops can be some real fun, in MMOs. My SWG starfighter shops were freaking excellent. You'd step in to see tools of the trade, rare materials, top-tier item examples, decorations splayed out in a unique manner, and fanciful items that sparked the imagination and caused to remember having stepped into my shops; If you'd ever come back a second time or more, you KNEW: 'Oh, it's THIS guy's shop, again! I remember this guy's shop'.

Mico

@Tyranthraxus that sounds like my cup of tea. Having customizable player shops that people can go into would be an awesome way to build your reputation as a crafter. Even if it was just a shop in your guild hall would be awesome. Being known in your guild as the guilds weapon smith or cloth crafter would be awesome in itself.

Yuyukoyay

I think it would help to limit the ability to make your own shop to a mid or high level profession skill. Just so you don't eventually have everyone in the entire server in their private shop at end game. Also differentiate someone whose aim is crafting over someone who is doing other things in the game.

Well at least crafting, gathering, and processing are all different this time so they will have to all work together.

Dygz

tautau wrote: »

I think that there will be boards in Taverns where you can post things for others to read. So the crafter could post their skills, location and contact information at taverns in nearby nodes to increase their reputation.

Player stalls also advertise on the bulletin boards of taverns, yes.

Skyra

Since next topic of dev discussion is supposed to be on crafting i will post this there as well, but since this is quite close i will post it here first.

When it comes to crafting what I find lacking in other games in general is lack of skill, bragging rights/reputation as crafter and fun during crafting. Crafting is usually a mindless clicking on recipe to progres skill and that is it. Most of the time it only exists to facilitate the economy or in worse case just for the sake of existing.
To fix this, my suggestion is to implement minigame/s that allow manual skill based crafting together with automatic crafting just by picking a recipe from the menu. Main difference between those two methods would be that crafting from the menu would be guaranteed to produce a standard version of selected item, while manual crafting would have an interval of possible results that include both better and worse outcomes (+-5% would be what i think is good amount) based on how crafter performed. System like this would allow crafters to distinguish themselves from others by their skill. Also it could provide more fun than just picking up a recipe from the menu, while still allowing those that are not interested in being the best to be a reasonably efficient part of the economy. This is the basic idea of my suggestion.

Now I will go more in depth to elaborate on supporting systems that would improve crafting with system like this even further.
Minigames should scale in difficulty based on level requirements and tier of an item. Legendary max level items should have the highest requirements on crafter skill to produce items that are actually better than what would be crafted by automatic crafting.
Together with manual crafting, leaderboards would be implemented, so crafters can show off how good they are in crafting and competitive players that want to have the best gear and be best would seek those that are on top of leaderboards. For leaderboards to really mean something each type of item ie. sword, staff, wand, bow etc. would have to have a minigame with their own special skill mechanic so there can be more than one best crafter. Leaderboards score for specific type of items swords for example would be an average of all (or all in some period of time) crafted swords of said crafter based on final result and difficulty of item crafting.
To complement leaderboards system like this and reduce frustration of not wanting to waste tons of materials for training especially on higher difficulties, practice crafting would exist. Practice crafting wouldn‘t provide exp for character, wouldn‘t craft an item, wouldn‘t affect leaderboards and would cost only a small fraction of the cost of a recipe, especially for legendary items and such it should cost only part of most common materials required. Practice crafting would also introduce another fairly easy to tune material sink into the economy.
Another possibility to leverage / incentivize players is to increase an amount of exp gained based on the result of manual crafting.

tl;dr implementation of dual crafting system with automatic and manual skill based crafting system with risk/effort vs rewards component, to facilitate fun, skill and potential for bragging

Mico

@Skyra , a leader board system for crafters would be an awesome idea. Having that system tied to each node would make sense. The nodes reset after losing a siege battle so having the leader board for crafters reset with that gives people new chances to get on the board.