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To get the quickest updates regarding Alpha Two, connect your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Comments
If I could design a crafting experience in a MMO setting, I'd go with crafting system that's more similar to an ARPG like POE or Last Epoch. Rather than a recipe, or a boss fight that drops fully functional gear, I think that they should just be a base item drop. After you get your item bases, armor, weapons, jewelry etc. you use the crafting professions to craft that gear into something you use. Crafting would be to create gear, augment it with new stats, change stats, even powerful stats that buff abilities. I envision tiers of bases and tiers of crafting materials. The most glorious weapons, armor, and jewelry would come from a combination of the best bases and best crafting materials.
Crafting items would critical to gearing. They could be locked behind different node types. Caravans could transport crafting items and bases. PvP and trading would center around the acquisition of them. The hardest PvE and PvP content would drop the rarest and more powerful crafting items. I'd like to see alot of time and energy to be spent creating and crafting your items.
I don't like the meta of MMO gearing and crafting where you just get your BIS item as a boss drop, then crafting just adds some power levels to the gear.
A crafting system as I've described would need to be carefully balanced around time to level and crafting acquisition. A certain amount of time and effort would have to be spent acquiring bases and crafting items, otherwise you would out level your gear and progressively become weaker in comparison to the content you're tackling. This would transition into the end game where the content and farming you participate in would be to craft greater power of gear.
TLDR - you craft all your gear, full stated BIS gear doesn't drop.
It was a bit of a grind but it was such an accomplishment and it was awesome for the economy, crafters want to feel accomplished like they mean something and their items also mean something. This is why we need the grind for crafting.
It's also mega fun to have to help my dwarf of the guild go find the ingredients meaning I have to dungeon and most likely pvp.
Never was prepared to take the risk of it blowing up, but was always in awe of those that did.
Part of me thought that some must really have exploited the system somehow to get the +12 enchantment at 1% chance, but then again I was always strapped for ingame gold in that game so don`t know
Whereas New World crafting system had elements I wish all MMORPGs had in their crafting systems.
And to be honest, I have never really been a gatherer or crafter but soooo enjoyed that part!
System had
Basic craft with set amounts of mats for rng result within gear range
Add a few basic mats to the set craft amount and the rng result was likely higher grade
Add many more basic mats and the rng result was even more likely to result in a higher grade craft
More experience and the rng range result is higher grade too, so gave insentive to craft
Then add specific items gathered from the world to give chance of specified attributes gave drops value and meaning
The gathering of core mats then mixed together to make dyes, I really like, especially the rarity of certain ones, providing insentive to actually gather if you wanted to improve you look
Ability to deconstruct all items to a proportional amount of all drops was a nice bonus!
Personally I really really like systems like Lineage 2, EVE, and SWG. From what I understand these games are also all inspirations for Ashes of Creation.
What I value most is a game that rewards you for you time using the crafting/gathering system at all levels of game play. Lineage 2 used materials from low level mobs that could be converted into materials for high level gear. This keeps anyone doing anything's work valuable. This is the game respecting my time. When a game respects my time I spend more time in the game, and I get more out of the game.
Outside of that I just want a lot of depth and customization when crafting. SWG is just perfect. Just look at that. Ashes sounds like it is taking the best of L2 and SWG. If it does that it will be a masterpiece. If it does anything less. It's a gamble.
Crafting and the economy are paramount to any MMO that is not a themepark.
If I had more time, I would write a shorter post.
In terms of decorations and personalization of crafting outcomes, I will just copy paste what I wrote in another thread:
"I think alternatively if the crafting outcome can look different depending on what exact ingredients you used that would be cool. If I use cow hide vs bear hide to make/decorate leather armor it should look different (just aesthetically) and if I use some mixture/combination it will just have a generic leather look. I also recall Steven saying something about crafting being very customizable and you can really play around with how the details look. It would be great if crafted gear could have decoration slots similar to jewel sockets in other games that you can fill out during the crafting process to change how the end result looks. If I make a helmet I can add feathers to it for example. If I gather a certain quality of feathers from some mob I should be able to slot it in as a decoration. It would add a lot of personality+character if you notice someone's helmet having parrot feathers from another continent (wow a foreigner, maybe they have goods from the other continent to sell) or if someone used valuable phoenix feathers (used in alchemy or some other purpose perhaps) on theirs to look badass or they just went full druid and have some plant's leaves instead of feathers. Lots of games have a cool looking skinned wolf hide helmet or w.e, imagine if it would look like the sabertooth tiger you skinned (100 times to get a high enough quality pelt to decorate your gear as such), would be immersive and badass. Most of this should be easy to implement as skin variations like what feather, leather, or dye metal (that you infuse into the ingot or something) you use. This of course would limit what decorations you put on what gear but I think would still be super cool, just feathers and leather alone would be amazing."
Edit: on that note and after reading some more about SWG (which comes up a lot in the comments) I love the idea of recipes where you can choose what exact material you use to satisfy the need of for example leather or ferrous metal. This does mean a lot of non-stackable resources (i.e. cow leather, horse leather, etc etc) but if the storage can be addressed (auto-organizing resource bags) it would be great!
It had a lot of ingredients, and the professions (depending on skill level and luck) could yield a wide range of quality (1-100) on a given products, not just the usual weak/average/good/exceptional/wondrous.
For Alchemy there was an even better system, where the ingredients were different for every player/character, so there was no "useless" herb, as some player needed that exact herb for his/her crafting. Alchemy even had no real recipes, instead you could mix out potions according to your needs.
The good stuff:
- I just love crafting systems that are something else than clicking a crafting button, just collecting the resources and having enough level to do something seems bland to me.
- The system alow you to have some sort of challenge from time to time, every time a new patch drops os there was a crafting event you really have to min/max in order to get the best results while crafting, but was forgiving enough for you to just super quickly craft anything most of the times if you are a dedicated crafter, this makes it challenging and not tedious.
Te not that great stuff:
- Being able to max every single profession makes market and or social interaction totaly unnecesary, id say being able to gather anything is ok, even processing anything too, but you shouldn't be able to craft everything, at least not the best stuff.
- Crafting gear should be relevant, but not mandatory at any given point of the game, with this what i mean is crafting gear shouldnt be better or good enough to do everything in the game, it should be an option. The super rare chest piece you will craft once or twice should be on pair with the super rare chestpiece you will see droping once or twice, and the easy to craft stuff should be on pait with the easy to grind stuff, and none of this last two should be enough to beat all the content in the game. In FFXIV gear is irrelevant since you can beat the whole expansion with just the crafting gear you can make day one.
Stuff id love to see in a crafting system:
- Regular crafting content, with this i mean PvPers and PvEers have their arenas, dungeons and other stuff, id love to see some sort of "endgame" for crafters, for example FFXIV had Ishgardian restoration, wich was a crafting event where we had to help to rebuild a city by crafting, we achieve points for our crafts and there was a ranking and rewards at the end, this also happen with crafting gear and weapons, there were some "legendary" crafting weapons and it was super cool to see people using them.
- A system that allow new player or players that are not super into crafting to participate or try via being a simple one, but having enought depth that someone with eough time or knowledge can make a difference.
Hope this help you out, cant wait to see this going!
Elements of crafting systems I enjoyed in previous MMOs:
- FF14: Crafting minigame, skills, HQ items.
It allowed play skill / knowledge / planning to have a place & make a difference during the process. Although I'd probably like the crafting minigame to be optional - i.e. make it so players get to choose to one-click craft a normal item, or minigame-craft a higher quality item.
Better yet, instead of having just normal & HQ items (depending on an RNG roll which depends on the results of the crafting minigame), let the stats vary depending on the minigame's score. i.e. a 95% score from the minigame means getting 95% of the HQ bonus. (Imagine the frustration when you get a normal item coz you hit a 5% bad RNG roll)
- Eve Online: The ability to improve recipes, and complex-enough production/supply chain that results in player-interdependence.
- SWG: I haven't played SWG before, but I really like the idea of selectable-components/ingredients that gives different properties to your item. (e.g. copper = better conductivity, iron etc. = more durable)
Along the same line, I hope recipes (other than the highest level ones may be) in Ashes will have a degree of flexibility in it. e.g. a mid level iron sword recipe shouldn't be stubbornly asking for a rare gem somehow.
And elements that I didn't like:
- WoW: Easy-to-level & irrelevant crafting (after WotLK)
- GW2: Near-compulsory crafting:
In GW2, the easiest way to obtain Ascended armor is probably through crafting. But crafted ascended armors are account-bound, as a result every player is technically encouraged to train a max-level crafter (no matter they like crafting or not). The over-supply of crafters, combined with easy character leveling, and how easy it was to obtain mid-level gears to get by the leveling process, has flooded the market with low to mid level items that nobody wants. The total cost of an item is almost always higher than its market price. That made the whole experience even worse.
1- Crafting to require focus - i enjoyed in say EQ2 where you had to maintain concentration while crafting as it was time based and so if you were to look away too frequently the end product would fail, crafting anything in the real world requires focus and so it should in an MMO too.
2 - Abilities - Picking certain points to use crafting abilities can be very satisfying when you make the right call and the product comes out exceptional because of it. FFXIV had some of this, but i ended up with 2-3 hotbars of skills and it being way too convoluted, in the end you would just google the correct pattern to always use to win. So some abilities yes but don't overload it.
3 - Autocrafting - Some MMOs have autocrafting, but i don't think it should be direct in Ashes, maybe there could be a requisition notice board in the town where you could drop off a batch of supplies, and offer to pay players a small commission for each one that they craft (you receiving the material automatically once crafted)
4 - Multiple skills to craft equipment - In regards to say making a breastplate and needing a leatherworker to make the strappings, blacksmith to make the metal and maybe tinkerer to make the clasps, i think this should be limited, if for instance the leatherworker then needs to go to an alchemist for glue to make the straps to supply to the blacksmith, it can be frustrating if someone wants to make a simple item and really needs the input of 6-7 different crafters to achieve it. I think maybe 3-4 different crafters and no sub-sub-sub components
The amounts of materials matter a lot to me, as does the droprate, since it helps to balance things. It feeds into the feeling of being in the world when you only have to collect 4 or 5 pieces of ore to make an ingot, and you only need a few ingots, and then rarer stuff gets to be just that, rarer. By contrast I hate BDO which is just 'gather 500 of this, then go craft 100 times to get 250 of this'.
In terms of which is the most interesting crafting system type, I also have thought a lot about it and realized a specific thing from FFXI, that's really nice. The final iteration of the 'fishing' system in FFXI starts a small minigame where an indicator would flash and you press left or right (I'd be happy with this expanded to WASD, no problem) to signify your character 'noticing that they have to adjust something or pay attention'. In this case to a fishing line, but I feel this would work well for a LOT of crafts. Every time you press the correct direction, a little progress meter moves down a bit, and when it is gone, you're done.
But most importantly, when you are significantly above the level required for the item being crafted, the meter goes down by itself over time even if you don't respond and press the correct direction at all. It takes slightly less time, and much less effort, to 'craft' in that case. This is also a good way to handle the chances of higher quality crafting, sometimes. Paying more attention and therefore reducing the time spent to craft means you can craft more, which means you have higher chances at 'High Quality' results just by volume, but you could make it so that there's a slightly higher chance of High Quality results when the timer ends up short (basically the player pays enough attention to hit the correct direction once or twice).
Most of the time I believe these systems get botted in one way or another, and I have no suggestions regarding that, other than to make it so your ingredients, instead of resulting in a different item every time, somehow affect the number of 'ticks' or whatever, of this minigame.
e.g. in Carpentry, two similar types of wood, but one is easier to work with, just harder to obtain. The more difficult wood causes a 15-tick crafting situation, the easier wood lowers it to 10-ticks. Mid level crafters are more likely to seek the easier wood, for greater success rates and speed. High level crafters can achieve the same results with the more difficult wood, and can also get marginally better success rates with the easier wood too, causing economic shifts sometimes.
So in terms of how much time is spent crafting, it's better to say that I spend more time on 'the economy around crafting' than the crafting itself, because I prefer games where crafting isn't a matter of collecting huge amounts of resources, but rather 'finding the right ones, and selling other random stuff you also gather, to other crafters'. Bonus points if you can literally 'randomly get slightly better versions of the same materials and use them for increased yield or chances at high quality things'. I like this because it makes it easier for new crafters to dabble, and use the simple things they happen to come across, or check the prices, instead of getting to the point where someone from their guild just 'sends them to gather hundreds of stalks of kelp'.
Any system where the resources in the world are not generally rate-limited by player population, but instead scales in any way with the number of players in the area, seems to turn out terrible. This seems to be countered in Ashes by the limitation on Freeholds, for farming and animal husbandry, at least, so I'm personally hoping that raw materials aren't guaranteed to be any particular thing (for anything other than trees, trees are 100% okay for this) and that they respawn slowly enough to discourage camping and botting, but quickly enough in general that two gatherers could find a rotation together without wanting to kill each other, and they just kill the third one that shows up, if any violence happens at all, of course. (I do not personally condone instantly killing people who show up in your gathering area)
I second this!
Furthermore, I would like to see a crafting system that advance in complexity as the the crafter advances in tiers. A gathering profession may have a entry tier gathering mechanic as simple as "push USE to pick up flower", but as the gatherer gains skill, the gathering may require new tools, certain herbs may only be used if gathered correctly. For example; "Do I cut the Meadow Bell above or below the leaves?". This could also tie in to the processing and crafting professions. Maybe the same herb can be gathered by a novice and a master, but the quality of the herb vary with gathering skill, and limit where it can be used.
I was a heavy raider in vanilla wow and I did Blacksmithing enough just to help make resistance gear for the end game content. I never really enjoyed it, was just something I had to do.
But when TBC came out, they said that you could make your own end game gear! Gear that could compete in high end raiding, as a warrior and someone who knew due to life in the near future and wouldn’t be able to raid, I knew this would be great for me.
It was hard to level. It was hard to get the materials to make your weapons and it was very rewarding to make the tier 1 and 2 versions of the sword. But then, the big hang up, some of the materials for the tier 3 version only came from high end raiding. It was kind of crushed. I didn’t have the time to farm for gold as much as I would have liked. If that was what the future of professions were I wasn’t going to dive into it again because I couldn’t make myself anything viable without high end raiding and then that would defeat the purpose of the crafting gear.
I believe making crafting hard will lead players with a rewarding experience once they reach their goals. I also believe that crafting gear should be end game viable but at a high difficulty. Why? If you spend your time in a hardcore fashion, whether raiding or completing difficult tasks with a group or solo for materials, the player should be rewarding. Make a legendary crafting item a 10 part quest. Or an adventure that cuts across multiple biomes for specific materials. With that you will have fulfillment and allow players to feel good that they have strong gear.
Also, I would like to see low level crafting materials still see a purpose in the end game. Contributing low level crafting reagents to your node in order to still progress it. Have your Church request materials in order to progress a project for the people, or your military node to request materials in order to build a new barracks. Whatever flavor you want to spin but that way materials from throughout the stages of the game will still be farmed for various reasons. With that you will have people farming low level materials when they come across it in the open world for their faction or affiliation creating deeper bonds with that they already identify with.
If i am a Mastersmith, then please dont let me go to the level 1 NPC-Smith to repair my armor. A Mastersmith schould be able to do that himself. I understand that such mechanics are a gold-sink, but some really stupid examples like this one should have an exception. The same for a weaver and his cloth-armor....
The more different factors you have at crafting, the longer time it can stay interesting:
Example 1: Different Workbenches, anvils, in different quality and from different materials, like different woods and different metals could have an influence on your crafting. Some could even deliver a little magical bonus or something different to the crafted item. Some special anvils could even be on a special place where you have to kill Monsters to get there. (If you dont want to fight but just craft, then you need a party that gets you there.)
Example 2: Using different tools made out of different materials or even enchanted ones could have not only influence on the quality and time to craft but on other things too like giving some special bonus sometimes on the crafted thing. Toolmaker could even be an own master-area.
Leveling the crafting-ability shouldnt be the only thing to get better at your crafting-job. There should be different quests for everything. Becoming master? -> Do a quest! Want to use that special material? -> Do a quest where you learn it (Maybe only for special ore, not for easy ones). With such things you can give very much content for every crafter.
You could make a system of combining different materials to get different bonis or enchantments or other stuff. How? Imagine using 10 Steel for a sword. then it gets only normal hit-damage. Now use 8 Steel and 2 Copper, then then sword could make a little less normal damage, but could have something different like a little fire-damage, or life leech or whatever.
By combining different materials i think of it as a game like with your planned system with the mounts. Combining, and then more combining and with that you get very much interesting combinations like with the mounts and pets. With that you could have a big variety of craftable things for all classes. That would mean even more Quests could be made for the crafters to learn such things as combination with this and combination with that....
A very big problem for me was always the irrelevance of crafted items when you already could have items from a raid or dungeon.
My Proposal: if something good drops in a raid, lets say a good magical sword. It should always be possibel for a mastersmith specialised as a swordsmith-master to try to make that even better or change some stats.
If there is no jewelry-smith, then thats an option to be a master in for a smith.
And yes, there should be a danger like making the sword worse or even destroy it in the process.
And now a funny but still serious proposal: How about a crafting-NPC-System? You are a master-smelter? Why not hire an NPC who works on your land for you. He/she wouldnt be a master-smelter but you could teach him to be one degree under you. This NPC could smelt simple things like copper and tin or whatever, while you are mining somewhere more ore. With that you wouldnt have all other jobs in form of an NPC at your home but only the one or two that you can teach something. They would be there to gain some time for you if the process of something like smelting would mean that you stand for 20 minutes there for a full bag of iron.
I want to third or fourth this! Reading all the comments in this thread is very interesting and have a lot of good aspects about what makes crafting "meaningful" and "immersive" in the game. I trust the game designers and developers are smart enough to come up with the mechanics to create crafting - at the end of the day, I want to proud of BEING a crafter and achieve a feeling of accomplishment that I crafted something for a person, party, or guild that really needed my services.
I like the comments I've read about a "renown" system or special proficiencies that a crafter could obtain by working with a particular material or category. For example, in my guild I would be known for making high-quality leather armor, with the ability to place unique stats for my customer. It would be great that once I achieved a master level, I could also imprint different designs on my armor to also achieve the look or fashion my customer desires. Each piece I produce would have my name on it, and I could store "Customer X" design as a custom recipe in my recipe book - if my customer comes back, I could possibly improve it with a rare monster drop they would bring me.
I would like to be able to gather materials myself, perhaps with additional inventory space that I gain because of my mastery level. My gathering skills for my specialized material would also yield better quality items because I know what I'm doing. And I'd have to spend A LOT OF TIME practicing in my gathering or refining to EARN my proficiencies.
I would like to choose from different types of leather (referring to a post above) from cow, horse, beast, etc and apply them to my recipes to see what makes a difference - or by combining a certain leather with other materials I can boost a particular stat or achieve a particular buff.
If my mastery level was really high, then I could produce unique, one of kind armor sets with matching pieces and stats!
I DONT want my skill to be restricted by time limits (ie. you can only craft that once a day....lol...no....). If my customer needs something to go raid a dungeon in four hours, and I have the materials, I would love to help him in time (of course, he should have placed his order in advance!)
My thoughts apply to ALL crafting types: cooking, alchemy, items, furnishings, gear and weapons. Crafters are unique players and for me, I like to feel needed and relied on by my guild, or anyone else that needs my help.
1. Skill - The crafter has to be made to feel that their skill is needed to be successful and is recognized when it they are.
2. Specialization - Those that go the extra mile in a specific way are heralded, sought out for their goods. These are the ones that special materials are brought too. Also limit how many crafting specializations you can be driving collaboration between crafters. Though don't restrict crafters to much in requiring another's specialized components to make their own items. Limit this to the processed materials. Nothing worse than being so specialized you need another to continue to progress and there is only one of those crafters on the server and they won't work with you.
3. Discovery - Understanding what materials combinations outcomes are to make a variety of items without RNG. If a craft combines x with y with z they get a predictable outcome. The quality or values of the predicted outcome can vary, this relates to skill not RNG depending on how the crafting process is implemented.
4. Drop vs Crafted Balance - Most crafting systems fail due to not properly addressing this. Powerful items should come from both methods. The values attached can have overlap however there should be specific values that only come from a dropped item and certain values that can only come from a crafted item. It now is up to the adventurer to choose which is more important to them. The grind for the drop or the investment in the crafted item.
5. Resource management - Have a system that doesn't punish the crafter to manage the resources. Make it clear in the UI how much of something a crafter has during the crafting process, make those resources easy to manage with storage and inventory. Don't over simplify it though, successful resource management is its own skill set for some.
6. Harvesting - Specific to the harvesters, skill needs to be rewarded and no locked behind character level requirements. Specialization also needs to feel powerful. If you allow everyone to harvest and a harvest specializes in harvesting, they need to acquire more resources and unique resources only available to the trained harvester. However don't make dropped resources only drop if a specialized harvester is present in a raid.
7. Market - Have a market that is user friendly and abuse preventive. By this I mean there needs to be reasonable caps on how much one can charge and how cheap on can sell items. Sell a 10K sword for 1k just to mess with the market is bad for everyone as well as the reverse. It leads to toxic environments. Player driven economies are great within reason. Systems that only allow an up or down pricing within a percentage of the current average stops that behavior. Prices can still get crazy over time as everyone slowly pushes the prices up or down but eventually they level out.
8. Junk items - eliminate the need to grind to level crafting. No make 20 swords that are useless just to get experience. No one wants to waste materials and time on items that won't sell as no one would use them.
9. Leaderboards - So many MMO's have leaderboards for everything but crafting. You want crafters to feel special, to be sought out for their skill. Their needs to be leaderboards that people can refer too. With this there needs to be a way the crafters can advertise their specializations, when they are available, how many orders they can do, so on. Let the leaderboards work for the entire economy, not just the dungeon runners and PVP elite.
10. Crafters Content - Every MMO has quests, dungeons, challenges, achievements which seem to forget that crafters need content that is specific to them. And I am not talking the tutorial quests but real quests that lead them to discover new recipes or looks to their existing recipes. Story based quests that takes them on a journey to learn of the famous crafters that helped shape the world. Crafting dungeons that require the crafter to make something special to unlock it to discover what is inside. Once unlock they may need a raid team to support them or specialized harvesters to gather the resources. Challenges that reward the craft in ways that supporter the crafting experience that may not be actually making items that comes with special rewards.
11. Materials matter - No matter the tier of a material, that resource needs to always matter. Nothing worse that having 100's of copper sitting in your bank forever because you have moved on to iron. This hurts the crafter, makes new players feel like that can't compete because what they can make or gather is not important to the elite. If you are making more complicated recipes, it needs to still have the potential to use all materials. Either by requiring multiple types of resources like in EVE or have varying results based on the material you use or finally have multiple ways to make the same item.
I could go on but I will wrap this up with the crafting system I feel most represented what I have stated above. Vanguard Saga of Hero's crafting system by far was the most rewarding to crafters of any game I have crafted it (Never got to play SWG). It is generally overlooked because it had some complexity to it and did have some issues. However it went in the right directions to reward the crafter for being a crafter, rewarded the specialized crafter with purpose and economic game from those that sought them out. Leaderboards and discover, it was all there. Even the harvesters needed to be skilled and dedicated to get the most resources for their time and effort. EVE Online is also an example of how resources are important regardless of the material tier and how specialized crafters were sought out and protected.
With Ashes and your territory build up and tear down mechanics, crafters need to be essential in that effort. Guilds need to compete to keep the best crafters happy and employed to assist in the conquest, not just as on outlet for extra resources between raids or PVP conquest. Make crafters feel like they are essential to the progress of the world and the game will succeed. Make the crafters feel like they are just a hobby activity, something to do when not doing other things and they game may or may not succeed as you just alienated a large percentage of players. Many players do enjoy doing all aspects of a game but many like to just focus on 1 and only do the others when forced by the game mechanics. So my final comment is don't make any content feel forced, make all aspects fun, have purpose and need skill and we will play them.
In my opinion the crafting system from GW2 where you can craft your own legendary weapon is very nice. it takes a long time to do so and got many little crafting steps to go trough.
I would really hope that crafting is somewhere you can get gear that is good enough to do end game content in. I would hate to see it as something people begrudgingly do daily just to get a mount after 30 days. Although some players might see that and give you a nod in respect to your diligence, it would be nice to have items that would help you at end game.
Maybe even with enough materials, skill and crafting level, you could be able to raise the star rating. So if you made a crappy 2 star sword, you could make it a 3, then 4 and finally a 5. Or I would be fine with having quality be permanent, thus making you try again and again once you’re a high enough level/skill and hopefully get a 4/5. The reason for this idea is the more deep and layered you can make crafting, and thus the adventure of acquiring top tier gear, the better.
What if we were to cook foods that require ingredients from the depths of lakes/water, and in return it would boost something along the lines of underwater breathing? Or require plants that have poisonous traits to actually create a potion that could combat poisons?
As far as duration, make it so that it will last the length a generous amount of time, but also challenging enough to create where it doesn't take 2 minutes and it lasts 24 hours.
I remember having a lot of fun with crafting in Ultima online and Star wars galaxies. the thing that stands out about those games is the ability for players to start their own store and have vendors buy and sell items and materials. I think a modern version of the vendor system would be important for ashes if the auction house is going to be as limited as it appears.
I also agree that crafting should be kept relevant into late game possibly including consumables like repair vouchers and resources being dropped from bosses more than gear (blue protocol is planning to use a similar system soon). I also think it would be very cool if there was a titanforging (hear me out!) system where you get a piece of gear then take it to your crafter buddy to tailor it to your character to get a stat bump related to how well the crafter did fitting the armor. this would take resources for each attempt but would allow you to try as many times as you like with crafters until you get a result you are happy with.
i have very fond memories of playing SWG gathering resources then taking those to a vendor mall to sell and then taking the credits the vendor just gave me to buy upgrades to my components. I really think that the systems around crafting are as important as the crafting itself.
It starts off like any typical crafting system, where you have some gathering classes. Where you can gather things like herbs, minerals, etc. Then there are crafting classes, ones that make armor only, hat only, shoes only, class specific weapon/gear only. and each crafting/gathering profession chance of success or chance of producing multiple items depends on character's attribute. There's a lot more to it than this, but I would really hope someone take a deeper look at it.
Also, it is super important to make it REALLY hard to progress in the system, otherwise crafting would feel like more of a mechanic that everyone will have to do, but if it is REALLY hard to get good, then not everyone will do it. make it like how BDO character level up works, it starts off really easy to level, then you hit a softcap then a "hardcap". and only people that really try very hard can reach and beyond hardcap, and only those people should be able to even have an attempt at crafting the best items. However, people at softcap should also be able to make relevant gears that "average softcap" players would buy too.
Everything this person said! Take that ambitious approach to it and give us in depth crafting!
So many bloody games have "Crafting" now and it's just a joke. I don't want to name drop because I don't want people who enjoy those games to feel it as a stab, but make it a true profession, not just a checkbox that MMOs have to "satisfy the genre".
The great thing is, you -could- make almost everybody happy (the entitled people that must have everything all the time will never be happy). Make crafting up to a certain soft cap pretty basic, easy to get into, learn, and enjoyable. But then have more, each recipe having options of complexity, or a higher level advancement that takes actual dedication beyond talking to a NPC for 2 seconds. Let a casual base get a taste of different aspects of the game, but don't keep systems dumbed down because of that.
No matter what, I've already got my chips on the table for AoC, I'm loving everything I'm reading and seeing from videos, streams and blogs. A hardcore, complex crafting system that players can devote most of their time to and be rewarded for such would just be icing on a very large cake.
This leads to my question. Are there going to be ways to allow for full consumption of resources? Having a lot of armor or weapons that are not useful flooding the game makes for time value loss. Are we going to be able to recycle items to use them to craft higher-tier items as we progress?
It keeps me pushing forward to unlock the next thing, always sitting in the back of my mind.
So while I might not be directly spending intentional time crafting, it drives a lot of my gameplay.
These are my favourite mechanics:
Progressive Upgrading
Many MMO's have a "pyramid" selection of gear. At low levels there's plenty of choice and diversity, but as you level up, your options narrow to the point that most late-game people are wearing the same thing. This is backwards!!
Instead of this, please take inspiration from the Weapon Upgrade Trees in Monster Hunter, that diversify as players level up and specialize. The following are the upgrade options for Greatswords that can be crafted from the iron sword.
Please note that at any decision point in the tree, the maximum number of options is 3, more than 3 options tends to become overwhelming and tedious.
Also note that not all branches lead to an "endgame" weapon - in this example the Lacerator Blade+ on the left is easy to craft making it great for mid-game but caps at much lower stats than the other leaves. This allows you to release an "endgame" version of these weapons in later patches (which is what Capcom does) to renew a stale meta.
Also note that diversity is easier to do in Monster Hunter because they have more levers to play with: sharpness, raw damage, elemental damage, jewel slots, affinity and passive bonuses.
Another thing is the effect of levelling at low levels is faster than at high levels.
This means that on your first day of playing, you whizz through 9 sets of weapon replacements, but at high levels it can be weeks before you meet the requirements for the next set of gear. It therefore makes more sense to cluster gear changing toward higher levels, where each gear change is more significant.
Equipment Sets / Furniture Sets
Monster Hunter breaks up the idea of set effects by distributing the effects across other sets too. This encourages players to mix-and-match until they get a collection of effects that they desire. There are consequences to this, though: You stop recognizing other players according to their gear, because everyone is so diverse so identity is lost in chaos, thus everyone becomes a stranger (except for their nametags above their heads)
BUT: don't make set effects so powerful that they become a major factor in determining what gear to wear. This happened in Maplestory and severely limits end-game choices.
Flexible Enhancement Sockets
Compare this to sockets in Monster Hunter - whose customization options are also available on other pieces of gear (they don't uniquely affect the build) it allows the player to put together a rough set of gear, and then use the sockets to round out any missing effects that the set is lacking. This flexibility opens the viability of different builds, allowing players to cover build weaknesses or push the build's strengths futher.
A similar mechanic from Diablo 3 is Kanai's Cube - which consumes 1 piece of equipment to permanently apply one of its effects to you passively. This gives players more breathing room when creating builds - if you need the effects of 3 weapons, you can equip 2, and place the 3rd in Kanai's Cube.
Revealing Hidden Stats
It also creates an interesting dynamic on the market - some players sell unidentified gear because it's worth more than revealing it to find it has average stats, and it's a fun risk to take as a buyer.
I think this also has huge potential to be a distinct industry for enchanters to capitalize on. Forge the weapon at a blacksmith, upgrade it and then take it to an enchanter to imbue it with magic.
BUT: PoE has multiple levels of "gear identification" (unidentified, awakened, etc.), which feels a bit excessive.
Also please stay away from %stat multipliers here - Maplestory introduced 12% stat multipliers, which can be stacked on all 20 equipment slots and meant players were hitting the damage cap all the time so they had to keep raising the damage cap - now a poor player does 1mil damage and a funded player does 13 trillion damage - a difference of several orders of magnitude. This makes balancing late-game content a nightmare.
Discovery
Or to completely switch gears, Pokemon Diamond had a really interesting mining minigame where you could only use your pickaxe a limited number of times in one area, and you could only take resources that you completely uncovered from the dirt, as in the following image:
Please hide valuable resources, and do not leave them out in the open - it's more fun to discover them. This also promotes exploration in search of rare resources.
Crafting Tools
Similarly in Subnautica, certain resources were gated by tool requirements, which gives a satisfying feeling of progression when you finally figure out how to mine those giant clumps of metal deposit.
In Maplestory, players could craft a workstation that other players could use to disassemble extra gear into crafting materials for a price set by the player who owned the workstation. Unfortunately, these workstations weren't too difficult to build, so when 5 players go to the city centre and set up their workstations, competing for lowest price, it essentially became a free service, and nobody made money from it.
Perhaps a solution to this is to limit a workstation to 1 user at a time - thus creating demand for more workstations to be opened. Alternatively, only qualified artisans can use the workstations - so you must purchase their services.
Crafting Consumables
In Maplestory, alchemy/herbalism suffered this fate because the effort required to produce 1 intelligence potion that lasted for only 10 minutes made it only useful to the extremely funded players who could afford to chug them all day, for the tiniest advantage.
On the other extreme, in the Witcher 3 consumables refill if you just rest so you don't feel bad using them - but then they are no longer truly consumable
I therefore prefer if consumables are not too difficult to source, and significantly powerful.
Rare consumables rarely get consumed.
Rerolling RNG
1. In a maplestory private server I played, a piece of gear could be RNG enhanced by up to 3 tiers using a special consumable, but these enhancements could not be re-rolled unless you reset the entire item. This meant that although there was risk involved in enhancement, there was no backwards progression unless you intentionally reset your item. This allowed the developers to left skew the RNG distribution toward zero, because even if you rolled badly, it was still better than nothing. This also provided a good long term pursuit of gear progression, because you could keep re-rolling on a spare piece of gear until it outclassed your own. I found this system very satisfying for gear progression, and the market for these consumables became a large piece of the server's economy.
2. In PoE/Diablo, there are ways to re-roll 1 of the effects on a piece of equipment, to help fix those pieces of gear that are almost what you need. You can also reroll the numbers on the effects in pursuit of min-maxing - this also gives players a long term goal for gear progression.
I don't like BDO's gear enhancement that demotes your gear on a failed enhancement.
Nor Maplestory Chaos scrolls that can equally decrease stats on an item.
Recipes
They also resolved the redundancy of finding a recipe you already have by instead rewarding the player with some titanium - a common but useful resource.
Skyrim/Witcher3 put their recipes in specific places, which were usually part of a set, so it made me look up the other locations online - I'm not sure if this is a behaviour to encourage or not, but it makes the recipe feel more special/rare.
Maplestory recipes were tradeable consumables for high level gear - but the drop rate of recipes was higher than the number of pieces being crafted. This meant that recipes flooded the market and became mostly worthless - this is especially true for not-quite-endgame gear. So the recipes might as well have been permanent, since it wasn't too hard to find someone selling the recipe you needed.
On the other hand, there were certain rings that were very powerful and were quite easy to craft, so the recipes became the bottleneck and skyrocketted in price (recipe price = item selling price)
Is there a way to regulate the distribution of recipes with materials so they are about equal?
Alternatively, make the drop rates of materials and recipes seasonal with opposite phases, so that demand/supply of either is always changing.
Components
While this might not work for mass-produced crafts, it would add flavour to uniquely crafted items. It's also a very flexible crafting system and opens the opportunity for highly customizable crafting.
Custom Design
A UI that did this better was the Creator in Spore - I have especially fond memories of the vehicle designer which calculated the stats of your vehicle by adding up the components you used in the vehicle's design. This could be a great option for something like custom furniture crafting.
Gathering
Multipurpose Resources
When there are multiple options for how a resource can be used, it prompts players to prioritize and makes the resource more precious. This is especially good for the very common materials (like titanium in Subnautica)
Similarly, important basic-needs items have multiple crafting routes: like water in Subnautica can be acquired using a filtration machine, capturing the pink fish, or using coral and salt (or eating certain foods with high water content) this invites creativity to work with what you have, rather than following a predefined route to acquiring water.
Resource Quality
I'd love to see a similar thing in the crafting system.
Perhaps the Processing Artisans can refine a large bulk of resources into a small amount of high quality resources, on top of their other services?
Repairs
It would be cool if equipment repair could work similarly - a damaged sword needs a blade replacement, you can resmelt the old blade for recycling.
This was the BEST time I had crafting. It was inherently a system for long-haul players, who wanted to be able to work on actual projects, in the game. Even with the absolute best materials, you were never guaranteed a final outcome; It was still random and un-giving of any promises as to what the finished product would/could have for stats. (Things like furniture were an exception.)
The complexity probably doesn't need to be quite as-deep, but you'll never catch me complaining if it is! Most WoW-clones copy WoW's crafting system, as to appeal to a less-interested less-invested type of player. I never cared for WoW-like systems, like we have in SWTOR, because it requires very little complexity and effort - and guarantees an always-repeatable outcome.
Instead, I'd love to see something akin to SWG's crafting systems in AoC - something that takes time and effort to put together, and where the final product's stats and quality is not a guarantee. This adds an element of fun in attaining success, even (or perhaps especially) if it takes a few tries to obtain the desired outcome.
I enjoy systems that are a little more than having the components in your inventory and pressing a button. I think BDO's cooking system is a good example. It had you drag items into spaces above a cauldron and press a button to mix them together. I think interacting with the components in that way gave a better feeling of using them to create something.
I also enjoy if there is some level of complexity/layers to crafting. An example would be items requiring you to also craft their components. I think it gives a better feeling of mastery if there is more to remember than 3 or 4 materials.
It would be nice if crafting was more visually entertaining. I think the best example i can think of is in Monster hunter worlds where there is a small cutscene that plays when you craft an item. Usually it's completely through a menu with maybe a fun effect when you successfully craft something. It would be nice to see your character craft the item.