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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.
Crafting system idea/worries
BerenErchamion
Member
Hello there
Not sure if this is the right place to post about it, but here i go.
I've thought a bit about it, and came to coclusion that the biggest discouragement from crafting is predetermined recipes.
Why? They just are a (usually) longer way of obtaining an item that has little to no diference to regular mob drop.
It makes crafters competetive to one another in only one aspect - grindig materials.
However in one game i experienced an absolutely briliant system, which worked in this way: crafting requires materials and *ingredients*. Materials would determine the most basic things - level, durability, main attack dmg or defense value.
Ingredients were the fun part - each would provide particular stats, either positive or negative. Here comes the player created recipe - ingredients are put into a grid, however the player must be clever about it as some ings would also influence other depending on position in the grid (like 50% more power to ings above), yet the player cant just spam the most powerful ings, as ings also influence durability. Basicly making a recipe was solving a puzzle.
(I could like describe it more in detail or link recipe making site for this game if anyone is intetested)
But to conclude my thoughts, i wish for crafting that puts emphasis on player ingeniuity and not mindless grind.
Let players have their secret "crabby patty" formulas xd
Not sure if this is the right place to post about it, but here i go.
I've thought a bit about it, and came to coclusion that the biggest discouragement from crafting is predetermined recipes.
Why? They just are a (usually) longer way of obtaining an item that has little to no diference to regular mob drop.
It makes crafters competetive to one another in only one aspect - grindig materials.
However in one game i experienced an absolutely briliant system, which worked in this way: crafting requires materials and *ingredients*. Materials would determine the most basic things - level, durability, main attack dmg or defense value.
Ingredients were the fun part - each would provide particular stats, either positive or negative. Here comes the player created recipe - ingredients are put into a grid, however the player must be clever about it as some ings would also influence other depending on position in the grid (like 50% more power to ings above), yet the player cant just spam the most powerful ings, as ings also influence durability. Basicly making a recipe was solving a puzzle.
(I could like describe it more in detail or link recipe making site for this game if anyone is intetested)
But to conclude my thoughts, i wish for crafting that puts emphasis on player ingeniuity and not mindless grind.
Let players have their secret "crabby patty" formulas xd
1
Comments
The idea of crafting finished goods (using designed macros) was unique.
However, it was also a grind ... more than crafting in most other MMOs.
We'll have to see what Intrepid debuts for Alpha-2.
Hopefully, it's involved and detailed without a monstrous grind for materials.
Yes please.
Lets say there are 2 rogues. One prefers playing alone than he would focus more on attack dmg and crit whereas the other rogue who plays with his friends can focus more on poison enabling build with more focus on attack speed to get them up early. This way the solo rogue can have plate armor with relatively higher strength & damage and the other rogue can have leather gear with more agility and speed.
I have been thinking about this aspect of crafting myself but am waiting for IS to shed more light on their plans before making any assumptions.
So a crafted item requires materials which come in several tiers and rarity. Material tier is like 10 levels (like 1-10 is oak wood, 11-20 is birch etc). Material tier and rarity dictates base durability, ingredient level u can use for the recipe and base attack/defense of the item.
While ingredients are not required to finish crafting an item, without them the result is a statless item on par with common tier of non crafted.
Ingredients are categorised by rarity and the level of crafting required to use them (also as mentioned before if an ingredient is level 20 u cant use it with 1-10 tier materials). Also the more powerful the ingredient, the bigger negative impact it has on durability (just a balance measure).
The ingredients are put into a 2x3 grid, the importance of this i'll explain in catalyst ings.
I'd say there are several types of ingredients (they are not really differenciated by the game itself)
- Base ingredients - the ones that just provide raw positive/negative stats to the item.
- Durability increasing ingredients - they usually add little to none positive stats, or even add solely negative
ones, but instead of taking durability, they provide it (a way to use more powerful ingredients or cheaper
quality materials)
- Catalyst ingredients - they are the tricky part, they influence the power of other ingredients in the grid. The catalysts affect only the stats of the other ings, not the durability they provide. The most popular catalysts are something like this: "-100% effectiveness to ingredients touching, +75% effectiveness to ingredients NOT touching". This means depending on the items position in the grid it can make for a great item. A skilled crafter would put it in one of the corners of the grid, add durability ings to the touching slots and as powerful ings as they can in the not touching slots.
There are also catalysts that give like -200% effectiveness to one other slot, they are used to 'flip' a base ingredient that has negative stats and turn them into positive.
I'll emphasize again, im not saying to replicate like a particular system, im just passing one idea, maybe someone will be at least somewhat inspired
https://wynnbuilder.github.io/crafter.html#19F965+9F5+5+9a91
SWG's crafting was the best and most in-depth crafting system I've ever seen in an MMO. It featured a lot of what you're talking about in their *schematics*.
Thats seems promising then, i hope they make something extraordinary
As a crafter i want to be respected for my creativity, not for the grind.
For instance, when making a composite long recurve bow, I would experiment with different blends of Blackwood (which added range) and bone (which added overall power).
I literally filled a notebook with different blends of all the materials to calibrate the few exact composite I wanted to fit my archer.
Nothing about that experience was prescriptive, it was left only to my devices to identify and document the recipe.
I’d love to see the essence of that ‘figure it out’ mentality in each of the Ashes crafting paths.
Wasn't there a ton of RNG in the gathering though? I wonder if Ashes really will introduce something like "quality" for their mats. Maybe doesn't have to be as complex as having qualities for conductivity and malleability and a ton of other qualities, could just be one overall quality for a material.
*SOME* materials will be loot-able from bosses, and their quality is universal - BUT, as the Wiki states:
"Resources will have differing tiers of quality for the same resource type.[22] This is somewhat similar to Star Wars Galaxies.[29]"
I really don't want to see a crafting system geared towards casual players; I want a crafting system where time and investment are involved. It took me many, many months to get all the best/near-best materials to make Starfighter parts in SWG, and I really, REALLY hope that AoC's system will be quite similar.
Yeah that's fine with me too, I want the whole system to just be copy pasted from Star Wars Galaxies. But there is still RNG, just in the gathering rather than the crafting which is fine by me. I wish their item decay was more like SWG and items would eventually break, but Steven has said that's not their goal.
i'm more aligned with a certain degree of unpredictability, not necessarily unpredictability in the stats received on the crafted gear, but unpredictability in the numbers range of the stats provided and thing like the possibility of lucky results like very small chances of getting double results or the item getting an extra stats as a rare bonus or bad outcomes like a chance of failing to craft the item(and the mastery of the crafter influencing the odds of those possibilities), those are things that provide excitement and expectation and makes crafting way more fun and kinda of a gamble.
Those who played Lineage 2 will most likely recognize that the crafting system i described is quite similar to the one Lineage 2 had back in the day, i wouldn't be surprised if Ashes takes some inspirations from it.
Aren't we all sinners?
Additionally I have very large concerns for the logistical aspect of how they’ve chosen to restrict crafting. For some reason they’ve arbitrarily chosen horizontal segments (focus on extremely vague level of processing) for specialization rather than vertical (focus on a particular craft)
A lumberer not being able to fine tune the logs they picked out for the specific stats makes no logical sense. A carpenter being unable to tell high quality wood from poor quality wood during gathering also makes no logical sense.
They still have no given sensible explanation as to why they made the “mastery” options locked by level of processing. Locking crafters into specifically crafting areas makes much more sense, and still requires using resources from other crafting professions. It also isn’t convenient or efficient to gather everything yourself, process it all yourself, and craft it all yourself, so it’s not like it would disincentivize creating trade arrangements among players who focus in one area over another. The current split just causes inconvenience for no meaningful benefit to the game.
There is already randomness in crafting. It's called open pvp. You never know who is going to take half your mats or more. Full of wonderous surprises! And if you somehow beat a fully geared gankered in your pve crafting gear you get a reward. 'Whatever they took from the last person they ganked'. Oh the possibilities.
More seriously, I personally hate gambling centric crafting. That leads to mindless grind. It should be more about making the right choices in the lead up process combined with the decision making for maintaining the freehold/node facilities. The goal should be creating a healthy economic ecosystem and an engaging play loop. Dopamine hit style gambling is the lowest form of 'engaging play loop' in my opinion.
I'm sure there are people who disagree with me on this, and that's fine. I just feel like Ashes has the potential to make much richer crafting experience in it's risk reward model than the gambling style you proposed. Yes there will obviously be some rng involved, but that shouldn't be the largest focus of the game play loop.
I mean you could certainly call it indirectly randomness in Gathering or Processing as raw and processed materials will drop in random pvp encounters in the open world, but actual crafted gear would only drop from corrupted players so not sure if it could apply as getting corrupted is a decision and getting ganked isn't.
Sure, i definitely understand your personal opinion, i know a lot of games that implemented such crafting gamblings in terrible ways that made me hate crafting in those games(PoE crafting for example is a sh1tshow heavy grinding ultra-RNG fiesta), but gambling on crafting when well implemented is fantastic and leads to a better economy as chance to fail crafting aswell as trying to hit a Lucky extra bonus on the crafter gear works as an extra material sink that raises and maintains the materials demand and relevancy and in my opinion the thrill of gambling on crafting is the crafters highest form of dopamine hit, other than having your name stamped on BIS Gear.
Just out of curiosity, could you name a game where you really disliked its gambling centric crafting system?
Yeah, the good thing about discussions is clashing different opinions and arguments against each other trying to reach common ground, for me the risk reward idea will always involve gambling as those concepts can be quite directly correlated...
Aren't we all sinners?
That was me being mildly sarcastic. However, we should be clear here. I am definitely including Gathering and Proccessing as part of AoC's 'crafting system'. So the fact that they are dropping mats is still 'part of crafting' to me. You are free to disagree and have a different definition for crafting. Just know that it's just a a 'difference in definition' that could make discussions with me on the matter unclear sometimes.
Well I'll be even more clear. It's not that 'getting a bonus' isn't 'fun'. I just want the bonus to come from something more abstract than 'random number generator go brr'. If I'm not involved in the bonus, I'm sure it triggers good feelings for someone, but it makes me quite detached and indifferent. Kind of the opposite of the intended dopamine hit.
As an example of a game with rng that I think meets in the middle, fishing in FFXI has rng and 'extra bonus' and'lose material on fail' built in, yet it never registers to me as 'gambling centric'. There is a lot of fine tuning and decision making that you have to make, that effect your outcome and efficency. There is definitive skill you can build. Yeah the minigame is part of why there is skill, but it's a lot more nuanced than just shoving in a minigame. The risks to your materials are there. You can definitely push to fish something outside of your skill level to make something more rewarding. But it mostly does not stray away from the skill in your decision making and preferred non-crafting areas/activity effecting what you are doing.
I tend to drop games with bad crafting systems fairly quickly. And not even because the crafting systems are bad, just due to other systems also being neglected. Is it unfair of me to say Neverwinter? It's been awhile since I've played an mmo with crafting I'd say is 'entirely bad' so you'd have to tell me if my memory wasn't right on that one. I also remember not being too keen on Star Wars Galaxies but I played that game even less than Neverwinter so that's just 'a shot in the dark'.
I'm sure Steven would agree with you given the most recent livestream. I definitely disagree. Gambling to me, to clarify, is 'betting on something that is purely rng with no agency in the matter'. You can create risk with agency. That happens when you design a craft around 'skill'. It's the difference between blackjack(with card counting) and slots. I think we can start referring to it as 'skill based risk v reward' and 'luck based risk vs reward'.
For example again fishing. Let's say RNG decides what the size/weight (maybe this effects quality, but it should probably effect difficulty of catching) and species (determines what recipies and therefore how economically valuable it is) of the fish is. It's up to you to: 'choose bait for your desired end goal,' 'find a safe fishing spot,' 'get a gauge on the weather and maybe prepare your rod and bait accordingly,' and obviously 'reel it in efficiently'.
Now let's say this may result in you having reeled in 100 sea bass for the hour and only 10 tuna. It's still better (to me) than all fishing taking the same amount of time to reel in with no skill input, all of the choices before you started fishing being 'realistically only a few choices/meta-optimized'. Even if I got 100 tuna per hour because I used a more hq rod that was more prone to randomly snapping in that scenario I'd still have less of a dopamine hit than in the 100 sea bass scenario. Because I could have 'used the wrong rod when it was raining and struggled with the larger sea bass more as a result and therefore only got 70 flippin sea bass'. Or if it wasn't raining and I used the rod that did better with larger ones, maybe it's 'overkill'. After all there is always some chance the rod may snap on a failed fish and now I'm out more mats than if I just 'used the less expensive rod that can deal with large ones in a pinch, but is more of an all-arounder'.
You feel me? I'm not actually sure if we are talking about different concepts. Which one of these is gambling to you and do you see how the 'sea bass' scenario can have much more opportunity for risk that is an agency driven choice and therefore a 'skill one could master' over a gambling guided concept of 'risk vs reward'?
In fairness, you can definitely have systems with agency on the risk as well that are bad. After all I think everyone can agree that if the choices you build into the system result in 'on average reducing risk gives you the most dollars per second' then you haven't really made a choice and just made things 'default'. The same problem I have with 'gambling centric systems' occur in that case.
Either way, I think there will be varying levels of 'how much skill based risk v reward' is in a craft vs 'luck based risk vs reward' depending on what the craft is. Some crafts are hard to translate differently from 'gambling' and make fair in a risk vs reward game like ashes. I just hope they can apply skill based risk v reward in more crafts often so there is a large variety to choose from.
I knew, i just played along. xD
But i agree with you, i also include Gathering and Proccessing as part of the crafting as one is the means to the end goal, and like the possibility of both of then having RNG aswell like double results or chances of higher tier results.
Different strokes for different folks, I can see that you would definitely take a 100% skill based or simply straight up RNG-less crafting system over a crafting system tainted by RNG but is able to withstand some RNG. For me a RNG-less crafting system would be pretty boring and way less exciting.
I can't argue about Neverwinter or Star Wars Galaxies as those are games that i never touched but would guess that they have some RNG features in their crafting. xD
Even tho i'm a RNG enthusiast, i have nothing against Skill based crafting systems and i certainly understand what a skill based RNG influenced system can look like (Btw the fishing example was excelent) as one doesn't negate the other and can be used in combination.
The risk vs rewards you presented is a risk that can be mitigated through skill agency, which worries me with the possibility of sheer skill trivializing the risk as a whole.
In the end its a matter of implementation, both systems can be well-implemented or badly-implemented and can even act in union.
Aren't we all sinners?
I'd prefer some rng, to be clear. For example I don't want to know the exact end result of my Gathering in advanced even if I can influence it some by picking which resource nodes to harvest. Random higher tier goods is nice in that sort of scenario. I'd also like a form of pushing your luck, risking it for the biscuit and going to more dangerous areas, going after bigger fish, trying to grow a weird seed you might not be the best equipped for due to character level or circumstance.
I personally am also ok in Crafting and Processing with a choice between aiming for average (to shift some of your full fail chance to your partial fail chance instead) vs aiming for quality for certain crafts (higher total fail chance but higher hq chance). I would preffer hq processed and gathered materials be able to increase your success chance on a quality synth but not mitigate the fail chance. That should be your characters skill level to mitigate. I think that's a fair compromise while still allowing for the skill part to have some over all influence in the process and preparation.
But I suppose yes if I had to choose between slots and arm wrestling I'd choose the latter.
Right but in my example you can't tell if you will hook a sea bass (less valuable) vs a tuna (more valuable.) Only when it is hooked would you be able to by the way it is pulling against you. The skill can mitigate how long it takes to aquire the result. But the bait is still used and all the skill in the world can't mitigate unfortunately rolling 70 times and getting sea bass. But your time and resources are decisively still optimized. The character skill level stop probably determines the range of things you can catch/benefit skill development wise from catching. You can risk snapping the rod if you used the wrong rod and failed at the bigger sea bass.
If that is an acceptable level of mitigation to you, let me know. If it is, then I think there is a middle ground IS can reach and make an interesting fleshed out system a lot of people will be happy with.
Yeah, those levels of RNG mitigation through skill are fine as it doesn't heavily damage the RNG of the system but the efficiency of the system through pushing your odds like being fast, wasting less resources in your example or a risk tradeoff manipulation, like increasing the chance of failing at crafting, or getting less gathering or processing materials, but also increasing the chance of getting more or higher tier/quality materials or hiting a rare bonus on crafted gear, even if those would possible involve skill based minigames like (perfect zone bar clicking for example).
Middle ground is certainly reachable and i have faith IS team can make a well-implemented and interesting gathering, processing and crafting system.
Aren't we all sinners?