Greetings, glorious adventurers! If you're joining in our Alpha One spot testing, please follow the steps here to see all the latest test info on our forums and Discord!
Options
About the proposed minigames for crafting
Nerror
Member, Alpha One, Adventurer
When you design this for our testing pleasure in A2, please consider your target audience. While there are many demographics that enjoy crafting, a big part of of them are not twitch skill gods or finger ninjas due to age or disabilities or just temperament. They enjoy the more leisurely pace that the artisan skills often provide.
So please, any minigames, or gameplay layers as Steven called them in the AMA, don't make them hard quick time action types or where a very high precision is required for the best results.
Obviously any gameplay layers need to not be tedious after the 100th time either.
So please, any minigames, or gameplay layers as Steven called them in the AMA, don't make them hard quick time action types or where a very high precision is required for the best results.
Obviously any gameplay layers need to not be tedious after the 100th time either.
11
Comments
But you haven't even seen a single example yet? I find it really hard to wrap my head around this kind of stance. "I don't know what it is, what it is comprised of, or how it will work, but I don't want it!"
I suppose some people's reaction to innovation or change is instant rejection. Shame...
I think it sounds innovative and fun but would like to see more. I like the idea of players having more agency regarding quality and spec, rather than it just being an entirely spread-sheet-oriented RNG-fest.
Since crafting is a heavy element in the game I don't believe everything should just easily be skipped over with one click, but that is just imo. Also depends how much quantity you are crafting, id expect things to be a lot more on the single digit side.
It's not something I feel is easily done for all professions. Fishing absolutely needs a minigame (imo), if you want most fishers to care. Do the other professions? Hard to say. But these sorts of decisions are really decisions about what types of people are 'allowed' to be a particular type of crafter (or certainly, enjoy it).
Agreed let’s test it in Alpha 2 first, @Nerror … rather than post a preemptive blanket warning in the forums saying “I can’t be bothered with mini-games.”
You're making an assumption here, possibly without realizing it.
A game doesn't need 'mass crafting'.
Half the time, the reason for it IS just to use up your time.
If the minigame uses up your time instead and is more engaging, 'mass crafting' could just be tossed out, and honestly, to me that's a lot more fun because the micromanagement of the systems is within the player's control rather than 'do what the system tells you to do' or 'do hundreds of X'.
Probably because i've done mini games with crafting in other mmo's and know first hand how terribly boring and tedious they get. There's no "skill" with it, just time sinking and monotony. It's not innovative as it's been done before. What sounds "fun" to the uninitiated is a plague for those who already know the annoyance of it. Mini games do not improve crafting they turn it into more of a chore.
I don't like RNG crafting either and that's probably the only thing we're going to agree on here.
So no Skill, Fun or Chance in crafting.... ok. Makes sense.
Material quality determines whether you have to play the minigame or not.
Minigames are generally undetectably bottable anyway. If they are beyond that point, players complain because they're VERY twitch-skill heavy.
Variety is their better bet.
We know that lower tiers will be required to craft higher tiers. I'd assume it won't be a direct use, but a step by step one. You craft t1s into t2s, t2s into t3 and so on until you craft t5. Now, that might not be true and we might just have direct mats instead of craftable ones.
But even then, I'm talking about a guild crafter who's supposed to craft 8 armor pieces for 100++ people. And that's per tier of gear. And if his second specialization is jewel cutting (assuming that's related to the 5 jewel slots), that would be another 5 per each of the 100+. That's a whole lotta minigaming.
I would REALLY hope that isn't the case. Or rather, that if it is the case, that it's a negative.
The idea that one person COULD outfit an entire guild AND this not be a negative or tedious process ALSO implies that one person could outfit an entire smaller node. Now, that's SORT of good, but wouldn't one do this over multiple days?
Isn't it BETTER to have 'daily crafting' to do? That sounds a lot more like the problem being on either supply or demand side, not 'crafter'.
If we take FFXIV crafting/gathering as an example. ( effectively what has been proposed by Steven with maybe some nuance added on top of it)
FFXIV crafting consists of only minigames that each crafter and gatherer has to complete in order to make or gather an item, after some time this process becomes quite boring as there is little variance in the system.
Generally speaking, people cope with this system by using user-made macros that effectively auto-complete the minigame for them. Adding a degree of variance (or chance) into this system seems like it will cause the macros people use to not work and require them to pay actual attention to a system that ultimately is just a grind of pressing buttons in order which at the highest tiers people would have had to of done thousands of times.
You understand how such systems while they might be fun to begin with they ultimately lead to the users either dropping it completely or creating their own system to automate the games system, should that ability to create some form of automation on the system be removed, it will very easily result in a huge drop of people using the games system.
Ultimately this is all a useless argument since while you are correct we have not seen an example of their (Intrepid studios) crafting system, Crafting minigames have been done over time and it seems to always end with crafting/gathering becoming an underused system or in the case of ffxiv, it becomes a human centipede where they are all feeding off of each other.
It was done through one crafter because it'd be a trusted person, it'd be a person with recipes already registered (you needed them registered to be able to craft the items) and at the lvl that supported the craft itself (depending on the server, this was also a long process).
And in that context, I look at AoC's system and see that only a few people would be able to master a particular direction. That mastering would require a ton of crafting, so it's beneficial to start crafting all the things the guild would need on that one person to boost him asap. And artisan reputation seems to matter too, so on top of your guild's crafting you might want to help out people in your node or maybe even in the whole vassal system.
And I look at that and see potentially thousands of crafts. And that's just within one "patch" of the game. Any expansions would bring more stuff. And any decaying (which will obviously happen) would most likely demand more crafts.
Now obviously you can split this all up across multiple days or even weeks, but, again, in my experience that shit don't work like that. If my guild needs the best possible gear for their next raid/siege/pvp encounter - I'm gonna craft it asap. And if the guild is working correctly, supply will be ready for me when I need it.
If they collected resources for 20 sets of armor, and it didn't take THEM multiple days to collect, you are in a high throughput guild. For some people this is great. If one doesn't like it, don't join that kind.
In my opinion it SHOULD be that they will stagger this depending on your time and interest. Or, in AoC's case, since the preprocessing would be done by ME, not by you...
You'd log in and find that I put materials for you to craft 4 sets (or 20 Helmets) in your 'inbox', you'd do those, and then go do something else, and the next day it would be another 4 sets (or 20 gloves).
Example I really like:
Now this is what I would consider to be the level of 'slow twitch' of what you are talking about Nerror. It's a twitch kind of minigame in that it requires you to actually 'stop what you are doing if you want to participate' on a timer. While you don't have /much/ time to hunt the mole and need to react, there is still a decent amount of time to grab it. If you are better at comboing or play a class with big burst damage you also need less time to kill it. Either way it is well within normal combat parameters in the rest of the game.
For those of you who haven't experienced BDO farming. The mole cannot be handled by workers nor are they lessened by workers. Moles only appear when harvesting. The mole essentially drops a good item. It's therefore not a requirement to hunt them but it's very incentivized. There is a lot of design philosophy behind why I think this is a good system but here's the tldr:
1. Hunting the mole is completely optional. You don't need to hunt it to keep farming.
2. It's a reward not a punishment
3. It breaks the monotony of the task with something a little more active in a sudden way outside the players control.
I'd give you an example of a 'slightly more fast twitch' skill but I leave that to fisher people for I don't personally gravitate towards fast twitch crafts even if I fully support them existing. Knowing your reaction to the speed of 'hunting a mole' might help others engage you better though.
Edit: converted link from shorts to regular youtube for all you hyperlink leery clickers.
You want the reputation of the "best crafter around"? You gotta be the fastest to the top and always be available to craft stuff for people, be it through your stall or in person.
You want your guild to be at the peak performance at all times? You gotta craft everything you can for them asap. Why should a guild gimp themselves just to let you work less?
Obviously those kinds of guilds will be on the rarer side in the grand scheme of things, but what I'm mainly asking for is just some way to do crafting at big scales w/o the requirement for the minigame, because I know for sure that each and every dedicated crafter of a hardcore guild will have to go through thousands of those minigames and I'd assume that it'll get tedious pretty quickly.
Now there's a chance that gear acquisition will be so damn slow that this 1k crafts will be spread over weeks of gameplay. And while I'd be totally fine with that, I dunno how the masses would see it. I'm used to getting a single new piece of gear after a week of grinding money/mats for it, but afaik that's a very oldschool line of thinking.
Just a week? Y'all whippersnappers!
Back in MY day we had to farm FIFTEEN WEEKS just to buy a new Status Removal Spell!
(Statements made in this response are hyperbole and may not reflect the reality of "Scroll of Erase" acquisition)
Anyways now a more serious response:
I don't understand large guilds that have only one crafter.
I don't understand the concept of being 'the best crafter around' to the point where you not only have no competition, but you are EXPECTED to play like this. That said I do know people that DO play like this, and then utterly enjoy it, so I don't see why we wouldn't support their dream.
But I don't see any connection here. Expected by who? If you want to be the absolute top, then yes, you often sacrifice some fun. In fact, I think most competitive games AUTOMATICALLY work this way, because humans only have fun doing the same thing for X period, but pushing beyond that to double the same time has payoffs.
Infinite fun, were it possible, would lead to infinite gains across all enjoyers. It's baked into Game Theory that if you want to be the BEST at something in a game, you will sacrifice some fun unless you have a VERY high tolerance/aptitude for the activity, in which case, good for you, you are naturally the best.
I already know your opinion on that, so.
I think it HAS to.
MMOs falter when things don't take long to get.
Also, part of this is from your lower experience with hard PvE, but for your reference, no one, I don't think even the TOP guilds, will care about the literal best gear BEFORE going to fight a hard boss.
If you don't die like 20 times before you even know what to DO with certainty, then it's not very hard. Mathematically there would be no progression pyramid.
This happens in PvP games too against top players. If you ditch the matchmaking and find a REALLY good player willing to keep fighting you, it takes 10-20 matches before you can even figure out what to do, far less manage to do it. At that point, your 'ability to win/learn because you do more damage or survive longer' is only minimally affected by the types of gear gaps I'm used to.
Tie the minigame to scale crafting. Maybe if you can perfectly beat the minigame your crafting triggers multiple times, if your mats allow for that. Or maybe you gotta do some special action during the minigame to trigger multicrafting. Neither of those things would impact casual crafters in any way, but they would remove tedium from scale crafters.
1. Fast crafting where you get your items instantly. Wouldn't recommend for making the best gear int he game
2. Slow crafting where you throw it in there and it takes a while in the oven to make
3. Mini game crafting that can reduce how long it is in the oven and has the highest chance to craft better stats
This way people that hate crafting can still not use the system it will just take longer. And people that want to craft and spend time in town crafting rather than adventuring can do so to make better items and increase their xp faster.
Pretty much my base idea on it so everyone is happy.
Wouldn't you need to be your best self to even see if it's possible to beat the boss at your progress stage? Or is that bad Lost Ark-like design of gear score that's not applicable to the games you've played?
This is terrible. Please don't do this. You'll be pissing money onto the wind if you're not using minigame crafting, so basically everyone will be forced to use it. How you think people play is not how they'll actually play.
lol back then it would take several months to collect resources to craft 1 set
iirc steven has said that crafting will take time, effort, and will be a long process. i imagine it will be similar to early l2, so no, u wont be crafting 20 items every day or even every week
he has also said that after you craft your gear, you can add things to it, like stats or elements ( i guess from jewelcrafting?) or modify the tats iirc. so yeah even more crafting
Those games have laughably bad design.
As mentioned, those 'DPS checks' and other things you see in modern games are just a simplification. They are 'the result of someone who understood only part of older games recreating the part they understand'. I could rant for hours.
The crafting minigame options available for Intrepid's use are many and I am sure they have people on staff with at LEAST my skill level, wouldn't you assume so too?
I doubt there's any need to outline to them all the things they can do to make MMO crafting good. The reason other MMOs don't do it isn't because they can't figure out what to do, it's that they are catering to players who don't want to do harder things, and they limit the potential of the systems based on that.
This is true for nearly everything in 'modern' MMOs. Ashes is in no way required to do the same. Their challenge is actually the one I focus on:
"How can I make this as understandable as possible without dumbing it down?"