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Alpha Two Phase II testing is currently taking place 5+ days each week. More information about testing schedule can be found here
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Alpha Two Phase II testing is currently taking place 5+ days each week. More information about testing schedule can be found here
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
An Ideal Crafting System
Mic
Member, Alpha Two
in Artisanship
Crafters have an endgame, and it often goes under appreciated, then stale, then dead.
For me, there are a few ingredients that go into making crafting fun. These are different ingredients than what makes PvE or PvP fun, but that’s perfectly fine because they appeal to different players in the MMO landscape.
1. We want to be able to differentiate ourselves in the economy.
This is an overlooked aspect from the hey-day of MMOs. You could be known server wide as the best at something, with respect to crafting. Too often, recently, MMOs have what I would call the carbon copy crafter conundrum. All weaponsmiths are the same weaponsmith, all leatherworkers are the same leatherworker, all carpenters are the same carpenter, and so on. If crafters converge at end-game to the same build, the end-game is stale, interchangeable, and causes us to quit.
To my mind there are two main ways to alleviate this: (a) give crafters training trees – something that is planned but is always only a half-measure and (b) make leveling up crafting professions recipe specific – something almost no game has done, to their detriment.
I always appreciate mirroring the same infrastructure throughout the game, so let’s re-use the current language of grandmaster, master, journeyman, apprentice, and novice). We should be able to level only 2 recipes in a chosen grandmaster crafting profession to grandmaster tier. I might, for example, choose to be a grandmaster weaponsmith with grandmaster 2H hammers, specialized in mithril. The rest of the things I can make are at lower tiers, following the same basic structure.
2. We want to be able to become known for something.
As a corollary to differentiation, comes notoriety. We want to be able to have our name known. This means some small things, where we can make an imprint on the game, like: being able to custom name items, having a maker’s mark, and a UI that shows what we have made, historically. Some of the deeds of the items should be linked back to the maker, if possible, for our records and our marketing.
A way we want notoriety that is a bigger design decision, is the ability to make unique or very rare items. Let me start with an important, but overlooked, premise: it is possible to have many very rare or unique items.
Take the idea of the server-unique item or crafted weapon, in-and-of-itself awesome, but often the only of its kind. Why not have 100 server-unique weapons over the course of the year? I fully recognize the balance-lift this implies, but even small changes create a marketplace. More easily balanced things like: this month, Rigg’s Metal Chain, which goes into Rigg’s Earring, drops with extreme rarity when killing River Runner Riggs and at most 10 times. This December Rigg’s Metal Chain is modified to be Frozen Rigg’s Metal Chain and adds a small amount of ice resistance on top of the max health, armor, and max mana. Then in January, it changes slightly with some modifier. This will help keep the market fresh. The wisest combatant would seek out a Jeweler who is a grandmaster at Earrings, specializing in Rigg’s Earrings.
The implication of this is that you can combine differentiation and permanently limited drops to create permanently limited crafts, whereby the notoriety of a jeweler being specialized in Rigg’s Earrings creates an intriguing marketplace that involves travel and communication, among other things.
3. We want to be experimenters.
Besides ranking up our 2H hammer crafting ability by applying all our low-level and low-rarity materials to making 2H hammers (and not just the most efficiently used material recipe to level), we should be able to receive rewards for our grindings. These can come in at least two flavors: (1) more efficient recipes and (2) discovered interesting recipes.
More efficient recipes should be given the more we have specialized and the more we have grinded a specific crafted object.
Discovered interesting recipes should come from true experimentation with optional additives. We need truly optional additives, some of which might do nothing until you discover a rare recipe, or some of which whose impact is mitigated until we have a breakthrough.
4. We want to be tinkerers.
Combinatorics is the designer’s best friend, if they want players not to get bored or systems not to grow stale. This is as true in creating training trees that cause players to make significant choices with real trade-offs as it is here, where we need to be able to mix and match ingredients to make different things.
This is at the required level (aka a Warhammer needs 10 metal ingots of any type) and at the optional level (the Warhammer has 5 slots for optional additives like bandit marks, wolf emblem, gemstone, herbal infusion, yada yada yada). The required is about generically creating recipes like “2H hammer” instead of 2H copper hammer, 2H iron hammer, 2H steel hammer, and so on. It has the added benefit of helping lower-tier harvestable like copper remain important forever, potentially. I recognize this would intersect with my second point about notoriety, wherein it’s the optional additives that can be unique or rare, not the recipes themselves. I am not opposed to single or limited use recipes, too, however.
5. We want to get lucky. We do not want to get tragically unlucky.
This might be the most contentious of the things I’ve listed. Well, not we do not want to get tragically unlucky. Critical failures in crafting should not be a thing. The baseline quality of the craft should be guaranteed. From there, make some kind of distribution of luck to quality within the craft, within the materials use. This is a classic system, well-proven to help the marketplace and add a little slot machine to crafting. Albion Online did this very well, so I’ll leave that as an example.
Thanks for reading.
For me, there are a few ingredients that go into making crafting fun. These are different ingredients than what makes PvE or PvP fun, but that’s perfectly fine because they appeal to different players in the MMO landscape.
1. We want to be able to differentiate ourselves in the economy.
This is an overlooked aspect from the hey-day of MMOs. You could be known server wide as the best at something, with respect to crafting. Too often, recently, MMOs have what I would call the carbon copy crafter conundrum. All weaponsmiths are the same weaponsmith, all leatherworkers are the same leatherworker, all carpenters are the same carpenter, and so on. If crafters converge at end-game to the same build, the end-game is stale, interchangeable, and causes us to quit.
To my mind there are two main ways to alleviate this: (a) give crafters training trees – something that is planned but is always only a half-measure and (b) make leveling up crafting professions recipe specific – something almost no game has done, to their detriment.
I always appreciate mirroring the same infrastructure throughout the game, so let’s re-use the current language of grandmaster, master, journeyman, apprentice, and novice). We should be able to level only 2 recipes in a chosen grandmaster crafting profession to grandmaster tier. I might, for example, choose to be a grandmaster weaponsmith with grandmaster 2H hammers, specialized in mithril. The rest of the things I can make are at lower tiers, following the same basic structure.
2. We want to be able to become known for something.
As a corollary to differentiation, comes notoriety. We want to be able to have our name known. This means some small things, where we can make an imprint on the game, like: being able to custom name items, having a maker’s mark, and a UI that shows what we have made, historically. Some of the deeds of the items should be linked back to the maker, if possible, for our records and our marketing.
A way we want notoriety that is a bigger design decision, is the ability to make unique or very rare items. Let me start with an important, but overlooked, premise: it is possible to have many very rare or unique items.
Take the idea of the server-unique item or crafted weapon, in-and-of-itself awesome, but often the only of its kind. Why not have 100 server-unique weapons over the course of the year? I fully recognize the balance-lift this implies, but even small changes create a marketplace. More easily balanced things like: this month, Rigg’s Metal Chain, which goes into Rigg’s Earring, drops with extreme rarity when killing River Runner Riggs and at most 10 times. This December Rigg’s Metal Chain is modified to be Frozen Rigg’s Metal Chain and adds a small amount of ice resistance on top of the max health, armor, and max mana. Then in January, it changes slightly with some modifier. This will help keep the market fresh. The wisest combatant would seek out a Jeweler who is a grandmaster at Earrings, specializing in Rigg’s Earrings.
The implication of this is that you can combine differentiation and permanently limited drops to create permanently limited crafts, whereby the notoriety of a jeweler being specialized in Rigg’s Earrings creates an intriguing marketplace that involves travel and communication, among other things.
3. We want to be experimenters.
Besides ranking up our 2H hammer crafting ability by applying all our low-level and low-rarity materials to making 2H hammers (and not just the most efficiently used material recipe to level), we should be able to receive rewards for our grindings. These can come in at least two flavors: (1) more efficient recipes and (2) discovered interesting recipes.
More efficient recipes should be given the more we have specialized and the more we have grinded a specific crafted object.
Discovered interesting recipes should come from true experimentation with optional additives. We need truly optional additives, some of which might do nothing until you discover a rare recipe, or some of which whose impact is mitigated until we have a breakthrough.
4. We want to be tinkerers.
Combinatorics is the designer’s best friend, if they want players not to get bored or systems not to grow stale. This is as true in creating training trees that cause players to make significant choices with real trade-offs as it is here, where we need to be able to mix and match ingredients to make different things.
This is at the required level (aka a Warhammer needs 10 metal ingots of any type) and at the optional level (the Warhammer has 5 slots for optional additives like bandit marks, wolf emblem, gemstone, herbal infusion, yada yada yada). The required is about generically creating recipes like “2H hammer” instead of 2H copper hammer, 2H iron hammer, 2H steel hammer, and so on. It has the added benefit of helping lower-tier harvestable like copper remain important forever, potentially. I recognize this would intersect with my second point about notoriety, wherein it’s the optional additives that can be unique or rare, not the recipes themselves. I am not opposed to single or limited use recipes, too, however.
5. We want to get lucky. We do not want to get tragically unlucky.
This might be the most contentious of the things I’ve listed. Well, not we do not want to get tragically unlucky. Critical failures in crafting should not be a thing. The baseline quality of the craft should be guaranteed. From there, make some kind of distribution of luck to quality within the craft, within the materials use. This is a classic system, well-proven to help the marketplace and add a little slot machine to crafting. Albion Online did this very well, so I’ll leave that as an example.
Thanks for reading.
12
Comments
Something I want. Guilds matter, friendship matters. Goals and effort matter. Crafting and playing, killing and leading, following and foraging. All of it takes time, and our time matters.
This I want to see.
1. Naming of items. Makers mark.
2. Guild based repository of patterns. When you join a guild you teach the patterns to the repository. If you quit the game, another can learn the patterns. Can make the generic things. If that sort of thing is possible. Having guild based accounts to get around the natural result of the crafters leaving is a chore.
3. Crafting from the guild warehouse with permissions. Likely with freeholds.
4. Drop box of items at a location, like mail but not to get around the shipping of mats. If I make a sword, handing it over is a big deal to me. But I want it in the hands of the killer, not playing discord tag to get it to them. Local mail to a local location might work.
More later I need to get food!
Things I would like to see within the structure of the current deign
1. The ability to Grand master 3 disciplines to coincide with the Certificate Clusters. Then apply the above specialization within the clusters. For example, under the Laboratory Certificates, you can GM Alchemy, Arcane Engineering and Scribing, but within those you are limited to only parts of the tree. You could be an Enchanting Specialist that focuses on Powders, Enchanting Charms and Enchanting Scrolls. Which would be inline with the above specialization recommendations.
2. Have a warehouse exchange for citizens. You specialize in wood but need ore. Take it to the towns warehouse exchange and trade one resource from the other. Since this is a non-player involved trade, a percentage of the resource deposited for trade would go to support the town as a tax. This would help crafters be able to offload extra resources for citizenship tickets, get the resources they need with little impact to the economy.
3. An adjustment to the stack size of unprocessed and processed resources. The resource bags let you stack to a certain amount when it raw goods, the processed stack should be more. IE a stack of 20 raw lumber could stack to 30 as the processed Timber as an example.
4. Banks need a sort function that organizes a resource tab by material type and quality, both raw and processed, so all oak together by rarity in raw the processed order. It a quality of like improvement that would be huge in support of the crafters sanity.
5. Reverse Engineering. Being able to break down items within your profession to let you have the potential to recover some of the resources required to create the item and potentially learn the recipe if one exists for that item and you don't know it. Gives more purpose to drop items that may or may not get used other than just selling them to a vendor.
So many thoughts, best stop and let the ideas peculate...
Makers mark, especially if the crafters SKILL matters is an amazing feature. I support it fullheartedly.
Dwarven Guild est. 1996. Hammers High!
discord.gg/lod
The Cost of Notoriety
Another boon to the system you outlined, specifically related to notoriety, is the PvP content notoriety would produce. Spotting the renown elven shortbow crafter speaking with a caravansary agent in a Riverland farming node that produces the most exquisite woven goods could be reason alone to sound the mustering horns. Any chance to integrate crafting systems more fully with other systems serves to strengthen the gameplay loop, letting folks sink further into an immersive world.
Spreading the Word
While I've never seen it before in a game, integrating the town NPC's could also be a neat companion system to notoriety. Hiring some town's street children to spread news of a renown grandmaster enchanter being in town could have vendors sharing such in their dialogue when trading or in conversation. Or paying a town crier could have them shouting out that for a short time only, you'll be in town selling 2H hammers like no others. A small interaction, perhaps only unlocked with grandmaster in a skill, that would aid in expanding a crafter's reach while also making a city feel more alive.
Very fun idea - it would likely need a few limitations to prevent spam, but I like the idea of unlocking the ability. I'd rather see a town crier proclaiming a message with some veracity (due to the unlock) as opposed to the typical random /shout spam.
Dwarven Guild est. 1996. Hammers High!
I definitely don't want it to become just a different sort of grind - where a big guild, buys multiple accounts and funnels resources to make the best boot, belt and chest piece crafters, etc. Yes that might supply a couple extra dollars to Intrepid and yes it might provide extra content if those crafters were renown but low level, targeted for the potential drops they might have if killed, but that's not what you're going for I don't think.
You're working toward the best thing this game already has - the world feels like a world!
Currently if I go around in the newb area looting bodies, my name will become known to others as an asshole. People would not invite me to groups, or possibly remember the past if it stung enough and get me killed in a later group. The reverse is true as well, where people will remember that I stopped to help them or handed down a piece of gear that I no longer needed (though obviously that system needs EVE or Albion breakage to have a viable economy, but that's another story).
Imagine having a barkeep mention, "Watch yourself, saw that ne'er do well lurking about town." if you come in after flagging up and killing someone outside town.
Reputation matters in this game.
Let's have it matter for crafting too!