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Throttling on Crafters

I have a question in regards to something that was touched on a few months ago but haven't found a specific answer to. Why is there going to be a throttling system in place on crafters?

Comments

  • if its due to a "raid/dungeon" lockout or span spawn restriction which can be considered natural phenomenon i can get behind that but if its something that is placed in just to block crafting like a fatigue system or the like what is the point in being a crafter.  Archeage for instance only allow me to be a crafter roughly 15% of the time.

  • I hit you with the relevant quotes on Discord. All we can do is wait for the development timeline to hit the crafting portion and see what they give us. They are aware what a shit system Trion and others have put in place to piss people off and have promised not to do that, all we can do is make sure they don't break that promise by calling them to account when and if it turns out bad.
  • With a player driven economy and the way IS intends to handle world resources it doesn't really make sense to have an arbitrary restriction on crafting. Now personally I would like to see a system that requires player attention instead of one click mass producing. 
  • I absolutely agree with Argentdawn. The "softcap" on crafting should come from the attention span of the player. Powerful equipment should take effort to create - it should be a process, not a button click. By doing so, there will naturally be a limit because people simply won't want/ have the capacity to spam make items.
  • I really hope it wont have some energy stat like BDO that limits all your activities.
  • Oiraeket said:
    I absolutely agree with Argentdawn. The "softcap" on crafting should come from the attention span of the player. Powerful equipment should take effort to create - it should be a process, not a button click. By doing so, there will naturally be a limit because people simply won't want/ have the capacity to spam make items.
    Same here. softcap should come from effort to create stuff. for example materials that hard to get cause of the dangerous zones, drop rates from dg's and extreme dedications for crafting class so your character is able to create to high tier items.
    I am even ok with rng involvmenet with base items crafting instead of limiting crafting with some kind of labor system which is is just annoying.
  • Crafting is one of my favorite aspects of mmorpg's and i am also expecting to see rich and complex crafting instead of mass productions system. Crafting process should take some time, but also be rewarding because of that. So even crafting a sword f.e. would take some time, it does not matter if you get good amount of xp and that sword has some real value. 
  • ArchivedUserArchivedUser Guest
    edited April 2018
    The time crafting takes should not be interpreted as "click a button and wait 3h after spending 1 week gathering the materials".

    Please, for the love of god, do not put useless time sinks and pauses in this game.
    Yes, I do want a simple system - click a button and craft something almost instantly or in a few seconds - but getting to that point should be the fun and difficult part!!

    Waiting 3h on an item to get done is not difficult, it just eats away from my subscription time for nothing.

    Of course, instead of the simple click some nice mini games could be made to craft slightly better stuff (e.g. crafting puzzles, hidden recipes, experimentation with different materials, etc). I think "The Repopulation" did some good things in terms of crafting.

  • Well i gues no-one would like to see crafting where you need to sit down and wait hours to get something done. Or maybe there could be something like that if you dont need to be online at the same time. Maybe you can leave you character to study new recipe while you are offline or something like that.

    I personally mean by time, that time you spend before the final crafting. Ok first items does not need to take ages to craft and should contain just some common materials. What it comes to higher level items i would like to see more complex crafting. You need more rare and/or different kind of materials. Some can be found from open world, some from dungeons, some from raids, some from open world bosses, some from rare drops from mobs, some from gathering, some from crafting, some from trading, some from salvation etc. etc. .. Just pointing out that there can be lots of variations.

    Maybe something needs to be done to some ingredients before you can use them to craft the final piece. That can be related to crafting too. So it is better if you need to see some effort to make the crafted items. That will also give your product some real value and it is easier to sell those forward with less competition. So that you can craft 1 sword instead of 10 is always better option. You can still get same xp and at least same amount of money if you sell 1 valueable sword than 10 mass producted.

    It is important to avoid easy mass production at any cost. That will only have negative effect to markets, because then those will be overflooding the same products with no value. Mass production style also open spossibility to guilds centralize all materials to few alt characters to progress instantly to end game gear f.e. This is where i want devs to pay attention.
  • Well the cap in crafting I imagine is going to come from the fact that resources aren't globally available. If you live in a metro that produces lumber you're going to have to import iron to make a sword. That means travel time (as fast travel is a limited thing), getting to the foreign place with iron, purchasing it at a reasonable price, setting up a caravan, and then guarding it all the way back to your city.
  • Lyiat said:
    Well the cap in crafting I imagine is going to come from the fact that resources aren't globally available. If you live in a metro that produces lumber you're going to have to import iron to make a sword. That means travel time (as fast travel is a limited thing), getting to the foreign place with iron, purchasing it at a reasonable price, setting up a caravan, and then guarding it all the way back to your city.
    Oh yes, really good point. They tried this same in Albion Online, but failed. There you can get three different resources from one type of biome. There are only five different resources at total and five different kind of biomes. So it is relatively easy to get all resources by yourself and you dont need to travel far.

    So IS devs should think this through wisely. One thing which will help for sure is if there will be good amount of different resources and one specific node has just few of them. Now balancing this can be a nightmare. Systems needs to work so trading is really needed maybe about half of the craftable stuff. Some products should be possible to do easily with local resources, some after effort and some cannot be done without ingredients from nodes at distance. I guess finding balance between these is the key to success. 
  • @Ferryman
    Yes exactly. Economic node treaties and such will be built upon mutual dependency. If a node can get everything they need...there is no need for mutual dependency. So collaboration is not required, although it doesnt prevent collaboration. Which means the game would probably decay into the typical all out war and kill what moves scenario. But it depends if the player base supports civilization (collaboration) or the law of the jungle (competition).

    The problem is the bigger the node gets....the more space it covers....so the less dependent it becomes. Which means it could potentially wipe out all the smaller nodes that dont have any option but to work together to have any hope of creating a comparable resource bank.
  • Jahlon asked Steven about this on discord and this is what Steven had to say about it.


  • Santy182 said:
    Jahlon asked Steven about this on discord and this is what Steven had to say about it.


    Quite an appropriate reply for something that is still very early in development. Still good information, at least we know his intentions.
  • Part of the incorporation of crafting limits may be to discourage attempts at botting. I know that the devs are working a lot to combat this issue, and maybe this is a part of it.

    I was very pleased to learn that Intrepid has someone with a PHD in Economics as a part of the team. I'm optimistic that they know what they're doing when it comes to building an economy, but like @Rodzor said, it's still very early in development. Testing will be a huge part of it.

    - Sikuba
  • With a player driven economy and the way IS intends to handle world resources it doesn't really make sense to have an arbitrary restriction on crafting. Now personally I would like to see a system that requires player attention instead of one click mass producing. 
    It's a fragile balance really. I like a crafting system that lets dedicated crafters shine. Ideally all max level crafters wouldn't be created equal either. Still I don't want a crafting system to be overly cumbersome just for the sake of giving the illusion of effort/hard work. I would like a lot of the effort to take place up to the point of crafting the final product. Since they want a player driven economy they know crafting/gathering have to play a big meaningful role in the game.
  • With a player driven economy and the way IS intends to handle world resources it doesn't really make sense to have an arbitrary restriction on crafting. Now personally I would like to see a system that requires player attention instead of one click mass producing. 
    It's a fragile balance really. I like a crafting system that lets dedicated crafters shine. Ideally all max level crafters wouldn't be created equal either. Still I don't want a crafting system to be overly cumbersome just for the sake of giving the illusion of effort/hard work. I would like a lot of the effort to take place up to the point of crafting the final product. Since they want a player driven economy they know crafting/gathering have to play a big meaningful role in the game.

    Thats the benefits of mixing a trial and error system of recipe finding with a trade/exploration system of finding recipes.
    You can give people the choice to grind, explore or trade.
    More importantly, trade what you grind through trial and error.
    You can of course keep recipes secret in such a system for mama johns secret baked pies and such.
    You can sell the product of a recipe rather than the recipe for the product.
  • Now personally I would like to see a system that requires player attention instead of one click mass producing. 
    This!!  A system where you actually have to be present and participating in order to craft.  Something like the event system used in EQ2. 
  • Well, we do know that crafting is intended to have dials that allow you to adjust the item's traits, and we know that artisans with different specializations will have different dials they can adjust. It would be great if they allowed groups of crafters to work on the same item together so as to expand the dial options in that item's crafting. If they couple that system with resources that have variable traits and scatter them around the world, I think that makes a pretty dynamic crafting playground that encourages community cooperation.

    I'd rather avoid the whole progress/durability reaction system from EQ2. After a decade of crafting there, it just felt so time-wasting and monotonous. The combining of items itself doesn't need to be a mini-game in order to make crafting engaging. I might consider instead a system like ESO, where much of the time spent at the crafting station engages us in the process of breaking down items to discover new recipes and enhancing the items we've made.

    The notion of automated mass production is something we should maybe reconsider too. I think it's actually a good idea, but only if it's balanced with significant item decay and eventual destruction. That is essentially how SWG worked. I understand they've suggested already that we'll have automated harvesting within a zone of influence of our home nodes. I might assume that could come in the form of maybe like a hired npc dwarven mining crew or peasant farmhands or things like that. It naturally follows that we could maybe hire artisan npc's to automate crafting - like little crafting elves helping the cobbler make his shoes. :) Similar to SWG then, you could maybe craft a prototype or blueprint, and then set your helpers to craft some quantity of them while you're out adventuring. The item decay is essential though if you have mass production, to increase demand to meet the supply.
  • As an amateur blacksmith in the real world, I would be completely turned off from all crafting if it was as time intensive, or even close, to the real thing (assuming constant interaction with the game to create something) ... otherwise, why wouldn't I just create something in the real world?

    That being said, I'm okay with having to wait on certain things.  It makes total sense to craft something in a game that has a 10-hour cast bar - at least I can do other things in the real world while that's going on.  On the other side, I really don't mind if it's an instant cast ability, but it requires a couple days of down-time to simulate the effort involved, or the physical toll it takes to make something super nice.

    I'm someone who would love to focus on crafting.  I would even love to be the best at it - or have some of the rarest recipes.  But I also understand there's other parts of the game I need to explore and do in order to get access to the crafting things that will make me the best.
  • ArchivedUserArchivedUser Guest
    edited April 2018
    For me crafting has always been a strange aspect of MMOs, I've usually done it to a great extent, but it always felt out of place.  You don't come back from slaying dragons to hammer some metal together into an epically powerful sword, someone who spends their entire life crafting does that for you.   I always found the put pieces of metal in a box and instantly have a strong weapon crafting to be silly.

    In short adventures shouldn't have enough free time to be master craftsmen.
    I've always envisioned a system with build times and other logical constraints where adventures can have crafters of various types on retainer that do the labors for them, these NPCS would be attached to a specific player, perhaps in a home instance or even as a world NPC and level as they are provided the materials and time by their master PC.  They could even possibly build up a team of blacksmiths or other crafters and open a shop, etc.
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