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[Shoku]

If making gauntlets out of wood or rock is the same as making gauntlets out of metal we lose immersion and if only some small fraction of players even has metal armor the demand is going to be so high that the only way to get material to practice with is devoting yourself to being a miner (and if whatever type of furnace operating isn't automatically part of mining you'll need to learn that too,) and then instead of immersion we lose diversity.

To me this is really saying "lets do it like the first MMOs did but maybe more extreme. Everquest and the like put materials on an exponential scale so that the top stuff was unattainable. It existed but it didn't really exist.
And today here we have people saying "lets make every material top tier" and "top tier should be scarce."

If you can practice off of the same lump of iron forever everyone is just going to train their cat to keep hitting the buttons for it. If the buttons are complex because it's a timing or strategy game people are going to get sick of it and nobody will want to do that. If the materials diminish with practice you can't practice because everyone needs armor and like in DF it's much more productive to have just one legendary armorer than to have two that are close to reaching master rank but not quite there yet.

In an MMO where it took a lot of time to move goods around you could still get one armorer per region with raw materials for that but you'd have so many novices who gave up because he's a master and their fifth rate goods are worth less than the material they are made out of.


Diminishing returns for overexerting yourself making trade goods on a scale somewhere between a day and a week would probably go a long way to counteract that and sounds like the sort of thing a lot of people in here would like in to be in an MMO.
Taking it a step further you could decide how much effort to put into each item you made so that it would be possible to make a pile of training grade gauntlets in a single day or you could just spend a whole weeks worth of effort trying to really create a masterpiece with the stunningly high quality materials you just got for whatever reason.

And to kind of reward the sort of crafting behavior people seem to be getting at you could gain skill more quickly by spending more than the minimum training effort on a piece after you'd applied the last thing you learned a few times.

-

I also like that mechanic, but a lot of people seem to want discovery as part of the profession system and when you're discovering things you don't have people above you to consult and any books past the intermediate level would have to be from lost civilizations. If the game includes exotic stuff like meteorite crystals from another dimension nobody should have a clue how to use them.

So do the forerunners just have to make a bunch of junk?

[Sowelu]

their fifth rate goods are worth less than the material they are made out of.

This is an important thing to me.  There's only a few ways around this:
- A Tale in the Desert made labor actually BE labor.  Making a good hatchet out of that metal was hard damn work.  So, even mediocre smiths can add SOME value.
- World of Warcraft restricts which people are allowed to craft certain things:  You can only have one crafting skill at a time IIRC.  That means that not everyone is an armorer.  ALSO, and equally important, a novice is incapable of producing ANYTHING from excellent materials.  You need a certain threshold of skill to be able to turn that bar of iron into anything at all.

Sure, WoW and its ilk don't have quality in crafts, but it's still important.  Imagine what an MMO would turn into, if any guy off the street with no crafting skill could buy a bar of iron, turn it into the worst gauntlets ever, and then sell it as vendor trash (or sell it to other players) for more than the bar of iron cost.  Very soon you would end up with no iron...and so the price of iron would start to rise.

Yeah, "the worst gauntlets ever" SHOULD be worth less than the material you used to make them.  Otherwise you end up with real abnormalities, unless there's no NPC vendors at all.

I know I'm straying far from the subject here but hopefully I said at least a couple useful things..

[Granite26]

Last I played, WoW let you get 2 skills, but since gathering was a skill and crafting was a skill, it's close enough.  Otherwise, dead on.


The problem I've always had with crafting has been the demand side of the equation.  For every person making something, it's relatively trivial for him to make enough for a bunch of people, hundreds even.  For that to work, only 1 person in a hundred should have a particular craft skill at that level.

Of course time restraints, input restraints, failure rates, and pain in the butt restraints (skill tests) could reduce this.  I don't have any NEW ideas though..

[Yanlin]

Here's a simple fix. Don't make it so damn easy and cheap to become awesome at something.

Easy to learn, hard to master.

Look at Wurm. It had an AWESOME system. During the times I played, there were only a handfull of master weapon makers. I think one was called Veon. He was the best of them all.

But any old asshat off the street, with a month to spare, could easily get around 40 skill (Out of 100) in anything. Granted he does only that thing for the entire time.

Veon had about 95 in the main weapon making skill.

(The skills worked in a family system. Every skill had a relative that had impact on it. You had a grandfather skill which would be generic like Carpentry. (I'm inventing the skill family tree here. The one in Wurm is different and less massive.) Then you had the father skill (Sub skill of grandfather) such as fine carpentry, fletching, etc. Then those could have son skills which would include something along the lines of buffing, polishing, repairing, etc. The grandfather skill increased when the father skill increased. The father skill increased when the son skills of that father increased.

Overall it was nicely balanced. But you also had cousin skills. For example, each tool had its own skill and having good skill in a tool you use for a craft impacted your skill in that craft. Directly. It also made the random number generator favor you more.)

Basically, a system where it becomes increasingly harder to gain skills as they advance. Everyone should be able to make mediocre armors and weapons and such with enough practice. But only true devoted masters should produce fine goods that the professionals consume. But the bulk of the people aren't rich. They want affordable stuff. Not the best.

As for "Worst gauntlets ever" I have to agree. They should be worth LESS than the bar itself because the bar could have been used for something better.

But you can't just expect somebody who knows NOTHING about gauntlet making to just make a pair! His attempt would FAIL HORRIBLY in the form that THE BAR TRANSFORMS INTO A USELESS LUMP OF METAL! It then has to be smelted down. But the player's skill in smelting would affect how much of the iron he got back.

Back to the schooling system. Obviously these should be viable methods to learn new skills. You go and read books about smelting and smithing. You examine goods to see how they are made and try to picture how to make them. Eventually, doing all these menial tasks fills a long progress bar. Once the bar is filled, the player may start doing that skill on his own!

Upon character creation, you should be able to pick a few starting skills that start at something along the lines of "Journeyman" level.

Eventually, you will have players from every skill and eventually, masters. Then you can create an academy mechanic where masters can go work in an academy teaching other players how to do it. The learning should be abstracted. A master would go there in his spare time to earn cash just for being there and "Teaching" (In effect just being unable to do anything else.) or log off in the academy to get paid less money but still get paid and slightly gain skill.

Meanwhile, other players could waltz in and start learning. (Paying hourly of course.) As I said, the learning is abstracted and simple. Like in Eve online. They can just log off to gain the skill they are "learning"

As I said, this process costs MONEY. How do players gain money? They do jobs. The more adventurous types will go hunting and sell their catch of the day to players who cook stuff and process the hides. Etc.

We should throw in an apprenticeship mechanic while we're at it. A master could take up to 3 apprentices who gain skill at a faster rate when working alongside the master. They could be helping the master in an abstracted to gain skill slowly. (While the master gains it slightly faster. To motivate players to actually use this mechanic.) Or the players could actively help the master to speed up his craft and have a mutual skill gain boost.

This comes assumed that crafting alone is a LONG process. In reality, a lone smith would require SEVERAL DAYS to craft ONE SET OF ARMOR. But in a shop with a few apprentices, this takes merely a day or so.

Apprentices work for knowledge. Not money. Thus, they do not get paid by the master unless the master wishes so.

We should not have a case where a certain master is able to lure players into working for him by paying huge sums that he can afford. Money shouldn't be that common.

Of course, we need corporations as well. A particularly well off player could just hire a bunch of masters. Pay them for their craft in exchange for supplying a steady demand for their goods.

This should allow for some great competition.

Also, taxes mechanic. To open up a stall in a particular city and start selling in it like in a market, you need to pay taxes for each transaction. You could try eluding taxes, but any player that noticed that can report you to a guard and get paid a finders fee for helping the guards stop crime. Alternatively, a guard could catch you doing it on patrol.

Of course, players should be able to be guards as well.



Meh. I'm just throwing random ideas about now. I gotta sleep now.

[Lear]

(I should have said resources instead of supplies.)

I know games aren't real life, but how is making the same sword over and over with diminishing returns at all intuitive?  People master trades to make better items, not worse items.  If you made 1000 swords in your life, the last one you make is not going to be worse than the first.

Perhaps I should have elaborated a bit. I'm talking if they continuously do it over and over again aka grinding (which is what annoys the hell out of me about mmos). Possible reasons for lessened quality: it could represent how fast he is working or his intent to churn out as many swords as possible, not taking care to insure each is as good quality as the last, or it could be fatigue, but I guess that wouldn't be tied to the specific activity so much as just an overall game mechanic.  Anyways I was also kind of assuming most of the talk in here was more RP inclined soz I guess I shouldn't have assumed when I posted.

You just need to have limited resources in a game world.  If they go the route suggested, that will be very easy to do.  Each tile that's mined out only produces so many of a specific material.  After that's used up, you'll have to melt down old items to make new.  Ironically, it will lead to a majority of the players using wooden/leather weapons (bats, batons, clubs, whips, arrows, bows, etc.) considering they are a fairly abundant renewable source.  Metals and other mined materials wouldn't come into the game world until the miners: A.) find the resource and B.) Refine it and sell it.

I'm all for this. Scarcity would make trade important and could also lead to disputes over land and resources which could make for some interesting conflict. It would also (hopefully) lead to some characters carefully managing their supplies. In a war, one side uses their resources more efficiently than the other and thusly gain advantage. The list of possible interactions and situations goes on.


Edit: Also, I agree with/think Yanlin's ideas are good.

[Chutney]

Ack, everyone is posting ideas that would make really good simulations, but not good games at all :<.

Taking days to craft armor, unless you have a shop and full apprentices? Only the elite can have high skill, with hard work and dedication? This is a video game, not a job! You log on, play for 1-3 hours, go do stuff, come back later and play for another 1-3 hours. Not 18 hours a day, doing nothing but mindlessly crafting your Armorsmithing skill so you can make Bronze Gauntlets + 2 instead of Bronze Gauntlets...
Systems should be simple and intuitive, and by allowing everyone to make "Swords of Godslaying", you add competition to the game, where the price finds an amount and changes only with the prices of materials. Instead of having only one person that can make something, so they set the prices (most likely at 1000g for an item worth about 10g of resources), you have dozens of people trying to get their items bought, so either one person brings the price down as low as possible but still profitable, or they agree on a price. This is something that WoW got this part right, I think.

EDIT: You might enjoy doing time consuming, tedious things (like mega projects in Dwarf Fortress) because those things ARE fun, and enjoyable, even if they don't do anything and take up hours and hours of your life, but it's different in an MMO.
Often, money is the only way to advance, ESPECIALLY in a heavily crafting based MMO, where most good items are made rather than found. You either have to be able to devote time to make them, or be able to afford them (most likely by crafting yourself). So now it's like playing Dwarf Fortress with a hundred other people, but in order to unlock the carpenters workshop you have to cast an obsidian statue of Armok riding a dragon. AKA very unpleasant.

[Shoku]

their fifth rate goods are worth less than the material they are made out of.

This is an important thing to me.  There's only a few ways around this:
- A Tale in the Desert made labor actually BE labor.  Making a good hatchet out of that metal was hard damn work.  So, even mediocre smiths can add SOME value.
- World of Warcraft restricts which people are allowed to craft certain things:  You can only have one crafting skill at a time IIRC.  That means that not everyone is an armorer.  ALSO, and equally important, a novice is incapable of producing ANYTHING from excellent materials.  You need a certain threshold of skill to be able to turn that bar of iron into anything at all.

Sure, WoW and its ilk don't have quality in crafts, but it's still important.  Imagine what an MMO would turn into, if any guy off the street with no crafting skill could buy a bar of iron, turn it into the worst gauntlets ever, and then sell it as vendor trash (or sell it to other players) for more than the bar of iron cost.  Very soon you would end up with no iron...and so the price of iron would start to rise.

Yeah, "the worst gauntlets ever" SHOULD be worth less than the material you used to make them.  Otherwise you end up with real abnormalities, unless there's no NPC vendors at all.

I know I'm straying far from the subject here but hopefully I said at least a couple useful things..

Profit from selling things to vendors is usually just enough to pay the maintenance cost of having ran around killing whatever you got it from. What I meant was that the player value for the materials was so much higher than what you'd get selling finished goods that you'd be better off selling the material to people than using it and you end up needing a fortune just to start learning a profession that uses materials.
-I don't just mean that the gauntlets are worth less than the material but that the gauntlets and the skill progress are worth less than the material. It's like the reason people are plugged into power plants instead of having solar panels and batteries supply all their power: it's really expensive now and the investment doesn't pay for itself for five years (plus solar systems have maintenance costs but that doesn't apply to skills.)

Not being able to use high quality materials becomes a lot more complicated when copper isn't below iron so much as next to it like was suggested earlier.

-What exactly did you do to make an item in ATITD?

Last I played, WoW let you get 2 skills, but since gathering was a skill and crafting was a skill, it's close enough.  Otherwise, dead on.


The problem I've always had with crafting has been the demand side of the equation.  For every person making something, it's relatively trivial for him to make enough for a bunch of people, hundreds even.  For that to work, only 1 person in a hundred should have a particular craft skill at that level.

Of course time restraints, input restraints, failure rates, and pain in the butt restraints (skill tests) could reduce this.  I don't have any NEW ideas though..

I'm reading time restraints as "crafting takes a lot of time" so if that's what you mean my production per day thing would be another way to handle it.

Here's a simple fix. Don't make it so damn easy and cheap to become awesome at something.

Easy to learn, hard to master.

Look at Wurm. It had an AWESOME system. During the times I played, there were only a handfull of master weapon makers. I think one was called Veon. He was the best of them all.

But any old asshat off the street, with a month to spare, could easily get around 40 skill (Out of 100) in anything. Granted he does only that thing for the entire time.

Veon had about 95 in the main weapon making skill.

(The skills worked in a family system. Every skill had a relative that had impact on it. You had a grandfather skill which would be generic like Carpentry. (I'm inventing the skill family tree here. The one in Wurm is different and less massive.) Then you had the father skill (Sub skill of grandfather) such as fine carpentry, fletching, etc. Then those could have son skills which would include something along the lines of buffing, polishing, repairing, etc. The grandfather skill increased when the father skill increased. The father skill increased when the son skills of that father increased.

Overall it was nicely balanced. But you also had cousin skills. For example, each tool had its own skill and having good skill in a tool you use for a craft impacted your skill in that craft. Directly. It also made the random number generator favor you more.)

Basically, a system where it becomes increasingly harder to gain skills as they advance. Everyone should be able to make mediocre armors and weapons and such with enough practice. But only true devoted masters should produce fine goods that the professionals consume. But the bulk of the people aren't rich. They want affordable stuff. Not the best.

So you mean you make leveling one skill harder by making it into leveling ten skills?

As for "Worst gauntlets ever" I have to agree. They should be worth LESS than the bar itself because the bar could have been used for something better.

But you can't just expect somebody who knows NOTHING about gauntlet making to just make a pair! His attempt would FAIL HORRIBLY in the form that THE BAR TRANSFORMS INTO A USELESS LUMP OF METAL! It then has to be smelted down. But the player's skill in smelting would affect how much of the iron he got back.

The idea is that the reading and having someone who knows what they are doing is just condensed into a moment in most games. You go to a trainer to learn the skill in the first place and might visit them again and again for generic recipes.

Back to the schooling system. Obviously these should be viable methods to learn new skills. You go and read books about smelting and smithing. You examine goods to see how they are made and try to picture how to make them. Eventually, doing all these menial tasks fills a long progress bar. Once the bar is filled, the player may start doing that skill on his own!

At minimum "using materials" levels your crafts are still junk compared to the guy turning the iron into masterwork plate mail.
Now if the first time someone took hammer to metal they were making stuff good enough for novice adventurers that would work well enough but if materials are scarce novice adventurers won't be able to pay for them.

Upon character creation, you should be able to pick a few starting skills that start at something along the lines of "Journeyman" level.

Eventually, you will have players from every skill and eventually, masters. Then you can create an academy mechanic where masters can go work in an academy teaching other players how to do it. The learning should be abstracted. A master would go there in his spare time to earn cash just for being there and "Teaching" (In effect just being unable to do anything else.) or log off in the academy to get paid less money but still get paid and slightly gain skill.

Meanwhile, other players could waltz in and start learning. (Paying hourly of course.) As I said, the learning is abstracted and simple. Like in Eve online. They can just log off to gain the skill they are "learning"

As I said, this process costs MONEY. How do players gain money? They do jobs. The more adventurous types will go hunting and sell their catch of the day to players who cook stuff and process the hides. Etc.

Are hides rare? 

We should throw in an apprenticeship mechanic while we're at it. A master could take up to 3 apprentices who gain skill at a faster rate when working alongside the master. They could be helping the master in an abstracted to gain skill slowly. (While the master gains it slightly faster. To motivate players to actually use this mechanic.) Or the players could actively help the master to speed up his craft and have a mutual skill gain boost.

This comes assumed that crafting alone is a LONG process. In reality, a lone smith would require SEVERAL DAYS to craft ONE SET OF ARMOR. But in a shop with a few apprentices, this takes merely a day or so.

I like that except that getting people together is a PITA. Just making sure everyone logs out in the shop would be the best bet because you're not going to get people who want to work on secondary aspects of the game all at the same time for the same duration for very long.

Apprentices work for knowledge. Not money. Thus, they do not get paid by the master unless the master wishes so.

Why would the master ever pay if this was the only way for the apprentices to learn without spending a fortune of their own?

We should not have a case where a certain master is able to lure players into working for him by paying huge sums that he can afford. Money shouldn't be that common.

Money is worth the material goods it represents. If there are 100 silver coins and 100 suits of armor then a suit of armor is worth 1 coin. 10,000 coins and 10 suits of armor and one is worth 1000 coins.

The other thing you could mean is that professionals do not have more money than people who don't know how to work- but then why would you want to learn how to make armor if you don't make a profit and spent months of time just getting to a level where you aren't losing a ton of money?

Of course, we need corporations as well. A particularly well off player could just hire a bunch of masters. Pay them for their craft in exchange for supplying a steady demand for their goods.

If their goods are worth the material investment why aren't they freelancing? Or is this like a bigger scale master apprentice thing but without it actually being skill based and you'd just bring a bunch of shops together so you can produce giant fighting robots that would take a year of in game time for a single player to make?

This should allow for some great competition.

Also, taxes mechanic. To open up a stall in a particular city and start selling in it like in a market, you need to pay taxes for each transaction. You could try eluding taxes, but any player that noticed that can report you to a guard and get paid a finders fee for helping the guards stop crime. Alternatively, a guard could catch you doing it on patrol.

I deal with taxes by making other people pay that much more when I have control. Somebody out there has more money than me and they probably got it by being unfair so I can either let them win or do it myself.

Making the tax not just a percent but the kind of growing percent that you see in our national taxes (how many people here aren't in the states?) so that the legion of poor people just pay a small fraction of their earnings but rich people pay around half that could offset inflation and such but cheating it probably isn't a good mechanic.

Of course, players should be able to be guards as well.



Meh. I'm just throwing random ideas about now. I gotta sleep now.

I like parts of them~

Ack, everyone is posting ideas that would make really good simulations, but not good games at all :<.

But a simulated world is a fantastic game... minus the being a fantastic game part.

Taking days to craft armor, unless you have a shop and full apprentices? Only the elite can have high skill, with hard work and dedication? This is a video game, not a job! You log on, play for 1-3 hours, go do stuff, come back later and play for another 1-3 hours. Not 18 hours a day, doing nothing but mindlessly crafting your Armorsmithing skill so you can make Bronze Gauntlets + 2 instead of Bronze Gauntlets...
Systems should be simple and intuitive, and by allowing everyone to make "Swords of Godslaying", you add competition to the game, where the price finds an amount and changes only with the prices of materials. Instead of having only one person that can make something, so they set the prices (most likely at 1000g for an item worth about 10g of resources), you have dozens of people trying to get their items bought, so either one person brings the price down as low as possible but still profitable, or they agree on a price. This is something that WoW got this part right, I think.

WoW did it very different from other games in that low level materials were totally unaffordable to low level characters because high level people wanted them. Usually that stuff was just trash that nobody of high levels bothered with so it was free for them to use but that also wouldn't be the case where different materials were just for different enemies.

EDIT: You might enjoy doing time consuming, tedious things (like mega projects in Dwarf Fortress) because those things ARE fun, and enjoyable, even if they don't do anything and take up hours and hours of your life, but it's different in an MMO.
Often, money is the only way to advance, ESPECIALLY in a heavily crafting based MMO, where most good items are made rather than found. You either have to be able to devote time to make them, or be able to afford them (most likely by crafting yourself). So now it's like playing Dwarf Fortress with a hundred other people, but in order to unlock the carpenters workshop you have to cast an obsidian statue of Armok riding a dragon. AKA very unpleasant.

That's just the requirement for non-optimal crafting set ups. If you did things to increase the effect they'd have to make an aluminum statue of Armok riding all of the dragons with bands of kitten bone and an image of the game creator in star diamond.

[ductape]

I think one way of dealing with at least part of this is to have crafted items be more customizable in the effects the can endow the user with.

I the game Ryzom, you were able to completely build all of you abilities using a sort of system that balances cost versus utility. The better the ability was in one way, it inevitbaly cost in another way.

Now, lets take that concept to crafting. Often players need some piece of equipment to balance out their set of other gear worn. IN WoW, we are given specific sets that work best together, but sometimes a little cross-pollination of gear sets can create some nice abilities and bonuses.

What if we create a situation where players desire very specific custom effects on gear pieces to pimp out their gear sets. Maybe certain crafters specialize in certain effects and are less capable at others. That way, armor maker X can do one thing or two really well, while armor maker Y does some other things better.

Makes crafting something special, not just anyone makes the same stuff. Also keeps it fun and not tedious. Could throw in the methid I just read about for Fallen Earth where crafting is not accomplished by clicking, but rather loading a queue and waiting for the items to finish "baking".

DING! your +3 frost resist gloves of thunderclap have come out of the easy bake oven! These will go nicely with my earmuffs of shock resist (those gloves are loud!).

[Shoku]

I think one way of dealing with at least part of this is to have crafted items be more customizable in the effects the can endow the user with.

I the game Ryzom, you were able to completely build all of you abilities using a sort of system that balances cost versus utility. The better the ability was in one way, it inevitbaly cost in another way.

Now, lets take that concept to crafting. Often players need some piece of equipment to balance out their set of other gear worn. IN WoW, we are given specific sets that work best together, but sometimes a little cross-pollination of gear sets can create some nice abilities and bonuses.

What if we create a situation where players desire very specific custom effects on gear pieces to pimp out their gear sets. Maybe certain crafters specialize in certain effects and are less capable at others. That way, armor maker X can do one thing or two really well, while armor maker Y does some other things better.

Makes crafting something special, not just anyone makes the same stuff. Also keeps it fun and not tedious. Could throw in the methid I just read about for Fallen Earth where crafting is not accomplished by clicking, but rather loading a queue and waiting for the items to finish "baking".

DING! your +3 frost resist gloves of thunderclap have come out of the easy bake oven! These will go nicely with my earmuffs of shock resist (those gloves are loud!).

So it's like having a frost resist armor profession and a shock resist profession and so on except they are the same profession so you do a lot of the same armor but it's kind of like there are more professions and it sounds like a lot whenever you talk about them because you say the general profession and then another word or three-

I made that drag on too long to throw exclamation points on it, or at least without being a bigger asshole than I want to be...

[ductape]

are you sure that you are not as big an asshole as you want to be?

Because if you want to be a big asshole, nobody is stopping you.

 

[Granite26]

I'm reading time restraints as "crafting takes a lot of time" so if that's what you mean my production per day thing would be another way to handle it.

I meant the statement to be broad enough to cover both.  Take a step back and say 'you can make X items per day'.  Doesn't matter if it just takes that long, or you've got a crafting cap.

So it's like having a frost resist armor profession and a shock resist profession and so on except they are the same profession so you do a lot of the same armor but it's kind of like there are more professions and it sounds like a lot whenever you talk about them because you say the general profession and then another word or three-

Not sure what you're trying to say.  Are you complaning about a skill for adding a specific rez time making your crafting tasks repetative?  The system sounding 'cool' but really being too deep to easily understand?

I kind of like the idea.  Crafting determines quality and maybe ordinal(Leather vs Boiled Leather) of the base item, specific Enchantment skills add the magic.  Adds a lot of new skills, so the CrafterwithSkill/Player ratio drops, adding value to the outputs.


I think consumption is the key issue here.  Even with soulbound items, a given player is only ever going to consume 1 of a crafted item. 

Could encouraging players to switch out equipment more be an answer?  (I.E. have more 'themed' dungeons, and make it worthwhile to create different sets of EQ for them?)  In my experience, you've usually got one set of best equipment, and any special items for themed is significantly lower quality.  What if players were encouraged to by fire-res gloves, cold-res gloves, and they were all of approx. equal quality?  One issue I've had with this is the tendency to replay one set of themed content to get the gold up to buy the next level of a different themed item (+1 cold res to +2 fire res, and then go back to the old content)

Another option would be wear on crafted items.  Normal items are good, but you could buy a +5 plate for a few missions.  As long as the extra capacity of the +5 plate allows you to pay for the cost, you'd be good.  This answer also makes raiding more interesting at high levels.  Rather than just get your raid gear and then serial crush the bosses, imagine if it took 3-5 missions to lesser dungeons to get the stuff to make the equipment.  You could build an entire pyramid guild scheme where the new players were getting the raw materials for the crafters to make the equipment for the 2nd tier players, who were getting the raw... ad nauseum.

[Sowelu]

-What exactly did you do to make an item in ATITD?

I can't find a good video or even pictures of the blacksmithing 'puzzle', but:  Let's say you want to make a hatchet.  You know what it needs to look like; wedged at the front, and a little narrower near the back so you can attach a haft.  Take iron to the anvil, and now you have a slab of iron shaped like a hatchet-blade...except it's all the same thickness.  You have to use various types of hammers (shaping mallets, ball-peen hammers, etc) to move the thickness around to shape it correctly.  You only get around 80 swings (more, when working with better metals!) and the closer your product comes to the template, the higher quality it is.  Higher quality axes can harvest more wood from a tree (so with a poor axe you could get 10 wood from clicking a tree (and trees respawn their wood every minute); with an average one you might get 15 every cycle instead).

Many other crafting puzzles are similar, though few are quite as complex.  Making a GOOD tool is time consuming, and can be frustrating if you're a perfectionist.

[Shoku]

are you sure that you are not as big an asshole as you want to be?

Because if you want to be a big asshole, nobody is stopping you.

 

I stop myself. I know I've got to keep within a certain boundary to keep people from tuning it our or just automatically disagreeing~

I'm reading time restraints as "crafting takes a lot of time" so if that's what you mean my production per day thing would be another way to handle it.

I meant the statement to be broad enough to cover both.  Take a step back and say 'you can make X items per day'.  Doesn't matter if it just takes that long, or you've got a crafting cap.

So it's like having a frost resist armor profession and a shock resist profession and so on except they are the same profession so you do a lot of the same armor but it's kind of like there are more professions and it sounds like a lot whenever you talk about them because you say the general profession and then another word or three-

Not sure what you're trying to say.  Are you complaning about a skill for adding a specific rez time making your crafting tasks repetative?  The system sounding 'cool' but really being too deep to easily understand?

I kind of like the idea.  Crafting determines quality and maybe ordinal(Leather vs Boiled Leather) of the base item, specific Enchantment skills add the magic.  Adds a lot of new skills, so the CrafterwithSkill/Player ratio drops, adding value to the outputs.

No, I'm saying that it's as if you couldn't think of enough ways to start professions so you recycled the same one a bunch of time for people who are going to end up doing something else.

I think consumption is the key issue here.  Even with soulbound items, a given player is only ever going to consume 1 of a crafted item. 

Could encouraging players to switch out equipment more be an answer?  (I.E. have more 'themed' dungeons, and make it worthwhile to create different sets of EQ for them?)  In my experience, you've usually got one set of best equipment, and any special items for themed is significantly lower quality.  What if players were encouraged to by fire-res gloves, cold-res gloves, and they were all of approx. equal quality?  One issue I've had with this is the tendency to replay one set of themed content to get the gold up to buy the next level of a different themed item (+1 cold res to +2 fire res, and then go back to the old content)

Another option would be wear on crafted items.  Normal items are good, but you could buy a +5 plate for a few missions.  As long as the extra capacity of the +5 plate allows you to pay for the cost, you'd be good.  This answer also makes raiding more interesting at high levels.  Rather than just get your raid gear and then serial crush the bosses, imagine if it took 3-5 missions to lesser dungeons to get the stuff to make the equipment.  You could build an entire pyramid guild scheme where the new players were getting the raw materials for the crafters to make the equipment for the 2nd tier players, who were getting the raw... ad nauseum.

It would take a lot of content for that- WoW's only just barely got enough tiers of raid content for that by the end of an expansion and they're always toning things down so a decent fraction of the serious raiding guilds will ever get to see it.

But should you really put a restriction on the next raid that's not based on the experience and skill a group has but rather how many people they can manage below themselves?

-What exactly did you do to make an item in ATITD?

I can't find a good video or even pictures of the blacksmithing 'puzzle', but:  Let's say you want to make a hatchet.  You know what it needs to look like; wedged at the front, and a little narrower near the back so you can attach a haft.  Take iron to the anvil, and now you have a slab of iron shaped like a hatchet-blade...except it's all the same thickness.  You have to use various types of hammers (shaping mallets, ball-peen hammers, etc) to move the thickness around to shape it correctly.  You only get around 80 swings (more, when working with better metals!) and the closer your product comes to the template, the higher quality it is.  Higher quality axes can harvest more wood from a tree (so with a poor axe you could get 10 wood from clicking a tree (and trees respawn their wood every minute); with an average one you might get 15 every cycle instead).

Many other crafting puzzles are similar, though few are quite as complex.  Making a GOOD tool is time consuming, and can be frustrating if you're a perfectionist.

What kind of game was there for making things from cloth?

[Sowelu]

Don't think there is any.  Some constructions are still just "gather resources, click button, receive bacon".  And there's no combat, so no armor, and clothes are not crafted.  It's a long ways off from the ideal MMO bandied about here, but it has some good ideas if you like crafting to be meaningfully difficult.

[Granite26]

It would take a lot of content for that- WoW's only just barely got enough tiers of raid content for that by the end of an expansion and they're always toning things down so a decent fraction of the serious raiding guilds will ever get to see it.

But should you really put a restriction on the next raid that's not based on the experience and skill a group has but rather how many people they can manage below themselves?

I'm assuming a certain level of comparative advantage.  It's not that they NEED the underlings, it's that having them do the grunt work is easier than doing it.  An equally stable item would be the guild elite going and doing the Max-1 dungeon themselves, since they won't need the advanced consumable items to successfully complete it.

Also, you're reading raid a little broadly.  At the base level, it could just be level 1 peons picking flowers and weaving flower bands in the beginner area.  The goal is for there to be a subset of level X players willing to purchase the consumable product of level X-1 players, because they don't want to make it.


In my mind the whole issue ties back into the level structure of any mature MMO...  After a short period of time, the vast majority of your players will be max level, with a trailing tail of people catching up and just starting.  It's just not natural