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I've spent a lot of time looking around, trying to find anything that even remotely resembles an entertainin crafting system and I'm coming up dry. The only game that seems to have any decent kind of crafting is ATITD, which actually does seem to do a good job. I've played the game to death though, and all too often you end up in the rut of making stuff to make other stuff, instead of make stuff for other people to get good use out of it, which is more fulfilling.

The original SWG crafting system was...ok. What turned me off from it was the min/maxing there was with the gathering component, and it seemed more focus was placed on the gathering than on the crafting. It could have been good, I was very much looking forward to the game based on the info they released beforehand, but as we all know the game didn't deliver on promises and was released in an unfinished state. -deadhorse-

Eve also seems to have some sort of workable crafting system in place. It seems to be more about training skills than crafting itself. I played Eve for a month but I was quickly turned off by the time-based skill system and the game just never really grew on me.

Everquest 2, from what I've read, actually seemed to have the foundation for a compelling crafting system on release. The devs had some good ideas but I get the feeling that crafting was one of the first things canned when it came down to crunch time to release the game. Rather than continue developing and expanding the crafting system after launch it seems like they've castrated it and turned it more or less into a version of WoW's extremely shallow and unfulfilling system.

It's like a deep yearning in me...for this mythical deep crafting system where the crafting itself is not paper thin in depth, and where the results of my crafting are desired by people who use it for whatever nefarious tasks they are up to. I know I'm not alone in this. It just seems to me that there is this promise out there in the ether...hints of good ideas in dev blogs and in discussions and whatnot, but there's no practical application, no actual game that does it.

In summary, who do I have to blow around here for a decent crafting system?

EVE Online's tradeskilling is supposed to be fairly well done.

I actually enjoyed the gathering component because my Master Doctor/near-Master Carbineer retained Novice Artisan and a fleet of high-end harvesters, so I was out in the remote parts of the relevant planet whenever a resource with better stats spawned, looking for a good spot. Same with scout-harvested resources - I would swap my 15 points from Novice Artisan into Novice Scout, and gather them myself.

I had a "crafting house" full of the best medical resources ever to spawn, and if a better one ever spawned I would upgrade to it, then go back to the crafting house and experiment with combinations. The range of possible resource stats and experimentation results meant everything old was new again when a better resource came along, altering the market and extending the life of the crafting game. That was pretty cool I thought - finding out what you could make from a 10-point better resource that goes into 30% of a component for a 5-component finished item, where you've had "amazing successes" on each part of each component, then making it a schematic and mass-producing a revolutionary new buff or med in your factory. Then taking it into PvP city wars and finding out your new 602-base cure is enough to one-shot the enemy's poisons (where it took two charges of the previous 590 packs).

What I didn't like was the need for loot that gave you extra experimentation points. That was horrible. It gave the super-rich a permanent advantage over the poor, even if the poor had the same resources.

I think your only hope, oddly enough, is Vanguard. Jeff Butler is a huge SWG fan and from what I've read, it sounds like they expanded on the SWG system. Here is a new write-up about it: http://vanguard.tentonhammer.com/index.php?module=ContentExpress&func=display&ceid=436 (beware the flashy Flash ads - maybe an idea to copy/paste the text into something more readable :) )

I'm not gunna lie, if I could specialize in crafting in Vanguard and it was anyway decent, I could probably get a decent amount of enjoyable playtime out of it, rest of the game's crappiness aside.

Any game centered on the idea of adventuring, especially a diku, isn't going to give you what you want. It's antithetical to that process.

I think the official Vanguard answer to that is there are three equal spheres in the game, playable independently of each other: adventuring, crafting and diplomacy (http://www.thesafehouse.org/vanguard/classes.php). If that turns out to be BS, you're looking at A Tale in the Desert (combatless crafting game).

It's not so much the adventuring part that's the problem, it's the dropped-loot-centered nature of many Dikus. In those types of games crafting will always be a second-class citizen even if the crafting system itself is well done.

Exactly.

SWG had the best conceptual integration of the systems (as did its ancestor in pre-Trammel UO). Execution wise... well...

In diku-inspired games, it's generally the consumables that are relevant. Gear is always eventually outclassed by drops. They almost have to be, because the core element of such games is to dispense rewards at a programmed pace. It's just easier to do that through quests and boss mobs.

Also, in dikus, one crafter can easily handle the needs of hundreds. SWG was on the right track here, by having so many shades of quality in the equipment, and allow each to be customized further. But there's a lot of players who'd rather just know what they're going to get from a quest dialog box rather than having to hunt the galaxy for the best deal. The former is a reward for some fun. The latter is a reward that requires more work. It inspires larger groups working more cohesively, but that's not necessarily the natural inclination of folks in the genre.

"Relevant crafting" is uch more complex than just making a fun activity out of it with rewards people want. It's getting a lot more people than presently playing to like the more indirect path to advancement.

I can think of...in theory...ideas to marry the two systems though. Like the system original described for EQ2 where important crafting components drop from epic encounters and they need to be crafted into the epic item. Even in WoW I could easily see integrating it with how tier 3 works. As it is, you get something like a "Desecrated Sandals" which needs to be turned in to a quest NPC for your respective classes armor piece. I could easily see changing that into some sort of player crafting process. Now WoW's crafting is extremely thin and just adding that into its current system wouldn't be anythnig special, but I'm just talking about marrying the two systems in theory. It could work but you need to intergrate crafting into the other systems.

I might be able to better tell you if any games have worthwhile crafting if you could if you could define for me what "worthwhile crafting" is.

The way I see it, crafting is an "outside of the GUI-level" activity, meaning it focuses more on the big picture and less on what's right in front of you.  Star Wars Galaxies, A Tale In The Desert, they made crafting their focus and in doing so kinda forgot to add the game.

So, in my mind, if you're saying to me, "do ANY games have worthwhile crafting", you're speaking in oxymorons.  Crafting isn't a game.  Crafting is that thing people do as a sub-activity on the outside of the game, supporting the game, at best.

You'd have to explain to me why crafting is more exciting than counting the cracks in the ceiling before I'll be able to forward some suggestions as to what game, if any, features "worthwhile" crafting.

You could always try my 'Creative Crafting I (http://www.peacekeeper.com/3dgs/ccirc3.zip)' mini game. It rapidly devolves into whack-a-mole though.

I was thinking of experimenting with something like Creative Crafting I and mashing it togather with some kind of Spore like interface for creating truely unique items.

That's sorta how high end WoW Crafting works in some cases. Like, in order to smelt some type of Ore, you need to be in (I think) Blackrock Depths, a 56-60 zone). For Alchemy, the best combines are done in the Alchemy Lab of Scholomanc, another 55+ zone. I'm not sure how much this happens because I'm not sure how many care about what those efforts output.

In SWG there was the Mandalorian Armor crafting process that required a raid-size group hold against waves of enemies while crafters did the necessary combiness. That came later in the games life though.

Another problem is how the game world is designed. They're supposed to be dangerous, so everyone starts out as an adventure. If the worlds weren't dangerous, content would be trivial and people would get bored. So now everyone needs some skills to survive the wilds. So now everyone who's a crafter needs to be an adventurer too. Levels and gear. So they need gear. And where do THEY get gear: from drops and quests. Because that's the most fun way to do it.

Very few people want to be that dedicated crafter with zip for combat skills. They weren't even asked to be that in SWG, where most content WAS trivial for any form of crafting needed. And they only put up with it in UO because their other three character slots were 7xGM-whatever-was-needed-for-farming/PvP/treasurehunting.

It's not that crafting in EVE is particularly fun (for me at least) it's just that it's actually important to the economy. And playing with the economy is where I get most of my fun out of EVE these days.

One aspect of Eve crafting. If you are trying to make ISK (money) crafting you need tier 2 blueprints. Which are won at auction and your odds are small, indeed very small. So you can do all of the right things, make all the right decisions and never get anywhere. Or of course, you may hit the jackpot. It dose happen. But don't count on it as your odds are very small. Those blueprints are sold, but for large amounts of money and the market is sporadic.

There's another reason crafting is always second-class in "Diku" type games. (The first being 'the game's about combat')   Crafters have shown they'll ALWAYS rape the combatants for cash when they're the economic centerpoint.   It happend in SWG, it happens with the T2 equip in Eve, it's happend in the few small MUDs I played that tried it as well.

When that happens, those of us more interested in combat find we're grinding for cash a hell of a lot more than we have to in traditional Games and wonder why we're bothering.   I know the ridiculous prices on Guns, armor, etc are why I stopped doing any kind of combat in SWG.  The amount of grinding required to gain the credits as a hybrid (not 100% combat) character for ANY weapon was insane when compared to your traditional 'catass' MMOs. 

Gotta agree. The real griefers of SWG were the Weaponsmiths.

If they were independent, yea. But the idea was that the guild/city/group would work together so that those IN that guild/city/group wouldn't get price-raped. That was for the suckers who flew into town to browse :)

Not saying that's how it happened for everyone. Just saying that was I think the theory.

If you want worthwhile crafting I can let you leech a few gigs of woodworking PDFs.

The crafting economy is fucked in games, primarily because the flow of resources is completely unnatural.  I mean, you wouldn't see somebody haul a ton of scrap metal into a garage, plop it down in front of a mechanic and say, 'Okay dude, I brought you the mats, so make me a car and I'll give you a couple buck tip.'  Having crafted items come from resources gathered in the game world immediately puts a weird spin on things as in many cases the ingredients are worth far more than the act of crafting them into a usable item.  And the people who gather those resources promptly price gouge the hell out of everyone for them, which puts the crafters in a bad spot.  If it takes you nine gold to get the materials to make a sword that's worth ten gold, why the hell would you want to take the time to get the skill to make the sword for one gold of profit when you could get the skill to get the materials and make nine gold?

That's a huge component right there. Many games make crafting into gathering plus pressing a button. A focus on gathering rare components is fine in its own right, but the crafting itself needs to have at least as much value as the gathering. For that to happen crafting requires complex interactions rather than tracking down the recipes and pressing a single button to make an item. ATITD far and away has gotten this part of it right. There's dozens of different "mini-games" required for each type of component. Some are very simple, practically the equivilent of pressing a single button. Some are complex tasks that only a few are able to master and produce good results from. Some anyone can do at a minimal level but require a lot of research, knowledge, and possibly skill to maximize the results from. All of them are unique and the combination of the whole crafting ecosystem is great. As I said the main part missing is the overarching purpose. I guess what I'm really saying is I'd like a crafting system like that married with an adventuring game/diku/something with killing.

The bigger problem in my mind is how they feel they need to make crafting as "hard" as adventuring in the first place. Blizzard made crafting entirely about resource gathering. EQ2 tried to make it "fun", but all that Action/Reaction stuff really does is slow down the grind between the one or two times a day you use the buffs to try for a really excellent combine. SWG crafting was complex but not really hard per se. You needed the right materials and some good bit of luck, but once you had the right schematic and a good stockpile, factory city. What was hard was all on the commerce side.

Central to this issue is as I stated earlier: one crafter can equip an entire server of players. You don't NEED to make an enriching and deep crafting minigame because the output ratio is all whack. A real armor maker was not banging out clones of the same uber set at a rate of 20 a day. That stuff took time. Just finding the right armorsmith, and then enticing him to work with you, was tough enough. Then you waited.

The games that can get monopolized by a few price-fixing crafters are the ones that most emulate real economy. The rest just want to let people make stuff to fill in gaps between mob drops. So far, that's been perfectly fine. The vast majority of players are not interested in crafting because crafting means not adventuring. No matter how fun or engaging or relevant crafting is, no matter how much money could theoretically be made by it, no matter how easy it could ever be, most people will still be off questing and adventuring, either within that game world or a more popular game.

The density of crafters in SWG does not compare to just how many people didn't play that game because the only parts that worked really well for a long time was crafting.

Wouldn't it be cool if it mimic ed real life more. I mean in a rising culture turning iron ore ( this is rust for all intents and purposeless) into swords is not a  trivial task. There are many steps and they all need skill and equipment. The opportunities to accomplish this would be few.and worth the journey as your sword would hold an edge much better, longer than the other guys bronze sword. Giving you a real advantage for your investment in getting it.

Realism isn't exactly the formula to fun, however.  It's all very compelling to say that fabricating cars out of raw materials or producing a dozen suits of armor in a day is totally unrealistic, but would you want to play a game where it takes you months of real time to produce a full suit of plate armor?

While I just got done debunking trade skills as being a game, I do have a fairly good idea about how they can be used to support a game.  As a side activity, they can possess mini games of their own.  As a virtual economy contributor, they can provide a means for players to formulate a number of lesser items into a greater one, creating an additional scavenger hunt minigame.

As stands alone, however, crafting doesn't offer much.  Production without a demand.  A bunch of overindustrious natives sitting on an island filling it with wallets nobody uses.  What fun such an endeavor would offer would have to have something to do with producing wallets of extremely high craftsmanship and quality simply for the love of the art of wallet making.  In EvE, they light the wallets on fire and throw them at eachother to break the monotony.

The problem here is one of development investment. The more complex the system, the harder it may be to do something in game, the fewer who will do it. ATITD vs WoW (for comparisons of complexity and popularity).

How many sword makers were often called upon to actually use the skills of wielding one? This is the dichotomy in my mind. People don't come by the millions to sharpen blades. They come to stab things with them.

They do this already.

I loved Asherons Call 2's method of crafting.  Primary issue was with gathering materials.  DIKU + Foreign game mechanic = too much cost.

I always thought it'd be fun to turn crafting into more of a resource management game than 'collect x, collect y, press button, presto you have a sword'.

My take on it:

Instead of managing the resources and the building of items yourself, it's delegated to servants, slaves, and skilled employees.

Ie: Instead of mining out that ore vein you just found, you let your foreman know it's location and he'll go down there with a couple of guys and start mining away. They'd transport the ore back to your villa/estate, and stockpile it. Once you have enough, you hire a skilled smelter to smelt all your stuff down and pass it off to your weaponsmith. He then takes the raw iron and creates whatever type of weapon you have queued up for him.

Your workers skill up as they work, so eventually they will be able to make better items faster - but maybe it still takes a week to make a sword.. but that's ok, you aren't doing the work yourself.

This would also open up the trade and selling of skilled craftsmen. Maybe for a quest you are given a slave who's very skilled in certain tailoring disciplines but you aren't doing that kind of work (and keeping him increases your estates daily food intake = maintenance $$) so you sell him. Yes yes, that's not PC but I'm sure it could be made more PC by having contracts with workers and selling the contract or some such.

.. anyways, babble babble babble ..

Yeah, I was just citing a few examples of where I found crafting actually contributing to a game, not uber new uses for trade skills.

If I were to try to innovate, I would probably look into adding depth.  Various ways skilled craftsmen can figure out how to improve crafted items, continually creating better and better versions.  Crafting would become a sort of invention system, with levels of technology improving through minor innovations and breakthroughs.  Put some fun on the GUI level so the players enjoy the innovation process.  The game developers would, of course, be constantly at work on additional content for crafters to discover.

Then, in order to balance the game in which these crafted tools are intended to support, you have the craftsmen sell the items to both players and their opposition.  If players don't want to fall behind the curve, they need to keep buying your goods.  Just like real arms dealers.

Of course, the distribution is another side game entirely.  I haven't seen very good smuggling mechanics yet.
I agree.  Tedious busywork is best delegated to machines/NPCs.  (Yes, DQ, I'm aware there are games that have done this.)

On the Good Crafting vs. Diku model topic, I want to point out that in EQ2 there's a very good balance between the loot and the crafted stuff.
Basically the Mastercrafted items in EQ2 are the BEST equipment you can get save the Legendary/Fabled stuff.

Meaning that of course you will keep on looking for the best loot, but until you can get those you will definitely want to buy Mastercrafted Weapons, Armours and Jewellery.

The idea was, tiering the equipment:

- Common stuff (crap)
- Uncommon Stuff (crap/useful)
- Crafted Stuff, common materials (useful/useful)
- Mastercrafted Stuff, rare materials (Good)
- Legendary [Rare Loot] stuff (Good)
- Mastercrafted Stuff Imbued, rare materials + rare materials (Very Good)
- Legendary with Proc [Rare Loot] (Very Good)
- Fabled Stuff [Very Rare Loot] (Uber)

As you can see crafters provide the best equipment all around between up to the point where you are in a uberraid guild.
Crafted stuff is supposed to cover the holes you can't still cover with fabled/Legendary and it serves the purpose very well.
Plus, EQ2 has 14 equippable slot on characters, meaning there's a lot to equip and lots to be crafted (and sold).
No need to say, almost every player in the game had at a certain point of his/her char's life a full set of rare-crafted armour and weapon.

I dare to say that EQ2 is one of the diku with the best balance between loot and crafted items. Sure they revamped the system (and the loot) a couple of times and basically botched some improvements (and improved some botches) in its 2 year life, but after all is one of the best implemented diku-crafting. The system works despite the loot focus of the game and I hope Vanguard can follow such a scheme and of course perfection it.

http://www.homedepot.com

I also support the idea that Viin brought up.  I'd much rather do the macromanagement of crafting than the mundane collection and crafting myself.  (Don't make it random like the original SB though.)

I also support combining this activity in with the rest of the game whether it be PvE or PvP or both.  While your team mines, harvests, etc., a team can be created to protect them from either NPC's or PC's depending on your type of game.  The more valuable the mining/harvesting area, the more dangrous it is and requires more firepower to protect.

The crafting can be done by actively recruited the best talent and keeping it the best talent though training and use.  Again, inventories and shops would have to be protected against theft.

All the other ways I've seen reduces the activity to sitting next to a pile of resources clicking the same 3-5 buttons over and over again.  Usually this also degrades down to using macros or in some cases providing macros in the actual game! (SWG)

SWG's crafting problems could have been reduced through 3 simple and easy to implement changes and 1 put-it-back-the-way-it-was ways.
1) Require harvester certs, so that novices can only use small harvs, and masters can use Heavy Harvs
2) Largers harv do NOT bring in *more* resources, only slightly better quality
3) Factories must DIE! Which means the need for identical components goes away too.
4) Decay, as much as fighters don't like it, is *required*

The SWG system could have mimic'd this system. It was set up for it, at least. In the beginning, you needed Apprentice points to become a Master, and you got them by teaching people skill's you already knew (instead of them buying them from a trainer). This made it possible for you to have a couple players lower in skill than you woking with you, helping you make lower quality stuff for you, like components and gear, while you made high quality stuff. THey benefitted from your skill's and advice, and you got Apprentice points.

This could have evolved into a system where one Master would have a crew of learning players working as a team. The problem was that the $$ flow became pretty ridiculous really quickly, not to mention farmers, and it became too much of a "hassle" to learn from others, so people just bought all their skills. Skill's were super cheap to buy. And factories made it really easy to knock out a hundreds of super premium goods all by yourself.

So sad.

Well, see, the way I figure it is like this:

If crafting uber-gun requires 100k of high-end resources + looted components that cost 500k a piece, then charging you 700k for a gun that cost me 600k isn't ripping you off. Especially if the guy buying the gun is going to go out and kill crap that drops the 500k components.

Every game that makes crafting useful -- rather than marginal -- ends up with combat folks who think they should be able to charge 5 million for a critical component, then turn around and buy the gun made with that component for a fraction of the price. It was a rare pure-combat toon who actually saw the costs that went into, say, a suit of armor. As a scout, I sold high-quality spawns or hide, bone, and meat to armorsmiths and doctors -- they had to buy massive quanities of a named spawn in order to continue producing high-quality goods when the spawn was inferior. I had a hard time bitching about armor costs when I could make millions of credits in a few hours whenever a good spawn was in place.

Ok. So I'm pretty much now officially against games with craftarding. Isn't a game supposed to be fun? I guess I'm also against Virtual Worlds and see more than ever the need to differentiate them right up front. I wasn't kidding with my link. If you're going to be more concerned about making stuff and profit margins, why not, you know, actually make stuff and make money? I just don't get it, I guess.

Some people enjoying creating and participating in economies not normally available. When will you get the chance to run a multibillion dollar corp that manufactures starships?

They just ignore us. I thought people played games to do things they otherwise couldn't in real life? I mean, I could drive my car into a farmer's market one weekend morning, but it's probably a better idea if I did it in a video game.

Spend 200 hours making furniture for space houses in SWG.... or spend 200 hours making real furniture. That's not a hard choice for me.

The biggest difference to me is that if I buy up a lot of commodities in EVE and am not able to unload them, any loss I take isn't real.  If I decide to do some work on my house, the end-result costs me real money and will look like shit if I do it wrong, or worse.  I have managed to accumulate some tools and am getting better at home improvement, but the real risk involved in doing some things can really take the fun out of it.  If I lose a hauler full of goods in EVE, it makes me angry but it doesn't really matter and I can have fun with it.

Also, I would not have this conversation with my son in EVE:
"Daddy, there's a screw hangin' out!"
*points at a crawlspace door I made and installed*
"Yeah... that's the door handle."

I am, however, really proud of that door.

Well, if you're a mudder, you really need to check out Dartmud's crafting system. I've played there on and off for a good while now, and it's hands down the best mud I've played.

All crafting begins with resource gathering. Smithing, for instance. The ore needs to be mined out of a mine that you actually tunnel yourself(mining skill), melted into ingots (metallurgy), and then smithed into whatever it is that you're going to make(smithing skill). The range of things you can make is huge, and you actually have to put some thought into it. A breastplate that's crafted for a size 13 gnome certainly won't fit an ogre, or you may need a special type of breastplate for the mud's spider-like race.

This goes for farming, tailoring, woodworking, alchemy - all of it. In addition, you can learn to do the whole process yourself, though that will take some time. That's actually one of the downfalls in my mind - it doesn't really promote player cooperation if you can master everything. It is nice though, since your skills develop based on how much you use them.

At any rate: www.dartmud.com - and don't let the pretty anime-ish drawings fool you. They completely misrepresent the gritty, harsh medieval world that DM is.

The problem with the 'online crafting lets you become a starship-building mogul' is that it lets EVERYONE be a starship-building mogul.  No one person will ever, ever come to stand out from the pack.  Schild Corp-brand starships won't become a household name in EVE.  Crafting works in the real world because crafters are a limited commodity.  You can't just run up to some random guy in the street, ask, "Hey, can you build me a television?" and expect an affirmative response.

Even if a game tried to make crafting realistic in requiring a huge amount of starting capital and research and design before a person could even start on building something, eventually there'd still be tons of crafters.  There's no way to pull away from the pack, and if there was, only giant catass guilds would have it.

Personally, I recommend Dwarf Fortress (http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/) for a good take on the crafting mechanics.  Build the neccessary smelters and forges, mine the necessary metals, assign the jobs, and away those busy little dwarves go.  It's a good approach because it takes all the unneccessary busywork out of the players' hands and assigns it to AI.  Although, it's not very user friendly yet, and it's offline.

This is often the argument, but when does this actually happen in practice?

SWG is a good example. A lot of players started out wanting to be a Weapon- or Armorsmith. How many ended up though? And why?

It's not because everyone was squeezed out of the market because of unfair game mechanics. It's because "Crafting" is not the function of clicking buttons. It's a holistic role in a game more like running a business. Yea, people can run businesses in real life. They can do it in games with far less risk. Am I ever going to run Enron? No. But I did in SWG and made buckets of cash doing it. It was a fulltime job though, both ingame and out.

It's not the game that makes it fulltime though. It's the other players. It's like anything, be it skill in FPS games, skill on a Soccer/Football field, skill in any competitive activity. Do it all the time or cede to others who do it all the time.

What squeezed players out, ultimately, is the same self-balancing mechanism that exists in any game, diku or not. You either focus on it or you won't be as successful. That's not terrible. Dabblers can be successful. Or folks who just do one specific thing occasionally, like emptying resource harvesters (I had a few people doing that) for the business owner who makes the Contracts and deliveries (me). The former group did this once a week and the rest of their time was spent hunting.

The hardest part of crafting is not the resource gathering nor the act of building something. It's making a successful and rewarding business out of it. That can require as much time as Raiding, so you better like it alot. The fact that there are many times more raiders/hunters than crafters indicates just how many prefer what.

That's true. I never put in the effort to be one of the "top sellers" in my preferred markets. I was not known to the server in general. I never, well ony one or two times, got stopped at the starport by someone who had bought something I made and loved it. Brands on my server like Asia Brothers, FelKel, and others did have that. They were Arch and WS, respectively. They were more active than me, and trafficed in more popular goods. My success was due to being known by those big guys, and getting their business, and the business of the people in their large guilds. Not to mention that I was a resource mogul for a while too. I would have made much more doing that if I had not kept most of the really good stuff to myself, lol.
I don't get to do, in real life, what I did in SWG, fantasy game notwithstanding. I'll never be known as the first player city Mayor IRL. It seems to me that the biggest problem with games with an interesting and useful craftign game is that the combat-centric folks don't like it, even though the crafters like the combat folk. I mean, come on, what else will you spend your money on? They will pay millions for some decorative loot, but bitch if someone makes a 30% profit on somthing that took hours to make and they have entire business infrastructure to support!?

Which is fine, except players whine when equipment has any form of decay (even decay which takes longer than one player could concievably use the item for), so it gets nerfed out of any game 6 months after launch, and this combined with loot mudflation means today's uber loot is tomorrows almost-uber hand-me-down guild loot. The handmedown stuff accumulates in game because the only sink is players quitting and taking it with them, and before long everyone considers themselves to 'need' legendary+ gear to compete, and crafting goes to hell for all purposes bar twinking. Again.

By the way: today November 14th 2006 the third EQ2 expansion launches (the fae one, Echoes of Faydwer), and it has tinkering and adorning added to the crafting job.
That's exclusive to crafters and higly desirable by players, so basically crafters are getting a sweet bone with this expansion, adding to an already pretty good diku-oriented crafting model.

That's why you don't give in to whiners. That's one of the reasons I like CCP - otherwise we'd be playing PvE-only Astroids.

I think to have a game with worthwhile crafting, which doesn't bork the core game for fighters etc. it needs its own advancement path.  Old SWG did that.  It stumbled over the same inbalances in combat .  Although could be argued that the imbalances were partly caused from itmes crafted drops of high end mats.

Great, so crafted gear will be considered cool for 2-3 months, then the "Supreme Spirit of Monkey Balls [Heroic Legendary ^^^+++]" will arise from the Death Pits of Antonia's Ass, and the magic of the Grand High Mouthbreather will bind the spirit in such a way that it can be repeatedly killed and made to vomit up special-plus-plus Hero lesuire wear in a variety of sizes and colours to suit every adventurer. Crafted gear becomes hand-me-downs, and so the cycle of Catass continues.

See also: DAoC spellcrafting.

You bite the bullet and make some or all categories of gear craftable only (possibly using dropped components) AND add item decay, or you give up on the idea of viable crafting - take your pick.
 

Or you just don't do uber items. Or if you do you make them only slightly more effective but much flashier like Guild Wars did.

Among other things, having one armour type be strictly better than all the others by a huge margin, doctor buffs giving out perma+400% to everything, Rancor-in-my-pocket pets, and the 'master box' skill tree structure contributed far more problems than anything sourced from the crafting system.

Or maybe I'm just being cranky.

A laudable strategy in general (see also: CoX), but if items don't matter, nor do crafters.

I tried the crafting minigame thingie in EQ2 and didn't enjoy it.  DAOC's crafting system was pure tedium.  CoX has - what now?  Runescape's crafting is very rudimentary.  I don't mind WoW crafting.  I tend to enjoy resource gathering/trading more than the actual crafting itself.

Crafting consumables makes sense.  Player crafted loot in a loot-based game doesn't, so much.

I'm not sure with the OP is looking for, in particular, with regard to "worthwhile."

CoX has no loot, hence no crafting.



You'll be happy to know they are patching it in though.

Salavge (dropped components) will be crafted into synthetic power enchancers (that is power enchancers that are better than the SO power enhancers everyone currently uses and which are practically free from stores). It remains to be seen how that works out.

SWG is a bit of a special case, because it had a large number of players who signed up to blast stormtroopers or chop off limbs with lightsabers.  When they found themselves in a world run by craftards like SmithnWessin, their choices were to sumbit to the craftards, become a craftard or quit and never get to shoot stromtroopers or chop off limbs with lightsabers in a MMO again.

A big part of why you could stand out as a crafter in SWG was that so many people had no desire to craft.  This raises the question of why people who don't like to craft would play a carftard-dominated game unless the allure of the IP was so strong that combat players would stick to a game where they are second-class citizens.  And, if you have a game of all craftards, I think you'll have serious issues with Kitsune's "when everyone is a mogol nobody is a mogol" problem (if your game allows everyone to "win") or with the general competitive game problem of losers becoming perma-losers and quitting (if you can craft to crush).

"Submit to the craftards"? Did armorsmiths force them to make ritual genuflections before selling them goods? WTF was the difference between an SWG's player-place NPC vendor and WoW NPC vendor? Or using the WoW AH?

Yes, you actually had to purchase your goods from a vendor as opposed to waiting for a fucking rat to cough up a suit of armor. Heaven forbids, the godawful SUFFERING that the poor combat players had to endure! Clicking an NPC vendor rather than killing a million foozles until he got the lucky one that ate a fucking lightsaber.

Seriously, how is Star Wars a special case? Basically speaking, the players ran the NPC vendors instead of them having static inventories and the mobs dropped less armor and weapons than most MMORPGs. That was about it. You didn't have to fucking submit to the craftards. You had to buy shit off their NPC, but I've played few MMORPGS where I didn't have to buy things off an NPC on a regular basis -- or from other players.

It was a game focused on crafting where a huge portion of the playerbase had no interest in crafting.  That makes it easier for crafters to feel like mogols, but it it's pretty hard to pull off without an IP like that because otherwise non-crafters will go to non-crafting-focused games.

The rest was just the usual f13 jackassery  :hello_kitty:  I actually thought SmithnWessin was a nice guy.

Here it is again. For some reason, any time crafting exists in a game... ANY game... of any consequence, the combatards have a hissy fit. We don't bitch and whine that they can kill a 10-story tall lizard with a tiny little hammer. We don't complain about their existence in OUR game. But the combatards can't seem to acept that we deserve to have just as much fun as they do in the games we pay to play.

Like Morat said, they bitch if thay have to pay a player money to get armor, but are fine if they have to pay an NPC for it. Bite me. I admit that at the very top of the pyramid of bank account balances there are usually crafters. But there are a HELL of a lot more wealthy combatards than crafters.

The game wasn't focused on crafting. If it was, we wouldn't have had 9 publishes focused exclusively on COMBAT and 1.5 focused on crafting (Chef one was good, the DE one sucked). Jedi would not have dominated the publish notes in almost every "Publish" up until the changed to a new "Chapter" system. Thats why the crafting game has suffered.... the fact that the Dev's never paid any reall attention to all the problems crfting had.

Even in the new system, the crafters had to wait until all the combat prof's got their new systems in place.

I enjoyed crafting back in the original SWG. I was a tailor and people would come to my shop and try on clothes, try different combinations and haggle over the price. They seemed to enjoy it too. Of course, they could just buy the stuff from the NPC vendor if they preferred.

However, I remember what a pain it was buying something. I think I knew of four decent gun shops on my server and two on the planet I was on, and those took some effort to get to.

Is it possible player crafting would work for both crafters and combat people (and I was both in any case) if it was easier? In almost every game I have tried, being a good crafter involved lots of clicking - to grind up to master tailor in SWG meant lots and lots of boringness. Also, you have to either spend huge amounts of cash on buying ingredients to grind with or spend a long time gathering respources, which is often boring too. SWG made resource gathering a little easier with harvesters but it still took a lot of time. WoW doesn't make you click, but you still have to gather the stuff . . . (Eve is different but as far as I can make out it depends partly on winning lotteries for rare blueprints).

If it was easy . . . more people might do it, and there might be more shops and the combatants could buy what they wanted far more easily.

I know some people will say you should work to be good at something in an MMORPG but I am not talking about everyone become a succesful merchant instantly. I mean a system where being succesful depended on spotting a gap in the market, desiging a product to meet people's needs (you could alter the stats on the product to an extent, maybe choose to use better materials if you thought there was a market for expensive uber stuff or go the cheap and cheerful route instead), give your items cool names, design what they looked like and what colour they were to an extent and advertise them well.

I know this does happen in games already to an extent, but it is limited and nearly always has to involve a lot of grinding too. I'd like to play something which was more like a business sim as far as the crafting went. Some merchants I suspect would still become uber rich but others would fail. The amount of money you could make would still depend on the amount others would have, and be willing to spend, so not everyone could be hugely succesful. If the market was flooded with merchants then some would leave (but put in a huge variety of goods and different versions of those goods to be made, and let people try to find a niche). And it would still take time, but that time would be spent making decisions, not clicking on ore in the wilderness repeatedly or putting items into slots and hitting the combine button over and over.

Some combat people might hate the whole idea, but they wouldn't need to pay any attention to it - they'd hopefully just have a good range of well-stocked shops, and be happy.

Ya know, Sky has got it right. Virtual crafting can never live up to 'real life' crafting for the same amount of effort/time spent. The only thing I can see is a cost/convenience advantage.

Want meaningful crafting? Try home brewing beer, amateur pyrotechnics (where legal .. or not  :lol:), musical instrument making.. etc etc etc.

That was one of my big bitches with ATTID pyro.. it was actually faster to go roll some stars in RL then to go through all the BS in the game, although the risk of personal injury was likely lower.

Just to slightly correct that statement that "CoX has no loot" - it has loot, as all Enhancements are loot. What it doesn't have much of is uber-rare uber loot. For 99% of Enhancements, you can walk into a store and buy them. That other 1% (the Hami-Os and SHOEs) are gained through either (hero-side) a raid on the Hamidon - infamous for the number of players who hang around just for the Hami-O drop - and (villainside) the Lord Recluse Strike Force - a difficult mission where you get two (?) SHOEs on completion. Obviously, Hami-Os and SHOEs are the most desirable loot in the game since they offer multiple bonuses to character powers.

The availability of Hami-Os and SHOEs (Synthetic Hamdon Origin Enhancements) will be further increased in I9 as well, with villains gaining access to the Hamidon raid and heroes getting a Statesman Strike Force.

Inventions will be interesting - the sneak peak seems to show that players will be able to craft enhancements that provide multiple bonuses and effects way outside what your character could normally do. We'll have to wait and see to know how it works in reality, but it would appear to have all the same issues of MMOG crafting - getting the right resources (ie salvage, which will be all-new types for crafting) of which some will be very rare.

Given that CoH/V has a lousy in-game economy (no need to buy and sell to other players - most stuff is either horded, deleted or just given away) it will be interesting to see if inventions will improve CoH/V or just cause problems.

No one really cares about non-visible loot.  Sorry.

In my opinion crafting IS boring. I mean in real life. As long as it's not artistical stuff, I don't think that handcrafting 100 copies of the same pair of shoes, or tailoring scarves, or carving figurines and so on can be fun at all. Sure it can be relaxing, and so is for lots of people crafting in EQ2, SWG, UO, WoW and other games where you just have to click the same buttons for hours and hours to get shitloads of identical items.
This doesn't mean I would despise a fun and entertaining minigame, but that to me the craft part was crappy in all the MMO I tried. Even the one where I actually enjoyed it. It's the business/management part that's fun.

Crafting is THE grind, equivalent to killing green mobs for hour. What needs to be well done and fun is the part where you promote your wares, where you build your connections and credit, where you buy low and sell high and where you have you grow your clientbase and get rewarded and satisfied for doing your job right. Warring for prices, advertising your stuff, doing clearance sales, thinking about marketing strategies and things like that are what makes the "tradeskills" (not the mere crafting) fun in a MMO.

SWG, and UO, were the best at that in my opinion but then again to me it's not the diku part the kills tradeskilling, but the diku playerbase that want it all and want it now. Yes, they can stand having to look for a npv everywhere to get a sword; but can't stand to look for a player crafter/trader to do that. It'S not the diku model that kills tradeskilling, just the way developers adapt to the majority of paying players. Exactly as it happened for harsh PvP, something completely pulled out from game designing as the paying whiners were morer than the paying praisers.

No matter if the game is a diku or not, as long as it has:

a) auction houses - where you don't get to know your crafters.
b) lack of item decay - where you don't really need crafters.

...then the tradeskilling part will probably be pretty bland, dull and boring.

On the contrary, give me a game where items decay with use and where you have to browse vendors to look for stuff (as it was in REAL WORLD until 10 years ago, just before the internet boom), and I will be a pretty happy trader. What? You said crafter? Not sure about that but as I explained before I can't think of mass-crafting lots of similar item being fun in any way.

Seriously, combatards?  You mean that demographic most people refer to as 99.8% of the motherfucking population of every single MMO in the entire universe?  You don't complain about them in "your" game because without them there wouldn't be any game.

Are you suggesting that 99.8% of the population of any MMOG don't deserve the suffix '-tards'?

I wouldn't even give them the credit of calling them "combat-tards", because, well.....1) Half of that shit doesn't deserve to be called combat and 2) Very few of them are playing for the sake of combat.

But whatever. Even if there was good combat, this shouldn't have to be an either/or situation. If you make a world, then you can fit anything inside of it. Combat, crafting, whatever. Nothing has to be so one dimensional.

This sounds like it's boiling down to the question "What's fun about MMOs?" Apparently crafting, socialization, looting, harvesting, PvP, raiding, questing, exploring, and, well, everything sucks. So why bother?

So there are one or two people out there who think PvP is fun in EverQuest. There are a couple people who like socializing in Meridian 59. There are even some people who like resource-gathering in A Tale in the Desert. The verdict is, every game has worthwhile crafting, if you're into that sort of thing.

This is why I really want ship decals in EVE.  That is somewhat different from obtaining a rare faction ship since you'd be a fool to fly the faction ship in hostile space.  But I can imagine that even being able to tint a hull would add a lot to desirability of basic equipment.  The lack of customability in EVE is occasionally bothersome... but then everything looks the same after it explodes.

Something that is sort of funny, my wife does crafting in real-life.  Lately she has been working glass.  It's rather similar to a MOG crafting system where you always have a chance of failure, you lose your materials on failure, have to buy supplies and craft tools, sometimes your tools break, and you gain skill the more you do it.  She could probably sell her end-products on ebay, but she doesn't want to do that.

She should give it a try. My mom used to make floral arrangements. She shipped them off to various stores in a 50-ish mile radius (Texas Craft Works is a chain that gives arts and crafts people their own booths to sell stuff. I'm sure other states have similar things).

Anyways, she was pulling in about $700-$1000 dollars from each store every month. Must have been at least 5 stores. She'd also make cash from private orders.

Enhancements are visible, they're just overly generic.  Given a 10 slot inventory, do you care more if it is filled with "Vorpal Greatswords" capable of increasing one's damage potential by 33%, or do you care more if it is filled with "Damage Enhancements" with an identical function?  Smoke and mirrors.

Hell, I think it is a great idea to sell the jewelry she makes.  I mean, the woman makes her own glass beads, then necklaces, earrings and so on.  She's even straining to get the equipment to work with metallic clay.  She doesn't want to sell anything she makes, though, although she has no problem making gifts for people.  I considered taking it up for the profits, but then I remembered I would rather slam a door on my nuts than grind skill to make jewelry.

Well said! The point I was making is that anyone can throw around catchy words ending in "tard", but it doesn't excuse one segment of the game stamping out another PAYING segment of the game. WHy is it that crafters are fine with combatards being in the game, but combatards are not okay with crafters being in game? From what I have read on F13, it seems there are very few games where crafted things are measurably better than loot. So it stands to reason then that there are a lot of games out there where you can kill and loot all day long and never give a red nickel to another player. And yet you are still bashing any game where crafters have a viable market?

I agree with Falconeer though, that for me, its not the clicking to make stuff that's fun... it's the gathering of resources and running of the business that's fun. I'd love to have an AI team of employee's who would do all the clicking for me, under my direction, and let me run the business.

Most combat is boring and repetitive.  Games use dropped loot to spice it up.  But if crafter items are the best, dropped loot isn't much of a spice.   Not saying that's good or bad, just how it is.

There is no good reason components can't be dropped instead of finished items.

Interdependancy cuts both ways, and it is necessary if you want both craftards and combatards to have a role in the same game.

I can state, with absolute certainty, that that isn't the crafters fault. If combat sucks and is boring, it sucks and is boring -- I'm just shocked that dropped loot is enough to cover it. Talk about low standards....

SWG more or less covered that -- you could get some good weapons as loot drops (some better than crafted, but not many). A lot of the best weapons and armor needed combat loot-drops, so you could get what you needed for some uber-gear and the crafter would happily make you a set in exchange for the rest of the pieces. (He might only need one of 6 components that dropped to make your gear).

Add in decorative drops and housing, and there was still plenty of spice.

But I think a much better option is to have non-boring combat in the first place, eh? I mean, isn't that better for the combat guys anyways?

The crafting grind in EQ2 has been "enhanced" with the chance of getting a very rare material as a loot while crafting.
You craft-grind, and sometimes your crafting is so exceptional that you get a rare material as loot.

Under-developed as usual, but again a good start.

Be non-visible, I mean it doesn't show up on your avatar for others to see.  There's no alteration of your physical appearence and no one can really know what you have it.  Loot that's only a buff is about as interesting as a monster dropping physical respresentations of AA points or talent points. 

How bad would WoW's loot system be if it was all jewelry and trinkets?  In a similar vein, how bad is the reaction to EQ2's loot here due to how bad it looks? 

CoH has costume pieces that are unlocked due to accomplishments, correct? That's interesting loot.  That's a constant visible reminder of your accomplishment to yourself and others even if it has no value other than looks.  Bonus points if it gives your ice beam a little extra kick.

I'm not saying that it doesn't work for the system it's in. CoH's player customization comes at minute 1.  I'm not sure a character system that starts with that much customization can work with a MMO "pimp-my-toon" loot system.  I'm just saying it's not a partically good or interesting loot system and not one that people who value loot or crafting are going to care about. 

Even if the mechanics of combat were good and fun, the "why" of combat still is a problem.  Like if no phat lootz dropped raids in WoW, why would you do it it beyond once just to check it out.  In SWG as combat guy, once you have the top equipment and level 90, why are you fighting?  I guess you could say GCW. But why would you do that?  Phat lootz is apparently the only 'why' that there is any consensus on.

As the resident -tard nicknamer, I have no problem with craftards in a game. I don't like having my shit break down so they have 'relevance'. I don't like shopping.
I disagree. Why do people fight ad nauseum through BF2? Because it's fun. I hate what Phat Lewtz eventually does to a (multiplayer) game.

That's probably a very low percentage of the people who have played BF2, many more people lost interest after they "learned" the game. (In the Raph sense of learn).  In addition the lack of a subscription fee, lowers expectations.  In MMOG land where you are trying to convert box-buyers into subscribers, the why needs to more than fun.  Okami is fun; Bully is fun; FFXII is fun; BF2 is fun, but why am I playing 15 a month for this game?  Collect virtual junk to make my toon tougher is the only why that has broad appeal.  I think that's why PS didn't take off, the lack of a compelling "why", even though most other aspects of the game are pretty good.

Then mmofps is doomed to fail because collecting junk to make your character stronger really fucks up pvp.

UO had great pvp with deep rpg elements and very little power differential gear. You might have a katana of vanq or two, but you put it on the line every time you used it, so most pvp I was involved in, we just wore gm crafter-made stuff.

I'm very biased against diku 'endgames', though.

Player Housing helps. SWG got that right -- showing off your toon is one thing, but if you have a house, you're showing off the epeen 24-7 (as long as you open it to the public).

"See all the kickass shit I've gotten. How long I've played. How mighty my epeen that shit THIS AWESOME is merely decoration to me? I spurn your crappy couches! My home only has couches that required loot drops from the toughest of bosses, plus immeasureably rare resources assembled by the finest crafter in the land and glued together with the blood of thousands of PKd newbies! THAT IS THE MEASURE OF MY EPEEN!"

The landscape was a mess, and they'd have been better off with instances "apartment blocls" or serious zoning restrictions and maybe some way to sign your house up for a museum tour or something (there were some really nicely done houses, guild halls, cantinas and the like -- but the idea is solid. It's much cooler to show off your Sword of Total Asskicking on your wall than to have it in the bank where no one notices it. (Assuming you're not using it).

I really don't understand the mmo mindset.

Not quite.  You need a tier 2 blueprint to make silly money but there's a living to be made on the tier 1 market.  Margins are usually very slim, so you might (for example) only make a few million from building and selling a battleship.  But I know plenty of people who've made heaps of cash that way.  Of course if you're supplying more inhospitable regions you can often make very respectable margins indeed.  If anyone is really interested PM me your email address and I'll send you an Excel spreadsheet that'll help on your way to billions.

As with SWG there's plenty of cash to be made in every step of the crafting process.  The richest guy I know in Eve made his money speculating on high end minerals.

Actually, you do, because it ties in directly to how effective your character is in combat. Knowing that a lvl 30 is fitted out in only DOs is a big warning sign in a PUG.

But yes, the net effect of having commonly available loot at nearly all levels of the game does reduce the importance of it.

Inventions is going to screw this system up, but how much and how far waits to be seen.

SKy has it right. Games like BF2 and Quake are fun for a pretty good number of people. Now imagine the BF2 combat/driving engine and physics along with an SWG/ATitD crafting system, plus SWG's social/home system, and Eve's skill progression, and you got a winner... IMHO.

I never spent any serious PVP time in SWG. The most I did was group duel guildmates. Literally. It just wasn't interesting to me. And then I "discovered" BF2, and I play it nearly every day (2142 now). To me, that says something. I'd gladly pay $15 a month to have a persistent world in BF2 where I could own a home, and craft the weapons and ammo we use, plus the uniforms, accessories, other peoples homes, art & decorations, etc, etc... Toss in the Star Wars IP and the GCW, and holy crap, it might just be a winner!