Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling

Grave said:

I dunno, I just think a lot of players would rather be the crafter themselves rather than having NPCs do everything for them.

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You can keep the system and still make it player focus"d. You"re arguing details here. Instead of hiring NPC crafter, you purchase a shop for your tools. Instead of it taking the NPC crafter 3 days to make a semi-rare item, once you hit combine and play whatever retarded "Press X to not fuck up" minigame some people insist is fun, you get a "hunk of molten steel" that takes 3 days to turn into the item you requested.

Don"t worry about the details. Worry more about the effect on gameplay. What I"m trying to cure here is the "Make 50 copper rivets to make 50 copper swords to make 50 bronze rivets to make 50 bronze swords...all in 5 minutes" mechanic and make crafting more interesting.

What I tried to do was 3 things.

1) Make rarity and value a function of time, not RNG based luck (item takes 5 days to create, not 3 days of sitting in one spot farming a rare spawn for his rare drop to make an item that takes 5 seconds to combine).

2) Make all tradeskills relatively of equal value as a commodity rather then an obviously valuable resource like gold suddenly worthless simply because it"s no loner used in laterday tradeskills.

3) Make tradeskilling more about materials management and production rather then the climax being "CAN I HAS PUSH COMBINE NOW?"

Anyways...

Materials acquisition is where you start to really have fun with the game. As others and myself suggested, HERE is where you add your mini-games, quests, "stock trading" all sorts of fun stuff. You can invest in an expedition and you get a portion of what they come back with. Try to shy away from "OH LOOK A COPPER NODE OUT IN THE MIDDLE OF A MEADOW HOW FORTUNATE AM I." Right click on node. Push X to not fuck up. "YAY!"

You can really go buck wild here, really create something deep, interesting and new.

Or you can be safe and boring like WoW and LOTRO and make 50 copper rivets to make 50 copper swords to make 50 bronze rivets...only you mix it up by giving players a 5% chance to DIE!

The choice is yours. Choose wisely.

Zehn - Vhex said:

play whatever retarded "Press X to not fuck up" minigame some people insist is fun

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Exhibit A for why you should not be designing crafting systems.

I don"t understand it myself, but crafting people like that stuff - and more power to them. They don"t want the shit you"re suggesting, AFIK, they want the mini games buffed up and made into full on virtual reality.

They want to make a virtual boat by sawing the wood, nailing and caulking the boards together, bolting on the mast and keel, sewing together some canvas and tying it all together with rope. The closer you can get to that the happier they"ll be.

They"re clearly insane - but they will pay good money so MMO companies should cater to them.

Did you just stop reading?

From later in said post said:

HERE is where you add your mini-games

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Use your head Tad. This is why I gravitate towards an NPC crafter. Maybe as one of the tasks you can request from him, he asks for help making something you"re working on. So you create a sword-crafting mini game where you have to balance heat, materials, etc...etc...and the better you do at it, maybe you get a partial refund on the materials invested, maybe it shaves some time off the crafting space.

Or you"re making an enchanted pattern that players can put on their cloaks for added bonuses. Your NPC tells you one of the apprentices he hired is sick during a crucial part of the process and it"ll be delayed by a few hours without your help. You now get an Okami interface pop up or whatever and have to draw the sigils in the air that he tells you to with the magic paintbrush. First you need to draw some happy little trees...

Voila. It"s there if you want it, but not required. It"s like I"m some kind of prophetic genius or something.

tad10 said:

No. Players will go to the path of least resistance. Here they"d just go NPC.

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AO has a version of this. To get your skillups once you"ve earned enough craft exp you either:

a) talk to a player with a higher skill than you and he trains you (you get skillup, he gets craft exp).

or

b) you go find the NPC trainer and give him gold.

Almost all players that I interact with go with option A whenever possible, even though it can take more time (finding someone online and not afk, or who has the will (a slowly refilling bar that"s used for quite a few different things from faster out of combat regen to teleporting to buying limited quantity items at severe discount)).

In this magical system we"re hashing out, if the NPC version *is* the one that starts trending towards the most use, then all of those "use NPC" drawbacks can be tweaked since they"re all tangibles. NPC starts taking X seconds longer or costing X% more or producing X quantity or quality less than before.

Untill the trend rights itself (wherever the Devs feel that proper % of player/npc use is).

Zehn - Vhex said:

Materials acquisition is where you start to really have fun with the game. As others and myself suggested, HERE is where you add your mini-games, quests, "stock trading" all sorts of fun stuff.

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I do not agree with you that materials acquisition is where crafters start to have fun with the crafting game. I knew people who enjoyed beating the mini-game that was the "combine process" in VG. I did not enjoy that mini-game, but then I"m not a crafter.

I had a long rant about how I hate crafting but I who cares really?

Because VanGuard is a shining example of attracting players.

Zehn - Vhex said:

Because VanGuard is a shining example of attracting players.

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I think most crafter types would agree that (at least initially -- no idea what status is today of either) VG crafting > WoW crafting -- whatever else you might think about the world, game performance, adventuring mechanics and etc.

I think you are trying to fix some things you view as problems, that I"m not sure crafters think of as problems. Not that this is a case of the fox redesigning the henhouse -- but maybe the WASP interior decorator redesigning Club Persh. The gold trim that you hate the Club Persh patrons love.

How"s that for an analogy!

tad10 said:

Exhibit A for why you should not be designing crafting systems.

I don"t understand it myself, but crafting people like that stuff - and more power to them. They don"t want the shit you"re suggesting, AFIK, they want the mini games buffed up and made into full on virtual reality.

They want to make a virtual boat by sawing the wood, nailing and caulking the boards together, bolting on the mast and keel, sewing together some canvas and tying it all together with rope. The closer you can get to that the happier they"ll be.

They"re clearly insane - but they will pay good money so MMO companies should cater to them.

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While I don"t speak for everyone, that"s actually not at all what I want, and I don"t think the mainstream players would want it either.

I actually like the crafting mechanics in LOTRO quite a bit, and even WoW is okay. Subtle things like how I see my character actually working the leather or hammering the anvil make LOTRO much more enjoyable than WoW though.

While minigames and complex systems like EQ2"s look impressive on paper and may actually be fun a few times, the fact is they just get old, fast. It"s more enjoyable, at least to me, to be challenged to collect rare materials (I love harvesting almost more than crafting) and recipes. When it comes to making the items themselves, I just want to watch it go into my pack. It"s satisfying. That being said, don"t get me wrong, I"m all for spicing things up with interesting procs, the chance to harvest rares, discovering new recipes, etc.

My problem with LOTRO/WoW is not the way crafting items works, its how useless they are and how little crafting is actually encouraged. I absolutely loved leveling my crafting on LOTRO, yet everything I made got vendored because it wasn"t worth anything to anyone. If I wanted to make money, I actually had to sell my harvested materials rather than anything I made.

That"s what I"d want to see changed in a new game. I want what I make, everything I make, to be useful somewhere. I realize it"s impossible to make people want a copper breastplate, but you could easily implement SOMETHING to do with it. I"d want to be able to turn the junk in to an NPC for some kind of reward, or even break it down into a percentage of the materials used. Other than that, I"d just want the things I mentioned before: crafting quests that are actually fun, meaningful rewards as I skill up, not just at the end, and so on.

Grave said:

While I don"t speak for everyone, that"s actually not at all what I want, and I don"t think the mainstream players would want it either.
.

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Fair enough - I shouldn"t be offering crafting advice either I just don"t get it, but I get that I don"t get it.

I can se so much potential with an NPC crafter. He could send you on quests for resources, recipes, to help other NPC crafters or crafting guilds. There is so much adventure/crafting potential there I would hate to see this idea wasted. And as Zehn said you could always roll up your sleeves and pitch in and help. Maybe by helping you can increase the NPC"s own leveling curve, or increase the chance to create a superior item. There are so many ways to go with that outside the normal whack a mole crafting system. I think it would be a pretty cool system.

Grave said:

I want what I make, everything I make, to be useful somewhere.

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At least 3 elements per crafting school.

1) Augments. The key here is that augments are always in high demand since you get a new augment everytime you get a new item, which is fairly often. As opposed to items which are only useful when a new character reaches that level of power, which isn"t quite as often. These are your moneymakers and what keeps a skillset interesting in the long run.

2) Equipment for the "Lol I maed my own sord!" people. Might as well. This would be the minority subset of items actually. It really shouldn"t be used to balance out RNG based item drops at the high end, but that"s an argument for another day.

3) Gimmicks. If you have housing, this is where people can craft items to put in said houses. Engineering in WoW is full of awesome gimmick items they abandoned later because they"re only okay with separate rulesets for PvP when it dicks Paladins. These have the advantage of being something everyone wants and are also more permanent then augments even if in the overall scheme of things they may be less useful.

1 is pretty much necessary for any given skill to turn a profit. 2/3 are largely optional but ultimately add to the attraction. This is, of course, all assuming copernicus is an RPG of sorts.

Just avoid "perk" items for having the skill like the goddamn plague. No "BUT IF YOU BALANCE IT!" malarky. Just flat out, -no-. Bad doggie. No biscuit.

Zehn - Vhex said:

At least 3 elements per crafting school.

1) Augments. The key here is that augments are always in high demand since you get a new augment everytime you get a new item, which is fairly often. As opposed to items which are only useful when a new character reaches that level of power, which isn"t quite as often. These are your moneymakers and what keeps a skillset interesting in the long run.

2) Equipment for the "Lol I maed my own sord!" people. Might as well. This would be the minority subset of items actually. It really shouldn"t be used to balance out RNG based item drops at the high end, but that"s an argument for another day.

3) Gimmicks. If you have housing, this is where people can craft items to put in said houses. Engineering in WoW is full of awesome gimmick items they abandoned later because they"re only okay with separate rulesets for PvP when it dicks Paladins. These have the advantage of being something everyone wants and are also more permanent then augments even if in the overall scheme of things they may be less useful.

1 is pretty much necessary for any given skill to turn a profit. 2/3 are largely optional but ultimately add to the attraction. This is, of course, all assuming copernicus is an RPG of sorts.

Just avoid "perk" items for having the skill like the goddamn plague. No "BUT IF YOU BALANCE IT!" malarky. Just flat out, -no-. Bad doggie. No biscuit.

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Something tells me you are not a fan of embroidering, glove/bracer sockets, etc. I can agree with that too, because it"s a pain in the ass to have to go back and mine the hell out of stuff in WoW so I can level my BSing and save up enough extra ore so I can drop mining and skill up my JC too for the stam gems. On the other hand, having over 30k unbuffed HP will be pretty fun and makes me feel like I"ve been rewarded pretty handsomly for skilling up the profession since trying to sell gear from blacksmithing these days feels like a waste.

And to not be a total waste, I think following your idea is a pretty good idea for crafting, but that really is for the mainstream RPG focus of "Kill the Dragon" games. I personally enjoy games where the majority of gear comes from crafters and mob dropped loot is rare. Though, I"m also an avid free loot pvp focus gamer ala UO/EVE/DF, so take my opinions for what they are.

I do really like the idea of hiring NPCs to do the crafting for you though. I also think setting up shop keepers like UO would be pretty sweet too, though Auction Houses kind of make this type of system feel dated.

The Muze said:

The problem with doing this in a linear game like WoW is that you dilute the economy. If crafting is the single best choice for gear, why would anyone choose any other option?

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Availability, convenience and price. Take EQ2 for example: even before they bumped up the levelling speed, doing 1-10 was extremely fast, so anything crafted for that tier wasn"t meant to last very long, in the end people didn"t care too much, but as soon as tier 2 was the topic, you had crafted armor and rare-crafted armor: not anyone could afford the latter, some decided to stay with the former.

Crafting can be marginally better or marginally worse and still be interesting: again taking EQ2 example the normal crafted armor was in general slightly worse than quested or dropped armor, but it was the perfect baseline for level 10, then 20, then 30 and so on.
The mastercrafted version was usable 2 levels later and was a lot less cheap, but usually better than most dropped or quested items until the end of the tier: a level 22 mc piece would be replaced usually by some good drop around level 28-29 which would be on par with level 30 armor and inferior to level 32 mc armor.

You didn"t "need" mastercrafted gear, it was a valid option (you kinda needed at least normal crafted one or replacing your armor sometimes wasn"t easy, especially in the old zones): leave players a choice, give selllers a market. The end result was pretty good in my opinion.

If the gear is "one off" so that you can craft it at level 20, but it is only useful at level 10 then right there you have a buyer and seller. The problem in WoW is that the item crafted at 20 and usable at 10 is still worthless. That is more a problem with itemization and the leveling curve.

This is why crafting seems to work so well in "sand box" games. The idea is that the buyer and seller never occupy the same space.

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The problem in wow is and was that everything you craft on the way is useless, it"s just like dumping materials in a trash bin and gaining experience for it: you could disenchant the results or vendor them, only in rare cases the goods were actually marketable.
A crafter likes to sell, this is true, but most of them also like to use their own goods.

Lotro and EQ2 cosmetic slots also add a new dimension to crafters usefulness: you really like the armor appearance you had with your mastercrafted level 32 set? You can show it at any time.

Draegan said:

Crafting almost completly depends on what kind of game are you producing. Eve? Diku? Sandbox?

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Draeg is spot on here. We could all outline ideas for a a half dozen different crafting systems, but without putting it into the context of every other part of the game we are just discussing our personal preferences.

So, having said that, I get heavily into crafting in whatever game I"m playing.


Just as important as the crafting process, is where the materials come from.

The "crystal" component idea in FFXI was genius. Every crafting recipe requires one of eight different types of crystal. Crystals have a chance to drop off all mobs, even down to lvl 1. Crystals are a great source of income for lower level characters and new players.

I also adored fishing in FFXI, which is "twitch" based. I hate anything twitch based in MMOs adventuring wise, but it worked great for trade skills - specifically fishing. And a part of that was it takes so long to level. I never have maxed it out, but I"ll still go back and sub for a month or two just to go fishing. Just be sure that, whatever form fishign takes, various types of creature that are fished up are significant crafting resources.



Most folks disliked the crafting "mini game" in EQ2, but the real problem with it was the masses of sub combines it took to make anything. So to get anywhere you spent hours combining up minor components. They made a major change to the system a year or so ago, so that now making anything just requires all the base components.


I detest everything about crafting in WoW. "nuff said.


The major issue with crafting is that to make it feel like you have achieved something it has to take time. The longer the time, the greater the sense of achievement and attachment. Just like adventuring, the trick is to make it take time, but not feel like a grind. Vanguards system was a grind and then some.

One idea I"d like to see considered would be to have a time based learning system for crafting a la Eve Online. It would help with the time vrs grind issue and also provide a lot of subscription retention.

Flight said:

Most folks disliked the crafting "mini game" in EQ2, but the real problem with it was the masses of sub combines it took to make anything. So to get anywhere you spent hours combining up minor components. They made a major change to the system a year or so ago, so that now making anything just requires all the base components.

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In their defense, devs wanted to promote interdependency between crafters and they were successfull at that, I remember several crafters-only guilds on my server with the highest spam happening in the trader channels.
Guilds were setting up subcombine crafts to satisfy all the needs and so on.

They went too far for the majority of the population, but from the point of view of one who loves crafting, what they obtained was superb. Of course most players didn"t give a rat ass about crafting when it was so complicated to make a simple piece of chainmail and they were, from their own point of view, completely right, but on the other hand nothing player-created was really necessary.

Back then, the complains about crafting were because non-crafters didn"t have such a huge source of income, not because of the amount of sub-combines.

Miele said:

A crafter likes to sell, this is true, but most of them also like to use their own goods.

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Actually, those are two distinct segments of the population. There"s a lot of people who take crafting to wear their own goods, and couldn"t care about selling stuff (with WoW profession perks, it"s taken to the extremes, when people take a profession only because it makes themselvesONEsingle good for their personal use. How many uber-guild blacksmiths have that profession because they wear their own armor, instead of just looking to the two added sockets?). And vice-versa.

When you"re talking about crafting, you need to be careful about which crafter you"re talking about. There"s four different crafters:

1) The economical crafter, who crafts to make money
2) The hobbyist crafter, who crafts to craft
3) The practical crafter, who crafts as a way of autonomy vs the game and players
4) The forced crafter, who crafts because the game requires him to craft

There"s little overlap between those four different crafters, and your game system will prop one, or maybe two of those profiles comfortably, but trying to push more than that, and you"re going to piss off the rest. If you "please" forced crafters, the economical crafter complains, since he has little outlet for his goods, because everyone crafts. If you please the hobbyist, everyone else complains because crafting is too complicated. And so on.

That"s the first question you need to ask yourself. Which of those four crafters you want your crafters to be. Once you"ve picked that, most of your crafting system core practically writes itself. If you"re looking for 3 or 4, then it must be extremely simple click-n-shoot that requires little time to start and is autonomous. If you want 1, you need lots of sub-professions providing separate components, and resource limitations (like Zehn suggests with time. Time is a resource. Whether it"s cooldowns, combine times, whatever). If you want 2, you need lots of complexity in the crafting process itself.

Eh, I would tend to disagree. The economist and "fuck crafting" guys can get along quite easily since the economist will sell to the fuck crafting guys. Problem solved there. See for how to make sure the economist always has something to sell.

Then you have the "Do it just because it"s something to do" people and so long as you avoid huge loops to jump through to get the basics down there"s again, no issue. Fund expedition/invest in mine, get raw materials, trade for what you need, queue up production on what you want, done. They may partake in the mini-games, they may not, but it isn"t forced down their gob so they"re happy.

Then you have an additional layer on top of all that for people who play the auction house all day in WoW. Introduce the trade princes with a mini-stock market style game, help fight territory and bidding wars.

Or you enjoy the more personal level, help your NPC develop his skills by assisting him in the shop. Play various mini-games such as "Don"t drink the green tea" only a little more interactive and imaginative then EQ2"s "do until completed if x then y loop".

The only person you"re going to have trouble designing your game for is the dicks out there who find something meaningless if other players can achieve it. What"s the point of making an elite uber axe if anybody can make it? IT SHOULD REQUIRE POOPING IN A SOCK FOR 3 MONTHS TO MAKE RAGE!!!!!

The real question, honestly, is do you care if your "I don"t give a shit about tradeskills" players..give a shit about tradeskills. It"s going to be a huge part of your game and a large enough portion of the playerbase just doesn"t enjoy that stuff no matter how entertaining you try to make it. How much of a asshole are you and do you want to force it on them anyways?

I"m a pretty staunch supporter of the "Don"t be an asshole developer" movement.

This is good read:Exclusive Interview with 38 Studios" R.A. Salvatore

Ukerric said:

Actually, those are two distinct segments of the population. There"s a lot of people who take crafting to wear their own goods, and couldn"t care about selling stuff (with WoW profession perks, it"s taken to the extremes, when people take a profession only because it makes themselvesONEsingle good for their personal use. How many uber-guild blacksmiths have that profession because they wear their own armor, instead of just looking to the two added sockets?). And vice-versa.

When you"re talking about crafting, you need to be careful about which crafter you"re talking about. There"s four different crafters:

1) The economical crafter, who crafts to make money
2) The hobbyist crafter, who crafts to craft
3) The practical crafter, who crafts as a way of autonomy vs the game and players
4) The forced crafter, who crafts because the game requires him to craft

There"s little overlap between those four different crafters, and your game system will prop one, or maybe two of those profiles comfortably, but trying to push more than that, and you"re going to piss off the rest. If you "please" forced crafters, the economical crafter complains, since he has little outlet for his goods, because everyone crafts. If you please the hobbyist, everyone else complains because crafting is too complicated. And so on.

That"s the first question you need to ask yourself. Which of those four crafters you want your crafters to be. Once you"ve picked that, most of your crafting system core practically writes itself. If you"re looking for 3 or 4, then it must be extremely simple click-n-shoot that requires little time to start and is autonomous. If you want 1, you need lots of sub-professions providing separate components, and resource limitations (like Zehn suggests with time. Time is a resource. Whether it"s cooldowns, combine times, whatever). If you want 2, you need lots of complexity in the crafting process itself.

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I"m obviously a bit biased towards my own style of crafting, but I"m confident a happy medium between 1 and 3 can be achieved, thus making even people in the category 4 happy enough if they can skip crafting by just buying things from those who make them (requiring a certain craft skill to do a required combine for a quests is not a good design choice imo).

There is enough room to overlap in my opinion: a category 3 crafter is happy to work on their own gear, providing it doesn"t force them to spend more hours gathering materials than actually making use of the final crafted products.

If you leave the boring part of the crafting to the NPCs (I may add gathering the common materials, rares can be handled differently) and you get to only do the final combines through for example some form of minigame, you already made a jump in quality over the existant crafting systems.
Balancing to obtain a system that satisfies the 1 to 3 types, should not be too hard to obtain.

Keep in mind that crafting should be a complement, not a main activity: with this I mean that I may spend anywhere from 10% to 20% of my online time to craft, because it"s cool, profitable and mildly entertaining, but the moment I require the 2 hours/night players to spend 1 hour+ to advance their profession, I"m on the wrong track as developer (imo).

So I log in, collect the mats/subproducts I ordered to the NPCs yesterday, do my things and eventually place them on the shelves for sale, then place the order for tomorrow, all by spending half an hour or so, then everything is fine.
Having an option to allow a higher production can be a good and a bad thing: you don"t want the market flooded, but you may want also to give the hardcore crafter something extra to work on: this is the hard part to work on.

Allowing hardcores to pick all the professions they want is the natural answer: you level one (let"s say the one who makes your armor), they level all of them. Everyone"s happy like this, or so I like to think.

Rythonn said:

Hire Raph Koster(yes I know he is working on his own project, maybe he can be an advisor). I loved the way SWG did crafting, mainly how resources were handled. That resources had varying stats to them. You could use any ole resource to produce an Item, but a true trader/crafter would seek out the best of the best and produce a much higher grade item to sell.

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This is only my word as a MMO poster, but I would never try any MMO where Koster had a role, because his ideas about what make a game fun are completely the opposite of mine. I just wanted to offer a contrary opinion.