Mark Jacobs has come to the Keen and Graev Community Forums once again. This time he’s gathering ideas and opinions about what a next-gen MMORPG crafting system should be like, and he’s given a framework to work in which seems to indicate Camelot Unchained’s direction..
I jotted down a few of my ideas. They’re mostly incorporating things from the past with a slight twist.
Customization
- Altering attributes of a weapon should provide increases and penalties, but the net change should always be a positive for someone. In other words, if I lower the durability of the weapon I can make it swing faster because it is lighter. I can also alter the weight to make it slower and hit harder. I can add more of one stat, but lose out on another.
Experimentation
- Coming up with new combinations of ingredients or ways to craft are fun. I like SWG’s method of adding in resources of differing qualities to provide more ‘experimentation points’ which allow crafters to seek the best materials. The trade off being that the resources are more valuable and the weapons are more costly.
Resource Gathering
- SWG’s method of placing harvesters in the world was great. This removed the tedium of going out and gathering, but added a ‘time to wait’ element. THere was also the added benefit of giving the player more time to experiment (see above) and come up with new ways of crafting.
- Another option is to send players out into mines like UO does and let the player actively find nodes on their own.
Crafters should contribute to territorial control
- Repairing anything should require a crafter.
- Upgrading anything should require a crafter.
- If no crafters are available, these can be purchased from NPCs are a huge cost with lower quality than a crafter can provide.
General Ideas
- Give crafters the control they need to make a name for themselves. If I work hard at it, I should be known for what I do. Maybe I’m the guy to buy swords from because I have perfected a technique that provides a great value. Maybe my prices are lowest because I don’t mind smaller margins since I enjoy going out and gathering resources vs. someone who hates it so wants more money for his/her time.
- Make it about more than price. A price war in crafting will reduce prices to zero. Someone should be able to charge more and still draw customers because there’s a value proposition supported by the game’s mechanics.
If you could design a next-gen crafting system, what would it be like?
My comment on experimentation.
I quite loathe the style of experimentation in crafting you see in most CRPG’s. The type where (for instance) there are three slots and you plug in a green leaf and a blue mushroom and an egg and see if it makes a powerful potion. This is a boring waste of time in my opinion, and I invariably just look up the recipes online, especially if it’s a MMO and so it’s impossible to escape the min-maxing of everyone else.
Here’s a type of experimentation I would love to see: a relatively simple setup of very well known and well defined parameters designed to allow emergence. Here’s an analogy that comes easily to mind: make the creation of a single weapon be similar to piecing together a full build for a character in League of Legends (or Dota or any MOBA as such). In moba’s there are other factors to consider of course, but that doesn’t stop people on the internet from endlessly debating and theory crafting about what the best way is to build their tank and there is also a tremendous amount of variety in builds, with each having genuine strengths and weaknesses and there not being one single “best” way to build a tank.
Now, take all that fun of choosing Warmogs Armor versus Frozen Mallet versus Sunfire Cape and translate each item (you can have 6 in LoL) into a stat decision you make when crafting a weapon for your MMO toon. Now YOU decide whether you would rather have damage or health, or resistances, or damage over time, or percent of health damage, or move speed, or decrease attack speed of nearby enemies etc. It is fully and truly fun to get to that “fully built” stage of a Moba, and no matter how many times I do it even as the same hero, I still feel like that hero is a little bit mine just because of the little decisions I made as I bought items. Bring a little of that to the crafting process and I think you would find people taking a real shine to the crafting system.
P.S.
To tie this back to experimentation: this is experimenting in a good way, where the parameters are fully known (in the analogy I had, there were a limited number of items for your character, so in an MMO there would be a similarly diverse but still comprehensible number of enchantments), rather than some crap shoot where you are slapping together random mats to try and get a item with a boring old +10 strength. It promotes emergence (just witness the ever-changing item meta of LoL or Dota) but also allows nubs to look up builds or use the builds of their favorite streamer. And it allows diversity because it is genuinely up to your playstyle what items to get (in the analogy: what kind of item to craft).
Next generation crafting should allow players to make their custom looking weapons…exactly, think the mods in skyrim and other single player RPGs..the company can create the API and LUA so it can give some tools to players to customize the look of their crafts and sell their own awesome armors and weapons that would not only depend on stats.
Furthermore I like it to be a lot of “grindy”. For example you will have levels on crafting that technically have no cap.You can craft 1000 2H Swords and after x swords you craft you gain levels in your sword mastery and your swords become better and better, with more stats, with more enchants slots, e.t.c.
Experimental is not good cause there is really not a real experimental in all games I have played and have that feature. Unless they have over 500 resources and the outcome is not “fixed” then there is no really experimental and you will never make something unique.
Gathering resources is pure pleasure for some people. I’ve played with quite a few people over the years who would probably put resource gathering near the top of the reasons they play MMOs. I don’t go that far, but I do enjoy it. Having some kind of legal bot that goes and gets it for you is no substitute for doing it yourself, even in a PvE game and in an RvR game I would have thought that you’d want resources to be fought over in the world as a prime piece of player-generated content.
Crafter-only item repair, on the other hand, is a nightmare. Assuming item repair matters, if you have to have an actual player operating his crafting character at the same location as your character for repair to happen, you can forget about playing outside of your server’s busiest time-slot. Bear in mind Mark Jacobs also predicates no fast travel. If your weapon breaks out in the wilds, it’s a 45 minute jog back to the nearest city, there’s most of your session gone, even if you can find someone willing to do the work.
What would work for repairs would be if items could only be repaired using kits that only crafters could make.
Crafting is one area where I feel theme park MMO’s – WoW in particular (and LOTRO because they imitated this part) – have it dead wrong. Crafting should not be something that every single player needs to do at the penalty of not getting crafter-only bonuses for combat. If everyone has a max level crafter as an incidental bit of progress en route to level cap, you might as well not have crafting. Just give people the stuff off a vendor and spend your time developing a system you’re actually going to put some thought into.
I would say that the actual activity of making the items needs to be time-consuming (active time at keyboard, NOT AFK) but fun. The former is necessary because there should be an incentive for the adventurer who mines to say that they’re rather pay someone else to forge a sword for them than do it themselves. However, it needs to stay fun for the crafter or they will give up. Free Realms probably isn’t the example Mark Jacobs is looking for, but the concept – crafting via minigames that are fun for some people but not necessarily your core RVR player – is sound. Perhaps almost how the concept of Dust514 would work with Eve – you actually have a completely separate game that appeals to different players sitting inside the shared world.
The toughest thing to balance is how to make crafting necessary without screwing people who don’t have a crafter handy. If your faction is underpopulated and gets stuck paying high prices for inferior goods from the NPC, that’s probably not going to be much fun for them. Perhaps have an incentive for the crafter who wants their side to win, but also have a black market that allows the player to turn a higher profit by funneling their goods over to the faction that doesn’t have many crafters. Any way you approach it, you will need a critical mass of crafters or else you’ll undercut the need for crafters so much that people won’t do it (and then, again, you might as well have just put the stuff on the vendor and spent your time on something worthwhile).
I have no interest in RVR and even less interest in sitting AFK in front of a crafting station with a spreadsheet that tells me what price to buy materials at so I can turn a profit. If you make crafting fun on its own merits and something that interacts with that world, you potentially have my attention. If you don’t have the resources to do this, there’s no shame in giving up on crafting and focusing on what your game is actually good at.
I’ve given this question quite a bit of thought in the past. What I’d like to see is a couple of different systems designed to add gameplay depth to the crafting process:
1. As mentioned by John, I’d like to see an “advanced” optional crafting system where players can modify the appearance of the items they have crafted. Different materials might provide more options, and special materials might be needed for effects like fire or glow. Of course, this would have to be policed to some extent as well as it would be necessary to enforce some standards of appropriateness.
2. I’d also like to see a basic crafting system which involves a relatively deep, skill based minigame to determine crafting success. This game could be played single player or multiplayer (ie: solo or group play). In the solo scenario, a crafter would select materials, play the minigame, and the results of the minigame would heavily influence the results of the crafting. The minigame would be simple and relatively easy for basic designs and much more difficult for high level, advanced, or highly customized work.
The group version would use an Apprentice and Master system. The master would contribute the materials and play the minigame with the apprentices. The apprentices would help the master increase his minigame score, while the apprentices would benefit by getting experience and practice at the minigame with no resource cost to themselves. The master would keep the result, of course. I think this would add a significant social/community aspect to crafting and help new players get into the game.
The key here is that significant development resources would need to go into making the crafting minigame fun, challenging and appealing to the kinds of players who want to craft. I think it’s totally doable though.
I agree with swarmofseals the main thing I would like to see in a crafting system would be making the actual crafting an active experience similar to combat. These games take great time and effort creating a combat system with unique skills and rotations but then when it comes to crafting you select an item, hit craft all and go afk.
I’d really like to see something where it is similar to combat progression, you start off with a few skills and as you progress you get more and more and you have to actively interact with the crafting or you could fail. Be similar to not paying attention in combat and missing a tell that leads to a big hit.
Then with a real robust system you could have crafting guilds where you work together to craft unique items or larger items like houses etc. But the experience would be similar to going on a raid, everyone having a role to play and actively engaging in the experience.
I like some of the other ideas as well about fully customizable items as far as stats and appearance as well.
Customization of your gear is the key. A heavy hammer would cause more damage when it hits but it would be slower moving and take more endurance to swing the weapon. The slower moving weapon would be easier to evade then a lighter and faster moving weapon. Wearing heavy armor would afford the player greater protection but at the cost of endurance and speed.
Armor and weapons should have a system to plug in various buffs. The buffs should again be a give and take. If you plug in fire damage resistance you will then decrease your water, earth and air damage resistence. A buff to decrease damage from piercing weapons would then cause your character to sustain greater damage from blunt and slicing weapons. If you plug in stun resistance on your characters rings, then your character would be easier to slow and for a greater length of time.
I loved the harvester system in SWG. But this isn’t SWG so harvesters are out. A character should have to gather their own crafting materials. Forcing them to find and then gather the materials places them onto the field of battle where they can be attacked.
I believe there should be various options to get items repaired. Let say I purchased my armor from Keen. If Keen is around and willing to repair my armor he would repair it at a reduced cost because I purchased the armor from him. I could also get my armor repaired from Keen’s NPC armor retailer, located in Keen’s house at a reduced cost. I could also have any other armor crafter or that armor crafter’s NPC repair it at a cost greater then what Keen would be getting. If I was a member of a guild, I could also go to the guild’s armor retailer NPC located at the guild house. It would cost me more at the guild’s house then at Keen’s house. The money would however go directly to the guild bank.
I never had a problem going to a crafting station to craft. But this is Unchained. So why not place the crafting stations on the field of battle. The crafting stations would be located in areas that could be held by any realm. If you want to craft you have to control the crafting station(s). If you want to add NPC guards at the crafting stations it will cost you.
thomas why the hell should force crafters into a pvp?We are talking about crafting system here and not how will give a group of gangers a better chances to find victims.
@John it’s a tactic they used in Dota I believe, making certain item ownership contingent on map control, and it seems like a great idea to me. It would add some real and tangible stakes to PvP where you are fighting not just for your own benefit but for your entire faction’s convenience. There’s a similar sort of concept in Eve I believe, where harvest of certain minerals depends on your corporation having control of certain systems.
First thing @John, I am a serious crafter. I always create various characters for the purpose of crafting everything in the game. I would hope Unchained would allow you to level during crafting just like GW2.
I knew level 1 crafters in SWG that did nothing but craft and sell. Many of them were serious role players. When they left the confines of the city, they needed an escort to search for materials or reach their harvesters. Without an escort an NPC would kill them. The threat of the NPC is similar to the threat of a PvP player.
There were even crafting only guilds in SWG and those guilds always had the best materials and the best gear for sale. They would request escorts all the time. They would give you gear, materials or money for escorting them.
Unchained should be well… Unchained. Crafters are always in a safe place correct? They are never threatened correct? So putting them in harms way will be something new. To craft would require cooperation from a guild or other players. To gather crafting materials would require the same cooperation to roam the RvR world. Isn’t cooperation what MMO’s are all about?
@Keen I agree on nearly everything in your topic post.
Except for the part about harvesting by placing a harvesting node that automates the process. Big no… Just like people like crafting, others like gathering.
To gatherers its the same as if we used a robot that automated the crafting.
For me the number 1 feature for a robust crafting system has to be that the items are breakable, permanently.
Without that feature nothing else really matters, all the customisation, resource gathering, tinkering etc will be left by the wayside as the non crafters, the customers, will only be after that 1 best in slot weapon once and then they’ll forget about the crafters except when it comes to consumables like potions or arrows, which are never going to be that interesting to manufacture. I’ve seen this in crafting systems where the “rare” sword was a random chance from making the common sword, so you ended up making 10 common swords you can’t do anything with in the hope of getting that one rare one that will actually sell.
With breakable weapons/armour, it gives the crafter more options e.g. do you focus on mass producing cheap gear designed to break quickly, or do you put in the extra effort to find the better resources and experiment during crafting to produce a rarer item that will last for longer and sell for me.
UO / Eve style gathering. Put the best resources our in RvRvR country similar to 0.0 in Eve. Suddenly PVP and territory control has so much more meaning. You create an ecosystem where PVPers grab land and protect gatherers/crafters, and benefit from the goods the crafters produce.
Definitely need tags on crafted items
Make crafted items have somewhat randomized stats
Ensure that the items system allows crafters to enhance any dropped item in some way (enchantments, sharpening stones, grips, etc)
Make sure the crafting system is deep and the different trades interact with one another, where you need components from several different crafters to create a particular item.
Here’s one that I haven’t seen yet in a fantasy game:
If you have different sized races, require a blacksmith or tailor to fit the armor to you.
Variety, Variety, Variety
-Wide variety of resource types. Wide variety in resource stats with spawns changing regularly. Variety of ways to obtain resources including multiple levels of harvesters and the ability to purchase resources from other players.
-Wide variety of crafted products including many types of armor, clothing, foods and enhancements, weapons, etc. These should have a wide variety of further customizations including colors, appearances, enhancements and specific uses. It’s imperative that there be equally valid choices. No one weapon or set of armor can be ‘best’.
-An experimentation system should be geared towards playing around with that variety (different resources, resources with different stats, enhancements, colors, appearances, etc). There’s plenty to play around with there so no need for silly recipe discovery systems.
-Crafters must also have a variety of ways to market their products including personalized shops and vendors, a centralized auction house, ability to C.O.D. through the mail system and trade with customers directly. I agree that the ability to make a name for oneself is very important. The ability to brand your products and give them unique names goes a long way toward setting yourself apart from the competition.
-To sustain a crafting economy long term there must be a need to repair or replace items over time and most crafted items should be as good or better than anything that can be looted. I lean toward a decay system that is convenient such as the use of repair kits that can be used anywhere or a slow decay that allows use of the item while it is decaying so that a mindful player is never stuck in the middle of no where with a busted weapon.
-Lastly, I’d like the next generation of MMOs to support crafting professions as a valid play-style on it’s own, not just an add on to combat professions.
I do not understand crafting centric MMO’s. To me it devalues the concept of loot and takes any fun away from getting random drops. To each their own I suppose.
@Zederok That is because your defenition of loot seems to be weapons and armor.
The loot just changes to things like trophies, unique decorations, armor dyes, very rare crafting components, gold (so you can pay the crafters) etc.
I liked some of the things Dominus was doing
– items break over time
– resources fought over
– crafters would need to hire guards
GW2 was neat in the discover process but limited. Infinite combos through mixing different grades of materials would be nice and add complexity. I really want the players to be in charge of the stats and abilites on an item.
I liked the idea of gear degrading as it always meant that crafting would be valuable.
I think crafting should be something not everyone does. The profitable aspects of it should be time consuming. There should be many ways to support the crafting system and earn crafted gear for yourself eg gathering dragon scales from dragon bosses, gathering items from nromal mobs, mining and harvesting, protecting crafters, trading (eg I have an item with max vitality bonus, its rare so I trade it to a crafter who can break it down then use the bonus in his recipe).
@Zyler Sadly I do. I am not aversed to having trophies, decorations and dyes/weapon glow effects in the loot profile but as someone with a D&D, Diablo, Asheron’s Call background I have always and will always remain commited to dynamic loot systems first. WoW specific themed loot drops second and I would never play an MMO with a crafting centric theme. It just isn’t my cup of tea and considering popular approval the crafting centric community is a rather small niche subset or there would be more. I am not opposed to anyone getting their own style of games though, jsut thought I’d voice my opinion, civily on the matter.
I really don’t want to see a large central Auction House, even for minerals. Smaller location-specific markets (like EVE Online) would be fine. That opens up the opportunity for traders to make money buying cheap in high-risk areas and transporting them to low-risk areas to sell (with the potential to lose it all if someone kills or steals from them along the way).
Items should have duribility mechanism or some other means to remove them from the world over time, to keep supply and demand steady.
Employing vulnerable harvesting NPCs (farmers, miners, fishermen etc) that you have to protect could be interesting, instead of making your character harvest resources directly. Although the latter should still be an option.
It could be fun to tie your crafting method, speed and quality to the type of character you’re playing (class if you have classes, otherwise skill group or equivalent). For example, a necromancer might command legions of poorly-trained undead NPCs to gather lots of resources and build things very quickly (but not very well). Whereas a paladin might have a single very proficient squire who is also a master blacksmith – he takes a while to forge that sword, but it will last a long time before breaking.
@Thomas I also consider myself a serious crafter and in any new MMOs the first thing that goes to max level is the professions and not my characters. The level 1 character
.I also don’t like the idea of level 1 crafter personaly. Crafter himself should go out and find for new and rare recipes. Also while the character leveling he must chose where to focus his experience. Think skyrim for example, when you level you get points to use. You can either use it in 2H sword, heavy armor, a school of magic, or you can use it to raise “blacksmith”. Now assuming there is a level cap or a level when aquiring further points is very very difficult, people may need to make a choices..will their character be more powerful in battle or he will be a better crafter?
this is for me “challenge” for crafters and not gangers or NPC attacks 🙂 You have to play your character and you have to sacrifice lot of experience points to become a good crafter. But from the other hand I don’t like pvp and especially I don’t like Forced ffa pvp. I used to liked it and I played vanilla wow in pvp server and Aion extensively and also lineage in a good private for over a year but now I am sick of it and I am avoiding as much as possible, probably got old 🙂
If you seperate out Crafting skills from gathering resource skills then you solve allot of problems, especially if you want the game to have a merchant/crafting class. If you think even a few hundred years ago, you didn’t have the garment factories going out and raising and shearing sheep, you had to pay whole sale for your materials. Having a gatherer/miner (or what ever) in the sub stages of crafting it creates another fluctuation in pricing for end goods.
I liked the way EQ2 did this, you could find certain tiers of good in different area depending on how hard the mobs were around then within that level range there were rare items that could be gained. This gave rise to the gatherer-crafter relationship, I had certain people that would guarentee buy my rares of any tier for a set price and in return I would get cut price end products. So just seperating the Crafting-gathering skill sets solves allot of the problems about being ganked whilst being a dedicated crafter/merchant.
My ideal crafting in a mmo would be something you can’t just look up on the internet to get ‘the best and fastest method to max your skill’ like pretty much every mmo to date. It would require experimentation and also randomisation per character (so what works for one character might be not so good for another). It would also include bonuses for where and how it’s crafted (think being taken to a high mountain surrounded by bad guys to reach a forge to have the chance to create something better than if I had sat around my home made forge). Customisation is good but needs to actually be worth it. Custom made (as someone compared it to Skyrim custom weapons) will be a no-no for most MMO’s due to limits placed on memory/tris limits. It’s all fine and well when it’s a single player game you can add and delete very easily these mods for new weapons but when therer is a few hundred people with a few hundred different weapons, just think the amount of memory for textures alone would create a night mare in popular places (think ironforge or ogg in wow) it would just not be feasable with todays hardware. Sure there are ways around it like toggling player made items being displayed etc but the main point in making something like that, uploading it and getting it approved is for other people to see it. And most will turn it off because of the massive FPS hit in towns.
btw it is funny that most of suggestions for the “next generation MMO crafting” is features from old MMOs that are missing from current MMOs 🙂
One input I would have for the overall experience of the game would be increasing the time of EVERYTHING compared to every MMO that came out after EQ. Leveling, crafting, travel etc. When you slow things down people get a chance to not only take in their surroundings more and pull them into the game more but it makes things worth more, because as they say, time is money.
There is no way to be “that guy that people go to when they want a special sword”, if this factor does not exist. If you speed things up too much you take that much more away from individuality. Everyone becomes a sword smith not just the few that took the extra time to do so. Speed and technology have made MMO’s a dime a dozen in the past decade. By technology I mean the internet in general. Websites dedicated to each MMO that comes out providing everything there is to know at your fingertips. I would welcome a fresh MMO that had no beta, no knowledge base prior to the game coming out, and only some solid gameplay footage from the dev team so on day 1, it is literally day 1. Not 2 months of beta, weeks of research on dedicated websites, etc.
Again, I’d like to emphasize time and individuality. Those are key to the success of not just crafting but the entire game. If they can find a way to do both of those correctly then they might have something.
@John I did not read John Jacobs post in the forums when I posted here. So some of the things I wrote would never be in the game. My mistake. He wants crafters to be able to just craft if they wish in total safety. How do they gather their materials or buy them is the question.
Sticking to his parameters will require further thinking on my part.
Mark Jacobs, not John Jacobs my mistake.
“If no crafters are available, these can be purchased from NPCs are a huge cost with lower quality than a crafter can provide.”
I think we need to be cognizant of the non-guilded players’ relative position in these decisions. While this may seem like a general benefit to the crafter, it is indirectly punitive to the non-guilded player.
While guilded a player basically has to pay for mats at worst. I wouldn’t see the point to having a “huge” cost difference for an inferior product as this would basically force such players into trade talks with crafters, thereby making the NPC crafters pointless.
If the auction house cost was always substantially lower for a product of higher quality than a NPC crafter’s, well why bother even coding a NPC crafter?
I think that frequently there is a largely unavoidable community bias that favors guilded players in MMO’s, so much so that I don’t think we need to be purposely writing code to reinforce it. Obviously an IMO-type of issue though…
As far as crafter ideas I could think of a few off of the top of my kopf:
1) Items should have limited lifespans and not be repairable. This reinforces the crafter’s role in the game economy.
2) Critical crafting successes should add stats, including potential random qualities. When combined with the limited lifespan, the need for balancing a relatively OP item is not significant; that is let someone feel powerful like a Berzerker love truck for 2 weeks and then poof, time for another purchase.
3) Make crafting actual class types instead of professions. They would research recipes and enhancements like any other classes’ abilities. For a RvR-based MMO one might want to make them competitive in PvP (in contrast to a SWG dancer’s abilities) so perhaps they get bonuses for using the type of items they craft and can make exceptional items exclusively for their use. One could work off of an engineer paradigm, only with far greater focus.
4) I like the idea of semi-random recipe unlocks during research that yield unique items. Why should every magical long sword recipe be exactly the same? Why can’t one crit recipe have a flaming skin and associated bonus, another frost, and so on. In this way crafters can actually gain a name for themselves as that guy who makes that really cool looking sword.
A few thoughts to ponder…
To follow Mark’s parameters you will have to have separate areas for crafting and another for RvR.
First you need to have a list of crafting skills. Armor, weapon, food, alchemy, siege/housing, wood, jewelry and jewel. You could specialize under the various sub sections.
You will have to have Gathering Skills for the fighter in RvR and Growing Skills for the Crafter player.
The player in the RvR area would be able to gather everything as long as they had the appropriate gathering tool. In this area you can gather, wild fruits, wild vegetables, wild hemp, wild game meats, wild game hides, wild game bone, stones, gems, ore, amd logs. The player should also be able to focus on just one gathering skill. The player that focuses on one type of gathering skill, would have a better chance at gathering the highest quality materials and the highest quantity.
The Growing Skills would be Farming, Herding, Geology and Forestry. The crafter could use all the growing skills or focus on just one. If you focus on just one skill you would have a better chance at the highest quality and the highest quantity.
Farming would allow you to grow fruits, vegetables, grains and hemp. If you focus on just one you would have a greater chance at the highest quality and quantity. Fruits, vegetable and grain would be used for Food crafting and feeding live stock. Hemp would be used for light armor crafting, thread, rope for siege equipment etc….
Herding would allow you to grow cattle, cows, sheep, and chickens. If you focus on just one you would have a greater chance at the highest quality and quantity.
Cattle would provide meat, hide, bone and manure. The meat and bone would be used for food crafting and hides for leather crafting. Bones would be used to make bone meal as well. The bone meal and manure would be used for fertilizing farms.
Cows would only provide milk, cream, manure and eventually meat, bone and hide if you decided to dispatch them when their milk production is low or poor quality.
Sheep would provide meat, hide, manure and wool. Chickens would provide meat, manure and feathers.
Geology would allow the player to locate ore, gems and minerals. If you focus on just one you would have a better chance at the highest quality and the highest quantity. Geology would provide materials for the various crafting skills.
Forestry would allow the player to grow various types of trees. I’m sure you get the picture by now, bows, wood handles, arrows, siege equipment parts, wood for houses etc…
What are they planning to do about alt crafters?
Item quality and features should be based primarily on skill, secondarily on material and tool quality. At the low end, the crafter shouldn’t have the control, so item quality and feature results should be more random. As skill level, material quality, and tool quality improve, the crafter should have more control, and results should be less random. At the high end, crafters should have absolute control over what they are creating, able to choose the exact quality and features.
NPC crafters should be available, but generally have their skill capped at average, with average prices. Only PC crafters should be able to achieve maximum skill. This allows solo or unguilded players access to repairs and upgrades, but only to a certain extent.
Crafted items should be very good overall, but not the best. The best items should still come from loot; otherwise what’s the point of going out and adventuring? Another possibility is upgrading found items; if the initial quality is good enough, then new features could be added by crafters.
Item quality should degrade with use, but also should be repairable. Repair kits should be available, but provide minimal improvement. E.g. if a sword’s blade breaks, no “kit” is going to make it whole again; it must be reforged, at a forge (not something you carry around in your back pocket). Reforging (or refurbishing) items would allow players to keep their favorite gear, but they still have to pay the equivalent of new gear.
If in a class-based system, crafters should have their own discrete classes, e.g. Weaponsmith. (This wouldn’t necessarily preclude them from having combat ability, however; a Weaponsmith might not be the best at fighting, but he’d have to know the basics at least.)
But I think crafting works better in a skill-based system. Here the crafting player naturally focuses on crafting skills, but still has the flexibility to learn other skills as necessary, without being forced to roll up an entirely new character.
Crafting resources (especially the highest quality ones) should only be available in highly contested RvR zones.
@FirbyWarden “Crafting resources (especially the highest quality ones) should only be available in highly contested RvR zones.”
This is a bad idea for the following reason.
In a RvR zone I already ahve to deal with useless AFK people. Your suggesting we add players that just go for the gathering nodes for their own selfish intentions?
The only resourcing gathering I want to see in a RvR conflict is the ones that help the warfefford that go to for instance the upgrading of guards and keeps.
You could however make it so that for the next 12 hours rare resource nodes become available for the winning faction only. Add the top tier instance as well.. as an incentive.
The idea behind putting the rare resources in the rvr zone is a good one. Even a full time crafter should have a risk vs. reward system in place in order to encourage them to take risks. While I am not married to putting the good stuff in the rvr zone I AM married to the risk vs reward theory so your alternatives must include it. . .IMO
i like most of these options i like crafting as a choice, crafters should be able to stay at lvl 1 and craft items at home, however better items are crafted off boss drops, the only part that bothers me about this is favored crafter in guilds will receive all the resources. i would like to see mining areas, being controlled by factions giving a income on ore, nothing fancy, also neutral mine zones, dangerous mine zone, so a solo players could visit a neutral mine, and gather resources, i would also like gathers being separated to miners, high level gatherers being the only player that can mine a specific resource, so you could level you character by gathering, with another skill have npcs to assist. so the blacksmith can purchase the items, and craft the equipment, i would like then broken down allot on bother gathering and crafting.
i would like to see guild crafters, whole guilds dedicated to crafting but i would also like to see solo crafters being able to make a name for themselves.
in regards to special resources spread them don’t make them appear in the same spot at the same time,
also give crafting guilds the mean to share there finds with others from the guilds, maybe even give the ability to install an emblem via an upgrade purchased for the guild. give bonus;s for belong to a crafting guild….