I fall into that catagory of hardcore crafter. please understand this when i describe a few things.

when determining whats needed to bring any item into the game it needs not be looked at as risk vs reward. risk vs reward is a fallacy thats often talked about in the mmo industry. instead lets talk about what really matters. time vs reward.

- 25 man raid takes 8 hours to complete and a total of 8 items drop that people are looking for. thats basically 1 item for every 25 man/hours of play time.

-when questing on a solo quest a comparable item should be available after 25 hours of questing, be it running around or killing solo mobs.

-when crafting the same rules apply ,but i am going to go a bit deeper into this.

crafters will often try to assemble a stockpile of raw materials to work with prior to crafting. they will want to make multiple items in a single run. the time to gather the items (wether buying from someone else or harvesting themselves) and the time to create are the major factors in whats involved here.

things i really need to see inproved on but so far the gaming industry wants to ignore….

1- crafting should be skill based. when you look at adventuring they have all these skill of things they can do to a mob. to earn xp. a crafter who wants to make something in alot of cases has a single button to click and chance takes over. eq2 has come the closest to a real working model on crafting but stopped way short on final implementation.

2- crafting needs to be varied. the biggest thing that crafters can give to the adventuring community is options. let us control the stats on the items. its very easy to do.

3- bring in group and raid content to crafters. crafters often work together in real life, why not in a game.

4- bring back the community. crafters need to get to know people. the crafters should be depend on each other for lower end consumables in the trade. eq2 had it right before they decided to simplify things.

if any of the writers want to talk … feel free to email.

Experienced crafters correctly saw that this would flood the market, increase harvesting, and make crafted goods unsellable. Now SOE may have decided in favor of the casual crafter, but the casual crafter now makes worthless unsellable junk — not sure why anyone would want this. By killing all the stats on crafted armor SOE made it useless except to level up and sell to a vendor.

A large amount of stuff that was crafted was always sold to a vendor — but thanks to the arrival of casual crafters, we no longer make any profit selling to the vendor. We used to make enough profit on a level to buy the next level crafting books plus some advanced books. That is no longer possible with crafting. I am not sure why anyone would see this as better.

Actually UO did a great job wtih crafting — there was a lot wrong with the game ( like PvP, ganking etc.) but they did get crafting right so it was an alternative career path. SOE had crafting right in the beginning. In a way it was like raiding — not for everyone. It took time to level up ( personally I think since LU 24 levelling takes longer) and a lot of casual crafters did not like the WORTS and sub combines. You had to spend hours getting all those skills up to the point that you could confidently make a pristine. Unless you had high thaumaturgy you really didn’t dare attempt a rare ink — but all dedicated crafting sages had Thaumatury at max. So that was not for the casual crafter, but I can’t believe the casual crafter enjoys what is left now — making unsellable junk and spending lots, and lots and lots of time harvesting, especially for roots.

Crafting to be a career in an MMO has to allow the crafter to raise their skills to the point where, with the appropriate recipes and raws, they can make both legendary and fabled items. Prior to LU24 rares were not that frequent which kept the amount of legendary goods to a reasonable amount. Controlling the amount of high quality goods is really a quetion of how frequently you let rare raws be generated in the game world. Another approach is to quest for a rare recipes which has limited number of uses etc. or even a 1 time use.

To make a pristine,the player has to have his skills at Max value or very close to it, but in addition he has to understand how the interface works. Now I can recover from a Critical Failure and still make a pristine, but it takes knowing what each individual button does when you press and what is the desired button combinations — you only learn that from crafting a lot.

I’m not sharing your opinion Theageoflegends that the LU24 killed the career path crafter. This option was gone much before LU24. I think to make crafting a valid alternative career path for a MMO is a very difficult task.

The other question would be how to balance the requirements on time and effort of player for the career path crafting with the time and effort for causal crafter.
The casual crafter should also be able to reach a goal, do you agree?

My understanding is that SOE decided in the flavor of casual crafter. In my opinion you can’t make both groups happy at the same time.
However I agree with you about the sellable only to NPC stuff (I wear only quest / raid gear nothing crafted with my main, actually with one big exception half of the swap resist jewelry is crafted) and the balance issue with raw needs.

I did not understand your comment about “mindlessly push buttons” because that’s actually what I’m doing as Carpenter (I need to be a little bit more careful as Jeweler).

I would be interested in your proposal/opinion how to limit the quantities for the great crafted gear. I think this would really help the professions but I’m totally clueless how to archive this without creating lots of frustrations for all involved parties.
When you talk about highly skilled, you talk about skill numbers or do you talk about player skill?

You cannot mindlessly push buttons and get a pristine product everytime. You have get the combinations right — especially where durability is concerned.

I believe, as SOE promised when EQ2 came out, that crafting would be a viable career path through the game for those that did not want to adventure. And believe it or not, there are people that do not like or want to adventure. Now SOE has broken that promise and killed a carerr path that a lot of players enjoyed.

The recipe changes messed up the raw needs with now and overwhelming need for roots to the point where roots sell for more money than crafted good. In provisioning they removed spice packs and replaced it with roots — now what was the point of that I ask you?

Just as EQ1 had good “foodstuffs” desired and purchased by players for their stat buffs so did EQ2 — suddently we lost that with the LU24 changes and no rational explanation was ever given.

What needs to be done is to boost the quality of crafted stuff and make it harder to make pristines and still allow crafters to make legendary or fabled gear with rare components. I do not believe that all the best gear should come from adventuring, I think crafting should also be able to produce that level of gear — not mass produce it, but highly skilled crafters should be able to put some some great gear in limited quantities.

Also I would not separate them completely, but I think the best stat items could come from the adventuring sphere and if you are looking for something visual consistency you could found it from the crafting sphere (I hate to look like a parrot with all the different armor pieces – at least most of the time). You may end up with two sets of equipment one with max stats and one with slightly lower stats but corresponding visual, to the expectations you have about your Avatar appearance (I’m not talking about fluff stuff. That’s in addition to useful equipment crafter can produce).

One additional idea I like is that crafter could improve rare powerful loot slightly (just a bonus and that could as well involve rare resources).

The main marked for crafter, following that separation scenario, would then be consumables. Where I think, many of the consumables should provide you with a smaller or larger benefit for adventuring (or crafting/harvesting) but they are not essential necessary (example may be to help you mitigate a missing key class in your group or providing something like 10% additional damage).

Only very few crafting consumables should be a necessary for playing (necessary in that case does not mean you can not play without them, I think more in a way you may not be desired by a group if you don’t have it. Example may be doing less than 60% of your usual damage without it) and for them, there should be alternate sources (NPC, loot, harvest or something else) to retrieve them (but not as comfortable as buying it from a crafter). I don’t like the idea that few people could control an important part of the game (may not so important if there is a large user base who builds a stable marked).

Also I like the idea that crafter could recycle old equipment. Not as normal resources but as necessary component to craft the more powerful equipment (something like extracting the magic of the object to build a patch; this would introduce a additional mechanic, if the magic of the object would increase by usage, making long worn objects more desirable).

I also think it’s better to split the crafting sphere not by equipment purpose (equipment class) or equipment slot. It could make it more difficult to balance the different crafting classes (several classes would be able to craft furniture, not necessary all; more than one classes can craft armor maybe separated based on used material, but both classes can craft other things as well for example furniture).

What I don’t like is that you adventure only the raw and you would need a crafter to build the powerful item. This removes, in my opinion, the options. I’m really more in the upgrade thing loosening the connection between both spheres.

I agree with some of the other people comments. I would like to have some challenges in the crafting sphere. Crafting should need some basic skill not stupid pushing the combine button.

I don’t like the idea that the adventuring is the only source of raw but I like the idea that it is an additional source of resources.

Crafting would not generate money if I would not be forced to produce things nobody wants and need to be sold to a NPC. It seems very difficult, in the game I’m currently playing, to find a balance between the availability of resources and the demand on good produced with them.
This is the case in both directions (I’m not talking about rare, just the common harvest) some resources are high in demand that they are almost not available other resources harvest from the same node are not needed much that it’s waste of time trying to sell them. Because crafting produces more items faster than the marked needs the goods are difficult to sell to someone else then the NPC.

These are just my thought and it’s a way to long writing.

The problem with eq2 crafting is that effort vs. reward seems to have no meaning in the games current state. Even with the introduction of mastercrafted I have seen little interest in crafted player gear.

Please note these comments do not stem from ‘raider mentality’. I leveled my weaponsmith to 70 on my spare time because I enjoy crafting and was looking forward to making money. I felt obligated to comment here when my first weapon order in 4 months fell through because the guy ‘found a fabled 1hander with particle and proc in halls of fate’. /sigh.

Basically you can’t force people to socialize with strangers if they don’t want to and it is a waste of time trying. And I am not sure why you think various schemes for “forced socialization” look great on paper. Lots of things look great on paper till they collapse after construction. You are right, thought, when you say that players will look for ways to get around it, like multiple accounts and “boxing” as was done in EQ1.

I suspect that developers assume that people will form closely knit circles like most development shops do once the folks settle in. Unfortunately you don’t “settle in” when you play an MMO. You login to have fun not to deal with drama queens.

How many groups have you been in where you litterally wanted to strangle some members for their sheer stupidity as you get “rezzed” for the umpteenth time that night? How many time have you become so sick of the “drama queens” on guild chat that you don’t want to listen to them or see the text any more? How many times have you dreaded logging into knowing that you will have to raid that night? These are all the reasons people don’t care about “enforced socialization” and seek to avoid it.

I think that developers have to accept the fact that lots and lots of people do NOT want to play the game with a group of strangers. The guilds and groups that are most successful are usually made up of people that know one another BEFORE they play the game and the game becomes an extension of their real life friendship.

A lot of people do crafting as it is somthing they can do as an individual without worrying about needing a team. This is why people like to solo. I think one of the reason’s WoW was so successful was that it allowed the solo player to have fun, get good loot etc. etc. then when they hit level 60 the game ended for them ( note all the complaints about raiding on WoW boards).

The era of manipulating players the way EQ1 did and still does is dead — EQ1 in that sense will be the last of its kind.

I think you’re reading too much into my post.

My take on the original article is that there appears to be a drive to help foster an interdependancy between crafters and adventurers, essentially adding additional socialization elements to games.

Meanwhile, players, while not necessarily adverse to socialization, will often take measures to ensure they have as much control over their virtual experience as possible. Some of these measures include purchasing additional accounts to assist with “soloing” in some games, EQ1 is a fine example of this. Others will pick up a second account to get around “artificial” limitations placed on characters (SWG’s original 10 lot land limit, and EQ2′s more restrictive crafting specializations are good examples).

The concern in my questions is more focused on the fact that you have developers looking to find ways to advance a design that is great on paper, but winds up being a design that players will look for ways to work around once implemented.

There is a game being released by Red Bedlam, a small and independent developer, on July 16th named “Roma Victor”. This is a MMO, but with an entire different take on the action of the game. Rather than pitting player-warriors against dragons or what have you, the game pits Roman players and barbarian players against eachother. The game is really more of a simulator than an RPG in the classic sense, focusing on realism and historical accuracy more than traditional RPGs.

Due to this focus, though, crafting has become the preferred profession for around half of the players. Since PvP is (between barbarians and Romans) open, crafters find themselves needing warriors and since there are no dragons to drop uber loot, warriors find themselves relying on crafters for everything from food to weaponry.

The game isn’t executed perfectly, due to the constraints of the team and general lack of major funding. However, it is proof of concept (it was pre-released to a limited number of players) that the traditional MMO structure isnt necessarily the best and that many players find a more detailed and realistic crafting tree to be exciting and interesting.

On the issue of isolationism. Time efficiency should make most players in any craft-heavy MMO have to either specialize in a craft or suffer reduced performance across the whole board.

Let me ask you a question? You state that you are worried about the lack of socialization caused by players multi-boxing of fulfilling key crafting roles through multiple accounts. Why do you think that a game has to fulfill a socializing role? Do you think that a game should players to group to get ahead — like EQ1 does? Shouldn’t a game allow various playstyle to make progress whether in a group, solo, raiding etc.

There is a game that SOE will publish called ROME:GODS & HEROES which supposedly will let you hire mercenaries to fight with you in combat which I would imagine negates, to a large extent, the need for a group.

Some of the latest surveys done of US Society indicates that people are “more alone” than they were several decades ago. I do think that society as a whole is becoming less “social” and more solitary. I think that it is the nature of the age we live in, and that it is a mistake to expect behaviour to change in a game. I think that manifests itself in an MMO by the way people move around between guilds, the way guilds arise, collapse, etc. that there are guilds made up of only soloers etc.