[Ysharros]

/comfort Shinto

I feel much the same way about crafting right now. Fortunately for me I'm an altoholic and I'm enjoying the killing-stuff and trying-stuff-out aspect of the game at the moment; that doesn't answer the base conundrum, but it does keep me going. How long, I don't know. For someone whose single major impetus was the crafting, however (and that could SO easily have been me), it's got to be pretty bleak at the moment.

I've been stoked about Vanguard crafting for years now, since I heard about the game back in 2004. In practice...

I applaud the efforts Sigil made to produce a crafting system that was different, and offered challenge, and that made it worth something to spend all the time it takes to become a useful crafter. I don't know if it's possible to take the grind out of crafting-in-games and still have meaningful crafting (if it is, I haven't come up with a way, that's for sure) -- so it's something one lives with. That said, the repetition of Work Orders is far more tedious, in practice, than it may have seemed on paper, but for a while that was balanced by the awesome stuff we could make and the fun stuff we got in reward packs. Now, the stuff we make is "meh" and barely compares with the legion of loot drops; and even when it does compare, it's more expensive to produce *and* it's now automatically bound... but that latter has been discussed elsewhere.

In my view, crafting in Vanguard has suffered from a series of compromises where, to put it bluntly, loot won and crafting lost. It's my long-held opinion that you CANNOT have a game with meaningful crafting if you also have a varied and multitudinous loot-drop system -- one or the other always loses out. I'm not sure I understand or agree with the notion that crafting was harming the loot drops; the latter were more plentiful, they were cheaper, but they weren't quite as good. Seemed a decent balance to me.

Crafting, as I see it, faces several issues in Vanguard, not least of which is its place in the meta-system of the game. I believe Silius has fought for what he and his team created, and that he's lost, and that he has to lump it and make the best of it. (No, this isn't drawn from any post, just inferred from those he's made. I could be entirely mistaken.) They also have to face that what looked like a kick-ass system on paper isn't all that engaging in practice -- and there again, you run into another problem. Do you make an "anyone can do this with their eyes closed" system, which is the road most games take to *all* their mechanics, or do you fight for something challenging that only the dedicated can do well? Add to that how you define "dedicated" which in MMOs these days, tends to mean more "has masses of time" rather than "has two brain cells to rub together".

For me, there's an ideological battle going on in Vanguard too, and the side I'm on is losing. I so want to see a game where players are made responsible for their actions and mistakes, where stuff isn't handed to you on a silver platter just because you pay a subscription, and where the basic premise isn't to please the Locust Gamer -- you know, the one who devours, complains, devours some more and moves on after 3-6 months. I wanted a game with consequences, even if I happen to be simply unlucky -- one where a disconnect I can do nothing about *can* lead to my death and I just have to live with it. I used to well enough in games before, but these days it's all about the instant-gratification factor and god forbid there should be any kind of unplanned discomfort.

I'm not hardcore, and I *am* old enough to know that people have lives and schedules. I do also, however, know that the pleasure you get from an achievement is in direct proportion to the effort it took to achieve, and when everything is fast-food, you can't expect to remember what you did 3 weeks, let alone 3 years, down the line. It's entirely possibly to provide smaller carrots more often (a basic vision principle Sigil abandoned very early on), but it's harder to design and put in place. Conversely, all the life-having adults out there are perfectly capable of scheduling their own lives so that they have an hour or two of gaming here and there. You cannot, on the one hand, demand a "meaningful" game and on the other hand complain that achievements take more than 10 minutes to complete. (To which I'd suggest larger achievements broken down into smaller steps, or into something where you *can* at least get the feeling you've done something useful even if you only have an hour to log in.) Again, I'm referring to a general "you" and should really say "we" -- the gaming community wants to be heard and has a right to be heard, but it would be more productive if "we" had any sort of clear idea of what "we" wanted, most especially when we seem to want two contradictory things and expect design teams to cater to both.

I'm starting to rant, not to mention to hijack, so I'll stop and just repeat:

/comfort Shinto