Crafting process

Solution0 · 01-11-2007, 09:30 AM

I don't know, maybe it's just me and maybe no.

I was looking carefully at the crafting system last night for the first time really (just been in beta since open one) and i personnaly thought something was missing.

Imo the crafting system in EQ2 right now is one of the best and most entertaining out there. Yes it's too easy, i can get max quality item all the time with no real effort and no i don't want Vanguard system to be so easy.

What i liked about EQ2 is the action/reaction system. It's going live, you have to quickly make a reaction to all the problem occuring and all. And i had TONS of fun crafting. So much actually that my crafting lvl was maxed out way before my advanturing one.

The actual system in vanguard is much more like a card game or something. It's not bad, many people will prefer that to live action but i kind of miss the "stress" generated by the crafting process in EQ2.

Just my opinion of course

I don't know if this topic has been posted before if it was i'm sorry.

What do you all think?

Pirotess · 01-11-2007, 09:57 AM

EQ2 must have really changed since release. EQ2s crafting system was really tedious back in the day and not at all fun. The system I had the most fun with was SWG's crafting system back before their first expansion. That was just a ton of fun to build armor and weapons with.

Pel · 01-11-2007, 11:46 AM

it must have changed since you played piro, cause when i played eq2 it had the best crafting system i have played with. the only other crafting system i really played with was WoW which i didnt like, and FFXI which i realllly didnt like. once i get home in a few days ill be able to try out vanguard.. then i can know what you guys are talking about = D

Solution0 · 01-11-2007, 11:50 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Pel

it must have changed since you played piro, cause when i played eq2 it had the best crafting system i have played with. the only other crafting system i really played with was WoW which i didnt like, and FFXI which i realllly didnt like. once i get home in a few days ill be able to try out vanguard.. then i can know what you guys are talking about = D

FFXI? which crafting system?
You start the craft you go AFK for the time it last and come back and start again ... boring as hell

LaurnaRose · 01-24-2007, 09:08 PM

IMO, and remember I'm simply one person speaking for myself.

Crafting should be fun and entertaining, make sense, and be worth your time.

I personally think a crafting system should consist of a system where you can actually create something. I liked SWG crafting system where you were given a choice of apparance (ie. dye color), but I felt the system was a little too easy. Player made items FLOODED the economy quickly. However, everything in preNGESWG was player made or it was useless (the way it should be IMO). However, I also like the current EQII system where it actually takes some interaction to create something.

I woud like to see a system similar to SWG where you had an experimentation screen similar to EQII. Let us experiement on quality, quantity, color, and durability. If we had a system like that, you can guarentee that there would be very few items in the game world that were identical.

Just IMO though.

Pel · 01-25-2007, 08:45 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Solution0

FFXI? which crafting system?
You start the craft you go AFK for the time it last and come back and start again ... boring as hell

exactly... the only thing that they made interactive with the crafting there is... well nothing really, the weather and day of the week was the only thing that made it slightly less mindless than fingerpainting... yay lets go craft with lightning crystals on lightningday... woo fun!

Ysharros · 01-25-2007, 09:16 AM

EQ2 had its flaws, or did when I was playing it a year ago. While it has (had?) the appearance of complexity and challenge, ultimately once you knew how to use the system and the reactions, it became little more than whack-a-mole. Making pristine items was a 100% thing once you'd worked it out and had your skills worked up, which made pristine the de facto standard and anything else sub-par - in which case, why bother with grades lower than pristine (that's a rhetorical question

).

Another thing that bothered me at the time was that each tier was, essentially, a repeat of the one before it. The only difference was in the names of the ingredients used. (I suspect this will bother me in VG too, but we'll see.) This was visible to different degrees in different professions, but in weaponsmithing for example, you'd use bronze at tier 1 and then have the same recipes using iron in tier 2 - and that was the only difference. (I've forgotten the actual names, but you know what I mean.) Granted, a shortsword is a shortsword is a shortsword, in most cases, but still... in the end, I found it tediously repetitive and with very little to look forward to from levelling other than being able to charge more for my wares.

Before you ask, I had a 70 Provisioner, 50 Weaponsmith (or whatever they were called), 50 Tailor, and all of the other profs in the 30-40s. Yeah, I'm a crafting junkie.

SWG had one of the best systems I've seen to date, barring the insane production of ground-out goods used in the levelling process, and the fact that people on their way up could almost never compete with the masters. (There were a few exceptions - tailors, to a degree, and architects, whose furniture goods didn't rely on experimentation.) The thing that bothered me about it in the end was that a crappy crafter with great resources could often outcraft a great crafter (who knew what they were doing) with average resources - I liked the harvesting, I liked the resource grades, but IMO there were too many spawns over time and the quality of resources could negate the quality (or lack thereof) of the crafter. This coming from someone who had 3 medium houses full of AS and WS resources, some of them excellent. (I played pre-CU, and have no idea what things are like now. Heck, I played before they started giving you colour coding for the quality of your resources.)

Having crafted in every game that offers it to date, and being an admitted crafting ho, I'm mostly very happy with Vanguard's system. For one, it does give a considerable place to player skill in terms of choosing what's on the table and what skills to prefer over others. For another, it lets you walk away in mid-craft which, to someone like me who has to AFK frequently for varying lengths of time, is a great boon. In that sense I vastly appreciate that Vanguard crafting doesn't require twitch-based reactions. All twitching does is test how well I'm watching my screen - it doesn't test my skills in any way once I've learned what reaction to use in a given situation (as in EQ2).

The lack of resource quality-grades is a bit of a shame, but probably an excessive variable for the system as it stands. I guess rares will sort of play that part. Another of my longer-term concerns is that strategies for becoming a competent crafter will emerge as the only decent "cookie-cutter" choice - for instance, I'm worried we'll discover that maxing out station skills and utilities and leaving tools to lag behind is the most efficient way to craft - in which case everyone will do that and player skill won't play much part in things anymore.

It's hard to draw any firm conclusions at this point, I guess, since they were tweaking and adjusting until the last minute and will no doubt continue to do so. I just hope the system is flexible enough to prevent it from becoming the no-brainer system every other game has ended up sporting, once people figure out its quirks. In that sense, SWG was a ground-breaker -- but on the bright side, I believe we're going to see experimentation in Vanguard pretty soon too, though I don't know what shape it's going to take.

Anyway, sorry for the ramble.

Here's a question for you guys that I think is related to the debate: does a player crafting system need a player-based economy in order to really shine? As an example, I think SWG with its 100% player-based economy was the best I've seen - sure, there were gougers, but there were also plenty of dedicated, reasonable merchants out there - and the point was, you *couldn't* get most stuff from anyone but other players, as someone mentioned above. One thing that worries me a little about Vanguard is that most gear can be obtained from NPCs as well as from players and loot - in which case, how many people are actually going to bother with player-made stuff, even if it's better? I'm thinking at this stage that the NPC vendors only slightly dilute the economy, since their stuff definitely isn't as good as even basic crafted stuff, but we'll see.

(Honourable mention among crafting systems should also go to poor Horizons, because they really tried to make something new and interesting.)

Breltik · 01-25-2007, 11:19 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ysharros

Anyway, sorry for the ramble.

Here's a question for you guys that I think is related to the debate: does a player crafting system need a player-based economy in order to really shine? As an example, I think SWG with its 100% player-based economy was the best I've seen - sure, there were gougers, but there were also plenty of dedicated, reasonable merchants out there - and the point was, you *couldn't* get most stuff from anyone but other players, as someone mentioned above. One thing that worries me a little about Vanguard is that most gear can be obtained from NPCs as well as from players and loot - in which case, how many people are actually going to bother with player-made stuff, even if it's better? I'm thinking at this stage that the NPC vendors only slightly dilute the economy, since their stuff definitely isn't as good as even basic crafted stuff, but we'll see.

(Honourable mention among crafting systems should also go to poor Horizons, because they really tried to make something new and interesting.)

No worries for rambling, we all do it.

I am hoping that the crafted economy thrives, the amount of options available to the adventurer through crafted items gives them the ability to really completely spec out any way they want. Want to hit more? Equip your dex gear, want more hp? Equip the con based gear. Healers with nukes can do the same by equiping different focus items that can now be crafted.

I believe in time the players will realize that the low end gear crafted by players is much better than the npc merchant gear. This with the prices wars that are inevitable on low end items will result in the end with cheaper gear than the merchant gear that is better, thus making the npc vendors obsolete.

Horizons did have a pretty good crafting system for its day, I see a lot of the ideas from it mirrored in VG, which is a good thing.

kreen · 01-25-2007, 05:25 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by LaurnaRose

....
I woud like to see a system similar to SWG where you had an experimentation screen similar to EQII. Let us experiement on quality, quantity, color, and durability. If we had a system like that, you can guarentee that there would be very few items in the game world that were identical.

Just IMO though.

Hi all, I was a 2 year armorsmith in SWG and loved the system, even after the CU it was still pretty good.
It was the best crafting system I have experienced so far. However, I do agree with Ysharros, it had its flaws and if you had the money, you could buy the crafting gear and the server best resources and be making the best relatively quickly so the barrier to entry was quite small.
A large part of this however was that the number of popular crafted items was relatively small e.g. a couple of set of armor from about 12 sets and a limited range of weapons from a much larger range sold well and the rest was hardly requested. The "quick entry" crafter didnt have to learn many different recipes/crafting tricks to get into it.
VG is slated to have a much larger popular range of items I believe - hopefully they will have more crafting variety to them than swg and require more knowledge to perform well.

The point I have highlighted above in red was one of the greatest flaws in the SWG system as far as the game designers were concerned though. This created huge problems with the swg database, access speeds etc. This is one of the main reasons VG has adopted the crafting system they have at present. A grade A longsword by me will be the same as a grade A longsword by another crafter - the only varistion will be dust type used and the crafters name. This will mean a lot less database issues for the designers.

My guess is they will slowly introduce a bit more customisation/experimentation to allow more variety while not causing database issues. After all who wants to be spending 15 minutes looking at the broker window waiting for it to refresh

kreen · 01-25-2007, 05:33 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ysharros

Here's a question for you guys that I think is related to the debate: does a player crafting system need a player-based economy in order to really shine? As an example, I think SWG with its 100% player-based economy was the best I've seen - sure, there were gougers, but there were also plenty of dedicated, reasonable merchants out there - and the point was, you *couldn't* get most stuff from anyone but other players, as someone mentioned above. One thing that worries me a little about Vanguard is that most gear can be obtained from NPCs as well as from players and loot - in which case, how many people are actually going to bother with player-made stuff, even if it's better? I'm thinking at this stage that the NPC vendors only slightly dilute the economy, since their stuff definitely isn't as good as even basic crafted stuff, but we'll see.

People will always want custom built stuff to supplement any looted kit they might have. All those min/max folks can either spend ages searching for the right loot, or try to buy the right loot, or go to a crafter and request a chestplate with dex, boots with str and a helmet with int.

Folks will also want different sets of gear for different scenarios. A bard might want a set with a lot of energy bonus for a mezz/slumber dungeon fest and another set with a balanced attribute build for general wear and tear. Crafter is the way to go here - only they can ensure a bespoke set of gear - think of loot as more off the peg

Plus, there is no looted houses or ships that I know of

Finally, I think a lot of the looted gear will end up being given as part payment for crafted gear so it can be decon'ed for enhancements to make more crafted gear

. If I decide this time round to make stuff for more than just me and friends then I will certainly be taking payment this way