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Original post by ntharotep I would have to disagree with some points of this, respectfully. There may be some people that are skillful at everything in a game but there is no one on the planet who can literally do everything....

It's true that not everyone can do everything, but to an extent, I want there to be a possibility to do everything, just that there needs to be an adequate trade-off. Everything needs some form of trad-off so that most players are motivated to staying in a class structure as they are the most efficient way to play.

The major problem with any role playing games is balance classes, and even techniques. As long as both of these can be balance appropriately, then players are willing to play. But when one is superior, then most players will move towards playing that class, or getting that technique. The question is "Can you make sure that you have balance for both class and techniques?" The need for socializing is an ability that everyone needs in real life. Anyone without this skill will have a large chance of failure in real life.

Maybe the crafting class does not have the courage to kill monsters. Even if they have a lot of strength, it takes courage [mental strength of some sort] to kill something, and these craftsman are unable to do so.

Maybe we can take psychology into account. People gain the ability to do something by doing that something. The more they experience, the more efficient they are able to do that task, but they must experience the correct way. Perfect Practice makes Perfect is the ideal here. The more you practice something, the harder it is to do a deviating movement because you don't want to lose the perfect of this one skill, you will be unable to learn another skill that may jeopardize your current skill.

Like real skills, maybe your craftsman are not efficient at the beginning, and need to use more materials to get the same results. When they are more skillful, their waste of materials decreases for the same product. Also, you should have them research by combining different materials together to learn new techniques, and there should be failure chances. Maybe you can have unknown side effects for the potions that your craftsman created because they have not mastered the ability to create that particular potion.

You can have crafting cause the player to stay in a non-moving environment, without moving "animates" that they are unable to reach to moving "animates," in this case monsters. Because they are used to being in one place while crafting, they lose their ability to reach to moving entities, but gain reaction to sudden movement, sudden sound changes, etc. A blacksmith might pound his hammer over and over on non moving metal, so being unable to react to moving enemies is common.

One of the big problems I see in RPGs with crafting (MMO and otherwise) is that the market is inevitably flooded by players who are grinding their skills, and if you don't have to grind the production skills, most players will just build exactly what they need, when they need it. I think you're on the right track with capital investment for production and the business model. Have prices controlled by shop rentals and material costs, and allow high-volume producers to charge less, and you might get lucky with your player base. If nobody does it, then they'll just quit playing, and if everyone does it, then they all lose money and quit doing it. If a player-crafting-driven economy is your goal, you'll have to do some serious work to get it up and running. EvE Online is a pretty good example of how it can work, but it's far from perfect, even after years of tweaking.

Many players will embrace the multi-character system. God knows there are plenty of people who'll spend weeks levelling a new dude in WoW just to get a different style of goblin genocide, or will level up a character just to have a good enchanter on their roster to beef up the other characters they've levelled.

Other players, like myself, will be turned off by the idea of having to maintain two or more avatars in the same game. It hurts immersion and prevents role-players from identifying with their in-game alterego. If gameplay is different, you should be okay, but if you're going to do that, why not just have both "characters" active at the same time? If each PC is a minor noble, they'll have a fiefdom out there someplace, and they can manage it via email or carrier pigeon or whatever, allowing them to keep doing what they're doing while the smithies and granaries of the homestead chug away. I'm becoming a bit of a Dwarf Fortress fanboy, and despite the game's larval stage, it covers both of these gameplay types admirably, since the fort can produce tons of food and equipment and trade goods, and the adventurer mode (though never concurrent) feature all the globe-trotting exploits you might expect. So marry those two into one game, so each player has a settlement to manage, which uses local natural resources and trade to thrive, and they also have the ability to send forth adventurers, either to establish trade routes, or to slay dragons, or to raid neighboring villages.

Platinum and ICC both made good points.
Balance is important because if the craftsmen "class" isn't as powerful as the "Badd Ass Berzerking Twinkmaster" class then you will simply see more of the latter being played. I don't want to overgeneralize but I've been on some other discussion boards and though the topic there was story, it amounts to the same- a majority of players could care less about new, unique story or about new, unique classes. Many times (and not always but many times) the first question will be "What does it do and what is its DPS?"
To a certain extent we are an instant gratification society and we want the "bright and shiny".

ICC made a good point about the market being flooded. In a solo play game this isn't so much an issue as your character and the NPCs are pretty much the market. But in a MMO, market values are about as real as Wall Street.
One hint you could take on this is from Second Life. I don't care much for the game, myself, but the market is kept enriched, or appears to be, in this game by "custom" items. Kind of like designer goods. This could carry over into a RPG in the same fashion. The crafted items might retain their value because they are the first of their kind or very few people have made it. This can take a toll on your game in its own way but its just one thought.
I just had an image of a "knockoff sword of power" for some reason...
You could also make these classes the soul distributers of some items which might not only help the market but also keep folks interested in playing them. Of course, you will just as likely have people making the characters just to make money or just out of necessity then.

The reason why I mention giving side effects to the created items is so that it can balance from flooding. Most of the side effects should be negative so that the players will not be certain if the product is safe. But some of the side effects are positive and these will allow the lower level experience players to compete with the higher levels. Until the ability is mastered, these side effects should occur, and the closer the player is to mastering an ability, the less chance of having side effects there should be. The higher level players would then learn the higher level crafting so they will not compete as much with the lower level players.

Also, you need to make sure that if there is input there is output, so all items that can be craft must be able to wear and tear until its gone. It does not have to be single use, but there must be a limit so that both the crafting class and warrior class have to stay working together. Make sure the input is slightly larger then the output (small amount of inflation) so the economy can stay going.

I was considering the item wear, at first I was thinking the amount of time it is equipped the more it decays. But I am now leaning more on basing the amount of damage to it on the amount of damage it's dealt, or something.

Most games have PC's limited in their crafting anyways. They can only make one type of thing. Why not go the full length and limit them all the way? A warrior can feasibly make just as much money as a crafter by selling the items needed for crafting.

I think I mentioned this will be a mostly social game. The warrior class is just half of the game. Not the main focus. A player would be able to play the game for months, not be bored, and still have done no fighting if that's not their thing.

Side note: In this game most everything is balanced. For example all metals/items used in crafting are balanced within themselves. No one type of normal metal is better than another. One type of metal may be more rigid and better at smashing(and more durable), and another more flexible with other advantages based on what the player is looking for.
This also eliminates noob items and the need for an excess of any one item on the market that no one will use.

[Edited by - Dasha on August 2, 2009 10:04:10 AM]

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I think I mentioned this will be a mostly social game.

Yes, and crafting will not make it such.

You don't seem to be looking at the point. You are arguing about how crafting should be implemented, but as crafting will not make it a social game, then the details of the crafting mini game are actually a red herring.

What we need to discuss is the mechanics of social interactions. If you are going to use just crafting, then you need to discuss how the players will get their crafting materials, and how the players will sell them to each other (and this is about the only interactions that crafting gives, not much socialisation).

A point I made in my last post is that if players can have multiple accounts, or multiple characters, then any restriction on having to be a crafter or a warrior is moot. Players will look to the cheapest option, namely going out and fighting to claim the resources needed, then posting them to their alt (who is the crafter). This will make any crafted item virtually worthless (only those players who do not want to keep switching between accounts/characters will pay for them), and virtually all social interaction "grinds" to a halt.

If you make all mini games (resource collecting, fighting, crafting, etc) fun, then it is worth the time a player puts into that task and the time spent is not considdered a penalty. So if all tasks are fun, and all tasks are needed to complete an item, then why would a player not want to perform them anyway? If they are going to play them and they are fun, then the player is rewarded for not interacting with other players on two fronts:

1) It is cheaper.
2) It is fun.

So the system you are proposing will not achieve the stated "main goal" of your game, which is to have a social game. You are rewarding player for not interacting.

Many MMO are often called Massively Single Player games because they claim to be social games, but fail almost completely to provide any real from of social interactions.

You are going to have to rethink your paradigm if you want to create a social game.

Often, encouraging social interaction comes at the cost of hardcore gameplay rewards. The chatter and discussion that makes social games fun is almost unheard of in achievement-based play, because you're always working hard enough to make conversations difficult or impossible, and there's almost always one "right way" to do things, so you don't have much to talk about in terms of strategy or cooperation once everyone learns to play.

My WoW experience was a cold, sterile one. The only time we really had for socializing was when we were waiting to form a group or waiting for a summon to an instance. The rest of the time it was just work. PvP in EvE was a good time, since there were long periods of inactivity during which we'd chat about the countries we were from or trade links to hilarious youtube videos or make fun of one another's penises, and mining ops in that same game were essentially devoid of gameplay, so we'd drink and laugh and hold corp meetings while everyone was cycling their lasers and warping to and from stations. Those social opportunities came during times that are widely lamented by players as being boring.

So make the actual work somewhat flat and uneventful, but marry it to a social interface so people can have an experience analogous to meeting their neighbors at the laundromat. Put the gameplay at about the level of Solitaire: Too complex to do afk, but not so taxing that you can't do other things.

If there was a restricted supply based on manpower, people would be compelled to hire manufacturers, pay them, maintain a shop, and otherwise involve many player characters in the process. If you went to a blacksmith and signed in to do some work, then the boss compared the value of the goods you produced to the value of the materials and utilities you consumed and paid you 40% of the difference, getting a part-time job would be like a casino in the game. You go in, you do some simple task, you get some money and maybe XP, and then you leave whenever you want to.

Labor management could include temp agencies and job boards to help people find work(ers) and all kinds of other middlemen could spring up as the system takes shape.

The bottom line is that players should have to work with other players, instead of harvesting armor from the woods and fields.

I think that you can seperate crafting and fighting into two different classes but I think you still want everyone to be crafting. The main reason you want everyone to be crafting IMO is because it gives the player more opportunities to experience a sense of accomplishment while also changing up gameplay a bit. It also provides them more choices.

With the advent of mailing systems and auction houses and banks it is very likely a player will have a mule in a main city. The "crafting" class could be one part mule one part crafter.

One thing this can allow you to do is make it so the crafter has to be in a major city to work, making them more dependent on structures for their crafting. This can encourage social behavior if people can pool resources to create a structure.

It also allows you to create different rules for different types of characters. For example the crafter could have a larger amount of bag space for raw materials than the fighter who is running around killing dragons.

The crafter could also have their own level/skill system.

Forcing people like this is never good. Lord of the Rings Online did that kind of thing, and it was, if I'm allowed to say, epic fail.

They tried to force people into cooperating by designing the craft system (which was pretty lame overall anyway) in such a way that you could not produce half of the things you needed for your craft. At the same time, you were only allowed to take one craft proficiency. Enough materials provided, you could max out your crafting in an afternoon, b ut you just couldn't get them alone.

Thus... they got two effects for the price of one: first you make a mule for getting what you need, and second it's piss boring, so you cancel your subscription after the first month (or the first two months at most).

The problem with crafters in MMORPGs is player's attachment to their items. What drives most MMORPGs is the quest for that slightly better item. To make sure players renew month after month, they need to always have some better item to shoot for. It must also be somewhat hard to get that item. This has the logical consequence of players wanting to keep their item because they worked hard for it, which means items never need to be replaced.

That works, but it has implications for crafters. Since items never need to be replaced, any item a player would want only needs to be produced once. If a crafter can produce 20 swords in a night of play and players can gather resources for a new sword every 2 weeks, then you end up with a crafter able to produce 400 swords in the time it takes 1 player to want a new sword. For supply to match demand, only 0.25% of your players can be swordsmiths. You can reduce the amount of produced swords, which means there can be more crafters, but their night becomes even more boring. And as mentioned, if you need to craft 100 swords to level up, which means you lose tons of money in the process. You can also reduce the time it takes to get a new sword, but you may end up with players quitting because they acquire new loot too fast.

The other way to do it is like UO. You could buy new gear a few times per week because you lost it on death. That meant there was a market for crafters since players always needed new gear. The downside of this is it's almost impossible to acquire awesome gear and keep it. The awesome gear must be easy to obtain or players become frustrated. This brings back the above problem where players do not have any item to shoot for because they can always grab the best item at a cheap enough price since it must be easy to acquire to prevent player frustration when they lose the item.

In the end, I don't think it's possible to get a great crafting system going in traditional MMORPGs to allow the carrot-on-a-stick addiction and give crafters the market they require.

What could work is a different type of MMO where you are in control of an army. You can mix the slow item progression with the rapid consumption of items. Your main character is the one you want to give new shiny gear. Your soldiers are expendable and it is too expensive to give them the best gear. Players will not care if they are stuck with rusty short swords as they are used to acquire components for the Flaming Sword of Uberness. Obviously, as you progress in the game, you need to outfit your soldiers with better gear to beat harder content, but logic says they need to have lower level gear or it is not profitable to hunt. This creates the required markets to allows crafters to skill up without being a money sink and allow players to always have something to shoot for.