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Original post by Stangler I am sorry I didn't notice you dismissed your own post in your last sentence.

He didn't dismiss his own post, he gave another possibility, knowing it would be brought up, and you did bring it up, and he pointed out that in his opinion, it's only slightly better. I don't see how it's dismissing anything, except a different possible system of crafting.

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Original post by Ashaman73 Example: healing potion (HP) Option 1: With a low alchemy skill you will be able to create lesser HP which will heal 100 hitspoints. For a low level character this will be more than enough, whereas a high level character will not really benefit from it. Option 2: With a low alchemy skill you will be able to create a lesser HP which will heal 5% of your max. hitpoints, whereas a high skill will create a greater HP which will heal about 25% of your max. hitpoints. Regardless of level/class/race etc. the skill will be usable always with the same effect.

What about a mix? Creating potions that heal 25% of your max HP, with a minimum of 20HP, up to a maximum of 200HP.

Or, what if the potion heals a set amount, based off of the alchemist's max HP at the time of creation? The alchemist has 200HP, and he has a decent alchemy skill level, so when he makes the potion, it gets imbued with 22% of his max HP (give or minus a random 3% per potion, for variation). Therefore, his potions might heal an average of 44 HP, regardless of the max HP of whoever he sells them to. This makes the potency of the potion get better when A) the alchemist gets to a higher level of max HP, and B) when he gets a higher alchemy skill level.

What if, when you use a potion, it doesn't instantly give you the health, but over 10-15 seconds, adds it to your HP bit by bit? (Think Diablo 2) You can then have some potions take less time to add their health to your HP, which is helpful in the heat of battle. This also means, you can have regen potions that last for, say, 5 minutes, but heal only 2-3 HP a second.

Or, what if, instead of your charactor somehow drinking a potion while holding a shield and fending monsters a sword, it actually takes a few seconds to pop a cork off a potion and gulp it down.

Why does health potions have to just instantly add to your health and be done? What if they carried minor buffs on them as well; a little movement speed increase, a little attack speed increase, better agility to dodge enemy's attacks, better attack accuracy, greater chance of critical hit, better chance of riposte or dodging or blocking or parrying.

You can have the amount of HP healed depend not just on what the alchemist's skill level is, but also on what ingrediants he uses, if you use ingrediants in your game. The skill level could increase the chance of success, and also the amount of HP that can be healed, but the ingrediants dictate the range of HP. Poor ingrediants might offer a range of 10-30 HP, and your skill level ensures you have a better chance of ending on the higher end of that range. Better ingrediants might offer a potion creation range of 20-60 HP.

What if a bad alchemy skill level has increased chance of accidentally overcooking the ingrediants, congealing the potion, adding minor de-buffs, or weak poison, or dizziness for the player (bad in the heat of battle), or some other bad status affect, not visible on the potion itself until you drink it. So you don't know whether that alchemist you bought it from was a skilled one or not, or whether he did a slip-slop job of making them in a hurry to sell and get some gold, or whether he even intentionally mixed nightshade or foxglove in it because he's a malicious jerk.

Personally, I don't like some of these methods, but I'm just pointing out that there are more than just two ways skill level can affect the end-product, to inspire creativity and originality.

As for applying the same system to weapon crafting, I don't like that. I think every skill type ought to have its own unique way of working, to increase replay value. Sword crafting shouldn't be the exact same as potion brewing "but with swords!". It needs it's own system.

The problem that I see is that a percentage-based system makes the products of the lower-level crafting abilities almost worthless. Why get a 5% potion when you can get a 25%? The only reason you'd buy that 5% potion is if they can't afford the 25%, which will be less and less likely as the game continues, players make money, and more people start producing the higher level potions. The end result is that you're going to have a lot of low-level crafters simply trashing the outputs of their craft skills, which turns it into yet-another grind.

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Original post by Rycross The problem that I see is that a percentage-based system makes the products of the lower-level crafting abilities almost worthless. Why get a 5% potion when you can get a 25%? The only reason you'd buy that 5% potion is if they can't afford the 25%, which will be less and less likely as the game continues, players make money, and more people start producing the higher level potions. The end result is that you're going to have a lot of low-level crafters simply trashing the outputs of their craft skills, which turns it into yet-another grind.

A % could scale better than a flat number depending on your system and if you want it to scale it would have to be connected to progression in some way most likely. Plus if you just attach it to level it wouldn't scale with items that provide advancement but don't change level.

You can look at DAOC for a system that includes % in their weapon calculations.

With a percentage system, you will need a lower efficiency at the higher levels.

5% healing potion uses 1 resource X
10% healing potion uses 3 resource X
15% healing potion uses 6 resource X
20% healing potion uses 10 resource X

By having an increasing requirement to the creation, the price of the product will balance the needs.

My preference is still the linear effect of items. Linear effects are easier for people to calculate than percentage effects.
Both system works as long as one does not make the other obsolete. I believe a lower resource efficiency (for higher levels) is a good way to balance the system because equal efficiency favors the higher level/quality items. There must be a trade-off. If one item is definitely better, then players will go with the better crafting skill.

When a game causes its own mechanics to become obsolete, it cannibalize itself and force the players to ask for more gameplay. They want more content because the old ones are obsolete. This force developers to develop more content faster. Therefore, make sure nothing makes something else obsolete or else you're asking yourself to release new content faster than you can create them. As long as you make a good game, you will have more time to release new content because the player base will not demand as much.

Even with the intent for a lower resource efficiency, the game still has infinite resources; therefore, the rate of resource entering the system affects the balance of how less efficient each higher level is relative to the previous level.

Remember, the higher level items that are crafted are more time efficient than the lower level items. The resource efficiency is trying to balance the effectiveness and time efficiency of the item.

edit:
Using 2 5% healing versus 1 10% healing item.
Using 2 items requires twice the time as using 1 item. Time efficiency 2, resource efficiency 2/3 => total efficiency 4/3. The item according to my list above actually give a better overall efficiency, so maybe the growth rate of resources used needs to be slightly faster than my suggestive example from above.

I see another issue for making items that are desirable to all players, using your example of 5% potion being desirable to a higher level character.

This basically priced out all lower level characters from the marketplace, since a higher level character can outbid a lower level character.

From my experience, most games have a bias towards higher level characters. I made a mistake in my calculation. I forgot that if the easier items are more efficient, then the higher level characters will have more resources to develop and outperform the lower level characters. This cause an obsolete to the needs of having lower level characters in a particular trade, leading to oligopoly. The only way around this is to design more content of profession.

With equal resource efficiency, the higher level items will be preferred because it is more time efficient during usage. That's why sometimes the resource is less efficient but the time efficiency is design so that the total efficiency increases for the higher level items. The resource inefficiency decrease the time advantage of the higher level items. This leads to a gamble of time efficiency versus resource efficiency.

What I'm trying to get is to have the higher level character to prefer the higher time efficient items, while the lower level characters choose the resource efficient items. There must be a balance that the higher level characters are willing to take. There needs to be something that can reinforce the higher level to prefer time efficient items such as low levels monsters do not give drops to higher level characters, and high level monsters do greater damage, actually a higher dps to push the player towards time efficient items.

Maybe my resource inefficiency function is decreasing the efficiency too fast that it is noticeable.

@haegarr
Yes, at the moment it is "only" a matter for crafting. Eventually the crafting concept will influence the items you will find.

@Tiblanc/Stangler
Never thought about it, but you're right, this could be a problem in the future. The scalability is somewhat restricted.

@JWalsh
Yes, crafting weapons or armor with a % system is a problem. The goal is to give the player a crafting skill system which will be equally useful independly of the character level.
In our game you're not able to create weapons, you can only upgrade weapons you looted. When you find a steak knife or a mighty magic sword and you will be able
to repair it, to balance it, to sharpen it which will give a % bonus to some item attributes.

@sunandshadow
Crafting will play a major role in our game. The game starts out as a singleplayer game playing in a dungeon where you have to use your "crafting" skills to survive and to
find alternative ways to overcome certain problems.

@Servant of the Lord
Indeed it is planned as a resource based crafting system. You got slots where you can add certain resources which will have certain effects on the final product and or modified item.
Which resources you can handle depends on your crafting skill.

@Rycross
The same applies to plan number potions. Why buy a heal 60-80 potion if you got 5000 hps ?

@Platium_Dragon
This would be the way to go. High potential items will need rare resources. But with higher skills you will be able to use more common resources to produce the same or atleast similar product.

@Si Hao
A MMO aspect is not important at the moment.



It seems that most of you dislike a % crafting(item) system. Mixing the system would be dangerous, if you got a heal 100% potion at level 1 and all your other potions only heal for 50 hp
you will not touch it, because it is just too powerful in high-level encounters. Finally you saved this potion, carried it around all the time and ended the game still not using up this potion.

So, the player should be encouraged to use it, at least in a plain number game the player will start using up his "old" potions.

--
Ashaman

I don't really agree with most of the supposed problems people thought would come up in a % based system compared to a flat number system.

A % system scales better than a flat number system. Period. That is the strength and the weakness of the system and is why it would probably have to include some flat numbers in there as well.

Check out Elitistjerks.com as they talk about the math behind WOW a lot and you can learn a lot about scaling issues.

A % system may scale better when you consider a specific item, but there is a problem in growth for a family of items. If you want your potions power to grow in time, you need to increase the %. At low level, you may be able to get 25% potions, which is very weak and at high level, 75% potions which is very strong. The dynamics of potions in combat change as you grow in power. At first, they are worthless and at the end, they are godly.

In a MMO with expansions, the % based potions will scale faster than the player's growth. This is due to the ressources required to make the potions. As players gain in power, they have more ressources, which can get them more potions which also scaled with their growth. Their effectiveness then gets increased twice. First because your max HP raised and second because their relative cost went down. You can put a level limit to the potions, but that doesn't fix the initial problem of low level items being worthless to high level players.

Essentially, that is why I prefer a fix effect instead of a percentage effect. With fix effect, higher level items are resource ineffective comparatively, but more time effective. As long as the absolute advantage is somewhat higher, players will still use the higher level items. With fixed effect, items will not scale effectiveness to the length of the health bar.