Quote:

Original post by Ashaman73 @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.

That's a nice goal. I'm not sure either of your two initial suggestions really contribute directly to it - have you considered instead making crafting be a tech tree that the player climbs? That would make crafting important to single player gameplay and single player leveling, and since the player would not be crafting consumables but instead would be unlocking gameplay elements, there would be no need to compare their efficacy to the efforts of higher level characters. What do I mean by unlocking gamelay elements? I man at first the character slides around on ice, then he learns to craft creepers, crafts one permanent set for himself, and now does not slide on ice. If spells in your game are attached to gems, the player would regularly need to expand the number of slots they have for such gems. If storage in your game is limited, the player would regularly want to expand the amount of storage they have. This is all perfectly good crafting gameplay even though the results are not salable. The player could gain the ability to fabricate keys for different types of locks, you could even go to the extent of having the player craft themselves a vehicle or genetically/magically craft themselves a pet.

Appearance customizations can also be treated as crafting, although it's probably irrelevant to single player gameplay. But if you are expanding from singleplayer start to MMO, then one of the first things it would be good to let players craft is dye. Dye could be salable without harming anything as long as it was not so expensive players saw it as a waste to actually use it on themselves.

About % heals and numerical heals, I agree that you have to pick one type or the other, don't mix them. Numerical heals are by nature only going to be useful to relevant levels; you could counteract this a bit by allowing smaller healing potions to be combined into bigger ones. Numberical healing potions are inherently economically biased against tank classes, but you could balance that somehow. % heals are useful at all levels, but there's no reason to have more than about 5 types (10%, 25% 50% 70% 100%) You could however also have potions that multiply natural healing rate for a half hour or an hour.

With absolute numbers, 10+1skill isn't much difference at the start, but later 10+10skill is a better health potion. It can help cut down on potions that have only size/level increases.

The main problem here is about obsolescence. Do items crafted early in the game become obsolete further down the line?

With the fixed value items, this is a problem because as the game progresses, the character (and monster) stats get higher and the gap between the item's values to the player's needs becomes wider.

However, with the % based items, when you have a higher % value item available to you, the lower % value items become obsolete.

In any game (especially single player games), any content that is obsolete becomes wasted effort on the part of the developers.

Game-play is about choices the player makes, if you eliminate choices (become they become obsolete, then you are reducing the game-play that the player experiences and thus reducing the value of the game to that player.

Both systems have the pros and cons, but what is needed is something that does not have the con of obsolescence (and thus reduced player choice).

Some have suggested a hybrid system that combines the two systems into one. This has its own problems too.

I think the biggest source of these problems lies in an assumption that has (in this thread at least) gone unquestioned: Does the character's overall stats have to increase for the character to improve?

If the character's overall stats can remain the same, then you can eliminate the cause of the obsolescent.

A system that I have toyed around with for a while is one where when you increase a stat, it comes at the cost of another. For instance, if you increase the character's strength stat, you might reduce the intelligence stat to compensate.

In this, advancing the character just allows more variation from the initial score. So a first level character might only be able to modify their stats by 10 points from their starting values, but a level 50 character might be able to modify them by up to 60 points.

This means that starting characters are generalists, and high level characters are specialists. Starting characters are useful and can turn their hand reasonably well to most things, but they can never achieve the great feats of skill that the high level characters can.

It also means that the value of certain stats like HP and such will fall with a certain range and means that fixed value items looses some of their cons. It makes more content available to lower level characters (in an MMO even low level characters might find a place in a high level raid (although they wouldn't be able to do it with just low level characters) where there is unknowns (generalists are better here because they can do what is needed) or as part of a strategy where they need to change roles quickly (in mid raid).

With crafting, this eliminates the problem of obsolescence as low level characters might have higher HP than a high level character that has sacrificed their HP for some other advantage (like manna points for a caster). It means that even high level characters might benefit from low level potions without using a % based system.

It also makes gear more important (especially if you are crafting that gear) as the gear can give an increase to stats without needing to sacrifice value in another stat.