Get rid of the flawed experience leveling crafting concept. Instead, make crafting level dynamic based on your economic success. Instead of crafters requiring a certain amount of junk items to gain a level, enabling them to create more junk items until they can make useful stuff, allow them to make the useful stuff from the start. What will differentiate crafters is their equipment and skills.

Equipment is acquired with money and has limited uses. For example, you could buy a few types of anvils. One is designed for mass production while the other is for masterwork items. With the first one, you don't get a bonus to item quality, but it lasts a lot longer. These items would come in grades. Crafters will be able to produce better stuff by investing in a higher grade anvil.

Ex :
Grade 0
- +0 quality bonus, 100 uses
or
- +20 quality bonus, 10 uses

Grade 10
- +10 quality bonus, 100 uses
or
- +100 quality bonus, 10 uses

By buying a grade 10 anvil, you can mass produce stuff that is near quality of what you could with the grade 0 anvil. If demand is for quality items, a low level crafter will be able to buy the quality grade 0 anvil and compete with mass production of experienced crafters. If he can turn a quick profit, he can start using higher grade stuff and be competitive rapidly.

Next is skills. These are acquired with crafting experience. They would give a bonus to various aspects of crafting and will give an edge to those who have been crafting for longer. They could be bonuses to quality, durability of equipment, chance to create higher quality stuff, etc. They will allow an experienced crafter to get back on his feet faster if they do a bad investment and nearly go broke.

With a system like this, low level crafters do not need to flood the market with useless junk. They can start working on high quality stuff right away. They will expend more resources than experienced crafters, but they will be able to create stuff that is in demand from level 1.

The best stuff will become rare because you need a series of lucky crafts to get it rather than time and because you can't mass produce it. However, for this to work, you need to have an item sink, else the mass producers will run out of customers rapidly and low level crafters won't be able to produce "quality" stuff that is now mass produced. Leave quality stuff for special occasions and kings. Soldiers should be using mass produced gear. As long as the bonuses difference between mass produced items and high quality items is not too big, players will not mind buying Swords at 100g instead of Swords of Doom at 10000gp and then losing them because they died charging that fort, yet it will keep the economy going.

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Original post by lessthanjake The problem is the fact that there are less people desiring low level goods than there are people wanting to produce them. If a low level crafter can only produce daggers, he will want to produce a bunch of them, but there aren't a lots of people demanding daggers for every low level crafter around. Thus, demand for the good is very low, while supply is high. This leads to a really low price. Thus, it is very possible that if everyone who wanted to craft did, the equilibrium price for the dagger would be less than the cost of the resources to make it. Realistically, it would never get to that point, though because people wouldn't craft if it were unprofitable. Supply would simply decrease to the point where economic profit equals zero (because the market for low level goods is essentially a free market, implying zero economic profit at equilibrium).

Hence my usage of the phrase "sensible crafting system". Having played Runescape for years, I have personal experience with an economy where most items cost less then the materials required to make them. (Because the market demand is for experience gain and the items are often just a byproduct.)

However, you have already stated that your crafting system will be completely different and won't suffer from these issues.

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Original post by lessthanjake Players shouldn't be crafting useless items in order to level up the skill; that's bad game design. I would absolutely want a grindless crafting system. I would have a player who decides to take up crafting as a profession be immediately able to make a fairly solid range of items.

Consumable items continue to have a demand, while permanent items suddenly lose their value. Throwing stars that get used up when thrown continue to be a valuable purchase. A sword that is purchased only once does not engender mass production.

So make the manufacturer construct consumable commodities.

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For an economic system so heavily focused on crafting it does seem to really disadvantage crafters. I think part of the problems there are essentially two different tasks you want to accomplish under the crafting banner. Manufacturing which is the bulk production of goods, and artisan work which production of high quality goods. Now these typically work themselves out by having different tiers of goods. But what about separating the activities in game? A player who goes down the manufacturing route could turn out 100 healing potions a day but someone who does the artisan route can turn only make 1 high quality sword. The problem of course becomes how you are going to keep the player interested involved in the process? One thing you mentioned was a limited number of resources being available each day. Now if it takes a player a week to save up enough iron to make a sword of slaying where does the achievement and excitement come from? I player for a week and didn’t do any crafting isn’t exactly and achievement. Basically all they are doing is waiting for time to elapse since the game artificially limits the amount of resource they can obtain at anyone time. They may do other stuff in game but if they want to focus on crafting they are at disadvantage, compared to adventurers. You wouldn’t have a kill limit in game would you? Sorry you’ve killed you 100 monsters today come back tomorrow if you want to kill more.

What do players who craft normally have to keep them interested? They just go farm resources from some random place they know of that spawns what they want, and then they press a button and an object is made. In my mind, farming resources isn't particularly fun; its just a grind. So I've eliminated that. Instead of spending a whole bunch of time grinding for resources, you can do something else fun (possibly something in order to get the money you need to buy as many resources as you can). That time is likely more fun than farming resources from the same place over and over.

As for feelings of achievement, I feel exactly the opposite. There's no feeling of achievement from making hundreds of worthless items. There's no real feeling of achievement from farming resources for a little bit and then pressing a button to make an item. There IS a feeling of achievement when you've thought about how much money/income you have to buy resources, decided what item is best to plan to build given your monetary situation, gathered the resources for it over time, and then created it. You won't have put a lot of game time into making this object (which is good because that would be boring), but it will have been a plan in the works for long enough in real time that eventually creating the item will feel like an achievement.

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After all if they player needs 10,000 iron shouldn’t there be a way from them to get that other than waiting? They might have enough money to buy 1,000,000 units of iron and get frustrated as they want to craft a sword of slaying but the game limits them to a mere 1000 units a day.

First off, there is a point to the limits on resource buying. The point is that if the player you mentioned has enough money to buy 1,000,000 units of iron and he buys it, but his nation only got 1,000,000 units of iron that entire day, then every other crafter in the nation cant get any iron and isn't having fun just so this one guy can make his sword of slaying more quickly. I didn't want that. No limits on resource buying would just lead to the rich, experienced players buying up all the resources, stopping new players from getting any.

Anyways, what is the problem with waiting to craft the item? What is the functional difference between a system where you create a lot of somewhat lame low value items and one where you create less items but they are better and yield high profit (because resource limits means supply of any given item you make will be low, meaning high price)? The profit for crafters will end up about the same. This is something I don't think you're thinking about. If it takes 5 days to gather resources for a longsword, then there won't be that many of them around, and thus the price will be really high, yielding significant profit for the crafter just on that one sale. The only differences are that the crafter won't have had to have spent a ton of time in a grind farming for resources, and he will feel like he actually made a cool item, since it'll be somewhat rare.

However, if a player really wants to speed build a particular item, they WILL have this ability. It will just take some planning and building something fast will be less profitable than taking your time. The reason for this is very simple. There will presumably become a market for resources. Let's say I really want to build a longsword today, but I can't get enough resources for it today due to limits. I need 100 iron more. Iron costs 10 gold per unit. I can walk up to someone who has just bought iron and offer him gold for 100 iron. Since he just bought it for 1000 gold, he would want more than that, so he could turn a profit. Therefore, I COULD get the resources to build the longsword right away, but I would profit more on the longsword if I waited until tomorrow and bought that last 100 iron for only 1000 gold.

A similar thing would happen if I allowed transmutation of items into resources in the game. Somebody might have spent 1000 gold buying 100 iron to make a dagger. If you bought that dagger, you could melt it down and you'd have your 100 iron. However, the crafter would only sell that dagger for more than 1000 gold in order to profit from it, so again, you could get more resources than your daily allotment, it is just that doing so would cut into your profits.

These previous two mechanisms are fine because they do not violate the problem I mentioned at the start of this response. New players would still be able to get resources to craft; they just might be approached by a rich player offering them more money than they paid for for those resources. They could still craft if they wanted, though.

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The real solution to low level crafting is transmutation. With transmutation, even the low level items can be transmuted (at a loss maybe) back into raw materials, and these raw materials can be use to make any of the itmes, including the high level itmes. Thus all the new players making the low level items to level up their crafting skills can be transmuted back into raw materials that the high level crafters can gain access to. You would expect the prices of the items to be transmuted will drop to that of the cost to extract the raw material (from mines or such) as if the price is higher than this, then the demand for transmutable items will drop and the supply will increase (the stockpile). If the cost of the transmutable items is lower then the raw material cost, then the demand for them will increase compared to the raw material and the supply (stockpile) will drop. If the raw material gathering has a cost (either from tools needed, risk, etc), then this will create a minimum stable point (it could go higher, but it will not likely go lower) around which the prices of the raw material and transmutable items will gravitate to (but it will fluctuate depending on various other factors).

I had not thought of this before, but since it has been brought to my attention in this thread I definitely agree. Transmutation is a good idea.

I will say, though, that I think transmutation would be less necessary in my game than in others. This is because I have said that I would want a grind-free crafting system. This would mean new crafters would be able to build a lot of stuff from the beginning. Thus, you wouldn't have an absurd amount of useless low level items floating around that would need to be transmuted to be useful. It is still a good mechanism, though, in that it makes sure that all a nation's resources are being allocated to create the most profitable (ie. most necessary and useful) items at any given time. As such, it makes the economy very fluid and adaptable. It's also useful as a way to allow people who really want to speed build an item a route to doing that.

My only concern is if transmutation would hurt new players. Hypothetically, rich players might buy up many low/mid-level items and devote the resources to a few high level items, leaving the economy with fewer low level items than optimal for new players. This SHOULDNT be too big a problem because eventually if that happened the supply of high level items would be high enough and the supply of low/mid-level items low enough that crafters would profit more from selling low/mid-level items than high level items. At the same time, low level players would still be able to craft their own items, if the supply of them was too low. So I'm thinking the issue isn't a real problem, but I'm not 100% sure.

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Next is skills. These are acquired with crafting experience. They would give a bonus to various aspects of crafting and will give an edge to those who have been crafting for longer. They could be bonuses to quality, durability of equipment, chance to create higher quality stuff, etc. They will allow an experienced crafter to get back on his feet faster if they do a bad investment and nearly go broke. With a system like this, low level crafters do not need to flood the market with useless junk. They can start working on high quality stuff right away. They will expend more resources than experienced crafters, but they will be able to create stuff that is in demand from level 1.

I really like this idea of crafting skills. It would make the process of crafting much more compelling for you to be able to customize/specialize what type of crafter you are. It also gives significant incentive to craft a bunch even if you can already craft a ton of items from the very start.

I also like the idea of different equipment. Between skills and equipment, different crafters would have far different strengths and weaknesses.

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However, for this to work, you need to have an item sink, else the mass producers will run out of customers rapidly and low level crafters won't be able to produce "quality" stuff that is now mass produced

I suppose I agree that item sinks might be necessary. Item sinks are hard though, because I can't really think of a way of doing it that isn't distinctly not fun for many players.

You could have items degrade over time. But that just isnt that fun. It seems like an added bit of realism that takes away fun.

Probably a better idea is to have people lose some items when they die. I have a few problems with that though. First off, many people hate big penalties at death like that. Secondly, (and this applies to degradation too) having it be quite possible that you'll lose a weapon lowers the value of that item a lot, making crafting less profitable.

I would prefer it if the game had many items that required so many resources to craft that it would take the game a long time for those to be around much. What would then happen is that the quality of items would just go up over time. It might start out where the mass produced items are Tier 1, and the rarer high level stuff is Tier 3. Eventually, everyone will have Tier 1 items and there won't be any more demand for them (except maybe from poor new players). As resources keep building up in the economy, the amount of Tier 3 stuff might expand until that's the new mass produced item that most people have. The high level players might start having Tier 5 stuff, which hadn't yet been made much at all because the amount of resources in the economy was too low to support that. If the top level of items possible was like Tier 20, then the game would be able to go a long time without hitting a point where everyone has the best stuff and there's no need to craft. Before that point, one could simply introduce an expansion or update that expanded the tiers of items.

The only problem with that is that if the game has been around a long time and the main items being used are Tier 16 weapons and you're a new player without much disposable funds, then each Tier 16 weapon might take a REALLYYYY long time to gather resources for and create because of the limit on resources bought per day. You wouldn't be able to make anything useful by yourself without putting in a ton of time. This is where transmutation comes in handy. You could spend very little time gathering resources and make a Tier 2 Longsword. No one will want to actually fight with this longsword, but someone will definitely buy it because they will want to melt it down for its resources in order to make a Tier 16 weapon. Eventually, after making a bunch of these low level weapons (or if you just quest around a lot and get gold), you'll have the funds to start buying other people's low level weapons and transmute them so that you can make Tier 16 weapons. Eventually, you'll get enough money to start buying Tier 16 weapons, and transmuting them in order to get resources to make rare higher tier weapons. You'll have gone up the business chain. I suppose that is a bit of a grind, which I dont like, but it's more of a start-up business sort of thing rather than a "Repeat the same boring thing over and over in order to level up your skill" sort of thing. It's not as bad IMO.

Personally I think this all negates the need for a resource/item sink at all. The only thing that is necessary is a lot of tiers of items and a game developer that would monitor the game and create better item sets when players started actually using the best stuff.

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Original post by lessthanjake I would prefer it if the game had many items that required so many resources to craft that it would take the game a long time for those to be around much. What would then happen is that the quality of items would just go up over time. It might start out where the mass produced items are Tier 1, and the rarer high level stuff is Tier 3. Eventually, everyone will have Tier 1 items and there won't be any more demand for them (except maybe from poor new players). As resources keep building up in the economy, the amount of Tier 3 stuff might expand until that's the new mass produced item that most people have. The high level players might start having Tier 5 stuff, which hadn't yet been made much at all because the amount of resources in the economy was too low to support that. If the top level of items possible was like Tier 20, then the game would be able to go a long time without hitting a point where everyone has the best stuff and there's no need to craft. Before that point, one could simply introduce an expansion or update that expanded the tiers of items. The only problem with that is that if the game has been around a long time and the main items being used are Tier 16 weapons and you're a new player without much disposable funds, then each Tier 16 weapon might take a REALLYYYY long time to gather resources for and create because of the limit on resources bought per day. You wouldn't be able to make anything useful by yourself without putting in a ton of time. This is where transmutation comes in handy. You could spend very little time gathering resources and make a Tier 2 Longsword. No one will want to actually fight with this longsword, but someone will definitely buy it because they will want to melt it down for its resources in order to make a Tier 16 weapon. Eventually, after making a bunch of these low level weapons (or if you just quest around a lot and get gold), you'll have the funds to start buying other people's low level weapons and transmute them so that you can make Tier 16 weapons. Eventually, you'll get enough money to start buying Tier 16 weapons, and transmuting them in order to get resources to make rare higher tier weapons. You'll have gone up the business chain. I suppose that is a bit of a grind, which I dont like, but it's more of a start-up business sort of thing rather than a "Repeat the same boring thing over and over in order to level up your skill" sort of thing. It's not as bad IMO. Personally I think this all negates the need for a resource/item sink at all. The only thing that is necessary is a lot of tiers of items and a game developer that would monitor the game and create better item sets when players started actually using the best stuff.

That will create balance issues. You said you wanted new players to be competitive. The more the game advances, the wider the gap will be between new and old players. If all a new player can buy is a cheap Longsword and everyone else is running around with Shiny Longswords of Godslaying +12, it will suck horribly for that new guy. He will have to be useless for weeks until he can buy decent stuff.

Something else you could have is item degradation on a half-life curve with means to restore power to the item. This will degrade the quality of items rapidly the higher quality the item is.

Ex :
Longsword +16, After 1000 swings, it becomes +8
Longsword +4, After 1000 swings, it becomes +2
With proper scaling for all + values in between

Player items never get destroyed, they only lose in power. Players can also get them repaired at a smithy or with some consumable item. This will get resources out of the economy and will give crafters a new market.

Also, items can only be repaired so many times before they degrade too rapidly to be worth it. After 5 repairs, the half-life of that sword may become 500 swings. At some point, it will become too costly to keep using the item at its original quality and buying a new one will be simpler. Players will be in control of when they part with their equipment.

Another process would allow restoration of an item. If you find a really awesomely cool sword and it has become useless, you could get it back to its original durability value with a resmelt process that would be quite expensive. Sorts of buying a new sword, but without any random element that may give you a lower quality item. This has to be so expensive it is only worth it for very high quality items.

Personally I like killing monsters to drophunt crafting resources, as long as the resources aren't ridiculously rare and there's no bullshit about resources only being droppable by people fighting as a group or from monsters within dungeons that can only be done as a group or loot only being awarded to characters who are the perfect level for the monster. I like the way WoW did skinning, you could do that for all drop-huntable resources, so only people who had the resource-gathering profession would get crafting drops from their kills, perhaps instead of some or all money the animal would usually drop, the same way capturing a monster gives you a pet instead of the loot the animal would usually drop.

I find killing monsters in general kind of boring because there is rarely much tactics required, so getting crafting ingredients I actually want as well as the XP I'm obligated to get makes it a bit less boring.

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That will create balance issues. You said you wanted new players to be competitive. The more the game advances, the wider the gap will be between new and old players. If all a new player can buy is a cheap Longsword and everyone else is running around with Shiny Longswords of Godslaying +12, it will suck horribly for that new guy. He will have to be useless for weeks until he can buy decent stuff.

This is a valid point. It is easily dealt with though, I think, with a little bit of sneaky game design.

I've already said that I suppose it is best to have the money stream not be even between players. The more activity one does, the greater piece of the money stream they will get. It can easily be manipulated over time by developers such that new players start out getting a bunch of money a day so that they will be able to afford mainstream weapons relatively quickly. New players could also start getting good amounts of money from the low level monsters they'll kill when they start. Lastly, as the mainstream weapons get more and more expensive, the amount of starting gold for new players could be increased.

Of course, it still WILL take time for new players to get the same weapons if mainstream weapons are Tier 16 or something. However, that is not a bad thing and is no different from any other MMO. It will always take time to get good items, and it SHOULD because building to that is a major point of MMOs. The only reason I'd introduce the mechanisms I just mentioned is because as the Tiers of mainstream weapons get higher and higher, the time needed for a new player to get to that point would get greater and greater. Those mechanisms would simply ensure that the time needed to get mainstream weapons would stay pretty even throughout the game's lifespan.

And yeah, while players spend time with inferior equipment and are low level in general, they will be of less use in major national PvP battles. However, there are a few things I would say about that. First off, given the focus on open PvP, I would have a top-level/top-equipment character be very powerful, but the difference wouldnt be so high that that player could kill a low-level/low-equipment character in a few seconds while taking no damage. With some skill and good tactics, a few low level characters would be able to take on one high level character and possibly win. That type of thing should allow new players to feel useful in national battles from the start, while still making the achievement of getting to high level rewarding.

Secondly, helping this out would be the fact that I would want actual player skill to be somewhat relevant to the outcome of battles. Assuming lag to not be an issue, a system with aiming, body part dependent damage, timing being necessary, combining different players powers (as Guild Wars 2 is saying they will), lots of creative tactics etc etc, would make it so that a small knowledgeable and skilled group of low level players could outplay a high level character in order to win. I think this would allow low level players to feel like they could be very effective in PvP battles.

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Original post by lessthanjake Probably a better idea is to have people lose some items when they die. I have a few problems with that though. First off, many people hate big penalties at death like that. Secondly, (and this applies to degradation too) having it be quite possible that you'll lose a weapon lowers the value of that item a lot, making crafting less profitable.

An item that can be purchased several times has a higher value to crafters than an item that can only be bought once. Increased sales, better business for crafters.

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There IS a feeling of achievement when you've thought about how much money/income you have to buy resources, decided what item is best to plan to build given your monetary situation, gathered the resources for it over time, and then created it. You won't have put a lot of game time into making this object (which is good because that would be boring), but it will have been a plan in the works for long enough in real time that eventually creating the item will feel like an achievement.

I was just playing Titan Quest, and what struck me was the sudden sense of buying into it. I had a rare treasure drop (bat tooth) that can be fused with a weapon to add an effect (leach life). I had to decide whether to put it on my current weapon, or wait until I level up and get a better one -- which I did. Once I had bought a better weapon and attached the magic item, I felt a sense of pride in that I would choose to keep my special magic bow over an ordinary bow that might technically be a tiny bit superior. That kind of ownership does not come with the mere passage of time.

[Edited by - AngleWyrm on September 19, 2010 8:18:08 PM]

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An item that can be purchased several times has a higher value to crafters than an item that can only be bought once. Increased sales, better business for crafters.

Hmm I'm fairly embarassed that I didn't think of that before I posted. That is certainly true. Items that can be lost will cost less per unit than items that can't be lost, but more of them will be sold.

However, my point still stands in a way if you look at the whole economy. In my system, there is a limited amount of resources and thus a limited amount of goods that can be crafted and sold. Assuming that all resources will be used for crafting, the supply of items is already fixed by the accumulated resource stream. Thus, losing items at death would simply lower the value on those items, making crafting less profitable, without being able to add to the amount sold. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, of course, but I tend to think it's best to ensure crafting is worth it. I also tend to think high death penalties should be avoided, especially in a game designed around incentivising players to fight each other to the death for territory all the time. The last thing you want is for a ton of players to avoid major PvP battles for fear of losing items at death.

What you are probably thinking is that not losing items at death (or some other resource sink) would eventually lower the amount crafters could sell since everyone would have everything eventually. However, that just goes back to my idea of a multi-tiered item system designed such that it will take a really long time for the world to have enough resources accumulated to have top tier weapons be mainstream. At that point you just make an expansion that expands the weapon tiers.

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I was just playing Titan Quest, and what struck me was the sudden sense of buying into it. I had a rare treasure drop (bat tooth) that can be fused with a weapon to add an effect (leach life). I had to decide whether to put it on my current weapon, or wait until I level up and get a better one -- which I did. Once I had bought a better weapon and attached the magic item, I felt a sense of pride in that I would choose to keep my special magic bow over an ordinary bow that might technically be a tiny bit superior. That kind of ownership does not come with the mere passage of time.

That's a slightly different issue though. Certainly when players modify their weapons with cool items, they feel a sense of ownership and attachment to the weapon. I would definitely want that in the game. However, what I was talking about was crafting with an eye to selling the object for gold. In that case, there is no feeling of attachment to the weapon; you're selling it. The sense of achievement can only come from you feeling like it took some time to make the item and (probably more importantly) you had to decide to make that item instead of a different one. In games where you can just farm resources, you are never deciding to make one item instead of another. You can just farm the resources needed for both and make both. There's no opportunity cost and thus no difficult decision to make. If you can only get a limited amount of resources per day, you actually have to decide which item to build up the resources for in a given time period. So when you finish that Longsword of Slaying, it matters to you because you have a connection with the decision to make that weapon. You might have decided to make the Longsword of Slaying instead of the Bow of Terror; possibly because you think it would be cooler or more profitable or something else. The point is that this all forces crafters to make actual choices, which should make the whole process more interesting and rewarding than farming endless resources to make items.

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Original post by lessthanjake However, my point still stands in a way if you look at the whole economy. In my system, there is a limited amount of resources and thus a limited amount of goods that can be crafted and sold. Assuming that all resources will be used for crafting, the supply of items is already fixed by the accumulated resource stream. Thus, losing items at death would simply lower the value on those items, making crafting less profitable, without being able to add to the amount sold. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, of course, but I tend to think it's best to ensure crafting is worth it. I also tend to think high death penalties should be avoided, especially in a game designed around incentivising players to fight each other to the death for territory all the time. The last thing you want is for a ton of players to avoid major PvP battles for fear of losing items at death.

It will be the opposite. If they lose items on death, then players lose resources, which increases the cost of resources and the value of items. There's no reason why an increase in demand without an increase in supply will make prices go down. Prices will only go down if you somehow get a bonus when creating items in bulk.

There was a game called Shattered Galaxy which had high repair costs when your units got blown up in early beta. These costs were manageable early on, but became prohibitive as you went up in levels. High level, it cost so much there was no fighting going on. One side would enter a territory, everyone else would leave, giving them the win and resources. Then the other side would come back and retake it. They were doing this all day long because fighting was not profitable enough. No need to say the game was boring. They changed it to cost practically nothing to repair and players started beating on each other again. It was a nice exemple of the Tragedy of the commons. Why risk resources when someone else can do it for me and I still get the same resources after a victory?