Just something to think about as a Crafter.

I posted this in the PvP Thread, but it pertains to crafters as well. Its just something to think about...

Crafting is so easy in an MMO anymore, anyone can do it. There is nothing stoping you harvesting, chopping wood or mining other than some AI monsters.

Even rare resources from raids or dungeons are sold in excess on bazaars or the marketplace.

In UO (pre-trammel), I had to work my tail off to GM Smith/Mining. I've told this story dozens of time. 6 months to GM, crafting 1-2 hours a day, fending of PKers in mines/caves, mining at off-peak hours, hiding ore piles every 10 minutes, dying daily, my packhorse dying daily and making deals with PKers.

I was part of a guild at the time and we did not have a GM Smith. Let me tell you, the day my guild met up in our 7x7 house lol and I gave my friend a sword crafted with my name engraved on it, I could feel them celebrating through the monitor. I felt proud that I achieved something against the odds and overcoming multiple obstacles.

We celebrated for a week. They made alts to mine ore for me (even though they hated it).

I then took my new status to the N. Brit Forge. Displaying my Grandmaster Smith title, taking orders, making repairs and just soaking in all the prestige that went along with becoming a GM Smith.

Years later when I returned to UO, I remember multiple times, running into people in the streets of Britain that had remembered me. Thanking me for previous work and some even mentioned they had saved some Valorite Platemail I had made for them. Pass the point when it was useful.

Today's games just make crafting meaningless. There just isn't the reward for your effort like I felt back in UO. SWG was good, but only because of their varying resource system. So if you put in the effort to trade and harvest the best resources from day 1, you would achieve the same popularity.

Am I making any sense? How many people pledging to SotA are gonna just go out and make a blacksmith ? Probably a ton and without much to stop you from gathering resources or adding in obstacles, its gonna be a cake walk. The recipe system of figuring things out will probably last a month before someone posts every single detail about crafting on the WEB.

You look at it as WORK to craft nowadays , when I see it as a simple task that anyone can master. You end up diluting any sense of accomplishment.

I remember in GW2, got my cooking up to 400 (top) in like a week. Thought it would be helpful to the guild. Well, when 10 of the other 40 members did the same, it really just made me feel like I wasted my efforts.

Do I want the crafters in SotA to struggle like I did in UO? Well not if they can't handle being PKed and maybe 1 hour of gather resources being looted. Not everyone is up to the task !!

Just something to think about. I for one will not pay any attention to crafting in SotA. Maybe Alchemy for consumables, but forget the rest of it. Let someone else waste their time making swords that 1000's of others can make. No prestige in that.

Plus, the demand for my services was non stop for 2yrs because of PKing and loss of loot. I always had gear to replace or repair. After Trammel and AOS, I was done. Didn't even have to sit at the forge anymore, I could make repair contracts and sell them off a vendor. Nobody had to see me in person anymore and the multiplayer interaction that I loved was gone and so was I.

I never felt important as a crafter again since Early UO and SWG.

 

Crafting dinamics have not be seen yet, so why you do not wait and see how it goes before even trying it?.

I understand your concerns but not your pessimism

 

I think it's going to massively depend on the different odds for some materials that DarkStarr mentioned in PvP/PvE areas. If it takes you a week to gather the material in PvE areas compared to an hour in the PvP area, then yes, there is sort of an achievement to it.

 

As-Is the crafting will be too easy for me as well. I'm mostly a crafter by nature and will cope with the game of guess and the game of wiki, but I won't like it. I hope the crafting is hard to level as it was in UO but I'm not holding my breath.

 

I'm holding my breath & hoping that against all odds they may keep their word when they said you won't be able to have time to master everything

 

I too, hold out great hope of recapturing the sense of achievement and pride I haven't found in a game crafting system since UO. The crafting stations look nifty for what they are, but also feel like a step back on the immersion front. Not only would I like the process to be challenging and interesting, I'd like to see my character sit at a spinning wheel, stand at a forge hammering, etc.

 

I too plan on making a smith. Getting GM Blacksmith in UO counts as my second finest achievement - right after my first million.

I truly hope they are able to capture the essence and struggle recalled by the OP. Those highs and lows in the mines East of Minoc and North of Britain were some of the best gaming memories I have.

I want to see different types of ore, bulk order deeds, and a vibrant and competitive market for GM-made (or its equivalent) goods.

 

I think it could be made challenging, but it's up to the devs to do that.

I don't think just because you don't have full open PVP like this thread is insinuating that their is no challenge....that comes down to the situations and areas needed to gather.

 

Crafting should be very difficult to achieve high levels (GM equivalent). It can be extremely lucrative and shouldn't take a week to master regardless of which areas (pvp-pve) you gather in. So many games of late have had absurdly easy crafting. Could Legendary I think it was 8 crafts, and their corresponding gathering skills in FFIX in 2 weeks. That's shameful if you ask me. It should take longer than that to Legendary a single craft IMO.

Not only is it better for the economy but the harder it is to raise crafting the harder combat becomes. Everyone in the game shouldn't be running around in GM gear the first week.

 

If the resource area is PVP or PK enabled maybe crafters gathering resources can hire NPC henchmen (or even players) as guards to fend off potential threats like monsters and Player Killers. I would love to see that in Shroud of the Avatar.

 

Great point Kabal. People can easily do the equivalent of a "guild hunt" with gathering. Especially since helping that person gather/skill up will yield the guild "free" gear in the future. I've implemented this in quite a few games and it generally benefits all parties involved.

 

Back-in-the-day I would escort miners into the Minoc Mines of Sosaria, protecting them and guarding against murderers and thieves. I never had to worry about armor repair or needing a new weapon as a result.

That was the purpose of my first guild - we would take rotations and patrol the roads from Yew to Minoc, helping miners and lumberjacks that we saw. That all ended with Trammel though.

*sigh* ahh... dem were the days...

 

Not to be harsh; but no, not completely anyway.

Its true that crafting is too easy in a lot of MMOs. But cutting down a tree in the wilderness shouldn't be that dangerous a task, making you a target for killers. Story-wise, and role-playing-wise, why is somebody going around killing lumberjacks and miners? There's no reason for it.

But yes, the devs should think about ways to make the task rewarding and challenging. Though I'd rather them think of ways to make crafting challenging other than exposing players to PKers, when it doesn't make sense at all.

 

I have to completely disagree. Think about how important steel was during the world wars. Think about how many Native Americans have been displaced because they were on valuable resources. There are many types of wood that are worth absurd amounts of money.

If you honestly think about it, there are innumerable scenarios where killing a miner or lumberjack makes a lot of sense. What about the gold rush where someone found a lucrative vein. Think about if you were like me in UO and would get greedy and drag around piles of ore as you mined because you didn't want to make that <10 minute to town from Brit mines.

It makes so much sense to PK gatherers. From a story, rp, economical... Almost any point of view. Since when wouldn't it make sense to take free money? Especially when you're talking about PKs. You think a murderer would think twice to steal from a blind man?

Edit: My post sounds kind of rude. Not trying to be mean, redfish. You have had many valuable posts for this community. I just happen to disagree on this point.

 

? where did thy post that and why woud thy do that ?
i thought pvp was optional.

olso attacking miners/lumberjacks/crafters is not PVP it is wat i call PK/griefing.
if thy do this i woud like the option of linking my ignore list to my vendor .
wat i mean by this is that if you are on my ignore list you will not be abel to purchase from my vendor.

 

Pvp is optional. Some resources can appears in pvp places, and you can choose to go or not. Like when you chose to travel to Felluca because there were more resources.

 

part of the problem is that in current MMO's the mindset in design is : "every player should be able to be largely independent to enjoy the goodies game." Crafting is not looked upon as fun but as a necessary evil... and when a design teams follows that mantra crafting is never ever going to be good... related is the fact that MMO's current style are largely lots of players online with minimal interaction.

I trust/hope this design team doesnt follow above mantra....

Crafting should be a full-blood respected part of the game, a part that designers should recognize that in itself can be fun and rewarding to players...

Making players dependent on each other is the only way to make a real/fun/lasting MMO imho...

 

Trammel came to UO because $ and people's accounts were falling. Trammel kept UO alive by retaining some of those players, but did not harm UO at all. UO was failing and falling off, Trammel just came along as a Band-Aid, when nothing else would stop it's bleeding. If it were not this way, then EA would have never approved it, because the only thing that matters to EA is $$$$$...

UO was dying with or without Trammel...... with or without the PK... with or without the PvP... Because nothing could stop that intellectual development cancer when they took the controls away from Lord British...
Intellectualism is the only difference between any game's depth, or shallow short lived death
~Time Lord~

 

A few thoughts of my own to the op since you seem to have put a lot of rational thought into your post, without a lot of insults to those who enjoy a different play style. As a pve crafter type player, I have no problem at all with crafting being made challenging. But when people who enjoy the crafting aspects of a game are required to expose themselves to aspects of the game they do not like, such as pvp, just so they can do what they like if they haven't quit in disgust by that time, that is when i cheerfully scratch that game off my list and never look back.

After 15 years of reading these kinds of discussions, I still find it difficult to understand why pvpers feel that they just have to somehow, some way, get pve people to pvp. They use terms like risk vs reward. The reason that makes no sense to me is that when a pvper is pvping, they are spending their time doing what they enjoy, presumably. There should be no need to entice them into it. They supposedly enjoy it, right? That's not risk vs reward, that's reward for your choice of play style.

It's a nebulous thought and hard to put into words for me, but I feel that putting the best resources or the most resources in pvp areas is rewarding the pvpers for their playstyle while penalizing the pve people for theirs. Both groups are doing exactly what they prefer doing and enjoy doing; how they like to spend their time. What you call additional risk, I call engaging in your preferred activity.


There is a huge segment of the gaming community who feel the same, which is why so many games take steps to ensure that doesn't happen if they want to bring that segment into their game. There are many games out there now that seem to have the mind set of somehow pushing non pvp people into pvp. I did a lot of looking around, especially at games in development, and when I found this one it was like a ray of sunshine in a very gloomy gaming industry as things stand right now for crafting/building/decorating/pve/rp types.

As far as I can see, with all I've read here so far, this game will be very nicely balancing the two opposing play styles, (with the exception of placement of the most and best resources), and allowing pvp with others who also want to pvp, but not with those who do not want to pvp. Why would you want to pvp with people who don't want to anyway? In my humble opinion, this is the way it should be. And why in the world are so many pvpers, (granted, not all), so keen on forcing others into pvp? The bottom line is, people differ in what they enjoy. They will search out games that allow them to do the things they enjoy. Calling it "risk" to do the things you enjoy doing and rewarding you for enjoying that, is nonsensical to me.

 

I understand what you are saying but I disagree. As a PvP player. When I'm out gathering on my lumberjack or miner, I'm not looking to PvP. I'm trying as hard as I can to avoid it because anyone geared for combat is going to kill me pretty easily.

Would it not be risky to travel to Africa and try to mine a gold mine? Would it not be risky to travel to South America to search for gem mines? The devs have stated all the resources will be in both types of land. There will just be a higher abundance of them in PvP areas.

That doesn't necessarily equate to more resources for people who are willing to "PvP", as I may get killed so often in those areas while gathering that it may be more beneficial to do so in the PvE zones. There are two sides to every coin.

I've never met a person who likes getting ganked while gathering. To call that rewarding me for something I enjoy doing, is nonsensical to me.