How to make crafting new and exciting without breking the bank and topping botters.

I do not understand this argument at all. It's the randomness that makes the skill work, with no randomness you would know from the beginning if you will success or not. Even a poor cook can sometimes be lucky and a make some good food And it's that lucky part we still need in the game for it to be fun.

As for mini games: Most of the ideas I have seen so far is not something I would like (both in this and other threads) but if there where to be some kind of mini game I would prefer a kind of decision making before one where you wave around with your mouse. In the end it's the character crafting skill that have the most influence in the outcome of the skill use.

I on the other hand have much more problems with how recipes works right now. A proper crafter knows what his end product will be what he start crafting... Right not you mass produce blades then hilts before you make swords of the two. That is not how it works. Or with carpenter would make come carvings in 2 Pine or Maple Boards and slap in a Sturdy Chair and call it a Gothic Chair? Something you would get a F on in wood shop when you are 10. That is not creative just plain laziness and I hope that it's just a alpha thing but I hope we will see huge changes to the crafting soon, we need a good system for designing our items before we craft them.

 

I'm undecided on the "deck" thing right now but your idea sounds interesting and I am curious as to what that could bring to the game.

 

It may be optional so everybody can either choose one-click-craft with randomized result, or try to add their personal skill by playing with deck where they have chances to get better result.
So, when you gather trees in a wood, you just make it one-click, but when you craft customized enchanted armor, you use deck to play with ingredients effects through the glyphs and "tune up" your crafted item with desired stats.

 

I definitely agree that crafting should be something you do beyond just clicking a button. Combat involves more than just a button click, things like deck planning, positioning, combos, etc all make it a fun system. If combat was simply "click a button and you have a 74.2% chance to kill the orc" it would be boring. So why is crafting essentially that system?

I love the idea of mini-games that influence the quality and/or success of your crafting.

Honestly, I don't care if its something as simple as a Match-3 or Memory style game, or something as complex as the deck system. I just want to see some effort beyond a simple dice roll to make crafting more fun.

 

Be careful with crafting mini games. It is good if you can make win-win changes, but don't throw the traditional crafter demographic to the wolves in an attempt to lure in non crafters. And no matter how cool a mini game sounds to someone who makes one or two items per month, it will be absolutely brain destroying to the traditional crafters who make hundreds of items in the same time period.

If we wanted to play candy crush, or farmville, we would be off doing just that.

 

Huge difference in that when you are fighting you have a limited things you can to depending on your and your enemy possession, momentum, etc etc and on top of all that you have a small time frame to make your dissension, that is what the random glyphs in combat represents in a good way.

When crafting you have normally no huge surprises in nor your opponent (wood, metal, pastry, and so on) behaviour, and if something happens you can often stop and think what to do about it before you take action. So if crafting would be glyph bases it must be turned based so I can look at my sword after each "turn" and carefully chose right glyph to use for my next pass. This would even make scene if you make each glyph as a crafting technique you use.

 

I initially thought the same - but then thought a bit more, and pastry dries out as you handle it, metal I guess can be over-worked so that it becomes too soft or brittle, if you keep shaving cloth and wood and leather you might end up with pieces that are too small to make the item perfectly... there's no reason the crafting process couldn't have a timer slowly trickling down, so that you have to balance the need to finish in timely fashion, with a desire to improve the product by waiting for glyphs.

If the counter-argument is that this would be unrealistic, I'm just grateful I don't have to scrape and wash the hides, or beat the sword blade, or stew the venison, for several hours rather than a few seconds. Time contraction can be a burden as well as a convenience, no?

My concern is that a completely new glyph system for crafting would involve a lot of work designing it before even considering implementation, it wouldn't be a simple rehash of the combat glyphs. Could be really interesting if they try it though.

 

Well my hobby is sword making, spending more time then my wife like at the forge so I was perhaps thinking to much in metal terms where you always can recover your losses (except for the loss of heat). But as you say if you work some materials to much you will waist material and to many step would not make scene. But still would a more slow phased turn based method be advised where you think carefully between the steps so you don't waist materials and you simply don't need to in the way you need to hurry in combat.

 

I get the golf sim analogy but was not sold by its 'fun factor.' Perhaps it sounds more interactive. But a golfing sim more or less boils down to clicking the mouse at a precise time. Perhaps that adds one level of thinking for crafting, but I am not sure how it adds to fun. For me the fun in crafting is in the collection of required crafting elements (that is a quest) and then the moment of creation from those parts. It comes from the adventure and thought leading to that moment. The fun is not in manually doing the creation. This is a game afterall. Manual, repetitive mouse clicking to drive a saw or pound a hammer is simply work. Not fun.

 

This is exactly what I mean by throwing crafting to the wolf to make it appeal to non crafters.

With traditional crafting, the fun is not in the action of creating. The fun is in managing your customer base, your trade network and your inventory. A lot of what you do is social in nature. It tends to attract the more patient, social and cerebral players.

That different facets of the game would appeal to different types of players is a good thing IMHO, rather than a problem to be fixed.

 

What you are describing are more like a trader and not a crafter. For a crafter it's the art of crafting/designing that it's important not maintaining the trade network. But the trader role will be as equal important and it will also be fun to see how that will be implemented.

 

Mini-games... back when we were still talking about the Ultimate RPG, there was discussion that Portalarium intended to leverage their app development experience to create mini-game app(s) so you could do activities like crafting entirely away from your computer. In other words, a cross-platform RPG with mini-game app(s) on your smart phone, tablet, etc.

Edit: This was well before $6 million were raised let alone a successful KS campaign so I am not sure that the cost is an overburden.

 

^this

Vanguard crafting was wonderful and had many nice features that made there crafting system one of the very best.

Junk

 

For me Vanguard is just a boring click feast. A lot of players use scripts to get around crafting just because it get boring in not a good sign neither.

 

I must say that I would prefer mini-games to die rolls. Die rolls, even when skill based, make crafting horribly grindy: you craft the same item again and again until you randomly get a "critical roll", or the random properties that you were hoping for.
The latter aspect is also very "gamey" and doesn't make you feel like a crafter. I mean, would you bakes cakes with random ingredients in random quantities until you get by sheer chance the taste you were expecting?!

On the other hand, unfortunately I can't think of a mini-game that wouldn't get boring quickly. I did play a few Korean/Chinese MMORPGs in the past which had crafting mini-games and they all turn into a chore after a little while.

 

Sure it was a Click-Feast..... but ..... you have to think how and what to click, otherwise the Result got destroyed or plain bad quality.

That alone mades it way funnier then just click-craft-click-craft ect.

I also would like to see something like DAoC crafting, where only the "Master-Crafter" made Mastercraft-Items like 100% Quality.

Im also full for Crafting Ranks, that could affect the outcome.

 

Befor i switch into "rage-mode" i would like to know what kind of "mini-games" you guys(and gurls) are talking about?

 

Personally I would like to see something like the old Daggerfall crafting where you with added resources got different properties but the more resources you add you less success chance you get. So the "mini game" would be concentrated on the design of your items not the actual crafting but this way you would also get better control over what you actually crafting compared to the system we have now.

The more I think about it the more I dislike the system we have today, not only is it really unintuitive with poor UI. The whole systems is flawed due to that every recipe needs to be unique and that will mean that they must add new ingredient as soon they want to make some new recipes and that will not work in the long run. If you take a piece of iron you can with the same tools make everything from a sword to a pair of tall candlesticks or why not a a candle stick lamp mounted in the ceiling? You will off cause be using different techniques to get to the end result but the ingredients is the same (depending on time period you might use fluss while forging your sword). So why must SotA use different ingredients for all this items when it's not really necessary?

 

In parts you can use which raw material you want. At least if its about furniture. It dosent matter if its pine or maple.
But that's not your point, i know.
Ok, if that's your version of a mini game i am all for it (or something like that).

 

ok, this has been bugging me for ages: what is 'topping botters'? I can't figure out if it's a typo or some kind of obscure internet slang or what