craft experimenting for basic recipes is pointless

Well, one thing we were given going into the Alpha was a couple of the basic recipes which was enough to kick off some minor experimentation, such as the blindingly obvious wall decoration, and feed us along the way, such as given the base requirements for the various forms of smelting / smithing and the knowledge that we do sometimes need multiples along the way. So would something like having these base recipes in our book, and some similar ones for the other 'building' crafts be worthwhile?

 

While I like the discovery mechanic, I don't think the crafting system should be centered around it, and as the OP pointed out, it wont be long before more if not all the recipes are posted somewhere on the web. Some of them already are, right here on these forums.

While dedicated crafting adds an alternate and needed role for many players, and is something I enjoy as well, all players regardless of play-style, should be able to craft basic things, and I prefer that most of those items not fall under discovery. Basic processing for instance should also not fall under discovery - IMO. Crafting something "meaningful" is a good application for the discovery mechanic though.

I know the game is still in pre-alpha phase, but I also hope we can make multiple items at once. The discovery system invalidated stacks of items has me sweatin'.

 

While experimentation is good.

There are some basic facts that really should be observed. You have to know the basics of how to do something before you experiment with it. A basic sword recipe for instance should be a necessity to start. You have to know something about what your experimenting on to start with.

Also, with smelting. You really don't need to make an ingot then a bar. It should be one or the other not both. Needing to make an ingot to get to bar is just a time and resource sink that is not needed.

 

+1

This point exactly. I'm the same way in real life too, with different skills.

 

I just had a random idea on how to balance discoverability, uniqueness, and knowledge sharing that might have some bearing on this conversation. I started a new thread here:

https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f...-discoverability-with-knowledge-sharing.6650/

 

--Alas, I do not have access to your post....I used my Christmas money to buy into the highest level I could....

 

D'oh, sorry about that. I spend most of my time lurking here, so I'm not entirely accustomed to the different areas of the fora. There's no good reason for it to be limited to the dev+ forum that I can think of, so here it is in its entirety:

-----

Random thought (coming from someone with nowhere near enough time to have played any MMO in the last 10 years, and only a smidge of experience with UO in its first year or two). I've been following this thread (https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f...imenting-for-basic-recipes-is-pointless.6477/) with some interest, especially the discussion of "discoverability" vs. "finding everything on the wiki".

Discovery is fine, and the point about everything being published on a wiki (which I will immediately use for basics) is well taken. FWIW, I do think that it would be less frustrating to just publish the basic recipes in the book automatically -- if only to save players the trouble of switching to a browser. But it seems to me that most of the contention on this thread involves the creation of "advanced" or "unique" items by "serious crafters".

Someone made the point in the above thread (which, as a reformed ex-game developer myself, I completely concur with), that true uniqueness is almost certainly too much to ask for in terms of complexity and resources. But it's perfectly reasonable to imagine a system within which the developers slowly add new, interesting items to the game to be discovered. But I think we all know that the recipes for these items will be published quickly, as soon as one player discovers them. One solution to this problem is "skill points", discussed earlier. That helps to some extent, though depending upon how they're allocated, it can lead to frustration as you can't easily create a "renaissance crafter" that is advanced in multiple branches of the skill tree.

A different (and possibly complementary) approach would be to "mix it up" for more advanced recipes. What I mean by this is that most of the recipe for the "+37 sword of bamboozling" (or whatever) would quickly become well-known, but a few ingredients would vary randomly per-player. Precisely how many (and from how large a pool of potential ingredients) could simply be chosen such that the number of permutations is large enough to make discovery difficult but not impossible. In this way, players could still share most of the recipe for an advanced item, but it would be up to each player to discover the "special" parts of the recipe on his/her own.

A variation on this approach would be to make the number of permutations for "special" ingredients too large to be realistically discoverable, then have some quest or NPC be able to tell you the right answer for your character. This has the potential to be much more interesting than "standard" loot, and very personal. It also provides an incentive for players to create characters that are both crafters and adventurers, rather than having two characters that support one-another (it's an exercise for the reader as to whether that's a good property, but at least it's a design option).

Minor technical note: The implementation of the "special" part should be really simple -- just take some aspect of the player object (e.g., a numeric id) and hash it to a value the same length as the number of permutations for a given recipe's "special" ingredients.

 

j15r, good input. Along those lines I had a thread "I wish to teach rare skills" which could be relevant to crafting (although it used spells as the example):

https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f...-to-teach-rare-skills.5968/page-2#post-107049

 

This brings up a good point. If I'm interested in crafting but trying to figure out how the system works, I have a couple options. One is, in-game, I can find information "here is how you make a longsword (from ore up to finished item), here is how to make leather armor (from hides to finished item) and then I can figure more advanced things out for myself. The other is that I go online, where I'll undoubtedly find, possibly on the same page as the longsword, the recipe for the Leet Sword of Uberness, which I otherwise would've had the opportunity to enjoy experimenting to find.

In other words, not having some basics in the game may make it WORSE for people who want to discover recipes themselves by increasing the risk of finding spoilers when they just wanted some basic pointers.

 

Interesting approach, so each character is the salt, so to speak.

The discovery system could also be rewired to just provide complete customization. Rather than having a "right" answer, combinations could always provide a result. Of which some would be horrible, some useful, and some amazing. Sort of like Morrowind.

Crafter skill would determine the overall bonus of the result. Assuming there will be skill gains for crafting (*hopes so*).

 

[Also from my other thread -- sorry for the confusion and splitting them up like this]

A bit of a tangent, but it's also worth noting that a similar approach could be used in other game mechanics. For instance, it's always bugged me that in most games I can simply look up a detailed step-by-step walkthrough for any quest, level, dungeon, or what-have-you. It's helpful at times, but it also takes some of the mystery out. If there were some components of a quest that were pseudo-randomly associated with the player, I believe it would restore a bit of this sense of mystery. For example, imagine a multi-part quest where in part A you learn the solution to a puzzle in part B. You have to remember the solution, but telling someone else your solution won't do them any good. They can't skip the discovery process.

Consider the plain-old "lever puzzle" that Skyrim beat to death. Read any walkthrough, and they'll tell you exactly what to do, and in what order. But that order of operations would be trivial to parameterize on a hash of player-id, making the "walkthrough" non-portable across players. To be clear, the Skyrim puzzles were all kind of stupid, because there was either no rhyme or reason, or a glaringly obvious solution. And the penalty for getting it wrong was usually so weak as to not discourage random guessing. But if you extend these to a few more moving parts, and add a "knowledge" component (e.g., an NPC who provides necessary components to the solution), and you have a more interesting system that defeats walkthroughs, is more interesting to play, and is very straightforward to implement and re-use in different contexts.

 

Yes, I thought the same thing. My wife suggested it may be the *spindle* in the center of the thread spool, that sounded pretty reasonable to me at the time.

Though thinking on it further, if that were the case, it should have been a carpentry action to create a number of spindles from the tree bark.