Deep Dive – Crafting APRIL 2, 2014

Gina/FireLotus: (Makes introductions, first for her Ban Hammer: "It's small, but it really hurts." and then for the others present to speak.)

LB/RG: (hands it over to Starr Long)

SL: Crafting Deep Dive: What we want out of Crafting, and our goal in Crafting - that all of the best items in the game are made by players. We're taking it to what some would consider extreme; the game itself won't be generating much other than basic items. We think this will create a vibrant community of merchants and crafters. We will have a strong player-driven economy. That is our big goal, and Richard wants to add to it.

LB/RG: I do, because you forgot to give our standard disclaimer. It starts with 'Thank you, thank you, thank you to our amazing community, who has helped us launch a year ago. It's almost the one year anniversary of the Kickstarter Funding. The caviat for these Deep Dives is that we're doing something very unusual in development; not only in the public eye, but with public involvement, community involvement, your involvement from the very beginning and all the way through these developments. These are not promises of either what already exists, or what will exist. We're often describing systems that are implemented. We're often describing systems that have not yet been implemented. We're very happy to talk, banter, argue amonst us on the Hangout formally, and listen to your proposals. No promises or assertions come out of this. This is all contemporary thinking, as we will repeat. Back to you, Starr.

SL: Is this my cue to say my 'celebrity catch-phrase'? "Don't lawyer me, Bro!"

LB/RG: Yeah, and people in the chat room we're already saying it before you said it.

SL: They were using it on chat with me last night, too.

LB/RG: The mature people 'get it' now.

Gina/FireLotus: It's totally not cool for you guys to edit that part out of the video.

LB/RG: Let's tell a little bit about 'B', Starr and Chris. The amazing Mr. B, and tell why on Crafting day specifically, he is here with us.

SL: We come up with a lot of wacky ideas about what we want in the game. All the systems and all the data, and getting it all set up, and connecting them, and the art connected to the code, this guy makes the whole thing work. He has really great conversations with us. He cautions us when we might be going off the deep end, but often jumps off at the deep end with us.

LB/RG: I would even go beyond that. We have a great team of superstars, and by that we have a great team that may be gray-haired and learned things through the school of hard knocks, to even the green people we're getting straight out of school, or interns. I have really a high level of confidence in each one of this Team. 'B' however, is one who deserves a bunch of extra credit in that game design in the modern era is a tough thing to do in the modern era. B is regularly out in front of this project and leading huge swaths of that.

CS: I want to jump in on that too. A lot of the early technical design I wrote up B is the one, more than anybody, who called BS on that. He called me out on it, on formulas that no longer make sense, and weapons that don't work.

B: I'm the first one that sees it before anyone else. I take feedback from other people, implement my own ideas, and then bring it back to the game. When people talk about being in game design, they may think they get to design 'their game'. You don't. You get to do certain aspects of other people's games. You have to take parts of the game that are at twenty percent, and stick them together, and come up with something that's at one hundred percent, and that runs, and it's fun, and it's entertaining. It's a consistent, challenging job. It's nice taking the feedback from each one of our senior people, our junior people, and our community, and bring all that together into a cohesive design.

CS: I want to coin the name 'Clutch' for B because he transfers the power from the motor to the wheels.

LB/RG: We also want to develop Crafting so that for you to gain skill in the Crafting system, you don't create thousands of repetitive low-level things that you can't get rid of and that you have to dump somewhere; to trash or the generic market. We don't want monotonous behavior in order to level up. We want to make sure that the crafting process on any individual crafting pass of making any single item is as interesting as possible. Part of that you've not seen in by R4. We also wanted Recipes to be something you actually learn, not go to a shop and buy a recipe. You actually have to go learn things from other people, or discover it, or research it. You may have to try combinations of things to discover what crafting might be. What you've seen so far is the first simple form of crafting. Once you discover them, it will be copied into your Recipe Book. B, tell us the current state of crafting, and what people should expect next, then we'll move over into questions that people have.

B: Really, what we have is an early version. We're combining certain items together. We've got our crafting book in there. Right now it's pretty exploratory. We want to keep the exploration in there, but add in different methods for gathering materials via quests or other methods for acquiring those. Our first version was frustrating, but we've gotten better since then with the book and evolved it. Now we have the fundamentals. We've talked about crafting events, which are making adjustments during a recipe, or at the end of a recipe. You'll see something that has a critical success, or you'll have something where the fire is too hot, so you'll have to adjust it, or you made some mistake while you're creating it. We're creating a generic method for that, and then apply it to the different disciplines. Inside of that we're looking for ways to differentiate behaviors. Right now a lot of those are the same; you're gathering similarly, crafting similarly, but we want to find a way to tweak those, so that gathering has more interesting aspects to it.

SL: At an abstract level, there's two kinds of goods to produce. There's durable goods like weapons, and armor, and chairs. Then there are consumable goods. Those are going to be potions and enchantment charges, for a wand or a staff. The way you make those is fundamentally different, and the results are different. When you are smithing something, based on the skill and the difficulty of the item, during at the end of it, you might create a broken version of that item, a slightly inferior item than you were trying to make, or a slightly better item than you were trying to make. In consumables, you don't make -- as an example, a 'broken' roast -- you might burn the roast, and it's not very useful. A failure at making a consumable would likely consume that item. Actually, someone asked the question earlier, I saw, about cooking a rare, magical animal, and would it provide magical benefits for a duration. That's an interesting one we hadn't considered. There was a poll in the forums about hunger, and I was please that a majority would have hunger be important in game play. That's great to me, because I play Fallout New Vegas in Hard Core Mode, where if you don't eat, drink, and sleep, you die, and you can only carry maybe two guns, and some ammo. I wouldn't put that on you guys. Richard, B and I have talked about how we want food and hunger to work and factor into the game play. We want it to provide bonuses and incentives. We're not going to starve you to death. It will effect things like healing rate, experience earned rate, and the healthier you are the easier it is for you to learn things, the faster you can do things, so it effects the constitution of your avatar.

CS: As for specific pies, like 'Unicorn Pie' or whatever, we're getting all the basic stuff down, making sure we know how it all works. We make sure the balance is there if we remove the tedious elements, so that going forward we can continue to add more recipes. We don't have Unicorn Pie yet (SL asserts that we will have unicorns if he has his way) -- but we need a static recipe.

LB/RG: We want to take some simple questions so we can give some simple questions. Someone asked, 'Can we make other shapes of tables, other than the initial square one?' The answer is yes. We just haven't written those recipes. We're going to try to make it so many, if not all the player housing props will ultimately be made by crafters, not by the game, is the trend line we're trying to go towards. Bulk crafting, yes. We've been talking about bulk crafting in-house. I don't know if we have a design for that yet. Starr, do we have that bulk crafting design already?

SL: It's not working in the game. It will probably be a higher level recipe. it's probably going to be its own recipe. It's a higher difficulty, so it's a higher recipe. It would be something like 'the recipe for ten iron bars' versus a single bar.

CS: Seir just asked whether there would be fuel required for every recipe. There won't be fuel required for every recipe. There might be some common elements that are in a lot of recipes in categories. For instance, you can call it fuel for the coal that's in a lot of the metal smith recipes.

LB/RG: If you're cooking things. There's fuel. If you're using the sewing machine or the tanning booth, your muscle is the fuel. It's contextual; we can design it any way we want. In theory while the most common element is coal right now, we could have 'Dragon's Fire', or 'hell fire and brimstone' for melting certain special things. We can make alternate resources. That's going to be up to B, and I'm sure he'll be happy to hear ideas from you guys as to how to make those recipes as interesting and diverse as possible.

CS: Most categories will have those common elements. Alchemy would probably have an empty vial for every recipe.

LB/RG: We need a glass-blower! You get the idea. That's one of the joys and pains we have is that B makes sure these all relate. I already like it. There are enough recipes now that you can smelt the metal and pull it into a variety of parts and pieces, pour into molds, blacksmith a spear-point. You can take some lumber, cut it down to boards, carpenter them into poles, and use either the carpentry or the blacksmith skill to assemble the final spear. I think this will get deeper and broader, and add a lot of fun.

B: One other thing for the people discussing fuels, we've talked about somewhere that torches are going to expire, so we need a type of fuel for lanterns and stuff. Somewhere down the road we need to unify a lot of our fueled things to the same process. We're going to quantify this fuel, and separate uses, so that certain things need certain types of fuel.

SL: Bubonic asked a question along the lines of 'if we're making all the armor and weapons User created, how are we planning on arming the players before the majority of crafters are skilled at making items?' I've learned like anyone who's played games for a long time that there is a core set of players that will get to those Max levels very quickly; faster than we ever planned for, so I think this will be a non-issue. We'll find out in test. If we find that the 'crafting curve' isn't matching the 'gear curve' we can easily adjust by giving crafters earlier access to better recipes. We're going to make sure the crafting and gear curves are matching up, and nothing is dropping off a cliff at the higher levels; we want to get the timing right. We want the crafters leveling up at the same time as the adventurers.

LB/RG: I also like it as a fundamental economy question. If we run short of good crafters, the value of good gear is going to go up. If the value of gear goes up, that's going to incentivise crafters to come out of the woodwork, because you can make a ton of money and buy a nice house. I think to some degree the economy will attempt to balance itself, but we can always push and pull value of objects in and out. If we ever have to put a higher generic weapon in the game, it wiil be generic, not the 'Elf-slaying' mega weapon that a player might be able to build and grow. Somebody asked, 'once I craft a very special weapon, and how much magic or affinity might pass on from person to person'. I'll take a rough cut at it. Tell me if I'm wrong, Starr, or embellish. If you kill a lot of elves with a weapon, the weapon might get the title, 'Elf-slayer', and that is imbued to the sword. If we get the affinity implementation, then the player that wielded it for that gain has gotten used to it's balance, and has gotten some personal affinity that would not pass on with the sword.

SL: Yeah, it's mostly accurate. We haven't designed all the details. At the beginning, we want the weapon to gain something, some enhancements or bonuses, or special abilities depending on how it is used. The only question mark is whether there is also a corresponding change that happens on the User side, which is a litle more challenging. There's some interesting balancing questions that come up with that, so on that half of the question, the answer is 'maybe'. That requires a lot more thought.

CS: Since TEK was asking questions on that, and since I've met him face to face, on that subject, only the most dedicated person will actually keep weapons for long term, because it will become more difficult to maintain weapons over time. So, a lot of people will hang on to weapons and level them up, but many will let them go, because the cheapest way will be to keep it for awhile, fix it a few times, and get a new one.

SL: TEK brought up some ideas. If there's not full loot when people die, then once everybody is geared up, will create a negative impact on the player economy? There wouldn't be a big demand for more gear. I think there's a lot of answers to that. One is, hopefully we're successful, and there's always a steady stream of new players to consume goods. Two, you can always sell to NPC shopkeepers, and the item goes into their inventory. ( he said some things here from 27:22 to 27:41 that I couldn't make out) (Did he say Army?) (and some go into the what-table?) The game will always want content, and will always pay for it. The game really needs the constant influx of those items. As Chris said, there will be wear on items. There will be a cost associated with repairing them. That cost will certainly go up based on how powerful that weapon or armor is. The more it's been enhanced or enchanted, the higher the level it is, the wear on the materials, the more expensive it is going to be to maintain. At some point the player is probably going to find it more economical to go out and get a crafter make a new one. PvP players will strategically get some differences with wearing down of equipment. because there's some specific skills in that of trying to break the other guy's gear. You can target their weapon or their armor instead of them. In a way, it's like economic warfare between guilds when they try to fight each other. I think there will be a constant demand due to all these factors.

LB/RG: I've got something for B here. (tries to pronounce Ahuaeynkgkxs) He's asking about engraving Coats of Arms onto things. I presume that's going to be some kind of unique recipe. Have you started thinking about that, or tackling that? How to make cloaks, or will players be able to have that crafting skill? How might it be done? If someone has their Coat of Arms, will I as a crafter be able to sit down and take the things that we know can accept those Arms, with a shield or a cloak, or whatever else we might have. We might do tables, we might do carpets on the floor, in theory. Will that be a recipe? How might we accomplish that?

B: Recipes have ingredients, and that would probably be an extra ingredient you would get from that person.

LB/RG: Like a 'Mark'.

B: Correct. You could have a unique recipe that belongs only to you.

LB/RG: Brainstorming live, another function for the College of Arms would be you go there to get an official regiestered version of your own Coat of Arms. You get it handed to you on a piece of parchment with the official Royal Seal on it. (makes gesture of stamping and handing the item out) "Yes, this is your personal Coat of Arms." When you go to the crafter to make that item you hand them one of those sheets of paper you've got from the College of Arms. Only you can get yours, because it's you registered at the College of Arms. Only people you give that to can have that craft prompt.

B: I think that is a unique opportunity to have something that belongs to 'B', but to allow someone else to create it. The recipe is the easy part. It is the ingredients and the balance, it's economical, and more difficult.

LB/RG: Melchior Meijer asks, 'Does your player's personal history of birth, for example being born in King's Port, give you any bonuses to ship building or something? I don't think we've ever discussed anything like that. It's an interesting idea. Right now, player history doesn't feed into that. We are doing the modern re-interpretation of the Virtue Tests. It will scatter people into the game uniquely and give them some unique attributes to begin with but nothing yet as specific as what town you make your home, or you describe as your birth city would effect you. We could; I don't know. Starr, do you have any thoughts on that?

SL: No. He put born in quotes. In our 'world' the fiction is that you are from earth, so you really weren't born there. For Episode 1, that location is probably not going to be a factor. Here's another question to design on-the-fly from Aaron Swordmaster: 'If the economy is going to be player based, how with Single Player be seeded with items?' I'm just going to make up something right now. You guys can tell me if I'm on track (or on crack?). Basically for that, we'll probably have two completely separate NPC shopkeeper inventory lists, and loot-tables for Single Player Offline, and all the Online modes. Remember in Single Player Online mode, you're still connected to the Servers. so the players are still going to see all of that data. They're going to put all that in the inventory, they're going to make all the stuff; you're still going to see all that. It's really only Single Player Offline where you'll be fire-walled from that. Remember, you can't go back and forth between Offline and Online. Offline, the shopkeepers will be fully stocked. The same will be true for the loot-tables in the world. We will stock with what would have been 'player-made' items, because we'll have all those items anyway. If I really want to do it at a simulation level, I would use the last data from the Online Mode to stock the Offline Mode.

RG/LB: To design on the fly, I think you're on track. Let me add one to it. One of the reasons we have Single Player Offline is because I want to be able to play whenever I cannot connect. I want to be able to have a character that I can play whenever I'm incapable of connecting to Servers, which in of course means in theory I can hack it, which is why I can't go back and play that same character online. However, even in Single Player Offline, we're going to occasionally want to give you a Patch to the game Service, to features, to new maps or whatever else is revealed. We don't want to force you to connect to be able to play, otherwise, you might as well play online, but when you boot up a Single Player Offline version of the game, we still want you to connect if you can, just to Patch you up to the most current version of the code. That would be another opportunity for us if we wanted to, to steal a current image of any other data we thought would enrich your Offline experience. We could make Offline the 'mostly'-Offline, and pull data from the Servers, but never push data back to the Servers whenever we got the chance.

CS: That's pretty much my thinking. The Offline Shopkeepers would have gear up to like seventy percent of the way up through the Crafting Tree. We want to reward the player and still give them a reason to hit the top of the Crafting Tree. We're not as heavily gear-based like most games, so not getting that thirty percent would be hard to craft during the Single, but Offline, it's not that big of a deal.

RG/LB: Let's take one from Bubonic. "Do we foresee players being able to create and sell their own non-balance-effecting 3D Models in the game such as decorations for your house?" I think the answer to that is pretty easy. We have to put things that go in the game in ourselves. It doesn't mean that lots of players won't create them. We just have to at least make sure they fit the game engine and don't blow textures, and have other kinds of data errors in them from our engine standpoint. While we very much endorse people submitting their own stuff, you won't be able to put them in the game without our involvement. Technically it is required to run on the game system that uses all the advanced shaders and techniques that we use. We have to have somebody review it.

SL: Long-term, that review is something we could maybe have the community participate in, just like we're doing a lot of our crowd-sourcing. Whenever we say, 'We're not going to do that', that usually just means that we're not going to do that the day we turn (Not sure what Starr says here 39.39 -39.52), the day we stop doing character wipes and Launch, that's just a moment in time, the beauty of online products and Episodic Content is, we'll continually add (39:58 words?) as a caveat, maybe we should add that to our beginning spiel. Even if we're saying we're not going to do it 'now', that may definitely be something we could consider later.

RG/LB: Speaking of things we're not going to do - Disclaimer! Thank you! These Deep Dives are talks on the fly, not promises or assertions. These are current thinking as we know it. Speculation as we discuss it live. Don't hold us to any of this, thank you very much.

SL: Don't lawyer me Bro. A couple of quick easy questions. Monxter asks, "Can a blacksmith create all smithy items that need wooden parts by himself, or does he have to have a carpenter?" Answer: The pole-arm has a wooden pole, and that pole has to come from somewhere. You could either level up some carpentry, or milling ability yourself, so you could be self sufficient. Remember, you still have to go get the wood. We purposed some of that interdependency. Remember, we're not limiting you. There's no such thing as a Blacksmith Class. There's no such thing as a Carpentry Class. While it wouldn't necessarily be possible to know every single crafting skill there is and Max it out -- and we are continuing to debate this. Any one person can have most of the crafting skills. We want that achievable. If we make it so that everybody can do everything, then there's no dependency. We think that harms the player economy.

RG/LB: Don't forget the supply and demand curves will find their own balance. If blacksmiths are constantly looking for the wooden shaft to put on axes and pole-arms, then naturally, the people with carpentry skills, or the forestry folks, are going to chop down trees, mill them into boards and poles, and sell those to shopkeepers. There's going to be a lot of boards and poles at shopkeepers in town whether they're playing Solo Player Offline or Solo Player Online, because that's what the player economy is going to demand. There's a variety of ways for it to fall out. We'll create recipes for all of the permutations, but which ones will become the most popular and valuable is going to come completely upon variables that are very hard to foresee.

SL: Here's a question from: (no idea of that name) "Will there be the ability to modify items post-production - enchanting, engraving, etc? Will these change the visual appearance of the items?" Answer to the first half of the question is absolutely. The whole design of our crafting system is meant to be this series of loops. It's not about making an item and being done. I'm going to make that item, and then I'm going to enhance it to make it a better item, or I'm going to enchant it to make it a better item, or I'm going to do both. Then there's the whole addition of going out and using the item that builds up the item, as we were talking about earlier. We want multiple paths of making and modifying items post that initial seed moment of creating the item. Creating the item is the first step. The other half of the question: "Will it change the visuals?" That answer is a little yes and no, or in some cases, yes. There's memory constraints about how much art we can have, and how much texture space we can use. Those of you playing on 32-bit systems are already feeling the pain. As much as we can, we want to change the visual, like every time a major change is made to the item, like a major upgrade. Visual effects will change though, to reflect the enhancement or enchantment, so that it sparkles, or has particle trails, or flames, ice, whatever.

CS: B is the one who has to figure out how to make it all work. If you have specific ideas on how to change things in crafting, I'll refer you to 'Clutch'.

RG/LB: The Chaotic Lady Amber Raine asks the next question. "Will our vendors be able to both sell and buy?"

SL: It's something we want. It doesn't currently fit. We have it ready for you to set prices and everything to stock and sell from vendors. For you to set the vendor to then turn around and buy things, is a little more complicated. You're setting parameters of how many will you buy, what will you pay. We want to do it. It's a Stretch Goal. I think it really will help the player economy. Right now, that's a wish list.

RG/LB: Canterbury asks, "B, can we have variations of recipes to ensure that people's items they make look different with some visual distinction?"

B: Now we're back to the previous question of how much equity we will bear. Do we restrict ourselves from creating a new design item? We don't have a visual. We have to have a visual to create a new bearing of it. The good thing about equipment is, we have our dye system. We have an ability of changing colors on it. (not catching all of it, just before 48:44) We'd like everything to be as unique as it can, it's just a resource and a time constraint. If we had the designs in, where we could create all these new types of armor, but it's the art that really takes time.

RG/LB: Could I ask you something a little deeper than that? The color palette is vast. Technically, how is it going to work? Is there going to be one hue zone, multiple hue zones, Then from a recipe standpoint, how do you personally imagine it will happen if I want to have a little more colorful armor? Is it going to be the blacksmith that does that? Do you go over to the dyeing station to add some lacquer or something?

B: Yeah, currently our dye system supports three different colors. The key with that question and armor is traditionally, you can dye cloth and leather in a different way than you dye metal. You can permanently dye cloth and leather, and maybe chain and other metal temporarily, so you'd have to reapply, so the key is, do things behave differently. We have to cross the line between art and programming, but I think the armor's been developed with that in mind, shaders developed with that in mind, we're just going to have to cross those. But I did a dye design on one document thinking about that. One thing we definitely want to avoid is for cloth and leather will be dyed after the fact. What you don't want to get in is that someone has 75 different colors of cloth. They're dying one piece, then going to this, then going to this. I get it that originally, you would have been doing that. We're going to dye it after the fact. You're going to get your cloth armor done, and then you're going to dye it.

RG/LB: That makes a lot of sense. Here's a question fore Starr. "How do we expect to address the inevitable trade hub? A small number of cities will become the defacto trading hub where commerce always happens." The suggestion from Aaron Swordmaster was, "Will there be location specific advantages to even the crafting moment?" His example is kind of funny. 'Having to sit under a waterfall to make a great loot.' I can throw out one example from yesterday. The 'Fires in Hilt' - we have one specific map where it is the only fires hot enough to mutate one particular resource type in the game. Any other thoughts on that previously or in real time?

SL: We haven't' given it a ton of thought but yes, we can design real time. I like the idea of having some very rare material or items that can only be made in specific locations, or even specify times of day, times of the year, and the rarest thing, like it has to be the hair of the unicorn slain on a full moon night'.

RG/LB: We have talked about that in resources. That's kind of classic Ultima, to say that Mandrake or Nightshade would only grow moonlit nights in the swamps. I think the interesting thing to point out here is to point out that crafting could have the same thing; that is not only on the astronomical demand. I presume, B, it's pretty easy to put a hook into the recipe system that says, 'latitude, longitude, nearness of a Lunar Rift, could be another check-mark required on the recipe.

B: Yeah, the great thing of having a role-simulation that we're doing and putting so much effort in that you want to have hooks in the system everywhere. We have real time, and we're simulating the day, and simulating these particular things. You need to be at the top of the mountain with a certain thing to produce that greatest weapon. I think that you want location basted crafting, and location based gathering and I think any aspect of it. One thing prototyping one of my maps was having that I knew on a certain day the sun set right here and the angle came down and this certain thing happened. As we get the maps more developed, and we get some of that stuff down, there's a timer behind the scenes of happening, making it easy to hook into that for every aspect of the game, whether it's something as simple as something spawning at day or at night, or getting some time and region based spawns in there. I think that's definitely going to be key to making these zones evolve and feel alive, is if they're pretty dynamic. I think this is really exciting.

SL: I think we could do, if for some reason, this crafting hub issue became an issue, there's some interesting things we could do, piling on to that with location, region, doing things like saying, 'The town of Owl's Head is known for it's milling and carpentry, and so in the public crafting station area, that is the best crafting location for those two kinds of crafting in the world. Make sure that we don't have those all in one place; that they are spread out. It's Ultima-esque, like the city of Yew, and woodworking. I think that's something we could play on. We're getting close to the end, so I just wanted to talk about and review all the things we're going to be adding to crafting. We started off about how we're in this embryonic state with the system, how we're getting the foundational functionality in, but just to remind you of all the stuff we still want to be adding. Over time, things like Maker's Marks, so that when you make an item, in the data associated with that item, the tool tips, your name as a crafter is going to be added to that item. We may even do things like because items will have these loops that they go through, and you may have multiple people who make an item, maybe you might not only have the smith's name, but you might also have the enchanter's name who comes back later and adds magic. So, you have both their names, and maybe there's this list of Makers associated with a really powerful item has like this history of Makers. That's going to be really cool, and reinforce when you find those items in the world, you're going to see. "Oh look, it's a sword made by Starr, and enchanted by B." You'll be all, "Oh cool," then you're going to find those people. That's a cool thing. The Events thing we talked about earlier, events that are happening during crafting, skill checks, and crafting skills, we'll be checking skills while you're in there, so that's going to make crafting more dynamic. It's not going to be this, "Works every time." We're going to be adding data in the recipe book about 'How to Craft', and from a stylistic standpoint, Richard and I have been brainstorming, and what we wanted to do is basically have some generalized instructions at the beginning of the book, but then for each School some specific instructions, but the illustrations that go with it would be this medieval wood-cut style. It would be a view of sawing the logs and banging on the anvil and so we think it will have a cool period feel to it while still being instructional, which it currently is not. We're going to be doing that improvement to the crafting book. We're going to be adding more crafting types. Right now we don't even have Alchemy and Cooking, and those are going to be coming out. Soon you'll be able to make potions and dyes, food to eat and drink, and of course alcohol (Starr makes a face with 'thumbs up' at 58:44) that has pros and cons. All that to say that there's a whole lot of stuff coming down the pike for crafting, so we're just at the very beginning.

CS: I wanted to slip in one thing since we didn't do any real deep tech talk. I know there's a few tech guys out there who always ask me questions. One thing that you guys aren't seeing that is going on behind the scenes for the next Release, is up until this Release all the item stuff has really been - it's not on the character, it's really been on the Server, but it's been stored more in a text opaque form where the Server doesn't know what it means. This next Release is when we're actually moving that so now the Server controls all inventory, and it knows what it means to have this specific sword, and that sword will have a unique ID. That sword is different from any other sword and we can store additional data on it. That is a big thing to unblock a lot of the stuff that we're talking about, so we can have Makers' Marks, this sword is different from that sword, and while they look like the same on the surface, we actually are tracking each and every one differently and uniquely on the Server. That's also another big part in terms of player trading. We had somebody who was able to hack and make a sword and informed us of it, which we already knew that and we'd put that in the forums. We knew that was possible. We like to be moving to the Server side of things. It's important in building the economy, to make sure that we are tracking all that stuff and not you guys. Anyway, that's all the stuff that's going on behind the scenes. It is a huge, huge task. You guys will probably see zero results of what actually happened. Just to let you know, that's going on and that's something that will open up all the stuff we're talking about here, in terms of history for items, and who owns it. Who made it? Where was it made? What forge was it made at, and all that stuff.

Richard gives the Disclaimer one more time.

Dallas reads the Prize Winners.

Everyone says thank you and the Hangout ends. (RG is in a killer Pirate disguise)

 

Thanks Fireangel !

 

Fireangel you are officially awesome. Thanks!

 

You're quite welcome. Some are more troublesome to hear than others. I like to get the information out!

 

You rock!
Thanks a lot Fireangel!

 

Once again, many thanks

 

Much thanks, m'lady!

 

Thank you Fire Angel! Passed it along

http://www.thecaverns.net/Wordpress/a-couple-of-transcripts-by-fireangel/

 

Awesome, even though I watched the session this is a great resource for ongoing reference!