Make the game better: Crafting Grind

With the attention being placed on making the game better, more attractive to backers and new players, and polishing existing systems, here's a wall of text on crafting (and my final wall of text post for the day)

Crafting is a grind, plain and simple. I'd like to turn gear into more of a commodity, something that's easily created and equally easy to leave the economy.

1. Increase the amount of resources we get from harvesting nodes. A tier 5 copper node doesn't reward much more copper than a tier one node - it should be significantly more.
2. Change meticulous collection to be instant instead of waiting for the crafting animation another 1-5 times, slowing down the process.
3. Dramatically increase the rate at which gear gets worn out.
4. Allow more than 3 options for Masterworking and Enchanting at high level - make it easier to replicate the gear we just lost.
5. Repairing a masterworked item should require silver, and repairing an enchanted item should require gold.
6. Make the repair skill useful. Completely reinvent the whole process. Give a crafter the option to repair the current durability (easy at low level) and the option to repair the max durability (hard to do). COTOs increase the chance of a successful repair.

Crafting events or mini-games should also be added to make crafting not just watching a progress bar.

Artifacts...these should come in pieces that need to be reassembled by crafters into various weapons/armor. An artifact hilt should need to be repaired by a GM Blacksmith, and then can be assembled into any sword. Crafters can mix and match different staff pieces, hilts, blades, handles, and other components to make a variety of higher end gear. In a nutshell, artifacts are just rare crafting components rather than completed items that just need to be master worked / enchanted.

 

I like a lot of your ideas. Great suggestions.

 

We need to get away from Random and maybe use minigames, super rare stuff or whatever to create MC or ENC more reliable (maybe have an risk reward minigame for the extend)

Right now, excuse my english, it is level skill to X and then dumb luck. And that is meh.

This is push the button and as soon the fat lady sings your lot is drawn, the dice rolls out and so on.

There are plenty of example from Off and Online games about balancing the scales and keeping the pressure steady and so on that are fun and make you feel as if you accomplished more than having dumb pure luck you got it right.

-Reducing the numbers of high end items.

NOT by rare spawn/drop crafting items (who are then farmed, really expensive and only for the 1% players who can then afford them) but by making time an factor, so like the highest tier items taking one hour, one day, one week whatever for the crafter to finnish (aka leave the components in an pocket dimension and the timer runs) and only one item at a time.

This way there is an point having more than one crafter around, the wealth is spread and so on.

Rethink the way crafting exp is fueled, right now if you want to level smithing you mine (and chop trees), if you want to raise carpentry you chop trees (and mine) and so on, there is no way around that gathering is mandatory for raising skill in any area of crafting (or you dump a %%%%load of RLmoney into cotos to sell for gp and buy insane amounts of raw materials.)

I am not versed enough in making games to think a solution there, maybe there is none, but as it is sadly is kinda not optimal.

Crafting, like Adv skill, should have one or two specialisations that boost the area they are used for, yes i know alts and so on, but no matter what, people make alts anyways.

A game function that buys up random number of items at random times, unclogging the markets (needs to know average price for items to make it not buy overpriced stuff) to add it to the loot table (I see that direct sale to npc is iffy but this solution should circumvent the problem of crafting for the npc vendor)

I know that crafting needs to be "slowed" or we end up to the neck in things, but the way it is done should be geared at painless, not at how to annoy people away from crafting.

More creative gold sinks than fuels, serious.

I think plenty of the people here have plenty of ideas how to create goldsinks that are fun to use without breaking economy or causing inflation, ideally something of minor convience for higher levels, something that is not frustratingly game breaking if one does not buy it. (teleport scrolls an example, they are imho an good blueprint for that the way they are done.)

 

You possibly are not aware that resource nodes are not always the same Tier as the area they are in? In say a Tier 4 area, not every single resource node is Tier 4 in the area.

Even a Tier 4 copper node gives you a lot more than a Tier 1 node.

 

The easy way to tell is by how much XP they give you:
T0 - 10xp (mostly for skinning rabbits and deer)
T1 - 50xp (reagent nodes in most scenes will only give this much)
T2 - 100xp
T3 - 200xp
T4 - 300xp
T5 - 500xp

 

While not bad ideas, implementing these would swing the pendulum much in the crafters' favor, meaning more folks would spend more time crafting when they would prefer to be adventuring, which isn't healthy in the long term.

 

Agree with everything you said, except mini games. Mini games quickly become a huge chore when crafting in any significant quantity. They are either too easy and become a pointless time sink barrier, or they are too hard and just add more frustration to the process. Also fwiw Tier 5 nodes do give significantly more tier 2 materials than a lower tier node.

I will also add:

Refining raw materials takes an ABSURD amount of time. This should be reduced tenfold at least. Even if it just means increasing the components by ten and then giving ten times as much refined materials. The refining sub skills should apply to everything in those trees, not just the base materials. Also cooking needs refining sub skills desperately as well.

 

The best producer exp gains are not from gathering, but from making high level recipes. Making dragon stew, astrolabes, houses and the really high level stuff with a high base skill for exceptional chance is the best way to make producer exp.

 

like mac said, I can pull a lot of XP by just crafting a ton of recall scrolls, teleport scrolls and wolf/bear/boar heads which all of us have access to with ease.

 

I'd love to see Pie charts of where producer experience has come from up to this point.

 

Shopping is simply too painful in SotA - I'd like to see the consumer experience improved. Finding reasonably priced gear with the attributes I want can consist of spending hours browsing every vendor in New Britannia. I have been leveling crafting myself basically because I don't want to engage in that activity anymore. It's just not pleasant trying to find decent vendors for gear that aren't prohibitively expensive.

And now you suggest making equipment wear out even faster? I have to repair 3-4x per play session as it is and I'm 80 in the weapon/armor preservation skills.

I miss SWG's merchant system. They effectively had regional economies. I think SotA could take a page from that book. In a nutshell, you could search the galaxy for vendors with specific gear, but you still had to travel to those places to actually buy the gear. I just don't get why more games don't take a page from the SWG book. It is hands down the most successful experiment in sandbox MMO crafting/merchant systems.

 

I like this idea. It has a lot of potential to limit the supply side and make crafting a bit more deliberate. Right now, I generally craft 10-20 pieces of gear, hope for the RNG gods to give me the stats that I want, and then give away the stuff I don't like.

The most copper/iron ore I've ever got from a node, not counting meticulous collections, has been two. Gold/silver my record is 3 from a node, again ignoring meticulous collections. If you know of a place that drops a lot more than 1-2 copper ore per node or more than 3 silver, please tell me and you'll be my best friend forever

 

None of those raw ores matter, the ones that drop tin are worth more than gold and silver.

Seriously, have you seen the price of tin? It’s almost the new COTO.

 

i noticed this too! tin was around 200 gold each! i’m assuming its due to a lower supply of tin in the game...

 

I’m just waiting for them to add an option to pay for lot taxes in tin. Seriously...