Sales Crafting vs. Creative Crafting

The notes on crafting in Kickstarter Update #20 make me happy... mostly. (And many thanks for the conversation with Warren Spector.)

I particularly appreciate that someone on the design team supports the position that crafting needs to "stand on its own" rather than exist only to service other interests (combat/economy).

As I've been observing for a while now (http://flatfingers-theory.blogspot.com/2005/06/creative-crafting-vs-sales-crafting.html), I believe there are plenty of gamers -- probably even more for an Ultima-style game than others -- who enjoy crafting for its own sake. The classic article "I Want To Bake Bread" by "Sie Ming" underlines that this is a real playstyle interest.

Unlike "sales crafters" who mass-produce products only as a means to an end (winning an economic competition), "creative crafters" craft because they actually like crafting! For these gamers, figuring out the rules by which interesting new kinds of things can be added to the world is highly entertaining in and of itself. I'm glad it appears that one of the SotA designers is thinking about this distinction.

But it's also exactly why I question the design choice to make crafting and adventure skills independent. I disagree with the decision that crafting and adventuring skills won't both draw from the same pool of advancement points.

As seen in other MMORPGs, this design choice leads to two undesirable effects. One is that it sends the message that crafting is not valued as highly as adventuring. When players don't have to choose between creative and destructive abilities, they are guaranteed to max out both.

The result is that people who craft because they specifically like creative game content get swamped by those who pick up crafting skills simply because they can. This devalues crafting. (Actually it devalues both -- it's just more important to crafters.)

The other negative result is a mechanical one: people who only care about crafting as a means to some other end -- primarily Achievers -- will crank out every possible item as quickly as possible. This leaves creative-crafters with no value in the game economy. Being good at making new kinds of things (because that's fun) is pointless when a bunch of Achievers have already grinded out every inch of the possibility space. (This only applies to the online version of SotA, obviously.)

After over a decade of millions of people playing MMORPGs, I think the evidence is pretty good that giving crafting skills their own advancement points tends to drive out the creative crafters. When anyone can do something, everyone will, and it stops being special for those who like it particularly. I hope the decision to have separate advancement point pools for crafting and adventuring skills can be reconsidered.

I have some other suggestions, primarily on the brilliance of how crafting resources were handled in Star Wars Galaxies , but this note is already too long. Thanks for considering these comments.

 

You pose several interesting points, here. As a fellow player, I can surely see the value in rarity and people having an investment in skills outside of my own. If separate advancements point pools were reconsidered, however, I wonder if it would cascade into other game mechanics.

For example, if you limited a player to say '7 skills', be they a combination of adventuring or crafting, you may also have to reconsider allowing people more than one online character. Otherwise, the cost of choosing these skills is not only rarity but perhaps exclusion of content.

Your points, to me, are not diminished--although I think it would be nice to allow all players a crafting tree.

As a suggestion someone from Portalarium might have more to say on your concerns in one of the hangouts? You could always pose your question there; they seem to get to a majority of folks.

 

Certainly there are no perfect answers when you're trying to design systems to be used by multiple people.

As a practical matter I'd have no objection to basic crafting abilities being available to all player characters. SWG tried the route of defining skills so that players required help from each other, and while I think that was an experiment worth trying and partially successful, I also think it was one of the justifications for the post-launch emphasis on adding combat-specific content over everything else. Letting everyone have basic abilities across the range of playstyle interests should -- in theory -- help resolve the frustration of needing other players while just getting into the game.

At higher levels, though, I think specialization can be enjoyable for players and useful for multiplayer game world designers. This lets players find the kinds of play activities they most enjoy, so that they *want* to contribute the products of that enjoyment to other players. (Call it a supply-side model of multiplayer entertainment delivery. )

In a MMORPG, though, the success of this depends on someone with design power really understanding (and, if possible, personally enjoying) what makes crafting fun for people who prefer creative play over destructive play. I'm pretty sure I've seen combat designers assigned to design crafting systems -- no one should have been surprised when they cranked out a "crafting system" that was actually a grindy, deterministic, combat-support system so that they could hurry up and get back to doing what they really liked.

I'm hopeful that crafting in SotA will be designed to allow creative people to demonstrate *craft* in all the fantastic connotations of that word. Crafting should be designed to enable *craftsmanship* first and foremost -- not mass-production to score points in an economic sub-game.