The "no need of bad crafters" issue

Discussion in 'Crafting & Gathering' started by Bulveigh, Jul 12, 2013.

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  1. tekkamansoul

    tekkamansoul Avatar

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    I think the only thing that would make any difference would be to, as suggested above, make low-level crafting items utility for high-level. Something common enough that anyone can really craft it, but lower level players can maintain an economy selling it to higher levels. Keeps the gold flowing, at least.
     
  2. Owain

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    I've done a bit of crafting in my time, but I don't see how a high level crafter benefits from getting items from low level crafters . I always employed vertical integration in what I crafted. It was faster, cheaper, more convenient, and easier. Why would I want to use a process that is slower, more expensive, less convenient, and harder?
     
  3. Fox Cunning

    Fox Cunning Localization Team

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    Hello gents.

    I see many good ideas and many comparisons to "real-world" situations.
    I think there is one problem which renders this kind of comparison impossible: in the real world "grandmasters" are very few, while in a virtual environment everyone who invests enough time can become just as good as anyone else.

    Give it enough time and you will have thousands of Van Goghs producing the same masterpieces, while in the real world there is only one Van Gogh and a limited number of his pantings.
    Give it more time and you will have 90% of the painters producing masterpieces, with only a few novices (i.e. new players).

    The result would be a low enough price for grandmaster-level products, and there will be plenty of them, so why bother buying anything else?
    This is regardless of the actual utility offered by a crafted item (which is why I chose paintings as an example: they do not offer different stats).

    I observed pretty much the same when I used to play UO. Literally thousands of grandmaster-made items, and nobody would even bother trying to sell anything else.
     
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  4. enderandrew

    enderandrew Legend of the Hearth

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    If gear does have increasing stats with level, then this issue somewhat goes away. I'm currently playing SWTOR. If I can craft armorings for a level 35 player, then there is a market for that amongst players currently leveling. If all armors were the same, but the best looking ones could only be crafted by a GM, then anything else is worthless.
     
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  5. Myth2

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    What if armor usefulness directly related to armor skill? SotA doesn't strike me as the kind of game to make wearing armor a skill, but imagine for a moment that armor wearing were a skill.

    If armor made by a lvl 50 smith (arbitrary numbers purely for example) provided the best protection/encumbrance ratio for an adventurer with lvl 50 heavy armor skill, then we would achieve a small market for all levels of armor while also linking the large supply of surplus GM armor to the demands of the ever-growing pool of GM adventurers. Better yet, new blacksmiths and adventurers would find themselves working together to level, trading sub-GM armor for sub-GM lootpacks.
     
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  6. Owain

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    There are no levels, only skills. In the armor making skill tree, I image a novice armorsmith could make leather armor (unless that is a tailoring skill). With more skill, you could make studded leather. More skill, ring mail, then chain mail, than banded steel, and so forth until with skill mastery, plate mail. This doesn't even consider materials. Low skill - iron armor. High skill, Mithril, baby!

    An armor wearing skill? I'm not seeing it. If I put on a bullet proof vest, the protection I get from that vest is passive, and has nothing to do with my skill. In the case of plate armor, do I have the strength and endurance necessary to handle the extra load? That would be the limiting factor, I would think.
     
  7. Myth2

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    You misunderstand. I mean an individual with 50 blacksmithing skill, or the equivalent to that. Still, the numbers are arbitrary. The problem that the OP brought up is that with blacksmithing as is, there is nothing to push some players towards anything besides the best armor available to them. The armor making skill tree doesn't address that, which is why a hypothetical skill has been used. I personally don't like the idea of an Armorwearing skill, however the idea of using a variable to restrict which armor you can wear effectively appeals (bullet proof vests are one thing, but moving in platemail requires practice). Examples of this variable could be an Armorwearing skill, but I'd rather see attributes (str, dex, etc.), other skills, or different variables fill the hole.

    To reiterate, I'm suggesting a limiting variable that will restrict younger players from wearing the best armor, as a solution for the "no need of bad crafters" issue. For clarity and example, this could be a str requirement for agapite, a total combat level (combined combat skills' values) requirement, or another skill requirement.
     
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  8. Owain

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    We don't know enough about the skill tree to say that. Chris touched on it in the Magic dev chat today. Sure you can wear full plate armor, but that comes with a weight and maybe a dexterity penalty which reduces your ability to avoid being hit to offset the benefit for absorbing more damage once you are hit. So what is "Best" might mean different things to different people, and someone who dual wields daggers might be better served by light chain or even leather armor, which affords them the ability to evade, while someone in a Tank style of play would go for heavy armor and shields, relying on improved damage absorption.
     
  9. Montesquieu Paine

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    Specialization and focus. If you were putting the gem-tile mosaic inlay on the wooden box, you might want to have one person creating the box, one person the gem-tiles, one person the glue, and you provide the superior craftsmanship that organizes and finalized the assembly.

    Master painters had schools of apprentices who made the materials (pigments, canvases), did the first roughs (charcoal lines), filled in the base tints, and even polished the final aspect.

    Admittedly, there is a huge difference between the Thomas Kinkade and Michaelangelo approaches to producing 'works'; the first is seen as more businesslike, the second as more artistic.

    A process which can be made independent of a 'single actor' approach, can become faster, less expensive, more convenient, and easier, with capital (specialized tools), labor, or a combination of the two. Innovation can improve a process across a group, far faster than the same group can uniformly progress to higher levels of skill.
     
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  10. Cloned

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    I figured I'd chime in here. I played UO from the beginning, mastered every skill in the game, and did so while spending very little gold. Smithing I GM'd by mining all the ore myself, same with tinkering, carpentry, and tailoring. Seems to me many people just want to be lazy, if you are spending too much gold on a profession that you can legitimately get all the resources for without spending a gold peice than you are doing it wrong. I was always making a profit selling crappy wares to NPC merchants. Im talking 100% profit. All my tools were tinkered so there was no overhead.

    The only profession that I really had to spend money was alchemy. If there was a way I could grow reagents at my house that would be fantastic.
     
  11. Lunar

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    A lot of people seem to be missing the fact that this can be played competly single player, meaning if i felt like playing just by myself and never seeing anyone, I would still be able to reach max level crafting, I don't think there should be too much of a problem leveling it.

    Also in the 3 month video, when hes talking to the bartender, he said they could use more comfortable chairs, but not like that throne of bone, that right there is the "no quests given part" but to me it sounds like "If you want to make chairs with cushins, I'll buy them"
     
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  12. Grogan

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    Excellent post and questions...

    There are two problems that any crafting system would need to overcome.

    1) Players don't want to pay 1 million gold for something. In the real world, when you get "the best" items, they cost "a lot". Players don't have time or patience for that. If there's a great item out there, they want it now. This is an example of why MMO economies are so horrible. It's because the developers use vendors and gold sinks to try to balance the supply and demand of items to the player's liking. The economy is arbitrary and bad for crafters that can't create the very best of the best items.

    In short, because the best items (GM) are so easy (relatively speaking) to create and sell, no one wants to waste their time and money using anything else.

    2) MMO items typically increase in price because the more something costs the better it is to use. While this makes SOME sense, there are certainly examples where this makes NO sense.

    Let’s look at weapons. In real life, you can kill someone with a sharp piece of anything. You don’t need a GM Sword of Vorpal Slicing to do the job. In fact you don’t even need a sword at all.

    But in MMO’s you NEED the fancy sword to do your job. You can’t use the cheap stuff for pvp or anything else. It’s not competitive, and in most cases it’s not even possible to do what you’re trying to do unless you have the more rare and expensive items.

    The solution to both these problems is to stop doing that.
     
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  13. God

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    I hate to go back to this, but what was the problem with the way uo did it?
    IRL, if I have a choice between something made by a novice or a master crafter, I will always go with the master's item.

    There were many GM's in UO, and everyone bought GM armor.. So there had to be some way to get there, right?

    Being a GM should come with it's perks.. Aka everyone wanting YOUR armor.

    Why does EVERYTHING have to be equal? If everything you make is valuable starting at %1 smithing, what's the point in going to GM?
    .. It's sad because the more I read these boards, the more I'm realizing that people want it to be pretty easy for them, and fun in ONLY the way "I" desire!
     
  14. Cloned

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    Yes I agree. The GM Crafters worked their butt's off to get where they got and thus deserve what they got from their wares. In addition, if low level crafting was valuable than everyone (or most everyone) would just make their own crafter character since it would be easy to do and crafting would be much less profitable anyway.

    As a huge fan of crafting, this games desirability will decrease dramatically for me if it goes to easy mode like most MMOs.
     
  15. Krovakin

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    I agree with some of the ideas people had on keeping the low level crafters happy.

    I think it has been touched on a couple times, but having usable items for low level crafters to make would be beneficial. In some games, low level crafters would make gears, spindles, nails... ECT... These things would be good for them to make money.

    The key to making this a well-oiled machine is to make it so the cost to sell them to vendors is low and the cost to sell them to players is higher without making them more expensive than buying them from npc vendors. In short make it so one player will have to buy nails etc... From lower players if they don't want to pay the inflated price in the npc vendors.

    Another method which I would agree to is to make it so once an item is very low level for you to make, then you can't make that item anymore. This will not be good in some people's eyes because they will not like having crafting abilities taken away from them. But the same principal applies to crafting in real life! A carpenter in real life knows how to cut mill and plane wood... however MOST carpenters will buy the wood they need already made into boards and then make their furniture etc... This could work in SOTA. For instance, to get to a higher level you need to make boards nails spindles, legs etc... But once you can make very good chairs, doors, and other furniture you can no longer make boards and would have to buy them from lower level crafters.

    My last idea is to have a cool down. So if you want to make wood boards for instance from logs, they could put in a requirement that you can only make X amount of boards an hour / day. This way if someone wanted to make a lot of furniture or a large item, they would have to buy the materials from a lower crafter (since higher crafters would want their boards) if they wanted to make a large item faster.

    Anyways these are my thoughts...
     
  16. Browncoat Jayson

    Browncoat Jayson Legend of the Hearth

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    I think the OP reasoning is good, but Im not sure of the implementation. The issue is that, in some games, there is NO player market for crafters until you have mastered the craft. Thus, you have GM items or no items at all. Most games scale this, so that you can only craft certain pieces of equipment at certain skill levels; however, to satisfy the crafter, the item being crafted higher has to be obviously better than those at lower skill. Thus, players have no desire for items created by lower skilled crafters.

    I think a master should be recognized in some ways, but I don't necessarily think that having their gear be over and above any other tier is the way to go. Instead, master craftsmen tend to have the luxury of fine tuning their craft, making it more valuable without necessarily being better. This can lend itself to more durability, as noted, but it also modifies the appearance of the item, making it look better, armor may fit better so encumber its wearer less, and of course a master craftsman can attach their Maker's Mark to an item, which shows who made it. Free advertising on every item!

    A way to make the climb to master craftsman less punishing is to replace the need to "vendor dive". For example, many MMOs require you to buy ingots from a smith NPC (or mine it yourself) and turn them into metal bars, sell them back to the vendor (usually for a loss) and do it again until you "level up" your craft skill. Some recipes will require those smaller pieces, but the top end will generally have their own pieces that cannot easily be made by a lesser worker.

    So what about giving some benefit to those master craftsmen to use the material that they "grew up on", and continue to need those from other aspiring craftsmen? An armorer who has mastered his craft *can* spend hours pounding out steel and forging rings to make the chain portion of his latest creation, but generally this is a waste of his time. those chain rings are tedious and don't sell well individually, but he could commission them in bulk, which would give other craftsmen something to do, while he spends the dozen or so hours needed to carefully shape the breastplate to which they will be attached. The master craftsman will gain all the recognition and fame for their skilled creation, but at the same time other craftsmen did contribute to the process. Now if bulk orders like this could be given to specific people, such as apprentices, it would encourage tradeskill guilds, and if they could be posted to the community it encourages growth of local tradeskillers.
     
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  17. Krovakin

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    This is a good idea to keep the lower crafters in buisness.... they could also put an order system into place where what is needed by someone can be posted on a crafters news board and the person could make them and in game mail them to the individual... to stop 10 people from sending one person his request, they can have an "accept this order" feature on the news board. This would put a "Being Fulfilled" status on the message so people know someone has claimed it... Then they can use a COD mail feature to recieve the payment when the items are shipped.
     
  18. Browncoat Jayson

    Browncoat Jayson Legend of the Hearth

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    Exactly, something like a crafting extension of a bounty system.
     
  19. Vaevectis

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    Well, as far the the "most games don't have a market for lower lvl crafted goods", I find that a week argument.
    If you played "Lord of the Rings Online", you'll find that all crafting professions (except for maybe farming) are really profitable at all levels. Why? because everything they make, at all tier levels, is usefull for people at the level the item is made for, while higher level crafting is more profitable because higher level players make more money to spend or crafted goods (due to larger drops, larger vender/quest rewards, etc).
    What I mean by profitable is that you can sell the items at a price notably higher than what you could of sold the raw materials used to make them, and when I'm talking about selling and buying, I'm always talking about doing so with players, except where stated.
    In SotA, I don't believe there are levels, but there are skill levels. A simple integration is to make crafted goods require specific skills to use, while higher grade crafted goods require higher levels of skill.
    I suppose it's difficult to see how you would need higher level cloth armor skill to use higher level cloth armor, than again, it's also difficult to see how higher level cloth armor can do a better job mitigating damage from a fireball or an ogre's club, or make you smarter and allow you to cast more powerfull fireballs. I suppose people say its all 'magic', in which case a skill can be made necessary to use the item to its full potential, otherwise you wouldn't get it's stat bonuses and maybe have other penalties, possibly even making it where you can't use it.

    The stat requirement system for crafted goods makes it easy for lower level crafters to make money as long as people either reroll new characters (on a different server if say there is 1 character per server) or if new people join the game, but they can only make money based on how much the population that their goods target can afford, hence why higher level crafting is more profitable than lower level, which is how it's supposed to be.

    If the player base matures and the vast majority of players are now highly skilled and so only looking for high-skill requiring goods, that might make it harder for a new player to profit on the economy as no one is interested in the lower level goods he's making.
    A solution to this would be with the component system that they did say is going to be in SotA.
    If, for example, you're an armorsmith, you don't just grab iron ingits and turn it into chainmail. You first process it into other components, like chain links, as well as make other components that might use other ingrediants, each of these things skills you up, and once all the components are made, you can then consume them to make your chainmail armor, giving you another skillup.
    At low level, this armor is not very usefull and so not many people interested in buying it, so all you can do is break it down and get back some of the components (or raw materials) to make more.
    This is basically what SotA has in mind, and by itself, it would work for the purpose of skilling up your trade skill enough untill you can start making money off of it.
    Another thing you can do though is making it where higher level, higher quality armor don't simply use higher level materials to make, but use a complex web of components to make, from various crafting skill levels. Someone crafting said armor can simply acquire all the raw materials himself and make all the components and eventually the armor, this would be the most time consuming but least costly means to make the armor (remember, in these games, and in life, time = money), or he cane buy some of the components off of other players, saving himself time while increasing his costs.
    This gives incentive for higher skill level crafters to buy components from lower level crafters, so in the first example, the novice armorsmith can just make components, and instead of making a crappy chainmail armor no one wants, he can sell those components at say cost + %10 to %20. He won't get as much skill up per unit of raw material, but since he's making money off of it, he can just buy more to make more, while the higher level your crafting skill is, the more crafting components you can craft in order to make the best stuff, more ways to make money.
     
  20. Fox Cunning

    Fox Cunning Localization Team

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    You have basically answered your own question. The problem is that basically if you are not a GM crafter and you still craft you are either wasting time or grinding panfully and in the most boring and non-profitable way.

    I've played UO for years, and I've played LOTRO as well. I kind of liked crafting in LOTRO and everything has its use there, but it's still far from perfect.

    EDIT: Another point which came to my mind. IRL, you can't always choose the "GM" crafter because you may not be able to afford it. You would rather have your shirt hand-crafted by Valentino, but chances are you will shop at Primark instead.
    In a MMO, eventually everyone will be filthy rich, i.e. millions of thousands of hundreds of billions rich, so Primark would be a desert there.
     
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