The "no need of bad crafters" issue

That is what you waste time and grind painfully for.. To be a GM and have everyone want YOUR armor.

 

I get your point, but problems arise when you are not "the GM": you are "just a GM" between a million others who can craft exactly the same thing, only with a different name on it.

 

There is also proximity. There may be many other GM crafters, but if I've just died and have been stripped, then the closest most conveniently located vendor will be one I buy from, and that isn't always in town. Not all crafters were very good at keeping thier vendors stocked, either, so for consumables like potions and such, I'd learn the location of vendors not only with reasonable prices, but vendors where the crafter always made sure to keep the vendor stocked and well organized so things were easy to find.

There were many ways for crafters to stand out, and they were the most successful crafters.

 

So you want crafting dumbed down so everyone is equal, no matter if they have .1 smithing or 100 smithing? That's ridiculous.

Edit: I read your post wrong. Apologies.


What would your solution to that be?

 

I don't think anyone is calling for "dumbing down" crafting. Although its been brought up, I don't think most people have an issue with more skilled players making better armor. What we want to avoid is the "there is no reason to go to another blacksmith when there is a GM in town" issue.

Bring a Grandmaster smith takes dedication and practice, but this has to come at a price as well. You can craft something extremely valuable and powerful, or you can craft a bunch of run-of-the-mill items. Both will make you a profit, but unless you are putting the time and energy into a masterpiece, your chainmail isn't all that much better than a journeyman's suit (although you can probably make them in much less time). So why buy yours from a GM, when its the same as the journeyman? In fact, if a GM has the ability to place a maker's mark and a journeyman does not, it may be *better* for some players to seek out a journeyman; less evidence, so to speak.

But beyond end goods, lesser smiths are also very useful to a GM to make the small pieces that they just don't want to take the time to make. How many steel ingots does a GM need to make a sword? Several, by all indications. When they make a dozen swords a week, are they going to spend several hours smelting ore and making their own ingots? No, they will subcontract that work. Thus, lesser smiths have something to do.

Its all economics. Make the system feel alive by providing room for all levels of skill to enjoy the fruits of their labors.

 

I don't think there's an "easy" solution, though I keep my hopes high and I trust that Richard, Starr and the dev team will come up with something that works.

My thoughts are:
- It shouldn't be easy to become a GM, but it shouldn't be a yawnfest grinding process either.
- If you're not a GM you should still be able to profit, but not as much of course.

I agree and you make a valid point, but if non-GM gear is basically rubbish then I reckon people would rather run naked to the next vendor, if the closest one does not have GM level stuff - thus making non-GM crafters again useless which was my point.

 

GM make would be preferred, but if i were naked, I think I would still buy what ever i could get from the closest vendor, particularly if the distance to the next vendor is far. At that point, demand is high, and supply is low, so I'll take what I can get, in which case, being a beginning crafter out in the wilderness might be a better bet than being located in town.

 

This is kind of taking away from the old-school UO style feel but what if the items showed their stats like damage, strength, or something? This way the value of the item can be accuratly priced. If you cant afford a high strength weapon than you can opt to get something a little weaker. Even a GM crafter could fail to make the best crafted items this way. In addition to strength it could show durability. What if crafters could choose how they make the item and focus more of the craft on durability rather than strength and visa versa. Again, another way to place value based on the stats of the item.

 

I like all of your suggestions Cloned, but I don't think it solves the problem of players holding out to buy the best (GM made) gear.

This is the only way I see to make lesser smiths useful. I think that it would be complicated and difficult to implement though.

 

Not necessarily. I really don't want to make master craftsmen run to the local marketplace and look up everyone who has an ingot for sale, and buy these with whatever overhead the marketplace adds to the sales. That would be bad for their business.

Instead, I want craftsmen to be able to post bulk orders. For example, a GM armorer may know they need 1000 ingots to finish all of their armor for the month. They can post a single order that another craftsman could claim, and then work their tail off to fulfill. Alternatively, they could post 10 deeds for 100 ingots each that multiple craftsmen could fulfill. Either way, the gold woudl be paid upon successfully returning the ingots, either to a shop "dropbox" or the GM's merchant NPC.

So in effect, a bounty system for craft goods.

 

So why not have wholesalers (buy bulk, sell in lots, to retailers/individual item crafters) and perhaps expediters/caravaneers (arbitrage between locations)?

 

Probably also a good idea. One of the benefits I would like to see for guilds/fellowships/whatever is the ability to "get in good" with the travelling merchants, and have the option to have a standing order for so many each time they come to town. This would give you the ability to order something from a remote area that you do not directly have access to, but craftsmen in that area might be able to create to sell to the merchants guild. So PC -> NPC -> PC craft chains (or multiple PC, if people want to play those types of roles).

 

as a VERY Dedicated crafter, i can say that personally i want it to be very hard to become a 'good' crafter.
But whats good for the game? Well, not as easy as WoW, more like the UO system.

I see alot of people commenting that in UO, noone would by items NOT crafted by GM Blacksmith, which is simply not true ( in the early days of UO, that is ).

I know for a FACT, that you dont need to be GM Blacksmith to sell goods. At various levels , you are still able to make EXCEPTIONAL weapons and armor, which is no different than GM weapons.. its just that it doesnt have a name attatched to it.

Bottom line for me, i want crafting to be DIFFICULT and REWARDING, so that the work i put into it matters compared to people who dont put as much work into it.

Some people would call that selfish, but i could argue that its just as selfish to want crafting to " be easy " ( Or "useful at lower levels" ) just because some people want to be able to craft themselves instead of paying others, while not having to put much time into it.

 

Wouldn't be a solution that GM quality gear is just a few % better then non GM gear? Rich Adventurers will always pay top bucks to squeeze out the last few points and because fewer people would bother to become GM for just a few % the price one can charge for GM gear would be much higher.

Specialists buying from specialists so to say...

 

No, I don't buy this. Quality gear is quality gear. A GM smith might have a better probability of making an exceptional item, but an exceptional sword from a non GM smith should be just as exceptional as one made by a GM smith. Might take him 20 attempts to make it whereas it might only take the GM smith 5 attempts, but exceptional is exceptional.

 

So the only difference from a normal to a GM crafter would be the chance of higher profit and maybe a "Makers Mark"? Guess that could work as well. Not sure if thats enough incentive to put hour upon hour into becoming a GM. But I am not a crafter so I dont really know...

 

I love crafting.

I have to agree with the mindset that 'not everyone should be a crafter'. Crafting should require the same amount of time and be just as viable as pursuing magic or military arts.

When you 'lower the bar', it devalues crafting. Unfortunately, this is what crafting has become in many recent games.

Should anyone be able to get involved with and enjoy crafting? Absolutely! But should everyone easily be able to craft their own weapons and armour? I would say no.

Some great suggestions here - if you're a novice crafter - you could be filling an order of say 1000 iron ingots for a master blacksmith. Or heck, even better - maybe he's agreed to take you on as his apprentice, and has you make the pieces for when he finally assembles an exceptional armor for a wealthy knight.

 

The solution, IMO, is simple enough:

Have crafting work always produce a "servicable" output if it succeeds. A crafter can then attempt to *improve* his prior output and, depending on how good it was and his skill, will either scrap it, damage it, fail to upgrade, or upgrade to the next level. The time it takes to make an improvement depends on what 'level' the craft good was: it takes, maybe, 10 seconds to attempt to upgrade from "servicable" to "fair"; it should take *days* of real time to upgrade from "epic" to "legendary", and only the greatest of masters should even attempt it.

(You need to have at least a dozen 'qualities' along that spectrum)

I would even go so far as to say that to pass a certain quality level (near the higher end) the item needs to be customized for a specific buyer. (*Really* good armor or weapons are fitted to their users)

This way, the supply would get vanishingly small as the quality increases; the grandmasters would be in very high demand but have a very small output -- the newbies would produce fair goods at a good price in greater quantity, and in 'downtime' they can try their hands at making an exceptional quality good.

-- Coren

 

(A tought; "re-customizing" armor or weapons of high quality once fitted to someone else would make for a good smithing 'aftermarket'; make it about as difficult as an upgrade and you've got a system).

Also, what I've said above works for every craft; just call it 'purifying' for alchemy, and so on.

[edit] More thought occur; this would create a very nice market for mid-quality output made by mid-level crafters as they would make great timesavers for the high level crafters who could then concentrate on the "hard" part of the final few upgrades.

-- Coren

 

Another way to limit the amount of GM weapons is to make the cost of them high. Perhaps to craft them you need a special type of coal to forge them that can only be mined in a very dangerous location? What if that coal must then be refined by an achemist to eliminate more impurities? If the cost of the supplies needed to craft the GM weapons is high, the value of the product will be high enough and the rarity low enough that it may be better for most to just settle for a lower quality weapon.

I don't think the problem can be solved by simply adding resizing of armor or extra tiers of weapons/armors, but if you control the supply of the resources to such a degree that the high level players actually fight for it then that allows the GM's to profit from their high skill level while still keeping a large portion of the economy open to the non-GM crafters. This is also where Guilds come in. If the Guild has the craftsmen needed to support each other and the protection needed to survive the dangers of getting the materials then they are going to become the high end crafting guild. Can they flood the market with GM gear? Perhaps, but to what end? Why devalue their most valuable product?

That vorpal halberd? 10,000 gold. Do you have 10k just laying around after paying for the house tax, potions, reagents, etc?
That regular halberd? 100 gold. -- Gimmie.