If you are worried about the mini games getting to easy there are two ways to handle it. say you hit the craft button and it launches an appropriately themed tetris clone. if you beat the first level you created the item. For each additional level you beat it the item gets a random bonus. For high level items you can crank the difficulty way up. The other way to go is change mini games so they don't get old and you can control hardness. Say the first level is wak a mole(hammering imperfections out of the steel), then when you try to create "class two" weapons the game switches to pole position(sharping blade on grinding wheel doging imperfections in the grinding stone)

I can see what Drigovas is saying, an open ended crafting system would be awsome, but the mechanics to it would be far too complex and since this is for an MMO I don't want to over-do things aand end up with a kick-a$$ game that no one could play. You have to remember, this would be one of many different system. However I think you could have something really cool for a single player smithing game. And yes, smithing is tedious, war is horrific, and zombies would be a catastrophe, but video games dont always reflect realism, they tend to glorify jobs that lack in real life, that's why people play sims. Everything is made easier and goes faster.

And Talroth my ideas for mini-games aren't far from what you're suggesting, and stonemetal, the sharpening of different weapons I think could be implemented as a way of giving any weapon a temporary bonus. I'f you've ever played dark cut the basis is that you're a medieval docter and you have to perform different tasks by moving your mouse from point to point and cutting open sores etc. BUT dark cut also shows you what to do with little stars. In this system the game would start of with little indicators of what to do, but after you'd stopped apprenticing the guides would go away. Then you would have to pay attention to stress points while hammering etc.

I vastly prefer the idea of having awesome weapons come from serious effort to the idea of awesome weapons coming from the bellies of lions, so a good crafting system is important.

Talroth makes a good point about absentee crafting, but because it's so easy, EvE's crafting generates mountains of cheap generic gear, and the economy is supported by the destruction of that gear, since it can be destroyed in battle or melted back into components. I myself like the fact that I can mine for an hour and have enough stuff to build a battlecruiser and all the guns for it.

But if your game won't be expending manufactured goods at that rate, then a more involved and time-consuming process would be appropriate. The most useful lesson of EvE, I think, would be recycling. Being able to buy up all the cheap, crappy stuff that inundates the market, then smash it into bits and use those bits to make decent stuff could help crafters remain functional without spending a lot of time in "gather" mode. Also, if you screw up your blade's balance, you can just melt it back down and try again. I'm assuming you're not using complex metallurgy that would preclude that, of course.

Why do schematics vanish? EvE does this with blueprint copies, and it doesn't make much sense there, either. There's got to be a better way to curb rampant production.

Most importantly, and in the spirit of your other threads about this project, I want to recommend non-hierarchical gear. Don't have some kind of silly shortsword->cutlass->longsword->scimitar->broadsword->dragonslayer tech tree, but instead have them balance out so that a "standard issue" item in your field of expertise is a good idea, and you aren't always trhowing all your crafted gear on the ground because that NPC wizard puked up a purple one when he died.

More specifically, I'd like to see geographical and stylistic synergy. If you live in the Berusan region, and the mountains there are rich in Tungstite ore, which is light and rigid but doesn't flex or hold an edge, then your maces and armor will be awesome, but your rapiers and spears will be a joke, so the people who make their home there will train up for the better available gear.

Expanding on that, maybe the basket-hilt rapier design offers better protection for your hand, but adds weight, so rapier manufacturers from neighboring kingdoms will buy tungstite from you for use in some of their components, or even contract out that part of the process, so you could make a living building and selling the best dang basket-hilts in the game, using a blend of materials and a schematic that you've customised a bit.

Furthermore, your tungstite hammer is great for working metal, but tongs made of it aren't very heat resistant, plus they mar the surface of the metal you're working on, so you've got to buy or trade for some softer tongs from the guys down the highway if you want to eliminate that small penalty from your work.

You could make everything from tungstite, but your work would never be perfect, and you'd have a seriously limited catalog of items that you could make well. The best stuff would be expensive, not because the ingredients only drop from every five-millionth snow leopard, but because some poor bastard had to carry the material for the pommel eighty miles from the place where it's harvested, then some other guy had to bring the finished blade to your workshop from the bladesmith three towns over, and the leather for the scabbard was bought from a gaucho who knows he's the only one who produces it.

This will give racial characteristics to regions without requiring players to choose a race and class at character creation, and will encourage trade among non-combat personnel, which will lead to interesting PvP based on controlling markets. If you know there's a shipment of basket hilts coming into this town, and the value of those hilts is equal to or greater than the resurrection fees and health potions and gear replacement you'll incur from killing off their guards and stealing it, then you get your crew together for some highway robbery.

fancy-pants hardware will be rare, not because you have to grind for it, but because it takes a lot of infrastructure to make it.

The idea of different metals being better for different things was a given and that includes tools as well. I didn't think of placing different metals regionally but now that you mention it that's a really good idea.

I definitely like the idea of recycling items because I've been looking for a way to do so for a while now.

And schematics vanishing was put in there to make it so crafters actually have something to do with their money and at the same time it would add that sense of items changing over the ages. Rapiers might be really rare in the begining become a big thing later on like they did in real life. and it will keep people from flooding the market.

As for harvesting resources, I plan to put a lot fewer mining areas across the world, this will make crafters either buy a mine from another player for high ammounts of gold, buy metal from them directly, or go visit a public mine and build there.

Quote:Original post by PatchesV
I can see what Drigovas is saying, an open ended crafting system would be awsome...

Kinda the point of the post was less about open-ended-ness, but the possible value of creating black-box crafting, that would allow for communities to be made around individuals or organizations that prioritize fine quality. The point of making it 'open ended' was mostly to make it intellectually challenging to the crafter, so that there is an opportunity for a player to actually participate in the crafting process, besides just accumulating the raw components, and through the crafter's competency, distinguish themselves.

Most my examples of this are modern kinds of manufacturing. Consider a space-ship. You buy a spaceship in a game, you go into the space ship and walk around, and you see the bridge, and the controls, storage areas, etc. You don't see life support, you don't see the wiring, you don't see the innards of the engine, the inertial dampers, but all of those things matter, and will differentiate a great space ship from a bad one. If you're flying in your space ship that you bought from a great vendor, and your buddy is flying one bought from a bad vendor, you might feel ripped off that you paid twice as much for something that looks effectively the same. Upon taking a shot, your friend's inertial dampeners give out, and he can't decelerate without liquefying himself against the interior of his own space ship [thus, he is in dire straights]. You take a shot, and your dampeners go out, and your backup ones come on [because the expert crafter that created your ship knew this sort of thing is prone to occurring], thus preserving your existence. This great crafter has thus developed a reputation for quality, and their skill and experience has earned them that reputation.

The crafting system involved in this sort of thing would be more complicated than many of the 'metal + hammer = armor' type of systems of course, and creating a single object could take a lot of initial effort. Creating components, and assembling them into larger parts, and assembling those into a ship, that takes considerable effort. Upon creating the ship the first time though, it seems reasonable to allow the ship to be recreated easily. To preserve the secrets of the original creator, the ship's resource requirements might jut be listed as 'x iron, y carbon, z ...., skills required = <>' [a black box], instead of a full schematic of the ship and the details of it's layout, allowing for others to create the ship as well [or even automate the process], while still allowing the original crafter to retain his/her trade and achievements, allowing crafters to distinguish themselves.

If posts like this aren't a sign that I'm indeed a systems architect at heart, I don't know what are.

Totally agreed that crafters should be able to distinguish themselves above others, but uniqueness and style will come from having taken the time to gather the ideal resources, schematics, tools, and having mastered the minigame. If a player discovers a new special schematic combination (which will also change the appearance of an item) there's nothing that's going to make them tell others about it. It could be mounths before anyone else discovers it and the original maker will have gotten rich off of his discovery.

So allow the ubertwitch minigamers to do more difficult things, to challenge themselves. For instance, when pounding out a sheet of metal, which I envision as a common building material, you could get your ingot and heat it up and put it on your anvil, then you start whacking away at it. Your super-great "blacksmith sense" allows you to see the differences in color and thickness of the metal and gauge its temperature, so you've got to hammer it into a sheet of uniform thickness and the right shape. Every stroke of your hammer affects the shape and temperature of the thing, and more strokes fatigues it, and if you hammer one part thin and leave another part thick, the end result is crappier.

There's no "victory" or "perfect" job. You just get a sheet with the better stats. If you can make a perfect copper plate every time, then maybe you should try something tougher to work with, like a vanadium alloy that cools fast and has less tolerance for error.

By having different materials, tools, and always room for improvement (if you can do it with five fewer strokes then usual, the metal's less fatigued from beign worked and will harden more) then the game will never be "winnable", it'll just level out at the grade that the worker can generate.

And as for repetition, how many times have people raided the goddamn Molten Core? How many pigs have they killed? If this crafting system gets as much attention as the combat system, then it'll be every bit as deep and rewarding to hammer out a masterpiece as it is to slay a dragon, in gameplay terms.