Crafty, That

Posted on March 31, 2010 by Scott Jennings| 79 Comments

Today’s MMORPG.com column is on intentional drudgery.

This entry was posted in MMORPG.com Articles. Bookmark the permalink.

JuJutsu

An article on crafting with NO discussion of EVE Online? You missed the mark bigtime in that regard.
http://www,damnedvulpine.com/ J.

fethers
Vetarnias

As someone who loves playing the economy in MMO’s, I agree with most of your points. (However, I can’t really comment on Second Life, but I don’t think we can say it’s an MMO, nor that its economy is one that exists within the set parameters of a game; it’s arguably the same as selling junk through Cafepress, except here it’s all virtual.)

My motivation for crafting, however, fits in neither of those three you give, because:
-I don’t really care about being the richest guy on the server (as long as I turn a profit), least of all if the best way to demonstrate it is to display as much wealth as possible;
-I don’t craft because I want the item I’m crafting (and in this case, I can’t really think of such a player as a “professional” crafter, if you only produce for yourself, and especially if you do so out of absolute necessity);
-I wouldn’t really like to be a guild peon being told to do the equivalent of a second job, so that the PvP lords can go on sneering at the milk cow that you are.

I would probably fall in a fourth category, which would perhaps be: for recognition within the game world, as the guy you go to if you want a quality Item X — an Antonio Stradivari of MMO’s, if you want. And I suspect the best way for a developer to include such a possibility would be to place crafting ability on a massive grinding scale, to such an extent that only a few players ever reach the end of it. Another way would perhaps be to give players the possibility of acting as trade agents, such as EVE’s banks, but without the paranoia. Examples of that are rare, but I remember hearing about trusted players in some old MMO (Asheron’s Call?) that acted as go-between trading agents because the game mechanics did not allow for automated trade.

No, I don’t want an atavistic MMO that fails to include proper trading mechanics so that I could rise to the occasion. But World of Warcraft really is the nadir of all my aspirations, not to mention all three other motivations for crafters. In those six weeks of playing WoW I did last year, I saw plenty to discourage me.

I wrote this of WoW in January 2009: There is the pointless economy which is entirely dedicated to levelling up crafting skills at the expense of rewarding craftsmanship resulting from such levelling-up in the first place. On the server I played, a stack of 20 bars of mithril could fetch 30 gold, while any piece of armor made of a dozen mithril bars would barely fetch 5 gold because it would have to compete with open world loot, while being inferior to some bind-on-pickup equipment from quests and dungeons. Not to mention that all the items you were forced to craft would end up flooding the market because there is no way to get rid of them at a decent price. Then hurdles would be placed for those seeking to level up by requiring increasingly arcane ingredients for which no justification could possibly be satisfactory in otherwise straightforward recipes; perhaps it was essential to place those pearls and moonstones on that shining silver breastplate, but why did higher blacksmithing recipes invariably require ichors of this, breezes of that? What does it have to do with the craft of blacksmithing? Isn’t magical stuff what enchanters should be doing? (I won’t even discuss armorsmith recipes producing items which only other armorsmiths can wear; what a way to nip demand in the bud.) End result: Crafters hawk their skill in major cities in a desperate attempt to level up without having to go grind for all those ichors and breezes — or grind for the money to buy them.

If you need a specific example, two words: “Mithril Spurs”. A relatively useless product, once you have a pair for yourself, but the recipe sold for exorbitant prices on the auction house. First, because it was rare (like deviate fish recipes, an even more useless item). Second, because cranking out spurs was the best way to level up around 8-10 levels, if I recall. It required little in the way of materials, and gave plenty of experience. When you write that WoW players “craft their work for resale”, I wish it were so, but I can’t say it is. You’re just riding the same treadmill as your fellow raiders, except you do it with the economy. You create stuff not because there is profit in it, but because you need to create it in order to level up the skill in the first place. Then, once the stuff is created, your options are either to dump it, or post it on the auction house; and only one of those gives you the possibility of making money.

That was the sickest part of the WoW economy, if you exclude the professional resellers who knew exactly what people absolutely definitely wanted to have for their twink, bought those items at low prices from unwitting sellers, and jacked up prices to obscene levels (meaning real newbies, levelling their first characters, never had access to the best stuff thanks to those leeches). WoW has no economy; just a treadmill.
TPRJones

In my opinion, intentionally making ANY part of your game tedious as a barrier to entry is very bad form. There are other and better ways to keep the number of merchants in your game down to a reasonable level.

Making the rest of the game actually fun and rewarding to play would be a good first step. Then players are less likely to turn to something they normally wouldn’t be interested in looking for fun and profit they can’t get from the rest of your game.

And I suspect the best way for a developer to include such a possibility would be to place crafting ability on a massive grinding scale, to such an extent that only a few players ever reach the end of it.

Oh hell no! If you want to introduce variable quality into your crafting system, there are at least two ways to do so that are better than this. One is to have variable quality ingredients, and learning just the best ways to combine these ingredients for the best products becomes a challenge in trial and error. Really good combinations become trade secrets held only by high-end crafters, and while there’s still a grind there it’s a grind that can be lessened by intelligence. The other is to use some sort of skill-based crafting mini-game, with success at the mini-game leading to variations in quality results. Best would be a combination of these two methods, allowing for both the skill and intelligence of the player to play a role in the process.

But, please, for the love of god, no more crafting level grinds. I’m begging you. If the key to success in your game is tedious repetition, you are not a game designer. You are a torture expert.
Njal

fethers

I am a mage.
Brask Mumei

When you want notoriety for your crafting, what you are saying is you don’t want your products to be a commodity.

Making crafters grind doesn’t do this. The grinding in crafting is the *cause* of the commodity markets! You don’t want the market distorted by people dumping stuff that they crafted just for the skill bonus.

Throw away the diku-mud “leveling” of crafting entirely. People should only craft when they want to *use* the result. Furnishing a house in UO was fun when you could chop your would, craft the pieces, etc. But when suddenly you were expected to first build 3000 chairs before you could make a table? There went any sense of fun.

Mini-games are also, IMHO, backwards. Crafters are more likely to be talkers who’d rather not be distracted playing tetris.

Idea to keep crafters rare: Charge $5 a month to enable crafting on the character.
Brent Michael Krupp

Yeah, crafting mini-games suck. They force you to pay attention the whole time (more attention than you have to pay while questing and killing stuff, in fact) and prevent you from talking to people while relaxing in town. EQ2 crafting SUCKED because of this.
Gx1080

I liked crafting minigames in Vanguard. But that’s me.

Also, for crafting to be good, you need to produce stuff that is at the same level or close to dungeon/random drops. At least for leveling. And make SKILL count for something, not just time in farming + time alt-tabbing (Leveling Mining and Jewelcrafting respectively. Also, have you tried to level a gathering profession in a Death Knight? Is horrid).

But there’s the point that if you demand skill and attention to crafting, you cannot have such a major treadmill. That’s one less time sink AND resources that could be used to do endgame, class balance or something. So there’s that.
Vetarnias

@TPRJones

Yeah, I agree; I should have written “easiest” instead of “best”. My own position on WoW should indicate how much I despise that approach.

However, according to your approach, how would you get “high quality ingredients”? Because if anyone can obtain high quality ingredients, say at random, you’re just placing the problem at another level instead of getting rid of it, worse if anyone can create the same item as soon as they have the ingredients. “Practice makes perfect” might translate into grinding, but some of this ought to be necessary.

Mini-games: I’m not sure. It worked for Puzzle Pirates, and you could provide offline labour according to your current rank in the puzzle, as long as you did the puzzle once in a while. However, if you have to do the mini-game every time you craft something, it’s going to get boring quickly (I even tired of refreshing my labour in PP, and that was once a week, if I remember). It also means that someone who masters the mini-game (assuming you’re not botting) will rarely if ever fail at producing the item; in PP, you were not really a “crafter”, just an employee doing an hour’s work. Their economy, however, worked.

However, even if a mini-game isn’t necessarily an ideal option, you must make the crafting process actually interesting. Pirates of the Burning Sea’s economy is an example of an economic model that seemed to have done everything it could to be unappealing to crafters. As long as you had the proper structure in place, the money for it, and, in some cases, the appropriate general level and/or class, you could produce anything. And actually, you, the player, produced nothing; you just clicked on a button and your structure’s “employees” automatically did the work. Three days’ production took five minutes to achieve; all you were left to do was to haul it around for better prices. What you had to do to maintain production, however, was to grind for the money required from the usual NPC mobs. But I see crafters/economic players as a breed entirely different from PvE players: crafters grind materials, and economic players play the market, specifically so they can avoid grinding for money off NPC’s.

That’s why I hated WoW’s “ichors and breezes”, which forced me to either grind mobs, or buy them off the market without the incentive of increased value of the finished item to offset the cost. Everybody was on the leveling treadmill, and finished goods, because of the resulting glut, sold for less than the resources required to make them. WoW’s economy is really meaningful only to those who engage in market speculation; it’s a waste of time for crafters. Warhammer Online, from the brief glimpse of it I had, was even worse.

But PotBS took the cake, as there was a game where the economy was supposed to play a major role, but where every attempt at getting rid of the most tedious parts of the crafting process backfired by getting rid of the only reason why crafters were needed: because they willingly dealt with those tedious parts while you were free to go PvP on the high seas. That’s why EVE’s economy works. If, however, it takes five minutes to craft three days’ production, and if, on top of that, everyone can do it, even your most ardent PvPer will set up his ten hemp lots and do his five minutes’ production if it can help his guild. In the end, everything was produced internally by major guilds because nothing was more efficient than producing at cost.

@ Brask Mumei

Well, Stradivari had his list of clients. So his products were a commodity, except that it was a niche market. And yes, there were other violins around.

That’s why I’m not really expecting much in the way of TPRJones’ suggestion of “a unique product only I can make with this secret recipe”, not least because I suspect the secret recipe wouldn’t stay secret for very long. So I guess I’ll have to be content with trying to become known as a regular supplier of a niche product, something, say, with lesser profit margins but with fewer producers on the market (I did rather well with wood tar in PotBS, until the economy in general went dead), or settle in a regional town instead of the server metropolis.

Yeah, I despise levels. Allow me to make a table from the start, even if I can only manage a few rough planks and barely level legs as a newbie, but also give me the option, if I go through hours of table-making, of making better tables, of higher quality, stuff that I can charge more for because it is a quality table. And if I make all those tables, also give me the option of using them as firewood, so I can avoid cluttering the market by having nothing else to do with them.

I also despise the idea of being shut out of certain production lines just because I picked another. It’s not because I’m perfecting my Italian that I should be barred from learning German; in other words, let me decide for myself, especially since it involves my time.

Also, crafters are unlikely to appreciate being taken for cheaters, especially if that means you get your actions constantly interrupted by random crap (RuneScape) and even NPC fights (Age of Conan) to fight off botters. And now you want to charge them $5?

Also to consider: If the economy is so damn profitable for some, why don’t gold farmers try to make more money that way, instead of grinding forever?
Joiry

Curious what you meant by “compete on service.” Other than price, what does a player merchant really provide? In SWG I guess there’s the merchant greetings and ability to have a nicely decked out house/store to present. That seems more an immersion aspect than “service.” Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy looking at setups players make with their furniture, but its generally not a deciding factor in who I buy from.

Perhaps selection of goods? But then, if I’m at the bazaar in SWG and I need to by X,Y,Z, I’m mostly likely to get waypoints to the three cheapest vendors. Possibly, if the same merchant offers several of the items, and say they aren’t 5 to 10% more expensive, I might go to the merchant with all of them. Assuming 5-10% isn’t a large chunk of money.

Btw, I’ll just add I’m not a huge fan of AHs, but nor am I hugely against them. I just think a “modern” MMO would need something interesting to make the retail/player merchant system have appeal.
http://tagn.wordpress.com/ wilhelm2451

If you localize a game client for, say, Hebrew or Arabic, should you make the crafting bar go from right to left?
http://chrome.blogspot.com Chrome

But the games have to be filled with 98% boring tedium… There is no other way! – Brad McQuaid
http://beafraid.com hellfire

The rarity equation is what kills “open” crafting games. It’s one of a 100 reasons why I gave up crafting in WoW and never had more than a passing interest in Aion or STO crafting. If everyone can grind things out and eventually create super-powered Jesus-sticks you have to make that process costly in some way to balance the scale. Otherwise your crafting system just dropped a big deuce on the comparable super-powered Jesus-stick you get from 6 weeks in a raid zone with 39 other people.

SWG succeeded because Architect was a “class”. By choosing to be a Master Architect you gave up the capability to become ANY of the tier-2 professions (Bounty Hunter, Commando, etc.) You were able to master some of the lower-tier professions, but the really juicy stuff was impossible. Choosing a crafting profession then becomes a limiter. That’s HUGE in the rarity equation because you no longer have to worry about some hypothetical doomsday world where every player has access to infinite mats, time and every crafting discipline.

I enjoy crafting, but developers really, REALLY need to take it seriously or just leave it out of their launch game entirely. STO, for example, is ridiculously bad. Except Tribble breeding – that’s hilarious.
Jarnis

Having to specialize your whole character as a crafter (like Master Architect) just breeds alts. Early on, you may be able to rake in megabucks as everyone is leveling up their “adventurer” char – I did the exact same thing as a super l33t weapon smith during the first weeks of SWG and ended up with so much money it became worthless to me. Still, once everyone has a maxed out one char, the obvious next step is to make a crafter alt. Give it a few months, and everyone has alts to craft everything, unless your crafting system requires massive dedication to it.

EVE Online is an example of a system that partially tries to avoid this pitfall. Investing SP in crafting skills (Science, Industry) doesn’t ultimate limit a single character, it just slows down the training of pew pew skills. Many still go by the alt route, with 2nd and 3rd accounts for some kind of non-PvP activities. Yet crafting in EVE has a whole different barrier that tends to weed out “casual crafter alts”. As soon as you move past the basic Tech 1 building that anyone can do with minimal training, the crafting trees become so huge and convoluted that it is fairly impossible to build something like a Tech 2 ship from “ground up” – moon mining and reacting moon materials is a “mini profession” on it’s own (no skills required, but a lot of capital and a lot of it set into harm’s way in lowsec/0.0) and adding up invention and Tech 2 ship component building and the end result is that unless you have multiple industrial accounts running a massive operation, you *have* to specialize and do business with other industrial types. Then there is the fact that while you can build something with fairly limited set of skills, in order not to make a loss while doing so, you need a lot of skills and a bunch of math to verify that yes, this convoluted build process actually gives you that ship cheaper than just buying one off Jita. Margins can be razor thin (to a point where less-than-perfect industrial skills mean you are making a loss)

The markets are constantly shifting – some stuff is overproduced, price tanks, people move to doing other stuff that seems profitable today… constant change. Add on top of that “Market PvP” with price manipulations, cornering markets in smaller hubs, massive speculative moves based on future patchnotes (or even worse, rumors of future patchnotes)… yes, Excel is a good addon.

And no, you don’t have to grind to craft – hauling materials and setting up builds, it can take days to get the end result out of the cooker (months in the case of supercapitals), so it is mostly a “passive” activity. Same is true for moon mining, reacting, blueprint copying, invention… heck, everything except mining related to crafting in EVE is mostly a passive activity – set things up, come back later to collect the goods. Same looks to be true with the planetary interaction that is currently in test (TLDR: build stuff on planets to harvest and manufacture goods)
Ed

Good crafting article. The main thing I *love* about crafting in Fallen Earth is how it takes place in real time and you can actually go do other things while you craft (ya know, like kill monsters). Instead of hitting the button and watching the bar go by, you can queue up a recipe and go. X number of minutes (or seconds or even hours later) your stuff is done.

Don’t even get me started on how addicting gathering is. A 5 minute trip can take 30 minutes for me if I hit a bunch of good harvesting nodes along the way.

Disclaimer: I work for Fallen Earth, but not in any design capacity.
Brask Mumei

$5 a month is cheaper than SWG’s option of forcing you to dedicate your one slot to crafting.

Charging an extra fee to crafter-enable your main avoid the whole Crafter-Alt problem. It allows mains to have crafting without having to nerf some of their pew-pew abilities.

It also makes crafting instantly rarer because most people will be, “WTF? No way!”

I personally think it is a more honorable way to rarify crafting than saying: “You must spend 500 hours grinding!” It also allows people to *stop* being crafters. If I grind up to max crafting skill, I have that forever. But a $5 fee I may drop next month, thereby controlling the population of crafters.

What can personalized stores offer?
1) Filtering. They pare down the list of goods to the useful ones. Ideally presented in an efficient layout. Why should an MMORPG designer agonize over how to split items across vendors when humans can figure that out for them?
2) Location.
3) Availability. UO’s regeant merchants were an example of this.
4) Personalization. Custom made contracts. Unique items.
5) Branding. “Exceptional Sword crafted by Brask”
6) Price.

Why do gold farmers grind rather than play the markets? Easy to answer that one. Playing the markets is a *real* game you can’t just “farm”. There are no safe “no-brainer” approaches.

Finally, IMHO, if you like crafter minigames, you weren’t a crafter. Crafting isn’t the “mini-game” – it is the “meta-game” you play with a spreadsheet.
Brask Mumei

And to answer the question: Would anyone actually pay an extra $5 to craft? Well, I paid full SWG price to *only* run a store and play the market. Mind you, maybe my diatribe about crafters is misplaced as I didn’t craft the stuff for the store, merely bought it from my partners.
http://geldonsgaming.blogspot.com geldonyetich

I’ve always preferred the model where drops<quests<crafting<epic.

This is because it tends to weigh the value in accordance to the difficulty in attaining them. Having monsters fart out candy when you kill them, or getting candy when you finish quests you were going to do anyway, is not all that great of an achievement.

On the other hand running over hill and dale and collecting all sorts of stuff required to craft candy is quite a chore! It's not easy to grind up a whole seperate tree whose purpose (aside from to burn time) is to produce candy. It can only be trumped with an epic undertaking, such as a coordinated raid.

I mentioned Mabinogi a few days back. While branding itself as an unabashed kid game where you're perpetually encouraged to recast your avatar as a ten-year-old, the bottom line is that this game is the closest thing we’ve seen to Ultima Online since Ultima Online itself because it put equal focus on crafting an adventure, and it even includes storefronts in the typical Korean fashion of letting everybody spam tracts of land with their own stores, housing nicely relegated to its own instances with limited housing plots and ruled over by a guild in a castle, and moongates.
Freakazoid

A Good Article. Too bad no one else will talk about crafting for the next several years.

Quartermasters are the casuals killing crafting in MMOs.
Vetarnias

@Geldonyetich

Good to know that Mabinogi is much better than I was expecting, but just looking at that artwork, I have to say: no thanks.

I agree with your equation, but I think very few games actually respect this. Certainly not World of Warcraft. Better still are games which don’t really require this hierarchy in the first place. Wurm Online has a rather intricate economic system, but it has no quests to speak of, no loot drops (unless you consider the butchered parts of a wolf’s corpse “loot”), and nothing that could even remotely be called “epic”. It’s all mundane items: planks, metalwork, foodstuffs, many of which take forever to craft. For example, melting iron alone must take 40 minutes, easily, then the blade you make automatically cools off when you hammer it, and you must heat it again to attach the handle, and then you have to reheat it if you want to improve its quality, etc. But, as you can guess, it’s a grind every step of the way, what with item decay on top (actually tripled on the free server, to convince players to go premium, which doesn’t stop most of the map from looking like a suburban wasteland), so the most common form of exchange for newbies is “you repair my fences, I feed you” — this because the game does not provide newbies with efficient means of getting food after 24 hours of play. Likewise, the game does not provide newbies with the appropriate tools to replant trees, while they all need wood to do anything. End result: everyone complains about deforestation, and nobody except established players can do a damn about it — when they bother about it at all.

From what I have seen, the turnover rate is high, and should you leave for too long, there is nothing to return to. The people I played with left in late January, and their houses are gone already, their land already settled over (twice in one case), and everything they owned either decayed or stolen. People come, build their little place, then leave and are soon forgotten. Nobody gives a damn about sustained development, cohesive planning, and least of all a collective memory — but you’re free to do as you want!

Yep, classic example of the tragedy of the commons. But crafting works, because they’ve turned everything in Wurm into a crafting grind.
http://dsob.wordpress.com geldonyetich

Good to know that Mabinogi is much better than I was expecting, but just looking at that artwork, I have to say: no thanks.

You’re certainly free to play whatever you want to play, and I’m no Mabinogi fanboy. However, I would like to say thus: in a genre oft saturated with mediocrity, judging books by their covers is not a luxury one has.

I agree with your equation, but I think very few games actually respect this.

This is true, and it’s disappointing every time I encounter it. It’s like the common MMORPG developer lacks the sense to simply balance reward versus effort. I should hunt them down where they live and offer to do a few hours of yard work. It’s a 50/50 chance whether they’ll pay me a worthless pittance or enough to retire on.

Wurm Online has a rather intricate economic system, but it has no quests to speak of, no loot drops (unless you consider the butchered parts of a wolf’s corpse “loot”), and nothing that could even remotely be called “epic”. It’s all mundane items: planks, metalwork, foodstuffs, many of which take forever to craft. For example, melting iron alone must take 40 minutes, easily, then the blade you make automatically cools off when you hammer it, and you must heat it again to attach the handle, and then you have to reheat it if you want to improve its quality, etc. But, as you can guess, it’s a grind every step of the way

Have not played it. Your description reminds me of Vanguard’s crafting mechanic. Intricate? Yes. But needlessly so.

But that’s not the worse thing you can do with a crafting system. The worst thing you can do with a crafting system (like any other system in an MMORPG) is make it an afterthought.

Case in point: Champions Online. It’s sort of like a simplified version of WoW’s crafting in a way: crafting nodes are scattered in fixed points throughout the map, hit them up whenever you see them, then take your recovered resources to a magic box, push a button, and candy comes out. Then watch as said candy is quickly made obsolete by present-level drops. Champion Online is worse, however, because the crafting interface just dumps everything you can make in order from highest to lowest skill requirements.

The auction house is even worse. No “search by stat” functionality at all. You can specify a level range for auctions, rarity, and equipment slot, but it’s basically like dumping all the classes gear in one list, and one that tops out a the first 100 results at that. It makes it next to impossible for potential customers to find you unless they’re really experienced players who know the gear they want by name. (And those names are unique enough to crafting gear that chances are they’ll only know them if they have a character who can already craft them.)

Say what you will about the shame of merchants being regulated to mere quartermaster/broker roles, but at least that’s something.
Vetarnias

Never played Champions; however, that description sounds exactly like Age of Conan/Warhammer Online. What I saw of Conan was old-fashioned resource gathering, which you then deposited in your guild city, etc., but the auction house was a bad version of WoW (and almost exclusively for loot drops). I saw the Warhammer auction house precisely once (as my game had a tendency to crash in places such as the capital), but it looked even worse than Conan’s.

At least an afterthought rarely ends up screwing up your entire game. Crafters probably saw nothing of interest in Warhammer Online, but you can’t say it was the economy/crafting that made it a failure. However, when the economy fails to function in a game where it’s vital — as in Pirates of the Burning Sea — it’s your entire design which is falling down.

As for Wurm, a point I have not yet delved into (because it doesn’t matter on the free server) is the use of game currency — on the free server, exchanges are usually informal and focus on barter.

Oh, and I fear my feeling about Mabinogi isn’t one of scorn, but of utter discomfort.
JadeFalcon

Generally I won’t play an mmo long if it doesn’t have a decent form of crafting.I’m not in it too make money or play the market but enjoy crafting on those days I don’t feel like monster bashing and like being able to outfit the group of people I bounce from mmo to mmo with in gear or items.

The tedium of it is hit and miss for me if it’s blatently obvious the designers have done things just to make it annoying that gets on my nerves and generally leads me to closing my account most times its enough that I can sit and craft while chatting on vent or in channel that keeps me content.
http://stabbedup.blogspot.com/ Stabs

It’s been a great hope for some time that someday a game will come which features immersive crafting, complex and intriguing economy and fun interesting pve.

SWG almost did it early on – in its first 3 months pve was great then people realised you could get Master Doctor buffs and solo group content and the game never truly recovered.

Eve has the first two but a pve system as dull as can be.

It seems that the coming crop of games will move ever further away, SWTOR, TSW, etc don’t seem to want to make an economy of player crafters part of their appeal at all. The problem with designing a player crafter system is it breaks so many design rules (you have to exclude most of your players from a core part of gameplay, you let some players wield enormous power over others etc etc). I think it will only be possible from a company as ballsy and niche as Aventurine or CCP, there’s no chance a mainstream game will gamble on a decent player crafter economy.
http://beafraid.com hellfire

Having to specialize your whole character as a crafter (like Master Architect) just breeds alts. Early on, you may be able to rake in megabucks as everyone is leveling up their “adventurer” char – I did the exact same thing as a super l33t weapon smith during the first weeks of SWG and ended up with so much money it became worthless to me. Still, once everyone has a maxed out one char, the obvious next step is to make a crafter alt.

In a game like WoW I would agree, but it worked in a character-slot limited game like SWG. And, again, even if you specialized in one of the “good” crafting masteries you didn’t give up the capacity to play a pro-combat character. You just couldn’t ramp up to the iconic hybrid professions. The same restrictions also barred you from creating a crafting ubermensch. You could marry up complimentary professions, but it had specific limits.

Don’t get me wrong – SWG was far from a crafting panacea. I’m not singing that tune by any stretch. The point I’m trying to put forward is that the vast majority of MMOs approach the rarity equation from the same perspective as EQ did and thus fall into the same grindy bullshit trap of mediocrity.

Freak mentioned it in far fewer words and I am inclined to agree: Quartermasters are killing GOOD crafting. Of course there are probably more master crafters in WoW than all other games in the known universe combined at this point. As I said before, if you can’t be bothered to put a meaningful (in all aspects) crafting system in don’t even bother. STO wouldn’t miss the “crafting” that it has now and 6 months down the road a content patch could be released with a useful crafting system that is tightly wound into the existing skillcaps ala SWG.
JuJutsu

“However, I would like to say thus: in a genre oft saturated with mediocrity, judging books by their covers is not a luxury one has.”

MMO’s are not old school text muds, they are a visual medium. The artwork in a game is not the cover of the book its the text of the book.
Aufero

I’m a bit boggled that you managed to write a whole article on MMO crafting that only mentioned Eve once in an aside. But then, I guess you can’t watch bars move from left to right while crafting in Eve.
http://geldonsgaming.blogspot.com geldonyetich

“However, I would like to say thus: in a genre oft saturated with mediocrity, judging books by their covers is not a luxury one has.”MMO’s are not old school text muds, they are a visual medium. The artwork in a game is not the cover of the book its the text of the book.

Well, to me (perhaps to many aspiring game designers – or am I a pundit now?) a game’s artwork is just dressing. It’s all very pretty at first, but sooner or later I just stop caring how a game looks and what I’m left with is how a game plays.

Given that this is my mindset, I don’t particularly are how good or bad the artwork is. To me, it really is just the cover of the book. I’d rather play a game that looks like crap but has a lot better attention to its system than play a game that’s got a pretty face but nothing going on upstairs.

Incidentally, Mabinogi’s graphics are a bit of a mixed bag. If you absolutely loathe anime, you’re off it right from the beginning because it draws heavily from anime influences. The faces in particular are rather comically simple, chibi-style. Many of the environments are about as tacky as you’d expect from a mediocre 2004 game (it was originally released in Korea in that year). However, there’s a remarkable amount of detail to be seen in gear, animations, and the pets.

Failing that, perhaps Mabinogi 2 (due out sometime around the end of the year) will be more your interest. Judging by what little we’ve seen of it so far, which is simply a couple of promo posters, it has a more photo-realistic, probably Aion Online-like, approach. Though it’s yet to be seen if they’ve really captured and improved upon Ultima Online in the same way they did the first game.
JuJutsu

How would you feel about reading a book printed in the most archaic convoluted gothic font? I don’t care about genre, character development, et cetera if the visuals make my eyes bleed I won’t make it past the first couple of pages. Ditto for artwork in a game.
http://geldonsgaming.blogspot.com geldonyetich

If the artwork made a game illegible, then sure. E.G. The polygons were so in-my-face I couldn’t see the game well enough to see what I’m up to. In terms of your analogy, I might not like Gothic font but, so long as I can read it, it doesn’t impede my getting at the game.

I’ll go with you insofar as good artwork might get me to try a game that I wouldn’t normally try on the grounds that I feel if the artwork is well done there’s a chance the game is well done. But, in the long run, what matters is the substance.

Aion Online, for example. Pretty, pretty game. I tried it in beta because it looked good. Found the gameplay to be reasonably well balanced but highly derivative and grindy. Didn’t bother to buy the box. In terms of your analogy, a game like Aion Online is like opening up a book, finding it’s written in a very pleasant font with gorgeous illustrations, but is actually Twilight fan fiction they printed off the Internet.

I pressed a soft kiss on Edward’s forearm, as we both watched the sunlight be reflected by our linked hands. The white-marble skin threw rainbows in the light of the low sun. In the sky, the crescent moon was already visible. “You can’t imagine how much I love you!”, Edward whispered into my ear, his voice like velvet. I turned to see into his golden eyes, his deep gaze burning with the intensity of never ending love, a window directly into his beautiful soul. His honey, lilac scent took my breath away, still.

DO NOT WANT.

Insofar as finding quality gameplay is concerned, beauty doesn’t have a whole lot do with it. Go look up some screen shots of Legend of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time, highest reviewed game of all time. Would you try that now based off of appearances alone? Mabinogi looks slightly better, give or take here and there. They even share that chibi-like approach to facial expression.

A bad crafting system, on the other hand, that’s the substance, not the face. No amount of pretty graphics will cover up the fact that Aionplayer would rather fund organized crime in China then drudge his way through more potion crafting.
http://www.metaplace.com Raph

This article makes me sad. Almost as sad as reading about the Mad Scientist toymaker with mini AT-ATs that is terrorizing the planets in SWG recently occupied by Ewoks with wings. (Hey, I guess he’s a crafter, though!)
http://actionfiguresbuff-jon.com action figures

No MMO ever has any economy, that’s an offline characteristic, and I think we should all visit it more often.
Sullee

I think you missed what I consider to be THE reason people want to craft.. the real draw. Sure the merchant-prince game is the whole game for a few and part of the game for most crafters but the underlying reason people want to craft is because of the fantasy.

People want to BE artisans.. they want to be extremely good at something they likely are not in their real lives and having that be a creative process (like blacksmithing or whatever) is quite a novel change considering you guys only rarely can get beyond making games entirely based on repetively killing shit.

It isn’t just creation vs. destruction either; this fantasy is in popular culture which echoes deeper myth. It is the jedi crafting his weapon, “I see you have constructed a new lightsaber. Your skills are complete.” or Hanzo smithing and giving a sword to Beatrix.

Also SWG? No offense to Raph but it was IMO shit particularly on the crafting score. It went from a sloppy beta to a release where people immediately exploited a whole host of issues to reach “crafting endgame”. The issues were slowly nerfed\fixed which really just made it worse for anyone late to the party whilst not fixing how saturated crafting had become (factory xp anyone?).

And really the “storefront” crap is old and sucked to begin with. It just doesn’t scale. Nobody wants to stand in gfay or commons tunnel and spend their game time hawking their crap and no, letting players plop down castles and npc merchants practically wherever they want on a first come, first serve basis doesn’t work either. The WoW AH is not evil it is evolution.

I’d also like to mention how badly crafting systems are typically designed. Why exactly do designers not want everyone crafting? Seems to be rather unenlightened EQ-style design sadism (Oh please play our game with large swaths of content designed for the most elite niche). No, games like WoW that not only expect everyone to craft but also have economies that don’t implode when everyone does are to be extolled.

The designed tedium (and DAOC’s green bar is pretty much the epitomy of this stupidity) really just adds an un-fun element to a part of the game that would keep some people subscribed. Game designers don’t get as much criticism on this as they deserve mostly because the hardcore crafters find it easier to preserve their “I’m an uber artisan” bubble if there are less other “I’m an uber artisan” folks running around. And don’t kid yourselves they workaround the tedium with macros or botting anyway.

I could go on more but already too long. Why no atitd mention?
Vetarnias

@Geldonyetich

Even though I never played either game, I don’t think you can draw a comparison between Ocarina of Time and Mabinogi, because my point never was about their graphical quality, and not even about their graphic design choices. It was mostly about their core market. Even though I’d probably feel silly about myself if I spent time playing Ocarina, I would take comfort in the knowledge that what I do wouldn’t escape the walls of my modest abode.

However, Mabinogi is an MMORPG, and, as you pointed out yourself, you’re constantly resurrected as a ten-year-old; in your words, it’s unabashedly a kids’ game. Not to mention, presumably, a game that targets girls (based on that artwork). Now, how does that sound when you say you’re a 30-year-old man playing a game where young girls can be found in great numbers? If you didn’t know better, you might have ended up throwing the “online sex predator” label at me just for saying as much. That’s the unease I was referring to, and which obviously can’t apply to Ocarina of Time, or any other single-player game where you’re left alone with your silliness when you know you would be better off reading Proust.

Not so with MMO’s. I used to play RuneScape back in the day (2006), rather enjoying it, although getting tired of repetition, right until when a random player, whom I had never even met before, asked me my age. Wary of disclosing too much about myself, but not wanting to answer with a curt “mind your own business” (as that player was getting persistent), I kept it vague, said I was in my mid-twenties, which was relatively truthful if you stretched the term (as I was above 25 years of age, but not yet 30). I was almost certain that the player in question, based on his spelling and grammar, was a pre-teen, and, I’m not sure why, probably female. She replied with an “oh” and quickly scurried away, just as if her parents had coached her that people like me were the virtual equivalent of strangers in cars offering you candy. And I can’t blame them. I, too, would feel uncomfortable if my daughter met such a person online, even though I wouldn’t make a criminal out of the other player strictly out of his age.

I had the same qualms about Puzzle Pirates, for that matter, until I obtained plenty of indications that the game was mostly played by adults. You’re bound to meet kids playing in most games, but at least there’s always plenty of adults around. I never was quite sure about RuneScape, though; nor am I about Mabinogi.
Vetarnias

@Sullee

I think you missed what I consider to be THE reason people want to craft.. the real draw. Sure the merchant-prince game is the whole game for a few and part of the game for most crafters but the underlying reason people want to craft is because of the fantasy.

People want to BE artisans.. they want to be extremely good at something they likely are not in their real lives and having that be a creative process (like blacksmithing or whatever) is quite a novel change considering you guys only rarely can get beyond making games entirely based on repetively killing shit.

I think this nicely complements my own views on the matter. I also think it explains why I never liked crafting where it involved killing critters for supplies: in those cases, the crafter isn’t a class by itself, just an extension of the rest of the PvE game. And if, to guarantee a supply of such ingredients when you’re unwilling to go out killing critters, you’re forced to buy them on the market at a much higher price than what you’re likely to get from the finished product, it makes real crafters the butt of a joke. Because a higher price for supplies than the product made from them points, inexorably, in the direction of a design decision. Like that high and mighty World of Warcraft.

It’s the damn leveling treadmill for crafting skills, where you’re forced to crank out dozens of the same item just to level up. You don’t do it because you’re taking pride in what you do; nor because your guild has asked you to restock their armory (those world drops do just as well, even better); nor to merely equip myself, since what you can make is already much below what you could get; and certainly not to become the Rockefeller of Azeroth — not when drilling gushers is invariably a losing proposition.

You know how I made my money in WoW? Not by mining, and absolutely not by blacksmithing. I ground level-5 mobs for hours for small eggs during Winter Veil. By level 46 (which was the highest I ever reached in that game), I had made up to 2,000 gold just by selling the eggs on the auction house. Seasonal recipes asked for it, and I banked on the fact that most people would be too lazy to bother collecting their own — a matter of maybe 5 minutes, but which would cut into their routine Raid of the Night. Still, you know what that got me, when I dared to complain about WoW and mentioned my moneymaking trick? Pretty much, they couldn’t understand why a newcomer to their game would dare know how to make money a few dozen levels before he was supposed to make money. In the words of someone in that thread, I “lucked into it”. Then, they blamed that for my allegedly taking time in leveling up (never mind this was after I decided to end my ride on that particular treadmill).

But wouldn’t this incident finally reveal the WoW economy for the sham that it is?
Aufero

But wouldn’t this incident finally reveal the WoW economy for the sham that it is?

I’m not sure how identifying a commodity people want and selling it at a price they’re willing to pay makes the WoW economy a sham, no matter what the forum trolls think about it. That’s real-world economics in a nutshell.

Sullee has a good point about the iconic image of the artisan in fiction. It’s one of the heroic archetypes people play RPGs to experience, and for that reason I think it will remain a part of MMOs.
pflorian

Curious what you meant by “compete on service.”Other than price, what does a player merchant really provide?

In EVE Online, you can provide convenience. I spent most of a year in a one-man operation building and selling Tech I ammo, modules, and ships (and later some Tech II modules) and had great success with it because I had chosen a less busy part of space and oftentimes was the only person selling those items in a five jump radius. I was routinely able to charge above the region’s average price and people would still buy from me rather than travel five jumps each way (taking ten or more real-time minutes just for travel) to the nearest trade hub.

Of course, that doesn’t work in any game providing easily accessible instant travel.
http://geldonsgaming.blogspot.com geldonyetich

@Geldonyetich
However, Mabinogi is an MMORPG, and, as you pointed out yourself, you’re constantly resurrected as a ten-year-old; in your words, it’s unabashedly a kids’ game.Not to mention, presumably, a game that targets girls (based on that artwork).Now, how does that sound when you say you’re a 30-year-old man playing a game where young girls can be found in great numbers?If you didn’t know better, you might have ended up throwing the “online sex predator” label at me just for saying as much.

Ah, where some might say this is only a problem that can be found in the overly-macho attitude of an ironically immature person, I know where you’re really coming from here. It’s okay, man, you can still enjoy Mabinogi, you just need to be willing to embrace that you want to stalk young girls like I am. After all, being an online sex predator is sort of like being a Troll Rogue in World of Warcraft, but without as much sexual ambiguity. If only it weren’t for all those damn college students playing, they’re totally ruining the game.
http://www.raphkoster.com Raph

@Sullee, I think you are absolutely right about the artisan fantasy. And absolutely wrong about the auction house, since it kills the artisan fantasy.
dartwick

Umm a fleeting mention of EVE?

In a column on crafting?

Are you high?
dartwick

Not addressing EVE is like writing a paper on Nuclear war and discussing the USSR, China and All of Europe. And then in the end saying “oh ya the USA dabbled in it a bit too.”

It is more or less just writing to fill paper.
Vetarnias

Regarding EVE’s economy, I can’t wait for the paper that will rip it to shreds. My only experience of it was “grind asteroids for a pittance, little man, your superiors have better things to do”. If it’s that great an economy, why was it even more boring to me than World of Warcraft?

Edit: Perhaps it’s because it’s a little too close to what unfettered capitalism is like. It’s great — if your name is Andrew Carnegie.
http://geldonsgaming.blogspot.com geldonyetich

@Vetarnias
As much as I dump EVE Online, I do acknowledge it has an economy a cut above the rest. What you’re complaining about is mostly the gameplay quality, not the economy.

As far as being an economic simulator is concerned, EVE Online is both remarkably robust and fundamentally lacking.

* Remarkably robust in that you have a remarkable amount of freedom to build up a powerful merchant empire. One where every single part in the game can be wrought, bought, sold, dismantled, used, reverse engineered, and destroyed by player hands.

* Fundamentally lacking in that no real world economic model could survive with as little regulation as EVE Online has without crashing and burning constantly.

It’s really no wonder the Goons moved right in. And are winning. It’s an absurdist’s paradise. And that’s what the players love about it: it’s an unlimited drama engine. To a great extent, it’s this “drama” aspect that sets MMORPGs apart.

I can see why Lum didn’t address EVE Online in his article (other than a “why would a sane person even be willing to throw in with this kind of drudgery” side note). EVE Online (and to a lesser extent Fallen Earth) exists in a land entirely different from what he’s talking about, and there be dragons there.
JuJutsu

“I can see why Lum didn’t address EVE Online in his article (other than a “why would a sane person even be willing to throw in with this kind of drudgery” side note). EVE Online (and to a lesser extent Fallen Earth) exists in a land entirely different from what he’s talking about, and there be dragons there.”

Eve doesn’t fit but Second Life does? Nonsense.
Cedia

Very good article. Personally I liked EQ2′s crafting the best, with Vanguard’s being a close second. It was a mini-game that actually required you to be “present”. (Yes, I know people in EQ2 use macros.)

In UO my favorite character was my carpenter. I just loved going around chopping trees and then turning the logs into furniture for others to decorate with. I guess this is what I like about EQ2 as well, all the house decorations.

LotRO’s crafting isn’t bad, but it is there for gear, not housing. The fact that housing is so disappointing in that incredibly beautiful game saddens me.
http://geldonsgaming.blogspot.com geldonyetich

“I can see why Lum didn’t address EVE Online in his article (other than a “why would a sane person even be willing to throw in with this kind of drudgery” side note). EVE Online (and to a lesser extent Fallen Earth) exists in a land entirely different from what he’s talking about, and there be dragons there.”Eve doesn’t fit but Second Life does? Nonsense.

True, Second Life is pretty far out there. It’s easier to address though, since it’s pretty much just player made content = money. It’s also a bit more noteworthy considering just how whacked that player made content can be.
ethereal.wolf

SWG could have been near perfect if so much of the crafting catalogue wasn’t useless junk and the urban sprawl made it difficult to place a harvester. Yes I played on Starsider. I canceled my sub at lvl 66, I didn’t have the heart to craft another vehicle….
Sullee

@Sullee, I think you are absolutely right about the artisan fantasy. And absolutely wrong about the auction house, since it kills the artisan fantasy. [Quote this in reply]

Well I very much appreciate your view Raph and experience but I’d like to know why specifically the WoW AH is so bad?

Before we get into it let me state right now that I think WoW probably doesn’t belong in a discussion about crafting but I do recognize Scott was probably pandering to the more familiar in the article.

However, the WoW AH does not break the crafter fantasy by any stretch of the imagination. The WoW AH is used to buy and sell commodities. The highest levels of crafting in that game are raid-drop recipes and those items are generally crafted to order and delivered in person. The AH cut combined with the high cost of materials makes auctioning not as attractive as an in-person transactions for both the buyer and seller. Yet at the same time the merchant-prince style player can use the AH (and *gasp* yes with addons like every other aspect of WoW) to build their finances.

I recognize a big part of the crafter fantasy is notoriety and distinguishing oneself from other crafters. A lot of players focus on the service aspects of crafting to do this and build their reputation. But WoW’s AH as I’ve stated doesn’t prevent or hinder that style of play.

And let’s be honest here.. what does break the crafter fantasy is the utterly facile design that pervades every game Scott mentioned. I’m talking about crafting being a simple recipe button push affair that transmutes widgets one and two into widget three. How can a player maintain their unique artisan fantasy when nothing they make is in ANY way unique beyond their name being stamped on it? How do you expect a player to suspend their disbelief when crafting takes less skill and decisions than even the lowest level combat in the game?

I recognize the advances that have come along (like higher quality widget one and two transmute to higher quality widget three) but still most of that is iterative. The focus should be on actually designing crafting systems that are both fun and require some skill (like combat does) or other gameplay mechanics that actually encourage creativity somewhat like the SL reference although I think Scott would have done better to plug atitd there.
Iconic

SWG crafting redefined my entire sense of what crafting could be and should be. It was (a few bugs aside) the closest that I have ever seen to a perfect crafting system, and nothing else has even come close.

If you want to know how you could take a WoW clone and instantly make it better than WoW, one answer is that you could design SWG caliber crafting, and mix it with a better itemization scheme (something like Burning Circle Notorious Monster loot from Final Fantasy XI).
dartwick

@Vetarnias
As much as I dump EVE Online, I do acknowledge it has an economy a cut above the rest. What you’re complaining about is mostly the gameplay quality, not the economy.
As far as being an economic simulator is concerned, EVE Online is both remarkably robust and fundamentally lacking.* Remarkably robust in that you have a remarkable amount of freedom to build up a powerful merchant empire.One where every single part in the game can be wrought, bought, sold, dismantled, used, reverse engineered, and destroyed by player hands.*Fundamentally lacking in that no real world economic model could survive with as little regulation as EVE Online has without crashing and burning constantly.It’s really no wonder the Goons moved right in.And are winning.It’s an absurdist’s paradise.And that’s what the players love about it: it’s an unlimited drama engine.To a great extent, it’s this “drama” aspect that sets MMORPGs apart.I can see why Lum didn’t address EVE Online in his article (other than a “why would a sane person even be willing to throw in with this kind of drudgery” side note). EVE Online (and to a lesser extent Fallen Earth) exists in a land entirely different from what he’s talking about, and there be dragons there.

You should be ashamed of that post. Its very silly.

When people complain about EVE not being fun – Ill never argue. Its simply not fun for many people.

But the “absurdest paradise” comment doesnt really mean much. All games are are competitions are won by people who for some reason try real hard(absurdly hard) – so your point is “any game that doesnt even the playing field between casual players and grinder/metagamer/achiever is absurd.
Thats nice.

And secondly Im not sure why the amount of regulation matter as to the value of a game, but for the record the economy is regulated much more than you realize – for instance read this weeks Dev blog.

Once again. Many people find EVE boring thats cool. Some people cant take the cut throat world(business and combat alike) thats cool. But stop making double talk comments about it and just say you prefer a safety net to protect casual players.

Crafty, That

Recent Comments

Archives

Look, Ads!