This is not an ad for my game, since it doesn't exist yet. This is just a question about crafting.

I love crafting. Cannot stress this enough. Words cannot express my love, other than that I feel a fiery passion stronger than a super nova when I meet a good crafting system. I do not know if my system will be good or balanced. But I am attempting to design an entirely player run economy with an open skill system. NPCs can be hired to run shops and mine/farm/cut trees/etc in a limited capacity. They can also be hired as guards, because every building in the game can be conquered. But not so much that a small group of high level players can't stomp the NPCs. NPCs cannot craft items. They can only work in player owned mines/farms. And hiring a player during their offline time is worth many more res per hour than using npcs. You have to pay them though, this partly replaces npc quests.

That is all just background to my main question however.

In my system with its vast selection of crafting options each player can use all the skills, however this is not necessarily as time efficient as working with other players. It is better to have a sword maker, an alchemist and an enchanter and a wizard than to have one player do it all. Also because raising one skill doesnt raise the time needed for others, there will be no multies. And because players can own storage, mules will also be irrelevant.

Furthermore, monsters do not drop items or gold, only mats for crafting. The money system is closed to a degree. Using flavor reasons as an excuse, each player enters the game with an amount of gold. The gold supply is based on player population. Inactives will have their gold distributed evenly across all the players maybe every month as a divine blessing type event. This method is used to try and control inflation and remove the problems from a faucet/drain style economy. It has its own problems I'm sure, but thats what beta testing is for.

The reason you might use all the 4 classes above in making a nice sword is because multiple professions can be used to enhance one item. Alchemists can use potions to refine materials. Magic can refine them also, and the same to some degree for metal/wood workers. Alchemists and wizards/sorcerers/enchanters can also align the matrix, which allows lower level gear to hold more powerful enchantments. Alchemists cannot add spells per say only apply potions for effects, such as poison, acid, and so forth. Enchanters can add effects permanently, and they are added by inscribing words on an item. Each item type has a certain amount of space for this engraving. This space can be inreased by isncribing the words with acid(alchemists) or magic(wizards/sorcerers), and higher level metal working skills because obviously you can practice to learn to write small and clear. The refinement of a scribing allows a more powerful version to be used, where as the size means more possible inscriptions. Enchanters can imbue these inscriptions with power but cannot add temporary buffs. Wizards and sorcerers can cast temporary buffs on items, but not permanent ones that enchanters can do.

So weapons can be physically well made, have an aligned matrix, have more or better enchantments, and have buffs. Their edges can be sharpened with alchemical acids beyond what physical crafters can do. They can be poisoned and have weaker acids that damage people but not metal. Magic bufs and potion effects are temporary. Crafting work and enchantments are permanent. There may or may not be gem or rare metal additions to items like a crytal or emerald hilt stone, which can add more enchantments. The reason inscription quality is separate from enchantment quality is because you can reinchant items to be more powerful as your enchanter levels up, as long as the inscription level is high enough. You can also change the enchantments on weapons as long as you have access to enchanting or another player to do it.

Of course alchemists can also use potions directly, lke tossing flamable things, poisons, or corrosives on enemies/monsters. And wizards/sorcerers can use their magic in the standard spell casting way. Essentially crafting is cross professional, although you don't have to, and each profession also has skills to make them viable in combat.

Spells and enchantments and traps with or without potions may or may not be usable to defend buildings to help in defense if you are offline.

The goal of the crafting system is to force players to work together, and to work with people with different specializations. You can do it all yourself, but likely your items wont be as good unless you play a lot more.

Magic is an economic resource as well, as players who want to be mages must either explore the world for ruins to find new words of power to forge spells, or purchase a grimoire from another player. Grimoires contain spells but don't give away the nature of the words of power, which have to be sold separately, this allows a wizard to hoard his knowledge of words of power. After all if buying a grimoire gave you the words, you could make your own and put him out of business.

Now I know a lot of people despise complexity in games, and in many cases even real depth. Some players just hate crafting period. That is what WoW is for.

Some people might say that you can't balance such a complex system, I disagree but obviously we won't know until I try.

I guess now that you understand the system more or less, if any of you are crafters, does it interest you? I have written code to make an alchemy rpg simulator, this code can be changed only slightly to add the other resources and item types. What I am trying to figure out is, is there a playerbase out there for this kind of game? Why spend years making it if there is no audience.

What game are you comparing this system to? I stopped reading when you starting comparing it to concepts I'd never heard of...such as a mule and "multies."

Originally posted by Jimmac

What game are you comparing this system to? I stopped reading when you starting comparing it to concepts I'd never heard of...such as a mule and "multies."

I dont understand your question. I am describing a possible economic and crafting system. Maybe you could say I was comparing to loot drop economies or faucet/drain economies. Multies are also known as alts. In some games where you can only learn a few crafting skills players make other accounts to get access to more crafting skills. Mules are alt accounts which hold items for a person if they are short on space on their main account.

Either way I am not comparing this to a specific game, or even really to faucet/drain or loot drop systems. Its just the economic system I plan to implement.

I think you are trying to be clever, because I am pretty sure mules and craft alts are pretty well known things that players do to get around restrictions. But I don't know what your point is.

Those two terms don't really relate to my main question though, and I'd rather avoid an unnecessary derail about them.

I didn't know those phrases, and so I thought you were comparing your game to some other game where those two phrases were phrases established by the other game itself. I wasn't trying to be clever. I was trying to figure out what that other game was so I could decipher the phrases you were using.

Originally posted by Jimmac

I didn't know those phrases, and so I thought you were comparing your game to some other game where those two phrases were phrases established by the other game itself. I wasn't trying to be clever. I was trying to figure out what that other game was so I could decipher the phrases you were using.

I was under the impression that they were commonly understood phrases within mmorpgs. ah well.

Now that phrases are defined and set aside as mostly not too important to the overall concept, any thoughts on that?

Originally posted by Cuathon

This is not an ad for my game, since it doesn't exist yet. This is just a question about crafting.

I love crafting. Cannot stress this enough. Words cannot express my love, other than that I feel a fiery passion stronger than a super nova when I meet a good crafting system. I do not know if my system will be good or balanced. But I am attempting to design an entirely player run economy with an open skill system. NPCs can be hired to run shops and mine/farm/cut trees/etc in a limited capacity. They can also be hired as guards, because every building in the game can be conquered. But not so much that a small group of high level players can't stomp the NPCs. NPCs cannot craft items. They can only work in player owned mines/farms. And hiring a player during their offline time is worth many more res per hour than using npcs. You have to pay them though, this partly replaces npc quests.

I like every idea in the above paragraph, a lot. It shows you have a good knowledge of what you want your foundation to be like, and that you know who your target audience will be.

That is all just background to my main question however.

In my system with its vast selection of crafting options each player can use all the skills, however this is not necessarily as time efficient as working with other players. It is better to have a sword maker, an alchemist and an enchanter and a wizard than to have one player do it all. Also because raising one skill doesnt raise the time needed for others, there will be no multies. And because players can own storage, mules will also be irrelevant.

Both good ideas as well, now that I know what the words mean.

Furthermore, monsters do not drop items or gold, only mats for crafting. The money system is closed to a degree. Using flavor reasons as an excuse, each player enters the game with an amount of gold. The gold supply is based on player population. Inactives will have their gold distributed evenly across all the players maybe every month as a divine blessing type event. This method is used to try and control inflation and remove the problems from a faucet/drain style economy. It has its own problems I'm sure, but thats what beta testing is for.

Okay I like your idea on how to control inflation, but there will definitely be some problems. Like you said, they will have to be dealt with in beta.

One immediate problem that comes to mind is that if gold is limited as you said it would be, then my guess is that materials themselves will become something of a currency. Why? Because materials drop, while gold doesn't. Then you get the same problems of currency and inflation with the materials that you get with gold. I know I've seen this exact scenario happen in an mmo before, but I can't remember off the top of my head which mmo it was. I'll report back later if I can remember.

Another problem is that this idea of limiting gold will only work if there are no permanent gold sinks from where the gold cannot be recovered. For example, a player goes up to an NPC and buys a health potion for 10 gold. There is no way for any player to get that gold back from that NPC. That 10 gold has just disappeared forever. The solution then is that all gold sinks need to have some kind of way of getting the gold back out.

Last, if gold is created upon the creation of a new player character, then distributed evenly among other characters if that new player character goes inactive, then this itself might work as a form of inflation in the long run, since new gold is being introduced but not taken away once the character quits. The solution would be to only redistribute the gold that player character has in excess of the amount of gold players start with. For example, if players start with 100 gold, then a player through his adventures acquires 120 gold, then only 20 gold should be redistributed, while the other 100 should disappear with him when he quits.

Also, I'm not sure limited gold is needed. Is it? Maybe just a mechanic to limit unneccessary inflation is needed. I feel like a world where gold is limited (meaning no new gold can be created other than by making a new character) might cause problems in and of itself with gold shortages.

The reason you might use all the 4 classes above in making a nice sword is because multiple professions can be used to enhance one item. Alchemists can use potions to refine materials. Magic can refine them also, and the same to some degree for metal/wood workers. Alchemists and wizards/sorcerers/enchanters can also align the matrix, which allows lower level gear to hold more powerful enchantments. Alchemists cannot add spells per say only apply potions for effects, such as poison, acid, and so forth. Enchanters can add effects permanently, and they are added by inscribing words on an item. Each item type has a certain amount of space for this engraving. This space can be inreased by isncribing the words with acid(alchemists) or magic(wizards/sorcerers), and higher level metal working skills because obviously you can practice to learn to write small and clear. The refinement of a scribing allows a more powerful version to be used, where as the size means more possible inscriptions. Enchanters can imbue these inscriptions with power but cannot add temporary buffs. Wizards and sorcerers can cast temporary buffs on items, but not permanent ones that enchanters can do.

Does this not create the need for alts/multies? If only different classes can make an item more powerful, then won't players want to have alts to do this by themselves? I could be misunderstanding.

So weapons can be physically well made, have an aligned matrix, have more or better enchantments, and have buffs. Their edges can be sharpened with alchemical acids beyond what physical crafters can do. They can be poisoned and have weaker acids that damage people but not metal. Magic bufs and potion effects are temporary. Crafting work and enchantments are permanent. There may or may not be gem or rare metal additions to items like a crytal or emerald hilt stone, which can add more enchantments. The reason inscription quality is separate from enchantment quality is because you can reinchant items to be more powerful as your enchanter levels up, as long as the inscription level is high enough. You can also change the enchantments on weapons as long as you have access to enchanting or another player to do it.

Honestly this all sounds pretty great. Because I don't know the basics of your crafting system, I can't say for sure how good it will be. But my point is that it sounds like you've thought it out enough to where it's probably going to be really good.

Of course alchemists can also use potions directly, lke tossing flamable things, poisons, or corrosives on enemies/monsters. And wizards/sorcerers can use their magic in the standard spell casting way. Essentially crafting is cross professional, although you don't have to, and each profession also has skills to make them viable in combat.

Spells and enchantments and traps with or without potions may or may not be usable to defend buildings to help in defense if you are offline.

The goal of the crafting system is to force players to work together, and to work with people with different specializations. You can do it all yourself, but likely your items wont be as good unless you play a lot more.

Good goal. Definitely will need to eliminate the need for alts, if you want this goal to be realized.

Magic is an economic resource as well, as players who want to be mages must either explore the world for ruins to find new words of power to forge spells, or purchase a grimoire from another player. Grimoires contain spells but don't give away the nature of the words of power, which have to be sold separately, this allows a wizard to hoard his knowledge of words of power. After all if buying a grimoire gave you the words, you could make your own and put him out of business.

Now I know a lot of people despise complexity in games, and in many cases even real depth. Some players just hate crafting period. That is what WoW is for.

Some people might say that you can't balance such a complex system, I disagree but obviously we won't know until I try.

I've always felt it is very possible to balance complex, intricate systems. My personal example is DAOC PVP and combat abilities. With so many classes in DAOC, with each class having a ton of abilities, and with PVP being a core focus of the game, many people felt like it was damn near impossible to balance the game properly. I disagree...

The problem with the way the devs in DAOC handled balancing is that when they made changes to classes and to abilities, they would make changes infrequently, and they would make big changes instead of small changes. The key to balancing a complex system (such as your crafting system and DAOC's classes and abilities) is to make SMALL adjustments OFTEN. Tweak, then tweak again, then tweak again. Don't make big changes after a long period of time. Instead, make small changes after a small period of time.

After 3 years or so of tweaking like how I am suggesting, I honestly think DAOC would have been damn close to being balanced. I think the same can be said for any complex system.

I guess now that you understand the system more or less, if any of you are crafters, does it interest you? I have written code to make an alchemy rpg simulator, this code can be changed only slightly to add the other resources and item types. What I am trying to figure out is, is there a playerbase out there for this kind of game? Why spend years making it if there is no audience.

Yeah I like pretty much all your ideas. I think anyone who is a fan of deep crafting, teamwork crafting, sandbox/world changing crafting, or just sandbox in general will like your ideas.

Is there a playerbase for this kind of game? I think there would be a small, niche playerbase. See A Tale in the Desert. Your target audience would be similar to theirs. It's not too much of a stretch to suggest that their success level should be achievable for another developer who might do what they're doing better.

Originally posted by Jimmac

Originally posted by Cuathon

This is not an ad for my game, since it doesn't exist yet. This is just a question about crafting.

I love crafting. Cannot stress this enough. Words cannot express my love, other than that I feel a fiery passion stronger than a super nova when I meet a good crafting system. I do not know if my system will be good or balanced. But I am attempting to design an entirely player run economy with an open skill system. NPCs can be hired to run shops and mine/farm/cut trees/etc in a limited capacity. They can also be hired as guards, because every building in the game can be conquered. But not so much that a small group of high level players can't stomp the NPCs. NPCs cannot craft items. They can only work in player owned mines/farms. And hiring a player during their offline time is worth many more res per hour than using npcs. You have to pay them though, this partly replaces npc quests.

I like every idea in the above paragraph, a lot. It shows you have a good knowledge of what you want your foundation to be like, and that you know who your target audience will be.

I did a lot of research and read many forums and articles. I have always been a fan of doing as much myself as possible before bugging other people about something I could hae learned with math and google.

That is all just background to my main question however.

In my system with its vast selection of crafting options each player can use all the skills, however this is not necessarily as time efficient as working with other players. It is better to have a sword maker, an alchemist and an enchanter and a wizard than to have one player do it all. Also because raising one skill doesnt raise the time needed for others, there will be no multies. And because players can own storage, mules will also be irrelevant.

Both good ideas as well, now that I know what the words mean.

Furthermore, monsters do not drop items or gold, only mats for crafting. The money system is closed to a degree. Using flavor reasons as an excuse, each player enters the game with an amount of gold. The gold supply is based on player population. Inactives will have their gold distributed evenly across all the players maybe every month as a divine blessing type event. This method is used to try and control inflation and remove the problems from a faucet/drain style economy. It has its own problems I'm sure, but thats what beta testing is for.

Okay I like your idea on how to control inflation, but there will definitely be some problems. Like you said, they will have to be dealt with in beta.

One immediate problem that comes to mind is that if gold is limited as you said it would be, then my guess is that materials themselves will become something of a currency. Why? Because materials drop, while gold doesn't. Then you get the same problems of currency and inflation with the materials that you get with gold. I know I've seen this exact scenario happen in an mmo before, but I can't remember off the top of my head which mmo it was. I'll report back later if I can remember.

I understand how secondary markets work. There could be a problem if I screw up that forces players to run an economy similar to the one based on SoJ in Diablo. Players need to be able to have enough gold to do any transaction they need. My system follows in a simplified manner some of the monetary policies of the fed, I am allowing controlled inflation as the game gains more players. The fed strives for keeping inflation constant at about 2%. One thing to note, because res can be farmed or mined that means that every player can "print" money which makes secondary markets dangerous and unstable to use.

Another problem is that this idea of limiting gold will only work if there are no permanent gold sinks from where the gold cannot be recovered. For example, a player goes up to an NPC and buys a health potion for 10 gold. There is no way for any player to get that gold back from that NPC. That 10 gold has just disappeared forever. The solution then is that all gold sinks need to have some kind of way of getting the gold back out.

As I describe, NPCs cannot do anything economy related. There are no npc shops or services. Everything is made by the player. My whole point is that this is not a faucet/drain economy. So there are no gold sinks like in most games. Also if a player tries to hoard gold all the other players can just attack him. There is no "safe space" to store items or gold. You can run banks as a player, but if a more powerful player group attacks, you can lose it. So hoarding doesn't work too well.

Last, if gold is created upon the creation of a new player character, then distributed evenly among other characters if that new player character goes inactive, then this itself might work as a form of inflation in the long run, since new gold is being introduced but not taken away once the character quits. The solution would be to only redistribute the gold that player character has in excess of the amount of gold players start with. For example, if players start with 100 gold, then a player through his adventures acquires 120 gold, then only 20 gold should be redistributed, while the other 100 should disappear with him when he quits.

As described above, increased gold is on purpose. I want the gold to grow over time, but I am limiting the speed. And also since its a "divine blessing event" if the gold supply is getting large I can just not "bless" the realms. I have total control. In some cases you could say that items will get inflation, however it is not exactly the case because I have consumables, item decay, probably pvp item loss. Also because players make items, if there is an item with enough excess players will stop making so much as the price drops.

Also, I'm not sure limited gold is needed. Is it? Maybe just a mechanic to limit unneccessary inflation is needed. I feel like a world where gold is limited (meaning no new gold can be created other than by making a new character) might cause problems in and of itself with gold shortages.

The reason you might use all the 4 classes above in making a nice sword is because multiple professions can be used to enhance one item. Alchemists can use potions to refine materials. Magic can refine them also, and the same to some degree for metal/wood workers. Alchemists and wizards/sorcerers/enchanters can also align the matrix, which allows lower level gear to hold more powerful enchantments. Alchemists cannot add spells per say only apply potions for effects, such as poison, acid, and so forth. Enchanters can add effects permanently, and they are added by inscribing words on an item. Each item type has a certain amount of space for this engraving. This space can be inreased by isncribing the words with acid(alchemists) or magic(wizards/sorcerers), and higher level metal working skills because obviously you can practice to learn to write small and clear. The refinement of a scribing allows a more powerful version to be used, where as the size means more possible inscriptions. Enchanters can imbue these inscriptions with power but cannot add temporary buffs. Wizards and sorcerers can cast temporary buffs on items, but not permanent ones that enchanters can do.

Does this not create the need for alts/multies? If only different classes can make an item more powerful, then won't players want to have alts to do this by themselves? I could be misunderstanding.

The trick is that any account can learn any crafting skills. It would be better to specialize because if you have a group you benefit when your friends/allies level their skills meaning its time you dont have to put in yourself. Alts exist because either you limit the number of crating professions a player can have, such as in WoW and its clones, or because all your skills are on one progression ladder where if you have 100 in one skill getting 1 in another is the same as getting 101 in that skill in terms of time/experience/grinding. My game has each kind of skill on a separate progression, so instead of wasting time with a multi just skill your main, it takes the same amount of time.

So weapons can be physically well made, have an aligned matrix, have more or better enchantments, and have buffs. Their edges can be sharpened with alchemical acids beyond what physical crafters can do. They can be poisoned and have weaker acids that damage people but not metal. Magic bufs and potion effects are temporary. Crafting work and enchantments are permanent. There may or may not be gem or rare metal additions to items like a crytal or emerald hilt stone, which can add more enchantments. The reason inscription quality is separate from enchantment quality is because you can reinchant items to be more powerful as your enchanter levels up, as long as the inscription level is high enough. You can also change the enchantments on weapons as long as you have access to enchanting or another player to do it.

Honestly this all sounds pretty great. Because I don't know the basics of your crafting system, I can't say for sure how good it will be. But my point is that it sounds like you've thought it out enough to where it's probably going to be really good.

What basics do you want to know? I have it all written out, so I can post a description easily.

Of course alchemists can also use potions directly, lke tossing flamable things, poisons, or corrosives on enemies/monsters. And wizards/sorcerers can use their magic in the standard spell casting way. Essentially crafting is cross professional, although you don't have to, and each profession also has skills to make them viable in combat.

Spells and enchantments and traps with or without potions may or may not be usable to defend buildings to help in defense if you are offline.

The goal of the crafting system is to force players to work together, and to work with people with different specializations. You can do it all yourself, but likely your items wont be as good unless you play a lot more.

Good goal. Definitely will need to eliminate the need for alts, if you want this goal to be realized.

Working together is all about saving time. If you raise one skill and your buddy another, you both benefit based on how much work the other guy has put in. If you both learn the same skills, you didn't save time. As described above though, there is no tangible benefit from using an alt instead of just stacking the skills on your first character.

Magic is an economic resource as well, as players who want to be mages must either explore the world for ruins to find new words of power to forge spells, or purchase a grimoire from another player. Grimoires contain spells but don't give away the nature of the words of power, which have to be sold separately, this allows a wizard to hoard his knowledge of words of power. After all if buying a grimoire gave you the words, you could make your own and put him out of business.

Now I know a lot of people despise complexity in games, and in many cases even real depth. Some players just hate crafting period. That is what WoW is for.

Some people might say that you can't balance such a complex system, I disagree but obviously we won't know until I try.

I've always felt it is very possible to balance complex, intricate systems. My personal example is DAOC PVP and combat abilities. With so many classes in DAOC, with each class having a ton of abilities, and with PVP being a core focus of the game, many people felt like it was damn near impossible to balance the game properly. I disagree...

The problem is that players who minmax get pissed when skills are changed constantly every day. Imagine fighting a hard monster one day, and the next day you can't kill it. It pisses off players more than poor balancing, and in some cases still doesn't work.

The problem with the way the devs in DAOC handled balancing is that when they made changes to classes and to abilities, they would make changes infrequently, and they would make big changes instead of small changes. The key to balancing a complex system (such as your crafting system and DAOC's classes and abilities) is to make SMALL adjustments OFTEN. Tweak, then tweak again, then tweak again. Don't make big changes after a long period of time. Instead, make small changes after a small period of time.

After 3 years or so of tweaking like how I am suggesting, I honestly think DAOC would have been damn close to being balanced. I think the same can be said for any complex system.

I guess now that you understand the system more or less, if any of you are crafters, does it interest you? I have written code to make an alchemy rpg simulator, this code can be changed only slightly to add the other resources and item types. What I am trying to figure out is, is there a playerbase out there for this kind of game? Why spend years making it if there is no audience.

Yeah I like pretty much all your ideas. I think anyone who is a fan of deep crafting, teamwork crafting, sandbox/world changing crafting, or just sandbox in general will like your ideas.

Is there a playerbase for this kind of game? I think there would be a small, niche playerbase. See A Tale in the Desert. Your target audience would be similar to theirs. It's not too much of a stretch to suggest that their success level should be achievable for another developer who might do what they're doing better.

Casual players are able to play the game as well. I am working to make ways so that casuals can have fun. Perhaps if I ever get enough people, there will be a divinely guarded world where casuals can play and they can permanently migrate into the normal worlds if they wanna dive in. In general low level players are not too affected by pvp, there is little reason to farm n00bs, and many higher level players will protect n00bs from attacks and maybe set up night time sanctuaries where you can be protected by highlevel players who go there to rest.

 

Reply in yellow. Stupid spam filter.

Theres some good ideas buried in here, but I think the premise is a bit self-contradictary.   Parts of this vision seem to contradict other parts, resulting with a bit of confusion.   Here's some feedback on specific points that may help you clarify your game.

Originally posted by Cuathon

 I am attempting to design an entirely player run economy with an open skill system. NPCs can be hired to run shops and mine/farm/cut trees/etc in a limited capacity. They can also be hired as guards, because every building in the game can be conquered. But not so much that a small group of high level players can't stomp the NPCs. NPCs cannot craft items. They can only work in player owned mines/farms. And hiring a player during their offline time is worth many more res per hour than using npcs. You have to pay them though, this partly replaces npc quests.

Admirable goal.  I wondering how exactly will the NPCs work.  From this, I see automated machine type processors that are going to reduce the 'harvesting' portions of crafting.   Doesn't this take some of the 'game' from the players?   More on this in a bit.

Originally posted by Cuathon

In my system with its vast selection of crafting options each player can use all the skills, however this is not necessarily as time efficient as working with other players.  It is better to have a sword maker, an alchemist and an enchanter and a wizard than to have one player do it all. Also because raising one skill doesnt raise the time needed for others, there will be no multies. And because players can own storage, mules will also be irrelevant.

Okay, each character can use all crafting skills, but it might not be as efficient from a time invested standpoint as buying materials, components, sub-assemblies, etc. from other players.  Multiple alternate characters (alts or multies) would not be advantageous for crafting, as one character can have (purchase) all the storage they might need/want, and each character can do all skills.

Originally posted by Cuathon

Furthermore, monsters do not drop items or gold, only mats for crafting. The money system is closed to a degree. Using flavor reasons as an excuse, each player enters the game with an amount of gold. The gold supply is based on player population. Inactives will have their gold distributed evenly across all the players maybe every month as a divine blessing type event. This method is used to try and control inflation and remove the problems from a faucet/drain style economy. It has its own problems I'm sure, but thats what beta testing is for.

Here we get a bit interesting.  The amount of money in game is fixed by the number of players in the game.  This might control inflation of coins, but I think this idea will introduce many more issues.  As another poster pointed out, there is a very strong liklihood that a secondary economy will spring up using materials or something else as a currency.  And the same poster also pointed out a real problem with  redistribution of wealth once a player leaves.

But if there is a limited coinage, how are the automated worker NPCs paid?  If they are paid with money, how does that money re-enter the economy?  This seems to be a definite money-sink and is counter to the idea of a closed economy that is the basis for this idea.

Mobs only drop mats.  Now, here's the first really big problem.  Are these mats the same as those that can be harvested by the automated NPC workers?  If so, why would any serious crafter actually do anything other than craft?  If not, there is at least a need for the crafter character to leave their comfortable nest and venture into the game world.

Now, there are at least two ways to get nearly unlimited materials for crafting -- hunting mobs and harvesting via automated NPCs.  Since these supplies are essentially creating goods in the world, this open-ended supply needs to be balanced in the closed economy..  Maybe your crafting system will be similar to EQ1, where failed combines can destroy materials, but since that is about the only 'destroy of fail' system that I've played, I would think not.  So, this is a faucet for materials without a corresponding sink.

Originally posted by Cuathon

The goal of the crafting system is to force players to work together, and to work with people with different specializations. You can do it all yourself, but likely your items wont be as good unless you play a lot more.

This is another big problem.  While it is good to have players be reliant on one another, this game design allows each character to be independent, as each character has access to all skills.  In my experience, humans are social pack animals with delusions of being solitary hunters.  In games, if a player can accomplish a goal with one or more of their own characters, they will do that, rather than looking for another party.  People see games as a solo experience rather than a communal experience.  Making an item is not a inherently a communal task, and given the opportunity, a player will not want to engage in social interaction in order to accomplish this task.  Given the choice of acting independently or buying a difficult sub-assembly from another player, the majority of players will attempt to make the item themselves.

Fundamentally, this quirk of human nature works against forcing players to be voluntarily dependent on another player.  For any system to force some dependency on others, that it not be possible to accomplish the task 'solo'.  I would strongly suggest that in order to accomplish the goal of 'forcing players to work together', a game system needs to incomplete/  That is, a character should not be allowed to have all the skills necessary for performing a task.  This makes characters dependent.  But to make the players (the humans playing the game) dependent, it is necessary to limit them to controlling a single account and character.  The more that 1:1 ratio is broken, the more independence the player (human) has.

Secondarily, this states that the only real investment in the game is time, and that a single character can make an item as good as a communally built item, only that it takes longer.  Let's face it.  People play a lot.  It isn't uncommon for some people to play 20-30 hours a week while holding down a full-time job.  Unless the crafting system is going to require more than 30 hours (real time) to make an item, then there really isn't a significant downside for crafting an item by oneself.  Since most crafting tasks take less than 1 minute, chances are very good that the time involved for making a complex item from scratch will be less than 30 minutes real time.  The game needs to provide some sense of accomplishment to keep its playerbase.  And if crafting a single item takes 30+ hours to complete, this game will be devoid of players rather quickly.  So, the designer either devises a system where a task takes a reasonable amount of time or they drive off their players.  And that reasonable amount of time encourages independence rather than dependence.

Originally posted by Cuathon

I guess now that you understand the system more or less, if any of you are crafters, does it interest you? I have written code to make an alchemy rpg simulator, this code can be changed only slightly to add the other resources and item types. What I am trying to figure out is, is there a playerbase out there for this kind of game? Why spend years making it if there is no audience.

I do think that there are a lot of people who do want a crafting-based game.  But that does need to be well-balanced and a solid game in order to succeed.  I'd also strongly suggest that you approach this entire project as a business, with a well-researched business plan in place and know what it is going to cost you to build this.

I wish you well in your efforts.

Originally posted by Mendel

Theres some good ideas buried in here, but I think the premise is a bit self-contradictary.   Parts of this vision seem to contradict other parts, resulting with a bit of confusion.   Here's some feedback on specific points that may help you clarify your game.

 

Originally posted by Cuathon

 I am attempting to design an entirely player run economy with an open skill system. NPCs can be hired to run shops and mine/farm/cut trees/etc in a limited capacity. They can also be hired as guards, because every building in the game can be conquered. But not so much that a small group of high level players can't stomp the NPCs. NPCs cannot craft items. They can only work in player owned mines/farms. And hiring a player during their offline time is worth many more res per hour than using npcs. You have to pay them though, this partly replaces npc quests.

Admirable goal.  I wondering how exactly will the NPCs work.  From this, I see automated machine type processors that are going to reduce the 'harvesting' portions of crafting.   Doesn't this take some of the 'game' from the players?   More on this in a bit.

Many mats cannot be harvested in this manner, such as mats from creatures. In this case we are trading the players time spent investing in gathering for time spent creating buildings and waysto guard buildings and also running a business.

Originally posted by Cuathon

In my system with its vast selection of crafting options each player can use all the skills, however this is not necessarily as time efficient as working with other players.  It is better to have a sword maker, an alchemist and an enchanter and a wizard than to have one player do it all. Also because raising one skill doesnt raise the time needed for others, there will be no multies. And because players can own storage, mules will also be irrelevant.

Okay, each character can use all crafting skills, but it might not be as efficient from a time invested standpoint as buying materials, components, sub-assemblies, etc. from other players.  Multiple alternate characters (alts or multies) would not be advantageous for crafting, as one character can have (purchase) all the storage they might need/want, and each character can do all skills.

Originally posted by Cuathon

Furthermore, monsters do not drop items or gold, only mats for crafting. The money system is closed to a degree. Using flavor reasons as an excuse, each player enters the game with an amount of gold. The gold supply is based on player population. Inactives will have their gold distributed evenly across all the players maybe every month as a divine blessing type event. This method is used to try and control inflation and remove the problems from a faucet/drain style economy. It has its own problems I'm sure, but thats what beta testing is for.

Here we get a bit interesting.  The amount of money in game is fixed by the number of players in the game.  This might control inflation of coins, but I think this idea will introduce many more issues.  As another poster pointed out, there is a very strong liklihood that a secondary economy will spring up using materials or something else as a currency.  And the same poster also pointed out a real problem with  redistribution of wealth once a player leaves.

I believe I addressed the matter of wealth redistribution, but it may have been on another forum. There are ways to separate quitters from people on breaks or vacation. I am aware of the secondary econmy issue, which is why i used inactive gold supplies as a way to raise the money supply so players dont have to resort to mat trading. Although I am allowing them to trade mats intentionally and it really wouldnt bug me too much if they insisted on mat trading.

But if there is a limited coinage, how are the automated worker NPCs paid?  If they are paid with money, how does that money re-enter the economy?  This seems to be a definite money-sink and is counter to the idea of a closed economy that is the basis for this idea.

Initially I had forgotten this issue, but i am going to have workers paid in mats, part of their mining production goes to them.

Mobs only drop mats.  Now, here's the first really big problem.  Are these mats the same as those that can be harvested by the automated NPC workers?  If so, why would any serious crafter actually do anything other than craft?  If not, there is at least a need for the crafter character to leave their comfortable nest and venture into the game world.

Mats dropped by monsters are distinct from mats gathered by mining and farming. Players do not have to do anything they don't want to. They can either buy mats from martial of magic centric characters, or not use them at all. Also every skill area has ways to fight monsters, so I don't see why fighting monsters poses a problem. You can choose to do as you please.

Now, there are at least two ways to get nearly unlimited materials for crafting -- hunting mobs and harvesting via automated NPCs.  Since these supplies are essentially creating goods in the world, this open-ended supply needs to be balanced in the closed economy..  Maybe your crafting system will be similar to EQ1, where failed combines can destroy materials, but since that is about the only 'destroy of fail' system that I've played, I would think not.  So, this is a faucet for materials without a corresponding sink.

Items both decay naturally over time and through extended use. Many items are also consumables, or are used in construction. One may also have to repair buildings. When a player is killed they lose the items they have on them, possibly some will be ruined in combat, and also players can lose items when production and storage facilities are attacked, which again can also damage some of the items.

Originally posted by Cuathon

The goal of the crafting system is to force players to work together, and to work with people with different specializations. You can do it all yourself, but likely your items wont be as good unless you play a lot more.

This is another big problem.  While it is good to have players be reliant on one another, this game design allows each character to be independent, as each character has access to all skills.  In my experience, humans are social pack animals with delusions of being solitary hunters.  In games, if a player can accomplish a goal with one or more of their own characters, they will do that, rather than looking for another party.  People see games as a solo experience rather than a communal experience.  Making an item is not a inherently a communal task, and given the opportunity, a player will not want to engage in social interaction in order to accomplish this task.  Given the choice of acting independently or buying a difficult sub-assembly from another player, the majority of players will attempt to make the item themselves.

I have played in many games where players work together in crafting, mining, ship building, building and so forth. If someone is obsessed with doing it all alone, that just means they will not impact the game world in a significant way.

Fundamentally, this quirk of human nature works against forcing players to be voluntarily dependent on another player.  For any system to force some dependency on others, that it not be possible to accomplish the task 'solo'.  I would strongly suggest that in order to accomplish the goal of 'forcing players to work together', a game system needs to incomplete/  That is, a character should not be allowed to have all the skills necessary for performing a task.  This makes characters dependent.  But to make the players (the humans playing the game) dependent, it is necessary to limit them to controlling a single account and character.  The more that 1:1 ratio is broken, the more independence the player (human) has.

Profession systems are annoying and people just cheat. If you dont let them cheat, they quit. Its more work than an open system. If players want to waste their time performing tasks better outsourced, that just makes them less relevant to the game. Also its a text based game, and there are time constraints from travel, and in crafting, and so forth. You can't really play constantly.

Secondarily, this states that the only real investment in the game is time, and that a single character can make an item as good as a communally built item, only that it takes longer.  Let's face it.  People play a lot.  It isn't uncommon for some people to play 20-30 hours a week while holding down a full-time job.  Unless the crafting system is going to require more than 30 hours (real time) to make an item, then there really isn't a significant downside for crafting an item by oneself.  Since most crafting tasks take less than 1 minute, chances are very good that the time involved for making a complex item from scratch will be less than 30 minutes real time.  The game needs to provide some sense of accomplishment to keep its playerbase.  And if crafting a single item takes 30+ hours to complete, this game will be devoid of players rather quickly.  So, the designer either devises a system where a task takes a reasonable amount of time or they drive off their players.  And that reasonable amount of time encourages independence rather than dependence.

Items take an amount of time to craft related to quality, size, and complexity. Crafting large scale items may take awhile, however the player can just hop offline and do something else if so.

Originally posted by Cuathon

I guess now that you understand the system more or less, if any of you are crafters, does it interest you? I have written code to make an alchemy rpg simulator, this code can be changed only slightly to add the other resources and item types. What I am trying to figure out is, is there a playerbase out there for this kind of game? Why spend years making it if there is no audience.

I do think that there are a lot of people who do want a crafting-based game.  But that does need to be well-balanced and a solid game in order to succeed.  I'd also strongly suggest that you approach this entire project as a business, with a well-researched business plan in place and know what it is going to cost you to build this.

Well, the game is txt based, and i do all the art and coding myself. My main costs are server hosting.

I wish you well in your efforts.

 

reply in yellow

Just a little update:

There is a mechanic in the game where players can send their characters to their shop when they log off. If a player's character is in their shop, they can be paid to craft items, but only certain parts of items. Players can set what services and prices they provide while offline for things like spell buffs, enchanting, and such. You could also set your character to mix potions for people while offline for a fee. I think it is very much a pain to find someone with the skill you want who is online. So I try to remove that problem.

Certain activities take too long, to do without player being on to agree, but possibly players can set those activities up during a sleep period. Like if it takes 4 hours to craft an item, you may not want other players to set your character to crafting without being able to confirm or deny during a normal logout, but if you are going to sleep it isnt so much a problem.

So, I have essentially filled out all the crafting mechanics in my game, its very complex and some things might be changed but this is what I am going to start programming:

Resources:

Resources will spawn over time SWG style.

Players can initially mine/gather/harvest by themselves but later may be able to run mines/farms. There will be thousands of kinds of resources which will spawn with varying quality.

Resources will go through various processing to become usable mats. Metals will need to be refined. Metal will be formed into ingots after this process. Metal can be formed into many shapes: rings, wires, coils, plates. Wires may wrap around staffs, be used in jewelry and other such things. Herbs may need to be dried or powdered or cut. Wood may be planked or poled.

Then items will be "crafted" or put into their basic final form. Metal will be made into blades and armor pieces, wires and pendants put together for jewelry, wood will be shaped for staffs or bows. Blades and guards and pommels will be put together, or tangs and handles, or hafts and heads, arrow head and wood and so forth. These items will be in usable form. So you could sell them to players and they could be used in battle or crafting. However there are still many steps to refine and improve items.

Enhancements can take many forms. Inscriptions to hold enchantments can be carved, you can align the matrix to allow weaker items to hold more magic. You can sharpen blades, polish wood, add gems, change item skins and so forth. You could wrap wire around a staff to make it pretttier and possibly allow more spells and magic to be used. You can actually cast the permanent enchantments or add the temporary spell buffs at this stage as well. This is the end stage.

You can revise carvings and enchantments and spells on weapons post production, and you can change gems and metal wires and recolor and like any other step an entirely different crafter from the original can do this.

This intense and some would say excessive customization is only part of the system however. At every stage of the crafting process it is possible to get small random bonuses to quality, essentially these bonuses are similar to initial resource bonuses and they stack.

Another aspect of the game that is somewhat novel and important are the crafting skills themselves.

Firstly there are no classes. Any single player can learn all the skills, use magic, learn fighting skills and so forth.

Further skills level in a somewhat unique way. There are no conventional levels per say. Firstly many things that can be crafted are in themselves used for crafting. Tools can be crafted and are used in production. The arrival area, as players "arrive" through a gate from another world, allows players to have access to incredibly basic crafting tools. Later the best crafting will be done with entirely player produced items. All tools have a value which corresponds to a % bonus to crafting value. Resources have these values also.

Now on to skills specifically:

Skills level by experience, so instead of having levels at certain amounts of experience, players just have that number. Experience is filtered through an equation to produce the bonus to the crafted item. Different experience is filtered through different equations. There are pseudo levels because some materials require a certain amount of experience to work with. They also require superior tools, for instance to use a higher level metal you may need a better smelting furnace to use the higher temperatures required to melt the metal. However the bonuses from experience produce the same bonuses regardless of the material used.

There are parent crafting skills and subskills and subskills of subskills. An example of all the skills affecting an item follow:

You are making a longsword:

A longsword is a weapon->sword->longsword

The material is metal->steel

You have 10000 experience in metal, and 6400 in steel

You have 10000 in weapon, 10000 in sword, and 2500 in longsword

The equations are :

+mexp^.25+stexp^.5+wexp^.25+swexp^.5+lexp^1/10

that means +10+80+10+100+250=+450% so the item is 550% better than 0/0/0/0/0 exp

obviously these numbers are a little too high, so the numbers would be messed with to lower the bonus.

the essential point is that the more specific the skill in relation to the product, the more valuable the exp. So if you want to be the best longsword maker on the server you might want to focus most of your crafting on longswords made of steel. Now I think that the specific material skill bonuses might be a smaller part of the total possible, because if you are making metal longswords you should be able to make iron ones nearly as good as your steel or bronze weapons similarly well.

The upside of many aspects of this system is individuality, uniqueness, mastery and customization. Players can easily create a brand with these options. You can be known for your mastery of a material, and/or of an item type.

Further the improvement is very fluid. There is no break moment when bam, you suddenly become much more powerful than a player one level lower, and neither is their a level cap because the equation works no matter the number, further the square root based system means that even a player with 1mil experience would not be amazingly more powerful and godlike. It takes more and more experience to get the same effective improvement.

Magic is made to be very powerful however. Magic is formed with words of power found in ruins around the world. Words of power fall into different categories. There are many parts of a spell and they affect different parts. Element/type of power, range, accuracy,  speed, range, power, mana and so forth. All of these can be moderated by changing the spell construction. Spells are cast with a keyword, so if you want to give a person a spell but not have access to the keywords you can just sell them a grimoire with keywords. They can use the spell but they can't make their own. You can choose to sell actual words of power.

My goal is to try and convince players to form sorcerous guilds and have different schools, as opposed to a single player learning all the magic alone.

Possible systems involve community spell word knowledge, a guild system where leaders or higher members are given any spell words members have and distribute grimoires to each player member so that one player can't join an enemy guild as a spy and learn all the words, as they would only have access to the grimoire and not the words, and they couldn't just copy the grimoire and spread it around either. Of course players are welcome to weild the magic system however they damn well please as well.

It's early in the morning and haven't been able to read the whole thread yet, but I wanted to post here, for bookmarking purposes and maybe contribute more at a later point.

The crafting system you describe here is very much like that of Wurm Online. It has deep crafting and works with different quality of resources and proficiency based crafting.

I do like this kind of games. The thing I have with most current AAA MMO's is that they are only about killing monsters for the phat lewt, but they have little to offer on the side. In the end you only fight monsters.

I played Wurm Online, and everyone interested in crafting should probably go through their tutorial. What I'm missing in their game is a sort of meta game. There is very limited fighting in the game, which made me believe that the only purpose to craft is to have a piece of land with a house on it. I heard from other players that they had taken up jobs as blacksmiths or weavers or cooks, but jobs are usually only good in the real world. For good crafting to work I think their needs to be a specific purpose.

The idea I had myself how to make this kind of crafting work, is to have a game with factions. Players upon entering a world are forced into 2 or 3 or maybe more communities. Communities are defended by NPC's which at first are much stronger than players when they start out. So it's not viable to goto the other faction at the start because you would simply get killed by guards. This way players will be forced to work on crafting, to build strong houses and walls. Players will want to make armour and weapons as good as possible. This should take time to get to a point where players become able to take on the defending NPC's. The meta goal of the game is to take down a neighbouring faction, after which the game resets for a new round. Players will have to work together, share resources, and make political plans, because that's the only way to "win".

This might be a viable way to make an almost pure crafting game work. Maybe tere are other kinds of meta games possible, I'm very curious to read about those.

Will post another time about the crafting itself.

edit: Another problem is all the abandoned property from players who have left the game. If people claim land to build houses etc, new players have to walk further and further away from spawning points, and abandoned houses give the game a sad look. There should probably a way to unclaim land if players don't return, or for the property to 'crumble'  in a timeframe that isn't close to a year.

Originally posted by Cuathon

So, I have essentially filled out all the crafting mechanics in my game, its very complex and some things might be changed but this is what I am going to start programming:

Resources:

Resources will spawn over time SWG style.

Players can initially mine/gather/harvest by themselves but later may be able to run mines/farms. There will be thousands of kinds of resources which will spawn with varying quality.

Resources will go through various processing to become usable mats. Metals will need to be refined. Metal will be formed into ingots after this process. Metal can be formed into many shapes: rings, wires, coils, plates. Wires may wrap around staffs, be used in jewelry and other such things. Herbs may need to be dried or powdered or cut. Wood may be planked or poled.

Then items will be "crafted" or put into their basic final form. Metal will be made into blades and armor pieces, wires and pendants put together for jewelry, wood will be shaped for staffs or bows. Blades and guards and pommels will be put together, or tangs and handles, or hafts and heads, arrow head and wood and so forth. These items will be in usable form. So you could sell them to players and they could be used in battle or crafting. However there are still many steps to refine and improve items.

Enhancements can take many forms. Inscriptions to hold enchantments can be carved, you can align the matrix to allow weaker items to hold more magic. You can sharpen blades, polish wood, add gems, change item skins and so forth. You could wrap wire around a staff to make it pretttier and possibly allow more spells and magic to be used. You can actually cast the permanent enchantments or add the temporary spell buffs at this stage as well. This is the end stage.

You can revise carvings and enchantments and spells on weapons post production, and you can change gems and metal wires and recolor and like any other step an entirely different crafter from the original can do this.

This intense and some would say excessive customization is only part of the system however. At every stage of the crafting process it is possible to get small random bonuses to quality, essentially these bonuses are similar to initial resource bonuses and they stack.

Another aspect of the game that is somewhat novel and important are the crafting skills themselves.

Firstly there are no classes. Any single player can learn all the skills, use magic, learn fighting skills and so forth.

Further skills level in a somewhat unique way. There are no conventional levels per say. Firstly many things that can be crafted are in themselves used for crafting. Tools can be crafted and are used in production. The arrival area, as players "arrive" through a gate from another world, allows players to have access to incredibly basic crafting tools. Later the best crafting will be done with entirely player produced items. All tools have a value which corresponds to a % bonus to crafting value. Resources have these values also.

Now on to skills specifically:

Skills level by experience, so instead of having levels at certain amounts of experience, players just have that number. Experience is filtered through an equation to produce the bonus to the crafted item. Different experience is filtered through different equations. There are pseudo levels because some materials require a certain amount of experience to work with. They also require superior tools, for instance to use a higher level metal you may need a better smelting furnace to use the higher temperatures required to melt the metal. However the bonuses from experience produce the same bonuses regardless of the material used.

There are parent crafting skills and subskills and subskills of subskills. An example of all the skills affecting an item follow:

You are making a longsword:

A longsword is a weapon->sword->longsword

The material is metal->steel

You have 10000 experience in metal, and 6400 in steel

You have 10000 in weapon, 10000 in sword, and 2500 in longsword

The equations are :

+mexp^.25+stexp^.5+wexp^.25+swexp^.5+lexp^1/10

that means +10+80+10+100+250=+450% so the item is 550% better than 0/0/0/0/0 exp

obviously these numbers are a little too high, so the numbers would be messed with to lower the bonus.

the essential point is that the more specific the skill in relation to the product, the more valuable the exp. So if you want to be the best longsword maker on the server you might want to focus most of your crafting on longswords made of steel. Now I think that the specific material skill bonuses might be a smaller part of the total possible, because if you are making metal longswords you should be able to make iron ones nearly as good as your steel or bronze weapons similarly well.

 

The upside of many aspects of this system is individuality, uniqueness, mastery and customization. Players can easily create a brand with these options. You can be known for your mastery of a material, and/or of an item type.

Further the improvement is very fluid. There is no break moment when bam, you suddenly become much more powerful than a player one level lower, and neither is their a level cap because the equation works no matter the number, further the square root based system means that even a player with 1mil experience would not be amazingly more powerful and godlike. It takes more and more experience to get the same effective improvement.

Magic is made to be very powerful however. Magic is formed with words of power found in ruins around the world. Words of power fall into different categories. There are many parts of a spell and they affect different parts. Element/type of power, range, accuracy,  speed, range, power, mana and so forth. All of these can be moderated by changing the spell construction. Spells are cast with a keyword, so if you want to give a person a spell but not have access to the keywords you can just sell them a grimoire with keywords. They can use the spell but they can't make their own. You can choose to sell actual words of power.

My goal is to try and convince players to form sorcerous guilds and have different schools, as opposed to a single player learning all the magic alone.

Possible systems involve community spell word knowledge, a guild system where leaders or higher members are given any spell words members have and distribute grimoires to each player member so that one player can't join an enemy guild as a spy and learn all the words, as they would only have access to the grimoire and not the words, and they couldn't just copy the grimoire and spread it around either. Of course players are welcome to weild the magic system however they damn well please as well.

It really sounds like my kind of game. You got deep, meaningful crafting, with ways for experienced crafters to make better items, you got a true sandbox, you got a PvE environment, and a PvP environment.

I think though that a game with such deep crafting will suffer from complexity in all honesty, and will therefore only be a niche market. If you limit yourself to a text-based game, that will make your audience even smaller. In an age with beautiful 3D-games few will be interested to go through the hassle.

However what you're trying to do will certainly cater to some people, how many I don't know. I will look forward to a time where I will be able to try this kind of product.

Originally posted by Cuathon

So, I have essentially filled out all the crafting mechanics in my game, its very complex and some things might be changed but this is what I am going to start programming:

Resources:

Resources will spawn over time SWG style.

Players can initially mine/gather/harvest by themselves but later may be able to run mines/farms. There will be thousands of kinds of resources which will spawn with varying quality.

Resources will go through various processing to become usable mats. Metals will need to be refined. Metal will be formed into ingots after this process. Metal can be formed into many shapes: rings, wires, coils, plates. Wires may wrap around staffs, be used in jewelry and other such things. Herbs may need to be dried or powdered or cut. Wood may be planked or poled.

Then items will be "crafted" or put into their basic final form. Metal will be made into blades and armor pieces, wires and pendants put together for jewelry, wood will be shaped for staffs or bows. Blades and guards and pommels will be put together, or tangs and handles, or hafts and heads, arrow head and wood and so forth. These items will be in usable form. So you could sell them to players and they could be used in battle or crafting. However there are still many steps to refine and improve items.

Enhancements can take many forms. Inscriptions to hold enchantments can be carved, you can align the matrix to allow weaker items to hold more magic. You can sharpen blades, polish wood, add gems, change item skins and so forth. You could wrap wire around a staff to make it pretttier and possibly allow more spells and magic to be used. You can actually cast the permanent enchantments or add the temporary spell buffs at this stage as well. This is the end stage.

You can revise carvings and enchantments and spells on weapons post production, and you can change gems and metal wires and recolor and like any other step an entirely different crafter from the original can do this.

This intense and some would say excessive customization is only part of the system however. At every stage of the crafting process it is possible to get small random bonuses to quality, essentially these bonuses are similar to initial resource bonuses and they stack.

Another aspect of the game that is somewhat novel and important are the crafting skills themselves.

Firstly there are no classes. Any single player can learn all the skills, use magic, learn fighting skills and so forth.

Further skills level in a somewhat unique way. There are no conventional levels per say. Firstly many things that can be crafted are in themselves used for crafting. Tools can be crafted and are used in production. The arrival area, as players "arrive" through a gate from another world, allows players to have access to incredibly basic crafting tools. Later the best crafting will be done with entirely player produced items. All tools have a value which corresponds to a % bonus to crafting value. Resources have these values also.

Now on to skills specifically:

Skills level by experience, so instead of having levels at certain amounts of experience, players just have that number. Experience is filtered through an equation to produce the bonus to the crafted item. Different experience is filtered through different equations. There are pseudo levels because some materials require a certain amount of experience to work with. They also require superior tools, for instance to use a higher level metal you may need a better smelting furnace to use the higher temperatures required to melt the metal. However the bonuses from experience produce the same bonuses regardless of the material used.

There are parent crafting skills and subskills and subskills of subskills. An example of all the skills affecting an item follow:

You are making a longsword:

A longsword is a weapon->sword->longsword

The material is metal->steel

You have 10000 experience in metal, and 6400 in steel

You have 10000 in weapon, 10000 in sword, and 2500 in longsword

The equations are :

+mexp^.25+stexp^.5+wexp^.25+swexp^.5+lexp^1/10

that means +10+80+10+100+250=+450% so the item is 550% better than 0/0/0/0/0 exp

obviously these numbers are a little too high, so the numbers would be messed with to lower the bonus.

the essential point is that the more specific the skill in relation to the product, the more valuable the exp. So if you want to be the best longsword maker on the server you might want to focus most of your crafting on longswords made of steel. Now I think that the specific material skill bonuses might be a smaller part of the total possible, because if you are making metal longswords you should be able to make iron ones nearly as good as your steel or bronze weapons similarly well.

 

The upside of many aspects of this system is individuality, uniqueness, mastery and customization. Players can easily create a brand with these options. You can be known for your mastery of a material, and/or of an item type.

Further the improvement is very fluid. There is no break moment when bam, you suddenly become much more powerful than a player one level lower, and neither is their a level cap because the equation works no matter the number, further the square root based system means that even a player with 1mil experience would not be amazingly more powerful and godlike. It takes more and more experience to get the same effective improvement.

Magic is made to be very powerful however. Magic is formed with words of power found in ruins around the world. Words of power fall into different categories. There are many parts of a spell and they affect different parts. Element/type of power, range, accuracy,  speed, range, power, mana and so forth. All of these can be moderated by changing the spell construction. Spells are cast with a keyword, so if you want to give a person a spell but not have access to the keywords you can just sell them a grimoire with keywords. They can use the spell but they can't make their own. You can choose to sell actual words of power.

My goal is to try and convince players to form sorcerous guilds and have different schools, as opposed to a single player learning all the magic alone.

Possible systems involve community spell word knowledge, a guild system where leaders or higher members are given any spell words members have and distribute grimoires to each player member so that one player can't join an enemy guild as a spy and learn all the words, as they would only have access to the grimoire and not the words, and they couldn't just copy the grimoire and spread it around either. Of course players are welcome to weild the magic system however they damn well please as well.

wow, i really want to play this :)

it sounds a lot like my dream game, mechanics are different but the basics are really similar :)

Originally posted by Mightyking

It really sounds like my kind of game. You got deep, meaningful crafting, with ways for experienced crafters to make better items, you got a true sandbox, you got a PvE environment, and a PvP environment.

I think though that a game with such deep crafting will suffer from complexity in all honesty, and will therefore only be a niche market. If you limit yourself to a text-based game, that will make your audience even smaller. In an age with beautiful 3D-games few will be interested to go through the hassle.

However what you're trying to do will certainly cater to some people, how many I don't know. I will look forward to a time where I will be able to try this kind of product.

Well the game is designed to be eminently portable to a 2d or even 3d world, aside from art asset issue. Although 2d with low quality graphics could probably run on procedural generation of the world as the text game does.

There are many companies making billions of dollars on text games, and even 2d games with inferior graphics. I am more worried about getting the word out on the game because obviously I don't have an advertising budget, and to some degree the game needs a large player base to reach its full potential.

Originally posted by CuathonYou have 10000 experience in metal, and 6400 in steel

You have 10000 in weapon, 10000 in sword, and 2500 in longsword

The equations are :

+mexp^.25+stexp^.5+wexp^.25+swexp^.5+lexp^1/10

that means +10+80+10+100+250=+450% so the item is 550% better than 0/0/0/0/0 exp

obviously these numbers are a little too high, so the numbers would be messed with to lower the bonus.

Minor math problem here.  I would interpret lexp^1/10 as lexp^.1  (if you want people to read this as lexp/10 state it that way -- there's no reason to raise a value to the power of 1).  The math should read +10 +80 +10 +100 +2.81 = +202.81.

And if this equation yeilds a percent increase in the quality of an item, it should not incorporate the base value (100% for 0/0/0/0/0).  So the actual item value would be 202.81, and 202.81% better than one of a value of 100 (100%).   So, even in your example (using your numbers), it should read "=+450% so the item is 450% better".

Originally posted by Cuathon

Originally posted by Jimmac

I didn't know those phrases, and so I thought you were comparing your game to some other game where those two phrases were phrases established by the other game itself. I wasn't trying to be clever. I was trying to figure out what that other game was so I could decipher the phrases you were using.

I was under the impression that they were commonly understood phrases within mmorpgs. ah well.

 

Now that phrases are defined and set aside as mostly not too important to the overall concept, any thoughts on that?

OP, you have to remember, some of these people didn't start playing MMO's until after WoW.   So the term "mule" or "multie" would be foreign to them.    Just like 95% of todays players don't know what a "mun" is.  :)

On topic, your crafting system seems deep and I'd like to see something like this added to a  game.  

Originally posted by Cuathon

Firstly there are no classes. Any single player can learn all the skills, use magic, learn fighting skills and so forth.

My goal is to try and convince players to form sorcerous guilds and have different schools, as opposed to a single player learning all the magic alone.

The big problem I see here is these two statements.  To me, opening a character to all available skills leads to a tank-mage syndrome -- everyone wants to do everything for themselves.  I know it is tempting to assume that players will choose to specialize in a few skills, but with nothing to prevent them from being self-sufficient, people won't.  If Skill A or Spell 2 give a percieved advantage in the game, be assured that almost every character in the game will have those skills and work to perfect them.

This ultimately leaves no advantage to a specialist.  Every character is able to do everything, leaving no real motive for interaction.  People will quickly learn that a generalist with Skills A, B and E and Spells 2, 5 and 7 can do everything without needing to rely on other players.  Every player is a generalist, with a predominent set of common skills and spells.

This makes these two statements somewhat contradictatory.  This might work for a gaming system, but the emergent behavior of the players will work against this.  The self-sufficient character doesn't need to trade with another player, especially if this game has any kind of PvP.  Selling an item is tatamount to increasing a potential opponent's ability to kill you.  The grimoire idea you propose might work to turn spells into single use items (thus restricting the number of times your opponent can kill you), but that doesn't work with a sword.

So, how do you plan to encourage cooperation rather than independence in this game?

Originally posted by Mendel

Originally posted by CuathonYou have 10000 experience in metal, and 6400 in steel

You have 10000 in weapon, 10000 in sword, and 2500 in longsword

The equations are :

+mexp^.25+stexp^.5+wexp^.25+swexp^.5+lexp^1/10

that means +10+80+10+100+250=+450% so the item is 550% better than 0/0/0/0/0 exp

obviously these numbers are a little too high, so the numbers would be messed with to lower the bonus.

Minor math problem here.  I would interpret lexp^1/10 as lexp^.1  (if you want people to read this as lexp/10 state it that way -- there's no reason to raise a value to the power of 1).  The math should read +10 +80 +10 +100 +2.81 = +202.81.

And if this equation yeilds a percent increase in the quality of an item, it should not incorporate the base value (100% for 0/0/0/0/0).  So the actual item value would be 202.81, and 202.81% better than one of a value of 100 (100%).   So, even in your example (using your numbers), it should read "=+450% so the item is 450% better".

Since its not in parentheses. However it probably wasn't necessary to display the default exponent, that is 1. So it would be lexp/10. I  did mess up, i meant it is 550% total quality.

Originally posted by Teala

Originally posted by Cuathon

Originally posted by Jimmac

I didn't know those phrases, and so I thought you were comparing your game to some other game where those two phrases were phrases established by the other game itself. I wasn't trying to be clever. I was trying to figure out what that other game was so I could decipher the phrases you were using.

I was under the impression that they were commonly understood phrases within mmorpgs. ah well.

 

Now that phrases are defined and set aside as mostly not too important to the overall concept, any thoughts on that?

OP, you have to remember, some of these people didn't start playing MMO's until after WoW.   So the term "mule" or "multie" would be foreign to them.    Just like 95% of todays players don't know what a "mun" is.  :)

On topic, your crafting system seems deep and I'd like to see something like this added to a  game.  

I just turned 21 on the 25th, I did not play MMORPGs prior to WoW. I see people use mule and multie all the time, but I guess that one guy just happened not to know. I just assumed based on post count that he would know.

You will be able to play a game with my system, just not an AAA title. Although maybe someday a company will do something similar.

In fact the straight experience and even the root based equation was taken from a space rts/tbs/4x game, they had the coolest space browser game research system I have ever seen with infinite unique results based on inputs, and I figured everything is numbers, I can make a fantasy game with a crafting system that does that. I had originally learned to program to clone that game and then develop new features, the owner allowed it as the current communtiy dev staff were too lazy or busy, but then later I decided I prefer to make an RPG.

People told me you can't mix an mmorpg with a strategy game and I say screw them, I do what I want.