Crafting: My Argument Against Synchronicity
In response to my initial crafting post, Moorgard’s post, and (to some extent) Aggro Me’s post last week on crafting, Evan Sampson provided his opinions in a post entitled “Synchronicity.” Before I begin, I must first comment that I work with Evan at SOE, and he never told me he made a blog. For that, I give you a wag of the finger, Mr. Sampson. For daring to challenge the mighty ego of Blackguard, however, I give you a tip of the hat. Make sure you read Evan’s post before this one, and it would do you well to read all three of the other posts I linked before reading his. Moving on…
Note: Given that the assumption of the above post is that a tradeskill system is being created for a game that is both adventure and item-centric, my response assumes the same.
I have a limited view of crafting, I admit. In my mind, crafting with other players would rarely, if ever, be fun. Part of the draw in crafting for me is the ability for me (and me alone) to create something. I like taking materials and applying my expertise to craft something worth using, whether it’s for me or for someone else. If I have to gain the aid of other players to make such an item, who would get it in the end? What is the reward for everyone who didn’t help out?
You could, of course, create an apprentice system for masters of their art. You might need one or two other players to help create pieces of an item, or to keep the fire at the right temperature, while you’re creating a masterpiece work. In the end, it is your item, your creation. Those who helped you, though, would get excellent experience and skill gain for observing you at your best. Feasible, yes, but that is still a license to print currency (whether it’s coin or items), given that you could guarantee the cooperation of certain people (or second boxes of your own).
Yes, it could require extremely rare items to create masterpieces worthy of the finest adventurer. But, then, where is the fun in creating the run-of-the-mill items that you can create with everyday materials? Is the fun just in making an item, breaking it down to its components (minus fuel), then remaking another item to gain experience and master your craft? I’d believe in that up until the end game, when the master crafter has little to nothing to do unless he obtains those extremely rare items, and in order for those extremely rare items to remain extremely rare, that master must remain extremely bored a majority of the time.
I’ll tackle each of the points listed in order:
There can be solo tasks undertaken that produce a useful but standard item.
I’ll buy that. I’ve never argued against allowing crafters to making useful items, even in adventure/item-centric games.
There can be group tasks that require multiple people to make a better quality item.
Perhaps, but you’re still giving players a guaranteed method of printing currency outside of the designer’s control.
There can be raid content that requires large groups of crafters to make an item.
I just don’t see how this could be fun, to be honest. OMG someone quell that fire! OMG someone hammer out that nick! OMG someone kill the fire daemon that spawned from the forge! You get my point. To me, cooperating with a large group of players to make an item isn’t fun. I want to make items by myself, because that is the way I feel I have achieved something, and there’s no way I would help someone make an uber rare item unless there was some chance that I would be the one who ended up with it.
Gates can prevent players from making huge amounts of crafted items.
One, I hate artificial restrictions. If you’ve read some of my posts on such things, you know that I despise them. Additionally, this idea seems to go counter to the vision of crafting you present–you see crafting as an integral system in the game. The only way crafters are truly going to feel rewarded is when they are producing the excellent items. If you artificially disallow them from doing so, they aren’t having fun, and you are then restricting crafting from taking place as an important and always-present factor for a single character (i.e. a character that is exclusively a crafter would have a ton of forced downtime, which is not fun).
This would be a different crafting system from any we have seen.
Quite true, and I think there is a reason: nobody has found a way to make this really fun just yet. I’m not saying group crafting can’t be fun, but it’s definitely not my bag.
Most crafters that I have encountered over the years fit a couple of stereotypes that would indicate that group crafting wouldn’t always fly: First, they are players who feel the greatest sense of achievement by creating something special. When I make a full suit of hard-to-craft armor for a large amount of coin and it has my name on it, I feel rewarded as hell. Second, they don’t like relying on other people. A player with a crafter mindset (in current games) is often someone who enjoys soloing, because they trust in their skills and gain a sense of achievement by accomplishing tasks by themselves. Finally, they are social creatures, but they often don’t like sharing–I want to get top dollar for my items, and anything I make I’m not giving away for free unless I owe someone (hence why I don’t think “raiding” an item would go over too well, since only one person would end up with the result).
I’m not trying to bag on all of your opinions, because they are surely valid and I’m confident that many people share your beliefs. My outlook, of course, is from that of someone who enjoys accomplishing tasks by himself, which naturally pulls me away from being attracted to this type of crafting system. I also detest artificial restrictions, which this type of system calls for. Finally, I have to be constantly concerned with a game’s economy. In a system in which items are extremely important in a game, and players have permanent access to creating awesome items, you’ve given them a license to print money and it would be difficult to control that flow without pissing a lot of people off.
Now, for all my arguing against crafters making incredible items, I will reveal to you something: My ultimate game would have crafting as an integral part of the game. Crafters would perform tasks that are essential to the well-being of every player, and their weapons and armor would indeed be some of the best, if not the best, in the game. The caveat? My ultimate game isn?t item-centric; yes, items are used very often and are quite versatile, but the difference between a player in crappy armor for their capabilities and amazing armor for their capabilities might be a 20% effectiveness divergence.
You know, from my comments on Moorgard’s blog, that I agree that the optimal idea is to make crafted loot identical to adventured loot. However I disagree with the idea, as you do, of group crafting. Crafting dependancy is ok, so long as it is minor, the weaponsmith needs to bye his metal from a smelter for example.
My solution is different, rather than having to have lots of people and artificial blocks. Have one person, lots of time and legitimate blocks. How long would it take a master craftsman to produce a masterpiece of a sword? For example the old multi-folded samuri swords, days even weeks. So why can crafters make the best items ina few minutes in most games?
So to make this sword we have our crafter, he has to spend time preparing the metal for the blade; working the blade, multiple times; shaping and sharpening the blade; engraving the magical runes on the blade; creating the crossguard; making the hilt; decorating the hilt; assembling the pieces; casting the magic rituals to embed the item with magical powers. Lots of things to do.
Now no craftsman can work 24/7 on making their wonderful sword so they need to take breaks, maintain equipment etc. So you build in an endurance system where the crafter gets tired can can no longer craft so needs to rest, though not for too long as downtime is often complained about so say 20% of the time.
Then we can add in forge maintenance, you need to keep the fire buring hot, let it get too cool and you won’t be able to craft until it is back up to temperature. Need to clean the place so that things left lying about don’t and up catching fire from a random spark. Tools can break, so you might need to go replace one, and if in the middle of something have to redo some of it.
How about procedures that take long inactive times, such as allowing a blade to cool naturally, without being quenched, in order for it to absorb magic dust you just sprinkled on it. Can’t do any more work on the item for 8 real hours.
Sure during the downtime the crafter could work on something else, assuming they don’t have essential maintenance of their workshop and have the endurance they need, but the items still enter the world at a slower rate.
So it might take 5 hours of game time to make a great item, 20 hours to make a near ultimate item, and for the items dropped by time limited, contested raid mobs 20 hours plus a special item that can only be obtained (and NOT through adventuring) once in a specific time period, or could drain the creator for so long that they can’t create any more of these best items for a while.
Your “printing money” doesn’t fly with me because the world admin always have control over crafting and how many crafted items are produced with restrictions on resource allocation. Too many people flooding the market with Uber Rare items that are lowering the value of raided items? Then just create a deficit in resources used to create that item. Make it special when someone DOES harvest/attain that item. This also brings the harvester/attain-er players into the fold.
yes, items are used very often and are quite versatile, but the difference between a player in crappy armor for their capabilities and amazing armor for their capabilities might be a 20% effectiveness divergence. posted by Ryan Shwayder @ 00:12 Comments Off
While reading the entire series of five posts, the one thing that’s always come to mind is Hattori Hanzo. (Again, assumption of Adventure and Item-centric.)
I think your point on apprenticeship would work well in allowing crafters to say, “Yeah, I made that, now go destory people with it.” Sure, the apprentice helped do the run of the mill things I could have done myself (with some higher effort), but it is still MY sword.
On the vein of swords (because I’m sure every crafter the specializes in Swords wants to craft that masterpiece Hanzo sword), they are things that take time. I agree that there do need to be some barriers so the world is not flooded with “One-of-a-kind Masterpiece Sword of Ass-Kickery”. Masterpieces are the items that a crafter takes the most pride in, especially if they were difficult (not tedious mind you) to make. One thing I was thinking of was simulating the process of working on a sword for X number of hours a day.
You’d have a couple of subcomponents that could be stock (what you’d use on your “mass production” weapons) or maybe just “fancy” (stock hilt + shiny gem?) but then when you get to the sword, you’d have to do “work” on the blade over a week or two. Having a slightly involved crafting process (maybe requiring an apprentice? or being very difficult without one) lasting for 3-5minutes a day. The master crafter would have this blade take 15 sessions to complete and could do one session a day. Then you’d place the recipes for all “Masterpiece Works” on a cooldown of a week or so. That way, it would take 3 weeks for a master crafter to move onto another masterpiece project without it a) not letting them be able to make their run-of-the-mill items, b) flooding the market with “one-of-a-kind” swords.
With any tradesman, it’s the craftsmanship involved that’s the important part, in fact, with those Masterpiece weapons, I’d probably only make them for friends and guildmates considering the amount of “time” it took to create, but I’d be rather proud that they were using them.
As it stands now, in all my MMOs I’ve played recently, I have a master craftsman, and none of them can really do both things. My Maker in Matrix can only make the same items as everyone else. My Master Domestic in SWG is hardly useful for anything (despite the awesome customization allowed by Tailoring, and Chef’s experimental crafting), and my Master Elemental Leatherworker in WoW can hardly make anything that’s either useful or worth the effort to make. I take pride in the fact that I have them, and jump at the chance to fufil an order for a guildmate, but they’re no where close to actually being “fun”.
If you can allow a craftsman to create masterpieces every once in a while, and still letting them manufacture items for everyday monster slaying both to keep out of the poor house and stave off bordem, you have a win-win(-win).
There are several assumptions behind all of these comments: that the game structure remains “play, build character, level up, raid”, as though the only end-game has to be raid-centric. I would argue for a complete revamp of the entire philosophy surrounding MMORPGs, beginning with placing raiding simply as another aspect of the game instead of its ‘conclusion’ (so to speak). There shouldn’t be an end-game, per se, nor should it basically devolve to “go raid again, rinse, repeat, etc.” Nor should crafting automatically be shoe-horned into a “always lesser than what can be found” niche, either.
Here’s a few ideas: a system that allows me to build a sword. What do I need? I need the basic template of a sword (not template for Iron Sword, template for sword — the basic fundamental pattern itself). I need to decide what materials I, the crafter, want to use — I may choose to use a lower-quality material, say tin, while someone else may go straight to iron. Whichever. We also need to build not just the blade, but the hilt. (I don’t want to get into the “sixty-three subcombines to make a shirt” silliness) — for the basic sword template, it’s blade plus hilt. Don’t have the system provides recipes for completed items — have them provide recipes for basic templates. Let the players mix/match materials to create the items — make the systems support that sort of thing. So if I choose to make a tin sword, but put a nice shiny, elaborately-worked hilt on it, I may raise its market-price because it’s a great “showpiece”, but in the field it will work less capably than that adamantine blade over there. Doesn’t even need a lot of choices of materials — just a few. The CHOICE, the mixing and matching, will create the potentials. Perhaps I want to add a bit of “glowing material” (to use an EQ2 term that cries out for more ingenuity in its phrasing, as in, “ooh, I built this sword with iron and some glowing material!” sounds far worse than “I forged this sword of iron, and mixed in the ash from a melted Dragon’s scale”) and go for enchantments — have a basic database of potential enchantments plus how they mix/match. The crafter chooses what he builds in this system — and each item comes out more unique than in the current boring, build-the-same-thing-as-Fred-over-three systems that dominate MMORPGs. Obviously working with Adamantine would be vastly more difficult and require far more skill than working Tin, for instance. And working in enchantments would add to the complexity and hence difficulty to build.
The basic thrust is: make systems that give the crafters the choices in what they build — instead of just “find recipe, gather materials, bang it out”, and you’re “iron sword” will look/feel just like every other iron sword out there. In EQ2, you get an extra +1 to the items stat-bonuses if you get better qualities — bleh. It’s better than nothing, and certainly better than WoW… but it’s far short of where it could be. Once again, the choices aren’t the crafters — they just follow blindly along the very stratified, top-down, hand-me-ther-recipes, build-repeat-yawn Crafting philosophies that exist.
My reply may not be the most cohesive thought structure, but I hope it conveys the basic idea: build crafting systems that reject the old “everyone builds the same things” arguments that totally dominate MMORPGs today and create flexible systems that put the choice of what to build in the player’s hands. And add color, for God’s sake — make a copper sword look different than Iron, and so forth. Make an enchantment either add a faint glow, or a deepening of the coloration, or… something. I hate the EQ2 “imbued” system, which lets even items for low-level characters carry “enchantments” — except they look exactly like every other item that’s the same basic name (iron chainmail shirt, imbued iron chainmail shirt, yup, can’t tell ‘em apart).
Where’s Dan Akroyd When You Need Him?…
?(Editor’s Note: This post is part of a series. Before reading it you should at least read the Role of Crafting in Massive Multiplayer Games, Synchronicity, and Crafting: My Argument Against Synchronicity. Optionally you might want to read Som…
[...] But I have comments. Oh yes. Also, in response to some other posts, my Vision Statement on how to make player crafting in a virtual world not totally suck! [...]
Crafting: My Argument Against Synchronicity Posted by Boon under Syndication , Development Comments Off
[...] Crafting: My Argument Against Synchronicity (Ryan Shwayder) [...]
[...] Anyway… crafting! Aggro Me, Moorgard, and Blackguard (the members of the Round Table) kicked off the tradeskill discussion with Craft This, Crafting in MMOs (Or, “Can’t We All Just Get Along?”), and The Role of Crafting in Massively Multiplayer Games respectively. With Synchronicity, MadScientist negates the Round Table’s postulate that mob loot must be made better than crafted items. Wondrous Inventions (”me”) then chimes by posting Crafting in Today’s MMOs just before Blackguard returns to further debate Synchronicity. To finish, West Karana dumps The Crafty Adventurer on the rest of us, who by that time I am sure are just about sick of reading about tradeskills. [...]
[...] exceptions. This is not the thoughts of SOE, but an interesting read non the less. Crafting: My Argument Against Synchronicity Your browser does not support iframes. Iframes are a requirement to see a user’s [...]
SWG did have a good system for crafting pre NGE. As most of you probably know it was based on resource quality (which spawned randomly) and for the truly special stuff looted subcomponents.
What SOE did wrong in relation to the SWG crafting system was perhaps too many randomly spawning resources (I was still waiting for the right Inert Gass for my Combat Medic components when the CURB hit) and of course the few wastly superior random itemdrops (Anyone remember the 1000 per tick mindfire light lightning cannon?)
I can agree with the sentiment that Blackguard expresses, that adventurers will be miffed if their loot from a dragon is a sword part as opposed to a sword. But I think that they might learn to live with it. Any sword that had been sat (and quite possible excremented) upon by a dragon would be pretty worse for wear anyways. To get the heartstone of a dragon for use in crafting the magical sword would be just as exhillarating and free from the prospect of dragon poop.
And, even more importantly, a system which allows you to drop a component as opposed to an item allows for more diversity and more abundancy in the drops. (much like the token system adopted by Blizzard for end game tier items) and I think even hard core adventurers will agree that the crafting components for three swords is a better drop than the one sword in itself. After that, it’s only a matter of waiting for some really good mithril to spawn