Recently, the EQ2 Blogger Cartel posted some interesting thoughts about crafting. Blackguard in particular pretty much nailed the various interplays between loot-centric and craft-centric systems, and how the two pressure groups tend to battle for dominance within games. My reaction to this: \’e2\’80\’9cHuh.\’e2\’80\’9d See, I\’e2\’80\’99m still thinking a bit more in terms of why than how.
Crafting should enable three basic urges:
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- Creativity
- Business Development
- Social Whittling
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- Creativity \’e2\’80\ldblquote an ideal crafting system will allow the creative player to express him/herself within the game. Second Life\’e2\’80\’99s fashion designers are a perfect example of a game designed for this, while Ultima Online\’e2\’80\’99s home decorators are a good example of emergent gameplay taking the limited tools available to them and running with them.
For example, picture a musicianship skill, which uses musical instruments \’e2\’80\ldblquote guitars. The functional part of building a guitar for this skill is fairly basic \’e2\’80\ldblquote it needs to be an object, it needs to have the \’e2\’80\’9cis an instrument\’e2\’80\’9d attribute, it needs to link to an in-game art asset that hopefully looks at least vaguely like a guitar. At this point, you have a guitar. Yet creative crafters will want to make that guitar not just \’e2\’80\’9cis an instrument\’e2\’80\’9d, but is a guitar with their own style \’e2\’80\ldblquote its own color scheme, body style, neck style, etc. The more options given to customize that model, the more valuable it will be as the crafter makes it their own. None of these options needs to actually do anything \’e2\’80\ldblquote they just need to be able to be visually distinctive. This isn\’e2\’80\’99t even limited to MMOs \’e2\’80\ldblquote one of the most popular features of Galactic Civilizations 2\’e2\’80\’99s ship building feature is the adding of chrome parts that don\’e2\’80\’99t actually do anything but look \’e2\’80\’9cspace-y\’e2\’80\’9d.
- Business Development \’e2\’80\ldblquote this is the player who looks at your system less as a creative outlet and more as an economy \’e2\’80\ldblquote one that they want to take as their own. These are the players who don\’e2\’80\’99t want to make things so much as run their own storefront. These players need the tools to buy and sell, advertise, and build a steady clientele. Eve has the best of breed tools here; with a dizzying array of commodity trading, price tracking and factory management. Star Wars Galaxies also has (or had, I\’e2\’80\’99m not sure how much the NGE ditched of this, if any) the ability for players to turn a rich player housing model into storefronts that can be almost infinitely customizable.
- Social Whittling \’e2\’80\ldblquote sometimes you just want to do something mindless, and crafting in most games is as low stress as they come. Communities will arise around crafting centers; you\’e2\’80\’99ll see the same folks on a regular basis, compete with them in a friendly manner for the odd walk-in business, and get to know each other over whatever global chat channels exist. It\’e2\’80\’99s really hard to mess up this requirement \’e2\’80\ldblquote just, make some central location that crafters need to gather at, a channel to talk in and a few other social tools.
So, in my opinion, a competent crafting system will meet all these needs \’e2\’80\ldblquote customization/creativity, player matching/business development, and social spaces/whittling. That\’e2\’80\’99s the basic requirements.
Now, what will destroy these systems?
- Killing your creativity: The Cloth Cap Infinite Horizon. Otherwise known as why use-based crafting skill advancement isn\’e2\’80\’99t a good idea. In Ultima Online, the powergaming method for increasing your tailoring skill was through the manufacture, one at a time, of the humble cloth cap. So people wanting to be tailors would make cloth caps. And since there were many tailors, and for reasons known only to Raph Koster the crafting system indexed itself based on how many people were using the skill, the skill became more difficult to raise as people used the skill. So you made more cloth caps. And more cloth caps. And more cloth caps. For some reason, NPCs would always buy your cloth caps. Somewhere, someone in Britannia had a lot of cloth caps. I\’e2\’80\’99m sure it was related to some great evil. Perhaps Mondain could be brought back, if only his minions could collect enough caps. Kind of a metaphysical redemption system.
Once you make 12 million cloth caps, do you really want to make a very special snowflake of a cloth cap? Is there really a market for one, when people are dumping cloth caps on the street because they have to make so many?
Conclusion: Use-based advancement systems suck and should be taken out back and shot.
- Killing Your Businesspeople: That Goddamn Coldain Prayer Shawl. Otherwise known as \’e2\’80\’9cThe Quest That Destroyed Everquest\’e2\’80\’99s Crafters\’e2\’80\’9d. Because, you see, the Coldain Prayer Shawl of Velious was an item with wondrous properties, that could only be made by crafters that had mastered every crafting skill. Oh, and it was no-drop. So if you wanted this shawl \’e2\’80\ldblquote and you did \’e2\’80\ldblquote you mastered every crafting skill. Guess what! With that quest, Everquest encouraged everyone to master every crafting skill. Soon, the people who crafted for reasons other than \’e2\’80\’9cI want a Coldain Prayer Shawl\’e2\’80\’9d found that they had a lot less business, what with everyone in the game now having their own crafting skill. Whoops.
When you make your business acumen dependent on the rarity of a skill, no matter how that rarity is established (through cost of materials required for obtaining the skill, through surviving ungodly levels of tedium involved in investing the time to gain the skill, or as distressingly regularly, both) if you then turn around and offer a reward to your powergamers for gaining that rare skill, they\’e2\’80\’99ll make that skill a lot less rare, and you\’e2\’80\’99ll watch the bottom drop out of your businessmen\’e2\’80\’99s market.
Conclusion: Never, ever, ever use crafting ability benchmarks as a gating mechanism for high level rewards, unless for some reason you\’e2\’80\’99re tired of having a crafting system and want to find an excuse to get rid of it.
- Killing your Socializers: Tetris Seemed Like Such A Good Idea At The Time! Everquest 2\’e2\’80\’99s crafting system is fairly well implemented mechanically \’e2\’80\ldblquote crafters are given unique tasks, animations, and tools. The problem is that it\’e2\’80\’99s active \’e2\’80\ldblquote too active. With EQ2\’e2\’80\’99s minigames, crafters are too busy crafting to \’e2\’80\’a6 type. Which means they can\’e2\’80\’99t advertise for business, or talk to others while crafting. So crafters looking for a social aspect will find that most crafters are too busy\’e2\’80\’a6 crafting.
EQ2 has enough other things in place (desirable items that crafters can make, and the ability of crafters to advertise those sales) to keep an economy going. But it\’e2\’80\’99s a very quiet economy.
Conclusion: Many crafters don\’e2\’80\’99t want to play whack-a-mole, because it gets in the way of discussing who in your guild had the embarrassing dropped cybersex emote this week.
So right now, I haven’t seen many crafting systems that fill all of these requirements. Some come close on 2, but ditch the remaining bit. And, you’ll note, most games don’t seem to suffer that much for missing a holistic crafting system. But if we want to get back to creating worlds instead of games, enabling your players to build chunks of it themselves is a pretty good way to start down that road.
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I can’t emphasize point #3 even more. The conventional wisdom with games like EQII and Vanguard is, “Crafting is boring, mindlessly repetetive click and combine quests, which most people don’t like. So we need to make crafting fun and interactive, like combat!” But as I’ve talked more and more with people who actually CRAFT, they tell me they don’t want that. Heaven help them, they LIKE the mindless repetitive crafting tasks, because they use that as something to do during downtime while they chat. I think they’re insane, but that seems to be what they want. If you’re trying to get more people to craft by making crafting interactive, it seems like you’re instead just going to alienate those people who WANT to craft.
If there is a potential redeeming feature of an interactive whack-a-mole crafting system, it can only be if it actually produces useful stuff almost every time, so there’s no real need to use that system to “grind” through a lot of useless items in order to make something good. I’m not sure what such a crafting system would look like… you’d probably have to have components be fairly rare, which once you collected the right combination you could take to almost any crafter who would combine them for you into something shiny and useful, for a fee.
Bruce
I think #2 is the driving factor behind it all. People who whack the moles all day feel like they need to earn the most. Crafting is “easy” and having them actually compete monetary-wise makes their choice of bopping field mice feel like a waste of time.
Gotta remember that no matter how seperated a game mechanic might be, if anyone in the same game as them is doing better at attaining a prominant goal of an MMO (in this case, making money), they’re going to either be irate and complain a lot, or take up that path themselves. Somehow, you have to find something that’ll satisfy both monster hunters and crafters so that both gameplays feel like they aren’t better than the other.
Right on the money there Scotty.
#1 is probably the hardest part to design, especially if devs think that by giving thousands and thousands of different options will feed the creative people out there. What you need is something easy to do on your side, but very open ended in its use and let the players sort that out. That’s why UO house gardeners got so popular, pure visual creativity using few tools available.
#2 Sure, Eve is the top of the top for real sellers but DAoC system was ok enough for casuals, quite like the houses with vendors for cheaper price or the market explorer if in a hurry. Eve is also using a Sci-Fi based background, makes trading/selling much more easier than Medieval-Fantasy one, unless you start pulling magic tricks all over
#3 Holy Geebus, so true there. Having buttons to push while crafting is so boring, I rather just sit, watch a movie and read a book then push a button once in a while to start the crafting thing.
Finally, I quite agree on the “building world” and not “building games”. I’m still dreaming for a game with no quests and no stupid NPCs apart from some monsters and animals, where it would be just us, players, fashioning that world through faction wars, peace, imagination and illusions…Ah well, DAoC will do meanwhile
Holy hell, what’s gotten into you? Three long, detailed design posts in less than that many days? If you keep this up, I’m going to have to go recover my old BattleVortex credentials so that I may more prominently disagree with you!
-Rip
This is a nice succinct summary of what crafting needs to have. I know on my site, that there are all kinds of people that do crafting for different reasons. There are the shipbuilders that want to be among the first to have a ship. There are the merchants that envision a “trade zone” where they can establish stores and socialize as they sell, and there are the quiet, introverted crafters that like to be around socializing but aren’t really interested in actually doing any of it.
The Coldain Prayer Shawl example is brilliant, because it really does point out how to screw up a player economy. It’s the express lane to an eviscerated player economy and in some ways mudflation as well, as all these useless ground items (cloth caps?) enter the market.
Great stuff, thanks!
Sorry, but I disagree with point 3. The main reason I liked crafting in EQ2 was that it was interactive. If crafting had been like WoW, where you push a button and get an item, I would have never bothered crafting.
The main problem with EQ2 crafting was something you talked about in your intro, a total lack of customization.
Gaute Godager, Game Director for “Age of Conan”, has given a little more info about the crafting system they’re planning in an interview today and explicitly states that Funcom are going for crafting advancement by means of crafting quests.
It’s certainly an approach that would make me want to take up crafting again (although I doubt it will be as involved as SWG crafting is – in answer to your query, it’s still very much like it was post-NGE although weapon and armour experimentation has been vastly over simplified and item decay has been removed meaning little in the way of sales. So basically, while crafting is pretty much what it ever was, there’s even less need for it).
I think it depends on the crafter, and something we need more research on (maybe a Daedalus survey?) to find out how many people want interactive crafting and how many do not.
I think EVE actually has crafting pretty right. The only thing missing is the ability to customize your products, and in theory that is coming soon. The very impressive thing about how EVE handles crafting is how much a part of the world’s economy it is. My biggest complaint about crafting systems is that for most games I have played the crafted stuff was just about worthless. Actually, I would put “value to the in game economy” on your list of important things to have in a crafting system, because some devs get this wrong.
Sure. I actually left that out mainly because the nerfbat article I linked to covered that pretty well.
side note:
Simple crafting is better where players can socialize. Some players don’t mind clicking a button every few minutes to craft. However, many players do.
This will inevitably be the victim of macros that craft for you. So my question is, should crafting have macros built into it? Click 1 button and it will craft that item in any measure or until you’re out of materials? What about craft queues?
ex. Set my crafter up to craft as many cloth caps as possible until he is out of cloth or cap patterns. Then begin to craft arrows.
Would crafters dislike this system for making the actual act of crafting a mostly afk action, where the gathering of materials is the actual work?
#1: SWG’s tailoring system was pretty good about this. Tailors had a wide enough variety of things to make and colors to make them in that no two tailor’s shops were alike, and it was a matter of finding one whose aesthetic sensibilities matched your own. My wife would spend whole evenings with tailors getting everything right. And since colors were fixed at the time of crafting (no dye after creation), picking clothing in that game wasn’t just a matter of buying a shirt and dyeing it black. Popular tailors could really have an impact on how their customers looked — many were really reluctant to let people walk away with exactly what they would have picked themselves.
Of course, at some point things hit a saturation point and most people had everything they wanted, and unfortunately there was never much in the way of new content for tailors to keep people coming back after that point. But it was great while it lasted. Oh, and then due to the Jedi system all the good tailors became commandos, then bioengineers, then weaponsmiths, then…
#3: Whittling is a good analogy. It’s a low-cognition activity, but not a no-cognition activity. It’s enough to keep you busy while nothing else is going on, but not so much that you can’t divide your attention. For a social activity to work, the first person to show up has to stay interested alone long enough for the second to get there.
I happen to disagree with SirBruce on his comment about Lum’s #3.
No, let me rephrase that. He’s probably right about many who take up the crafting trades in games. However, while I really enjoy making things in MMOs, I *hate* making it a mindless drudge best done as a secondary task to something like chatting or watching a movie.
I must be odd, but I have this notion that a game out to be per se entertaining. When it comes down to it, crafting is making loot from components, and hunting is making loot from mobs. Either way, there’s going to be an object of value in players’ hands.
All that remains is balancing risk and time v. reward. If the process of crafting is mentally trivial and risk-free, then the reward *has* to be commensurately weak, or else everyone will do them and ignore the adventuring part of your game (good old invisible hand at work again). If the crafted items are equivalent to those obtained from monsters, the danger has to be the same, or else the time to create a certain item has to be longer.
Personally I enjoyed the forge-based crafting in EQ2, because it could *kill* you if you faltered. I don’t know if that’s still the case.
“out” s/b “ought” in the above *sigh*
I liked SWG’s automation, they just needed a better interface for it. It sucked having to spend hours every week to maintain, empty an move my harvesters. I think gathering in MMOs should be more like it is in RTS games. Either have some sort of automatic gathering mechanic, or let you hire minions (or minion-type constructs) to do your work for you.
Re the discussion regarding #3….. I am currently and EQ2 crafter, and I enjoy it. Yet, it does indeed interfere with the social downtime part of crafting. There were many nights in EQ live that I logged in to chat with my guild while clicking combine. What I would love to see is a combination — the mindless click combine that permits socializing as the skillup method, and the more interactive, fight with the forge, no time to talk method when making ‘real’ items. Yes, this means having cheap consumables as skill up items, or even cheap to make non useful items; and having customizable, useful items that take more effort, yet will have real value.
I’m one of those freaks who enjoys in-game crafting, for the sake of crafting and selling crafted goods to other players.
I prefer non-interactive crafting system simply because when I’m crafting, I’m not actually actively *crafting*… I’m chatting with the person I’m crafting for, trying to figure out -exactly- what they want/need; I’m looking up costs to craft on a spreadsheet, and working out how much profit I want to build-in to the price I’m going to charge; I’m fielding the /sends from the other three people that are looking for a crafted item and telling them where they are in the queue and how long it should take me to get to them; and in the rare moments when there isn’t anything going on, I’m chatting with the other crafters in the game and commiserating about the crafting system.
If crafted items have value, then crafters will be sought after. If crafters are sought after, then the interactivity in the crafting system becomes integral with it, by virtue of supply/demand. Thus, social whittling “magically” appears in a well designed crafting/items system and doesn’t need to be considered as a separate design item at all!
For your final “problem” with crafting systems, I have a suggestion. Set up your crafting system where things take a little time. Not a lot, but a few moments, or maybe as much as a minute or two. So if you want to click the button and chat and be social, you can do exactly that.
BUT, if you don’t want to be social, there’s a mini-game you can play that speeds up the process. Not a lot, but enough to make it worth it if you are doing it for business. This lets the business crafters speed things up and do something interesting and feel that they are better than the social crafters. But it’s not something that’s required for the process.
The hard part will be striking the perfect balance so that business crafters find it worth the time to minigame and yet the gains aren’t also too high so that the social crafters feel that they must do so as well or they are wasting their time.
Make a crafting system like the stock market. Put buy order and sell order on it. Let players put out buy order, harvesters sell orders. Make it an auction. Make crafting fun, not something to bot with a macro program. EQ2 crafting (When it first released) almost made me insane. All the buttons made you think it helped, but it was an effort of random punching of buttons and way too stressful
The tetris-esque mini-games should be the resource gathering where you have to be moving around and on your feet anyway. Nobody chatted while they mined in UO, but everyone hung out at the blacksmith in britain and socialized. Mining was boring, not because there was nobody there, but because you had to just sit and watch and wait for each ore-hit to be done. The same way you just watch the bar go across as you pick an herb in WoW, but then you have to run 12 screens away to find the next one.
Ironically TheAmazin it’s the resource gathering in Eve that’s the most social, as it’s the only thing that becomes more efficient when multiple people do it helping each other.
I think crafting needs to go one of two ways.
On one side is full automation, where the player is simply organizing and managing NPCs or Harvesters or Factories that do the little boring tasks. Like Eve manufacturing, the resources go in and after awhile the product comes out. This doesn’t stop people from socializing, nor does it attempt to simulate tedium. The risk portion of the equation would need to come from the logistics.
Another though would be full interactivity, where the systems are designed to be just as engaging as any other kind of gameplay. Always easier said than done. Just because some people want these crafting systems to basically be an idle activity doesn’t mean every last one of them needs to be devoid of gameplay. These are still being called games, after all.
I think #1 and #2 are universally true, but #3 depends on the crafter. I love crafting, but I was never social about it and I hated the click-and-combine designs. I’d much rather have an interactive minigame that produced goods.
Then again, I play Puzzle Pirates, so there’s probably a connection here.
Oh — there’s also a functional compromise that allows one to use minigames for crafting without killing the social aspect: don’t make the minigame time-based. Puzzle Pirates’ “Alchemistry” puzzle is a good example of this: it’s move-based, not time-based. So if you want to be social there’s zero penalty for pausing the game and talking. True, you won’t be able to craft at peak efficiency when you’re chatting, but even in the click-and-combine games you’re going to be clicking more slowly if you’re also chatting. Unless you’re going to argue that it’s a good thing for the game to have long stretches of waiting between clicks, while the crafter can do nothing whatsoever except chat. Which seems pretty extreme to me.
Might I sugest that the one place where twitch skills would be found useful in MMRPGs would be in crafting and trades. Sure some would be the standard clicky combines but others would and should impliment various forms of twitch.
Adding twitch would held stop the trades farmers for one. For another it would add an element of difficulty and even fun for some gamers.
I’ve played EQ2 and really enjoyed the crafting system a great deal. Honestly I love the interactive crafting. Yes, I realize it kills the social aspect of crafting while it’s happening but the system is much more rewarding in general. The main selling point really is the fact that the interactivity and eventually mastery of the system was a truely learned skill. My own personal experience went into mastering crafting since I had to learn how to play the system and get the most out of it. Not only that, I rarely if ever fail now. I’m willing just as often as I would in pve combat. Failure is only because I tried something too difficult or had a streak of bad luck. For the most part, I’m winning and getting rewarded for it.
It feels like I’m actually playing a game instead of working. Although MMOG’s sometimes make you feel like you’re working anyways but that’s besides the point.
Here’s something I though about. Some will argue that the interactive ‘combat’ method of EQ2 is perhaps too involved and takes away from the social aspect of the game. Well if that’s true, then isn’t the combat in all MMOG’s also broken? Because they basicly require you to play an active role in the game instead of being passive like most crafting systems are.
What if instead, we had all players just click on an attack button once every 1-2 minutes, and wait to see if they succeeded in combat or not. Failure didn’t mean death, it just means they didn’t manage to defeat the target, Perhaps it ran away or they flead from combat. Perhaps a critical failure could mean death for the player. This leaves them all that free time and room to chat with each other and really build that social aspect of the game we all talk about. I mean seriously, why should the combat get in the way of good interpersonal relations.
I’ll tell ya why, and we all know this. It’s boring like hell! Plus, if every combat worth fighting only resulted in a 50/50 chance of a general success worth a damn, then the game would get real boring, real fast!
Active and engaging systems should not be left to just the combat system. Let crafting and all other subsystems in the game be just as fun and engaging to do.
Killing your creativity: The Cloth Cap Infinite Horizon
This reminded me alot of the discussions between Raph when he was designing Star Wars Galaxies and the pre-release community.
Raph, as always, had big plans to revolutionize the way crafters gained xp. No more endless clicking, making 2 million gnarled staves which would be thorwn directly into the trash barrel, crafters in SWG were to gain crafting xp by making an item, selling it, and the player that bought it using the item. No XP was granted for the actual process of creating the item.
So if you created a blaster, and the person that bought it went out and shot so many Nerfs with it, then and only then would the crafter gain xp for making the item.
The vast majority of the community hated the idea (though of course the same people complained about all the clicking after release) Many claimed to like the mindless clicking over and over, hard as that is to believe.
Eventually the idea of usage xp was scrapped and went to the conventional “make a blaster, get some xp”. They fixed the glut of crafted items on the market by adding a handy little box that if you clicked would not actually create the item in exchange for a little additional xp.
Its one of those love/hate things that are so prevelant in MMOGs.
As I recall, the main complaint about usage XP was that it was bugged so hard it just didn’t work. The second complaint was that it meant your progress depended on other people, so you couldn’t power-grind perfectly – not that that bothered me much, as an amateur crafter. It certainly didn’t stop the creation of lots of items, because you could put them on the bazaar for a few hundred credits and n00bs would give you usage XP (when the damned thing worked). I certainly remember loading plenty of people up with Teltier noodles and Starshine surprise.
Generally people ignored usage XP, which was probably the ideal situation the designers hoped for. Good crafters who made things that people used should do better (advance faster) than grinders, but I doubt this was observed. I don’t actually remember usage XP being explicitly removed.
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