Problem with every mmorpg

Jarek · Dec 31, 2017

I always wondered why the Ultima Online/Star Wars Galaxies skill-based, player driven, open world style MMO was never done properly. WoW pretty much nailed the EQ style theme park, but nobody ever hit the perfect 3D skill based MMO.

SWG still has the best crafting economy ever seen hands down. It was massive, thriving, had dedicated crafting classes with player-owned merchants, shops, entire malls all packed full of high end crafted goods if every kind. SWG had like 10 dedicated crafting/non-combat classes! Maybe more.

Problem though, SWG was a buggy mess. UO/SWG needed a successor like EQ got with WoW, but that never happened.

Khane · Dec 31, 2017

I'd like to see an MMO with real, dedicated crafting/professions. To the point where you could set up merchant guilds and basically run an entire server's economy. However, the problem is as you mentioned there haven't really been any "successful" MMOs that had that formula and a big name publisher probably wouldn't want to jump on it. So chances are you'd get a small studio/small budget MMO with high chances of it being a turd.

I think there is potentially a huge market for an MMO like that because people like being virtual tradesmen because people like being virtually rich.

Pyros · Dec 31, 2017

One of the main issue with the "realistic" economy systems is the chinese ruining everything they touch. Every game is plagued by bots and hackers or just farmers and it fucks up the economy in various places, so if your game is too reliant on it, it tends to kinda shit itself with massive inflation due to whales buying tons of gold and the basic supplies being annoying to collect due to being overcamped and what not.

Jarek · Dec 31, 2017

Pyros said:
One of the main issue with the "realistic" economy systems is the chinese ruining everything they touch. Every game is plagued by bots and hackers or just farmers and it fucks up the economy in various places, so if your game is too reliant on it, it tends to kinda shit itself with massive inflation due to whales buying tons of gold and the basic supplies being annoying to collect due to being overcamped and what not.

Ultimately the main problem with MMO's is all the other fucking people.

Daidraco · Jan 1, 2018

Ha ~ Id still rather play with these shit stains than not. So the people will have to stay.

Ive always looked at the reason I hated crafting in MMO's for the downfall of why a proper economy is never set up. Mundane supplies (Basic Iron, Wood etc.) are these seemingly infinite, but yet finite resources that you have to journey all over the f'n map for. They dont add much in the way of gameplay and hope to appeal to your exploratory side. In comes the bots and the farmers that essentially own the node before it even visually repops. So now, if you're not botting yourself, you're walking all over this map trying to find a simple resources that should be plentiful but you cant because the botters are doing so. Much less do I enjoy making 200 steel daggers to get 40 points to move up to Mithril Daggers to repeat the process.

Lastly, this works with the whole argument - no one ever sets the economy up properly so that a crafter that crafts a lvl 5 item could sell it to a level 5 thinking he would have the money. But at level 5, timmy has 40 copper that hes scraped to save and the lvl 5 item thats been crafted has components in it that total 3 gold. Even if the crafter just made it for him to be nice, to break even he would need at least 3 gold. When will Timmy have 3 gold? By the time hes lvl 20. Will he need that lvl 5 item then?... the whole design is beyond stupid.

I would enjoy crafting if one, the blue print was handed to me from a faction grind or similar. The base components like Iron were gathered for me by workers, ala Black Desert Online, and the special rare components were from when I killed this thing in a dungeon. Higher quality being based solely off finding rarer parts for it. No randomization. There is nothing intrinsically fun about grinding crafting skill levels. You literally hit "Build All" in most games and walk away. FUNNNNN .....

Khane · Jan 1, 2018

Says the botter.

Joking aside, low level crafting has been worthless in almost every MMO I've played as you mentioned. The developers seem to just slap it together to say professions are there and only focus on a few max level recipes that are usable and desirable.

I don't agree with having NPCs collect shit for you. Instead I'd like to see crafting set up in a way that gathering isn't something just any adventurer could do. You'd need to be specialized and you could upgrade your ability to gather and even, eventually, create mills/factories that convert raw materials for you or refine materials more efficiently for better output. But only the crafter classes can utilize these "upgrades". If a crafter wanted to gather rare ingredients from hard to reach or dangerous places they'd have to set up a caravan with their equipment and hire adventure classes to take them to it. The adventurers couldn't gather the items from the monster's corpse or from the rare mineral vein deep in the dungeon. The crafter would have to be there to do that.

The only thing adventure classes could gather/retrieve would be basic raw materials which would be sellable to crafters/merchants but would need to be refined/combined into something usable in crafting. And it would be more efficient/profitable for a crafter to hire adventurers or group with them and harvest the materials themselves because they could get better materials or more of them.

Vimeseh · Jan 1, 2018

So is the crafting specialized character in your idea completely useless in combat Khane? I'd never play something like that but I know a couple people who would love to be a boring ass leech for financial gain in an mmo. Also would still have the problem with botters, you play your main as an adventurer and bot your crafting mule along with you.

Khane · Jan 1, 2018

There would be crafting classes that would be very marginally useful in combat situations. There would also be traditional adventuring classes like Rogue, Mage, Warrior, etc.

Also, the crafting classes wouldn't be a leech because they would be the ones who turn the raw materials into weapons and armor for the adventurers. Symbiotic relationship.

Dual boxing isn't botting. I see nothing wrong with dual boxing. You wanna pay the extra money to maintain multiple accounts and turn a social game into a solo game go for it. Who cares.

Pyros · Jan 1, 2018

Problem of this system is you create yet another required role for grouping. Now not only do you need your usual trifecta(assuming typical mmo) of tank/healer/DPS, and potentially CC/support depending on your class system, but you also need a crafter in your group wherever you go, since you basically can't get shit worth anything without one. On the other hand because of I assume the limited ressources, you only have one spot for a crafter per group, maybe 2 if the dungeon is designed to say have rare mining veins in the boss room so you get one to skin the dragon and one to mine the rare ore and shit like that.

Forced grouping with a class that literally doesn't fight doesn't sound that great either. What does the crafter do while the adventurers are clearing shit? Just sit there? Start some crafts in the middle of nowhere? I mean assuming crafting is a system that doesn't require a crafting station of sort(anvil, sawmill, whatever), wouldn't the crafting process also be lenghty and interesting, making it hard to actually just do randomly with the risk of getting hit by an aoe or whatever. So the crafter ends up not really being able to do anything during these dungeon runs until the boss is down, then they click a button to gather or whatever and dungeon run done, sounds pretty boring.

Also would require a bunch of systems to ensure payment and such is done properly otherwise it'd be scam central, would need like a way to specify payment only for a specific task done with the group and to be paid after completion.

I don't know, I think this is just overcomplicating things and wouldn't add much to the crafting experience. You could simply make every boss drop craftable items rather than gear, and this way all gear goes through crafters anyway, but without having to drag them around during dungeons.

It raises several other issues though that I'm not sure it's such a great change.

Ukerric · Jan 2, 2018

My ideal crafting system would start by making crafting useful. Until you make crafting useful, talking about dedicated harvesters or crafting "classes" is useless.

Any MMO in which crafting is useful has three main components:

1) Item drop rarity. As long as you're showered with a full set of items every 2 hours because you entered a new zone, crafting is useless (which is a factor why only high-end craft ever succeeds because that's the point where you don't get your item replaced after 2 hours of /played).

2) Item decay. If you can use an item until it is replaced by something better, than any recipe that doesn't produce the best item has to be cheap (in which case no one wants it) or is useless. Or both.

3) Crafting time. If you can craft any amount of items, any time (limited to your access to components), then everyone is crafting everything they can, and you have few outlets for your production.

Games have attempted a few tweaks to try to make things more interesting (rare recipes dropped from raid, quest to unlock recipes), but unless you address the core problems and make it so that not everyone has crafters among their stable of alts, you're still putting a band-aid on the pegleg. And those 3 points have to be designed in the game from the start, or it will never work.

Khane · Jan 2, 2018

Pyros said:
Problem of this system is you create yet another required role for grouping. Now not only do you need your usual trifecta(assuming typical mmo) of tank/healer/DPS, and potentially CC/support depending on your class system, but you also need a crafter in your group wherever you go, since you basically can't get shit worth anything without one. On the other hand because of I assume the limited ressources, you only have one spot for a crafter per group, maybe 2 if the dungeon is designed to say have rare mining veins in the boss room so you get one to skin the dragon and one to mine the rare ore and shit like that.

Forced grouping with a class that literally doesn't fight doesn't sound that great either. What does the crafter do while the adventurers are clearing shit? Just sit there? Start some crafts in the middle of nowhere? I mean assuming crafting is a system that doesn't require a crafting station of sort(anvil, sawmill, whatever), wouldn't the crafting process also be lenghty and interesting, making it hard to actually just do randomly with the risk of getting hit by an aoe or whatever. So the crafter ends up not really being able to do anything during these dungeon runs until the boss is down, then they click a button to gather or whatever and dungeon run done, sounds pretty boring.

Also would require a bunch of systems to ensure payment and such is done properly otherwise it'd be scam central, would need like a way to specify payment only for a specific task done with the group and to be paid after completion.

I don't know, I think this is just overcomplicating things and wouldn't add much to the crafting experience. You could simply make every boss drop craftable items rather than gear, and this way all gear goes through crafters anyway, but without having to drag them around during dungeons.

It raises several other issues though that I'm not sure it's such a great change.

Eh, these are issues you have to solve any time you're trying to do something different or unique. I wouldn't say these people are required. You can adventure and get items and some materials you can sell for the game's currency, you don't need a crafter with you. The crafters are the ones who would want to be taken along more than anything else because that's their profit margin on the line. And they'd probably pay the adventurers for the privilege.

It certainly would not force players to bring crafters along. Will min/maxers want to do it? Most likely. But that doesn't make it a necessity. You could also add other avenues of obtaining the rare items for crafters. Perhaps crafters could sell limited use gathering tools to adventurers to procure said items.

I'm just armchair devving, I haven't thought about implementing everything that the game would need to be successful. I just think it would be an interesting game to play if done well.

Grim1 · Jan 2, 2018

I agree with a lot of the issues brought up here. But personally my main problem with mmorpg's is being forced to sort though all the crap you accumulate over the course of the game. By the time I get to the end game I have so much junk in my bank that it becomes overwhelming and tedious to sort through.

The actual time spent killing mobs and having fun at the end game becomes secondary to standing at the bank while alt tabbing to a wiki to figure it all out. Sucks, more so if you have alts. Some mmos are worse than others at this, and those are the mmos I almost never return to after a break.

Srathor · Jan 2, 2018

I am scared to mention it, but Crowfall has the gathering and Crafting yall are describing.

It has some great Ideas. But it also has some piss poor implementation.

Ukerric · Jan 3, 2018

Of course it has. It was one of the design objectives (make crafting useful/necessary), so they got the right solutions. Other games have "good" crafting as well. UO had. EVE has.

WoW and and its derivatives... have not.

Jarek · Jan 3, 2018

I think a skillpoint-based system works a lot better than a class system in a crafting based economy. Being able to have both "blacksmithing" and "swordsmanship," plus some magic or healing skills etc, solves many problems with being gimped in group/combat and self reliance as a character. Or you can devote yourself purely to crafting, or combat, or min/max. I guess that opens up player balancing problems, but solving those is what game design is for.

Again, UO and SWG got it almost right, but UO was primitive, 2D isometric in the new age of 3D, and SWG was rushed, unfinished, unbalanced, and buggy. We never got the perfect version and probably never will now.

Alkorin · Jan 3, 2018

Jarek said:
I guess that opens up player balancing problems, but solving those is what game design is for.

This is like saying "sure, we can have world peace, but that's what diplomacy is for". The problem is staggering, and there are so many variables (including each and every one of us, because we all have differing opinions on what "balanced" means) that this will be an ongoing, messy, epic battle for all of eternity.

So, to each and every person who's suggested that something works better than something else: Yes, for you, and perhaps for others, but not for everyone. Follow the money. Whatever helps retain the most people (hint: WoW crafting lets you make cute shit, not useful shit, 99% of the time) is going to end up garnering the most favour. If you want a pure crafting experience, sorry to say that you're the niche market and you probably won't find what you're looking for without a battle.

P.S. Making a sword != using a sword, so the two should really have nothing to do with one another. It's reasonable to assume that knowing how a sword is balanced could help you use it more efficiently, but that's a stretch for all but the most skilled artisan, I'd imagine.

mkopec · Jan 3, 2018

I never cared for crafting in games, but I can see the appeal to others. I just want to kill shit and collect good lootz. The thing thats missing in todays games is that most loot is boring excel sheet +3 bullshit that is meaningless. Bring back hand crafted good loot randomly spawn that you can actually see on the mob. I want to have a reason to go adventure and seek out out of the way places and see what drops there. Most games today have none of this. Simple zone wide loot tables with a few rares thrown in that are and extra+2 or some shit. Boring and gay.

a c i d.f l y · Jan 5, 2018

Jarek said:
I think a skillpoint-based system works a lot better than a class system in a crafting based economy. Being able to have both "blacksmithing" and "swordsmanship," plus some magic or healing skills etc, solves many problems with being gimped in group/combat and self reliance as a character. Or you can devote yourself purely to crafting, or combat, or min/max. I guess that opens up player balancing problems, but solving those is what game design is for.

Again, UO and SWG got it almost right, but UO was primitive, 2D isometric in the new age of 3D, and SWG was rushed, unfinished, unbalanced, and buggy. We never got the perfect version and probably never will now.

As much as I enjoyed the crafting system in SWG pre-JTL, building a full +luck suit was kind of obnoxious. And outside a few unique pieces from certain mobs, you found yourself just farming materials to continually craft the same shit over and over until it lucked the best stats. Wow kinna picked that up in Legion, but the crafted stuff is still left in the wake of easy as shit LFR drops, set bonus requirements, legendaries, and trinkets.

Ukerric · Jan 6, 2018

I tend to frown on any crafting system that has a luck factor. Whether it's random stats, or a random quality, or whatever, if I craft based on a recipe I've crafted before, I expect to get the same item I've crafted before.

Anything where you craft an item and the result are random simply means you have to craft dozens or more items before you get a useful one. A good crafting system should have the fact that you only craft one item when you need one item, for you or for sale.

a c i d.f l y · Jan 6, 2018

Ukerric said:
I tend to frown on any crafting system that has a luck factor. Whether it's random stats, or a random quality, or whatever, if I craft based on a recipe I've crafted before, I expect to get the same item I've crafted before.

Anything where you craft an item and the result are random simply means you have to craft dozens or more items before you get a useful one. A good crafting system should have the fact that you only craft one item when you need one item, for you or for sale.

I'd be OK with an items getting better the more you craft it, sorta like UO did it. A GM armor smith produced better of the same type of armor than that of a journeyman, and could better use more rare materials.

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