In CoX, there was invention salvage which was needed to make invention enhancements. If you needed a Hamidon goo and two gold bars to make something, you had to have those exact things, there were no substitutes for them and you couldn't make a Hami Goo out of anything else. I would dub this "discrete" as each type of salvage was separate from the rest and had to be obtained somehow by someone somewhere getting said item to drop and then either using or selling it. All such items were originally created by randomized drops of that item somehow.
There were also Incarnate Components (Shards, Threads, and other items) which was "upgradable" meaning you could combine so many threads to make a thing, or threads and things to make better things, whatever. Threads dropped pretty regularly and things dropped at mission completion for Incarnate Trials.
In CoX the "upgradable" stuff was not something you could trade with other players or sell on the market. The discrete stuff was for sale.
Is it a good idea to have "upgradability" in the CoT crafting system, and if so, should upgradable stuff be for sale as well? If not why not? Should all crafting inputs be upgradable and sellable or not?
Another factor in this is the fact that when crafting components are discrete, you either need one or you don't. When they're upgradable, you can ALWAYS use everything, by virtue of the fact that it can be combined to make something you want, in all likelihood, eventually, once you get enough of them.
So in the discrete system, a person who get's a Circuit Board to drop and decides they have no need of one might just delete it to make room in inventory, figuring that the time and effort spent to sell it are wasted based on the going rate for Circuit Boards. On the other hand, if Circuit Boards could be combined to make "Improved Circuit Boards" and those combined to make something better, you might want to either hold onto or sell your Circuit Boards.
If crafting components are going to be upgradable I think there should be a cost in in-game currency to do that in all cases. This would be a good IGC sink and a way of fighting hyperinflation. How much the combination rates are is another question. I also think in that system you'd need to be able to sell groupings of like items as one "sale package" on the market. That is, you'd put together a "lot" containing some number of Circuit Boards and sell that, not just one at a time. you might even let people assemble "aggregate lots" of different items for sale as one package deal.
I'm not sure whether I like upgradable items or discrete items better though.
What do you think?
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Imagine a game like CoT where there are different types of salvage components, e.g. the metal bar, which can be upgraded by combining, say, 10 identical items into one item of the next higher rank in the same set. So like, ten lead bars makes an iron bar, ten iron makes a steel, ten steel make an alloy, etc. If there are enough different families of these items (metal bars, gems, microchips, etc). you might be able to set the game up such that the average person doesn't have room in inventory to store all ranks of all families of all salvage that exists, and thus you have a constant need to mange inventory. What to keep, what to sell, what to trash in the middle of a mission, etc. One thing this does is it encourages people to participate in the economy at large by taking their stuff to market once in a while and selling it to get IGC to buy other stuff they want.
People could join together SGs just to be able to facilitate more efficient collection and storage of various items, and to be able to share them with each other.
Characters who might have trouble defeating the badguys that drop microchips might be able to more easily generate gems and trade one for the other.
In CoX if you had some spare Radioactive Isotopes you didn't need, you couldn't get much for them and thus they were not worth storing long-term. People only stored stuff they felt was worth the inventory space. In this system you would probably want to store everything or else get full value for what you were getting rid of, because in all likelihood, the higher rank the item is, the more expensive it is.
The question also occurs to me of whether or not a singe higher rank item ought to be able to be broken down into some number of lower rank items. This too would be a useful thing to have, but might need to cost IGC or else it might have to yield less stuff than the upgrading process too to make the thing. E.g. it takes 10 lead bars to make one iron bar, but when to downgrade that iron bar you only get 5 lead bars back. That or you get ten lead bars, but the downgrade process requires a lot of IGC to do.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
This might be a bit premature. To be able to discuss these things we need a lot more info than we have.
First we need to know if crafting items will be named or generic.
If they are generic then this won't matter much. If they are named then that opens a whole bunch of other questions....that will open more lines of questions like if there is going to be a division of rarity, how many separate items will there be and what the drop rates are to name a few. With those answered we need to know if they are going to be linked to specific foes and if the drops will be divided by catagories (magic science mutation or north south whatever ). Every question answered means more questions.
But on the face of it....I do like the idea of combining lesser parts to make a greater one.....though this might lead to more isolation as you now need others even less than you did before.
Not to drag unhealthy connotations into things, but you're essentially requesting what amounts to a Pyramid Scheme of conversions. The analogy you'd want to be reaching for is that any 3 Inspirations of one type could be converted into any 1 Inspiration of another type (on that tier). After that, it's just a matter of figuring out the requirements to "upgrade" and "downgrade" salvage components ... much like what you'd see in the Incarnate System for [url=http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Incarnate_Thread_Component]Incarnate Threads[/url].
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[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
It is also exactly how the gem upgrade system in Diablo 3 works (at least the upgrading part).
((although to be totally honest, it can get VERY expensive in terms of chipped gems to build one of the top range gems.... it is about 22million chipped gems to make a single Flawless Royal Gem, but *thankfully* Imperial Gems drop in Master+ difficulty levels, so that will save you a large chunk of gems that you no longer have to worry about))
The benefit of being able to "disassemble" stuff that you don't want is that you can then use those base components for something that you CAN use instead. Of course, this is all dependant on how the crafting system actually works etc
In an upgradable situation, it's probably true that more time spent gathering stuff will result in more wealth, but we had that in CoX too with the discrete system it had. so it's possible that's either unavoidable or somehow not heavily dependent on the discrete vs upgradable question.
As for isolationism, I don't think the effects would be so great as to bother me personally. In a discrete system you try to grind to randomly generate the thing you want, or enough other swag to buy the thing you want. In the process you generate a ton of mostly unwanted crap. In an upgradable system, that crap could be condensed down into ever-increasingly valuable stuff over time instead of just getting trashed or dumped on the market for pennies.
And I agree with islandtrevor72 that the whole crafting and looting system has to be designed, not just one part of it. That said, I don't know if the discrete versus upgradable question is gated in any hard sense by the other decisions you make. I mean, discrete or upgradable is a question you have to answer at some point and it can be done regardless of what other parameters you specify. Parameters will always need constant tweaking anyway.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Oh also, for the record, I'd like to have named items, not just base everything one "gems" or some other generic thing.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
This has no stamp of any level of dev approval, and is just me speaking my own preferences...
But I have always been a fan of doing a more MineCraft-like approach to MMO crafting. Arrange items on a grid - with the grid potentially changing based on what in-game object you're using as your "crafting table" (which could be a reason to have different kinds of tables as base items in your superbase) - to produce new items. Whether things would be "upgradable" would be more in terms of what transforms to what. That rough ruby used on a jeweler's bench could be turned into a focusing lens, perhaps, which is an element of two or three differnent light-beam themed items.
Again, this is just personal preference and musing.
[color=#ff0000]Business Manager[/color]
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I too love the minecraft style crafting. But how would it be applied to CoT without it becoming an annoyance. Can we craft anything as long as we have the parts (ala minecraft)...do we need recipes (ala CoH) if we need recipes do we 'forget' how to make the item after one use or can we always make it...how many separate items is there to craft with?
Really...this is such a tough subject to discuss until we know at the very least the basics of the CoT crafting system. Most we can say is what we would like to see right now.
Personally I would like a minecraft style crafting with recipes that are both one use and long term (one use for the rarest recipes and the others being learned forever). In this system it mirrors CoH but expands upon it in that we can craft a basic enhancement whenever but the rare ones are not duplicatable from a single recipe....
Again, personally - I always thought the idea that you needed a unique, consumable "recipe" to make something was silly. At that point, you're not really crafting. You're getting a specific item and having to pay for it with wacky currency. The recipe is the item, you just have to "unlock" it. And that defeats a lot of the purpose behind crafting as a concept, to me.
[color=#ff0000]Business Manager[/color]
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If you wanted to be really evil you could make all of crafting a black box whereby you just have a periodic table of different raw materials that drop and a set of crafting tools that can be used to process them, but never tell anyone what combinations of which items will make which Augments, or worse, don't even tell people up front which Augments and Refinements even exist that can be crafted, and then roll out more over time and don't tell people that either, so that last week three rubies and a circuit board got you nothing, but NOW it get's you a cool new "Beamsplitter" Augment, which is a new one and really good, but only craft-able on the High Tech Workbench, not the Alchemist's Forge or the Scientist's Laboratory. And then just let everyone learn everything by trial and error, like the Horadric Cube from Diablo I. Fun fun fun. MAYBE give people the TOTAL number of different Augments and Refinements that exist, then let the crowd source it to their hearts' content.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
The wiki would obviously eventually cover all of this, but it would make for an early-bird bonus for those who like that sort of gameplay, while the wiki would keep it from becoming too obtuse for those who do not.
I like the idea in concept. I again am not speaking with any dev authority or knowledge, however.
[color=#ff0000]Business Manager[/color]
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I totally agree with this. Calling those Recipes "Recipes" was misleading. It's not like every time you want to bake a cake you need a fresh copy of the written instructions for making that cake. The recipe doesn't get consumed or destroyed in the process of making the thing it tells you how to make.
Edit: That said, there's noting wrong with having an item that works like Recipes in CoX worked, I would have just called it something else.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Honestly? I'm glad you brought that up, to me "crafting systems" like that don't really feel like crafting systems, I don't feel like I'm making anything and more like I'm scrounging for change to buy specific items. DCUO's crafting system was one of the few things I liked about the game, you didn't have this wide variety of currency that you had to scrounge up for specific items, you had 3 and they all had a specific purpose, red was damage, yellow was support and blue was control/defense, with that you could look at what exobits you have and instantly know what exactly you can make and what exactly that thing did. I'd rather just fuse 3 red things to make a damage adjustment then try to explain to myself just why my mutant fire breathing thug knows how to fuse a magic totem and a circuit board together to make something that increases my damage somehow....
not my video just one I lke ===> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6-SdIN0hsM
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I remember 1st time hearing about recipes for CoH/V and though that I just had to use salvage to craft them.
Later I learned that recipes were more like ready Made Pie Crusts. Just a shell that you can throw in different ingredients to make different kinds of Pie's. :)
Either that, or Different types of Cookie Cutters. :(
I'm on the opposite side of the spectrum here. I would rather have lots of different raw materials, different levels of quality or each, different sub-components that can be made from them, and different Augments, Refinements, and temp powers that can be made from the components.
Going back to what Segev said, you could take care to make sure things don't seem to be too "off theme". First you'd need to insure that all of the raw materials are basically generic enough that they don't sound inherently magical or high tech. So like Iron is fine, but Uranium sounds a little too "sciency" to be a thing you'd end up putting into a magical themed Augment. The different workbenches ought to make on-theme Augments and Refinements, etc.
So maybe you have to grind for a lot of "iron ore" salvage to combine them and make a "cast iron ingot" then several of them can (and perhaps some other stuff) be combined to make a "low grade uranium sample" and then you combine some of those, with some other stuff, to make a "reactor fuel rod" which is a component that is needed for a certain Augment you want. Then someone else might want Iron ores to use for making some other thing that is ultimately magical sounding. With or without the refining and combining its still basically a system where you gather stuff and process it to make useful things.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
well yes, but my way it's far more easier for new players to actually understand it!!! Gathering all these materials is too complex and annoying, why choose that over something that's easy to understand and actually fun to use!!!!
not my video just one I lke ===> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6-SdIN0hsM
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Perhaps some sort of combination of these things: simple elements that get combined on simple kinds of crafting tables to make the myriad more complex ones, and from those come the combinations for nifty new items.
With the intermediary crafting items also being potential "drops," so you don't have to craft all of them if you don't want to.
[color=#ff0000]Business Manager[/color]
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While logic dictates that once you know how to make something, you can make it again...game balance needs to be considered first in this instance.
First, look at drop value. If you get the recipe and now can craft the ultra rare item at will it looses value and rarity on each crafting....there is little control, aside from further limiting the ingredients for the ultra rare item (which could also affect a great many other things not the least of which is the feeling of being punished by those players with the recipe already learned) to curb its spread at that point by the devs. This results in the eventuality that every rare item will become common as more people learn how to make it.....The only way to counteract this trend is to make the ingredients so rare as to become a chore unto itself to aquire....not a bad thing except that progress in the game goes from one of growth to one of farming. Akin to the gear grinds in Korean games....not something I desire personally.
Second, the economy suffers as players learn more and more...making each additional drop of the recipe itself loose value the same way the item looses value....except now it doubles the loss because they both begin working in concert to disrupt the value of these supposed 'rare' items. This means that as the game progresses there is simply no reason to buy the recipes or completed items resulting in more IGC just sitting in players vaults. Once you can do it yourself then you don't need others to help you as much...
Sometimes real world logic has to take a backseat to game issues and I feel that in the case of rare recipes is one of those times.
What you are suggesting here only makes it so people can craft the learned recipes easier and does not address the game itself IMO.
If you really are hung up on the idea of the recipe being another ingredient (not the new currency as you call it because I think that opinion was misguided)....then call it the Key Component (name).....so to use a CoH recipe called Positrons Blast....its now called Key Component Positrons Blast.
It's less about real-world logic, though that applies, and more about how the locking of it behind a particular recipe removes "crafting" from it entirely, when the recipe is a 1-shot item to make the end item. In the end, the recipe really is the item itself; the "ingredients" are just cruft, especially if they're not as rare as the recipe itself.
If you want items to be rare with a true crafting system, you [u]do[/u] control it through the rarity of the ingredients.
[color=#ff0000]Business Manager[/color]
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I'd feel better about this if I could still make stuff with just the simple stuff, so even if I'm new to the game I can still up my guy's damage and maybe just a make a proc out of simple stuff but have like the big, extremely rare and extremely gimmicky stuff like buildable animations and costume pieces (that I should still be able to buy on the market place might I add) or for extremely powerul but extremely limited temporary powers like nukes or orbital space lasers that should be saved for really tough challenges. I'm fine with a complex system for that kind of stuff, that should feel like something epic I'm building, but I don't want to collect like thousands of iron bars just so my guy could hit a little harder
not my video just one I lke ===> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6-SdIN0hsM
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As Segev pointed out this is his own personal musings and is not reflective of the current design framework for crafting in the game.
[hr]I don't use a nerf bat, I have a magic crowbar!
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[color=#ff0000]Tech Team. [/color]
I don't see how....it becomes an ingredient ...much like any other aspect of the item....to make a diamond sword you need diamond....to make positrons blast you need the key component for positrons blast....
Crafting in games is an abstract concept at best to begin with....you are not actually 'crafting' anything you are gathering items to trade for another item....you may need to lay them out in a specific order but it does not change that its a trade.
Which I spoke about when I described the way a system like that seems more like the gear grinding games. Having a 2 tier system allows for the devs to modify one without affecting the other...if they find an imbalance with the amount of Positrons Blast in the game they can adjust the key component drop rate without having to balance the rest ...which may be ingredients for other items that do not need adjusting. Its a safeguard against mistakes or player made loopholes. Its far less intrusive to have a single drop rate adjusted than to see wide range adjustments....keeping the players a bit happier in the long run.
None of this takes into account that calling it a recipe does not make it one...it is an ingredient....plain and simple. So by and large you are right....control comes from the rarity of the ingredients....just the way I see it...without making each rare recipe requiring a drop that only works for that item you lose too much control over the entire system....
Could you design a system for CoT like Minecrafts? Probably...but not without including Minecraft's checks and balances of item decay which very few are receptive to.
Still...without knowing the crafting system that's going to be in the game...much of this is bound to be completely moot.
We know, these things are going to take, you have to go through all these meetings to decide on a final product before, but if you want to fill the shoes of the CoX dev team then we know you're going to listen to your future players, and while the majority of those aren't really here, we steal want to put in our two cents on what's wanted and needed to make the game work :)
not my video just one I lke ===> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6-SdIN0hsM
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Tannim is implying that Serg's posts are not what the system is going to be....but can't elaborate.
notears man.... much of the discussion in these threads will be mostly theoretical in nature.... it will take a massive outpouring or truly unique concept to get the devs to veer that far from the decided paths as the cost in both time, effort and expense is too high. Rest assured they do listen though and at times take what is discussed and have it influence (note the use of influence and not change) the direction of development.
kay :)
not my video just one I lke ===> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6-SdIN0hsM
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I'm fine with the idea that each Augment, Refinement, and Temp Power might have a unique "key component" that's required to make it (which is the role the Recipes served in CoX, tho they had the added benefit of coming with a list of all of the other items needed as well).
I also agree with notears that there is a need for "beginner" gear that's not hard to make or acquire. CoX had the original Enhancements that used to drop, fully ready to slot, so you could do that too, just make them the least combat effective option so that the "pro" players will eventually graduate to the crafted stuff at or near or soon after reaching the level cap (at the latest). I wouldn't have different ones for different origins (Science, Mutants, etc) like CoX had, and I wouldn't have three different grades of them like SO, DO and TO, nor would I make them operate like those did in CoX where you eventually out-level them and they stop working, etc. I level 3 toon isn't going to have a full-blown lair and SG base with all the crafting tools set up after all, so there's a need for those "quick, cheap, and easy" type Augments for sure.
One thing I'm totally against though is making the system ultra simple so as to placate the ultra-disinterested-in-crafting-for-crafting's-sake people. I want the crafting/Augment/Refinement system to be a richly detailed thing you can interact with and think about and make plans designed around it, etc. I don't want it to be so easy that it's just "turn crank, get thing you want". The crafting subsystem of the game ought to be designed in a way that makes the economy work reasonably well, get's people trading and engaging in commerce with each other, connects well with the character building (powers/Augment Slots) system, and rewards the people who get good at doing it by learning about how it works and exploring their options.
I would hate to see the crafting system (raw materials, key components, how they drop, how you craft stuff you want) or the character building system (which powers, how many slots, where, what Augments in them and why) get minimized so as to make it as unobtrusive as possible. Like if all raw materials needed to make any Augment were just called "crystals" and you could make anything with enough crystals, I would hate that. Even if it were like "okay, there's red crystals, blue crystals, and green crystals,", I'm personally not going to like it. I'd much rather have the very diverse set of salvage stuff that CoX had than something that simplistic.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
There is nothing to stop having all recipes in a dropdown list at the crafting area if they loose the recipe drop as a concept. Thereby letting you know well in advance what you need to gather if you are so inclined.
I think notears wanted a way to ease into crafting for beginners...have items crafted with relative ease using common drops. In CoH you had the basic IO's that modified acc, dam, ect ...those can very easily be used to fill this roll.
Thats a lot to ask for. Crafting is one of those things that needs to be carefully applied in a game where the focus is not gear as it can easily change the focus to gear. A crafting system that works well with the economy is tough enough but making it too complex or in depth is a tightrope I would hate to see the devs fall off of. If they think they can do it then go for it...if they are unsure...I would rather they make it simple enough so they are comfortable.
Having a diverse set of names is not difficult to work around....its when you start to limit which foes drop which items that you begin the ugly path towards gear grinding....
I could be misreading Radiac's intentions here, but "richly detailed" crafting systems that are very involved and require a lot of planning a head can drive people away from the system. Leaving a smaller pool of people to be involved with the crafting end of the economy than you could have before, it is also something you usually (not always but usually) find in MMOs with dedicated crafting skills / professions through which players can literally design a character around the sole profession of crafting.
This is first and foremost a combat-centric game. We want players to be able to get into crafting, give it some depth, but not bog down the system to the point where it in of itself becomes "the game" taking someone away from the action of combat. If we were to do that we would create player class systems that were designed around such professions, which we are not.
Our crafting system is definitely inspired by the old game. It diverges in a coup,e of different ways, giving it a unique twists, enough so that it is clearly our own but harkens back to the old game as to be familiar.
[hr]I don't use a nerf bat, I have a magic crowbar!
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[color=#ff0000]Tech Team. [/color]
I'm not big on crafting (mostly self sufficient on consumables) but the game with the best crafting system imo is (or rather was) Star Wars Galaxies, at least during Gen 1 (Vanilla) and mostly during Gen 2 (CU).
The basics of it was that you gathered raw materials then made them into components that you later made into final products. The materials had a number of properties with values that shifted over time (not for already harvested ones) where some of them were important to the item you made, which meant that the quality of the initial materials set a form of base stats for the final product. You could also increase the "stats" of both the component and the final product through experimentation during the crafting process. There existed some rare drops that could replace certain components (mostly weapons iirc) and if you wanted [i]The Best[/i][sup]TM[/sup] equipment possible you needed to hunt (or rather grind) for those drops.
Mass production was achieved by making a schematic instead of a final product and feeding that and sufficient materials into a factory.
Outside of certain DoT weapons everything worthwhile using was crafted by players, and with a the skill system (not level based) as a whole that did not mandate that you take any combat skills meant that there arose dedicated crafters who were able to push item stats way beyond of what SOE though people would do since they didn't put a hard cap on stats.
Now I'm not saying that we need this an equally intricate crafting system but I would like to see something like it since I kinda miss it, even though I wasn't a crafter. More like on the level that the quality of the initial materials decide the quality of the final product, and at least keeping a "component" stage of crafting. Not sure how tie a level based progression system into this but maybe it could work by just increasing the amount of materials needed by "level tier" of the component or final product.
The biggest divergence between crafting in CoT and SWG is the acquisition of materials.....CoT will most likely be drops while in SWG you gathered through a sort of mining/farming process getting the material you were looking for...maybe not the quality but the type.
This is an artificial game time extender system that requires a player to spend much more time gathering the materials needed to craft an item they want.....basically a gear grind.
I am trying to find a way to explain why I am not a fan of this without constantly bringing up gear grinding and failing.
This entire system is designed to artificially extend the time it takes to gain access to the better items...from requiring foe farming for drops to extra stages of crafting to quality of finished product.
This type of system is suited for games where gear is the deciding factor on your characters abilities (SWG, STO, DDO, NWN ect) but not for a game like CoT is shaping up to be.
This system makes it exceedingly difficult for casual gamers to gather the better items...which creates a division in the players as haves and have nots....which in turn causes havoc on creating content for the game....on one hand the devs have to create challenges for those ultra geared and on the other those same challenges need to be not so difficult to allow those not ultra geared to complete them....
IMO the crafting in CoT should not be overly difficult and time consuming.
Taking your notion and putting a different spin on it ...
What if there were 3 Tiers of Crafting Tables ... Apprentice, Journeyman, Master.
At the Apprentice Table, you have to arrange your materials in 1 dimension ... a line.
At the Journeyman Table, you have to arrange your materials in 2 dimensions ... a plane.
At the Master Table, you have to arrange your materials in 3 dimensions ... a spatial grid.
Now assume that there are 5 slots to fill at each tier.
The Apprentice Table is 5 slots in a line.
The Journeyman Table is 5x5 slots in a grid on a plane.
The Master Table is 5x5x5 slots in a grid within a cube (that can be spun to view from different angles).
The "act" of Crafting is a Mini-game ... arrange the crafting materials into the provided slots in the correct order for what you're trying to craft.
Make the icons for the Crafting Materials use different colors (preferably ones that don't conflict with color blindness issues). Give the Crafting Table a menu where the Player selects the type of result they want to Craft. Once the selection is dialed in, the "correct combination" for that particular crafting will visually pulse in using FX on the line/grid/cube and it is then incumbent upon the Player to "color within the lines" to match the formula for that specific item.
Match the formula and you'll get the crafting result that matches that formula.
Fail to match ANY formula (more combinations possible than are actually used by the system) and you'll get Vendor Bait (i.e. crafting fail).
Note that this structure has scaling built directly within it (base 5, base 6, base 8, base 10, etc.) so that complexity levels can be tuned to desired expectations/difficulty, and to inherently exceed the number of possible combinations available (so only a subset of combinations "works"). Furthermore, this structure has a sort of built in "learning curve" associated with it, where the Player is obliged to learn how to use the crafting system progressively (1 dimension, 2 dimensions, 3 dimensions) so as to be able to "clear stages" of crafting in order to reach the next Tier.
A "memorization" / expert function could be achieved through use of a countdown timer once the combination of materials has been input. The time delay for completion could start "high" (60 seconds?) and then be reduced every time that particular crafting result is successfully crafted, down to a minimum time/fastest speed. That way, you represent "getting better" at repeatedly making a specific crafting result. All that is required is a database entry recording how many times that specific result has been crafted and then making use of that information in the Crafting Time formula that determines how long it takes your character to craft that result.
Have crafting attempts cost IGC (duh, sink). Two options for modifying the "price" of the IGC cost to craft specific results would be:
[list][*]How many Powers do you have that can make use of that Crafting Result?
[*]How many of those Crafting Results do you already have slotted in your build?[/list]
Total those factors up and apply them as discounts to the IGC cost of crafting, so as to (in effect) make some characters better suited to crafting certain types of results than others ... even though everyone can (in effect) craft anything. It's just that some characters are more [i]efficient[/i] at crafting certain things than others.
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[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
Not a bad idea, Red, but how about 3 instead of 5.
Be Well!
Fireheart
Players that don't care about crafting can use the Apprentice Crafting table, which is almost a one step process, but Only 95% as effective?
And a little more for the other 2...
Master reaching 99%-100% effectiveness?
Personally, if we were using such an involved system, I'd divorce it from character capability simply because I find "success chances" on things like that to be little more than irritants. The obstacle would be in obtaining access to or being able to afford the proper crafting tools, tables, and materials. Admittedly, this makes it not something you will likely explore multiple times with multiple characters; your first character to build a base with an eye towards crafting will likely be your primary crafter. But isn't that the case anyway when crafting is a character skill?
[color=#ff0000]Business Manager[/color]
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Honestly, I can't see any crafting system that doesn't boil down to a "gear grind" in the end, all I have seen have a combination of grinding for mats or recipes at varying proportions.
The difference in power between haves and have nots only depends on the difference in power level between min and max quality, and by quality I meant more like the quality of IO sets in CoH, like yellow orange and purple IO's.
I also don't think it will be exceedingly difficult for casuals since that can be adjusted with drop rates and alternative methods of gaining materials. There is also the possibility of havs selling/giving finished product to the have nots.
A 3 grid (i.e. Tic-Tac-Toe) would probably fall a little short on possible combinations. 3/9/27 seems a bit "tight" on possibilities, while 5/25/125 gives you more "breathing room" for available combinations, and even then, I don't think it would be enough to account for all of the crafting results that could come out of crafting tables in City of Heroes ... and still have "room left over" for combinations that don't result in anything besides Vendor Bait (i.e. "trash").
Remember, you wouldn't be trying to "fill" all of the available slots, necessarily, in order to generate a specific crafting result. All you're aiming for is the right [i]pattern combination[/i] to match the instructions. If that means "connect 4" then that's all you're supposed to do (in the indicated slots). There wouldn't be any time limit for arranging your Materials into the correct slots, so just take as long as you need to be sure you've got it right.
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[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
Segev, you misunderstood. I was talking about discounts on IGC costs for crafting.
Base cost 100 IGC.
-1% per Power you have that can use that crafting result.
-1% per Slot already using that crafting result.
So if I'm crafting an Accuracy, and I've got 10 Powers that can use Accuracy Enhancements, and I've got 15 Accuracy Enhancements slotted into everything, then *I* get a -25% (-10% and -15% combined) price discount on the IGC cost to craft an Accuracy Enhancement. So it costs ME only 75 IGC to craft that item, while it might cost someone else 80 or 85 IGC to craft it.
In other words, my *build* is what determines what *I* can craft most efficiently (in terms of IGC expense).
As for "crafting failures" ... those would only occur when the combinations of Materials entered into the table do not match the required/desired results.
So if I put in:
A - B - C - D - E
And the instructions were:
E - D - C - B - A
Then I've done it wrong. The crafting failure is on ME ... the Player ... not on the Game or on the Random Number Generator. Why? Because *I* ... the Player ... didn't follow instructions or the "guide" built into the table to help me use the correct ordering as demonstrated by the table.
[b]PEBKAC[/b]
Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair
And ... if that A - B - C - D - E combination doesn't correspond to "anything valid" in the crafting database, then I'll get Vendor Bait "trash" for my efforts, instead of what I wanted. Why? Because I failed at playing the mini-game.
I'll agree with you Segev, as far as the notion that crafting failures imposed by the RNG is something to be avoided, simply because that introduces an element of "gambling" into the equation. But if you're doing a system of "put the shiny stones in the correct places in the correct order" ... then realistically the only "failures" would be ones where Players do things that don't align with what the database says they should be doing to get the results they want. That's a "failure" of ACTIONS rather than a "failure" of random chances.
Very different from what I was offering.
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[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
Ah, gotcha.
What is the goal behind the basis for your suggested IGC discounts? Why cheaper if you can use it or if you already have it in use?
[color=#ff0000]Business Manager[/color]
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Cheaper because it's Familiar?
Be Well!
Fireheart
Also we should definatly still have augments and refinements as random drops
not my video just one I lke ===> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6-SdIN0hsM
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You are trying to break the issues I have with a dedicated source system of material gathering (one like you described in SWG that involves mining or one where a specific foe is the only drop source) into manageable problems. Each issue is related in such a way that changing one changes the other.
When you make it so an item can only be gained through a specific action (mining or fighting a specific foe) then the only way to gain that item is by engaging in that particular activity. Once you have what you want you move on. There is little excess to use for the market resulting in prices that exceed the actual value of the material.
In the design I champion.... random material gathering through drops... any combat encounter (the majority of the game CoT is going to be) is progress towards getting the desired material. You never stop gathering as just playing the game is the gathering process. This results in an abundance of excess material that can be offered on the market and as it is an abundance the market values stay lower.
One encourages the grind...the other is playing the game.
Its not just min and max quality.... its no quality and max quality.... and until we know what those difference are its something we need to be concerned about. The issue becomes more pronounced when you make it so the ways to gather the materials favors those with the items.
You can't adjust the drop rates without making it more beneficial to one style of play. If you put hard caps on material gathering in a day then the dedicateds who play every day gain the most benefit. If you adjust the drop rates you adjust them for everyone....If you try to limit the dedicated players gathering abilities while making it easier for the casuals to gather you are unfairly punish the games most staunch supporters. The worst way would be to make gathering material so easy that neither casual player or dedicated player has to put any effort into it resulting in making the max level of crafting the only level worth doing.
As far as selling...I touched on it earlier.... if the way to gain material is with activities that result in only one type of material (or a small range of materials) then you set up the situation where less of that material is available overall. Players will engage in that activity as much as they need to (in most cases) then move on to the next activity which does not create an abundance of the material. It drives up the cost.
But again...all of this is pure speculation as we have no real idea what the final crafting or gathering of material will be.
For me...I hope the system for gathering materials is a random drop from foes (or activities) allowing players to choose the activities they want to engage in....with the actual crafting process to be a simple grid that requires you to place the objects in specific patterns (with failure means no loss or at worst a minimal loss of the materials/IGC) so as to not become tiresome to those who don't enjoy the process but still gives something for those who do enjoy it.
Actually, my intent was to carve out a design space in which even though "everyone" can indeed craft "everything" that is available ... some PCs can craft *some* things more efficiently than others. The deciding factor for who is most efficient at crafting what? Your build, of course! After all, what ... defines ... your character (game mechanically speaking) more than your build? What Powers you've taken, the number of slots dedicated to those Powers, and what you've filled those slots with.
The discount system I've described is one that allows altaholics to develop Crafting Specializations [i]as a side effect[/i] of the build strategies used on different characters. That way the difference isn't "permission" (Craft? Y/N) but rather one of min/max return on investment in terms of IGC cost.
So let's say that I've got Redlynne running a build thoroughly dedicated to producing the signature [b]NO GET HITSU!![/b] experience. That means softcapping Defense (vs Melee/Ranged/AoE). In order to do that, as I recall I had at least 8 Powers dedicated to Defense (3 SR toggles, 3 SR passives, Hover and Maneuvers) and a LOT of slots dedicated to Defense Enhancements (mainly Luck of the Gambler IO Sets).
Net result? Redlynne "ought to" be an "expert" in Defense Crafting, simply because she uses so much of it in her build strategy.
Contrast that with Ms Givings, my Mind/Kinetics Controller, who used hardly any Defensive Enhancements at all (after all, why would she?). Not a whole lot of need for Defense when fighting in the City of Statues.
So Redlynne would be great for crafting Defense Enhancements cheaply, while Ms Givings would not. Conversely, Ms Givings would be great for crafting a wide range of Mez Enhancements (Hold, Sleep, Terror, Confusion) while Redlynne would not, simply because Redlynne's build only used Stun (3 Powers) and Hold (1 Power).
The practical upshot of this is that if you want to create a "Crafting Mule" character ... you can (just do up the build for that purpose) ... but that one character won't be able to craft EVERYTHING equally efficiently.
In other words, you can't be all/do all equally well all at the same time. The build that your character uses determines how "efficiently" you can craft different things. That way you don't wind up with City of Cookie Cutter Crafters, where you are trapped in a crafting table used by everyone [i]in exactly the same way [b]at exactly the same cost[/b][/i] in resources. You allow for "specializations" in crafting and you key it to the character build ... such that what you're "good at" crafting is determined by "who you are" and by "what you can do" game mechanically.
Want to craft a Pet Set cheaply? Ask/get a Mastermind to do the job. Why? They're the Pet Masters.
Want to craft a Taunt Set cheaply? Ask/get a Tanker to do the job. Why? Because Taunting is their calling card, and they get a lot of Powers that can do it.
The alternative is rather ... bland ... and thus not recommended (by me, anyway).
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[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
Unrelated to the topic, but I just noticed (again) that you have two "n"s in your name, Redlynne, which means that I am unsure whether you pronounce it with a short or a long "i" sound. How do you pronounce "Redlynne?"
[color=#ff0000]Business Manager[/color]
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As I understand it, it's pronounced like "Red Line" (as in "pushed beyond safe limits, having buried the needle beyond the red line on the tachometer"), as this was the name that was originally desired (in CoH) but was already taken. That's the story I heard anyway.
As for richly detailed crafting, I would call what CoX had "richly detailed", or at least a richly detailed as I needed. I just hate the hacky simplification of "all superpowers in this scifi universe come from the same power source" thing. In Freedom Force it was called "Energy X". I would like to avoid the oversimplification of such things (character origins, the fluff text of how Augments are supposed to work, etc) to the point of just having everything be based on one standardized resource for simplicity's sake. I prefer having Alchemical Silver and Positronic Matrices and Hamidon Goo and Circuit Boards and Mathematical Proofs instead of just "Dilithium" or "Energy X" or "power gems" or whatever.
Edit: the original question then was whether or not we want to be able to combine multiple Circuit Boards into one motherboard and then multiples of those into one mainframe and them multiples of those into one neural network etc.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
We still don't know what the crafting or material gathering system is going to be but based on your parameters...I would say no to combining materials....mostly because any system where you see that the trade off is usually out of whack and each recipe requires massive amounts to complete all the while extending the crafting process artificially with extra steps. CoT is not a resource gathering or crafting game...system should be simple.
If the system promised to be exactly like CoH with the only change being the ability to combine common for uncommon and common/uncommon for rare then sure...
I personally don't want there to be a toon crafting skill level involved, like you have to make your toon really good at crafting so you can craft highest quality stuff for him and your other toons, etc.. I'd actually rather have the quality of stuff you make gated by rrandom drops and by which content got you the drops, etc over that, personally. but then, I can't say it would really BOTHER me if that type of a system actually happens, but it's not what I would prefer.
I don't have a problem with the 1D, 2D, 3D crafting process as Redlynne describes it above, but I think that system, if it works the way I think it does, is so idiot proof that you'll never fail to craft the thing you want, like ever, assuming you know the correct formula for what you want in the first place. Only when you accidentally hit the wrong button or something will you actually screw it up. At that point I have to wonder why we even bother making it "get it right the first time, every time, or else" when all that does is cause people to very rarely screw it up by not paying attention. You could just set it up like "if you try to make something work in the wrong order, it just fails to process and you get your inputs materials back", or it just goes "*BUZZ* try again" or something. Then all you lost is the "cost to craft" IGC you paid to push the "process now" button, which is non-refundable, maybe something along those lines?
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Going back to "number of different possibilities" and the need for like hundreds of them, if the 1D, 2D and 3D grids allowed for empty slots and the possibility of repeats in the slots a 1D "linear row grid" of N slots would have a number of different possibilities equal to the number of different possible objects that could occupy a slot (plus one, to accommodate the empty slot option) raised to the power of N.
So if there are, say, 99 different pieces of salvage that exist, then a "1D row of 3" grid would have 100^3 = 1,000,000 different possibilities. Note, however, that this type of system considers "empty slot, Carbon Rod, Carbon Rod" to be a distinct and uniquely different set than "Carbon Rod, empty slot, Carbon Rod" for example.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
It seems that you are reading too much into my usage of SWG as an example, but I also admit that I could have been somewhat clearer.
The two things I explicitly said that I wanted was that initial material quality determines quality of final product, and usage of sub-components. Neither of this means I advocated for using a dedicated gathering system, nor for special drops. Though I can now see how others can see it as I am implying it through my reference to SWG.
Ohh, and materials does not necessarily mean "raw" materials.
You will have to give some kind of example as to the idea of 'initial quality determines quality of the final product' because to me (based upon you earlier statement of quality) that is just another way of saying use rare drops for rare recipes. I would assume that to be the case if there was a system of common/uncommon/rare material involved...I can't imagine that being in doubt.
As far as sub-components....I again assume you mean an additional layer of crafting...the idea of turning one material into another which in turn is used in the crafting process. That's just a way to extend the crafting process and I am not a fan of it. The 'get 10 ore to make 1 iron to make 1 spoon' concept bugs me because it you could just as easily say 'get 10 ore OR get 1 Iron to make 1 spoon'. Not a fan of clunky play extensions.
Radiac provides the correct answer, the context and the history.
When speaking, I always refer to my character name with a pronunciation of "Red Line" even though the spelling doesn't make that obvious. I chose the name before I even settled on the defining costume motif for my character ... that of the Red Stripe On Black like you can see here (when 5th Column Foes could be literally 9 feet tall!) in this screencap from all the way back in Issue 2:
[img]http://srv.fotopages.com/images/2/7/9/6/3/3336972.cmp[/img]
Although my avatar pic isn't the ideal reference for it, you can see the "red line" on her costume if you know what you're looking for in the Stripe 1 pattern on the arms and legs of my signature costume. Took me a little while to get the right color shading of red though (although I did eventually).
[img]http://srv.fotopages.com/images/7/5/7/8/6/5768757.cmp[/img]
So yeah ... "Red Line" is what I was after, and in Issue 2 the name (and all of its permutations) were already taken. So I settled on a variation that was close enough without relying on l33t sp34k (bleh!) to get there.
For those who are curious, Redlynne always stood exactly 5'0" tall in the costume editor and had a "coltishly leggy" teenager fit'n'trim build to her (i.e. all business). Even though she was a Scrapper, I always thought of her as being more of a "pocket tank" ... especially since Super Reflexes wasn't an option until MUCH later for Tankers. I never rerolled her though and kept the original Issue 2 incarnation of her. The biggest update I ever did to her basic Costume 1 look was add the mini-vest and switch out her Bottoms: Tights for tight fitting long pants and sneakers (since the boot option of pre-Issue 3 was not attractive).
The red stripe (i.e. the Red Line) on black motif though, was constant.
Redlynne had escaped from the Sisters of Divine Love and Retribution Catholic Girls School and Seminary prior to taking her [b]Vow of Violence[/b], despite having been trained to take the Vow for nearly all of her life. After that, she was a fugitive ... who turned up in the streets of Paragon City, and never looked back ... except to make sure none of the nuns from the school could ever find her and bring her back.
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[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
One of my motivations for picking 5 as the scalar for each of the dimensions was that with 5x5 and in 5x5x5 you have enough grid points to begin to start "drawing shapes" as an option. It's hard to do that kind of recognizable shape drawing on a 3x3 tic-tac-toe grid.
City of Heroes used 8 colors for [url=http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Inspirations#Single_Type_Inspirations]Inspirations[/url]:
Red: Damage
Orange: Resistance
Yellow: Accuracy
Green: Healing
Cyan: "Wakie"
Blue: Endurance
Indigo: Break Free
Violet: Defense
This is close enough to a ROYG(C)BIV rainbow distribution to represent the maximum number of "color pieces" I'd want to be using in the 5 / 5x5 / 5x5x5 crafting table UI that I described previously. If that number of available combinations gets reduced to accommodate color blindness issues, I'd really have no objection. Even crunching it down to a mere "5 colors" for Materials would be fine with me. It just matters how many combinations are "needed" by the Crafting System (not just to start with, but for all time!) and what makes for a good distribution that is easy to recognize and manipulate.
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[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
CoX had over 100 different specifically named invention salvage items in three different tiers of rarity and two different "origins" (i.e. thechy and magicky) and that number doesn't even count the Base Salvage system that had existed and got scrapped after a while (items from that system had different names, which brings the count up even more though). I would much prefer something on the order of 25-75 different salvageable crafting materials instead of just 5-10, but maybe that's just me.
Also, you might be able to change the orientation of the items in the slots, like by rotating them. So in the 3-slot, 1-D model, the object might have a direction that it "points in" and it can either point left or right (or maybe up/down, or maybe north, south, east, and west, I don't know). In the 2-D you maybe get more possible orientations (so like now you add in NE, NW, SE and SW, for a total of 8 directions). In the 3-D grid you then have a whole additional rotational axis to play with, giving you like 26 different directions that a thing can point in (the object in the center of the 3-D cube has literally 26 other boxes that it can "point directly at"). The idea being that objects might have to be pointing at each other to work right, and some might have different amounts of symmetry in 1D, 2D and 3D, etc. Like a Carbon Rod is a linear object, so it might only matter which direction the long axis is oriented in, and there is no "front" or "back" end, because it's symmetric. On the other hand a cone-shaped object has a wide end and a pointy end, etc. A sphere would be totally the same no matter what orientation you rotated it around to, A brick-shaped shaped rectangular prism might have many different interesting orientations, etc.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Radiac, what you're getting at is a question of "where does the complexity come into things?" in order to account for a wide variety of results.
Invention Salvage had 6 items on 3 tiers in 2 origins. That's 36 types of Invention Salvage.
On the surface of things, having only 5 types of "salvage" (I'm just using the placeholder notion of "colored rocks" for clarity) might seem unnecessarily limiting and bland ... until you realize that the "complexity" of the system has been offloaded into the Structural Arrangement of those "colored rocks" rather than into the diversity of their types.
With 5 "colored rocks" you can have 6 possible combinations put into any one "slot" in the crafting table (including "none"). That then gives you 6x6x6x6x6=46,656 available combinations in just the one dimensional "line" arrangement of 5 slots.
Trust me ... with the broad brushstrokes of the system I outlined, you don't NEED to have a huge pile of different types of "colored rocks" (or permission slips, if you prefer to think of it that way) in order to get a really wide variety of possible combinations. Indeed, it would be advantageous to limit the variety of the "colored rocks" for simplicity (as in KISS equals Keep It Simple Stupid) and let the STRUCTURE of the Crafting System bear the load of the complexity to generate a wide variety of outcomes. Then realize that just like with the Costume System, only a tiny fraction of the available combinations are probably ever going to get used (or in the case of costumes, Look Good™) and now you've got the "freedom" as a designer to make use of the best [i]subsets of possibilities[/i] to use for your Crafting System, rather than "needing" to make use of everything because you've got available space issues for being able to contain everything.
Heck, we could probably even go down to 4 types of "colored rocks" and use a 4 / 4x4 / 4x4x4 set of tables instead of relying on Base 5 for it all. That would yield 5x5x5x5=625 possible combinations for the Apprentice Table of arranging things in a straight line ... 3125 combinations for the Journeyman Table of arranging things on a plane ... and 15,625 combinations for Master Table. Now it's always possible I could be wrong, but ... I'm thinking that might be an adequate number of potential combinations for the purposes of City of Titans to use in its Crafting System. That's a total of 22,375 combinations available across all three Crafting Tables. Using even as little as 10% of those combinations would still yield over 2000 available arrangements of "colored rocks" to craft stuff with (and the rest being "dud" results that give you Vendor Bait as a Consolation Prize for "doing it wrong"™).
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[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
And limiting number of types of "colored rocks" makes it a bit easier to manage them in your inventory, as well. 100 different types of salvage meant if you needed one of everything it would take up 100 spaces in your inventory, no matter how deep each slot was. And regardless of whether you need them or not, if they drop and you pick them up, then if you need the space for something else you have the choice of going back to the vendors (or your long-term storage, if you have more room there) or discarding it. Even cutting it down to ten different types makes it much easier for the devs to tweak the stack depth to adjust how often you need to make that decision.
Foradain, Mage of Phoenix Rising.
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I fully appreciate the need to make the system deep enough to be interesting but easy enough to not be daunting. I also see the merits of the system proposed, I think, in terms of complexity and crafting options, etc. I just personally liked the fact that CoX had so many different salvage items to make stuff out of, and that it wasn't as simple as "all powers are powered by energy crystals, and there are 4 types (colors) of them to know about and collect".
I would prefer that my character's backstory not be tied to the game world's one-size-fits-all explanation of where all power enhancements come from (again, like Energy X in Freedom Force). In CoX every IO Enhancement needed the recipe and then like a math proof, a carbon rod, a circuit board and a positronic matrix to make, or whatever. If you were science or tech origin this felt very on theme with what your toon's story was. Likewise the magicky salvage sounded a lot like what your magic origin character would use to make Enhancements for powers (Black Blood of the Earth, Prophecy, alchemical gold, etc). The one flaw was that all toons used the same items to make the same recipes, so you could be a Technology character and need a lot of magical sounding salvage to make stuff you wanted, which was non-ideal in the immersion sense. I'd like to find a way around THAT, if possible, but I personally would prefer not to resort to an arbitrary generic color coded system of rocks or gems or whatever. Again, that;s just MY preference though.
I also see the merit that the CoX system had vis a vis recipes. The recipe that you had to have in order to make a Posi Blast Damage/Acc IO was the rate-limiting reagent in the process and as such that system gave CoX the ability to control the supply of that particular item in ways that would not seriously affect the supply of anything else. I don't know if CoX ever monkeyed with such things but they at least COULD have, in theory, and that's a nice thing to be able to do.
I don't have answers to how best to do it, I only have my own experiences and the opinions and thoughts that I get from them about what I like. Maybe CoT will have a system unlike anything I've even imagined so far and maybe it will be awesome. I don't know. I hope we all enjoy finding out as soon as possible.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Use the color system but have each one get an irrelevant name based on a RNG.
Or just have lots of different salvage, but all of them fall into one of 'X' different categories. That still leaves us with lots of 'stuff' in our inventories, however.
Be Well!
Fireheart
Personally, I think that the concept of inventory would need some fundamental work to begin with. I've been playing ESo, and there are several things I like about that crafting system, but the game's inventory system of "each item type takes one slot, up to some large number of that item" is ridiculous. Common, popular, but ridiculous.
Inventory size should be at most a means of forcing people to take breaks to dump things in the bank. They get onerous and annoying when the bank itself is too capacity limited to store most, if not all, crafting components available. Yes, people will hoard, but so what? That's how real people feed their crafting urges, too. Go visit anyone who likes to make things and look at the huge mass of junk they keep on hand. They don't sell it on ebay because they hit some arbitrary cap, especially if the items were hard to get or you have no guarantee you can get them later if you need them. And being out of whatever you need to make stuff work just plain sucks.
Getting back on topic with Radiac's initial idea: I think it's okay, but it's really a starting point. You need sidegrades and downgrades, too, and IMHO it would be really interesting to see these actions implemented as market transactions as opposed to crafting "recipes." Basically, if you need some kind of item, you can trade it for some other item(s) you have on an exchange. Further, these exchanges may or may not involve IGC costs, and the exchanges themselves would simply maintain fungible pools of each component, and not use an auction house "match buyers and sellers" model. The idea being that there are entities, maybe some big entities, out there who actually use this stuff, and they're in the market as well, creating a certain amount of resource sink on their own. And they have stuff they've overstocked and would like to get rid of, too. (I forget which dev was thinking of throwing NPC actors into the markets, but this is ripe for it.) This gives the devs a set of levers that they can use to influence item availability somewhat without having to directly manipulate prices, market sales, or character inventories.
As for applicability, I think everyone needs to remember that the most successful crafting system in CoH, the part which really made it stand out from other games, was the ability to craft POWERS. Seriously, all enhancements were were loot that you could exchange, combine, and otherwise mess with to customize the operation of your powers. Each enhancement did certain things, and you could spend as much or little time as you wanted working out the best customization for your powers. CoT's system looks like it's aiming to take that to the next level. If anything else is crafted in CoT, it should follow this model, not the "combine N random items and a recipe to make a loot item" which Segev has so roundly mocked as just being a less-random lockbox model.
Crafting should be optional and fun. If one does not want to craft, it should be easy and fun to use what others have crafted, and it should remain mostly fun if you just outfit your character with drops and store-bought stuff instead. It should also be fun to sell stuff you found to those who care, and fun for those who care to craft to sell their wares to others without requiring them to create a crafting mule.
[i]Has anyone seen my mind? It was right here...[/i]
Dare I say, "Lin nails it, again"?
Be Well!
Fireheart
I hope your idea of sidegrade and downgrade along with the upgrade already offered is not a required step (as in the only way to get these materials is by reworking other materials). If it is I am not a fan. With the hints that crafting will be done in specific locations and not on the fly (variety of crafting tables) I can't agree with what amounts to a step which artificially extends the crafting process by travelling to multiple locations.
As your description is a bit vague for me could you clarify if you mean SO, IO or Set bonuses.
Again...I don't get what you are saying here. What model should CoT follow that is different than combining materials?
I would love to hear your ideas of how to do this.
It shouldn't be! CoH had it in its incarnate salvage system. IIRC, if you didn't have the right Rare salvage, you could downgrade any of your Very Rare salvage at 1:1 with no other cost, or sidegrade from some other kind of Rare salvage plus an Uncommon salvage, or similar. In Star Trek Online, you can "Reassign" several lower-tier duty officers to get a higher-tier one (5 in, 1 out) or reassign a higher-tier one to get lower-tier ones (1 in, 3 out).
Conversions should be available at any location, or at some equally easily accessible location, like your local Hero Shack. We're here to play a game, not work a second job.
It's vague because it covers all of those. Even back in CoH Issue 2, when I started, and all we had were TO/DO/SO, and HOs were new. Players don't normally think of powers as being crafted because they're not items. They're not loot. You don't put powers on the auction house or in your inventory.
But they were still crafted. You had to pick the power in the first place, then decide later how many slots to put in it, then decide what to slot into it. Each enhancement had its own effect on that power, and some were better than others depending on what you wanted the power to do.
Unfortunately, due to lack of balance, Damage enhancements were somewhat overpowered (Redlynne and many others had plenty of rants about that: "Damage is King") compared to others like endurance reduction, so players like me that would slot a range enhancement into Sniper Rifle so I can shoot things past draw distance were rare, and because of this there was a widespread feeling that there was only one non-gimped way to slot most things, but in spite of it all you had a huge amount of flexibility and control, and weren't dependent on the RNG like so many other games' crafting/enchantment systems.
IMHO, power crafting was what made CoX different from the other Holy Trinity games out there. I've seen other games with class/skill trees and they were really just making people ride on rails. Heck, skills in Tera were simply a money sink: you went to the trainer and bought everything you could, limited only by class and level. So every level 60 archer was skilled out like every other level 60 archer, your gear was the only customization you had, and you had to grind to get the very rare drops that only had a 3% chance of upgrading a slot in the weapon, and it was up to the RNG what landed in that slot. So incredibly not fun.
Later on, when IOs came along with set bonuses, this added another dimension to the whole thing because now the crafting of a given power was no longer almost completely independent of the other powers. Before, the only guaranteed effect that crafting a given power had on other powers was that it consumed (or didn't consume) slots that could be used elsewhere. Now you could slot a certain set into a power which, directly, wasn't much different from other sets you could put in the power, and indeed was sometimes less effective than slotting common IOs into that power, but would have additional effects that boosted other powers, or your character in general.
My biggest annoyance with IOs was that they were usually set up as "better" (named character) or "average" sets for each set class, so even if the non-named-character sets had interesting effects that went different directions from the "leet" set, they were a bit weaker than they needed to be. It would have been more fun to see the various sets be better balanced and yet going in different directions.
I wasn't talking about combining materials. I was talking about the one-use recipes.
I'd love to write them up, but my ideas need to become a bit more coherent first. This rant of mine is half-baked enough already.
[i]Has anyone seen my mind? It was right here...[/i]
Oh, and there were some things I liked about [url=http://cityoftitans.com/forum/barmy-limitations-crafting]Redlynne's earlier ideas[/url]... but given the visceral condemnation that got, maybe I should just keep that to myself.
One other thing, regarding component markets: Red and I have been playing an (allegedly) kid's game called Pirate101. In it, the market is much simpler than an AH, and goes in the direction I'm thinking for a component market. You don't post goods for sale or offers to buy. Instead, the market itself keeps inventory, and prices depend on the level of said inventory. If what you're buying or selling is only available in quantity 10 or so, it'll fetch a high price (hundreds of gold), and if there are thousands of them on hand you'll only get a couple gold and pay tens of gold. (Yes, the price you buy at is a lot higher than the price you sell at, so it acts as an IGC sink. But vendoring items often pays less unless the market has thousands of the item.) If the market has quantity 0, you can't buy the item, so this isn't a way to whale yourself to leet gear.
A CoT component market could work similarly, even if it only works this way for common items that would (in other game implementations) be available from vendors. This way, even if something is common, you can unload it at the market for better than trash prices if it's in demand across the player base. And we can keep the auction house system for rarer items if folks want wildly fluctuating prices and unstable supply for these. (Though at least please give us the option of placing orders for items that aren't available. This will help set a market price for those items, far better than bid sniping ever will.)
[i]Has anyone seen my mind? It was right here...[/i]
Lin has a habit of doing that ... ^_~
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[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
I was going to bring up CoH's Incarnate Crafting -Versus- CoH's IO Crafting and ask which was preferable?
Or, ask.. would you pick and choose parts you liked from each and merge them? ;)
Just a reminder... the Incarnate crafting as it was.. might be tooooo involved for casual players. I know i was pulling my hair out trying to grasp it when it was 1st introduced. >:(
When i'm new to a game, as a n00b, I expect no more that 2 to 3 pieces to craft what i want. Anything more than that, I might rethink my involvement in the crafting system. And if the crafting system is deemed as really Necessary*, I might re-think my involvement in the game as well. :[
Side note: If only the Range enhancement reached a bit further, then I would have slotted it in my squishes. But since it didn't reach adequately, I never used Ranged enhancements! I wondered allot if Teleport really benefited enough from Ranged SO's. I think recall Friend with 2 SO's, still didn't reach from one side of Independence Port to the other lengthwise. >:(
I'm glad you see it this way. When you make the upgrading or sidegrading of a material part of the crafting process it frustrates the hell out of me. The idea of refining a material should be left to games that rely on crafting as a mechanic...not one that uses it as an optional activity.
As long as upgrading or sidegrading is not required this is fine....its in effect buying something on the market with a different currency.
That's prolly because crafting is not exactly the right description of what you were doing with powers in CoH. You were customizing it....the use of enhancements (any enhancement) was effectively the same as putting a skill point into that power. Crafting is close enough for the purposes of this discussion though.
This was why I asked you to clarify the earlier statement. As I agree, IO's and sets were the start of power creep in CoH. I wanted to be sure this aspect was not the one you were touting as the 'most successful crafting' before I commented on that.
A recipe is a material....or rather the recipes in CoH were a part of the material components even if they were not named as such.
I wouldn't call it half-baked...the part I quoted might be a bit obvious (make it fun). I was hoping you actually had something to discuss that was a bit more concrete than the talking points you provided.
I would hardly call the lack of agreement that suggestion found 'visceral condemnation'. There were things that I too found interesting in that suggestion but was not in agreement it was going to do the things it was suggested doing.
From the way you described it...this sounds like combining the market and vendors.
While I personally like the idea that players do not directly set prices on what they sell (and it does reflect a real world economy better)...I think this will be poorly received by those who want to play the market.
ACTUALLY!
This only worked with the original Freedom Force. FF vs The 3rd Reich introduced heroes (and villains) from before the Energy X debacle who gained their powers in other ways, some creating their own (Black Jack) and some knowing a tech guy (Sky King).
..And I'm pretty sure Eve from the first one already had hers.. I might be heavily wrong on that.
[B]Revenge is motivation enough. At least it's honest...[/B]
Roleplayer; Esteemed Villain
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That is why I generally prefer the games where you can start of crafting just a few items, and then the longer you do it, the more you understand.
That is why (depends on game) they generally introduce concepts over time. ie Crafting a basic item at the start, then (if the game allows it) modifications to the craft after X number of levels. That doesn't mean that X concept *cannot* be done at all, just that you might not be *told* about it until later on.
Side note: Was it ever mentioned in City of Heroes about Enhancement combination? Or was that just something that only cropped up if you delved deep in the to help section of the game?
Similar to the rule of five for IO bonuses... it is stuff like this that *sometimes* you wish was made a little bit clearer....
It occurs to me that this inefficiency or cost represents a type of IGC and/or resource sink that most players are reasonably OK with. It seems reasonable for there to be a power cost to transform those bars, and that can be reflected in IGC. It also stands to reason that some amount of material is lost in the process.
It can be frustrating when "certain players"* create an artificial scarcity of a particular item and then jack up the price. Options** such as upgrading, downgrading, and sidegrading (thanks Lin) make it much more difficult for "certain players" to create such artificial scarcity.
*) "certain players" = "market manipulators" = jerks
**) I don't know that we would want to get too complex, but there could also be other options with materials. For instance there could be mixtures. For example 1 part peanut + 1 part butter + 1 part chocolate makes one super awesome snack. The super awesome snacks are, of course, needed for adrenaline upgrades. Perhaps all of the various "options" could be referred to as transmutations. Either way it seems to me that most if not all mats should have some sort of transmutation path in order to limit market manipulation.
In general, I think all upgrades, downgrades and sidegrades should probably cost some amount of IGC, and I also think that no "upgrade then immediately re-downgrade" type of combo should ever yield back the same amounts of items as you started with. I think players should always be buying "retail" and selling "wholesale" and any exchange of currencies or bartered items should have an exchange rates that favors the "house" in any mechanics of any "you dealing with the game AI" type of scenario. Player-to-player trading is a different story.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Agreed that all downgrades, sidegrades and upgrades ought to be "inherently inefficient" such that those actions consume more than they produce. The key factor involved however is the notion that if supplies of one commodity are constrained (for whatever reason, from insufficient farming to market manipulation by speculators) that there are alternative means of supply which will allow the in-game economy for such supplies to "self correct" over time into a dynamic equilibrium.
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[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
Well, it would likely work more like a barter system than currency, because only a subset of available crafting items could be traded in for a certain crafting item. Chickens for checkups.
Yes, and I'm trying to draw attention to the fact that the difference is more of semantics than practicality. Slotting something into a power could be done any time, but adding powers and adding slots to powers could only be done at a [s]crafting table[/s] trainer. Removal didn't happen unless you did a full respec.
Looking at power customization as a type of crafting can highlight interesting paths that would otherwise be missed. For example, what if you could break enhancements down, recovering some of their components, and use them to build other enhancements? Or, in a more limited form, what if you could pull an enhancement out of a slot, but you would only get one of the salvage components that went into it, instead of losing the enhancement entirely? This assumes crafted enhancements.
Further along these lines, what if there were predictable relationships between the components and the crafted enhancement? In ESO, you create enchantments (basically magic aftermarket enhancements for gear) with three components: one determines the level range, one determines the rarity and power level, and the last determines the effect.
It's hard to be concrete when the game in question isn't.
Pirate101 still has vendors that sold a fixed list of items at fixed prices, and buys things back at fixed prices. I'd love to see the two integrated so you didn't have to run all over town to get the best deal on something, but that's a bit off the thread topic.
Bear in mind that those who want to "play" the market are sometimes the ones that destroy the market and piss everyone off. It's not always in the game's best interest to give them their every wish.
it was somewhere early in the tutorial. But after the first character nobody bothered doing it and sold the TO's instead, because you'd hit level 5 real quick anyway and buy new ones. If you didn't just do without enhancements at all in those first few levels because the 8% boost of a TO was almost pointless.
The rule of five wasn't directly mentioned in game via alert window or NPC talk, IIRC. It might have been mentioned in one of the walls of text clickies that you hit in the invention tutorial. It was mentioned on the forums and in the patch notes somewhere, kinda sorta, and was really easy to miss.
Later, I think it was indicated somewhere in the statistics screens, after they added them.
[i]Has anyone seen my mind? It was right here...[/i]
Or, just as I said....effectively using different currency.
I've read this a few times and I am confused how looking at power customization(slotting) highlights the paths to breaking an enhancement down. Please explain further.
I am not a fan of market manipulators...but its for purely personal reasons....but just saying it's not always in the best interest without explaining why is hardly an argument as I could easily just say that sometimes it is in the best interest.
I wasn't asking you to be concrete...I was asking for something more concrete than just 'make it fun'. Which you have with your pirate101 example.
It was mentioned in the stats screen, if you dug through it, but even then it wasn't really all that clear (it was something like Small Bonus, Medium Bonus, Large Bonus etc etc all sorted by "enhanced" category (ie accuracy, range etc etc). So it wasn't really ideal. And you could never view the two needed screens together (the enhancement window *took over* the main view, which hid the stats window)