Crafting: A Blueprint for the Future
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=csystems&message.id=18597
2004/04/15
Note: All the hairy details are in this initial message, but I've now added a message that summarizes these ideas later in this thread (about 9 messages down).
I've been a crafter since SWG was released. In addition to mastering the Artisan and Merchant professions, I've picked up and used Novice-or-better skills from all the advanced crafting professions branching from the Engineering discipline. I've enjoyed crafting, but for a while now something has been bothering me about crafting in SWG. I think I've been able to put my finger on what it is: there's no surprise.
I. THE ELEMENT OF SURPRISE
The design of the crafting system in SWG is highly result-oriented, rather than being process-oriented. In other words, the point is what you get at the end of crafting, rather than the act of crafting itself. That's good for making sure that other players have the things they need, but it can leave crafters feeling a bit like mere cogs in a product distribution machine.
Other than being a bit boring, there's nothing really wrong with crafting's result-oriented design. There are actually a number of good ideas well implemented. The idea of schematics is good. The concept of needing different kinds of resources and subcomponents in schematics is good. The concept of resources having different attributes that condition the effectiveness of the final product is good. And the concept of experimentation is good.
But something is missing. The design focus on results over process has left the act of crafting an exercise in grinding, rather than allowing crafting to be something that's fun in its own right because the process itself is interesting. If I may suggest the source of this problem: the assembly and experimentation steps are too simple to allow for surprise.
What makes engineering (more specifically, "invention") fun in the real world is that you don't always know exactly what you're going to get. The behavior of complex objects isn't normally a pass/fail, perfect/junk kind of thing (as in SWG) -- complex real-world objects often live in a gray area of functionality. When you put many odd-shaped things together in different ways, when you try new kinds of parts as subcomponents, it's hard to know precisely how the final object will look or act. Real-world objects demonstrate unpredictable and even surprising behaviors precisely because they are complex. This element of surprise is what makes real-world "crafting" an interesting and fun process.
But there's no chance of anything interesting happening when assembling or experimenting on an item in SWG because you always know exactly what you're going to get. With a few exceptions (certain armor and weapon schematics can take an optional component), you always assemble the same components in the same amounts, and they always go together in exactly the same way. As for experimentation, the only question is whether you'll have to craft your prototype for practice XP because one of your experiments yielded a result less than "great success." This player focus on only accepting "perfect" products is the natural result of a crafting design that's focused on results for other players instead of being a fun process for the crafters themselves.
But what if not getting exactly what you wanted didn't always mean that the result was unusable? What if not all surprises were bad (as they are now with critical fails)? In short, what if you could have "interesting failures?"
II. PROPOSED CHANGES
There are four changes I'd like to see made to crafting in order to allow for surprise, and thus for a crafting experience that's a lot more fun:
Let's look at each of these suggestions in more detail to see how it would help contribute to a more interesting and satisfying crafting experience.
III. DISCUSSION OF CHANGES
1. PERFORMANCE/APPEARANCE CHARACTERISTICS
If every instance of a particular crafted object looks and acts the same way, surprise is impossible. This isn't always a bad thing -- you wouldn't want significant variation in products manufactured by a factory, for example.
But constructed objects need to have a wide variety of appearance and performance characteristics if variation in materials and processes are to allow for surprising results. If an object always looks the same and always has the same operational characteristics, then what's the point of making such an object except to have one? Where's the joy in the process of creating the item?
The three most common appearance characteristics are color, shape, and size. Clothing is allowed color customization options (and Tailors are given more color customization options than Artisans) because it's understood that making clothing (which doesn't allow experimentation) would be incredibly boring otherwise. Another example of appearance customization is a pistol whose scope and stock have been selected from a list of optional types, and which displays those selected scope and stock types when the crafted pistol is examined. And of course we now have basic (frame and trim) customization kits for droids and vehicles.
These options should be extended to many more items. Objects should be capable of having different colors; they should be craftable in a range of sizes; their shapes should be allowed to vary in well-defined ways.
For example, consider a simple object: a staff. Why must all staves be the same length? And why brown? Sure, trees on Earth have brown wood... but we're not on Earth! Similarly, why should even more complex objects all look the same? Must the engines always be in the same place on a landspeeder? Why are there only about ten types of house plans in the entire galaxy?
As for performance characteristics, these include the obvious ones -- min and max damage, range-based to-hit modifiers, and attack speed for weapons, for example, as well as other purely numeric attributes -- but objects have other features that should be variable.
Consider ranged weapons: when you fire them, they have a visual effect (such as a blaster bolt) and they make a sound. What if these effects could vary? Maybe blaster bolts can come in different colors (like lightsabers). Maybe the sound effect can be pitched differently, or perhaps it has a different duration. You wouldn't want to allow too much variety in these attributes since they're considered defining features for those objects. But some reasonable variation should be possible.
Other performance characteristics that should vary between objects include: bonuses or weaknesses versus certain mobs or classes of mobs; special behaviors in certain environments (desert, forest, water, nighttime); alternate-fire modes (for some weapons); vehicle top speeds, turn rates, and acceleration rates; droid intelligence and loyalty; and so on.
2. RESOURCE ATTRIBUTES
Once you've established that objects can have many different kinds of varying features, you need a way to relate those features to the materials used to construct objects.
The good news is that we're already partway to achieving this because the resource system already allows a great deal of variation. For example, there are several types of Mineral (Metal, Ore, Radioactives); two types of Metal (Ferrous and Non-Ferrous); two types of Non-Ferrous Metal (Aluminum and Copper); several types of Copper (Mythra, Platinite, etc.); and several places (Lok, Naboo, etc.) where you can get that kind of Copper. All these attributes could contribute to the qualities of the final product creating using them.
Let's use the staff again as our example. It's made out of wood, but that wood can be of three types, and can come from any planet. That's thirty different types of wood right there! Why shouldn't the type of wood used contribute to the performance of the staff, and to its appearance? Let's assume that the basic numeric attributes don't vary (since otherwise we'd have people complaining "I can't make staffs!" because the "best" wood currently has lousy stats).
Maybe wood from Lok causes staves to be tinted green. Maybe deciduous wood does extra kinetic damage because it's harder than evergreen or coniferous wood, but this also makes staves made from deciduous wood decay much faster than those made from evergreen or coniferous wood. Maybe Endorian Evergreen Wood has minerals in it that make it particularly effective against any kind of spider. Maybe objects crafted from coniferous wood from Yavin IV glow in the dark.
See how this works? Crafting currently doesn't make nearly enough use of resource attributes in determining properties of the final product... but it could.
3. SUBCOMPONENT CONFIGURATION
For more complex objects which include subcomponents, appearance and performance characteristics should be related to how the crafter chooses to connect these component parts to each other.
In the current system you make a bunch of similar subcomponents, then another set of other similar subcomponents, then a few more subcomponents, then you take them all and, with some raw resources, lay them out flat on a table, hit the "assemble" button, and hey presto!, you've built an item. (Assuming you don't get a critical fail on assembly.) While this does at least recognize that complex items tend to be built from subcomponents, it doesn't recognize the importance of allowing crafters to vary the organization of those subcomponents.
As a variation on the above scenario, suppose instead that you craft four similar subcomponents. When you lay them out to construct the larger item that is composed of these pieces, you get to choose how you want those pieces to be connected to each other. (I imagine the crafting tool GUI letting you click to draw lines between subcomponents to indicate configuration connections.) One configuration might improve the final item's durability at the cost of some of its power; another might give you the same type of item but one that's brittle but very effective; a third configuration might give you mediocre performance attributes but some kind of additional special power.
For very complex products that require many different subcomponents, you should have numerous options for how to interconnect the pieces -- so many, in fact, that it's effectively impossible to predict the exact final qualities of the finished assembled object.
There should still be some predictability in this process. Making two complex objects with the same configuration of subcomponents should yield two items with similar appearance and performance characteristics. But where the artisan has choices for how the subcomponents of a complex object can fit together, those choices should affect the features of the finished component.
4. CRITICAL SUCCESSES
As a final suggestion, if critical failures -- either in assembly or experimentation -- can ruin a crafted object, shouldn't critical successes also be possible?
Just as a critical failure is an "I don't know what I did wrong!" situation, a critical success would represent the rare "I don't know how I did it but WOW!" situation. To allow only horrible results is both unrealistic and not "fair" in a game context.
There are two obvious ways to reflect critical success situations. I propose that each of these two possibilities be implemented, one for the assembly phase, and one for experimentation.
(In the discussion that follows, please note that a critical success is not the same thing as an "amazing success" result any more than a critical failure is the same thing as a "moderate failure" result. "Critical success" should either be a new result type, or the "amazing success" result type should be enhanced in the ways described here.)
In the assembly phase, just as a critical failure results in the complete loss of all resources and subcomponents, a critical success should result in the crafting of the desired item without using up any resources or components. The risk of losing all materials (in a critical failure) should be balanced by the potential reward of getting to keep all your materials (in a critical success). (Note that this would not apply to Architect-only schematics since these are no longer subject to the threat of loss in a critical failure. Just as Architect objects aren't subject to the risk of loss, they should always be used up no matter what the result of assembly.)
The obvious result of a critical success in the experimentation phase should be object performance that is better than would normally be possible. The features improved should only be those on which experimentation points were spent, and performance should only be improved proportional to the number of experimentation points spent.
One potential problem with this enhancement would be that some individuals with excessive free time and plenty of patience might be inclined to try to make all their objects "perfect" with critical successes on all experimentation attempts. This is unlikely to be effective for several reasons.
First, the percentage rate of critical successes should be about 1% for everyone. (This would still favor Master crafters, since they have more experimentation points to spend than other crafters.) A 1% critical success rate would make these events sufficiently rare that someone who wants to craft only perfect items would only be able to create perhaps two or three such items per day. Given how good these items would be, how in demand they would be, and how much money high-end players have, a crafter would not be able to keep such items stocked (nor any other items if he spends all his time trying to craft perfect items!), not even if he could craft 24/7 with macros that somehow knew how to keep only perfect items.
Second, the maximum possible improvement would only be possible by either using up all your experimentation points in one burst and getting a critical success on that attempt, or by getting a critical success result for each and every experiment attempt. In the former case, a 1% success rate would mean harvesting resources and crafting subcomponents only to destroy all of them 99 times for every one "perfect" item created. The cost of doing this (particularly for very high-end items) would likely not be recoverable through the sale of the one perfect item. As for trying to use experimentation points separately, a 1% critical success rate and 10 or more experimentation points to spend makes getting 10 critical successes in a row not very likely.
Overall, implementing critical successes would be one more way to allow the rare and pleasant surprises that make crafting fun.
[2005/03/30: It's come to my attention that critical success results, while rare, are now possible. It's probably not implemented in the way I've described it above, but any progress here is appreciated!]
IV. CONCLUSION
By offering variability in crafted object features, by allowing crafters to have lots of choices in resource usage and subcomponent configurations, and by making those choices have different results in finished products, you take the focus off of repeatedly grinding out the same thing over and over again, and move the focus to letting crafters make creative decisions that help to differentiate their products from those of other crafters. That would be tons more fun for crafters, plus product differentiation would help them market the products they create, plus it would allow the people who buy these items to better define their characters by having distinctive possessions.
When crafters are able to express their creativity as an integral part of the crafting process, everybody wins.
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2004/04/20
As usual, I've been a little wordy in my initial presentation. So let me summarize what I'm after when I ask for crafting to focus more on process than on result.
1. Craftable objects ought to have more properties.
All objects ought to have variable color, size, and shape, and various types of objects should have additional properties relevant to their purpose. To list just a very few examples of additional properties:
Foods, droids, starships, and all other types of crafted objects should have similar extended properties.
2. Resource types and subcomponent configurations should determine the properties of crafted objects.
Food created with rice should be different somehow than food created with wheat; food created with Lokian wheat should be different somehow from food made with Nabooian wheat; food produced with domesticated wheat should differ from food produced with wild wheat, and so on. Igneous ores and sedimentary ores should result in objects with different final properties, as should using Copper versus Aluminum in a schematic that simply calls for a Non-Ferrous Metal. Maybe different materials just change the color of the final obejct, or its size, but the materials used to build an object need to be reflected somehow in that object.
In more complicated objects, the way that subcomponents are connected to each other should determine other types of properties that those complex crafted objects have. "Configuring" subcomponents could be as simple as clicking to draw a line between any of the subcomponents. Or it could be as intricate as offering a certain number of "bonds" (like molecular bonds) per object (perhaps derived from the complexity of the object) -- you could choose to link all subcomponents in a "ring" pattern, or join all subcomponents to a central subcomponent in a "star" pattern, or join just a few subcomponents using double bonds, and so on. Or perhaps you click on the name of a pattern and the schematic's subcomponents are connected automatically. In any case, the specific configuration chosen by the crafter should dictate what properties the final crafted object has.
As a final feature, let experimental modes also be determined by the types of resources and configuration of subcomponents. Maybe some resources let you experiment on durability while others don't, but those others instead let you experiment on damage capabilities. This would give the developers what they were looking for in the aborted Publish 7 crafting change (to prevent crafters from maxing out all an object's experimental properties), while still allowing players to decide what experimental features they want in an object by letting them choose what resources and subcomponent configurations they want to use in crafting that object.
3. The numeric quality level of resources and subcomponents should determine the highest level to which a crafted object can be experimented.
If the value of an object's Experimental Durability is determined by a resource's Shock Resistance value, then using a resource with the maximum SR value of 1000 should result in the maximum number of experimentation points available to spend on improving the final object's Durability.
(This is how crafting works now. It's good, and doesn't need to be changed. I mention it here only to make it clear that the types of resources used should determine the types of properties of the final object, while the quality of the resources used should determine the amount to which the final object has those properties.)
4. Critical fails should be balanced by critical successes.
A critical success on assembly should leave most or all resources in the schematic after construction, just as a critical failure destroys resources and subcomponents. (Architect schematics would be exempt from the effects of critical failures and critical successes.)
A critical success on experimentation should improve the property being experimented on to levels beyond the normal caps (which are determined by resource quality & subcomponent effectiveness values).
Critical success rates should be held to no more than 1%. Critical successes should be frequent enough to motivate crafting, but rare enough to discourage grinding.
[2005/03/30: A "critical success" feature like the one suggested here may now be part of crafting.]
I hope this clarifies what I'd like crafting to become. Again, my goal is to find ways to make it more fun by moving the focus away from just achieving some result (which promotes mindless grinding) and toward a more interesting process.
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2005/03/08
For various reasons I haven't had the time to jump into this discussion.
I have a little time now. Be afraid�.
The first thing that needs to be said is that I think we're confusing two different questions here.
Question #1 (which is what I started this thread to address) is "how do we make crafting more fun for crafters?" Question #2 (which was brought up later) is "how do we insure useful participation in the game economy for both novice and master crafters?" Both of these are good questions, but we need to bear in mind that they are two different questions.
In particular, the difference between these questions is that each one is based on a different assumption about what crafting is for. If you hold the assumption that crafting is about supplying players with necessary and desirable goods --in other words, if crafting is valuable mostly for its results -- then the way to judge the crafting system is to see how well it allows both novices and masters to participate usefully in the game economy.
If on the other hand your natural assumption is that crafting is about the creative experience, that it's mostly valuable to the degree to which crafters themselves enjoy crafting, then you're asking question #1, not question #2.
progman63's suggestion for graduated abilities to crafting and using items addresses question #1 more than it addresses question #2. But that's not a flaw in his suggestion as I don't believe it was intended to go into the economic aspects of crafting. The economic repercussions of restructuring crafting for crafters is a good question to ask as a follow-up, but it's not entirely fair to criticize his suggestion for not addressing something it wasn't intended to directly address.
CPark wrote: As I reread the thread I'm struck that these changes might create a nightmare for beginning crafters. If a new player stumbles onto a crafting profession how can they get started? How can we meld all this freedom into an approachable profession? And in terms of the relationship between crafting and the rest of the game, how does so fluid a crafting system create simple products reliably for beginners in other professions? Before an new player knows what to look for in a pistol how can he choose (or perhaps even find) one if there are no "standard" models?
progman63 wrote: The trick is to provide lower level players in any profession with products that are desirable to the market - preferably consumables so there's a steady supply of customers (and creds) - so that they can bankroll their grind while providing something useful.
With respect to progman63, I read CPark's question not as an economic one, but as a "new user experience" question. With freedom comes complexity -- when you can do almost anything, how do you decide what to do? Too much opportunity can be confusing for a new user.
I think there's a simple solution to this. In fact, SWG already uses it: the less advanced a crafter's skills, the simpler the products that can be crafted.
If you're a Novice Artisan, the items you can make should be quite simple. Their schematics should call for only a few easy-to-obtain resources and no subcomponents. As you gain skill levels, the schematics for craftable objects should become increasingly complex. At the Master level, schematics should require several rare resources and subcomponents that are themselves constructed from subcomponents.
Furthermore (to follow my original suggestions), experimentation should progress from the simple to the complex as a crafter earns new skill levels. Instead of experimentation points that (along with each experiment result) directly affect the quality of the final product's attributes, what if experimentation points determined how many connections the crafter could make between resources and subcomponents? Novice crafters would find crafting to be simple because they'd have few options for experimentation -- you pretty much just take whatever you were able to assemble. Expert and Master crafters, on the other hand, would have earned the experimentation points (and access to suitably complicated schematics) to have the many options for experimenting among the resources/subcomponents that would make crafting the surprising and creative experience it ought to be.
progman63 wrote: what if the 'results' weren't so much item oriented as skill oriented??? If you can use a pistol, or carbine, or rifle, couldn't you use any pistol or carbine or rifle only not as well? Handling the more advanced weapons would require more training, but you could still use them at a reduced capacity. And crafting the more advanced weapons would require more training, but you could still craft them at a reduced capacity. If you are certed to use pistols, you can use all pistols with the more complex pistols having a reduced effectiveness (yes that's the way it's supposed to work now). If you are certed to craft pistols, you can craft all pistols with the more complex pistols having reduced stats.
This is also an interesting idea. It's a novel approach to differentiating between what a novice crafter can create and what a Master can create, as well as how effectively crafted products can be used. (Note that this concept could be applied to more than just weapons -- what about medicines, survey devices, and musical instruments?)
Tinkergirl wrote: In your system proposed, Progman63, would you end up with possibly Novice Crafters making Advanced Weapons (badly) and Novice Fighters using those (poor) Advanced Weapons, badly? This sounds like the worst possible scenario and I'm wondering where the advantage to this system would be? Surely Fighters would advance as fast as ever (thusly able to use all weapons at perfect effectivness) and they would not stand for a shoddily made Advanced Weapon from a Novice Crafter. They would still search out the Master Crafter for the Advanced Weapon.
TInkergirl, I'm not sure this would necessarily be the case. There's a certain "coolness" factor in having the biggest, baddest-looking weapon that for some people might override the technical specs. There's also a question of price -- novice and low-level crafters know they can't charge the same price for their products as a Master can charge for the uberdevices she can craft. So an "advanced" weapon with less-than-perfect killing stats might still be desirable to the cost-conscious combatant.
(My gripe: Most combatants ought to be too poor to afford the high-level gear. That would do more than anything else to insure that low-level crafters have people to sell their inexpensive products to. See Why Should Fighters Be Rich? . Sigh.)
Tinkergirl wrote:
As unpopular as it may be (and it was discussed back in the mists of time) I believe that for certain aspects of crafting, creating and maintaining a market for less-than-Master items would either involve non-experimental consumables, or the 'forgetting' of older schematics as you learn new ones in a crafting tree.
The longer SWG survives, the more I like both of these old ideas. I also still wish that schematics were defined so that more items needed subcomponents (especially subcomponents that don't have quality ratings), and that these subcomponents could not be made in factories. This would give budding crafters a definite market niche!
Again, both of these questions -- how to make the process of crafting fun, and how to define the products of crafting so that novice crafters can survive economically -- are good, worthwhile questions. Maybe that second question deserves its own thread...?
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2005/03/09
Thanks for taking the time to comment, CPark. If an idea is good, it can withstand (and even be improved by) fair-minded criticism.
So let's see if that's the case here.
CPark wrote:
Flatfingers items 2 and 3 in the original post were: 2. The attributes of the resources used to craft an object should be reflected in the appearance and/or performance of the final product. 3. The configuration of subcomponents should be reflected in the appearance and/or performance of the final product.
I believe these capabilities are already in the system.
... if the game mechanism could support full fledged implementation of these ideas, and in some areas do implement them, why isn�t more being done?
I agree... up to a point.
In a few cases (but not all), attribute values for crafted subcomponents help determine the final attribute values for the final product. (Resource attribute values also matter, but the outcome of each assembly and experimentation step is the main determinant of object attribute quality.) This association of inputs with outputs is so useful that I'd like to see it expanded to many more objects. It seems like a natural feature for a crafting system.
However, it's not critical in and of itself. This is for two reasons I've mentioned before:
Again, though, while as I note above the association of inputs with outputs shouldn't be the most important thing in a crafting system, it's still important. That being the case, we might as well do it right, which means applying it to most objects instead of the few objects that currently take the attributes of their subcomponents into account.
(And remember, I'm talking about associating many more kinds of final attributes with input characteristics. That helps make crafting more interesting to do. More on this in the next section.)
Implementation issues: Looking at Flatfingers item 1 emphasizes why SWG may have decided there are better ways to use the people and time implementation would need.
Item 1 was � Complex objects should have multiple appearance and performance characteristics beyond simple numeric attributes.
The final products, being tied to game mechanics, need � o artwork � that flashy new gun needs all the modeling effort of an existing gun, and if the subcomponents have to fit together visibly, then each subcomponent has to be modeled and all the possible assemblies tested together o balance against existing game systems � the combination of all the weapon speed increases from the intermediate components can�t blow out the max for speed in the external system o New mechanisms � the pulses of the laser with the burst component have to be animated differently than the solid line of the piercing component. All these changes cost people and time. Add to that the resources necessary to implement the changes in intermediate item crafting and we have a lot of effort. So why doesn�t SWG do it? Why is the priority low?
Well, I would argue that it's been because servicing the combat-oriented players has historically been considered more worthy of developer time and money. That doesn't mean creating a truly interesting crafting system isn't something worth doing on its own merits; it just means that combat features have been given the higher priority.
But of course, just because that's how things have been doesn't imply that it's how they must continue to be.
I should add here that I find it interesting that you reversed the order of the suggestions as I originally made them. I had items 1, 2, and 3 ordered the way I did for a reason: each improved crafting feature builds upon the previous suggested feature. If you break up that order, well, of course the strength of the overall proposal seems weakened!
Each of the steps I suggested flows into the next. Step 1 is to modify objects so that they have lots of features -- not just numeric characteristics, but things you can see and hear and use. Crafters can't make such objects yet, but they can be made (perhaps as loot). Once you've allowed for complex objects by implementing step 1 (and seeing as best you can how they interoperate with the game's other systems such as combat), then it becomes appropriate and useful to move to step 2, which is to tie outputs to inputs, to strongly associate an object's features with the features of the items that went into its construction. That provides the fundamental structure for a "deep" crafting experience. And once you've got that, then you can in step 3 expand on the system by which you make these input/output associations. In this way the opportunity for interesting (i.e., surprising) experimentation finally becomes possible.
First step 1, then step 2, then step 3. Done in this order, you can achieve the goal of a truly satisfying crafting process without having to dedicate your entire programming staff to do everything all at once.
Only a small proportion of the current population is affected. If the Astromech Stats about professions are still true, while a third of people try out artisan and medic, only about 5% go into the �pure� advanced crafting professions (weaponsmith, architect) � and the �mixed� crafting professions (doctor, bio-engineer) account for about 4% of players. Even if there was no overlap in the advanced professions that means no more than 9% of players are impacted by the changes being proposed.
Having just referenced those Character Metrics stats yesterday, I have to say I think your interpretation of them is a little off.
(Before we get into this, we should note that these stats were posted October 20, 2003, and are almost certainly not representative of current profession statistics. Still, they're all we've got, so let's assume they're still valid.)
First of all, I don't think you can exclude the starter professions and wind up with an accurate picture of who's crafting and who's not. If a third of SWG's players are trying (or playing) Artisans and Medics, that's a pretty good-sized chunk of the player base. Add in a few more percentage points for those who just take the Engineering and Home Ec skill lines to get to Weaponsmith, Armorsmith, Architect, Tailor, and Chef, and you're looking at even more players. Doctors and Bio-Engineers add even more to the numbers. And if you consider Merchants to be crafters (not unreasonable considering their close relationship to crafting and the extension of their profession from the Artisan's Business skill line), you're probably looking at half the player base directly affected (to a greater or lesser degree, of course) by how crafting works.
That's not trivial at all.
The benefits to draw and retention of players are not worth the effort. If the changes did make crafting more desirable and bring more crafters into the game, does the game need more crafters? What would the impact of more crafters be? o more goods o lower prices for goods o higher prices for resources (individual resources are seen as more valuable because their connection to the end product is more visible) o more desirable products -- look at the call for furniture coloring or the pilots trying to match blaster fire patterns with weapons to get the neat effects when the weapons fire. o increased draw and retention of players that care about the �wow� factor of the environment -- These changes must be, by the nature of balance limits on things like damage done from weapons, cosmetic.
First, I'm not convinced (yet) that better crafting = many more crafters.
More? Well, I hope so, especially if that means more people giving SOE their money. That translates into better survival value for SWG, which benefits all of us who are still playing.
But many more? Doubtful. I look at players as people -- they have things they like doing, and things they don't like doing. When they play a game, they extend these likes and dislikes to game features. People who like being active and experiencing things won't care whether SWG has a great crafting system or a lousy one because they'll be too busy doing things that they enjoy more (namely, combat). Meanwhile, those folks whose interests naturally tend to the creative will gravitate immediately to crafting whether it's good or bad. Its goodness or badness will determine whether they stay, but it's not a significant factor in attracting new players. (I would admit that word of mouth is a significant factor in attracting combat-oriented players to a game, but how many Web sites or magazines are there that exist to highlight the non-lethal features of games?)
Having said this, let's say you're right -- suppose the developers took all my wonderful suggestions and made crafting in SWG more fun than being tickled with $10,000 bills you got to keep afterwards. And let's further suppose that this attracted a lot of new players. What then?
Would more goods be created? Probably, which in addition to lower prices would mean more choices for consumers. I doubt most of SWG's other players would consider either of these to be Bad Things! As for crafters, they won't care unless they're Merchants, since with a crafting system that's loads of fun in its own right, you don't have to sell what you make in order to have fun. And as for Merchants... well, they're clever devils; they can figure out some way to profit from anything.
Would resource prices go up due to competition between crafters? Possibly, but not inevitably, since starting crafters usually also pick up the Survey line and can mine their own resources at no cost to anyone else. Furthermore, even if competition did increase resource prices somewhat, it's unlikely that these costs would rise to a level that would affect the pricing of crafted objects, which is fairly inelastic -- prices of crafted objects are primarily based not on resource cost but on perceived desirability. (This is somewhat less true for the most advanced items like RIS armor that require rare components, but desirability still determines pricing.) As a conversation over in the Business and Economy forum noted, there's a pretty good cushion between most resource costs and prices for items crafted using those resources. That means resource costs could go up a reasonable amount and not meaningfully affect object costs. So a lot of new crafters would probably not affect object pricing due to contention for resources.
As for the enhanced desirability of products and an increased "wow" factor due to more crafters using an improved crafting system... these don't seem like things that would damage SWG in any way.
Finally, it's just a theory of mine but I believe that crafters tend to stay with an online game longer than combat-oriented players. So if improving the crafting system meant a larger proportion of crafters in the SWG player base, that suggests to me that SWG has subscribers who'll stick around longer and keep putting money in SOE's pocket. That would seem to mean better survival odds for SWG, wouldn't it?
All told, then, I don't come to the conclusion that improving the crafting system to make it a more enjoyable process would not be worth the effort -- just the opposite, in fact.
The only question I have is how to make the business case (more than has already been made) that the changes I suggest are not just worth doing, but that they're more worth doing than yet more features for the combat-oriented players after nearly two years of rapt attention to their demands. As I've said before, I've got nothing against combat-oriented players and I don't mind them getting cool new combat features... but I do mind going for two years without equally cool major features for non-combat players.
I suspect SWG has decided those aren�t pressing enough reasons to put out the effort this game. For future games � could they be right? What kind of game could support this different balance?
That's a great question. I don't mean to be glib, but I think a reasonable answer is: a better SWG.
For one thing, focusing even temporarily on improving the game for crafters would create a "deeper" game, with more complex objects and more interesting actions and interactions between players. The combat-oriented player might not care directly about increased deepness, but it would affect the game world in which he plays. I think most (perhaps not all, but most) of those effects would be positive -- deep = less boring, and pretty much everyone agrees that the worst sin any game can commit is to be boring.
For another thing, a serious refocusing on crafters (even if only temporary) would possibly attract more crafters. Given the way that players report likes and dislikes to developers (or maybe I should say, given how developers hear what they want to hear about what players like and dislike based on what they happen to have developed for those players), a significant positive response from a lot of crafters enjoying an improved crafting game could lead SWG's developers to conclude that new crafting features are a relatively cheap way to get good PR, and from that conclusion decide to maintain an interest in keeping crafters happy along with combat-oriented players. I don't see how that would diminish SWG for anyone.
I believe in my overall goal -- that crafting in SWG, while good, could be better if reworked to focus more on the process of crafting itself than on the results of crafting. But I'm not married to any of the specific suggestions I made at the top of this thread to try to achieve that goal. Still, I felt that given such a reasonable criticism of them, they deserved one good rebuttal. I hope this was it!
Thanks again for the thought-provoking comments, CPark.
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2005/03/30
progman63 wrote:
I still question the ability to completely remove the grind, while still
allowing sufficient time for advancement - i.e. delay - to slow the rush from novice
to master. I know that many people would disagree with purposeful delays in
advancement, but there obviously needs to be some sort of achievment to
render a satisfying reward in mastery.
My personal opinion is that complexity, and mastery of that complexity, if
properly designed and implemented, could serve as both an appropriate delay and
a satisfying achievment.
...
But the system is designed so that SP are really the only
metric that determines advancement. Tools, techniques, interfaces, etc are the
exact same whether novice or master. The only difference is the type of result
(items produced) and the size of certain pools to use during the process (and
risk of failure).
Being that exploreres like to investigate, study, and discover new processes
and patterns, wouldn't gradually changing these processes and patterns during
advancement be more fulfilling?
This is actually a subject that applies to a lot more than just crafting.
What this system of "experience points" really is is a holdover from Dungeons & Dragons. Thirty years ago it was a brilliant innovation. By assigning some number of points for successful actions, and requiring the accumulation of a certain number of points to gain access to more powerful abilities, you could regulate the progress of a character's access through the game's varied content. Not only was this system easy to implement, it proved to be highly effective at providing regular rewards to players to induce them to keep playing.
And those two advantages have insured that it's the advancement management system that has been implemented in virtually every role-playing game system ever since. When computers came along, it was a no-brainer to let the computer keep track of XP awarded for in-game actions and award new levels for accruing enough XP.
Because an XP system is easy to program and easy to tweak to provide regular rewards, that's what online game designers keep giving us. Only now the system has been so boiled down to a quick-and-easy mechanic that playing these games becomes a matter of chasing numbers, of only doing what gives known amounts of XP -- in short, of grinding.
There are successful tabletop RPGs that have used other means by which to persuade players to play. Maybe some day an online RPG developer will try one of these alternatives, and we can finally start to break free of the tyranny of XP.
A real crafting system would be difficult to
master, encourage dedication to the craft, and fair pricing for fair products,
and cater to the crafting geeks. The type of player that like to spend time
tinkering and learning. NOT every Tom, Richard (dern filters!) and Harry that
has a few extra SP.
The real masters would be the people who actually took the time to master the
system and truely enjoyed that type of game play. Not wannabe's and leet dudes.
Let them go kill things (and each other) in great numbers.
How's THAT for focusing on the process rather than the result???
Well, I don't know about everyone else, but I like it.
Actually, I'm reminded of the examinations that were required for promotion in the old Royal Navy, such as are described in C.S Forester's "Horatio Hornblower" novels. You'd sit before three crusty old captains, who'd grill you for hours on specific questions of ship handling and mastery of other men. Only if you could satisfy them that you'd be able to do your duty -- even while utterly alone for months on the other side of the world -- would you be promoted.
I'm not suggesting that achieving mastery in SWG should work like that! But there's still something fascinating about the idea of gaining access to increased power by proving your ability to real experts, as opposed to mashing the same mouse buttons over and over and over again for hours. (Or, even worse, letting a macro do it for you... or buying a master character from eBay.)
The thing to recognize here is that crafting in SWG is utterly simple compared to the number of things you have to know to successfully captain a ship of the line. SWG's crafting system is better than that in most other games, we all agree on that... but it's still extremely simple and limited. There just isn't much room for innovation or creativity or surprise -- you just don't have to know that much to master a crafting profession because crafting is mostly about mashing buttons.
Now, if crafting were enhanced to allow more options in experimentation, if actual player creativity could somehow be permitted in the creation of objects and processes so that player knowledge and skill actually mattered... now that would be a game worth mastering.
We hear from time to time that PvP play and JtL play are supposed to measure the player's skill, not just the character's acquired abilities. Shouldn't that hold true for crafting, too?