Unique and Modified crafted gear

Today I am going to touch on Unique and Modified gear. I feel these things are pretty closely related. Unique gear can come from modifications or it can stand alone. Either way it gives crafters the ability to create gear that can perform particularly well for certain people.

So what makes gear unique? If everyone has a +3 mace of smiting why would anyone want a +1 or +2 mace of smiting. Well, if the +1 mace of smiting had an increased attack speed or maybe did more damage, I'd buy it over the +3. Why? Maybe I'm not a priest, so the +3 doesn't help any of my skills, why bother, i just want something that works better than my last weapon.

As a crafter it is up to us to make items that other players want to use. SWG did a great job with their experimentation. I could experiment and get additional points put into the damage that a particular weapon did. Sometimes you could craft over and over again and get a spectacular boost to an item. You could save the recipe as a blueprint and crank out hundreds of the item to make better weapons with.

Ok, so uniqueness, or an ability to modify the base stats of an item. This is also the primary concern of Mods placed on gear. Lots of single player games have this component. You have Item X, and you have this Mod Y. Lets say that Mod Y increases the attack speed of an item by making it lighter or more balanced. Why not have the same thing in crafting. Certain recipes are given to players as "Mods". These items can be placed after the fact, such as additional plating for armor, or something like a sharpener for making a sharper blades, i.e. more dmg. Other mods can be placed into recipes. SWG had this, you could make a food mod, such as a flavoring agent or something else, and add it to the drink at creation, this enabled better foods to be created with specific enhancements.

Both of these options lead to more people enjoying crafting because there can be competition between crafters for who can make the better type of item.

Customizing the crafting experience.

So I feel like i need to touch upon each of the things outlined in the last blog. I chose to start with Customization and discuss things that can be done and what places do them.

Customizing may seem pretty trivial to everyone else, but its a pretty powerful thing to a crafter.

The problem is that when you see another player, you see what armor they are wearing, usually what level they are, even a comparison to your level. Some games will even allow you to look at the gear another player is wearing.

That's all well and good for combat characters, but how do you distinguish yourself as a crafter? How do you tell if that piece of armor is something special that you created?

In some systems it would show your name in the details of the armor. This was great for games where you could see the armor someone was wearing and get a good look at the stats and say "Wow, Yadana Toitovna crafted that piece of armor, I wonder if they still make it that good or better." Now you are talking, there is fame involved and you can even build a player base of customers besides word of mouth.

Further in the customizing field is the ability to change how something looks. This doesn't have to be like second life where we actually get design new models. It can be something as simple as picking a shield texture and color. Nothing says my shield is better than yours than to see a giant glowing lion head on the face of the shield, or making a shield all black except for the gold rivets that hold the metal in place. You don't have to get elaborate, some games its all about what color your gear is. Its nice to have matching sets of gear for an entire guild.

If I'm a shield maker and I craft small shields, who says it can only be brown and only round? Let us pick small round, teardrop, or heater and give us a variety of color schemes or even a color wheel and just recolor part or all of the shield based on two or three colors.

Crafting whats good.

Today I was reading posts and trying to decide what is good for a crafting system. Many hard core crafters rely on the same type of games to determine what is good and what isn't. So here are my favorite guidelines on how to design a crafting system.

1. Customizable - What is the point of a crafting system that gives you the same stuff no matter how many times its crafted. Give the crafters the ability to change the look of the visible things that other players see. Before completing the craft pop up a new dialog that allows players to at least choose which model to use. Color is another good thing but may be reserved for dyes.
2. Uniqueness - Give the players some play when it comes to item creation. Let them decide the stats of an item to some degree. Give crafted items a base and give the players some points that they can invest to make the base item just a little better. Sure you can make it random when they craft but at least let them make it unique.
3. Modifications - Along the same lines as uniqueness allow the players to craft something truly spectacular. Give them even a 5% chance to craft a rare item. Heck give them a .01% chance to create a super rare. Or you could have rare drops. Raids are the perfect place to add a rare drop that players can take to a crafter and have them create a rare item by placing the rare into a mod slot. Different rares could do different things. Make it interesting for players.
4. Recipies - Give the crafters some quests for recipes. Make some recipes rare drops off of raid mobs. Make books of recipes. Make some recipes experiment only. Some people don't enjoy this as much as others but it gives some uniqueness and some social ability for crafters.
5. Materials - Make the materials interesting. A few games such as SWG and the upcoming Beyond Protocol give stats to each material. Want to make lightweight armor? Let them use aluminum to give it light weight. Want to make it as strong as possible, suffer with steel for weight but it gives the best protection. Let the materials help define how good an item is.
6. Harvesting - This is my personal favorite. I enjoyed how Saga of Ryzom allowed players to look for materials without making static visible spawns. If you combine it with SWGs ever changing resources you could make one heck of a game just for harvesting classes. I have more thoughts on this that will have to wait for another blog post.
7. Leveling - Seriously, who thought it would be fun to force players to level their character to advance their crafting? Was it really so hard to make it separate that you have to tie it into the combat levels? Really? It wasn't hard for Ryzom. It wasn't hard for EQ2. It wasn't hard for AC2. Heck, you could be a pure crafter in SWG and never touch combat. The point I'm trying to make is that I don't want to be forced to level a stupid class just so i can make stuff. Is it that way in real life? Do I have to join the military and learn to shoot a rifle at 200 yrds just so that i can go into the hills and chop down a tree? Do i have to learn how to become good at swinging a sword just so i can hammer metal into shapes? If a blacksmith in the middle ages didn't know how to make a armor he just wasn't hired to make armor, he could go learn from another blacksmith, but he didn't have to join the local militia to learn it.
   

These are just a few points that true crafters are looking for when it comes to an online game. Seriously, throw us a crumb or two and we will follow the trail to where it leads. Make it fun for people other than those that just want to kill things. Give us room and watch us lead the economy to new levels.

A fresh start

Today, I begin anew. After seeing Wurm Online, my desire to create my own MMO started again.

I sat down and began to review what I wanted in an online game. Then I decided to start a blog to help catalog my ideas and to help me view my progress.

Tonight's goal: getting a client and server started and get them to talk to each other and pass messages.