Second Look: Everquest 2 Tradeskills

Crafting in MMORPG games is about using resources to create useful items . The crafting economy is always in some sort of competition with the economybased on monster loot, requiring the two to be balanced. If creating items and making money through tradeskills is significantly easier than finding items and money from monsters, monster loot becomes irrelevant, and the MMORPG loses one of its major driving forces for adventuring. Thus a good tradeskill system makes crafting as difficult as slaying monsters, although the difficulties are of a different kind.

In Everquest 2, there are several difficulties you have to overcome before you can craft an item. The first is that each recipe for the creation of something has a level. Your artisan skill level has to match the recipe level to make the item. These recipe levels are sorted into tiers of 10 levels, tier 1 being level 1 to 9, tier 2 being level 10 to 19, tier 3 being level 20 to 29, and so on.

The second difficulty is that you need to have a recipe for the item you want to create. Basic recipes can be found in books; for example the book "artisan essentials volume 5" contains the basic level 5 recipes, which you can learn when you reach artisan level 5. There are also books with more rare recipes based on rare resources, and these books are sometimes found as loot from monsters.

The third problem is the need for resources. Unlike the beta version of EQ2, very few resources can now be bought from NPC vendors. In most cases you need to go out and harvest the resources before you can craft an item. This is where the tiers of recipe levels come into play: all tier 1 resources use the same bundle of resources, for example elm as wood. These tier 1 resources can be found in the newbie zones of the two big cities, where they spawn in resource nodes.

Starting from tier 2, there are additional difficulties to resource gathering: One is that tier 2 resources are found in Antonica and Commonlands, zones which are higher in level, thus more dangerous than the newbie zones. But more importantly for the harvesting of tier 2 resources you need a minimum skill level, for example foresting skill level 40 to collect the tier 2 wood named maple.

Once you have the skill, the recipe, and the resources, you still need to actually craft the item. To the great credit of Everquest 2, this involves a simple mini-game rather than just hitting a button and waiting for the item to be finished. For each tradeskill, you have three buttons with different symbols. During the crafting process, accidents happen, indicated by a symbol and a short description. And, you guessed it, the three possible accident symbols correspond to the three button symbols, and you need to hit the correct button in the 2 seconds after the accident happens to repair the mistake.

But that fortunately isn't all. When you start the crafting process, the quality of the crafted item (called durability) starts at 100%, and your progress starts at 0%. Every few seconds, you see your progress going up by a bit, but the quality often going down by a bit. Your goal is to get your progress up as far a possible, before the quality drops too low. There are 4 different quality levels which describe your final success in this: crude, shaped, good, and pristine. If you manage to reach 100% progress before the quality drops below the first marker, you made a pristine item. If it has dropped by one marker, but not yet two, you make a good item, and so on. It is highly unlikely that you fall below crude quality, and if it ever happens, you only lose the cheapest part of your resources, the so-called fuel, which can be bought for a mere 6 copper pieces. You never lose rare resources or hard to get intermediate products.

You can stop the crafting process before it ends at 100% progress and voluntarily make a lower quality item. But usually you will want to make as high quality as you possibly can. A pristine quality weapon might deal more damage or have stats bonuses a lower quality weapon of the same type doesn't have. Pristine armor protects its wearer better. A pristine container has more slots. And even with intermediate products, the quality can be important: the first ingredient of a recipe limits its quality. If you cut your elm wood into shaped elm lumber instead of pristine elm lumber, any item you make with that lumber as primary ingredient cannot have a better quality than shaped. Furthermore, for some basic chemical ingredients, higher quality will also result in increased quantity.

The three buttons are used not only repair mistakes during crafting, but also help you to advance your crafting skills. This usually comes at a small cost, some cost magical power to press, others trade a small loss in quality for a gain in progress. But all of them are usually helpful, so you generally achieve better results by using the buttons as buffs as well as to repair mistakes. That will keep you on your toes, because if you just mindlessly mash the buttons, chances are that you hit the wrong button just as a mistake pops up.

Once you reach level 10 in crafting, you will need to specialize into one of three subclasses: scholar, crafter, or outfitter. At level 20, each of these further splits up into two or more specialized classes. And it is possible that to make an item you will need an intermediate product made by a crafter with a different specialization. This gives room for some player to player interaction, be it by trade or by organization inside a guild.

This tradeskill system has quite a number of advantages over crafting in older games. The mini-game during crafting means that the crafting itself is a bit more interesting than elsewhere. It also means that you cannot simply program a macro to do the crafting for you, endlessly hitting the same button(s). Furthermore, your actions do have an influence on the final quality of the item produced. And the need for resources and intermediate products means that the total process from zero to finished product takes some time and involves different and varied steps.

Unfortunately the Everquest 2 tradeskill system also has significant problems, most of which are probably caused by the fact that the system was never beta tested in its current form. Huge changes were made in the last week of beta, and again in the two day period between beta and release. This resulted in a system which is very badly balanced.

Probably the worst problem is the way in which harvesting skills are leveled up, and in how you need higher harvesting skills to harvest the tier 2 and higher resources. There are several different harvesting skills, foresting, gathering, mining, trapping, and fishing, each of which you have to increase separately.. You start with a base level of 10 or 15. From this base, you need to reach 40 to be able to harvest in Antonica. So there are 5 harvesting skills, each of which you need to gain 30 skill points in. But gaining skill points is not easy. I don’t know the exact formula, but my rough estimate based on experience is that you gain a skill point every 10 to 20 harvesting attempts.

That means you need to harvest resources in the newbie zones 1500 to 3000 times before you have skilled up your 5 harvesting skills to the point where you can gather tier 2 resources, thus enabling you to make recipes at level 10 to 19. This would already take a long time if resource nodes were plentiful. But they are not. Resource nodes spawn slowly, and the newbie zones in which they spawn are packed full with people that have at least some interest in crafting, and thus immediately harvest them on sight. In the newbie zones you gain maybe 1 or 2 skill points per hour, because the resource nodes are so hotly contested, thus taking you about 100 hours before you reach the tier 2 resources.

This is not only hard, it is badly balanced with the time needed to increase your adventuring level or your crafting level to level 10. Everquest 2 has a quite fast level progression through these very low levels (although it slows down considerably in the teens levels). In 10 hours you could be level 10 in both adventuring and crafting, and then find yourself blocked by your inability to gather the resources you need to make tier 2 items. After a couple of frustrating hours trying to gain harvesting skill, the crafting career of most people ends at this point.

There is a work-around for this problem, with which I managed to increase at least mining, foresting, and gathering to 40 in less than 20 hours, but it is likely that it wasn't intended this way by the developers: resource nodes are considerably more frequent on the Isle of Refuge, the tutorial area of Everquest 2. Add to that the fact that most people on the Isle of Refuge haven't realized yet how desperately they will be searching for resource nodes later in life, plus the fact that in this early days there are many instances of the tutorial area between which you can travel, and you will see how staying on the Isle speeds up your harvesting skill gains considerably.

Once you leave the Isle, you cannot go back. And unless you leave, you cannot advance your adventuring level beyond 6 or your crafting level beyond 9. So I actually made a second character with the express purpose of having one harvester, after having made the mistake of leaving the Isle of Refuge with my first character and finding my crafting career blocked.

Unfortunately the harvesting skills are not the only problem of the tradeskill system, although it definitely is the one real showstopper. The tradeskill system simply isn't finished. Some obvious bugs still exist, like resources selling for "free", which then can't be bought. And some recipes seem to have been hastily added, without making much sense. There is a highly elaborate branch with lots of cooking recipes, but food effects haven't been implemented yet. Every expensive and hard to make food has the same effect as the simple bread you can buy from any innkeeper for a few copper pieces. There is also lots of different furniture, but it doesn't have any function yet. You can use it to decorate your house, but you can't even sit on a chair, and the quality of the chair makes no difference. Quality also does not make any difference in the creation of skill upgrades; a crude skill upgrade does exactly the same thing as a pristine one.

The introduction of tradeskill societies is a mixed bag. In beta, you could craft in any tradeskill. Since release, you have to join one of them as member. You can call up a societies window and see the level and number of members of each society. Levels are gained by the members doing resource gathering tasks, thus gaining points, with a graphical display of the points gained and still needed for next level. When the crafting society goes up in level, the vendor in that tradeskill instance supposedly sells a wider variety of items.

And suddenly we are back to the problem of there not being enough resource nodes in the newbie zones, and few people having the skill to gather resources elsewhere. Because resource gathering is so difficult, nobody does the crafting society resource gathering tasks. Most people did one or two, decided that the 3 silver pieces reward was laughable in comparison to the effort, and moved to something else. In spite of my crafting society having 500 members, the level display shows up completely empty, with not a single pixel width of xp gained towards the next level two weeks after release. This might be a rather slow process, if it works at all.

Up to now, crafting makes economic sense. There are some recipes where if you gather the resources yourself and buy the fuel component, you can sell the resulting product to the NPC vendor without losing money. The profit is tiny, less than what you would make if you looted monsters instead, but even such a tiny profit is unusual in MMORPG games. In other games it is often feared that by making crafting profitable, somebody will come up with a macro that creates money out of nothing and then crashes the economy. But fortunately the EQ2 system is quite resistant against this, as the resource gathering can't be macroed at all, and a crafting macro would only produce unprofitable low quality stuff.

But where the real money is, is the crafting of things for other players. As weapons and armor from quests are plentiful and have good stats, there isn't a market for them. Food and furniture are sold so cheaply by NPC vendors that there isn't a market for these either. But containers and skill upgrades are money makers, at least up to now, where very few players actually are able to make tier 2 items due to the harvesting skill barrier. And to make these containers and skill upgrades you have to craft so many intermediate items that your crafting level goes up without your having to grind useless items. I can't craft fast enough to even fill the demand from my guild, which is a definite improvement over other games.

So in summary, I am happy with the Everquest 2 tradeskill system. It is quite elaborate, thus fitting well into this relatively complicated game. I wish it were better balanced, especially with respect to the harvesting skills. And it would probably have been a lot better if it had been introduced a month before the beta ended, so that more of the bugs and problems could have been ironed out by now. But behind the sloppy execution lies a very solid system, which is surprisingly fun. And at least the bugs will certainly get fixed sooner or later. What probably won't be changed is how time-intensive the system is, which will limit crafting to a few serious enthusiasts. But that too fits well into the achiever mentality of EQ2, which simply isn't the game that offers quick rewards to casual players.

This article has been posted on Grimwell.com
- posted by Tobold @ 7:52 PM Permanent Link