Tobold's Blog
Friday, March 31, 2006
 
Reverse difficulty in tradeskills

If I would design a tradeskill system for a MMORPG, it would be easy to get recipes, there would be some gathering mini-game to get the resources, and then there would be a puzzle-type mini-game for the assembly of the item. So recipe easy, resources medium difficulty, and the challenge in the assembly.

Where I am a bit disappointed by the World of Warcraft tradeskill system is that the difficulty is exactly reversed to my ideal. The assembly of goods is trivial, you just click a button. The gathering of resources is of medium difficulty, as it should be, and I quite like the system there. But gaining recipes in WoW is the hard part, and totally annoying.

Only the basic recipes are gotten from the trainers. For other recipes you need to travel and then camp a vendor for a limited supply recipe spawning. Then there are lots of recipes which are random drops. Either one type of monster drops it, and you need to kill hundreds of them because of the low drop percentage. Or the recipe drops randomly from many different monsters of the same level range, for example the swiftness potion. You can only hope that somebody else finds that recipe and sells it to you, there is no chance to systematically search for such a random drop recipe if you want it. A third type of recipe is boss recipes, which drop from raid dragons, or boss mobs in high-level dungeons. If you are not a member of a powerful guild, you can forget about getting these recipes yourself, and the auction prices for these are usually astronomical. The last type of recipes is the most annoying, because these recipes are sold based on your reputation with some faction. And no, there is not one faction with all tailoring recipes, one faction with all alchemy recipes, and so on. Every faction has recipes for every tradeskill, and you need to grind faction for months until you can get the recipes from everywhere.

I don't think there is a single crafter in this game who has all the possible recipes of his chosen profession. Now that could be a viable concept if that would lead to different crafters making different items and trading them. But the most valuable items are "bind on pickup", thus only the person crafting them can use them. In spite of the high cost of the recipe for e.g. Truefaith Vestments, everybody who buys it makes exactly one vestment, and then never uses the recipe again.

Assembly being so easy, people tend to not value them at all. I witnessed a heated exchange on the trade chat recently, where one guy shouted "WTB Crusader enchantment, got the materials", and then got very angry when an enchanter tried to charge him 10 gold for the service. As the Crusader enchantment recipe costs around 400 gold, offering the service for 10 gold is quite reasonable. But the customer saw the only value in the materials, and wanted the service for free, because it only takes seconds to do the enchantment.

I played games with much better crafting systems. Smithing a blade in A Tale in the Desert is a very interesting and difficult game. You hit the blade in 3D with different hammers, which makes the metal move, and you try to get it as closely as possible to a given template. The closer you get, the better the blade. That would probably be too complicated for a mass public MMORPG. But even the simple puzzles of Puzzle Pirates for making items would be a big improvement. Because each different tradeskill has a different puzzle, while in WoW clicking the smithing button is the same as clicking the alchemy button. And the difficulty level of the same puzzle goes up for more difficult items. It would be great if the best blacksmith would be the guy who was best at something involving player skill. Right now the best blacksmith in WoW is probably somebody who is in a big guild and gets the recipes from his guild mates. Tradeskills should be an alternative to leveling and gathering equipment, but in World of Warcraft getting better in crafting works exactly like collecting gear: You raid and you grind.
Comments:
As a reward driven player type, i often have issues with tradeskills. In WoW i only did 1st aid and enchanting, cause by far these two offer the best bang for the buck. You get items, wich can not be obtained elsewhere, while smithing and tailoring stuff can be. I can not stand the fact to grind on a second rail, to get rewards wich are sub-par to drop stuff.

The only time i did tradeskilling with real focus, was when EQ introduced the diety bound armors. Those were very good, compared to the items, i could camp back then.

Now for the actual mechanics of creating something, well this is years away from being satisfying for me. I bet you saw the Spore video. When they have this kind of ingame editor to create things, im signed. Up to then i swallow the click your butt off solution.
 
Yeah - this kind of sucks. I've noticed too that, even with recipes being very difficult to find, that Blacksmiths for instance can't make full sets of armor. You know - a full matching set of "Something". They just make parts and pieces - maybe 2 or 3 - but never a full matching set. Pretty fuckin' stupid if you ask me.

They don't even have their drop system set up so that you can assemble a matching set of armor (I mean you CAN if you're one of these anti-social, tube-fed freaks who has your ass stapled to a computer chair) - the average player just winds up running around in a what is a goofy looking hodge-podge of different armor pieces.

For instance on my Pally just trying to get a full matching set of "Of the Eagle" armor (Templar, Emerald, Commander's, Whatever) is fucking impossible. Sure I can assemble a full suit of all "Of the Eagle" stuff pretty easily, but I look like a RETARD.

ASSHATS!!

Spank you for letting me vent TObold.
 
I had similar problems when I was still weaponsmithing, and somebody asked me to make him a sword of level X, and I only had either level X-6 or X+4 available. A crafter in WoW has no customization options whatsoever.

Theoretically you could imagine an interface where you enter the armor class and bonuses you want, and get the minimum level to wear and the materials needed calculated. You then can chose the look and the colors, and make the item your customer wants.

In WoW, I can't even chose the color of a cloth robe I tailor.
 
I agree with Brian, I think SWG was heading in the right direction. Maybe if the resources didn't shift every 3-5 days it would have been better. As it was, I was running out to my harvesters all the time - terribly annoying. Plus the identical-factory-created parts were terribly annoying. You needed a substantial investment in a factory in order to produce some mid-grade items? Not good, imo.

Too bad all this was subsumed by the NGE. ('Least I'm assuming it was, from what I've read about the NGE. I quit SWG *long* before the NGE.)
 
Tradeskills should be an alternative to leveling and gathering equipment, but in World of Warcraft getting better in crafting works exactly like collecting gear: You raid and you grind.

Which is exactly how the developers want it, because raiding and grinding are timesinks, and timesinks are fun, right?

Stormgaard, as a 300 LW I can say that the reason crafters never make full sets of armor is because blizzard's crafting system either makes it nearly impossible or not worthwhile. "Nearly impossible" because recipes are hard to find, and sometimes they don't even make a full set even if you have all the recipes. "Not worthwhile" because for some daft reason all craftable set armors vary in level. For instance, the first piece of Wicked Leather armor can be used at level 45. The final piece of Wicked Leather armor cannot be used until level 54. What level 54 player in their right mind is going to wear a level 45 green? The craftable sets need to all be the same level, or at least within a very narrow level range.
 
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