My Beef with Mastercrafting Items aka Please Consider Changing this, Love Bebop

[Bigbruiser]

Crafters should get skinning even if it is JM and risks breaking that pile of bones.. I can master craft fucking epic bone daggers but I can't break apart a pile of bones?

[Raptor_Dan]

Ok, this is what I want to happen.

1. All clans get one item per month Custom Crafted. This is a stand-alone addition, meaning regardless of current PC classes or subclasses, the highest ranking person in a clan can send in a Custom Craft request, hereafter referred to as CCR. This gives all clans a chance at survival, regardless of PB distribution.

2. Submissions for CCRs become the responsibility of those in charge of them. Indie CCR, it goes to staff. Clanned CCR request? It goes to leadership of the clan. This would necessitate changes to the request system that would make clan leadership responsible for keeping items thematically in-line with the game. This particular wish is highly unlikely.

3. Artisan gets custom crafting ability. They choose one craft. Those with one karma can choose two. Two karma can choose three, three karma can choose four. You still can't do /everything/. Maybe the karma part is not a good idea, but artisan getting one custom craft that they pick is. As a sadist (and maybe a narcissist, I'm looking into that) Maybe it should be random.

Yep. Just off the top of my head. I dunno.

[Cabooze]

3. Artisan gets custom crafting ability. They choose one craft. Those with one karma can choose two. Two karma can choose three, three karma can choose four. You still can't do /everything/. Maybe the karma part is not a good idea, but artisan getting one custom craft that they pick is. As a sadist (and maybe a narcissist, I'm looking into that) Maybe it should be random.

Artisans should get custom-craft on anything they can craft. The class isn't useful for anything other than crafting.

In fact, they are less useful all-around than the original Merchant guild and similar mercantile classes, both in regards to combat ability and crafting ability.. There's actually nothing that 'Artisan' has going for it that you can't get from what is basically its upgrade, 'Dune Trader' - except for wagon-making (which... you know. you can't even make those, anyway), Cavilish, and the lack of the bludgeoning weapon skill.

[LauraMars]

It seems like the original post wants:

A) The ability to do custom crafts more easily

and

B) More and fancier items to show up in game.

I have no real opinion on A, having never played a custom crafter of any kind before the changes or since.

But for B - Based on my experience, there are ALREADY many many cool things in the game database. Armageddon's item database is the text game equivalent of a Cave of Wonders buried beneath the sand.  There are only so many ways to get this stuff out to you, the players. In the past (I don't know if they still do this), staff would load things up for merchant house family to do fancy auctions and things with, and occasionally they'll show up in plots or someone will get a bug in their ear and manually rotate shop stock. But there's never been a really good, easy, automated way to cycle through the vast quantities of amazing shit that's been dreamed up by hundreds of people over the past 25 years, and get it in front of your eyeballs.

And that's too bad because I think that that would be super cool.

[Raptor_Dan]

Now I want Artisan to get reverse crafting recipe power. The thing were you have one item, and you 'craft item', and get a list of things you could craft with it if you had X items to work with.

I think that'd be a pretty good way to make all the cool crafts more accessible, and make Artisans more badass.

[Veselka]

Unfortunately, there is and always will be a desire for 'Cool Custom Shit'. People can easily say 'Get me the coolest ring you got' or 'Get me the fanciest blade you got', but 9/10, people will want to get a unique, new item that is FrEsH and eLiTe.

I honestly think that GMH should just have a 'Custom Order NPC' that takes orders for people at a public place, tells people when they are full up, what the costs/turnaround will be, or something like that. It ends up being a huge time suck for GMH in general from what I've seen, at the sake of actual plots of substance.

Most of the onus is on leadership PCs and Staff to make the crafts happen, they end up taking a while, people get pissed when they have to wait around for them, and it leads to drama/never ordering from House X again because they took too long, ad nauseam. I've seen it for the past good long while in the game as a persistent thread. And while it does make for shaking things up a bit, and IC should be kept IC, it sucks that at least half of the system and its tardiness is assuredly OOC and just based around people got lives and shit to do, and requests take up to 30 days to complete for master-craft items.

Anyways, yeah, I don't really like custom crafts. I like that Custom Crafters can make anything 'up to their level in skill', as it provides more capability to make every day items that people use, rather than the Elite Sword of Slicing +4.

[kahuna]

To make custom crafting a bit more accessible I think the object creation process should be more automated. What I mean by this is after staff simply click an 'approve' button in the web interface what was written in the request gets automatically sent into the game and created. Instead I am sure that the old diku OLC is used. You have commands that you have to use to create objects/rooms such as oset <vnum> <options> <input>, this is tedious and that is why custom crafting takes a while.

More automation is the only thing I can contribute to this thread.

[Heade]

They should just reverse the situation now with custom crafting. Instead of custom crafting being tied to a subguild, they should give it to all of the heavy merchantile classes and take it away from the subguilds completely. Here is the justification as to why:

Originally, custom crafting was the sole purview of the merchant class, and sort of became their defining feature. It's what separated the full time merchant from the moonlighter. Later, when ESGs were added, they were given the ability to custom craft primarily as a means to help avoid guild-sniffing, so that someone could pretend to be a full time merchant, but really have a different primary guild. Back then, it was pretty normal for even full merchants to adopt a specialty/title like master Jeweler or Armor crafter, despite having the coded ability to make just about anything, and so having an ESG that gave master level crafting skill and the ability to custom craft allowed one to pretty successfully masquerade as a fulltime merchant character.

Fast forward to the latest change, which shook up all the old guilds and tied custom crafting to subguilds. The rationale behind it was likely twofold:

1. Staff had too many custom crafting requests, and wanted to reduce their monthly workload.
2. There were likely more people that would be effected by taking custom crafting away from crafting ESGs than by taking it away from the heavy merchantile classes.

While, on the surface, this seems to support the decision that ultimately transpired, it completely ignores the fact that custom crafting had become a defining feature of the core "merchant" characters. Furthermore, I contend that from an RP perspective, heavy merchantile classes without the ability to custom craft are hurt more by this change than would be true of the master crafting ESGs.

Personally, I think they should both have custom crafting available to them. If staff workload for custom items is too high, I think the answer is more staff. But if it has to be one or the other, I think it's a no brainer that the heavy merchantile classes should get custom crafting over the subguilds. Subguilds shouldn't outshine the core classes. That is something that Brokkr stated was part of his mission statement with the change to classes in the game, and in this one case, that simply isn't true. Crafting ESGs are currently better than the heavy merchantile classes, because they don't have to take 2 classes just to fully perform their craft.

I've been on a hiatus from the game, due in no small part to this particular issue. Since I really enjoy playing heavy merchantile characters, but don't enjoy it under the current system, my ideas for characters is stymied. I'd never play a heavy merchantile character without custom crafting, but playing one with custom crafting means I'm severely limited in concepts because I won't have a subguild.

[Riev]

Fast forward to the latest change, which shook up all the old guilds and tied custom crafting to subguilds. The rationale behind it was likely twofold:

1. Staff had too many custom crafting requests, and wanted to reduce their monthly workload.
2. There were likely more people that would be effected by taking custom crafting away from crafting ESGs than by taking it away from the heavy merchantile classes.

It has been mentioned before that the reason for this was NOT because there are too many requests, but the requests were often all of "master" quality, with brilliant azure gem-studded finger claws, and not enough custom-crafted low-tier "fancy cloth pants tailored to what someone requested". By limiting the number of people requesting, it allows for more conversation and, with ESGs, more of a "trust" that a first-time player isn't going to sit behind their locked doors and create masterwork diamond studded longswords.

[Veselka]

The problem with the current system (one of a few) is that there are simply fewer 'master crafters' to go around. So custom/master crafts get bogged down or disappear entirely when a crafter in a GMH ups and stores, delaying the entire pipeline for another month or two.

I don't think a GMH's majority of plot lines should revolve around 'where is X master craft I ordered' and the fallout surrounding OOC time constraints (Can only file a master craft every 30 days). At a given time, there might be 2, or just 1, PC that can handle XYZ Master Crafts. God forbid they have a life and don't play the game 24/7, or have old master-crafts to get through.

This would be alleviated entirely if Leaders in GMH (Overseer/Crew Leader/Apprentice Agent+) could file 1 or 2 Mastercraft Requests themselves per month. They would virtually be working with the hundreds of crafters and master crafters on staff to fulfill requests. It would be further proof that joining a GMH and working with a GMH is far superior to working with independents. It would also account for the lean times, when there are sometimes 0 Crafters of talent who can fulfill custom requests, or 0 available.

More than this -- The Zeitgeist of the game seems to surround 'Noble/Templar Soandso wants to order a design they dreamed up', instead of 'House Kadius/Salarr/Kurac has a brand new design they want to sell Noble/Templar on'. Why would Nobles/Templars know better than these premier GMH about their own product, and design things for them? Of course, they are inherently better than by birth, but are they suddenly weapon designers, jewelry designers, and clothing designers all at the same time?

I truly wish the Zeitgeist was put more into GMH's decision making, rather than reacting, creating something people are inevitably mildly disappointed with, and wasting another month of RL time. It's truly a burnout to be a Custom Vending Machine That Never Seems To Please.

[lostinspace]

Later, when ESGs were added, they were given the ability to custom craft primarily as a means to help avoid guild-sniffing, so that someone could pretend to be a full time merchant, but really have a different primary guild.

One thing I haven't seen mentioned, with the moving of custom crafting and magick to subguilds, you now can't custom craft on any witches. What's that, you wanted to custom craft a cool gnarled staff to walk around with? Too bad, you lost your creative design skills when you started throwing around boulders.

[kahuna]

Later, when ESGs were added, they were given the ability to custom craft primarily as a means to help avoid guild-sniffing, so that someone could pretend to be a full time merchant, but really have a different primary guild.

One thing I haven't seen mentioned, with the moving of custom crafting and magick to subguilds, you now can't custom craft on any witches. What's that, you wanted to custom craft a cool gnarled staff to walk around with? Too bad, you lost your creative design skills when you started throwing around boulders.

I think a staff would fall under bludgeoning weapons or tool making? So a magicker wouldn't be able to do it anyways they'd need to have a subguild toolmaking/staff making. Also the custom crafting help file clearly states that magickal components aren't allowed:

with the exception of brewed cures and poisons, magickal components, lumberjacking, wagonmaking, armor repair, perfumes and liquid types (e.g. teas, alcohols, etc.)

[lostinspace]

I know. Mages can't custom craft ANYTHING, because there is no combination of class/subclass currently that lets them pick both a mage subguilds and a custom crafting subguilds.


So even if that mage had club making at master, they won't be making a custom club to use for themselves.

Also, if you see a character custom craft, you know they aren't a mage, barring legacy merchants or witch full guilds.

[Brokkr]

http://gdb.armageddon.org/index.php/topic,49825.msg1036922.html#msg1036922

[Veselka]

Thank you. This creates more options for custom-crafting PCs, which hopefully will lead to more of those PCs being available and employed by GMH (or independent and making their own private Idaho).

[valeria]

http://gdb.armageddon.org/index.php/topic,49825.msg1036922.html#msg1036922

*doesn't even drink anymore but pops champagne just because*

[JohnMichaelHenry]

Edited cuz everyone else said it first.

[Brokkr]

We have been looking at whether to do a change or not since May.

[Jihelu]

Finally users of Magick are capable of doing the most secret of art:

Custom crafting.

[Harmless]

Fantastic change, thank you guys so much. I miss my fence PC now (whereas before all I thought was, "Why didn't I choose custom crafter with that fence..)

[Nao]

This is great!

[Heade]

Thank you for this change, Brokkr and staff! It's much appreciated by those of us who enjoy crafters!

So many more options for character concepts now. My head is swimming with ideas.

[Bebop]

Wewt! 😀

[Barsook]

Awesome! Thank you staff!

[Heade]

It's a shame that this announcement came after two different roles I would have apped for had it come earlier, but I'm glad the change has come nonetheless. I'll be keeping my eyes open for role calls in the future!