Suggested changes to "crafting"

[mansa]

Hi,


Suggested change #1:
Using an item, and defining a crafting skill, figure out all the recipes you have the skill/clan structure, that include that one item as an ingredient.

>craft -ingredient piece.bone knife making
Using your knife making skill, you can make the following items with a piece of bone:

#1 - amethyst-pommeled bone dagger
#2 - carnelian-pommeled bone dagger
#3 - turquoise-pommeled bone dagger
#4 - moonstone-pommeled bone dagger
#5 - jade-pommeled bone dagger
#6 - temboeye-pommeled bone dagger
#7 - marble-set bone dagger
#8 - razor-sharp engraved skinning knife
#9 - thin bone throwing dagger
#10 - small bone knife
...
#325 - vicious claw longknife


Suggested change #2:
Using an item, and defining a crafting skill, and the specific result you want to make, figure out all the missing pieces.

>craft -recipe piece.bone knife making #5
Using your knife making skill, the recipe for a jade-pommeled bone dagger is:
a piece of bone
a rough bit of jade

Ideally, this would happen after Suggested Change #1 goes into the game.






Why change crafting?
a) Old players know a lot of the crafting recipes already.   New players do not.   Old players have excel files full of crafting recipes.

b) Singular players who have custom crafted items with unique/advanced/annoying recipes might be the only ones who know the recipe, and those items may be lost forever.

c) Once you know the recipe, you still need to go out and gather the items in the game - this is step 2 in a multi-step problem of crafters.  (Next steps are - do you have the skill, do you have the tools, do you have the intermediate pieces)

d) If you had 6 unique items, there are over 600 different number of combinations you can have to figure out if there are crafting recipes for them.  If you add in all the different types of wood, gems, clothing, dyes, you start rolling into the billions of combinations.  This is impossible to figure out how to make items.

[Jihelu]

A: This is true. I've got a big ass 50+ page word doc of all the cures and crafting recipes I gave a shit about. It's silly I should have to have this.

B: No comment

C: This is a big one. It's a pain in the dick to find some obscure items. 'Oh I wonder if this jewelry piece needs to be polished or unpolished, guess I need to keep 2 on me at all times. Oh I wonder if I could make a necklace with a cord or a length of leather. Damn it turns out I needed an unpolished, a cord of leather, and a small blackstone. Damn.'

[MeTekillot]

Mansa is correct.

[creeper386]

I'd love to see an update along these lines and imagine with the database update this might be feasible.

It certainly solves the problem of hiding crafts behind some random obscure object, that really has nothing to do with the end project just to gate keep crafting. I've certainly ran across a few of those.

Certainly is a step up beyond analyze'ing objects in stores. I think we'd see a lot more varied objects instead of just the same old items.

It changes shifts the onus on character knowledge to the character instead of, what does the player know.

Cons: Rare items may not be as rare anymore. The rarity would be dependent on the material rarity. I like this but perhaps not everyone would. Don't know if this would cause issues with the economy rebalance.

It also removes a lot of player discoverability that I've heard people like to do. Personally I'd rather have this, as even with a veteran player, crafting is still just a mind numbing activity. Even when I have a storage room full of all sorts of items, trying to figure something out is a pain and I end up going back through my own item database to try and figure out what I could make. When you don't have any clue or a store of item information, crafting is awful.

This does cut out the onus of needing player teachers as much. But I don't think that's a bad thing. Trying to find a knowledgeable player to learn from is rough. Even when in a merchant house, I've not been able to get help learning how things work or what to craft from what. I don't think we have the playerbase to rely on that anymore, and maybe never really did.

[mansa]

...
This does cut out the onus of needing player teachers as much. But I don't think that's a bad thing. Trying to find a knowledgeable player to learn from is rough. Even when in a merchant house, I've not been able to get help learning how things work or what to craft from what. I don't think we have the playerbase to rely on that anymore, and maybe never really did.

This scarcity of 'how to craft item xyz' is voided as soon as you acquire one of those crafting recipe excel files.  Once a player knows how to make it, every single one of their characters in the future also knows how to make it.

Rather than keep the recipe a secret, make gathering the items required harder.   -This is where you would be forced to gather more players together to go kill a mekillot for a mekillot bone in order for you to craft a yellow silk, king-sized bed.

[Alesan]

Please. Maybe I'd actually play crafters once in a while instead of outdoorsy-person #93476. I don't really enjoy the "but you should be expected to play the trial-and-error game with billions of combinations of items, I did, and I like it" argument either.

[Lotion]

Mansa is right on this. Currently my opinion on crafting is that it's stupid and not worth my time to experiment with a system that is designed to be so abhorrently opaque. Every full guild crafter I've played I either stored or epic yolo'd on (aside from one that I was going to keep playing but couldn't due to wrist pain).

[Barsook]

Agreed with Lotion. Full omicrafters aren't my thing anymore.

[dumbstruck]

This would be an amazing change, and so long as it didn't reveal clan only crafting recipes there would always be some joy of discovery by joining different clans and trying out the same command to see what new things pop up, while making things much easier for newer players to get a foot in the door in a scene where older players already have so many advantages.

[mansa]

I wanted to start a new topic, but really I think it can just be appended to this conversation.


What is wrong with discovering all the crafting recipes?

[Brytta Léofa]

What is wrong with discovering all the crafting recipes?

I'll grant that there are probably players who enjoy the discovery process, and that making discovery easier takes away that particular source of fun.

My opinion is that making crafts uberdiscoverable is a strong net positive anyway.

(1) Craft-explorers still have the fun of discovering obscure recipes and figuring out how to get the ingredients.

(2) It gives new players a huge leg up on actually making things and having fun with their crafting skill. TBH this is enough reason in itself; we should be doing everything we can to help new players enjoy themselves and stick around.

(3) It ensures that custom crafts have public value (potentially enriching all crafters' experience) rather than just private value (the dude who designed it). I think that's a very reasonable bar for a thing that requires hands-on time from the staff.

[mansa]

In my opinion,

the short description of the item that you can potentially create doesn't satisfy the curiosity of actually creating the object and reading it's main description.

So... whether you can see you can make:
#1 - amethyst-pommeled bone dagger
#2 - carnelian-pommeled bone dagger
#3 - turquoise-pommeled bone dagger
#4 - moonstone-pommeled bone dagger
#5 - jade-pommeled bone dagger
#6 - temboeye-pommeled bone dagger
#7 - marble-set bone dagger
#8 - razor-sharp engraved skinning knife
...doesn't actually give you the enjoyment that you get when you actually make your first 'razor-sharp engraved skinning knife' and read it's main description to see what the actual engravement is.




I think the gameplay loop would be more enjoyable if it was:
crafter knows they need item x to craft item y -> crafter hires mercenaries to find item x -> mercenaries acquire item x -> crafter makes item y with ingredient item x

But right now, the gameplay loop is:
crafter doesn't know they need item x to craft item y -> crafter spends hours alone in their apartment trying millions of combinations with items they already have -> crafter reaches out to other players for known recipes -> crafter creates a ticket in the request tool -> staff answers ticket with ingredient list -> crafter hires mercenaries to find item x -> .....

[Mercy]

As someone who is "smart" but also incredibly fucking stupid, the current method of trial-and-error crafting turns me off from playing a crafter, almost entirely. I cannot express the number of times I have sought out to craft a specific item. Attained all the pieces for that item, and then tried everything EXCEPT the right combination because I was utterly convinced either: I already tried that combination, OR, that one of the items I totally have just isn't actually necessary and stopped using it in my rotation of tries.

Also, I have moved so many times, lost so many hard drives, and just completely forgotten about several documents I've saved to cloud storage, that I presently have NO personal documentation regarding crafting anymore. I was fully convinced I still had my last file saved somewhere and totally can't find it. It's probably in front of my face but I have no clue.

It's like a chore. Part of why I choose to play Armageddon is to avoid chores IRL. It feels freaking terrible to look at an item, go "I definitely can craft that. I have a reasonable idea of what I need to craft that. There are at least 12 variations of ONE of the items that could/would go into that recipe. But I'm never getting my hand on that item to analyze it. Oh well I guess fuck it."

I suck at guessing recipes. Sometimes my brain gets hard stuck on an item, thinking it must be involved, not realizing that what is effectively a variant of that same item could actually be it. Why? Because I'm DUMB. It is so irksome for my PC, who is potentially smarter than me IRL, to be gated by me the player actually being an idiot.

Please release the shackles on my PCs. Those shackles being my brain.

[Riev]

Part of this could go towards more strict custom items. An item's mdesc should contain a reference to each item used in the recipe. None of this "random bone nail that isn't even mentioned".

[najdorf]

its good but such discovery should be better if it requires 1 or 2 level ups
ie you can only discover an advanced craft w master skill
or make this a separate skill for craft oriented main guilds

[Lotion]

its good but such discovery should be better if it requires 1 or 2 level ups
ie you can only discover an advanced craft w master skill
or make this a separate skill for craft oriented main guilds

The coded method of learning crafting recipe should be as ICly easy as possible. Some people have megabytes of files containing crafting recipes which gives them a massive meta advantage over people who are starting from scratch using this system.

[Armaddict]

If you really want to make it easier, make every item in the game reducible via salvage.  Make crafts all built out of the salvaged items.

There are like 100 various pieces of small bone in the game, so when you look at an item, you can't tell which one is in the recipe, if one is even in it.  If you make all of those reduce down to 1 item via salvage, then the recipe uses the salvaged item, then you start looking at very broad strokes instead.

'I need a few small pieces of bone, so bring me all the smaller bones you get on hunts.'
'This has a leather handle, so I'll need some hides, or we can break down some leather armor and see what kind of leather we get.'

etc, etc.

Instead of searching the known world for a particular item of this type despite that material being readily accessible in other items, just make crafting use a base item that all those items of that material break down to.

[Ulga]

To be honest, the main reason I've never played a full merchant/crafter class is because learning recipes is really difficult. It drives me nuts wondering "So, I already know i cant craft anything out of X+Y... But What about XXY? XXXY? XXXXYZ? XYY? Thats insane.