Crafting / Looting

[Diethe]

We'll scratch the crafting slot system then and rely on the materials needed to keep it simple at the same time tier 9s still pretty rare to make (Due to the amount of materials). It'll help the crafters by only having to track their materials and no longer the craft time. People can in the meantime, put 2 crafting PTs to make 2 items to keep it simple.

But we still have to put crafting limits AND a way to add a skill level for crafting. We'll also scratch lessening RV costs as skill level goes up. To hit two birds with one stone, I'll use the Craftsman Skill levels as limits for crafting.

Craftsman
Novice (Required: 200 JP) - Tier 1 and 2 Items craftable.
Apprentice (Required: 10 Items created) - Tier 3 and 4
Journeyman (Required: 40 Items created) - Tier 5 and 6
Master (Required: 100 Items created) - Tier 7 and 8

(Or in the case of Mordred's tiers, spread the 4 skills evenly across 14 tiers)

There. Coupled with both of your ideas and balances, we made crafting appealing, balanced and simple. Any other ideas?

I'll post later to integrate that and to address the other ideas Mord gave into a more complete draft. Schwer's welcome to address the new 14 tier plan and we'll work on it once we all agree. How about 12 though? Common denominator-easy for formulas and future use of other systems integrated to crafting, but 14's alright if we have that loot table you made right nd there's no need to change it to 12. Personally, as long as it's balanced. Sure. More variety of items as well. Damn you for having us make up more names though, heh.

[Schwerpunkt]

I don't like that system, either. If we make crafting three tiers (I, II, M), then we can't fit four different tiers of crafting in unless we making Blacksmithing I irrelevant by allowing people to smith swords without taking it. Similarly, if Blacksmithing M and Tailor M are mutually exclusive, then forcing crafter to specialize in one specific weapon type to build high-level stuff will create an artificial scarcity. Especially for any classes that don't have the benefit of using really common weapons (like, for instance, the Samurai).

I have no idea what those skills will be used for, but it can't be to simply unlock extra tiers. We may use Tailor I to unlock tailoring, Tailor II to allow the use of one special reagent, and Tailor M to allow the use of three special reagents (three for balance purposes; two is anemic).

As for those 14 tiers: doesn't work. In addition to two tiers being rather odd for metals, 14 tiers is just a lot. How many tiers can we reliably stretch 9 different item tiers across? Remember, 40 levels isn't a hard-and-fast requirement.

[Diethe]

What's your take on using a single craftsman skill vs. having 5 different skills based on materials (smith, tailor, tanner, woodsman and alchemist, including special reagent)? It would prevent people from having to invest different skills for a job especially when the higher tier weapons require different ingredients. It would also make crafting simpler. For example, how would you determine experience gained in an item? An Excalibur requiring like 500 RV, 10 wood RV, 20 leather RV will amount to how much crafting experience and to what skill? It'll be messy. I suggest using only Craftsman (Novice) unlockable at 200 JP which gains experience. It upgrades to Craftsman (Apprentice) at 10 items created (10 experience), Craftsman (Journeyman) at 40 and Craftsman (Master) at 80 items crafted. We'll make it simpler this way, with no need to bother with going and using different skills to craft and technically we dont need it anyway since we scratched the idea of lessening RV as skill goes up. We still keep the 5 Raw Material types though. Just not the skills.

Also, sorry reread my post I edited it to to accomodate 4 crafting skills and the requirements. It won't be 3 only. Its merely a way to limit beginners from crafting super top tier items. Only a few people will have the amount raw materials and gil needed and means to obtain it, hopefully. A lot of players will be stuck with like...2nd or 3rd to the last tiers for awhile until they earn it. Either way, once we create a tier system I'll fix it and tell me what you think. We need that limit for beginners though.

I like the reagent idea too. But it'll be useless to a lot of people and less demand for it, especially early game. Balance the crafting skill-reagent relationship. Perhaps allow new crafters to put 1 special reagent per item then scale up from there (Best idea) or tier special reagents also (crazy idea). Up to 3 total reagents only though, as you said. It's a good limit.

Anyway, let's discuss tier ideas then. Something we can work and agree with. We have to balance between spreading tiers evenly and allowing people to catch up to tiers and items as well as consider crafting time. If we have too less tiers, there'd be less demand for crafting items especially considering the number of players we might have. Crafters can go stale from doing nothing because everyone already has their items/no need for new items. If we have too many, we'll have people spending too much, there'd be too much base stats to give away, people wont be able to catch up to items and demand and generally be too cluttered.

Look for something that fits the '1-3 item per month craftable' idea using the PT, consider the number of crafters that might be available when we launch (say 5-20), and create a balanced number of tiers out of it that allows people alowance to catch up to items. Once we agree on a tier system out of the 40 levels we can work with, then we can continue polishing other concerns such as tables, formulas and names, but we're doing pretty good progress.

[Mordred]

The focus on artificially restricting the supply of high-grade items isn't a significant concern; the restriction will happen naturally based on the high crafting value of the loot drops needed to make those weapons. Only high-level monsters (37+) will drop "Legendarium" (146,300 Gil per unit), so by the time mobs are actually dropping Legendarium, crafters need to be able to keep up with the demand for Legendarium items.

I think the best strategy is to make sure that crafters' ability to use new loots in crafting scales with hunters' ability to generate new loots with killing. If we want to keep novice crafters from forging high-grade items, we'd have to have some kind of skill level restricting crafting based on tier or item Gil value, which either way kind of screws new characters after the earlygame. Tying crafting ability to character level doesn't strike me as being a wholly inappropriate idea, since newly-rolled characters will be getting XP as the game goes on.

Forcing crafters to specialize in a single skill is also a nonstarter. I expect 10% or less of the player base to be interested in crafting, and if that 10% has to subdivide itself among multiple item categories, you've made the availability problem so much worse.

As for 14 versus 9 versus X tiers, I really don't care. I just picked 14 because it spreads evenly across 40 levels, which apparently isn't known already to be the max level. Good form says "pick a number of tiers that spreads evenly over a character lifetime," so honestly, whatever. Pick a max level and extrapolate the number of items you want from there. The names I provided are entirely just placeholders. "Legendarium" is only slightly less lame than "Unobtainium" as a name for a rare material.

The number of tiers doesn't actually affect the supply/demand balance for items, because you can define a crafter's maximum output based on the expected rate of item acquisition of players. For instance if we decided on 7 tiers instead of 14, that means players would need 5 new items every 6 levels, so they need 5/6 of an item per turn, so assuming 10% crafter population, a siingle crafter needs to put out 50/6 items per turn - roughly 9, rather than the 17/turn they'd need under a 14 tier system.

[Diethe]

Mordred's post:
Crafting Limits = No need. Aye, the guy who technically slays a legendarium drop will be so sought after by the crafters, encouraging the economy more.

Crafting Skills = Agreed that we'll botch the different specializations and come up with just 1 Crafting skill.

Crafting Skill Rewards = Waiting on Schwer to come up with a special reagent scheme, or at least a Crafting (Novice, Journeyman, Master) System where mastery has a good reward.

Tiers = Waiting on Schwer.

Sorry. summarizing for easier reference. I'll come up with a new full draft with the ideas we agreed on later. I'm just waiting on Schwer regarding the issues I brought up with him.

[Schwerpunkt]

Fine, fine, consolidate all the crafting skills. Although I'd still want Chemist to be separate because creating consumables is rather different than creating swords. Plus we really ought to have something called 'Chemist' in-game.

That said, I still don't want to tie crafting skills to how many swords you've forged. In addition to being inherently nonsensical (there's an enormous amount of skill difference between forging swords used by random grunts and forging custom weapons for high-paying customers -- note, for instance, that most of Hollywood's swords tend to be machine-mad, but their custom stuff is all blacksmith-made), it is heavily biased against characters that aren't their faction's blacksmith or whatever. I'd much rather simply have them be sinking JP into the thing.

Craftsman I for 200 JP, Craftsman II for 500 JP, and Craftsman M for 750 JP seems sensible to me. It works out to just over three levels' worth of JP, so it's too expensive, and it gives plenty of utility.

And I'd rather scale the thing out to level 50. We probably won't see the game reach that far, but since HoI has plenty of 40ish nubs, I'd rather plan in advance. Something like 10 tiers would work well, I think.

[Diethe]

Deal. Last 2 questions, how shall we give fair advantage to the real crafters from the ones who merely saved up their JP and bought craftsman M?

Also, if we're going to use JP to buy crafting levels, do you think crafting PT should reward JP 1) to get crafters an advantage and eventually save up for a master Craftsman skill and 2) to get them motivated.

I was thinking of a middle ground between your 7 tiers and the 14 tiers. 10 tiers for 50 levels sounds good enough. That'd make the Meteorite-that-God-crapped Armor really really hard to get if someone actually makes it to that, at all.

[Schwerpunkt]

Crafting should reward JP. That was, at least, something we seemed to have agreed upon earlier in this topic (or maybe the PT topic; don't recall).

[Mordred]

The only way I could sign on to craft skills costing JP is if they generated JP via their use in quantities sufficient to pay for themselves at the target "reasonable" rate. So yeah, I'm all for Schwer's scheme. We'll have to tweak the JP costs a bit, natch.

10 tiers for 50 levels? Let me edit the spreadsheet... There we are.

This is the part where we decide if items will be made out of a bunch of different loots or just one chunk o' loot. I don't care which, but we need to know to start pricing.

[Schwerpunkt]

The first thing we need to do is review my proposed loot type breakdown from earlier in this topic.

Metal: This is primarily used for making weapons and armor for the POJs. It will show up irregularly elsewhere (maybe the higher level oracle reinforces his rod with metal).

Cloth: This is primarily used for clothing and accessories.

Wood: This is used pretty evenly across all three trees (spears, rods, bows, staves, etc.).

Leather: This is primarily used for accessories (shoes and cloaks primarily), but will sometimes show up in clothing.

Gemstones: These are used primarily in sticks and staves, perhaps showing up in higher level weapons of other sorts.

Plant-related: These are all the berries and grasses that you use for potions.

Special Reagents: These are used for adding special effects.

If we're agreed on that, we could then start talking about mixing-and-matching. I think the ideal thing to do would be to have a given item cost ~80% RV in one specific type (if you're forging an Iron Sword, it's kind of nonsensical to need more wood than iron). The rest of the RV value would be made up in the form of other item types.

We'd have to individually go through each and every item type to balance it. Let's start with strictly weapons.
Swords - 80% metal, 20% wood
Claymores - 90% metal, 10% gemstone
Sticks - 75% wood, 25% gemstone
Staves - 85% wood, 15% gemstone
Rods - 80% metal, 20% gemstone
Longbow - 90% wood, 10% metal
Crossbow - 70% wood, 30% metal
Shield - 75% metal, 25% wood
Spear - 60% metal, 40% wood
Polearms - 70% metal, 30% wood
Katana - 90% metal, 10% wood
Instrument - 80% wood, 20% gemstone
Guns - 60% metal, 40% gemstone
Knives - 50% metal, 50% leather


Thoughts?

[sunspawn]

My only nitpick is spears and polearms taking more metal; than wood. That's nonsense./ Most spears are mostly wooden haft with a neat, smallish point from metal unless you plan to make them the kind that's covered in sheet metal for protection against being cut into pieces.

Oh amd how come Claymores don't need Wood?

[Diethe]

Since we've agreed on using just 1 craftsman skills, I have no complaints regarding the percentage balance of item types. Yeah we agreed on using those item types.

That and the fact that we'll be using JP to upgrade our crafting and rewarding crafting with JP and we're all set. All we need now is a bit polishing. Tables, formulas, item names etc. We're almost done. I think? Just maybe PC Shops and merchants to discuss (Black Market, Bazaar, some of the other stuff I mentioned). Crafting looks pretty good so far.

I'll post the updated complete draft later.

[Schwerpunkt]

May 6, 2013 15:24:02 GMT -6 sunspawn said:

My only nitpick is spears and polearms taking more metal; than wood. That's nonsense./ Most spears are mostly wooden haft with a neat, smallish point from metal unless you plan to make them the kind that's covered in sheet metal for protection against being cut into pieces.

Oh amd how come Claymores don't need Wood?

Claymores don't need wood for balance purposes.

Polearms and spears require more metal than wood because wood is a primarily caster resource. If we start requiring they use more wood, we're over-burdening wood requirements by adding POJs to the list.

And the realism argument obviously doesn't hold weight since a proper sword is very unlikely to use much wood at all. Rather, the grip is traditionally nothing more than leather wrapped around the tang. We're already using a simplified system.

[Diethe]

Rods have no gemstones? I was thinking maybe rods be like metal-gemstone, or even wood-gemstone.

Also, regarding Mordred's concern, shall we reward JP from crafting based in item tier?

Also, as requested we divided the crafting into 2, Craftsman and Alchemist/Chemist. Increasing craftsman skill rewards craftsmen additional special reagent slots to add to items. You have to come up with a reward for buying more/mastering Chemist skills though. We can't put special reagents into consumables. That'd be like massaging, sugarcoating and falling in love with your dinner everynight until you eat it after.

[Schwerpunkt]

I guess metal/gemstone makes more sense for rods. Edited.

And Chemist I'm still not sure about. We'll worry about it after we tackle the primary crafting stuff.