Queued & offline crafting?

In Fallen Earth you can queue up crafting activities, and this all goes on while you're off doing whatever it is you do in Fallen Earth. Admiring sunsets and running from hermit crabs, apparently.

In EvE, character skills are also learned in a similar way. You queue up skills to learn, time passes, and you get the skills.

In WoW, crafting and learning are done first person. You have to be there, you can't queue anything (without mods), you can't go off and do something else during that time, and you certainly can't log off and expect any progress.

The discombobulating thing with Fallen Earth's crafting is just how the heck does your character manage to craft their thingy while they're busy admiring sunsets and running away from hermit crabs. Similarly with EvE, just how are you managing to do all that homework while dodging missiles from rats and concentrating on that oh so tricky mining operation (ahem).

So, here's a different take on queued crafting: your character doesn't do it, you instead hire NPCs to do it. You install them in your player or guild housing, you buy them equipment, you pay them a weekly wage, you send them materials. They stay back at base doing the boring crafting while you galavant about the countryside slaying dragons and wooing princesses.

They could also be designed to sell their spare stock to others, at prices you choose. And purchase the materials he needs as well. With not too much effort you could even set them up to take build orders from others, if you so wish.

Now you also have a resource management mini-game - if you don't queue up enough tasks, and don't queue up enough crafting materials, your expensive crafting NPC just sits there building nothing.

If these crafting NPCs are geographically dispersed, you've also got support in the game for players to act as traders, seeking out goods at competitive prices and taking them to the local market/auction house.

The NPC wage would also act as a gold sink for the economy.

Hmm ... what happens though if you don't pay the wage?

Two factions, two themes, two destinies

Setting: a border town, controlled by one faction, struggling to survive. A rebel faction is hiding out in the hills, skirmishing, scouting, waiting for the chance opportunity to take control of the border town.

In the town there would be available a number of quests, but since this is a settler outpost they would be geared around peaceful activities, and give rewards appropriately. You'd be sent out to the forest to gather firewood and chestnuts, delivering rations to guard posts, bring back reports from those guard posts, digging up ore in a mine, planting of crops and so on. Your rewards would be new mounts, fancy clothes, opportunities to learn new skills or recipes.

The rebels have no such luxury though. The rebel leaders would give rewards like magic tinctures that guard against detection, finely crafted weapons of war, special combat rations and so on. They'd want you to go raid a guard post, to intercept deliveries of guard post rations and reports, to gank the farmers in the fields and steal their crops.

If successful, the town folk become stronger in peaceful capabilities. They can mine faster and deeper, their crops are more bountiful, they learn to sing and dance and craft. The remote guardposts form into hamlets, then villages. The rebels meanwhile become stronger in hostile capabilities, become sneakier, hit harder, take less damage, negotiate dark deals with the wilder forces such as ogres and worse.

Eventually though the town defenses will fall to the rebels, and the factions switch sides. This story repeats across a dozen different border towns. The settlers flee one pillaged town to seek sanctuary in another, perhaps stronger, border town. Some rebels, their blood tainted with everburning anger and knowing they could never take up the settler's lot, will seek out some other border town to go harass.

leveling the crafting economy

high level recipes with low level components?

will high level players re-visit lowbie zones to farm components, or will the simply visit the AH?

will this provide a source of revenue to lowbie toons, counteracting the problem of high-level toons causing inflation?

MMOG design anti-patterns?

Some quick background, lifting from Wikipedia:

A design pattern is a formal way of documenting a solution to a design problem in a particular field of expertise. The idea was introduced by the architect Christopher Alexander in the field of architecture, and has been adapted for various other disciplines, including computer science.

A pattern must explain why a particular situation causes problems, and why the proposed solution is considered a good one.

Alexander describes common design problems as arising from "conflicting forces" -- such as the conflict between wanting a room to be sunny and wanting it not to overheat on summer afternoons. A pattern would not tell the designer how many windows to put in the room; instead, it would propose a set of values to guide the designer toward a decision that is best for their particular application.

In software engineering, an anti-pattern is a design pattern that appears obvious but is ineffective or far from optimal in practice. [...] Some repeated pattern of action, process or structure that initially appears to be beneficial, but ultimately produces more bad consequences than beneficial results

I've cross posted this to the Nerfbat forums, where there is already a healthy discussion, mostly focused on whether crafting interdependency is an anti-pattern. What other MMOG design anti-patterns have you become aware of?

hindering the grinding of professions?

A thought offered for debate...

Given the mostly negative impact that grinding/power-leveling professions in WoW have, what might be done to alleviate, hinder, or prevent that activity? (Not necessarily in WoW itself, but in some hypothetical game design).

Previously, I've proposed a textured skill tree system, one where you could fast track your the scope of your profession at the cost of expertise in crafting each individual item.

Another idea to throw on the table today: put a cap or diminishing returns on how many skill ups occur in a given time period. This could be explained in-game as “learning new skills is taxing on the mind and body, the harder you study the more you will need to rest”. Grinding 10 skill points will still be as easy as before, but grinding the next 10 might be difficult or impossible that same day .. or as easy as the first 10 if you wait until the next day.

If a diminishing returns model is used there will inevitably be that one crazy fool that will grind out 10,000 swords for that last skill point (where he could wait 24 hours, grind one sword, and 100% chance get that same point). Most min/maxers wouldn't do that because, by definition, they use a cost/benefits analysis approach in all that they do. Just in case someone does though the game could be designed to give some kind of debilitating debuff - plenty of real world examples to draw from here (headline: gamer dies of exhaustion after playing non-stop for 72 hours).

I'm led to understand that something like this was implemented on the Siege Perilous and Mugen shards of UO - anyone got experience with that?

crafted items vs mob drops?

I don't remember where I read it, but apparently crafted items in WoW are designed to be slightly inferior to what drops from mobs. Consequently, there is very little market for crafted items.

Consider though if the reverse was true - there would be more demand for crafted items, everyone would want to be a crafter, but there would also be greater demand for materials too. What to do with all the mob drops then? Scale them back, or change the crafting recipes to also require magic essences, dusts, shards, etc.

Quest rewards should still be competitive, and of course the phat lewt from dungeon and raid bosses should be superior to most other gear, maybe even the best epic crafted goods.

random discoveries vs crafted inventions

I'm both liking and disliking the alchemy discovery system in WoW right now. I'm liking it in that it rewards continuing effort at crafting, but disliking how it seems so random. I do like how the discoveries for the major protection cauldrons are tied to making the relevant potions, but all the other recipes are pure chance, and that I'm not excited about. It smacks of a boring grind for a lucky result.

This got me thinking about more directed efforts towards discovery, a way of experimenting. Blizzard could introduce a new "Experimentation" skill, which you get from each trainer at the end of each skill level (apprentice, journeyman, expert, artisan, master).

With this skill the player would select which herbs and other components to combine and then click the button to see if anything happens. Most combinations would result in some kind of [Vile Concoction of X] which gives a debuff or even damage on consumption. Some combinations however, in combination with luck, would be just the right combination resulting in discovering a new recipe which give slightly better results than similar regular potions, or maybe give a combination effect (eg. healing + swiftness).

If the player is close to getting just the right combination, perhaps they would be rewarded with a [Imperfect Healing Potion] or a [Bitter Healing Potion]. The results would be substandard, but the name suggests they are getting close to discovering something interesting. The nature of the substandard result might be lowered efficacy (eg. less healing than what you could get from a different recipe of the same components), or a debuff of some kind (not unlike the Fel Ache debuff you get with Fel Mana potions). It'd be funny to see an [Imperfect Swiftness Potion] which not only gives a +50% speed buff but also a -50% speed debuff, or a [Spoiled Adepts Elixer] which can only be used by warriors.

It would also be interesting to try combining both high level and low level herbs together, which might result in a secondary market for the low level herbs once again, or at least return visits to the old world. Hmm .. high level toons competing with low level toons for low level herbs .. that may be not such a good idea.

The system could even be rolled out such that the combinations necessary actually vary from realm server to realm server. For example: a [Potent Healing Potion] might be made from 2x Golden Sansam, Mountain Silversage, and Silverleaf on the Dath'Remar server, but be made from 2x Golden Sansam, Mountain Silversage, and Peacebloom on the Frostmourne server. Meanwhile, on some other server, it would require 1x Golden Sansam, Mountain Silversage, and 6x Peacebloom.

Differing recipes on a per server basis would have the effect of nullifying the game spoiling effect of online databases, retaining the game element of experimentation and invention, the game mechanic of economic demand for lots of different herbs (with many efforts resulting in a [Vile Concoction]), and the prestige of being one of the few who know how to craft certain rare potions (because no one else has yet figured out how to).

All this could probably be applied to other crafting professions too.

crafting some amusement

First, consider a crafting system where the skill for each item is arranged into a multi-branching tree, rather like the tech-tree of Sid Meier's Civilisation games. In such a system there isn't the need to segregate crafting into separate professions, while the more advanced item skills would require learning related item skills and thus there would be "professions" as such. Some item skills are to produce items, and some are simply knowledge skills (to help pad out the tree).

Not all skills lead to dependent skills. Some skills are dependent on more than one skill, some dependencies have alternatives (eg. cannon might require skill in any one of rifle, shotgun, or pistol .. but not necessarily all three or any specific one).

Next, have each item skill be separately improved - apprentice, journeyman, expert, artisan, master. The items you craft could vary in their quality, depending on your skill level. A basic Sword of Striking might net you a +1 bonus at apprentice skill, +2 at journeyman skill, all the way up to +5 as a master. The level requirements to use the item would remain the same however, and thus you're not simply crafting a weapon for higher level toons but instead crafting a higher quality weapon for the same level.

While you are still apprentice skill, there's a strong chance your crafting attempt will fail, consuming the required materials but producing only grey junk. You would however have a strong chance of earning a skill point, learning from both your mistakes and your successes.

Once you have journeyman skill in an item you can reliably craft items without failure. As journeyman, this would also unlock any dependent skills, which you would need to find a trainer for. You could at this point then move on to dependent skills deeper into the skill tree, leaving your skill at this item at the journeyman level.

On the other hand, you could strive to become an expert in crafting that item. Again, the attempts might fail, but at least this time the failures wouldn't be total junk, just slightly degraded efficacy. Sometimes you'd fluke a slightly better quality result too.

As a master craftsman of an item you could also train others in that item skill too. Also, being master skill in an item can also result in discovering one or more of the dependent skills, instead of having to train in it. Interestingly, this means the game wouldn't need to provide trainers other than as necessary to kick-start the crafting ecology/economy. There could even be entire technology branches which remain undiscovered.

Producing the items using those skills can improve your skill rating in that skill item, so long as you are striving to produce the best quality you are capable of. Producing lower quality items won't result in any chance to improve that skill. To improve knowledge skills involves a studying activity instead of producing something and would involve material requirements. You might also gain a skill point in a knowledge skill when producing an item which is dependent on that knowledge skill.

Thus, you don't need to be fully proficient in every item skill to progress up the tree, and you can skill up in any item at a later time as desired. It's quite possible many players will just get to journeyman in many of their item skills, and only excel in the items they particularly care for. This leaves open opportunities to become the only master craftsman of a particular item, carving out a particular niche for yourself. As a master craftsman in some obscure item you might even discover a new branch of technology .. one which you'd keep secret the pre-requisites so as to maintain a monopoly.

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The actual act of producing an item or studying a skill would be a mini game, one which affects the quality of the produced item, the chance of earning a skill point, and extent of wastage of materials (less wastage means you don't use up all required materials). There should be some way of automating the workflow administration of a production that involves sub-units (learning from the tedious and fiddly process of the engineering skill in WoW).

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Inevitably, players will grind their production skilling in pursuit of earning skill points, producing a massive excess of stock which the market would not support. It would thus be useful to provide faction NPCs which accept turn-ins of various crafted goods in exchange for reputation, the same way there is a Cloth Quartermaster for each faction. After all, the town guards need to be equipped, don't they?

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In addition to the skill points/levels per skill, keep track and display the average or recent trend of quality of items someone produces. A bit like maintaining a "high score" for skill in playing the production mini-game. Maintaining a high average might well also accrue bonus reputation with your faction, as a further reward. Remember though that producing high-quality items isn't a one-click grind, you'd have to work at it.

(I also have a followup post on random discovery of new crafting recipes)