Design Intent - Are characters not gaining XP supposed to craft?

[Duffy]

I think when crafting is a incredibly important pillar of your game that approach is preferable, especially if crafting is essentially another class and not a system tacked onto your other classes. I feel that in theme parks click and forget crafting as your downtime activity makes sense. In a sandbox I would prefer it to be its own thing, especially in a game with a strongly modeled economy.

[Loko Loki]

Ryan Dancey wrote:

Duffy wrote:

what else are you going to do on your "main" crafter besides manage your queues every few hours at best?

The people in EVE who spend their time focused on economic concerns spend their time searching for pricing arbitrage - looking for places to buy low and sell high.

Because warfare between corporations shifts locations and tactics continuously there is no stead-state in the economy. The thing "everyone needed" last week might fall out of demand, and something new will take its place. So the economic masters are never able to just reach a point of "perfect economic capability" and go on autopilot. They are continuously updating their information and using those updates to change their logistics chains.

Arbitrage and economic schemes are fine and will have a place. However, they do not require any crafting, recipes, or XP spending. Thats a human feature not a game feature. For a crafter I would like an engaging / meaninful experience from the actual crafting. Currently everything is the same and there is no "meaningful" choice in crafting. There is no producing a better item than the competition. No seeing that a certain "element" attack is underdefended and producing that item or corresponding producing a armor to counter the current "element" favorite. With the way feat / equipment keywords are locked in, I dont know how much choice can be added in the future (obviously alpha and not everything planned is implemented). My understanding of the resource quality feature is that its basically a effect of encumberance and will still have to effect on final item quality (unless things have changed).

The current system pushes towards crafting as an alt in my view.

[Ryan Dancey]

@Loko Loki - the problem with the suggestion of making the act of crafting "more interesting" is that it does not scale.

If you want to be a meaningful economic participant, that is, you intend to make logistics (and crafting is a part of logistics) your thing, you are not going to make one sword. You are going to make thousands of swords. Multiply that by all the items in the database.

In theory spending time to make an item "different" sounds cool. In practice, it turns into a repetitive, easily macro'd or bot'd process that robs the system of value and is despised by those who are forced to use it.

Over time we will iterate on the crafting system and add more interesting things to it. We are not going to add "minigames" or anything that requires the player to interact with the system continuously in order for it to function, but we might add things like occasional work stoppages that require a player intervention to resolve.

The "meaningful choices" in crafting are legion. You have to decide what to craft, where. You have to decide what to pay for the inputs (recipes, raw materials), and how to time your crafting jobs. Once a job is finished you'll have to decide where to sell the output and how to get it to that market.

Just within the question of how to craft an item you have to decide which materials to use - what combination of refined resources vs. scavenged loot, what "+" values to use, etc. Within a given category of item you have choices: Steel, cold iron, silvered, adamantine, etc.

[Corphan]

It sounds like I'd need several well-organized spreadsheets with up-to-date market information in order to participate effectively in the crafting economy. That doesn't really sound like a fun time to me. So, based on what I'm hearing in this thread, I won't be investing much time or xp in crafting.

[T7V Jazzlvraz]

Corphan wrote:

...several well-organized spreadsheets with up-to-date market information...

Ryan's consistently said he won't disadvantage players who don't have pricing information because they don't have access to the right out-of-game sites:

Ryan Dancey (Goblinworks Blog: Money Changes Everything) wrote:

Megatroid wrote:

Pathfinder's take on sandbox economics sounds interesting, and very much like Eve, at first glance. Perhaps too much like Eve in the sense of the speed and miraculous availability of information the description implies to me.

Information will propagate instantly, whether it is done in-game or out-of-game. It's trivially easy to ensure that you have up-to-the-second pricing and availability info anywhere that you care about by using alts.

So rather than put players who don't understand that at a disadvantage, we'll just provide those tools to everyone automatically.

RyanD

[Ryan Dancey]

Note that having well-organized spreadsheets with up-to-date market information is what you get when we make a tool available to be able to extract the market data from the game. It's just not everyone's cup of tea.

[Loko Loki]

Ryan Dancey wrote:

@Loko Loki - the problem with the suggestion of making the act of crafting "more interesting" is that it does not scale.

If you want to be a meaningful economic participant, that is, you intend to make logistics (and crafting is a part of logistics) your thing, you are not going to make one sword. You are going to make thousands of swords. Multiply that by all the items in the database.

In theory spending time to make an item "different" sounds cool. In practice, it turns into a repetitive, easily macro'd or bot'd process that robs the system of value and is despised by those who are forced to use it.

Over time we will iterate on the crafting system and add more interesting things to it. We are not going to add "minigames" or anything that requires the player to interact with the system continuously in order for it to function, but we might add things like occasional work stoppages that require a player intervention to resolve.

The "meaningful choices" in crafting are legion. You have to decide what to craft, where. You have to decide what to pay for the inputs (recipes, raw materials), and how to time your crafting jobs. Once a job is finished you'll have to decide where to sell the output and how to get it to that market.

Just within the question of how to craft an item you have to decide which materials to use - what combination of refined resources vs. scavenged loot, what "+" values to use, etc. Within a given category of item you have choices: Steel, cold iron, silvered, adamantine, etc.

I was not referring to minigames. I agree that would quickly get annoying.

The things you list are all important for being successful as a crafter / business. Managing costs will be important, but the end result is the same exact item with the same keywords. The competition is all about price and nothing about quality or function. Outside of apothecary I havent seen much difficulty selecting mats (use the iron, copper, hide, hemp etc which have 1 use before the salvage that has 2). I was thinking more of the old star wars galaxy style crafting where making good choices in the above recipe / mat selection would result in a better item. You obviously have a clearer view as to what is planned to be implemented vs what can never be fit into the existing system. In the end we probably just have different perspectives.

[Tyncale]

Loko Loki wrote:

Ryan Dancey wrote:

@Loko Loki - the problem with the suggestion of making the act of crafting "more interesting" is that it does not scale.

If you want to be a meaningful economic participant, that is, you intend to make logistics (and crafting is a part of logistics) your thing, you are not going to make one sword. You are going to make thousands of swords. Multiply that by all the items in the database.

In theory spending time to make an item "different" sounds cool. In practice, it turns into a repetitive, easily macro'd or bot'd process that robs the system of value and is despised by those who are forced to use it.

Over time we will iterate on the crafting system and add more interesting things to it. We are not going to add "minigames" or anything that requires the player to interact with the system continuously in order for it to function, but we might add things like occasional work stoppages that require a player intervention to resolve.

The "meaningful choices" in crafting are legion. You have to decide what to craft, where. You have to decide what to pay for the inputs (recipes, raw materials), and how to time your crafting jobs. Once a job is finished you'll have to decide where to sell the output and how to get it to that market.

Just within the question of how to craft an item you have to decide which materials to use - what combination of refined resources vs. scavenged loot, what "+" values to use, etc. Within a given category of item you have choices: Steel, cold iron, silvered, adamantine, etc.

I was not referring to minigames. I agree that would quickly get annoying.

The things you list are all important for being successful as a crafter / business. Managing costs will be important, but the end result is the same exact item with the same keywords. The competition is all about price and nothing about quality or function. Outside of apothecary I havent seen much difficulty selecting mats (use the iron, copper, hide, hemp etc which have 1 use...

I see what you want. I remember a post somewhere from Ryan where he explained that small iterations in power/stats of a weapon (as can happen with SWG's system, and made it interesting) are hard to fit into PFO's Economy, where items will have a much higher turnover and will be sold in the thousands. About how it would be impossible to list and/or search for each specific iteration, and exploding databases and such.

Also, the current keyword system does not seem to lend itself for this. They would have to add stats. Off course there are (hidden) stats involved, but not quit as in SWG or Everquest.

The +4 and +5 refined items do hinge on a RNG + some smart input of Resources but for the rest the outcome of crafting an item is pretty straightforward and predictable.

Maybe Ryan or Stephen can explain a bit more.