Skippy’s Dream MMO Part 1
Over the years I have played many online games. I have current accounts on City of Heroes and Age of Conan. I experimented with Pirates of the Burning Seas, Auto Assault, Eve, and Lord of the Rings, and D&D Online. I was on the Star Wars Galaxies and Tabula Rasa betas. I had a World of Warcraft habit that lasted for years. And in fact it was when I was introduced to Dark Age of Camelot while I was still in the Army that I decided that I want to make video games for a living.
So basically I have spent a lot of time thinking about how large scale online games are put together, and how to make them more fun.
So for this installment, I want to talk about crafting, and how I think that it could be improved.
At the moment, most crafting systems worked in one of two ways.
1) Static Recipe System
The player has access to recipes, and by providing the exact components the recipe calls for they can assemble an item that is identical to every other item created from the same recipe. This is how most of the big MMOs have handled it. It has the advantage of being very easy to understand, but it is a grind based system, which can get boring quickly.
2) Varied Recipe
The player has access to recipes, and the ability to create experiment with small parts within the formula. Star Wars Galaxies had a system like this, where there was a large variety in the stats possible when an item was generated. Various factors ranging from character skill level, the the quality of the materials, and even a certain amount of luck could effect the end product in a variety of ways. This had the advantage of being a lot more interesting for the crafter. But many players found this to be too complicated, and it was difficult to predict how any particular item would turn out. Player would frequently have to make several items in order to randomly generate an optimal one.
So the biggest complaints that I always hear is that every crafting system is either too static and simplistic to be fun, or too dynamic and complicated to be fun.
My solution is a system which I call the “Assembly” crafting system.
The idea is that the player still has recipes. But the recipes aren’t for completed items. The recipes are for the individual components that go into into a finished item.
To demonstrate I have made this quick example, using a retro sci-fi theme
Each ray gun is made up of three components. A Firing Mechanism, A Power Supply, and an Emitter.
Each component has a variety of ways that it effects the stats of the final weapon.
Firing Mechanism
Repeater – The pistol gets an increased rate of fire, but reduced accuracy and damage.
Charger – The pistol gets an increased damage, but reduced range and accuracy
Phaser – The pistol gets an increased range, but reduced rate of attack and damage
Power Supply
Heat Bank- Weapon does 5 points of heat damage per shot
Atomic Battery- Weapon does 5 points of Atomic damage per shot
Neutron Compiler- Weapon does 5 points of Neutron damage per shot
Emitter
Beam- Weapon gets increased range and armor penetration, but reduced damage
Blast – Weapon gets an increase to damage, but a decrease to accuracy
Ray – Weapon has severely reduced range, but gains area of effect attack
A player would be able to make 27 different weapons from the sample components I’ve shown so far. And in each case the weapon would be significantly different, both in game use and appearance. So if we had an expanded list of components, say 20 in each category, we’d have 8000 possible combinations. This would give the players who want to craft more than enough options to be able to make weapons optimized for the needs of any other player. And it has the added effect that players can also craft to get a specific desired appearance, in case they are more into the role-playing and dress up elements of the game.
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June 16th, 2008 at 11:51 am
A problem I see with this concept is that, How do you keep track of all the combinations, and thus keep them from becoming just a gallery of weapons that all do the same thing, just slightly differently in each iteration?
Where does scaling for things like: Level, Weapon skill, class restrictions, etc.
What prevents the players from simply going, “Ok, well, this combination does things the most efficiently, for the most damage, at the least cost…” as then you have thousands of players all running around with the exact same weapon, tweaked in the exact same way, and the other forms are superfluous, as no one ever uses them?
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skippy reply on June 17th, 2008 10:43 am:
I completely get what your saying, but most of those are concerns for fleshing out and balancing a system like this, which is farther than I was planning to take this idea at the present. The trick would be to make sacrificing range for damage, for instance, to be a real trade off. I’m sure that builds that are considered optimal will develop, but with enough variety there will always be players who want to tinker to customize things.
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F1yboy reply on June 24th, 2008 4:39 am:
“Where does scaling for things like: Level, Weapon skill, class restrictions, etc.”
That would be easy to sort out:
Introduce a weapons reliability, say a 1 in X chance of of a misfire
Level: The higher the crafting level, the greater access to parts you have and the more reliable they’d be. So at level 1 you have 1 part from each section with a 1 in 10 chance of a misfire. At level 50, you have all parts and can make a weapon with a 1 in 100 chance of a misfire.
Weapon Skill: Level 1 would only let players use a charged heat blaster, level 5 would allow a repeating heat blaster and so on..
Class Restrictions: Some classes can use all types of weapons, some can’t. The higher a general level of character, the more bonuses they’d get, e.g. decreased chance of a misfire, lower level to use/craft different weapons..
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Signalist reply on August 17th, 2011 2:16 pm:
I’d say that as long as there is only limited number of possible choises, let’s say 32 as an example, that there is no such thing as a weapon that’s optimal for every possible use one could come up with, it would be best to have something like this: 32 possible choises for building a pistol, same amount of choises for building a rifle, these would be the weapons anyone can use, with pistol being lighter but also less accurate than a rifle that’s more accurate and powerful, but much heavier and bulkier (that’s how it is in real world, don’t see any reason not to make it so in games.)
Then there could be number of weapons that only certain classes/professions can use, such as portable gatlings/plasma cannons (heavy and bulky and not that accurate, but the damage and/or range will be more than enough to compensate for those) or some kind of sniper rifles that double as melee weapons (long range, accurate, the ability to deal serious damage in close quarters combat immediately after using the weapon to take out some VIP from miles away, the big problem being the fact that when used in melee the damn thing is slow to use), or something like that.
Then if we add levels to the weapons crafting, making it so that while pros of each kind of weapon go up with every level, the cons too have an increased effect.
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Signalist reply on August 17th, 2011 2:26 pm:
I mean, wouldn’t you guys just LOVE to see a sniper armed with a .50 caliber sniper rifle start swingin his/her rifle like it were a broad-axe or some other medieval European polearm?
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June 16th, 2008 at 2:20 pm
I love the idea skippy but i think PFC McCay raises a valid point. but the inclusion of the various power supplies can sort of fix that, causing basic damage plus various kinds of bonus element specific damage would add reason to use different combinations and as for level restriction you could include varying levels of purity which effects the level of power for the material used in the power supplies and character level would dictate a sort of license for handling the various levels of power. Oh and of corse the concept of class specific weapon types could be used to limit what configurations of ray gun people could use.
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June 16th, 2008 at 4:20 pm
BTW, it would be 27 configs, if you had 3 options per component, and 3 components to choose. I’m not an MMO player, so this doesn’t really make a difference to me, but it sounds cool. Keep up the great work!
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skippy reply on June 16th, 2008 7:28 pm:
Oopas, yeah your right. Math is fun.
I’ll go and change that now.
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June 16th, 2008 at 6:12 pm
I recall that Diablo II had an excellent idea of Runes that fit into socketed Weapons, Dungeon Siege II, also used a similar idea, I remember that there were also randomly generated modifiers, and with all of this there were only two or three “crafted” weapons worth buying having. All the other millions of possibilities weren’t used.
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June 16th, 2008 at 6:58 pm
Play Mabinogi (www.mabinogi.nexon.net), it has a pretty cool crafting system involving minigames which affect the quality of the produced goods.
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June 16th, 2008 at 8:33 pm
did KOTOR 2 inspire any part of this idea Skippy ? ;)
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June 16th, 2008 at 8:37 pm
No I never actually played KOTOR 2. Mostly the idea came from the random weapons from Diablo and Warcraft. This is essentially very similar to the “Crimson Longsword of the Wolf” type of thing, except that the player chooses what qualities get mixed, and the model actually changes.
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June 17th, 2008 at 4:18 am
Didn’t SWG do pretty much this? You had to take harvested minerals with varying qualities. Those qualities would affect the outcome of the weapon component, and the qualities of the weapon components, when assembled, yeilded, with “experimentation”, the quality of the weapon?
Though I think you may be replacing “quality” with “effect” or “property”.
The biggest problem, IMHO (which I refer to as the MF’in gospel)with most MMO crafting systems is that there isn’t any meaningful item decay. Meaning that if jackass A can craft the same thing as jackass B, but once crafted, neither item ever leaves play (see mudflation) unless sold to an NPC merchant (see vendor diving) or trashed (rarely happens, even with junk stuff). Therefore, most MMO economies reduce themselves to pricing wars, or, as I like to call it, whichever retard can undercut himself the most.
The best game that I’ve found for avoiding this is EVE. Because when you get blowed up, you lose all your shit. Most of it is destroyed, some of it is dropped as loot. And if someone takes it, eventually, they get destroyed, and the total global item quantity is reduced again.
The biggest problem with EVE crafting/manufacturing is the lack of an ability to make goods of varying statistics/quality.
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skippy reply on June 17th, 2008 10:53 am:
SWG did something similar (At least when I played it)
You could get different stats on a weapon, but the model wouldn’t change based on your design.
Plus the final stats where randomized slightly, within a certain range. Making the exact same item twice in a row wouldn’t always end in the same result.
The biggest difference is that in SWG each material that you worked with had around 20 different stats, that interacted with each other in sometimes complicated ways. Basically I’m trying to streamline the process from Galaxies, while removing some of the randomness. So that the player themselves gets to do more tinkering rather than grinding and hoping for a lucky role.
And yeah lack of decay is a huge problem in online games, but I’ve noticed that Galaxies had a good way of dealing with it, as did WOW. I’ll probably just have to write a post just ont hat subject at some point.
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June 17th, 2008 at 7:41 am
It would be nice if you could become a master crafter without having to level up or have an alt that can farm the materials or money. I’ve always wanted to play a crafter of some sort and slowly move my way up the economic ladder without having to leave town.
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June 17th, 2008 at 7:46 am
Actually, this sounds very similar to what Borderlands is going to be doing, and I know I’ve seen it elsewhere too (can’t recall where). It wasn’t in an MMO though. And the big way to keep them from all being the same is to balance them. Make some better in certain situations or for certain playstyles, and then make sure those playstyles are balanced and those situations come up. If the Charged Heat Beam is best because you get to hit more often than with blast (for a higher effective DPS) and multiple enemies don’t show up enough for ray, then add in some spawns of large groups of weaker eneimes and up the accuracy fo the blast. Or you could make it so for lower levels, beam is better because of increased accuracy, but later on you sart to hit more often and them blast does more damage. Also, with this idea, you could have addons, like bayonet in case they get too close. Personally, I think it’s awesome and more games in general need to use it.
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June 17th, 2008 at 10:36 am
Sounds just a little TOO complicated to me… imagine programming all those in and making enough situations to where all can be applicable at one point or another, then the player would also have a lot of choices to make as to what type of damage they wanted to do as well as what range, bonus damage, and accuracy they wanted, this would almost definitely have to be a highly group based game, otherwise each player could only survive 1 in many situations, thus causing a lot of grief with all the dying and trouble just surviving unless the bulk of enemies were easily avoided.
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Delbin reply on June 17th, 2008 11:12 am:
Or make more than one weapon. The types of stuff he has listed are just damage type, range, and area of effect. Stats any weapon would have. If the system is made modular from the ground up, it’ll be pretty easy to implement.
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June 17th, 2008 at 10:39 am
sorry for the double post, but i almost think something like WoW’s socketing system would work well (putting gems into items to add stats) but possibly make it so that any gems (or whatever item you substitute) which the player wanted to use on the item would have to be added during the creation process not afterward
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skippy reply on June 17th, 2008 11:03 am:
ITunes first post- Maybe, but it doesn’t seem any more complicated than any MMO that already exists. Having a fire sword might help you beat the ice trolls more efficiently, but in most games you can still win without one. For most players it wouldn’t be any more complicated than comparing the stats of two different weapon, which they do all the time anyways.
Your second post – Oh I agree completely. When it comes to the end functionality, this is essentially the socket system, with a few tweaks. But in this case some of the crafters are the ones making the “socket gems”.
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iTuneYouOut reply on June 17th, 2008 11:32 am:
oh alright, i see what you mean, i got thrown off by the whole specific type of damage thing thinking you meant it could only damage a certain set of enemies rather than just have bonuses on certain types, i like the overall idea for the system but i think 8000 possibilities would be a little much =)
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June 17th, 2008 at 11:30 am
Oh, and another idea along these lines.
Let’s say emitter X and firing mechanism X each add damage.
And emitter Y and Firing mechanism Y each add range.
So if a crafter used any combination of X and Y they have a gun that has the same stats,but looks different.
This will help fight the problems that a lot of MMOs have at high levels, when all of the players start looking identical to every other player that is playing the same class.
Even if at high levels the only real meaningful choices the players wind up making are cosmetic, a lot of people will still eat that up. Think about how much people liked the City of Heroes character creation system, and how much of that really had absolutely no effect on the game.
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June 18th, 2008 at 12:10 am
Vanguard: Saga of Heroes crafting *started* to get it a little right, but the game sucked donkey dick. Aside from the game sucking, though, another thing that I think a lot of MMO’s fail at in crafting spheres is that entry level items cease to be come useful at some point, without fast item decay/destruction.
Most games use some sort of skill level > success chance > recipe availability system. What happens, though, is that people simply grind up the cheapest way possible, often throwing money into it just to get to the “end game” items. I’d like to see some sort of system that did away with the “this items is MORE POWERFUL than that items” and implemented more of what you’re talking about (i.e. this item is more useful in this situation, but less useful than that item in other situations. More of a Rock Paper Scissiors approach, as opposed to a slingshot>handgun>bazooka approach).
Oh, and crafting class interdependencies, or do away with crafting classes, and just make everyone an artisan, with a blank “recipe” binder, and you can fill that binder with “X” recipes, where X = 5% of all available recipes or something like that. So no one character can make everything, and has to choose carefully what they want to specialize in.
Damn you for making me want to take another look at SWG to see whats changed… :P
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June 18th, 2008 at 12:16 am
Christallmytea. I sidetracked myself. What I meant to get on about was that there needed to be some interdependence and requirement for the items that people tend to use to grind with. If making laser power packs nets the player experience/levels/whatever, those power packs need to be able to be used by other players for more than just weaponsmiths. Maybe armorers could use it to give armor “laser resistance” or combat medics could use it to improve their laser scalpels, or vehicle specialists would use them to power long distance scanners or something.
Anyway, interdependence that is MEANINGFUL is important. V:SOH set sail on a ship of fail with their interdependence. The experience grind was completley separate from actual items needed for other crafting profesions, therefore the entire economy was cockblocked for crafted items until the players that crafted rolled up alts so they could make their own subcomponents. Because you could either grind at stuff for players to make coppers, or you could grind at stuff to advance your levels, but you couldn’t grind anything that would fill both niches.
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June 19th, 2008 at 1:55 am
Absolutely fantastic concept.
Now, make a damn MMO already. Something with zombies, preferably. I’ll help.
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June 19th, 2008 at 2:50 am
I’ll get right on that. Just as soon as you fork over the 5-20 million to make it, and find us a publisher.
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June 19th, 2008 at 1:35 pm
The idea was also explored to a degree in Vagrant Story, if anyone remembers that game enough. You had ‘hilts’, which affected your range to a degree, your damage, damage types, etc. and the number of gems a weapon could hold. Then you had your ‘blades’ which also affected damage and damage type, but affected elements in addition, and lastly you had gems, which all had various effects from status afflictions to buffs to damage types or elements.
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June 19th, 2008 at 4:01 pm
I like the ideas, and a couple of games’ had great socket systems despite a few complaints I’ve read. KOTOR2 and Fable(and Fable: Lost Chapters) have had optional power ups. Fable had a great idea of making permanent power ups that you can add to your weapon at any time. KOTOR2 also had a good idea with the lightsaber crystals changing the effects of it for different situations. I’m all for either way. But the KOTOR2 system seemed to be better; it got rid of the need to destroy starter items, you could improve them instead.
As for item decay, my little sister has been playing “The Game of Life: Twists and Turns.” It’s a fairly simple board game. Some of the items in it have a item decay and value system. One of the cars ends up disappearing after X turns and the other loses value for X years and then gains value for Y years as a classic. Might be a good feature but it should be based on Level and the player’s economy.
If player 1 is Lv10 but has only 1/3 of the cost of the Lv10 item, the level 9 item won’t disappear.
When Player 1 has enough money for the Lv10 item the Lv9 item automatically turns into cash value for the Lv10 item [i]when[/i] at the buy menu screen. OR Player 1 has the option of waiting to the next level and getting the next item while during X time units the Lv9 item loses value until Y time units pass. At which point it gains value as memories.
BUT When Player2 starts the game @ lv1 with all the equipment for Lv1 gets to Lv2 the equipment begins to decay. After X time units of becoming Lv2 the Lv1 items disappear into a small cash value.
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August 27th, 2008 at 11:28 pm
Have you looked at http://www.tinywarz.com turn based web game that I have no time to play any more. They have a similar (but more simplistic) concept for creating vehicles,mechs weapons etc…
Its pretty cool. Apologies for adding to you game addiction burden ;)
Captcha: ‘Heart onside’
I should hope so… right here inside my left chest.
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November 28th, 2008 at 10:34 pm
I think you should put in a macro system, like what WoW has, but better. It could be used to create a set of attacks that are really effective together, mixed in with insults and offensive gestures.
You’re guild system should make it so that it has ‘sign-up lists’. A guild member wants to raid a dungeon, so he makes a sign-up list that has certain positions in the party open. Example
wants party to raid . Positions open:
Tank
Puller
Mage
Rogue
etc.
Then guild members can sign up for it and can pick which ones he wants, because the sign-up will display name, level, class, specialy, whatever, and away they go to conquer evil.
Also, Guilds should have slogans.
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Suomynona reply on November 28th, 2008 10:37 pm:
Edit.
Apparently Greater than/Less than signs remove parts of text. It should say
L33tzor wants party to raid Evil Castle of Doom
and
…members can sign up for it and L33zor can pick…
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December 15th, 2008 at 5:12 pm
As for your weapons customization idea, will the configurations be permanent, or will you be able to change parts out? Unless you are going for the high-tech theme, I would think it would have to be, otherwise it wouldn’t make sense to be able to switch out the metal your sword is made of for another. Making it permanent would also keep down the amount of gold hoarding, as players would spend lots of money to figure out all the possible combos. It would also create a lot of chat as people discuss what works well together. Heck, you could even set up a channel specifically for it.
Also, are you going to have augments? Permanent pieces of magical wonderfullness that add to a weapon’s power? I think you should. If you do, would they be part of the weapon creation process, or could you add them in later?
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