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Crafting suggestions
The brief description of what the devs have in mind for a crafting system leaves a lot unsaid.
As far as I can see, there are three issues.
1) Why would people craft things they can buy?
2) Why would people buy things from players?
3) How would this trade be conducted?
1)
This is all not too hard to solve, but quite tricky to put in... for instance, if crafting things in missions is boring, why do it? The cunning part would be making this kind of thing fun. So why not make a completely original mission/crafting setup?
What I thought was this. You have a small room, you are on the inside of one wall manning a turret. On the opposite wall is a puzzle. By shooting the targets in the correct order, with enough haste, you make something cool. The faster you do it, the better the item that comes out- if you refuse, you merely make an "ordinary" item, or one slightly worse than is sold.
"But what kind of puzzle" I hear you ask.
Lights Out, Vendetta-style! The inside of the room would look somewhat like a reactor, and the targets would be observer-shaped and change color upon a hit, with the immediate 2-4 neighbors also swapping color.
And instead of one larger puzzle, you have many small 3x3 or 4x4 puzzles depending on the complexity of what you are making. Turn all the targets green from red, and you move on.
It sounds ridiculous, but if Vendetta can set itself above the countless other games with player-crafted weaponry, it would attract the sort of RPing player that the community/money classes in other MMORPGs tend to host.
2)
Now, if the materials were flexible, that would be a way of regulating the fluctuation of item quality. If you use the most expensive ores, you get a high quality item. Secondly, if the items that are crafted ALWAYS are better than those the NPC stations churn out, there's little point to making them. There has to be an element of chance involved.
Ah, chance. What if there was a small chance of making something COMPLETELY unexpected. You try making a positron blaster, end up with a mega positron blaster with gauss autoaim. A gatling cannon ending up as a gatling turret with the cannon energy consumption. A starflare launcher strong enough to use sunflare ammo with no added weight. This is all small-scale.
Now imagine if the same thing happened with a HUGE weapon.
You take a VAST amount of material and make some sort of god-weapon to mount on a capital ship, purely out of minute chance.
Or with ships.
You somehow manage to squeeze 2000 extra armor on a cent mkII. Or your brand new, HUGE BATTLE CRUISER OF DEATH gets to mount not 2, but 3 massive killer weapons because of your own personal good fortune.
But you know what? Its still too easy.
To unlock the potential of this 1/100 chance type of craft, you need processing power that no human has developed. Oh no, you need the collective mind of THE HIVE. So you've just made this kickass battle cruiser with an extra boomstick slot. But you can't put anything on it, so you need *special* parts to make it functional. Guess what you're going to get them from?
This is where the guild part comes in. So you're well in with a nation. They've given your guild the blueprint for said battle cruiser, and the guild has given it to you, the expert crafter, along with enough materials to make three. One turns out to be said *kickass* battle cruiser, which needs leviathan part A and 6 hive queen parts B. Send in the guild, with perhaps another guild or two you plan to give the standard cruisers to if they manage to bring you the parts. Cue epic raid scenario on leviathan stronghold. Kickass battle cruiser is now fully functional, you take it into war on the Itani/Serco border, and do some SERIOUS damage. This way, every guild might need one or more specialised engineers to take on such mammoth building jobs, no? Which creates more diversity, which is only a good thing.
Rare items should be needed to even start making some of the heavy-duty stuff. Just requiring ore and trade goods would *not* be enough to make anything larger than a moth. There would have to be some semi-rare component which can only be salvaged off, say, Helmans or A3s.
3)
The idea is simple- have a Vending tab in every station. Anything that can dock or fit in the station can be made/sold there if you have the necessary expertise. And to sell these items, you simply give a token contribution to the station and put the item up on the Vending list alongside your name and chosen price. Contributions to the vending service going along the lines of 1% of your chosen price per 3 hours- to stop pointless overpricing that plagues other multiplayer online communities.
And you would be able to search this list of player-made/salvaged items for the exact item you are looking for. If you want an average mega positron blaster, you click Weapon, Large, Energy, Standard in that order. If kickass battle cruiser is on sale, you click Ship, Capital, Cruiser, Special. This would require a dropdown set of menus on the same screen, enabling/disabling whatever menus make sense (ie. you can't go Ship, Capital, Energy- since the third tab would have only the Capital ship types available to select from.)
To trade ship-to-ship, have a new weapon. The matter-transfer beam (1), (2), (3), (4) etc. All the same price, but only the highest one available to you would be listed. 10m range, no energy drain. Now you have the problem of newbies equipping ridiculously uber weapons solved. A beam (4) could only receive/transmit level 4 and below items, or they, uh, would disintegrate or something. But wait! Now you have the space-reloading problem solved, too. Give ammo refills mass, and simply get *right* next to another ship and transfer the ammo over, direct to their weapons. So the engineers would also provide the support in battle, through repair beams and extra ammunition. (The interface for transfer/trade? Similar to the jettison menu, but with 2 sides. One for you, and one for them.)
Oops, another long post. :P
Crazy go nuts
As far as I can see, there are three issues.
1) Why would people craft things they can buy?
2) Why would people buy things from players?
3) How would this trade be conducted?
1)
This is all not too hard to solve, but quite tricky to put in... for instance, if crafting things in missions is boring, why do it? The cunning part would be making this kind of thing fun. So why not make a completely original mission/crafting setup?
What I thought was this. You have a small room, you are on the inside of one wall manning a turret. On the opposite wall is a puzzle. By shooting the targets in the correct order, with enough haste, you make something cool. The faster you do it, the better the item that comes out- if you refuse, you merely make an "ordinary" item, or one slightly worse than is sold.
"But what kind of puzzle" I hear you ask.
Lights Out, Vendetta-style! The inside of the room would look somewhat like a reactor, and the targets would be observer-shaped and change color upon a hit, with the immediate 2-4 neighbors also swapping color.
And instead of one larger puzzle, you have many small 3x3 or 4x4 puzzles depending on the complexity of what you are making. Turn all the targets green from red, and you move on.
It sounds ridiculous, but if Vendetta can set itself above the countless other games with player-crafted weaponry, it would attract the sort of RPing player that the community/money classes in other MMORPGs tend to host.
2)
Now, if the materials were flexible, that would be a way of regulating the fluctuation of item quality. If you use the most expensive ores, you get a high quality item. Secondly, if the items that are crafted ALWAYS are better than those the NPC stations churn out, there's little point to making them. There has to be an element of chance involved.
Ah, chance. What if there was a small chance of making something COMPLETELY unexpected. You try making a positron blaster, end up with a mega positron blaster with gauss autoaim. A gatling cannon ending up as a gatling turret with the cannon energy consumption. A starflare launcher strong enough to use sunflare ammo with no added weight. This is all small-scale.
Now imagine if the same thing happened with a HUGE weapon.
You take a VAST amount of material and make some sort of god-weapon to mount on a capital ship, purely out of minute chance.
Or with ships.
You somehow manage to squeeze 2000 extra armor on a cent mkII. Or your brand new, HUGE BATTLE CRUISER OF DEATH gets to mount not 2, but 3 massive killer weapons because of your own personal good fortune.
But you know what? Its still too easy.
To unlock the potential of this 1/100 chance type of craft, you need processing power that no human has developed. Oh no, you need the collective mind of THE HIVE. So you've just made this kickass battle cruiser with an extra boomstick slot. But you can't put anything on it, so you need *special* parts to make it functional. Guess what you're going to get them from?
This is where the guild part comes in. So you're well in with a nation. They've given your guild the blueprint for said battle cruiser, and the guild has given it to you, the expert crafter, along with enough materials to make three. One turns out to be said *kickass* battle cruiser, which needs leviathan part A and 6 hive queen parts B. Send in the guild, with perhaps another guild or two you plan to give the standard cruisers to if they manage to bring you the parts. Cue epic raid scenario on leviathan stronghold. Kickass battle cruiser is now fully functional, you take it into war on the Itani/Serco border, and do some SERIOUS damage. This way, every guild might need one or more specialised engineers to take on such mammoth building jobs, no? Which creates more diversity, which is only a good thing.
Rare items should be needed to even start making some of the heavy-duty stuff. Just requiring ore and trade goods would *not* be enough to make anything larger than a moth. There would have to be some semi-rare component which can only be salvaged off, say, Helmans or A3s.
3)
The idea is simple- have a Vending tab in every station. Anything that can dock or fit in the station can be made/sold there if you have the necessary expertise. And to sell these items, you simply give a token contribution to the station and put the item up on the Vending list alongside your name and chosen price. Contributions to the vending service going along the lines of 1% of your chosen price per 3 hours- to stop pointless overpricing that plagues other multiplayer online communities.
And you would be able to search this list of player-made/salvaged items for the exact item you are looking for. If you want an average mega positron blaster, you click Weapon, Large, Energy, Standard in that order. If kickass battle cruiser is on sale, you click Ship, Capital, Cruiser, Special. This would require a dropdown set of menus on the same screen, enabling/disabling whatever menus make sense (ie. you can't go Ship, Capital, Energy- since the third tab would have only the Capital ship types available to select from.)
To trade ship-to-ship, have a new weapon. The matter-transfer beam (1), (2), (3), (4) etc. All the same price, but only the highest one available to you would be listed. 10m range, no energy drain. Now you have the problem of newbies equipping ridiculously uber weapons solved. A beam (4) could only receive/transmit level 4 and below items, or they, uh, would disintegrate or something. But wait! Now you have the space-reloading problem solved, too. Give ammo refills mass, and simply get *right* next to another ship and transfer the ammo over, direct to their weapons. So the engineers would also provide the support in battle, through repair beams and extra ammunition. (The interface for transfer/trade? Similar to the jettison menu, but with 2 sides. One for you, and one for them.)
Oops, another long post. :P
Crazy go nuts
Actually dave what i garnered from the wiki was that items above a certain level of complexity would ONLY be availible if a player made them/contributed to the creation of them.
Obviously NPC craft could, and probably SHOULD produce enough ores/crafted components to keep a minimal supply on hand, but based on the below paragraph of the design wiki, we are effectively looking at a limited, player driven supply of the more complex equipment.
""-Mining, necessary for (the) crafting system which becomes necessary for most upper-level small ships and equipment. Many items become user created. Crafting linked into many aspects of commerce and user involvement. Purchasing/creating capital/freighter level ships requires massive donation of ores or even actual alloys and metals (pre-combined ores, etc). Mining becomes critical to every level of ship/equipment/gameplay as well as commerce and fundamental financial income from basic mining / ore sales. -""
I interpret that as meaning that mining of ores becomes the basis for crafting (you need A B and C ore to make Y item). Crafting in turn is needed for the creation of the better quality ships/equipment.
for example a mk2 centurion craft might require a crafter to make and deliver item YYY to a station that can produce centurion hulls, however many item YYY's he sells to the station determines how many MK 2 centurions can be purchased there. Different stations would have different facilities for creating different ships, so delivering item Y to a station without the proper type of shipyard does nothing.
In the same token manufacturing stations could be set up to create only certain types of "parts".
What this would do is create a situation where commerce of all types is rewarded. Miners now have incentive to bring certain specific ores, and the stocks of those ores are then depleted by players who have worked on crafting. Traders move the appropriate products around so that ships and equipment can be created. If a station falls short of an item an automatic mission is generated in the trade guild tab, or posted in the news tab.
if coupled with a serious redistribution of the "raw" ores, so that the more valuable ones were only found in sectors away from stations/wormholes where confrontation with the hive is likely, it sets up a good interdependency of players.
Miners get ore for crafters
Crafters create components/equipment for traders
Traders move the components around so ships/weapons are created for fighetrs
Fighters clear the hive sectors for miners.
Specialization becomes prevelant.
Obviously NPC craft could, and probably SHOULD produce enough ores/crafted components to keep a minimal supply on hand, but based on the below paragraph of the design wiki, we are effectively looking at a limited, player driven supply of the more complex equipment.
""-Mining, necessary for (the) crafting system which becomes necessary for most upper-level small ships and equipment. Many items become user created. Crafting linked into many aspects of commerce and user involvement. Purchasing/creating capital/freighter level ships requires massive donation of ores or even actual alloys and metals (pre-combined ores, etc). Mining becomes critical to every level of ship/equipment/gameplay as well as commerce and fundamental financial income from basic mining / ore sales. -""
I interpret that as meaning that mining of ores becomes the basis for crafting (you need A B and C ore to make Y item). Crafting in turn is needed for the creation of the better quality ships/equipment.
for example a mk2 centurion craft might require a crafter to make and deliver item YYY to a station that can produce centurion hulls, however many item YYY's he sells to the station determines how many MK 2 centurions can be purchased there. Different stations would have different facilities for creating different ships, so delivering item Y to a station without the proper type of shipyard does nothing.
In the same token manufacturing stations could be set up to create only certain types of "parts".
What this would do is create a situation where commerce of all types is rewarded. Miners now have incentive to bring certain specific ores, and the stocks of those ores are then depleted by players who have worked on crafting. Traders move the appropriate products around so that ships and equipment can be created. If a station falls short of an item an automatic mission is generated in the trade guild tab, or posted in the news tab.
if coupled with a serious redistribution of the "raw" ores, so that the more valuable ones were only found in sectors away from stations/wormholes where confrontation with the hive is likely, it sets up a good interdependency of players.
Miners get ore for crafters
Crafters create components/equipment for traders
Traders move the components around so ships/weapons are created for fighetrs
Fighters clear the hive sectors for miners.
Specialization becomes prevelant.
I may have been a bit unclear on that...
What I meant was, how does one start up if the initial crafting items are already in good supply? The huge problem with other games with craft systems is the vast difficulty and lack of fun in building a character in such a manner, since there is no profitability until later on.
And about the ores, my intention was that the types of ores would be flexible. If you use mined xith it would be better than using the shop stuff... ah well, I'm being vague again...
What I meant was, how does one start up if the initial crafting items are already in good supply? The huge problem with other games with craft systems is the vast difficulty and lack of fun in building a character in such a manner, since there is no profitability until later on.
And about the ores, my intention was that the types of ores would be flexible. If you use mined xith it would be better than using the shop stuff... ah well, I'm being vague again...
Hmmm I see your point there dave..
However I suspect that some guilds will want to set up dedicated to crafting certain items/types of items. A new player could always get a start in one of those.
However I suspect that some guilds will want to set up dedicated to crafting certain items/types of items. A new player could always get a start in one of those.