tkjode made a couple of points, in a nice, concise summary:

- Crafting will hinge upon a working and stable economy
Agreed. In fact, I think the economy will have to be done first.

- Player owned stations will create the demand, players and NPC's can be the supply, trade missions+mining will be more meaningful
Agreed, except for the fact that I think that initially at least, players and guilds should RENT space at existing stations, and stations are "infinite boxes" of space. (See the "Station Limits Thread", http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/11421 )
Eventually I agree - player stations and guild stations would be kickass, but the game will have to crawl before it can run.

- Stations 'tech levels' will determine the quality of items
Agreed. Somewhat. I think that, if the devs cannot implement any "twitch" in crafting like I TRULY desire, then this is an acceptable alternative. Stations with higher tech levels will be far more expensive to rent space in or to use than you run-of-the-mill station. It needs to be hard and time-consuming to make the highest-level or highest-quality items.

- Stations 'specialties' (eg. mining, research) will determine their skills in manufacturing
Agreed. As long as the devs cannot implement "twitch" in crafting like I TRULY desire. I'd like the actual skill of the player to determine what can be made.

- Research (by station scientists) and experimentation (by players) can enhance the characteristics and attributes of an item
Totally and Wholeheartedly agree. Research by Station A.I. by the "research station scientists" should proceed at a slow, predictable, boring pace. But players can do wild and crazy things like.. "Hrm, what happens when I make XiRite Alloy with a little bit of Heliocene thrown in? - Holy COW I get Ultra Xi-Rite alloy which gives me +30% armor when I make a ship out of it! I am teh 'leet!"

- Players will have the ability to make simple trade-offs on their items (eg. Damage vs. firing rate) without the need for research.
Agreed. Well, once you unlock the CAPABILITY to do that, like Phaser said. Kind of goes with the last topic. More fleshing out of this idea is required.

- Datapads will contain blueprints for items/components, with a cooresponding LEVEL for the item/component it contains.
Agreed. However you must buy the datapad/blueprint BEFORE you start crafting, and if you make something worthless, or if you make something substandard, then you've blown the cost of the datapad/blueprint. And yes, in order to make an Itani IDF Valk, you'd need a level 10 datapad. Making an Ion Blaster requires only a level 1 datapad.

- Stations should require manufacturing/refinement equipment in order to build components/items.
Agreed. Somewhat. Stations should not just "have" the equipment sitting around for anyone to use. I think that individual PLAYERS (or guilds) need to rent the space in a station, gather the materials to BUILD the equipment, and then use that equipment with other resources to build yet more higher-level equipment that makes even higher-level items. Should be a pyramid-type structure with simple equipment at the bottom, and the fanciest stuff at the top.

(I've got more, hold on...)

tkjode, I like your "Station Staff" idea. EXCEPT for the part about the research. I think the PLAYERS should be doing the research, spending the money, taking the chances, and getting the credit (and profit) for their technological advances. Otherwise the game ("Station research Staff") would do the crafting FOR us, and I think that TOTALLY defeats the purpose of this discussion.

Manual labor should be contracted at stations, however you might as well roboticize it. How's this idea: Just have a "robotic manufacturing capacity" level for a Station instead of manual labor.

I also like the idea of certain stations being limited in their tech levels. For example, a Tunguska station would be awesome at refining, forging, and turning out steel, XI Rite Alloy, etc. But it would SUCK at the production of Luxury Goods, in fact it might not be able to make them at all. However, there's no reason that a station could not improve. Either through the help and/or goodwill of players, or through the staion A.I., any station can eventually be improved in its levels, with higher station tech levels requiring more "XP" or resources donated or whatever. (Just like a player!)

So, yes, I think that eventually a single station could be awesome at everything. Nothing wrong with that. Although getting to that point should be a Herculean effort, along the lines of what Phaser said. The "home" stations of Serco, UIT, Itani, and posssibly TPG & Corvus to a lesser extent, should be larger, more functional, higher-tech stations.

Since we have limited stations at this point, it's inevitable that many of them will go this "mega-station" route. Until we can make our own stations, I don't think it will pay to have ultra-specialized stations in the long run. But personal and guild stations should be a long-term goal.

I've never played X-Com, I'd better get on it. Does it run on a Mac? Hrm....

I strongly agree with johnhawl, the crafting, prototyping and construction should unequivocally NOT be taken away from the actual player. The players should be the "designers" and the "conceptual" drive behind crafting. It's OK to let "Station engineers" or "robotic construction" take over when the original blueprint design is safe in the datapad.

johnhawl said ...it would still be nice, to go out, mine some ore, take it to a refinery, grind it down, smelt it, cool and shape it into usable sheets of metal or other part configurations, then take it to a different station that has an assembly line, put in my components, have it generate the next level component, take that to a finishing work station to equip the electronic components, then take it to the ship yard and have it equipped to my ship or a friends for that matter, and away we go. That is the fun part to me...

EXACTLY my opinion. EXACTLY. Now, the point of this discussion is: how do we make that work?

Whether we make crafting "mini-games" (like my "Welding a bead properly in a realtime twitch situation" idea) or not can be put aside for now. (Even though I would LIKE the game to have twitch-based crafting, just like combat in V-O, to become good you will have to have real-world skill.) If it's not the PLAYERS doing the crafting, experimenting, tinkering, and then building great industrial assembly lines to churn out their wares, then what is the POINT?

I envision that possibly in the future, there MAY be people who will play Vendetta-Online and never leave the station, they will be a member of a guild and work solely as support staff, crafting away, making the best Phase Blasters in the galaxy. That kind of personality is not attracted to V-O right now since it's all about combat at the moment. But, from my old days of playing that other game I mentioned ("A Tale in the Desert"), there are MANY MANY MANY people who will play a MMORPG game that is basically just a big crafting engine, grinding away to make the next level "thing", with absolutely NO PvP whatsoever.

There needs to be some limiting factor on creating every possible "uber" item. Because the JOURNEY towards those items is the POINT of crafting. (It's not the destination, it's the journey!) Once you reach the pinnacle and you have crafted the perfect item of every possible piece of equipment, there is no more interest, and the game is back at square one, as if the crafting system did not exist, because everyone will eventually have the "perfect" item of every piece of equipment, along with enough money to buy everything they ever wanted.

I would suggest that the limiting factor should be twitch-based crafting (Yes, Phaser, with simple "mini-games"). I would be happy with other limiting factors, such as: (And these are just wild ideas)

1. A limited amount of level 20 crafting people are allowed ingame, one of those people has to die or quit before there can be another level 20 crafter person.

or

2. Your crafting levels are temporary. Upon reaching the required resource gathering or goals that give you the level, you only retain the level for a limited period of time. In order to create a Valkyrie Mk. V, you would need to work HARD and continuously to obtain the level 10 crafting necessary in order to do it. If you stopped working, your crafting levels would drop all the way back down to zero if you don't maintain your levels. If you ran out of "level 10" crafting skill while working on your valk, it is ruined and you must start over.

or

3. Your character is created with levels that you can set, but never modify ingame. You could create a character that is good at crafting, or a character that is good at piloting. These levels are mutually exclusive. For example, a character could have crafting level 20 and piloting level 5, or crafting 25 and piloting 0, or crafting 5 and piloting 20. These would be set permanently and not be modifiable, and would apply across all your alts. You would have to have another account (a small penalty, but hey it's something) in order to have a differently-oriented character.
(This last one is pretty lame but I'm running out of ideas here)

I am of the firm opinion that unless some kind of limiter is placed on the crafting, we will end up with the equivalent of a bunch of Level 80 Wizards sitting around in B-8 chatting about how boring things are.

Where did you come up with Wizards LeberMac? lol

"I envision that possibly in the future, there MAY be people who will play Vendetta-Online and never leave the station, they will be a member of a guild and work solely as support staff, crafting away, making the best Phase Blasters in the galaxy. That kind of personality is not attracted to V-O right now since it's all about combat at the moment. But, from my old days of playing that other game I mentioned ("A Tale in the Desert"), there are MANY MANY MANY people who will play a MMORPG game that is basically just a big crafting engine, grinding away to make the next level "thing", with absolutely NO PvP whatsoever."

This is sort of what I've been looking for, though I do enjoy pvp, it's not my primary appeal to VO. What is and what I'm waiting for is exactly what Leber just described. I would be this support tech in a guild, I've been a master blacksmith and made armor for servers before, and it's nice to be needed, cause true crafters are hard to find. Not everyone is made to do this kind of work and we should support diversity not squash it.

As far as your ideas for limiters, I think you've gone a bit too extreme. Either make the supplies neccesary for the "uber" items hard to get, like drops from leviathans or something that can only be aquired after a long multi-part mission. That way it takes a guild to craft just one item. Thus it takes much more team work to outfit a guild with uber items. Plus even if you have them, that does not guarentee that you will not loose it in your next battle so I dont' think we need extremely hard set rules as to who can craft and how many "good" crafters can be on the server at one time.

In my mind, the best way to make crafting hard is to add failure to each possible crafted item. I know it's been said that everyone hates that idea, but it's the only one that really makes any sense. In large factories, there is hole departments set aside to do quality control, where they remove unsatisfactory parts from end sale, in essence failed attempts to produce the item. Even in coin manufacturing in mints, they toss tons of coins that are misstamped. As you produce stuff successfully you would gain more xp towards you manufacturing license. As your able to create more upper teir items, the lower ones become trivial so you can't max your level by simply refining premium ferric or into pureified ferric ore. You would HAVE to go out and aquire those hard to find components and you'd have to get them in mass quantities to get any real xp increase thus making it VERY hard to get to a level 20 crafter, not impossible.

There could be different crafting licenses, BUT, you could only have one of them, so you'd have to choose which catagory to specialize in. Ore Refinement, Electronics, Assembly, R&D, etc. This would squash any one player from becoming the uber crafter, and give more meaning to having a guild of crafters working together.

ct said: I think the key to having a good economy is having ways in and out at every level. This means that you don't necessarily have to use your refined supplies to craft, but can sell them for a profit as well.
Right! Perhaps you only want to sell Ion Cores, and not make the whole Ion Cannon! Sure, as long as there is a market for that. If ctishman's Ion Cores are more convenient to buy than spending the time to make stuff on your own, then more power to ya.

I like the "grades" of ore idea very much. Perhaps add "ionized" ore as well, which is mined from within ion storms?

Perhaps instead of defined grades of ore, we could implement a 0-100 "Quality" scale acrosss the board on ALL widgets, and not just ores.
Raw ore is at 10% to 50% quality
Refined Ore is at 50% to 75% quality
Advanced ore is at 75% to 100% quality

And as far as widgets go, you could have an Ion Blaster Mk. I require a 50% quality Ion Core, an Ion Blaster Mk. II require a 65% quality Ion Core, and a Ion Blaster Mk. III require an 80% quality Ion Core.

The quality of the Ion core would be directly related to the quality of the original components that you put into it, so it will be important to start with VERY high quality original components.

Again, if you spcialize in different parts of the manufacturing process you will inevitable HAVE to sell your product to someone that can use it or sell to station for there supplies. If all you can produce is "x"cores and someone else is a weapons manufacturer you could set up contracts for bulk production between players as CT has suggested.

johnhawl said: ...make the supplies neccesary for the "uber" items hard to get, like drops from leviathans or something that can only be aquired after a long multi-part mission. That way it takes a guild to craft just one item...
Ooh, even better. I like the idea that an "epic" dropped item is not a pre-made gun or something "ready-to-equip", but merely raw materials required to craft some item.

I think that also what to DO with that bunch of material should NOT be told to the playerbase. Let them experiment with it. The players should not be told "If you kill a Levi, you get an "Orb of Hyperspace", which, when combined with 10 Heliocene and 5 XiRite Alloy in a Fusion Smelter gives you the "Trans-Warp Drive" which allows you to devwarp to any position anywhere instantly." BAD!
I think players should have to (by trial & error, and perhaps some educated guessing and blind luck) figure out how to make things on their own. It might take 100 attempts to make something with the material that a levi drops, but I have confidence in the persistence of the playerbase.

And I like the idea of failure when crafting. I do NOT hate that idea at ALL.

But instead of abject failure, I'd like to implement that "quality" rating I talked about earlier. If we implement the "Quality" rating, you can have a really good quality item if you use the best materials and ores, or you can make due with a low quality item. So failure would not create a pile of scrap, just a very low quality item.
For example: If you need an automobile, you can make a BMW 850 if you want-and if you have the time, skill and money. Or, if you want something basic you could settle for a Ford Contour.

"I think players should have to (by trial & error, and perhaps some educated guessing and blind luck) figure out how to make things on their own. It might take 100 attempts to make something with the material that a levi drops, but I have confidence in the persistence of the playerbase."

This is exactly what I ment by a skill tree for "R&D" as you attempt to make something new your R&D skill increases, so that after a while your more likely to successfully create a new item.

"But instead of abject failure, I'd like to implement that "quality" rating I talked about earlier. If we implement the "Quality" rating, you can have a really good quality item if you use the best materials and ores, or you can make due with a low quality item. So failure would not create a pile of scrap, just a very low quality item.
For example: If you need an automobile, you can make a BMW 850 if you want-and if you have the time, skill and money. Or, if you want something basic you could settle for a Ford Contour."

Instead of everyone flying around with substandard equipment, what if the failures could be resmelted and reused? That way you have some sort of quanity control and not a bunch of junkyard ships?

Yes, you learn and get better after failures. Sure! That's how you learn in real life!

Oh, sure, there can be a "Salvage" skill that allows you to take poor quality components and salvage the good stuff that went into making them.

Excellent.

Me & Mark must share a brain. Well, mostly me. 80/20?

here is an idea on how to limit crafting to prevent overflow of uber items:

why not limit player designed crafting to a trade-off balance sort of format. so by adding redundant tageting systems i can inpruve the auto aim or delay, but in doing so i worsen the power drain. this way player designed crafted objects are always better or worse more as a mater of opinion than anything els.

Then have legendary items dropped, by leviathins and as rewards for long missions be given in the form of an actual item. that way if you want to make more you will have to reverse engeneer it, and doing so caries a risk of failyer, and only allows you to set up 1 production line (unless you reverse engeneer more of them as you produce them)

then this can be further limited by having legendary items require extreemly hight quality parts and facilities (and therefor lisences and faction standing)

i don't think crafting lisences should figure into any sort of "virtual dice" sytem. instead i'd like to see crafting facilities and equipment be sold or rented only to those who have apropriat lisences and standing. (the only exception to this is guild owned stations where the guild leadership and only the guild leadership has direct controle over the station's facilities, and can set requirnments fro who can use what.

anything that has a % chance should depend on the quality of the parts and equipment used, and not on the level of the crafter.

Yes, I think everything tends to circle back to Phaser's tradeoff idea, it's simple and will work.

However it would be cool if with effort you COULD make items that were "uber". I think that's really what people want when they craft things. It's a reward for their skill in crafting.

It's a tough balance to find... and one that would have to be treated very carefully because it could easily break the game.

On the one hand, crafting an item has a higher opportunity cost than just buying one from the station, so you want to reward the player for their time... on the other hand you don't want to make these items so uber they will unbalance the game... because if anything history has taught us Players Will Find A Way To Break Things.

That's my biggest hesitation when considering any type of Research tree... if you can steadily improve on an item or blueprint over time, before you know it we'll have gauss cannons that deal 10k damage and fire ten times per second (okay, perhaps that's an exaggeration, but you see what I'm getting at). That is why I think every single improvement to the basic weapon types should come with an equal and opposite tradeoff, and the magnitude and nature of these tradeoffs should be limited. (Higher tech, or player skill or what have you, allows for larger and different types of tradeoffs).

Then you don't get some crafted items that are uber compared to others per se... you get some crafted items that are more highly and interestingly modified than others.

As a way to balance the "Research Tree" issue of overflowing UBER items, how's about this:

We're in a warring environment.. Itani doesn't want Serco to have the upper hand. Serco doesn't want Itani to have the upper hand. And god forbid the UIT have any kind of hand at all!

So, what happens if an Itani research station gets a little TOO advanced for Serco's liking? BLOW IT UP!!!!!

Make it a group mission... you gotta knock 'em down to protect your upper hand in these matters! That station churning out Level 15 Gauss Mk.XV SuperCannons is a big risk.

This could potentially give the cap ships something important to do!

Heck, even the HIVE might take notice when 3 players come in with Omega Beam cannons and start wasting Leviathans in minutes... thier logic could dictate a massive strike against a station.

Station blows up, research maybe lost unless you're sneaky and are keeping backup datapads somewhere safe, and balance is restored.

Even then, if you were the one who lost your station, getting production of your item back up and running will take lots of time and money... and even then, would you want to risk another massive strike?

Edit: This would be in addition to the basic trade-offs that have been discussed. I think research should still be implemented as a way to make the tradeoffs less drastic (eg. reduce the ratios of give and take)... certain weapons should only be able to be modified to a limit, and that limit, while not super-uber, should be pretty kickass anyway, as a payback for all that time and money you've spent researching.

:)

And to reply to John, Phaser and Leber's informative posts:

I guess I look at crafting from a different perspective than you guys do. Maybe you've had different MMO experience (eg. WoW or whatever) where you do the crafting yourself.

I don't disagree with that route AT ALL. However, from my point of view, I call that EXPERIMENTATION, and when I said Experimentation in my posts, that's exactly what I meant.

When I say RESEARCH, I think of contracting this work out to another station, or my own stations staff, so that I don't have to do it myself. Consider it an option or alternative to experimentation. Because I know there's going to be people who don't like trying to peice things together only to have it fail, or try and get something working in a 'mini-game'. I'd like to see RESEARCH as something LESS rewarding and MORE costly and time-consuming than Player Experimentation. This gives players the option of letting their research teams work on a component/item, freeing up the player to go fight in B-8 :)

- T.K.Jode

I like that idea! Station doing to well, it goes up on the mission list as a prime target for attack by oposing nation and hive, possibly even Akaneese and Pirates.

As far as Experimentation vs. Reasearch, sure I see where your coming from, and I agree. The "reasearch" team will be the ones that are giving you your blueprints on your datapads, they could be coming from Biocom, Valent, Xang Xi, etc. The experimentation would be swapping out different types of alloys, like a vismetal vs. a XiRite alloy vs. Steel, etc.

Having a strike mission on a station seems like a great idea at first. It sounds exciting and fun.

BUT. Put yourself in the shoes of the station owner.

You have invested hundreds of millions of credits and WEEKS of ingame time into your station, you've tried to keep its location secret, you have had to take some "premptive action" against some people who got too close to your station.

But someone finds out where your precious station is. As soon as you log off, they get their friends together and blast the crap out of your station. <poof> (Even if you have an armada of capships with Strike Force Bots buzzing around your station, players will ALWAYS defeat bots. ALWAYS.)

All your crafted items: gone
All your stockpiled resources: gone
All your equipment and widgets: gone
All your datapads & blueprints: gone

You have the ship you're in and some money. That's It.
After that, I'd rather quit the game and go play The Sims or something else lame, than rebuild ALL that WORK.

I say a BIG NO WAY to destructible stations, once they are established. I am willing to support (and encourage) a destructible station in its initial construction stages, but not after it has become a functional station. It's just too much to lose, and players just are NOT online enough to always be protecting their hard work.

not player owned stations, npc nation stations.

I agree that having your station destroyed is too harsh. However, I think your station should be potentially vulnerable to getting raided
http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/6352#79819
http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/11317
giving the station owner some cause to invest in station defenses.

Agreed
Complete destruction is harsh indeed

Raids would be better... ways to drop the tech level of the station. How that would be facilitated, I have no idea, that's for someone else to think up.

I'd like to see the station owners be able to a) Keep a strike force on hand, and b) Keep bot defenses on hand (Like a handful of Seekers + Arklan guardians). It would definitely be a worthwhile investment. Raiding a very advanced station should be impossible to do without a cap ship... it'd be a waste of time as you'd never be able to loot much of the station even with a Moth.

ON THE FLIP SIDE:
If stations cannot be destroyed, then EVERY sector in the universe will end up with a station at some point or another. We've got 30 sectors at the moment, with a 16x16 grid... that's like 7,680 sectors, then exclude suns, exclude sectors with stations in them, and you've got around 7,600 sectors. Ok, it'll take a long time for it to get full, but you know what I mean... it'll get crowded quick... Even if a playerbase of 600 people with 5 alts having stations, that's nearly HALF OF THE KNOWN UNIVERSE.

So maybe stations SHOULD be destroyable... but obviously you won't want to be left in the dust with a ship and a few bucks.

Solution: Nation Insurance! Owning a station should be like owning a house... you put insurance on it in case anything happens to it. I'd imagine for every tech level your station attains, the monetary WORTH of the station increases... so if your Level 10 station blows up, your insurance should cover a major portion of the money you've invested in it (I can't even fathom a number :P)

Oh, and 2 words... DERELICT STATIONS :D

Again, I don't think that a "player" should be able to own a station. Only "guilds" should be able to own stations. That will limit the number of stations. For the individual player, they should be able to choose at any of there nation stations, or a sub-faction corp (UIT) if they are "admired" to add a wing onto an existing station, thereby being protected by that stations defenses. Guilds have a much better chance of defending a complete stations, and have the resources to keep it afloat.

In other games you have to get a "plot" of land, in an already established "town". They can't simply go off and set up a home next to the best killing fields or near a great dungeon (sorry for the fantasy references, but they are all that apply that I know of). The players are bound to cities. So why not make players bound to stations that already exist?