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Ok - the general thinking here is to provide a vehicle for introducing player & economics driven crafting.
There's value in allowing crafting to me more dynamic, driven - boosting some aspects of a crafted item at the expense of others.

With the dawn of a new portal system and places to explore - there are opportunities to expand the horizons of Ayts - not just for combat but also for resources & crafting. The latter enables the former :)

The current plan system work well but it's static; producing identical items based on the mats being used - but I was thinking more along the lines of raw plans being dropped items from the new zones - these raw plans can be researched pushing the attributes of the plan into a specific direction.

The kind of directions I have in mind would allow things like better stats on the end result, while reducing the durability or reliability on the end result but there are many variations and it could lead to a new occupation for players.

The key aspect however is that the player decides which direction to push the plan - the end result would be a trade-able item that you or others could use to craft with. Player driven crafting with this kind of model would allow for a more dynamic environment in all sides of the game - allowing players to develop an edge that's more than just numbers & lvls.

Plans would degrade with use - having a limited number of prints or runs until they expired. One of the interesting aspects is that this would then allow the choice of mats that are used to vary to compensate or to enhance an attribute coming from a plan.

With a new type of plan comes new possibilities of enhancing crafting in another direction. Specifically I'm thinking about composite items - where a plan might produce a magic focus item, which can then be used to craft amps - this would open up crafter/market opportunities as well as unique items usable by players.

With this in mind the new zones could offer the supporting materials to the new system - allowing the basic ingredients to drop (maybe even the skills needed) and then a slow steady (and player driven) exploration of how the crafting system works. With the right design that included time & energy - this would also allow the devs to monitor & tweak over the following weeks to ensure an appropriate balance.

In terms of exploration - some of which have been touched upon in an earlier post - it might be interesting to have NPC outposts in the new lands - attackable by players and GH's lootable by players, allowing ad-hoc op-wars for precious resources. Which, of course, requires players to locate, prepare, attack & loot within a very narrow time frame. This in itself would help make the game more dynamic as people carefully pull together teams to tackle the objective - while calculating loot split & the risk ofc that those they are working with might renegade after the battle and run off with the riches.

This post is really a work in-progress - to push out the idea - munch over the general concept and to see if players can find some merit in the overall idea.

Look forward to hearing your feedback.

I had somewhat similar idea, but the feedback wasn't that positive :P

http://app.ryzom.com/app_forum/?page=topic/view/6808/6#6

Thanks for the link Tumbleweed - I did search but must have overlooked this one.
There are 2 main differences that I see:

1) The primary vehicle I'm looking to explore is degradable, use limited plans. Time/Effort to research, pushing the focus onto a commodity to drive economics & effort into an occupation based task. The general idea being about creative endeavours to explore/gather & then experiment. Using this approach you introduce a repeatable effort based task - you'll need to find the seeds of plans, research/push them in some way, craft the result until the plan degrades, then rinse & repeat.

2) Balancing the plan approach with mats - in a way that complements existing methods of crafting and working the stats of the end result. The stanza approach that you outline is a good idea and I think the specifics you outline would make a good basis if refocussed onto R&D of plans.

Aseeker --

I'm not understanding what you are going for here. Right now we have plans that have a VERY large number of possible permutations and tradeoffs depending on the particular mats or combination of mats that you use. You also have the addition of OP mats to the recipes for various weapons. These allow you to tune the final product to an amazing extent, and the use of armilo and rubbarn tools allow you to boost your final recipe even more.

Not all of the recipe interactions are obvious, and some are counter-intuitive.

Then you have the already available plans for NPC armor which are only achievable by great effort, are limited use and demand the investment of special materials that you can only get by dangerous expeditions to defeat the NPC's.

What makes your system different? What do you mean by Research? I'm not at all sure that we have reached the limit of research on what we currently have available for crafting.

I do see the opportunity for fresh materials (seeds, for instance, that have Desert resist as their primary, accessible only in the Inter Lands or mats that have new colors), but I don't understand your "plan" thing at all.

It's really about spicing up how the current plan system works.
You do have scope for playing with the stats on the end result by playing with the mats - but currently the plans are static with no variation apart from Quality which affects only the number of mats required.
OP plans aren't really any major change - the only difference is the use of an OP mat which limits the global availability of the number of items in the game- the end result is as predictable as all other plans.

The tools add a little spice but not much - and it's luck rather than skill.

By introducing variable op plans - which can affect stats, quality, number of mats needed, quantity of the output, etc and skill/effort driven - you provide more of an incentive for players to interact with the game, provide a time & resource sink - and with the plans being tradable items, you provide something that might help stimulate the economy. Later, allowing the OP plans to go the same route and by giving stats to OP mats, could provide more interesting combinations of OP mats - what would happen if you could combine bramble with some other op material...

Research - in the context of plans - providing a vehicle for adjusting the plan before you apply materials to the equation. As mentioned above - this could affect the number of materials, the type of slots currently being used and thereby expanding the leading edge of crafting.

Imagine being able to explore new lands and to find the seeds of crafting plans - the building blocks of what makes a plan - and then having to find, forage, kill, explore to find the components that then allow you to push a plan in a specific direction through a new occupation. As you lvl the occupation, gathering what's required and learning how to nudge the output of a plan in certain ways - balancing out quantity, quality, stats - and then sharing, trading or building out the item and seeing how the rich variation of the mats affect the stats of the end result.

It does increase the complexity - but it also allows for the crafting side to be expanded - in a way that boosts it as a profession - rather than an adjunct to forage. One of the problems with crafting & mats - as it currently stands is that when you have an optimal mix for an item - you're done. By allowing the front-end of the process, the plans to play a factor - you introduce some variation that's more unpredictable. Each time you'll need to re-examine how to achieve a more optimal result when you apply mats to the plan.

My thinking is to provide a way - time, effort, energy, imagination. I'm not looking for a change for the sake of change - but to find a way to introduce more spice into the activity. The ideas themselves are quite young and not fully formed - but more presented as a seed - with this type of approach how do you think it could be changed, adjusted to make crafting more dynamic?

So we already have changing the number of mats, which does affect the stats that can be achieved since you cannot have a 50-50 mix of seeds and nails if you are making basic or HQ jewels (for instance). The results are predictable (even with the advanced tools, they are predictable, just the chance of getting the result is not).

I submit to you that no crafter using high-rarity mats is going to use a plan that isn't predictable!

I think I understand what you are proposing now, learning a profession that allows you to (for instance) change the ratios of mats or add mats in a plan; changing HQ HA sleeves to take 12 wood, 10 resin 6 oil and 4 sap, instead of the current 10, 10, 6, 6. Or perhaps at higher levels the ability to add fiber/clothing to armor bits to put more mats into the plan. Have I interpreted your proposal correctly?

I don't see how you are going to make the mechanic so that the results are not capable of breaking the crafting game while making the results actually worth the effort of learning a whole new skill on top of crafting. Few enough people master crafting a few things, and even fewer master the recipes. Even those who have are often improvising the recipe when there aren't quite sufficient mats of the desired type/q/quality. This seems to me to be a major project in terms of effort by the devs, potential bugs and game balance issues, that will give a very few players something new to do.

In addition, how are you going to handle the models with this much variability? If a modified Fyros helmet continues to look like a Fyros helmet with only minor improvements in the stats, there's not going to be a big call for the new ones. (And if the stats are uber, then you've just broken part of the game.)

It's an interesting idea but I don't see it as likely to be implemented or implementable until Winchgate has a team of 20 devs and 5 modelers.

-- B

heh - well let's work from the bottom up.

Models:
I was thinking along the lines of modular models.
With the example of the helmet - make it a composite of x parts which are then assembled into the whole. With 2-3 slots and 2-3 items for each slot - you end up with 9 unique helmets before you think about applying textures. With the right architecture - the impact can be quite low on the designers & developers.

I'm thinking more of this being an addition to crafting - with the implementation of the new zones & exploration in the other thread. This shouldn't impact the regular crafting process in it's current form. Maybe later if it proves worthwhile - it could be expanded - but I don't anticipate that currently.

So you don't see how an approach that's been roughly outlined can provide any value to the game? Do you have any suggestions how something (roughly along these lines) might be altered so it did?
I appreciate the feedback - do you have any suggestions on how the idea might be changed for the better?

I think a balance can be achieved between predictable and unpredictable crafting - research and the application of mats to the occupation will reduce the unpredictability of the process - there will always been some variation in the output - but the application of the mats will be done via the existing process - it's essentially following the existing craft process once you have the researched plan. As such the crafting cycle post plan is completely predictable.

The number of mats used would be just one aspect you can influence - should you wish as the driver behind the research of the plan - you can chose to take it in a number of different directions.
What do you think would be useful/interesting aspects of plans that could/should be affected?

OK, I did not realize that you thought of this as an add-on rather than an expansion of current plans. (Though any crafting extension *will* affect the current crafting; it is inevitable.

I think you grossly under-estimate the complexity of putting "pieces" together to form a coherent whole in a model, especially when you are talking about three different kinds of armor (at 5 5 and 6 pieces each plus caster pants), 8 weapons, and amps (jewelry doesn't show up so no models needed and I'm ignoring range for the moment), then modeled to fit on four different races. On the other hand, a new look will be a big incentive for this to go forward. Many Atysians are style-conscious.

I also think you grossly under-estimate the amount of calculation that would be necessary to make sure that the variable plans that you suggest would not end up with a game-breaker uber weapon/armor.

However, even if that could be done, it still is going to give something to only a small portion of the Atysian population. I'm not saying it won't provide value, but that the cost/added value will be much higher even than adding a new type of mob (one model, some AI code and some animations plus the necessity of fitting it in somewhere).

I saw how new mats (with new colors and stats combinations) would definitely add to what crafters already do.

I think that if all that was found in the new lands (beyond the mats) was the ability to talk to some of these isolated tribes and learn their native crafts so that there was a new model set (not fancy combos) for armor and weapons that such would be sufficient to excite people to try it out. Not a new (complex) minigame, but just new plans, would be sufficient.


It seems to me that what you are aiming for here is game equipment development as a minigame. I'm not sure that's truly viable. If you have a limited number of pieces (even if they are pieces of pieces) you are going to be constrained in development. What makes heavy armor heavy? Is it number of Mats, which Mats are used or is it something else? What if I want to make a cloak? There's a lot of animation in a cloak, but everyone would want one.

It's not that you don't have good ideas here, Aseeker, but that I don't see them as feasible given the realities of the current dev staff.

I quite like Bittty's idea about even having some Tribes that could produce a new Crafting start, allowing a crafter to start building "Tribal" gear.

That seems like it could be implemented in a reasonable fashion. It could also mean that defeating a local NPC in their area gained "Faction Points" or something with them... so that plans could perhaps be "bought" from them with Faction Points rather than pure Crafting SP... or perhaps a certain mission must be completed for a specific plan. Specific Raw mats could be supplied from the Tribe, like "Generic Raw Mats" are supplied from Federal/Royal/Imperial/Dynastic Merchants...

I'd love to see a Tribe that could supply a shield plan, for instance, where the texture was mapped from your Guild Logo or perhaps some HA where Guild Logo was mapped onto back/front of chest piece...

I could see people being interested in building a "Team Kit" for PvP or OP battles I think.

Thanks for the thought-provoking discussion guys :)

Love the ideas - thanks for the feedback :)

Seek~