Just a quick note that I have created a blog site for my main The Secret World character. David “Daeyong” Young is a 28 year old Korean American who is currently enroute to bury his grandfather (and hapkido teacher) in Korea.
In previous posts, I’ve talked about the vast number of skills and combinations (decks) there of which can be used to customize your character’s skill sets. For background on this, I’d refer you to:
In reviewing some recent comments from developers and players at the PAX East conference, I’ve come across two things that have made me revise my model:
Each of the 9 weapons has an Elite Active and Elite Passive ability. However, in your build deck, you are only allowed one of each. I’ve made the assumption (which I feel is safe) that the elite abilities will be strong enough that one will want to have them included in your build deck. This has the following effects on your skill selections:
I’ve seen a couple of comments which go along these lines:
“There are 9 abilites in each cell of the skill wheel which alternate Active then Passive”
If this holds true, then the split of active to passive skills should be 5 to 4. So I’ve adjusted my respective pools using those numbers for now.
With this new information, my calculations break down as follows:
Select 1 of 2 Active Elite abilities, giving you 2 possible Active Elite combinations.
Select 6 of 60 Active Standard abilities, giving you 50,063,860 Active Standard Combinations.
Multiply and get 100,127,720 potential Active Builds
Select 1 of 9 Passive Elite abilities for 9 possible Passive Elite combinations.
Select 6 of 226 Passive Standard abilities for 168,488,720,400 possible Passive Standard combinations
Multiply to get 1,516,398,483,600 potential Passive Builds
Multiply the Active Builds and the Passive Builds and you get 151,833,522,774,325,000,000 potential character builds. Using the 1 millionth of 1 percent number that I’ve used to filter for viability, that still represents 1,518,335 potential viable builds!
While each bit of information that we get reduces the raw numbers of builds that we can use, I think it stands to reason that this number is still staggeringly diverse and should allow for an extremely high degree of customization for our TSW characters.
For those of you who wold like to disect my math model, I’ve uploaded my latest version of the spreadsheet as well.
Excel 2007/2010 format: TSW-SkillBuilds-v3
Excel 97-2003 format: TSW-SkillBuilds-v3 (2003)
This isn’t a post so much as a notice that in my links section, I’ll be linking to forum topics and other blogs / sites that have information about the numbers and math behind The Secret World. I’ll try to keep the link section as up to date as I can.
This is actually an update to my previous post Balance, Diversity, and The Secret World. Please take a look there for the basic information about how character abilities are built into a “deck” for your character.
In a dev blog entry from Martin Bruusgaard, lead designer for The Secret World, Martin shares some additional information about how abilities work, the syngergies between them, and refines the numbers slightly. Read the full article at: Martin Bruusgaard explains character development
For purposes of the math I’m about to do, the salient points are:
Total abilities a character can unlock: 525
Starter skills (not associated with the weapons in the game) : 3
Weapons (used to categorize abilities): 9
Abilities / Weapon: 58
A character can have up to 2 weapons equippped. The seven active abilities in the character’s deck are selected from the pool of abilities for those two weapons.
Passive abilites are not restricted to the equipped weapon, and therefore any passive ability can be selcted to be part of the 7 passives each character can have in their ability deck.
My main assumption is that the split between active and passive abilites is 50/50 and consistent across weapons. If I get additional information about the ability design, I can revisit this to remove said assumption.
If I can select 7 abilities out of a pool of 58 (2 weapons * 29 active abilities each), then there are 300,674,088 different combinations of active abilities to choose from.
Since I select 7 abilities out of a pool of 264 total passive abilities, there are 16,366,799,252,232 different combinations of passive abilities to choose from.
To get the total potential builds, we multiply the number of active ability combinations by the number of passive ability combinations. This means there are 4,921,072,438,643,940,000,000 total potential character builds. If you’re having issues counting the commas, that’s nearly 5 million trillion potential character ability decks!
Now, gamers know that all builds are not created equal. It wouldn’t do any good to have a build where all of my passive abilities are improving conditions that my active abilities can’t take care of. Viability numbers are often a point of contention. I’ll decide that only 1 trillionth of 1 percent ( 1 / 100,000,000,000,000 ) would be good enough to be considered “viable” by most gamers.
In that case, from our pool of 4,921,072,438,643,940,000,000 builds, we’d be reduced to “only” having 49,210,724 that actually work. In other words there would still be over 49 million ways for you to build your character’s ability decks which would be useful to play the game. And that’s assuming that only 1 in 100 trillion builds were useful!
Ok, Karl, the math is mind boggling. Even the government doesn’t consider those types of numbers. But what does it mean to game play?
Well, one of the fears that MMO gamers often express is ”Will the classes be balanced?” This is especially true for Player verses Player (PvP) players. Since they don’t want to choose a Warrior only to discover that Rangers are kicking their arse each time they step on to a battle field.
The beauty of a system like what Funcom is using for The Secret World is that they don’t HAVE to balance classes. They don’t even really have to balance abilities. If it turns out that one of the Hammer abilities is really good, any player can pick that ability up and use it too.
And with almost 5 million trillion ways to build a charcter, I still say that I have a really hard time believing that there will be a character build that is SO overpowerful that there’s no way for another player to counter it.
I’ve been a member of The Older Gamers for many years now. Recently I returned to them as I started playing Star Wars: The Old Republic. A discussion sparked in the main SWTOR that got me to thinking.
One of my fellow TOG members was commenting about how when he started playing MMORPG’s with games like Everquest, Asheron’s Call, and Dark Age of Camelot it seemed that what your fellow players thought of you mattered more than it does today. In particular he mentioned some instances of having a chest ninja looted from him while clearing out the defenders, and patienly waiting for a respawn of a quest mob only to have another player try to swoop in and take it from him at the last minute.
He posed the question as to whether the idea of fairplay and being polite to your fellow gamer is dead or not.
Several opionions were voiced about how the targetting of MMO’s to the mass market has led to an abundance of players who got into the MMORPG hobby without learning the rules of ettiquette the rest of us used to take for granted.
I added the following to the discussion.
First, I think a contributing factor to the fact that many players don’t care about their rep anymore is that we’ve dumbed down the levelling curve as well. When I started MMO’s 10 years ago (with Anarchy Online) if you had a max level character, you probably put 6 months or more of hard work into making that happen. It was something to be really proud of to walk around at level cap.
The idea of rolling a new alt to avoid your reputation was PAINFUL. You cared about that character because you’d lived with them for the last half year.
Now when people can power level to cap in 3 or 4 weeks (or faster for the truly extreme), the idea of ditching a character and starting over isn’t a big deal.
Second, when a lot of us started this MMO hobby, we started as roleplayers. In my AO days, I cared about what people thought of Katpaws and Dooley. For the first 2 years I played, I didn’t tell anyone about the person behind the character. I cared about how people viewed my alter ego. It was important to me that people had good opinions of them and I took pride when I would hear about how helpful Dooley was or what a good storyteller Kat was.
A lot of players today are coming from FPS games or single player games on consoles. As most roleplayers know, the player who truly cares about the character they see on the screen is a vanishing portion of the population of a server. When people stop caring about how their in-game persona is viewed, it’s much easier to justify how they play with “It’s just a game”.
In the end, while pondering why the lack of fairplay is occuring is interesting, but there really isn’t very much we as players can do about it. After all the limits of our control are very sharply defined. They begin and end with ourselves. So I guess for us Old Guard folks that remember how things used to be, all we can do is act as examples to our fellow players and hope that maybe by demonstrating another way we can influence others to at least consider their actions.
As I mentioned almost a year ago in my The Balance Myth post, I’m not sure gamers really want complete balance as much as they want to make sure that no powers / skills are so overwhelming that there is no defense against them. Likewise they’d like to make sure that whatever character they are playing always has a way to be useful in the situations they’re playing in.
Funcom has talked extensively about the freedom of progression in the way that skills are handled in their upcoming The Secret World MMORPG. From time to time, people have asked on the public forums about balance issues with this type of system. My standpoint is if the above guidelines are adhered to (no overwhelming / no counter powers and make sure I don’t totally gimp myself with my choices) that the shear diversity of options will handle the overall balance “issue”.
I’ve posted a few times in these threads about the math behind my stance, but I figured I’d add it here as well so people can truly see how diverse your choices will be.
Funcom has said that they plan to have over 500 skills in the skill tree. Players can freely choose to purchase whatever skills they would like to have. There is a progression of sorts within the branches of the skill tree. So if I’m purchasing skills in the Fire Magic branch, I have to buy the first skill before I can buy the second skill, and so on. These skills are unique; so I’m not talking about buying Fireball 1, then Fireball 2, then Fireball 3. A fireball is a fireball whether you’re just starting out or have maxed out your skill points. It will be possible (given enough time) to earn enough xp and skill points to purchase all the skills in the game.
Now, even though you can have up to 500+ skills, you can only have 7 active and 7 passive skills that are selected at once. They have compared this to building a deck in a trading card game. You’ll be able to save these templates and load them again; so if you have a tank build that you really like, you can save that, swap to DPS for the PvP battle you’re entering, and then reload the tank build for the raid this weekend.
Although Funcom has said there will be over 500 skills (and word from the current beta is that there are more than that right now), let’s go with the 500 number. It’s daunting enough.
We don’t know exactly how those will break down between active and passive skills, but let’s say that it is 50% active and 50% passive. That means there are 250 potential active skills and 250 passive skills.
While you have to purchase skills in order, selecting them for your build is not order dependent; so from a statistics / mathematical standpoint, we’re talking about combinations, not permutations.
( If your statistic math skills are a little rusty, this site does a good job of explaining the difference and how they are calculated: Combinations and Permutations )
Let’s take each active/passive combinations first. Selecting 7 of 250 potential skills means that there are 11,126,241,217,000 different ways to select your 7 active skills and 11,126,241,217,000 to select your 7 passive skills.
Since the selection of active and passive skills are independent, we multiple the two numbers to arrive at how many potential builds are possible. Ready for this?
There are 123,793,243,618,870,000,000,000,000 different ways that you could select 7 active and 7 passive skills from the pool of 500!
Ok, I know what you’re probably thinking. What if I select 7 shotgun skills, but all my 7 passive skills do is buff cold damage. I’m really wasting that build. So that number is crazy.
I agree with you.
So let’s say that only 1% of all those builds are actually viable and effective. Then we’re left with only 1,237,932,436,188,700,000,000,000 potential builds.
Still too high? Yeah, probably so. So let’s say that only 1 millionth of 1 percent (0.000001%) of those builds were effective. What do we have now?
1,237,932,436,188,700,000 potential builds!
In words, that’s 1.2 million trillion builds you could choose from. That’s a number even bigger than the government understands!
With that staggering number of potential builds, I find it hard to believe that there will be one killer skill deck for which there is no counter. But I acknowledge that the belief stems from my premise at the start … that there are no skills created which do not also have effective counter skills. In other words, if I stock up on fire magic, my opponents should be able to stock up on fire resist skills.
My concern in this system is not balance. It is how do I build one of these skill decks without building one of those 99.999999% of the builds that aren’t considered viable? This is where I hope that Funcom is going to help us out. I’d like to see things work in 2 ways.
In-game when I’m selecting skills, it would be nice if the UI suggested complementary skills for me. Don’t force me into those choices. I may be choosing passive skills that provide defensive bonuses even though my active skills are all fire damage. But help me by pointing out that if all I have are shotgun and fire magic, choosing a passive skill that buffs cold damage output wouldn’t be a good idea.
Secondly, Funcom has said that we’ll be able to save these “decks” as templates and reload them later. So if I create a good tank build, but my party needs DPS for the upcoming PvP battle, then I can save my tank, load my DPS and party on. Then on the weekend when we’re going to do the new 10-man raid, I can reload my tank build without having to remember how it works.
This is great, but I hope that they go one teensy step further. I’d love to see it that when I save that build I can either take the build file and upload it to a forum or website, or even simply if there was a code assigned to the build that other people could type in to load the same skills on their character, that’d work too. This would let the community work together on creating effective builds for the various situations they’ll find themselves in.
I think the math stands for itself in saying that the amount of ways that you’ll be able to build your character in The Secret World should allay most concerns about the balance of power. As long as Funcom helps us control the beastly levels of diversity, players shouldn’t have any concerns about their character’s ability to participate in whatever aspects of The Secret World they choose.
I’m really looking forward to seeing this work in practice as it has the potential to change how game developers view our character’s progression.
If you’d like to play with my numbers (adjust the numbers of skills, the split between active and passive, the percent of viable builds), I’ve uploaded the Excel spreadsheet that I used to do the math for me. Feel free to have fun.
TSW Skill Builds (Excel 97/2000/XP)
TSW Skill Builds (Excel 2007/2010)
So I have started to get back into 3D graphics lately. It’s been almost a year and a half since I’ve done anything in this. Currently I’m trying to work in Carrara 8 from DAZ 3D. C8 is a full featured 3D package with modeling, animation, etc. and it supports the Poser / DAZ Studio characters and other content. I like the program, but am finding it hard to convert how I thought about my images in DAZ Studio over to C8.
My latest challenge was trying to work with Stonemason’s Streets of Asia set in C8. Stonemason is a great environmental content provider and supports DAZ Studio really well. But as with most things in 3D graphics, what works in one program doesn’t work in another. Or at least not the same way. The case I’m looking at here is trying to get the displacement maps which worked great in DS to work as wll in C8.
I posted a question on DAZ’s Carrara discussion board about this: http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=169768
I setup the shot I wanted to do in C8 in DAZ Studio 3. I added Streets of Asia and a single distant light to simulate the sun. For the purposes of this experiment, I hid the ivy that is normally on the left side of the opening in the Ached Wall that is part of the courtyard. The following image shows how it looks in DS3 (click to see it bigger).
In particular, note how the writing is carved into the walls and the stones in the lower left and right corners have depth to them.
I created a new scene in C8 and imported Streets of Asia into it. I adjusted the default distance light and camera to match my DS setup as closely as possible. I hid the ivy here too and hit render. The following image shows what it looks like by default.
See how flat the wall looks? The stones in particular look like they are painted onto the wall (which in fact they are in 3D speak, just not how they should look in the final image).
Being somewhat obstinate, I ignored some of the advice given in the thread I referenced. My thought was “Stephan created this with displacement in mind, I need to get that to work.”. So I loaded his displacement map into the shader, made sure displacement was enabled and hit render. I got the following image.
Believe it or not, there is a little difference between the two, but you have to look REALLY closely. You can crank up the amplitude of the displacement, but all that does is bring to light one big difference between C8 and DS.
DAZ Studio automatically subdivides most surfaces. Especially when bump or displacment maps are applied. These added polygons and vertices allow DS to increase the density of the mesh for rendering and improve the fidelity of things like the displacement effect. Carrara doesn’t do this by default, but you can turn it on surface-by-surface in the shader room. So, I turned on subdividing in the shader settings at the default level of 2 passes, and got the following result.
Better, but you see the grooves in the lower left part of the wall? That’s because the wall is made of polygons that radiate from the central opening. Clearly 2 passes isn’t enough. Now C8 warns you that each pass of subdivision can add up to 4 times as many polygons. Since I’m just doing a single image and don’t have to worry about the computational cost of doing that for each frame of an animation, I’m ok with whatever it takes to get the image I want. The following series shows how sliding subdivision passes up to 4, 8 and 10 (maximum) improves the results.
4 Passes
8 passes
10 passes
Interesting to me that the application of Stephan’s displacement map in C8 seems to be picking up some noise in the texture that DS didn’t see or pay attention too. You can see it especially in the pits and bumps on the stones in the lower left.
Other than the noise, using 10 passes (which took about 2 minutes on my computer) clearly gets decent results. I could probably clean up the noise myself in GIMP or something, so I seem to have solved how to get Displacment to work in Carrara.
Most people would probably declare the 8 or 10 pass renders “good enough” and go on. But I’m still not totally happy that I don’t have the DS image replicated in C8. So I decided to try loading the displacement map directly into C8′s bump channel (and turn off Displacement). Rendering using the default bump settings got me the following image.
If you’re wondering where the bump is, don’t worry, so was I. 
So I cranked up the bump amplitude to 50% then to 100% with the following results.
Bump @ 50%
Bump @ 100%
So it’s not bad. The noise I menitoned earlier is even more obvious here, though. So the image would need to be cleaned up some. Even the 50% render might be “good enough” for the texturing of the wall, but one thing that I really wanted to see was the shadowing of the stones in the lower corners of the wall, and bumping by iteself doesn’t really get me there.
If you read the thread I linked above (or if you started there and came here), you’ll see many people mentioned using Normal Maps instead of Displacement or Bump Maps. Normally those are created by adding details to a high-polygon version of an object and then using tools in a 3D program to compare the high-density model with the low-density model and figure out how the polygon normals would be tweaked on the low-density model if it actually had the details in the high-density version.
I don’t have a high-density model to create a normal map with; however there are other tools available. As Age of Armour points out in the thread I linked at the beginning, there are filters for both Photoshop and Gimp which will convert a displacement map to a normal map. I tried the Gimp one, but wasn’t too happy with the results. There is, however, another option. The freeware program called XNormal also has a converter. I tried that one and go better results from it.
I re-ran the same bump channel tests as above, but instead of using the texture map, I used a normal map in the bump channel. The results are shown in the following series of images:
Normal @ 18% (default)
Normal @ 50%
Normal @ 100%
It definitely seems to look better to my eyes than using the displacement map in the bump channel directly. It isn’t picking up as much of the “noise” in the texture file, probably because XNormal automatically ignored some of it when I processed the file.
So, I decided to see what happens when I go above 100% strength. The following images are at 125%, 150%, 200% bump strength with the bump channel configured with the XNormal normal map file.
Normal @ 125%
Normal @ 150%
Normal @ 200%
For my purposes, even at 200% I think the normal map is giving me the depth of texture I wanted on the wall without adding a bunch of random holes and bumps that I didn’t. Again I could probably improve my results by filtering the displacement map a little to remove some of the unwanted noise before processing through XNormal, but I’m approaching the “good enough” stage where I have to admit that pushing much further would be to fix individual pixels in the final image which nobody but me would notice.
Well, if I’d just taken the advice at face value, the experiment wouldn’t have been necessary. But for me it sometimes helps when I know WHY something is the best way beyond just “the experts say so”. If you read my whole experiment, I hope this has helped you some too.
If you go back to the original thread, you’ll see Age of Armour suggested another enhancement to the process I used. Basically after converting the Displacement Map to a Normal Map using XNormal, I pulled the converted file into GIMP. Then I duplicated the layer, performed a 2px by 2px gaussian blur on the copy and set it to Overlay. I then made 2 more copies of that layer. There is no Bump Map for this texture; so I just left it at that. The resulting image shown below has my manipulated Normal Map file applied at 100% in the Bump channel of the shader for the wall. I think it’s pretty much perfect and just what I was hoping to achieve.
In the last 2 weeks, I was at my dad’s side as he passed away and spoke at his memorial service. I say this not for sympathy sake, but to simply say that my thoughts this morning are more philosophical in nature than typical MMO design related.
I have often told people that in my opinion the greatest lie we tell ourselves is “I don’t have time for…” The reality is that each of us have the same 24 hours in a day. And we each make choices about how we spend those hours. The way we choose to spend those hours, however, does say something about what is important to us.
Now in the past when I’ve said this to someone, I’ve heard things like “I don’t have a choice, I have to go to work.” To which I reply “Of course you have a choice. You could choose not to go to work. But then you may lose your job, be unable to pay your bills, etc. The truth is that you’ve decided that paying your bills, buying food, and such is more important to you than not going to work.”
For myself, I have always maintained that I need a certain level of leisure time in my day. I’ve found that if I don’t have some sort of release for the stresses of my day that I can become so tense and frustrated that I become less able to focus on the tasks at hand and eventually my health even suffers.
I think that most people benefit from some “down time”. Whether that is watching TV, reading a book, painting, sewing, carpentry or playing computer games.
I have had some people (mostly family members) argue that it is wasted. They assert that time spent on frivolous things like computer games could be spent more wisely on other pursuits. Basically, the argument goes that if I spent the hours that I normally spend on gaming learning something new I would somehow be a better person.
I won’t dispute that learning a new language, studying some new software system for my job, or some other endeavor along those lines would have benefits. And it is hard sometimes to argue logically that those benefits would be outweighed by any therapeutic benefit to playing games.
I guess the matter comes to how much “down time” is really needed? While I hold to my previous statement that I do need some time to decompress, I can also be aware enough to know that sometimes I have used that as an excuse to overindulge. It can be the same as anything that people do for enjoyment.
Having a glass of wine with dinner because you like it and it helps relax you after a long day is different than drinking a whole bottle of wine every night. Or having a bowl of chocolate ice cream for dessert is different than eating a whole quart every day.
Anything we like and enjoy can become an obsession that can hurt us if we allow it to.
In the end, the question of whether you are wasting time or not is a personal one. I guess one way that I use to gauge it is whether I am using time playing games that should be spent on other things that I should be doing. For instance, are dirty dishes piling up and attracting flies because “I don’t have time to wash them”, but I do have time to login and check my auction house sales? Or am I re-wearing dirty socks because I didn’t get around to doing laundry this week, but I managed to ding level 50 last night?
I guess that I’m saying that for me, choosing to play games instead of studying the latest Microsoft Exchange release notes is a choice I can live with. I only start to feel like I’m wasting time with games when I am sacrificing my own or my family’s health and well-being due to too much time in games.
I guess there is no real “point” to this other than to express some of what I’ve been thinking about over the past few days. And maybe to encourage you to think about how you are spending your time as well. Thanks for reading. I’ll get back to talking about my views on game design issues sometime soon.
I recently received a note from Lodestar (one of the frequent posters at The Secret World forums) talking about how he feels like he’s becoming somewhat disenchanted with games in general and MMO’s in particular. He posited the question, are we (as a whole) becoming more jaded? Is it really getting harder to get us excited about “The Next Great Thing”?
As I thought about this for myself, I think there are three factors at work here. One is personal experience / perception. The other is technology is edging toward the “So what?” plateau. And then there is the WOW factor.
One of the things I have noticed over my 10+ years of MMO gaming is that people tend to really fall in love with their first game. Every other game usually ends up being compared to the first one that they REALLY loved playing.
For me, my first MMO was Anarchy Online. I started playing AO a couple months after the launch date (lucky for me I missed some of the technical issues they had). I still remember spawning for the first time in West Athen Backyard 3 (a place I still visit in-game for some nostalgia). I remember how impressed I was with the graphics, and then realizing that most of the characters I saw around me were connected to other real people elsewhere in the world. It was a sense of wonder and awe that I haven’t ever felt since.
It has been my position that many people who move from game to game are trying to find that feeling of wonder again. We want to be blown away to the point where we forget that we’re sitting in a chair in front of a keyboard and we’ve found another world that we want to visit over and over again.
The problem is, that I’m not sure that it’s truly possible to regain that sense of awe. As we move from one game to another, things that were new to us before become “Oh, that’s just like such-and-so in the other game.” I’ve played most of the major MMO releases since 2001. And while some have captured my attention for a month or two, there was never that same feeling that I had with AO. In fact, I just recently started playing AO once again and am having fun back there with my old guild.
I remember reading a technology futurist talking about HDTV and the prospect of having a 2 meter screen in your living room. The pundits were talking about how great it would be to have a theater like experience in your own home. He took a different slant that eventually such technology would lead the consumer to a “so what?” mentality. They’ve seen theater screens before. If they want to see a huge picture with great resolution, they’ll pay for a ticket. The value of such home entertainment for the average consumer may be overhyped.
I feel that we’re approaching such a plateau in computer graphics and game engines as well. The difference between playing the very latest Unreal engine based game and what I played in 2001 when I started playing AO is one of degrees. It isn’t a revolution anymore.
Particle effects, water ripples, reflections, lighting models, etc. are all well and good, but we’re talking about refining what we’ve seen before. And even though we can acknowledge that what we do live today in-game used to require massive rendering farms just a few years ago, we’ve seen these graphics before. Pixar and the other studios have spoiled us with great looking graphics in movies for years. The fact that we’re seeing them on our PC screens in a live game is cool, but that coolness wears off pretty quickly.
For myself, I’m finding less and less to get excited about with in-game footage of game engine updates. The animation may be a touch smoother or the water effects may be a little more realistic, but it isn’t so much of a change that I’m like “Wow! I have to get that as soon as I can!”
Whether you are a particular fan of World of Warcraft or not, I think it would be remiss not to acknowledge what Blizzard has done to the genre over these past 6 years. WoW 2010 may have refined the traditional fantasy based MMORPG formula to the pinnacle. Any fantasy game today must be compared to WoW whether they want it to be or not.
While games like Age of Conan or Aion or Rift may offer a few unique twists, at the end we’re looking at using swords and spells to fight fantasy creatures for quest givers, all trying to grind for levels and loot. PvP aspects may give us some reason to want better gear, but they are seldom so game changing that they can serve as a purpose all to themselves.
We can argue all we want about whether a new MMO needs to be a “WoW killer” or even “WoW also-ran” to be successful or not. See my friend Craig’s blog (The Numbers Game) for some interesting discussions about the numbers game MMO’s get dragged into. But the design, features, level of polish, etc. of any new MMO will certainly be compared to WoW.
So these are the three reasons that I see where the hardcore gamer may be getting a bit frustrated with the latest round o MMO’s (and games in general). Would love to hear why some of you think about your own disenchantment.
Sorry that it’s been a while since my last posting. Just went through a bit of a change as I switched jobs and such. Life needed to calm down a little so I can think and write again.
Today I wanted to write about a topic that’s dear to me in MMORPG’s … crafting. I think many MMO designers are still struggling to figure out how to address this area and I have some thoughts on what works and what doesn’t.
First I wanted to talk about why people like to make stuff in games in the first place. The way I see it, there are three primary motivators:
Just like there are levels of interest in things like raiding or PvP combat, there are levels of interest in crafting as well. Casual crafters want something easy and fun. Hardcore crafters are usually more interested in depth and the utility of the things they do. The things that make a hardcore crafter happy (like skill based crafting and a challenging process) will probably turn off a casual crafter. So designers need to decide from the get-go which way they’re heading.
You could even go whole hog this direction by allowing me at character creation time to specify that my class is Craftsman and then not have any combat skills associated with him. This is one thing that I liked about Star Wars Galaxies (even post-NGE). BUT! If you’re going to do that, you better make sure that my character has enough crafting stuff to do so that I can keep him interesting.
But understand, that as a crafter, a casual system isn’t likely to hold my attention. So if you think that adding an easy / simple crafting system to your game is going to attract those of us who love to make stuff, well put your efforts elsewhere because you’re probably wasting your time.
I absolutely despise systems where my crafting skill is somehow tied to my combat skill levels. Why can’t I decide that my character wants to be a master armorer but has no interest whatsoever in actually donning a suit of plate mail and battling the minions of evil? Please Mr. Designer, forcing the hardcore crafter to go out and fight and finish quests and stuff is torture. Please let us spend our evenings at our beloved forge hammering out our latest masterpiece. You wouldn’t dream of forcing the hardcore raiding player to spend time brewing up potions just so they can have access to the next dungeon they want to play in, why do you treat us that way?
Next on my pet peeves is when I have to make 20 swords that nobody wants (more on crafted items in a bit) just so that I can build my levels up to the point where I’m making things they actually do want. Look, everyone knows that for the first 10-25% of a character’s leveling lifetime they are mostly relying on dropped weapons and armor. They don’t need anything my crafters are making at that point. So rather than having me making a bunch of stuff nobody cares about, why not have me making my tools, or forming the base materials that I’ll need later on? Why not make it so that I feel like my character is actually learning his trade as he’s leveling?
Once I’m past that, making a single item should take enough time that granting me some significant experience doesn’t seem like a hand out. If it takes me 15 minutes to make a sword, making that worth 1/6 or 1/8 of a level isn’t too Monty Haulish. If the process of making a sword requires that I form the iron bar for the blade, sharpen it, form the hilt, pommel and crossguard, and assemble it into a whole, then 15 minutes won’t seem like a grind.
Crafted items need to be melded into the overall item design for the game. Tacking them on as an afterthought almost always ends up making them cheap and uninteresting. I’d like to see tiers of crafted items mixed into the overall item plan. From least to most powerful:
Yes, even as a crafter, I think that the players who dedicate their time and energy to taking on the toughest challenges also deserve to have the best weapons. I’m ok with my stuff being one step down from the ultimate.
Raw material gathering is an issue that is hard to address properly. The “gathering node” method is interesting in that it makes you get further and further out in the world. But as a crafter, you’re moving back toward forcing me to also be a fighter. If you go the SWG route and make it so I’m seen as non-aggressive by the mobs, it breaks down the world believability. Also node stealing often becomes an issue if crafting gets to be popular.
One option has been to expect the economy to be such that raw materials are supplied by the adventuring players and consumed by the crafting players. But this can end up skewing the economy to where materials are so rare that the crafter has to spend more to make an item than it’s worth on the market.
My solution would be to have a commodity market. The market (run by NPCs) would buy raw materials from the gathering players and would sell to the crafters. The prices of these materials would fluctuate based on supply and demand. The market would never run out of stacks of material (presumably they have non-player sources that keep a base inventory) but the more that players sell to them, the lower the prices go. Likewise the more of a material that is purchased, the higher the cost rises. The game designers could then set floor and ceiling prices on commodities. A feedback loop from the finished item prices on the auction house could be used to keep prices fair to the crafters.
Another thing that I liked from SWG’s crafting was in the ship building craft. As an engineer focused on building ship parts, I could decide if my weapon did more damage / was faster firing / had greater range / etc. Each positive also had a corresponding negative; so I had to balance my choices. As a consumer of such crafted items, I started to know which vendors made the engines that I liked and which I bought my weapons from, etc. As a crafter, it was very nice to be able to make my items unique even though I was using the same materials and blueprints as everyone else.
( As an aside, one of my favorite RP experiences in SWG was when I entered the stop of my favorite ship weapon designer and he was actually there working on some new items. It was a very brief conversation, but my Jedi thanked him for his craftsmanship and acknowledged that his equipment had saved my butt several times. I’m sure that the crafter likewise felt that glow of knowing that his work was appreciated.)
Basically, if you can allow me to make design time decisions which affect the attributes of my item (speed, damage, weight, etc.) or add specific ability buffs or other characteristics, then I’ll be a happy crafter.
We hardcore crafters really want to have a challenge when we’re doing this. Just like other gamers, we would like our skill at crafting (which usually means understanding how crafting works and how to get the most out of it) to mean something. Turning over our results to the random number generator doesn’t thrill us. Actually, forcing us to waste 20 units of materials to get one “proc” to fire and get the result we want will turn us off pretty quickly.
Personally, I liked Everquest II’s way of handling this. I liked that I had crafting skills and I had to remain aware of what was happening on the crafting table so that I could counter improper results. It was much more interesting than setting up with a stack of iron bars, pressing “craft all” and walking away for a while to come back and see if any of them got the premium result I was hoping for.
While we’re on that topic, if there are going to be special events that cause superior results, realize that you’ve just made all the non-superior results worthless. Sure I could vendor them and hope that I get back a fraction of my material cost, but what if instead I could melt them down, disassemble them, or what have you and get a slightly reduced stack of materials instead?
I’d love to hear any ideas / feedback any of the rest of my fellow crafting peeps have on the topic. Please feel free to comment.
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