Some dude said something in another thread that got me thinking

Some dude said something in another thread that got me thinking.
One of the bane of video games (MMOs in particular) is that pretty much everything tends to be revolved around combat. Don't kneejerk and think I don't love me some fighting, because I do. The issue is that when it comes to doing stuff that isn't killing shit, it's usually never as fleshed out as just running around killing shit.
For example, why would I want to be a blacksmith in an MMO when it's just picking shit from a menu, looking for items, and churning out something that's… alright? Usually it's supplementary to getting in a group and bashing some skulls in.

What I'm asking is, how do we make non-combat classes fun?
What if I really want to be a merchant 24/7, or I want to open a restaurant that serves monster food? How do you make it entertaining but not tedious?

Design a game which isn't for the masses.

...

An MMO with a 100% player driven economy might work. If there's no way to get gear except by making your own or buying from a blacksmith player, then being a full time blacksmith becomes a viable alternative to the standard. I can also imagine guilds and the like vying for market control.
As for the mechanics of actually playing as the blacksmith, the process of smithing could be represented by going into the "smithing realm" where you fight against Impurities to make the best blade possible :^) Or perhaps make it a puzzle with larger and more intricate designs increasing the difficulty.

I haven't.
Please tell me more, user. I enjoy learning about things old games have done well.

I think the former would be the more interesting option since it would differentiate the crafting classes.

...

The problem with the idea of player driven economies is that it makes the mistake of assuming every player is on equal footing. They aren't. Lots of people use macros or outright hack their way to better shit. The best player in the world wouldn't be able to compete with a guild that has a bunch of people running macros. The economy would be irrevocably fucked in their favor in no time flat. This is also ignoring the fact that Chinese farmers will eventually show up and burn the economy to the ground because not even the most efficient script kiddie guild can keep up with a company employing people to wreck the economy 24-7.

In order for non combat mechanics to work in MMOs, you need a good community.
Player interactions during trading, crafting etc improves the non-combat aspects of a multiplayer focused game.

However here's the thing: MMO communities are utter shit.
WoW right now is a fully instanced semi-singleplayer game, and people think that's the case because Blizzard didn't listen to their fans.
But that's not true at all.
Blizzard DID listen to their playerbase, and their playerbase constantly told them that the WoW community WAS FUCKING SHIT and they DIDN'T WANT TO INTERACT AMONG THEMSELVES.
So Blizzard made the game contained with various automated systems that made it possible to do everything without interacting too much with other players.

Old MMORPGs and MMOs had better community, because there were less people on the internet in general.
New MMORPGs and MMOs have terrible communities because the internet at large now has horrible communities in general, since the amount of people has increased exponentially.

There really is nothing you can do, all the non-combat shit is tied to player interaction in order to be good and you can't fix people themselves, there's no patch or improvement you can make to your game that can fix your own players, the only thing you can do is contain the interaction and minimize it, and that's what Blizzard did.

By making them at all.
By giving combat classes the ability to barter with non combat classes with materials and gold.
By making monsters killed by combat classes drop materials often.
By making those materials required for recipies that are useful all the way around.
BY AVOIDING THE TRADITIONAL MMO GEAR GRIND, SMALL STAT INCREASES ACROSS THE BOARD ONLY. NOT LIKE GW2 WHERE ITS HALF AND HALF, I'M TALKING +5 STR -2 DEX AT MAX LEVEL USABLE FROM LEVEL 1
By not putting a fucking auction house/market board in your mmo. At least not in the traditional sense. This garbage kills any hope for non combat classes and a player driven market, as well as farming lower level mobs for materials.

Basically no mmo will ever try it. Ragnarok online did a good job, but that is fucking dead now because gravity turned it into WoW.

Here here, but even RO was only halfway there

I don't get this, please elaborate

First you need to ask yourself what makes fighting fun?

Your brain is screaming at you to get a job and contribute to the tribe, and this is how it manifests.

But what if you already have a job.

Mopping a floor ain't blacksmithing, is it?

That would make sense if I were some kind of nigger living in a hut, but I'm not, so fuck off.

Clearly lacking a sense of community and achievement, regardless of who and where you think you are.

That's nice.

x…D?

can you be a blacksmith on EVE?

every ship and item in the game is made by players, not sure what you want to call it

But is it fun?

Or a Star Wars Galaxies
Shame SOE had to shoot it in the head

fun is different for everyone

Games are all about options.

they are, but it's how you present the options what matters

He means the strongest gear is usable from level 1 and only grants minor buffs instead of the autistic post-deity ultrazord destroyer of autism charcters from most mmos.

The one that deal 8 digit damage and have HP that needs to be in smaller font each expansion to keep from running off the screen.

I think right now what OP wants, EVE is the closest. But SWG was the best.

For a ground based MMO (or any game for that matter where you can craft). unless you can
(Mass production leading to generic items with no difference in stats and customized single items leading to uber powerful, but expensive, variants)

If those needs aren't met, what's the point of being a blacksmith? SWG hit 2.5 of the 3. Only half of the third one because you could mass produce the best item that you've ever crafted. I think making it so you can't mass produce those things does a couple of things:

I know 8ch generally hates SAO but there's a few things from it I think are good ideas for MMOs generally. The way they portrayed crafting was interesting and different. We did only see the individual crafting but I'm sure the players were able to do some sort of mass production. I think it was also an interesting idea that there were difficult bosses that either guard or drop special crafting materials, and bosses that you don't need to beat to advance, but if you want something super duper cool you'd have to go and find them, kill them take the crafting material and take it to a smith with good skill. I've written multiple pages on what I think could enhance MMO design in the future but I haven't gotten around to finishing it yet, mostly because I've been uninspired lately.

Gear has no or very few level requirements to equip it.

Gear has incredibly small stat changes, and often has a drawback to said stat changes.

Stat changes in general on your character are tied to level and your choice of distribution, not a gear grind ladder ala raiding or rep grinding.

What this means is that you might come across a helmet at level 5 with +2 defense. Its better than anything you're going to run into for a while, and costs a decent amount in an NPC shop. Since enemies don't often drop currency you either would have to grind drops to sell to afford it, or come across it naturally. You'll take this helmet until you come across something better, but that probably won't be for a while as gear that offers larger stat bonuses is either much more expensive, harder to find, or requires a crafter and materials that are currently out of your reach. It gives you a number of goals to go for instead of just MAX LEVEL HEROICS HEROICS RAID RAID RAID

GW2 made it sound like when you hit max level you'd be decked out in the best you can get. Stats would not matter, only runes and sigils as everything else would be pretty normalized. They lied, we got ascended gear behind a huge grind wall, though it wasn't a whole lot better than exotic(the next lowest tier). Moreover, every single piece of gear below exotic max level gear is worthless.

Crafting gear is made entirely irrelevant very quickly in themepark rollercoaster mmos with every patch.

/thread

That sounds pretty good, it reminds me of D&D before 3rd edition rolled around and the power creep got out of control. Nowadays, you'd think a +5 sword would just be some basic enchanted gear before you start getting into the crazy shit like +50 fire damage over 33 seconds and shit, but back then, going from a +2 to a +3 was something meaningful. You worked for levels and levels to earn that shit, and each +1 on top of it was another hard fought battle.

But that just covers the mathematics behind it. What about the mechanics of smithing?

Even though it's single player, Dark Messiah had the basics for what could be a deep and engaging smithing system. Like it should be, it's just a simplified version of the real deal and you have to do every step yourself.
Take something like this and let the player fine tune the materials further, then let them build and operate their own shop, Recettear style, and you'd have a damn fun blacksmith simulator.>>9324043

See also: Arx Fatalis. It was a whole song and dance to process the special ore you need for a specific plot-related weapon, and you were being hunted by a mysterious beast, but god damn if it didn't feel good to finish at the end of it. And, it has a very small but meaningful gesture: If you want to cook food at a fire, you have to remove it from your inventory and physically place the object right next to the fire and let it sit for a short while before it's cooked. Even something as small as that can go a long way, I think.

Came here to post this and Arx Fatalis. You have to actually gather materials and forge your own shit. Same with spells, that require more than just pushing a fucking hotkey.

It really shouldn't be difficult to adapt this to multiplayer, and would make non-combat classes actually worth engaging in, since hard-to-make items would fetch a hefty price.

Couldn't find a decent video without commentary.

Forgot my fucking video.

user, stop talking out of your ass.

I'd like to think Project Gorgon was on the right path to what OP suggested but we will never know, shit fizzled out and died cause the devs ask for money to continue playing the game and nobody was going to drop 30 bucks for it.

What part of basics and could be did you not understand?


I did

Please tell me you're not Duke-user, I still feel bad for him.

Yes. They promised that end-game progression would be sideways instead of vertical. This is fact. This was also the major selling point for GW1 and GW2. There was no "grind" for gear, only cosmetics.

Except GW2 was created in a different time, by different, incompetent people. GW2 STILL TO THIS FUCKING DAY has no end-game to speak of. Ascended gear was created in place of end-game largely due to complaints that there was nothing to do.

Unlike in GW1, GW2's only cosmetic items worth actually wearing were microtransactions rather than unlockables. People realized that there's no reason to run dungeons at max level because there's nothing to "collect".

Oh, hell no, I only dropped $20 on it.
What even happened to him?

I think he never managed to get that refund so probably hanged himself for listening to a bunch of shitters online. Nevertheless, I miss the generals and me being an autist with the skeleton niggers over or Waifu rulers and Deer faggots.

...

...

I’m actually surprised the multiglom companies haven’t done something like this yet. Have a monthly-pay MMO where you can create nearly ANY manner of character to fill in the world’s economy, and then just tie in SEPARATE paid games to these characters. Rather than bloat the MMO system with all the different game-types that would make the characters fun and playable, sell the other types of games standalone and let progress within them count toward actions within the MMO.

So you play the standalone fighting game like in the video, get really good, and that “goodness” translates to a shit-ton of inventory for you to sell as a merchant (or to merchants as an industrial company) in the MMO. Or if you only have that game, it’s just you playing that game.

The system would give a purpose to playing the non-MMO games put out by that company other than the fun you get while playing them while simultaneously pushing people toward buying the MMO and paying them forever.

Woah there, buddy, I think you need to calm down.

I laugh, but that'd be awesome.

Camelot Unchained seems to have it locked down with their crafter class.

been thinking about making a game

so you play as a guy that leads a group of people.

they mine grow crops mill flower bake bread….

all of this go to commands mixed with stockpiles same as stronghold. but its a persistent mmo. your village/city district that you control makes deliveries to other players as you form trade deals with them for daily /hourly deliveries that have to be transported between villages.

so you take control over a pice of land and make it into a well oiled machine then you go and engage in trade with other players. as you try and maximize your output. limiting growing or less fertile land as you trade materials to acquire food. or abandoning mining to maximize food production as your land specializes in it. or even purchasing a city district to maximize access to a marketplace to manufacture goods. as you pay taxes to the city guards to protect your interests in the city and build roads/keep them safe.

all leading to the complex logistical challenges of feeding large quarantines of troupes of outfitting them and training them. and the driving causes of conflict as groups start to try to exploit one another economically and politically. as farming communities get bullied by manufacturing centers that are starting to starve. as guilds vie for power over materials and labor thugs walk the streets as gang violence erupts between guild heads in the city as the town guard tries to maintain order. as a "nation" collapses as the cites empty farmers struggle to keep bandits out of their granaries.

i mean it could work but i've tried making assets i've tried to learn to program. but i've kinda maxed out. i don't really know where to go from here. people give me shit saying that if i was really passionate about it that i would be able to power threw it. that i would be able to find others to work together on a project. that i would be willing to shell out money for assets and help to get a project going and on kikestarter…

so a merchant simulator to a certen extent but including the fielding of military units based on giving a citizen armor weapon and training each that affects his stats along with a hunger bar that refills at a "camp" that you would have to set up and dump food into. via caravans.

Design content for non-combat classes.
Like nobody seriously thinks levelling and grinding is at the core of the combat experience, its just a part of the whole, why should it be the only part of the non-combat one?
Why not have dungeons that can only be beaten through the application of crafting? Like a slave mine you need to forge keys to free slaves, clear out blocked passageways with mining, forge weapons to help the slaves revolt etc etc to get rare recipes and materials. Another example could be a a desert oasis being poisoned by fungus and an alchemist has to investigate it, develop a cure and then apply the cure.

Also to be clear, these dungeons should NOT require any application of combat and should NOT be completed by combat classes. Even in the ones were something like combat would take place (like that slave mine) it should be totally unrelated to the goals of the crafting mission and easy as fuck or impossibly hard, either way would do.

You remove the world of warcraft style user interface from mmos entirely.

Every mmo is the same fucking game. I want a game that plays like fucking Prototype, but with character progression, multiplayer and pvp.

Is that so much to ask?