Crafting / Ressource Refining

[vylqun]

The most important thing about a mmorpg for me is an entertaining combat system, and closely after its the crafting.

So far there was no game where i would have said "Thats it, perfect crafting system", so i want to give some suggestions which i hope will inspire the devs to create a crafting system where i completely forget the combat

 

There are many games which describe their crafting systems as "complex" or "complicated" while it still is nothing different than clicking 2 or more items together to get a predetermined result. In the end every player crafts the same items, there is no real distinction between single crafters except for their masteries and endgame gear has the same stats for everyone.

Better and worse at the same time are the chinese mmorpg's, especially those in the past which added a random factor to the crafting. While this is a good way to make crafting a bit more ... realistic (afterall every reallife artisan will create items with slight quality differences) the randomness is not good.

 

For those who dont want to read a wall of text i will give a summary here, as for the devs and players interested in a discussion i hope they'll read the wall of text in the next post

 

Summary:

All crafting starts with the ressources gatheredand refined. The gathered ressources are equal for everyone, an iron mine on hyperion will get the same iron as one on earth (except for the composition of isotopes maybe, but thats neglectable i think)

But which will make a difference is the refining, the creation of composite metals / plastics etc. Those refined materials will have a direct impact on the crafted items. Thus my suggestion starts with the refinement system.

To refine any compositve material a player can add several primary ressources and catalysators, additionally he has to vary a refining parameter, for metals it could be heat. Each of the ressource, (i will stay at metals for the rest of the text to simplify things) has a "heat-affinity", if the player sets the correct heat value the final composite metal will have better stats. This is the basic crafting that everyone can do, just take a metal or two, vary the heat and u will get some result. More advanced crafters will add catalysators, those affect the affinities of the metals, ultimately giving the chance to get a higher affinity value thus further improving the result and at the same time enabling composites which arent possible without them.

 

This way every player has the opportunity to create his own secret compounds, giving items built with those materials superior (or inferior) stats to other crafters. It gives the players the chance to really learn crafting instead of just learning recipes, and with a little bit luck in experimenting with the materials and parameters a new crafter could even get superior materials than an old veteran.

Depending on the stats of the materials used to craft an item, an armor for example, the movement, armorvalue, durability etc. can vary thus giving the possiblity to greatly individualize the gear if the crafter has access to the proper materials.

[vylqun]

Detailed Version

 

Every resource has several stats, for example Hardness, Quality, Flexibility etc., depending on the type of ressource (hardness for a liquid would be rather weird). As stated in the previous post i'll take metals as example and give them the attributes hardness and quality (i'll set weight aside because the weight can be just an weighted average of all materials used in the process). Each attribute has an attribute affinity, that means every ressource has 2 values for every attribute. The attribute and Attribute affinity define a gaussian:

 

 

The attribute is the maxium Value, and the attribue affinity is the location of the maximum. the shown attribute has a value of 15 with an affinity of 6.( the formula for the gaussian is A*e^(-B(C-x)^2), A = Hardness or Quality and C = Hardness Affinity or Quality Affinity, B will be defined further below, its a weighting factor depending on the amount of the ressource used)

 

If we assume now that the player wants to refine a material with just one ressource and without catalysator, he will get the best result for the hardness if he sets up a heat equivalent to the affinity value of 6. If he is a little bit lower, at 5,5 then he only recieves a value ~13. It would make sense to let the refinment fail, if the archieved attribute value is a lot lower than the maximum, nobody needs an iron ingot with a hardness of literally zero. That also means, that the affinity values for the single attribues of a ressource have to be relatively close together, else it would always fail because either the hardness is to low, or the quality. an example for a ressource would be following graph:

 

 

If the player sets a temperature between 4 and 5,2 he would get a result, everything else would fail because either the hardness or the quality is to low. at ~4,95 he would have a material with a balanced hardness and quality, a lower temperature produces a material with the focus on hardness, a higher temperature with the focus on quality.

 

Now assume the player wants to create a compound of 2 materials. i will concentrate on only one attribute now, to not make the graphs to complicated.

For that purpose the Gaussians of all metals are summed up and multiplied by a limiter function:
(2-0.6^n)/n * e^(-(D-x)^2)*(Sum of the Gaussians of every used ressource)
where n is the number of different ressources used and D is the sum of the Hardness or Quality Affinities of all ressources divided by the amount of them.

 

 

the black and blue functions are the hardness gaussians of the single ressources, the magenta curve is the sum of both gaussians and the red one is the sum multiplied by the limiter function. The limiter function is important to not exponentially increase the attribute with the number of ressources used.

The example shown in this picture is a rather bad choice of ressources for a compound, as it reduces the maximum of the archieveable hardness.

If we take two other ressources which affinities are clother together we get the following graph:

 

 

the color code is the same, and now its clealy visible, that the red graph has a higher maximum than any of the single gaussians, thus the compound can archieve a hardness which is higher than one of the single metals. If a player uses more than 1 different ressource, the parameter B from the gaussian becomes important, its not 1 anymore. The value for C is 1/Amount . The amount is realtive, that means if u use 2 parts iron and 1 part copper the relative amount of iron is 2/3 and the one from copper is 1/3. The value 1/Amount gives 3/2 for iron and 3 for copper as result.

 

This is where the crafting for uninterested people ends, its realitvely easy to mix 2 or 3 metals and archieve a fairly good result, but anything after that becomes complicated enough to be fun for crafting addicted

[vylqun]

Catalysts

 

The usage of catalysts is for the advanced or master crafters, they can change the affinity value of the attributes and increase the attributes for certain affinity values, enabling completely new compounds.

 

A catalyst has 4 stats,

 

Factor
Affinity
Width
Shifting

 

 

the formula for the catalysts is 1+Ee^(-(F+G-x)^2)-e^(-1/H(F+G-x)^2)
E is the Factor, it is the maximum multiplicator for the basic improvement of the ore due to the catalyst, its something between 1 and 1.5. F is the Affinity and G the Shifting, F+G decide the location of the peak on the x-axis. H is the Width, it determines the depth and range of the area below 1, which would reduce the final value.
The Shifting has an additional purpose, it changes the Hardness or Quality Affinity of anything that's near the Affinity of the Catalyst. It works with a Gaussian again, its calculated by
Affinityshift= G*e^(-(F-C)^2) where C is the Affinity of the primary resource. That affinity is then changed to C = C+Affinityshift. In this way primary resources which aren't compatible without catalyst can still be successfully mixed. One example for the Hardness and Hardness Affinities of 2 different types of Ore, mixed in a 1:1 ratio:

 

 

this picture shows the graphs without active catalyst, the black graphs are the ore Gaussians, the red one is the combined function with limiter and the green graph is the function of the catalyst which wasn't applied yet. The Affinity of the Catalyst is 6.7, the Shifting is -2.5.

If the Catalyst is applied to only the right ore function its transformed to this way:

 

 

red is the original function, black the new one with catalyst. For refining a single ressource, that catalyst would be pretty bad, because it reduces the maximum hardness value. Thus the result would be inferior to refining without catalyst. However, using the catalyst on the compound improves the result significantly because, even tho it reduces the hardness of the second ressource, it brings its affinity much closer to the first ressource, leading to a great improvement, as seen in the magenta graph which shows the compound function after applying the catalyst:

 

 

the affinities are brought close enough together so that the maximum possible hardness is higher than for a single ressource.

[Astrophil]

I am rather of the opinion that everyone is too intimidated by the complexity of your crafting system to answer, but it sounds like players will need to have an understanding of resources and environmental impacts on them when crafting. I think crafters would get better with practice as they understand more of what's required and whatnot under this system, which isn't something that has been too prevalent in other MMORPG's. I would think that a very thorough guide would be needed to introduce the crafting system to new players.

[vylqun]

i dont know if getting into it would really be as complicated as u think it is, basically the players only add the ressources and catalysators and move a single slider, especially for "low level" crafting where u use just 1 or 2 ressources its really simple, they "just" need to chose the correct craft parameter and chose relatively well fitting ressources, and for that there could be basic recipes which are at maybe 70% of the best archieveable value.

As for the coding, the formulas should be pretty easy, but i can imagine that balancing all possible ressources and catalysators will be a horrible work^^

[NQ-Nyzaltar]

Hi vylqun

 

Thanks a lot for the detailed suggestion on crafting! There is a lot of interesting ideas here.

We don't plan to make crafting as predefined like in other MMOs, but it's a bit too soon to talk about it.

And we are also paying attention to build a final user interface that remains intuitive and simple for crafting (even if game mechanics behind it will be complex).

Of course, feedback from the community will be welcome when we will have a first proper draft to show.

All your suggestions have been transmitted to the game design department

 

Best regards,

Nyzaltar.

[Bella_Astrum]

I feel like a crafting system that is interesting / complex enough to keep people interested, and serious crafters entertained, is needed, but anything too complex could become a chore. Sometimes simple is good, maybe a system that is simple at its foundation, but can become more complex depending on how much effort the player wants to put in. The more effort (the more rare/valuable the materials) the harder, more complex it is to make something. So you could have a certain piece of armor, or other usable item, with two ways of making it. A simple, straight-forward path, which will create a lesser version of the item, or the harder route, wherein the item has much better stats, or bells and whistles.

 

Just my general thoughts, looking forward to how it will be in Dual Universe! 

[NQ-Nyzaltar]

Hi Lady Astrum,

 

Glad to see you posting!

To find the right balance "easy to start/hard to master" is indeed a tough challenge.

We are trying to make something different from traditional MMORPGs on this aspect. It probably won't be perfect from the beginning as we are going to try new directions, and that's why player feedback will be critical in improving it over time

 

Best regards,

Nyzaltar

[vylqun]

A simple, straight-forward path, which will create a lesser version of the item, or the harder route, wherein the item has much better stats, or bells and whistles.

 

yes, exactly that was what i had in mind when i thought of this system, its pretty easy to get the basic materials, nearly as easy as smelting in wow just with a single slider u have to use, while the creation of a little bit better materials requires the use of catalysators and more types of basic ressources, thus everyone can easily make materials with ~80% of the maximum attributes, while getting up to 95% or something alike can take months of research (and not just going down a skilltree which is then called research by most games)