Everything You Know About Crafting

[Ratief]

The only crafted items that required multiple crafters (excluding houses and boats) were the upgrade recipes. All other items used two items (plus a dust if you want) and you could make both of the items needed (both of those component items could have dusts applied as well). The upgrade recipes used a primary item that you could make, but the secondary item came from another crafter (IE tailors needed gems to upgrade gear).

[Jakkal]

I like your ideas Ratief. They sound good to me. Don't forget that we'd like to add complication commands so we can macro them as well (For those of us that get Repetitive strain injuries easily.) I think that was also to stop botting, but it really just hurt the wrists of many a player.

Deconstruction: I preferred the decon kits that all players could use. Letting crafters-only decon stuff just made it A. more difficult, and B. forced you to sell loot if it was soulbound, instead of decon-ing it for the chance at mats or to make bag space.

Anmath: What you're talking about, the community generally called those 'clickies'. The cooldown issue is something they did late in the game, and it pretty much annoyed the hell out of everyone. I've told John about this a few times since I used a lot of clickies.

One thing I liked about the crafted invis clickies is that they didn't break early like spells would.

[Amnath]

Ok, so multiple crafts was for upgrades. I'm thinking: if available, you wanted everything upgraded as far as you could push it, so: you'd make blue items for the xp, but the final thing you would want to use, would be higher quality. Or if not for personal use, you'd want the higher quality to place on the auction house. From that point of view, the "viable" items require two crafters.

Yes, universal deconning gives everyone a chance at some rare crafting mats even if they can't personally use them. That would become a debate--fact is that anyone could do it and it is not, currently, crafting. While that might be kinda weird to me, placing rare harvest resources on raid mob loot, seemed like a reasonable resolution in game compared to watching someone six box with a bard all over the kdq nodes.

I figured "clickies" were discrete items such as Portable Alchemy Lab, whose cooldown could then be triggered by using a consumable. That part of the game may have been unintentional, but it was definitely abhorrent.

Crafted items were also required to do griffon, weren't they?

Pretty safe to say, it's not so much the "what you can make" that is as outstanding as the "crafting mini-game" which, some people enjoyed it so much, that's what they did to the exclusion of adventuring.

[Jakkal]

The items weren't required for the gryphon, you could buy them outright for a few plat from the NPC. But if you wanted to save money you could get them made. It was an option for both ways.

[Ratief]

You never made items for XP. That is what work orders are for. The reason you would make an item not fully upgraded is because the level restriction was lower or you would outgrow an item so fast that it was pointless. Also, some ultra rares were vary hard to get, so you might only upgrade to rare instead of heroic. BTW, all of this only applies to gear (which there wasn't ever a market for because SOE destroyed it shortly after launch, though weapons still had a small market). The items that actually sold were boat/house parts, bags, saddlebags, and clickies. None of those needed a second crafter.

All of that was very sad as VG was suppose to have a crafting community that did require crafters to work together. Personally I'm hoping to bring that back. My view is that crafted gear should be slightly better then equivalent quested/dropped gear (excluding some special/hard quest lines). I'm not saying that we will do that, but it is my personal opinion because I think of it as either you do two spheres and so you get better rewards or you engage with the community and so you get better rewards.

The griffon items were there as a way to reduce the cost. You also had the option to just buy the stuff you needed. There was also a diplo option to reduce part of it as well.

[Amnath]

Wowzas.

That's pretty telling. Just about nukes "what you can make" as having much value throughout most of the game. My standard of comparison was, when I played up a monk alt into the 40s, I had a guildie who had all the master crafters and all the mats. He rolled a monk, crafted on it for a couple weeks, and then when he started soloing it, blazed up to my level in an incredibly brief time span--in his words, "nothing can hit me". When we took our alts to the raids, he was in mostly red gear and played circles around me. In that case, crafting totally blew away dungeon gear, but, only after doing it for years and having every recipe and anything else you could ever want.

Crafting in Istaria is almost the same as Vanguard, minus the complications. When they first plague you, your limited ability to fix them typically has to be done about three times. As you proceed, that initial fix will improve and only need be done twice. Eventually, you discover new abilities that may use a different tool or resource that work even better. You're trying not just to have enough Action Points to finish, but to not have to use the "quick finish", which I think drops quality--the higher cost finish maintains what you've made. Quality can only be increased in the prior assembly stages--or did I just never get to a finish that's also an improvement?

Edit: as I've been playing around, I've looted a lot of crafted gear which was pretty much all flawless, orange stuff that looks pretty viable--was this all collected from inspects? If so, that kind of says that there is at least some amount of leveling gear worth making by two crafters.

[Billham]

The Telonica wikia is still up and has lots of crafting info here http://vanguard.wikia.com/wiki/Crafting including a couple videos here http://vanguard.wikia.com/wiki/Featured_Crafting_Media. It is far from complete but should be useful.
I contacted Bowd a while back, he still has admin rights and is willing to promote someone with an account to admin. At the very least the info could be copied to the new wiki.

I also like Ratief's ideas, especially [quote]2) I plan on sending the recipes to the client in a sorted order! No more lists of randomly ordered recipes![/quote]
and the idea that crafted gear should be slightly better that quested.

I had 6 T5 crafters, only 2 that made it to lvl 50 but I preferred crafted over most of the quested or dropped gear.

[zippyzee]

Since I am burrowing deeper and deeper into this rabbit hole, I will start asking some additional questions.

Did you ever get more than one item from a crafting session. Not as in quantity, but 2 distinct items. I am setting up the resulting items in the database, and it makes a difference if there is only one item id or multiples.

Thanks!

[Ratief]

I can't think of any instance where you got multiple different items.

When you didn't meet the minimum required quality, you would get damaged material or some such stuff for non work order recipes. Other then that, you just got the item, and number, that the recipe calls for.

There is one thing that I was going to try to fix when we implemented crafting. Sigil did crafting, but then SOE added some recipes that had more components then the Sigil system allowed. The way that SOE had these work is that they just magically consumed those components upon completion. I was going to add actions to use those components. So it might be good if your system allows for unlimited components to be added to a recipe or at least a large number like 5. You can see this sort of thing with upgrade recipes and the PoTA and I think probably the enhancement recipes.

[zippyzee]

Since a *lot* of the crafting system seems to be server-side, and very little on the client end, hopefully we can improve it. I will keep in mind we need a "failed" item as well as a "success" item as results from crafting.