Just to much....CRAFTING!

[ysbryd]

okay my humble tuppenceworth.

I was a crafter in Haven, and I think the crafting here is much improved. The thing I always hated about Haven was the luck factor... if you found a clay node day one, and had the infrastructure/experience/friends to protect it... you could buy everything else and never had to work.

Now, apart from the fact that griefers are rampant as usual, anyone can have everything if they work hard enough!

This means that in villages, people can specialise, but hermits also stand a chance, if they are willing to put the hours in.

Also. this is a work in progress, clearly top level items have to be harder, but achievable by everyone! given enough effort.

I guess I'm anti capitalism pro effort, there are still going to be people who want to buy stuff ready done, but the satisfaction of being able to do it yourself, eventually, regardless of 'luck' is what I think Salem has in spades over Haven. In Haven, eventually, you HAD to go to the market to get clay. And the factions who had it could write their own ticket. THAT is imbalance, feudal power etc etc, everyone else singing to their tune.

As it stands, here metal and agricultural q are both the limiting factors to your success, and both are available to anyone who puts the hours in.
So you are still going to have a market, for people who cant wait/cant be bothered to raise skills other than PVP ones, but the playing field (or sandbox) is a lot more level.

I dont want to be Kow-towing forever to someone who just lucked out day one.

(edit) regarding post below, agree to an extent, liked that everything was linked and the upgrading of one thing led to upgrades in others, but still, all about luck and where you spawned day one

[CharlesM]

Undeveloped purity is the main reason why Salem's crafting is inferior to Haven's. In Haven *everything* is interconnected in the quality grind, while in Salem most things don't even have purity or just ignore the purity of their ingredients. A secondary problem with Salem is doing anything to do with trees, because bloody things take aeons to chop down and process, which makes crafting with lumber too slow to be fun. If you're concerned about clearcutting, just introduce tool wear or something.

Anyway, back to purity vs quality. I'd argue that in Haven the fun part never was getting ever higher numbers, because pushing crop q was always the most boring part. Pushing metal q always felt the most fun, because it was all about assembling highly limited resources and optimizing their use. Troll bone kilns, cast iron spiralling, coal made out of a tree planted with the best 4 pieces of soil you can get, etc. I think an analogous system can be introduced in Salem while retaining the purity hard cap. It's simply a matter of moving the focus from purifying infrastructure to purifying individual final products. Ie if you get a high purity smelter and anvil you shouldn't be able to spam good purity swords. You should instead have to invest lots of purifying materials throughout the smelting and smithing process. Infrastructure purity should still be relevant, of course, but I think it'd be best if it just softcapped purity of final products rather than augmenting it.

As for those purifying agents I mentioned, they're the analogue for haven's q spots. I'd rather not see invisible q spots come back, because they always felt pretty lame to me. Instead it should be about biomes, ie these materials might be some kind of forage that spawns in specific biomes, both major (grass, forest, etc.) and minor (beach, mudflat, etc.). Making different biomes more suitable for pushing different purities would go a long way towards promoting trade and making different parts of the world feel different.

That's what really draws me towards HnH, the cyclical nature of crafting quality. Once I make one good item I can use it to improve basically everything, then it will come back and I can make a better version of the original item and the cycle repeats itself. It is a very rewarding system because everything is to intertwined. With Salem I feel that it lacks that feeling very much so.

And even if you didn't have good q soil, water, metal, it didn't really matter because with what you did have, you could make them good quality. You could then trade what YOU produced for something you lacked.

[MagicManICT]

I dont want to be Kow-towing forever to someone who just lucked out day one.

By "lucked out," do you mean spawning hundreds of alts around the map and finding the first q60+ clay or water node just so you can get a base set up? (Yes, yet another example of a broken mechanic, but I believe luck comes to those that make it.)

[CharlesM]

I dont want to be Kow-towing forever to someone who just lucked out day one.

By "lucked out," do you mean spawning hundreds of alts around the map and finding the first q60+ clay or water node just so you can get a base set up? (Yes, yet another example of a broken mechanic, but I believe luck comes to those that make it.)

And they forget, having a high quality node is a double edged sword. By having an astounding quality node people will be drawn to attack you. most people don't want to be on the look out for raiders daily, but some do and the nodes suit them.

Others perfer living far away on a decent quality but not particularly high node and trade for the better things.

[JeffGV]

Regarding crafting, i've got some ideas regarding trees and wood that could be used to deepen that branch of industry.
They could implement different types of wood, based on the tree it was cut from. Doing so, they may then do some other additions. For example, houses and furniture that heavily depend on wood could have an hue dependant to the type of wood used. According to the wood used, it would also be possible to have some bonuses in some regards. Some types are more tougher than others, for example, or better suited for different uses. For aesthetical purposes, the stalls could also sell some types of rare wood not usually found in america (ebony, for example).
In addition to this, trees could have different behaviours according to the biome (albeit something like a "climate" would be more appropriate, probably). Some could grow better in a biome, some worse, some maybe could not grow at all in some biomes. This would favor trading, in my opinion.

[Glennfinnan]

I recall one of the devs talking about eventually adding wood tiers so it'd probably reflect your ideas a bit [the furniture and housing wood kind dependant ones].

[Potjeh]

And yeah, there's a problem with the shape of the craft tree. It's got plenty of breadth, but it really needs more depth.

[MagicManICT]

I recall one of the devs talking about eventually adding wood tiers so it'd probably reflect your ideas a bit [the furniture and housing wood kind dependant ones].

I shouldn't post this (don't want to give them ideas), but I hope they aren't thinking of something like this for metals.

[rkaney]

I never played HnH. I have always enjoyed crafting in mmo's. The two that stand out in my mind were SWG and vanguard. SWG success i think was attributed to the large range of resources available, each resource had different 7 or 8 atrributes on a range of 0 - 1000 based. Resources were mined and the nodes were reset/respawned every week or 2. The combinations were basically endless and you were always hunting for better resources through trade or mining yourself.

Vanguard stands out to me because of the minigame aspect to crafting items. Events would pop up and would have to be countered. Success depended on your skill and affected the end result quality.

Both games are vastly different and the systems wouldnt transfer to salem easily, but the concepts would. Variety and quality matters and provides a richness and depth with resources. Resources are finite and not unlimited. Introduce skill and effort which can impact the quality of items crafted.

[MagicManICT]

Vanguard stands out to me because of the minigame aspect to crafting items. Events would pop up and would have to be countered. Success depended on your skill and affected the end result quality.

Never played Vanguard because I was neck-deep running auctions on the Exchange in EQ2. If the crafting min-game wasn't any more involved than that one, it's still a junk system. (From what I've heard from others, it wasn't any harder.) The only two "involved" crafting mini-games I've ran into so far are Puzzle Pirates (everything is a mini-game puzzle) and Free Realms.