Alright. I’m finally home and ready to spill so many words in the name of justice and crafting freedom. This issue has been broached so many times before. It has been done in so many ways. But, one of the myriad posts says the same basic thing. We are not happy with the crafting.
This ties into the skill and character progression, preventing a feeling of accomplishment in the game, and a staying power that would normally be made available in a massively multiplayer game. Currently, there is no actual reason to keep playing if you have already built everything, and there’s no reason to keep building everything if you are trying to progress. The absolute worst part of this situation is that if you want to sandbox the bantha poodoo out of this game, doing things like building monoliths to our collective sins, you can’t do that without crafting skills. It’s a catch 22 at it’s finest, creating a need to do things you don’t want to do to do things you want to do. Like work. So, where it would normally capture the attention of the most dedicated player, there is little incentive to actually keep that level of dedication in the long run. There isn’t a multiple day long endeavor, or collection quest, or anything that would normally give reason for continued activity.
Now, I know that you are all asking, “Why in the hell is this related to crafting skills?” and I’ll tell you : Because crafting skills are 100% tied to character development in an MMO. If there was an opportunity for us to advance along the lines of limited creation, such as armorsmith, tailor, etc, then there would be a reason for progressive character development. As for the roleplay aspect of it all, the skills we DO have are what I like to call “base skills”. All of them. If they are required to accomplish feat that are made available to your character, regardless of the build, then all the skills are needed, or rerolls should be unlocked, permanently.
I have been outspoken on this issue since I bought this game, advocating a revamp of the basic mechanics for a while now. I think that specialization would be preferred, in the long run, but it’s not the path that the developers seemed to have in mind. So, the only other option to this would be something along the lines of a job system, allowing each character to freely switch between classes on the fly. But, then again, if you do allow that, what’s the point of alts?
Alts are a basic requirement for continued longevity and team play. Locking one character to a role, I.E. Tank or healer makes it a need for a more dedicated player to create more than one character, or become a master of their own fate and harness their potential to the fullest. As it stands, alts simply don’t cut it. This is BECAUSE of the crafting system, forcing you to have a character that can create all the items at the cost of EVERY other skill available. This enfeebled townsperson behaves as a bookmark, just getting online and remaining active until the resources are used up,to be religated to the waiting room until something else needs to be crafted. So my crafter character has no intrinsic development, or opportunities for advancement unless I have a constant stream of supplies.
So this brings up another aspect of how the crafting system is nerfing character experience. If I create a crafter, just for that reason, I need supplies that they can’t get themselves. This either requires me to create an alt, who will naturally develop at a faster rate than my crafter, due to the feat system, or to get someone else to gather for me. But hiring or befriending a gatherer is something that depreciates my crafter character further. Marginalizing profits due to sharing of resources and crafted goods. It’s just another trap. There can’t be any other way for us to actually accomidate this style of play, realistically. Being beholden to someone is the fastest way to get me disinterested in a game. I want my own actions to hold their own merits, not be based on the collective actions of a community.
Games like Helldivers, which is amazing, has a system in place where there is a community contribution towards a war effort. That makes individual actions less impact in the long run, since you could feasibly join at the end of a war effort and contribute the base minimum, reaping the maximum reward. Or, conversely, you could join too early, and then be forced to carry the weight of an entire community, pushing against the grain towards an imaginary goal post that is constantly on the move. So, why does this example go into crafting? Again, because you can’t just do anything. You can’t just wake up and craft hammers, or whatever, because gathering, buying, trading, and other issues stand in the way, based on the willingness of the community that actively determines the value of your actions.
I have so many ideas on how to fix this problem, but the best one is to abandon this loosey goosey method of gameplay and simplify and streamline the skills. Give basic advancement tiers, based on level. Give stats based on level. Create classes with unique and interesting skills. Create interesting crafts and recipes that would make me want to craft them, just to try them, rather than going for the “best tool” and forgoing the rest. I would love to hear what you all have to say about this.
