Crafting Interdependence

One of the major aspects of the game we often espouse is a heavily player driven economy to fuel and drive the game versus a heavy emphasis on end-game raiding. Our team is working diligently to create the recipes for the many skill lines, and today we wanted to take a closer look at the interdependence created from the many recipes, skills, and ingredients that will be available. What is interdependence exactly or how do we define it? In many other MMOs you might have some reliance on gathering for crafting, but the design is simple; you either collect the raw materials or purchase them, and then you craft everything yourself. We have a system in place that at times goes 4-5 layers deep with a wide variety of recipes and skills used to create the components that would go into what we call an “end product” such as a Fitting.

This might sound a little excessive at first, and when you see our flowchart for a single fitting it certainly seems like a lot, but crafting is one of the core components of our system and building interdependence will ensure that players have to work together to create the best products in the game. It can be as a solo crafter working through the auction system, shops, or work order system (reverse auction) to purchase the ingredients and agents needed. Alternatively, it can also be with a few friends or new online friends to work together as a group or as a large group feeding the needs of their nation who in return supply them materials and other resources. Materials are gathered through harvesting; whether it is from an ore mine or a defeated creature all the raw materials harvested are useful to one trade or another.

This gives all crafters a specific role to fill since, although crafting an end product like fittings might be a lucrative business, crafting the subcomponents required to make those end products can be equally lucrative. The interdependence of the crafting skills ensures that each skill can be a great source of income. We also have crafting options available for the gatherers in the system as most of the “raw” collected resources will need to be refined before they can be used by crafters. In the case of fittings, this is a very important step of the process as the refined materials determine the available attributes for the fitting to utilize.

As mentioned a few times before, since we have no levels there is no artificial limit in place to stop brand new players from building up their crafting skill and recipes. If you can acquire the materials, through gathering them yourself or purchasing them, you can create anything you have enough skill to create. We have both a grading and a progression system with recipes. The grading system will allow crafters to learn higher quality recipes than other crafters who are just beginning a crafting skill, and the progression system will gradually increase the quality of frequently crafted items.This will help to build up demand for highly skilled crafters and the high grade materials that they will need to craft the best products in the game. Mix that with some special rare drops and a robust recipe system that easily changes the outcome with a simple ingredient change, and you have the ability to provide even more high quality and scarce results. Finally, the crafting attribute system wraps this process up by adding flexibility to stats for fittings and allowing us to wrap other systems around these attributes for other recipes not involving fittings.

Here is an example of a mostly finished recipe set out in a flowchart. This is one of the most complex items in the game, so it will serve as a premiere example of how interdependency works. Remember, recipe mastery, resource quality, sub-component quality, skill level and luck will all play into the quality of the end product. You will not be making '+3 iron dagger' just like the 47 thousand others just like it on the auction house. You will be making the best item you possibly can, using material that you, or other dedicated crafters, have gathered and created. In this example the “Dodge” stat would be the primary one and, depending on the attributes granted by the refined bar, will contain other stats that will be considered secondary and tertiary. We hope you enjoyed this look into crafting interdependence and encourage you to keep an eye out for a new crafting oriented video before PAX East showing how crafting is shaping up for Beta. Click to enlarge picture.