Fixing craftery [Ideas]

[Splup]

Heya,

Crafting seems kinda broken to me. Crafters are not able to sell pretty much anything else then high end runic made stuff. Back Pre AoS when there was no insurance and armor were more simple then nowdays, there was loads of player kept vendors selling GM armors. Nowdays there's no demand for regular craftermade items.

People are using insured high end armor, and there is no use for anything else then runic made. (Well, those Very Rare good items dropped from monsters, this one needs revamping too )

New recipes gave new items for crafters to make, but to be able to make these you need a lot of PvM to get the ingredients. The items are pretty useless compared to how much hard to get ingredients they need, and that is why you see only very few of those new items being sold.

Pendant of the magi
Scrappers compendium
Night reaper
Spell woven britches
Spell woven pants (or what was the name)

Those are the most popular ones I think, not many others are really seen on vendors.

I don't have an idea how to fix this whole mess, and that is pretty much why I made this thread, so people could throw their little ideas here and maybe those can be combined to make crafting more worth a while again.

So please, share your ideas with us.

My idea: Enhancing in trade window.

Nowdays if you want some crafter to enhance your armor/wep, you need to give it to him. After that there is no way for you to know if enhancing succeeded or not, so basically crafter can just steal the item if he wants. This basically means, you either create your own crafter, or use someone who you know well.

How it should work is that you put the item to a trade window. There you can check the trade as enhance trade, then you mark the item that is supposed to be enhanced. Now both accept the trade, crafter tries to enhance the item ---> If it succeeds, the enhanced item drops to customers backpack, and everything that was in trade window to crafters backpack. If it fails, crafter still gets the other items in trade window (Usually some gold pieces that the customer is paying for the enhancement)

Same thing with repairing items. Crafter should also be able to gain skill when enhancing/repairing (dunno if they can nowdays), even thou usually people let just legendary crafters to enhance.

Then we just might have some crafters at banks making enhancements/repairs for money.

Then there's one I borrow from one other thread:

To be honest they should have used faction crafting instead of the chests to turn silver in.

All of the faction artifacts, potions, consumables, gems, faction stronghold runes, could have been tied back to some sort of a crafting skill.

The only problem is that it would be hard to make them character bound this way. Could probably do something so the first person that equips it gets bound to it (similar to how the Talisman's that are "owned" works).

Even then, people would start selling the faction arties on vendors and jacking up the rates (which is no different than selling silver IMO).

Crafted in a faction town that your faction controls like it used to be. Of course have silver be a required item to make it (in the same amounts as now). I'd say use normal crafting kits. Also make it so the crafter has to have the required recipe to make it and have the recipes spawn on faction monsters?

This one sounds good to me also, would help crafters.

 

[Setnaffa]

This is sort of , but I'll chime in anyway...

I don't want to rehash over too many of the ideas we've seen over the last few years since the imbuing skill may be a game changer. Let's wait and see.

An enhance Trade Window would be nice, but a REPAIR trade Window is pretty much essential. We've been asking for this since at least 2004.

The recipes were a good edition, but there aren't enough of them. Add more!

For the sake of all crafters, insurance definitely needs some changes. We need a Dynamic Insurance Rate. First, each time you use your insurance over a 40-hour window, the rate doubles. Also, arties and rare items should cost 10 times more to insure and the insurance on crafted items should be based on the number of properties and their intensities.

 

[kelmo]

I believe crafters need specialization. Instead of making all things mediocre, crafters should make a few things really well. Your basic smith could make pretty much anything OK. A master sword could make excellent swords and average maces...

 

[Gheed]

I believe crafters need specialization. Instead of making all things mediocre, crafters should make a few things really well. Your basic smith could make pretty much anything OK. A master sword could make excellent swords and average maces...

I have always thought something like this. Only more related to the skill itsself. Just like PvM or PVP crams a template, so should crafting. A highly skilled blacksmith should really have to use all of their points to perfect their trade. And the scale should slide between reliance on RNG. A GM smith alone would rely on RNG runic properties for a chance at a good piece of armor. But an 120 smithy/lore/artificer/mystic/miner should be able to make exactly what they want. I thought thats what imbuing would add. But imbuing doesn't seem to be dependant on any specific skill as a compliment or bonus.

 

[Sindris]

Crafting has been all but worthless since Sunsword realized his dream of combining UO with the look and feel of Diablo II. The best thing he ever did for UO was leave. Crafting will never be what it was prior to the release of AoS.

 

[Lynk]

Crafting has been all but worthless since Sunsword realized his dream of combining UO with the look and feel of Diablo II. The best thing he ever did for UO was leave. Crafting will never be what it was prior to the release of AoS.

QFT

 

[Setnaffa]

I believe crafters need specialization. Instead of making all things mediocre, crafters should make a few things really well. Your basic smith could make pretty much anything OK. A master sword could make excellent swords and average maces...

I like that idea. I don't know how easy it would be to implement, but specialization could take crafting (and other skill categories for that matter) to an entirely new level of diversity.

 

[Maplestone]

Throws in my 2 cents as usual ...

Outside of Siege, In the modern UO there is very little done with "common gear" (with the possible exception of spined leather suits which still seem to have a nice niche market - I assume amongst casual players and alternate characters?). It will be interesting to see what effect imbuing has ... it feels like it is going to create a much larger diversity in the market for "entry level gear".

For crafters to dabble in the high end of the game means that artifact-level gear needs artifact-level time to make it - otherwise it floods the market and devalues everything else in the game. The act of crafting itself is instantaneous, which means that the "time sink" needs to come out in some other way - either in the tools or materials.

Specialization by skills, recipees, talismans are all just barriers-to-entry: once two crafters have them, any competition between them causes the value of their service to drop to the marginal cost: 0.

Assorted Ideas:
- if your (base, unmodified) skill drops below the minimum to know a recipe, you lose the recipee permanently; this helps solve the "soulstone problem" in specialization
- alternatively, allow only a finite number of recipees to be known at a time (you can still making anything, but need to burn through recipee scrolls to relearn)
- create a comprehensive crafting trade window: repairs, enhancement, imbueing, crafting attempts (I don't want the responsibility of holding someone's uber item in my possession if anything goes wrong or need to say "oops sorry, bad luck I really did just burn through all your white perals, no I didn't just pocket them")
- create dungeons that are extremely hostile to equipment without a special property only available by imbuing (eg: items imbued with "flame shielded" property for a lava dungeon or "void shielded" to cross some dark, empty place); this creates specialty markets and forces people to play with new gear if they want in (or repair regular gear much more often)

( I think focusing attention on ways of restricting what gear can be used in niche areas would be more useful to crafters than focusing on the crafters themselves - aside from the trade window ideas people have )

 

[Spree]

I would like to see weapons and armor properties by skills.

Meditation= mage armor or spell channeling
focous = Mana regen or stam regen
Magery= hit spell
Tactic= HCI
anatomy= heath leach


This way people have to specialize in what they make. Players would be able to sell armor and weapons because every one isn't makings the same items.

Hit spell weapons have charges and need to refilled with spell scrolls made by inscriptionist.

 

[Specialshoes]

For the sake of all crafters, insurance definitely needs some changes. We need a Dynamic Insurance Rate. First, each time you use your insurance over a 40-hour window, the rate doubles. Also, arties and rare items should cost 10 times more to insure and the insurance on crafted items should be based on the number of properties and their intensities.

Such a good idea! Could even revive the Item ID skill. Thinking....Using item ID to gain knowledge of how much the insurance on an item would cost!

 

[Uvtha]

too much supply = no demand. It wont change unless things can break or are lost.

 

[Gheed]

too much supply = no demand. It wont change unless things can break or are lost.

It isn't as simple as that since AoS. There is too much demand even now for sure. Vendors are in for a rude awakening if they think they can keep stock for all the combinations of templates out there now. And end users are in for a bigger chore when they have to manage all the current mods plus keep a tighter watch for repairs. Things wont wear out evenly.

One point of total durability lost because they weren't wacthing their consumable armor closely enough = losing about 2hrs of use. I hope imbuing is a small step to a greater solution.