The art of crafting (making tradeskilling useful)

Tradeskilling is very much secondary in most MMOs, something that people do either to make a bit of money or to enhance their character's stats a little to make them more effective at adventuring (which is obviously the primary role of the character). In almost all cases, the entire procedure is a huge grind that requires little or no skill and generates even less excitement. Much of it actually seems fairly superfluous, sometimes included just because developers feel they should.

It's a waste, really. Tradeskilling could add a whole extra dimension to the game world, moving it away from the realms of Diablo-style adventure games once and for all. One of the things most obviously missing from the WoW-esque games on the market at the moment is some kind of realistic economic simulation, something only offered by EVE in the current crop. I'm of the opinion that there needs to be a huge paradigm shift in the way we think about tradeskilling, and that we need to make it at least as important to the game as adventuring if we want the genre to continue to expand and improve.

Removing some of the more artificially restrictive aspects of MMO design and giving the function to players would be a good way to do this. There's a lot of them, actually - ideas that don't really make sense but are just so common in the genre that we've got used to them now. The first, and probably largest, is the idea that monsters should drop usable loot. It sort of makes sense if you're fighting a humanoid of the same size and gender as you, but other than that it's a bit ridiculous. It'd make more sense to have the mobs drop loot that then have to be taken to a craftsman to be modified into something useful. I think this is a great idea for several reasons.

Firstly, it makes crafters vital to the economy. If you add some kind of skill-based system where the more competent crafters can produce a better item, it might be quite interesting. Perhaps if they could customise the stats to an extent, or the appearance of the item?

Secondly, it means that you don't need to have loads of different drops in a dungeon for the various classes. If a boss drops a raw material that could then be turned into a class-specific item by the crafter, it means everyone in a group would be fully entitled to roll on drops and bad runs where no class-specific items drop for you would be done away with. Thirdly, it means you could have items that require several boss drops to make. Admittedly, these already exist, but they could be made far more common than they are now. It'd give people something to work for, and overall I think it'd be a good first step to making crafting useful.

The next thing that needs to be implemented is a system where component items can be mastercrafted, and crafted items have stats that are customisable to a degree. Appearance could also be customisable, allowing the more talented players to sell armour designs a little like as occurs in Second Life. But anyway, if a weapon or piece of armour needs half a dozen components (as it should), these should be able to be mastercrafted if the crafter is skillful enough, and the bonus stats carry over into the finished item. Thus, if you really pay out top buck and buy only the finest materials, a player could have an item mastercrafted at every stage of the development to get a truly superb piece of gear.

Additionally, group crafting should be implemented, where several crafters work on the same item at the same time, probably with different skills, and hopefully with some part of the minigame requiring co-operation to triumph in. The finished item would receive bonuses linked to how well the members of the group performed. Of course, the group-crafting items would be more powerful than those crafted by single players, and maybe it'd represent the final stages of assembling an epic weapon or something.

This would require a fairly robust system of accounting for what would happen when the item is sold, so all players would have to agree on how the profits would be shared and accept an appropriate contract before they started work.

Still, though, while all of this makes crafting a much more integral part of the MMO experience, it doesn't exactly make it fun, does it? Sure, some people just enjoy passing the time through crafting and the process of creation, but for the vast majority of us it's hardly going to become the focal part of the game. Therefore, you need to go beyond giving the crafters more control over the economy, you need to give them some action.

But what's the point of having someone in a group who doesn't fight? Under the current combat systems, not an awful lot. But I've been thinking about alternative forms of combat recently, and it occurred to me that if you burst into a castle, the battle almost certainly wouldn't unfold as it does in a current MMO. As is, the mobs stand around in small groups and the players beat them in small groups, systematically working through the dungeon/castle while the surviving mobs completely ignore the sounds of their comrades being murdered.

You are these guys. You are Chuck Norris with a bazooka.

Instead, the mobs should not be few in number and strong (too strong to solo), but they should be many in number and weak. After all, the players are meant to be great heroes, the Delta Force or SAS of the gameworld. It makes sense that they're tougher than the average guard, but it also makes sense that they'll be massively outnumbered. Therefore, I think weaker enemies on continuous spawn makes more sense, to represent the level of reinforcements that would be coming all the time.

Positioning and use of scenery would thus be highly important. A tank blocking a doorway would mean that the reinforcements from that area wouldn't overwhelm the group, while someone sealing up a door would temporarily hold off the enemies while the group did their work. And its here, in interacting with the environment, that the crafters could become non-combatant support classes that had a role in a group but didn't directly fight their enemies. For example, a trained smith would probably be the best person to bring with you if you're trying to loot a castle, because he'll know what's worth stealing and how to best remove it without damaging it. He could be grabbing the loot from the environment (using minigames) while everyone else buys him the time to do it.

The second use could be setting and disarming traps, or barring doors, or otherwise using the environment to help the fighters do their job. In effect, they'd be similar to a crowd control class. But the idea of the combat classes trying desperately to hold back the tides of incoming enemy NPCs while the support class(es) do their stuff and grab the loot is a cool one. It could play into the instance design, too, with them having to lay a bomb or sabotage something, so not only could it improve gameplay but also enhance the variety in dungeon crawls.

Overall, then, the 'support' professions need to be made more important. The MMORPG combat model is functional right now, but it could be much more realistic and exciting (I mean, it's not exactly white knuckle stuff when you're single-pulling mobs) if you added more non-combat roles. And that would add more variety to the game, and mean that there actually WAS an alternative to simply killing things. And that needs to be done if the genre wants to progress.