Gold cost for Crafters to make items: thoughts?

Taxes are taxes! Everyone pays and no one can escape. Also, quite a lot of crafters won't be buying mats, they'll be provided them.

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Yeah, or just a circle of friends sharing everything with each other. Or crafters helping out their nodemates for no price (I know I will do this).

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https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Crafting_stations

I've thought about this for a while and I don't really feel like we have enough information to say with certainty.

Different games represent the cost of crafting in different ways, but it's generally not a good idea for it to not even exist, in my opinion.

Of the four ways I'm used to, I like this one the least as an 'economy player' and I also dislike it from the perspective of 'game designer trying to figure out what would be the most fun'.

FFXI uses 'crystals', basically every instance of crafting has an item requirement beyond the materials, there's always a cost. This is good for the economy but not high on the fun scale for most people.

BDO uses 'Workers' and 'Tools' (but somewhat inconsistently) and things with durability. Fails on both econ and fun scales.

Most other games I know of use 'Crafting Stations' or some item with durability that is consumed on every craft, similar to gathering, somewhere between the two above. Generally combines better, average for both fun and economy.

And of course there's 'just throw gold at it', which is... 'unstable' in my experience, but I don't think that it can't be done right, I've just never seen it. If the gold cost is 'to rent the crafting station' or 'to repair it', I don't like it.

The thing that BDO achieves is player independence, it's effectively a single player game, they use the Workers and Tools as 'time gates' and 'annoyance factors'.

The thing that FFXI achieves is redistribution. Rich, high level crafters buy their crystals from low level adventuring parties (high level too, but you get the idea)

The "Crafting Stations" games achieve less of both, but it's a solid approach that people don't seem to hate.

"Throw gold at it" gets closer to BDO's 'single player game' but with an addition of a gold sink. In a different type of game I'd think that was good, because it would be 'equal to gathering', but not here. Here, I expect it will lead to the obnoxious outcome that BDO gets where raw materials are always worth meaningfully more than the items you get by crafting them and Crafters are treated as people who don't want to engage with the rest of the game.

But no good developer would recreate BDO's terrible 'crafting system' right? Right?

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That's a skill issue I've both trusted people and have been trusted by others to craft them stuff. You just gotta build that trust.

Azherae wrote: »

If the gold cost is 'to rent the crafting station' or 'to repair it', I don't like it.

Could you explain the implications of this that make you dislike it? And what if that cost was just an automatization of the "gets consumed on each craft" item? So the station at a node would consume that item automatically and you'd be paying for that, while crafts at a freehold or just the player shop at a node would require that item from the crafter themselves.

Item acquisition could come in whatever way and on whatever lvl, from mob drops at lvl1 to some artisan profession at the top lvl of progress. Nodes could have these items as task requirement, so even lowbies that have no friends could be a part of the crafting system and get paid on top of that.

NiKr wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

If the gold cost is 'to rent the crafting station' or 'to repair it', I don't like it.

Could you explain the implications of this that make you dislike it? And what if that cost was just an automatization of the "gets consumed on each craft" item? So the station at a node would consume that item automatically and you'd be paying for that, while crafts at a freehold or just the player shop at a node would require that item from the crafter themselves.

Item acquisition could come in whatever way and on whatever lvl, from mob drops at lvl1 to some artisan profession at the top lvl of progress. Nodes could have these items as task requirement, so even lowbies that have no friends could be a part of the crafting system and get paid on top of that.

The difference is simply whether or not a player activity is required to recharge or repair the station.

If players gather the coal and wood and whatever else that 'refuels the Crafting Forge in the node' then it's close enough to the same as one of the other ones I don't dislike (not entirely but that's a long discussion).

If that sort of stuff just 'happens because you throw Gold at it and some NPC magically repairs the station' then it's a gold sink, not a player interaction, and economically, this can cause some issues. Not saying it would. Without knowing what their Economy Designer has in mind, there's no way to say with certainty, it would just make me cautious.

Azherae wrote: »

If that sort of stuff just 'happens because you throw Gold at it and some NPC magically repairs the station' then it's a gold sink, not a player interaction, and economically, this can cause some issues. Not saying it would. Without knowing what their Economy Designer has in mind, there's no way to say with certainty, it would just make me cautious.

I'd imagine node tasks would pay out money as a reward. That money would have to come from taxes and any type of npc transactions within the node (unless Intrepid want to have a neverending stream of money for players). So I think that having money-based automated station refueling/repairs would be fine, if it was in the context of "this money pays for the tasks that the node gives out". And the flow of money itself could be controlled by the world manager and depend on whatever Intrepid sees necessary for their economy.