Does Crafting have any place in modern MMOs?

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This is going to be a little Twitter-heavy, and I apologize for that.

The @PantheonCrafter account, posted a survey today about crafting:

I just had to question the whole idea of crafting. It’s become a checkbox item — does your MMO have… [x] crafting? [ ] fishing? [ ] dance emotes?

Oh, it doesn’t have dance emotes? Well, can’t play it your gritty, realistic Knights of the Round Table MMO without dance emotes!

In real life, crafting is an outlet for explosive creativity. Crafty people, in real life, make amazing things, astounding things, and they inspire other people to test their limits and try new things. But crafting in MMOs is just the opposite of that — you press some keys and out comes an item. Whether those keys make your character mime swinging a sword or swinging a hammer, the result is the same.

I argued that there’s only a few reasons to have crafting in your MMO:

  • You want to drain money from the economy
  • You want to encourage players to spend longer online, grinding
  • You want to allow non-raiders a path to get near raid-quality items
  • You want to give players another way to interact

I felt that you could get pretty much all these things just by having a vendor that would sell things priced by quality and demand. Something costs a million nitwicks, you grind for it, get the item. Call the NPC a crafter, even 🙂

I knew this wouldn’t be a popular opinion, but I just thought the question needed asking. All my crafting professions are maxed or nearly maxed in FFXIV. I have a bunch of crafting alts in EQ2. I had various crafters in EQ. I have put in my time in front of a crafting machine. I really enjoyed the EQ2 group crafting instances. I love the FFXIV crafting quest lines. But, I don’t fool myself with any of this that the result was ever worthwhile. It was just more stuff to do, and mostly I would have just preferred to outright buy the finished product.

Nephele challenged me on this:

I am absolutely, 100% in favor of non-combat activities in MMOs. I can easily conceive of MMOs with no combat whatsoever — Minecraft in Creative Mode. A significant percentage of the Neverwinter player-created Foundry missions. EQ Next Landmark (though they did add some combat near the end).

There’s plenty of non-crafting, non-combat activities in MMOs as well. Vanguard had the Diplomacy minigame, as well as home construction. Lord of the Rings Online and FFXIV let you form player bands and play whatever music you can think of. (Well, FFXIV won’t let you play certain songs… it’s true).

FFXIV actually has a whole section of the game — the Golden Saucer — full of non-combat activities, such as Mahjong, Chocobo Racing, Arena games played with your minions, card games… they actually have really made an effort to give players non-crafting, non-combat games.

To gain some perspective on this from a game dev point of view, I reached out to Emily “Domino” Taylor, one time the EverQuest II crafting guru and now a game designer at EA/Bioware. I honestly didn’t expect a reply, but… she did.

Crafting as a system to tie together the economy and the game world — sure, I can get behind that. Let players do something besides operating a murder simulator — absolutely. One thing Domino didn’t really touch on was crafting as a way of making actually useful items, or of touching upon player creativity in any way.

Crafting as an idea is fun — crafters were a hugely important part of the feudal society in which so many MMOs are set. But if I can’t bring my creativity into the game world, then I’m just pressing buttons to get the same result anyone else would get.

The original survey question asked which MMO’s crafting system Pantheon’s should try to mimic.

A long, long time ago, I went to Sigil’s first (and perhaps only) fan faire, before the game was released. I lived in the San Diego area at the time, trying (unsuccessfully) to get a job at SOE while working on short term contracts.

Brad McQuaid had a vision of crafters as every bit as vital as any other profession. I had the idea, after listening to him, of crafters who were a vital part of a raid, where they would have to make things or mine things or do all sorts of things in order to supply the raid or open up passages and so on — actual non-combat roles that would still get you in to all the cool places to go.

Vanguard never delivered on that (and I may have been extrapolating from what Brad was really saying). EverQuest II had crafting content where you would supply defenders with the gear they needed to repel attacking monsters (very fun), and of course FFXIV has gone overboard (heh) recently with their fishing raid. So crafting can be done right.

But, as a checkbox item that MMOs feel compelled to add without any really deep connection into the world — WoW and EQ, for example — not a fan. I’d rather do without.

Related posts:

EverQuest is dead. Long live EverQuest! New games trying to capture EQ nostalgia are doomed. Default ThumbnailFavorite Game Series #2: EverQuest I’m still playing EverQuest for some reason…

11 thoughts on “Does Crafting have any place in modern MMOs?”

  1. I’m with you here, and it might be aging-out, or it might be “been there, done that”, but the idea of having crafting in an MMO has become part of the fabric of the furniture. We’re not the only ones in this: I remember when SWTOR was gearing up, one of the devs literally said that the game would have crafting “because other MMOs have it”. Not because it added anything, or playing a meaningful part in the enjoyment, but because it was expected.
    I loved Vanguard’s crafting system because it was interactive. It felt like it was a minigame (a dirty word to some, I know), but combat has rotations and builds, so why couldn’t crafting? It made the process a first-tier system when others were just using pushbutton mechanics.
    The two games I think do crafting right are EVE and potentially Crowfall, because each of them rely heavily on crafting in order to make the rest of the game possible. I do not think that most devs would consider this because the draw is ALWAYS the combat, and making crafting THE premiere task in the game doesn’t let guilds get first raid takedowns and it doesn’t make for the kinds of visceral, violent gameplay that packs seats.

  2. First an aside. Dark Age of Camelot had exactly what you mention; the requirement of crafters during PvP sieges. They’d have to be out there building war machines on the spot, which meant not only the crafter herself, but a team of people to carry materials. I was a carrier and it sounds absolutely dull but in fact it was pretty exciting, knowing it was crucial for me to get this load of wood to the crafters so they could compete the catapult we needed, and knowing at any minute I might run into an enemy rogue lurking behind the lines trying to cut off supply lines. It was also a nice way to involve lower level characters in the “Realm Wars.”

    That said, I enjoy crafting. FF XIV has 8 jobs built around crafting and I have a character that does them all and hardly fights and she’s just as fun for me as my ‘combat’ character. I mean yes you’re pushing buttons to make the same sword anyone else can make, but if you weren’t doing that you’d be pushing buttons to kill the same orc everyone else is killing, probably using the same skill rotation everyone else was using based on a build you found online. Running through instances that people do on auto-pilot hoping you get a drop. MMOs in general aren’t very creative, but where they can be is in things like decorating housing. Yes you could just sell all the decorations but for me that’s not as fun as ‘working’ for them, and I put that in quotes because you aren’t working any more than you’re actually fighting when you press buttons to make a mob die. What I like about crafting is having several systems that rely on each other. I usually make a ‘family’ of alts to see if I can get a cottage industry going, because for me its fun. Also in the case of consumables I make things I actually use, on a regular basis. I COULD buy good food and drink and potions in ESO if I was filthy in-game rich, but instead I gather the materials (which means exploring/roaming which is a part of MMOs I most enjoy) and craft them for free, which means I can save my gold for buying gear if I don’t want to craft it.

    So yeah for me crafting is really important and I enjoy it. The more complex the better.

    • I had totally forgotten about the use of crafters in PvP! I’d even helped build the siege engines on offense and repair the castle in defense! DAoC was probably the one game where I really enjoyed the PvP because of the three sides and the persistent nature of it. But, it wasn’t much use during the PvE that gradually became the focus of the game. Yet another system that fell by the wayside, even in a game that did it so well in the beginning.

      I’m hearing from you what I think a lot of people would say — that they want to play an MMO where they don’t have to rely on being in a certain place at a certain time with certain people in order to have fun. Making consumables is probably the best use case for crafting that I can think of. But I’d like MMO devs to challenge themselves to think of other ways that people who don’t have time for an instance or a raid could just putter away online on their own work. Perhaps by exploring, or learning some NPC tribe’s native language to get better deals.

      Crafting is a tick in a checkbox. Make it as important to the game as endgame raiding — like it was for a time in DAoC — and then see what happens.

      • See though, endgame raiding is ZERO importance to me.
        That’s the thing with posts like this one: we all assume everyone enjoys the same things we do with the same basic level of intensity. If I had 2 MMOs to choose from and one had crafting but no endgame raiding, and the other had endgame raiding but no crafting, all other aspects being the same, I would absolutely play the one with crafting.
        So for you crafting is a tick in a checkbox. For me endgame raiding is. I’d be really interested to know what % of players in various MMOs do crafting and what % do endgame raiding, honestly. And I’m sure it would vary wildly between games.

        • Oh no, I am not a raider. I play MMOs for group content. I just like chatting with people. You can’t do that in raids, and you can’t do that in crafting. I just want to hang with some new friends and chat and have fun.

  3. Okay, I got two paragraphs into a reply and then realized it was going to go long so I’m going to turn it into a post of my own. The tl:dr part is, I think this whole discussion is verging on talking about crafting in the way people who don’t like video games talk about video games. Not everything has to be “for” a greater purpose. A lot of things are “for” themselves.

    Also, in my definition of “crafting” in MMORPGs, much of you did in Neverwinter’s Foundry was what I would always have defined as “crafting”. I don’t really see this hard divide between “combat”, “non-combat” and “crafting” content. In MMORPGs, lots of things are all of them at once.

    Anyway, if I don’t end up writing about something else, I’ll expand further. Great topic and congratulations on getting Domino involved. Best craft dev ever.

    • I could probably get another few posts out of the discussion we had on Twitter 🙂

      I would call the Foundry, and house decorating, and most of what you do in Minecraft, as “building”. This may be a distinction without much meaning. I am narrowly defining crafting as the process of inputting time, currency and resources into some mechanism, out of which pops a known result which is identical to every other such item.

  4. I feel like so much of the potential of crafting in some MMORPGs is lost due to PVP or economic balance concerns and, in my imagination at least, the avoidance of a making the larger, non-crafter segment of the playerbase feel that it is mandatory to craft. Playing WoW over the years, and even now Classic, I feel that most professions are simply not useful to me. I think crafting has to feel useful for it be worth spending time on developing, or as gameplay. Useful here can mean a few different things, but it crafting is none of these things then surely it’s tacked on or has been designed into obsolescence. Crafting is useful to me if I can make things I want, e.g. gear that is useful at the stage/level when I can make it or at least that sells. I too love having alts that can form a sort of crafting empire to address interdependencies, it gives me a lot of extra gameplay. In WoW and other games crafting meets none of these different usefulness tests – you can’t make armour or weapons until you’ve already outleveled or outgeared them, nobody buys the gear you can make either and there’s no housing to allow crafting to make a more permanent mark on the your character’s world. The potential is there but for whatever reasons it’s not in the place I feel it needs to be.

    • Most MMOs are really tuned toward making raiders happy. If the player base is sitting in crafting halls making useful stuff, then they aren’t raiding, and all the content on the box art is pointless. Even in FFXIV, the top gear crafted stuff requires raid drops. And a LOT of grinding. WoW’s crafting wasn’t useful when I was playing. The auction house would drive prices of commodities to the floor, and the things that sold were the things alts needed before they could be carried into raids. WoW definitely just clicked the checkbox for crafting without really integrating it into their world.

      Thanks for the insight! Most people who’ve replied really want crafting whether or not it is useful.

  5. Pingback: Global Chat: Is MMO crafting obsolete? – tomorrowsnews.net

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