Trade Skills: Don't Quit your Day Job

Crafting remains one of the most tedious aspects of MMOs. For most players, trade skills are a nice addition to the gaming experience but we'd rather not quit our adventuring "day job" for long hours at a time to keep up on crafting. Trade skills are generally time consuming, tedious, and devoid of player skill when they should be enjoyable, not just for the rewards they offer at the end of the hard work, but because the hard work is fun in and of itself.

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It was a really, really nice article.

I think the major reason why crafting in MMOs is over-looked is due to its place as a secondary element of gameplay. I mean, in WoW there's some pretty cool rewards for being a master of your trade (everything from flying carpets to epic-level armaments) but the system of putting it together is still very vanilla - as you suggest. There's a reason for this, of course: The developers believe all our time and effort is going into engaging into the other activities available in-game, and that we don't have much time to be fiddling around with different, unpredictable reagents because there's simply better things to do. The idea is that we just want to enjoy the reward, not the journey to that goal.

Really , I am against "work" in games , running around for materials so you can make money in a game , I would rather actually work and make REAL money .

One day I'm going to make a game where everything in it is fun ...

Most MMO's indeed have a boring tradeskill system.

You actually didn't mention Vanguard. Vanguard still has the same boring harvesting, but the crafting is really a big step forward in my opinion. You can level up in crafting, the crafting itself is something you have to master and really look into to understand and to get the most out of it. It's pretty rewarding, even without making money out of it.

But as all things in Vanguard, it's slow to progress. I don't play it anymore, but it had very good point; 3 leveling systems apart from each other, so you could choose what to do and be rewarded for it. Diplomacy is one of them and really something different, but again a bit too slow and not enough impact on the gameplay. Maybe it's all different now as I haven't played it in quite a while though.

Interesting article. I'm also addicted to the trades, some games are more disappointing in what they provide than others. EQ, for example, generally puts out the most useless crap ever, ultimately resulting in one big tedious plat sink. Player created gear only recently became somewhat on par with the group/raid drops.

EQ2 actually took one step towards this idea of having someone else gather goods, when they recently introduced guild halls. The guild hall has an NPC available to collect goods over a period of time. You pick the level range and what type of materials to gather. There's a cost, of course.

Pirates of the Burning Sea took things in the right direction, making it so that you simply click a button to use up labor hours and then move goods around and use more labor to put things together, but that can still be tedious and somewhat dangerous. While I do enjoy watching my characters actually put stuff together, I like this system best.

Great article, if a bit brief. I'd love to hear more about your ideas on NPC "vassals" or tradespeople who work for the player!

Vanguard did indeed have one of the better crafting mechanics. The fact that it had "quests" of its own, albeit very repetitive, and that you could level in JUST crafting was a step forward. MrFixxiT points out the downside, though - slow to progress, and the gathering was standard fare for MMOs.

If someone were to implement something like a NPC worker-bee system, I could see it having, or requiring, even deeper changes to game mechanics. It would have serious impact on the economy of a game, possibly bringing a sort of "price fixing" solution to systems that tend to be grossly inflated. It takes time to hunt down and harvest the random-spawning nodes in most MMOs, so crafting materials tend to be very expensive. With a system where a player can grow and harvest materials, even when they are not logged in - well, at that point you have something closer to today's market mechanics.

Plus, I imagine that housing would need to be purchased in order to allow this. Suddenly housing takes on a whole new level of importance. A game could even dictate the number of vassals and their rate of output based on how much land a player owns. The more land, the more vassals, the more they output. But the more it costs to upkeep. The downside of this is that, like many mechanics in today's MMOs, it's open to exploitation by powergamers - those with more time are given yet ANOTHER mechanic to build personal "power" and wealth, and have greater access to high-level gear, etc (by nature of their increased wealth).

Still, all said, it definitely something worth thinking about. Great article!

Though I enjoyed the artical, you refer to WoW quite often as if that game should undergo the changes you have mentioned; yet, I wonder if you have thought of the rammifications of such a system to the current economy of the game.

Aside from the obvious start-up cost dellema, to low and you risk crashing prices to high you risk hording and profiteering, one of the basic challenges of the game is attaining currency and the "work" you do in the game helps to define the enjoyment when you complete a goal. WoW has played to this with it's current, although unrealistic when compared to human history, system. Some choose to grind out materials for hours as hunter gatherers and some choose to do the bidding of others for thier daily stipen, I prefer to use my skills to manufacture for others; buying from the first and selling to the second.

Farming minerals by flying on a gryphon over rocky terrain looking for a "node" is not realistic by any means, but WoW is based in a fantasy realm and comparing it to any point in human history would not serve to positively impact it as a fantasy. Things are ment to be different from the norm. As a wandering vagabond of Azeroth your not going to set up a homestead and watch a garden grow, you travel and explore and should you find rare herbs or ore you bring it back to sell in exchange for the days bread and possibly a good night in the inn.

One could also argue that all the active mines are in starting areas on the different continents and that ore there is less precious than the others you would find abroad (that and I have yet to find a mine without an infestation of sometype, which further reduces the avilability). Herbs like frost lotus would likely not be something that one could simply plant and we all know that you can't just walking around skinning the warchief's worg.

The point is as a fantasy game it must steer clear of the regular ins and outs of daily life yet still allow you to experience the ins and outs of your characters life, it is supposed to be immerssing and realistic within the realm of the story. This is not the SIMs it's an MMO. I think we get more from the game when we have to work for it, pressing the FF button when our character, or another, does the work would reduce WoW as a game rather than enrich it.

This is part of the game, love it or hate it, it is a major component of why it works for the millions of subscribers. Your time spent at "work" is rewarded with currency. If everything was free, or could be farmed without personal effort, the values of everything would drop including the personal feeling of achievement we all enjoy when we buy that epic flyer or other epeen flexing status symbol.

That said, introducing this as part of a new economy in a new game would be exciting to see provided the rest of the game was built to sustain it and foster that style of an economy. Currently I don't belive WoW could support it, but moving away from WoW into other prospective games (blizzard's new MMO for example) would be very nice to see. Back in the day when Final Fantasy Online was released one of the things that attracted me to it was the ability to farm and grow on your own, have your own home, as well as strike out into the wilderness for fame and fortune. How we do it matters, but only to the extent that it sustains a healthy economy and creates a balance between work and play so we can enjoy in our sucessess.