Building the Theoretical MMORPG: Crafting

Crafting systems in games started back in ancient times when pixels roamed the earth, but have now not only become an automatic include into every RPG, and often appears in other genres as well.  Crafting in each game varies greatly in both purpose and outcome, but in the genre of MMORPG the purpose is to be an economic factor and time sink, and the outcome is boredom and tedium that few people would do if it wasn't for their Skinner box style rewards schedules.  To explain Skinner box from the last section, go watch this video on Escapist's Magazine's website if you haven't already (go ahead, this article isn't going to go anywhere while you're gone; just remember to come back with some flowers and candy to make up for neglecting it's attention).

It's the opinion of this author, and S.Q.U.I.R.R.E.L.S. (Southern Quarter United Independent Reactionary Radicals Engaged with the Legion of S.N.A.P.P.L.E.), that MMORPG crafting would benefit from having several aspects of it redesigned to make it a more fun experience that players may actually enjoy, rather than a time sink done solely for the rewards.  In this article I've broken crafting down into three sections: ingredient gathering, item creation, and crafting economics.  Topically speaking with worded explanatory blocks and bold text:

Ingredient Gathering

Items gathered from nodes are nice when you are doing something else in the area, such as questing, and they just happen to be there for you to harvest (nice in the sense that it doesn't waste as much effort as solely doing said task), but if the only thing you want to do in that area is harvest, either for skill or crafting purposes, then the tedium of running circles around a zone you've long since stopped caring about for hours on end can make for boring game play that, if not for the rewards, no one sane would do.  Mob drops can create similar problems, except the harvesting player is usually killing vastly under-leveled mobs and is now making it hard for other players to enjoy the actual fun parts of the game that take place in said area and involve those mobs.

A good solution to the tedium would be instanced solo content, with possibly even set sub-quests that can be done where the rewards are more ingredients.  For example, in order to gather ore, the player could go into a solo instance of a randomized mine map that has a few nodes, some minor trash mobs and a couple of mini bosses, as well as a couple of random quests based around exploring the area and killing mobs.  Another idea is to have gathering done by the playing a casual style mini-game, like getting gems from playing bejeweled or getting herbs by playing plants vs zombies.  In a system like this crafting skill could give players new abilities in the mini-game, which makes for a more rewarding experience than the frustration of being taunted by nodes you can't harvest because you ain't good enough at swinging a pick, shovel, or spoon.

Item Creation

Between the ingredients for each recipe and the recipes that make ingredients for other recipes, item creation can make for a lot of annoying inventory management and unnecessary steps.  Add to this that different tiers of skill usually have different versions of the same style of ingredient, (metal ingredients, for example often consist of: copper, iron, steel, platinum, gundanium, ridiculousjokeium etc.) and the frustration of inventory management gets to be that much worse; especially since in order to gain skill in crafting you usually have to turn out thousands of pointless widgets that clutter your inventory.  While I do appreciate the idea behind having me do things during item creation as a way of making the process slightly less suck, after the annoyance of ingredient gathering and inventory management I personally prefer to hit a button that will take forever to craft a thousand pointless items so I can go and do something fun or entertaining rather than playing the same quick-time event over and over again.  As for the random chance that you create a better version of that item idea, this is a terrible Skinner box style method of lengthening the amount of time and effort you spend on a not-entertaining crafting system.

The bloody idea of grinding out a veritable ass load of worthless crap in order to gain skill in crafting needs to die a lonely death on the side of the road to Vegas after a forty eight week Shasta drinking binge.  Much better methods of gaining crafting skill include, but aren't limited to: mini games; questing; exploration; instanced solo content; canceling your subscription and finding a better game; and smashing your hand with a hammer.  A good way of eliminating the inventory management silliness from crafting is to have their be only one type of gathered item that is broken down by the player into various ingredients that all act akin to a pseudo currency (example:gathered "ores" could break down into low quality metals, medium quality metals, and high quality metals that are a number on your ingredients page rather than items in your inventory) and have all recipes just use various amounts of said ingredients and not need a pantheon of different items in order to make a basic sword; with the possible exception of end game content recipes requiring some style type of boss drop ingredient.

Crafting Economics

The one thing crafting actually does successfully do is help create a hole for money to fall through to keep inflation in check, but this alone does not justify making an entire portion of a game into a poor Skinner box reliant pile of tedious boredom, especially since all it takes is a bit of creativity in order for you to find other methods of subtly making in-game currency disappear.  While gathering in a lot of games is a great way to get new players some much needed cash to purchase things from vendors and auction houses, this is more of a nice side effect than a necessity for a functional game.  Also, while rare recipes and ingredients make for good happiness like things for the person that finds them, it also makes for a much greater amount of negative on the side of the people who actually want to purchase either said item or it's finished product, as the cash for your lotto style winning ticket has to be payed out by a single player's pocket book.

A good deal of the end game economics of crafting has to do with how much of the ingredients players need to make items that actually fill a demand in the market, and whether or not said item can actually be made.  Both of these factors are a matter of game polish and how well balanced they are says more about the quality of the company in charge of the MMORPG rather than how well the design premise is.

To give an executive summery of the ideas gone over in the above paragraphs, and to have an excuse to make silly pictures:

The crafting systems in MMORPGs can be more than a boring element copied from everyone's competition in order to say that your game has crafting, a feature based around a Skinner box style rewards schedule as the sole driving factor behind why anyone bothers with the tedium and inventory management annoyances.