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MMO for a casual crafter?
trevellian
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
After getting burnt out on WoW I quit a few months back.
I am now looking for an MMO to fiddle around with on a casual basis, ideally one that has some kind of crafting setup - or something that allows me to be 'productive' without the "go kill xx number of yy and bring me the results" grindquests. Currently I am running my one months free trial on Tabula Rasa but I am a little disappointed about the crafting side of things.
I had played EQ2 some time back and although it wasn't particularly taxing it did have a crafting element to it. How is the game holding up at the moment? - I would assume it's in it's maturity phase now with many/most people at the upper levels and geared up towards raiding to get the whatever the "uber" gear drops are so they can raid the next instance for slightly better "uber" gear. Is there still a place for low level crafting - or is it just not worth the time?
Are there *any* MMO's out there that cater to my tastes? I used to love the crafting in SWG pre-CU, the whole process of surveying, mining, collecting, experimenting, creating blueprints and manufacturing was fascinating to me, and could be done pretty much without having to get too far into the fighting side of things.
Any suggestions?
I am now looking for an MMO to fiddle around with on a casual basis, ideally one that has some kind of crafting setup - or something that allows me to be 'productive' without the "go kill xx number of yy and bring me the results" grindquests. Currently I am running my one months free trial on Tabula Rasa but I am a little disappointed about the crafting side of things.
I had played EQ2 some time back and although it wasn't particularly taxing it did have a crafting element to it. How is the game holding up at the moment? - I would assume it's in it's maturity phase now with many/most people at the upper levels and geared up towards raiding to get the whatever the "uber" gear drops are so they can raid the next instance for slightly better "uber" gear. Is there still a place for low level crafting - or is it just not worth the time?
Are there *any* MMO's out there that cater to my tastes? I used to love the crafting in SWG pre-CU, the whole process of surveying, mining, collecting, experimenting, creating blueprints and manufacturing was fascinating to me, and could be done pretty much without having to get too far into the fighting side of things.
Any suggestions?
trevellian on
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You can get stuff from killing animals, or forage for it. Foraging means that you make a foraging skill out of components - search in a circle, cone or line, range, what quality item to search for etc. (You can make attack spells like this too.)
Then you make a gathering skill and gather stuff, and build stuff from it.
...ok, that was a pretty horrible description of how it works. But anyway, it's a deep system.
Hah, no. Ryzom. :P
But overall I'd still recommend EVE over Ryzom. Mostly because people actually play it.
Very nice casual, complicated economy to draw in folks that were really into the more hardcore crafting ie UO, SWG, EVE.
Mix that with a bunch of pvp where people are going to be losing a ton of stuff, you are looking at a quick a very high amount of demand for about anything you can create.
In spite of all the horrible gameplay and shitty combat implementation (fuck you SOE and your little NGE too), the crafting was genuinely enjoyable.
I certainly do NOT miss DAoC's crafting though.
8-)
edit: Well geuss I should have read the thread before hitting reply. It has been mentioned and linked.
I might play it for free just because I'm an Egypt nut but I'm not paying any amount of money for those graphics, oi!
Maybe I'll download the client again, just to see how it works.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
So I can log in for 15 minutes, make all the stuff I can using whatever raw materials and stored labor I have, put my products on the auction house. Then I go to bed, and when I wake up I have 8 more hours of stored labor to make stuff with again. No npc loot grind for anything, and no hours spent crafting widgets.
The downside is this game isn't released yet. Open beta is still going, and characters will be wiped an the end.
If you pre-order you can play on Jan 7. Otherwise you will have to wait until Jan 23 I think.
I wouldn't say that the Potbs economy is as robust as the one in EVE, more of a EVE-lite. However, it is much less of a time sink. The ship combat is great, and a real change from typical mmo combat. The land combat is sub-par compared with the other mmo's on the market, and is not really this game's focus anyway.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
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I was thinking maybe I'd start the client download when I leave for christmas traveling in a couple days, then play it sometime after that.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Basically. But with some new, very expensive ships, the only method to do so is to "invent" the blueprint to make that ship. Which is a convoluted and exceedingly expensive/complex thing to do if you're attempting to do so on your own.
Also risky, since you'll be shipping your stuff down to lowsec to put up towers to do the research most likely.
That and drug production. I've heard tales of woe from people that attempted to do that
(which is too bad because I had hoped to throw in my lot to become a drug lord)
I'd wager 80% or more of the lvl 50 crafters in Vanguard got there using bots, and most of those are actually active players when they're not botting. Crafting for level is just so boring that a lot of people turn to the dark side.
(Please do not gift. My game bank is already full.)
EVE's economy, AFAIK, is pretty well-balanced. WoW's is screwed up because it's really easy to level crafting and you can do it on the side, so having high crafting doesn't really mean anything. Plus, crafted gear is almost always inferior to stuff you find in instances/while questing.
Unless it is stuff that binds when you craft it. Then you are looking at stuff that will last for a pretty long time. But that does you no good as far as trying to make money is concerned.
Don't you have to train up skills to craft in Eve and thus give up skills that would make you better in combat? What I'm getting at is that in WoW crafting doesn't cost you in terms of combat skills. This leads to materials being seen as a way to skill up crafting skills instead of a way to make useful items.
(Please do not gift. My game bank is already full.)
It only costs in that you need to spend time leveling industrial skills instead of combat skills. Overall you lose nothing.
For example, I have a "tinkerer" profession on my main. This includes jewelcrafting, mining, and cooking. My mining can supplement my jewelcrafting, but I need access to a farmer to do a lot of my cooking. This forces me to either roll an alt to farm for me, or more likely find a farmer buddy and trade finished goods for produce, or hit up the AH.
A lot of the professions are symbiotic like this in that they need another person to complete them. It works out huge for small groups of people who take different classes - we have like 6-7 guys who play regularly and there's an open free trade network of raw goods going to crafters and finished goods going to anyone who needs them.
And everyone can cook in WoW, and fish to supplement it. In LOTRO I am a man whose services are in demand as a cook. Especially since you can get a title of "Breakfast Connisseur" if you eat 9 of each of the game's 5 or so breakfast foods.
It's a strange sort of setup - in some ways very casual friendly and in others not at all friendly. (got podkilled about 30 seconds after I poked my head into an asteroid belt in 0.3 sec space...unfortunately carrying a couple hundred thousand ISK worth of training books too...). Death actually means something here, and nowhere is 100% safe (not even the 1.0 sec areas, suicide squads anyone?)
The skill training/learning arrangement is interesting - basically you pick an area you want to train up in and your character automatically starts learning it, even when you are offline, just that each skill and skill level has an amount of time before you have completed it. So if I am currently learning Iron Will level 3, which takes 8 hours or so to learn, I just start it off before I leave for work and when I come back home I am done
Anyway, I am roaming around the 0.7 - 1.0 areas for now, just mining and ratting to build up a base of ISK while I build up skillpoints. Characters name is McGough if anyone sees me.
The downside to that is that I kept going "OK, I have 150 million bucks and two weeks on this skill, so I'll log on again in two weeks." :P
..of course, that was also my first MMO, so I was probably fairly starry-eyed about the whole process. I remember it as being super gratifying though.
I'm the same way about SWG[1] to be honest - it was the closest MMO to have a real broad spectrum of possibilities and I got hooked into the crafting side of things, but I have to temper my memories with the fact that it was my first ever MMO and was in a star wars setting to boot so there is a real danger of rose-tinted glasses.
It was the complexity of the crafting that hooked me.
[1] All SWG references are from EU launch until CU, at which point I had enough of SOE playing silly buggers and I left.