Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Wichura]

We stay in our bases because crafting is too slow and we don't want to loose hours of work...

It's called "cowardice", my young padawan :>

When crafting times were shorter, whole Wasteland was full of miniguns, rockets, armors and other stuff, that was almost worthless, no matter what it was. Now a good gun has some value, not only in caps, and that is how IMO it should look like. I mean it's Wasteland, not some Counter-Strike-Happy-Arena-Of-Gunz-And-Ammoz-Everywhere-OMG-Lulz, every bullet has certain price and should be considered if target is worth shooting.

[Pozzo]

I agree with you Wichura about amount of stuff. But crafting shouldn"t be *1 click, wait 6 minutes, 1 click, wait 6 minutes, 3 clicks, wait 6 hours*. If you want that you can play to Ogame or other kind of game.

[Wichura]

So what should it be?
I'm not saying that I love to sit and watch timer goes down. I might be crazy, but I'm not an idiot :> But I can't see any other way to make crafting reasonable, as cooldowns, unless we don't want "combat-armor-flood" on Wastes.

[Cryofluid]

The problem is that if you allow easy crafting, you allow big amount of stuff=> nobody will care about losing stuff=> no care about nothing=> no game.


Moreover, nobody care about dying in bluesuit already=> AND this is a problem (people even travel by dying which is nonsense!)

That is not the case on TLA where you don't care about stuff BUT you do care about dying (because of THE HELL) and this is a good point.
On TLA you care about your LIFE not your STUFF.

2238 has crafting constraint, TLA has THE HELL constraint

Yet, perhaps another form of constraint could be found in crafting on 2238...

[Kilgore]

So, no game before wipe? As I remember, there were no gathering/crafting cooldowns. Is stuff everything? As I stated some time ago, maybe when people stop caring about losing their shit, they will start some other activity... and I don't mean "whoaaaa PvP 24/7 everyone whoaaaa", also it's so funny that I'm telling it to a member of Orphans gang.

Solar, you often say that in few days/weeks you were able to craft a shitload of stuff and get lots of monies, while being totally safe and all.. Now please let us know: how many times were you using this stuff against other player, actually? Because I've got a feeling that you were not playing this game... you were only crafting to see how long it takes. Am I wrong? Did you fight anything other than rats scorps and dogs? Did you take any risk?

[Badger]

Is this it? Yes it is.

The devs have got a system they like, and they seem to be geared towards tweaking than overhauling.

If it were up to me, crafting wouldn't be that big a gameplay element. You could build basic armour, guns and ammo in your backyard and that would be it. The basic stuff would be everywhere, cheap to buy and easy to craft. Anything mid to high end would be obtainable by quest and, god forbid, looting 'dungeons'.

What I've learned from FOnline is that making anything worthwhile craftable will lead to it being farmed to death. Even if it requires a rare location or exciting parts. People will find the most efficient way and then just churn it out.

[FischiPiSti]

It's not really about the timers. PvP is like that too. I find myself having FOnline open and just doing something else while alt tabbing and performing one or two clicks every 10 or 15 minutes. Right now it's not really a game you "play", it's more of a browser game where you do a few actions per day and you're done.

Not to mention how much this system helps bots...
The other day i was gathering some resources, entered NCR to get to the workbench, and a "player" was trying to gather junk from the barrel non-stop. Finished what i wanted, left town, and every now and then returned to craft more stuff, and every time i enetered town, the same "player" was standing in that very same spot fiddling with his hands on the barrel non-stop. For hours. I mean ffs, you just need to position the mouse on the barrel, switch to use mode, and start a macro that simulates clicking.
Why not borrow ideas from other games that work perfectly fine? Gather from a node, then the node is depleted. The player needs to find another node. Isnt that serving the same purpose as CD-s? Slowing down the economy? In a more fun and realistic way?

[Solar]

Solar, you often say that in few days/weeks you were able to craft a shitload of stuff and get lots of monies, while being totally safe and all.. Now please let us know: how many times were you using this stuff against other player, actually? Because I've got a feeling that you were not playing this game... you were only crafting to see how long it takes. Am I wrong? Did you fight anything other than rats scorps and dogs? Did you take any risk?

I was "gathering" for X% of the time, which was a high percentage because I was testing out specifically to see how much I could churn out, and for Y% of the time I was fighting (I actually mostly killed a tonne of Brahmin and Geckos, which I did both whilst I was gathering and whilst purely fighting, but that's not the point ) it did, infact, included the odd bit of PvP when I was bored and wanted to shoot someone in the face, but of course not to the same extent as the gangs.

Generally my time was spent - Gather fruit whilst killing cows and lizards -> return to the vault to craft a batch of Mentats -> Gather enough stuff for the next batch whilst killing cows and lizards -> Free time to do whatever -> Craft the next batch -> Repeat.

Of course I'd much rather have been doing some of the things that are to come, but one thing I wasn't doing was staring at a cooldown timer.

If I were using my time to mainly fight players instead, I dare say I would have lost a lot of stuff, would have gained some back and I would have burnt through yet more ammo, drugs, what have you. I would also have not cared about building up a big store of crap that I would never use, so a much smaller percentage of my time would have been craft orientated.

[Solar]

The player needs to find another node. Isnt that serving the same purpose as CD-s? Slowing down the economy? In a more fun and realistic way?

That would be fine, to stop botting, but pointless to control the economy for normal players when you can just go and instantly find another it makes it pointless.

Unless you then somehow control the "respawning" of these nodes, which of course must be per player as otherwise they will just be camped. At which point you just have a personal timeout in exactly the same way.


As for crafting, it was never meant to be a "big" gameplay element, its just one of the easiest to do game play elements to get working.

[UbiValkin]

As for crafting, it was never meant to be a "big" gameplay element, its just one of the easiest to do game play elements to get working.

It's boring to kill more and more mobs... As for me, now crafting is very very very "big" element, 'cause it's only way i get XP now, craft ammo till ~59 minute CD of crafting and then craft most XP giving gun, then get resources for all that ammo and gun again, and then log off, till CD again 59 minutes, or, if need to go somewhere/do something/sleep, till 0 minutes and then again craft ammo+ammo+ammo+gun.

[Ari Lazarus]

I'd say increasing the number of item sinks might help with the issue of flooding finished products.

Right now we got
- Critical misses
- Deterioration and subsequent dumping of item
- Disassembly / Upgrading
- Dying in a random encounter
- Selling to Merchants

As the main item inputs are pretty damn big (Crafters and Encounters), a multi-pronged approach should be taken so that item influx is at a steadily growing rate, to match player populations. Aside from selling to merchants and dying with equipment (which is itself usually avoided), most of the sinks are too small to make any significant impact. From what I can currently see Devs restrict crafting heavily but the role Encounters play should also be given attention. Tweaking the amount of loot in Random Encounters would also affect the speed of items being introduced.

One way to beef up disassembly would be to make it so that only certain transitory items (products like gunpowder, alloy, metal parts) are obtained from disassembly. For example, I might need a '10mm Gun Barrel' to produce a 10mm SMG. This can only be acquired from... you guessed it, 10mm Pistols. This system is already in place (i.e. requiring a gun to make another gun), but having it be a chance-based result from disassembly will further reduce the number of extra 10mms in the game.

Come to think of it, a chance-based EVERYTHING would be preferable to cool downs.

Want to gather?
Chance to find the resource area. Based on Outdoorsman already.
Chance to fail to mine. Based on STR and / or Melee.
Critical Luck Fail! You hit the stones and unearth a family of angry molerats!
Critical Luck Win! You discover a discarded Material / random amount of caps hidden in the ore!
Variable amount of resource gathered: 1-6 Ore / Minerals, 1-10 Fruits, 2-5 Fibres, etc.
One-off gathering so only gathered once before node disappears.
TIE random encounters to the world map triangle so if people don't move they will end up in the same place (the area without a node)
Allow entering an 'empty' map to actually be a Random Encounter, based on Luck and Outdoorsman. So much for mining naked!

Want to distill stuff?
Chance of explosion in your face from poor handling of dangerous materials.
Chance of unintentionally making the BEST BOOZE EVAR... +2 CHA when drunk, addictive!
Require variable wood: 1-5, and variable fruit: 5-10
Create random amount of random alcohol based on number of fruits, amount of wood, and heck, Luck.

Want to craft?
Chance to fail creation. Based on Profession Level, Science / Repair Average and Luck.
Chance to create a poor item that starts deteriorated.
Chance to create an epic version of the same item. If perkless, given random weapon perk!

Want to disassemble?
Chance for disassemble-exclusive items. Based on Science and Luck.
Ultrafail! You totally destroy the item, salvaging nothing.

There. Removing cooldowns then including all these chance-based situations will lead to a HARDER yet more ACTIVE and EXCITING crafting cycle, one which requires more player interaction and supervision.

P.S. To head off any idea that this will lead to a slew of 'powerlevelling' alts to 21, I'd say if your faction (yes, you would need one to pull this off) can amass the huge amounts of material required at the abovementioned difficulty and scarcity, you bloody well deserve it.

[FischiPiSti]

That would be fine, to stop botting, but pointless to control the economy for normal players when you can just go and instantly find another it makes it pointless.

Unless you then somehow control the "respawning" of these nodes, which of course must be per player as otherwise they will just be camped. At which point you just have a personal timeout in exactly the same way.


As for crafting, it was never meant to be a "big" gameplay element, its just one of the easiest to do game play elements to get working.

Yes, one of the problems is that ore/minerals are waaaay too common... I dont know if the engine lets you, but can you control the encounter areas? For example every square on the worldmap would have 1 specific layout, not allways changing when you enter it like it does now. This way you could setup a few nodes around the world that would control the economy perfectly because it limits total resources. Ofc this also raises other problems like gangs camping the node. Note that they cannot benefit from this because for them, the node is depleted, so they cant gather resources from it, just to bug others. Actually when i think about it, no change there since i get PK-ed anyway while farming the same node over and over again

Or even better! Remove resources from REs alltogether, and setup small custom areas like the ares military base, that contain nodes, and name them mines, woods, junkpiles, mutated..corn...like..plant...fields, etc. A player needs to travel from mine to mine to gather resources.

Again, this would be quite fatal to the averega miner, but think about the gang wars. Gangs fighting for control of mines.... If you think about it, it makes sense, the great war started because of low resources anyway.. I dont think any country would invade others and start a nuclear war that exterminates 90% of humanity if they could just go into the wilderness 1 "square away" and find ore, minerals, wood, fruit, etc to make miniguns, ammo,  even fuel...

A grand example is the ghost farm... A whole field of fruit and you cant gather them?? Why??

Summary of my pov: Limit the resources the world has to offer, Not the players. Needless to say this also limits crafting in general, as no resources means no end product for the crowd either. Even better: Low amounts of goods on the market(game badly needs an AH.) means higher prices, high amount of goods, low prices. You, the devs would have TOTAL controll over the ENTIRE economy, by limiting the resources. No alts would solve the gangs problems. No Bots could automate the gathering.

I seriously cant think of a counter argument, other then implementing all this is hard, but i think its possible.

[Ari Lazarus]

Alliances would fight over these all the time.

The average gatherer / crafter would be shot on sight.

Prices would be pretty interesting to watch as alliances exerted their influence on the market. It MAY tank.

Small factions would have to be friendly to the controlling alliance.

Perhaps some might charge caps to allow others to mine.

Either way, putting all of a particular resource into the hands of a certain few would be... unconventional.

The winner of these wars would become pretty much the player version of either the Brotherhood of Steel, or the Enclave.

[Solar]

There. Removing cooldowns then including all these chance-based situations will lead to a HARDER yet more ACTIVE and EXCITING crafting cycle, one which requires more player interaction and supervision.

P.S. To head off any idea that this will lead to a slew of 'powerlevelling' alts to 21, I'd say if your faction (yes, you would need one to pull this off) can amass the huge amounts of material required at the abovementioned difficulty and scarcity, you bloody well deserve it.

We can rig chances to mirror timeouts, we can make people gatherer 10 times more and only have a 10% success rate. Make it depend on skills so new characters are at an even worse disadvantage, or any number of things to mirror the function of the simple timeout.

Basically its taking the free time afforded by a timeout and filling it with mindless extra work. People could already be out there running about doing whatever they liked, but they choose to sit and stare at a timeout.

Would make players have to talk to two NPC's on opposite ends of the WM for a more "active" crafting too, then we could remove timeouts altogether.

[FischiPiSti]

Alliances would fight over these all the time.

The average gatherer / crafter would be shot on sight.

Prices would be pretty interesting to watch as alliances exerted their influence on the market. It MAY tank.

Small factions would have to be friendly to the controlling alliance.

Perhaps some might charge caps to allow others to mine.

Either way, putting all of a particular resource into the hands of a certain few would be... unconventional.

The winner of these wars would become pretty much the player version of either the Brotherhood of Steel, or the Enclave.

Yes, but no faction could afford to guard it 24/7. There should be many mines, in which are only a few resources. The factions cant control every one of them. Anyhow this was A suggestion  -which can also be tweaked so that 1 or 2 faction cant dominate the world-, 1 from the many possible solutions, but tweaking cds without a major overhaul just wont fix the issues of alts/bots.