Wits Intact

One of the fundamental problems with the idea of making lots of items available via crafting is that at the moment, it’s pretty difficult to find specific items on vendors. Many people will probably hear that, nod their heads and say “ah, yes, what we need is an auction house.”

Well, maybe.

I agree that would be effective, but it would pretty much put vendors out of business, and I think vendors are one of the things that give UO it’s unique feel. I would rather not kick them to the curb unless there were no other way . . . and I believe we could address that problem in party by making vendors easier to use.

Imagine, if you will, a shopping gump that lists all the items on vendors on the screen. Imagine you could buy these items (or, perhaps, make an offer on them for the vendor’s controller to accept or reject later) with one mouse click within this interface. Now imagine you could filter that list based on whatever criteria you wanted. That would certainly make shopping for unique crafted items a lot easier, wouldn’t it?

That’s kind of cool, and, frankly, something I want to do eventually regardless of where this whole crafting discussion goes. But there’s another idea I really like (and yes, in case it’s not blatantly obvious, pretty much everything in this series of articles has been suggested by players in one form or another). That idea is player-created BODs.

Maybe “BODs” isn’t quite the right term here, but the principal is the same — a contract for a specific set of items. In this case, I’m envisioning that you could post an order to some kind of public bulletin board and crafters could compete to be the first one to deliver the goods, sort of like a bounty system. This would certainly be an easier way to get a specific item you were looking for, and all it would cost is a bundle of cash.

But player BODs wouldn’t be just for crafters, oh no! Many people picked up on the point that rare crafting material “fragments” mentioned in my last article would be loot drops and not easily attainable by pure crafters. That was deliberate. The intent is to supply a commodity to PvM players that will not be directly usable by them, but will have value to crafters, thereby making the trade relationship reciprocal instead of one-way. But that could irritate a lot of crafters who don’t want to have to find suppliers of these kinds of materials. Once again, player BODs to the rescue! Crafters could create BODs for “100 Phoenix Feathers” or “3,000 Adamantine Ingots”, which some PvMers could then compete to fill, in exactly the same way.

This is exactly the kind of discussion I was hoping for when I started down this path.

The one comment I feel I need to respond to immediately was this:

danger powers: Rather than a cap on the number of repairs I would like to see something like a “drastic repair error” introduced.

Honestly, I think this is a very bad idea. If there’s one thing people would hate worse than their stuff breaking, it’s their stuff breaking randomly. That’s why, of all the proposed ways to implement item decay I’ve seen, this is the one I liked best. It’s predictable. (On the heels of that, I should mention — in response to everyone who pointed out how quickly durability goes away in the game today — that it was my intent with this design that we would regulate that so durability loss is quite a bit slower.)

(Caveat: same rules of commitment apply as with the first part of this article: this is my blog, these are not plans but ideas, and so on.)

As many people pointed out, it’s not too cool to have your double slayer HCI SSI Sword of Everything that took you a year of Doom-trawling to get bust . . . unless it gets a lot easier to replace.

Well, what if it was?

Some people have suggested that we should port the Tokuno arti system (where your chances of getting one increase for each eligible creature you kill) to Doom and the paragon system. We will probably get to the paragon system in time, but I am actively planning to update Doom to work like this soon. This is going to put more artifact caliber loot into players’ hands. There are some additional changes that are not yet on the menu, but I would like to do to loot in general:

• Remove generics on all but the lowest-end creatures. (Does the dark father really need to drop regs?).
• Drop fewer items, but ensure that those that do get dropped are of better quality.
• Make high-end creatures drop rare crafting materials. Speedman calls these “fragments” and for want of a better term, that’s what I’ll call them as well.

So what would these fragments do? Each different fragment type would be associated with a specific property. We would modify crafting so you could integrate fragments into the process and control the specific properties on an item. The more properties you try to add, the harder the crafting job would become (with artifact-caliber items, even Legendary crafters would have a good chance of failing, consuming a bunch of those rare loot dropped crafting materials and making crafted artifacts expensive).

Lots of good feedback in the comments. Thanks everybody! Even those of you who think I’m an ass

I actually like devil_woman’s suggestion of keeping repair deeds with no chance of avoiding burning a repair charge better than the notion of getting rid of them — convenience at a tangible price is a reasonable trade-off.

notorious, I was thinking that items would have 10 repair charges, and that we would tweak durability loss so it would take around 20 hours of use to reduce an item to 0 durability. 20 hours is the average amount of time UO players spend in-game in a week, so that would make items last 10 weeks (aka 2 1/2 months). More casual players might see their items last MUCH longer, and of course the hard-core players would be replacing equipment more regularly — but then, they will be the ones making phat bank, so this should not be so much an issue with them.

I figured artis would get an extra 10 repairs, legacy items another 10 (so legacy artis would have a lifespan of about 8 months of normal usage). For “free repair” chance, I was considering a 2% chance at GM, +2% each at 105, 110, 115 and 120. Using PoT would double that chance, so if you regularly got a legendary crafter to repair your stuff with PoT, it would last an extra 20% (or almost a year, for legacy artifacts).

The next part of this discussion will be about the flip side of this equation — new abilities for crafters. I should have that posted later in the week.

I’ve resisted the temptation to start a blog for a long time, both because I feel like I’m jumping on the bandwagon fairly late in the game (I’m not one to do something just because the cool kids are doing it, as a rule) and because I fear that I won’t keep it up.

However.

I now find I want to talk about the things I’d like to do with crafting in UO, but I don’t have an appropriate venue in which to do so. These ideas are just that, ideas. There’s no guarantee that these “features” or anything resembling them, will ever hit production. Hopefully the fact that this is my blog and not an official source of UO information will curb the tendency of anyone who happens to read this to have the traditional “you promised this and it never materialized” reaction.

That being said, if I were to start work on a crafting revamp today, here are some things I might like to do concerning item decay:

• Items will have a “repair charges” attribute, representing the number of times they can be repaired before breaking.
• Artifacts will receive “bonus” repair charges, as will legacy items.
• Dropping to 0 durability will have no lasting adverse effects on items. At 0 durability, they are less functional than normal — weapons do less damage, armor resists are lowered and so on.
• Each time an item is repaired, it will use one repair charge. However, at GM craft skill and above, there will be a small chance of the repair being “free”.
• Powder of Temperament will cease to have any impact on item durability whatsoever. Instead, crafters will use it to increase the chance of a free repair.
• You will, of course, be able to do repairs via the trade window.
• And naturally, repair deeds are right out.
• Self repair items will automatically repair themselves when they hit 0 durability. The property intensity will be re-mapped to represent the chance of the repair being free.