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Anitra · 01-13-2006, 06:12 PM

There is of course a way to make crafting creative without unbalancing the game.

You can give the crafters limited access to OLC; that is allow them to write descriptions, or at least restring, without at the same time allowing them to influence the stats of the item. (Those should be set as a combination of the raw materials, the skill of the crafter, the time spent on refining the object and possibly an amount of luck). I am no coder, but I think the restring command could pretty easily be given to mortals without giving full OLC access.

There is of course an obvious risk with this concept. Not all players are good writers. By allowing them to write their own descriptions, you also risk that the mud gets flooded by crappy objects, with ill written descriptions full of typos and grammar errors. This would in turn make the mud look bad to any newcomers, who weren't aware of the crafting system, but just saw the crappy objects. The risk would be even greater because of the element of time/efficiency involved. The quicker you turn out the crafted items the more exp you get, and most players would probably not spend a lot of time on thinking out beautiful or poetic descs.

One of the muds I am playing is actually still discussing a system like the above. One of their ideas about how to keep a minimum of quality into the crafted items is to make a Crafters' Guild, where you would have to apply with examples of your writing skills to be accepted. Then, if you later turned out too many crappy items, you'd be kicked out of the Guild for incompetence and lose the crafting ability.

But even with an application and quality check system like this, I still suspect the majority of players would be less interested in creating good descriptions than creating as many items as possible in the shortest possible time.

Players often complain about repetitiveness, but when you look at what most of them are doing, they usually choose repetitive tasks before making any type of effort, like exploring or questing. It's a bit sad, really.

01-13-2006, 06:12 PM	#13
Anitra Member Join Date: Sep 2005 Posts: 123	There is of course a way to make crafting creative without unbalancing the game. You can give the crafters limited access to OLC; that is allow them to write descriptions, or at least restring, without at the same time allowing them to influence the stats of the item. (Those should be set as a combination of the raw materials, the skill of the crafter, the time spent on refining the object and possibly an amount of luck). I am no coder, but I think the restring command could pretty easily be given to mortals without giving full OLC access. There is of course an obvious risk with this concept. Not all players are good writers. By allowing them to write their own descriptions, you also risk that the mud gets flooded by crappy objects, with ill written descriptions full of typos and grammar errors. This would in turn make the mud look bad to any newcomers, who weren't aware of the crafting system, but just saw the crappy objects. The risk would be even greater because of the element of time/efficiency involved. The quicker you turn out the crafted items the more exp you get, and most players would probably not spend a lot of time on thinking out beautiful or poetic descs. One of the muds I am playing is actually still discussing a system like the above. One of their ideas about how to keep a minimum of quality into the crafted items is to make a Crafters' Guild, where you would have to apply with examples of your writing skills to be accepted. Then, if you later turned out too many crappy items, you'd be kicked out of the Guild for incompetence and lose the crafting ability. But even with an application and quality check system like this, I still suspect the majority of players would be less interested in creating good descriptions than creating as many items as possible in the shortest possible time. Players often complain about repetitiveness, but when you look at what most of them are doing, they usually choose repetitive tasks before making any type of effort, like exploring or questing. It's a bit sad, really.