Gathering, Crafting, Found items, Auction house. Image made in Paint
For some reason, for as long as I can remember, I have enjoyed crafting items in multiplayer games. There is a great feeling when I hand out some items and see players use them during play. When I played Runescape I would craft full bronze armor sets and hand them out to new/low level players to begin their journey. In World of Warcraft I would hand out consumables and place repair stations and give players stat boosting food before a battleground would start. When I play survival crafting games with my buddies, I usually designate myself 'Crafter' and when they ask for an item I will venture out to gather the materials and create it for them.
Crafting in a game is often considered a tedious part of the game, only included to give players something else to do besides group up and clear content.
Chop chop
Dig Dig
Pew Pew
I've said this before but the crafting aspect of a game gives me a chance to explore the different zones and sights in the game world while listening to music or something I am learning about. It also helps that the items I make will probably be listed on the auction house for other players to buy.
Not much but it's sold!
Older picture from a previous post
Whenever a new game comes out or my friends want to try out a game the first thing I'll check out is the crafting system. Generally they are all 'Gather X, Click Y, Receive Z'. This system has made it easy for bots to take over the crafting system. I would like to see a crafting mini game to determine success or perhaps have input from the player during the crafting process to gain a higher yield of the item or materials returned due to efficient sequences. Something to make the creation process interesting! Though knowing tenacious players, they will figure out how to program a bot to min/max the system and control it anyway.
People have praised older MMORPGs such as Star Wars Galaxies and Ultima Online for their crafting systems but it seems like once World of Warcraft became popular other developers decided to follow their crafting style and so far it seems the crafting aspect has stagnated. There are some recently launched games and yet to be released games that are trying to add something more to the crafting system but we'll see! I hope that in the future of crafting systems there will be options to craft an item with a signature of the creator or perhaps a trade mark of some sort that other players will know 'Oh, this player is using (Insert name) Creations!'.
I've been wanting to make a post concerning Crafting for quite sometime but could never find the right approach to write a post. Hopefully what I wrote here is enjoyable or invites conversation about the topic.
I am always on the hunt for multiplayer games with an interesting crafting/profession system and if you know or play any then please leave a comment! It would be fun to check out.
Thank you for reading.
Happy Gaming!