A crafting Survey

One fine bored evening I decided that it might be a good idea to create a crafting survey to find out if there are others out there, like me who want that something more from crafting, a forum post wouldn't do as I wanted it to be a little bit more factual than subjective, a survey seemed the best way to go. The yammobs rallied to my aid with some great suggestions and off I went to google docs to get the ball rolling. The crafters in the MMO world took it to their heart and it only took a few short days to reach the 200 response mark I initialy wanted to aim for. A big thankyou to those that took the time to fill it in and thankyou for both the positive feedback and the discussions that ensued.

While it would be nice to think that this could reflect the gamer community I am the first to admit that isn't true, very few with no interest in crafting would have taken the time to fill it in, this then reflects the experience and desires of a small cross section of the crafting community in MMOs, nothing more, nothing less.

The basics

Considering that the majority of responses came from crafters it is no surprise that most people felt that crafting played an important role in their game play experience and that the majority wanted to be able to max multiple crafting professions.
These results show that most crafters would like to spend over 50% of their game time involved in crafting yet currently the majority spend less than 20% of their game time crafting, that says alot about the cuyrrent state of crafting in MMOs, crafting sadly needs much more attention from developers than it's getting.

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For the question Which MMO's with crafting systems have you played/are currently playing? Other games listed included: Darkfall (2), Aion (7), Pirates of the Burning Sea (4), Horizons (4), Neocron (2), Ryzom (2), UO (9), A Tale in the Desert (3), WAR (2), Puzzle Pirates (2), Planetside, Wurm Online (2), Wizard 101, AO (3), Istaria (2), Legend of Mir (2), Ragnarok Online (3), GW (2) - even though it has no crafting that I know of, CoH (2), Cabal, Asheron's Call , EQ , Dragonica, Ashen Empires, Voyage Century, Spellborn.

The number in brackets represents the number who opted for that game if greater than 1.

For the question What is your current main MMO ? a significant amount answered for 'Other' that they were waiting for a new MMO (Aion featured highly).

I always thought that most PvP players wouldn't hold much interest in crafting, which is down to my experience of games tendencies to provide the best PvP gear through progression rather than crafting, I was pleased to see a healthy number from the PvP community represented. While the majority of crafters spend substantial amounts ingame the figure for less than 5hrs per week shows that for casual players crafting still holds some appeal. The majority of crafters seemed to have taken part in light role playing at some time or another, are crafters than generally more creative or are RP players more into crafting? That might be interesting to explore further in a later survey.

Crafting Comparison

I asked people to rate their crafting experience in the games they have played

The choice for other showed that Ultima Online was rated highly by several respondants, Aion (still in beta) also had a healthy showing. SWG recieved the highest ratings from those who had played it, forum comments have me believe that the current crafting system in SWG isn't as good as the original system, that system recieved nothing but praise and made me wish i had 'been there'. The question itself was flawed as the spreadsheet included multiple games chosen as 'Other' making it hard to see which games were being rated.

Quality of crafted items

As it currently stands thinking on quality of crafted items seems to be 'better than world drops, lesser than raid drops' in most MMOs, it's nice then to see that given a choice crafters would like the ability to go one step further and have the ability to improve on those raid drops by crafting upgrades or additions, that choice doesnt take away from the 'carrot on a stick' that is 'phat lewt' for raiders and keeps the crafters healthily employed with new recipes/rare materials to seek out.

Some of the answers for 'Other' included:"Items shouldn't improve statistically so there should be not best teir of items at all"
"Tiers of items increasing from "better than equivalent greens" to "better than raid drops" where each tier is progressively difficult and needs rarer materials"
"there should be a balance some 'top end' items better than or comperable or worse than 'end game' items."
"Standard crafted gear should be equal to gear given as quest rewards. There should be lootable recipes for crafters whcih yield items equal in quality to the best lootable items in the game."
"equal to both raid/world but with a unique quality that fits the mmo that could not be found in raid/world equip. etc. run speed, makes food, or something fun"

"Raiding sucks. All items obtained in the world by killing things should be pretty much random while crafted items should have reliable stats based on the skills of the crafter and choices he made during the crafting process."

In retrospect more work can be done with that question and include things such as the social aspect of crafted items.

Motivation

Most of us craft initialy to suit our own needs, crafting for others and profit came a close second, those of us in a guild seem to be equaly split between crafting for ourselves and meeting the needs of the guild. One of the reasons listed for 'Other' was the ability to create unique items only available for crafters, I suspect that our desire to be unique in our chosen vuirtual world might be a good motivator.

Luck ?

It seems a small majority enjoy the luck element of crafting, most games have it, maybe it's because it's something we are used to and comfortable with rather than something we positively embrace? Most felt that our chances of a positive outcome should scale and provide us with a higher success rate as we become masters of our craft.

Leveling

For 'Other' players resonded with a desire for meaning and variety in the progression while a few wondered why there needed to be any quest content related to crafting 'crafting in itself should be enough'.

Gathering/Harvesting

Cyrrently most of us feel that gathering ranges from a boring grind to something that is at best 'passable' very few of us find great enjoyment in it. Most of us would like to see a degree of dynamic content while gathering, the kind of content talked about included incredibly hard to reach nodes (dungeons), fighting off NPCs, environmental challenges and PvP.

Recipes

One of the more interesting things to come out of comments for 'Other' when asked how people would like to gain recipes was through 'research and experimentation' which I feel while being probably very difficult to implement would provide a very rich and diverse crafting experience. Some also felt that the concept of recipes itself was redundant.

It's good to see that most players felt there should be a synergy between the professions, no one should be 100% reliant on someone else but a degree of reliance allows for added diversity for crafters and should be good for the economy.

Economy

When posing the question is crafting bad for the economy? I struggled to think of ways that it is, it seems likely to be a more subjective answer based on the users personal experience, I know i've felt that prices have got out of hand at various stages in a games evolvement but ultimately things seem to even themselves out, it may well have been a redundant question...

The Crafting Process

While little or no input during the crafting process is good for the casual player, attend to the kids, make a cup of tea, phone mum etc, it looks like most crafters want a fairly high degree of input during the process, watching success/fail progress bars just isn't enough, we want more interaction. Most feel that the visual elements of crafting and it's location are important, it does help for reasons of immersion. This is another area I'd like to expand on in a subsequent survey.

Age and gender of respondants

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If you want to view the full spreadsheet of results you can do so here

The survey is closed for now while I evaluate everything I've learned from this initial experience. I will probably relaunch the survey at a later date and aim for a higher number of responses

Can GW2 offer any MMO hope ?

I'm biased, Guild wars was my first ever foray into the world of online role playing games, because it was my first it has that something special going for it, I haven't played it in a while, I've been too busy chasing that next big thing that could suck me in the way GW did, nothing has.

I had and enjoyed a lengthy flirtation with WoW but come lvl 68 I got an overwhelming 'meh' feeling and I couldn't face any more, strangely though, some months later, I still get these inexplicable urges to play something bright and colourful..WoW almost made it back onto my machine, luckily for me Aion came along but more about that later.

I've tried a few F2P games, the endless grind coming from non reliance on shop bought items made most obsolete pretty quickly, Perfectworld had me for a month or two, I'm a social creature so having friends join in that game gave it the longevity. Runes of Magic lasted maybe 2 weeks, Atlantica Online had a retro feel that worked against it for me, Requiem:Bloodymare while being an interesting concept bored me to death with its very long 'tutorial' quests (what is it with F2P games using massive cities as a crude time sink?).

City of Heroes, Lord of the Rings Online, Spellborn, Vanguard, Everquest2 and Age of Conan are all games that made it onto my machine post GW, only LotRO and Age of Conan remain. LotRO hasn't grabbed me, I've enjoyed some time spent there but it's real charms have so far eluded me, it still seems not quite finished for some reason, I first played in the CB which may still be lingering somewhere at the back of my mind. Vanguard would have stayed on my machine if the engine had, you know, worked properly and compared to current day graphics it looked dated, shame as it held the most promise for me. Age of Conan I played from launch, rage quit 2 months in at such an abysmal excuse for a 'working game', left it alone for a couple of months and came back to something that almost worked as intended, it's got more solid since then and is a great game up until a point...aren't they all?

Which leads me to now, just closed the doors on the end of the EU/NA closed beta for Aion. I played Aion a few times before on the chinese retail client, each time a new server opened you got 15 days free on that server, servers opened frequently and usually 15 days apart. I've leveled a few characters to mid 20's now, I'm a primary PvE player who wished NCsoft had put the E in PvPvE in brackets, they say you can 'focus' purely on PvE, it's hard to focus on your quests when a rift squad is ganking you, I say you can't and you lie. I've only so far been witness to the endless cat and mouse of rift fights and abyss gate PvP so far, the organised PvP later in the game looks like it has promise though. Outside of it's unique playstyle tag of PvPvE and the ability to fly Aion really isn't anything new.

If you've managed to stick with me so far you can tell by now I'm getting increasingly disenfranchised with the world of the MMO, so wheres the hope ? Maybe it's the sign of a desperate man who can't forget his first love, maybe it's the glimmer of news on the horizon along with the new graphic on the GW2 homepage thats making me look in GW2s direction and wonder if I should have hope or learn from experience that in this day and age nobody seems to want to make something really new..