Learn By Crafting Balance

[warmer]

A simple way to avoid someone spamming stone axes to level up passed tier 1 is to diminish crafting xp for each new crafting level in a tier and finally remove crafting XP for an item once you have reach legendary crafting in that tier.

ie.
Stone axe lvl 1 crafting 100% xp
Stone axe lvl 2 crafting 80% xp
Stone axe lvl 3 crafting 60% xp
Stone axe lvl 4 crafting 40% xp
Stone axe lvl 5 crafting 20% xp
Stone axe lvl 6 crafting 0% xp

The only way to earn more XP is to craft the next tier object

This would require finding a magazine to give you the last level required to move from tier 1 lvl 6 stone axe to tier 2 lvl 1 iron tools.

This seems both fair and also logical in my mind. The magazine gives you that knowledge required for the "leap of logic" to go to the next tier that is a big sticking point for many people with LBD.

Thoughts?

 

[ALEXZANDER]

A simple way to avoid someone spamming stone axes to level up passed tier 1 is to diminish crafting xp for each new crafting level in a tier and finally remove crafting XP for an item once you have reach legendary crafting in that tier.

ie.
Stone axe lvl 1 crafting 100% xp
Stone axe lvl 2 crafting 80% xp
Stone axe lvl 3 crafting 60% xp
Stone axe lvl 4 crafting 40% xp
Stone axe lvl 5 crafting 20% xp
Stone axe lvl 6 crafting 0% xp

The only way to earn more XP is to craft the next tier object

This would require finding a magazine to give you the last level required to move from tier 1 lvl 6 stone axe to tier 2 lvl 1 iron tools.

This seems both fair and also logical in my mind. The magazine gives you that knowledge required for the "leap of logic" to go to the next tier that is a big sticking point for many people with LBD.

Thoughts?

 

[Vaeliorin]

If I have to spam craft to improve my crafting, I'm modding it out right away, and I've generally been an advocate of LBD returning. My hope is that it'll be using tools/weapons that, along with the magazines, will improve your crafting skill.

That said, having to save magazines (or possibly be stuck until I find a magazine) sounds awful to me. Yet I'm okay with needing schematics to craft things. I think it's the difference between being blocked from progress versus simply not having access to something.

Maybe if you make it so that a magazine read at any time will unlock the next tier (or whatever) it might be okay, assuming they aren't stupidly rare (at which point, why even bother having the requirement, really?)

 

[ElCabong]

From what I just saw on YouTube this morning, they're bringing back the old system where you would level things up by combining them. This would improve your crafting skill. Magazines aren't going away, you're just not going to have to read as many of them. You would make a better weapon my combining them too.

Learning by doing makes the most sense with the weapon you're always using and your skill increases naturally. I didn't see any mention of that.

 

[meganoth]

The important question with weapons or tools is: Will you be learning by crafting or using the weapon or tool? AFAIK madmole didn't say which one he will do, but my guess would be that it will be the latter, using the weapon or tool. I.e. you would learn to craft better weapons by shooting zombies and you would learn better stone axe crafting by hacking wood or stone with the stone axe.

No question that learning by crafting would be more immersive, but that would be the only advantage. Disadvantages:
1) If crafting isn't done through spam crafting the dopamine kick is missing that most LBD proponents want. Even if spam crafting were done you can't really make the player craft for example 100 pistols per learning step.
2) And crafting always needs ingredients. Anything but crafting exactly 1 weapon to get to the next quality level would mean you are crafting useless weapons just to get better at crafting, i.e. spam crafting, the thing everyone, especially TFP, wants to avoid

On the other hand using a weapon or tool means just doing what you normally do, fullfills the requirement of all the instant gratification dopamine addicts. And is done often enough that you can split one learning step into an appropriate number of use-item steps, meaning you can easily balance the average learning speed by increasing that number.

 

[warmer]

The important question with weapons or tools is: Will you be learning by crafting or using the weapon or tool? AFAIK madmole didn't say which one he will do, but my guess would be that it will be the latter, using the weapon or tool. I.e. you would learn to craft better weapons by shooting zombies and you would learn better stone axe crafting by hacking wood or stone with the stone axe.

I failed to mention that magazines would still give you XP towards the next level in crafting in my original post.
The point I was attempting to make was a magazine should be required to go to the next level and spam crafting is not only discouraged, but counter productive at the end of a tier.

From what I heard weapon skills are not part of the LBD system, only crafting skills. I personally like the idea of getting better with a given weapon type as I use it more. That to me is the essence of an RPG in my opinion. Your actions directly influence your characters development.

 

[Roland]

I doubt it will be crafting lbd to improve crafting. It is much more likely to be using an item to improve the stats of it when you craft a new version. So crafting 1000 stone axes will do nothing but using your stone axe 1000 times will do what reading some number of tool magazines do now.

 

[meganoth]

I failed to mention that magazines would still give you XP towards the next level in crafting in my original post.
The point I was attempting to make was a magazine should be required to go to the next level and spam crafting is not only discouraged, but counter productive at the end of a tier.

From what I heard weapon skills are not part of the LBD system, only crafting skills. I personally like the idea of getting better with a given weapon type as I use it more. That to me is the essence of an RPG in my opinion. Your actions directly influence your characters development.

Maybe I was not explainig well. We already know that LBD will only be used to get a higher crafting skill, not better weapons skills, that is a given. But the question is what actions are used to increase your crafting skill in weapons, and one choice would be crafting, the other choice would be using the weapon. And in my opinion it will be the latter.

In other words I agree with what Roland said.

 

[Roland]

Especially given that by A15 they had already gotten rid of spam crafting LBD while keeping the rest going into A16. They already know they don’t want spam crafting.

 

[warmer]

I doubt it will be crafting lbd to improve crafting. It is much more likely to be using an item to improve the stats of it when you craft a new version. So crafting 1000 stone axes will do nothing but using your stone axe 1000 times will do what reading some number of tool magazines do now.

this is interesting, I hadn't considered using the item improves crafting. that completely eliminates the spam and encourages game play decisions. I think that is really well thought out.

 

[Riamus]

that completely eliminates the spam

Not really. You can sit there with a macro that makes you keep swinging a tool or weapon over and over (or just put something on your mouse button), allowing you to spam the use of those to improve crafting. If they require your use to include hitting something, that will reduce it, but there will still be spamming. You might just have to be present to do it as you would have to move around a little bit. With the new smell system, eating a lot of stuff and carrying stacks of raw meat will draw in zombies in a city without trouble and you can quickly use your weapon over and over again. So no, it doesn't completely eliminate spamming. It just shifts it to another kind of spamming.

 

[Kyoji]

Not really. You can sit there with a macro that makes you keep swinging a tool or weapon over and over (or just put something on your mouse button), allowing you to spam the use of those to improve crafting. If they require your use to include hitting something, that will reduce it, but there will still be spamming. You might just have to be present to do it as you would have to move around a little bit. With the new smell system, eating a lot of stuff and carrying stacks of raw meat will draw in zombies in a city without trouble and you can quickly use your weapon over and over again. So no, it doesn't completely eliminate spamming. It just shifts it to another kind of spamming.

If you have to hit a zombie to level up then I imagine if you really wanted to perhaps you could create a macro and hit them behind steel blocks enough not to kill them and just repair every so often but by then it's such an extreme case I don't see that happening.

Even the case of hitting tons of zombies isn't bad as you could still gain perk points via experience and farm them but no one did. It's not efficient. In a game where 7 days matter you often won't have the luxury to just sit back and swing at zombies to gain crafting skill and later it won't mater as you would have gotten maxed out with the old system regardless.

It just depends on how they implement the system, but if they do it right then it could potentially slow down how fast you can get to steel weapons which evens out the grind and makes you spend at least a little time at each tier. Will see.

 

[WarMongerian]

Does anyone remember a post of mine a while back where I mentioned some ideas about crafting & using weapons, to be able to make better weapons, where the first weapons would be a bit worse, and then gradually get better?

I think Roland read it back when. I'm waiting to see if my brother can run me to the ER, or if i have to use an ambulance.

If someone wanted to check my posts, they could get that thread, and just post a link to the reply that had that comments. If/when I get back from the the ER today/tonight, I can look for it myself, but no telling when that will be.

Have a happy new year everybody.

 

[WarMongerian]

Here we go, maybe folks might like something like this?

Hi all, just another thread about wanting a more involved crafting system.

Three levels to this hypothetical system.

1) Unlock by book/magazine.
2) Improve by doing/crafting.
3) Perfect by using.

So, under this kind of a system, we would initially be able to unlock things just like now, by reading a book or a magazine. This would allow us to start crafting whatever it was we unlocked, but unlike now, we would only be able to start crafting inferior versions of the thing. I'm not talking about tier 1 items of gear as opposed to higher tier items of gear, but tier one items of gear that would not even be as good as a 'Bog standard' 'run-of-the-mill' tier one item, because the player is a novice at crafting stuff, and their initial items should be worse than those items made by someone competent.

This concept is about give and take, we take away from the initial crafting of items, but then we give a progression system that allows a player to "Get Good" at crafting things that are better than the standard things.

For food/consumables, say we had penalties for the very first of a given meal/drink/medicine, and these very first things would have a "-4" applied to them {let us leave what these minuses are for later, right now, we just need to know they are there}, so the very first "Bacon and Eggs" meal would have the '-4', then the 2nd and third Bacon & Eggs meals would only have a '-3' applied to them, the next three, a '-2', and finally the 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th meals would just get a '-1', and all later Bacon and Eggs meals would be normal (or potentially, better) than the norm.

For all gear, I would apply this system:

First crude prototype, -4.
Second and third items, better than the first, but still worse than standard, so -3.
Fourth thru sixth items, improved skills, so just a -2.
Seventh through tenth items, almost there, -1.

Eleventh and above, good as any, no penalties.

First crude prototype of any given type of thing, say any Axe, a '-4', but for later on and better materials, I would reduce the penalties by one for Iron axes, by two for steel axes, and a legendary part an additional reduction of penalties. In other words, even if a player only ever crafted just the one initial stone axe, and their very next crafted axe was going to be the tier 6 steel axe, which would normally still have a -3 penalty, this would make it possible to avoid the negatives altogether but at a cost.

Now that we have talked about the "Take" part, let us talk now about the "Give" part.

In the case of gear personally crafted & used by the player, they start gaining skill/experience to unlocking the ability to make better gear, above and beyond the standard gear. Think in terms of items with a bonus, rather than a tier 7 item. Allow for room for an open ended progression, with increasingly harder and harder to get to improvements, and we can get end game gear that is better than anything that can be had without crafting it yourself.

I would say that such a system should include all three elements, so extra books/magazines, plus more crafting, followed by more use of the gear by the crafter, to keep unlocking better and better bonuses.

This might look something like this;

Tier 6 gear item, 100% components, + 100% additional components, +10 books, equals a roll (at a 10% chance) to gain a bonus trait.

Personal use of such an item, for however long is deemed needed to try for better, allows for unlocking this;

Tier 6 item, 100% components, + 200% additional components, + 30 books, equals a roll (at a 30% chance) for one bonus trait, and a second roll (at 10% chance) for a possible 2nd additional bonus trait.

After personal use for a time;

Tier 6 item, 100% components, + 300% additional components, + 60 books, equals a roll (at a 60% chance) for one bonus trait, a second roll (at 30% chance) for a 2nd additional bonus trait, and a third roll (at a 10% chance) for a 3rd additional bonus trait.

After still more time of personal use;

Tier 6 item, 100% components, + 400% additional components, +100 books, equals a 100% chance for one bonus trait, a second roll (at 60% chance) for a 2nd additional bonus trait, a third roll (at a 30% chance) for a 3rd additional bonus trait, and a fourth additional roll (at a 10% chance) for a 4th additional bonus trait.

After all this, unlock an additional chance to craft the above, on a one time basis, for a second such item, repeat endlessly, for as long a folks keep playing that character and keep using suce items.

It might be a way to get what folks want.

Enjoy.