What is the best theory on MMORPG equipment design?

The original big three (Asheron's Call, Everquest, and Ultima Online) seemed to have competing philosophies on game design. I wonder what you think the best approach towards equipment is in a MMORPG and why, and where Guild Wars falls in that spectrum.

In Asheron's Call, the devs stated that all the most powerful and best items should always come out of the randomized loot system that would put random stats and buffs on random weapon and item types. AC's random loot system was a revolutionary innovation at the time, and to some extent it still is, because MMORPGs were based off having a table of predictable weapons with predictable stats, and in some cases being quest loot or crafting gear that could be obtained in predictable ways. The only way to get the best loot in AC was to go hunt down mobs that have a high percentage of dropping the best stuff or trade with other players for what they had found.This was fitting with AC's open world zoneless design that put a premium on exploration. Although they did have non-random quest loot you could get from dungeons, by design it was never the best you could get. Maybe even the hardest to obtain quest loot only had level 4 enchantment spells on it instead of the maximum of level 6 that you could find from random loot. It is a successful system if your goal is to encourage players to explore and encounter new things. Quests would still be done because sometimes it was easier and faster to settle for lower tier gear than it was to try to find something better yourself.In theory, this system is also successful if your goal is to get players interacting via trade more, as trade becomes the only other way to get the best gear. In practice AC didn't have much trade going on when I played because they did not have the means to enable players to actually trade, such as auction houses or bank storage. Although, you could still obtain gear from other players indirectly. When they sold their gear to an NPC, it was available for purchase by anyone else. This is how player discovered equipment filtered into the economy. But the ease with which some higher level stuff could be obtained as time went on via this method also made a lot of quest gear redundant as being too low level.
The downside of this system? Crafting was non-existent. There literally were no weapon/armor tradeskills. Sometimes you used other tradeskills for things like assembling a quest weapon from parts you looted from mobs, but that was as far as it went. Generally there wasn't much need for the other crafting skills.A minor downside is that there wasn't a reason to do much of the quest content because the gear you got out of it wasn't that good. Unless you just wanted to do it for fun.

I never played much of Ultima Online or Everquest, but from what I remember it seemed like they had two very different philosophies:

In Everquest, the best gear was always obtained by group quests. This had the result of putting an emphasis on group raids as the core of the game at the expense of crafting, exploring, and trading. I personally always hated this model because it was too predictable and was always done in a way that felt like too much of a grind you were forced to do to remain viable. I preferred AC's system of dungeons being voluntary but not necessary challenges to tackle. It's also inevitable that with this kind of system you introduce power creep as a way of giving players a reason to do the new content.I experienced more of this system firsthand in Dark Age of Camelot. Originally the best stuff was player crafted, and all was well, but then they introduce grindy, difficult, and time consuming everquest style raid content that you are forced to do in order to remain viable in PvP because that stuff is now better than what can be crafted. That was when the game went downhill, and they responded by opening up classic servers that didn't have the new raid content.

In Ultima Online it seemed like their philosophy was that the best gear should be player crafted. This puts an emphasis on player based economics and trade, and also makes it's viable for players to roleplay a character devoted to crafting because of the way their skill system works. In other games, you need to gain experience by killing in order to put points into trade skills. It also seems like Eve Online takes the UO approach towards their game with the necessity of player crafters as the route to everything top tier you need. The advantage of this system is that it puts a premium on player interaction and trade. Eve is a very guild based game where the core of the game is trade, economics, and crafting, and those are the things guilds go to war over. And it doesn't have to discourage people from engaging in quests or exploration either if you require components in crafting that can only be obtained via those avenues, although I'm not sure to what extent that is the case in EVE. The downside of this system in UO or classic DAoC is probably that it's predictable, and over time the market can get saturated, and over time demand decreases for the lower level crafters. You would need a system that introduces entropy, equipment degradation and destruction, to even have a chance of keeping the market demand up. But because of game design that doesn't reflect real world economics, and the fact that playerbases don't keep expanding, low level crafters can't be competitive in a market filled with high level crafters. In real economic systems, the low level crafters do have a reason for existing as high level crafters have limited time so they focus on doing high end stuff while leaving the low end work to others.

I still think Asheron's Call had the best system, and Ultimate Online had the second best. Ideally I might try to combine both together in a way that compliments rather than contradicts each other.In a lot of ways AC was far ahead of it's time, and to this day it did things that even modern MMORPGs don't attempt (a seamless zoneless world without instances).

I always liked to craft stuff, until i played gw2, its the 1st mmo where im avoiding it due how bad it feels to me... tks Anet for making the most boooooring crafting system ;P i ever saw.

I always did like UO crafting scheme, gw2 imo felt Anet was lost adding ascended stuff cause they made it has a panic tier, since players were doing exotic must faster than Anet was expecting that would take, and the market got flooded in the first months.Still ascended is a mess, some from laurers and limited to certain stats only... some trough crafting where u need to wiki where to obtain recipe for it, bit messy....part of the crafting beign messy m8 be also to do it how rewards in this game feel wayy to free and come out of nowhere :\

I don't think you mention it in your post, but as far as I know (thanks, google) your gear can break in Ultima Online (have never played it myself, though). If true, it of course changes the whole feel of the game economy and just makes the game, well, completely different. Imagine if your legendary gear could break in GW 2 after you've used it long enough.

@Airdive.2613 said:I don't think you mention it in your post, but as far as I know (thanks, google) your gear can break in Ultima Online (have never played it myself, though). If true, it of course changes the whole feel of the game economy and just makes the game, well, completely different. Imagine if your legendary gear could break in GW 2 after you've used it long enough.

I do believe that's true. That probably helped make the whole thing more viable.

The system needs entropy built in to continue functioning as an economy.

There are other ways to do it too. In Asheron's Call on the PvP servers you saw people use much less fancy gear because they would lose some of it on death. If they did lose it the other person might sell it, so entropy enters the system.You could technically lose items if you died to NPCs on a normal server and didn't recover your body, but there were ways to guard against that so I don't know if it was ever a significant part of the economy.

The reason why I loved Star Wars Galaxies when it first came out was because it was an open sandbox game that had player run economy. The best armor and weapons were player crafted all with varying degree of stats.

GW2 does a fairly decent job at crafting with ascended items and being able to swap out stats but there's much to be desired there, though.

I would have to go with Ultima (Hey what happened to your "Original big 3"? Meridian 59 that was the first big 3d mmo!)Anyway - Players should craft the best (best looking) gear - Raidlocked armor is just SO 2005!

I really love the feeling of dropping an extremely strong and useful item and the gear progression that comes from that There are a few bad examples of this though, most notably perhaps Diablo 3. The amount of garbage you get very quickly ruins the rush whenever you do drop a shiny legendary.

However I really enjoy GW2's approach to this, but I wish they added a few ultrarare and unique drops to more things

@Rise.8259 said:The original big three (Asheron's Call, Everquest, and Ultima Online) seemed to have competing philosophies on game design. I wonder what you think the best approach towards equipment is in a MMORPG and why, and where Guild Wars falls in that spectrum.

In Asheron's Call, the devs stated that all the most powerful and best items should always come out of the randomized loot system that would put random stats and buffs on random weapon and item types. AC's random loot system was a revolutionary innovation at the time, and to some extent it still is, because MMORPGs were based off having a table of predictable weapons with predictable stats, and in some cases being quest loot or crafting gear that could be obtained in predictable ways. The only way to get the best loot in AC was to go hunt down mobs that have a high percentage of dropping the best stuff or trade with other players for what they had found.This was fitting with AC's open world zoneless design that put a premium on exploration. Although they did have non-random quest loot you could get from dungeons, by design it was never the best you could get. Maybe even the hardest to obtain quest loot only had level 4 enchantment spells on it instead of the maximum of level 6 that you could find from random loot. It is a successful system if your goal is to encourage players to explore and encounter new things. Quests would still be done because sometimes it was easier and faster to settle for lower tier gear than it was to try to find something better yourself.In theory, this system is also successful if your goal is to get players interacting via trade more, as trade becomes the only other way to get the best gear. In practice AC didn't have much trade going on when I played because they did not have the means to enable players to actually trade, such as auction houses or bank storage. Although, you could still obtain gear from other players indirectly. When they sold their gear to an NPC, it was available for purchase by anyone else. This is how player discovered equipment filtered into the economy. But the ease with which some higher level stuff could be obtained as time went on via this method also made a lot of quest gear redundant as being too low level.

The downside of this system? Crafting was non-existent. There literally were no weapon/armor tradeskills. Sometimes you used other tradeskills for things like assembling a quest weapon from parts you looted from mobs, but that was as far as it went. Generally there wasn't much need for the other crafting skills.A minor downside is that there wasn't a reason to do much of the quest content because the gear you got out of it wasn't that good. Unless you just wanted to do it for fun.

I never played much of Ultima Online or Everquest, but from what I remember it seemed like they had two very different philosophies:

In Everquest, the best gear was always obtained by group quests. This had the result of putting an emphasis on group raids as the core of the game at the expense of crafting, exploring, and trading. I personally always hated this model because it was too predictable and was always done in a way that felt like too much of a grind you were forced to do to remain viable. I preferred AC's system of dungeons being voluntary but not necessary challenges to tackle. It's also inevitable that with this kind of system you introduce power creep as a way of giving players a reason to do the new content.I experienced more of this system firsthand in Dark Age of Camelot. Originally the best stuff was player crafted, and all was well, but then they introduce grindy, difficult, and time consuming everquest style raid content that you are forced to do in order to remain viable in PvP because that stuff is now better than what can be crafted. That was when the game went downhill, and they responded by opening up classic servers that didn't have the new raid content.

In Ultima Online it seemed like their philosophy was that the best gear should be player crafted. This puts an emphasis on player based economics and trade, and also makes it's viable for players to roleplay a character devoted to crafting because of the way their skill system works. In other games, you need to gain experience by killing in order to put points into trade skills. It also seems like Eve Online takes the UO approach towards their game with the necessity of player crafters as the route to everything top tier you need. The advantage of this system is that it puts a premium on player interaction and trade. Eve is a very guild based game where the core of the game is trade, economics, and crafting, and those are the things guilds go to war over. And it doesn't have to discourage people from engaging in quests or exploration either if you require components in crafting that can only be obtained via those avenues, although I'm not sure to what extent that is the case in EVE. The downside of this system in UO or classic DAoC is probably that it's predictable, and over time the market can get saturated, and over time demand decreases for the lower level crafters. You would need a system that introduces entropy, equipment degradation and destruction, to even have a chance of keeping the market demand up. But because of game design that doesn't reflect real world economics, and the fact that playerbases don't keep expanding, low level crafters can't be competitive in a market filled with high level crafters. In real economic systems, the low level crafters do have a reason for existing as high level crafters have limited time so they focus on doing high end stuff while leaving the low end work to others.

I still think Asheron's Call had the best system, and Ultimate Online had the second best. Ideally I might try to combine both together in a way that compliments rather than contradicts each other.In a lot of ways AC was far ahead of it's time, and to this day it did things that even modern MMORPGs don't attempt (a seamless zoneless world without instances).

I've played Ultima Online and for the first couple of weeks I spend most of my time around a graveyard in new heaven killing skeletons for bones.Then selling the bones to another player who used them in crafting. It was actually fun and helped me learn how to play a mage and increase someof my skills (Magery and EI). Crafting in UO is really interesting. You can create a character focused only on crafting and make him Grandmaster Smiththen setup shop in one of the big cities or near a dungeon, and sell repair contracts (only way to repair armor or weapons was using repair contracts,or finding a craftsman to do it for you) and armor / weapons for adventurers.

In UO you increase your skills by using them (So you swing your sword you gain mastery in the sword skill.) and this made for quite interesting characters.And since the best gear was player crafted, you didn't really mind losing it to a PK. (My first low reagent cost [allowing me to cast without using reagents]set was stolen from my dead body when I visited Trinsic.)

Overall I preferred the way UO handles gear. Nothing was soul/account bound, best gear could be crafted and guilds helped raise and supply their craftsmen.

Well later they did add 'Artifacts' - stronger gear that dropped from bosses (or stealing them from the dungeon).

Even with objective differences between different design philosophies, any decision as to what is best is rooted in personal preferences. With that as a caveat, here goes.

The current prevailing principle in equipment design philosophy in MMO's seems to be, "Let's design the system to keep players playing for as long as possible because we'll make more money." I can't help but feel that MMO's are poorer games as a result.

I never played Asheron's Call, but I do not see how, "go kill this particular mob or group of mobs because they have a high percentage of dropping the best stuff," is any less predictable, or repetitive, than any other option (such as dungeons).

Personally I liked how City of Heroes handled equipment.

Every single skill you learned had slots. As you leveled up, you could increase the number of slots each skill had. You would regularly get enhancements, which would increase one aspect of a skill (accuracy, damage, recharge time, endurance cost, other unique traits, and other special effects). You would use these enhancements to customize each individual skill how you would see fit.

The basic enhancements you'd get were mostly useless. You'd use them as you leveled up, until you could get Invention enhancements, which you could craft. After that, if you wanted to customize your character to be even more powerful, there were IO sets. These enhancements had group bonuses depending on how many were slot into skills. If you built your toon right, you could solo Archvillians, which were roughly the equivalent to a legendary mob with massive regen in GW2.

Respeccing was a nightmare, but the amount of meaningful customization was amazing.

A furthering of UO was SWG (had some of the same designers btw), that put such a focus on crafting that there was no weapon drops anywhere. They might have had a few basic merchants to get you some starter weapons, but everything else was crafted. This quite literally forced player interactions between gatherers, crafters, and anyone interested in having guns etc. Also all gear eventually broke down, and had to be replaced, so the cycle continued.

Then again SWG is probably the game with the most developed and deep crafting system, recommended reading.

Personally I think my favorite system was GW1, because I utterly hate and despise any kind of grinding and RNG drops :p I liked buying my no frills basic max armor, and never having to worry about it ever again.

I'm probably not the right person to ask, since I consider any kind of gear grind to be so boring as to make me lost interest. Which is probably why GW2 is the first MMO I've bothered sticking to.

Anarchy online and lotro used rolling for loot, with Anarchy also using a token based bidding system where token were accumulated from doing the raid over and over. Almost all loot was from camping or highlevel group content.

I liked lotros rolling implemrntation since decent guilds often ran raids multiple times, withthose who got a lucky drop previously not allowed to rollto ensureeventually everyone got their shiny.

I mostly prefer gw2s system since i can largely control what i get myself.

I think crafting is best but can be done to differing levels of quality. GW2 is definitely a crafters game for equipment. Oh and grinding ofc. Wouldn't be a proper mmo without some grinding.

I prefer "none of the above."

Top tier equipment should be a plateau - everyone on an even level. Finding gear is not about upgrading, but about specializing with the gear set that fits your build. Gear should constantly break down and need replaced, forcing people to constantly make/find new stuff, thus driving a natural economy. Think Shadowbane or EVE Online's systems.

There is no best because it depends on context. The best one for a particular game depends on the rest of the systems and features in the game. For example you shouldn't have one system rendering another completely obsolete. Ideally they should be reinforcing and adding value to each other.

@Blood Red Arachnid.2493 said:Personally I liked how City of Heroes handled equipment.I would love to see another game handle it like CoH did.

Also, for those that are wondering, there were two ways to get most Enhancements (as I recall, forgive me if I miss-remember). You could get them as drops, which was common if all you wanted was the more generic versions, but the odds were against you getting the specific rare ones you wanted that way. (And yes, there was a market to trade through, so that helped.) The other way was to get a recipe, and craft the Enhancement that way. The recipe would be used as part of the crafting, and they could be hard to come by too, but there were ways to buy them. So, it never was left to just luck and the market.

@"IndigoSundown.5419" said:Even with objective differences between different design philosophies, any decision as to what is best is rooted in personal preferences. With that as a caveat, here goes.

The current prevailing principle in equipment design philosophy in MMO's seems to be, "Let's design the system to keep players playing for as long as possible because we'll make more money." I can't help but feel that MMO's are poorer games as a result.

@joneirikb.7506 said:A furthering of UO was SWG (had some of the same designers btw), that put such a focus on crafting that there was no weapon drops anywhere. They might have had a few basic merchants to get you some starter weapons, but everything else was crafted. This quite literally forced player interactions between gatherers, crafters, and anyone interested in having guns etc. Also all gear eventually broke down, and had to be replaced, so the cycle continued.

Then again SWG is probably the game with the most developed and deep crafting system, recommended reading.

---

Personally I think my favorite system was GW1, because I utterly hate and despise any kind of grinding and RNG drops :p I liked buying my no frills basic max armor, and never having to worry about it ever again.

I'm probably not the right person to ask, since I consider any kind of gear grind to be so boring as to make me lost interest. Which is probably why GW2 is the first MMO I've bothered sticking to.

@"Stand The Wall.6987" said:I think crafting is best but can be done to differing levels of quality. GW2 is definitely a crafters game for equipment. Oh and grinding ofc. Wouldn't be a proper mmo without some grinding.

I wanna poke a hole in all of this, but not for people might think. Basically there is no best design for this..... players won't tolerate it for too long. And personal preference, for all the weight people put into it, is not particularly useful as a design premise. I say this because a really well assembled set of complimenting mechanics can make for a great game, but because if it doesn't match someone's "personal preference", then is it a success or failure? So it does seriously raise the question of "who are you making this game for?". Accessibility is important- but it shouldn't overtake the design to the point where it excludes otherwise good design combinations, out of fear of excluding a potential audience.

Which makes the type of game you're trying to make all the more important to the discussion as a whole; and reveals much of the problems that MMOs have struggled with ever since WoW launched a 1000 copy cats. And its not as simple as making a list of traits a game has to describe it, because thats already been done, and has fallen flat on its face in 80% of my made up statistics (though anecdotally it hits pretty close to home). You can even extend this to the bulk of the Entertainment industry as a whole, because it suffers from the same overall mentality.

MMOs used to be extremely strong due to the communities that build up around them. And given that they're primarily socially enabling games, that makes perfect sense. But normal games can easily develop this as well. Multiplayer games tend to develop this naturally through interactions with other players (even if purely competitive), but single player games had also exploded in a similar fashion with things like the Internet, message boards, and easier distribution of mods.

But far too many games are being caught up in the mistake of trying to establish this idea of a "life style game". And discount this definition just yet, because this has been a thing in advertising for longer then there has been video games. Incidentally, this started having a knock on effect in game design around the same time games fell into this unstable state between product and service. Classically, games are sold as products, but handled as experiences by the consumers. This was always a little weird; but in the era of arcades, a nice divide existed where games were very much an activity, and coin-op was a somewhat shady, but easily correlated way to associate playtime and enjoyment. If you were enjoying yourself enough, you'd keep pumping coins into the machine to keep playing, and if you weren't, you'd give up on it. And while some games were deviously difficult to keep coins flowing, those games would fail if there wasn't something interesting to keep players invested or wanting to revisit it.

And this kind of leads us to the overarching problems.... the market is sub-divided into various exclusive niches, but the description of those niches evolve over time. Having a strong, singular aspect of a game is enough to draw attention to it... but not enough to retain it indefinitely. Many now classified as "retro games", tend to follow this less complicated approach to few, but well meshed mechanics, as the time they were developed in had very harsh limitations on what could be done. "Modern Retro" is an attempt to recapture that overall purity, and polish it using more modern techniques and design concepts. Now a typical modern game is the evolution of those older games melding, to create a much more complex organism. Some things work together, while others do not.... but one thing thats remained pretty consistent is that a person tends to like more then one thing. And those who refuse to like more then one thing obviously has a bad time.... not just in games, but with life in general. A full breadth of experience if you will.

And thus brings us to the real important question that no one has been asking. Its not "How can we cater to the widest audience possible?", but "how do we capture multiple niches, and get something better then the sum of its parts?". Equally important is the further evolution of existing genres with new idea, either resulting in new sub-genres, important miles stones in core genres, or even the creation of new genres to participate in the culture of a society. And as loft as it sounds, its something every project is automatically doing by simply existing. Its really just a matter of it being good enough for people to adopt, and spread to others to share in the experience. Some of it is intentional, but others are not. Sometimes by focusing on improving the design of a niche game, that improvement works its way up into the mainstream.

But there is a pit fall to all of this that everyone has to be aware of...... homogenization is both a boon and an enemy. Adopting good ideas, and reusing them in everything that benefits from it, will elevate a society. But a society is always changing... and without a proper flow of new ideas, it eventually starts eatting itself like a starving body. For the gaming industry, that malnourishment comes from only offering the same thing over and over, with minor changes in dressing to try and change the flavor slightly. On both ends of the spectrum with the industry and the consumers, we very much have a problem where people are want an all-in-one solution to all their entertainment needs, and an unhealthy shift to "Binge culture"..... binge games, binge movies, binge netflix series, binge eating.... much of which is the result of our really weird approach to time management, and an inability to stay interested in any particular thing for more then a few weeks at a time. Thus we're searching for variety in fewer places, and most of those places are all trying to do similar things to bring in the largest customer base possible. Thus when something new and exciting comes out of left field, it gets swarmed for its novelty, and crushed under the weight of locusts in a feeding frenzy to consume all that they can, before the flavor losses its effect. And once we're sick of it, we chastise the game for not being better, after once calling it the greatest thing to ever exist, and move on to the next thing worthy of suffering pestilence. And since the industry tends to parrot success, a year a later we get a fresh round of games in a genre the consumer is already sick of, and doesn't want anymore. That is the vicious cycle we live in, and is something this idea of "personal preference" can't even begin to properly enter the discussion, much less offer itself as a solution.

Can adding things that appeal to "Personal preference" save any of the Battle Royale games that are already petering out? The answer is no.... its ultimately too late for that. It doesn't need more options, what it needs is a healthy injection of ideas that can evolve the genre through various titles..... but that involves "more titles" doing different things to offer different approaches to the basic idea. Yet even if it were successful in doing so..... how successful as a business does it allow you to be in a One-game culture, where you're not that one "one-game" everyone is playing, and everyone wants a piece of it?

and of course the forums strips out code links...... (Skip to 1:25 for the start of the video. Everything before it is kind of an inside joke)

@"Ashen.2907" said:I never played Asheron's Call, but I do not see how, "go kill this particular mob or group of mobs because they have a high percentage of dropping the best stuff," is any less predictable, or repetitive, than any other option (such as dungeons).

You didn't understand it because you misunderstood what I said.

You can't go to a particular mob to get a particular bow with particular enchantments. All loot is randomly created and unique. With so many different variables you may never see the exact same high end item again.

But some more difficult enemies have a higher chance of dropping better gear. And they are scattered everywhere over the world. There's no particular place you necessarily have to go.

And that is completely different. You have no guarantee of any particular kind of loot from achieving any particular feat, unless you do quests (which is never as good as random loot). You don't even have a chance of rolling a particular guaranteed kind of loot. Someone can't tell you "hey, I got X item off those guys over there", and then go kill them enough times and hope to get the same item. It will never happen.

In a raid based system, everyone eventually all gets the same exact gear - they just have to grind their brains out to do it or pay lots of money. Not fun, not interesting.And not fair to those who play more casually.

@Blood Red Arachnid.2493 said:Personally I liked how City of Heroes handled equipment.

Every single skill you learned had slots. As you leveled up, you could increase the number of slots each skill had. You would regularly get enhancements, which would increase one aspect of a skill (accuracy, damage, recharge time, endurance cost, other unique traits, and other special effects). You would use these enhancements to customize each individual skill how you would see fit.

The basic enhancements you'd get were mostly useless. You'd use them as you leveled up, until you could get Invention enhancements, which you could craft. After that, if you wanted to customize your character to be even more powerful, there were IO sets. These enhancements had group bonuses depending on how many were slot into skills. If you built your toon right, you could solo Archvillians, which were roughly the equivalent to a legendary mob with massive regen in GW2.

Respeccing was a nightmare, but the amount of meaningful customization was amazing.

COH didn't have an equipment or loot system for most of it's life.It just had a skill customization system.All the enchancements you needed to customize your skills could be bought at the store for an ultimately irrelevant fee, which is why money meant nothing in the game. There was no looting of things you can't get in the store.

Later, much much later, and not longer before NCsoft murdered the game for no reason, they did get create loot/crafting based sets that could be bought and sold on a market.But that system was an utter abomination.It combined the worst of AC and EQ systems.You had predictable static items, yet you had to win the lottery to ever see them drop.And then you had to win the lottery two dozen times over to complete your ideal build.

You would never, ever, complete a full set of everything you wanted unless you had low expectations and settled for common stuff in your build.

That is a failure of a system. It doesn't respect my time as a player. Half the fun is designing new builds and trying them out. It does me no good if I'll never be able to realize those builds no matter how much I grind.

@joneirikb.7506 said:A furthering of UO was SWG (had some of the same designers btw), that put such a focus on crafting that there was no weapon drops anywhere. They might have had a few basic merchants to get you some starter weapons, but everything else was crafted. This quite literally forced player interactions between gatherers, crafters, and anyone interested in having guns etc. Also all gear eventually broke down, and had to be replaced, so the cycle continued.

Then again SWG is probably the game with the most developed and deep crafting system, recommended reading.

---

Personally I think my favorite system was GW1, because I utterly hate and despise any kind of grinding and RNG drops :p I liked buying my no frills basic max armor, and never having to worry about it ever again.

I'm probably not the right person to ask, since I consider any kind of gear grind to be so boring as to make me lost interest. Which is probably why GW2 is the first MMO I've bothered sticking to.

I also absolutely hate gear grinds. I never want to play an MMORPG where I feel like I have to work a second job before I can fully experience the game and finally have fun with it.

In AC, there was nothing to grind because you had on guarantee of anything. You either got something or you didn't, so just have fun and whatever you get you get. Then try to trade for what you need or get lucky buying something from an NPC that was sold by a player.

Whether or not a crafting or raid based equipment system is a grind depends on the particulars of how you do it.But generally, historically, we've seen that games that go the crafting route choose not to make it a grind because the equipment is frequently used and replaced.Games that go the raid route tend to make it extremely time consuming and frustrating to complete your gear because once you've done it you're done, so they have an incentive to give you a reason to take as long to do it as possible.That's bad design.

@"Rhyse.8179" said:I prefer "none of the above."

Top tier equipment should be a plateau - everyone on an even level. Finding gear is not about upgrading, but about specializing with the gear set that fits your build. Gear should constantly break down and need replaced, forcing people to constantly make/find new stuff, thus driving a natural economy. Think Shadowbane or EVE Online's systems.

EVE is a crafting based system where players make the best stuff. So you didn't actually choose "none of the above" as your preference.

EVE Online by far has the most breadth and depth of any system, to the point where they employed an irl ecomomist full time to oversee the whole thing. I have yet to see it matched in any MMO.

@Rise.8259 said:Later, much much later, and not longer before NCsoft murdered the game for no reason, they did get create loot/crafting based sets that could be bought and sold on a market.But that system was an utter abomination.It combined the worst of AC and EQ systems.You had predictable static items, yet you had to win the lottery to ever see them drop.And then you had to win the lottery two dozen times over to complete your ideal build.

You would never, ever, complete a full set of everything you wanted unless you had low expectations and settled for common stuff in your build.You're forgetting Merits, especially Alignment Merits. They were slow to build up, but they could be used to buy even purples. It was slow, yes, and it required the Going Rogue expansion (major flaw, I'll agree there), but you did have the option.

I'll also grant you that the actual crafting process was very simple. One of the first reasons I ever looked at GW2 was because I missed having a more complex crafting system to mess around with.

Where's guild wars 2's design philosophy in this debate? :p One of the reasons why I like Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2 is because endgame gear is easy and simple to obtain - either through crafting, playing the game, or as random loot (all 3 methods listed above). Plus, you have a certain security that today's gear won't be utterly useless tomorrow, unless you're using a really niche build (I'm looking at you, WoW and Runescape).