I have been giving it some though, and I have come to this conclusion: the crafting system in Spiral Knights is lame. It's not that the gear is lame or that the materials are lame or that the UVs are lame--I basically like the elements of the crafting process--I just think that these elements are not well leveraged. Specifically, the problem is focus.
Right now, the focus of the crafting system is on energy: the cost to create an item is part materials, part crowns, part finding and purchasing the recipe. But the cost of the crowns, recipe, and materials are are substantially lower, even in combination, than the value of the energy. Energy is the focus, and this makes some amount of sense: forcing players to use energy generates profit for OOO--and this is not a bad thing. OOO needs profits or the game goes away. I certainly don't fault the effort, and any proposed change to the crafting system has to acknowledge that just making things cheaper is not an acceptable solution.
So, what's the problem?
The first problem is that energy should be used to play the game. When you spend 800ce on a sword, that's 80 levels (or 700ce and 70 levels) of play that's just not happening as a result. This seems like a waste--and it seems contrary to the point of any game. In any game, the design should encourage you to play. In this game, this one element of the design--focus on crystal energy--encourages you to play less--to forgo playing in favor of building gear.
The second problem is that energy is boring. It's the out-of-context currency, the intrusion into the game's reality that economics demands, but which is basically not fun. Gel Drops are fun. Blaze Peppers are fun. Energy is not fun. It has no character.
Finally, materials are underutilized, period. I have thousands of materials sitting unused--likely to never be used--in my arsenal right now, and I know that I am not alone. As it is, they are almost entirely without value. They are essentially a currency, just like energy and crowns, but unlike crowns and energy there is no effective materials sink. The current crafting process uses a tiny number of materials, which leaves huge mountains of materials piling up, virtually worthless, in every corner of the game. This is, frankly, tragic--materials are a cool, characterful currency. They are far more engaging than either crowns or CE. Clearly, a fair amount of design work went into them. It is a shame that they are so underutilized, that they have been relegated to dark and shadowy corners while CE, pretty much the least characterful and most boring element in the entire game, is spotlit time and time again.
So, what's the solution?
The solution, I think, is to reduce energy's dominance over the crafting process and replace it with an incentive to actually play the game. I recognize that taking energy out of the crafting process entirely might not be reasonable, but I think that reducing the emphasis on energy and placing the emphasis, instead, on materials could make the crafting system more fun and more interesting, while keeping it similarly profitable. My proposal is basically this (with the understanding that some numbers may need to be optimized so that energy spent on acquiring items is similar to the amount of energy not saved on alchemy fees):
Leave recipe costs the same.
Leave crown alchemy costs the same.
Only allow Crystal energy to be spent on alchemy fees
Reduce energy alchemy costs for 2* items to 25
Reduce energy alchemy costs for 3* items to 50
Reduce energy alchemy costs for 4* items to 100
Reduce energy alchemy costs for 5* items to 200
Multiply material requirements for 2* items by 5
Multiply material requirements for 3* items by 10
Multiply material requirements for 4* items by 15
Multiply material requirements for 5* items by 20 (perhaps make exceptions for shadow-lair or other boss-only materials)
Allow players to spend additional materials when crafting to increase chance of UV and quality of UVs. I propose a system like this (using swords as an example):
When crafting, each item has a score in each of the following categories:
Damage vs. Gremlin
Damage vs. Fiend
Damage vs. Beast
Damage vs. Slime
Damage vs. Construct
Damage vs. Undead
Charge Time Reduction
Attack Speed Increase
Each material contributed to the alchemy process beyond the required materials adds to the score of each category with which that material is associated (for example, its star rating could be divided up among its associated categories: for example, a Silver Spring might add 1 to Damage vs. Construct and 3 to Charge Time Reduction, a Royal Core might add 5 to damage vs. Jelly).
In addition, each item has a total UV rating (we'll call this u) which is the sum of all of its category ratings.
The item first has a chance of getting three UVs equal to (10+u)/(10000+u)
If that fails, the item then has a chance of getting two UVs equal to (5+u)/(1000+u)
If that fails, the item then has a chance of getting one UV equal to (1+u)/(100+u)
If the item receives any UVs, the UVs it receives are determined by the ranking of its categories--an item receiving two UVs, for instance, would receive the two UVs with the highest scores.
For each UV, then (with rating r) there is a chance that that UV will be:
Very High, equal to (20+r)/(100000+r)
And, failing that, a chance that that UV will be High, equal to (10+r)/(10000+r)
And so on.
Obviously, my suggested fomulae are purely speculative, and the actual probabilities would have to be optimized based on drop rates and business plans to which I don't have access.
I believe that such a scheme would make crafting more fun. I think that the task of delving in the clockworks for amusing materials is more interesting than the task of accumulating some amount of Crystal Energy--and that can be made, fairly easily, to be just as energy-intensive (and thus just as profitable to OOO). It is obvious that this would improve the state of the materials market, making material gathering and resale a viable and interesting element of the game. Giving players control over UV generation in the way I propose would create a massive materials sink which would help keep the value of materials up. It would give us a fun alternative to mindless rage-crafting, as well as offering us a greater sense of involvement and immersion in the game--something the current crafting system greatly lacks. Finally, I don't think that a change of this type would necessarily cost OOO money. Again, it merely shifts the focus from forcing people to pay straight-up for better gear to forcing people to play the game so much to get better gear that the same amount of energy gets spent.
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