Developer Chat: Volume 7

The UO crafting system
By - Thomas "Hanse" Eidson

One of the largest systems and cornerstones of Ultima Online is its crafting system. Over the past few years, despite its high visibility only a few new features have been added to it. Recognizing that Blacksmiths are one of the most popular classes and one of our new player templates as well, it seemed like a good time to revisit crafting and interject some exciting new options.

The new system had to be interesting to a developing blacksmith, allow skill gain, and give ongoing and measured rewards to the player. In many ways, the system needed to parallel the "treasure map" system that has been present (and quite successful) in Ultima Online for several years now. I went to the drawing board with nothing specific in mind, just a lot of rough ideas and a chance to create something new - which is an opportunity designers on a live team crave but rarely receive! After bouncing ideas off other designers and players, I decided on a course of action that involved making a totally new system that would exist separately from any specific crafting skill, yet still enhances blacksmithing by essentially working in tandem with it. Definitely more work then making a few simple additions to the blacksmithing skill, but a much higher pay-off for our players.

Since many new players entering Ultima Online are completely new to this type of game, we decided the new system would have to be included as part of our new-player training quest, integrated into the interactions with NPC (Non-Player Characters) vendors for those pursuing the blacksmithing profession. This established the jumping off point from which a player is introduced into the system.

In order to satisfy the aforementioned goals, I devised a simple set of quests that could be offered to developing blacksmiths any time the player had a significant interaction with an NPC (in this case, selling an item to an NPC blacksmith). Since the essence of the quest was a request to create a large quantity of a specific item, I decided to dub the system "bulk orders" (a clear and simplistic title). The mechanic for displaying relevant information and progressing through the system needed to be intuitive. As a result, the quest is represented with a descriptive icon in the player's backpack (in the form of a "deed"). The system is now commonly referred to as the "Bulk Order Deed System" (BOD's for short).
The offers available to a specific player were hinged to the player's level of ability as a blacksmith. The system had to gently challenge the player in a manner that enabled them to further hone their skill by participating in the system. With this in mind, a specific group of items that help increase the player's blacksmithing ability when used had to be selected. The player could then craft the items required and turn them back in for a neat little reward of some gold (UO currency) and a magic or enhanced item. Thus motivating them to continue developing the skill.

The magic or enhanced item had to help the new player in some way. So, we made sure the items were tied to skill bonuses that helped them craft more efficiently or create higher quality merchandise than otherwise possible.

At about this point, the system was complete. It was a simple system, but Evocare (our lead designer for the live team) wanted more. Something uniquely rewarding for achieving extraordinarily difficult tasks had to be added to create appeal for veteran players. I feared feature creep at this point (hey, the system was already done!), but we sat down and began bouncing ideas off each other again.

Evocare mandated that the additions to the system would need to increase its appeal to veterans through a few key methods. It had to enhance community interaction by fostering trading activity, and introduce rare items (extremely rare in some cases) that couldn't be obtained by other means. In order to achieve the desired result, we opted to add another layer to the system that allows "large orders" to be offered to veteran blacksmiths. These large orders would be scaled in value and rarity according to their difficulty to complete, and require the completion of their corresponding "small orders". The difficulty factor was incorporated by virtue of the fact that Ultima Online has different colors of armor that can be crafted using ores of differing type and rarity. In addition, blacksmiths can acquire the ability to create specially enhanced armor and weapons of exceptional quality exceeding that of the common types of armor.

With 49 items, three different quantities of orders that can be requested (10, 15, or 20 items), normal and exceptional quality levels, 9 different colors of armor, and the large bulk order component, we now had 1608 different combinations of deeds. We proceeded to rank each deed in order of difficulty. Once deeds were ranked by difficulty, we designed a point system to reward players for completion of the order. The highest-ranking reward would be achieved by filling the highest-ranking Large Bulk Order.
The rewards themselves were far from trivial. One of the most time-consuming development tasks was the process of adjusting and measuring the prospective distribution quantities of each type of deed so that one order type would not be given out in such a manner as to unbalance the game. Many of the rewards added the ability to craft magic weapons (something completely new in UO). We had to ensure we did not create an overabundance of those types of weapons, keeping the distribution of those requests very rare so we did not risk eroding their "rare" value in the game. Once the system was completed we loaded it onto our test servers where we placed heavy logging scripts to review the player's progress within the system. Our goal was to learn player's response to the system, identify any missing pieces along with opportunities to enhance the system that we had over-looked.

The logging turned out to be a tremendous source of information. We found loopholes, patched them up, removed unintentional obstacles, and fine-tuned the rewards. The final system was remarkably successful within the confines of our knowledge and ability to predict behavior - which you learn quickly on a live team to never take for granted (we are continuously monitoring and tracking user results within the test and live production servers). In addition, the system is also open-ended and modular. It can be applied to any other skill without significant retrofitting. This allows us to expand it to other skills, if we choose to do so. It is now a ready and somewhat proven system available to allow us to expeditiously enhance other skills in the game and thereby increase the overall satisfaction of the players throughout our community. The Bulk Order system is one of a multitude of new additions that we have added that bring a sense of "newness" and discovery into the game world while offering players a dynamic challenge and a sense of accomplishment which is key for any online game.

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