Tailor Archive
Thread: My own far-fetched vision of what tailoring should be like
Sounds great to me, with one concern. :-) (Of course!)
The idea of experimenting to determine the available dye colors runs the risk that you may have to experiment multiple times to make a single item to match that one great success you just had. What I might suggest instead is a form of durability called color fastness. Simply put, as the item decays, this determines the fading of the color. A well dyed item could very well decay to brightly colored rags and disappear, but a poorly done one will fade quickly. (perhaps link the fade chance to the repair of the clothing?) Just a thought or two. I'll try not to have many more. ;-)
Some neat ideas in there ... I especially like the color decay versus the item itself. And the bandage aspect is nice particularly now that players are learning the importance of managing bleeding damage.
My only concern is that the line between customization and tedium can be real thin at times.
If I have to go through a billion steps and choices just to restock the 10 uniform boots and 5 sturdy boots and 5 standard boots on my vendors, I'd be exhauseted after the process. I like being able to "click" "click" "click" and "i'm done" when it comes to restocking my 500+ inventory. And if we have to revert to what the armorsmiths have to go through to find the "best" components to make the "uber" clothes, not sure I would like that either.
What I guess I am saying is I like the basic process we have now .... just give me some form of item decay (maybe via color loss over use) ... and the option of adding BioEng tissue to soup up the stats ... and I would be happy 
Now if you want to make me estatic ... I would love if the devs put in a "Clothing Catalog" that customers could call up from our vendor that would pop up a screen like we see in our crafting kit. This would allow the customer to see what they want ... and perhaps some way to have a preview of how it would look on the player.
It's a good vision
I look at the color fade proposal as a placeholder for actually having four or five different skins for each and every piece of clothing representing degrees of wear from brand-new to tatters. Color fade would work in the interim, however.
I also think that skill enhancers need to die with the garment, and the frequency of them as dropped loot increased. It doesn't impact Tailors that much one way or the other, but in a larger game context I think any bonus that lasts forever for all intents and purposes is trouble.
Overall, though, I would have no regrets or reservations if the game went in just the direction you described.
An ideal if hard to code upgrade? Let us dye things when we take them out of factory crates. :-)
I would love to dye and re-dye things post creation.. that would be a wonderful addition... maybe? Then again playing devils advocate, the idea of colorizing after creation would open up the idea of extended use of a single set of clothes.. just keep re-dying them....which would be all sorts of price arguments like image designers have with their craft. (why shoud you charge for the hairstyle.. it doesn't cost you anything)
Imagine if you will this little gem of imagination. Take it for what you will, but I think this would be a good basis to work from in a revamp of what tailoring should be like.
My goals in this musing are here:
1.It should have its challenges. Not life and death, but every click a tailor makes should be fraught with choices, decisions, surprising joys and perhaps heart wrenching failures.
2.It should be entertaining. Not just to you as a tailor but to the client involved as well. One should never have to wait on the other and at all possible moments both should be involved in the complex mini-game that is tailoring.
3.It should have products that mean something. Not just fashion statements, but actually provide useful aids to the wearer’s own game play.
4.It should have products that are consumable. Whether it is clothing degradation, color fade, cloth bandages to stop bleeding, or whatever. Things that a person would either single use and at some time discard and get a replacement.
So here is how I see the process of making an item we will not use a master tailor for this example.
The tailor first needs resources, they picks the ones that would be of best quality for their current schematic, say... a cold weather jacket. The jacket says that for optimal resistance to the chill of the winter, wooly hides would be best, especially with high resistance to cold elements and unit toughness. Malleability plays a part on how supple the resulting item will be which then translate to how well it will take to dye colors.
Once the first initial combine is made, the tailor then is allowed to tweak the various resulting stats. He has a choice between sinking points into the ‘resistances’ of the item (more cold resist, possibly mild padding from kinetic attacks), the Malleability of the item (how well it takes to color), The Quality of the item (for sockets) and the durability of the item.
A word on colors. I do not think colors should have ever been linked to experimentation the way it has. As you have seen in the color pallets each color ‘hue’ has about 8 ranks of saturation - the lowest one being a terribly pale version of its high rich cousin over on rank 8 of the swatch. We should run with this when dealing with color fading and how well and item takes to color:
0% -9% - Crap, either its natural hues or bleach it white wash it with some bleach
10% - 14% - Okay we can get the lightest hue from ALL the color swatches.
15% - 29% - Rank 2 The next color hue opens, you can still pick previous ranks
30% - 39% - Rank 3
40% - 49% - Rank 4 The middle rank, general medium hues are gotten here.
50% - 59% - Rank 5
60% - 69% - Rank 6
70% - 79% - Rank 7
80% + Rank 8 Deep rich heavy bright colors.
A word on Resistances: By no means am I suggestion that clothing replace armor or deflectors. However clothing should incur some minor natural bonuses. You wear thick hides, that club the Swooper just whacked you with shouldn’t hurt quite as much. Say in the range of 1-5% average maybe even up to 15% for 1000 quality sources and a fantastic experimentation roll.
Durability: There should be several factors that should cause an item degrade, stages it goes through. Each time it reaches a certain plateau of loss it should make a check to see which part degrades. Does it fade a rank of color? Does it loose a percent of Resistance? Does that cool stat tape that was socketed in drop out of it and back into your inventory?
The Entertainment Factor (getting you and the customer involved): I do not recommend the customer have full access to the whole dressing and tailoring of the item. There should be a generous amount of control in the tailor’s hand to keep said artisan from becoming a factory. But our customer could stand there and have a ‘clothing design’ hologram projection initiated by the tailor in question. Maybe this device is something an architect can make, or a droid engineer. Basically the tailor chooses some items, and selects the colors for the item, then ‘projects’ it onto the client, allowing them to see what is possible. There changes can be made. When that is done the tailor can look at the readings and see what percentages he needs to reach to get the colors needed and get to work creating the outfit, trying to get as close to the clients specifications as possible.
While the item is being crafted, it would be nice to actually see some sort of animation of crafting. This not only gives the client the idea you are not just AFK but actually doing something, but it also is entertaining in a mild form.
Also as a side note, I’ve noticed that many of the other artisan classes have consumables that go directly to the end user. For us, we should also get some sort of consumable item that the end user can enjoy as a one-shot aid to their combat needs.
Some ideas on consumables:
Clothing Repair kits (already exist but are unneeded)
Well if we have clothing that decays, this will help moderately restore the item for some extra life.
Bandages that stop bleeding
Maybe how many it takes depends on the quality of bandage and the severity of the bleed somehow?
Thoughts? Am I smocking Crack? Is this a decent start to a constructive discussion?
*hugs*
I would propose that we be able to dye cloth and have that tie to decay as well. Buy one pair of pants and dye them a different colour all the time and you'll have faded, paper-thin pants in no time. I'd also suggest that the dyeing process be something that you need basic Dom Arts-level skill in to do, and perhaps a "Star Wars Dyeing Tub" with consumable dyes (made by us, of course) that need to be used.
There's my 2 creds!
I don't like tieing the colors we can dye to a random number generator. I think that will make restocking vendors far more tedious. Personally I don't have a problem with gaining new colors the way we do now, I think it gives you something tangible to look forward to as you progress.
I think that we should be able to dye things as we take them out of the factory crate. I would use my factory a whole lot more if I wasn't limited to making them all the same color.
I think that artisan/survey missions should occasionally give "rare" dyes as a reward. These could allow that items that normally use the leather color palettes to use the full color palettes, or they could allow for a wider range of colors than we currently have. They should also give rare schematics as a reward occasionally. Give us some reason to do these missions instead of picking up some combat skills (which give far better reward for much less work, in my opinion)
UO has a crafter's mini-game system which gives special colored cloth as a reward.It was very popular and the high level, hard to get colors sold for huge amounts in a market where clothing had no real value.
I'm sorry, but experimenting for colours is a BAD idea. Imagine trying to make an outfit for someone in all one colour. 4-5 peices. How many tries to get it all to match? How frustrating would that befor the tailor? What a waste of materials on the discarded items... how impatient would customers get waiting 30 minutes or more while you try to match the trousers to the shirt! Plain and simple.. implement decay and reinstate experimentation for decay resistance. As far as colours fading, it sounds good in theory... in practice? Imagine someone who wears their jacket more than their trousers (or vice versa). In just a day or two they won't match anymore. This will annoy most customers and they will stop buying the vibrant colours so the fading won't matter so much. Also, the code involved in doing something like this would take ages to fix. Implementing decay (at a slower rate than it was in beta) would be simple as the code is already there. You're asking for more than the devs can give us right now, and something that both tailors and their customers would in the end find frustrating.
Resistances... this is why they are fixing the bio-engineeringline. Get friendly with your local bio-engineer. You're going to need him or her to be a viable tailor after the upcoming patch. You want resistances in your clothing, you buy the tissues from abio-engineer. They are not going to add additional resists to our clothing... that would make the bio-engineer's tissue line redundant.
The "entertainment value". Is it really that neccessary? Bug fixes are far more important. And, there is no way I could offer this routinely with my customer base. I can see it now... customers wanting to use the holo projector to see every single item I can make in every single colour. NO THANK YOU! To me, the best part of my job as a tailor is in finding the right outfit for each customer, with a little guidance from them. With this sort of thing, it could take me hours to make ONE customer happy. Not a chance. Vandessa, I'd love for you to come visit my shop on a weekend. It's a constant stream of customers. Being on the test server, you don't see the sheer volume that some of us do on the more populated servers. After a couple hours in my shoes, you'd see this isn't realistic. Please, Vandessa, find a very busy tailor on one of the populated servers and spend some time with them. You just can not imagine what headaches this could cuase until you've seen the life of a well-known tailor on a busy server.
Being able to dye and re-dye? No way. Talk about customers never buying clothes again! That's just not acceptable.
Consumables would be great. Bandages are probably the best suggestion for this. Having spent my entire EQ life summoning bandages, I know how valuable they can be if implemented properly.
That's my two creds.
Nalinya Dreamstar
Master Tailor of Valcyn