Maker tag - in-game symbol

[Emron]

I thought that it might be interesting if things that were crafted, whatever the tradeskill would have a tag denoting the maker. Just an idea from an avid tradeskiller.

Also, I've been trying to find an in-game symbol of some type to identify the members of our guild. I had thought that the fire-brand weapons would have an interesting graphic that would be similar for each weapon, but such is not the case. My idea was that, hopefully, some type of "flame" would dance about each weapon, such that our enchanters could carry daggers, warriors swords, etc, etc. Anyone have any ideas on this?
thanks,
Emron

[Galain]

I wouldn't expect to see this ever. Currently each item is stored as a single row in their database. If you were to try to add a 'maker' tag, you could easily run this number up to at least a thousand. Then multiply that by the number of crafted items possible in the game and you have just created a huge problem looking up the data.

[Tinile]

unless it could be implemented like augs.

[Dunthor Warsmith]

Something like the Augs seems reasonable. However, all augs are No Drop - this might not just be a balance driven, or SOE cash-hungry decision, but instead an engine one: passing things like aug'd items through Trades, sales, drops, and whatnot could very easily require entire rewrites of those systems - hence they make them nodrop, and remove all that recoding. If "Made by Dunthor" tag were to be added ala backend solution similar to Augs, then those concerns would have to be addressed, because you'd want the items to be droppable.

Then there's the fun of deleted characters. If I make my Armor_of_Smithing, it gets a "Made by Dunthor" tag, and then I delete Dunthor, what does it do? If I get a GM to change my name to Dorfdude, what happens to the made by tag? The various solutions to these problems all create problems of their own, and would definitely take some good decision making and careful planning in implementation.

(Examples: If you just point the "Made by" to the character's Name field, if that character is deleted that would be null, or at least potentially null- if you check for nullity every time, that adds to your processor load for every single inspect. If you change it on character delete, than the character file has to hold references to ALL items its made, which is a potentially infinitely large array - not something chardata can do at this point.

If instead you make a record of "Maker-of-stuff: Dunthor", what about the guy that creates a character, D1, makes a metal bit, gives it away, deletes D1. Makes a character D2, makes a metal bit, gives it away, deletes D2. Repeat numerous times. You start having a LOT of makers-of-stuff, more than you have players probably by a good margin. And what happens if I make a character Ubernewb, make something, and delete him, and then someone ELSE comes along, and makes a char named Ubernewb? Does he get credit for all the stuff my original char made?

And many other painful scenarios.)

[Bregalad]

Actually, according to SOE, augmenting process works in this way: if both item and augment are tradeable, the resulting item is tradeable too.

If either is NODROP, augmented item is NODROP. Since at this point ALL augments are NODROP, so is everything augmented. I have to say though, that if augmented stuff was tradeable, shopping in bazaar would become.... interesting.

However, today's augments are also database-defined items, and where each gear/inventory slot has previously been a single pointer, it is now a set of up to four pointers (the three extra ones indicating augments). Suppose SOE adds a string there as well, and when a tradeable, non-stackable item is made, that string will contain the maker's name.

[Krazick]

This idea has been tossed around in the past. The various problems Dunthor describes are indeed some of the variations that could come up.

Some possible ways people might think to address it could be like:

1. The only way to create a "Maker Tag Augment" would be to use your Grandmaster Trophy. And it could be a tradeable augment that REQUIRES a component that is NOT cheap... like a Bar of Platinum or Velium. Take the Trophy, and a Bar of Velium, put them both into the Adventurer's Augment "Bird Bath"... and that produces your Maker Tag Augment, and your Trophy back.

This sort of step would prevent the casual creation and deletion of characters.

But then again, characters can still be deleted, or moved to a different server.

To prevent the "loss of info"... the Maker Tag would need the "Maker of Stuff-Dunthor" record added and associated with the Tag.

To apply the Augment, take the Item, and your Tag and meld in the Augment Bath. And it should take a "Maker Tag" Augment Slot (Slot Zero). and not one which might be used for attribute augments.

For things like a Name-Change, the Character Record would need to point to the "Maker of stuff-XXX" record so that a name change would be applied there as well.

Also note, that any such "Maker Tag/Augment" would only be applicable to items that are end-products that are not consumables. ie., no food, drinks, or sub-combines would be taggable.

This also gets tricky when some sub-combines (like fine steel plate for example) are perfectly fine as an end-product but can also be used in further recipes like dying, or the small version to make clockwork armor.

[Taushar]

First of all, if you play SWG, this feature is in the game. Matter of fact, if someone uses your crafted container to make things, you get more crafting xp. I actually works pretty well.

However, on EQ, this will never happen. Mainly because the developers said they won't. We asked this question at two of fan faire at least and they said never. Of course they said they will never give us more than 8 bank slots in the past so who knows.

(Following is my speculation only) I think the problem will be the game architecture would not allow this feature, at least not without some serious consequences. The player made items are stored in a database so if you hold an item, an associated number pointing to an item database is stored in your inventory file at the server. If all the items owned by 100 people are the same, they only need to implement one field for each person's inventory and only one record for the item datebase.

If you start to attach uniqueness to each crafted item, you will need two fields for each item at player's file, one for the item and one for the who it was made by. Also, the item database will also have to hold total number of people playing the game (450,000 people from last I heard) times number of possible craftable items in the game (I don't know the number but guessing to be in thousands). This would increase the data storage requirements by many times at their end. Not only that, the processing power to access the database will suck up a lot of the bandwidth and the game would come to a crawl. Finally, you will have to significantly modify the code and database structure to accommodate this, which means more bugs can be expected.

I think for these reason, it's not a reasonable to implement this feature. Would I like to see it? Of course, as a tradeskiller, I would love to see people come to me because they saw my name on something I made. However, for practical reasons I would not want to have SOE implement this change. Don't fix what ain't broken.

Taushar

[eniamn]

augment type slot 9 to all player made items (non-consumables sorry i bake and brew too but stacking issues).

type 9 aug requires skill 150 to make. just trophy or just 250 ppl seems really eletist. 150 skill is a significant expendeture to stop most ppl who would make the metal bit and restart.

suggest mage summoned aug for peridot or an easy or no-fail smithing combine to make the aug. use a peridot or equivalent other money item to add a plat sink and you aren't going to augment stuff for nothing. make sure it is droppable.

[Imrahil]

Seems simple though, each item slot on a character requires one more field yeah, one to the character ID of who made it. When you inspect it the first time in a playing session it gets the name associated with that ID and puts it up, and can cache that for future inspections. (Safe to assume you won't care if they change their name during that session and it isn't updated for you right away) You already get loads of names from player IDs all the time. Any time someone comes in view you look up their name to show it over their head, or any time you /who you look up names from IDs in the zone.

To handle character deletion then when you do an inspect and the character ID no longer is valid, just strip off the ID from your item, and save it back to null. So when a crafter is deleted, all their items will loose their trademark the frist time they're inspected.

So for tradeing for example instead of A is offering B item 12345, it's A is offering B item 12345, augmented with aug 321, with maker ID 56789

[GraemeFaelban]

Having an identifier on the slot would be problematical. It needs to be associated with a specific item, and that is the hang up. Even augments are specific items in the database, and making them custom for each user would cause the same problems as doing the same with the items.

Obviously the problem is not completely insurmountable, but, it is quite possible that with the way EQ currently exists it is not worth the effor to SoE.

[Imrahil]

Well ID for the item in the slot. Essentially it's aother augment slot, non-player removable. Augments are specific items in the database yes, but as far as data representation goes there is a single solitary instance of any item or augment. You don't need to store all the stats info for every item you have. All that exists is a reference to that single solitary instance of that item or aug. You just store the item ID and augment ID's as a tuple. So for example there is no database of possesed items that needs to be updated.

Example:
If I have a rusty dagger equiped, all it stores is the ID for "a dagger" in my inventory. It doesn't bother creating a new instance of "a dagger" in some dagger database. So when I trade the dagger to you it doesn't have to go into that dagger database and change a specific dagger from being owned by me to being owned by you, all it does is remove the "a rusty dagger" ID from my inventory and add the "a rusty dagger ID" to your inventory.

So essentially the "made by" field is just like another augment ID. Say I have a rusty dagger (item 12345) augmented with an augment Aug1 (augment 001) made by myself (player 34567) then what's in data for that dagger is just the tuple (12345, 001, 34567) in my inventory.
There is no actual instance of that dagger in any other table anywhere that has "owner" and "made by" fields. Imagine needing a seperate instance of every "a rusty dagger" on the server. That would be insane.

So when I trade it to you for example, all it does is remove that tuple (12345, 001, 34567) from my inventory and add that tuple (12345, 001, 34567) to your inventory.

No new items need be created at all for this, item's must be expanded for one more number in the tuple, (exactly what they had to do for augments) In this case that new number is simply a reference to an already existing playerID. Also they would need to implement updating that ID on item creation and the example of player deletion. How big a deal this is I don't know.

[Salash Penumbra]

Good lord! Some people are over complicating this.

EQ has a database of items, this is basically what you see when you choose things in magelo / lucy / etc, which is where the basic attributes of an item are stored (stats, effects, etc).

You then have "instances" of these items (the stuff we have in our inventories, in the bank, on corpse, on mobs even) which basically say "On my cursor (or wherever) I have item number 9727 (or a Dairy Spoon to the rest of us)".

These "instances" already have additional information associated with them, such as charges and augs. All they'd have to do is add another piece of information, such as "creator" and the job's a good one. This all assumes EQ doesn't use some twisted and convoluted method of dealing with augs and charges

Or, um, what Imrahil said above

[OberonMiM]

they COULD do it if the characters are stored in a database using a system very much like the augment

basically another slotlike could be added which corresponds to the character id of the maker.

But it would NOT work on server transfers. in which case it might even crash if a character with that certain id does not exist. /shrug

but it is possible but it would cause EXCESSIVE database access though in comparison (accessing the character database every time rather than just the item database).

Note this is assuming that the characters are in a database accessable by a Unique ID v1alue (probably right though). Storing the Characters name woudl cause a database explosion though (and ID would be much quicker)

[Soulfiend]

This used to be in Ultima Online.

If you were GM in a skill, you got to put your Name on the item.

IF it can be done with a crappy game like that, any decent programmer would be able to impliment it on this....

[Soulfiend]

Every chacter has a character id some where.

Add a field to the item called Maker.

Add character id to maker.

Not hard.