Nineaxis' Weapons Crafting Theory

Nineaxis

Quack Doctor
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May 19, 2008
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There's a lot of speculation out there about Weapon Crafting, and more specifically, how it'll work. I've been thinking about it for quite a while, and this is what I arrived at as the most likely, most logical way for it to work, with support from GCF content.

Firstly, I'd like to say I doubt that you will be able to craft hats. It's not logical, and I'm fairly confident that hats will remain random drops. Also, thoughts about inter-weapon breeding (for lack of better term) seems illogical. There's no way to balance and logically determine what a cross between the Killing Gloves of Boxing, an Axtinguisher, and the Ambassador would be.

What do I think will happen? Let's take a look at what has already been found. There's a color chart for various weapon "levels". Specifically, unique items (yellow), Valve weapons (purple), community items (green), and then various shades that are labelled Rarity 1-5, and raw backpack data says a Quality number. This gives merit to the weapon level system, but at pre-determined levels and with pre-determined statistics, the most logical way to maintain a fair amount of balance.

How does this relate to weapon crafting? I'd take a gander that all random weapon drops will be Quality 1, lowest level. Duplicates of the same weapon can be combined with each other to increase the level, or "Quality" of the weapon. If I have a couple of Kritzkriegs, I can craft a Quality 2 Kritzkrieg. From here, it's hard to predict the rate at which they would upgrade. I'm guessing that Quality 6 should be hard to obtain (to give merit to trading duplicates and high Quality weapons), so it doesn't make sense that you can get the highest level with only six Kritzkriegs to combine. Might double or something, I don't know.

Different Qualities would have improving statistics of course. Depending on how hard high Quality weapons are to craft, and how their statistics improve, they could very well be worthy of trading for a hat, and a hat could be worthy of trading for a cache of duplicates to improve your favorite unlockable. This gives merit to the highly criticized trading system, thought to only be useful for hat-to-hat trades. If the Quality system is valuable enough, I know I wouldn't mind trading an unwanted hat for a high-level Medic loadout.

That's my thought on it. I put no guarantees on it being accurate to any degree, it's just my interpretation of what little information we have on it. Your thoughts?
 
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NovaSilisko

L42: Life, the Universe and Everything
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Feb 3, 2009
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Interesting.
 

J4CK8

L11: Posh Member
Mar 4, 2009
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As long as the weapons don't give gameplay changes. I hardly think it's fair that someone's walking around with a triple mounted machine gun with lasers and a cream pie catapult upgrade for the medigun is going to get obliterated by someone who spent a week idling in tf2 and crafted the Chuck Norris.

Would be awesome if they made, and I hope they will, better looking weapons for upgrades. Different models, skins etc becuase at least then if peopel get that annoyed by someone having a better looking weapon, they can model/skin their own.
 

drp

aa
Oct 25, 2007
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im just worried about balancing issues.

going up against a heavy with a level 100 minigun vs your level 1 would suck.
 

drp

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Oct 25, 2007
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maybe make the levels purely aesthetic? the golden minigun?
 

Terr

Cranky Coder
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Jul 31, 2009
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IMO "crafting" is tricky to get right, compared to "discard X items and randomly get a new random item".

I had some pseudocode in the SPUF forums a while back for a way to do random weapons based on the existing archetypes, but the search engine is broken today. Every combination would have some pros and some cons, such that the system tried to avoid any obviously-better or obviously-worse guns. (Unlike games like Diablo you can't use the price of the item to fine-tune things.)

The "rare" items would really just be "extremely altered" rather than "extremely good". like the Rocket Launcher of +30% damage and -40% speed might be rare, while the Rocket Launcher of smaller plus/minus values might be easier to find.

Edit: Found the [ame=http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=846984]thread[/ame] via google, still have the source code (Python + SQLite) lying around somewhere...

HvC_Terr said:
More crazy demo output. This script doesn't yet use the "aberration" value, so pretty much everything it generates is pretty far from normal.

Code:
weapon: rocket
positive attributes:
	name: crit	 value: 4.16666666667
	name: range	 value: 3.33333333333
negative attributes:
	name: reload	 value: -10.0

Code:
weapon: rocket
positive attributes:
	name: damage	 value: 15.0
negative attributes:
	name: knock	 value: -50.0
Edit: I should be inverting my weights a bit. Oops. Idea being that for the rocket/range combo, the weight is low because people "care" less about it. Therefore it ought to have a larger fluctuation in the end, since nobody cares about, say, +/-5% range.
 
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MrAlBobo

L13: Stunning Member
Feb 20, 2008
1,059
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Theory seems sound...though I still doubt that higher level weapons with have any gameplay benefits. Just for the sole reason that idling will be significantly higher then it has ever been, I mean, when gameplay becomes effected is when I start idling.
 

TMP

Ancient Pyro Main
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Aug 11, 2008
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Anyways my idea is this.

I think what you are saying would make sense, but it takes 2 of the same quality to match up. That means for a lvl 6 quality it would require... Uh... I think 64 of the quality 1 items to get it, which sounds right.

Or valve could be mean and make it 3 :p That creates an astounding 729 of that item to forge the highest level.
 

uma plata

L6: Sharp Member
Jan 20, 2009
294
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Really doubt they would allow variants with "better" statistics. In a FPS balance is king, not so much with MMO/RPGs

My theory is the levels were going to represent the amount of variation from the original, but the end product would not be any more powerful. So your rocket launcher would have more damage but slower rate of fire, or something

Crafting would just be buffing one attribute at the expense of another
 

Doppler12

L1: Registered
Sep 10, 2009
44
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Here's a scary idea, maybe once they put the crafting thing into effect the unlockables gain a condition attribute and will break if not repaired with other items
 

NovaSilisko

L42: Life, the Universe and Everything
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Feb 3, 2009
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Here's a scary idea, maybe once they put the crafting thing into effect the unlockables gain a condition attribute and will break if not repaired with other items

Fallout Fortress 3
 

grazr

Old Man Mutant Ninja Turtle
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Mar 4, 2008
5,441
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Fuck. No.


Anything like this will downright murder this game. This isn't WoW.

Actually, Valve is actively taking inspiration from WoW, where do you think all of these rpg elements came from?

That said. I'm pretty sure i've watched a podcast where a Valve employee talks about crafting unwanted or duplicate hats into desired alternatives. Due to the "admittadely" flawed system. Hmmm.
 

Caliostro

L6: Sharp Member
Jul 6, 2009
261
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Actually, Valve is actively taking inspiration from WoW, where do you think all of these rpg elements came from?

That said. I'm pretty sure i've watched a podcast where a Valve employee talks about crafting unwanted or duplicate hats into desired alternatives. Due to the "admittadely" flawed system. Hmmm.

I'm aware, and it's a bit like having... Fuck, I can't think of an analogy worse than Valve taking inspiration from the shit that is WoW... It's the bottom of the barrel...

But yeah, THAT is what I'm hoping it'll become... Just change things that exist into other things that exist... No retarded weapon levels...


(yes, I know weapon levels exist now, but they're a joke... Literally, they're just a joke)