Very upset at the lowering of whiskey profit! Unbalanced Now!

Discussion in 'Crafting & Gathering' started by odyssey2003, Mar 14, 2021.

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  1. Cora Cuz'avich

    Cora Cuz'avich Avatar

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    It sounds like we might get something like this in R89. Whether or not it is a big fix, or just a step, remains to be seen. Bonuses from materials are going to get buffed, drops for components are going to go up. And it sounds as though there is some sort of "artifacts drop something that can be used to apply artifact-like bonuses to crafted gear" system in the works, though they've stayed quiet on details.
     
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  2. Cora Cuz'avich

    Cora Cuz'avich Avatar

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    While there are many dissertations on what can be fixed in crafting, I think the biggest issue overall is that we have a crafting system that was designed for a Shroud of the Avatar where T5 was the toughest the game got. That's not where we are now, and the crafting system hasn't been modified to catch up, except by adding more artifacts and allowing them to be combined. (Mainly, I would guess, because those were things Chris could do, while overhauling crafting needed to be Bzus task. But Chris likely wouldn't allow major changes without a lot of supervision, which he didn't have time to do. But that's just a guess.)

    That said, based on the general direction of changes recently, I'm somewhat optimistic. It used to be if something was "fixed" it just became "very slightly marginally better, and probably at the cost of something else getting worse." The last few releases, improvements to things have actually made things measurably better. I might still complain about stuff, but I went from 2-5 hours one day a week, to 3-6 hours every other day or so, and 8-12 hours on a weekend.
     
  3. FrostII

    FrostII Bug Hunter

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    IMO the 3 quotes below sum things up quite nicely:

    The most obvious response came from @Anpu (above) - with one BIG catch - which @Barugon adresses beautifully (just below) !

    Then there's @kaeshiva 's post (below):
    We need a PLAYER DRIVEN economy , which would be completely solved by a GLOBAL VENDOR SEARCH w/prices - then our current system of shortsighted "spreadsheet" fixes could just go away.
     
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  4. Wilfred

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    I think the time sink should be mostly in gathering and producing raw materials. Since players are buying raw materials and then botting to get the Producer XP, just reduce the refining and crafting times so players can get the Producer XP without botting. The potential Producer XP is a big part of the value of raw materials. So reducing the time it takes to craft and refine items would make raw materials more valuable in relation to refined materials and finished items. Which would make gathering and farming raw materials more profitable.
     
  5. Sorgin Txakal

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    Well, for one, I am the only one who talks about ROI in crafting and so the reason those conversations weren't had was because I wasn't here ;)


    The thing is, the dev's don't want people to make money off of crafting for various reasons. Whiskey seemed to be an exception historically because it served no purpose other than to sell to NPC merchants.

    Now, maybe 5% of whiskey produced can be sold to the player base, but there will never be sufficient demand in the player base to cover the production capacity of the crafters and farmers in the game.

    So the question becomes one of how Catnip discourages botting while encouraging crafting.

    This is a complex problem, exacerbated by many players who do nothing but complain because they have to consume food more than once in a 24 hour period or cannot find everything they want from just doing dungeon exploration, which further pushes people away from crafting except for what they need for themselves.


    How does crafting become something that is viewed as worthwhile when demand for many crafted products (most foods, non-artifact armor, non-artifact weapons, most produce) is steadily approaching zero across the player base?


    I don't have the answers, I don't believe anyone does, and as someone who is one of the people targeted by the whiskey price lowering my first instinct is to evaluate if it is even worth my time to brew again or if I should try to sell casks to new players to recoup my costs - which was the intended effect I believe.


    TL;DR the problem isn't with the lowering or balancing of X item - I think the problem is with the approach to offsetting production capacity of players with appropriate demand for crafted items, and this is a problem with a much larger scope and impact than just the people who brew whiskey for low effort residual income.
     
  6. necronut

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    There's a reason I'm not really in the agriculture game anymore. A small farm for crafting xp and reagents just for self sufficiency.

    There's a glut of whiskey so I'm not trying to be competitive in a flooded market in such a chaotic waxing/waning.

    If we halved the reg outpout, that wouldn't be enough to fix things, there's also a glut of regs in the economy. Output was doubled with the demand remaining the exact same. So boxes, bags, banks, and pockets are filled beyond the brim with otherwise useless regs.
     
  7. Sorgin Txakal

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    Well, this is kinda the point I am brining up. There is nothing in the game that drives demand for anything except adventuring.

    While I am, generally speaking, pro removing items from NPC merchants that players can farm in bulk to help create a better player-driven economy - the relationship has to work both ways, there has to be a driver of consumption.

    Every business in the world runs the risk of over-producing relative to demand, but in those instances there are costs associated with storage and demand is generated organically. In SotA, we have no cost to storage and no drivers of demand except for farmers selling to crafters to make thousands of items that then sit idle in vendors for months or years.

    The main appeal to selling to NPC merchants is not that you can make obscene profits, which is why I am generally not complaining about the price lowering, but that demand exists.

    Catnip talked about lowering the price of gems sold to merchants because high level fire mages have no ceiling on profits, I have no problem with that. Now they are talking about, haven't implemented but are talking about, lowering the price of sold whiskey. Again, I don't really have a big complaint about that.

    My complaint is, that NPC merchants are substitutes for drivers of supply and demand, when phasing them out, there needs to be something approaching corresponding changes to gameplay to drive demand in players who should buy at least a fraction of the goods that are currently mostly sold to vendors.
     
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  8. necronut

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    Okay, so we agree and disagree.

    Point one: The econ needs gold sink. I agree wholeheartedly with Shawn that there aren't enough gold sinks, and NPC Merchants should exist in the same way bodegas coexist with grocery stores. The grocery store (player vendor) is further away, has more stuff, and better prices. The bodega (npc merchant) is in your neighborhood, overcharges for everything except lottery tickets, and will sell you weed if you keep your mouth shut -but I digress. NPC Merchants should exist, but charge a lot more; sure, you can get a gallon of milk at the bodega, but the convenience is gonna cost you.

    Point two: In the case for global vendor search, a decent middle ground is Fallout76. I mouse over another player's camp in 76, I can see what items, by type, they have before I waste caps fast travelling over there. i.e. I'm looking for iron ore, not the price of iron ore, so I'm only looking for vendor locations that have iron ore. I'm not tryna wander the globe shaking hands with every man, woman, and child asking "Where da weed at?"

    Otherwise, I love the way you talk.
     
  9. Sorgin Txakal

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    Well, I don't really feel that NPC merchants have functioned as gold sinks. I mean, the only thing I buy from NPC vendors are items that cannot be farmed by players effectively, if at all (milk, black pearls, coal) and items that cannot be crafted (glass jars, vials, creosote, etc.). From my understanding, these aren't really meant to be gold sinks, but just stop gaps until the means of players farming these items are implemented.

    Gold sinks should have been crafting failures that consume/alter ingredients (not just a tiny fuel component - not that failures are a concern anymore), reliance on significant potion and food consumption to make you successful (not just a nice little bonus), repair/maintenance costs, costs associated with moving items between regions, lot fees, vendor listing fees, consumed thrown items/poisons used in abundance of their accessibility.


    None of those things exist because of player demands for a "easier crafting", "more loot", quick travel invalidating the region/pass system, and the lack of competitive craftable gear in game.

    This is why I don't think global vendor search will fix any problems, it will just be another mechanism to detach players from any economy-related gameplay in the name of "convenience" and further reduce time from any equation related to the economy - and will expose to more players, who can't be bothered to use one of their free lots in a merchant city or even browse a few, just how big the glut of supplies is in the player economy for everything except COTOs, bandit gear, and fire mage artifacts.


    Deep economic gameplay requires punishment for bad investments and unexpected catastrophes in production/storage/movement of goods - I don't think the majority of the player base would allow Catnip to kick out the training wheels and rip off the band-aids that are limiting the risk/reward potential of the economy. And if an economy isn't based on risk/reward, then we're always going to see a surplus of any good that can't be sold to NPC merchants which is going to drive players to want to just sell to NPC merchants for the steady demand if they don't want to spend their time farming the same top of the meta artifacts over and over again.
     
    Last edited: Mar 15, 2021
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  10. necronut

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    Make sure to look for "How to Make Thousands of Gold Per Day" by Lazarus Long at your local player vendors. XD
     
  11. kaeshiva

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    This is the core of the problem in my opinion, this feeling that a crafter spending time playing the game crafting should not be able to make a profit.

    The vision seems to be:
    Adventurer makes the money, to buy things off the crafter, and the crafter has the gold sinks purging the gold from the system.

    The reality is:
    Adventurer makes the money. Crafter can't self finance because insufficient demand for crafted goods and no way to make money through crafting only, so becomes an adventurer instead and resents having to spend 99% of their time killing stuff in order to be a "crafter." Thinks it will get better as they progress their skill but it is actually less satisfying the higher level you get as there's a very very small demand market and no real market system that lets you compete or expose your wares to buyers. You end up trying to dump stuff at under cost to recoup some of the fuel you spent. And so on.

    This has been the spiral for me. Is it worth my time to ...brew? ...craft....? log in at all....?
    After you've made your first few casks and worked out the math of what you're buyin, brewing isn't "fun". Its hitting a button thousands of times. Its a semi-afk activity that you do while you're waiting for people, letting attenuation cool off, or while you're doing something else like watching TV. It isn't fun, it doesn't require a lot of attention, and its no surprise whatsoever that people bot it. I can't imagine thinking "Oh, its a new day! I'm going to log on shroud and watch the progress bar go from left to right slowly 1600 times for 8 hours! I'm so excited!" The experience and money you earn from it is the entire point. Take that away, and why do it?

    A lot of games do this, where you can come back to town, do your crafting business in a few minutes, then get back out and you know, play. It works great. I've never understood why we have this huge "time block" for refining when it doesn't serve any practical purpose if you make that time worthless. If the time had appropriate value, then yes - but player time value is negated by botting - a bot can do it for free, so why pay a player to do it.

    I guess if we didn't have the time delay, we could get rid of the bots, but then there'd be people who just dump a bunch of $$ into the system to buy raws and craft them up to get their levels, thus making the thousands of hours people have spent levelling/developing crafting the proper way meaningless. A lot of the items that have "demand" now only have it because crafting Xp. People aren't using all that garlic casting spells, right? So if your "crafting level" became just an expression of how much money you'd spent on raw resources, then we arrive at the corridors of pay to win. Don't get me wrong, we're already there - it just takes longer because you actually have to take the time to process the goods.

    There's little functional difference between a player who has sunk 10,000 hours into harvesting, crafting, and developing their character over the course of years, and a player who has spent a few thousand bucks on gold/materials and then used a program to achieve the same level in a fraction of the time.

    I remember when double exp hit and suddenly everyone started wanting all this stuff whose only purpose was xp-cranking and that's how they were gonna spend their weekend. We used to have an "underground processing facility" where a handful of us would go, with our boxes of stuff, and just hang out and chat while crafting away thousands of useless items to "get the xp." Knowing that people can just drop a bunch of cash and then have a program set running 24/7 to accomplish in a few weeks what I did slowly over the course of years a few hours at a time, frankly disgusts me and definitely influences my feelings of "its pointless to play."

    All of that being said, it seems the extreme fix is to remove progress bars, reduce all crafting exp from actually crafting down to 1% of what it is now, and add a completely different new crafting progression system based on work orders to actually level up as these would be more difficult to bot.

    Either that or just actually do something about the botting.

    At the end of the day, all the economic problems seem to be focused on this issue that "there are bots" and solutions seem to be getting built around the fact that there are bots - so let's stop just treating the symptoms. I know "enforcement" isn't nearly so simple but its either that or we keep throwing bandaids at it forever while more and more nonbotting players spend less and less time playing because their time has no value.
     
  12. Sorgin Txakal

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    This is why I keep brining up the idea that NPC merchants and/or new gold/coto-buyable with gold sink wages NPC processors should be included in game.

    If you want to eliminate botting and create a legitimate gold sink at the same time. Create an NPC you can load up with materials to refine them for you, and pay them gold every day. You can then choose between doing it yourself for extended periods of time for the tiny amount of xp, or spend your time in a gathering profession which actually yields significant xp and far far more gold than you make in the refining or crafting part of the profession - and no single botting player could ever even come close to competing with the combined refining abilities of a guild working together loading up a community NPC refinery and spending their crafting xp in selective ways to focus on a specific set of final production and/or enchanting and/or master crafting which could then be made more engaging/skill based to both make crafting enjoyable as well as nearly-impossible to bot final production.

    Then things like over-abundance of whiskey in the market (brining this convo back around to whiskey lol) don't become a problem as the wages of NPC refiners could increase over time with the rate of inflation in game so selling to NPC vendors isn't so much a luxury, but a necessary cost against your potential profits due to maintaining a large scale operation.
     
    Last edited: Mar 15, 2021
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  13. AzazelReborn

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    All this boils down to is the devs do not care about time spent and invested in the game. You can see it everywhere in the game. Your time spent does not matter and they will wipe that out as they feel like it.
     
  14. FrostII

    FrostII Bug Hunter

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    Crafting becomes worthwhile when EVERYONE has a way for EVERYONE to see what's on their vendor - in Po Dunk, or wherever - and that will be if/when Chris realizes that a Global Vendor Search w/prices would be the spark that would - virtually instantly - ignite a booming economy - one that never had a chance because of the shear number of towns loading screens and no way for anyone to know what anyone else has put on a vendor other than to run around blindly looking and no workable way to compare prices.

    The current model simple doesn't work - which is why there SEEMS to be no current demand for crafted products.

    There's always been plenty of DEMAND but there has never been a way for us to know who has what to sell - which is why, as Sorgin has so succinctly put it:
    Our lack of a REASONABLE way to find what we need from a competing market has been the PRIMARY REASON that our "player base" has BECOME SO DIMINISHED over the years.

    Games are here to be a fun relief after a day of making a living, and watching loading screens and progress bars is just no relief at all - much less fun.

    SotA has the primary elements of another UO (only better and modern and could be popular for years and years), but alas, we just don't enjoy the amount of boredom forced upon us by not being able to easily find what we need and simply go and get it.

    That has to change.
     
    Last edited: Mar 16, 2021
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  15. kaeshiva

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    I dunno. I mean, I don't disagree with anything you're saying, but I think there is more to it.

    Let's look at the sheer amount of stuff a single player can produce and the potential demand for it.
    In a single day, I could harvest wood for, and craft, enough round tables that I could probably fill the entire Novian demand for round tables for several months at least. Why? Because a round table is something that occupies a "physical space" in the game, and there's a finite number of places and houses where such tables could go, even if you filled them to the brim, which wouldn't make aesthetic sense;, no, at most, most people would only want a couple of these in a house, and the recipe is certainly easy enough that rather than fight with the player market system it is simply easier to go make one yourself.
    (This is why a "mail order catalogue" service that S Mart Sales used to do was amazing - just place your order! Imagine if gear crafting had no RNG and could be the same...but I digress).

    Ok so furniture demand is limited by potential "decorating space" which is finite and there are thousands of potential furniture/deco items to choose from further diluting the appeal of this particular table. If it was the only table we got, it would be in more demand (remember pre persistence when everyone's houses had the same handful of decorations cause that's all there was?)

    So there's finite demand for a round table, and if I wanted to SELL a round table, there's no way for people to know that I'm selling it unless they stumble across it in the huge massive loadscreen gated world, which isn't likely. And even if they did find it I'd likely have to price it somewhere around the cost of materials since in Sota, player time has no value (already well established precedent).

    Why there is no demand for craftable decorations
    1. Self-sufficiency. Easier to make it yourself than find it for sale (poor market system)
    2. No skill gate, static product regardless of creator
    3. Finite demand, utilization dependent on available space

    Ok, so fine with the tables.
    What about consumables?

    Why there is no demand for consumables
    Some of the same things apply:

    1. Self sufficiency. Easier to make it yourself than find it for sale (poor market system)
    2. No skill gate, static product regardless of creator

    Consumables have a few different properties:
    a) an inventory carry weight
    b) an effect
    c) a duration
    d) exist in monster drop tables - oversupply
    e) can be crafted in extreme bulk vs. duration - oversupply

    I know as someone who doesn't use a lot of consumables ( I don't like all the extra inventory clutter to carry around buff potions that don't last very long or health potions that probably wont save me - if I get into enough trouble that I need a potion, a potion isn't going to help lol) that all my consumable needs are completely met/exceeded by what I get as drops. Scrolls, repair kits, potions, teleport scrolls - I get more of these than I use without ever having to resort to buy them. Poisons tend to be one of those things people craft for experience, so there's a huge glut of these available and thousands just get vendor fed because no interest - (I left thousands of festering poisons on a vendor for the same price NPC pays, they were there for months).

    So what about other consumables?
    Taming collars = useful, demand exists, requires silver so they don't get spammed for experience, but demand is limited to the "tamer" subset of player and at some point, you have enough pets. Unless you are selling pets, but then you hit the second wall of trying to sell pet necklaces when there's a limited amount of demand for them. (And taming collars ARE in the loot tables, too). About the only person I know who is always out of taming collars is someone who tames pets and gives them away to everyone on a daily basis.

    What about food?
    This is another oversupply situation. Right now, in a box in my house, I have enough dragon stew, that if I ate one every 8 hours (which is how long they last), I have enough to last something like 21 years. And this is while constantly keeping vendors updated selling it at 1 gold above cost over the course of years, and giving it away by the 100stack - I STILL have this much left. I'm sure there are others in the same position. Why do I have so much ? 1) there's nothing else you can make from dragon meat and 2) making dragon stew is good exp, so I make it even though I don't need it. The piles of bear, wolf, surprise aren't quite as bad, but they're getting there. You craft the things for exp, but demand is capped at how long a player plays in a day and now long they need those buffs for.

    Now, I'm not suggesting we nerf food durations - then they'll go the way of the stat potions - (don't last long enough to bother with).
    I'm just trying to point out that demand reaches a finite level because an item that gives an 8 hour buff - at most a player needs to consume a couple a day.

    Why there is no demand for crafted gear
    1. Self sufficiency. Easier to make it yourself than find it for sale (poor market system)
    2. High production costs, rng-plagued outputs (no control/decision making)
    ---1&2 corollary: Everyone tries to be self sufficient, and everyone tries to sell their failures/leftover junk, way oversupply
    3. No consumption/binding
    4. Market monopoly for elite equipment
    5. Hard limit of equip slots per character per situation

    Permanent durability loss isn't working to drive demand.
    Its both too fast and too slow.
    Durability wear down is too slow to require frequent replacement, however, making it degrade faster reduces its value
    Knowing your gear wont last very long means you don't want to invest in extremely good gear (no demand for 500,000 gold gear pieces, or simply, people can't afford it and accept mediocrity - they simply don't 'need' it).
    The reason why most games have bind-on-equip and repair-via-cash sink with no permanent degradation is because this system works.
    Most games with perma dura loss also have consistent, reliable gear replacement - Sota's RNG system is the opposite of this.
    So gear just sticks around forever. You can't sell it (not worth a fraction of materials) to the NPC, you can't salvage it (again, returns are like 1% of value), you can't turn it in for a quest, melt it down, or do anything with it. And our system is designed to generate hundreds/thousands of excess, unwanted pieces by removing decision/control from the process. And while people may have a chest full of alternate gear pieces, at the end of the day, how many helmets do you need, you only have a single head!

    There are a handful of well known gear-crafters who are well known for being high level and having a ready supply of high end gear. That's not a criticism of those people - they've worked hard, damn hard, to build up that reputation, fighting past the limitations of the market and gone to considerable personal effort and investment to do so - however it does create a situation in which other crafters can't compete - and new players wanting to uptake crafting from zero are thousands of hours and millions of gold away from getting there. So the monopolies meet the demand; all the gear on vendors everywhere else languishes, unwanted.

    Conclusion

    I'm sure there's stuff I've left out.
    But the way it feels to me is, yes, the poor market system is a factor in the lack of demand,
    But finite limits on the usefulness of stuff (you only have so much space in your house, there's only 24 hours in a day during which you need the effect of a particular food, you only have 1 head so you only need a half-dozen or so helmet options).
    I can create thousands of hours worth of 'buff food' in 24 hour period.
    I can create hundreds of helmets in a single sitting but there aren't hundreds of heads to wear them.
    Same thing with any particular deco item, really.
    Nothing gets consumed. Nothing gets used up, or at least not as fast as its made.
    We need alternatives or a workable salvage system or some sort of output for all the inputs.

    Another observation could be - a lot more people are participating in crafting, than there are people who need the stuff.
    How many are crafting it themselves cause they can't find it and would rather not? - Better market system may actually work to reduce supply
    How many are crafting it themselves (gear) because the RNG is so random that its exceptionally difficult to get the result you want if just sampling player vendors. Removing randomness from crafting would allow custom orders - whole new market for suppliers and also reduce supply for people trying to sell excess junk to recoup anything. Craft-for-hire would become a thing.

    Most people aren't crafting food and potions and dye because they want to be chefs and alchemists, they're not even doing it to make money - they're doing it to get producer XP to invest in higher and higher gearcrafting.

    Our system is by no means simple, but just going back to this whiskey thing - its a knee jerk fix to a small part of a very large and complex problem with supply and demand, the actual crafting process, and the crafter-consumption dynamics. We have a system wherein a single player can crank out ridiculous amounts of a single commodity (such as whiskey) that may have a use but isn't useful enough to ever consume that which is made.
    Why do you make something nobody wants? For the exp, or for income (sell to npc). I think we should tackle that part of the problem rather than just removing the income element because it just makes it a straight "paying for exp" situation and there's likely better choices than whiskey with far less up front investment. Whiskey becomes abandoned, useless, an entire system that serves no purpose outside deco/roleplay.

    If whiskey had the effect of "throw this whiskey to do a 1000 point damage aoe in front of you" I think we'd still struggle to use it all - because it costs too much to make. No matter how good you make the buff or effect, you have far more players engaged in making the stuff than you do in using it. Players are compelled to "make stuff" to level up but there's nothing to do with all the stuff. At some point, players get to the point where further crafting levels aren't going to make enough of a difference, and like myself, they look back on their landfill of stuff jammed in boxes and basements, and realize, they really don't need any more stuff and there's nothing to do with all the stuff they've accumulated. Its too hard to sell it, and if you COULD sell it, then you'd just be sitting on a big pile of money that you don't need because there's nothing you really want to buy - you can make/get it all yourself. And specialization wont fix it, because hard lines of specialization are easily circumvented with alts, since levelling crafting is a process that involves "feeding materials to character to process until desired level reached" and as mentioned before, apparently people do this with bots/macros.

    So how do we fix it?
    - Stop trying to prevent crafting as a gold faucet, make sell-to-npc viable, make salvage viable - less crap gets stuck in player market unwanted (lower supply).
    - Add alternative consumption. Let us salvage junk potions to get empty bottles at a 100% return (I just poured it out, ok?). Let me smash up these tables/chairs to get boards. Add repeatable NPC quests that reward something not obtainable any other way in exchange for turning in a stack of (whatever-thing). 1000 dragon stew -> turn in to get a "Dragon-shaped spoon" tool/artifact for cooking or some such nonsense. Turning in 10 of those spoons gives you a dragon-shaped-cooking-pot with some bonuses. From a pure collectability standpoint, you've added sinks for a lot of things, that can be planned for, worked for incrementally, and set as goals instead of relying on RNG rare drops for everything nice. It doesn't even need to be physical stuff. Stop with the dropped recipes nonsense, make them earnable via turnins. Turn in enough granite blocks of a particular shape, learn how to make a new room out of it. Could even turn in like, 100 of every cooked food for a "gourmand" title or something, or even account features unlocks (ie, gourmand title gives you +1% to all food potency). These sorts of small incremental achievements, especially if they have some benefit, add years of replayability and create so many resource sinks. It also means that you've got potentials in the recipe department that are limited to players who have really worked to unlock them, making them rarer and far less in supply.
    - Get rid of randomness and perma dura loss, replace with predictable, plannable gear crafting. This will reduce the amount of gear on the market by something like 99% and create a whole new craft-for-hire dynamic instead of what we have now.

    There's been loads of good ideas on these forums!
     
    Last edited: Mar 16, 2021
  16. Cora Cuz'avich

    Cora Cuz'avich Avatar

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    I always go back and forth on global vendor search. I like the idea when I need to find something I want to buy, but I'm not so enthusiastic about it when it comes to my own sales. Admittedly, it probably won't hurt me, as most of my sales come from townies. Well, until the last few left for greener pastures. I used to do really well when the Oracle could dump new players in the other starting areas, our town is the first one you see coming out of Blood River. I was able to sell a lot of starter stuff back then. Now it's just the one or two remaining town residents, who grab a few consumables every weekend, and maybe some of the new drops from that release if I managed to have any spares after farming them myself. On the one hand, I suppose it'll help, in that my stuff is always reasonably priced, at or slightly below whatever I've determined to be market value. However, I don't see people coming from all over Novia to buy potions from me, unless I undercut other prices enough to make the trip worth it. Which is Step One of the "race to the bottom."


    I'm (cautiously) optimistic, but based on hints Elgarion has been dropping, salvage is getting a major rework, probably coming R89. Some of it may go in for R88, but i think the Texas Snowstorm pushed a lot of things out a bit.
     
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  17. majoria70

    majoria70 Avatar

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    Speaking of this and that will effect the economy has the capability imo to slow down progress to fix the interesting, satisfying, and depth of crafting in itself. Economy is people buy your goods but what if there are other uses for your goods as @kaeshiva alludes to in her comments such as daily NPC crafting quests, progression quests, and of course taking most recipes out of loot tables and put back into the crafting progression tasks to earn them. Counting only in the economy for value for your goods is a very unsatisfying experience especially when those sales don't happen. Giving crafting other dimensions and depth would help more imo.

    I know it's easy to think one direction on anything but it doesn't always fix a problem. Give us daily crafting progression rewards of recipes, gold and special crafting resources. Make those also sellable for those who don't enjoy questing. Let us do crafting quests for npc's who need our goods and will reward us for them.

    One directional thoughts on this are craft and sell to other players but this is limiting the games potential to be more interesting and capable. At the moment devs send this game in a direction that is mostly about combat related tasks to acquire most things which is very unbalanced as a game.
    For example:

    Crafters want to craft and have intetesting rewarding progression. Questers want to Quest for interesting story and satisfaction, progression and of course everyone wants gold and special resources and items.

    To make this game mostly about economics does not address the core. As with most systems in this game the game direction did not get the depth and completion needed to provide continuous satisfying stimulation and reward to players.

    Adding the depth in to systems like fishing for example would have been a richer experience. As is catch a bigger fish technology is blah, blah, blah and OK for one part of fishing as also can be used for cooking recipes and trophies that are a necessary part but why else to fish? What is interesting about it? Krakens, message in a bottles that provide map pieces and quests, a chance to find a treasure box, a Parahna or shark that attacks would add a lot.

    Fishing npc's should absolutely give quests for fishing rewards and progressions. Special bait, a fishing hat with a bonus. The quests could also give a specialization of some kind from completing more crafting quests, etc for example.

    So again imo just being selling to players is not enough of a direction for this game. We need more reason to do things. More interesting, more crafting tasks, in game achievement system, more selling tools as in sellable bags of goods, global search and find item. Then we could get on with the show.

    Making alcohol more useful not just as a buff material but useful in potion making, cleaning items if we had that is, and more cooking recipes and of course more cooking skills needed.

    Oops sorry so long
     
    Last edited: Mar 17, 2021
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  18. odyssey2003

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  19. odyssey2003

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    That exactly how I feel now.. I log before and said F it and went out and killed 15 dragons.. so now my crafting outlook as been poisoned as I say now " what the point of crafting if I am going to get nothing out of it.. its a Role that I like to play but its a role that will not get me anywhere in the game I will stay stagnant are gradually get poorer!
     
  20. odyssey2003

    odyssey2003 Avatar

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    I agree with this 100% .. I really do not see the fun in it especially now that there is barely nothing to gain from it.. mine as well not do it at all is the way I now feel about crafting!
     
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