Mining, Are You Serious?

There's a cause and effect in place here.
If ores were faster/easier to obtain, they'd be cheaper, which would allow crafters to buy ores and craft their items for less money. But then the resulting items will sell for even less money because they are now cheaper to make.
The only 'standard' is the fuel costs (which could do with being lower).

NPCs paying more than pennies for crafted goods could go a long way toward making 'crafting as a primary gameplay style' more viable.

A true player economy needs to be a closed system, and it isn't at the moment. Because we have NPCs paying for crap drops flooding the economy with money from fighting but all the money sinks are in crafting. (unless you're a mage, in which case you get some money sink too!).

Hypothetical scenario:

What if NPCs stopped buying trash mob loot? What if they only bought full durability player crafted items? (Crafters get income)
What if the only purpose of such loot was to be reduced to scrap and sold to crafters? (Fighters get income)
This would put more income on the production side of the scale and crafters could afford to buy the materials that gatherers/fighters provide, and in turn provide crafted tools/equips.

Take it a step further. What if there was sustainable agriculture? IE option to harvest a plant for seeds, removing the need to buy them from an NPC.
And People learned how to fill water buckets. Now, sustainable agriculture.
Lets grow all these regs and fuels that it is sensible to grow and add locations to harvest those that it isn't.
Now we don't need those NPCs either.

Players find a niche. I'm going to be a wax farmer or a coal miner or whatever.
There'd be a market for such things because you can't simply 'grind junk, buy from npc'.

As long as you can grind junk, buy from NPC, we're never going to have a true player economy because crafters can't sustain their business without also fighting or spending inordinate amounts of time playing the market.

The main problem is:
Not enough demand for crafted goods
Nothing else to do with crafted goods, so they pile up, and become more worthless as more and more are made and we arrive where we are now with materials costing more than finished products. One suggestion is to get people to stop crafting things nobody wants, another option is to add something that can be done with those items - maybe fix salvaging so it gives you back everything but the fuel or something, I don't know. Maybe add other things to each of the crafting schools that people actually want, consumables of some sort that will have a lasting demand.

The solution so far seems to be "stifle the supply" by making ore harder to come by but the knock on effect is that this is just making crafting even more expensive.

 

It may be true some people are jumping to one specific solution to the problem for which there are potentially several - reduced consumption rate, increased success chances as skill increases, getting more control over the mastercraft/enchant selection as your skill increases, more powerful MC/enchant bonii, etc.

But the problem certainly exists. The problem is that the functionality of the upgrade is not obviously worth the time effort to gather the materials to perform the upgrade (assuming the market price of resources is the value of the time effort). You can certainly say "Well, just don't mastercraft stuff then, stupid!" but surely you can acknowledge taking that position is incompatible with saying crafting is just fine as it is.

 

I won't even pay to enchant or masterwork my own gear, given the "oh, you failed? poof!", all that time and effort is gone AND it's not worth doing on anything that's not exceptional AND you get the joy of knowing every swing of that axe and every shot from that bow degrades that equipment.
If I won't even do it on my own gear, and I can, at cost, because I gather it all myself, there's no way in hell anyone is going to pay thousands of gold per attempt at masterwork.
I saw someone in Soltown today selling 100 silver for 11,000 gold. Ok, so that's 5 masterwork attempts for 11k. That's half my fortune. Half. I'm level 55 and every scrap of gold I've managed to make, 5 masterwork attempts would consume half of my fortune? Nope. Good giggity god NOPE.

 

No the ore is worth more than players will pay for finished goods.

Lets say copper two handed sword with bronze hilt. 36 copper ore and 4 tin. Roughly 20 coal (120 gold) 11 uses of ingot mold. (10 gold) best price you can hope for on copper ore is 10k per hundred but usually around 15k. Assuming the coal,tin,ingot molds, smelting tongs, smithing hammer, were all free, and you could get copper for 10k you would need to charge 3.3k per sword just to pay for the ore. they won't sell at that price 2k can sell occasionally.

So instead you need to make it with metal scraps. 18 Cooper ore, and 216 metal scraps. But you going to need to salvage about 1k worth of hammers to get that many scraps. Which brings your cost for just the copper ore and scraps to 2.6k per sword. Assuming tin, coal,molds, tools were all free and you only consider copper at the lowest price anywhere ever and not the going rate

 

cuz the game just started and everyone is trying to level up their craft.
economy fluctuates. just saying.

 

Must be my lack of knowledge of the game then. Where do you find a mine where there are NO monsters?

 

Exactly this.
Which is why people are going out and mining their own ore, so that when they sell those swords for 2k they're actually making an income.
If this isn't how the game is meant to work, then things need to be adjusted so that this is how they will work.
The current system has fighters/gatherers making all the money and crafters are the ones that need to buy everything with no way to make an income.

 

No monsters at all?
There isn't one.

 

Sure, but did you try hiring guards?

 

The system is designed such that there will be an economy for resources and crafted goods. You aren't supposed to be able to collect it all....you are supposed to purchase resources from others or work as a group.

The economy is completely unstable and people are still placing lots. People don't know where to find goods or how to properly price them. A balance will find its way in eventually.

Now isn't the time for "the sky is falling" threads. We are what? 3 weeks in to the new world?

These cries are a bit much, guys.


And to reiterate what I have said in other threads.....you shouldn't be able to have everything right now with crafting. It should take time. It should take resources. Not everyone should have the fortitude to be a crafter. If it were easy....everyone would do it and then we would have no economy.

 

Speak for yourself. I am a gatherer and crafter, and approve of the changes, and think it should even be harder. I dont want to go on the lengthy diatribe of "do you have any idea what it takes to forge a sword..." for the 15th time, but yeah.

Also, when the economy starts to kick off, you wont need to gather. You can go to a local market and buy silver. Right now, there is little player economy, as data persistence just started.

Also, posting while angry is likely unproductive. Try posting while happy

Do you believe that a "good" or "fun" game is one where everyone is a polymath?

They have. I have produced many items! My house is full of decorations built by me! I also have an abundance of resources to make many more items, but right now im more interested in adventuring. I also have played for many, many, many fewer hours than you, so trust me, its possible.

The circumstances you describe sound like someone trying to do everything. Being an astronaut, a mom, a statesperson, and a restaurant chef would be extremely hard, and its likely one would not provide premium services under such conditions. Being just one of those roles would give someone the ability to provide a premium service.

So you could perhaps choose to be a crafter, or an adventurer, and provide a premium service in either role. Or you could play both roles, and provide less than premium service, but be more independent. If you fear the baddies as a pure crafter, you could take advantage of the many adventurers in the game, and pay them to fend off monsters while you mine. Community is a wonderful thing!

 

I agree its too early to see what will happen.
Which is I guess why people are frustrated at the band-aid fixes and nerfs happening at 3 weeks in before we've even had the chance to see how things are going to work.

 

Ill give you the benefit of the doubt then. So what you are saying is, there is no mine without monsters, so a non-combatant gatherer will somehow skirt around inside a monster filled mine, trying to both mine and gather.
I guess, Im just not that good

 

Crafting is not complete.

There are entire crafting trees and products to make that aren't even in the game yet. People are running to "mastercraft" like it's the only thing in the world to do in the game. 6 months from now they're bound to be upset when there are 20 other skill trees branching off from the current ones and they complain that they "didn't know" those would be options. Welcome to early access development!

In the meantime, the expectation that just because something exits you should be able to live off of it is not helpful. Running to the forums and complaining everytime you make poor business decisions is not helpful. It's not really a question of crafting being fine or not at the moment. It's a question of if people have the capacity to look beyond, I have a skill that I GM'd, why am I not rich? People without any crafting or combat skill can become tycoons of wealth and power in this game. And I honestly think that's what's confusing people.

I personally love it.

 

I wouldn't suggest that you do that.

I would suggest you find a big huge fighter to go a long with you and give him/her a cut of your mining profits. Negotiate good terms. Explain that they get to work on their skills and make extra profit on the side. Just keep the monsters off of your back so you can mine. Seems like a perfect business relationship to me.

 

The "band aids" and "nerfs" are likely because the devs have observed things that you aren't seeing.

People are getting free farm in shardfalls without consequence.

People were mining for hours and collecting absurd amounts of ore with the potential to flood the market quickly.

People were raising skills faster than they should have been due to bugs.

These things are all bad. They will hurt crafting in the long run. I am certainly not saying crafting or gathering is perfect right now, but a lot of this frustration is unwarranted right now.

I think there is a serious problem with the mentality people have around crafting. You should not have a +7 anything 3 weeks into persistence. If we are there now, where are we 6 months from now? How about a year?

Where is the challenge and rarity? .....You should be comfortable using gear that has base stats. Gear with lots of stats should be something you strive for.

Just wait til Port starts gating more recipes with level requirements. It's coming....and it's needed. As a crafter, you should want these things to happen so your items are worth something.

 

At least you are good at making jokes

 

Can I still play if I don't want to run a business? Can I just have fun? Looking at most of the remarks from Baron Drocis I'm not sure that I can

 

There are some 'safe-ish' mines where you wouldn't need to hire a guard just be careful. Even at very low combat skills Etceter and Owls Nest are doable.

As an amusing aside, right this minute I'm about to escort a low lvl guildmate who wants to mine silver but can't kill the monsters. I'm not getting paid for it though, maybe that's where I'm going wrong, I just help people...lol

 

If you're trying to make killer profits, it's a business inside this player economy. If you want to make some cool stuff for yourself and occasionally sell something it's a hobby.

If you want to have fun and rich and be the king of merchants, that's not going to be an easy task if you want to casually think about what you're doing.