A game where the best gear is made by crafters ---Good Luck with That

So first we were unable to discover recipes and new players had to fork out 250 gold a recipe . Good Luck with That.

Then they started having us play whack a mole to find recipes on vendors. Good Luck with That.


Oh hey lets just make them drop only on new ones like potions. Good Luck with That.


Now hey lets randomly remove recipes from vendors and out of the hundreds and hundreds of recipes, you can hunt for a million hours hoping for the right drop, or you can wander for a million hours checking folks vendors to try to pay an over priced scalper for the recipe. Good Luck with That.


Sorry to be so grumpy so early in the morning, but its just very frustrating to tell new players who want to be a crafter about the randomness of actually being a crafter with all these changes to make it harder and harder for no reason whatsoever other than lets frustrate the crafters yet again.

 

(and look see I didn't even mention the vast number of resources required per item and the amount of time it takes to harvest those items)

 

I agree, but changes are almost never made in favor of the new or up and coming player. As you've explained in your post, it only gets worse. At first, we could learn recipes just by performing them without the recipe item. Now, those of us who haven't spammed each recipe to unlock it for free are stuck paying tons of gold just to have the privilege of learning them.

 

I gave up on most crafting. It feels like a scavenger hunt to find the recipe you want. You need sometimes 5-10 recipes for one item. After spending hours and hours watching a bar go across the screen as you gather and refine the materials, you can then actually make the item you want. I don't feel an excitement or a sense of accomplishment, I just feel relieved that it is over.

This doesn't even include all the failed attempts or trying to make the perfect item.

 

Over the last 2 days I've been to every NPC town and checked every NPC vendor I could find.

I'm looking for the royal purple dye recipe and mandrake seeds. I could have sworn I new it, as I have died a number of items. But, I can find it in my book and now I can't find it on a vendor to relearn it. Of course, I can't learn it because it is not teachable. My only hope now is to either get it in a drop from ??? after hour/days of grinding on ??? or paying gold/cash for it. As for the seed, I have some stashed away. I ain't found a single NPC vendor that sells them. I guess the few I have are worth 10k gold each now.

If I'm not careful, I'm going to start felling punished for wanting to turn large amounts of raw materials into useful stuff.

Update: My example of the royal purple dye recipe may be a bad example. Just replace it with any given recipe (bone armor parts etc) you are having trouble finding.

 

Isn't royal purple dye recipe a founder reward?



*edit* found this link to an old bug - discussion

https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/known-royal-purple-dye-recipe-lost.81020/

 

The seed/plant was. At some point it was marked as tradable and the recipe was discoverable. Then it was no longer discoverable and you had to find the recipe. Then the recipe was removed from existing books.

It's been quite a ride with this one.

 

My example of the royal purple dye recipe may be a bad example. Just replace it with any given recipe (bone armor parts etc) you are having trouble finding.

 

It's really hard to qualify crafting in this game as a "system". It's quite frankly far too defunct to deserve that classification. As @Lace drew out with the timeline, it's actually only gotten worse instead of better AND the festering disease at the base of it all remains untouched.

 

I would not even call it randomness.

It's obtrusiveness. Decisions like this baffle me; they do not encourage new (or existing players) to take up crafting at all.

Spoken from the perspective of:
80 Blacksmithing
80 Woodworking
84 Tailoring

I currently have 3,222,012 pooled experience for Crafting. (I gave up on it)

I'm fine with 250 gold or whatever it is for a recipe; 250 gold is not all that much money - 20 minutes of fighting or so in the right place. But for higher end recipes... I get Port's point of view... it needs to be harder to obtain them. But this? Meh.

A far more engaging experience could be:

1. Learn about master crafter from someone (trainer, store etc)
2. Go find master crafter
3. Perform quest for master crafter (Kill something, explore a dungeon and learn a secret from a spirit, gather materials, learn other recipes... etc)
4. Receive recipe as payment
5. Receive tips about other master crafters who will offer their own quests.

Heck you could even make these quests community created using the asset + program.

This quest should take about 45 minutes to complete. It should be reasonably straightforward with concise enough directions to avoid the "I spent 30 minutes looking for the guy".


In my view... I want your game to be challenging and engaging... but not obtrsuive in its nature.

Thanks for reading,

Romaan

 

Royal purple dye is not obtainable by everyone. It was based on pledge and a reward. There was a bug that allowed plant sales and all kinds of chicanery that was not intended so some have this recipe that should not.

If you are not a pledged royal founder I believe it is you should not have it and looking for it is pointless. If you are and lost your seed/plant or sold it you should contact customer service .....but if you sold the seed/dye which gives back the seed on apply it could be your mistake and you are stuck without being able to reproduce more which is not clearly defined in the immortal plants from early backers.

 

I feel your pain, I spent many hours looking for a smelting recipe. Hopefully we will get some hints or pointers. In the meantime, have you seen this thread about Mandrake Seeds? I was happy to discover this news:

https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f...-not-sold-may-not-be-a-bug.96433/#post-853604

 

There should be a crafting skill related to deconstructing an existing item to learn the recipe. Skill level determines the odds of getting the recipe and the quantity of resources earned from it.

 

The Etceter vegetable vendor also carries mandrake seeds.

 

I think you bring up a good point about the random recipe drops, but the other items you mention I don't see as a problem. The random recipe drops are annoying with a low population, but collectively players can buy them from other players once our population increases. So even that might not be a big deal.

What I do see as a big deal is Artifacts. Players can't make these, they're only found on high level mobs, and they don't require resources. Artifacts really destroy the crafting system, imo. If there were armor artifacts a player could wear nothing but artifacts and completely ignore crafting entirely. This is something I'd like to see addressed soon. I like artifacts, they're cool. But they don't currently fit into our player drive economy in a good way.

 

Not quite true. You can't very well get artifacts yourself without a set of crafted gear to start with, at least not efficiently. If you're talking about someone wallet warrior'ing their way to victory, well they can do that no matter what system is in place. As it stands there's no way to bypass crafting gear to get the artifacts as SOMEONE had to craft/enchant/mw the gear to be able to kill things to generate the artifacts.

Pretty much everything in the game though is annoying with a low population so we'll see how it pans out when resources aren't priced sky-high forcing everyone realistically to buy gold/resources with RMT or get them themselves.

 

Yes you can, I wear unenchanted robes.

You really don't need crafted anything in this game.

I could get artifacts naked if I wanted to.

 

You can get lucky with a random drop in a 5 skull zone, sure, but you can't kill bosses and "farm" them naked. Hence the efficiently qualifier.

 

I recently switched to crafted gear but only so that I could get a bit of dodge and critical boost from the materials. None of my gear is enchanted or masterworked.

 

You can kill bosses naked. Not all bosses.

If you're in a group of naked people you can totally do it.

It's build dependent. It requires you to be high level. But armor is not mandatory.