So...crafting spec WONT be "choose your bonuses" ?

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by kaeshiva, Jun 10, 2019.

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  1. kaeshiva

    kaeshiva Avatar

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    Very well put.
    To further your analogy - not everyone is going to want chocolate cake. Variety will still exist as some people prefer other flavors. If none of the other flavors is appealing, that's a different problem to be addressed via balancing. There's little point in baking all these cakes that nobody wants and nobody is going to eat.
     
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  2. Spinok

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    Same as you I like crafting, and want craft spec.
    But: making spec just to determine the exact bonus is a bad idea. There are a huge amount of reasons why rng should be in our crafting environment.
    And another point that there is so much what spec can give, so - a miss of those exciting opportunity to make it really cool and instead of this get just boring properties choosing its a bad for Sota.
    I would prefer to wait more for really cool craft specializations.
     
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  3. Scanphor

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    Unless I've missed a major update somewhere this is all wild speculation based on a few off the cuff statements on a stream where the essence was that the full plan was yet to be clarified but would be, then presented to the crafting community for discussion.
     
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  4. Fenrus MacRath

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    I think you are leaving out the part of the equation, where I get no desirable option as a choice during masterwork, lets say this happens 50% of the successful rolls when you are trying to make a specific type of item , that shoots your entire equation. I have on a few occasions had a message come up at the crafting table asking me if I want to spend 10 mandrake to succeed in lieu of a failure, I think it was on potions or something rather insignificant. WHAT IF, you do your masterwork and there is a button, which will allow you to reroll your choices for 5X the material components. It would look like this : You make a pass of masterwork for 5 silver. You succeed, but don't like any of the options presented to you, so you can click out and essentially "reroll " your choices, but at a cost of 5X the initial investment, so you got your 2nd chance, but it cost you 5 + 25 Silver=30 ingots. Next run, same thing happens, another 30 ingots. You could have multiple rerolls per pass at 30 ingots a try. It would make the cost quite high to really customize your item and increase demand for silver and gold at the same time. You would still be subject to the % of success chance, 1st pass 96%, second 50%, 3rd 19% etc, and a fail is a fail.

    Thoughts?
     
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  5. Spungwa

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    Eg (numbers made up, port has the data to balance these)

    Let me take 5 identical none exceptionals and I craft a gauranteed exceptional.

    Let me take 5 single MW items and get a choose MW first MW rune.

    Let me take 5 double MW items and get a choose MW second rune.

    Etc

    This means with RNG I can get what I want cheaper, if not it is a known and still expensive maximum cost (is rare), AND takes all the junk out of the economy.

    Regards
    Spung
     
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  6. Griffler

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    In Any situation experience is King. You don't go to a new contractor to build you a million dollar house expecting everything to be hunky dory... You pay the most experienced person you can find/afford due to the fact that the experience gives you a Much higher expectation of the desired outcome. In no world does Less Experience mean you should be able to get a Better finished product than a Substantially more experienced person, period, regardless of being the luckiest quadruple lottery winning fool! The system is obviously flawed and with substantial enough experience you Should expect a better product and the ability to shape said into what you or your client desires with greater efficiency the higher you develop your skill set. It's not rocket surgery.

    Following the same rule of Logic, I should be able to outperform Mac whose outpaced me in the game by several times just out of luck?... That's not an assumption anyone in the game makes, at least not any sane person. Experience means you are better, fight better, cast better, survive better and yes... Craft Better.
     
  7. Fenrus MacRath

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    Subject, indeed. Plate armor with +4 dance moves, or +8% more yield when drawing water from the well.
     
  8. kaeshiva

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    Other games have done similar sort of things in their own context to prevent "runaway failures" and it works pretty well to establish a maximum cost even if you get bad rolls every time at some point, brute force will win out. This at least establishes a worst case scenario and lets players work toward a goal, although luckier players can get there cheaper, and faster.

    I guess I just don't understand why we need to make the distinction of luck, rather than skill, choice, experience. Why make it all about luck?
    What if combat was all about luck? Like, regardless of deck, skills, build, level - if you walk up to a mob, roll the RNG, and 90% of the time it will kill you and there's nothing you can do about it. How long would that be fun....? What if a PvP tourney was same way? Everyone puts their name on a list and we just roll dice to see who wins. I think everyone can agree that'd be stupid?

    You want your knowledge, skill, time investment, and choices to matter and determine the result as a fighter. That is all I am asking for as a crafter.

    Luck might be ok to give you a small bonus to a system or influence a system but it shouldn't be the cornerstone of the entire system.
     
    Last edited: Jun 10, 2019
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  9. Fenrus MacRath

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    If I may, please take this out of context and offer a more lifelike example, since there exists no Enchanting in real like. If I am a painter, of hand crafted toys, if you will. There crappy painters and brilliant painters. It is in the details. A crappy painter with a spray paint can, can crack out 50 toys an hour cheaply. A master painter might be able to beautifully craft one toy train in a day, with beautiful detail and design, but rarely does that painter sit down to paint a wooden train and for no choice of his own end up with a train painted like a duck.
     
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  10. Scoffer

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    Since we are talking real life context.

    Crafting in sota is like going to your favorite restaurant. You have been going there for years and you love it but....When you turn up and you order chicken the waiter brings you fish. You didn't order fish, you didn't want fish. You don't even like fish but thats what they brought. So you complain and the waiter tells you fine, but the fish has been made so you have to pay $10 for it since its already been cooked and he will try again. You pay, you wait, he comes back with Soup. Soup is ok...its not what you wanted but its almost as good.
    This carries on for a few months and your friend arrives from out of town and wants to go out for a meal. You tell them of the best place to eat and all the meals are only $10 each! but you also tell them to bring $100 just in case you don't get what you want.
    After you have been complaining about this head waiter for 6 months the management says "Don't worry, we have hired a specialist waiter who will bring you exactly what you ordered!"
    So you wait
    And wait.
    Evertime you ask about this new waiter you are told "he can't start this week, it might be next week though and he will bring you exactly what you ordered!"
    A few more months go by and still no head waiter.
    But hold on! You overhear one of the staff talking about this new waiter who is starting and will fix the entire restaurants reputation! He will be starting later this month and will make all the customers happy. The first thing he will do is add pork, beef and snails to the menu. That will make the customers happy right?
     
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  11. Vladamir Begemot

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    Shimizu's right on most of this.

    Very important:

    If we had a month of choosing exactly what we wanted on all MW/Enchants, the devs would quickly see which are junk. Those should be balanced so they aren't junk.

    When you are faced with 3 bad choices, this is a flaw in the game. When you are faced with 1 obvious choice and 2 bad choices, this is a flaw in the game.

    If the choices became a lot more evened out, ie every choice IS going to be a good choice for someone, some build, then the RNG issue would start to fade.
    • Evaluate and beef up the junk choices
    • Every serious crafter is about to have a bunch of alts, so maybe specs aren't all they are cut out to be
    • Incorporate Exceptionals in the refining process. It is early on RNG, use that to justify lowering MW/Enchant RNG
    • More choices will help a lot
      • But there shouldn't be junk choices!
    • (To us) New players shouldn't be expected to or try to craft high end gear, stop telling them to
      • Help them craft some copper and iron stuff, and not freak out if it's "junk" to us
        • There is a profitable market there for new players if they ever step into it
     
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  12. Pawz

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    Atos and the team are looking to make the game better. He has said in his stream that before anything goes live, he will consult with some of the top crafters. I have faith that they will make crafting better than it is now. Lets all calm down and see what they come up with. :)
     
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  13. Joe Zhudarak

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    In my opinion skill level and specialization should matter. If they adjust the potency according to the level and slightly reduce the RNG with spec the system would be more fair.

    Highend crafters will be preferred by costumers and there will be a trade-off between being a jack of all trades spreading XP among numerous alts with less powerfull enchants and masterworks X a focused high level crafters.

    Of course some hardcore players can level 130+ each character but it will be time consuming task.
     
    Last edited: Jun 10, 2019
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  14. Vladamir Begemot

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    Follow up, regarding ordering the fish and getting the duck.

    It seems that Shroud may have reached a Local Maximum in some of its systems. We can tweak and muck about, but we're already on the highest part of the mountain we're standing on.

    For crafting, we add in some specializations (which people will sidestep,) that means we found a rock we can stand on. Put in more choices and at the same time add more options to make sure the game isn't overflowing with top tier gear, that may mean we climbed up the tree on top of the mountain (or maybe tripped and rolled down, we'll see).

    But there is a much taller mountain over there --->

    We're as high as we can go on some of these systems, and the only way to go higher is to go down the mountain (rip out the system), and then climb the next one (build from scratch). A painful process for sure.

    This is Will Wright advice, from his game design Masterclass.
     
  15. Fenrus MacRath

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    Well said!
     
  16. Bedawyn

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    I'm a new player and a low-level crafter. And the current system made me quickly give up any hope of one day becoming a high-level crafter. What I heard on the stream just makes me worry about the future even more.

    I don't WANT to have the same chance to produce something fantastic as someone who's been crafting for years. It's illogical, it's immersion-breaking, and it's obviously created a lot of unhappy players. It ruins any motivation to practice and hone my skill. If Kaeshiva can create fantastic items and I can only create mediocre ones, that's the way reality works. That's the way an economy should work.

    So high-level players won't buy my mediocre items; they don't need them. But the other low-level players MIGHT buy my mediocre items, which are still good enough for their low-level needs, IF the vendors aren't jam-packed with Kaeshiva's rejects. If the vendors aren't full of high-level rejects, then low-level players won't be immediately confronted with a complex and confusing enormity of options that newbies don't realize are rejects. They'll be able to find my simple items and weigh their options with more confidence, and if I still don't have anything they want to buy, then it's on me to make better choices. The higher-level options will appear on the vendors more rarely (being more often made-to-order), unclogged vendors will be easier for everyone to use, and the high-level gear that does still appear on the vendors will let low-level players window-shop and plan what to save up for rather than creating the current in-your-face overcomplexity.

    As things are now, I've no reason to even try to get my skill up to 100, because the vendors are glutted with so much stuff that may be junk to experienced eyes but is shiny to newbie eyes than I haven't got a chance in Tartarus of actually selling anything.

    Sure, even if the most virtuoso of crafters will once in a while get distracted by a noise outside, hammer their thumb, and mess up what they were working on. But since experts know how to concentrate and pay careful attention to what they're doing, that should be a rare exception rather than the rule. Sure, if they're working with damaged tools, their success rate should go down. Absolutely, RNG should affect their ability to get rare mats, rare components, rare recipes. But your ability to create a specific item, when you've got all the needed ingredients, should be based on the time you've spent practicing that skill -- not on a dice roll.

    How would adventurers feel if they racked up their combat skills, then a dice roll sent their fireball to kill their friends who were actually behind them instead of heading towards the enemy it was actually aimed at? If all the time you put into learning how to build and use a combat deck was meaningless because your "locked" glyph could transform into something else entirely WHILE you were in the process of casting it? That's what the state of high-level crafting sounds like to me.
     
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  17. Barugon

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    I have to say that I'm disappointed that they reneged on the "choose your enhancement" thing.
     
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  18. rebbieforever

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    I am going more towards Antrax here. If you can make exactly what you want without RNG means your item has little to no value. Because You and 200 other crafters can make it the same day. Gears dont get destroyed in any other ways so people will stock up their gearsets fast with their needed gears for them and their alts - you will have 1 months marketing boost maybe - and after the equipment market is done. People will buy when they make new chars or when new players enter the game - thats it.

    What needs fixing is LESS RNG, more meaningful potential options in enchanting and for once have the RNG feedback potentials to show the true potential - not an imaginary one. When you got 50% to succeed for example it shouldnt work like 10-15%. Their percentages are off - I am pretty sure their variables + counters are bugged and they havent found out yet
     
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  19. Tiina Onir

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    As a crafter (more for myself then for sale), I don't want to see the RNG completely removed from the process, but I do want it to become less of an effect. As it stands now, as you increase in level, the odds of getting what you want DECREASE. That's just not right.

    I feel like for every one or two new options that gets added to the pool of potential options you should get the ability to exclude an option from the pool. I don't know how that could be made to work in practice, but something needs done to keep this bizarre situation of "the better you get, the less likely you are to get what you want" in check.
     
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  20. kaeshiva

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    Thanks Bedawyn for posting a newer player's perspective, couple things I hadn't even considered.
     
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