Crafting, RNG and Specialisation

Discussion in 'Crafting & Gathering' started by Spungwa, Jun 29, 2019.

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  1. kaeshiva

    kaeshiva Avatar

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    I have yet to see a good argument/reason why we -need- to have RNG.

    "It lets lower level crafters compete" - Wrong, it helps a lower level crafter who happens to get lucky, maybe compete occasionally but the item still isn't as good. We should not plan the entire system around a lower level crafter 1% of the time getting a hail mary item that is 'almost as good' as what a high lvl produces. Low lvls shouldn't produce as well as high lvls, if they could, then why would anyone level?

    "It helps the economy" - Wrong, it creates junk that bloats vendors, makes shopping difficult, makes it difficult for people to identify 'good' from 'bad' especially new folks, and allows people to rip people off. It completely eliminates crafting-as-a-service as the artisan has little control over the output. It wastes materials causing unrealistic prices for resources and gear that eventually deteriorates. Plenty of other games have crafting systems where the player can customize (and therefore price) the gear they want and their economies are not in the toilet.
    Sota has RNG, and has it solved problem? No! 95% of crafted gear is junk sitting languishing on vendors, given away to new players, or just vendor-dumped outright. You can't sell anything for a fraction of its production cost. Skill and time investment are near meaningless. See ^ toilet.

    "It creates variety so we're not all wearing the same stuff" - Wrong, people want specific things, all RNG does is make it cost significantly more to get those specific things, or force people to accept wearing what they don't want because of the prohibitive cost. Every mage I've ever crafted for ever, wants int on their gear. Its not like the RNG gives them Health instead and they say "wow, great, cool, I'll be different and wear this!" No, they try again, and again, and again, until they get int. RNG does not create variety, it creates a big pile of "crap" that nobody wants and wastes player time. Not everyone agrees on what the "best" stats are, and control over the system would actually ENCOURAGE VARIETY MORE ...because you could actually set out to craft and try something specific, instead of just dealing with what you're given.

    This situation is "embarrassing" as Chris says, and seriously needs addressing.

    We have this great system with material bonuses allowing you to pick and choose the sort of gear you want to build,
    and then we add a "supply bag slot machine" obstacle to actually using it
    and then we get to the mw/enchanting step and its like the ball was dropped completely.

    And its not just the RNG. We also have "success/fail" to contend with, even at levels of experience investment so high you could have created 50 grandmaster characters in the same skill.

    Not to mention the fact that we were promised "choose your bonuses" for over a year, both on every telethon (where money is essentially solicited to support those promises) and every release notes for the same period. Crafting spec is coming. Have faith guys! We'll fix it! We kept the faith, and now we find out that faith was misplaced.

    I can see the appeal of RNG to = the big dogs who have endless amounts of time and resources to keep pressing that button hoping for a better outcome the next time and, once they get it, listing it at a huge price on a vendor that someone will pay to simply not have to fight with the system. I'm not saying that price isn't fair - but its a crap system. It puts everyone else into a "get lucky, or get screwed" situation that is well, very familiar to the rest of RNG-plagued gameplay.

    We've already seen best-in-slot artifacts replace crafted gear slot by slot.
    You've already got your "rare drop" components that go through TWO iterations of RNG (getting the item to drop, getting the item to salvage) and then a third check for pass/fail on doing anything to it.

    Enough is enough!
     
    Last edited: Jul 5, 2019
  2. Scoffer

    Scoffer Avatar

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  3. kaeshiva

    kaeshiva Avatar

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    When they first announced the promise to "choose your bonuses" with specialization, the very first thing that occurred to me was that the rate at which items needed repairing/replacing would be cranked way up. And that'd be fine, because the stuff would be replaceable. Sure, your perfect gear wouldn't sell for as much....but you'd sell it more often, to more people, and have to maintain and inventory and cultivate a customer base and you know....participate in the economy and run a business.

    Just adding this "reroll maybe" isn't going to change anything fundamentally.
     
  4. Spungwa

    Spungwa Avatar

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    Ok, I have no problem with this idea, and making a bigger raw material investment for a better end product is all good, but I don't see how this answers ANY of the 3 issues I posed in the original post. If this still has RNG with NO CAP on failure then you still have the no basis to set price on in the non mass market environment (as you cant rely on RNG averages if you are only making 1 piece of gear).

    Problem 2 will feel even worse. Now you have invest even more raw materials and still see no end in sight if you continually get unlucky....

    Problem 3, still if you make something that is not what is wanted, it is still junk, just more expensive junk.

    The only thing it answers, is now to keep raw material demand high......


    Regards
    Spung
     
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  5. Spungwa

    Spungwa Avatar

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    This makes one very big assumption, that as a crafter I am interested in vendor selling and making money off my crafting.
    I can tell you now, I'm not, if I wanted to play that MMO economy playstyle game I would go back to playing Eve.

    I'm happy with making good quality gear for friends and guildies only. Happy to invest the huge amounts of time levelling.

    But what I want is to make custom armour. I want players to tell me what they are trying to achieve and we design the best gear to achieve that and work out what I would need to make that for them.
    Until the 3 issues are resolved. Then the play style of crafter I want to play is impossible......

    If you aren't Ikea style of crafting where you are rolling the dice so often in a mass market environment, meaning you can price via the average then you can't price.


    Regards
    Spung
     
    Last edited: Jul 5, 2019
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  6. kaeshiva

    kaeshiva Avatar

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    ^ Material demand can be addressed in other ways, such as adjusting item wear rates / frequency of replacement. Right now that's simply not possible because good gear is far too difficult to come by. I kind of assumed this would be a given with the announcement of "choose your bonuses" - and it made sense. Gear customizability combined with faster degradation = repeat business for crafters = economy.

    Adding more RNG in rerolls will just result in more material waste to create junk. More expensive junk, as Spungwa says - and still no guarantee of getting something usable. Does not address the problem, arguably makes it worse, unless the reroll is completely free (no material use) and completely safe (ie, you already passed the 'fail' check) - in which case it would be a slight improvement to the situation, for the small price of specializing and forcing everyone to run around trying to find at least 2 different people to assemble them a set of gear.

    RNG should just go away. Have specialization add value in a different way. Fix the core system then add frills.
     
  7. Spungwa

    Spungwa Avatar

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    The idea is good, would help a lot.
    This helps reduce the RNG to more predictable levels. So would help with issue 3, less junk being made and put into the economy. However without a cap on failure or other way to make a certain result. Issue 1 and 2 persist.

    This is the kind of mechanic I would expect as implementation of my idea of use the junk to make a certain result. Melt the threshold amount of junk into an item you add to the MW or ENC to make it a pick option. For the considerations, the item would melt into an item which restricted the crafted item in the recipe to an item of the same materials as those that where melted and the number of MW and ENC the salvaged items had.


    Regards
    Spung
     
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  8. Cora Cuz'avich

    Cora Cuz'avich Avatar

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    The whole Port approach to crafting seems like sprinkling sugar on poo in small amounts until we finally can't taste the poo anymore. "You like it now? No? Well, here... try it now!" It's fundamentally not a good system, and they are unwilling to scrap it and start over. Yeah, it would cause havoc for a bit. And maybe it'll look bad to be scrapping and re-working a major system after launch. But I really don't want a giant pile of sugar-glazed poo. (And sugar attracts flies just as much as the poo does...)
     
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  9. Elrond

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    You can do that with the current system also., you just have to be willing to put in the time to aquire materials or gold to buy them . Anyway if i were to pick between a system where i gotta craft 20 items to get 1 i like and a system where i can craft 20 items and all 20 turn out as i want em id definetly pick the first . Second option would feel boring and very unsatisfying ... In the years i spent crafting the really good stuff i made numbers in maybe 5 or 10 items ... but those were glorious moments for me ... Here is one example

    [​IMG]

    I understand your position , but thats like saying '' if im not selling none else should '' ...Crafting is a big part of the economy ...it involves people gathering resources , refining them , molding them into a finished product ... if you reduce that to craft 1 to get 1 instead of craft 20 to get 1 ... that whole production chain crumbles .
     
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  10. Browncoat Jayson

    Browncoat Jayson Legend of the Hearth

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    If only it was 20. I've crafted hundreds of bows, and I still use one I bought from someone else because it was better than every one of mine.

    Not to mention offline, where crafting is just as bad, with no economy to fall back on. Fun.
     
  11. Spungwa

    Spungwa Avatar

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    Which is why I was NOT proposing get rid of RNG. Winning the lottery is fun, no question. Also increasing the your chance in RNG is a reason to level. However for that one lottery winner there is flip side of coin where someone has a 1 in 100 chance and after 1000 tries still hasn't hit the jackpot. It's the second half I'm proposing to limit. If the odds are 1 in 100, then after (made the number up) 200 failures you should have a way to use all those failures to get a certain result.

    I'm not against the economy, I do have 2 vendors, that do quite well, I just don't, and don't plan to, sell gear.
    I would actually be interested in seeing how much of the economy is actually gear transactions by volume and value. Then how much of the raw materials end up in gear crafting as opposed to the other crafts that have zero RNG.

    Wood, I'm guessing, is far more demand via cask building than gear crafting. The wood price was tanking until brewing was added to the game.


    Regards
    Spung
     
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  12. DavidDC

    DavidDC Programmer Moderator SOTA Developer

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    20 failure in a row is about my max when i want to make something... (20 item fail, that happened maybe once or twice, i often get it quicker than that)

    i think some enchantment or masterwork are seen as a failure just because the people dont know how to build an appropriate character to use those "bad" stats. If we had more guide on possible characters build, im sure that vision would change
     
  13. Arlin

    Arlin Avatar

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    I have a much less stupid idea, can the crafting system be set up to be fun for those of us without crippling gambling addictions? Lotteries are predatory moneymaking scams designed to take advantage of some unfortunate quirks in human psychology. Keep them out of my video games please.
     
  14. DavidDC

    DavidDC Programmer Moderator SOTA Developer

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    Well its my video game too and i like loterry. I wish there was some casino in game. I remember playing dragon warrior on nintendo and there was some casino where you could win special items. That was great!
     
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  15. Spungwa

    Spungwa Avatar

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    Then you are lucky, last bow I made, I had a over 30% chance of exceptional, made 13 non exceptional bows in a row before I got an exceptional. This was before the MW and ENC RNG.
    I was not surprised, this is not that uncommon to happen in a game of chance where the the rolls are independent of each other.

    A person on these forum even did the maths for the envy bow drop that was a 1 in 33 chance and worked out, i think this is from memory, that 1 in 100 people would have to kill her over 200 times to get one.

    This is where my issues lie, as shown with the 3 issues in my original post. If you are are not a whole sale crafter then RNG without any caps on failure makes it impossible to price one off items and is not fun as you feel no progression towards your goal. 1 or 100 failures, make no difference, you are don't feel any closer to your goal. It was why I was very happy when heard the essence/totem mechanics. Easy to start and get low level one, hard to get high level ones, with progression all the way through the process.


    Regards
    Spung
     
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  16. DavidDC

    DavidDC Programmer Moderator SOTA Developer

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    Id vouch for a "Luck" atribute, starting at 0%, everytime you loot or craft and fail that luck increase, as soon as you get something it goes back down.
     
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  17. Rowell

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    I actually LIKE the base crafting system, where different raw materials (ie Iron, Copper, Bronze, etc) gives certain properties when building an item.
    The part that the crafting system fails at is the Enchanting/Masterwork. That whole section needs to be scrapped and redone to get away from the heavy reliance on RNG.
     
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  18. Arlin

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    I think most people agree with you, because you're correct. "Crafting will be a big focus for the next few releases" but they aren't going to fix the part of it that's fundamentally broken? Yeah, I'm not optimistic.
     
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  19. Spungwa

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    I like the idea in principle for exceptional and failure rate. Except I think this would be gamed. It does not take the considerations I put in the second post into account.

    I would make bear headresses until I had 3 failures (or whatever was worked out by trial and error) then switch to to a high value item.

    Also getting the correct MW and ENC is not affected by this. It would need to know what you were aiming for.


    Regards
    Spung
     
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  20. oplek

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    On Wednesday's stream, I think it was, they were talking about why they won't remove RNG from crafting. It's the same arguments that have been addressed here in the forums repeatedly, if they bothered to read.

    One of the points they made was that, without RNG, people could just make exactly what they wanted. I was like, "oh no". That's only an issue because items are rarely ever removed from circulation. Edit: I think they were talking about the "value" from the standpoint of RMT... yet another reason it poisons everything.

    The big glaring thing for me, was that, are they admitting that crafting literally anything outside of MW/enchanting, is completely fubar? They don't seem to be scrambling to make it so, if you try to craft a chair, you accidentally craft a plant pot instead. I thought creating exactly what you wanted was a problem.
     
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