Crafting specialisation - we can pick all trees ( Chris Stream)

As has been said numerous times, it's exceptionally clear that the people working on crafting have no idea how their system works from an actual game perspective. It all seems to be theories.

 

I am afraid of this as well, but we have to wait and see for sure.

 

I think it's pretty clear that a lot of player feedback is needed to improve crafting. It would be a lot easier for players to give constructive feedback if it was more clear what the objectives actually are. Whatever the objectives are, not everyone will agree with them, but at least if they knew, they wouldn't be wasting time trying to think of ways to achieve goals that aren't actually goals.

 

Equally importantly, there needs to be a discussion with dev involvement. Currently, we make thread after thread full of ideas (most good, some bad) and then we find out we're getting none of those ideas. Instead, we're getting something that nobody seems to believe fixes the problems, and no feedback as to why that is better than any of the hundreds of suggestions. They spend six months saying we're going to get to choose MWs and enchants, then out of the blue say, "no, if we remove RNG it'll wreck the economy." To which nearly everyone replied, "what economy?" No discussion or explanation of why they think it'll wreck the economy, no indication that they even know why we hate crafting so much.

Honestly, livestream a one hour skype call between Chris, Bzus, and two or three of the highest level crafters. Who knows, maybe the devs can even make the case that what they want to do will be awesome.

 

THAT would probably be the single best thing they could do right now. Wish some of the Twitchers with influence would suggest it. What's worrisome, though -- I don't remember which stream it was, but on one of them, Chris said they HAD talked to a couple of top crafters already. He didn't mention which ones, didn't say specifically what they had told him. And it didn't seem as if the conversation had actually had any useful outcome.

And... I don't wanna see any epic-level fights over WHICH top crafters best represent the needs of the community as a whole.

 

Just so you all know, it's not called Specialization now; It's called Mastery.

 

We've provided endless feedback. We've had devs ask us for feedback in threads (See the crafting is fundamentally broken thread in my sig...). It has resulted in the crafting masteries being introduced, and one minor change to wood pulp that utterly missed the fundamental problems with crafting. I've been playing solidly since persistence, so I've seen 3 years of feedback of the problems with crafting, which quite honestly, 99% has never been acknowledged, let alone addressed.

 

"Highest level crafters"? So you're entirely focused on one tiny portion of crafting, production. (Albeit an important one). That completely ignores the fact that crafting *as a whole* is broken, from the gathering to the refining to the production trees.

 

Well, if such an event were to happen, how would you propose the participants be selected? At random? Newbies only? I would presume that a high level crafted would have a decent amount of experience with all aspects.

 

Presumptions are dangerous. Perhaps find those people with high levels of experience in each of those individual areas. However, the forums are full of data that could be trivially mined about problems with the various crafting areas. I.e., many threads on the problems with how agriculture is implemented, etc. I do have to give them credit for giving a lot of focus on mining to improve it, on the foraging level.

 

Uh... So instead of high level crafters, you'd rather it were high level crafters?

 

You're not wrong, but the higher you go, the more broken it is. I have no idea who Chris spoke to that told him any of this was a good idea, because the more time you put into it, the stupider and more broken the crafting system is.

 

You said 3, which would most likely end up being Tailoring, Blacksmithing, Carpentry. My point is a much broader spectrum of viewpoints is needed.

 

There is no crafting specialisation anymore ..theres just a new skill called Mastery... so the question is ...are we still getting spec for crafting sometimes in the future or thats that ?

 

Maybe, but I didn't suggest a low number to narrow the spectrum of viewpoints, but to prevent it from becoming a SotA town hall meeting where eight crafters shout at two devs who then tune everything out.

 

Problem being, I don't see that they're likely going to be able to represent the full spectrum of problems with crafting. It's just flawed at a fundamental level and needs a complete overhaul.

 

You're fixating on the wrong motive. The idea isn't a council of crafters that represent all aspects and minutiae of crafting, it's to get one or two people to broadly stand in for all of us in a discussion with the devs which doesn't result in short answers to our questions that come with no explanation, or a dismissive misunderstanding of our concerns.

 

So perhaps we need other ways to think outside the box. WRT adventuring woes, inertia picked up when devs started streaming and basically playing the game experiencing pain points first hand. Perhaps they need to have their gear made for them by crafting based devs so that they can share the experience.

Maybe also there should be another crafting contest where the devs participate. There was one many many releases ago. Perhaps that might be a good venue to demonstrate pain points.

 

There are so many issues with crafting, and these issues affect everyone....not just the highest level crafters.

Issue #1) Refining is tedious as hell. If I have to queue up a load of ore to get turned into ingots, then Alt-Tab to a browser or video feed to have something to do while the processing is happening...the game design is completely broken. And the fact that converting things like Timbers into Boards has a limit of 20 items, meaning I have to alt-tab back to queue up the next batch is another evidence of bad game design. Basically, the player is online and connected (using up resources) for not even playing the game. You could have an "apprentice" NPC be doing the work on the side (while you're out adventuring, or while you're signed off...like Star Wars: The Old Republic does it) to complete these menial tasks. It's just a waste of player time to be sitting for hours converting wood to timbers, timbers to boards/poles/binding/etc, so you can then use the materials to make something usable.

Issue #2) As has been stated in this, and many many other Crafting Threads....Enchanting/Master Work is inherently broken. RNG slot machine that eats up materials that took hours/days or thousands of gold to get, only to poop out useless items that no player will use, and no NPC vendor will buy for even a close to fair price.... it's frustrating, and wasteful. You shouldn't have to "pull the handle" 20 times to get the item you wanted with the right stats (leaving you with 19 pieces of junk that won't even sell for near the cost of making them). "End Game" crafting is a frustrating bad of irritation that will only be compounded by the upcoming changes in R68 and R69.

Don't get me wrong, the base crafting system, with different materials having different properties, is great. I love that part of crafting. But the two above items are the biggest points of contention.

I suggest that the dev(s) in charge of coding the crafting system stop coding, and play with it for a month. Start a brand new character, with absolutely no GM powers or "gifts" (no additional gold, etc), and no botting. Then work that character up to GM in several crafting trees, then craft items at +15 (and higher) with the most desired stats. In other words, walk in the players' shoes and feel our pain.

 

All excellent points that have been made many times before and never addressed. There are other areas that continually get ignored as well, such as cooking (single skill), the potion making part of alchemy, agriculture, and the gathering processes in general.

For example with agriculture, unless you're either (a) an insomniac or (b) work from home, it's generally impossible to meet the time requirements on watering to get full crops for many of the crops.

For the gathering processes, I'd love to see gathering masteries that perhaps do something like increase the likelihood of obtaining rare components (tungsten for mining, beetles for foraging, etc).

It would also be nice to see leather scraps and cloth scraps actually have a point to their use, and scrapping gold & silver items actually result in gold and silver scraps as opposed to metal scraps, making the gold/silver ingots from scraps worthwhile.

For the cooking tree, further skill trees perhaps that allow for the RNG potential to craft more food from a batch of ingredients... similarly for Alchemy and potions.

All of these are of course suggestions I and others have been making for at least 3 years (among many other suggestions).