This game is so focused on making crafting rewarding that it makes adventuring feel pointless.

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Aetrion, Sep 7, 2019.

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  1. sarbonn

    sarbonn Avatar

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    I don't disagree with you (I cut out a lot of the dialogue cause I'm not disputing any of it). My problem is that I sense there's a problem in the latter part of the game, and I don't think there are solutions that are available so far. It's like there's an edge to the game, like there is something right there but just not readily apparent, and I'm hoping they'll add that next level of wonderment that will cause the game to push to that next level. I see a bit of a problem with crafting (as it does feel a bit limited), but at the same time I'm not sure the solutions are there either. I just don't know what they are.
     
  2. Superbitsandbob

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    How many of these artifacts are used I wonder and by whom? Who can afford some of them. I've farmed a lot in the highest level zones although not as much as some, and the drop rate for anything is incredibly low. Looking at my own gear there isn't really anything I have gotten as a drop myself that I use apart from a sash and a + fire ring. When I tame there are some droppable armour bits but what else is there apart from rings, necklaces and a bow or 2? Most other slots seem to be all player crafted. I wonder if players are seeing what the top 1% are using and just assuming it's readily available. I imagine to the average players it's not.

    A broken record at this point but if the whole idea behind a player run economy was to make players run around looking at vendors for hours then its a failure. It's just the least fun ever to get new equipment.
     
  3. kaeshiva

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    I think you've hit on one of the unfortunate outcomes of this problem - the player vendor gear situation . Its a pretty horrible situation. For every person who lists good quality gear you have 10 that list junk, failures, etc. to try and recoup some of what they'v spent since the system forces you to waste so many materials making junk because "random". Many crafters don't even bother with a vendor (all my work is to existing customers and by request). If you want specific gear, you can talk to a crafter, most of whom (including myself) will tell you to get the materials because as implemented the crafting system makes it impossible to quote a price for anything because you don't know how much you're going to waste until you see how much the RNG hates you on any particular day.

    I completely agree with you re: availability of some of the higher end artifacts. The problem is crafting, while useful for lower levels, becomes less and less relevant the higher level you get. That's because getting yourself the best in slot artifacts -is- the end game, its the ultimate "get yourself better gear" goal and it comes 100% from adventuring. The premise of this thread was that everything filters down into crafting, which is simply not true. Everything is about kill kill kill , and some of the stuff you get from/by killing filters through a crafter but most of the best and most highly desired items do not.
     
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  4. Superbitsandbob

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    I know it's not what the vets still playing bought into originally, but I want more equipment to drop that I can use to upgrade. There is a balance to be had and at the moment, there still seems to be a number of slots that are player made only.

    A lot of the problems we are talking about and with the game in general, is the population. There aren't enough players to support all of the vendors in the game so that crafters equipment ticks over or to just support the bloated economy. There aren't enough players out in the world playing the game so the spread of artifacts and items is split between more players. I imagine if you look at the people selling or getting the desirable artifacts, it's the same small number of top end players who sell them for money generally not realistic for most players. It's weird but the population feels such that it's always the same small pool of player names you hear when it comes to crafting the best stuff or grinding the biggest mobs.

    The lack of a population makes it feel like a monopoly but it has been caused by that small population. Just not enough players out in the world doing stuff so the love is spread around.
     
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  5. Sulaene Moon

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    I've slowly come to realize this is the issue. I go out and adventure for materials and come back to craft items. Since it takes so much time to get certain items to craft decent gear to sell I end up buying some of the mats since I only can play some much out of the week. Then since the market is saturated I can't recoup the money or time it takes to make the items. So my vendor sits. :(

    If there were more players I feel I could sell my stuff quicker and for a decent rate where at least I recoup my costs.
     
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  6. Aetrion

    Aetrion Avatar

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    Making the game more adventurous is likely a big part of what would bring in more players.

    One thing I would like to say about artifacts: I'm kind of coming around to the idea that they are actually replacing crafted gear in a lot of slots, but I don't consider that to be a win for adventurers in this game, because artifacts aren't what I'm talking about when I say there needs to be a meaningful reward for completing difficult content. Artifacts drop pretty randomly so it's tricky to go after a specific one to begin with, and now you need 16 of them to make the most powerful version they really don't constitute a great reward item. They still end up going to whoever has the most money to spend, not to whoever actually pushed themselves beyond just doing the most convenient grind.

    At the end of the day I think the biggest thing that causes people who enjoy the core game to leave relatively quickly is when they realize that their character advancement through activities they enjoy has stalled out. First there is a point where they realize exploring around the world and trying to do quests is not anywhere near as rewarding as squatting in a good grind spot all day on the XP front, so a lot of people probably walk away right there because they aren't used to MMORPGs of the late 90s, early 2000s. The ones who do stick around and do the UT grind or whatever to build up their character eventually wind up with their first dozen GM skills, but by that time they will have seen people with 300 attunement blow up an entire UT wave with a single spell, or archers critting every other shot for over 500 on full auto, and they realize that those numbers aren't accomplished by just spending XP. They see the cost of their skills skyrocket after GM, so they know that's not where that giant leap in power comes from. Then they realize this isn't raid gear, this isn't the reward at the end of the dungeon, this is just grinding till you have millions of gold to spend, and then grinding some more so you can replace those items when they break. In that moment they sort of envision their future in SOTA, and they don't see some great adventure they thought they were preparing for, they just see more grinding forever.
     
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  7. oplek

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    No.

    If we had 100x the players, we'd have 100x the crafters producing 100x the amount of stuff, and we'd still have the stagnation. The problem is that the system doesn't remove items in the quantity they're added.

    Raw resources do have this fundamental aspect of a basic rudimentary economy, which is why that corner of the market is very active. They're produced (gathered), then removed (consumed) in roughly the same quantity. It's just that, when they turn into a thing... the economy slams into a brick wall face-first at mach 7, because there's little to no loss.

    Can someone **PLEASE** explain to me how an economy can work, where people are adding stuff in truckloads and barrels and wheelbarrows, every single day, but stuff is rarely ever **REMOVED**. Once a couch is created, it persists until the player quits the game.
     
  8. Spungwa

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    I don't agree, it's a design problem. The problem is that demand goes not scale in a linear way with supply indexed by the population.

    I have said in many posts before, there needs to be a demand mechanic that scales with population and ideally does not reward in gold. Or if it does reward in gold it needs to use up player time that is not multi boxable. So that the players time justifies the gold faucet. Supply is not the problem, we get loads of stuff. Just most of that stuff is only worth it vendor trash value as there is no player demand.

    Silly example to make a point (not suggesting this):
    Player complain about rusty spoon drops. If you could take 100 rusty spoons and make a usable item that removed attenuation. No on would be complaining they get too many rusty spoon in their loot.

    Currently demand scales by at a much smaller amount than supply. In your early game, gold drains through your hands like water, but once you have bought all the one off purchases you just keep adding to the supply while not adding much to the demand.

    This is not a sustainable economy unless you are relying on continuing turn over of new players AND those players lock what they have away in inactive accounts.

    This is why loot drop MMOs have bind on equip and bind on pickup. It does not take the item out of the game, but it does take the item out of the economy, you can only sell it to the NPC at a fraction of its player worth. Then periodically they have gear creep making your gear no longer a viable option forcing you to get new gear. But this breaks the player driven economy principal.

    Create demand in player driven economy and everything that has demand is good loot.
    Don't see people selling wood, beetle carapace, spider queen loot, dolus hoods, sage sashes and more complaining that that loot is worthless. In fact all I've heard is people complaining they are too expensive or too hard to get considering (arguably) there importance to certain end game builds.


    Regards
    Spung
     
    Last edited: Sep 11, 2019
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  9. Aetrion

    Aetrion Avatar

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    More players wouldn't mean the exact same distribution of the types of players though. Improving the game for people who want to go out on adventures, or who want to wage faction wars would bring in different types of players with different priorities in how they want to spend their time.

    I think that is really dangerous territory to tread, if they added degredation to furniture I think this game would be dead in a few months. Decorating your house is as close to SOTA comes to an endgame right now, that's what the people who are really invested in the game do, and I honestly think the majority of them would give up on the game if their furniture constantly broke and had to be replaced. There is no real benefit to having a mansion with several themed rooms beyond just self expression, so having that break down will eventually just result in row lots full of boxes being the practical way to live. It would probably result in the loss of a lot of people who spend a ton of money because they love the housing aspect of SOTA.
     
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  10. Spungwa

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    So for me, as I only sell furniture on my vendors, though i am a competent leather and bow maker. It was noticeably when the magic mover was added. I sell more furniture and to long term players because the players lock the furniture away in a magic mover. Then start again rather than undo all the time investment in the previous deco project and reuse that deco.

    So the magic mover behaved as a item sink without actually removing the items from the player.

    For adventuring I suggest we need more consumables. Guild castles that requires X vendor value gold of any items per week to maintain. Removes junk items without adding gold to the economy, this type of thing.

    Regards
    Spung
     
  11. Spungwa

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    Now i'm not really into the quest side of things, but this I can see. Unfortunately I can't see a way forward for this until episode 2 and new questing system. Adding lots more quests to the current system that make your journal even harder to understand and the frustration that can ensue from trying to interact with the NPCs and move the quests on can be as much a barrier to continuing to play as the grind side. As well as adding "technical debt" if they need to be migrated to the new system.

    My hope is that new questing system allows this and to make quests reasonable XP compared to player time investment based on grinding mobs in the same tier level scene as the quest is in. It would actually be good if the player created NPCs and quests gave decent XP. Hard to QA/police for abuse but if there was a way to set the XP based on the time taken to complete, that would be awesome. Maybe if you could buy a service ticket to get a customer support to evaluate and set the XP reward for your player quest then it becomes locked or something.


    Regards
    Spung
     
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  12. Bryce Pallaton

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    This seems to me to be an interesting idea, but I don't see why it'd necessarily have anything to do with equipment. It'd be simpler just to have a set of N "Achievement Slots" where you would be able to apply a subset of your sigils (to use your example).
     
  13. Aetrion

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    That's a good point, a character could have a number of slots that you can use to slot feats or something like that as well. There could be a large variety of feats requiring a number of different tasks to be performed. For example you could have feats for inflicting certain kinds of damage, or taking certain kinds of damage, feats for killing a number of a specific enemy (For example, a feat that ranks up as you kill trolls that gives you higher in combat life regen) Feats for completing specific dungeons could also be added.
     
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  14. Spungwa

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    You could use the title system, if the titles gave different buffs as well as just being cosmetic.
    Add titles for "achievements" with a relevant buff for that title.
    Player would collect titles and could switch titles in a given situation based on the best buff for the task in hand. Probably would want to be an out of combat thing, else you are kind of adding another slot for a buff to the deck.


    Regards
    Spung
     
  15. Vladamir Begemot

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    It should happen as part of the "Payment" for NPCs who do something. Want crafting NPCs to work while you're gone? Well you're going to need a place to house them, to put in some upkeep on their stuff, and once you have an untenable amount, a maintenance NPC to go around and repair things for you.
     
  16. Aetrion

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    If there was a system where you provide lodging for NPC workers in exchange for something else it would make sense to occasionally have them demand furniture, I agree.
     
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  17. oplek

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    Of course we can find temporary non-sustainable ways that items can be effectively removed from circulation, such as people quitting the game. That's easy. The question is a regular, sustainable process. Last I knew, people only had so many magic mover slots.

    Does magic mover act as a non-stop round-the-clock continual item sink? If not.... next.

    It's already dying because the economy is fundamentally dysfunctional. Damned if they do, damned if they don't, I guess. If there's no process for removing couches from the game, crafting couches has no viable economic path.

    Period.
     
  18. Aetrion

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    Every game has player turnover, the question is whether new players stick around long enough to need a couch, and like Vladamir said, there is the potential for creating demand for household items by simulating having vassals that work for you or something like that.
     
    Last edited: Sep 12, 2019
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  19. Katu

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    Adventuring is becoming pointless now because of economy also. IGG to $ price is dropping with constant speed. There is absolutely no point in adventuring for money and it will only get worse. Its now 1M for 40$.
    Also, adventuring for xp is meaningless, because you can just tag team with 300gm player and afk at UT.
     
  20. FrostII

    FrostII Bug Hunter

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    Myself and others that I know, who watch what chars contribute - will have no quams about kicking anyone who doesn't participate.
    I spend a fair amount of time in UT and don't see a lot of non-participation .
     
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