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.

Thread Status:
Not open for further replies.
  1. Katu

    Katu Avatar

    Messages:
    454
    Likes Received:
    777
    Trophy Points:
    55
    Gender:
    Male
    Location:
    Finland
    I might have exaggerated a bit :)
    Problem is there still. Grinding and leveling is meaningless as low level, because its so much more efficient to go to UT.
     
  2. Lace

    Lace Avatar

    Messages:
    1,567
    Likes Received:
    5,160
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Gender:
    Female
    Location:
    Florida
    This op was of the opinion that crafters get too much love. Guess what it took YEARS for R68 changes. before that all we got was non destruction of items which ONLY benefited those buying by accepting durability loss on items rather than off the charts prices for recoupment of the material cost to make one good piece. It seems to gotten off track with some good thought some bad .. but to reply to OP.... UM .. NO ... Crafters have received the least love in the game for YEARS.

    The game was touted as the best gear made by crafters. As many have pointed out that is so not true with artifacts. So oh Mary please.
     
  3. Superbitsandbob

    Superbitsandbob Avatar

    Messages:
    307
    Likes Received:
    684
    Trophy Points:
    43
    How can the system remove items already created? Vendor sell? Break them down for raw materials again? If the game did have a way of removing items how would that help the game anyway? They wouldn't be leaving the game because a large population of players was buying them. Also if everyone was a crafter no one would buy any made items anyway.

    I think that you are placing an over-inflated popularity on crafting in games. Many people dabble in crafting, generally to give their character an edge, but not to the level that SOTA requires. You can see it in WOW Classic at the moment. People are doing gathering and crafting but it is a much simpler system and only to the point where they get specific items for raiding or to afford their mount. The millions currently playing are not doing it for the crafting but the PvE combat experience and the PvP.

    SOTA requires a lot more than dabbling in crafting for the average MMO player. Also lets be honest the only people who would put up with things like the messy interface are those who are mostly only here for the crafting or heavily invested financially or time wise.

    The hundreds of vendors sitting around the world will continue to sit there full of unwanted items. This game has become I guess what it wanted to be; heavily focused on interior design, crafting and activities like fishing. In their original design philosophy though they forgot that you need fairly large population of players who don't want to craft to support those systems.
     
    Chatele, Witcheypoo and Cordelayne like this.
  4. Katu

    Katu Avatar

    Messages:
    454
    Likes Received:
    777
    Trophy Points:
    55
    Gender:
    Male
    Location:
    Finland
    You can make items obsolete. Other games do it and there's no reason Sota should not do it.
    EP2 should introduce new properties that can only be added to new items. Maybe a new material, that gives something that players like.
    Wow does this with every upgrade. If you are 110 lvl guy, you are not going to run around successfully, with lvl 60 gear. Simple, yet effective.
     
  5. kaeshiva

    kaeshiva Avatar

    Messages:
    3,054
    Likes Received:
    11,752
    Trophy Points:
    153
    Gender:
    Female
    I think the key problem with crafted gear is a design imbalance between creation and consumption.

    On paper, the idea that "adventurers earn money, pay crafters to make them stuff" sounds great. Unfortunately, the crafting system's heavy reliance on waste and RNG makes this a non-starter. Its impossible to price a piece of gear because the very same piece of gear may cost you 5k to make one day and 100k the next simply due to luck. I have always felt this is stupid. The reason why you see the same handful of names selling gear is that a lot of us aren't willing to eat all the losses just to list nice gear on a vendor that "might" sell. I maintained a gear vendor fairly early on but quickly realized I was much better off crafting-for-hire or selling materials if my end goal was profit. Since its been made clear that this RNG issue is not going to be addressed, and its what we've got, I don't think there's ever going to be a day when the gear-vendor-situation is going to be fundamentally different than what we have now: a handful of vendors selling nice things, and hundreds selling failures/junk/leftovers. I've stopped bothering trying to list the not-quite-right stuff and throw it all on a guild chapterhouse "yard sale" lot where new players can take any of it for free.

    Adventurers dont need to pay out for new gear that often. But we can't make gear break faster, because its so expensive/frustrating/impossible to actually make gear with the stats we want. If we're going to insist upon a system that generates 90% waste, we need to be able to do something with that waste other than put it on a vendor with a price tag and a prayer. I suggest improving the salvage system to actually give you a reasonable chunk of your stuff back, or providing another outlet for junk gear (since selling it to the NPC gives you less than a penny on the dollar). This outlet could be anything: turn it in to an NPC who gives you some xp for it or a 'crafter's bag' that include recipes or something. Hell, throw it in a wishing well and get something of value back. Don't care what. Just there needs to be something to do with all of it or it just gluts up all the vendors and people actually trying to find gear have to wade through it all.

    The reward for adventuring aspect - I agree there needs to be something more. At the moment, the main reason I kill anything is to get crafting components (or because its stood in the way of a tree I want to chop down, etc). I long ago concluded that killing more difficult content, bosses, etc. was not a lucrative use of my time because 99% of the time you get nothing interesting and, if you do get something interesting, it usually just translates into an amount of money you could sell it for. That being the case, it makes more sense for me to earn money via more consistent means and ignore 'difficult' content as its simply not worth the time.

    Its a funny thing with Sota - in every other MMO I've ever played, if you saw a creature that had a special name or that was a boss, you go out of your way to kill it, every time, because there was a fairly good chance it was going to drop something good or it had a special something you could get from it. In Sota, if you see a boss level / named creature, you avoid it unless you're at a level at which you can steamroll it, because its often simply not worth the time it takes to kill. Even monsters that do have desirable drops, give them up so infrequently that again, its often not worth the time.

    Instead of relying on a 1 in 10,000 chance drop that, or systems that screw you based on what time you play if the max number of items for that day has already dropped, etc. I suggest incremental bonuses. We're starting to see a bit of this with things like essence. Instead of something that is say, a 1% drop chance, make it 100% drop but you need 100 of them. This way your adventuring you'd at least be working toward something instead of 99 times out of 100 just getting nothing but disappointment. That's a good start. You can still have the rare trophy stuff, you can still have achievements, etc. I'd personally like to see completionist type achievements that increase your character's performance - ie, kill 1000 wolves, get a title, kill 10,000 wolves, now you get a 2% damage bonus against wolf type monsters, and so on. Many games do this or similar with 'achievements' that can them be equpped/slotted/etc. to convey various bonuses and it adds a whole completionist aspect to adventuring with the ability to unlock more and more complex requirements for better and better bonuses.
     
  6. Vladamir Begemot

    Vladamir Begemot Avatar

    Messages:
    6,194
    Likes Received:
    12,076
    Trophy Points:
    153
    Gender:
    Male
     
    Cordelayne and Chatele like this.
  7. Sulaene Moon

    Sulaene Moon Avatar

    Messages:
    508
    Likes Received:
    903
    Trophy Points:
    63
    In my short time here I have come to the same conclusion. Sad, but true.
     
    Cordelayne, Chatele and FrostII like this.
  8. Cora Cuz'avich

    Cora Cuz'avich Avatar

    Messages:
    4,648
    Likes Received:
    7,614
    Trophy Points:
    153
    Location:
    Veritas Sanctuary
    I love UT now! I can login for an hour a month, collect my rewards, run two or three cycles of UT, sell all the loot, pay my lot taxes for thirty days, then go play something else for the rest of the month.
     
    Arya Stoneheart and Jaesun like this.
  9. Aetrion

    Aetrion Avatar

    Messages:
    789
    Likes Received:
    1,725
    Trophy Points:
    93
    This is actually a really excellent point, collecting essence and then crafting a big payoff does feel a lot more smooth than just waiting for a rare drop, and rewards like that have enough granularity that they could scale up too, like a boss might drop 10, or 100.
     
    Gravidy and Cordelayne like this.
  10. Sketch_

    Sketch_ Avatar

    Messages:
    345
    Likes Received:
    618
    Trophy Points:
    43
    Gender:
    Male
    So you're enjoying crafting? :cool:
     
  11. Mishikal

    Mishikal Avatar

    Messages:
    1,965
    Likes Received:
    2,834
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Location:
    Brittany Estates
    People have an infinite number of magic mover slots available, as you can purchase additional ones. Between us, my wife and I have some 15+ decorated homes stored that we switch out as desired. And more in progress.
     
  12. eli

    eli Avatar

    Messages:
    683
    Likes Received:
    1,192
    Trophy Points:
    93
    I think the biggest problem with the adventuring experience is not the cost or reward, but the difficulty.

    The group difficulty curve on disappears almost completely around level 90. At that point, adventuring with a group becomes a social or RP activity rather than a challenge.

    But when you've got all the xp you need, loot economics dictate that this is a solo adventure game, and that difficulty curve is even weirder, and depends upon which OP moves your class has and a bizarre collection of mob invulnerabilities. The only "challenge" is learning which button is OP against what and pushing it over and over.

    You can try mobs which are not assigned to your class, but instead of challenging it just becomes infuriating, like you feel dumb hitting your head against the wall. You might eventually bash through the wall with your forehead and feel proud of it, but the game won't recognize it with loot or XP, so that's likely the last time you'll take that encounter.

    Then, when you've done that against everything, you have nothing left that is challenging. The only thing left to go after is reward, which in this game means grinding.
     
  13. Aetrion

    Aetrion Avatar

    Messages:
    789
    Likes Received:
    1,725
    Trophy Points:
    93
    It's impossible to design content that is a meaningful challenge when the game is so unbalanced that the most powerful people can simply solo everything. For example you can spend billions of XP trying to raise life magic and you're not going to get as much attunement out as wielding two legendary ankhs will give you for example. One shotting an entire UT wave with banish is something you can simply buy if you have enough gold, gold you could theoretically acquire by just selling COTOs. That's the pinnacle of achievement in this game, and the power of a character like that also makes the generation of good PvE content for average players impossible.
     
    yinki2 and Sulaene Moon like this.
  14. A'chelata

    A'chelata Avatar

    Messages:
    835
    Likes Received:
    1,504
    Trophy Points:
    105
    Gender:
    Male
    Location:
    Texas
    That's only been a complaint by almost everyone since .. . . . oh . . . . forever . . . . Hoping for a fix in release 70 *fingers crossed*

    And then, if anyone gets to where they can steamroll something, to actually fool yourself into thinking you can beat sota math you do kill bosses, then they just ner . . . oh wait, I think that was a different thread. sorry.
     
    FrostII likes this.
  15. FrostII

    FrostII Bug Hunter

    Messages:
    5,884
    Likes Received:
    11,033
    Trophy Points:
    153
    Gender:
    Male
    Location:
    Pacific Northwest
    ^^^:rolleyes:^^ And yet they STILL fail to see it. After all the posts over all the years, Chris just doesn't get it .
    I really don't like saying this, but I have to. Our lead dev is so focused on his ego inflating stream and the tiny % of the population that can attend, that the tree get's in the way of being able to see the forest.
    I'm guessin' they're so paranoid over having too much decent/good sh*t in the marketplace, that they think that their version of "rare" is proper.
    They just don't seem to have a clue........
    ..

    Sorry for the rant, but I'm losing hope on a daily basis........ :(
     
    Last edited: Sep 16, 2019
    Malimn likes this.
  16. Aetrion

    Aetrion Avatar

    Messages:
    789
    Likes Received:
    1,725
    Trophy Points:
    93
    I don't think that's a fair assessment of what's going on. Have they painted themselves into a corner? Yea, kind of. In order to fix the really big structural issues with the game they would have to make some really drastic changes to the core systems, and alienating the small audience they have, which seems to at least be paying enough to keep the game running, isn't a good move in pursuit of a bigger audience that might never show up.

    As of right now simply putting the best items on the toughest monsters wouldn't make the game better, in fact it would probably make it feel even more one sided because the richest players can buy gear that lets them basically solo everything. What they really need to do is adjust the system so that the top end is only about 10-20% more powerful than the average player, not three times as powerful. Then they can start designing challenging content that isn't going to either be impossible for most people or ridiculously easy for a tiny elite.

    Maybe more than anything they need to get rid of giant leaps in gear power, like let's say a sun build's weapons jumping from a maximum of +20 attunement from crafted to +100 by switching to Ankhs. That's a giant leap that costs about 200-300k to make and puts you in reagent cost hell so you better be rich to begin with. If you want the legendary versions you're easily looking at 4 million gold (And that price will go up when the new sun skill gets added and phoenix gets improved). About 140 natural attunement is where XP costs get completely crazy for a specialist character. Double legendary ankhs are +160 attunement, and that's before rings, chest, amulet and any other bonuses. And yea, crafters are getting screwed there too, because that's almost all artifacts being used.

    There is no smooth progression on the gear portion of that equation like there is with the skill portion. You pretty much just go from 20 to 200+ if you're insanely rich, and this is game where buying gold is perfectly acceptable. That's the real issue with this game that they need to address. It's ridiculous that more than half the power of a character is bought with gigantic sums of gold, and by extension most easily bought with $$.
     
    Last edited: Sep 16, 2019
    Gravidy, Cordelayne and kaeshiva like this.
  17. kaeshiva

    kaeshiva Avatar

    Messages:
    3,054
    Likes Received:
    11,752
    Trophy Points:
    153
    Gender:
    Female

    In this, I am in complete agreement.
     
    Gravidy and Cordelayne like this.
  18. Bow Vale

    Bow Vale Avatar

    Messages:
    1,729
    Likes Received:
    4,699
    Trophy Points:
    113
    Location:
    Pericaliya
    Fact check.....Single Wands can get close to 30 attunement now and have for a while and the uncommon ankh Wala is +50 attunement...the Legendary +80.

    Also wands get many other bonus's including less reagent use. It was never worth using a+50 attunement ankh, Wala or Sacrifice over a well made wand. The +30 extra attunement now for Legendary is only in truth better for adding attunement to the school, it misses many other bonus's still.

    Basic Maths....buy 16 uncommon Ankhs for 100k each, theres many for sale for 75k at moment or was in the last week.....Make legendary item 1.6mill gold max...personally i have been buying them at 30k or 50k many times so infatc they even cheaper than that...16*30k = Not 4 million gold.
     
    Jaesun and Mac2 like this.
  19. Vladamir Begemot

    Vladamir Begemot Avatar

    Messages:
    6,194
    Likes Received:
    12,076
    Trophy Points:
    153
    Gender:
    Male
    Local maxima. Sometimes you have to walk down the hill you are on to get to the next higher one you are looking at.
     
    Gravidy and Bedawyn like this.
  20. Aetrion

    Aetrion Avatar

    Messages:
    789
    Likes Received:
    1,725
    Trophy Points:
    93
    Ok, so the difference between two high end wands and two legendary ankhs is 60 vs. 160. That's just slightly different numbers for exactly the same problem I've been pointing out.

    You have to watch someone oneshot entire UT waves with double Ankhs of Sacrifice to appreciate how absurd having 350 attunement is I guess. That's coming to sun spec soon, and with +100 int enlightenments that also give massive crit chance bonuses you just make all the other stats yourself.

    You need 2 Ankhs, not one, so you have to buy 32 of them. But you know, basic math. Also simply claiming that you know where to get them for one third of what I've seen them at today doesn't disprove any math. What I can tell you for sure though is that's been exactly 7 days since Atos revealed that he's adding a new AoE sun attack on stream.
     
    Last edited: Sep 16, 2019
Thread Status:
Not open for further replies.