Multiboxing and crafting

That's kinda what power creep does. But seeing as all the power creep in shroud comes from gear Im not sure new players are any more affected than old ones.

 

Three game days for one character to make a full set of leather armour sounds just about right to me.

Sure, some will find that much work tedious. So hire a lower-level crafter to do your refining for you. Personally, I find combat on noncombatant characters who don't want to fight anything to be tedious at best, and more often downright unpleasant. Fair is fair. If my crafter has to be a killer in order to get mats, even though I don't enjoy that kind of play, I see nothing wrong with other people's crafters being forced to actually... craft.

Whether the crafting recipes, and in particular the amount of mats that go into anything, are reasonable or not... that's an entirely different discussion.

I hesitated to Like the official post on this, because I was afraid it was going to turn into exactly what Chris posted here. So I'm concerned but unsurprised to see that the rule applies to both autoattack and crafting, except it maybe won't be enforced for crafting, because Reasons.

Rules should apply objectively to everyone, without wiggle room.

As for people rage-quitting... SotA doesn't seem to have any lack of people always rage-quitting for one reason or another. If it wasn't this, I'm sure it'd be something else. And yes, I'd expect this kind of multiboxed crafting to have a MUCH bigger impact on the economy than multiboxed combat. People wouldn't be threatening to rage-quit if it wasn't going to have a substantial impact on what they do in game. Heck, this would give my crafter a reason to log IN again, if she could make money smelting for others instead of having to kill things for a living, when I've barely done anything with her since summer.

IF the change discussed here is actually implemented. I agree with the OP on this much... @Chris, it doesn't help anyone to say "The only thing that is not allowed is... [snip] ... executing some automatically triggered skill like autoattack or crafting" only to follow it up by saying out-of-focus crafting is fine as long as you're not using a macro. It's that kind of unclear or even contradictory statements that foster misinformation and FUD, not players trying to figure out what's going on and how it's going to affect them. Regardless of which side of the issue someone's on, we all need clarity, one way or the other.

Either the rules apply to batch crafting or they don't. Which is it?

 

Because all the crafters will find another game to play. Good reason.

 

The point exactly.

Was the OP looking to increase the locked thread ratio?

 

Official answer:

https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/clarification-on-multiboxing.161199/

 

Having a second account refine my materials while my main is adventuring is a pretty good idea. I might have to try that out (note that I won't be doing anything outside of the game's capabilities; switch to the alt window, double click the recipe, select the maximum number of tries, click craft, switch back to the other window, repeat as necessary).

 

I like this method too. My only problem is that it's my main character who has the highest crafting AND combat skills. It'll take me quite a bit of work to repurpose my alternate to be a pure crafter.

Wish there was a job board ingame so i could advertise for raw mats. One of the reasons the gameworld economy is so raw is that the tools just aren't there. So everyone tries to do everything and be everything.

There has to be a better way.

 

Well, very specifically, it's just the refining skills. I have a few million crafting experience on my alt. I'll use that to get the refining skills to say 80, which is good enough.

 

It was 2.5 hours of watching a progress bar and not doing anything else I was objecting to. Not the elapsed time. This was not including anything else that needed to be done, just the time the character was locked on a table with a bar going up. I

I played Eve and made tech 2 ships. That involved days of blueprints copying, days of invention on those blueprints. Then weeks of making ships and components to finally put the the ship together. However this time was elapsed offline time. I spent 30mins a day or so setting it all up and then waited and could play other aspects of the game while those jobs completed. Those 30 mins were working out what to build, setting up orders for materials, setting up the lab and factory jobs etc. Not passively watching as a bar went up.


Regards
Spung

 

I'm happy if the changes pause background clients. There is no reason for people to be running auto anything in the background. tabbing to one doing a process then tabbing to another to do something should pause the background client until you tab back. For Crafters that mutli client does not make me feel bad I craft with my one character and if I need something made by my other account I tab to that make the item then hand to my main. I dont have my clients all crafting at the same time as it was against the policy. Does not hurt my market at all, may hurt a few of the "power crafters" which from my prospective helps me more

 

Well, if this change goes into effect as I think I'm reading right here... I'm likely never going to play SOTA ever again.

When I play a MMO, crafting is a major part of my fun experience. However, in SOTA the crafting is so boring, tedious, and time consuming that I purchased multiple accounts because I was able to run multiple clients at the same time and have different characters do different parts of my crafting. I typically have one sitting and grinding away at the crafting tables refining and making minor components while another would be mining or killing/skinning, etc.

Sitting and watching the crafting bar in this game is boring and seems like a total waste of time. There is no interaction to affect crafting, just click a button and wait for a batch to complete. At least before I was able to do other things on my other accounts that required my attention when I wanted to craft something.

It's not about cheating the system for me. Sure, gathering on two clients at the same time in the same scene did help a bit with the ridiculous need for so many mats to make an end product, but it's more about being able to do the boring things in the background while I so something "fun" (and I use that term loosely here, especially when it comes to gathering) on another account.

So, if tabbing to another client changes to halting a "click and forget" crafting action... then I would be forced to stare at a boring monotonous crafting table to make things... and that WON'T HAPPEN!

I've been really looking for a reason to get back into this game again and hoping something new would draw me back. But this change would do the complete opposite for me.

@Chris - Please think this through before you implement it. You will lose many many players with a change like this.

 

This one is a difficult knot to untie.

On the one hand, as one who has dabbled in crafting some, the crafting system in this game is tedious to the point of lunacy. The "stare at a progress bar" horse has been killed, skinned, butchered, and thoroughly tenderized. If I had a system that could handle more than one client, I would be multiboxing in a heartbeat just to cut the monotony.

On the other hand, if they don't do something about multiboxing, then someone could easily come up with a program that will slave multiple accounts to the first, and it's EvE all over again with fleets of accounts running around under the control of one person, obliterating content that was meant to be taken on by teams of players. Or, as has already been stated, things that were meant to take multiple stages with one character or player now can be time-compressed by having multiple accounts logged in at the same time, performing the different stages of crafting in parallel.

The best solution would be one that makes crafting simultaneously less tedious and more rewarding, so that implementing the stated controls would feel less punishing... but that isn't happening. It has taken them years and they still don't get it.

The worst solution, well.. that's what's on the table: in the effort to curb exploits of unintended mechanics use, they will punish those who are using the system to fix the tedious crafting system in the only way available.

Good luck to all involved.

 

I personally like this idea mainly to prevent bot/automation. It is extremely easy to fully automate things with all the 3rd party stuff out there. as @Lord Tachys al`Fahn says I have seen in many many games what bots do to the economy and even for automated group play. This would eliminate any that exists and more then likely help balance the markets out. This also gets around the issue of using 3rd party automation software if the pauses are built into the client. allowing for only one parent window of that application to be up at one time. For me as far as crafting go, I would still like to be able to use always on top with netflix or browser well playing in the back ground if possible but if that has to go then so be it.

@Daxxe Diggler trying to understand what you are saying having two toons gathering in same scene? why it takes less then a few seconds for one to harvest so switching between doesn't really gain anything it will take you more time to control one then the other and moving then to move and harvest with one character.... Care to elaborate on how this works?

 

Sure, I can elaborate on what I use to do:

I'd have two clients running at the same time, each on a different monitor (on same PC). I'd party them up and take them both to the same mine.

Once there, I'd take the first one to an ore node and click to start mining it. While that one is going, I'd run the other one to a node on a different floor of the mine. I used different floors for each because if they were in the same area, the nodes would not re-pop fast enough. Also, if the first one finishes it's node before the 2nd gets to his 1st node, I'll tab back to the first and start him on another node to keep productive.

Once I get them both going on different floors, I try to time them so that I start mining on one, then tab to the other instantly and start that one. Move my mouse back over to the first and prepare to "loot all" and move him to the next adjacent node... then immediately tab to the other character and do the same.

Sometimes, a meticulous chance and/or a critical (near instant) will screw up the timing, but I try to keep them synced up best I can.

I'm essentially just doing the same thing on 2 different screens... just on different levels of the mine. I see them both at the same time (so neither is really "in the background").

And yes, I do need to stop to fight mobs when they spawn which can be problematic with timing... but having a pet for each on aggressive will usually help with getting aggro before the mining attempt is completed.

With having to worry about 2 characters going at once, it at least added some excitement to mining while the pick was swinging for the animation. It kept me focused on the game and at the same time, I was gaining almost double the ore for my efforts. I say almost double because it is not as efficient as concentrating on 1 client at a time... but it is certainly more exciting and overall it is considerably more ore than when I do it solo. Don't discard the fact that 2 toons can carry twice as much ore also.

On a side note, I used to be able to do this with one character mining and the other back at my home refining and crafting things. Going mining or killing mobs with 1 account while the other sat at the crafting tables was one of the ways I would cope with the boring crafting system. So, I would just start mining, tab over to start a batch of refining, tab back and mine until the refining was done, then start another batch and back to mining, etc.

 

So all of us rich folks with multiple PCs are still good?

Good, **** poor people, they don't deserve to play this game anyways (/sarcasm for the carebears that still populate these forums)

 

haha what do you mean carebears... you are right though @Illesac that people with more then one pc can still multibox with out being implemented. I think the idea is just to make it harder to exploit the system, you can't beat every option but you can for sure eliminate a large % of it. There are further things that could be done to curve bad actors like anti cheat tech (program detection, IP detection, mouse and keyboard patterns etc) which all have pros / cons. In the end it comes down to keeping things fair for all. If its against policy just give 1 warning then ban on next offence. I think that the numbers lost would be minimal as most people don't do this so only a few would be effected by the change. there is better value to keeping the customers then try to keep the wrong ones.... business logic that hold true.

keep in mind this is just my opinion -

 

Imagine a pet automoton that would follow you around a zone and mine or forage or skin for you. Add a skill to it that produces a refined mat when it collects enough raw material. So you come back from an adventure and unload the ingots, timbers, and leathers your pet was able to collect.

vj

 

That would be cool.

I sorta have something like that right now in ESO which is nice. A hireling running around harvesting runes for my enchanting pleasure while I'm offline

 

Sounds great . The code and behavior to spot resources is already there - the summonable Wisp already does that in patrol mode.

 

Sounds like EvE Online players are coming to play this game. I multi-box when I play EvE.