Crafting Feedback - Time for another thread

I've said before, it feels like crafting was designed to make each step in the process as painful and dull as possible. Why do we have both a chance of success and a progress bar? It should be one or the other. Either it's a 100% success, but I have to sit and wait, or it's a % chance that happens instantaneously. I just failed eight times in a row to make wyvern chops with a 72% chance of success. Obvious SotAMath(tm) complaints aside, if I'm going to make ten batches of wyvern chops... I'm going to make ten batches of wyvern chops. I'm not walking away from that crafting table until I get ten batches. Whether I have to watch that bar 10 times or 18 times or 47 times. If you want crafting to have a gold sink, and failures (thus consuming fuels) is a part of that, fine. But making me wait and wait and wait on top of those failures is about the most unrewarding gameplay design you could invent. If your argument for progress bars is, "well, we can't have just instantaneously making large amounts of something" then... how long do you think it took me to kill and harvest 5 wyvern haunches? Killing, looting, gathering, harvesting, and fishing are already massive time sinks. And those time sinks are acceptable, because they involve actually playing the game.

 

But whatever. The OP was in April, and Chris' "crafting dive" has yet to happen. Crafting is always going to suck in this game. Same with loot. I should go play ESO instead tonight.

 

He jus tweeted that this is the thread he's looking at for feedback.

 

Cool. What's the crafting equivalent of just making the text bigger and calling it good enough?

 

3 got done so far ...i know...its slow ..and maybe not what some would have wanted done first....but its progress .

 

Now that I've had a few cups of coffee, let me try and be more constructive, and a little less snarky:

People want the best stuff. Any less than the best they can get is trash. A system where most of the time you get a "normal" item and 25% of the time you get an exceptional item sounds greta on paper. I mean, hey, sometimes we get something better! Except to people who play games like this, that's a system where 25% of the time you get a good item, and 75% of the time you get a crap item.

The biggest issue whit crafting is RNG. A little RNG is fine. But in this system, we fight it Every. Step. Of. The. Way.

If I want to make a full set of epic hardened leather armor with just 3/3 MW/Enchants, I need (minus the bindings):

• 220 Animal Hides
• 365 Curing Salt
• 55 Beetle Carapaces
• 17 wax
• 300 Gold Ore
• 150 Mandrake Root
• 300 Silver Ore
• 150 Chunks of Coal

Animal hides aren't too tough to come by, but beetles don't drop so often. So from the get-go, just gathering materials, I'm fighting RNG. Fair enough. (I didn't list gold/mandrake/silver here,

However, to have any durability left over after MW/enchants, I need exceptionals. I only get those theoretically roughly 25% of the time. (But, given the small batch size at this point, probably more like 20%. So I need to make five of everything to get at least one exceptional item. So that's:

• 1100 Animal Hides
• 1825 Curing Salt
• 275 Beetle Carapaces
• 85 Wax
• 300 Gold Ore
• 150 Mandrake Root
• 300 Silver Ore
• 150 Chunks of Coal

Now, it's getting a little rough. 1100 animal hides is a lot of killing and skinning, but the scenes have enough mobs that it's still not too bad. But it takes a pretty long time to get 275 beetles. (I did not factor in the MW/Enchant materials, as if you

However, again: I'm going to have failures when I MW/enchant. And, even with all the rerolls from GMing the Mastery skills, I'm still not guaranteed the MW/Enchants I want if I'm making a single item. So, I'm going to want at least five or exceptional items to have a decent shot at getting the stats I want. So now I'm at:

• 5500 Animal Hides
• 9125 Curing Salt
• 1375 Beetle Carapaces
• 425 Wax
• 300 Gold Ore*
• 150 Mandrake Root*
• 300 Silver Ore*
• 150 Chunks of Coal*

That's really a lot of killing and skinning. And getting 1375 Beetles? I can maybe get 8-10 an hour if I'm lucky, but averaged over a day, it's more like 5-6 an hour. So I'm spending who knows how many hours killing and skinning to get 5500 hides, and probably around 300 hours to get the beetles. And the Guardian only knows how much time spent STARING AT F@*%ING PROGRESS BARS.

Now, if after all that, I was guaranteed to have exactly the set of 3/3 armor I wanted, I might not hate crafting so much. I mean, that's a lot of effort for a single set of armor. But there's still no guarantee I will have the items I want with enough durability left for the items to be worth it. So all of that time and effort will have resulted in having to settle for something that's maybe close to what I want. That is too much damn effort for "close enough." I'd scrap the stuff and start over, but you get such garbage back, I may as well throw it out. I can probably sell some of the reasonably okay items on a vendor, but we don't get a lot of traffic in the PoT I live in, so most likely it's all going to an NPC vendor.

And? If I wanted 4/4 gear? Given how steeply the success rate of MW/Ench tanks after 3 rounds, it's gotta be at least ten times the amounts I listed above. I don't even bother trying, unless maybe I got lucky enough to end up with a 3/3 item with the correct MW/Enchants and no failures, with enough durability left to not be too upset at a failure. I'll let you know if that ever works out for me, when it finally does.

If I wanted to be a crafter as a trade in the game, rather than just making things for myself? How do you possibly make money at it? Elrond and Adam Crow must just love pain and progress bars in some sick way; that's the only explanation I can think of.

The final icing on this crap cake is that I'll need to replace it all in a month or two, because it'll lose all its durability and be useless.


* I didn't increase thee numbers, as the amounts are going to vary widely. If you MW first, you're not going to enchant the items that don't end up with good MWs. And if you get a lot of failures, you're going to use a lot more. Not easy to guess an exact amount you'll need, but suffice it to say, it's going to go up quite a bit.

 

crafting smelting should way more fast in uo it was a double click and we had ingots whats the point to make us wait forever for everything crafting related its lame and unactractive stoped any sort of crafting beside potions because i need them

 

Last i heard beetle drops was increased from 20 to 60% ( unverifiable though , maybe folks who gather beetles can confirm).

As for the rest i proposed changes to the system to adress exactly the things you mentioned hopefully Chris will take a look at them and try to make them more approachable

- No more 95% failures when mw
- Getting 25% exceptionals out of 10 - 20 instead of 100
- Getting 50% success rate every 10 - 20 mw instead of 100 .

Overall these changes should make crafting more appealing and less painfull ...all that remains for Chris to work out is something for us to do with the 75% non exceptionals and with the bad crafted items ...to alleviate some of the losses.

 

I would rather see:

1. Item durability increased across the board.
2. Either MW/Ench only affect durability on failure, or not at all. (If not at all, then don't buff durability across the board, it wouldn't be needed.) Ideally, it should be possible to make a 5/5 item without failures and still have 50-75 durability left.
   
3. Items lose durability faster in use. (Not as bad as it sounds, the above changes would result in items having more durability to start with.)
4. No more major repairs. (Or maybe only one per item.)
5. Instead of exceptionals having more durability, they buff that new Durability multiplier. They don't get more durability, but they lose it slower. So they're still good and desirable, but not a requirement for higher-level items.
6. T2/T3 materials applied to upgrade existing items rather than used in their creation. You'd have to increase the amounts needed substantially. More of a perception issue than anything, but I would "feel" better using 100 beetles to improve one piece of armor from Simple to Hardened rather than using 100 beetles to make 25 of Hardened items and throwing out 24 of them.
   
7. No RNG in MW/ench results. Instead, results are tied to new craft materials. Maybe each material gives a choice of 3 different results. Don't need to be unique to each item, but make some of the stronger ones only availabel on one or two material types. Have these materials drop in different scenes/regions. You want Major Strength, you need to farm mobs in North Paladis. You want Int, need to go to Longfall. You want Aimed Shot Power, you need to kill wolves in certain scens, etc. Doesn't have to be exactly those, but it gives something to collect, and reasons to farm little-used scenes. (And don't make them drop like, 2% of the time. Instead, make them somewhat commonly dropped, but needed in larger quantities. needing 100 of something that drops 50% of the time is much more fun than needing 1 of something that drops .5% of the time.)
   
8. One place I would be fine with RNG for Ench results is if Ancient Essences could be used for Enchants. Thr results would be random, but you'd get access to Artifact level enchants. (Though, I'd actually prefer even mor eif crafted items gained an "artifact slot" similar to a gem slot, that allowed you to socket an ancient essence and gain a cool artifact ability.)
9. Number of times you can MW/Ench tied to skill. Every 50 levels of the MW/Ench base skill, you unlock one round. You get one for free. S at level 1 you can Enchant or MW an item one time. at 50, you can do it twice. 3 times at 100, 4 at 150, 5 at 200. Yeah, people will be annoyed, since 5/5 items will basically become impossible to make. (Though, anybody who manages to get a skill to 200 will make a fortune, and probably should.) Initial success for any level is 50%, this goes up by raising the Mastery skill (since that skill n longer would be linked to rerolls, it needs to affect something.) Mastery lvl 100 would maybe give you 85% success. Maybe 90% at 130, 95%at 160, 100% at 200.

The idea overall is to make getting what you want a lot easier, but make items cycle out faster. You don't make money as a crafter by managing to make that occasional perfect item, but by continuously and consistently making good items. And for those of us that want to really dedicate themselves to a craft, maybe that ability to make the 5/5 "perfect" item is a goal to shoot for. Even making 4/4 items would take a lot of investment, but if you made the investment, you could do it reliably, and woul;d make you sought-after as a crafter. I don't care if my stuff crumbles to garbage fast, if I can make a replacement without grinding dumb stuff for a week and a half.

Admittedly, I am much more a gatherer than a crafter, and this system also encourages that. My marginally successful potion shop makes most of its money selling reagents, so having more items in the vein to sell would be useful.

 

Those 3 look like they took a whole 5 minutes to change a number on a table lol



Honestly pick 1 competent guy on the team, have him work on nothing but 1 major area for months. That's all he does.

Then maaaaybe by the end of the year, we could have something like a crafting system that's on par with housing.


As far as the beetles, the past few days have been significantly less than usual. Today was about average.

For whatever that's worth lol

 

Lol. Larger batch sizes for scrolls.

 

Oh, so he did actually do his crafting deep dive, then.

 

Through the public API data, I am not seeing any change at all.

 

I hate progress bars, I feel like wasting my time by not playing the game...
I mean, I dealt with the issue of boring game by using my second monitor to watch videos instead of progress bars, but it would be nice if instead of watching progress bars for hours I could actually play the game... The loading screens are annoying enough, with the progress bars on the vast majority of skills and all the crafting from gathering to enchanting, it is sooo boooring.
Getting the materials is slow enough why slow us with progress bars on top of that, i do not know. Sure, you can level up and making them bit shorter, but there is a lot of extra lag as items go to the server and it is verified I used some items and got other ones, so the progress bars do not matter all that much, just a top of the iceberg of boredom. The whole crafting system is like something that could be easily automated by script because it is so boring and repetitive, but that is not allowed.

And yes, all the failures, especially when they chain, are extremely annoying. I think that true random system is bad, if we fail, we should get higher chance next time, if we succeed we can get slightly lower chance next time ,that way the failures get more evenly distributed and I will not spend 5 minutes trying to chop one tree and get twice interrupted by the respawning wolf.

 

This is is Pinhead. He is the actual (unofficial) representative of the current crafting system in Shroud of the Avatar. Here is his message about crafting:



May you all have a wonderful day.

 

-- Use micro-essence (arcane essence broken down) for a slight increase on exceptional item success. (1 micro essence for 1% but no higher than 1%?) and likely other uses.

-- Salvage artifacts for components that can be used in existing recipes .. for example salvaging a rare component of an envy bow, and then adding it to a bow recipe .. when crafted it would read 'Envious Bow of Sorcery' .. etc?


--Shift Click and Drag multiple items from your inventory onto the Crafting Inventory window where you put the resources to craft the item. It would only apply to stackable items like resources and crafting components. This would allow you to CTRL click multiple items as usual, but when you hold down shift the game understands you're trying to drag multiple items. Right now it doesn't. So you go to the alchemy station, open your inventory and CTRL+click on Mandrake and Gold Ingots to highlight them. When you left click and drag them into the crafting inventory window, it brings up 2 sliders instead of 1. You choose the quantity you want, then click OK and it adds the resources to the crafting inventory window. When you try to repeat the process it remembers that you did 10 mandrake and 5 gold ingots from the last time. This would reduce a lot of clicking and dragging.

--Dragging and dropping items onto Recipes in the crafting station's recipe list. If you wanted to slot a 2h weapon with Gaiaism gems you'd drag the 2h sword onto the Gem Socketed Two-Handed recipe and it would automatically populate the 10 mandrake and put the sword in the Crafting Inventory window - and then ask you what type of gems (by showing you a list) based on the gems in your inventory? Sounds like a lot of coding.. like most of my ideas I guess.

--Another idea I had was being able to create Recipe Templates within the crafting station. Say you're creating an Augmented Cloth Chest Armor piece - when you load all of the resources into the Crafting Inventory window you have the option of right clicking the Recipe and selecting Save as Template - it will ask you the name of the template and add it to the list of templates for that specific recipe. This would help eliminate the wrong crafting components from being loaded into the Crafting Inventory window, which tends to occur if you double click the recipe and forget to remove unnecessary components from your inventory.

Lets say you put 9 carapacean cloth bolts, 2 carapacean cloth straps, 2 white iron bindings, 4 wax and 1 bone needle into the Crafting Inventory window. You right click the Augmented Cloth Chest Armor recipe and choose Save as Template. You might call the template "Carapacean bolts and straps, white iron" - the next time you make this item you simply load the template into the recipe and from there you simply double click the icon to load those specific crafting materials into the crafting inventory window.

I'm not sure if there are enchantable bone needles but if that was the case you could save the template without the bone needle and add it manually, or save that specific enchanted bone needle. If your bone needle ran out of durability you'd need to get another one of that specific item before double clicking the recipe would work.. or perhaps it would load all of the items into the crafting inventory window, except for the bone needle.

--Also another idea I've submitted before is the ability to do multiple searches in the filter at once so if you're looking for gold and mandrake to show up in the same list it you would type gol+man in the filter in the crafting tab of inventory. It's just as easy to load all your crafting materials into a backpack but would like to test that feature.

--More recognizable method to indicate the item is Exceptional quality

 

When players lose focus on the game to do “something else” because they are waiting or bored - there is a problem, Austin.

The game should engage players and keep them engaged - not make them want to alt-tab and do something else

 

I've always wondered why they didn't use the combat deck system (with slight modifications) for crafting. Here's my half baked idea... you select a recipe at a crafting table. The item you're trying to craft requires X "work" which is basically hit points. There's an auto attack where you're slowly hammering away but also active skills of various kinds which can either do the work faster or increase your chance to get better durability or other masterwork effects. Critical success might mean it getting done faster or better. Critical failure might mean losing fuel / components, losing focus (reducing opportunity to use other abilities), or hammering your foot (ouch).

Making crafting active like that opens up all kinds of possibilities for buffs and crafting gear (like a blacksmith apron) in the same way that combat has those things.

 

I think there should be a better chance of salvaging components out of gear created if you created it. After all, you put it together. The item is already tagged with the creators name, so I feel should be easy to program that additional tag in addition to ones salvage skill.

Right now I constantly make a lot of subpar gear that I cant sell, and feels like a waste just to salvage or sell as vendor trash. Giving an increase chance to recover some component will make the system a little more appealing.

 

As we continue this thread with a lot of great ideas regarding the crafting process I feel the need to come back to point out a few things that in my opinion effect the game.

One thing is interest. Most players aren't playing to effect the economy which in my opinion is not the reason for anything. If we would finally get a global vendor search the chance to sell goods for each individual vendor goes up especially for those not inclined to visit a crafting town. Does the player feel engaged and rewarded for their crafting efforts? Are there surprises?
Again get the basic recipes out of loot and in the crafting system. Like "you have reached carpentry level 30 you have learned a new recipe". Make leveling matter more.

Having crafting quests that teach skills and give extra reasons to craft is important. Also earn that crafting apron that adds to skill for example. Learn improved fire to augment those recipes if you master it. Interesting please. See the fire mage.

Dont forget to make craftable bags that we can put on vendors to sell bags of items like red furniture set, ballroom gown set, bone armor set, bohemian rhapsody song set 5 parts. Interesting please and long overdue to get ability to sell bags of items. Also creative competition to create interesting sets of bags to sell. Grab bags anyone? Special bags buy at your own risk with chance of special item. Other bags contents are viewable. Please please please finally add these.

Also don't forget to tie brewing to cooking by making recipes that use our brewed alcohol. Buffing brewed products is not enough to make it matter or continuously viable to brew. Please don't think it is. It is not anything but a bandage. Brewing won't stay viable that way.