Crafting RNG

I believe this may have been asked more than a couple of times in the past, but I'll do it anyway.

Please add a way to avoid RNG in crafting entirely. Make it VERY expensive material wise (e.g. double the expected materials to make it with RNG), even require stiff COTO rates if you fancy, but please make me able to know how many materials it will take beforehand and prevent me from getting (infuriating) 10 fails in a row at 56% thus ruining 10 top tier base items.

I think this solution would be a reasonable compromise between those who like RNG and those who find RNG frustrating (lower average material consumption for RNG users, better control for non RNG).

 

Absolutely yes from me, been asking for a way to bypass/mitigate this ridiculous system since Day 1. It adds no benefit to the game and has significant detriment, filling boxes and vendors with unwanted, unsellable junk, allows new players to be bamboozled out of money buying it, and frustrates any serious crafter by creating piles and piles of waste. No crafting for hire, either, since you can guarantee nothing. Worse still, its like all this effort was made to give the player incredible freedom to customize exactly what they wanted from a materials perspective and then its like someone else got ahold of it and said "right now lets just make everything random after that." Why?? Sota's crafting system would be one of the finest out there if you actually let players make what they are trying to make. If you want it to take 1000 ingots to make a chestpiece with specific stats, then just make it take 1000 ingots, but enough with the "oh, you have a random chance!" nonsense. I've made thousands of these robes by now, you think I would have figured out how to put a particular stat on it.

There is no lore-related, realism-related, immersion-related reason or economic need to make this system so needlessly grindy/sinky/awful. Some sort of mitigator that you can grind/earn/get from crafting that can be used to bolster the crafting experience when its really important you get something specific, at the very least (like say, on the epic you just spent 6 months farming) is really needed. As someone who has had to create the -same- epic THREE TIMES due to this nonsense, it was almost at "uninstall game" levels of irritation.

 

My two cents is this would take much of the reward and feeling of accomplishment out of crafting and trivialize the production of top end gear while making it even more difficult to craft for a profit. It would also likely plummet the price of raw materials, the gathering of which is one of the most reliable means of newer players earning gold.

 

brb

 

See, I don't think it would do either.

I very rarely feel a "sense of accomplishment" because I very rarely actually get the top end gear exactly as I want. Usually its a feeling of resignation, or "good enough", or I've spent untold thousands of materials and this is probably as close as I'm going to get. Removing the RNG would actually LET you accomplish what you set out to do.

And if we're talking about removing RNG but increasing costs, I don't think you'll plummet the price of materials either. A change was made to exceptionals making them no longer the only viable option. And materials prices all went UP. Considerably! Even though you need less of them now than ever before. With too much randomness and no real aspirations for a positive outcome, people simply don't bother - it is just too expensive to try and actually succeed. Now that I don't need to waste 80% of my materials making a few pennies worth of metal scraps to even get a piece to work with, I actually make a lot more stuff now than I ever did.

Lastly, "more difficult to craft for profit?" Crafting is already extremely unprofitable once you get beyond consumables. Very very rarely will a piece of gear sell for what it costs to make (assuming you account for all the botched pieces in the process which form part of your cost). You are 100% of the time better off selling raw mateirals to someone else willing to punish themselves with the RNG and try their luck. Best bet, is you'll bamboozle a new player into buying something - I have seen countless people wearing stuff they picked up off vendors without understanding that this is someone's cast-off. This is why in town after town, on vendor after vendor, there is a glut of languishing unwanted gear pieces unable to sell for even a fraction of the cost that went into them. We have loads of "garbage in", almost no "garbage out" all for the sake of a very very occasional "diamond in the rough" which rarely sees a vendor since its the thing you were trying to make for yourself to begin with.

I personally would much prefer that things continue in the way they start - choose your materials. Choose your masterworks/enchants. Build your own custom set. And if you could do this, you'd see people doing bespoke equipment orders. Make mastery affect potency, and see skill suddenly really matter, and the actual decisions made by the artisan become more important than a random dice roll. Now the "good gear" is the well thought out gear, the planned gear - not the "I got lucky once" gear. See people build alternative gear sets since they can actually control the outcomes. Slowly see the world cleanse itself of the landfill of crappy botch jobs and see quality, thoughtful pieces replace them.

It'd be better financially for the game, too. Players making loads of alternate gear sets are going to need patterns and dyes for all these different gear sets, mannequins to display them on, and so on. They'll be trying different builds, and maybe buying reset potions to unlearn / relearn specializations. At the moment, the crafting of equivalent gear for another build is a significant blocker.

If I'm honest, this random nonsense is probably the one thing that puts off any serious long-term player from sticking around here, because gearing yourself is a hopeless journey of waste, failure, and RNG. And if you do finally get it right, with enough durability to not have to be dumping $$ into keeping it due to the perma-dura-loss system, then you have the dread of looking forward to doing it to every other piece. Its even worse now with epic artifacts taking months to acquire and then subject to the whimsy of fate, if this thing you spent MONTHs getting, becomes a paperweight!

While I appreciate that some people like that special feeling of "oh, I won" in the very very rare cases that you get a good crafting result, for every 1 nice piece made, there are 10 "okay pieces" and thousands of "utter crap" with congruent levels of disappointment. I don't think Sota is sustainable if it only caters to a small % of people who are looking to play "medieval fantasy hardship simulator". That certainly has no appeal to me. Like many people, I'm happy to put in the time, I'm happy to grind - hours, weeks, months. What I'm tired of doing is wasting my time flushing resources down the drain due to an outdated system that offers no real benefit whatsoever other than to create a false sense of "difficulty".

The difficulty/rng can be in obtaining the components if we feel we need this. (Through CRAFTING MEANS! Not more impossible to get RNG boss drops for crafters please...). But the final step should be a deliberate, intentional process where the player has made decisions about what they want, and then executes it. The economic sink is completely adjustable - if the intent is for the player to spend 500 of each ingot trying to get a piece right, then simply remove the RNG and increase the cost accordingly. Stop the madness!

Imagine if adventuring worked like crafting. If you went out to hit something with your sword and your deck decided NOPE, you got a fireball. It would be stupid and unplayable. Its no less acceptable in the crafting sphere. In today's gaming market the player has thousands of choices on where they are going to spend their time and call home (and where they're going to spend their money, too). Sota has a lot of great things going for it but it has this tendency to every now and then, just punch players in the face. It should stop doing this!

 

I'd wager material prices wouldn't change too drastically; it would become much more common to replace worn gear than to throw crowns at it.

 

I get both sides of this discussion, but I would prefer the rng left as is, and they add in a crafting specialization.

Only 1 crafting spec per account which would allow you to pick from the entire list of options if you succeed the craft. Your crafting spec skill would determine how many times per day you could do this. Maybe like once at 40 skill, twice at 80, 3 at 100 etc.

In addition to the ability above it could also give you an additional 4th option, on the normal crafts you do for that particular craft. So if you choose Tailoring spec, all masterworks done for Tailoring will give you 4 options to choose from once you hit a certain skill level in the crafting spec. (80 Maybe?)

My biggest issue with the current system is what @kaeshiva mentioned about what can happen with epic artifacts. I had an epic sages sash that missed major intel on every roll. I was so frustrated, I respeced my entire adventure tree and stopped being a mage at that point lol.

I think with a system like this you would encourage players to work together to make items. And also you would see a push for materials as hardcore crafters make alts for each discipline. But most importantly it would allow you to craft those epic pieces with much more certainty, then the crapshoot we have now.

Maybe it could even cost a small amount of cotos each time you used the special ability. Might be moving a bit too far into the 'pay to win' argument with that suggestion, but I don't know, just throwing out ideas.

 

To play on the specialization, add it to the crafting tree under each individual masterwork and (perhaps or) enchantment-- blades, plate armor, cloth armor, etc. It would add a fraction of a percent to the success per level. Perhaps add to the strength of the bonuses as well, and/or add another bonus. This way you can be the best sword maker or whatever. Make it so only one specialization is in play at one time in crafting or enchantment.

 

They decided against specialization a long time ago because it would just cause players to create multiple chars to get all the crafting specializations. Instead, they implemented the mastery skills.

 

This is what they intended to do originally with crafting specialization (the current "mastery" skills we have) and instead they watered it down to just making you get rerolls. I think the reason why they moved away from a limiting specialization was because many players were completely prepared to have an army of alts ready to go to maintain self sufficiency. Unlike adventuring, which limits two specs due to balance purposes, there was no real reason to put an artificial limit for crafting specs since it would be no issue whatsoever to make more accounts.

As to why they decided NOT to remove RNG entirely with specialization (which is what they did originally scope specialization to do! many times, on many streams...), it was a different time, under different management, when we still had a lot of painful mechanics that served no purpose other than to be obstacles to getting things done. Since then we've seen the game come a long way in quality of life, with zone maps, zone scrolls, and dozens of more convenience features to ease playability - the old "reasons" to keep things artificially frustrating have become less and less relevant . It would be nice if this applied to crafting as well.

Not addressing the RNG crafting issue also stymies crafting, we can't add more effects/options to the pool, it is already far too diluted with some particular mw/enchant having over 20 choices, making it nearly impossible to get what you want regardless of how many times you do it.

I'm not against there being a cost, or requirement, whether that's an investment of experience or the addition of additional materials, or even an addition of another sort of skill that increases the number of choices to choose from (that works hand in hand with mastery's rerolls - say, at level 80 giving you 4 choices, at 100 5 choices, at 120 6 choices, and so on...). That would -help- the problem. But I'd much prefer we -solve- the problem rather than band-aid it yet again.

One approach we could explore would simply be the addition of a component to the mw/enchant process that guarantees a particular option comes up. For example, if I throw a troll thighbone in, I'll definitely get the major strength option. This would also clean up a lot of useless bric-a-brac by making them crafting components. If we're worried about material cost, we could require that metals/gold/silver/whatever create some sort of catalyst to use in this process, using a junk component + various metals or simply increase the number of ingots the recipe requires when using a catalyst or just priming the ingots.

The economics of it are absolutely fixable.
Even if you could choose exactly what you wanted (no RNG), you'd still be subject to success/fail so we'd still have quite a bit of waste. On average, making a single full set of gear would still require hours/days of material gathering/refining, even without RNG.

Honestly, I still see absolutely no reason to have the RNG mechanic, it adds no benefit, does not improve the experience, it just causes angst. I think there's plenty of "sense of accomplishment" possible by fully executing your crafting vision according to what you actually want, and it would be nice if all players had that opportunity instead of the few that "get lucky". We've seen the artifact system change to this sort of mindset, with gathering them piecemeal and upgrading them instead of relying on the 1 in 1000 chance drop. Its time to do the same for other systems and mechanics. If anything, it will HELP the economy, it will CLEAN up all the junk, it will ALLOW craft-for-hire and customizable sets, it will HELP new players get into the system and participate in the economy. There's literally no downside other than people who just want things to be awkward/wasteful/difficult/annoying. But if you truly want this, you can artificially impose whatever restrictions on yourself that you like. No need to make the baseline something so unpalatable.


With regards to account-based limits -
I'm firmly against trying to shoehorn crafters with an arbitrary account-based limit. Its too easy to game by power-players who have no problem buying levelled up producer accounts or spending $$ to buy gold to buy mats to crank their alts up to bypass the restriction. There's also quite a few of us who, when we were told years ago that specialization WOULD remove RNG, spent months levelling up alternate characters for this purpose. And they're still there, ready to go. So it seems a bit pointless if I'm honest.

 

Heh.

 

We've had this discussion so many times, I can't even remember what idea I like best anymore. Now that you mentioned it again, I always loved the idea of adding items into the process to guarantee a specific option.

 

i really like this solution. have a masterwork catalyst ingredient which guarantees the masterwork in the masterwork list, our skill levels determine how much it adds, and leave RNG to determine success. sell the masterwork catalysts on the COTO store or special drops from mobs where it would be logical to get that masterwork catalyst.

 

I won't touch on every detail of this, but making a perfect piece is what people are going to set out to do. Gear quality is, like most everything else in this game, a soft cap system. Letting folks accomplish what they want when what they want is perfect end game gear rather undermines that.

Remember that the changes to durability also coincided with a massive wave of bot banning and other crafting changes (making crafted gear by and large stronger than artifacts again and adding imbued gems/jewels that prompted multiple loadouts per build) that both contributed significantly to raw materials price changes. I've not seen any proposal to offset the reduced demand in this case.

I enjoy crafting and I spend a lot of time crafting. Someone recently ordered a very high end set of gear from me, and part of it was a pair of 17str 38dex pants. It took many attempts (actually got the pair I was looking for on the 100th try), and it was many joyus hours spent in one of my favorite systems of the game. One of reasons I cannot see a system like you describe being profitable for crafters is because if making high end gear is so trivial I'll frankly be churning out hundreds of pieces at a time and selling them below cost, just because I enjoy crafting. There's legitimate skill and strategy in massaging the odds in crafting. The more it's trivialized the more saturated the market will become, and the more zero--margin and negative-margin sellers there will be.

All of a sudden the few hundred pieces of gear everyone makes to raise their skill levels isn't a cost of learning, it's enough gear and weapons to outfit half the server. Once your levels are up you're set to single-handedly outfit the other half.

 

In reference to the comment above and the line it's quoting, please, this thread is far too short for everyone to start revealing themselves as more interested in diatribes than conversations. Can't we save that for page 3 or 4?

 

I believe we have a fraction of the community that enjoy RNG in crafting, and that's why I proposed a system in which both parts of the community (pro-RNG and against-RNG) could enjoy.

Your 100 piece, joyful crafting session would be exactly the same with the solution I proposed. And it would be, on average, cheaper cost compared to the RNG free.

In short, if you enjoy RNG you won't be affected by the new system I propose at all. You may entirely ignore the RNG free part of crafting.

 

Once was talk about celestial events affecting crafting. How would it affect things if certain results was more likely during certain constellations/planets

 

This is kind of my point, though.
If someone orders a high end set of gear from you, and you have to do 100 tries - 100 makings of the item, probably what, 20-40 ingots in silver and gold per "try" (assuming you abort after x many failures etc) ...how much is that piece costing you? Based on the current price of materials? When I work out single pieces that are costing in excess of 500k in materials at market rates, it is unfathomable that someone is going to actually pay that. How do you even price something like this, since it could end up costing you 10k or 100k or a million depending on luck?

This may work fine for someone with abundant resources (or the willingness to spend RL money and buy resources as many high level crafters do), but where is the niche in this system for a budding crafter starting out, they can't make anything worth having or that anyone would possibly want with any sort of reliability or affordability.

Not to mention that's completely impossible/irrelevant in the context of working on artifacts where having 100 epics to "play with" to get the bonuses right is a laughable implausability.

The piles and piles of junk filling vendors aren't "level up" pieces, they are "this didn't go right, I'll try to recoup something" pieces precisely because of the failures. The 99 botch jobs you did before you got lucky number 100, I assume the most serviceable of these get listed on vendors somewhere (else its a complete write off to the npc or salvage). After spending 5 years playing the crafting ratrace losing money hand over fist no matter what you did, I pretty much just make stuff for my own /friends use and gave up the idea of EVER trying to run a profitable crafting business. Our current system makes it impossible. Nobody will pay what things actually cost.

The "joyousness" of getting that lucky success does not outweigh the weeks of grind/frustration/failure.
Especially since that success is in no way guaranteed or achievable. You could spend 500k in materials and have nothing whatsoever to show for it.
To me, that is a broken system seriously in need of a rethink.

 

I'm not even sure what you're referring to here but he quoted a small piece of my post where I said there is no downside to removing RNGother than because some people want the frustration element so I will clarify this.

I have still not seen any good reason/argument why we need RNG other than to artificially make things difficult/frustrating/wasteful.

The economic arguments for it are easily addressable and it has been illustrated in countless other discussions of this topic over the years. Ultimately, removing RNG would allow some consistency, planning, and confidence in a system that up until now has been largely thriving on chaos.

The only reason to keep such a system, the only reasonable argument I've heard, boils down to "some people like chaos." I'm not calling out any individuals or even saying this is bad, its a valid argument and a valid reason. Its something that certainly needs to be considered.

I just think it does not hold sufficient weight against the significant stack of negatives for players at every level of the spectrum. It is extremely detrimental to the game as a whole in that it negatively impacts player retention. Looking at a RNG-plagued months-long grind with little hope of a positive outcome does not have a good outlook. If you tell someone they need to spend 6 months gathering gold or materials to "maybe" make the set of gear they want "if they are lucky" - and that gear is not even theirs to keep, it is subject to permanent durability loss/destruction unless they cough up real life money for COTO repair - they're going to find something else to play 9 times out of 10. It simply isn't worth the effort.

This was further exacerbated with artifacts becoming best-in-slot for most builds and the considerable time/cost investment in building those up. Removing RNG is absolutely not going to be a case of having end game gear "done" in a few days. And it could always be better, with higher skill levels, or different directions could be tried, experimentation, different gear sets for different occasions ..things currently too cost prohibitive to even consider would suddenly be possible. A good crafter is a thoughtful crafter, who understands mechanics and builds gear accordingly, instead of everyone just being random buttonpushers and oh look someone won the jackpot. Especially when even "jackpot" pieces don't pay for themselves!

If we are ever going to get the sort of population numbers that we want here, we have to consider adapting some of the more horrific, clunky, annoying systems to more palatable alternatives, or even endearing systems that a small niche of players truly enjoyed but that were ultimately impractical. Look at "bag mode" inventory, beloved by many but ultimately retired because it was impractical as the game moved on. We're in the same position now with crafting, where the reasons to keep a thing are sentimental rather than practical or logical and we need to move forward.

If people truly like the frustration/challenge/waste for challenge's sake, and this is not just bravado -- The actual proposed wishlist suggestion was something along the lines of keeping the random system as the default anyway. So, happy days, keep doing your thing - if you're actually doing it because you enjoy it, that's great!! The more expensive alternative is proposed for the rest of folks who would like choice to matter rather than luck.