Is agriculture back in the game?

Elgarion was going to balance some of this, but he left the game and never did. If they had lowered the seed price for some of those crops, it would have helped a lot. I just hate being forced to only grow certain crops when before I could grow anything and get a little bit of profit out of it.

 

All crops should net a small profit if sold to the npc

it's a big coto, gold and time investment to get a big farm running! sure you get exp for doing it but most of us like making gold as well

 

When you sell your crops to NPCs, do you actually get tag value (I'm betting no)?

 

Any item with an NPC value of 4gp per unit or lower automatically tag matches, which includes all crops.

 

Regardless of tag matches, your water costs less, etc..... when you have players like TimeLord (who spent more cotos on Bell Towers than any other player in the game and owns multiple towns) quit playing, and you have players like me who stop farming over these changes, you are doing something very wrong. Trying to force a player economy by limiting farming choices is not the way to go in my opinion. I cannot believe that I am the only one who agrees with TimeLord on this. You can throw logic and stats about selling certain crops, but when it hits people the wrong way and they leave the game over it, it is not good for Shroud.

 

I do agree with you and TimeLord

 

I think all the big farmers have long left the game because of the changes and that's why not many are reading this to agree with you folks. I was never much of a farmer but do agree that the changes were not right and should be reversed, but have long learnt some things won't happen, but then again you never know.

 

A tanner could buy 10 million gp in raw hides from the market, then buy hundreds of the highest end tanning stations placed on a bunch of lots, and then multi-box on a bunch of systems to craft at them all optimally. Should they get the same profits you do when they sell their leather?

 

Are you kidding me? No one in the game would ever do that, and if they did a lot of people would consider it as cheating. Have you ever farmed? You cannot really compare tanning and blacksmithing to farming. There is really no up front cost and maintenance cost (watering) with tanning and blacksmithing. You may need to collect ore or animal hides, but no one is going to do what you suggest. The point is that you used to be able to do something in the game, and now you cannot. It also drove people out of the game. If it bothers you so much, then farm instead of tanning or blacksmithing. I do not understand your mindset. The NPC pays great money for Hardend Leather. Right now if you sell just Leather to the NPC, you get 8 gold per, and Hardened Leather, you get 64 gold per. Now imagine you have a stock of hundred of thousands of Hardened Leather and they change the NPC price to 8 gold pieces in the next release. You can sell a few hundred a week on your vendor, but now you are stuck with a lot of a resources that you used to be able to make a profit on, and you will just stop making Hardened Leather altogether. I have played the game for many years, and I do not have to buy animal hides when I tan. I have a lot of those in my inventory. I have a lot of ore for blacksmithing from mining. I do not get seeds and buckets of water as drops. I have to buy all of those, so to answer your question, I have no issue with farmers selling crops to a NPC for a profit.

 

Remind me, how much do the ingredients for leather and hardened leather sell for? Also, you do understand that the reason no one is buying millions of gp of hides and refining them at hundreds of stations isn't because it is against the rules, multi-boxing is perfectly legal per the devs as long as no automation or scripts are running, it's because it wouldn't be profitable. If it were, folks would be "farming" absolutely everything you could craft. Farming is more involved than the others, but at the end of the day it is solo play in non-adventure zones, making it (more) profitable is just selling money printers, which is a bad idea for any MMO.

 

You can sell your hardened leather to an NPC just like a farmer can sell his crop. The reason that so many people left the game is because the pricing changed overnight. I had 600k of tea leaves that I harvested after the price changed. It takes a month to grow that in a dungeon. Can you imagine growing 25 year whiskey (which takes almost a year in RL) and then the vendor price changes to where the 25 year whiskey sells for less than the 2 year whiskey on the vendor? You will lose money before you have time to harvest it? That is the real issue here. When that happens, you feel cheated.

 

So? Hardened leather straps once were worth around 120 gp a piece and you got 3 from a single crafting. It was fixed because the value was too high. Health potions lost around 75% of their value at one point, folks had been holding millions of gp of them. It was a fix because the value was too high. Do I really need to go through the history of the game for every time the devs noticed that they had created a crafting situation that allowed players to craft at a profit to NPC vendors and reduced the price of the product?

 

Farming is so much more involved than crafting that I think it makes a poor comparison. I mostly farmed for xp and big pumpkins. I did not leave the game over the change, but a lot of people did. I do not think that the price changes were well thought out. I still think investing money and time in something, waiting a month or so for it to mature and then having no option to make a profit is a really bad game dynamic. Not all crops are like that, but a few of them are. Before the price changes, this was not an issue. You can grow just one crop to sell to the NPC for a profit, and that is very boring. If you corrected some of these issues, you might even get players like TimeLord to come back to SOTA.

 

360 in a sum + materials and hides? I really forgot when BC cost as low as 400gp. Also there was always low supply of BC. So if about this exact change it was absurd and there was no point.

 

Things are dire when Time Lord has stopped using animated gifs.

 

Back then, you could find BC for around 200 or so, but it was back when hardened leather wasn't the only meaningful option for decent leather armor, in those days suet went for just as much if not more. The core design of the crafting system is that "crafting is not a gold faucet", I get that farmers really wish that that wasn't the case, but if the dev make the change, they might as well start selling chests that generate gold on a daily basis in the cash shop, it'd make them a quick buck and couldn't damage the economy further at that point.

 

Yeah, supple leather used to be the best until they nerfed it into oblivion.

 

Oddly, that nerf was also a stealth buff for folks 5-10 years later, probably around now. It rendered supple leather pointless for new players, but game breakingly good for players with thousands of hours of grinding in. Have they nerfed it again more recently, or are folks abusing the heck out of it?

 

I tried it again not too long ago and even with more than 400 dex, it still wasn't as good as hard leather. I suspect that the bonus is only applied against your base critical chance.

 

Supple is still king for many builds, but part of the reason is that it allows you to maintain high crit rate despite lower dex, giving the option to stack more strength. The diminishing returns on crit chance mean that stacking 400 dex on top of supple is redundant for probably any build; you need to go in the opposite direction.