Response to Crafting Deep Dive

Magical enchantments are a bit different. If a non-mage is trying to repair an enchanted blade ok. I can see a little more loss. Complete loss though is neither fun nor practical. Material goods just don't vanish into thin air.. thick air.. or any other kind of air.

The type of loss I would imagine would be from chips, splinters, unusable small parts like beat up wood pieces, worn leather straps etc.

Speaking of enchantments and salvage brings to me the question.. could you magically salvage/store enchantments or components used to hold enchantments in place? I suppose that would depend on how enchanting functioned in the first place.

I don't especially care for transferring enchantments unless it's done physically.. such as reusing a physical component that holds the enchantment (ie the blade or gem) to build a new item.

 

i would like to expand on your post

what if a system does this:



blacksmith makes normal sword ( blade & hilt)
blade gets enchanted with X ability

later on player decides to salvage sword

but because sword is magical, salvaged metal from blade = metal with X ability

in that way you do not limit transferring enchantments to physical components as a whole ( reusing literally the same blade every time until it gets removed somehow) while still keeping the transfer physically

this also makes combining of abilities a lot more interesting as a process

also breaking the sword up in different components ( blade & hilt) gives even more flexibility to crafting, enchanting, combining different (enchanted) components

 

I think you may have lost me? It sounds like you've switched between 2 ideas midway?

My thinking is that if the component that has the enchantment loses its form then the enchantment would be lost. If the enchantment is on the blade for example and the blade is melted down during salvage then you should lose the enchantment.

Salvage should at least be able to break items down into the components used to build the item. Since a sword recipe uses a blade and a hilt for example.. keeping one or the other through salvage should be possible. Likewise you should be able to retrieve gems or other components to be reused. Especially if the component doesn't normally take damage.. such as gems.

If an enchantment were on a blade or gem and those parts were salvaged then it doesn't make any sense to lose the enchantment. Of course if the enchantment is on the item as a whole then it's all rather moot to begin with.

 

aha now i understand, you can safely ignore my post as lost you indeed

 

Eventually, as the item wears through use and the cost of repair goes up, we'll need to make the decision of when to salvage.

Those players who will not be crafters may wish to sell said item to the crafter for a small fee. Depending on how enchantments are implemented the crafter may be able to salvage the enchantment ( if of a high enough skill ) and return the enchantment to the seller for use in his or her next item.

However, enabling this will eventually shrink the demand for alchemists at the high end if the enchantment itself can be salvaged/re-used over and over again. Thus I would prefer that the enchantment(s) disappear along with the item being salvaged.

 

I like the idea of salvaging materials from an item, but the only area it might not make sense is cooked food.

 

I hope they have a cap on how many resources can go into repairing an item. What's the point of having a sword that says it killed 1000 elves if it requires you to spend more resources to repair it than it costs to make the sword from scratch. I can't imagine that would be a good thing.

Also if you find the item on a monster "recovered from the economy", then will it be back to fresh stats or will it cost 10K gold worth of materials to repair it every time you repair it. I would hope that the weapons we find would be good quality and not be broken. A broken and expensive to repair item isn't much of a prize.

I understand they want to keep people going back to crafters, but I hope there is another solution than making this old sword still worth being repaired especially since it has such a long history.

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Then there are mace fighters. For one their skills will wreck weapons and armor before being able to loot it. Also if you meet a mace fighter in PvP they will wreck your weapons, and/or armor. If it costs more to repair your items each time then we are looking at nobody wanting to even fight a mace fighter in PvP. People might just flea immediately! Not fun for the mace fighter, and surely not fun for the guy getting hit by the mace fighter.

(I don't think they should change the mace fighting skills. Those are great as is! I really like mace fighting as it stands. However I hope they reconsider just how costly repairs will get).

REPAIRS SHOULD NOT REQUIRE TOO MUCH EXTRA MATERIALS TO REPAIR. IT'S JUST A REPAIR. Maybe it might have to go back through the refining process "some times", but I don't see it being that good to have greater repair costs just for the sake of "economy".

 

I don't want to derail this thread, but I have to mention it because it makes good sense. Full loot in PvP would provide a reason for people to keep returning to crafters. Then we wouldn't need to have such high repair costs. PvPers would then have to buy two of every suit of armor and weapon at least. That would resolve the issue.

However this isn't a PvP debate. I was just stating this to show how that would resolve the issue even if only one tenth of the playerbase even PvPed. Those would be return customers.

 

Eventually that sword blade cannot be sharpened further or that piece of armor that was banged up six ways from Sunday repaired. I personally do NOT want that sword or piece of armor to appear in some monster loot table magically refreshed to new. It is what it is at that point - strictly a salvage item.

 

so you are in favor of items being destroyed like they were in UO in the early days, before they added the self repair properties on some items?

That makes sense. Having items wear down to the point you just throw them out, or reduce them to ingots. However that causes trouble with having player made items showing up on monsters.

 

Can humanoid monsters salvage?

If an old weapon / armor was taken by a humanoid - it would be cool if they salvaged - created other weapons of lesser quality but with a higher lifespan

 

I wouldn't mind if there were weapons or armor of slightly lesser quality that are indestructible. To me that would be a far more valuable item even if it protected less, or did less damage than other materials that show wear. It could be a utility item that you could use against earth elementals or beating against rocks.

However that would upset macers in PvP because they couldn't break such an item. However the tradeoff of it doing less damage or providing less protection, which might even it up a bit.

 

I would go for that if they had a greater chance to appear as loot in PvP upon defeat and you could not pay ransom on that ... also not too many of them in the world

 

indestructible gear/weapons even lower quality if you have a system with increased repair costs would derange the economy even further imho

 

Please forgive me for not having digested the complete deep dive as this might have been mentioned within, but I just finished watching the Captial Factory vid and in it RG talked about how they want to seed loot as little as possible, that they want player crafted stuff to fill the world as mush as possible so that (almost) every item has history attached to it.

He gave the example of a sword getting lost in a dungeon, going into a loot repository on the server, and being placed back into the game when a treasure chest needed something to fill it.

I thought that was one of the coolest, freshest ideas I've heard in a while...but then I read here about this runaway repair cost. How can they possibly implement the former and the latter at the same time?

 

Well, one way to do it is have the game reset overly repaired equipment to lower stats once they have been sold.

So :

1. You sell a 1D10 Sword that has been heavily repaired back to a game vendor.
2. The vendor "repairs" the weapon, sets its stats to 1D4, and then resets its "repairability index" back to the lowest settings
3. The game then adds the object to the loot table as a lower-end drop.

OR

Simply have the vendor delete the equipment if it is too badly damaged. That way the system becomes a sink to remove older equipment from the game, and make way for newly crafted items.

 

This is what I was thinking. Have the 'return to loot table' cut off after a certain threshold has been reached on an item. If an item is dropped, sold, or whatever is done that introduces it to the loot table once a certain point in the repair cost is reached it is erased from the system.

It is a good way to manage items in the system if they are completely removed from circulation.

 

The problem with resetting the repair costs is that the item being found in loot is one less item a crafter has to make in order to replace something else. It remains an issue of an ever increasing pool of items in the world reducing the demand for new items.

Now if players are receiving gold from vendors for items that ultimately get removed from the world then the net effect is you're getting gold for nothing. On the other hand.. the vendor could buy for salvage and inject components back into the economy. That would work.

 

you mean that essentially the vendors buy resources? ( if player sells gear to them?)

 

I would expect the game-vendor to still purchase the equipment as-is, so from the perspective of the selling player there is no real difference.

It is simply in the background that the game would break the object down into components and add those items to the economy, rather than simply outright delete the object from existence.

(Such of course only occurring for the equipment that is too badly damaged to be considered repairable by the game vendor)