A quick update on harvesting skills!

You are 100% correct IMHO! As I posted somewhere before, the difference between grinding and game play is whether you like it.

 

I personally like gathering. Although not all people will.

 

Can you explain further so I can follow the maths you did?

 

I am going to cop out on this as it is half speculative, but read fully the OP and follow it with this one later posted by Chris.

 

Ok I see what you're looking at. I'd really like to see some specifics. I hope Chris will provide a little more insight later on.

 

Looks like a soft cap of about level 80 in crafting skills unless we see higher yield than 200 exp nodes (maybe we will). For one very high level character you would be able to max 2 of each (2 gather, 2 refining, 2 crafting) and have some left over for extra gathering skills assuming you also levelled adventuring. Keep in mind that the future will see diminishing returns preventing levelling by making 10,000 mugs and the amount of points per level may get adjusted.

 

successive iterations based on singular expressions resulting in a maximum, maximum of let's say 100-250recipes, 250x250 61,500 xp just to go through the list, at best, maybe 1 level.

then median return is lessened for each iteration. So the next from actual crafting might actually only be at best, 2-3; levels from actually crafting?

plus, awesome on the nodes!

(granted these are levels 30+ not 1-10) in my example: so you'd want to craft these things asap, for maximum benefit

this is clever for test reasons to have someone make arguably 1 of everything, let's go with 100 recipes, so you spend 25k to get 100 recipes + the time to gather the mats, for a gain of 200-250; meanwhile I can go to a mine, or any place with wood, and hit it with a 50% chance to gain 200? are those numbers suspect to change as well in the future?

446 x 250 = ~100k; typical level 1-30 is about 100k.

446 x 250 = 100k gold as well

446 x 250 = for mats = time != effort

negative returns would go something like this in coding logic. That 1= is boolean logic for false.
However assuming level 5, and just starting might be somewhat viable on your early stumbling across crafting. Arguably.... very early....
y= effort attempt (+1 with each craft/more or less)
z= mats
time = u
" 446 * 250 = (z) (2 *u +1/2y " != your effort

last and final edit: interesting to note that they are punishing players that decide to sit in and craft, while rewarding in a rather disproportionate way anybody who plays farmer. While at the same time, giving a rather mighty ef yew to the crafter who has to deal with gumps from the 90's-00's. interesting.

 

this is great stuff.


Sounds to me like nobody will truly have a career leveling up as a refiner alone etc, because it wouldn't be as efficient to gain levels. That sounds like another one of those great economic/logic things that personally make me happy. This sounds like it will keep most players from being utterly self sufficient using all three alts on one account to gather, refine, and craft everything.

 

you need a bag of if-ficiency. pun standing.

 

I'm going to unblock you for that comment.

Yeah I'm speculating. Although I like to think about "potential". It is natural to establish a good strategy based upon facts, but coming up with future strategies based upon potential also has its merits.

if we ever could be self sufficient then it sort of messes up a game like this.

It seems reasonable to assume the developers want to encourage as many people as possible to settle down and focus on a single trade if they want to be a true master at that trade (OR if they want to optimize their adventuring skill points from crafting let that path be through focusing on a trade).

The reason I say that is that if they can make it so that it is just as efficient or more efficient to level crafting as a player focusing on mastering a specific trade, that would be better for shroud.

*************************************

Having a person focus on gathering all kinds of stuff is fine, but having gathering (or refining) alone could be a slower way to level (at higher levels) wouldn't be a bad thing.

I'm thinking how somebody might want to maximize their crafting potential for level gaining purposes. So the PvPer who wants to maximize their skill gain might not want to spend his gold on raw materials to gain crafting skill points if refining has diminishing returns on XP. If gathering and refining yield greater XP into the higher levels that is how the power gamer will do it... if choosing a crafting specialty and focusing on gathering specific materials, and specific refinement gains more levels at the higher levels, then that would even be better than having it be by gathering alone because now it just encouraged another person to create a finished product. In the process of crafting they might have to make stuff they won't personally use so they can try to sell those items to other players or to NPCs (which will populate a loot bank).

*******************

That's my thought on it. I'm sure anybody can gain levels doing anything even with diminishing returns, but if they make it so that players who want to get the most skill points faster doing it a certain way ... then we can expect powergamer type players to do it that certain way.

Also if the player's goal is to make their main character the best PvPer possible with the most skill points possible, then they might not use their second and third alts to craft as much because they might want all the XP on the one character IF that is the most efficient way to gain XP.

SO maybe it won't make the use of the alts useless, but there is the potential that they might cause some players to want to specialize on their main character. I don't know.... this is a tough one. Regardless the little post made me feel better and that's all I care about right now.

 

I am going to master everything and nobody can stop me.

 

When the server breaks, I think we know who to be looking at :3

 

TLDR; man this guy can rant. Gathering sucks, if this is what crafting will be like, no thanks.

DISCLAIMER: Don't read this as I have an "angry" tone. Just surprised and frustrated that any thought of dabbling in crafting is a bad idea. I'm not likely to read replies to this anytime soon, I don't get by the forums much, but if I notice and I feel up to it, I'll reply. I just want to put in my two cents, and the following post is quite a rant that might come of is OMG I'M SO PISSED I QUIT, but it's not. It's a rambling rant which I try to make points, accented by my frustration.


Here's the deal from what I have seen. Iron node in an easy area, high chance to succeed with 3 points in success chance. 1-3 ore maybe.
Graff Mines, I hit an ore node about 20 times (give or take 20) and I get 2 ore. This was painful because of the super long mine time (20 seconds maybe, I didn't time it, but it felt like it). My thought, hey, if it's taking this long, lucking out will give a great payout. Nope, just a big "lulz" from the node after wasting all that time AND durability on my pick. Same with a copper node in a shard fall. It's copper, it's not different copper. WHY would it be harder to extract. Makes 0 sense. <1 percent chance, so I didn't bother with it, but I assume based on the ore payout, it would have been 1-3 bits of ore.

Deep Ravenswood, copper node, 5-10 mine time, 1 copper, 1 tin, 1 zinc. NOT worth it. If the idea of avoiding any kind of grind was the original design thoughts of the game (along with no classes/levels skill based system which we kind of have), where did it go.

What is the point of longer times on the same type of ore, if the output is the same. If time is the penalty, the reward should be more.

Easy game design question for any feature you implement:

"Is it fun?"

If the answer is yes, it probably should be there.
If the answer is maybe for someone who likes watching a progress bar to get the same results. It probably needs to be adjusted.

I get the idea behind the speed/success/chance for bonus skills. But they seem more like a triple punishment to slow down resource gathering, which already seems slow to me (keep in mind I haven't been a crafter, but I have almost no desire to do it right now because of how painful gathering is. If the actual craft skills then turn it into more RNG punishment, on top of time, then I have even less interest.

I know someone is going to say, "but yeah, that's why the people who SUFFER THROUGH IT will be the master crafters and you just don't have what it takes". I guess so, if the way to gate the amount of crafters is to make the process mind-numbingly boring, mission accomplished. But honestly it's terrible game design IMO.

I also know that I will hear the "but yeah, it's in testing, they'll tweak it, etc." They'll only tweak it with feedback, and my feedback right now is kill it with fire.

As I've been killing stuff, leveling up to 20ish, I've been harvesting. I may have 30 copper ore. What is that, 7 ingots/bars. Even if I skipped the hunting, what is my recourse, go into an area, harvest 3 nodes and leave and come back. Does that even work. And if it does, how does that even make sense. Now, I will say my being a noob in game probably is keeping me from knowing of the "such and such copper mine of Antioch, beware of Rabbit." But as it stands right now as a noob, the most I've thought about crafting is repair kits, but after seeing how long it's taken me to get 4 iron ingots (I could probably make 8), it's easier to kill stuff for money to buy them for 200 a pop from an NPC. If this becomes a player only sold item, I expect the price to go into the 1000s, like everything I see on vendors right now.

And I'm sure part of that is that the economy isn't really there yet, maybe there is something you're going to tweak to make it better, but if it takes hours to gather enough to make one weapon, I can now understand why it costs anywhere from 2-15k for one from the vendor. I feel lucky that I nabbed a 2handed flaming sword for 3.5k, which was about half of what I have made since I started playing this release.

Sorry for the long rant, but man, it's painful right now, IMO. Way painful. And if that's the intent, great. Can't wait for money making to get completely gutted so it becomes nearly impossible for those who want a house to have one.

 

Everything seems pretty perfect as planned as far as crafting goes. Deep ravenswood, Graff mines, Spectral mines and mysterious swamp all very high yield areas.

 

Hi Sir Nicolli lol. It is ok to rant, we all do it sometimes. I don't think gathering is fun at the moment or even that interesting. At first with the new gathering line being so so so slow, I was like what? then it was sped up, but sitll it is not interesting to have a line move to show success, what about chipping away at a piece of ore with the correct sound effects for that and the failure sound effects also. Well it is still early, so I will keep looking for examples myself. Thank you for your thoughts.

 

Level one mining high level area bad, level 30 mining high level area good.

 

He said he wouldn't likely respond to anything, but I found one thing he said that really stuck out to me.

A but should not be taken lightly especially in a forum full of gamers.

 

FTFY