1000 Kills, 1000 Crafts, And Here's My Thoughts...

As the title says, I've been on a little bit of a Shroud recently, and decided to try my hand at crafting properly for the first time... and having reached the 1,000 Steam Milestones, I wanted to give my feedback on how I've found it all.

Not all of it was done in Release 19, so some of my experiences has changed as I went along, and I'll try and indicate where.

Killing Sheep For Fun And Profit.

I began simply at first, attempting to test the R18 Achievements on Steam. To this end, I began doing laps of Owls Head, killing the sheep, chickens and pigs and then skinning them inside the player owned house opposite the Inn. Each kill counts as a monster kill, each skin as a crafting. I found this actually gave relatively decent gold as well, if you sold off all the products.

I did attempt to craft with them as well, but this was where I first discovered the horror that is the interconnected crafting system. I'll return to this later, but simply to say that it took a good 2 hours of using the wiki, locating vegetable ingredients on NPCs, and multiple sub steps of sub component crafting before I had a single plate of food. Whilst it had proven Zen like to watch my Steam figures rise, it became increasingly frustrating, and by now I wanted to actually make things I could keep!

Damnable Spiders

Here's where things began to really frustrate. You need 2 basic resources to start the main crafting trees. Ingots (Iron and Copper), and Wood (Maple and Pine). Under R18 the ore lodes were quite hard to see, but even in R19 they proved extremely hard to get at. Why? The mob spawn is just too fast, they have a huge aggro radius, and creatures will automatically run towards other creatures and bring them into the fight too. Here's an infamous example from the start of Owls Nest; this greets you the minute you zone into the area...



There is a single choppable tree to the left, some ore nodes on the right, and the odd cotton scattered around, but I would be fighting, fighting, FIGHTING for so long I never got the chance to collect them.

It was the same in Greymark Forest too, even the Stags would run towards the elves and trigger them.
Other people said they could handle it easily, but in the starter Royal Founder Plate, I'd more often end up dead than harvesting; and when you die your kills all despawn so I couldn't even loot the things I'd killed. Notice the health there; I'm Adventurer Level 30; and even at that level I just couldn't often remove the mobs easily enough to get at the resources.

I spent hours trying to find a place I could actually begin crafting; I used to deliberately trigger Ambushes because at least the monsters don't respawn... in the end, the Owl's Nest caves proved my saviour for metal at least, because once the mobs in there were cleared out, you had the entire place to yourself to mine in peace.

My Name Is Smith

Once I started being able to get at mining nodes, my crafting skill shot through the roof; in turn this allowed me to increase the productivity of my harvesting, and when R19 came, Meticulous Collection sped it up even further. Except... it still took a massive amount of time, with using the wiki, to make a single piece of armor.

I believe I started somewhere around 200 crafted items. At first I started making swords, simply to sell them on the auction house, and try and get a Village Lot deed because at that point no Row Lots had been available for weeks.

First frustration; swords unsold not only cost you money but the Auction House kept them too. Hnnngh.
I did manage to make these fine blades;



But curiously I was STILL struggling to stay alive fighting. So I decided to craft better plate armor again.

By the time I'd got a set, I'd crafted another 900 times more to get to 1100 recorded now.



That's 900 x 2 (Craft, Collect All) manual clicks on the crafting table alone for ONE set of armor. Why does it take so much? You need to craft the ingots, each one it's own crafting stage. Meticulous Collection sped up this part, but didn't remove the labour part. Then the ingots into multiple forms like sheets, which increases the amount of ingots required of course, because sheets take multiples. Then find the other resources to go into Bindings...

Here I hit a brick wall; I needed Heavy Leather, but despite killing umpty-gajillions of spiders, I hadn't seen a single Spider's Carapace. I ended up buying 3 from the auction house at the ridiculous price of 2,000 gold each, sigh.

And this brought home another agonizing element of crafting; each resource branches into multiple different components, which means the specialization works against you. If I wanted Meteroic Iron, I had to burn up all of my Iron Ingots because of the exchange rate to get it... but that meant I couldn't make either Iron or White Iron until I'd gone and mined for an hour or so again to replenish the base resources.

What's worse is that the bonuses for Armor don't track to Armor type. I wanted +Dodge and +Defence, but to get that I ended up with a White Iron Helm, Meteoric Chest, Copper Leggings... the recipes for Gauntlets and Boots weren't on the Wiki so I just stayed with Iron for those. But it meant I had to go deep into one crafting path (Meteoric) then go right back to the beginning and craft again; hence 900 odd crafted items for ONE set of Armor.

It's nice armour, look!



But still... it was hateful getting it!

And Wood was even worse; Timber is not the same as Boards and I realised too late you can't convert backwards of course. So let's talk about wood now;

I Can't See The Wood For The Trees!

This was a real pittance to locate. I went to all the forests trying to find some; Here's Greymark for instance. Got wood? You'd think so, wouldn't you?



I wandered around in the thick trees for ages trying to find it. The experts will now be giggling because there really is a lot of harvestables in that zone, but common sense said to me they'd be in the forest part. I wasted countless hours looking though and couldn't see them. Very, very occasionally they'd sparkle to indicate one was choppable.

It wasn't until I left the forests and out of desperation entered the North Valeway that I discovered on that they also have specific leaf colouration, and more importantly, stand apart from the forests. I even screen-shotted it for future recognition. Here is our first lesson;

No.1: The Larch. The... Larch.



Going back to Greymark forest then, I realised just how many trees there were to chop, but not in the forest itself; Our next lesson...

No. 3: The Larch



There's at least 5 choppable trees in that screenshot (the one centre with foliage is the type). Which whilst useful for identification does somewhat limit the seasonal effects you can have; they'll be forever autumn unfortunately. I'd much rather prefer some sort of contextual clue they're choppable (better sparkles? "Crafting sense" for your character?), have the trees mixed in with the actual forests, and let them visually change both by type (maple looks like maple, pine like pine) and season.

And look at those elves getting a kicking! Which brings us on to combat...

Gear Is Law.

I've not improved more than 1 level since the spider screenshot, but now I was able to tear through huge mobs simply by benefit of having much, much better armour. The points spent in skills, the bonuses to stats from levelling up, it was all secondary to just getting nice gear. Whilst it was PAINFUL getting it, and you could argue as it currently stands it should be amazing once you've struggled to craft it, I don't consider it good design that it is.

In particular, even great weapons weren't useful as mentioned, because the way mobs dogpile on mean ability to tank is more important. But once I had that, I could simply go AFK and let my character auto-whittle the opponents down.

Combat itself is much improved in R19. The new sound effects help, as does the sorting of skills into specific columns; but in making it easier to ignore the UI I'm not sure it leaves the card system as sufficiently new to be a major feature point. It just feels generic again. I'm enjoying the game more, but thinking about the combat less. I've given my thoughts on solutions for that elsewhere; but right now I feel functional but not revolutionary.

I've not PvPed so I've not played in an environment where skill will factor in; this is purely a PvE criticism, but as it currently stands a good set of armour makes all the difference in my ability to go places and actually engage with the wider game. Which is fortunate because...

There Is A Spoon... Fortunately

Spoon here on the forums kindly offered me a spare benefactor account for $30, and as I'd put the $10 for $10 on my account recently, I picked it up at half price for a friend who was on the fence about trying the game. I'm trying to get him to play more, because he will have a lot of great feedback for the game if he does... his best idea came whilst we were exploring Etceter for the first time.



We also had the pleasure of getting his first hat too;



Lessons from this though; whilst the /zone command is in, it doesn't make sense for a newbie why I'd suddenly vanished, and my friend asked why he didn't auto zone to me when I explained I was ambushed on the main map. The loading times too would make it difficult for him to get to me quickly if he had to wait until he could type /zone. Some sort of in game mechanism to notify players team mates were under attack would be useful.

Finding each other on even the simplest dungeon map can be tricky; In Skyrim you have the Clairvoyance spell which draws a line to mission goals, something similar here which draws a line towards team members might be a good fit, rather than UI changes.

The only other comment I could get from him in the brief time we had together was "It feels more of a game now!"

So moving on...

An Englishman's Home Is... Chore? Bah.

Just before R19 launched, I managed to get a hold of a house in... I shan't say where, I wanted to try and encourage people to find it and test the geocache chests! Someone liked that thread as I was typing this in fact, and it raised an interesting question as to needing some way to see what activity has happened with the chest (Who has opened it, how many items taken etc).

I didn't use my Ancestor home; in R19 you can still keep the house that stands there when you purchase the lot, so instead I got a free Store house, tee hee. And then I got on with the crafting and decorating.

There's a number of issues; placement of items is considerably wonky. You can put the crafting tables in such a way that although they're usable, it jams you into the walls and you have to /stuck your way out.



Item placement is curiously confined by problems you can't see; Candlesticks which I could once put on the steps of a Hot Tub, when I came to move the tub the candles now couldn't go back anywhere on the entire floor except right up against a few walls. Torches on one wall, which would sit on the middle of the surface, on one specific floor would only go near the roof; is something bleeding through from the house next door or some thing of mine nearby blocking it? I stripped the house but couldn't find a reason for it.
The Yule tree has an enormous footprint, the Darkstarr Metronome needs space both left and right beyond it's footprint to be able to be placed (one side you can understand, the door opens there, but it seems to be both sides) whilst books with text in can't go on the shelves yet, which is disappointing... I wanted to set up a mini library and bought all the books in Owl's Head, and ended up binning them to save weight.

Whilst it is nice to have a home again, I am fully aware I've got twice the floorplan I'd have even as an Ancestor. As a consequence I won't be doing even this much decorating until months into the game at launch and I can abandon the home I'm allowed to place. I've said it before and I'll say it again, the game desperately needs to focus more on the experience for the average user who won't be spending, like I have, $300 dollars on the game.

Kill The King!

Another thought that came to me in R19 is... I'm not sure the game is going to be as sandbox as we would have hoped. Some of that comes from the problem that people just can't resist throttling their own golden goose; we can't have nice things these days because you won't keep them nice. But the specific worry came to me when seeing Lord British log on; and I was idly wondering "Should I /zone to him, and see if I can kill him as is traditional in an Ultima game?"

Whilst I believe the community is decent and doesn't just badger the Devs (except the ones who misname cows, YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE) I started thinking... unless he flags for PvP, is there any actual way we could do that in Shroud? Where's the emergent gameplay? Think of the ways traditionally he's been whacked; can we do any of that here? Can we get him to stand under a sign that falls on his head, or blast him with ship cannon? I wondered if I could set my Black ships Cat on him, but unless he takes his Dev Armor off, that's not possible either.

For a Lord British game, I'm not sure yet we have any true Lord British style freedom, except that which we roleplay; "I'm crushing the King's head! Like putty in my hands!". But in reality? I don't get the UO feel I once did.

_____________________________________________________________________

And that's it for my thoughts for now! Does anyone agree with me, disagree? Over to you!

 

Very impressive write up, and I can't address all concerns, but as far as crafting goes ...

I would very much suggest to buy at least the basic recipes from the NPCs in the crafting building of owl's head.
There have been many iterations of recipes throughout the releases, and many of the web-sites are bound to be out of date.
Also, you can simply double click the recipe in your recipe book, while at the appropriate crafting station, to expedite the crafting process.

Each weapon/armor property does come from the material you choose for each line item in the recipes.
However, identical materials do not stack within the same crafted item.

For example, if a plate chest requires metal sheets, and metal bindings, you do not want to use the same metal for the 2 line items.

Constantan Sheets, and White Iron Bindings, would give you +2 Strength and +2 Dexterity
White Iron Sheets, and Constantan Bindings, would give you the identical +2 Strength, and +2 Dexterity
(But the colors would be different in the resulting piece)

White Iron Sheets, and White Iron Bindings, would give you only +2 Strength.
Constantan Sheets, and Constantan Bindings, would give you only +2 Dexterity


Also, Spider carapaces come from gathering the cotton plants, thought admittedly you would expect it from spiders.

 

Thank you for those tips; It reminds me of a bug I noticed too, if you already know the recipe, but manually enter the items into the window, it would often not give you the option to craft them... you have to click the recipe itself.

As for spiders, I did a fair amount of collecting of cotton in order to make a bed, but I didn't see a carapace, so the drop rate is still quite low I assume?

 

I've always been able to enter in recipes manually, even if I've learned the recipe in the past.

Sometimes on new releases, if there were many recipe changes, there could be bugs between the representation of the recipe (the text displayed), and it's internal workings, so if you had manually matched what it displayed, you may not get the craft button, but those would normally have been reported and fixed pretty quickly.

As to spider carapace, it is quite low drop rate, as it's the "rare" add-in for level 2 crafting of cloth and leather (Carapacian Cloth: .2 magic damage, and Hardened Leather: .2 damage avoidance, respectively).

However, you should have got some, unless you're harvesting exclusively low level cotton nodes (You can tell by the exp given for success).

It may be possible they are only on novia and not the vale, but I'm not sure of that.

Also, referring back to your original post about the effectiveness of armor being so extreme, well yes I agree. At present it may seem over powered, to rarely take much damage in heavy plate, but keep in mind that's only against the current spectrum of monsters. I'm pretty sure they intend to introduce harder monsters as development progresses, so that should balance things out some. Additionally, in PvP, the ability for the lightly armored magic user opponent to move around quickly, actually diminishes the heavy armor's effectiveness, because the melee player needs to be able to close the gap, and it can be quite difficult, especially considering some (i think chaos) magic causes the movement keys to behave awkwardly for the target of the spell.

 

I do most of my hunting in Deep Ravenswood. Can tell you're they're definitely found in the Vale.

 

They were in the desert areas of the vale too.

 

The OP delivers a true example of constructive, valuable feedback.

 

Maybe it's not the best attitude, but I find myself perpetually thinking when playing SotA: "why didn't they just take the way it worked in UO and modernize it?" I'm guessing a lot has to with the difference in game engine, but still as the old saying goes - don't reinvent the wheel.

I bring this up because I had similar reactions to Nemo with regards to crafting (which admittedly isn't fully implemented and subject to change). One of the unique and cool things about UO was the tremendous availability of raw goods - often times in perfectly safe areas. If you saw a tree, go on up and chop that sucker and get some wood (unless someone had been there already). If you see some stone go ahead and mine it! Want to make a little gold without swinging a sword? Buy some cloth, make some shirts, and sell for a small profit - all from the safety of town. In these three experiences you felt much more so the openness and responsiveness of the world around you.

In SotA, that experience is currently diminished - if you a see a tree, you cant harvest it unless it's sparkling and reddish in color. See some stone, or rocks - they're just for looks; you'll need to find that sparkly random node sticking out of the rock face, which is inexplicably being guarded by a pack of wolves. Want to make money from a little peaceful crafting? Too bad - vendors only sell required consumables, and likely every iteration of crafting reduces the value of goods (anecdotally speaking - I havent crunched the numbers). I posted more about my concerns on crafting here but have yet to get any comment or feedback.

I also agree that the monsters are a bit over the top in terms of their aggro zone, and the mob effect is kind of annoying. I guess the pipe dream for a more immersive environment would be one in which the things you fight have a reason for being there and a more natural rate of return (seriously, where do all the bandits come from? if there's an endless supply of them coming into existence why dont they take over?).

 

I agree with your general view, but I wanted to point this bit out especially; as the market will be pure player driven, it's hard to predict how it will work, but currently as it stands the experience points you gain for crafting do collapse after the second item. It goes from 250 to 45 and then quickly down. Ingots for me now only give 2-6 xp.

I got to Production Level 27, but only from the consistent 200xp gains from the mining nodes. If it weren't for that, I don't think I'd have actually been able to go deeply into crafting at all... which might mean the prices are always going to remain high, because there won't be many skilled crafters.

I just read your post in the meantime, and there is a random improvement component to the crafting process; that sword with +3 strength was from a skill check, I think. But it won't be too common because we can't spend any points in the Skill Trees for Production yet. But yes, NPCs do pay less than for the components; I asked about this in a prior Dev Chat, and this apparently is deliberate to encourage us to trade with players. I disagree with this, I think it'll make raising crafting exorbitantly expensive in either time or resources (no one is going to want to buy anything but high end, finished items so that will be sunk cost, which I expect the players to then try passing on to each other) ... but that's their thinking at the moment.

 

What I'd really like to see is some semblance of rationality behind vendors, i.e. not just magic NPC's with unlimited resources to sell and unlimited gold to buy things. It would be nice if there were NPC craftsmen who would actually use raw materials purchased from players to make the things they sell. It would be nice if they only had limited stocks and limited gold and if their stocks and gold were tied to their activities. I imagine this would be quite challenging to implement and balance, and that the work required may not result in something super impactful to the game world. But it would be novel, and pretty awesome IMO.

 

That's the ultimate design idea, from what has been said; they're only stocking those things now because they can't be found in game elsewhere yet (There's no farming, so no cabbages can be grown etc) and the wider mechanisms to support the distribution of items that are, aren't in (monsters were supposed to only have player created loot on them, but as hardly anyone is crafting, they've not coded for that yet and are focused elsewhere)...

The problem is, as I debated before when I was asking about this, is if NPCs don't pay you even the cost of the goods, and players aren't going to buy what we would call "vendor trash" elsewhere, because everyone can make their own crafters, where is this NPC market going to come from, except out of the Magic Sack? Even if they can resell the items they outright steal via the Auction House, as they do now, the NPCs have to massively overprice them at sale in order to encourage Player sales instead. But that requires the Devs making a guess at what the upper price the player market can bear, to ensure they don't undercut it; whilst the players will be wanting to claw back a lot of the investment they made to get to the level to produce the swords they're selling, so they'll be massively overcharging.

It's possible, but I have serious doubts about the economic model working as currently perceived.

 

I think you're right that only having players and vendor NPC's transacting would be insufficient for a workable economy. I think what's needed is a large population of generic NPC's to add life to the world, all of whom consume and produce things. Even if they are somewhat invisible (i.e. their consumption and production occurs only on tables behind the scenes not in the actual game world).

A basic example might work like this: the town blacksmith can produce several types of widgets each day based upon his skill level. Some of those widgets could be basic components used in crafting (like ingots / bindings) and some could be things useful to other NPCs. The blacksmith would have a quota of how many raw materials he buys each day based upon what he can produce, what's in stock, and what he's previously purchased. Players could purchase crafting related items essentially at cost and achieve savings in time required to craft those things. Other NPC's would have a set of needs to fulfill (perhaps based on daily/weekly/monthly cycles) and would purchase the blacksmiths widgets related to their needs. They would have their own profession with similar inputs / outputs allowing them to produce and consume things.

Now, entire games are built around nothing but that kind of concept, so maybe it's too big for SotA, but still nice to imagine

 

A few notes. There isn't enough of a system yet to be overly concerned. We're still only seeing a small piece of a much bigger picture.

UO was much simplier technology. We can't simply chop down any ol' tree because those trees aren't specifically designed to be chopped down. Unless you want EVERY single tree in the game to be the one used now, someone has to spend the energy building trees that will fall. Similiar issue with mining any ol' stone. The tech is a lot more complicated now and that means time and money.

The current thinking behind the market is ALL will be supplied by the players.. even NPC stock which will be pulled from the world. You find a weapon in the dragon's horde.. it was made by a player.. you find raw cotton from the NPC tailor.. a player went out and picked it.. maybe they picked that cotton, got killed and an NPC bandit came around and looted it.. now it's in the world pool and that's where the tailor got it. The game won't be generating an unlimited supply of raw material directly from vendors.. someone has to go get it.

There are two major drawbacks to this kind of thinking though and unfortunately they skew general perception.

1. Player's tend to be greedy and it always seems more often than not that they will always over charge. There is however always a few serious business like players who are reasonable.. but the fewer players there are the fewer reasonable merchants there are as well. Which leads to the next problem..

2. It's pre-alpha.. which means there are fewer dedicated players overall and fewer still to support a working economy. The current thinking requires a significant player base with enough players to go out and participate in the system. Prices will remain high until enough people go out gather materials to sell in order to bring those prices down. In theory at least, after launch this will be a much smaller issue.. more players will come in with more incentive to engage in the system as there won't be any more wipes.

Proper balance of crafting is the key here.. as well as establishing a good balancce of monetary value. If people feel like gold isn't very valuable.. prices will always be high and the prevailing attitude will support inflation. A lot will depend both on the availability of raw resources and currency.

The deliberate devaluing of finished goods as I heard it.. was intended to prevent mass production of finished good for resale back to vendors. The notion has one tragic flaw.. in that in order for that to work.. you have to devalue everything.. not just the final product. Take wood for example.. rather than selling a bow made with hard maple.. I make hard maple bindings instead and sell those for a tidy sum.. Which is just what people will do.. make the most expensive components and sell those instead of weapons and armor. So the intended result is not met. But devalue everything and you're right back where you're started with the final product.

 

You're right Bowen that we can't see much of the system for now; but the idea sketched I think is going to be extremely hard to balance correctly. Let me try and explain what I mean.

Let's take an Iron Ingot as the basic unit for now. There are two ways a player may, in general, try and ascribe a value to such an Ingot.

1.) The price an NPC will buy it for, as the minimum price they'd sell it for in any setting.
2.) An attempt to apply a value to their time, probably what they could have earned in the same time doing something else, and say an Ingot is worth that much gold.

Let's just say for now the NPC offers 100g, and that if a player spent as much time killing Elves or whatever, he'd gain 100g too; so both values lead a player to giving the value of 1 ingot as 100g.

Here's the first consequence of the intended design; if that was the case, a player would always sell to an NPC, because with both values being 100, that sale is easier, especially if the NPC demand doesn't fluctuate at all. You know where they always are, and you can sell when you're ready too. So the value an NPC has to offer must be substantially lower than 100 (remember we're dealing with abstracts here) to make them unattractive... Indeed what we can see in game already is that the prices of finished goods being sold to an NPC is lower even than the cost to buy the subcomponents of that item from the same NPC. You're not supposed to be making money selling to NPCs by design. So let's say the value of an Ingot to an NPC buying is 2 instead of 100.

Which leads to the second consequence; in order to keep the players buying from each other, the NPC selling the Iron Ingot has to do it for massively more than the 100g the player expects. And here's the catch; How much more? Ridiculously more is all we can say for certain, because real people are strange things, and may put a lot of value in not dealing with those sweaty, hairy player Smiths if they can avoid it. So the price has to be truly punitive to be certain player to player transactions look attractive. So 1000? 10,000 per ingot? Let's say 1000 for now.

And this is where we hit the first design problem; if the prices to buy it from NPCs are punitive, what is to stop the player who has ingots on their vendor selling it at not quite as punitive prices? How about 999 per ingot? We can assume competition will lower prices, but if the player base is small, it may just as easily fall under the sway of a player cartel who fix prices... or just a market scripting Bot, which even the biggest games like WoW get hit by now and then, which buys all the ingots and re-lists them at 999. The main limitation then is how much the market is prepared to pay.

Which is roughly set by that gold per hour figure again. If ingots on the player market are at 999 (remember, you'd still pay 1,000 from an NPC) but the player only earns 100 per hour from elf-whacking... instead of fighting for 10x the time, aren't they more likely to just go and mine the ingot themselves, and thus save the money and time? And as we can all be both fighter and crafter, why not just craft everything you need? Especially if you can have your own name as a Crafter's Mark on the resulting goods. So the purchaser is, in general, only likely to want to buy ingots for convenience or if the price goes below 100 and they make a saving from what they could do for themselves. And in that case, why would the crafter sell at what is a loss to them, compared to what they could have earned going elf-whacking instead?

The only way it makes sense is if some people don't actually want to do their own crafting. Which is the case right now, but only because it's such a miserable grind to do. But I'm not sure, outside of a general ignorance of what the production time of an Ingot actually is, where the player market for somebody else's ingot will be. In the early years of UO crafters were unique, but later on all the dedicated players had their own mules on their account because they'd worked out it was easier and cheaper that way. In Shroud
that logic is apparently going to be built in right from the start... so I expect everyone to be their own producer and consumer. And I'm not sure it's going to work out as planned... which will be a disaster if the loot on monsters and everything else is tied to a player economy that never takes off. After all, if no one is selling to NPCs, where is the loot supposed to come from?

We'll see... but I only hope this is something the Dev Team are really thinking hard about. Sorry if this got a bit confusing, writing it at 3am after a long hard day... But I think I illustrated roughly what I mean, even if in too prolix a way!