Crafting? When is it going to become - Interesting? Creative? Innovative?

At this time it is one of the saddest parts - it makes grinding away for exp points look like fun.

Fist of in order to work up the Exp points needed to be viable and worthwhile you have to burn and completely waste tons of resources. Also along those lines if you do not gather you have basically NO chance to be a plain old crafter?

But worse is the fact that is nothing but a click / wait / grind to convert resources and the numbers needed are just plain wonky.

It takes more than 2 minutes and 30 seconds to convert hides to leather 20 times this uses up 2 Hides and 1 Curing Salt to make one leather piece (which is basically useless in itself) Now sitting in my chest at the house is over 2500 hides. SO in order to convert this to something that still take 2 - 4 times longer and at least 4 time more resources to make something usable it would take me basically 53 HOURS of actually converting them not to include the time to click the 20 items buy more salt when needed . . . .

This is just plain I N S A N E

this is doing nothing but making plain Leather - Plain Leather??

Come on ?

You are going to end up with a game which has Awesome looking PvP worlds and in depth content but no one around.

Time to put 1/2 as much effort being put forth in that aspect to some of the core aspects of the game.

 

Coming soon to the addon store or in game with cotos, purchase the ability to speed up crafting times!

 

Actually I like the crafting system.

 

If you have time, what do you like about it Atogrim?

I play 3 MMOs right now and it's interesting the radically different approaches to crafting, at least as far as i am willing to invest my time ..

ESO: I craft a lot and have a specialist gatherer crafter. Hardly any of my gear is worth my characters wearing due to reward drops and gear set bonuses.

BDO: Crafting is a 'meta' activity associated with your account, not characters who just get on with the story. If you want a boat or a good horse, house deco, or just about anything you really have to make it. Gear however again seems associated with character rewards and not crafting

SOTA: crafting is at the character level, it's old school and traditional, and fine by me, it's just one way of doing it. This means grinding resources, which can be a bit dull, but I see the Devs are trying to make acquisition of rares a bit of a challenge, that could be fun eventually and to groups probably already fun.

For me making stuff is the issue. As the author of this thread says, as a character level activity, crafting consumes loads of game time gathering and processing. I have spent a lot of time gathering and crafting and really none of my gear is wearable on my characters, it costs far too much with the high failure rates to create anything useful. It's a heart breaker to get a sword to level 6 just to have it disappear in a puff of smoke trying to get to 7.

Some folks manage it, clearly. I'm running with weapons up around 10+. I can only suggest, with some envy and resentment I admit, that as with much in SOTA, you have to be rich enough to burn the resources needed to get to an 11+ sword, and even richer to make them in quantities to put excess production on the market.

To get this amount of coin you have to have property and have NPC tradesmen, at least one probably selling COTOs. I don't own property, I won't own property under the current pricing policy, it's not that I can't own property, It just my personal investment principles right now and I live with that.

In living with that I also accept that as a non property owning SOTA player currently I enjoy about half the potential of the game.

 

Will come back to you when i am back from work.

 

I wanted to became pure crafter after persistence but at some point I had to let go this idea just because crafting is tied to adventuring so much. You have to rise combat skills to gather stuff.
And you can't earn exp and level up just by crafting. You have to gather stuff to keep your XP pool at high levels.
Gathering skill number one is mining, just because silver and gold is used in all masterworking recipes.

It is impossible to sustain your crafting business without commission free vendor. As there are not enough buyers atm and because there is no demand for low level and mid level stuff.
Purchased once top level gear can be repaired by anyone and sustained for months or years. So people rarely come back for new stuff.

I would get rid mastercraft rng systems and tedious time sinks. At the same time ways of loosing your gear after death (full loot anybody?) are needed for quicker gear rotation and higher profits for crafters.
Crafting skills should remain hard to train.

Just make crafting great again

 

I asked about Meticulous Refining for next week's livestream.

It would be nice to get refining skills in to address demand for resources since supply is going to be harder to get from now on.

 

So, let me clarify something first.
The topic Weins choosed has nothing to do with what Weins is ranting about.

He is ranting about the material use in the actuall iteration of crafting and the time needed to farm materials and produce things.
And in the end he is ranting about a PvP world...which isn't there but that's a different can of worms i am not going to open.
Connection to his own topic? Somewhere?

I like the crafting system because this is one of the few games out there where crafting actually matters.
Take a look at WoW. Crafted things are usually worth sh** because everything gets replaced with the first green item that drops.
The stuff that would be worth crafting forces you to endless grinding because you need 20 items of x out of raid z (which drop once a week). Yay!

Stuff i carft here can actually put to good use. By myself, by others. Even a +0 Pine Bow i craft is valid for farming runs. That's actually pretty awsome.
I can produce furniture for myself and others. Armors i produce are valid. And so on.

Do we have a problem with the market at the moment? Yes.
Is the material cost to high? I am not sure. I still think that's a part of the overall market problem. But let's stick with another "yes" for the moment.
Is crafting too time consuming? In my opinion: no. Crafting can only be a valid profession if it eats up some time. But i guess that part could need some finetuning as well.
In other words: i can partly agree with the rant.

What grinds my gear is the fact that they made another gold sink out of the recipe part of crafting. I liked the discovery idea. If they were disturbed by the fact that you could read up all the recipes in the interwebz i would have made a minigame out of it so that every discovery process is different.

 

Unpopular opinion here, but frankly Portalarium has X amount of dollars left and any of that spent on improving the experience of sitting in a corner stroking a piece of wood isn't spent making the game better for the majority of players. Heck, the majority of players would probably be better served with a traditional drops + NPC vendor system as opposed to the system where adventurers are forced to serve crafters that many folks keep proposing.
Maybe if Portalarium had another 20 million to play with, then they could create the bizarre chimera that you are proposing, but making a solid action/adventure RPG should take priority over a Gordon Gecko simulator.

 

Clipped alot out of your post because I want to expand on ESO crafting. First, it is not a crafting game, everyone can do everything fairly easily. Crafted gear with the proper sets is perfectly viable as long as it is improved. Basic whites are useless. Crafting is used as much for improving dropped gear as for making new gear. That improvement can make an item go poof but here is the thing. You are told the odds of failure upfront and can spend more materials to reduce the odds (to 0 eventually).

The only reason that is true in SOTA is because the NPCs don't drop anything but vendor trash. Rely on NPC drops in SOTA and you will have a rusty weapon, a splintered bow with no arrows and no armor. If you stick with it long enough you might eventually get a necklace.

SOTA took the endless gear grind of WOW and turned it into an endless material grind. In the process the fun and challenging group content (raiding) was eliminated.

 

I actually partly agree.
Fixing the economy would help crafting a lot and would cost not even 5% of the time and cash a new system would need.

 

WHAT! This isn't your primary job? ;-)

 

I tried getting paid for my hobby. It's more stress than you would expect ;-)

 

I was telling my husband last night that at this point I wouldn't classify this as either an adventure or crafting rpg, but as a really slow turn-based strategy game where in-between turns we get to spend a few days roleplaying manual labor tasks instead of being able to assign them to a personally owned population of loyal peons.

That's not meant quite as negatively as it sounds because I also happen to really like slow turn-based srategies and would find a good MMO version of one appealing. But I definitely understand that's not likely to be as satisfying to others who had expectations otherwise. But since this is about crafting, I'll stick to a few succinct thoughts about that.

Gameplay-wise, if something more innovative isn't forthcoming, I'd rather have something like the crafting/house-building/mercantile experience we had in UO or the responsive tables+Far Seas crafting quest lines of EQ2.

Beyond gameplay, I forsee a hindering conflict with the choice of thematic setting that probably needs addressing before a solid foundation can be put into place. Mixing swords and sorcery with steampunk would be something that could be handled storywise in a single player adventure, but in a game with a multiplayer economy, the logistical ramifications hit too hard to maintain suspension of disbelief that this can magically work out in a way that's not going to cause a lot of civil strife and upheaval.

Right now the apparent experience is a lot like feeding mats into a machine with the appropriate punch card to produce your desired goods. Machines don't have the dynamic capabilites of humans to work with natural variations in materials on a case-by-case basis, so stuff breaks or isn't worked to its highest potential in the process, so cookie-cutter profit-loss equations form to offset waste with efficiency.

That's actually totally thematically appropriate given the lore we have now (other than one particular point of imbalancing incongruity that such mechanization hasn't been equally applied to harvesting disciplines where the time and labor savings would be even more profitable), but in real life terms it causes a product-market mismatch.

Most people that want to pay for crafting environments don't want to roleplay factory-style technologies, and instead often want to be playing the handcraft artisans that such technologies subsequently obsolesced and impoverished. Sticking with that course threatens their virtual lifestyle without offering a satisfying replacement, so the more likely reaction is to rebel rather than adapt.

From this point of view, a meaningful change will probably necessitate giving some attention to better integrating lore with player experience and expectations to either remove unharmonious conflicts or capitalize on them to provide further depth and challenge for more satisfying play.

On the bright side, this can offer some great opportunities for innovation, uniqueness, and compelling world stories, but it's probably not as simple as just adding in some new mechanics.

 

Agreed... I actually like the crafting system for the most part... and I agree with @Earl Atogrim von Draken that selling low end gear to new players isn't tough and it helps them to get started... as well as puts a few coin in the pocket for your trouble. Yes, it's a bit of a grind to get the skills up, but that's makes the successes (and sale of that successful item) all that much more sweet.

My biggest grip is the amount of materials need to craft things. I've already posted about this elsewhere, but the resources required for most recipes really needs to be evaluated and better balanced. I have to essentially clear-cut a forest to make a couple of decent bows. That's just plain silly.

 

I would prefer that the artifact system was more of a rare crafting enhancement system than a pick-up and use it system.

The worry for this harkens back to when certain excellent crafting systems were watered down...

 

I'm not sure the time required to turn 2500 hides into leather is so much a problem. How long did it take you to harvest 2500 hides in the first place?

But I agree that crafting materials required for some items are too high, its then insane having to lose them all on a failed crafting attempt, and that the process of crafting is boring and would benefit from some type of process like a mini-game.

 

I think its fun to find unique magic items in the wild, but it would also be nice to repurpose them for the crafting system. Either by enhancing the original item, or a salvage process that you could use to transfer the magical properties.

 

SOTA is the only game I have crafted in since UO, the dozen other major games I have played since I have had no interest. That includes:

EQ, DAOC, EQ2, Wow, GW2, ESO, SWG, SWoR.... etc...etc...

So in my opinion, they are doing something right.


But... I agree... it could be better (less grindy)