All About Crafting - a Necro post ressurected to be rehashed forever

That makes absolutely no sense to me.

IRL, a Painter that really enjoy painting should sell paintings for dirt cheap just because he enjoyed painting it?
A Woodworker that sell you a customized table that he spend hours on, should sell it to you dirt cheap cause he enjoy being a woodworker?

This is a game, yes, but the goal of most MMO games is to make Money to get the stuff you want. Crafters included.

There is a good solution, and the solution is *NOT* To be able to be both a top tier fighter AND a top tier crafter. It makes everyone self sufficient.

 

Actually many painters can't sell their stuff at all since painting, like playing SOTA, is something people do for enjoyment. The supply is always greater than the demand. For this very reason, if you look at arts and culture related activities in general people tend to work for comparatively low pay or even for free. You need to be better than others to make money while in other more boring/laborous fields you get payed for just putting in the time.

Edit: Also in the real world, there is actual talent separating people which enables some to make money on what they enjoy, while in SOTA, it's just a matter of the time you spend.

 

Yes you may enjoy that, but when i come home from work i dont want to go back to working, grinding for minimal resource and exp, Unlike you i do not enjoy crafting its not fun to me, i enjoy going out and killing things, even that is minimal fun becuase i have to grind so long to get stuff i need.

Perfect scenario would be i come to your vendor buy crap go out and kill stuff, in return you ask me to grab some resources for you (for a price) while im out, now we both are making money your enjoying what you do and im enjoying what i do. I cant see how that would effect one or the other when we both are enjoying what we personally enjoy. (now you have a player run economy for real)

 

Yeah forcing specialization would probably make the economy work better. But I think chosing between crafting/fighting might not be enough. Dedicated players could easily have two accounts. Maybe if every account can only chose a single skill tree with bonuses. But it kind of goes against the idea of the game, and would probably be disliked by many because it would feel too restricting.

 

or you could have one character that is a crafter and one that is an adventurer, i have 2 characters one is a fighter, the other a guinea pig/ semi RP/gatherer/crafter. when i get bored of killing things over and over i use my other character to craft/experiment on/gather/semi rp etc..etc..

 

If you don't want to craft, it kind of already works as you described. You can sell your resources and buy cheap gear from the crafters. We know that crafting is not profitable, yet a lot of people level the skills and keep crafting, so there must be plenty of players who unlike you enjoy it. If everyone role played a character that hates manual labour maybe we would get a more realistic economy.

 

Personally i work long hard days, and when i come to home relax i dont go right back to work. I buy my stuff from others already, but some of you crafters charge stupid amounts of gold to craft decent items, which means i have to go grind my ass off or make it myself, not fun for me. This game was built for people like yourselves crafters, not so much for adventurers, the crafters as is can put any prices on any items they want, we still as adventurers have the same amount of gold making ability as we always have we cant just say "this time ill make 35000 gold" so i can get that piece of crap item i wanted from the vendor that charges outrageous prices! Thats the difference you will always make what you make in gold we do not. Something is definitely wrong there

 

this game was built for the crafter not the adventurer and yes thats my opinion and why i tend to go to other games and play them. I keep playing this game cause i was stupid enough to kickstart it and have invested more money in it than any other game. That and friends i have here are the only reason i am still here, i am not dedicated to this game cause its fun (its not) im dedicated to this game because i spent way too much on it hoping for something better.

 

I'm pretty sure I'm one of the highest blacksmiths in game at the moment and I very very rarely sell armour. The issue isn't that you have to keep lowering prices, the issue that the RNG gives you things that are undesirable and therefor, won't sell unless its dirt cheap. If you are making high end tank gear and after 2 masterworks and 2 enchants you get something like Focus on it....

Costing by material simply doesn't work, example:
+10 Plate chest piece with +10 str, +9 dex, + avoidance
VS
+10 Plate chest piece with +20 focus, +25 health, heavy armour focus cost.

Both use the same materials and both are vastly different. One will sell, the other will sit on a vendor gathering dust for months even if priced at only 2k.

 

where and who is your vendor? Pitch your shop, ill come there and buy stuff, ill add on my places to buy stuff list! if its overpriced i wont just saying!

 

I have a vendor in Serenite but its not stocked. The cost of materials are so high that just stocking whatever random items I happen to get isn't worth it.
I usually do pre-ordered work where someone will ask for x, y, z and I'll go get 2k ore and make items to order.

 

This is an interesting theory and certainly encompasses "part" of the problem, however, the "race to the bottom" is an effect, not a cause, of a poorly designed economic system.
Crafters can't make any money because the materials are worth far, far more than anything you can make out of it. Why? Because it takes hundreds (if not thousands) of ingots to try and make the piece of gear you want, due to an extremely high breakage rate, even at grandmaster levels, and due to the RNG forcing players to accept mediocre gear or "try try again" ad nauseum. Just the other night we blew through over 1000 copper ingots as well as hundreds of silver and gold ingots to get one single decent set of gear, and even that wasn't perfect, but good enough. I'm not going to itemize the monies spent on coal, straps, mandrake, etc. It isn't cheap.

There is no way anyone would pay the material value of this gear. Why? Because its DISPOSABLE. That's right! The awesome gear that you can spend hundreds of thousands in materials to make, is going to be junk after a few weeks' use. Now, if you are a consumer, are you going to pay top dollar for something that has a 1 month warranty after which its junk? Of course not. And that's the problem.

Removing the ability to keep Coto-ing gear back to full durability SEEMED like a good idea to "help" crafters but the reality is that its had the opposite effect. People MIGHT pay a premium for a nice piece of gear, if doing so made that piece of gear theirs forever, that gear slot was taken care of, no longer to be worried about. Sadly, this isn't the case, and the trend is that people will buy cheaper, crappier, "good enough" stuff to go fight in, saving the really nice things for things like pvp tourneys. I myself have a full set of "nice" gear sitting in a box that I don't wear except to special occasions, and I'm a crafter!

Where your "race to the bottom" fits into this scenario is here:

Crafters cannot make money selling their wares, they are better off selling materials
Crafters end up making a bunch of crap to level up the skills.
Junk is put on vendors at rock bottom price to try and recoup something, anyting, because crafting is a giant cash sink that must be fueled by adventuring monies. A crafter has to afford to be an adventurer and dump hundreds of thousands of gold into levelling their trade. So yeah, if they can sell a piece of gear "worth" 50k in materials for 5k, well, that's better than nothing. The salvage system isn't an option, you'll get 16 gold worth of metal scraps so that's pointless. And there's only so much low end gear you need to give away to new guildmates.

The easiest solution is LET PEOPLE MAKE WHAT THEY WANT.
Stop with the RNG, if you let people choose the silly bonuses it will reduce the amount of junk gear considerably. It would also allow people to custom craft a set for customers instead of ending up with piles of junk that you try to recoup cost on.

Cause, yeah, if I end up with a pile of crappy gear that didn't go right?
Its going on my vendor for a steal
And if it doesn't sell
I reduce the price
Because I need it to GO AWAY

 

I do not think Crafters charging too little is the main issue. The main problem is that gathered materials are way more expensive than they should be.

 

Things i see suffering in sales are completed gear and deco.

Things i dont see suffering right now are raw materials and consumables.

 

Right because the raw material prices are driving the break even on crafted materials too high for the market to bear. Players need to stop paying too much for raw materials.

 

None of this really holds true because ALMOST everyone has to gather their own materials to craft. Raw prices are simply too high AND the producer experience you get gathering your own stuff is actually mandatory to progress (You cannot progress in crafting by ONLY crafting is what I'm getting at). So we have a situation where there is minimal "cost" to these people outside their time and at which point what they sell stuff for is their own business.

You're entirely barking up the wrong tree telling people they're pricing stuff wrong. You need to address the BASE problem that is crafting, in its entirety, before anything in your ideal economy here can come to fruition. The system itself is broken as you CANNOT be a crafter without being a producer and that nixes your entire argument.

 

It is far more profitable to sell raw materials than anything you can craft from them. I only craft in hopes that someday it will be worth it.

When pricing crafted goods, I start with the cost to produce and mark up for the effort spent. Prices are a direct result of market values for raw materials.

 

Unfortunately, undercutting is a way of life and not controllable in MMO economies.

 

That about sums up the crafting "system".

 

There was a text MMO I played back in the '90s (others here may have heard of it) called Gemstone. As I vaguely recall, enchanting items would take days, with each step (additional plus) taking longer than the one before.

Oh hi, Google... (the game is still around so of course there's a wiki now)
https://gswiki.play.net/Enchant_Item_(925)
https://gswiki.play.net/Forging

So basically, for enchanting, you prepare the item, wait a few days (yes, days), then make an attempt at improving it. Failure means a delay in the process, restarting the current step, or a complete reset of all progress on an item, but no blow-ups. This is entirely based on the same magic skills as used for combat, so no training. As I recall, it was common to commission someone to enchant an item for you.

It also has an item creation (forging) system with blow-ups. As I recall, it had no resource harvesting system, so all materials were bought from NPC vendors, and maybe sometimes rare mob drops. Some materials were harder to work (and presumably more expensive and different durability) than others. It seems that the better materials were geographically distributed, so you had to go farther for the better stuff. Skills are raised by talking to training NPCs who (IIRC) have you make them stuff, which they dispose of, so junk doesn't go into the general economy.


SotA uses a model closer to how FFXI works (other games too I'm sure, but that's the one I'm familiar with) where you raise skills by making items on your own, then you end up with a pile of junk that cost you money and resources to make, but they are actual items that can be sold. This ends up as either useless vendor-bait junk (in FFXI, stats are mostly from item type alone, almost everything you can craft is crap, and loot drop gear is usually better anyhow, so all you can do is vendor it) or low-spec semi-usable junk which depresses the crafting economy by producing an excess by at least an order of magnitude of supply over demand.

So there's an example of a system that doesn't flood the market with junk, and makes players have to take real time to make the best gear.