Classless becoming classed.

How many new users join UO per month? What percent of total users still play?
That it exists does not mean it is alive and growing. It is barely alive and certainly not growing.

Games without rewards for playing are certain to die. The OP wants to show how the game lost a huge part of its appeal, viz., that an avatar would be able to learn skills and advance without traditional ‘class’ restrictions. With that idea I was in agreement. As was every backer who shared their feelings at the LoM dinner at Lord British’s Home. It was a huge allure of the game, that you could not have a class.

The OP sees the specialized skill for adventure trees as a poor choice, and hopes it won’t be replicated as a mistake imposed upon crafting. I agree with him, and hope crafting is no so artificially regulated.

 

Stats might be interesting, but it sure is stable, and the freeshards with those systems have a steady influx of new players, our devs even visited the most popular shard for publicity because they thought it was possible to convert some of those players.

It's kind of puzzling to me because on those freeshards forums SOTA has a negative reputation, its called an EQ clone.

But anyways, one freeshard has more concurrent players than SOTA, and it feels more alive (possibly because the world is smaller and inter-dependencies are more structured)

But its kind of always been the same for Lord British games... does having a skill cap as in UO make it not classless ?

I did pvp tournaments for over 10 years in UO, and I know not two people with the same skill setup.

Those who won those tournaments weren't specialized 7x gms. In fact we rarely saw any pass the qualifications.

I agree, but at the same time I got a nagging feeling that everything is artificially regulated, mostly by the RNG, but also by RMT.

I don't see a player economy and although I'm a big fan of RG, when I hear him speak about our "features" like this classless system and player economy, I can't help but cringe big time.

Whats the goal of being classless exactly if the adventurer level and your HP count matters more than your skill selections in the end ?

We see a new type of game shape up sure... but its a game where you make your own rewards, and this isn't new.

In golden age UO, for the gm blacksmith the reward was that his reputation would become so great that he could sell his signed items for more just because of the legendary name. Also people who came to the britain blacksmith always trusted this person more to repair their precious rare items. That made other blacksmiths in competition ask themselves if they were not better to move to minoc where there were more low level crafters to share ressources with. This made the world feel more alive because players organically organised to have the most impact.

The reward became something else, and not only related to time=reward.

 

@Ahuaeynjgkxs love love love this: I would love to see this, as you wrote it beautifully

“In golden age UO, for the gm blacksmith the reward was that his reputation would become so great that he could sell his signed items for more just because of the legendary name. Also people who came to the britain blacksmith always trusted this person more to repair their precious rare items. That made other blacksmiths in competition ask themselves if they were not better to move to minoc where there were more low level crafters to share ressources with. This made the world feel more alive because players organically organised to have the most impact.”

 

I would love if the whole game followed the same premise... its hard to make some weapons and armors, you need all the mats, even fuels... its extremely realistic that you'd make one in 100 items that you'd feel is worth the exceptional stamp. Yet we turn around and for the sake of convenience we can teleport resources, not need any escort to help me move precious mats from risky regions, have remote ATMs and magic repair kits, even COTO repair kits.

So for the pure crafter point of view, I have no reason what so ever to establish a loyal relationship, its very discouraging.

 

Getting stormy in this teapot.

 

This is absolutely true. There are 218,109 Britannians according to the webpage. You talk about 13 peeps? Thats less then 0,0001 percent. But that was always the problem - even in the old days. Richard listened to minorities. Noways you see the will of ppl if they buy the game. And if it is always ignored that there are so many troubles and many went away - even if some return - then this game will never fly, prosper and pay the monthly costs of the developers. But it's ok - 13 guys are better then zero.

 

Sorry, I was convinced that your are hardcore player
I am casual too, and went similar path that you took. I wanted to be a crafter and specialise in carpentry and alchemy but ended up all over the place because of the current classless system. I had to train adventuring skills and other crafting skills to be efficient, at least to some extent.
I hope devs will make changes that will make pure crafters (with specialisation) possible.

 

lol I would never say they were useless of course.

 

If you people are worried about all that crafting and what not stuff there is an very easy solution.
PLAY THE GAME AS YOU WANT AND DO NOT CARE ABOUT OTHERS!
I play quite a lot without bothering with other people (I have not changed one word so far with anyone) and I am having a grande time. I enjoy when i manage to craft something for myself, get through an dungeon in one piece and do not compare myself to others, i just try to be today a little bit better than yesterday.
No pressure, no grinding but a lot of fun (because this is what games should be about)
No i am just wandering over the map sneaking through tier 5 passes (I am kinda tier 2ish) and explore. I have fun, simply by not giving a damm about what others do!

 

It seems like you can encourage specialization without adding a specialization skill for crafting simply by altering the distribution of level requirements for recipes. Right now, most recipes require level 40 in a skill to use and a handful are higher than that. If recipe requirements were spread out over a longer range with some requiring 100, 120, 150, that would demand specialization from 99.9% of players (but still allow the dedicated hardcore to at least try to do everything). As well, providing meaningful upgrades in skills at those higher levels would encourage specialization, and do so at a variety of gradients rather than just 'pick 2'.

This way you might strategize on being able to complete a specific supply chain to specialize on a specific item, or go all in for one type of masterwork, or be able to make all kinds of basic things but forgo lots of advanced things. You don't need everyone to be specialists to have an economy; you just need the vast majority of the population to not be completely self sufficient. I love playing as self sufficient and I still buy stuff from other players.

 

... okay.. but 13 / (generous) 1000.. suddenly its a lil more realistic.

Of the 9 people in RL i convinced to buy sota ( my normal gaming crew outside of guild ) .. 1 made it last 2 mlnths n played for about 4months..

Recently they gave it another try.. and now its 0/10 when you include me.

Personally im waiten to see their big GVG additions n maybe ill be back with maaybe thr 1 guy who played with me.


13 people isnt.. really a minority in the current SoTa community is all im saying.. since your 200k .. isnt people playing.

 

I think we should all be able to agree on a few points at this stage of the discussion:

• Self-sufficiency isn't going away. No in-game mechanic can restrict it. The rich will just buy and operate alts, pricing the poor out of the self-sufficiency game.
• The price of high end items is so high because the cost of making those items is equally high. You produce one high quality item for every 500 you make (as cited in one example).
• Prices across the board are high because the cost of gathering the resources to make them is also high. The time to acquire the resources is much higher than it was in games like UO and SWG.
• The vast majority of players can't afford to spend 500k on a weapon that will break in a month of hard use (especially with the current decay bugs).

As @mass said, there is already an inherent specialization system built in to the current skill system. The problem is the game's itemization doesn't really utilize it this way. While personally, I don't think levels belong on the recipes themselves, there should be a minimum level before you can successfully craft an item. Simply knowing the recipe shouldn't really require any skill level as far as I'm concerned, but if I try to attempt to make epic plate armor at blacksmithing level 40, I should fail 80% of the time, and my end product should be vastly inferior to the point that it's simply not worth trying. As I progress into the 100's, I acquire the skill to make the epic plate armor every time, but perhaps not always exceptional. Finally, as I ascend into the 130+ range, I gain the skills required to imbue even more additional properties on these items. This is effectively specialization.

What the newly introduced specialization mechanic brings to the equation is that all other specializations get set to unlearn while one specialization is set to learn or maintain. This effectively means that one character can specialize in only one thing efficiently, and maybe two things practically. Specializing in two things is extremely costly because you have to over-learn another specialization in order to have both specializations simultaneously. This is very inefficient.

However, as I mentioned earlier, this system isn't going to prevent the rich from being self-sufficient. It's just going to require them to be self-sufficient across a few accounts. This will just be a hassle to them, while preventing anyone else from engaging in self-sufficiency.

It seems to me that the real fix to the crafting system would be addressing the high cost, in terms of time spent, of acquiring resources to craft. The most efficient miners in the most dense mines are acquiring something like 250-300 ore per hour. Let's break down the math on that.

Let's say that you acquire 300 Iron Ore in 1 hour game time. You are a grandmaster smelter, with a 20% chance to create two ingots instead of one ingot per make. It costs 4 Iron Ore, 1 Coal, and 1 Hitpoint of Ingot Mold per make. Coal costs 6g, Iron Ore sells for ~38g, and 1 hitpoint of an Ingot Mold amounts to .5g.

One Iron Ingot cost can be totaled as follows: (1 coal * 6g) + (4 iron ore * 38g) + (1hp ingot mold * .5g) = 158.5g per ingot.

We can add a 20% discount to that price if the 20% chance to create two ingots is reliable and at GM smelting, we reliably never fail at creating at least one ingot (I don't know that either of these is true).

So our new calculation would be: 158.5g * .80 = 126.8g per ingot.

I've never seen any player vendor buying Iron Ingots at this price. The most I've seen is 110g per ingot at S Mart, which works out to the exact cost of producing iron ingots with the Iron Ingot from Metal Scrap recipe (2 iron ore, 12 metal scrap).

So, if you were to make and sell these ingots (making virtually no profit on top of what you could've received for just selling the raw materials), you can make approximately 75 of these per hour = 9,510g. That's decent. Almost 10 days of taxes on a Village Lot for an hour spent in-game. Assuming you can find someone to buy your ingots or ore.

So that established let's move on to the producer professions. Let's say that a Blacksmith buys my ingots at 126.8g per ingot, and is out to craft a simple Epic Plate Chest with 4 Masterworks and 4 Enchantments.

You load up the recipe, and you see that it takes:

• Epic Metal Chest Armor
  • 8 Metal Sheets = (8 * 386.9) = 3,095.2g
    • 1 Iron Sheet = ((126.8g * 3)+ 6g + .5g) = 386.9
      • 3 Iron Ingots @ 126.8g
      • 1 Chunk of Coal @ 6g
      • 1 Sheet Mold (hitpoint deduction) @ .5g per use
  • 4 Metal Bindings = (4 / 2 * 132.8g) = 265.6g
    • 2 Iron Bindings = (126.8g + 6g) = 132.8g
      • 1 Iron Ingot @ 126.8g
      • 1 Chunk of Coal @ 6g
  • 2 Straps (leather) = (2 / 2 * 48g) = 48g
    • 2 Leather Straps = (40g + 8g) = 48g
      • 1 Leather @ 40g (not sure what the going rate for this is)
      • 1 Curing Salt @ 8g
  • 3 Chunks of Coal = (6g * 3) = 18g
  • 1 Edged Chisel (hitpoint deduction) @1g per use = 1g

So the total cost for a strictly Iron based Epic Metal Chest Armor is 3,095.2g + 265.6g + 48g + 18g + 1g = 3427.8g.

Players are saying that they have to create 500 of these to pump out one top tier one, so that's 3,427.8g * 500 = 1,713,900g for a basic Iron Epic Chest Armor with the ideal masterworks, enchantments, and exceptional. And that's just the cost of crafting it. You still haven't made a profit yet.

If you either reduce the resource costs for making items or increase the supply of resources, the price will inevitably drop because the value of each resource will change.

TLDR; The best way to fix the crafting system is to make more resources drop. Instead of mining 300 ore per hour, we should be mining 1200 ore per hour. Apply this to all resources across the board. Resource prices drop to somewhere around 10g per instead of 40g per, and now the price of gear has been reduced by 4x. This will get more people buying and selling gear because more players will be at a point they can actually afford the gear.

Couple that with some mechanic that allows the crafter to further influence what types of enchantments and masterwork attributes they may get instead of it being sheer luck, and we could see prices fall into something reasonable. That doesn't mean those 1 in a million items shouldn't exist that cost astronomical prices. But we need to do something about the middle-tier and upper-middle-tier items prices.


Typically, the prices I'm seeing on middle-tier to upper-middle-tier armor and weapons are 10k+. Therefore, I'd have to spend roughly 1 hour per piece needed doing painstaking mining. And that is if I can find someone to buy the stuff I mined for a decent price. Also, guess what's going to happen when more and more people keep flooding the market with resources. The price of resources should fall, sure, but that also means how much money people can make in an hour will fall with it.

 

Ok... While I agree that crafting has a lot of work, and yes I talked to Port while I was onsite for the Release party event, they are aware of the issues. I spent at least 30 minutes with one of the developers who deals with crafting and I explained a LOT of my frustration with crafting. Some things they were aware of and others they were not..

Examples I used were as follows:

Recently I spent at least 40 hours of mining to obtain enough materials, or so I thought, to make a good suit of armor which is exceptional from the start (AKA +1). I used all the appropriate Rings and blessings as well. After this time I had at least 4k in iron ingots after smelting them and this was done PRIOR to the new skills as well So I now head off to make my new suit of armor (Choose Meteoric Iron) and was not going to stop until I had a complete set of 3x Masterwork AND 3x Enchant. I am GM in all MW skills and Enchanting when it applies to making these items. When I am done spending another 4 hours of crafting, I have no more iron ingots, only have 3 items completed at +14 and better and an average 3 pieces too boot. While this is the extreme, there is NO way anyone is going to pay for this because of 3 things...

First the material costs alone (Coal, Wax, Curing Salt) will be rather high and will come in at a couple thousand in gold. Lets say the crafters time is worth 1k gold per hour (which anyone can make EASILY in game) to make the suit and this is 4k and now we are at base of 6k without adding in the cost of the ingots alone.

Second there is no way for the crafter to control what is made during the enchanting / masterwork process unfortunately and this causes a LOT of bad items to be listed on the market.

Third unless you are able to craft the upper tier items, your in for a LONG road to gain experience.

I asked how does one gain experience in crafting to make it on par as adventuring, they gain skills at a MUCH faster rate and we are forced to slug our way through the process... They have almost a 3 to 1 ratio when it comes to skill gain and it seems that it is more important in game to raise the "Combat Skills" and the crafting skills are an afterthought.. This person somewhat agreed and stated that crafting does need to be looked at and they are currently working on ways to fix said ideas..

One idea that was mentioned that would make sense of crafting was how Meticulous crafting needs to be fixed because now I just cancel the Meticulous and move to the next node for experience and material gains... Comment was made that why not add a small chance to obtain a material or component that either enhances an item or can be used to make an item stronger in game... Each time you get a Meticulous Collection happen you have say 5-10% of a chance to obtain an item each time or overall..

There were others as well but one thing they did say was that the Crafting Specialization would not be added until some changes / adjustments were made for it.

Personally I am on the fence for crafting specializations because they are being added so late and we will not have an option to "Change" our build unless they allow for the same "100%" skill reduction option as well.

Oh well time for me to shaddup and get back to work

Respectfully,

Malimn

 

I agree.

Current masterwork/enchant skills :
First 100 levels - 95 % of the stats you apply on item
Next 200 levels - 5% of the stats you apply on item (basically a huge XP black hole that feels very unrewarding)

Will Specializations be the same ?

Add specialization if you must but fix the 200 levels that give nothing also.