Multiboxing and crafting

The pointless timesinky tedium of refining as it is currently designed is the main incentive to use multiple accounts to do it.
If they don't want players to use multiple accounts to do it, then they need to speed refining up. Considerably. Not this barely noticeable 20% increase for a million xp sunk, but like by a factor of 20. Coming back from adventuring and refining your materials should not be a 5 hour affair to get them refined to the stage at which they will be used for something.

There's simply no good reason to tie players up at tables for 20-30 hours a week. It doesn't add anything meaningful to the game. I get the harvesting bars taking time because you could get interrupted by something or whatever, reasons. But the refining bars should be as quick as salvage. There's simply no reason for them not to be. Someone wants me to make them a chestpiece and they don't have things pre-refined, they're going to be stood for an hour while I smelt ores, then smelt ingots, then smelt different ingots, then smelt coils, then make bindings, then spool thread, then make straps, then the smelting for the silver and gold - all of this before we even get to the mw/enchant steps which may or may not go well because of the RNG. Maybe we get to do it all over again! Fun, right?

Is it any surprise at all that players make secondary accounts to do all the tedium prep work? Or at the very least, park their character doing that while tabbed out watching TV or playing another game? You've created a system that is basically begging for players to do exactly that.

Its either that, or consume large amounts of their playtime stuck staring at a progress bar, which no matter how you look at it, is not fun or engaging in any way.

 

What NEW players?

 

Or a Magical Container of Refinement you carry and put ore, hide, wood, cotton into that creates ingots, leather, timbers, spools while you adventure. To me it is just these 4 that take forever. I only do it while watching Shroud streamers. Watching Fzol and groups wipe out dragons makes me forget I'm hammering away for 5 minutes

 

This right here is why some are really high level and some like myself are not. I have accounts but follow the policy as it was written. I get my xp the hardway and refine at the slow pace well watching that is for sure. That puts me at a disadvantage over the power crafters because I cant produce as much on my single account that I run. This like all things is why the policy exists and needs to be enforced to prevent advantages over others especially when in a player driven economy. That said I 100% agree that there needs to be larger batch sizes for final product and a faster way to process. I dont mind being at the tables for hour simply because the mechanics are designed to prevent market flooding. If we call could pump out 100's of items at the top level there would be too much out there and with limited market now because of player base numbers it should stay so imo.

Just my thoughts

 

Player numbers will not affect this. The only thing that affects this is the ratio of gathers, craftets and non crafters.

Supply and demand will scale with the player base. If the supply is too high with 1000 people for the demand of those 1000 people. The same would be true of 100 000 people if the ratio of gathers, crafters and non crafters within those populations stay the same.


Regards
Spung

 

On the gathering and adventure side I agree. However with crafting I don't see how this is true. To get to a high level you need high levels of XP on a single character. There is no way to move the XP from one account to the other.

Personally most of my crafting XP comes from skinning and the continual trickle from planting. Dual boxing actually takes the refining and component XP off my main, who only does the final combine as he has the high base, masterwork and enchanting skills.

Regards
Spung

 

I should add, no one should read my OP as I will quit if this change is made.

I will play the game that is put in front of me, by the rules that are set by that game.

I'm just saying I don't agree with this change and explaining why, i think it makes the game worse not better (at least for me). It would not fundamentally change much for me, I would continue to refine and make components, except probably on my main to get the XP on my main. It just I would be playing a non SOTA game at the same time rather than playing SOTA while I refine and make components.


Regards
Spung

 

This is what I've noticed happening as well, and this change will only really enforce it- I find that I do most of my refining while I'm working/doing something else in another window - so only single instance of the game open anyway. I used to have my alt parked in the basement processing while my main was out fighting, but over time this has slowly changed to just using my main character (who has higher skills) to do it while I'm doing something completely un-Shroud-related in another window. There's nothing wrong with this, it works, but I just don't think its an optimal solution.

I think it is detrimental to design game content in such a way that players treat it as a chore to be done while tabbed out playing something else. Its not a multibox concern so much as an attention span concern. With regards to the crafting, disabling multiboxable refining just means if I wanted to do it, I install Shroud on my laptop. Then we have the same argument, "people with better computers who multibox have an advantage" vs. "people with more than one computer" have an advantage. Its just kicking the can down the road.

I understand where Xee is coming from, in that the refining time/tedium serves as a limiter to the churning out of gear, but really, the resource acquisition is the effective limiter - refining work is just a sink. The time I spend refining, when I could be out getting 'more stuff' is what's being bypassed by multiboxing, but the reality is I would NEVER sit in town refining when I could be actually playing the game. Its a waste of my "gaming time" for something that is just extremely not-fun. If the intent is that players can't get the tedium work done while also having fun doing something else - then I can live with that decision. But then we really need to address the not-fun-ness of refining, as a system, as a result. Some sort of "you put it in the smelter and the smelter slowly melts it" (many games do this) or simply speeding up the process to something more palatable, would eliminate the appeal of multiboxing entirely.

Its far better, I think, to make multiboxing give no real advantage than to try and police it.