Producer Experience

@Chris , since you didn't know what my concern with this was on the telethon, I'll elaborate:

Currently the amount of producer experience you gain from either refining or crafting is trivial, which means that the only effective way to gain producer experience is gathering (either mining or or skinning). This isn't such a problem for the main skill, scavenging, or repair, but nobody can realistically afford to spend 5 silver ingots to apply 20 experience to Masterworking, which means we need a bank, which means we have to farm experience either mining or skinning. This is turn means you need a high adventurer level to survive in the t5 mines (since mining node experience is based on scene level) or to fight t5 animals for the skinning(I assume - I don't go that route). So to be a crafter, in addition to needing lots of materials and spending a lot on gold sinks like coal and molds, you have to spend nearly all of your time fighting the same enemies over and over again.

 

I agree :-(

 

yeah they need to really take a HUGE step back and actually care about crafters before they even think about implementing some kind of Producer Decay.

 

That's a very good analysis of a problem that should be considered.

Although I don't have a good solution at this time. I would caution @Chris not to assume that it's "ok" to just sit around salvaging junk or "crafting" in an endless loop that increases your crafting skill.

I love the idea of a player being a "full time crafter" but not at the expense of fair play. There has to be some give and take, some sacrifice. Otherwise crafting becomes trivial and the economy suffers.

One solution I'd like to see considered is what I call the D&D crafting system. Whenever a wizard enchanted an item, they would lose a point of constitution. Because no player character would have more than 18 or so points of constitution, and you needed that attribute to live, this greatly reduced the amount of magical items players could create.

What I can imagine is a system KIND OF like that, where the more items you put out into the world the more decay you have. But I haven't figured out the details yet.

 

Yeah, that's not workable. You want my decay to be controlled by other people? Absolutely not. And why are you even talking about decay systems? This is about gaining producer XP. We're a long way from decay even being realistic to implement in any form.

 

No, I want a good game that is not ruined by people that can only think about how much of an easy crafting simulation they can turn it into. I'm not saying that's your goal, just that there are people that seem to not understand that crafting for the sake of crafting is just as bad as making people adventure so they can be good at crafting.

I said above that I don't have a working solution yet, just a concept.

Well the two go hand in hand. We need to be thinking about all of it, how it works together and where it makes sense to have decay we need it.

We're not a long way off from needing decay for producer XP...Chris talked about that in the telethon too.

So while I really do appreciate your expert defining of a problem, it would be nice if you could also see the bigger picture that includes decay and probably also includes some kind of sacrifice on the part of the crafter. There's no way that this game can support some form of "Evercrafting" where you infinitely gain crafting levels and you never need adventure. That's not practical, which is one of the reasons why they shouldn't give a lot of XP for salvaging or making the same hat over and over again (only to salvage it and make more XP).

 

Your concept inherently involves my decay being controlled by other people. I have no way to reduce it and it would make being a crafter impossible. It would also mean that I couldn't have stores of items to practice enchanting/MW on because they would increase my decay. It's a terrible concept.

The sacrifice on the part of the crafter is resources and time, even more so than it is for other players. Crafting is currently a miserable tedious mess, and people like you wanting to make it "harder" for no actual reason helps no one and contributes nothing. If producer XP gets a revamp, then and only then can we talk about decay, because at the moment producer XP is so difficult to acquire that any decay at all will basically cripple us.

 

I don't know what the good baron is talking about. The only source of materials for production at this time is raw ore, animal products, cotton, reagents, and crystals Almost all producer experience is due to the processing of this raw material to finished goods. Salvaging to obtain raw material is insignificant. The metal and wood recoverable from finished goods will at present only contribute some single digit amount of resource contribution to a finished or intermediate product. No one could possibly make swords , salvage same and make more from the salvage at all. As to hats, there is no cloth salvage in the game at this time either. With the pitiful gains at the crafting table to pooled experience, essentially all experience used for crafting skills comes from gathering in the field. A crafter cannot buy all their raw materials because they will have no experience to gain skills at the table. For people who are really into the role play model, this is a no starter. The fact that the crafter is forced to gather all his own materials makes him develop into a self-sustaining character. No chance that he can succeed in a role play situation where he arranges for a supply chain arrangement with fellow players. Not without producer experience in his bag.

 

Yes, agreed.

It does force you down a path of doing it all yourself. But if these skills were to decay and you couldn't do it all yourself - that's when supply chains would begin to form organically. Do you see my point now?

 

Not really. The point is that a crafter with present design cannot learn the crafting skills without gathering himself. A supply chain is no good to him if he does not have an experience pool to draw from for training crafting.

Edited to add word "crafting"

 

Most players i k now have a solution for this: have a child so they can mine for you, trick your neighbors child to mine for you, hire a Filipino to mine for you

simple, easy, 1 mil producer exp a week

 

Yes, I understand that what you're talking about and the OP is talking about is a problem. But it's a problem that we can't fix in a vacuum or it results in more problems.

 

Shameless plug for my thoughts on this issue:
https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f...f-xp-gain-between-crafting-professions.85569/