Thanks For Scattering Common Recipes All Over Novia

While I was skeptical at first, I must say this has turned out quite well.

It adds some flavour and provides some unique experiences you normally wouldn't associate with crafting.

Here are some of the highlights of those experiences while I attempted to begin crafting.

1. Finding an NPC selling recipes
Open my Sota Map, Head over to a town with a carpenter, except
Oops. There's no carpenter.
Non-existant NPCs, Missing Maps, NPCs off napping while I sit around waiting 15 min for daylight. Having to run through the entire town to verify if they even exist at all or have simply been moved.

2. Getting to the NPC selling recipes
Massive lag for half my journey since the recipes are located in major cities
3 Restarts because of memory leaks
Even better when combined with #1

3. Finding and getting to the appropriate NPC, except that
His recipe list is inexplicably incomplete. He sells Sturdy chair, stool and bench but no table. The table is on the other side of Novia.
He doesn't even sell carpentry recipes but the home decorations merchant on the other side of town does.
It varies from town to town so every town you visit you have to check every npc. Virtually anyone in a town could be holding the recipe youre looking for.

4. No order to recipes in my recipe book. This means that when I see some carpentry recipes on a vendor, I have to
Keep my recipe book open
Flip through 27 pages of carpentry deco PER RECIPE to see if I already have it.
For recipes that could be one of any trades like a banner, I have to flip through my whole book.
When the vendor walks off mid conversation, I get to do this twice.
The more recipes I get, the more pages I get to flip through.

5. Where can I find other recipes?
Re-experience 1 - 4 for every town in Novia or open browser, chat, search forums.
Sounds good except:
All info is out of date.
NPC's, vendor stocks, etc get changed/swapped with every release. Many times without notice.
Good luck trying to keep an up-to-date database that could help out.

6. Teachable Recipes
Some work, many don't.
Some recipes cannot be taught simply because of when or how you acquired them.
You can teach someone how to build a Porcelain Bathtub from scratch but not how to arrange a bunch of flowers.

7. World drops for common recipes
Killing Elves or finding a seller so you can complete the last piece of your elven set. Cool
Tracking down and dishing out 5-10k for every axe head, binding, strap, sheet and who knows what else? Not so much

8. Every release a batch of new recipes is added
Having to run all over Novia back to the same NPCs every release to pick up recipes from some generic NPC is pointless.
And that is assuming the recipes were added properly, the NPC is in the same spot as last release, He stills sells carpentry recipes, etc etc
Otherwise it's back to step 1

9. Forced into slave labor for 3rd party websites
Cramped hands and a sore back from long hours spent performing data entry and other tasks for 3rd party websites like SotaWiki leave me too tired or unable to craft any of the items I acquire recipes for.

10. False and misleading info in the player instructions
Cooperation, comradery and other non-profitable activities required to obtain recipes.

11. Breaks more immersion than it adds
What are elves doing chopping down trees for weapons and furniture?
Why is the vendor in Ardoris selling a Norgard High Back Chair?

12. You get the picture


Instead of this scattering madness

Here are some easy fixes. This way when there is a current or new player who wants to start crafting, they can get off to a relatively seamless start instead of being assaulted by 1000 bugs/flaws/broken content.

Make all recipes teachable except for the few instances of rare or set recipes that are working properly
(example non-teachable - Elven Deco Furniture. These were implemented fairly well, make sense, and are a cool rare drop that give carpenters something to aim for)

Limit any new recipes introduced every release to either common or well thought out and designed rares

All new common recipes should be automatically added to the rewards tab

All current and future common recipes should also be purchaseable in one location like OH or Central Brit until the game is polished enough to start implementing grander designs.

New rare drop recipes should not be ninja altered so people can start keeping current databases.

They should also not be added so only 10 ppl in the game can solo them. Rarity is good enough.

Put the recipe book in Alphabetical order


And most importantly

Fix combat so I can be PVP / PVEing instead of finding other things to do like crafting.

.

 

Use sotawiki.

 

I don't mind so much that only some vendors sell certain things, but there doesn't appear to be any logic behind it, only exacerbated by a lot of internal inconsistencies in how this was implemented.

The merchants could also refer you to other merchants that might carry recipes they don't. Would love to see some sort of an in-game guild between NPC merchants, and they could logically tie these merchants to various guilds and build that logic and consistency behind inventories.

Not ideal, but the tooltip for the recipe shows if you've already learned the recipe or not. Even better would be the vendor UI having an option to hide known recipes or putting it in a different color or tag.

+1

 

I just go here https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Kkzc2iavsDDmBaC0wgeY0BWYLZ08bAB23Zo5_ggv68s/htmlview#gid=0

 

Like I mentioned in #5, that database is out of date, NPCs no longer exist or have been changed. Sotawiki is the same thing. I saw an Iron Bar recipe in there

The vendor filter would be helpful

 

If the wiki is incorrect, you can change it. That is the point of a wiki.

 

So, along with having to seek out of game resources in the first place, I should also be expected to contribute and maintain these resources?

I will add that as number 9.

 

Yep. It's called community.

 

That is the point of a wiki for ANY game. I spent 7 or 8 years playing FFXI and I was always editing the wiki when I found stuff that was missing or new or changed.

 

Except in FFXI you could probably finish typing the entry for the wiki before it became outdated.

On to #10 then,

In the player instructions it says

Much of crafting is left for you to discover through experimenting with how items work with each other.You can share your discoveries with other players, either in the game itself or online, on Shroud of the Avatar’s official message board or on sites run by Shroud of the Avatar fans such as sotawiki.net.

I propose we change this with

Much of crafting is left for you to discover through experimenting with OOG resources and 3rd party websites. Portalarium is not responsible for any virus, malware or explicit images you encounter while visiting these sites. You MUST share your discoveries with these sites otherwise everyone's gonna need a GPS, tour guide or Pocahontas.

 

#11 Immersion

The immersion gained from scattering these recipes is nominal at best.

Most of the current recipes are common and have nothing to do with the regions they are located in.

Some are misplaced or make no sense actually breaking immersion.

 

Yeah, sadly, I generally consider "immersion" in this game a joke for a number of reasons, but particularly since they destroyed SPO.

 

now that is a good observation. how silly!