Very upset at the lowering of whiskey profit! Unbalanced Now!

odyssey2003 · Mar 16, 2021

kaeshiva said: ↑

I dunno. I mean, I don't disagree with anything you're saying, but I think there is more to it.

Let's look at the sheer amount of stuff a single player can produce and the potential demand for it.
In a single day, I could harvest wood for, and craft, enough round tables that I could probably fill the entire Novian demand for round tables for several months at least. Why? Because a round table is something that occupies a "physical space" in the game, and there's a finite number of places and houses where such tables could go, even if you filled them to the brim, which wouldn't make aesthetic sense;, no, at most, most people would only want a couple of these in a house, and the recipe is certainly easy enough that rather than fight with the player market system it is simply easier to go make one yourself.
(This is why a "mail order catalogue" service that S Mart Sales used to do was amazing - just place your order! Imagine if gear crafting had no RNG and could be the same...but I digress).

Ok so furniture demand is limited by potential "decorating space" which is finite and there are thousands of potential furniture/deco items to choose from further diluting the appeal of this particular table. If it was the only table we got, it would be in more demand (remember pre persistence when everyone's houses had the same handful of decorations cause that's all there was?)

So there's finite demand for a round table, and if I wanted to SELL a round table, there's no way for people to know that I'm selling it unless they stumble across it in the huge massive loadscreen gated world, which isn't likely. And even if they did find it I'd likely have to price it somewhere around the cost of materials since in Sota, player time has no value (already well established precedent).

Why there is no demand for craftable decorations
1. Self-sufficiency. Easier to make it yourself than find it for sale (poor market system)
2. No skill gate, static product regardless of creator
3. Finite demand, utilization dependent on available space

Ok, so fine with the tables.
What about consumables?

Why there is no demand for consumables
Some of the same things apply:

1. Self sufficiency. Easier to make it yourself than find it for sale (poor market system)
2. No skill gate, static product regardless of creator

Consumables have a few different properties:
a) an inventory carry weight
b) an effect
c) a duration
d) exist in monster drop tables - oversupply
e) can be crafted in extreme bulk vs. duration - oversupply

I know as someone who doesn't use a lot of consumables ( I don't like all the extra inventory clutter to carry around buff potions that don't last very long or health potions that probably wont save me - if I get into enough trouble that I need a potion, a potion isn't going to help lol) that all my consumable needs are completely met/exceeded by what I get as drops. Scrolls, repair kits, potions, teleport scrolls - I get more of these than I use without ever having to resort to buy them. Poisons tend to be one of those things people craft for experience, so there's a huge glut of these available and thousands just get vendor fed because no interest - (I left thousands of festering poisons on a vendor for the same price NPC pays, they were there for months).

So what about other consumables?
Taming collars = useful, demand exists, requires silver so they don't get spammed for experience, but demand is limited to the "tamer" subset of player and at some point, you have enough pets. Unless you are selling pets, but then you hit the second wall of trying to sell pet necklaces when there's a limited amount of demand for them. (And taming collars ARE in the loot tables, too). About the only person I know who is always out of taming collars is someone who tames pets and gives them away to everyone on a daily basis.

What about food?
This is another oversupply situation. Right now, in a box in my house, I have enough dragon stew, that if I ate one every 8 hours (which is how long they last), I have enough to last something like 21 years. And this is while constantly keeping vendors updated selling it at 1 gold above cost over the course of years, and giving it away by the 100stack - I STILL have this much left. I'm sure there are others in the same position. Why do I have so much ? 1) there's nothing else you can make from dragon meat and 2) making dragon stew is good exp, so I make it even though I don't need it. The piles of bear, wolf, surprise aren't quite as bad, but they're getting there. You craft the things for exp, but demand is capped at how long a player plays in a day and now long they need those buffs for.

Now, I'm not suggesting we nerf food durations - then they'll go the way of the stat potions - (don't last long enough to bother with).
I'm just trying to point out that demand reaches a finite level because an item that gives an 8 hour buff - at most a player needs to consume a couple a day.

Why there is no demand for crafted gear
1. Self sufficiency. Easier to make it yourself than find it for sale (poor market system)
2. High production costs, rng-plagued outputs (no control/decision making)
---1&2 corollary: Everyone tries to be self sufficient, and everyone tries to sell their failures/leftover junk, way oversupply
3. No consumption/binding
4. Market monopoly for elite equipment
5. Hard limit of equip slots per character per situation

Permanent durability loss isn't working to drive demand.
Its both too fast and too slow.
Durability wear down is too slow to require frequent replacement, however, making it degrade faster reduces its value
Knowing your gear wont last very long means you don't want to invest in extremely good gear (no demand for 500,000 gold gear pieces, or simply, people can't afford it and accept mediocrity - they simply don't 'need' it).
The reason why most games have bind-on-equip and repair-via-cash sink with no permanent degradation is because this system works.
Most games with perma dura loss also have consistent, reliable gear replacement - Sota's RNG system is the opposite of this.
So gear just sticks around forever. You can't sell it (not worth a fraction of materials) to the NPC, you can't salvage it (again, returns are like 1% of value), you can't turn it in for a quest, melt it down, or do anything with it. And our system is designed to generate hundreds/thousands of excess, unwanted pieces by removing decision/control from the process. And while people may have a chest full of alternate gear pieces, at the end of the day, how many helmets do you need, you only have a single head!

There are a handful of well known gear-crafters who are well known for being high level and having a ready supply of high end gear. That's not a criticism of those people - they've worked hard, damn hard, to build up that reputation, fighting past the limitations of the market and gone to considerable personal effort and investment to do so - however it does create a situation in which other crafters can't compete - and new players wanting to uptake crafting from zero are thousands of hours and millions of gold away from getting there. So the monopolies meet the demand; all the gear on vendors everywhere else languishes, unwanted.

Conclusion

I'm sure there's stuff I've left out.
But the way it feels to me is, yes, the poor market system is a factor in the lack of demand,
But finite limits on the usefulness of stuff (you only have so much space in your house, there's only 24 hours in a day during which you need the effect of a particular food, you only have 1 head so you only need a half-dozen or so helmet options).
I can create thousands of hours worth of 'buff food' in 24 hour period.
I can create hundreds of helmets in a single sitting but there aren't hundreds of heads to wear them.
Same thing with any particular deco item, really.
Nothing gets consumed. Nothing gets used up, or at least not as fast as its made.
We need alternatives or a workable salvage system or some sort of output for all the inputs.

Another observation could be - a lot more people are participating in crafting, than there are people who need the stuff.
How many are crafting it themselves cause they can't find it and would rather not? - Better market system may actually work to reduce supply
How many are crafting it themselves (gear) because the RNG is so random that its exceptionally difficult to get the result you want if just sampling player vendors. Removing randomness from crafting would allow custom orders - whole new market for suppliers and also reduce supply for people trying to sell excess junk to recoup anything. Craft-for-hire would become a thing.

Most people aren't crafting food and potions and dye because they want to be chefs and alchemists, they're not even doing it to make money - they're doing it to get producer XP to invest in higher and higher gearcrafting.

Our system is by no means simple, but just going back to this whiskey thing - its a knee jerk fix to a small part of a very large and complex problem with supply and demand, the actual crafting process, and the crafter-consumption dynamics. We have a system wherein a single player can crank out ridiculous amounts of a single commodity (such as whiskey) that may have a use but isn't useful enough to ever consume that which is made.
Why do you make something nobody wants? For the exp, or for income (sell to npc). I think we should tackle that part of the problem rather than just removing the income element because it just makes it a straight "paying for exp" situation and there's likely better choices than whiskey with far less up front investment. Whiskey becomes abandoned, useless, an entire system that serves no purpose outside deco/roleplay.

If whiskey had the effect of "throw this whiskey to do a 1000 point damage aoe in front of you" I think we'd still struggle to use it all - because it costs too much to make. No matter how good you make the buff or effect, you have far more players engaged in making the stuff than you do in using it. Players are compelled to "make stuff" to level up but there's nothing to do with all the stuff. At some point, players get to the point where further crafting levels aren't going to make enough of a difference, and like myself, they look back on their landfill of stuff jammed in boxes and basements, and realize, they really don't need any more stuff and there's nothing to do with all the stuff they've accumulated. Its too hard to sell it, and if you COULD sell it, then you'd just be sitting on a big pile of money that you don't need because there's nothing you really want to buy - you can make/get it all yourself. And specialization wont fix it, because hard lines of specialization are easily circumvented with alts, since levelling crafting is a process that involves "feeding materials to character to process until desired level reached" and as mentioned before, apparently people do this with bots/macros.

So how do we fix it?
- Stop trying to prevent crafting as a gold faucet, make sell-to-npc viable, make salvage viable - less crap gets stuck in player market unwanted (lower supply).
- Add alternative consumption. Let us salvage junk potions to get empty bottles at a 100% return (I just poured it out, ok?). Let me smash up these tables/chairs to get boards. Add repeatable NPC quests that reward something not obtainable any other way in exchange for turning in a stack of (whatever-thing). 1000 dragon stew -> turn in to get a "Dragon-shaped spoon" tool/artifact for cooking or some such nonsense. Turning in 10 of those spoons gives you a dragon-shaped-cooking-pot with some bonuses. From a pure collectability standpoint, you've added sinks for a lot of things, that can be planned for, worked for incrementally, and set as goals instead of relying on RNG rare drops for everything nice. It doesn't even need to be physical stuff. Stop with the dropped recipes nonsense, make them earnable via turnins. Turn in enough granite blocks of a particular shape, learn how to make a new room out of it. Could even turn in like, 100 of every cooked food for a "gourmand" title or something, or even account features unlocks (ie, gourmand title gives you +1% to all food potency). These sorts of small incremental achievements, especially if they have some benefit, add years of replayability and create so many resource sinks. It also means that you've got potentials in the recipe department that are limited to players who have really worked to unlock them, making them rarer and far less in supply.
- Get rid of randomness and perma dura loss, replace with predictable, plannable gear crafting. This will reduce the amount of gear on the market by something like 99% and create a whole new craft-for-hire dynamic instead of what we have now.

There's been loads of good ideas on these forums!
Click to expand...

IMO you have hit the point on the head ! I hope the devs see this post of yours and seriously take its suggestions into consideration as even your ideas for possible solutions are right on what I have been feeling about this game and I hear it time and time again from other crafters as well.

Thank you for this post

odyssey2003 · Mar 16, 2021

majoria70 said: ↑

Speaking of this and that will effect the economy has the capability imo to slow down progress to fix the interesting, satisfying, and depth of crafting in itself. Economy is people buy your goods but what if there are other uses for your goods as @kaeshiva alludes to in her comments such as daily NPC crafting quests, progression quests, and of course taking most recipes out of loot tables and put back into the crafting progression tasks to earn them. Counting only in the economy for value for your goods is a very unsatisfying experience especially when those sales don't happen. Giving crafting other dimensions and depth would help more imo.

I know it's easy to think one direction on anything but it doesn't always fix a problem. Give us daily crafting progression rewards of recipes, gold and special crafting resources. Make those also sellable for those who don't enjoy questing. Let us do crafting quests for npc's who need our goods and will reward us for them.

One directional thoughts on this are craft and sell to other players but this is limiting the games potential to be more interesting and capable. At the moment devs send this game in a direction that is mostly about combat related tasks to acquire most things which is very unbalanced as a game.
For example:

Crafters want to craft and have intetesting rewarding progression. Questers want to Quest for interesting story and satisfaction, progression and of course everyone wants gold and special resources and items.

To make this game mostly about economics does not address the core. As with most systems in this game the game direction did not get the depth and completion needed to provide continuous satisfying stimulation and reward to players.

Adding the depth in to systems like fishing for example would have been a richer experience. As is catch a bigger fish technology is blah, blah, blah and OK for one part of fishing as also can be used for cooking recipes and trophies that are a necessary part but why else to fish? What is interesting about it? Krakens, message in a bottles that provide map pieces and quests, a chance to find a treasure box, a Parahna or shark that attacks would add a lot.

Fishing npc's should absolutely give quests for fishing rewards and progressions. Special bait, a fishing hat with a bonus. The quests could also give a specialization of some kind from completing more crafting quests, etc for example.

So again imo just being selling to players is not enough of a direction for this game. We need more reason to do things. More interesting, more crafting tasks, in game achievement system, more selling tools as in sellable bags of goods, global search and find item. Then we could get on with the show.

Making alcohol more useful not just as a buff material but useful in potion making, cleaning itens, and more cooking recipes.

Oops sorry so long
Click to expand...

Agreed, I hear this from multiple players now, "Give us a reason to do things" I keep on hearing this over and over again. I don't hear so much "give us a new area!, give us more deco! give us more adventuring!" I hear give us a reason to do things!!!!!!

Lets be real about how many areas that are NOT BEING USED!!! when was the last time anyone been to a level 2 or 3 or 4 area ( other that the one with the razorback boars) ? There are more than enough adventure zones that are doing nothing but taking up space on the server so why not put quest in them that even high level users can enjoy going back to them ? We can recycle these area that took a designer/dev many many hours to build that is just going to waste and at the same time you can give us something to do ( which is what A lot of us want ) ! kill to birds with one stone!! and free up dev time to do a crap load more like maybe take in some suggestion from the post from kaeshiva

I also like everything in this post as well and it comes down to " give us an incentive to craft " which right now with the example of the whiskey seems to be going in the wrong direction!

odyssey2003 · Mar 17, 2021

You know now that I reflex some more on my town that was suppose to be a farming town I realize that this whiskey move sets such a damper on things that it renders my town to dust now! Given what kaeshiva mentioned about most players being self sufficient why would anyone need more than one lot now for farming? Cotton maybe ? well Chris said on a recent live stream that he wanted to remove players selling their good to the NPC vendors, so now that whiskey is nerfed wouldnt that mean now cotton is next ? so what left to justify a farming town? with basements and dungeons I see little reason to justify using a LOT or Taxable lot to farm. So their goes the whole farming ROLE that I wanted ( along others like the Pot "Farming town" ) .

The Foundation of this game is that its a RPG ( Role playing Game ) and with this move he single handedly removing any will to role play a farmer ( unless of course you don't mind spending all kind of money and a crap load of time for no return like kaeshiva mentioned in her above post ).

Once again I really believe the devs should re evaluate the whiskey nerf and fore more take a good look at what kaeshiva mentioned as I agree that something has to be done and I agree with the band aid metaphor.

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