Voting Poll for Crafting Feedback as of R35 (not R36) for curiosity the DISLIKES

(NOTE IT SHOULD NOT SAY LIKE -- since you cannot give a yes no to the items, this should be dislike - we can get a like poll going based on these and other things too)


The initial items I have listed are ones I have heard frustration expressed over or experienced myself. I will add any other suggestions that folks have to the poll as it continues, and have made it to where you can change your answers or add to them because of this.

With proposed sweeping changes, I feel it is also a good time for us to express our current frustrations or joy before new ones are introduced.

Not trying to rouse folks up, genuinely curious if its fine or what specifically folks like/dislike in a quantitative fashion

it is a broad range of questions so we can maybe narrow it down some in the future.

 

Poll wording is confusing... do I select the things that I like, or the things that I dislike?

 

The Recipe Book needs a complete do over - even when I'm in game and wondering about the ingredients for a recipe I already have in my book - I still tab out and hit the internet.

 

Yeah I realized that and added a orange thing at top of it .. i cannot change the title in the poll it seems or I cannot find the tool to do it

 

My biggest dislikes are:

1) Skill doesn't make enough difference. For almost everything, it's fairly trivial to reach a skill level where diminishing returns are incredibly steep or progress is completely halted. Beyond that point, more skill only slightly increases your success %s at best and has no effect on the quality of what you make or the results of your enhancement rolls.

2) Mining is too essential for crafting as a whole. Mined materials are used for everything and mining produces far more production xp than anything else. The fastest way to do anything production related usually starts with mining.

3) Too many items aren't worth the time it takes to make them. Stacking diminishing returns on top of diminishing returns on top of diminishing returns, while granting only tiny upgrades for each successful step, results in a whole lot of very impractical items.

 

This is great feedback how about these to add

Exceptional Quality success is not level based enough and no room for growth - the converse being 25% Exceptional chance is fine how it is at GM

Mining is the only reliable way to gain producer XP -Converse is same

Too many sub components required in final product creation -- the converse being Love the use of sub components in final product creation


Adding these thigns to both polls and remember to do the LIKE and DISLIKE polls

 

Just as a fun aside about 20 years ago I did statistical analysis for an expert witness for imminent domain cases and tourism for several states. This guy taught me about word smithing the surveys (and why that crap is crooked as hell lol). We would spend 4 hours on one question sometimes to make it very netural or lean a certain way. (crooked crooked racket lol)

I am sorry but did not have hours and hours to try to make these super neutral so forgive me if they appear swayed and just focus on your feelings not my wording.

 

Wipe the crafting book/recipes and make recipes buy/loot only.

Discovery has ruined crafting.

 

Discovery has kick-started crafting and is a huge green-shoot for the economy. Take away discovery and you'll see less production, which means less efficient pricing. Fewer crafters will produce fewer goods, everything will be more expensive, shopping will be more difficult, and the game will lose depth for many players who would have otherwise enjoyed crafting. I spent all week discovering recipes so I don't have to deal with the pain of R36 crafting bureaucracy and expense. New players will be turned off by the difficulty of acquiring recipes. Huge mistake IMO. Crafting is actually pretty good in its current state.

 

Pretty good quality poll, not major tilted. I am happy to see that most shared my view that hard, tedious and costly crafting helps make it worth doing.

 

One of my major dislikes is not being able to get crafting xp in any real amount by just crafting. Discovery boosts help slightly but I shouldn't have to discover recipes in carpentry in order to become a better tailor any more then I should have to mine to be a better cook. Overall I'm happy with the crafting in general, I just don't want to be forced into a mine to get the xp for actually training in a craft.

Edited to add:
Another thing that needs to be looked at is being able to salvage to high skill levels. Salvage gains should be capped at a relatively low level.

 

It's actually worse then that, when you consider the flip side: because you can't develop your crafting skills without mining, there is no way for someone to be a dedicated miner and sell ore/ingots to dedicated crafters. The potential depth of the economy is undermined from a 2-3 level system to a 1 level system.

 

No one is discovering anything @Budner. They're going to a website and looking up the recipe. Why would anyone bother buying anything from other players when they can easily craft it themselves. It takes almost no time at all to level a crafting line.

 

Sorry but saying it takes no time is so wrong. Sure 1-70 is not too bad .. but go up from there my friend. And you so must for the enchanting and masterworking, and then start to specialize in masterworking.

Hundreds and Hundreds of hours of hunting and refining and sure maybe a few minutes of crafting if you have gotten all the producer xp from the hundreds and hundreds of hours of hunting and refining.

 

Refining only helps your producer xp in any significant amount if your willing to sit there and go through 500 attempts one at a time to get the same end result in products as if you hit make 20 and do something else for a few minutes.

 

The main problem I have with 'discovery' of recipes is that there's precious little sense in what components make something. As it stands, 'discovery' would mean adding multiple items in varying quantities, one piece at a time, to hope you stumble onto something. No wonder people use, and like, the websites that give recipes - the 'discovery' system is nonsense! Even as a very mediocre craftsman in real life, I do know pretty much what items I need to assemble to make a cabinet and have a solid, logic and experience based assessment of the things I will need. In SotA terms to 'work out what is needed' I'd have made a table, couple of chairs, benches and God alone knows what else in the process of working out how to make a cabinet.I need to practice to have the skill to make the thing with any build quality - not to figure out the pieces needed to make it.

Discovering recipes, great idea in the abstract, but hopelessly illogical and silly in execution. I don't think you can program in an enjoyable way to represent people being ... well, for want of a better word, sensible. You end up with the weirdness of current crafting, where you have no idea what you are making until it pops up on the table as a complete 'thing'. And the best of luck to anyone trying to 'discover' the recipes and component recipes to make something as complex as a training dummy (for heaven's sakes it's a roughly human shaped collection of lumps of wood! In SotA terms, sub assemblies needing rope, ores to make ingots to make metal sheet to make a shield, various cloths/woods/leathers to make straps, bags, bindings, some wood planks as well as basic wood, apparently randomly determined amount of wax. Good grief!).

 

I've used discovery both from 3rd party websites and from legitimate discovery. I learned most of the smelting recipes by incrementally placing granite on the table. I had hopes that discovery would increase in it's utility as more valuable recipes became available thinking that people would be less likely to throw them up on a website as they could keep it secret and profit from them in game (these recipes would need to be rare, expensive, and difficult to figure out). But it looks like that idea may simply not be feasible.

This is my biggest gripe with crafting. There should be a few really cool things that you can do at level 150 and 200 that give a reason to level that high. And there should be mechanisms to provide more player agency in the outcomes of crafting. Like, if you're going from +9 to +10, and you fail, should be able to spend some appropriately punitive amount of resources to save the item and lock it from further enchantment or masterworking. And if you succeed, but do not get the enhancement option you want, you should be able to spend resources to have those options reroll. The resource spend should be punitive enough to balance the benefit, but at least then, the player has some agency on the outcome and not just at the mercy of RNG.

 

My largest gripe is the enchanting and masterworking aspect. You'd think with the RNG and percentile based chance to break an item doing this it would allow for less randomness when it comes to selecting your enchants and masterworks.
Obviously the higher level and more specialization you put in the more options you have, but when trying to customize something for someone you often get enchants or masterworks completely useless for said specialized piece of gear.
What I'd like to see is each time you do your roll for an enchant or masterwork you get your 3 options, but also have the option to not apply any of them while consuming the resources required to enchant/masterwork to essentially reroll while paying a cost to doing so.

 

Two of my biggest dislikes are:

1) Lack of peaceful resource gathering. It should be possible to do forestry and mining without forcing combat (or, at the very least, I shouldn't have to spend the majority of my gathering time in combat). I don't think believe all resources should be available this way, but I do believe all mundane materials should be available this way.

2) Complete absence of crafting in the main storyline. As a dedicated crafter, I want a path through the main storyline that doesn't involve combat, but rather involves crafting. There's lots of games that are designed around fighting your way through the story, it'd be nice to see something different, that appeals to the builders in the crowd and not just the killers.

 

Good poll!