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How to have fun and profit from the new crafting system
feanor70118
Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 1,170 Arc User
First, decide which professions you want to enjoy and hang out a sign informing local artisans which professions you are recruiting for and what the requirements are: must be fast workers with no excessive commission demands. Oh wait! You can't choose which professions generate applicants. If you want to get started any time soon, you have to take what gatherers and crafters the RNG gives you. Since even epic crafters can come with up to a 200% commission penalty, be prepared to spend 50 gold per day per alt just to generate 30-35k in commission to upgrade your workshop to get better applicants. So it's time to plan ahead. Don't rely on your gatherers and crafters to make a profit - because Neverwinter relies on real-world economic logic, it costs much more money to gather raw materials than they can be sold for. In fact, it costs many times more, because that's how the world works!
5.5 million commission to upgrade to level 4 means 153 fully productive workshop days! That's up to 7650 gold! Better really plan ahead. It's time to learn MS Excel and get to work on a spreadsheet! Isn't this fun? You're learning real world skills in navigating a fun, exciting part of a computer game! Just imagine explaining "Extensive familiarity with Excel from over 60 hours compiling Neverwinter spreadsheets" on your CV to potential employers! They're sure to be impressed.
Check the AH to see if you can stock up on gold right away. Hmm, a stack of 100 platinum statuettes worth about1/3 gold each sells for only 12.6k AD as of this writing. That means all you need to get 7650 gold is ((7,650/33) x 12,600) = (231.818 x 12,600) = 2,920,909 AD to cover commission costs to keep your crafters busy while you wait for one single workshop to upgrade so you can get epic applicants that might, just might, eventually show up and offer their services without significant commission or speed penalties. If you're lucky, after running dungeons for one month at 100k/day - no slacking and taking days off this fun, exciting chore - you'll be ready to spend all that hard-earned AD on treasure from dungeons to get your crafters ready. So let's come back in just one month! In the meantime, make all the gold you can! So: no refining gear you pick up, and definitely no buying those expensive 5 gold crafted keys to get your loot and extra from dungeons. You have the time, so run more dungeons and get your AD from the free chests!
(One month later)
It's now late December, but you don't have time to enjoy the Christmas event - you've got AD to spend! Let's hope that the universal demand for gold hasn't driven up prices on everything you can sell for gold, like statuettes, bowls, chalices, masks, low-level blue gear, and consumables. Surely people who aren't as smart as you will have given up on this crafting idea, so demand will be depressed by now. Let's hope so, anyway!
Ok, you've spent your three million AD, converted it to gold by selling at least 232 but, let's be honest, as many as a thousand stacks of items from the AH (hope you've cleared your inventory bags!) and you can finally get off to a fast start on professions! In only 153 workshop days, if you check in every few hours (no napping!) to check your delivery box, you'll have a fully upgraded workshop and those epic artisans will be lining up to occasionally offer their services, depending on the always-friendly RNG! You can now look forward to a friendly bout with the RNG as you explore the wonderful world of mastercrafting every day with its multiple layers of potential for failure, but it'll all be worth it when you finally beat the odds and get that recipe book! Surely mastercrafted gear will still be relevant to the game and in demand when that long-awaited day arrives!
5.5 million commission to upgrade to level 4 means 153 fully productive workshop days! That's up to 7650 gold! Better really plan ahead. It's time to learn MS Excel and get to work on a spreadsheet! Isn't this fun? You're learning real world skills in navigating a fun, exciting part of a computer game! Just imagine explaining "Extensive familiarity with Excel from over 60 hours compiling Neverwinter spreadsheets" on your CV to potential employers! They're sure to be impressed.
Check the AH to see if you can stock up on gold right away. Hmm, a stack of 100 platinum statuettes worth about1/3 gold each sells for only 12.6k AD as of this writing. That means all you need to get 7650 gold is ((7,650/33) x 12,600) = (231.818 x 12,600) = 2,920,909 AD to cover commission costs to keep your crafters busy while you wait for one single workshop to upgrade so you can get epic applicants that might, just might, eventually show up and offer their services without significant commission or speed penalties. If you're lucky, after running dungeons for one month at 100k/day - no slacking and taking days off this fun, exciting chore - you'll be ready to spend all that hard-earned AD on treasure from dungeons to get your crafters ready. So let's come back in just one month! In the meantime, make all the gold you can! So: no refining gear you pick up, and definitely no buying those expensive 5 gold crafted keys to get your loot and extra from dungeons. You have the time, so run more dungeons and get your AD from the free chests!
(One month later)
It's now late December, but you don't have time to enjoy the Christmas event - you've got AD to spend! Let's hope that the universal demand for gold hasn't driven up prices on everything you can sell for gold, like statuettes, bowls, chalices, masks, low-level blue gear, and consumables. Surely people who aren't as smart as you will have given up on this crafting idea, so demand will be depressed by now. Let's hope so, anyway!
Ok, you've spent your three million AD, converted it to gold by selling at least 232 but, let's be honest, as many as a thousand stacks of items from the AH (hope you've cleared your inventory bags!) and you can finally get off to a fast start on professions! In only 153 workshop days, if you check in every few hours (no napping!) to check your delivery box, you'll have a fully upgraded workshop and those epic artisans will be lining up to occasionally offer their services, depending on the always-friendly RNG! You can now look forward to a friendly bout with the RNG as you explore the wonderful world of mastercrafting every day with its multiple layers of potential for failure, but it'll all be worth it when you finally beat the odds and get that recipe book! Surely mastercrafted gear will still be relevant to the game and in demand when that long-awaited day arrives!
Post edited by feanor70118 on
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Comments
The spreadsheet, however, is only a list of artisans, tasks and so on. It does not calculate, for instance, how much gold each one will cost per day of crafting (plus up to 10 attempts at crafting level 70 items with morale). It does not calculate how much gold three gatherers and three crafters will consume in a day of crafting - that is something I learned from experience when the RNG saddled one of of my alts with expensive crafters and gatherers and failed to provide cheaper replacement applicants.
The point is that system is economically unsound, illogical, unbalanced, time consuming and frustrating. It is in no way fun or a game - it's an exercise in self-flagellation. Since I am not a medieval monk - indeed there's no Monk class as yet - I don't enjoy it.
I did the 500k to get to Workshop rank 3 then calculated the time/effort to get to rank 4 and walked away shaking my figurative head. I havent touched it since.
Its a shame as overall I think its a massive improvement in immersive gameplay, there is loads of logic to the system... but as the OP says the reality is a harsh wake up call that this is now a very serious time consuming job to craft!
I enjoy the new system much more than the old one.
The Rainer's file seems a good basis, but I rather use my own spreadsheet (I don't like to use something i didn't make :P) with my own infos (i don't like to take from others too), all of that only for myself (because I don't want to share everything ^^).
I didn't really bother yet with rank 4 (it's not my goal right now), but i did the maths on rank 3.
Rough approx, for level 70 artisan and with the profession i have chosen :
rank 2=>3 is 11 days max for 1 workshop fully working on it (if you don't have a stupid team for your RNGartisans),
I expect rank 3=>4 to be around 147+ days (3h craft instead of 2h, 10 x more to go + %failure on level 68-70 crafts for no legendary/gond tool).
So i'm pretty close (a bit above) to your final precise 153 days total.
Gold can be translated into workshop time, in my opinon.
You can make whatever quantity of gold by chosing and producing a good gold-earning reciepe (they are obvious...).
We made insane amounts from balms before they fixed it, but even now there are still some nice gold-earning reciepes (but yeah, it usually involves more collects/intermediate crafts than the balm).
Question : is rank 4 really needed to make crafts profitable ?
My opinion is no.
6 more slots in the delivery box (very marginal advantage as soon as you are on 2h-3h crafts) and access to epic artisans as candidates is not requiered to be profitable.
Yep, some of the best artisans are epic ones, depending on how you work, what you craft, and what is it for. But not all the best are epics, or you can find some "little lesser efficient equivalent" in rare and common.
Obsession to be "BiS" everywhere will make you burn out.
Maths, spreadsheets/Excel, wild calculations, etc can be fun (depends on how much you enjoy getting deep in a system).
It allows you to see flaws, navigate between reciepes to hit the most beneficial one and avoid crappy ones.
You can also enjoy the craft without any (or only a few) maths involved, with just basic concepts which are all very very obvious (im"h"o).
You just have to know what you want to do with each of your workshops (gold, AD, craft only for yourself, all of that in the same workshop, quick low tier reciepes, high tier reciepes, masterwork ? is this workshop will only be the supplyer for another one ? Is this workship will only craft "finished products" ?) because one artisan who is the best for one thing is often not for the other.
Today, I made around 400k DA /day by selling crafts (much more during the first 10 days of the mod15), with 6-8 workshops (i have 30) only built and based on my "common sense" and it take around 40minutes of my playtime. It's not even mastercraft.
I can very improve by more calculations and more alt+tab on spreadsheets... but... hey...
Am I cost efficient enough gold-wise reported to platine bowl (for exemple) AD buying cost ? Can i make more margins ? Can i produce more AD/day by increasing speed/miracle workers/dab hands ? Should I buy legendary tools and how much time does it take to amortize their cost ?
Should I really care about that if i'm not a huge fan of crafting ?
Or am I fine with my 40-50min = 400kDA sales/ day ?
Earning gold for its own sake accomplishes nothing but funding a workshop.
In other words, you agree that the system is not self-sustaining, so thanks.
Oh, and the price of balm wasn't fixed by the change, it was broken by it.
I think it's obvious that the entire point of my post was that the path to a BiS workshop is too long and expensive to be worthwhile, so I'm glad you agree. Obviously epic artisans are not always the best. In fact, the abilities/penalties assigned to epic artisans seem to me to be no better than those assigned to "common" artisans and are often worse. The ranks make no sense at all, but then neither does having a list of pre-rolled artisans instead of truly random ones that all have traits within viable limits. However, since the devs decided that in the delivery box and only in the delivery box certain items should not stack (and really, isn't it obvious that a gemstone made to be mounted in a ring takes up the same amount of space as a suit of plate mail?), having a larger box is essential for those of us who have to work and sleep and therefore cannot be bothered to check in with NW every three hours.
Yes, anyone can make money selling reinforcement kits made by a -75% commission artisan until everyone has the -75% commission artisans. If I needed AD right now I'd take advantage of that bubble too. In the meantime, thanks for helping me to point out that the storyline that tries to get players to max out their workshops is deceptive and not economical for players who want to use a crafting system productively.
Devs transform craft system in a "more bureaucratic version of Brasilia".
And believe me, Brasilia is very very very bureaucratic.
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Wow, what fun, what gaming enjoyment, what a laugh. I mean seriously, why does Cryptic program like they actually hate their customers? Its like something out of Dilbert.
e.g. One can consider chess and/or Go are fun and they need you are super careful, do lots and lots of research and analysis, etc. otherwise, you will get screwed by your opponent.
Can anyone do it, even if they are new to the game, or do we need a certain amount of gold/resources to get started?
And is this process safe, or is this something that might get patched up in time?
I did create a new character after mod 15 who did not get help from his brother/sister for gold.
He did his basic adventure to gather some gold himself before he reached the level to do profession. Not much, it was about 2 to 3 gold. He does have VIP. Hence, he could id gear and sell them.
He is now earning at least 20 gold per day and has over 200 gold in his pocket for doing low level profession to level up and earn gold. He did not borrow resource from his brother/sister to do profession. He gathers, crafts, sells. No, he did not do balm which was patched before he started to work on profession.
I did not go to preview and he is my first character who does new profession (I was using him as test bed because of the buggy version). Yes, you do need VIP. Without VIP, it will be very painful.
If one does not want to spend time to figure it out right the way, wait for others to do the job first.
I'm a chess and a go player (among other tact/strat boardgames).
My IRL job is supply-chain/scheduling production in industrial plastic molded pieces.
I love MS Excel.
It's a Perfect fit with the new crafting system i guess
@feanor70118
Craft is only one part of the game. Should every part of the game please the majority of the players ?
If the majority says "epic dungeons are too hard", should the devs decrease the difficulty ? If majority says "hardcore mode is not hardcore enough", should they increase the difficulty ? If the majority says "craft is not worth the invest" should they simplify ? Depending on how you want to drive your boat, you can have formulas (yeah maybe not only one, you really expected it to be as simple ?) to make indicators for the craft. But as any indicator, they only show you something very specific.
In IRL industry, you have a lot of indicators : for production efficiency you can look at Overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) or Total Effective Equipment Performance (TEEP). Both shows you 2 "vues" of how well your industrial workshop runs.
If it doesn't work well, then you can check "formulas inside the formula". Maybe it's a quality problem ? (%good pieces). Maybe it's a performance problem ? (the machine should make 120pces/h but only make 80 [bad + good] ). Maybe is the availability bad (too much breaks/changing productions) ?
But having a 99% OOE or a 90% TEEP doesn't mean your manufacturing business is earning money, though it's should somehow be part of how you calculate the sale prices.
You don't seem to have clearly define any goal or what crafting should mainly mean or bring to you. That's, in my opinion, the main problem you have.
Who do you really want to be as a crafter-player ? Judging by your last answers, i expect you to answer "I don't want to be a crafter-player anymore", and it would be ok. You don't have to, as I don't have to do dungeons/bashing monsters during all my playtime.
I started work on spreadsheets for the new profession system myself but after doing the first (Gathering) I decided it really needs a full-fledged database...and probably more work than I want to put into any game system. Especially one as dubious as this one.
No, I don't think that "every part of every game should please most of its players" is a sound statement. However, there should be a really good and obvious reason to design something that's tedious, a drain on resources and illogical and make it the centerpiece of a major part of a game. People having more gold than they know what to do with isn't that kind of reason. And the fact that I don't find any of that challenging or exciting is why I gave up on a double major in accounting after only 9 credit hours. I'm not sure how you're drawing your conclusions, but I want crafting to be something I don't have to check in on every few hours because I have a job and I need sleep. I want crafting to be something other than just another struggle against the RNG, which (besides godawful boss encounters based on control/immunity/instadeath and making class balance worse by the month) is most of what the devs seem to produce.
I think it's pretty simple to say that crafting should be a way to profitably and sustainably produce items to augment a player's AD and RP income without having to tediously check in on every workshop every 2-3 hours, tediously sell crafted items for gold to keep the RP workshops running, and do frakking SPREADSHEETS to keep track of it all. This is a game, not a Kafka novel.
I think you totally missed @tchefi#6735 's point.
Regarding your argument about logging in every few hours:
After you found the production chains that work best for you, you log in once a day for 30-60mins and make a lot of AD.
Regarding profit in general:
You don't understand how that actually works, if it would be extremely easy and everyone could do it, then none could profit.
Simplified you need to have something that the majority of your competitors don't have (or more than them), the most important factors would be AD, know-how and time.
If everyone would be at the same level in these factors, then none could profit.
PS:
1.) The only tedious thing in my opinion is, that I have to throw a party every 30sec to replenish workshop morale..
(Which I can't right now because my workshop is bugged out >_>)
2.) You can write a spreadsheet that helps you maximize your profit in a couple of hours, maybe even minutes if you don't have to parse recipes and know excel (doesn't need to be super fancy).
Well, the reason why I didn't post actual numbers is, that I didn't want to boast with how much AD I make, so I made a general approach.
I really didn't mean to insult you, English is not my first language, if you feel insulted, then I'm honestly sorry.
And yea, I don't think that I'm superior, everyone who puts some time into the system and has the starting capital can do what I do and even more and better than me. This time of the year I'm usually busy with work and don't have much time to play, someone who plays longer than 1h per day can easily outnumber me.
Here are some informations, hopefully good enough to back up my statements:
I do a lot of testing on preview, not only professions, also class mechanics and builds.
.. upgraded my workshop to max level on the first day and had epic artisans with >= 20% dab hand and recycle in every profession (except tailoring and leatherworking) since then.
(recycle, dab hand, high proficiency and high focus are actually important for masterworkers, speed and commission are secondary)
.. was making on average well over 5m AD per day with investing 30-60mins of playtime. (Until the bug)
.. earned well over 100m ad since then (net profit, excluding speculation profit from stacking mats beforehand).
Here is a small part of the spreadsheet I am using (not updated in a week).
First number is the averaged net profit I made on a sale of a +0 or +1 item, second is roi in %:
("2" in my notation refers to the last MW tier)
Idk, 5m ad in less than an hour per day, is that how you waste time?
Professions have to be reworked again, so that everyone can profit from them.
As it is, I have to spend all my saved-up AD to buy half of one weapon set as it's exceedingly expensive to even get to being able to craft for myself (no good tools ensures I fail and waste expensive resources...)
Add on top maybe 1-2 sets of neck/waist and you can tell this is meant only for endgamers/rich players.
Sure, it'll even out over time, but those of us who have not had the luxury of exploits/leadership armies/luck with luckboxes/years of events and just playing/whatever have no chance at gearing up until mod 16.
Something's definitely wrong when you can sell items for 8mils on a daily basis.
Well, they did say crafting was not going to be for everyone, but the results are in the same niche, soo...
Since that's all this mod offers, what the HAMSTER is the rest of us expected to do?
Get on the forums and "female variant of a dog"? Check! (screw you, filter)
Play other games? On it!
No one is surprised or impressed that someone who's selling mastercrafted items can make money. If you were willing to rack up the enormous amount of AD, guild marks and invest either a ton of time and failure or a ton of AD to finish mastercrafting, great. Now you have the ability to make imaginary money in an imaginary world that you don't have the time to play a game in. So if you think that's fun, congratulations. It sounds pretty pointless to me and it has nothing to do with the faults in this system for the vast majority of players.
Punishment must be an option.