Crafting

Hasukurobi - Heavens Tear

IceJazmin - Heavens Tear wrote: »

On the mastery part. Using your anology, there were hundreds of blacksmiths in the old ages, right? However, very very few ever made master pieces.

If you were to look at Japan, for example, there are few than 100 masterpiece katanas, and that is out of millions made. Every generation there may have been one or two grand masters, even nowadays, with all the technology we have, there is only one master blacksmith in Japan, and you have to wait 10 years for your pre-paid katana to be ready for delivery.... and you are talking millions of dollars for one.

If you look at something as common place as computer boards, even though they are made by machines, they have a defect rate of 20% on a good manufacturing run.

If it took you a year to make one sword, I could see how you would be able to make a great sword, however, in-game you can make a sword every 10 seconds...... The only way to balance the gear, so there is rare gear that people want, is by making it random, or else a single player could flood the market with the perfect piece of equipment in less than a day.

Alright, first off they did not all make master pieces but they also did not make junk on nearly every occasion. They were skilled enough to be able to make a good very useful weapon or plate if paid enough to get the material and put in the effort. They DEFINITELY did not once in awhile just magically make an awesome item and then sometimes make junk...that sort of randomness loses you your job.

As for Japan...That is because smithing is a dead art...I mean...I would love that it were not the case but these days people buy guns not swords. Once again though you are talking about masterpieces whereas I am talking about "better than average". In game terms I am talking about an Item with a socket, or magical bonus, or ** being more common for the lower level things you are making when you are far beyond them in skill. Masamune, for instance, does not make a "standard" Katana even when he is not being paid for a masterpiece. His skill is just too great to ever make a run of the mill blade. It would shame him to create such mediocrity. That is the point here, that if you are already a lvl 6 smith then lvl 1-5 should always be a little above par when your hands craft them. (Not *** with awesome bonuses but not * with nothing at all special about it)

As for the circuit boards example not only are they machined but they are also in all likelyhood manufactured (as are the machines which make them) with designed obsolescence in mind. Which means that they are made (and so are the machines making them) to fail at a certain time period so that the consumer must buy new ones to replace them. Sometimes this failure occurs more quickly than desired and causes this failure rate issue. (Got to love run away capitalism...) However, even with the example as stated that is 80% success which is far from random. That means that 8 out of 10 boards is perfect. Good luck getting those odds in crafting as it stands.

To address the last point, the actual *'s and bonuses would still be Random but as your skill improved your chances of getting better items should go up in proper proportion. You would not be able to "Flood the Market" because you are still in no way guaranteed to have made a perfect 3* item or even an item with superb bonuses just one that is not bare basics. Even the lower level item you get with at least one socket or magical bonus may not be very salable depending on what bonuses it gets and how much people want to spend for that one socket but at least it would not be a blank PoS...There might be a bit more "decent" gear on the market with this system but that also means that more crafters could get a bit of a reward for spending the time and coin to learn those skills to begin with while those who did not spend the time and coin on the skills can benefit from not wearing utter ****.

As for the time it takes...well...Yeah...But then again in the real world it would take one blow to kill most things, you die when you fall several stories, and most people when asked to kill hordes of big scary magical monsters from some hellish place all alone would say...Well you get the idea LOL. However, if they wanted to make the crafting process more involved like how it would be to really forge something, I think that would be a cool and fun game within the game myself...But that would take a lot of coding.

Konariraiden - Heavens Tear

Fubatsu - Heavens Tear wrote: »

Sorry to keep the discussion serious, but I do take this seriously.

I just wanted to touch for a moment on your driving anecdote, as I believe that it serves to furtehr my point. You don't nearly have fatal crashes every day, I would hope. You don't fail to arrie at your destination most of the time. The rule is that you have a decent drive to your destination, free of incident, and the exception is that something goes wrong. If this were not the case, I doubt we'd be having this discussion.

Actually, uh...I'm a very careful driver...but so careful to the point that I almost get into an accident most every day. I'm surprised the worst that I've gotten is a very small dent.

But I digress. You do seem to have a bit of a point. Again, I totally agree that the whole "one-star, no bonus" chance should be completely eliminated.

Solaere - Sanctuary

I agree crafting can be extremely frustrating ... that's why I don't craft anymore. Which says something when someone who started out crafting everything - just for the enjoyment of wearing all my own stuff - gives it up completely. (And yes, I know I look low level ... looks can be deceiving )

I remember one time in particular, crafting an item 10 times in a row and getting nothing but junk. Yes, I did get about 3 2* items - but they were all missing resistances (which IMO makes them junk - esp on arcane armour). In fact, the only items out of those 10 that had all the resistances were 1* with no bonuses. I ended up buying a 1* (with bonus) item from the AH because it was just too frustrating (not to mention expensive!) to keep crafting it myself.

Getting better with experience I think is great - more than just what level your crafting is at though, I'd love to see a seperate experience bar that goes up every time you craft something. So that even when trying to craft something for yourself (i.e: at your current crafting level), getting junk 10 times in a row at least means you've gained some experience, and have a better chance of getting something good on the next attempt.

And I'd be fine with the idea that making something good costs you more - maybe it takes a lot longer to make and uses more mats - but in the end you assured of something good. Maybe it can even be a slider, where the more you increase the time/mats used, the more you improve your chances.

The other thing that IMO really needs to be changed is remove (or at least greatly reduce) the chance of getting armour that's missing resistances.

TT equipment does make things better at high levels ... but in a way I think that shows they recognized the problem with crafting, in that they felt higher levels needed to be able to craft good equipment that wasn't random (or at least has a very small random component).

P.S: Getting rid of missing resistances for Tailor, and ensuring at least 1* with bonuses would be enough of a change to get me crafting again. Though I'd still like to see the experience thing added ...