Crafting system

[Fozzharn]

how long have there been complaints about the gold-price and it's destroying the economy?

Instead of reducing it, gold was made even more valuable due to the possibility of making ingots and selling them at more than double an ore is worth.

Miners are selling ore to crafters at 300 Tria (!)  -  If this will stay it is completely impossible to earn money with selfcrafted weapon if you want to do it an ecological way and employ miners ...

I'm sorry, but this was the absolutely WRONG way.

[Idoru]

This 'gold rush' will probably die down soon. Its just that the skill is new and there are few players able to make the ingots (is this new to the game? I couldnt do it a lvl 10 metallurgy last week)

[John80sk]

mrmph, well, one thing I admit it has done is caused players to work together, something that I haven't seen them do using the game mechanics in a long time.  Would be nice if we could actually make useable items worth the time and effort put into their creation though.

[Fozzharn]

sorry, this gold-rush will NEVER die down ...

It is and it was always the fastest way to make money and if you watch the gold mine you will see the most heroic warriors using a pick to earn money ...

But what I want to say:

First of all: The crafting system is now in an excellent condition. The way of making experience in the different skills is absolutely traceable.

So thank you Dev's for that !

But the way to make a selfcrafted highquality weapon should be as follows:

Master miners dig the ore and the coal and sell them to metallurgists
Master metallurgists make highquality steel of it and sell it to the blacksmiths
Master blacksmiths take the steel and make highquality weapons of it.

As long as you can earn unbelievable amounts of money by just getting it out of the ground and sell it to an NPC at 240 Tria (which is a very good price) or even find players and sell it for 300 Tria (wich is an astronomic price) there is just no way to sell a handcrafted weapon at is real worth.

And you will never find a miner, digging ore for you !

And due to that there is no way to earn money with crafting weapon.

The result is ... a blacksmith standing in front of you saying (and trying to stay IC) -  "Well, I have to do further training for my blacksmithing but I ran out of money. I think I will take a day at the gold mine."

or even worse:  "My blacksmith training got stuck because I ran out of xxxxxxxxx (whatever you roleplay PP) I will take a journey to the outlands and kill some bad people to make more training possible."


What am I up to say, again ?

Gold price - DOWN
Crafting    - must give PP (what about an NPC taking steel stock for example and paying you in PP instead of Tria ? (depending on quality and players skill))

thanks for reading ...

[Idoru]

And you will never find a miner, digging ore for you !

I spent several hours last week trying to actually sell some iron ore and coal, but no-one was interested in the raw products. I spent a long time mining it and there was no market when it came time to sell (not to mention some guy constantly undercutting my price and making it uneconomical to mine the products, it would be more cost effective to mine gold). The only thing I could sell was steel stock but I only managed to sell a few of those.

[Rongar Elani]

I cant see why the current goldrush should be so bad at all. It is a good way to earn money, for the (yet) few who have spent time, tria and nerves (lost by trying to manage to work with 8 stock at a time to PL the metallurgy skill  ), aswell as for the miners, who get mostly 50% of the final products value. So, the people are filling their purse up, which means, more money to spend (like on weapons). Why is this bad?

Yes, I do understand why the weapon crafters are complaining about it. Other people are making the big money, while they are spending their time at the anvil, trying to build up their crafting skills and producing a not too bad weapon, which wont sell for much, if they sell at all. But this is nothing, that should worry you. Once you can make the real good stuff by crafting, the high-skilled metallurgists will take a jealous look over to the anvil and curse themselves, not to have levelled their other crafting skills.


So, currently there are 3 points, that should be changed, in order to make the crafters happy 


1. Fix the repair bugs (all I need is 2 of the same weapons to repair them almost back to max Q, like 2 sw ss or 2 ss of the same crafter, and I wont need any new swords anymore)

2. Lower the slash on the existing weapons or make them really, REALLY rare to be looted. (like the iron heavy dagger  ) Self crafted weapons HAVE to have a higher value, than they have currently.

3. Implement new kinds of weapons, a crafter can actually make. like a higher slash weapon or other boni, like STR +10 STR for example.
   [as suggested here: http://hydlaa.com/smf/index.php?topic=27989.0 ]
   Ill await this to be done soon(tm)...   

@all crafters: the time has come, where the citizens of Yliakum are wealthy again, or on the way to it. So raise the prizes for your products, even if it mean less sales for you. The price dumping has to come to an end. The effect of the mini wipe, which has lead to the price dumping, is faded

[Nikodemus]

i see there is a concern about ore not worth selling to players.

- make the picks decay while using (successful or not)
- set the NPC price of ores at a level that let's say guy with 20 rank will be hardly (but still) able to earn some profit from mining wile selling it to NPC. Player character will obviously give more than NPC. That way people will mine as much as the market needs.
- Because of the fact, that we both don't want the pick decay too fast and have the NPC prices of ores somewhat normal.... (they can't be 1.5, so 1 or 2, only thats a big difference) Maybe miner should eat? The more he mine, the more he eat and the food cost too.

Thank you

Of course there is more balancing/remaking in other areas of the game and with them being flawed, it is possible the above idea won't work as expected. But you have to start from something.

Oh, and for these who say NPCs should have higher prices. I gues because you want the NPC to be believble, each have their life and that they build thing too.... need ore and stuff... You then ask why they would but the Ore at so low price? Because they know that a trained miners will sell them the ore, because it may be profitable for trained miners. Also, you may expect many lazy people, who will sell the ore to NPCs even if they loose money because of that Lazy, because they won't wait a bit on the plaza for the buyer

[Jackdaw]

One thing that might help would be to make gold much harder to mine. For some reason, items that are needed for weapons crafting, like coal, take a lot of time to dig.

I could see keeping gold at a higher value than coal but in terms of effort spent, coal is a multiple of times harder to mine.

Either that or have Harnquist willing to buy coal for 500 trias.

[John80sk]

I still say this is easily solved by reducing the rediculous amount of iron needed to make a single steel stock...

[Vengeance]

Didn't gold get harder to mine recently?  Hmmm....  :-)

[Garon]

Gold price - DOWN [/u]

It's not just as easy as that, because gold is the main way new money enters the economy.  Drop the gold price, and training will take more trias out then is coming in, causing a crash in prices due to lack of money.  Nobody having any money is just as bad, if not worse, then lots of people having lots of money.  One is inflation, the other is deflation, both cause extremes.

[Unnamed_Source]

The lack of PP is one of the contributers that make crafting not a worth while possibility. Having to turn your attention to killing NPC's to level makes dedicated Miners, Smelters, and Smiths not doable in the constrains of real life. At higher levels the amount of PP needed to fill in the red bar vs the amount of PP gained by just the practice from the last lvl is nowhere near the same. And thus you will never see dedicated crafters cause they will always need to gain PP else where.

The lack of storage is another facter. Because dedicated crafters are spending time away from their posts gaining xp to train their perspective skill, you will not see a trade of goods from one crafter to the other, Lets not even equate real lif into this, just the fact that I need to leave the forge area in order to level my skill(ie kill NPCs) I will miss whom ever is coming around selling stock. Like wise the weight factors in, I can mine 2-3 stocks worths of iron and coal before I need to smelt or drop them. Now If i cannot find a runner, I have to take them to the smelter myself and if I'm going to do that I might as well smelt them myself, cutting out a middle man and gaining practice in metalurgy, Now I might or might not find someone to buy the stock right ther and then. But thankfully I can go back and mine some more since the stock weight s fraction of the raw material. But eventually I too will be bogged down by the wieght of the stock and I will not be able to mine any more. I can sell the stock or I can craft with it. More than likely I will craft since I will not likely find any PC to buy it . Even if the end result is a terrible blade, slowly but surely  I will get better, right after I go kill a few hundred monsters that is. If we had storage, I could then mine an/or smelt and stow it away till that blue moon rises and the PC buyers come back from the hunt. As of now I am limited by my weight carrying capacity. Also, the use of mules is not an excersise that everyone can do, whether it is to have a second client running or the very risky drop/quit/relog. Mules are not the solution for most solo players.

The problem is not the price of gold or lack there of. Buy devaluating the price of gold you will only make the problem worse. More time will then be needed to dig gold to then use to train in skills. Cause what other reason is there for tria, than to train? If you think the mine area is crowded, just wait till the price drops. Now if you figure in that the time it take to mine a chunk of gold is woth 240 tria. Surely you could say the same for any other mined item, even if the NPS is not willing to give you that. Since it is not attained anywhere else but through mining, The price for the time would be reasonably the same. But you also have to factor in the weight, all the metal chunks weight the same, so figure in that you can spend 15 minuts mining gold or iron the price will be the same since your have a full capacity but the same number of each. wherr ase Coaland the other non metals take lees weight and there for mining them will take longer to fill your carrying weight, you will gain 3+ times the amount. So in turn I would charge by the weight rather than the time. Now if some joker under bids, then let him sell his time away for nothing and eventually the price will steady it self as the rumer spreads that one iron = one gold(= 3 coal weight wise)

Now, as stated above, with the lack of a viable storage you will not get far in mining iron solo before you reach your limit. With the lack of a quick sale, what are you going to do? Team up! Guild up a few fellow miners, with each making a mule or two, Each mule carring its max, you can Run the mules to the smelter and wait for a perspective smelter to buy your ore or smelt the stuff yourself, each pair of miners taking from his partners mule till its emptied out then vis versa. Buy this stage you should be able to mine some more or hopefully find some smelter to take your stock. Rinse and Repeat till your mules and main characters are all full then each can practice smithing if that buyer was ano show. Don't like to group? Welcome to the club, I am the grand Puba, we meet every 3rd thursday, and its ByoB.

[Jackdaw]

You make a number of good points Unamed.

Having to take breaks on occasion to go kill as many NPC's as you can to gain pp does make it hard to stay consistently with crafting. And if you are on your own, all the time you spend away from the forge means less practice in your craft or missing out on a sale. It would be great to see more experience points awarded for blacksmith or weapons making. I don't think you will have people jumping on the crafting bandwagon just for the experience points.

I'm sure that there are plenty of economic arguments on either side as to what the availability and price of gold should be. In the long term, however, we need to have mining iron, coal and making steel stock be profitable enough to the individual without breaking the crafter. As long as gold is as available as iron or even close to as available, no one will want to mine for you. Gold ore tends to sell for 450 trias apiece. No crafter can attempt to match that for iron ore unless they can sell a weapon for a very high price.

Learning crafting is a very time consuming venture on it's own. In that regard, having readily available gold that the crafter can earn tria on becomes very attractive while they are learning their craft. Unless you started with a big bankroll you can't afford to hire miners and your weapons won't sell for much as they are not that good. Maybe there are some guilds with money they would be willing to loan or invest in you. Or, there are some crafting guilds that might be interested in contracting with you to mine for them to earn some tria to fund your learning your craft.

[bilbous]

One thing I think many people miss is that it was not entirely uncommon in the medieval period for young men to enter the army when young and gadabout the countryside, participating in battles getting loot and then retiring to a different kind of life if they lived long enough. This would be akin to going out, training (fighting whatever) until you have mastered a weapon and an armor type and then taking up crafting. I guarantee if you do this you will have plenty of spare pp's maxed stats and carrying capacity and the basis for claiming you know what a good weapon really is. I would be really surprised to discover a weapon smith in such a time period who made any quality weapon whose use he was not proficient with. It would be all too easy to get the balance wrong or too much play in the steel or whatever. My problem with the crafting comes from what happens to the scrap? For example last night I took 4 stock and made an alpha blade whose quality was rather poor. I heated it up and started to hammer it some more and it turned into one stock. So where are the  three stocks worth of scrap metal I should be able to recast? Usable metal would not be so dear if it did not disappear so easily. I'm not saying there should be no loss of raw materials but 75% is a little extreme. I also am not saying a master smith could not make good weapons he did not know how to use just that they would be better if he did. Perhaps some amount of skill in the relevant weapon could add to the making as a bonus factor.

[sam5992]

I like the new crafting system. It's more realistic. You can't study crafting for an hour and make master weapons.  I do have a small gripe with megulargy though.  After spending a half hour at the iron mine filling up my sacks, I make my way back to Harni.  I melt them, and make them into stocks.  I don't have a lot of strength, so I usually make only one stock a run.  On average, that takes me 45 minutes.  one stock. that makes [ ] that much megullargy practical training.  So it takes about 5 hours for me to get from zero to one?  How about from one to 2? I really think that will just take to long.  Making it to 200 in megullargy, sword crafting, axe, shield, blacksmithing....  Does this seem like a lot to anyone else?  i order to make your own stuff, you need 1000 progression points to be a master crafter. and weapon repair and armor repair are good skills for any blacksmith.  And some crafters might want to mine their own stuff.  Never mind strength training to carry all your books, tools, diagrams, ect.  So, in order to be a "master" you need around 2k prog. points.  And with the difficulty to earn progression points in crafting, and megulargy.... I just don't think it's quite possible.  What I think the fix should be is having level 200's making insane weapons, that cannot be looted.  A person with level 10 in megullagy, some kind of weapon crafting, blacksmithing, ect., should be able to make decent weapons.  Its not fair that the people who want to learn a profession need to spend hours upon hours training to make the same weapon a person with a level 2 axe skill can loot off of a rogue. There should definitely be benifits for those who chose to learn something rather than hack and slash their way to decent items. 

Another thing the crafting system needs is more quests.  It seems that I did three crafting related quests for harni, and now all he needs from me is gold ore.  And the smith in Ojaveda gives the same quests.  Maybe if you did a really hard quest you would gain a whole skill level in a certain area?  Or just more quests to give you more, maybe easier diagrams.  I still can't make a sword..... 

Thats just the opinion of a frustrated crafter-in-training.  Sorry I think I misspelled megulargy every time I used it, but it's not part of firefox's spell-check.