Questions and suggestions on the new Artisan material requirement changes

Hello wanted to make this thread about the new artisan material increases to express opinions and request a response on it from Intrepid. Making the thread in alpha general over the artisan section is to get some different eyes on it. While I appreciate the hard work the team puts forward some miscommunication or slow communication causes a lot of discontent like with this change. Also would like to ask about some of the ideas that come to mind from reading the fan wiki and determine how viable they sound since I'm not a developer. I just want a more detailed exchange on the current artisan system's feel.

First the catalyst for this post was the changes on the server release that multiplied some artisan crafts by 27 times the amount of raw resources needed. Intrepid has walked it back a bit but some still need 8 times the amount to be made mostly the tier 3 recipes and tier 1 recipes were almost completely reverted though some are still 2 times more expensive. This was a change in the artisan system with no warning and communication which took as far as I could tell everyone off guard. As it pertains to one of the main systems in the game that people have collected data and made charts to keep track of the non-communication aspect was I think a little abrupt on Intrepid end. Not asking for a full statement when these things are iterated on, but communication that a change like this is in the works and the idea behind such a big overarching change would be appreciated.

Now I still would like to disagree with these changes being implemented, but I will try to infer the reason for them. I can think of three reasons after observing and discussing with people for the past two days. First guess there were too many legendary items by the end of phase 2.0 by the end most level 25's had at least a few legendary pieces of gear. Second reason is that there was too much left in the storage such that some players created alternate characters to act as secondary storage. Third and last that I can think of is they were trying to rebalance the speed at which adventurer's get gear and level with the artisan systems leveling and crafting speed.

Approaching the first guess I can agree there was the way many legendary pieces of gear by the end of the first part of phase 2. The problem with this being a reason to increase the material requirement is that it doesn't address the underlying problem which stems from this being a test and with so much of the artisan system missing. The reason that I can see the large amount of legendary gear is from the lack of a degradation system, more importantly a permanent degradation system so that those items would disappear over time. Having a permanent durability loss would allow a cycle to form which I think is going to be needed especially when we hit max level in this game in the future. Which is basically where the last phase ended up with most players being at max level for 2.5 months which allowed the build up of top quality gear. The next part of this connects with the next reasoning of people having too much stored away.

About midway through the last phase maybe a little before I'd already heard of people having overflowing storage banks such that alts were made with the sole purpose of having the extra storage space. If this is the reason for the increase in material requirements I think it would be a gross misunderstanding on why that was happening. The connecting point between to much legendary gear and overflowing storage was that heroic+ rarity materials were just common enough that players wanted to have only the best they could get. If you look at the two exceptions to this hunting and coal. A lot of people tolerated a generally lower rarity piece when these two materials were involved. So the slight seeming availability of the higher rarities meant a lot of players waited and gathered them instead of slowly upgrading the gear they had over time.

Another reason for the overflowing storage is the lack of an easy trade environment. First the basic market we had was barely usable till the added the material search function and honestly still not great but it's alpha. I'm not expecting it to be very usable in a lot of aspects. I'd just like an explanation about the change when the economy itself is in such an unfinished state because of missing systems like these. One of the biggest reasons for raw material stockpiling was the specific needs of each recipe for different types of processed goods which points to another missing system the wiki states.
Q: Are crafting materials going cross tiers? For example, using higher level materials in lower level recipes, or low level materials in a higher level recipe? Is that allowed?
A: Yes.[8] – Steven Sharif
and
Recipes have slots for required and selectable crafting materials. Adding higher rarity selectable materials increases the rarity of the crafted item.[34][35][36] Choosing different selectable items can also result in crafted items with different statblocks and unique properties.[37]

Both would let a more flexible use of materials cutting a bit back on the stockpiles.

Finally the last guess from why Intrepid implemented this was to try and balance the leveling between artisan and the adventurers that go grinding, losing a majority of the mob drops. Two problems with this, the mob's can still get higher rarity gear that now takes longer but is still comparatively faster then building the nodes up and have crafters build up the artisan skill they need especially with an increase in material requirement. As an example of how off balance the current system is there is already level 10 heroic gear drops from bosses and not a single apprentice building up. I wouldn't be surprised given there are level 25's after two day's that world boss gear has already entered the game.

Also our guild spreadsheet person SabuMaru did some math using the previous artisan processing system compared to the current one which might be an eye opener. Guildies once gathered to make 50 gear sets in 36 hours for a siege so
50x10 gear pieces
every item takes about 20 raw material ( for the math )

then every one of that is for JM 3 steps of processing

50x10x20x3 = 30.000 raw materials

that is 120 x 250batch size processes

taking total of
480 Hours / 20 Days

so in those 36 Hours we had ~ 14 people working on this
( Mains and Alts )

This was pre-half revert back
NEW MATH
50 sets
10 pieces per set
~ 40 material into every piece ( This was upped )
and every process is at least 3 into it 1 and 3 cycles for load of these things

50x10x40x3x3x3 = 540.000 RAW materials

is ~8500 Hours / 360 Days

OR .... we needed 240 characters to work 36hours straight to get the same result

current
~ 40 material into every piece ( This was upped )
and every process is atleast 2 into it 1 and 2 cycles for load of these things

50x10x40x2x2x2 = 160.000 RAW materials

is ~2560 Hours / 160 Days

OR .... we needed 71 characters to work 36hours straight to get the same result
So the time investment went way up for processing it's 4-5 times the effort. Then if we look at the gathering time -
say 100 materials an hour as a base it would take
160,000 / 100 = 1,600 hours with the incre
ase in time between each rarity being about 4 times the effort every time
it comes to being 6,400 uncommon
25,600 for rare
102,400 for heroic
409,600 for epic
1,638,400 for legendary
Even splitting that over a 50 man guild it's 32,768 hours per person.
I asked for help writing this and have been reminded to also point out the processing cost for these extra materials per level starts to add up since it is another multiplicative.

As the base of the gathering system, I don't think Intrepid truly thought through the amount of time required to do basic crafts with this kind of material inflation. There is one last possibility but I don't think it should count as an actual guess to make these changes and that the artisan skill tree might affect processing ratios. Which feels like a stretch. I think a lot of the complaints and speculations could have been avoided with some more of an input from Intrepid because this does kill the motivation every time I look at it.

On to some theorizing and suggestions which I'm putting forward in hopes something helps balance out the current systems. I feel like in the future with the systems Steven put forward like land management and the more interactive moving veins after emptying one would erase a lot of the problems this change was trying to deal with. These changes seemed to ignore the static resource farming that was going on as a a big reason legendary gear was so readily available. I do feel that just having the regular possibility to have heroic+ spawn in the world also isn't good. I'd rather there be special spawn or growth systems in place that would allow the rarity to go up for a resource. Example like a forest growing and the trees getting denser in the center of it with some being higher rarity or they haven't been chopped over a period of time and the tree grew bigger requiring extra tools or time to chop with some of the materials coming out being higher rarity.

There needs to be a look at the storage system as that is also a problem especially with storage bags now locked behind crafting itself. With the rarity system the way it is there needs to be a way to hold more of the same resource at different rarities because it takes up too many slots for the lack of stack amount you're going to get so it wastes the stack size it could have. The only two ways I see to solve this while also keeping six rarities is either add more bag slots to the bag and lower the stack size or the other stack all rarities together but allow drop downs for each "pocket" in the bag. This problem is also why as a JM miner and JM herbalist I used only the JM mining bags to hold my herbs because I didn't lose that much space comparatively.

This also doesn't solve the node storage problem but that's more about the specialized storage being mostly useless and the storage crates only partially working. If you want specialized storage actual differences like the bags are required not a general halve the space but stack limit is now 44. There really needs to be a higher cap I think for node storage, but I could easily be wrong here. We are also getting guild and freehold storage sometime in the coming months so we'll see how that feels.

The last few suggestions are based on making the game feel good instead of just being about balancing. One a fellow guildmate asked was to change the selection for turn in commissions to always take the lowest rarity.

I'd like to point hat the balancing of lowering all drops probably isn't a good experience. Though this is a test I've seen people suggest adjusting it to more of a material drop system to help ease the feel a lot. No player likes seeing nothing but money drop but with the crafting economy being what Intrepid seems to be looking for I think a compromise needs to be made somewhere. A second idea I've seen is there being an ingrained depuff on the dropped gear from mobs like either a 50% stat cut even a 25% stat cut would work. As someone who focuses on crafting, seeing people already getting rare and heroic drops while we don't even have apprentice buildings online is a friction point on this side of the argument.

The last suggestion I have for here is after witnessing 3 server starts there needs to be a fresh server growth system in place because the disparity as players already hit max level compared to how fast the nodes get online and the artisan buildings built is a large disparity. I will say I have no idea what the fresh server growth system would entail but I see the need after seeing this three times over.

Would appreciate any feedback on this post and wouldn't mind a response on some of the reasoning for the changes Intrepid implemented.

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Ludullu

Azherae wrote: »

(If any Phoenix Initiative knows why this material requirement change even had a chance of going live with the original 3-3-3, plz tell us, the commoners are dying out here).

From what some PTR people have said, lately things have barely had any PTR testing and mostly just went live asap. Dunno if PIs have an even deeper access to dev clients, but even if they do - that shit would be under very strict NDA.

Also, how's this for a radical idea. Any lootable gear should only have a single substat. And when you deconstruct that item - that's gonna be the substat that the resulting material will transfer to the crafted item. So if you wanna have a sword with +con and +str - you gotta get 2 swords with the respective stats.

I just dunno whether this should be a full alternative to the general materials impacting your substats or if it should be a required part. I'd imagine that people would complain about too much rng in crafting, if this was a required part.

Azherae

Ludullu wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

(If any Phoenix Initiative knows why this material requirement change even had a chance of going live with the original 3-3-3, plz tell us, the commoners are dying out here).

From what some PTR people have said, lately things have barely had any PTR testing and mostly just went live asap. Dunno if PIs have an even deeper access to dev clients, but even if they do - that shit would be under very strict NDA.

Also, how's this for a radical idea. Any lootable gear should only have a single substat. And when you deconstruct that item - that's gonna be the substat that the resulting material will transfer to the crafted item. So if you wanna have a sword with +con and +str - you gotta get 2 swords with the respective stats.

I just dunno whether this should be a full alternative to the general materials impacting your substats or if it should be a required part. I'd imagine that people would complain about too much rng in crafting, if this was a required part.

You already know where to find this implementation, don't you?

lamina5432

Seems like we've exhausted the current reach we can with the discussion about mob drops and a system to interlock it with artisans for now. Viewing the discord feedbacks which are pretty messy it mostly goes nobody likes it and there should be an alternative then just turning down all drops. I did confirm that gear drops are still possible and even heroic drops level 10 but they are much slower than before.

On another note got some exact math on crafting 50 sets of gear an important number given that it's base guild size. Received from another guildie who mathed the whole thing out.
The Total Processing time for 50 sets has gone from 300 hrs 40 mins to 1326 hrs 10 mins - an increase of 341% (or multiplied by 4.6)

Total Raw materials have gone from 7740 to 87420 - an increase of 1028% (or multiplied by 11.3)
Still seems way over balanced even if they wanted to do an increase in requirements. Not even counting how much more time and materials it will have taken to go from level 10 to 20 in a crafting artisanship.

An interesting topic that came up in my guild was that they might want more granular modifications for recipe's and an idea was proposed to make everything need ten times the amount of materials though a definite modification would have to be made. I thought an idea would be when we process raw materials they could result in a lot more goods. Such as an ore making a 3-5 fragments instead or even more if you want to go that way. It would lead to a similar ability like they have from the gear stat system right now of adjusting the sliders much more minutely than right now where every single change is a lot on the recipes. This also lends to a common complaint of a whole forest going into one bow that I see.

It would also allow for some more interesting merged crafting recipes a fellow guildie gave the example of mixing different inks in a scroll for different results. Though this would result in a bigger storage adjustment. In tune with that what about having city use only crafting bags and we are also getting access to crafting and processing from storage to help with that. have so much larger numbers in town would also allow a use for material transport caravans a system pretty much by the wayside right now but with some numbers played with I think would them become a viable reason to use caravans that way.

Enough for now but there is always more problems I'll bring up over time any thoughts are appreciated.

Ludullu

lamina5432 wrote: »

I thought an idea would be when we process raw materials they could result in a lot more goods. Such as an ore making a 3-5 fragments instead or even more if you want to go that way.

What if we had this for rarity decrease? Say you have an option, you either get one Epic frag from one Epic copper, or you get 3 Hero frags or 6 Rare or 12 uncomm or 24 comm.

This would probably require an adjustment to the recipes where high rarity results don't require as many mats in them, cause otherwise we'll never craft a super high rarity item, but this particular feature could come from the "recipes leveling up" thing they mentioned. A crafter makes several items from the same recipe and their skill at executing on that recipe lets them make the thing at a higher rarity with a lower mat requirement.

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