Impressions of Chapter 1 from ATS: of special interest to those who forage.

[moriant]

Just curious...anyone know what mats are used in crafting the new 'amps' ( I mean glam rock gloves)? Same as before, even though they no longer have a 'shaft'? Light armor with an amber twist?

Same materials as the current staves unless this is changed in the next few days. The only changes to 'amps' is the graphical change and the smart 'lets-put-the-new-item-in-a-brand-new-crafting-tree-that-no-one-has' change.

[tleilaxu]

Same materials as the current staves unless this is changed in the next few days. The only changes to 'amps' is the graphical change and the smart 'lets-put-the-new-item-in-a-brand-new-crafting-tree-that-no-one-has' change.

Yep same mats as magic staves

[shrike]

So Shrike.. how exactly are the vendors going to be a huge new source of training mats for crafters if the harvesters won't even be able to pull the same amount of mats per hour (or whatever time table) as compared to now?
...

I don't know if you have noticed them so far, but some of the things in the game which move are not players. Those are called "mobs". Now, the interesting thing is that you can "attack" those "mobs" and "kill" them.

When this happens you can get mats from them, too. Imagine this!

Granted, 50% of the mobmats drop from nonaggro-herbivores, whose droprate is quite nonexistant. But the other 50% come from kitin/aggro mobs, which are *very* abanduant. Previously I would say 95% of all these mats just vanished at the NPCs. Now crafters can buy them without much effort. And it's a huge difference if you have to forage 100% of your trainingmats or only 20-60% of them. Only jewelcrafters have no advantage here.

[botello]

Devoted harvesters seem to have far outlevelled other classes ( and doing it solo I might add ). The QL of the stuff some of you pull far exceeds the demanded level.

So....I don't think its wise to have people level up to max in a few months, so I think Nevrax's system is fair in the interim, but maybe increase the exp back a bit in patch 2 when all the other classes catch up. Also I like the idea that foragers have to group... just like mob hunters. Sounds fair to me. Just my opinion.

I don't give a damn if they nerf the max ql you can harvest per lvl. BUT from what I hear this makes foraging IMPOSSIBLE to do solo. They limit the quantity of mats you can get by requiring you to use astonomical amounts of focus for a few mats.

"Oh wow all of us have worked together ALL day to get the mats for this SINGLE set of heavy armor! oops! Three out of the 6 pieces degraded. Anyways, let's do this for the next 3 days so we can all get armor then go out hunt with it!"
Hmmm so what? you'll spend all that time getting some damn armor mats to have it BREAK after a day or two of use...

[moriant]

I don't know if you have noticed them so far, but some of the things in the game which move are not players. Those are called "mobs". Now, the interesting thing is that you can "attack" those "mobs" and "kill" them.

When this happens you can get mats from them, too. Imagine this!

Granted, 50% of the mobmats drop from nonaggro-herbivores, whose droprate is quite nonexistant. But the other 50% come from kitin/aggro mobs, which are *very* abanduant. Previously I would say 95% of all these mats just vanished at the NPCs. Now crafters can buy them without much effort. And it's a huge difference if you have to forage 100% of your trainingmats or only 20-60% of them. Only jewelcrafters have no advantage here.

The increased difficulty of critters will likely reduce the amount of quartered loot that is being added to the game. (people killing less/slower, forced to group)

Lets assume though that everyone will start selling all (or even some) of their quartered loot to the vendors. So will people offload a lot of small quartered loot stacks or will they save up and sell them in big stacks? What about the limit to the number of items/stacks they can sell at any one time? Even harvesting will suffer from this problem as it seems that getting a stack of the same quality mats will be troublesome by some reports.

Packer inventory space is now 500 bulk (not the 500k bulk currently). It will be a lot harder after the patch to store up a lot of small stacks for future use. Sure I could buy a lot of quartered mats from the vendors, but it might be 2 or 3 days before I could use them because I have to go harvest mats to use with them. Again, this doesnt even take into account keeping a stock of good materials for crafting or keeping items in stock for selling.

Oh and thanks for the condescending remarks about how quartered loot works. I would have never know that.. except for the 20 other threads you've posted the exact same thing in. Yes.. we know... quartered loot has its uses.

[alugilac]

I don't know if you have noticed them so far, but some of the things in the game which move are not players. Those are called "mobs". Now, the interesting thing is that you can "attack" those "mobs" and "kill" them.

When this happens you can get mats from them, too. Imagine this!

Granted, 50% of the mobmats drop from nonaggro-herbivores, whose droprate is quite nonexistant. But the other 50% come from kitin/aggro mobs, which are *very* abanduant. Previously I would say 95% of all these mats just vanished at the NPCs. Now crafters can buy them without much effort. And it's a huge difference if you have to forage 100% of your trainingmats or only 20-60% of them. Only jewelcrafters have no advantage here.

OMG what a great solution!! Killing the mobs. Ok lets figure this out. To get 1 crafter from 101-150 skill in 1 crafting line takes 18k mats. Now if we kill 1 mob that drops 4 mats, which i think is a safe rounded number per kill, we can figure on killing only 4500 mobs. 2250 if we get 50% of our mats from foraging! I cant wait to get started, lets just remember that we will need to use mats to replace all the broken equipment from the hunting. If we have to replace swords, and we try to build magic amps that will slow down the grind.

The bright side is we only have to get 11 crafting lines past 150, then 200, then 250...

should be able to get that done in about a year.

In the future you should actually try the brilliant solutions you come up with, before you proclaim how they are the fix all to every problem.

The devs really are putting the cart before the horse on every turn.... We complain that harvesting cant keep up with the equipment degradation, so they make harvesting even slower, and offer no fix for the equipment degrading problems.

Devs should spend a lot more time playing their game, before throwing things in that are just way off the wall. Im really dissapointed. Ryzom was better in beta then it is now. Really sad.

[btamilio]

I'm with Shrike on this one. It's a total game balance thing, not just to whip out the "nerf-bat" on harvesting because it's too easy. The merchants change EVERYTHING about the economy, and they want to make this a key part of the game.

There's an unspoken balancing effect here, in that is takes focus off of the guild-harvesters-supplying-the-guild-crafters thing, because they won't be able to keep up. Instead, you'll have to rely more on the marketplace, (eg: the economy outside your guild for all us "independant" and casual players).

[mordred3]

There's an unspoken balancing effect here, in that is takes focus off of the guild-harvesters-supplying-the-guild-crafters thing, because they won't be able to keep up. Instead, you'll have to rely more on the marketplace, (eg: the economy outside your guild for all us "independant" and casual players).[/QUOTE]

If the powergamers - many of the people testing this stuff on the test server (Trust me, I know them) can't harvest well, what on Earth makes you think the "casual" players will be able to meet the demand that they (the powergamers) used to meet? You have to take into account the sheer amount of materials required to level above 100 crafting. Thousands, tens of thousands of materials. Most people can't supply that now, and they are just making it increasingly difficult to do it after the patch. To add insult to injury, decay is STILL not fixed.

There is no marketplace nor will there be any great marketplace post patch, at least not for materials. If anything, there will be less marketplace because no one will want to sell their hard earned materials and instead will give it to their guild crafters as mentioned before.

[moriant]

I'm with Shrike on this one. It's a total game balance thing, not just to whip out the "nerf-bat" on harvesting because it's too easy. The merchants change EVERYTHING about the economy, and they want to make this a key part of the game.

There's an unspoken balancing effect here, in that is takes focus off of the guild-harvesters-supplying-the-guild-crafters thing, because they won't be able to keep up. Instead, you'll have to rely more on the marketplace, (eg: the economy outside your guild for all us "independant" and casual players).

Guild harvesters can not keep up now with guild crafter needs and you think it will somehow get better with this patch?

We've tried hiring outside harvesters and offering on region to buy various stacks of harvested mats. Response: mostly crickets.

How are changes that make it MORE difficult to get both harvested and quartered mats going to make people more willing to collect and sell those mats as opposed to now?

The vendor system makes it easier to sell, but the patch does everything in its power to make collecting those materials more tedious and difficult.

How exactly are independant harvesters going to supply mats when a solo harvester will not be able to pull a steady amount of mats? What incentive is there to sell that stack of materials you just spent an hour or more collecting? Dapper? What will you spend the dapper on?

If anything these changes will hurt the independants.

[btamilio]

can't harvest well, what on Earth makes you think the "casual" players will be able to meet the demand that they (the powergamers) used to meet? You have to take into account the sheer amount of materials required to level above 100 crafting.

That's... the point.. of the merchants. The incentive for any harvester is to sell it on the marketplace for 3x to 5x what they would get from a merchant, or from giving it away to a guildie crafter.

Given enough people harvesting and putting mats on consignment, it should work as intended. If not, then it just slows you down at those higher levels. Too bad.
There is no reason someone should be breaking 200 one month after the game comes out. I'm sure that's not what was intended.