Ryzom

wow i made someone's sig - i'm very honoured

toadus wrote:wow i made someone's sig - i'm very honoured

And so you shoud be

There are any number of post-patch 1 crafting issues raised in this post that are just, well, wrong. Allow me to respond.

jaggarot wrote:AFAIK there's no MMORPG in existance where you can buy raw materials from NPC vendors and sell them back to the vendor as a finished good for more than you paid for them!

Yes, but there are also no MMORPGs I've ever played that force you to lose over half the value of the item made. Grinding went from about a 15% loss to over 50% loss. It is now basically impossible to grind in any serious fashion using NPC mats without a big bank account to absorb the losses.

And the concept of using player supplied mats to grind is a fantasy predicated by fanbois. No one supplies the quantities in bulk you need to grind; I bought up every piece of q50 amber and seed on the vendor over a weeklong period to level one of my jewelry lines that was stuck at 60. Grand total of 3 levels worth of mats were available...over a week.

Basically, anyone could quite easily "grind" thier way up the crafting tree simply by investing time.

Given you can't level using vendor mats, your only choice is to harvest, harvest, harvest. And so now I'm investing 10x the time I spent before to harvest large stacks of raw mats that give me very little harvest experience And for that matter, I actually don't want to level harvest any further since I want my lines to be somewhat even to avoid getting caught in the DP trap. If I were to harvest q100 stacks...well, I'd probably have picked up 20-30 levels by now (I've already picked up 4 harvest levels at 150-180 exp a pop, which is frightening.) Frankly, it is the most bored I've ever been playing a MMORPG.

As it was, before the patch, the only brake on crafting was the money supply. The immense amount of dappers that could be made from missions meant that I could level very rapidly indeed (I have all crafting trees in the q80-100 range, was making 2-3 million dapper a day and my Green Seed and Matis Fame have been capped for quite some time)

This is a point if you're like the poster or myself, who leveled up reasonably well pre-patch. I won't disagree that some of the apprentice missions were sickly lucrative after you got the mandatory 20 levels over the q required and had no failure rates.

But what if you're a budding crafter? This is sheer disaster for a newbie. They can't harvest well and now their one source of income for buying grind mats is gone. So...you can hunt and slowly level harvest since you can't get 3k exp per mat pull...and keep in mind the nice pull rates we get at level 100 are predicated on large amounts of focus and the higher rate extractions. Newbies and lowbies aren't pulling 10 mats, they're pulling 2 or 3.

I won't disagree that there was something wrong with being able to make 2m dappers a day safely. But there were better solutions, like level caps.

Under the "new" system in order to level in crafting I have to get mats from:

1. Harvesting
2. Animal mats from guildmates's hunts
3. Player sold mats on the NPC vendors

#1 and #3 have been discussed. #2 is nice if you're a guildie, but even then the quantities aren't enough to make a real impact given the max for most players wearing heavy is about 150 items and the max for light about 200.

A far, far better system IMHO than simply doing 8 missions every 90 minutes and then grinding 5 or 6 levels at a time (the situation it was before).

As for making a profit - you really have to be creative. Yes - there are a lot of items on sale at the vendors at base price (and they make me a comfortable amount of cash - I'm "poor" if my account dips below 250K) - but if same chap wants a quality sword with +20 hp/+20 Stam then he isn't going to be able to get it off the merchants...........

And with item decay rates way down, the only reason these are selling is the large influx of new players brought on by the free trial. I've sold more q50 pieces over the last week than I had in the previous month. And I've watched max damage choice q70 weapons at lower prices than anyone on the vendor sit there unsold. This tells me its not the existing base that's buying.

What happens when the free trial influx ends? And if I'm selling stuff this cheap since I have access to large amounts of mats, what does it mean for the poor newbie who because of failure rates has to make 10 items to even place something on the vendor that will sell? They're certainly not making any money selling at base price.

There ought to be an opportunity there for a dedicated crafter

Yes, there should be.

But now that we've eliminated the opportunity for crafters to have an income stream so as to buy materials (because of nerfing missions), you can't be a dedicated crafter starting up from level 1. Add on top of that your grind costs went up huge, and even if missions were still in existence you'd still be in trouble as a newbie. And if you want to store mats, forget putting them on a packer...max 10 stacks of 99 now. (Of course, you can always put them on a vendor at ridiculous prices for storage purposes, but isn't that a near violation of the EULA?)

Basically crafters got the shaft more than any other class in patch 1. And the result has not been surprising. Many of the best crafters in the game have already left. And given what I just discussed there aren't going to be many replacing them, as leveling crafting as a newbie has gotten very, very difficult.

So, I stand by what I've said elsewhere. The initial result from patch 1 was to flood the market with raw mats, lowering prices significantly. The result we're going to see later on is prices going up signficantly as there will be only a few pre-patch people left crafting with no one to replace those who've left. Great for people like myself and the poster. Lousy for everyone else.

But, who cares, right?