Morderon wrote:5) Crafting points should be capped at x4 of whatever the character can get (so capped at 200+any crafting boonsx4) but still refreshed at the rate now (50+crafting boons every IG day). That way you don't lose out on that crafting potential for being unable to log in. At least for that reason; if you don't have the resources to use those points then shame on you.
2 points per in-game hour would be my dream. So over an in-game day you get 48 points (just shy of the 50 current), but yes! increase the cap to 200 or so!
For those who have invested into the Gift of Crafting (whatever it is called) or into the crafting skills (like spending skill points on Craft Armor/Weapon), make them increase both the points per hour and the max or something.
iria_huntress wrote:The problem I have with that claim, Mystery, is they don't even try to look into it half the time. I have seen DM's go off hearsay plenty of times. I KNOW someone specific has been chewed out twice for things I've done. Like starting PVP with a councilor of a district we were at war with. I made the first shot (within the rules), and someone else was given a warning because Bjorgunmork complained about them. They didn't look into it. They didn't even care, apparently. They just hated the player. If you aren't going to look into it, don't try to fix it. You'll only muck things up worse.
Blanket answers that punish the wrong people, simply to get at the few that are actually in the wrong, is not the solution. Appraise (as is) can only be seen as a punishment. Not a new "feature". More game breaking for many concepts. Those shops that you say are going to disappear. What if that shop was a large portion of their RP, and the appraise helped them supplement their supplies? Well, who cares! The guy with 9 million in his bank MIGHT start losing money over the next RL year. YAY! WE DID SOMETHING!
Just because you don't see what goes on behind the scenes, doesn't mean they don't care or nothing is happening. I know from experience they are going to collect info from logs, you, the other player, people who might be around etc. If you report something chances at you will never get a follow up on what happened with it. A dm who targets a player simply because they didn't like them wouldn't be a dm long.
From my understanding appraise still helps with selling, just not buying. Also money is still not that hard to come by, I can think of a few places where you can make between 30k to 40k from coin and selling items.
iria_huntress wrote:The problem I have with that claim, Mystery, is they don't even try to look into it half the time. I have seen DM's go off hearsay plenty of times. I KNOW someone specific has been chewed out twice for things I've done. Like starting PVP with a councilor of a district we were at war with. I made the first shot (within the rules), and someone else was given a warning because Bjorgunmork complained about them. They didn't look into it. They didn't even care, apparently. They just hated the player. If you aren't going to look into it, don't try to fix it. You'll only muck things up worse.
Blanket answers that punish the wrong people, simply to get at the few that are actually in the wrong, is not the solution. Appraise (as is) can only be seen as a punishment. Not a new "feature". More game breaking for many concepts. Those shops that you say are going to disappear. What if that shop was a large portion of their RP, and the appraise helped them supplement their supplies? Well, who cares! The guy with 9 million in his bank MIGHT start losing money over the next RL year. YAY! WE DID SOMETHING!
You're diverting the topic and throwing it into "other things they did and I didn't like so the team is the devil". This is not a valid argument. And no, I fail to see how this is punishing people, beyond having them pay 1000 gp more for lenses and already hinting this will be balanced by earning more money from loot. Leaving appraise running untouched was.
Chill, please. I ran a shop -exactly- like you did. You can still sell a bunch of profitable wares such as poisons, adamantine/metals in general, crafted items, the new items that you've already been told will be in the loot matrix, artefacts, wands, scrolls, and a bajillion other items.
As for the super rich. Expect money to bleed out a lot faster, since there ARE good money sinks in the server. Appraise running simply made it possible to have 9 millions AND maintain that sum + a very expensive playstyle. Now that sum may be either maintained, or spent to fuel that playstyle for a couple months top. Not both, indefinitely.
There's a lot still planned, we're just in a transitory period that doesn't look that great while follow-up features are being worked on. Also, lens prices need to be reduced from 3500 to something like 2500 or 2000. That was caused by the base price of a lens being 5000 gold.
Irongron and I did talk about flipping wares in a player-run shop (temp essences, lenses). It did come up as a consideration for the players that were doing it. I had considered factoring in appraise on the sell prices in a very small % change, but that would also limit the gold gains from selling to a merchant.
We decided that selling the same wares about half a room away for less isn't that great for immersion. Wouldn't the NPC react and increase the cost of his wares to stay competitive with you? Price standardization just made more sense as well, both from the standpoints of simplicity and fairness between the UD and surface. Also, consider how that would play out: "Hello sir/madame, would you like to buy some of my heal kits?" "Ah, yes, I would, but you made a slight imperfection here and I'm only willing to offer 32 gold instead of 35 gold. Otherwise no sale." Would this merchant really want to continue dealing with you every day, on every item sold? It's one thing to say "Look how this gold necklace sparkles in the light!" and quite another to say "Your wares are bad and I'm paying less for them." I'd argue that such an NPC would eventually not do business with you and give you the bird instead.
New updates should give players more stuff to sell to others. Keep in mind, people are only interested in buying if those things are useful to them, so it follows that any new items that will be added are likely to be (really, must be) functionally useful in adventures. Even if they can't be sold in player shops, the appraise change means you can sell them to NPCs for values exceeding the old 200 gold cap.
I should also note here that 20 appraise isn't likely to be sufficient anymore, at least with the current algorithm. It continues to scale indefinitely, so having like 60 or even 80 appraise will have a use. Whether it's worth the skill point allocation remains to be seen and the algorithm may need to be adjusted accordingly (right now, I think it might be too stingy on the benefits, so it may be buffed).
Gear items also factor into this appraise score, as does feats.
Selling NPC wares in player-run shops might provide an edge for lowbies, but I feel like that's fixing a problem with a different problem. If the issue is that lowbies have too hard of a time at low levels (and I don't think they do honestly), then we can always increase chest gains for low level adventuring to help them make their gear.
How often will lowbies really need lenses? Temp essences and kits I understand, but all the low level areas are adjacent to the settlements they start in. Selling cheap lenses makes more sense to say mid or epic level characters who would rather pay less for them than at an NPC merchant, but epic levels don't really have a problem making lots of gold, and in some cases already have their end-game gear and have little upkeep. They don't really need the savings, it just serves as a means of passive income and leverages the NPC's inability to follow market dynamics for extra profit.
The initial gold curve for low levels is brutal because they need to make all their starting gear and still purchase supplies on top of having less gold gains. I feel like that isn't a problem with shop prices necessarily, but rather one with treasure and the actual gains from adventuring, and giving lowbies the means to support themselves. The CR cap on gold was lowered, but this doesn't mean that gold has been reduced across the board. It means that in the upper-mid-level range, and in epics especially, it's lower.
If the aim of providing temp essences, kits, and lenses was to facilitate low level play, does this mean that it's being done as a charity, at a tangible expense to the player? Well, the way gold works (on an exponential curve) suggests to me that the drawback of being charitable is quite small, and I would even wager that those wares were still being sold at a profit, even at small gains of 100 gold. I'd argue for PvE reblancing or item accessibility before taking the big-brother approach.
I don't really think sinking 20 ranks in appraise is necessarily a huge sacrifice to make, especially with the way skilldumping works. You take 20 ranks appraise at level 30 for merching, level down, reassign points as needed. I don't really like that players can do this, or think that they should, but they certainly can in the current model. If you're serious about being a merchant running appraise, the good news is that appraise scales up to 127 ranks, and Craft Armor and Craft Weapon increase daily CP. If you craft a few iron daggers or iron short swords, with sufficient appraise, you could then sell each of those for about 500 gold or more. Just iron, not even masterwork. If you wanted to play a merchant king and you made wares that were then sold, you could easily support yourself with that play-style, and you would even have a functional use in an adventuring party.
My advice would be to just wait and see what else comes. Lenses are already being considered for a price reduction. Passive income, and appraise running, shouldn't be a thing. How can you have a stable economy when certain players can "Press F4 for Infinite Gold", and print gobs of money as needed? You can't just consider that "That's them, and it doesn't affect me." because it does. Consider what gold is used for on Arelith, from bounties, to hiring goons, to paying for artifacts, guildhouses, quarters, enchanting, etc. It affects all those systems.
We're not playing The Sims where you can sit in a settlement or Guildhall indefinitely, never need to adventure or worry about how you'll make ends meet, and buy anything you want given enough time. The game, at its core, is a D&D Roleplaying game, and that means players will be adventuring for fame and fortune. Any system that puts the adventurers in a second-class citizen scenario is not a good design. I get that merchants exist in such a setting, but for adventuring to hold importance, we can't have a non-adventuring profession be orders-of-magnitude more profitable than adventuring. Those adventurers are risking death adventuring, and there's a reward involved with that risk.
Last edited by Septire on Wed Mar 08, 2017 4:04 pm, edited 1 time in total.
I really love what you wrote Septire because it really is true, having watched a single guildhouse sell to one player for 1m, who then sold it for over 1.5m, its kinda sad to know that the economy is so flooded with gold that everyone that doesn't have millions is kinda swept under the rug. Houses should not go for that kinda money. Heck my own characters have given away houses at their own expense rather then see it go to the wealthy.
Septire wrote:Lenses are already being considered for a price reduction.
That's all I care about. I'm fine with making gold mining more difficult, and I'm up for trying anything that makes the economy more player based, but sorry folks, I have a job; I can't be spending half an hour walking from point to point, every time I want to go somewhere.
Oh, and something else I forgot to mention. We also decided that having merchants ID things should be a trivial task. Before it varied in price but in general it was very expensive for lowbies. For item identification, it's a flat 50 gold now.
Lore will be beneficial when you're out adventuring and want to keep the adventure going. For instance, being able to ID potions and other consumables you'd use while adventuring. I'd also be interested in adding more lore skill-checks which could lead to additional treasure. Again, transitory period, we're getting there.
This change should make low-level adventuring a little less painful now.
My only main problem with this update is the incredibly significant drop in gold gains from adventuring. The other night, I and several others ran around the desert for 6-7 hours, adventuring away. We made about 8k each... from seven hours. We then were forced to spend the majority of that in restocking, ending up with a net gain of about 2k each for that entire time... and this is in a mid level area. Is the idea to make gold incredibly rare, while also increasing prices of all goods? I understand removing the ability for appraise runs, but people seem to keep comparing the new prices to the old UD prices and saying "people were fine with the higher prices down there, so it should be good across the boards". However, if gold drops have truly been dropped to about 1/3 of before, as it seems... this change will hit doubly hard.
"Well hello, consumer, yes hello consumer bop bop bop bop be da bup bebop cola~ yeah~!"
Lost Valkyrie wrote:Are we entitled to rebuilds so we can recapture wasted skill points?
The answer after every change like this is no. Appraise still benefits your character, just not as much as it used to, and in a slightly different way. That is to say: they aren't wasted skill points (even if they are not skill points you would have chosen to spend in the particular way you did).
Aftond wrote:Let's hope for something /real bueno/ for crafters.
We can only hope.
Dinosaur Space Program is my working partner on Arelith-related projects. If my inbox is full or I take a while to get back to you, feel free to PM them questions or concerns.
Well there you go, reduce that to something that characters without 30 STR can handle, also something that isn't absurd as turning hundreds of pounds of meat into a tiny 5 lbs bundle.
Cortex wrote:Reducing the absurd amount of meat required for the higher tier healing kits would help a lot. Is it still big meat 7x for +10?
Yep, still is. The materials scale up exponentially even as the benefits do not.
There are a lot of recipes where the issue isn't the final product, but rather the materials / crafting points that go into it. The portal lens recipe is another big example. As is the availability of animal sinew for carpentry, even though you'd think it'd be an easy material to obtain.
The devs should review most of the recipes already in existence, otherwise they'll never be worthwhile to craft, no matter how much the vendors are tinkered with.
Dinosaur Space Program is my working partner on Arelith-related projects. If my inbox is full or I take a while to get back to you, feel free to PM them questions or concerns.
