Item prices going way up - patch 1 crafting disaster.

[usinuk]

I'm glad to see the devs listened - a little bit - on harvesting. Now its time to discuss crafting issues.

For those of you who aren't big crafters, there were a number of changes that were, well, disastrous. And most haven't been discussed on the board. Let me illustrate what's changed...and then talk about the effect.

1. Prices for harvested mats are up. That's known given the harvesting changes.

2. Purchase prices for wondermats are up about 20%. Example: q50 mats at 100 fame used to run 751 per item. Now they run 866.

3. Prices that NPCs pay for items are way down...almost 50%. Example: a q50 earring (requiring 2 mats) used to sell for over 1000 dappers per earring. Now it sells for 466 dappers.

4. Failure rates for a number of items are up in a big way. Example: a 75th level crafter attempting to make a q70 magic amp previously had a 70% chance (defined as partial/full success...more like 4 in 10 chances for a full quality item.) Now, they have a 40% chance.

5. Crafting missions now pay out 1/10th of what they did before.

What does all of this mean?

Income for young crafters just went away. #5 means that the way most of us paid to level up in crafting is gone. Prior to the patch, most craft missions ended up giving you 2x the cost of purchased mats if your fame was up, plus nice experience in what you crafted. Now, you get 1/5th of the item cost back for doing a mission, which is even less than what the NPCs pay.

Grinding for young crafters now costs 3-6x as much, meaning its unlikely you'll see many more crafters around. #2 and #3 mean it should cost you about 2-3x what it used to cost to grind mats. #4 adds a much higher failure rate. Net net - somewhere between 3-6x costs to level.

The combination of fewer crafters, more expensive mats, and higher failure rates mean item prices are going way up. #1 means mat costs to crafters are probably double. #4 means item failures are way up, probably adding another double to prices. Fewer crafters...well, supply and demand will make things even worse.

Just thought everyone should know why your item prices are going way up, and if you care about it, you might want to say something.

[usinuk]

Oh, one more negative. Packer bulk being limited to a little over a bag means we can't stockpile mats, which is not good either.

One positive...q100 mats will get the few of us that make 80 or so up to 120 as long as we have other income. There really won't be that many though given the costs to go up.

[usinuk]

Oh, one more negative. Packer bulk being limited to a little over a bag means we can't stockpile mats, which is not good either.

One positive...q100 mats will get the few of us that make 80 or so up to 120 as long as we have other income. There really won't be that many though given the costs to go up.

Are any of these issues being addressed in today's patch? Half of them sound like bugs, and if they don't get fixed...well, we'll talk about that later.

[maggers]

3. Prices that NPCs pay for items are way down...almost 50%. Example: a q50 earring (requiring 2 mats) used to sell for over 1000 dappers per earring. Now it sells for 466 dappers.
Thats because you half now half later if you leave your sell price at the default.
(thats if someone buys your items)


Well they are fixing the patch today.. so please stop with the moaning until after the patch.

I understand your concearns and sympathise with you, but please wait.

[usinuk]

Thats because you half now half later if you leave your sell price at the default.
(thats if someone buys your items)

Wrong. That's not the case if you unclick the sell on market option to sell directly to the NPC, which you do when grinding. Those prices are down over 50%. Please don't post misinformation. Yesterday I spent 1 million dappers grinding 11 levels of earring quality so to meet the need created by the changes for higher end jewelry sets. Pre-patch it would have run about 100k. How many people have 6m dappers sitting around they're willing to spend on making other players happy to increase their hps by 50 points?

Well they are fixing the patch today.. so please stop with the moaning until after the patch.

Flaming me doesn't solve the problems they've created. Pull my post history. My comments on this patch have been constructive, not 'I'm gonna quit if you don't...' or 'Fighting is too hard'. I don't like a lot of the balance changes in the patch, but I'm willing to give it time and my experience on ATS has taught me many of the complaints are by people who haven't tried different ways of getting around an issue. That said, in this instance, I tied together a calm, reasonable list of issues and bugs raised that haven't been brought up in a single post before, that can't be gotten around, and you call it moaning? Shame on you.

I understand your concearns and sympathise with you, but please wait.

Calling me a 'moaner' is an odd way of sympathizing. I would be happy to wait if anyone had bothered addressing some of these issues in the GM responses but so far almost every post has been either on harvesting or mob strength.

These issues will affect every player in the game that doesn't want to fight naked with their fists shortly, and while I don't like to sound like a broken record, many were known and reported on ATS. Its my belief that several of these, if not all, are outright bugs caused by differentiating what vendors pay for basic versus supreme mats...overseers paying less than mat costs makes no sense as a change. If they are bugs, crafters as a class got substantially more bugs than anyone else this last patch, its unconscionable that QA let the patch out in that state, and given these are newly introduced bugs they should be at the top of the priority list.

And if they're balance changes, we need to have a rather urgent discussion.

[maggers]

Ooooh I am sorry Mr Uber Player.

Your the one Mis-Informing others.

Your the one clicking off the option to sell at a higher price.

Your the one Moaning like a little kid.

Just quit and get it over with oh and can I have your items ?

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Now thats a flame.. see the difference ?

Now pick yourself off the floor and notice the only one posting on your thread is me. What does that tell you ? No one is listening but me and Im a sad Bas*ard who is sitting here bored at work.

Oh if you want more flaming.. please ask and you shall recieve :)

[maggers]

Oh that last post is supposed to be sarcasm but I have this odd feeling your an emotional person and you are going to take it very bad.

Well here is a sypathy post.


Maggers you are not listening, he had some valid points.
No leave him alone and get on with your work. Your evil pure evil.

[usinuk]

Your the one clicking off the option to sell at a higher price.

You just don't get it, do you. The 'option' to sell at a higher price is THE PRICE YOU CAN SET AT AUCTION. (Which works, even if the message you get is wrong when someone buys an auctioned item.)

This does crafters trying to level up no good, since no one wants to buy 100 q20 boots of nothingness except an NPC, who will pay less than 1/2 of what they did before.

Heck, I'm not emotional. I'm right. And the only emotion I'll have is chuckling when other crafters who read this will sell you stuff at 20x what they used to for you being a jerk. :)

[pcheez]

This is good, this is good, positive anger ..
Now usinuk, how long have you two been together ?
Maggers, plz dont interrupt,its his turn to vent
:p :p :p
just kidding.
Btw, i put 5 suits of ql 40 armors of nothingness up for sale at 5x the Npc price, they were all sold within 1 day .

[maggers]

Ok end of flame war. My apologies, seems I picked a flamer who outsmarted me :(
Calling me a Jerk.. come on you can do better than that :)

Oooh Cheezy the Pantless one. :)

Anyhoo .. /whistles and runs away :@

[helbreat]

jewel merchants are bugged too i think as i sold some jewelry to one lastnight it goes in my list of sales but it doesnt show in the shop i put it in and theres nothing to say what vendor it is on so its probably likely theyll never sell

[maggers]

jewel merchants are bugged too i think as i sold some jewelry to one lastnight it goes in my list of sales but it doesnt show in the shop i put it in and theres nothing to say what vendor it is on so its probably likely theyll never sell
Helbreat have you tried the other Jewelry Traders, I have a feeling depending on the level of the item it only shows up on certain traders.

[daniel6]

Ooooh I am sorry Mr Uber Player.

Your the one Mis-Informing others.

Your the one clicking off the option to sell at a higher price.

Your the one Moaning like a little kid.

Just quit and get it over with oh and can I have your items ?

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Now thats a flame.. see the difference ?

Now pick yourself off the floor and notice the only one posting on your thread is me. What does that tell you ? No one is listening but me and Im a sad Bas*ard who is sitting here bored at work.

Oh if you want more flaming.. please ask and you shall recieve :)

Oh man, can I be your (<- Notice the correct use of the word your.) friend?
You're
(<- Try using that sometimes.) clearly a true master of 'flaming' and deserve alot of respect.

[maggers]

Oh man, can I be your (<- Notice the correct use of the word your.) friend?
You're
(<- Try using that sometimes.) clearly a true master of 'flaming' and deserve alot of respect.
Hahahahah Nice one.. I like reading posts from bored peeps .. YOUR very clever :)

I just read all 7 of YOUR posts and not one was constructive or even interesting. Actaully all where whines. Did you want some Cheeze with your WHINE ?

:D

[usinuk]

jewel merchants are bugged too i think as i sold some jewelry to one lastnight it goes in my list of sales but it doesnt show in the shop i put it in and theres nothing to say what vendor it is on so its probably likely theyll never sell

helbreat, check the (previous) q50 mat merchants; they should have jewelry merchants next to them that sell higher q stuff. the old q25 merchants seem to be limited to selling q25 stuff; the old q50s list everything.

Pcheez, were you using wondermats? Impressive someone actually bought that. Maybe I should sell useless armor too. ;)

And getting back on topic...

Tra da! Nothing has been fixed with the latest patch.

- Craft missions still pay less than item costs.

- NPC prices unchanged.

- Impossible to access packer materials in some cases.

- Close combat crafting tree still not rewarding exp, 4 weeks after this was noted in 3 languages on ATS.

- Failure rates unchanged.

I'm high enough level and have enough dappers in crafting so I can probably survive this, especially when I start charging a ton more, which will be the natural result. (For that matter, maybe I'll start working on magic again since it seems to have been boosted.) Lower level crafters trying to level up, however, are toast.

*sigh*

[zzeii]

1. Prices for harvested mats are up. That's known given the harvesting changes.

2. Purchase prices for wondermats are up about 20%. Example: q50 mats at 100 fame used to run 751 per item. Now they run 866.

-The price for wondermats are up, encouraging people to underprice the vendors to get their mats to sell faster.

3. Prices that NPCs pay for items are way down...almost 50%. Example: a q50 earring (requiring 2 mats) used to sell for over 1000 dappers per earring. Now it sells for 466 dappers.

-The return price on gear that was grinded out on poor mats is down, but the ease of selling choice made gear has gone up.

4. Failure rates for a number of items are up in a big way. Example: a 75th level crafter attempting to make a q70 magic amp previously had a 70% chance (defined as partial/full success...more like 4 in 10 chances for a full quality item.) Now, they have a 40% chance.

-poor example using magic amps since the skill is currently based off from 51 now (close combat crafting) which is currently bugged, and they are working on a fix for that (if you were 51 in melee weapon craft pre-patch, the new branch is greyed out and you recieve no xp from crafting magical amps).

5. Crafting missions now pay out 1/10th of what they did before.

What does all of this mean?

Income for young crafters just went away. #5 means that the way most of us paid to level up in crafting is gone. Prior to the patch, most craft missions ended up giving you 2x the cost of purchased mats if your fame was up, plus nice experience in what you crafted. Now, you get 1/5th of the item cost back for doing a mission, which is even less than what the NPCs pay.

-2 days on newb isle you could get to 50+ in armor and melee weapon craft and be sitting on a nice 500k+ dappers, just doing missions. And this doesn't seem a little wrong? And again, your calculation are based off from using the npc items, not player sold.

Grinding for young crafters now costs 3-6x as much, meaning its unlikely you'll see many more crafters around. #2 and #3 mean it should cost you about 2-3x what it used to cost to grind mats. #4 adds a much higher failure rate. Net net - somewhere between 3-6x costs to level.

-Only if you purely use vendor purchased (npc items), if you buy what the players sell your costs will probably be lowered considerably.

The combination of fewer crafters, more expensive mats, and higher failure rates mean item prices are going way up. #1 means mat costs to crafters are probably double. #4 means item failures are way up, probably adding another double to prices. Fewer crafters...well, supply and demand will make things even worse.

-Higher failure rates applied to magical amps (above q60), I had no issues of anything else having lower success rates during crafting, between this and the previous point, your calculations are off.

[korin77]

But whats the point of doing those crafting missions now? To gain fame? What good is fame if you can simply buy player sold items and sell it through the same system? Why should I waste my time crafting things that I know I will lose massive amounts of money on? As if those missions were not boring enough before. Now they just got redundant altogether.

You told me you maxed out your tryker fame already zzei. So would you ever do another crafting mission for tryker anymore? You won't even get more fame.

[usinuk]

-The price for wondermats are up, encouraging people to underprice the vendors to get their mats to sell faster.

-The return price on gear that was grinded out on poor mats is down, but the ease of selling choice made gear has gone up.

-Only if you purely use vendor purchased (npc items), if you buy what the players sell your costs will probably be lowered considerably.

Again, what do you grind with if you're a young crafter? I can't find 1000 seeds and 1000 amber...no one sells bulk q50 grinding mats except for...NPCs. I'm sure you'll come back with an argument there will be a player that does. I hope that's the case... but as a 98th level harvester I can't imagine someone going out, spending 10 hours harvesting this quantity, and putting it on the vendor. Your packer is too small, your bag too small, and the profit level isn't there. Much better off as a harvester concentrating on choice mat spots. Might as well take the NPC mats off the vendor as the only thing they're good for is grinding material.

-poor example using magic amps since the skill is currently based off from 51 now (close combat crafting) which is currently bugged, and they are working on a fix for that (if you were 51 in melee weapon craft pre-patch, the new branch is greyed out and you recieve no xp from crafting magical amps).

-Higher failure rates applied to magical amps (above q60)

Yep, and the bug has been known for 4 weeks on ATS, even reported in French. Shame on them for rolling out a patch with it, and a mini patch that ignored this.

And the 'failure' rates in general have been a known issue since the game began. You don't get 85% success...you get 60%, with a bunch of degraded items. The CC failure rates are well above this.

2 days on newb isle you could get to 50+ in armor and melee weapon craft and be sitting on a nice 500k+ dappers, just doing missions. And this doesn't seem a little wrong? And again, your calculation are based off from using the npc items, not player sold.

Where do I begin? Yes, if you want to craft exclusively and run only crafting missions you could get rich under the old system...assuming you ignored the trees that didn't give missions, which I for one haven't. But...most crafters immediately poured their mission earnings back into grinding more. It was the only way they could afford the loss rates.

Now...you can't. There's frankly no reason to ever take an overseer mission - if you want to waste money to increase fame, you can just take a welcomer mission. Costs less, and gives you 1 fame point per mission rather than 1/5th a point.

And the source of income for young crafters to pay for grinding is gone. Items crafted by senior crafters with much lower failure rates will cost less than what you can produce using player mats, so can't make money that way. Can't make money running missions. And Heaven help you if you make jewelry...never degrades, so every q50 set ever made is still out there. Good luck trying to level in that if you can't pay for it somehow.

How they grind without being harvest or melee specialists I don't know. Do I think that there should be a level cap on overseer missions so you can't milk run 200k every 90 minutes? Yeah, at some point. That's what you have senior overseers for giving q100 missions. But the way this is done just destroys newbie and lowbie crafters.

between this and the previous point, your calculations are off.

Not really. At the very least, this means a lot fewer crafters coming in = less supply = higher pricing. I've pushed jewelry and armor prices up between 50-200% already and they're selling like hotcakes. Probably won't be on the upper end of my estimates given it looks like we might be able to get a reasonable amount of player mats with the harvest fix, but grinding costs have gone way way way up, and pricing is going to reflect this even for higher end crafters.

What really irks me is this makes the least newbie friendly MMORPG out there even less newbie friendly. More expensive gear, very very difficult to level up to craft your own gear...not good.

Why the second least played class in the game (after ranged weapons fighters, which I am as well) had this happen I frankly don't understand.

I like some of the changes - selling stuff on vendors is useful, and reducing plan costs a bit helps me take more plans in general (along with halving ammo costs) - but I am not going to sit quietly while I watch an entire generation of people below me get the shaft. It might help you (and me) not to have competition on the crafting side, but I like to see people play the game the way they want to play it.

[krone9]

hey guess what - on newbie island you only have player-sold mats available as well. I went to the raw mat bloke to buy 35 lining and found they only had 1 in stock.

I don't like the comment 'if you play your crafter for 2 days you can get 50k and 500k in dappers' - perhaps if you don't do anything else for those 2 days and forage all the mats yourself. I've played my crafter for probably around that - I'm level 38 and I have about 130k in dappers which I don't think is unreasonable. If you were a melee fighter and you sold all your loot you'd have about the same - whats the problem?

Besides lvling in melee costs you money only for armour (but theres no point in wearing it) or for weapons (which you don't need *that* often). Crafting burns thru money like no tomorrow - the overseer missions were the only way we had to offset it.

If the problem is people exploiting them to make too much money then just set the respawn time for the missions to a greater interval, don't make them completely stupid loss making exercises.

My main character is a melee fighter - but out of all the changes in Patch 1, this nix on craft is by far the most annoying for me.

[jaggarot]

Ummm - let's put it nicely - you're wrong guys.

The route for crafting now is to harvest, then craft. No more grinding of NPC mats.

Harvesting has had a big boost and mob mat drops a leseer boost (they drop more and higher qual mats).

If you fight and craft - use animal mats to level craft.
If you harvest and craft - use harvested mats to level, and level on the highest qual items you can make.
If you just craft - you're on to a loser, but can get mats cheaper than before from players via the traders.

If anything , crafted prices seem to be going down, at least they will be once I start flooding the market!

[krone9]

sorry - you're wrong. There aren't enough people foraging to support the market. This will never ever work either because there is no point to raising money.

If I was a harvester rather than a crafter, why the hell would I want to sell my mats, rather than give them to my guild? What am I gonna spend the money on?

Thats apart from the fact that there just aren't the mats there in the newbie worlds for new crafters to get started.

If I just want to craft - why the hell should I be onto a loser??? Every other skill can be played solo so why should they limit crafting like this? I don't want to play a harvester - I find it very very tedious. Animal mats are still way too hard to get in the quantities requires to craft lvl with. Apart from the fact is very very hard to get decent quality mats from drops.

Unless this crafting gimp is sorted I can't see me playing my crafter characters - which will annoy me immensely.

[usinuk]

Ummm - let's put it nicely - you're wrong guys.

The route for crafting now is to harvest, then craft. No more grinding of NPC mats.

Harvesting has had a big boost and mob mat drops a leseer boost (they drop more and higher qual mats).

If you fight and craft - use animal mats to level craft.
If you harvest and craft - use harvested mats to level, and level on the highest qual items you can make.
If you just craft - you're on to a loser, but can get mats cheaper than before from players via the traders.

If anything , crafted prices seem to be going down, at least they will be once I start flooding the market!

There are any number of problems with this (kindly put) (il)logic.

One, we've already tried the harvest/fight then craft approach and it didn't work. Players spent 5x as much time (and exp) harvesting versus crafting until you hit 100 or so in harvesting when you get the higher pull-per-mat stanzas to give you large quantities of mats (along with the stupid forever-focus repatch which will just flood the market with mats, but that's another post), meaning realistic advancement is pretty much impossible in crafting until other skills hit high level. Same goes for fight. This is the same system we had before q50 mats hit the NPCs, or q100 mats now. I could count the number of crafters able to make q50 or q100 stuff on one hand as a result.

Two, if you want to buy from vendors, bulk grinding mats are just not available. I was leveling one of my minor jewelry trees today and bought every q50 piece of amber that wasn't outrageously priced. Found a grand total of 300 pieces. That's 3 levels of crafting. 3! Maybe you don't get the amounts, but when you seriously grind crafting you go through thousands of pieces of mats.

Three, while raw material costs (especially high end) will likely drop under patch 1+, there isn't going to be anyone left to craft the items given what I just described except those few already at high level. You simply cannot advance crafting at a low level any more given you go bankrupt trying. Two or three of us together could probably destroy any chance of other crafters going on the jewelry market ourselves if we decided to put up stuff at well below their costs and ignore the fact I've spent something like 15M dappers leveling the tree...there's no way they could afford to match it given no more missions to run.

Bascially, fewer crafters = higher costs. Pretty simple econ. And that's what we're heading towards. The flood of mats from the harvesting giveaway and vendors are lowering prices right now, but just wait.

[usinuk]

And footnote:

CC experience has been fixed. 5 weeks later.

Everything else remains the same...or worse, a couple of missions are 1/2 of what they were before. And I hope the devs are paying attention.

[usinuk]

Footnote two: Server went down briefly tonight to fix a bug that was allowing certain items to be crafted with lower chance of failure than normal. Why this is a priority I'm not sure, but one of the other bugs have been fixed, or even acknowledged.

And having spent several hours harvesting 500 q50 grind mats I'm ready to throw something at the PC. None were available on the market besides the 2x cost NPC version.