No Globals, No Worries

Atrax

Prowler
Joined
Jun 3, 2011
Posts
1,138
Avatar Name
Mutant Atrax Stalker
OK so

I was standing around the quarry this morning, deciding what (if anything) I wanted to do. I noticed a busy crafting machine and someone making rapid-fire EPIV globals.

Walked over, dropped 10 PED on nanocubes, whipped out my trusty 62 QR EPII, and cranked out 50 clicks.



That's a 300% good morning on my first action today, and a lovely morning to you too, Mr Loot Engine.
 
These guys are still lighting up this machine. I threw in the 5 clicks I salvaged earlier and waited. When MAsa hit the second of three in a row I hit those 5 clicks on condition :wtg:

I got about 1.65 loot in 2 partials, and then about 3 seconds later:

Linas Lingarr Garunkstis manufactured an item (Explosive Projectiles) worth 2295 PED! A record has been added to the Hall of Fame.

lots of GZ in local he was clicking EPIII.

This tempted me into grabbing the ores and whatnot I had in my shop lol.

=================================================

first 2 click "run" :



TT profit I'll toss the scanner into my shop with +2 for a couple days.

=================================================================

22 clicks Lysterium Power Container:



22 x 1.20 PED =26.4 PED. TT returned 29.64 (bout 112%).

I clicked these by hand you can see I got impatient and a bad run of "near success" there. It took about 12 - 14 minutes 1 attempt at a time.

Straight TT food no BPs or anything. Also it looks like I failed to pay attention and ate my own returns or 3 clicks of additional loss. Whoops.

======================================================

I'll click at least one more item, but I expect this to dry up soon heh :rolleyes:
 
Yeahhhhh, no.

I lined up 50 clicks or Poly-Alloy strap. Clicking by Hand again.



I did 23 clicks. 13.8 PED out 9.3 PED back. I'm not calculating a percentage eyeball it. I'm walking away a good 15 - 18 PED in profit for this session, depending on selling that scanner and maybe some straps. 15 PED straight TT though.

In this time, there were a couple of 4 DIGIT EP HoF. After that the two (non-AFK) EP grinders both left the machine. HoF stream went from every 20 - 30 seconds to no crafting Hof in over a minute.

I screen capped what I had and started posting to the gallery , etc... It was nearly 5 minutes before another crafting HoF. It matters that you can see when to stop.

They're coming again at a slower pace but I'm done crafting for now. If it looks nice maybe I'll go shoot some wombana today.

GL all :D
 
I am starting to wonder, how does it feel to be schizofrenic?



Sorry am dunk :p



I am happy YOU are happy!
 
I am starting to wonder, how does it feel to be schizofrenic?



Sorry am dunk :p

LOL no worries Atrax are often misunderstood. We're super friendly - just head out to any low level atrax spawn and they will all run up and jump on you for lots and lots of atrax kisses. Just like puppies with too many teeth!

Us grown up ones can get a bit moody, though. It's true.
If you see the queen don't tell her I said she's a *****.

I am happy YOU are happy!

Me TOO Thank you :yay: It beats the heck out of sweating.


Just editing to add if you're on arkadia stop and grab some of this:

 
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On hunting i'd agree with the "no globals, no worries", as hunting returns are quite good even without globals.
As it goes for mining/crafting.... "no globals, bad return", well if you do more than 20 clicks =)
 
On hunting i'd agree with the "no globals, no worries", as hunting returns are quite good even without globals.
As it goes for mining/crafting.... "no globals, bad return", well if you do more than 20 clicks =)

Sure - the negativity had been ramping up when I hit that 300% on a little run like that I decided to post it for something positive.

Then it kept going :D

I came across a similar old post from 2012 this week from me on arkadia forum, heh. Nothing impressive, just a note amidst all the struggles that sometimes things go right for a minute.

I did go hunt Wombana BTW it was no good that night and I lost about 50 PED in two hours :laugh:

Hunted Ambu yesterday for almost 5 hours on a 125 PED bankroll and came out +TT even after I bought a new (L) gun. <3 hogglos (or any mega shared loot) lol.

I also learned a lesson about hunting severely over my level in loot 2.0 this week. My old favorite pastime of the occasional solo levi hunt is over for a loooooong time.

Besides a great ambu hunt I had a lot more small success in crafting this week than hunting. The ambu hunt was definitely great end to another week in EU. One minor global but mini, mini, mini, mini, mini. I took pics.

EU is always full of ups and downs. It's well understood that people tend to focus on the downs. Anything good happen to you this week?

EDIT: Old crafting log: http://arkadiaforum.com/threads/mini-crafting-log.4040/

Looking at tracker it seems I globaled on corria the next day. Also this reminds me to apologize to the entire texturing community for what I did to corria texture again :laugh:
 
I'll make a post or maybe stream the next time I spend 3 EUR on Tallinn-Stockholm cruise.
 
I'll make a post or maybe stream the next time I spend 3 EUR on Tallinn-Stockholm cruise.

TBF this would probably get your youtube more subs than streaming EU. Grind those ad revenue microtransactions and you can probably withdraw with no depo :laugh:

Maybe we need some twitch channels of people posting on EU forums too.


:yup:
 
Yeah, it still is no global, lots of worries.

Selling crafting skills btw.
 
Yeah, it still is no global, lots of worries.

Selling crafting skills btw.

Everything sucks atm The only real remedy I know when it honestly gets like this everywhere is to do less for a while.

I've been mining, ffs.

But now, apparently, so is everybody else and there goes MU :rolleyes:

I'm going to finish some of what I've started but I sure hope they're (MA) just banking up some PEDs for the rush at the moon right now.

Keep an eye on the time, and watch where the money goes. Everybody is hunting last weeks markup, and things are changing. It's hard but these are sometimes moments of opportunity in EU.

There's a crafting version of "amping up for lyst" as well. TBH though I'm working to be positive, not trying to be mysterious. So if you know what that is right now please drop me a pm :scratch2:
 
Ok, Not really double posting here this post is "inspired by" the conversation here: https://www.planetcalypsoforum.com/...ith-crafting&p=3663272&viewfull=1#post3663272

It's not a direct response to that thread or really an attempt to 'school' anybody. It's also more appropriate to this thread since I'm about to ramble. This thread is, after all, about a philosophy of a sort.

Among all the other stuff going on, It sounds like maybe we'll lose another good player, who's willing to deposit, willing to study, willing to grind their way up, and wants to play. Also a tracker, willing to share their personal insights, and willing to share (some) hard numbers.

Despite a little initial friction with Alukat, I always hate it when that happens. Still this thread isn't just for or about him.

It's a weird time in EU, the back end is changing more significantly than it ever has. The system isn't working as a lot of people expect it to and that's frustrating. Comfortable people are upset by it, and those who were really working the way it was are various levels of angry.

If you're not hurting for cash, don't sell out your skills. It's a crap time to sell them, and if something happens to make you want to play again, a number of other people will be thinking the same thing and it will be a crap time to buy them. This is advice based in personal experience. If you're not 100% sure you quit forever, don't sell out your avatar.

I've never quit, but I sold some skills I "didn't need right now" in my early days and when I wanted them back, well some other people wanted them too. It was actually cheaper to skill back up. And every minute sucked lol.

So since Alukat mentioned selling crafting skills after a year of really going at it, I just want to point that out. You do you, if you're sure you won't come back try and get your money. If you're irritated and don't want to play RIGHT NOW, keep what you've already earned or bought.

EU has come a long way since I joined, but it seems to me that what's happening right now is very similar to what happened around v.u. 10 and cryengine. I was late for that change and since I was looking for a new MMO to play, it was actually an article about the cryengine conversion that tipped me off to EU.

But that led me right to the articles about never die and etcetera which have also led so many others to the game.

I came to EU to kick ass and take names. I was bored of playing out the non-grinding RPG type MMO games, not interested in long grinders, and while the notion of a VR sandbox was sort of stumbling along, second life suuuucccckkkked.

There just wasn't much else. EU advertised all the things I wanted, and had just moved over to a new, high end gaming platform. Interactive RCE was a bonus, but not the closer. For me. Hunt, Mine, Craft, Trade, Customize. Tradable skills? Amazing! (UGH EU DAMNIT) No forced character build, class limitations, need to grind up multiple avatars.

To be honest it sounded like it had everything second life had, plus actual gameplay available in the traditional RPG styles.

So while I've never been a FPS or platformer, I've loved MMORPG since The Realm. I still have one treasured screen cap of my main glitched into a forbidden zone there., c.a. 1998. Arguably the first commercially successful MMO.

Pretty much everything to then was a MUD if you know what I mean. Anyways I hadn't met an MMORPG that I couldn't excel at. Ultima Online had some grinding in it but it was manageable, and you could evolve your character, which was pretty new and cool. Everquest was fun for a while, but I had a wife and kids then and a full time job and just got away from it.

Move on a decade and I was single again. My kids were over one weekend and they were taking turns messing with my PC when I realized my son was playing an MMORPG. It turned into a bonding experience, that caught the other kids' attention, they started playing and pretty soon I was interacting daily with them in an MMO. Good solid, casual interaction with my tween and teen children based in shared interests and common goals and activities.

I think it's a sort of relationship that a lot of people never find a way to develop with their children. And while I've deleted (already) a bit more personally revealing information from here, this is telling in regards to the reason that I'm so passionate or eager to defend certain aspects of the general MMO experience. I do actually see this sort of thing as having a considerably different use and potential from, say, fortnite.

So anyways to bring that back around, we had moved on once or twice as a group but in late 2010 they were looking to break away a little. Our family grouping was known of course and so while it was great for us, they were also the kids who's dad played :/

Anyways those games were all min/maxed already so it was nothing to shoot to the top in terms of skill/class and start working up some economic domination. And that's the attitude I brought to EU. I was looking for a mature, quasi RPG (or not) MMO to settle into as a hobby for a long time. And I expected to throw a couple hundred bucks at it, move to the top of my class, and have whatever I wanted just like I had in every other MMO (RPG or not) that I ever played.

I wouldn't have lasted two weeks in EU if it hadn't been for a guy named Princess :)

Anybody who ever met Adam Princess Daly in EU, feel free to stop by and speak up. He was an EU MAD MAN. He played non-stop, and even though he had already had his escalated, the deposit limits on the game were a real problem for him. He had a whole backstory that I wouldn't even try to tell, but by the end I believed every bit of it and still do.

One thing is for sure wherever it came from the money was no doubt, and except on a matter of principle, I never saw him worry for one second about taking a profit. TT or MV or whatever. He was going to get his MV if he sold something or whatever but it wasn't what he was playing for. And he had plenty of friends, the kind that were with him for the money spilling off but also plenty of the kind that weren't. He could find the right people, and he could get them together.

If you can't tell, I developed a great admiration for him. He was, in a way a completely anonymous internet stranger, and possibly a 100% manufactured personality. But I don't think so. Nor did I doubt, after a year and a half, or however long we played together, the endlessly synced story of the person who claimed to be his full time employee and mostly tasked with taking care of business in entropia. He was that serious. About having FUN!

I've never met anyone else like that in my life so here's a little tribute. Guys I'm in my 29th hour right now and still intoxicated, forgive me :eek:

Back on track. I've gotten a lot of funny looks when I talk to "modern" players about learning to play entropia, or how the game works. But princess, and a couple of others (I'm not adding names because some are still in game, and one is just returning) had it down. The real old way. From the time when every player had a non-sib gear and nobody had any skills. When there weren't that many players and everybody carried their own weight in one way or another(not always by paying) and the work was real and appreciated. The economy was cooperative, not competitive. LOL can you imagine?

I'm painting a sort of idealized picture but come on and tell us you real old timers.

I couldn't have known how they were actually in the process of trying to revitalize some of their own love for the game at that time because i was caught up in something so awesome I didn't get how they could think it was going so wrong.

So these guys had formed up a soc, and packed it with people, and were just tearing it up. I took advice from Princess. And one other person in particular. Advice that would make a lot of current EU people rage :)

My first set of armor was gremlin, and I still wear it a lot :) I have a clericdagger 3c that i bought (with a warning from him he didn't advise that) at the same time. That knife is the reason I have my first global. I did also buy a maddox IV (with coaching, there were SIB in game at this time)and some other items that would destroy a new player on their own.

But these guys saw where I was coming from and they helped me to learn what I needed to know to chip a profession in and out. Again, not with "here's a skill chip you put skills on it". Advice about how to select skills to move a professional standing with minimal cost, or what to beef up to enable rapid advancement across several professions. Also how to get rebalanced with minimal cost after a bad decision.

During this time the soc was growing and it seemed like we kept managing to have a solid cadre of 20 - 30 people around pretty much all the time. Nothing ever had to be done solo, and there was always someone there with helpful advice. OR real, actual help sometimes in terms of some more advanced gear.

Hats off to the gent that handed me a level 2 finder amp BP with like 20 QR on it and said "You want to find out how those endless amp globals work?". Hats off because after having a laugh he proceeded to coach me into being able to profit regularly with that blueprint. Maybe not entirely consistently, because it's EU After all and that's against the system. But regularly.

I really was trying to be a crafter from day one, but that's not exactly how it went. If you wanted to hang out with the 'core' of AnD, you did everything. All the time. There were tons of specialists in the soc, not everybody was a party animal. But everybody had a good attitude, wanted to play, and was ready to do what they could to enjoy the game.

You could log in and say "how's mining" and have 2 or 3 solid miners give you an answer. You could ask about hunting and hear from players hunting punies to people waiting for more aurli to spawn at CP. You could ask how crafting was on Amathera, or Eudoria at the moment lol. How many people would even ask that now??

It still matters. A lot. And other details - some of which are super hard to get, of you don't have 15 - 40 people active and willing to speak freely at any given moment. So everybody might be just hanging out at PA telling jokes and showing our cars and junk to the new players and someone would be like "oh gotta hunt now" and anywhere from 5 - 25 people would gang up and head out.

People with commando got the same opalo as me. If you haven't seen 20+ people eat up a leviathan with opalos or something similar, it's crazy fun. It's a lot like a busy shared loot event, I guess. Except with every body matched for DPP and DPS. And so we would all have a blast shooting at levi for half an hour or forty five minutes or something. Everybody walked away with a ton of loot almost every time.

The big guys were maybe more or less happy with the global count or whatever they had particularly hoped to achieve in terms of item loot, but especially at the beginning all I knew was if I did what they did, I walked away +tt almost every time.

At one point i was complaining about the difficulty and expense of skilling melee and one of the best teachers in the entire soc took me aside and said, "It doesn't suck that bad. It's expensive compared to lasers but you're doing it wrong." We talked about the difference, and the professions, and matching your armor to a mob when you're going to fight close.

It turns out that I needed to chip out a little skill. Chipping up with concern only for pistols I had unbalanced my melee skills a bit, which was encouraging me (so to speak) to use inappropriate gear. Also most of the soc hunts and most hunting really was done with guns, I was learning melee on the side. So I got a little extra teaching about plates and armor, and he told me to go buy a couple of a specific knife.

I hadn't actually wanted to buy those, they were a little more than I wanted to spend on hunting right then and i wasn't quite mastering them so I'd been holding out. But now my skills weren't so uneven and we went and hunted atrax on atrax beach. I got the right plates so I could stop wasting my armor and my time healing endlessly between knife attacks. I followed him around - he did tank quite a bit and it surely helped :)

At the end of that hunt I had better returns than I'd ever had from a melee hunt. I had skilled up noticeably instead of haltingly. I was still pretty new I think I gained more than one HP in that hunt. The knives were slow, and I wanted them to be fast. :) choices in EU. I had a fast knife, and I could use it. But now I knew exactly what I was spending my PED on there, why it got turned into waste, and I just didn't do that anymore.

"It's time to mine!" Hey we had sweaters with tt finders and ubers with I don't even know what going on. You dropped what you could but when >the miner< said it was time to mine, you went and mined. And the hit rate was good. And if you went to wrong place or did something silly instead of where they went you could mess it up. But when he said it was time to mine, the hit rate was going to be good - it was up to you to find your markup, or your crafting mats, or whatever you picked up a finder for.

But if you screwed it up they would tell you why. And how to fix it. And if you had PED and a good head on your shoulders he would also help you skill up efficiently to do what you want. You win some and you lose some, but you can manage the waste. So on my tracker I have a big amped hit that's still like 20% of my total tracked mining from my first months in game.

Heyyy not a noob subsidy or a promo HoF or a "welcome back" or a "lucky avatar" or all those salty things you hear. I wanted to drop a big amp. Or a few. I stated my goal, received advice on how to achieve it from a knowledgeable player, then went and did that.

A 500 PED Hof wasn't impressive for a oA-12 or whatever I had on my f-105 (yep still using that my 2nd finder after the freebie). But I asked for it and went and got it, and I was happy but I found out I wasn't actually super enthused about mining. Never did sell those skills though, I still drop that f-105 amped and unamped, I'm about mastered in it for enmats, and also, well nevermind about treasure ;)

What I didn't do was throw a bunch of ped in the trash and end up broke and ragequitting. I had my skill, I had my gear, I had my lessons, and I was (very) happy about it.

"Hey we have to go craft. Let's Go."

Ok. Crafting is the best :) If you were into what you were doing, it's not like you were required to go. They'd tell you what service center they were headed to and see you soon. I only lagged behind a couple times because while it might look like they were walking away from a goldmine, it wouldn't be 10 minutes before average dpp/dps was dropping, and the multis were gone. No resources found.

It was actually literally crafting time in the EU loot engine and not only did someone know it, they could see it coming. So again, all kinds of players, all kinds of clicks. "What should I click?" Someone would take a moment to find out what skills you have , what BPs you had, what resources you had (if any) on hand and help you figure out what to click. And it was usually good.

To be honest, I did some silly things. Sometimes really just to be silly. Sometimes out of a desire to try something I had heard about. But I never ever felt like I "lost" money in EU. I spent money here. A ton of money, relative to my personal economy. And I felt like I knew what I was buying, and I was almost always happy to pay for it.

OK wow this post is a little crazy right now. OT in my own thread :wtg: Sort of.

One more story about Princess. Today I can't imagine this played out the way it seemed but, maybe it did. I have to tell it like I saw it. We were all grinding away at crafting on arkadia, and Princess was constantly grousing that there was no place on the entire planet that he could stand an open the terminals he wanted open. I don't think there was even a quarry yet, it was pretty new.

Anyways one day he was like "this has got to get fixed" and he logged out. He came back a couple hours later or something, and we were like "man what happened". He said something to the effect of "they'll take care of it in the next update" and that was the end of the grousing and the last time he mentioned the terminals.

So the update comes, it was like a week. We all log into the game to see if they changed the terminals around, and they didn't. But there was a whole new building in Celeste Harbor. And it had a whole row of crazy crafting machines with all the other terminals built right into them. So we were trying them out and here comes Cyrus, and somebody else I don't remember who it was.

They came looking for Princess and they were like "Hey did you see what we got for you? Is this what you needed? What do you think?". So I'm not kidding this is an old and maybe a little polished memory but he said he was going to get those terminals fixed, he went off and did something, and literally a few days later in the next VU there's a whole new crafting center that's exactly what he kept saying he wanted.

Today I'm pretty sure that the building had been in the works, and maybe the crafting machines. It's where the Celeste Harbor booths are at. So I can't imagine that he went and made a request to them and had something like that in game for him at the very next VU. But there was exactly what he had been saying he wanted and there was the Arkadia staff to make sure he liked it.

:dancing:

He's an old PE player and he was seriously dripping money into the game, whatever his real life deal was. He probably did know david. It's unlikely that it played out as simply as it looked from my perspective as still a fairly new member of the community at the time. Being an old PE player I'm sure he occasionally lurks around, I hope he comes and reads this for a laugh.

Watching him exist was an amazing experience for me. And now if anyone actually is reading all of this stuff, You're going to have way TMI on how my initial impression of EU was formed, how and why I started playing, and what my examples and inspirations here were.

I don't honestly think anyone cares, don't worry. This is turning out to be really cathartic for me right now. For better or for worse I've posted all sorts of stuff here for nearly a decade. This is probably not the most embarrassing.

I'm afraid the forum will blow up and take what I've typed with it right now so I'm going to post this. Take a break and grab a bite, see what else is happening on the forum(s). Hmm maybe I should have started one of the blogs for this.

I'll get back to the thing about crafting in a while. I'm not done here.

If this is amusing people (ah, in a positive fashion), maybe I'll post the cheesy fanfic/RP backstory I created for Atrax in 2012 or so when I had an entire website about entropia :ahh:
 
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I don't honestly think anyone cares, don't worry. This is turning out to be really cathartic for me right now. For better or for worse I've posted all sorts of stuff here for nearly a decade. This is probably not the most embarrassing.

I'm afraid the forum will blow up and take what I've typed with it right now so I'm going to post this. Take a break and grab a bite, see what else is happening on the forum(s). Hmm maybe I should have started one of the blogs for this.

I'll get back to the thing about crafting in a while. I'm not done here.

I care & it's a good read. Thank you for posting it Atrax. :thumbup:
 
OK, so a brief interlude before I start the next part of this saga.

I'm not claiming to be some great repository of mystic EU lore or anything like that. I hung out with these guys over a period of something like 14 - 16 months. The didn't all leave at the same time.

This was nov 2010 to early 2012. I don't have VU numbers on hand or anything.

I am saying that I saw this in action. As far as anyone ever told me, the loot engine(s?) at that time was pretty close to the PE engine, or so I was told. I'd have to look to be sure but I think they had put SIB in PE? Without looking it up I couldn't say.

I learned what I could. Nobody was publishing PDFs or anything. I asked questions, and because of the group I was in, I actually got real answers. I also developed the habit of throwing what I new onto the collective pile of information.

Still I knew what loaded BPs were and sort of how to watch for them but you can get a crappy 3 PEC drop of any (L) BP and markup wasn't always the best indicator. both because of manipulation, and because of confusion.

Already.

I was as shocked as anyone when Snablesnot Male Young published that giant list to the forum and explained to a ton of people for the first time why he had been standing in twins buying seemingly random BP all the time. I knew what he was doing, but wow the list!

I've missed some other pretty interesting posts, I hear, because after all of these friends had pretty much left the game (some have never even taken a break still) I could never find another group of players like that. And to know what's going on all over the whole EU, you have to constantly be in touch with people from the whole EU.

Who are also willing to tell you :laugh:

I pretty much took a three year hiatus, and a LOT changed in that time.

I can find links to some posts that may still be in the forum database but nobody without admin can view. I don't know how nasty some of them may have gotten. But it's true that due to a change in demographic over time, too much honest information has nearly wrecked the game.

It's a real rock/hard place situation with the RCE.

But one thing is for sure, until recently, with several layers of adjustment and obscuring in place to make them harder to spot, shorter and more difficult to prepare for - A lot of the old things about how the loot works in EU have continued to be true.

Being aware of this has helped me tremendously to stay active, and to deal with the changes since I've been back the last three years. Maybe it's all voodoo but, It's been working for me, and I'll take it.

Ok I want to ramble on about the changes to the demographic, and the population, and how that's affected the situation. I have some stuff to say about how despite the constant cries that they're taking more and more away, MA actually keeps giving back more and more all of the time.

Maybe later, I keep promising crafting.
 
So since Alukat mentioned selling crafting skills after a year of really going at it, I just want to point that out. You do you, if you're sure you won't come back try and get your money. If you're irritated and don't want to play RIGHT NOW, keep what you've already earned or bought.
i was really going at it since 4 years and when i heard they want to make crafting 2.0 and reduce the volatility i got all excited and started making plans for future investments and what stuff i still need to grind, but running into 81-85% return over and over again all that excitement is gone and all that's left is pure frustration, after each run i'm wondering why i am even doing this to myself any longer... so i guess it's better to just pull the plug...
 
With crafting I see a few different sets of motivations, and each has a way to go at it. In one way you can see them as sort of phases.

Four basic motivations:

  • Skilling (learning)
  • Drops (collecting)
  • Markup (producing)
  • Swirls (gambling)

I put in parenthesis a description of these more as phases or growth stages in this particular order.

It's EU though so you don't have to go through them in this order. In fact some people go straight for swirls (a little skilling is required but you can just chip it up).

Drops continue throughout so no matter your end goal (whether you are 'fishing' for loot or trying to build your collection) you do get them. But I've met people who consider them the entire goal of crafting, and I've met people who consider them to be mostly irritating trash.

Markup, it seems like crafting for markup is the least liked facet of crafting. It's certainly the hardest. It used to do well though, because it used to be required for most people to continue to go for the swirls.

Crafting for markup will get you some swirls (so will crafting for drops) but now there are MUCH easier ways to do that if the swirls are your goal. Yes, Yes. EPI-IV No BS, here is your VIP pass to the slot machine, sir.

We all know what EPIV looks like, but most of us also know it's not all about what you see in the global channel.

That thing has literally caused breakdowns. And you hear a lot of complaining about "Barely breaking even while EPIV globals" while you barely hear quiet stories of going deep into loss before quitting.

For the purposes of this post MA separated swirls, and allowed people to shortcut the phases. I think EPIV was required.

IT's better now that they've offered another way for people to move forward with the training series of BPs. It's a nice middle of the road path for people who want to advance in more than one profession but aren't ready to sort out an end-user market so that they can craft for markup.

The clicks are big enough for swirls and the progression is clear so I see it as an attractive option for anyone who wants to click big, but doesn't want to be limited to EP. The fact that they consume both hunting and mining resources is great, of course. It seems well done.

That leaves us with people who grind or chip through the skilling phase to craft for either drops, or markup.

If you craft for markup, you're going to get drops, and if you craft very far up the ladder for drops, you're going to have to manage some markup, These two can't be fully separated.

But depending on which is your goal, you make some different choices. Drops is the faster, easier money. But like a lot of things in EU - like everything in EU - it's gotten competitive.

It's no longer just a bonus (o some recovery) for the crafter working their way into markup items so that can click big for swirls without losing it all to 50% returns..

Because for a long time, with good drop lists available, targeted skilling, and proven demand crafting for drops became a skill set and a goal to itself. Another sort of min-maxing. You only need to go so far to get the good consumable BPs for the good consumable items that people really make a market for.

So once upon a time the gamblers were forced to participate in the economy, and learn how to manage markup. But for reasons, that need was eliminated.

But the people who persisted still got drops, and their own swirls to go on. But pretty soon the drops got narrowed down and with gamblers already isolated - and plenty of people opting to stop at levels where they could harvest drops, certain odd components or otherwise useless items start to eat up mass amounts of specific resources.

And most of the blueprint book got kicked to the curb. Too many otherwise useless items being produced. Resources with markup becoming TT food - just the cost of bait. As long as the fishing is good, buying bait is no problem. When the drops were coming it was working.

But there's that old problem, the better it works the more people do it, it gets over competitive and stops being profitable.

Now the gamblers had left, and the fishers have cut the value of the drops that helped to sustain the markup crafters, so they mostly either quit, or moved to EP since most of that had reached higher levels would rather have swirls than drops.

Back to people who are intentionally crafting with an end goal of making markup from other players.

Real examples of people who craft for markup, and support a multi profession economy?

Kikki Jikki, notably if you've ever spent much time on Arkadia. Caly too but there was nobody else doing what he was for so long at arkadia.

Southern Fortress. The Armor shop With DraKil. But I think he's the second proprietor of that business, which brings us to - Auktuma.

Just a couple of examples off the top of my head. I'm not trying to leave anyone out or anything I don't have a giant friend list.

I don't recall ever meeting Auktuma, but in my opinion he's may be single handedly responsible for the market that we currently have in ar-matrix items. He broke everything down, he sorted out the required progressions, then he published it and encouraged others to contribute.

This meant that a level 3 crafter could easily see how their component would eventually fit into a level 8 (just an example) part, and gave them a reason to put it on the market. And once those components were on the market, the higher level crafters could skip those parts, and get on with what they do.

See I think Auktuma could have been a participant in, if not actually dominated, a fairly limited market for very high markup ar-matrix gear. He was ( I think this is changing again, thanks to him) one of the few active high level crafters with the skills, the blueprints, and the market knowledge to efficiently perform every stage of the process.

I wasn't really active at the time. I'm not sure how the nitty gritty of this played out and I'm not trying to miss or downplay anyone else's contribution. I came upon the information, the forum threads, and the charts later so to all the people that participated and helped to make that happen, a big cheer and a thanks from me.

Things could have gone any one way or another but in hindsight, this happened, and IMO it was great. Right now crafting for markup is a real thing in EU again.

That's great because taking things that players found, and turning them into things that players want was supposed to be the whole point of the crafting profession in the first place. Now MA have cut the drops. It's a legitimate response to market forces, and it's needed even though I HATE it.

Because I like to fill my books, and I like to fill my shop, and while I craft items to sell in my shop, the blueprints are a big part of what crafting has always been about. Because people chose to focus on that it has to be limited further, or all BPs will fall to near zero value. I don't have to like this to understand it.

And I'm not blaming any body. You can probably find me 50 times in this forum saying "go where the money is at". That has definitely been BPs more than end user products, for a very long time. It was the logical thing to do.

But now it's not. I pressed "preview post" to skim for typos and now I see Alukat's response. This part is for you if you haven't done it. It's also for anyone else who is struggling with this change and trying to make a decision.

If you actually like entropia, and you actually enjoy crafting. Give it a shot. Instead of starting with a drop list, start in the auction house at "orders". See what people have actually already put money to get. There are plenty of times orders for lowish level clicks that mid or high level crafters don't want to do thousands of, to have a few clicks of their level whatever blueprint.

Pick one, grind them up, and drop them in auction. OF course if a lot of people start paying attention to the actual markets for crafted parts, you probably won't see so many standing orders for 120, 130, 140% plus components.

I'm looking at auction right now, and there's not a lot. It's not like there are thousands of PED for the taking but there are hundreds it seems. Sometimes it's more, I've rarely seen less. There's an order for a million welding wire at 140%. MV 150%. Time vs. turnover is an option. You can click a million welding wire and not have to worry about locking up an auction slot for a week losing fees, and or undercutting market anyways and then waiting.

I'm not saying this is great lol. Some days are better than others it's sunday night right now. But it's an option.

So anyways alukat, I'm not trying to call you noob or imply you don't know. If you've personally looked into this kind of thing then understand I've written it out without asking in case it might help someone else too.

Have you considered a shop? My shops are literally the only reason I'm still playing. I never really sold out but I filled them up (altogether <200 slots they're not big) and when I had to login for account activity, I would walk over and top it off. By the time I was seeing enough new content that I was ready to play again, i had a pretty decent stack of PED sitting there.

My booth is an exceptional location but only if it's stocked with the right stuff. I have a bunch of mini maffoid 6 ped globals for a reason and it looks like MA is trying to cut that sort of farming as well. I can sell rubio/azuro/b101 like MAD. But now I can't effectively loot them, and there's no room for resell on a new player's loot like that.

Anyways there are other things. There's a different mode of gameplay that's a little (ok a lot) less fast paced, but with care it's sustainable. Keep at it and the drops get replaced with swirls.

It takes more patience, but there might be increased rewards.

Anyways honestly Alukat despite any BS, it sucks to see a good player go. I honestly hope you can find something you like before you're out.
 
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ty, d-class for the win i guess xD
But why does it always take untill i hit the point of being at the edge of ragequitting? ....

We all like to think it's a coincidence. Maybe it is. Having worked on some pretty hefty profitability analysis software I'm just going to say:

It could be a coincidence. Probably.
 
I was going to talk about loot 2.0 but I'm really on the nostalgia train.

So instead, what I learned, and why I left after AnD (my first soc) broke up and most of the best people (that I knew) quit EU.

Obviously I never fully left but it was three years of logging in when I would get an inactivity warning. MAYBE taking time to check stock or add something to one or both of my shops, then logging back out. No forums, No gameplay. No real interest. I never wanted to withdraw, and it always seems like EU has just hovered right on the precipice of so much unrealized potential.

But after the rosy picture hat I just painted of what I had wanted here, and what i found when i got here, the reality of how much it was actually falling apart really was awful. It didn't take long for the shine to dull a little bit, especially in the company of people that were painfully aware of what was missing, and what was changing.

Neverdie really got a lot of attention. Kudos. Somewhere between there and the crysis engine, i think, Mindark started advertising and referring to the EU as a place where you could "make money". Make money hunting. Make money crafting. Make money mining. Make money trading and providing services to other players!

Ok so guess what? A bunch of people showed up to make money. They weren't here to mine, or craft, or hunt. They surely weren't here to sweat, or to purchase a shop and craft and customize items. They would do any of those things, of course. They were here to make money.

What they wanted to do was find someone to tell them how to get to the make money make money make money part. I mean people that barely had enough english to ask where the money was at. Which was ok because there's people here that speak a lot of languages.

This 7 minute video is a good watch, if you're into people talking about old video games and how and why things have changed. It's about what happened when people got into what these persons had built. I played UO from pretty early on until it was too crowded to be fun and i never knew about this:


So MA dropped this new crowd on top of the old PE crowd. It was a mixed bag. I showed up and a lot of other players who were interested in and willing to help maintain and participate in a virtual universe with a real economy and so much going on.

I was here for the sandbox,most of all. Also the adult demographic, after playing games with my kids for a few years. A game about enjoying yourself. And also a game without the stigma of "not playing" because there wasn't "a game".

I didn't have to worry about being harassed for not min/maxing one of every class and then hanging around PVP arenas in 6 months. If you wanted to grind you could grind all you could afford to. If you didn't nobody cared. You could dance on the beach or PVP in one of the rings or chase oil.

Some people were very proud of their natural skilling, some people were very happy with their chipping up. Still, you do you. If you have the skills, do the activity that you want.

It was just fine that I would rather drive my car around Amathera than shoot anything.

Ohhh look where we have come.

Still we saw "new content coming" where the older players saw "old content missing" even though sometimes it was the same content.

Like pets. I paid a guy 200 ped for some random pet deeds that you could literally not do anything with to help him out, and in anticipation of having some pets already when they returned.

Yeah when I got here the people were generous, and so was the system. The system could afford to be generous because many of the players were. And everybody was trying to chill out and have some fun. It didn't matter if you went down on your "bankroll" for a minute because you didn't want to "chase the waves" because the waves would come back round and you could usually at least average out. And if not this time, what's a couple bucks for some great entertainment.

Back to make money make money make money.

So it's true that there was already salt among some of the older players and none of the new players really cared why. There have really always been people here to get money. They just weren't the majority. The people that were here to spend money have always been aware of them.

Still most of the people you ran into were friendly, If you asked them a question they would try and answer it, and if you asked for help, they would probably try and help. It was a very social game, and that's how people survived and learned to fit in. Again, many of these new people weren't concerned with fitting in.. They were concerned about applying the principles of putting in minimum effort for maximum rewards to the advertised "make money".

Human nature is what it is. I had no problem dropping twenty bucks for a couple of hours of saturday afternoon entertainment. If I'm staring at another avatar in the same place as me, ostensibly for the same reasons (to participate) as me and if tossing him 10 PED worth of ammo and an opalo so he can find out what it's like to go actually shoot at some stuff amused me, there's no problem with that.

But the first time you get a few people together for a "sponsored" HUNT (yeah we were sometimes unknowingly DPS support :laugh:) and fully half of them just split as soon as you hand them the gear, it's upsetting.

"Thanks" and running off was somehow less insulting than just vanishing from logging out the instant they had $1.30 in inventory. Plus if you had them on site before you passed out the stuff and they did that you could at least sometimes shoot them down and get some entertainment for your PED.

"gib money" "ome PEDS?" "Help me out" All the stupid stuff that people type when they beg online. Offering help and getting "no I just need PEDs". It's as bad as when the bum at the freeway turns down your lunch because they "only take cash". WTF??

Ok I understand that some of these people could change their lives if they could scrape together 1000 PED every couple of months to withdraw. I would possibly have been willing to help them out in real life more than they could have begged/semi scammed from me in game.

But that was at most a tiny percentage of them, and EU had gone to the crysis engine. I understand you can get on the internet with a lot of stuff but these guys weren't in thatched huts with no electricity playing EU at all hours.

I understand why people were leaving in droves. It's a simple equation, for every person who showed up here with no other goal than to remove money from the system, some number of people would feel the sudden sucking at their wallet, and leave. Most people who arrived early enough, and were smart enough to make some friends and learn how the system worked in order to apply this goal (instead of logging out to hide every time they got fingers on some PEC), was making out ok.

I guess there was enough of this, and enough people still trying to hold on, that this looked good on mindark's balance sheet because they still advertise "make money" today. After all the complaining and the other changes. They put it out there like you're going to grind and get paid. They don't say that, but if you've seen some of their ads...

Hmmm I'm not really done here but, I'm going to go to sleep. I suspect I'll be in the mood to continue this tomorrow.
 
ok I'm going to let this lie.

I had to be up for nearly 40 hours, for reasons unrelated to EU.

The mind does wander. This has led me to a lot of thinking about what i want from EU, and what I'm getting from it after the last 6 - 8 weeks of increased activity.

There's nothing really wrong about what I posted here, I don't see any reason to delete it. But I'm not eager to put myself back into that state of mind. Or frankly spend the time today.

It's clear that I'm currently emotionally over invested in EU. I'm not sure what I'll do about that at the moment, but probably "cut back" is a good start lol.

Thanks for those that actually read through that and didn't (at least not yet) use it to start some kind of flame war or something. Hopefully the bit about crafting at least has some value for someone.

:)
 
lots of bad and okay returns > 1,5k ~1,8 ped clicks craft with bad return > 673 alt hof with d-class in 39 drops > 5,7k clicks basic auxiliary socket (bad return) > 100 drops planet side > ~15 clicks sleipnir (bad return) > 53 clicks road-monkey (bad return) > 110 clicks roadie (mediorce return) > 443 ped ares hof in hell in 100 drops....

i don't know what to think about it....
 
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lots of bad and okay returns > 1,5k ~1,8 ped clicks craft with bad return > 673 alt hof with d-class in 39 drops > 5,7k clicks basic auxiliary socket (bad return) > 100 drops planet side > ~15 clicks sleipnir (bad return) > 53 clicks road-monkey (bad return) > 110 clicks roadie (mediorce return) > 443 ped ares hof in hell in 100 drops....

i don't know what to think about it....

It's 100% time to hang back.

I've had bad returns at anything I've done as well, for the most part.

After several conversations about it, mostly confirming that other people feel the same or when it seemed to start, it seems things changed since they updated the moon. I'm not sure how good it really is on the moon but have started seeing some HoF from there in game and posted to the ark forum.

I haven't clicked a crafting machine since Tuesday.

With one exception - I didn't feel good about it (LOL) at the time but I actually ran that partial Level 5 amp at FOMA and as long as I don't finish the drops I can pretend I might break even in TT by only dropping one Level 5 :wtg:

Not as nice as that HoF though.

To be fair, based on what I've said here, I'm in FOMA right now still and when I log in and it "looks good" for mining I think I might get 1 hit out of 12.

I was dealing with some heavy negativity from a few directions when I started this thread and I really do try to be positive about EU but sometimes, you just have to wait.

"No globals, No worries" is only easy if you're not trying to cycle a bunch of PED. That's for sure.

Some tidbits of advice, this one is easy for me but hand click your crafting if it's anything bigger than a TT food component. If you want items, I'm saying, hand click. Sometimes there's a rhythm, sometimes you might start to notice your successes syncing with something else. lol like other rashes of crafting globals, to be really blunt.

You used to have to hand click everything, but while autoclicking a few thousand components is nice there's something to be said for getting a little bored, and messing with the crafting machine.

Also quantity - condition has more than two settings and it can be your friend. But not much on auto.

In the end sometimes the magic of clicking by hand is that it can literally just cut your losses by slowing you down. At bad times that alone is worth it even if all the rest is 100% crap.

Despite all that they've done to squash the volatility and suppress the "Wave" effect of the loot engine working. Among other effects, EP has changed that. EP has a way, too.

I have two globals on my EP II and when I went to look at entropia life the other day I realized that they are exactly one year apart. I use EPII for very short runs most of the time. I occasionally need a bit of rockets, mostly it's to do with running 5 - 10 clicks though sort of like using a rookie finder even while you're mining with something bigger. What I'm getting at though is I rarely grind for EP II lol. The odds that Iws using on the same day even a year apart are not 100%

I wonder how long of a "cycle" this thing is on. Huge coincidence, I'm sure. I was clicking batches of EP exclusively when I got the second global. MAN i wish I could get a laser for my VTOL.

So anyways there's a ton of things to do but when things get bad, pushing harder to find something good is a normal reaction. It's rising to the challenge.

Sometimes the challenge is, how fast can you fill the loot pool. Are you ready to rise to it?

:laugh:
 
anyway, i'd be happy if they change the 25% near successes to 40% and the 50% ones to 70% return, this way the worst case should change from 81.4% in 1000 clicks (SIB) to maybe ~89% in 1000 clicks.
 
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