Mining and Crafting Overhaul (TM)

[Eli]

MA hinted that mining and crafting was going to see a major overhaul someday and that they know we've been asking for it and they've heard us.

Now, we have no idea how long this will take. It could be 6 months, it could be 4 years. I don't think crafting has ever seen any major overhauls, has it? That's excluding the UI improvements, which I suppose was very helpful. But the underlying issues with crafting, supply/demand has been growing steadily worse and worse since I started.

So, while MA is working hard on that overhaul, I'd like to collect thoughts on issues we're having in mining and crafting into one place and hope MA will see them and place them in their considerations.

NOTE: We all know the Explosive Projectile elephant in the room. Please keep your feedback surrounding this as specific and constructive as you can.

 

[Pratahn]

NOTE: We all know the Explosive Projectile elephant in the room. Please keep your feedback surrounding this as specific and constructive as you can.

We know a guy who gambled and lost 120,000$ on EP crafting. Well, those 120,000 $ are $$$ which the other players did not lost thanks to him and to the EP craft. So why MA should remove it? Many heavy gamblers will stop gambling and we, the rest of the players, will have to pay to MA the missed revenue.

 

[Eli]

We know a guy who gambled and lost 120,000$ on EP crafting. Well, those 120,000 $ are $$$ which the other players did not lost thanks to him and to the EP craft. So why MA should remove it? Many heavy gamblers will stop gambling and we, the rest of the players, will have to pay to MA the missed revenue.

I really don't want to fire this up with rolling debate about EP, but your statements make some pretty large assumptions about how the crafting system works and I don't think we really know how that works at all. Just because another player spent that much on EP crafting does not mean it alters your returns. This is a concept we often seen applied and there's really no proof behind it.

If MA takes .5% from every click's TT value as a baseline and the rest of it is thrown into a pool for all those clicking the same BP (this is just a scenario I'm not implying this is how it works), then it really does not matter to MA if you click EP or you click laser scopes.

EDIT: Right now crafting is widely perceived as pure gambling. It doesn't matter how much one person spends. How does having one of 3 major professions be pegged as "throwing away money" benefit MA in the long run? Why not entice 100 people to craft because it has meaning, rather than 1 person throwing their wallet into the game?

 

[Pratahn]

If MA takes .5% from every click's TT value as a baseline and the rest of it is thrown into a pool for all those clicking the same BP

It doesn't matter what the it really is. What does matter this is a business. And as such it *must* correspond to certain rules:
1. It exists to make a profit. If it doesn't make a profit for a long time it will be closed. The profit should be above some min - ie which can be received by safely bank deposits etc
2. As MA works with private citizens - not receiving government grants and such, it exists until it has customers. So it has to keep balance between the profits and the customers.
Therefore no matter how it treats the EP craft income, it should receive it's cut (rule 1) - and return the excess into the game (rule 2). And it cannot afford to disbalance one craft over other or the craft as a whole over the other activities.

 

[Eli]

It doesn't matter what the it really is. What does matter this is a business. And as such it *must* correspond to certain rules:
1. It exists to make a profit. If it doesn't make a profit for a long time it will be closed. The profit should be above some min - ie which can be received by safely bank deposits etc
2. As MA works with private citizens - not receiving government grants and such, it exists until it has customers. So it has to keep balance between the profits and the customers.
Therefore no matter how it treats the EP craft income, it should receive it's cut (rule 1) - and return the excess into the game (rule 2). And it cannot afford to disbalance one craft over other or the craft as a whole over the other activities.

It's a bit too late, it's already unbalanced. But this isn't about keeping EP alive. It's about resurrecting crafting anything but EP and other components that don't build into other items.

 

[Rocket192]

My feedback is short and simple:

The current changes... between weapon drop rates and the new weapon bps... have cause A LOT of hunting markups to rise. when you do loot a L gun hunting, you can sell it fro 150% or more now...

It's a good start.. but L guns still cost too much relative to the average hunting markup. I suspect this will balance itself out more and more and more bps come into existence... such as laser pistols and blp rifles.

Mining will get a little bump... as seen already.. but nothing too substantial which is fine. We need the average hunting markup to exceed 5% again.

 

[Lefty]

I'll come back to this thread later for sure, when more % of my brain cells are available for it as balanced against work. But right now I'll note that the Widget/Gizmo bp set have created a very doable use for low level component crafting, in all 3 of the main component professions. In theory they should also prop up animal oils but it looks like that hasn't kicked in yet, if it will. The occasional whining about rarity of fragments pending more-complete tuning of Loot 2.0 shows that the demand for fragments is fine. As for sweat... well, it's sweat, haha. Crates have given it a theoretical floor by being auctionable, but it was already selling below that floor, so... haha.

 

[Eli]

I'll come back to this thread later for sure, when more % of my brain cells are available for it as balanced against work. But right now I'll note that the Widget/Gizmo bp set have created a very doable use for low level component crafting, in all 3 of the main component professions. In theory they should also prop up animal oils but it looks like that hasn't kicked in yet, if it will. The occasional whining about rarity of fragments pending more-complete tuning of Loot 2.0 shows that the demand for fragments is fine. As for sweat... well, it's sweat, haha. Crates have given it a theoretical floor by being auctionable, but it was already selling below that floor, so... haha.

Are there any uses for the components other than crafting other components? I haven't crafted them because they just seem like a more convoluted replacement for EPs while they nerf EP returns into the ground.

 

[Lefty]

Are there any uses for the components other than crafting other components? I haven't crafted them because they just seem like a more convoluted replacement for EPs while they nerf EP returns into the ground.

I've heard mention of using the widget and gizmo bp's to fish for bp drops

 

[mastermesh]

Overhauled a couple of times... L did not always exist.

Still a lot that could be done...
Will add more later when I'm not typing on a autocorrect loving phone

 

[Atrax]

hmmm and now there's the recycler BP's that let you craft shrapnel at the end of the cycle.

 

[Kerham]

There has been one major conceptual overhaul of crafting, before my time, when they switched from a paradigm of building subansambles in order to build the final object.

This is slowly crawling back with building components, but imo crafting presently has a shortcoming, that is the situation when you needlessly craft zounds of jesters d-1 just to throw them into tt, in order to skill and maybe loot some bp. The gizmo way I think is the correct one, for example throwing away all the useless bps for weapons, just let in a gamut of final items, all of them usable, on all tiers. Say, 2-3 of each type of weapon for every, dunno, 5-10 levels of hit & damage? And rest of skilling inbetween should be on components (weapon butt, knife handle, generic laser (which would emulate say the smelting of steel for archaic swords) etc.), components used in building the weapons themselves. Such as, any click should have as result, if succesful, a sellable item. I know is easier said than done and I know there was a reason to get away from this system in the past, but now we have (L)...

On mining, the most important change I saw since I play was, when amps were introduced, getting away from the skill-based mining, in which every deposit had a set number of pulls and extracting skills were generating the actual value. So highly skilled miners like Zefram, Strakkan or di Avlo were globaling on each "great" (which back then could hold maximum 50ish), while newbie me would global only once in 4 or so.

No matter the technical execution, what I want to see is a genuine demand (and MU) for materials generated by crafting needs (also materials from huning loot, ye?) and only say some 10% balancing from MA, and not the present state, where MU is decided by how often an ore can be found and only 10% by actual crafting demand.

My

 

[Eli]

I've heard mention of using the widget and gizmo bp's to fish for bp drops

But you could do that with any of the other BPs too?

I currently don't see any difference between crafting a ton of widgets to try and get a BP or crafting a ton of tt crap guns for bps. Except maybe the current widgets have inflated MU on relevant minerals because... NEW THINGS!