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
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
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.
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