DEAR DEVELOPERS..... can we please have next Year's Arc be focused on CRAFTING and Crafters ?
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Comments
I have not get well into all of the ins and outs to maximize what crafting allows nowdays to make with reforging and all that but yes, I know what it currently takes to craft.
With the exception of some "fine tuned" suits which require spreadsheets and the matching of all numbers, to make "average" suits is not that big of a deal....
We need to realize that we are talking here of a Crafting "Revamp" which would bring "high end" Crafted items on par with Legendary items that are looted through fights....
Only, that with Crafting one can "design" the wanted piece while with looting, one has to wait for that lucky drop....
My thinking is, that it is necessary, if we want to give to High End Crafting the same quality of Looted Legendary pieces, it needs to NOT BE a simplified process but requires REAL LIFE skill, learning of the crafting processes involved and investment of time both into learning the "how to" and to actually "make" those high end Crafted pieces that would be"on par" with the quality of looted Legendary Artifact items.....
I do not like to put the difficulty for Crafters into the gathering of resources which, most often, are Designed to come as loot from fighting....
Crafters do not fight. Crafters make things.
Resources, therefore, should be obtainable for the largest part, to my opinion, via non fighting ways. Otherwise, Crafters become totally dependant on fighters' mood on how much to have to pay for those Resources which then can create trouble to Crafters being played as a Main character to be competitive with other Crafters being played by some player who "also" has a Fighter to gather those Resources and who can, therefore, undersell those other Crafters who do not have a Fighter character to get their Resources....
Bottom line is, that, to my viewing, the "Risk vs. Reward" for Crafters should not come as a fighting Risk, but as a difficulty in the Learning Process connected to the Learning of "How to" Craft, at least, for the High End items that would be competitive with Looted Legendary Artifacts and the likes....
And of course, also through a complexity and time consumingness of the entire crafting process.
This should be the "Risk" involved with Crafting to justify the High Rewards associated....
If Crafting was to be simplified, this making it more easy would necessarily reduce the "High Risk" associated to Crafting and would, therefore, not justify the High Rewards associated to then be able to craft High End items comparable to looted Legendary Artifacts and the likes....
That is at least how I see it.
There are pages where I can read about it, but I'm from the "Show Me" state.
I can usually figure things out myself, but with something so complex...
why can't there be a quest that teaches you how to do reforging and imbuing...
a quest that tells you step by step of what to do... like the one you can do for animal training.
And the reward can be the materials you used and loyalty to the Gargoyle Queen.
You clearly are over your head on this. Reforging is complicated. So complicated you have never tried to do it.
How many 90 charge Barbed kits do you have? See how long it takes you to get 10 so you can start to Reforge a suit. 10 will not be enough to make a good Luck suit.
That is at least how I see it.
kirthag.blogspot.com
Yes, reforging is complicated and only those players dedicated to Crafting usually take the time and make the effort to learn the ins and outs of it.
No, the complexity of Reforging would NOT be sufficient to "compensate" for a revamp of Crafted items that would make crafting to be "on par" with Looted Legendary items....
What is the problem with crafting now ?
That looted, Legendary items are better, far better as crafted items saved Reforged Luck items and a few Weapons.
Therefore, the "market" for Crafted items is much reduced and players who play Crafters as their "Main", may have trouble being able to "make a living" in Sosaria....
Now, if a Crafting Revamp would then have the scope and goal to again permit to Crafters to make items that would be "competitive" with the best Legendary Looted items out there, I think that this ability should be "compensated" with some checks and balances....
The checks and balances that I see is, would be increased complexity in the "how to" Learning processes involved as well as in the Crafting times.
In Real Life, usually, Professions which require a longer and more intensive study time yield better salaries.... why shouldn't it be the same for Ultima Online ?
If we want, as I think we should, bring back to Crafters the ability to be able to make items that were to compete with high end Legendary looted items, this increased and profitable ability should come with ALSO an increased effort in Learning the "how to", as well as in the time that it would take to actually make those items.
Otherwise, we would end up with the current scenario, but reversed....
If Crafting was to be simplified, what would players do ?
My guess is that players would just rush to their Crafters' characters and craft whatever high end items they may need or want and forget about going hunting for them as Looted high end items....
Basically, just like now looted Legendary items make crafted ones obsolete and a waste of time to make, if Crafting was made a simplified process, but yielding still high end items of a comparable usefullness and power as looted Legendary items, the changed scenario would see players only create these items through Crafting and no longer go hunting to loot for them....
The current inbalance between Crafted and Looted items would remain, entirely, only as reversed to what it is now.
This is why I insist that Crafting for high end items should be made a complex and difficult, time consuming process, to be able to then maintain a balance in between Crafted high end items and Looted high end items.
Anything different, to my opinion, would create inbalances in between these 2 different ways to have access to high end items.
That is at least the way I see it.
My crafter was a support character to keep my pvper and pvmers going.
I used to build a suit, go out and pvp, lose it, come back, make another - But you could always remake with the same Stats!! Being able to make what you actually want is a key part of crafting - NOT randomness.
I agree Crafting should be a main staple of UO, that has got lost along the wayside.
It cannot be made any more complicated, it is already complicated enough - I do all 8 BOD types, and enjoy them - that is the maximum complicated it should be allowed to get.
I don't currently make anything anymore, even though I have all Crafting skills. I don't want to put all that time and effort in, to get something Random. If I were to make something, I'd have planned it first, and know exactly what I am out to get. When you make a building, or an item of clothing, you don't gather all the resources, then throw them together, and express surprise at the outcome - you make something definite.
I'd like to see crafting use the Imbuing regs and material resources, to produce greater reforged style gear, that is not randomly generated, and probably have boosted stats to compete with pvm loot properties, which I also never collect because it is so random and stupid.
KISS Keep It Simple Stupid
Add the "cursed" property to any item with property weights higher than what can be crafted.
Done. You could still have your awesome suits with a ridiculous number of mods but eventually you'll lose it and need to get another one. The fact is that any item worth keeping stays in the game essentially forever and nothing ever really gets lost or destroyed. Cursing all of these "elite" loot items would be a step in the right direction to fix that.
I mean, if Crafting was something easy, and could produce items as good as Looted Legendary items if not better (as it should be, to my opinion....), WHY ON EARTH would any players want to fight and hope for a good drop when they could just make it ?
It simply cannot be, at least to my opinion.
YES, Crafting should absolutely be capable of creating same High End quality as Looted items to "beat" the current discrepancy which has players go hunto for drops and neglect Crafting, BUT, at the same time, Crafting cannot and should not be "made easy" because THEN, it would kill outright, to my opinion, the hunting for High End "Looted" items...
So, YES to High End Crafted Items of a comparable quality as Looted High End items BUT, at the expense of Crafting such higher end items being very complex, convoluted and a hard process to master, learn, and time consuming to produce.
Otherwise, if crafting was to be simplified, we'd see the same current inbalance between high end looted items and crafted items but, reversed....
At least, that is the way I see it.
That would be bringing, at least for those items, Felucca onto Trammel and it would not be welcomed by the majority of players....
If we want Crafting to make a real come back, it should be able to make High End items of a comparable quality as Looted ones and the drawback should not be losing them all the time where the resources and time invested to make them will be considerable and, I would imagine, the higher the quality of the Crafted item the most expensive the resources and time invested in the crafting would be....
Having them be cursed would mean losing all those Resources and Time spent and, if those items where purchased, UO Gold spent to buy them....
Who'd then be willing to spend any serious Gold purchasing them from Crafters when they would be labelled Cursed and, thus, be loosable easily?
It would not help Crafters to make a leaving.... which should be the goal of a Crafting revamp.... that revamp, to be able to give to Crafters again something to make which they can actually sell for good gold....
So, I am sorry but no, I do not think that forcing "cursed" on High End Crafted items would be a good idea at all....
In such a case, "depending" on the DELTA for the quality between Looted, "Cursed" items and regular "non cursed" Crafted items this "might" work but it would still depend very much on whether High End non-cursed Crafted items were to be "much inferior" to High End cursed Looted items as well as, how "often" these High End cursed Looted items, were to be obtainable as a drop....
What I am trying to say is, that if High End "cursed" Loot items where to be significantly superior to whatever High End could be crafted and, on top of that, they were to also be quite a common drop as Loot, I would imagine that players would STILL prefer the Looted High End items even if cursed, and,as a resultof this, Crafted High End items would still result in not having a market pretty much....
So, I imagine, it would be a "fine balance" here to be obtained which would depend very much on players' "tastes" and style of gameplay for the items which they would want to use....
Another possible "deterrant" that could be introduced to get players prefer Crafted items, even when a little "less good" as compared to Looted cursed items, would be to put in a mechanics where 90%+ of times, upon death of the character, cursed items would be looted by NPCs and the NPC would have to be killed to then retrieve them....
Although, the work around which players would probably resort to, to avoid that problem, would be to have "both" looted better cursed items AND a little lesser Crafted items with them and use the cursed items initially.... if they died and lost the cursed ones to NPCs, they would then put on the Crafted ones, albeit of a lesser quality, proceed to kill the NPCs that looted them, and recover those cursed items....
Still, in the long run it would become an annoying endeavour and many players could simply avoid the cursed ones and resort to the Crafted ones to avoid the extra weight to carry and the burden to have to always need to recover them upon the death of their character....
Other possible "work arounds" to compensate for the loss of Cursed High End looted items to NPCs grabbing them from the corpse of the player's character, would be players hunting in a group where, if their character dies and lost his/her cursed items to some NPCs, the other members of the group would focus on killing these NPCs to recover the looted cursed items from their corpses....
Still, as I said, it would depend much on how much of a "lesser quality" Crafted, non-cursed High End items would be possible to be as compared to cursed, High End looted items, as well as how "easy and frequent" as a drop, the Cursed High End looted items were made to be.
@Popps ;- I can completely agree with the sentiment that Crafting needs a boost. It is, and should be, one of the most fun, rewarding parts of UO - building your own suit, to make the characters you build, be able to go out and do stuff. It is even more rewarding, when you have done it yourself, with your own crafter.
I cannot agree that it needs to get more complicated. Lets take a step back, and actually look at what suit building currently entails.
If I take my Pure Dexxer, which is actually a really basic fun character - that the Devs helped fix the template massively by introducing the First Aid Belt, something I'd been begging for ages.
You put all that together, and that was just off the top of my head, I've probably forgotten some aspects, and none of that is easy or simple. In fact, It is so complicated and time consuming, I believe there are only a couple of proper suit builders left in the entire game, who genuinely get it all. There is no point, anyone investing the mental energy to do this properly anymore, when you can just throw together random looted stuff that eclipses the Crafted gear that took all that knowledge and effort.
The daily challenges would be quests you can pick up in Brit Commons. Each day the quests would be several random dungeons or monsters in different areas that include free content areas and the High Sea/ TOL areas. As well as both Fel and Ilsh champ spawns.
The challenges are only good for 1 day, so you can't save them up. You would need to pick them up each day and delete any old ones you didn't finish.
Once completed you would acquire points for the daily dungeon master npc in Brit Commons.
Some dungeons and monsters could offer more points depending on level and difficulty.
Things like Kill 10 blood elementals
Kill Travesty
Hunt and kill 50 earth elementals
Kill Barracoon the Piper
You could also make it to where subscribers get more dailies than EJ accounts.
Create new rewards that entice players to want to do this and to buy TOL and HighSeas
Such as the:
--Recipes: Mythical crafting recipes that require items from each monster to create it; something from Dreadhorn, Mel, Savage skin paint, etc. Mythical Sword, Mythical Staff, Mythical Shield and lesser versions such as exalted, grandmaster and legendary.
Crafting has the time consuming and difficulty. It needs the boosts now!
Anyone can just google and look on the stratics the pages and pages of guides and excel sheets on how to, what to use.
Even nowadays, the suits that I make with legendaries, I still open my excel and put everything on it and check what is missing, it is time consume, than you have imbuing, than you have enhance and you HAVE to use the metal forged after, because you dont want to loose all your work and yet you still open for mistakes, how many times i crafted a piece, imbued to just than realize I forgot to Pof. Hahah
The new element would be applied to base crafted normal items (think reforging or Whetstones) and have 2 effects on the piece. First it would apply a +75 resist bonus to the piece (think armslore bonus application). Second it would allow 6 additional properties to be imbued and increase the imbuing cap to 800 points.
If the base piece was reforged instead of imbued it would increase the cap to 850 and use the legendary loot table caps for individual properties (MR4 instead of MR2, etc).
This would keep hunting for high level loot drops relevant and provide a mechanism to craft some higher level gear without over complicating things too much more.
Couple of issues with this. Temporary? Why Temporary? Temporary is philosophically such a weak, negative mindset and zero fun. If you've worked for something, you want it to last. If you want Temporary - just delete all the "elite" stuff, I have no issues with it all being deleted and downgrade everything. The Suit is not meant to be the be all and the end point of the game, it is just a midpoint in building up to play the game. So why Temporary? Why have to keep going back there? There are already so many variations of suits needed for different events, and different characters we can never finish any in the first place. I don't have a certain geographical mentality of building stuff to last for 2 weeks. Are your Stats and Skills temporary - do they keep sliding backwards?
And no, didn't say we need better gear than we have now, I said I'd like Crafting to have a Boost. That can be by making the systems more cohesive, making them a bit more simple, fixing a few things, giving more choice and customisation - I certainly did not say they should hit +14 Property level, but, I do believe Crafting should be a viable Playstyle route to match PvM loot if a player wanted to go that way. If a player has put in the effort a PvMer has to get something, they should be able to get something as nice, and it can have more sentiment to certain players, if they built it themselves... (to last...!!).
Edit - Thinking about it, I realise you play on Siege, and your mindset fits there, but does not fit on production really. There is just so much more in terms of characters and gearing requirements on production. If we were back to Felucca old days, or Siege, I would have zero problem losing it all, and having to remake, but I don't want to have to do that, just to be an unnecessary time filler. That's the sort of con games with no content pull-off.
It would also add a new dimension to PvP. Someone with the best gear had better be able to fight as well because if not, he won't have that gear anymore. PvPers would have something to fight over and would have to be able to balance their skills with their gear.
So, I'll leave it at that. I agree that something has to be done to balance crafting and loot. I think my idea has merit as it is very simple and solves multiple issues. Some may think otherwise. Either way I can assure you that making things more complex, making better gear than we have now, or making craftable gear better is not the answer.
Here is one for you. How about you write a very detailed point paper on exactly what you want done and at the same time tell all the UO Crafters exactly how to do every mod/change you want added/changed to the current Crafting system. This needs to include detailed instructions and also where and how to get all needed material to do your requested additions/changes.
Please forward all this information to the Devs and the people that maintain the UO Wilki.
Sorry but I cannot agree.
Why ?
Because it would again be forcing a Crafter, a NON-fighting character, to HAVE TO fight in order to get Crating Recipes to better, higher end items....
It would be, once again, at the benefit of players who use Crafters' characters as "mules" in support of their Fighting, "Main" characters....
No, sorry.
I would like to see Crafting and Crafters get a role of its own, once again, in Ultima Online, WITHOUT being anymore "so much" dependant on fighting and fighters....
That's why I much prefer having difficulties and hardship for Crafting be coming from a more complex and complicated mental and learning process as well as a time consuming production activity rather then keeping on forcing Crafting and Crafters be totally subject to Figthing and fighters...
To my opinion, Crafters and Crafting deserve better then being mere "Mules" at the service of fighting and fighters' characters....
The best armor I have ever looted.
You can easily build a sweet dex suit around this piece.
Thanks @Kyronix @Bleak ; I have loved all the events this year!!!!
Smithing - obvious... making armor and weapons
Fletching - obvious... making bows and arrows used in war and hunting
Tinkering - making adornments for rank and hierarchy, and as tech developed, making the "finer things" used in muskets and war machines
Tailoring - making uniforms and clothing the armies and their families and all the supporting people around the fighters
Embroidery - marking said uniforms to show rank, class, creed, faction; also making flags and banners (very much done with embroidery)
Farming - food! horses! cattle! veggies (no scurvy on yon navy vessels!)
Carpentry - along with Tinkers and Smiths, making all those glorious war machines (trebuchet, ballista, cannons) and housing said garrison, repairing the castle, making furniture for the officers and nobles and what not...
Pottery - Without clay pottery, how do you think the Greeks got water from the rivers to the battlefields? The Byzantines made clay plating for their armor!
I can go on and bore the masses... but in all honesty, in a game - the crafter IS the supporting character.
It is up to a Player to decide how he/she wants to play their crafter... and I for one DID play my crafter as a main... until it got so very boring that it got pointless to be a crafter. Now... she is more of a merchant, only crafting what is needed periodically and placed on vendors for others to find. And I don't really play Kirthag (who really did start out as a tailor) much anymore either - she is more the Lady of her fiefdom and only makes appearances when needed.
It is not about the systems for the skills, it is about the community's NEED of the solo-crafter... of which doesn't exist in UO any longer.
A sad truth, but still truth.
kirthag.blogspot.com
I can find it as tolerable that a minority of resources necessary for Crafting might come from fighting, but certainly, at least to my opinion, the grandest majority of what Crafters would need to make a living should definitively come from non-fighting ways and mechanics....
Otherwise, Crafters would stay (as they are), "subject" to Fighters and totally depend on fighters for their Crafting needs.
Which, it usually ends up, with Crafting (and Recipes) prices going up the roof and beyond.....
With an extremely reduced market, because most players have crafting "mules" and, thus, are self sufficient for their needs, someone please explain to me HOW a Crafter character being played as a "Main" chracter (that is, not in support of a Fighting character), could ever afford paying for Recipes 30+ millions of UO Gold and for ingredients/resources sometimes very high prices....
If the number of their buyers is very much reduced and limited (because too many players have their own crafting "mules"....), how could these Crafters being played as "Mains" be able to recover the huge expenses done to purchase Recipes and Ingredients from fighters, fundamental to the existance of their Crafting Profession ?
I concur that it is a sad thing that Crafters in Ultima Online might have been diminished to a mere "Mules" role....
My question to the Developers is, though, do we HAVE TO accept this sad state of things ?
In their ingenuity, creativity and ability to shape the online digital World of Ultima Online, wouldn't it "perhaps", just perhaps, be possible for Developers to change the status of Crafters and Crafting in Ultima Online and "re-shape" things so that, ONCE AGAIN, Crafting and Crafters in Ultima Online could regain a more relevant status, "on par" with that of Fighting characters and from other Professions, and not just be seen as a character that makes stuff for one's own "Main" Fighting character ?
What I would like to see, is Crafting made something which ONLY, or at least MOSTLY, those players TRULY motivated to play a Crafter most of their online time, would be willing to play with.
All other players, not finding it justified to put so much as effort and time into Crafting, would THEN need to resort out to "other" players playing a Crafter as their Main, in order to get their Crafting needs be covered....
Personally, the way I see such a thing become possible, would be making Crafting a complex and more difficult process to have to be learned (and thus put considerable effort and time into learning it) as well as the productive processed to make High End crafted items take considerable time.
All things, making ONLY those players really wanting to play a Crafter as their Main then do it with all of the other players be sufficiently deterred from wanting to play a Crafter to let other players do it and so provide that Market which Crafters would need to exist as a Profession in Ultima Online.
At least, that's the way I see it.
kirthag.blogspot.com