Feedback - Crafting - Update 10, Patch 1

[Gkar]

Why do you let players onto Mournlands if you don't listen to their feedback?

What makes you think they didn't?

[mournbladereigns]

adding my voice to the cacaphony (which now probably requires a bloomin voice of the master to craft)

1.First let me say that 'crafting is in BETA' is a pathetic excuse to sideline blame, one used by facebook games and pay to win games. Id hate to think ddo is going in that direction but...

2.Astral diamonds. NO. I will not pay real money for ingame weapons and items. If this trend continues, if players will have to pay real cash for items i will leave, i will be sory to go but by that point the game will be ruined. I truly hope this does not happen. aparently astral diamonds drop in game... yeh well ive been playing since WAY before they existed, i play most days for a few hours and ive never seen one.

3. raid gear being used is very bad for the game, more importantly it will destroy utterly any passing of raid loot and comunity spirit. Further more 'crafting is in BETA' is no excuse here because its impacting the rest of the game.

4. if crafted banes and greater banes need restricting for balance then remove them until such time as you can find a decent solution that does not involve 'pay to win'

5. we do not want to have to grind low lvl chains and quests to get crafting ingredients. no one wants this, grind is dull. The idea of getting all you need for recipies randomly in chests UNBOUND was great, it has generated a decent economy.

6. We do not want a bank full of non stacking items that dont fit in ingredient or collectable bags that are used in crafting. ALL CRAFTING ITEMS SHOULD BE EITHER INGREDIENTS OR COLLECTABLES. If you want to sell packs through crafting then more items like brocoli and fish are the way to go.

7.If any crafting recipies use epic tokens then the resultant item MUST be epic. No requirement of epic tokens for anything less than epic items, Many players loathe epic and only run it to get tokens to tr, epic is not fun, not balanced.

8. Do not release this update, it will seriously negatively impact more than just crafting. It will destroy raiding comunities.

No one expects a free ride even in a free to play game, but YOU WILL DESTROY THIS GAME if you continue down the pay to win path, Its not even subtle anymore. Content sale is the way forward if you want to maintain a robust game.

OR

Just have done with it and start selling finished mineral2's, lit2's, EPIC SOS and all that other stuff we strive for at $50 a pop and the mmo crowd can move on to swotor and the pen an paper crowd can get back to roleplaying.

Lots of ^THIS^

Use the lame mystic broccoli and other items you already put in the game as requirements for this stuff. needing 20 of these is plenty. NO and HELL NO to requiring raid loot/bound loot/named loot/tomes for crafting.

[Lithic]

Lots of ^THIS^

Use the lame mystic broccoli and other items you already put in the game as requirements for this stuff. needing 20 of these is plenty. NO and HELL NO to requiring raid loot/bound loot/named loot/tomes for crafting.

20 broccolies, that only come from vale end rewards, that are BTA? No thanks. I'd be done with it if it was more than one. Crafting is already a huge grind for greaters, a second different grind for lessers, a third grind for collectables (if you don't have a 6 year stockpile). Adding a fourth layer of grind would free up a LOT of my free time.

[WangChi]

Please - stop the insanity. Get rid of the astral diamonds, eberron essences, tomes, etc. Cannith crafting was really starting to get somewhere with players being able to craft useful, but not overpowerful (read: Raid/Epic loot) items.

If greater banes were such a monster problem, just remove the recipes, greater banes don't even need to be there in order for the system to be useful. Cannith crafting was useful for taking a junk silver weapon and turning it into a decent boss beater by grinding your way up to decent crafting levels to do so. Or making a useful set of melee goggles (blindness immunity of battle skill anyone?) without having to run VoD 100 times for Tharnes or Shroud 100 times for the mats to make a GS set.

The sad reality of this is that once again, the Dev's looked at a few power-gamers and said, "Oh my god, they've already reached level 100! We have to stop this before it gets out of hand." Meanwhile, the rest of us poor saps who don't play the game 60 hours a week are left holding our heads in dismay because now we'll never be able to make something useful.

I got extremely, EXTREMELY lucky and managed to buy a silver khopesh off the AH for 35k and made myself a +4 holy silver khopesh of evil outsider bane. I had to spend quite a bit on greater good essences and collectibles I didn't have to do it, and then I found a silver shortsword in a random chest and made a matching +4 holy eob out of it for raiding shroud. I have 48/43/46 crafting levels and am probably a little more than casual, but certainly not a hardcore player (1-3 hours a night if my wife/child let me).

I'm saddened by and utterly disappointed in the development team on this one. You guys had a really good system that was working beautifully for a lot of people to make their own stuff after hours and hours of normal non-repetitive questing, and now we've all gone back to the raid, raid, raid and reraid, off-timer repeat static quest with random rare drop system to gear up. Congratulations, you took the entire loot system in one direction so far we've gotten back to where we started. (Except this time you managed to work in the DDO Store, nice job, I see what you did there).

It was rather refreshing to take my packs of loot to the weapon broker in Denieth today, he hasn't seen me in a long time.

[Qzipoun]

Depends upon the rarity.

Using an item like Dusk Heart, Giant Stalker Knife or a Large Gnawed Bone (high drop rate, frequently looted chest, and the items aren't 'used up' in any real sense) - 100% fine.

Using an item like the Globe of Imperial Blood (very low drop rate, frequently looted chest, item never really 'used up') - Borderline. These items are scarce (there may only be a dozen looted per server per week), and if they are used up in a remotely useful recipe, well, they will become an absolute nightmare to obtain.
This gets much worse if it's an item that is desirable on its own, like the Firestorm Greaves.

Agreed 100%. I'm thinking about the really junky items that are somewhat common but completely useless. Anything valuable or really grindy would go against the whole point of crafting what you want vs grinding for loot

[steelblueskies]

Please - stop the insanity. Get rid of the astral diamonds, eberron essences, tomes, etc. Cannith crafting was really starting to get somewhere with players being able to craft useful, but not overpowerful (read: Raid/Epic loot) items.

If greater banes were such a monster problem, just remove the recipes, greater banes don't even need to be there in order for the system to be useful. Cannith crafting was useful for taking a junk silver weapon and turning it into a decent boss beater by grinding your way up to decent crafting levels to do so. Or making a useful set of melee goggles (blindness immunity of battle skill anyone?) without having to run VoD 100 times for Tharnes or Shroud 100 times for the mats to make a GS set.

The sad reality of this is that once again, the Dev's looked at a few power-gamers and said, "Oh my god, they've already reached level 100! We have to stop this before it gets out of hand." Meanwhile, the rest of us poor saps who don't play the game 60 hours a week are left holding our heads in dismay because now we'll never be able to make something useful.

I got extremely, EXTREMELY lucky and managed to buy a silver khopesh off the AH for 35k and made myself a +4 holy silver khopesh of evil outsider bane. I had to spend quite a bit on greater good essences and collectibles I didn't have to do it, and then I found a silver shortsword in a random chest and made a matching +4 holy eob out of it for raiding shroud. I have 48/43/46 crafting levels and am probably a little more than casual, but certainly not a hardcore player (1-3 hours a night if my wife/child let me).

I'm saddened by and utterly disappointed in the development team on this one. You guys had a really good system that was working beautifully for a lot of people to make their own stuff after hours and hours of normal non-repetitive questing, and now we've all gone back to the raid, raid, raid and reraid, off-timer repeat static quest with random rare drop system to gear up. Congratulations, you took the entire loot system in one direction so far we've gotten back to where we started. (Except this time you managed to work in the DDO Store, nice job, I see what you did there).

It was rather refreshing to take my packs of loot to the weapon broker in Denieth today, he hasn't seen me in a long time.

was in the 80's for my schools. was deliberately working it via the slow grindy way and documenting, so i could post a chronicle at some point. big thing is they didn't just break crafting with the changes here. they broke crafting, broke their fixes and new features, generally refrained from comment to unilateral outrage, harmed community and trust in the company, and are more or less still sitting behind a wall of silence.

if your coffeemaker melted down due to a flaw, poisoning you, the company said nothing, and the best individual response was a surprised worker apologizing, you might be a little wary of choosing that brand in the future, even if it was free.

i think its pretty fair to say this was a very big moodkiller for the community at large, and theres going to be a lot of distrust of turbine depending on how they respond. theres your poison.

[macubrae]

There comes a time when the "it's still in beta" excuse starts getting old. With such an overflowing, all negative responces from the people that you depend on, "it's too late, we'll fix it later" doesn't work for us either.

Last year was great. New quests were introduced, bugs were fixed, and the only complaints I heard were petty. THIS, is a major screw up! Monk handwraps, a pay to play class, was a screw up. And not seeing the fact(or just ignoring it) that this is a problem, might just be the straw that broke the camels back for many of your paying customers.

Requiring ingredience such as very rare drops from raids, to make a 6th level item's shard(+1 greater banes are 6th level) is ridiculous. Did you introduce crafting to add enjoyment to your customers experience, just to later slap them in the face and dare them to try to make something powerful. Of course not. Don't let it go LIVE until the dev gamers and testers agree on a solution. Pushing it through solves NOTHING.

[Raiderone]

I'm beginning to think that Crafting is becoming a waste of Dev's time.

Instead of crafting maybe we could have some epic levels before the end of 2011.
Or maybe Druids by end of 2011 instead of a mixed bag of crafting mistakes (er BETA).

And whats the purpose of crafting anyway? It will totally ruin the normal loot tables.
I liked crafting originally and yes I know its all BETA.

But really at what point does Turbine stop with the oh this is in Beta. And come out with the final product. That this is BETA is just so that they can change it anytime they want too.

Okay you want to add raid items, then when normal looted items with Greater Halfing Bane are deconstructed, give a percentage chance that we get a Chattering Ring...

The material drops are rediculiously low on some really high end items.
As far as I'm concerned Turbine is just looking to tie in the DDO Store..

P.S. I think all the Spell Changes are still in BETA too!

Glad I just cancelled my SUB. Tired of DDO. I'll be around in FTP land and Turbine will need to earn my money...

[Runeskald71]

Give me a call I can help you with your obviously broken change control process and help you with how to have quality backout plans. This is IT 101 as far as I am concerned and I can point you to several good books and whitepapers on how this should be managed to prevent bad code making it to production.

You got some bad code there, luckily you identified it prior to going to production time to delay deployment and cancel the change ticket. Backout plans should cover any changes that were made in preparation prior to deployment. Schedule a new change ticket, have a few people pull some overtime and determine a new date to go to production after the bad code is removed or fixed... good change control processes prevent embarassing mistakes.

[Matuse]

Too late to not have in the update? Saywhatnow?

Here's a thought: Delay the release of 10.1 to live. Then you DO have time.

What do you think will cause a greater outcry: Releasing this patch as it is now, or delaying the patch for 1-2 weeks?

Bear in mind that a large number of players DO NOT READ THE FORUMS. And they especially do not read the Lamma forums. They will come in on patch day and visit the crafting stations to see the changes. And then they will quit.

[Roderickus]

I just heard people would be able to deconstruct raid loot or in general BtC/BtA stuff.... if that's true nobody will EVER put things up for roll if hes aware of that and wants to craft. It's hard to get stuff as madstone boots as it is, imagine a caster takes it for deconstruction purposes.

[vVAnjilaVv]

Turbine must have a "have to see it to believe mentality"...which is why they intend to release this anyways....to see how much a change like this will actually effect their pocketbooks.

I hope a lot...because I think these changes S**K!

[Dark_Helmet]

For Update 10, Patch 1, a number of changes have been made to the new Crafting system including a crafting tutorial and Crafting Recycling.

Please take some time over the next few days to log onto Lamannia and check out the changes, then come to this thread and give us your feedback.

The auction house is stocked up and the changes will be posted in the Release Notes once Lamannia is opened to the public.

No...no...no...

Using rare items for crafting is going too far. Instead of teamwork "Hey anyone want a Xachosian Eardweller? Iam not a caster" becomes "Hmm, I might need this for crafting in the future. Too bad I never play a caster!"




Very bad move.

[MartinusWyllt]

even just the catacombs necklace for the undead bane is bleh...who actually wants to grind those...what, 7 quests with the annoying up and down the stairs?

[Valiance]

It took me a long time but I've finally come up with an excuse for what the Turbos are doing.

They must have plans in the works for recipes that are much stronger than "greater banes" ect for future updates. Something like 2 steps above greater bane and one above epic bane...something like Ludicrous Bane or something with +8 to hit and 7d8 added dmg or something. It was for all of these incredibly powered items that you can't get anywhere else that the crazy raid loot ingredients were for and they accidently got transposed onto the simple "can randomly pull this loot anywhere" recipes of bane and greater bane.....right Turbine? Right?

On a more serious note if these crazy ingredients were required for something that was unavailable anywhere else and very powerful then it would be ok. Like let's say a cloak of the Zephyr and a Storm and 10 blue dragon scales were required ingredients to make a clickie that gave you 10 abundant steps ....that would be f'ing awesome.

Or a Skiver and a Greenblade as ingredients for an epic arcane lore shard.

This would be ok as you're taking super powered ingredients and allowing them to be transformed into something even better.

MAKE IT HAPPEN TURBOS YOU CAN DO IT!

V

[Krell]

Whooops. We clearly were out of line with several of these ingredients. Including items like Dreamspitter and Chattering Ring is an embarrasing error on our part and was in no way intentional.

Our motivation to add these extra ingredients (which was only made to a subset of recipes that concerned us) was to preserve and not devalue the efforts made by players to obtain many of the existing powerful named items in the game.

We will make changes. Unfortunately, they will not be made in time to alter the upcoming patch. As you know, the system is still in beta and we will effect changes as soon as we can.

Our apologies and thanks for the swift, clear feedback.

Thanks for the response. I agree with others that mixing raid loot and crafting is a bad idea. I agree with balancing the time investment with obtaining powerful weapons versus the time required to craft roughly equal or better weapons. I just recommend finding another way to do it. It is hard enough to get someone to put a decent raid loot item up for roll considering the TR system and all the new people. It could be replace it with rare collectables, put certain effects at the 150 skill level, or just remove certain effects if they can't be balanced with the time investment for equal items.

A couple side notes - I'd like the crafting system to support a player or guild sending crafting materials to a crafting character without that character having to personally obtain certain items. The crafting character could be level one or 20, uber or gimped, for example. Second, I'd like the option to permanently sign non-bound crafted items. Make it optional such as a flag or switch in case some would rather not, but I think it adds flavor and character to the game and the craft system and worked well in other Turbine games.

Thanks, Krell

[Solmage]

Will I get lynched if I dare to suggest that I can see the dev's point?

Once you reach X level in crafting, churning out mass of X items, not to mention A,B,C all the way to Z etc is extremely easy: it is akin to once you craft your first mineral II on the shroud, you're now able to craft EVERY accessory and multiple min IIs on the shroud for free, any time you want, for all your characters. [Not quite free, hey maybe they'll cost you a bone, or a shrapnel but the basic idea holds] - And just to add insult to injury this stuff is more powerful than any min II.

Surely I'm not the only person that when they saw crafting go live went 'omg, this is horribly ridiculously overpowered, I can't believe they went with this as it stands'?

I clearly remember posting a lone (and ignored) post stating that perhaps in order to craft the more powerful items, they should require rare components that dropped only in raids, to avoid just this situation.

Now, I do understand people's concerns: Requiring certain packs to craft certain items, people no longer putting stuff up for roll because they'll instead use it in crafting, etc. I think instead of simply complaining, our time will be better spent coming up with ways to solve these issues while maintaining the basic premise of stopping the gravy train on high end/raid-level weapons and items flooding the game.

So with that in mind:

- Offer alternatives ingredients-wise. Say you want to craft a devil bane, you need an item (or items) either from the shroud, or Amrath, or devil assault, not just from one of those.

- Don't use actual raid loot, instead add a separate chance to the end rewards for raids to get specialcomponentX.

- IF you are going to use raid loot, then two changes need to happen: 20th completions need to now give a FULL raid loot list, because it'll become much much harder (not to mention annoying and involving less camaraderie) to obtain the item you want, and, ideally, bound loot needs to switch to being invisible to other party members, to avoid the grief fest that's going to be "I need the sos to make it epic" "yeah well I need it to make my greater bane, tough luck". Lastly, raid loot needs to become BtA so you can pass it to your crafter.

- Use +1 tomes as wild cards for low level components, +2 tomes for medium level, and +3 for high level. (if you're going to use tomes at all)

- Astral Diamonds, no. This is 100% pay to win, please no no no. If you want to start selling more Astral Diamonds, then fix the lower tier ships so they're more appealing, (low level ships with more crew hooks and less item hooks, and higher tier 'plat ships' available earlier in the black market through ADs come to mind, but whatever, this is a different topic)

[lazyashell]

I have seen one or two other chiming in with this, but I am a fairly casual player that has dropped $300ish over my sporadic play periods on turbine points, and I have a couple of feelings on the crafting as it stands (and where it might go) for the devs:

(tl;dr version: crafting systems can make or break games, and dropping the ball here will cost turbine money)

1.) Cannith crafting is already worse. It has a higher ML (which, to be fair is somewhat irrelevant for endgame, but for the bulk of the player base matters) I was shocked to send a +4 shard to my level 6 alt character and then read it and find out that I wouldn't be able to use it for a level. Not a huge deal to get from 6 to seven, but the mats for the +4 shard far outweighed the cost of just buying a +4 at the broker or auction house. Putting a penalty on top of that is just, well, frustrating.

2.) Raid items are pretty serious business. Everyone and their sister has already chimed in on this, but its really important enough to mention again. Unless it is going to be possible to surpass raid loot quality by having the raid loot drop and the crafting skill to back it up, this is absurd. People will just keep the raid items. Especially if the ingredients are BTC and the crafting level remains per character, this is nuts.

3.) This is Eberron! The facility of crafting should have been inherent from the start -- Scrolls, wands, and potions are really still not a part of this? I hate to drop PnP on the devs, because DDO is clearly its own thing, but seriously, when i can buy a wand of cure moderate as a level one anything (well, ok, probably 3 by the time I get through Korthos) from the corner store, why the heck can't an endgame wizard even figure out how to make a scroll? Just make it a plat sink, or fall back on PnP and throw in an XP cost.

4.) Please include ways to put race/alignment restrictions on items -- either as a means to preserve materials, or as a means to lower the minimum level on items (for increased materials cost). Being restricted to a single suffix/prefix already means that named goods are likely to be superior (if harder to find), in addition to MLs being shifted for crafted items.

5.) Crafting drew me back in, and I spent money because of it. I say this not as a gripe, as I have enjoyed the experience, but as a plea -- I really want to pay you guys when you make good things. I almost always find it to be worthwhile. If you drop this ball, though, which it would be so easy to keep aloft, I will find it harder and harder to support you. I am perfectly willing to pay for content, and even for convenience items -- but as soon as the curve drops into a situation where I am paying for progress instead of progressing through what I have paid for, you've lost me. Think of major crafting systems like advertising -- make it good, and people will start showing up because of it. Make it bad, and things flow in the opposite direction.

Also, personally, please make it good. I like DDO, and I would hate to see it stumble just as Rift is picking up steam and SW:ToR is on the horizon.

[Coldin]

Silver Flame pots for Holy Burst has got to change. Nobody wants to farm Silver Flame Favor on their PM because they didn't forsee this little cookie before choosing a crafting toon.

This is actually the one thing I don't mind. It would be an added incentive to achieving high favor with a faction. LOTRO already does this, and I think it's rather effective. Though you usually only have to achieve the first level of favor to begin to craft, not the uppermost tier.

[Backley]

Crafting Hall vendors will now buy and repair equipment.

Nope, they won't buy my equipment, they will only sell me decon mats or repair my equipment.

Need to add the Sell and Buy Back tabs to them, as you said you would.