Feedback - Crafting - Update 10, Patch 1

[Indoran]

crafting is already REALLY EXPENSIVE... What got into your minds ppl? seriously? dont you see we are hurt by this kind of thing

[vVAnjilaVv]

I know one thing for sure, I have 15 capped toons that at one time I could play all of and still be pretty nicely geared......with what this is gonna do, I am definitely shelving all but maybe 2-3........it's almost too much to cover anymore to even play more than one...which may be what I may ultimately end up doing.

[Mister_Peace]

What makes you think they didn't?

You aren't serious, are you? BS like this should never have made it to Lamannia, let alone the live servers as MadFloyd says it will. I'm only assuming what the closed-group response must have been, but it's pretty obvious that recipes like these only make it to live servers if the devs are
A out of touch
and B not listening to feedback

I'm sorry MadFloyd, but the inability to stop or divert this train is what causes trainwrecks.

[vVAnjilaVv]

I recently saw all the Resident Evil movies....Warner Brothers is starting to come off as being an Umbrella like corporation to me....they could care less about the trainwrecks......they just want results whether they are good or bad to further there studies in gamer psychology.

Hopefully Alice will be visiting soon

[Aelonwy]

/wall of text and my apologies

I understood crafting to be an alternative to gearing your alts to be capable for raiding and possibly ready for the easier epics. Apparently, I was mistaken because 10.1 completely refutes this idea. With 10.1 you must be raiding inorder to craft. Huh what?!

BTC Raid gear including tomes, and even rare named loot = BAD IDEA because:

A) It will absolutely ruin the sharing/team work atmosphere of this game. /rolling on loot will be a thing of the past.

-Firstly you demonstrated you were considering using the named and rare loot as trash ingredients.
Player speculation will forever be the specter raised by this and will hurt the game evermore, even if this never goes live. You cannot patch player speculation causing deterioration of community quality, when the players cannot trust you.

Quoted for heartfelt emphasis.

B) The whole idea behind BTA shards was to only be forced to have one crafting alt per account, making recipes require BTC ingredients brings this back to square one.

C) Destroying a good/rare/named item for a % chance at a decent crafted item = foolish. Foolish for anyone to require it of us, foolish for us to acquiesce to it.

D) % chance of failure and lost ingredients which may include rare loot = Not gonna happen, no one in their right mind would attempt these recipes with less than a 100% chance of success.

E) Cost of getting raid gear/rare named item/tome/etc in terms of time and effort and resources for 1 shard (of ANYTHING) = silly?!

F) Did you think about the cost of this for the purpose of leveling crafting? Is the only reasonable way to level at those high levels deconstructing alone?

Raid gear, tomes, rare named loot, and astral diamonds used in crafting recipes with or without a % chance of failure is MIND BOGGLING and nonsensical. Favor rewards also do not make sense when you take into account that many ppl leveled a storage alt to be their crafter; and while crafting xp may go with your character when they TR, favor does not. Additionaly, I agree with whomever said it wasn't right to require an epic token for something that isn't epic.

Constructively, I would suggest using the rarest collectibles, the new mystical collectibles, and IF YOU MUST create some newer never before seen ultra rare mystical collectibles for those recipes you feel are problematic for us to craft. I would tenatively accept the small and medium shroud ingredients used in crafting, afterall Shroud is the adv pack recommended for just about anyone to purchase.

Please, please, DO NOT USE raid gear, tomes, rare named loot, epic tokens, and astral diamonds or ANYTHING ELSE that would force Cannith Crafting into a Pay to Win scenario. If having crafting free to play is not netting enough profit to balance the expenditure of dev time and resources then when it is out of BETA make it an adv pack type account based purchase.

Finally, please do not punish us with this patch, roll it back, give it time and alot of luv ...we will be only too happy to wait for you to fix it.

/wall of text done, again my apologies.

[Aussieee]

I am really disappointed to see that collectables didn't get more use and value. I guess they can continue collecting dust

[Ruphus]

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)

No, No, No-No-No-NOOO! He...ck No!

First and foremost, from what I know of Cannith Crafting is that it's supposed to replace the randomness of random loot. Currently, with luck, you can pull a +4 Holy Silver Khopesh of Greater Evil Outsider Bane from a chest, it's rare, veeeerry rare, but it's possible. Adding +1 and Burst does not make this a raid item, nor should it.

And with that, NOTHING from Cannith Crafting should ever require a raid drop unless it is going to offer a raid type effect.

You can claim that a Holy Silver GEOB is better than a Min2, against devils, but you forget that someone can easily get a Min2 by the time they are 16, earlier if they reaaaaally tried, and that Min2 is by far a MUCH better weapon against any NON Evil outsider especially if they are not immune to acid. Also note, a Holy Silver GEOB weapon crafted is going to be ML 20. Basically same ML as Epic.

I am not even going to go into how great Lit2s are as general purpose weapons. It would take an entire bag full of bane weapons and other weapons to completely replace those.

Now you also have to consider that one of the other major hopes/plans for Cannith Crafting was to get newer players better chances at obtaining "Boss Beaters" Everyone and their brother knows that a melee w/o a boss beater is going to get snubbed every so often for raids. This was the one chance for people to get them w/o getting lucky or without shelling out 250k+ for a fairly decent one.

And Tomes. Really? TOMES?! I am lucky to pull ANY tome twice a month, and I consider myself a pretty hardcore player.

In over 2 years of playing DDO, I have 1, yes 1 +3 tome and I have seen 2 others drop for me. In every 20/40th DQ completions I have gained, I have yet to even see a +3 tome in the list. I have yet to see a +4 tome drop from ToD, eVoN6 or in the ToD 20/40th lists. The only +3's I have seen in 20th lists have been from Shroud, and with the exception of the one I have chose, I almost always am taking Essences of Cleansing, cause guess what, there is no other way to get those! The 2 +3s I have seen drop, both in eDQ, were +3 Int, and +3 Cha, which of course, I was on my melee, and being generous, I let a wizard take the +3 int and I think a bard or sorc get the +3 cha. Had I known they would ever be needed for something like this, I would have NEVER given them up. Nor will anyone else in the future.

Any tome is a BAD idea. Any named loot is a BAD idea. Even if just from a realism point of view, how does grinding up a magical book or item equate to making another magic item?

Now, that being said....

If they want to make the recipes more difficult, the first thing they need to do is acknowledge that Bound and Unbound need to be drastically different in cost. Bound shards should not be overly difficult to make, even for the best banes or effects, simply because your putting in the time, money and resources to just get to where you can make them.

Unbound is where there needs to be a really rare and hard to get item. ****BUT**** It should not be from a raid. Nor should it include anything you can get from the DDO store, nor should it include a Tome, or other insanely rare item that already has a general purpose in the game.

What needs to be done for Unbound shards is as follows, as I see it.....

Start with Shards of Potential. Making these hard to make strictly limits how good and how many of the highest items enter the world. Instead of taking XYZ of any lesser/greater essence of the appropriate type, a divine shard of potential +6 Should be 75 Greater Divines. +7 Should be 100 Greater Divines and 100 Greater Goods. Potential 8 should be 150 Greater Divines, 150 Greater Goods, 150 Greater Evils.

Potential shards should continue to increase, drastically, like above, and once you get to +9 they need to require a "Mystical" item. Start including these "Mysticals" as drops in Amrath Quests, Gianthold, Sand, VoN, Inspired Quarters, and Dreaming Dark quests and others, heck each pack should have it's own "Mystical". Make sure they are new ones, this will push pack sales and keep old content still wanted/needed/desired. This covers the need to make money part. Also with the Mysticals, so people aren't feeling like they have to have every pack, add a trasmuter that allows you to change any 5 Mysticals for 1 of another type.

Now, on to the actual shards. Same process as above, use a TON of essences, but instead of using a "Mystical" they should use a drop from specific quest chests/end rewards that is a bit rarer than the Mysticals, but not as rare as a tome. Roughly a 4-7% drop rate. Enough so that if you spend a day cranking out 20 of the appropriate quest, you should see 1-2 drop. But they should not be Tome rare, or named item rare, or even boot ingrediant rare, but rare enough you do not see them every quest, or every other quest like the Mysticals are now.

And DDO Store items should NEVER be apart of ANY recipe, the only things you should be able to get from the DDO store than involve this is a way to speed things up a notch, but never an actual component itself.

[MartinusWyllt]

...
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....

I guess this is a matter of perspective. from 40/38/37 it will be a very long time before I'm "churning out mass of X items" not to mention how much essences mass production costs. I expect this is more representative of the majority of players; we don't all have millions of plat to buy thousands of essences.

To make that twink gear for an alt, like the pair of +4 holy silver of evil outsider bane khopeshes, took a lot of resources and I'm not going to be churning them out. If you can just crank them out then you already had tons of resources.

[Backley]

Maker's Crafting Tutorial claims:

("Crafted Bound Items are Bound to Account.")
Woohoo! Something to actually look forward to!

But, the actual crafted item:

(Bound to Character, as all Bound crafted items have been so far, except items that start as Bound to Account before being stripped.)

Bug reported. Wish I could hope for the binding to be changed to Account instead of the text.

[Tirisha]

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.

I'm sry. My Crafting toon has max Favor but I still can't get around the ideal of having to run necro 1-4 on elite to get access to holy burst shards. The system is grindy and expensive enough in my eyes.

[Postumus]

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?

For... each... shard... attempt

[Rawel_San]

/tl;dr New changes are bad. Developers don't know what they are doing. Don't remove the plat sink that crafting
is now by letting deconstructions give you plat.

Now [/begin wall of text]


First let me say: Please reevaluate the nonsense that is this update to crafting. I know it feels bad that you are
made to look like fools that not only don't play your own game, which I could understand, but that don't even
have any clue about it. I mean nada, zip, zero, zilch, none. Making chattering ring, which takes on average
3 months of dedicated grinding to get an ingredient in a recipe for something that 80% of players would just
leave in the chest if it ended up being randomly generated, that just shows incredible incompetence.
Making the twinblade (litany turn in) worth about 5-6 mill plat in AH prices for tome pages on Thelanis and
about 3 mill plat if you know where to buy an ingredient in a recipe that is just as bad is also fun.
The funniest is that the items that people actually really really want are trifles in comparison medium shroud
ingredients, or even a large scale are pennies in comparison.

Not one to respond a lot on these forums, but this patch and your response have risen a lot of question for me:

*) Wasn't Cannith Crafting intended as a way to get decent high level gear without having to run raids? I play with a friend of mine and we are in no way capable of running raids with the two of us, we were more than happy to use the crafting system as an alternative means to get the gear we wanted when we reach level 20.

<snip>

Second I would like to reply to this very valid point. I think this was exactly what they intended to do. The
problem of course is that it's not what they did. I don't know if the people working for Turbine don't have
rudimentary math skills or if they just didn't bother to actually do any checking, but the result of the
crafting system was making items which surpass by quite a bit the best shroud gear against the
appropriate enemies and are only slightly behind the best epic items. Allowing the crafting of +4 attack bonus
on goggles with a ML of 8 when the only other items in the game that provide this bonus are Epic and some
of the harder ones to get to boot was another questionable move. I personally would have no problem
letting that recipe keep the spectral gloves as an ingredient since it's so OP at the level you can start using it
it's just not funny.

Now while all this is happening 80-90% of the player base doesn't really see it since the grind to get to level
70 or so which is what you need to craft these is so large and the cost in plat (even assuming you only crunch
items instead of selling them) so large that they won't get there for another 4-6 months at earliest, if at all.

Personally I've bought zero essences am sitting at 56/47/47 crafting levels and just in lost plat I'm estimating
this has cost me about 2 mill. The estimate comes from the fact that I normally keep accumulating more plat
then I spend and since starting crafting my plat reserves have gone down by about 1.5 mill and I sold off
7 +2 tomes just to keep some of my toons from going broke.

The last thing I would like to talk about is the fact that crafting will now give you plat O.O
Who in their right mind came up with that? The one huge redeeming factor of the flustercluck that crafting is
in the present state is that it actually is a plat sink. Not a great plat sink and not a particularly long term one
but at least it's a bit of a plat sink. If you feel the need to make it easier on the newer players to get into
crafting make greaters work like renown and have them drop in low level quests quite a bit but only if you run
them at level. While it would not make it impossible for the capped people to get them (you can always roll up
a new toon or TR) it wouldn't let us grind them on our lvl 20's in irestone while still giving them to the
newbies who really need them.
[/end wall of text]

Just my 2 copper,
Rawel

[Kmnh]

Raid loot being used as ingredients?

meh.

I knew crafting would be a terrible thing for the game, but this is ********. Do you see thas shark, devs? It's not supposed to be jumped over

[Martdon]

/not signed

Fail

Feedback = You do this. You are going to actually lose players, this time.

[bando]

Okay, based on the overwhelming negative response to the crafting update (in fact, I haven't read one post supporting the idea of making raid loot part of the crafting system), I'd be hard-pressed to say that the devs didn't see this coming. Hopefully, they have something else coming down the pipeline that will make this better for us:

Devs, please tell us at least one of the following things is going to happen:

1) You're listening to our complaints and not going to go through with this (thusly earning yourself brownie points from players: "Well my handwraps still don't work, but at least they didn't do that crafting thing).

2) You're drastically change the loot mechanism for some of this stuff ("Chattering Ring now offered as an end reward after five completions? Also, it's now an item found in Tempest Spine? Lovely")

3) Adding raid-loot requirements to crafting was the only way to manipulate the code to allow for Druids, gnomes, that new level 20 raid to come into play.

Otherwise, guys, we're gonna just have to trust them on this one that it's not going to kill the game. So far, nothing else that they've done has destroyed DDO. Even if this turns out to be as bad as it sounds, it's not gonna kill it either.

[Buggss]

....(in fact, I haven't read one post supporting the idea of making raid loot part of the crafting system....

I have but it was from a self-confessed devil's advocate and wasn't very enthusiastic.

I've also been looking for a silver lining in this cloud, no tornado and still can't seem to find one.

The closest thing I could imagine that would even come close to this nightmare of an idea would simply be that you can use ANY example of raid loot such as the azure necklace we all have rotting in our banks when noone would even roll on it. God knows my capped clonk has a chaos blade he'll most likely never use just because noone rolled on it which totally amazed me but there it sits.

The problem there though would be you'd have people looting SOS's for their crafting and denying 5 2H barbs all clamouring for it just so they can make their greater lawful bane shard for a guildy or something like that. Not ONE variation of this plan seems even vaguely beneficial or popular in the least.

The closest I've read to an agreeing post was "I'm sure the devs know what they're doing"

Let's all hope so eh?

[in4theride75]

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)

I agree with parts of this. It IS too easy to get some incredibly powerful items through crafting, but raid loot and tomes are a big no no. A better option is to include specialty crafting materials that only drop in raids or high level quests. This way the raid loot still maintains it's availability while maintaining difficulty in crafting very powerful gear.
Another option would be deconstruction in fragments. Say if I want a greater evil outsider bane weapon I would need 20 shards of outsider bane from deconstructing greater evil outsider bane weapons. If you put those types of limits on the crafting there will be much less issue.

[Claymorep]

Absurd, simply absurd!!!

This will have a lot of impact to the game that You'll surely loose gamers in the medium term.
1- The crafting will require too investment that 90% will never use it!
2- That 10% will be so ingredients absorbers it will have a great impact on mkt prices (read absurd inflation!)
3- Complete destruction of social loot rules as everyone will loot everithing as it probably will become of some use in future
4- Increment in frustration (especially in new gamers)

All this put togheter will create another big barrier to approach of new players as they will find too difficult to reach some efficacy in party, so veterans will not play so easy with them as they will be less equipped.
Moreover this new "solution" will have an impact of numbers of alts as it will be more difficult to equip them.

Forget the idea to put this absurd crafting online as it will destroy another piece of the game!!!

[Zerkul]

Another grind? More greed? No thanks.

[Willibold]

I know that many people are upset, and the rhetoric gets a little..........out of hand.

But seriously, this time the devs have made a Grade A* pigs ear of things.

Raid loot is supposed to be uber, not to be a component of something.......lesser?

Sorry guys, you appear to have had a brainstorm, and made a serious mistake.