Crafting + Guilds: Possible Problem.

[Boromirs]

An issue that may or may not have been discussed is the problem with high level crafting and guilds. At least on Cannith/Sarlona/Khyber I've been noticing the general strategy that guilds are using is to produce a single "Guild Crafter" with very high level crafting skills. Couple this with the fact that crafting beyond level 50 is extremely plat & time consuming and is nearly an impossible task for anyone but the most hardcore gamer and I see a problem brewing.

"Elite guilds" along with their pbase drift higher and higher in the power scale relative to the more "casual/slightly hardcore" pbase which probably represents the majority of the players in DDO. Devs, may not believe this is a problem (since it's really not a technical issue but more of a internal social issue) but this "power drift" will eventually make it that much harder for devs to roll out quests balanced for their entire pbase.

Definition: A Guild crafter (from what I've been noticing) is a single shared "mule" character that a trusted segment of a guild (usually the officers who all have each others phone numbers) would level up as a team. Ingredients/essences/plats will be donated by the entire guild (at least in my guild, the officers would actually be brazen enough to give me a tell saying "Did you donate some essences/plats today?").

The benefits to this is obvious, Guild Crafting becomes a cakewalk when you split the grinding duties between 20~30 people in eleven different time zones with some 200+ other people throwing in plats/essences to give you enough mats for a dozen capped crafters. And the payoff at the end is also obvious "Hey does so and so have a harry beater?"..."Oh darn, he doesn't" ..."Hey no problem, let me get on Guild Crafter and whip him up a set of +5 Holy Burst Silver Khopesh of Greater Evil Outsider Bane Khopeshes, it'll just be a sec."

Conclusion: Crafting is great... I love it. But this such a complex system (not technically as much as the balancing issue part) that it should really REALLY have been thoroughly tested on Lam before going live. Hopefully, the devs can find an ingenious solution to all of this... because if they don't... I see this becoming a Sony's Star Wars Galaxies moment for Turbine.

[Quikster]

An issue that may or may not have been discussed is the problem with high level crafting and guilds. At least on Cannith/Sarlona/Khyber I've been noticing the general strategy that guilds are using is to produce a single "Guild Crafter" with very high level crafting skills. Couple this with the fact that crafting beyond level 50 is extremely plat & time consuming and is nearly an impossible task for anyone but the most hardcore gamer and I see a problem brewing.

"Elite guilds" along with their pbase drift higher and higher in the power scale relative to the more "casual/slightly hardcore" pbase which probably represents the majority of the players in DDO. Devs, may not believe this is a problem (since it's really not a technical issue but more of a internal social issue) but this "power drift" will eventually make it that much harder for devs to roll out quests balanced for their entire pbase.

Definition: A Guild crafter (from what I've been noticing) is a single shared "mule" character that a trusted segment of a guild (usually the officers who all have each others phone numbers) would level up as a team. Ingredients/essences/plats will be donated by the entire guild (at least in my guild, the officers would actually be brazen enough to give me a tell saying "Did you donate some essences/plats today?").

The benefits to this is obvious, Guild Crafting becomes a cakewalk when you split the grinding duties between 20~30 people in eleven different time zones with some 200+ other people throwing in plats/essences to give you enough mats for a dozen capped crafters. And the payoff at the end is also obvious "Hey does so and so have a harry beater?"..."Oh darn, he doesn't" ..."Hey no problem, let me get on Guild Crafter and whip him up a set of +5 Holy Burst Silver Khopesh of Greater Evil Outsider Bane Khopeshes, it'll just be a sec."

Conclusion: Crafting is great... I love it. But this such a complex system (not technically as much as the balancing issue part) that it should really REALLY have been thoroughly tested on Lam before going live. Hopefully, the devs can find an ingenious solution to all of this... because if they don't... I see this becoming a Sony's Star Wars Galaxies moment for Turbine.

Meh, ive been playing pretty casually and managed to get to lvl 82 in one school with virtually no help from my guild. I think 2 guildies gave me around 100 essences each. That could have easily been 2 friends. We have 2 other guildies that are near or at cap currently.

[insaneuou]

I donot see any problem with it.

DDO has newbies to vets and proz. Players with jst decent gear to fully equipped epic gears....so balance an issue?

[donfilibuster]

Hopefully, the devs can find an ingenious solution to all of this... because if they don't... I see this becoming a Sony's Star Wars Galaxies moment for Turbine.

The 'ingenous solution' today is requiring demon blood and devil scales for GLOB, GCOB and GEOB, a flawless siberys for GDB, a yugo pot for attack +4 and a silver flame pot for holy burst.

[lethargos]

Meh, ive been playing pretty casually and managed to get to lvl 82 in one school with virtually no help from my guild. I think 2 guildies gave me around 100 essences each. That could have easily been 2 friends. We have 2 other guildies that are near or at cap currently.

Meh well i guess the devs heard you.Thats bragtastic ! Thanks !

And really its becouse of comments like that we got our lovely recipes. I think your casual play ( 8hours/day ?) is not my casual play of 8 hours a week.

[Boromirs]

Meh, ive been playing pretty casually and managed to get to lvl 82 in one school with virtually no help from my guild. I think 2 guildies gave me around 100 essences each. That could have easily been 2 friends. We have 2 other guildies that are near or at cap currently.

lvl 82 even in one school will take some epic amounts of grinding. I know I took like 4~5 hours of play a day to get to scratch the surface of lvl 80 so... if you took a shorter period of time you must have a hack since this was continuous grinding.

[AmatsukaIncarnate]

Meh well i guess the devs heard you.Thats bragtastic ! Thanks !

And really its becouse of comments like that we got our lovely recipes. I think your casual play ( 8hours/day ?) is not my casual play of 8 hours a week.

Seriously.
"Pretty Casually" seems like a gross understatement.

I've been crafting as much as I can with my playtime for the last several weeks and achieved...level 40? not even?

[Dark_Knight_Silver]

It's just simply more efficient to have a guild crafter. That being said, I don't even Bother him unless I have a question. The flip side of this is what if the guild crafter leaves the game? what if there is an update and certain characteristics are taken from the unbound alters(you know like the new one).

I have a simple system. I decon items, armor and shields. I only sell weapons +5 or higher. Gives me the plat I need and a few essences to craft with. My levels are 40ish across the board. Just because theres a more efficient way to craft doesn't mean it's The way to go

[Dark_Knight_Silver]

Seriously.
"Pretty Casually" seems like a gross understatement.

I've been crafting as much as I can with my playtime for the last several weeks and achieved...level 40? not even?

He did say level 80 in one school which means he's probably trading his our essences for that particular type

[Doxmaster]

An issue that may or may not have been discussed is the problem with high level crafting and guilds. At least on Cannith/Sarlona/Khyber I've been noticing the general strategy that guilds are using is to produce a single "Guild Crafter" with very high level crafting skills. Couple this with the fact that crafting beyond level 50 is extremely plat & time consuming and is nearly an impossible task for anyone but the most hardcore gamer and I see a problem brewing.

"Elite guilds" along with their pbase drift higher and higher in the power scale relative to the more "casual/slightly hardcore" pbase which probably represents the majority of the players in DDO. Devs, may not believe this is a problem (since it's really not a technical issue but more of a internal social issue) but this "power drift" will eventually make it that much harder for devs to roll out quests balanced for their entire pbase.

Definition: A Guild crafter (from what I've been noticing) is a single shared "mule" character that a trusted segment of a guild (usually the officers who all have each others phone numbers) would level up as a team. Ingredients/essences/plats will be donated by the entire guild (at least in my guild, the officers would actually be brazen enough to give me a tell saying "Did you donate some essences/plats today?").

The benefits to this is obvious, Guild Crafting becomes a cakewalk when you split the grinding duties between 20~30 people in eleven different time zones with some 200+ other people throwing in plats/essences to give you enough mats for a dozen capped crafters. And the payoff at the end is also obvious "Hey does so and so have a harry beater?"..."Oh darn, he doesn't" ..."Hey no problem, let me get on Guild Crafter and whip him up a set of +5 Holy Burst Silver Khopesh of Greater Evil Outsider Bane Khopeshes, it'll just be a sec."

Conclusion: Crafting is great... I love it. But this such a complex system (not technically as much as the balancing issue part) that it should really REALLY have been thoroughly tested on Lam before going live. Hopefully, the devs can find an ingenious solution to all of this... because if they don't... I see this becoming a Sony's Star Wars Galaxies moment for Turbine.

Thats the thing though; Guilds are suppose to have nice things that newbies off korthos dont have access to, wont have for a long time and probably dont even know about. Thats why guilds are what they are, and arent just called "friend list Part 2, the better version".

Examples include:

*Guild buffs
*Vets who know quests inside and out
*Twink gear
*Rare items
*A group of people capable of teaching you all you need to know about X, so you can Y like you've been doing it all your life.
*Like minded people who wont mind certain habits, certain requests or certain personal failures

Hell, even going by the original intent of "Guild" this new crafting thing is right on the money. Guilds were associations of tradesmen who organized, shared information and worked in manners that, at the very least, indirectly cooperated with each other. Jericko not selling pots, Greddo only selling jars, Jacques teaching people how to make pots and jars, etc.

Yes, newbies should be able to get these things on their own...eventually. They arent excluded from crafting altogether and never should be, as that wouldnt be fair. But, by all rights, the group of 29 people who have been playing since 5 years before the game came out should be leaps and bounds ahead of Tom, who just stepped off the Korthos boat, if he and they are working on similar goals.

Besides the small matter of multiple people playing one character(Is that even allowed? You might want to discourage your guild from doing that...) there is nothing wrong with this. If my whole guild sends one person things to become a maxed out crafter and he then make things for them, we're playing the game perfectly: Sharing, working together towards a common goal, benefitting from each other...

In basically every MMo, people who can tolorate the grind to becoem crafters are desired, as such people can create useful things. Guilds either snatch them up, or groom them to become a crafter in the first place. Why should guilds be punished for doing something that is basically common sense?

-----
Assuming that being able to gear up a player from head to toe in generic(very very nice generic, but generic all the same) gear is a bad thing...why dont you have a problem with the amount of plat a character can have? Or the AH? or /Trade? Give me 2 mill plat, a minute on the AH and another minute in "/TRade" and I'll have that newby walking around thinking he is an e-thug because his teeth are gold.

How is just outright buying the gear any different from paying in time and gold to make the gear, even if you are splitting the time/money cost among dozens of people? If you can get 200 people to toss in 1k plat in essenses, couldnt you request a donation of 1k plat to get Tom all the +2 tomes and +# items he needs to beat kobolds like they owe him money? Couldn't you just ask for the items themselves?

[Vanshilar]

It'd be nice if this were the way it works. Unfortunately, unbound shards are twice the level, meaning that crafting for others (or having a guild crafter) will never catch up to being able to craft stuff for oneself, unless unbound levels end up being capped at twice the bound levels. The cost of leveling up a guild crafter is also pretty substantial compared with just getting the mats yourself.

Take the example of making a +4 holy (silver from weapon) of (regular) lawful outsider bane. It has potential +8 which is level 40 (bound), +4 which is level 45 arcane, holy which is level 37 divine, and LOB which is level 41 divine. So the shard levels needed are level 45 arcane and level 41 divine, which means you can start crafting it at level 35 arcane and level 31 divine. So you need 4097 arcane XP and 2910 divine XP, or a total of 7007 XP if you crafted the bound version yourself a DR-bypasser that's roughly a Min2 (though slightly stronger).

Now say people pooled their resources so that a specific person can be the designated crafter for this. Then then potential +8 is level 80 (unbound), +4 is level 90 arcane, holy is level 73 divine, LOB is level 81 divine. So you'd need arcane 80 and divine 71 to craft the unbound version. That's 29738 arcane XP and 22988 divine XP, or a total of 52726 total XP. So it's around 7.5 people's worth of mats -- that is to say, in exchange for having a guild crafter, you have the equivalent of 7.5 people not being able to make their own crafted weapons. May be feasible for large guilds, but harder to come by for small guilds. This also assumes that the XP/mat ratio is pretty constant as you level up -- that is, it takes the same amount of mats to go from 20000 to 21000 XP as it does to go from 2000 to 3000 XP, which I'm not sure about.

But here's the rub. Let's say you want to make a +5 holy burst silver of greater lawful outsider bane. The bound version is potential +13 which is level 80, +5 which is arcane level 70, holy burst which is divine level 72, and GLOB which is divine level 73. So this means you can make the parts at arcane 60 and divine 63. But to make the potential +13 shard, you'll need to level at least one school to level 70 to make the level 80 shard, so I'll choose divine since it has a higher required level. Thus, you need arcane 60 and divine 70 to make the +5 holy burst silver of GLOB for yourself, or 15838 arcane XP and 22288 divine XP, a total of 38126 XP.

If you wanted to make unbound +5 holy burst silver of GLOB, however, you're out of luck. The potential +13 is bound level 80, so the unbound version is likely level 160. The +5 enhancement is bound level 70, so the unbound version is likely arcane level 140. Similarly, holy burst is likely divine level 144, and GLOB is likely divine level 146. Because the potential is so high though, you'll have to wait until they release unbound shards up to level 160. And as with above, you'll need crafting levels of arcane 130 and divine 150 to make these.

We can extrapolate the XP needed for this. For level 42 and above, thus far the XP for each crafting level matches 5*lvl^2 - 5*lvl - 1862 exactly. So the XP needed per level are projected to be:

42	6748
43	7168
44	7598
45	8038
46	8488
47	8948
48	9418
49	9898
50	10388
51	10888
52	11398
53	11918
54	12448
55	12988
56	13538
57	14098
58	14668
59	15248
60	15838
61	16438
62	17048
63	17668
64	18298
65	18938
66	19588
67	20248
68	20918
69	21598
70	22288
71	22988
72	23698
73	24418
74	25148
75	25888
76	26638
77	27398
78	28168
79	28948
80	29738
81	30538
82	31348
83	32168
84	32998
85	33838
86	34688
87	35548
88	36418
89	37298
90	38188
91	39088
92	39998
93	40918
94	41848
95	42788
96	43738
97	44698
98	45668
99	46648
100	47638
101	48638
102	49648
103	50668
104	51698
105	52738
106	53788
107	54848
108	55918
109	56998
110	58088
111	59188
112	60298
113	61418
114	62548
115	63688
116	64838
117	65998
118	67168
119	68348
120	69538
121	70738
122	71948
123	73168
124	74398
125	75638
126	76888
127	78148
128	79418
129	80698
130	81988
131	83288
132	84598
133	85918
134	87248
135	88588
136	89938
137	91298
138	92668
139	94048
140	95438
141	96838
142	98248
143	99668
144	101098
145	102538
146	103988
147	105448
148	106918
149	108398
150	109888

For arcane 130 you'll need 81988 XP, and for divine 150 you'll need 109888 XP, a total of 191876 XP -- over 5x more than the 38126 XP for a person to craft this on his own. So to have a dedicated crafter, you'll need to sacrifice 5 people's ability to make them on their own. Plus, you need to wait for Turbine's schedule on releasing levels to 160 or above. Those 5 people can be crafting the high-tier versions for themselves right now. The dedicated crafter can only craft the middle-tier version for everyone.

Also, these shards are unbound. There is no reason unbound shards have to be guild-only. When sufficient people get to those levels, they can be made and sold on the auction house. So it is not something exclusive to guilds, but whatever a dedicated crafter can make, can also be found on the auction house -- sort of like epic scrolls for guilds that maintain a scroll bank.

So what this really means is that elite guilds are not going to bother with a designated guild crafter. The benefits for each person being able to craft for themselves will outweigh the benefits of having a centralized crafter, plus the powergame mentality is also for each to be more capable and get the best, rather than to dedicate one that can only provide mediocre items for everyone. Elite guilds also tend to be limited by size; you will need enough people willing to sacrifice their own crafting ability to have a dedicated crafter, and this is much easier with large guilds due to scale -- it is much easier to get a lot of players to sacrifice a little, than for a few players to sacrifice a lot (buying guild airships with astral diamonds is another example of this -- because the cost is fixed regardless of guild size, some small elite guilds are foregoing the luxury class of airships altogether, while large guilds can pretty much all afford to buy them as they level up).

So it's more likely that elite guilds won't bother with a dedicated guild crafter per se because multiple members will be getting to the higher levels on their own and willing to spend the resources to do so as Turbine releases more levels. Rather, it's mostly the large guilds that will benefit from having a dedicated guild crafter, by having everyone sacrifice a little and pooling the resources. Because large elite guilds will have multiple people who are already getting to the higher levels on their own, the actual type of guild that will benefit the most from this is large casual guilds (small casual guilds are unlikely to have enough resources to get to the higher levels even if they pool them). What having a dedicated guild crafter will do is to bring all large casuals up from metal + pg to Min2, while the crafting system is bringing individual members in elite guilds (or just individual powergamers in general) from Min2 to +5 holy burst of greater banes. The gap between elites and casuals will likely remain roughly similar, while the gap between large casuals and small casuals will increase.

Note: shard levels taken from cannith crafting spreadsheet here. XP taken from ddowiki here. I haven't bothered to verify them myself, but I assume they've been out long enough that people have corrected any incorrect information.

[Quikster]

Meh well i guess the devs heard you.Thats bragtastic ! Thanks !

And really its becouse of comments like that we got our lovely recipes. I think your casual play ( 8hours/day ?) is not my casual play of 8 hours a week.

I prolly am on crafting some days late into the night while im watching tv, other days I dont log in at all.

As far as questing goes, last night I ran von 6 (twice as the first one was a wreck) shroud, and echrono.

The night before I ran 2 echronos and 2 ev6's.

Didnt play for a few nights before that.

Before the few nights off, I ran 3 IQ quests on hard 1 on elite.

Before that, I didnt play for a few days.

So yeah, thats your 8 hours a day.

The reason you have recipes like we got today, is because once you get a crafter up to level, you can craft very powerful, albeit specific, weapons for as many slots as you need a weapon for. You can do this extremely cheap.

So rather than try to slam me for being an elitist, why dont you try to offer a solution instead of taking pot shots at others?

[Quikster]

lvl 82 even in one school will take some epic amounts of grinding. I know I took like 4~5 hours of play a day to get to scratch the surface of lvl 80 so... if you took a shorter period of time you must have a hack since this was continuous grinding.

Not sure how you did it. Me I crafted on nights when not much was going on rather than pugging my trs or epics or raids. I purchased most of my ingredients either as weapons to be decond from the ah or directly off the ah as essences. It took me about a week to get to lvl 60.

I also grabbed my laptop and crafted while watching tv into the wee hours of the morning.

Several guildies have asked recently if i was logging in to play or craft so I guess ive spent some time in the crafting hall.


No hack, either making shards around 50% chances or spamming out lvl 1 shards for 1 xp at a time. Pretty straight forward just like you see all over the forums here.

[Zorth]

An issue that may or may not have been discussed is the problem with high level crafting and guilds. At least on Cannith/Sarlona/Khyber I've been noticing the general strategy that guilds are using is to produce a single "Guild Crafter" with very high level crafting skills. Couple this with the fact that crafting beyond level 50 is extremely plat & time consuming and is nearly an impossible task for anyone but the most hardcore gamer and I see a problem brewing.

"Elite guilds" along with their pbase drift higher and higher in the power scale relative to the more "casual/slightly hardcore" pbase which probably represents the majority of the players in DDO. Devs, may not believe this is a problem (since it's really not a technical issue but more of a internal social issue) but this "power drift" will eventually make it that much harder for devs to roll out quests balanced for their entire pbase.

Definition: A Guild crafter (from what I've been noticing) is a single shared "mule" character that a trusted segment of a guild (usually the officers who all have each others phone numbers) would level up as a team. Ingredients/essences/plats will be donated by the entire guild (at least in my guild, the officers would actually be brazen enough to give me a tell saying "Did you donate some essences/plats today?").

The benefits to this is obvious, Guild Crafting becomes a cakewalk when you split the grinding duties between 20~30 people in eleven different time zones with some 200+ other people throwing in plats/essences to give you enough mats for a dozen capped crafters. And the payoff at the end is also obvious "Hey does so and so have a harry beater?"..."Oh darn, he doesn't" ..."Hey no problem, let me get on Guild Crafter and whip him up a set of +5 Holy Burst Silver Khopesh of Greater Evil Outsider Bane Khopeshes, it'll just be a sec."

Conclusion: Crafting is great... I love it. But this such a complex system (not technically as much as the balancing issue part) that it should really REALLY have been thoroughly tested on Lam before going live. Hopefully, the devs can find an ingenious solution to all of this... because if they don't... I see this becoming a Sony's Star Wars Galaxies moment for Turbine.

Right.

[Zorth]

I am a Mercenary with no guild atm. I do not support the ruin of this game.

[Zorth]

Yes This is a huge step for someone like myself to stand by. But I will always be a, "Free Bird," Mercenary as long as this travesty of such a great game exists and that is guilds with mule crafters ruining the game.

[lethargos]

I dont have an answer quikster. But what i do have, is a large amount of players who make claims that crafting is soooo easy to achieve as a "casual" player. But the truth is, its the hardcore gamers that have the high crafting levels. You just dont have those as a casual player.

[moops]

I dont think you need to worry about balance. As of yet there is not one raid or one quest that can't be completed without crafted shroud or any other crafted kind of gear.

In fact the game is too easy for the most part.

Sure, some of the crafted weapons will produce big numbers esp on paladins, but most wont come close to lightning 2 depending on build/mobs. Crafting just gives players more options.

I would say about half the people I know aren't even crafting, including myself, I would rather log on and play with my pals. I have no intention of asking my guildies to craft for me, because unless they can craft a Torc Seal, I don't need it.

[Kriogen]

...
Conclusion: Crafting is great... I love it. But this such a complex system (not technically as much as the balancing issue part) that it should really REALLY have been thoroughly tested on Lam before going live. Hopefully, the devs can find an ingenious solution to all of this... because if they don't... I see this becoming a Sony's Star Wars Galaxies moment for Turbine.

Crafting as such is not a problem.

Problem is that the difference between 'casual' and 'veteran' is bigger then 1d20. DnD works if your number vs monsters number is within 1d20 (1 to 20) range. Its always my DC vs saves + d20 or tohit +1d20 vs AC and so on.

Gear in DDO is so powerful that it breaks d20 system. Not one single piece, but combination, stacking. Items, pots, buff, ship this, tome that, etc.

Gear has broken DDO long time ago. Crafting doesn't break DDO. It was already broken.

[Standal]

There's nothing in DDO that hardcore gamers don't have an edge in versus the casual player. Why should there be? Unless you put a "Pick a Boss Beater" quest in the the market like "Hall of the Mark".

Crafting was never going to change the fact that playing more, questing more, and being in an elite or large guild causes you to have better gear. Crafting did give me a chance to make devil beater banes, and I was happy about that. I pretty much just ground up all the items that I would have vendored to get the plat to buy a worse boss beater on the AH.

Elite players with multiple greensteel and Epic items have always and perhaps always will outclass my toon's gear. That's just the way it is.