I'm seeing a major issue with a lack of a market for low end gear. New players have to either: Rely on charity Wear low dura mob drops which constantly break Spend more money than they have to/need to on higher tier gear there's a market for Buy vendor armor, which is expensive and low durability Start the lengthy grind to building everything themselves A new player looking for a banded set in trade will generally get a response like "banded is shit buy scale". Well that's great but a scale set uses over twice the mats as a banded set for a relatively minor increase in protections. A new player now has to spend twice as long farming for a set of gear than they really need to, if they get ganked and looted for a set of armor that will most likely be trashed anyway, and that's just upgrading to scale. Even asking for scale in trade is unlikely to result in many replies, with basically the minimum armor that anyone is selling in any great quantity being Full-Plate, far beyond the means of the average new player. If newer players do find someone selling lower tier armors, they generally need to buy in sets of 5-10 sets. Buying a single piece or even a single suit, is out of the question. If one piece of your armor breaks, expect to spend a lot of time trying to replace it. This is why I really think SOMETHING needs to be added to the game fast. This situation is created because the transaction costs are far too high. It's not worth people trading low value gear in small quantities because there's barely any margin on them. A scale cuirass might cost about 230 gp in materials to craft, and might fetch 300 gp, maximum - this isn't enough to entice someone to even produce these items because they would have to wait around a bank or travel back to it to sell it. Deployable vendors/Marketplaces/Auction houses, whatever would allow someone to stock these items in high traffic new player areas and replace them as they sell, and a lot of new players would have a much easier time playing the game. I don't even craft, but I'd happily find someone willing to produce these items and stock them if something was in the game to make them easier to sell.
I know we need gold sinks but if gold was removed from the crafting material cost then people could sell their goods a little easier. It's a miserable marketplace having to account for the gold cost when crafting stuff and not immersive at all. If I've got some ingots and some leather that oughta be enough to make some armor. I don't see the gold coin trim anywhere in that plate chest piece.
People can't do simple math? If people are capable of calculating material costs then adding gold cost is just the final step. Personally I think the gold costs of crafting are largely irrelevant to people's ability to sell their gear. But they do make a massive long term impact on the games economy. I think gold costs are supposed to represent the cost of certain consumables used in the crafting process, gathered into a low value pool. I do agree that some gold costs are excessive, but don't think it impacts on people's ability to sell their final wares. Long travel times and having to actively participate in every trade are the major factors reducing trade. We don't have a retail level trade system. Imagine if you had to buy everything you bought in cartons or pallets in reality, or car manufacturers only sold the top of the line models. That's basically the situation we have in Darkfall.
I think lower gear is just generally screwed right now, regardless of a marketplace. Wish they had some sort of baseline gear around the R40/plate mark that you could level up. Like you start with a R0 starting wep, but you can grind/quest to eventually make it the same as an R40. Marketplace won't make that gear useful again. At a certain point there is no reason to make that gear, and balancing protections on all those sets is a nightmare.
The thing about low end gear is that you don't need to use it ever. You can complete your character playing naked, then craft mid/high end gear as your first set. Bone barely does anything. There's just the illusion that you need gear to help you farm because that's how other games are.
NOBODY wants to buy my stuff I make. Try selling some r30 weps in trade chat lol. Hell try selling your r40s. I hope auction houses can change that. There is literally zero market for low end gear atm. That's disappointing. EVERYONE can make EVERYTHING. It's horrible. Ahem... skill cap also it's incredibly tuff to get players to check their 14 chat tabs to find who is talking to them.
I've been thinking about this off and on for a while now. The first step we've mentioned is to increase the effectiveness of lower tier gear. This helps, but obviously doesn't solve the issues. Changing how mob damage is affected by armor and weapon stats would help as well. What I've been putting thought into now is how crafting works. First I would like to remove the actual gold cost and replace it with a vendor purchased item, like a mold or blueprint. Then I think changing up the recipes to require previous tier items as a base. Maybe not every tier, but at least in the later r40+ tiers. So an r40 greatsword would require an r30 greatsword as it's base. An r50 require an r40, and so forth. Adjustments to recipes would need to be made, but I think this general direction would help create a market for lower tier items, as they will continue to be needed. Come to think of it I don't think it's necessary to go beyond r50/full plate. the cost for the next tier would jump exponentially. --- Post updated --- In fact we could make it so the lower tier r10 -r40 work for r50-r80. r50 requires an r10 base, r80 requires r40. Hmm. The thought is still in it's infancy and I don't usually discuss ideas publicly until I've had more time, but there you go lol.
Archage had this type of crafting system and it was really shitty, just speaking from past experience.
Why? I thought the main reason for these changes was to reduce tedium. Adding a meaningless extra step is step in the wrong direction.
Because it's actually not meaningless. Exchanging gold for an item that has a specific use (see reagents) is a positive thing for the economy. You'll need x amount of gold spent either way.
Exactly, either way you spend x gold, the only difference being that there's an extra meaningless step that you have to perform on the way to the crafting station. How is it good for the economy to have arbitrary fixed value exchanges? Besides, the itemization in this game is already over the top (e.g. more than 100 different enchanting materials). Don't make it worse by adding another one that you can buy for gold at a vendor anyway.
And once you craft items now, your gold is gone. Again, what's the difference, except extra tedium? And what's so special about gold being gone?
Thought I can't speak for kilrain, the idea of an exchange of gold for items to craft is good for a couple reasons. 1. It adds options for items to be added to loot tables + rarer versions of the item + reasons to farm certain mobs over others. What if to craft R70s you needed a rare mold off a shadow knight? Instead of enchant mats, which we want to use for enchanting, not making swords, and you now just gave another reason to farm shadow knights over other mobs, making that spawn more lucrative, sought after, and fought over. 2. Although I think gold is pretty tightly gripped ATM gold sinks are always good for the game so the currency doesn't get devalued over time. New players who enter get swamped with gold costs on market items because they can't farm as much as someone whos been farming way longer than them, has stacks sitting in his bank, and wants more gold then is reasonable. 3. I really don't find this tedious. A lifer crafter will always have the necessary materials to do his crafts otherwise he's not much of a crafter. Also: Nothing is wrong with some depth to the game, if we just started using gold instead of regs, gold instead of materials etc, if the only thing that we used was gold to do everything, the game would get stale/repetitive, boring. Things like different crafting material/requirements add some more flare to the crafting professions and give crafters something more to look forward to gather for their wares other than just raw gold. Yo let me go farm some Cairn Giants for some gold, because it's a necessary requirement to make this staff. We aren't melting down gold to make a wooden staff -.-
It doesn't really make any sense though. Lets make a sword from a sword? It doesn't really work. People aren't going to pay a new player to craft R20's so they can make R30's so they can make R40's so they can make R50's, and so on, they'll just do it all themselves. People don't pay anyone to do anything now I don't see how a new system would change that. People don't like the existing material requirements for staves so I doubt adding random "blueprints" to the game would really improve things. If you want to improve trade give us more ways to trade. Player vendors would've done that. Right now there's no market for R30's or below (there's barely a market for R40's) because the transaction costs of doing a trade are too high. Taking time out of my day to travel to a trading location to sell a new player an R30 greatsword simply isn't worth a players time. But if we had vendors in good locations (like in NPC cities), then crafting 5 R30 weapons of each type and leaving them on a vendor alongside my R40's, R50's, R70'd, Banded, Leather, Bone, Plate and Infernal isn't too much of an imposition. Taking them off NPC vendors would help too (R0's only!).
