Transmutation Revamp

Cooper

Please read one of the ~10 times this was already explained in this thread. My patience is pretty much 0 for people bitching about how this is a nerf and not good for them.

Kyrra

Don’t have traits or gloves?

[Deleted User]

Locki said:

First thing I want to point out is the lack of LORE related to this change.

Unlike many similar changes over the years, there was an event that introduced this change which explained in-fiction what happened and why, and provided an IC justification for each change. If you're interested, I recommend searching for people who can provide more information in-game.

Locki said:

Keep in mind that the "Minerals" that we eat as cures are artificial. In, Essence: they don't show up in nature. Like Vitamin C Extract in solid flake form. Why would you take a premise like that and think to yourself, "Oh lets just throw them into the ground; that'll be fine".

This is not necessarily the case. The ground in Achaea has presumably always had minerals in it. It isn't like the earth in Achaea mysteriously didn't have magnesium in it for instance. The event explained why alchemists had been extracting primes instead of extracting minerals directly, why that was no longer an option, and how Achaeans learned to extract minerals directly instead of extracting primes.

Locki said:

(So am I now to assume that Mhaldor has a dependence on naturally grown minerals? even though that was our original purpose of avoiding Harvesting?)

Mhaldor has historically been opposed to Nature, primarily regarding plants and their interaction with the red fog. Mhaldor is built atop earth and stone. Presumably Mhaldorians are not inherently hostile to the ground simply because it's naturally occurring. Nor have Mhaldorians been hostile to, for instance, commodity mining.

Locki said:

The whole point to adding this kind of update would be to attempt to eliminate the time spent synthesizing minerals when at an alchemical lab. If that was the case, they could have just altered the syntax for existing synthesis abilities to be able to work with more per batch.

That would certainly have been easier to design and implement! But any simple change we made to synthesis or mineral transmutation would have had a proportional effect on the economic efficiency of the tradeskill. Simply eliminating or drastically reducing the time cost was not an option without completely breaking the cure economy. I was also wary about taking a skill that already had little gameplay and little connection to the world and turning it into even more of a "push button for cures" situation.

Locki said:

But the whole point of Synthesis to begin with was to negate the need to explore for various cures, and instead invest time in order to evenly distribute your materials. By making "transmutation" similar to Harvesting, it totally ruins its intended utility.

This was a natural consequence of how Synthesis was designed, but not necessarily the whole point of Synthesis or even one of the intended goals of the skill's design. Some of the original goals of Synthesis also turned out to be not-so-great in practice (see, for instance, the reunification of the liquid cures).

Locki said:

Making people go to Digsites for minerals? "PFFT". I'd rather just farm an area, I've been through. Even if it means it costs 10x the amount in minerals to convert. Why?.. Because that's what I picked the synthesis skill-set for in the first place.

You shouldn't need to go to digsites for minerals if you don't want to. There is no mineral available in a digsite that is not also available in significant quantities in other areas. A few of those other areas were frequently extracted out each Achaean day for a little while, but especially after the change making digsite digging about ten times faster, the digsites are more accessible than ever and the alternate areas are also frequently full of minerals.

Locki said:

Also getting back to these Reactant conversion costs. 2000 minerals for only 200 reactants, each reactant worth 1 mineral conversion. Really!?? Even if there is a gold exchange for reactants, it doesn't change the fact that the efficiency of Synthesis/transmutation has been drastically reduced.

The efficiency of producing minerals is significantly higher than the old design if you are extracting minerals (some of the earlier posts in this thread break it down).

Efficiency is substantially lower if you are Transmutating them. Transmutation is not intended to be the normal means of acquiring minerals and it is not, in most cases, economically efficient. It implements a cap on mineral prices in case something ever happens to make one or more minerals briefly rare (as has happened very occasionally with some herbs - one of the actual major reasons the tradeskill was added to the game). Further, it allows people who prefer to be self-sufficient, but also can't be bothered to go extract one or more particular minerals, to pay gold to achieve that. Finally, you gain free transmutations every RL day as a small perk.

This could have been communicated better. I thought people would see the increased efficiency of extraction compared to the old process and the cost of transmutation and immediately recognise that extraction was the way to go and transmutation was now a side benefit/safety valve. I know many people did not attend the event where this was explained more explicitly, but I thought it would be relatively apparent from simply reading the changes and seeing the costs. For many people it seems I was wrong, and the inertia of the old design made the intent confusing. Lesson learned.

Locki said:

Before, It cost about 3 primes for 5 minerals. Now it costs 5 primes just to convert a single existing mineral.

It's true that your prime/metal stockpiles are almost certainly worth less than before, but the prime/metal turn-in was a way to avoid simply making people's existing stockpiles suddenly worthless. We've done changes that devalued stockpiles before, but here I tried to ensure that they had at least some value going forward. Their value has admittedly decreased now that more people know most of the areas to extract from - when the change first went in, people were buying one another's stockpiles to get reactants to produce the minerals they hadn't found yet, especially after the mineral drought that preceded the change.

Overall, the trade-in did what I intended it to do: it ate up a lot of the stockpiles and didn't feel as bad as making primes/metals completely useless all at once. The trade-in was originally only going to be available temporarily, but I've left it in so people don't get stuck with a bunch of vials of reactants they don't plan to use yet. That shouldn't give the impression, however, that prime/metal conversion is the normal way to acquire reactants - you will notice that you no longer have the ability to extract primes at all for instance.

Using prime stockpile to buy reactants and perform transmutations is slightly more efficient than you give it credit for though, since you can extract minerals faster than you could extract/synthesise/transmutate before, and the transmutation with reactants can transmutate hundreds of minerals in a couple of seconds.

Locki said:

Like seriously!? Not to mention that reactants all need vials. So either you get 10 empty vials and spend 10k in primes (20k in minerals), or you just pay a random denizen tons of gold. Which I don't have.

You shouldn't need more than one vial. You're safe to leave your primes/metals in your rift until you actually intend to transmutate something (more than 200 of something) and need the reactants.

The reactants are purposefully not riftable because I don't want people stockpiling them. Since they're used as a safety valve to cap mineral prices, it is conceivable that we may want to lower or raise (more likely lower) the gold price of reactants if for some reason a mineral does actually become very scarce at some point and the safety valve comes into play. If people have large stockpiles, then raising the price is ineffective and lowering the price feels bad since we're devaluing stockpiles again. The goal is to discourage stockpiling of any production component we might tweak in the future so we don't end up in this prime/metal situation again.

Locki said:

It is undescriptive to have a skill called "transmutation" not be a manufacturing based skill-set.

I agree. I considered changing the skill's name to Extraction several times. Ultimately I thought giving the skill another new name was a little bit excessive, Extraction wasn't very descriptive of the skill's flavour, and transmutation is still a unique feature of the skill, even if its purpose has shifted. I'm still not entirely happy with the name, but that ship has sailed.

Locki said:

I can agree with the changes to some point, Like the desire to spread mineral types all over the realms. Even if it doesn't fit correctly with the lore.

Please let me know if you find an inconsistency in the lore. Obviously I can't necessarily fix it right away, but we try to at least bear inconsistencies in mind going forward.

Puxi

#murderedbywords

Klendathu

I can get 1000 potash far faster now than I could before, just by running around a few areas. The change is positive, but you have to get over the fact you can no longer DOR TRANSMUTATE for hours on end and fill your rift.

Xaden

Puxi said:

#murderedbywords

He was... wordered ?

Solnir

In all seriousness, can we take a minute to appreciate our admin delving into Locki's post and addressing it properly? A lot of games would just ignore that kind of rant. A+ @Ronwe

Trey

If he doesn't feel like a proper dickhead after Ronwe's post, nothing will do the trick.

Synthus

So, first and foremost, let me just say this: I'm a software engineer by trade, I appreciate the effort and work that goes into designing, developing, and implementing new systems that replace old ones. I also appreciate that with everything that went into this change, there was probably a lot of cross-approval for stuff needed( Creating the event that explained IC reasons, for example ). So thank you for all the work you put into this Ronwe.

That being said, I've been mulling over these changes for a bit now. I only found out last night that they were implemented when my mineral stockpiles started running low - I've not played in quite a while now. I figured "Eh, I'll go out, grab some primes, bring myself back up to 500 each, and be on my merry way." That's when I discovered the synthesis to transmutation change.

My initial reaction was a somber one. I used to enjoy prime gathering and synthesizing in a lab, and now that aspect had been removed from my character. Still, I figured I'd give it a whirl and see how I liked it. In short: I don't. At all.

I know I'm going to be told it's a buff, but it doesn't feel like it. The numbers may be there to support it, but sometimes empirical data and user experience just do not line up. It feels like Harvesting 2.0 with a special little transmute bow tied on it, and to be blunt, I don't want that. I'd much rather Harvesting get a buff to bring the price of plants down to mineral levels and Synthesis stay as it were than this.

I realize all the work put into the new system isn't going to just be chucked out the window, and to a degree it shouldn't, but I'm just really not digging it so far. (Pun intended)