Crafting and the practical use.

Eril

So, I absolutely love Achaea, been playing it nigh on religiously for about 12 years, maybe more, but I find that there are opportunities being missed.  Now, I'm no coder, so I may be absolutely dreaming with some of these, and I will likely be making subsequent posts for other ideas, but this one will be for crafting!!

I find that crafting has gotten to a point where it's entirely cosmetic and rather limited on the benefits crafting can have.  I have always forged, it's been the method that I've played, and perhaps my view is rather limited in that regard due to just knowing blacksmithing.  My understanding though, is that there are few crafting skills that actually help the players.  With forging, I found that continued use of the craft would give better chances for higher stats, which in turn was valued more by the players.  I find that while the continued improvement of ones blacksmithing rank does allow for more interesting descriptors, it's a rather high price to pay for something simply cosmetic.

I understand that it was changed to make the artefact armor and weapons more valuable and increase sales, and I do believe that the cosmetic side is nice, but I wonder if there is a way to improve the practicality of an item, making the skill of the crafter and the focus more useful to the user.  Enchanting is an area that I believe could go well here, mixing enchanting and blacksmithing, or enchanting and jewelry, to increase the practicality of items as well as continuing their cosmetic usefulness.  This would encourage people to work on their crafting skills, perhaps introducing more skill sets for player investment, or even adding new potential for the crafting direction entirely!

This is meant to start a conversation, to see if this is something only I am interested in, or if there is a more broad base that would appreciate this direction.  Again, I'm uneducated in coding, so whether or not something of the magnitude I've mentioned so far is even feasible is beyond my knowledge, but I look forward to learning and discussing things with people if interested!

Also, this is my first ever discussion post on the forums so kinda excited to see how it goes, and hopefully won't be the last! (Well, some may hope it is I'm sure...:P)

Jiraishin

Are you talking about just forging, or crafting in general? Because the benefit of tailoring is that people don't make fun of you for not wearing clothes. The benefit of jewelry is that you can make adornments and sentimental keepsakes. People pay for both these things... I don't do as much in the way of beverages, and don't have a furnishing or cooking license, but so far it seems people will pay for beverages as rp props as well. 

It may be cosmetic, but that doesn't make it impractical or useless. 

Sothantos

Make it so that people over level 80 have to eat pls. Food is totally useless right now.

Lenn

I once suggested that cooked food should give very minor buffs that nevertheless stack with everything else, possibly depending on the ingredients used.

I also once suggested that higher forging descriptors give minor boosts to the item's stats, and to allow reforging existing items to level it up in the same way (at least for artefact armour).

Melodie

Cooking giving buffs yes pls let me feed Mhaldor delicious homemade treats. Ruth would be proud.

Eril

Jiraishin said:

Are you talking about just forging, or crafting in general? Because the benefit of tailoring is that people don't make fun of you for not wearing clothes. The benefit of jewelry is that you can make adornments and sentimental keepsakes. People pay for both these things... I don't do as much in the way of beverages, and don't have a furnishing or cooking license, but so far it seems people will pay for beverages as rp props as well. 

It may be cosmetic, but that doesn't make it impractical or useless. 

See, I've never had jewelry or tailoring.  Honestly I think jewelry could have some more enchantment possibilities.  My main thing here was to see if there was any interest in a discussion to add to the way crafting works.  My experience personally, is about forging.  I miss the old ways to be honest, but think there's a better way to accomplish it.

Ismay

Sothantos said:

Make it so that people over level 80 have to eat pls. Food is totally useless right now.

I totally  you, but please please no. The best thing about lvl 80 is no need to eat or sleep. 

Kyrra

Food is needed for hell fumes!

Skye

I've got one of the biggest horses in the running here, so I'm clearly very biased haha.

I'd love for there to be additional bonuses for consumables, but honestly I'd just as soon settle for removing the no-food bonus for level 80.

Crafting is one part of the game that takes a lot of (if not the most) direct player contribution, and admin have clearly put a lot of work into it by giving us two (well, three) whopping new crafting skills this year. But at the same time, crafting has the half-hearted air of an 'if you really want to' optional feature.

Most people will communicate by messages instead of letters. They don't need to carry lamps at night and they don't need to consume food or drink, and even when they need to before Logosian, there are no consequences for poor nutrition. You can live on nuts and mutton all the day long. Furniture doesn't provide any restorative benefits whether you lie on the ground or on a bed/couch. Even the idea of clothing is cosmetic (clearly since they gave up on clothing warmth recently). If you own enough arties, nobody will even notice you're walking around stark naked. Heck, denizens don't even really judge you for being naked either. The result is that players barely need to consume anything that isn't a curative.

Not needing to sleep at Logosian is already plenty convenient, and it's barely an inconvenience to just carry a few food items around. It's not like you have to sit down to eat, you can even take a steak with you and it'd stay perfectly hot and medium rare until the day it decays (lol). So I do feel like that'd be the barest bone that could be thrown to crafters.

As an aside, most of the time, bulk income for crafting comes from people holding parties. So I'm very dependent on people actually having exciting shit happening, but at the same time as a rogue, I also wind up competing with in-house or local crafters, it's rough out there hold more parties, people.

Khel

I'd rather have to sleep post-80 than eat. Walk to npcshop, buy 50 mutton, eat mutton x50 or go uncon constantly while taking damage and throwing up is like the least fun mechanic ever. At least with sleep I can go get a drink or do something else, or frankly just ignore it and keep bashing, with kola.

Jurixe

I don't think you'd really have to remove the level 80 bonus - not having to eat or sleep was one of the major reasons I ever even bothered with 80 and I'm sure that's true of most other people too. Instead, making food and other items more attractive so they would be worth using would be a better idea.

Sure, you can survive without it, but if you bother to take the time to care about what are essentially RP props, you can also be rewarded for it, even if just a little.

Khel

Aetolia had it up wp/end regen and give a small xp bonus, iirc, with lower hunger draining it, and natural hunger decayed down to peckish post-80.

Not sure I like that a whole lot either, but a slight nudge to end/wp for eating/drinking might encourage people to do it more.

Or maybe someone can get extra grandmotherly and start force-feeding everybody.

Melodie

I adore cooking and have more than once roleplayed creating a meal from scratch via recipe, having someone helping me along, and/or teaching someone how. It has been a very important, if quiet, foundational aspect for my character. I'd love few things more than to have more reason to create new recipes. I definitely watch enough cooking shows on youtube...

Eril

Khel said:

Or maybe someone can get extra grandmotherly and start force-feeding everybody.

Oh so you've met Perl and Phelia! (Don't kill me you two...)

Seriously though, I know nothing about food, but completely agree that it should have some form of benefit, as it is rarely used except in special circumstances, which damages usefulness and appeal to cooking.

In Smithing, I find that there really isn't anything that can set you apart from your fellow blacksmiths, everyone can produce the same benefits for the most part, but if that's the case, what's the point of improving and expanding your skills therein?  Just my personal observations.

Kresslack

Forging is already expensive, and people only really seem to care about embrasures. The amount of commodities (and inks) required for some of the descriptors can seem astronomical and not really worth it. Forging essentially just became a race to Legendary to be able to add embrasures to suits and sell them for a lot.

Minifie

Something I would love to see, but would not be something to rush out due to the current gold-in-the-system issues is allowing any of the following:

Trans forgers can apply the descriptors to artefact weapons, so if you want a pink-serrated scimitar, find someone with the affix and your scimitar of eagles can be a pink-serrated. You can add a cost for a few mats that can only be bought from vendors, and while you won't specifically have high demand for it, I know quite a number of the affixes I kind of like, and would use instead of personal customisations. 

For food: Adding a list of buffs that can be applied to food that are overwritten by artefacts on short buff duration timers could be a good idea. A sponge cake with storm-whipped buttercream could give +3 dexterity that does NOT stack with artefact boots for 10 minutes as an example. When you get pixie boots, that is only +2, while the +1 version doesn't give any bonus. If the devs really don't want players using these for PK, that can dissipate on gaining aggression timer, which I don't think is really a problem, but if you have items that give these bonuses that you have to "integrate" into a recipe (air-whipped butter is +1, delicate wafers are +2 and weightless sponge is +3 or something). When you submit a food, you submit it with one of these ingredients, and if it is approved then it keeps all the descriptors you want, but also gives that for 5 or 10 minutes. 

There are lots of options to make tradeskills still creative avenues for those whom want to pursue it, but also add in practicality so that players can access cheap, but short-term buffs to help level playing fields. You can keep delicately balanced artefacts away, or, as I said, dissipate on aggression. It's artefact loaning without loaning artefacts, keeps it an IC method and also requires a player to put in downpayment into a tradeskill just to make them.

Lenn

For food, my idea was to be more subtle, on par with the forestal/alchemist buff, rather than an artefact loaning system, which to me personally makes more sense as an augmentation/conjuration thing.

Ismay

Similar Lusternia food buffs are more reasonable than removing the -eat and -sleep advantage lvl 80 gives.

Accipiter

I just want something done with forging. Right now it is only useful for people without artes, and those people tend to not have enough money to pay for anything fancy anyway. I don’t know how to make it useful again but the investment to get to legend smith is the equivalent to getting a design based skill but you don’t get any of the fun of designing anything.

Maybe something along the lines of honing artefacts to give an extra couple of points in a stat that wears off after 30 months or so.

Lenn

It might be closer to the equivalent of getting all the design-based skills in terms of price, though even my lowest estimates when I did it were still higher.

[Deleted User]

Ismay said:

Similar Lusternia food buffs are more reasonable than removing the -eat and -sleep advantage lvl 80 gives.

Kresslack

Didn't one of those have brewing years before?

Accipiter

Lenn said:

It might be closer to the equivalent of getting all the design-based skills in terms of price, though even my lowest estimates when I did it were still higher.

I was being conservative what with skyrocketing credit prices, from what I have going from grandmaster to legend is about 3m just in lacquer and I am slowly gathering the inks myself so I put a lower price on those, but it is probably another 8-10m there if you price them at market value.

Vakvyr

Make "utterly satiated" a defense that negates hunger drain stuff. Also make hunger drain stuff have a chance to strip that defense.

Please leave Logosian alone thanks.

Jiraishin

Vakvyr said:

Make "utterly satiated" a defense that negates hunger drain stuff. Also make hunger drain stuff have a chance to strip that defense.

Please leave Logosian alone thanks.

That would make food even less useful than it already is, since right now hunger drain can affect 'satiated' people.

Vakvyr

Eh, tried. I stand by my last sentence though. I'm sure there's some way to make food more interesting that doesn't involve nerfing Logo. A massive motivation for hitting level 80 is no food/sleep. Even characters designed purely for RP with no interest in bashing/combat will snag level 80 just so their rp doesn't get interrupted by k/o spam.

Reyson

Retroactively adding realism into a game that's as patently silly as Achaea in some respects is a bad idea. If you add hunger as a mechanic everyone has to deal with and no one can get away from, there's no reason not to add carrying limits, sleep, cold/exposure, etc. etc. 

Personally, I think it'd be great if people in Cities could have denizens serve food a crafter gives them permission to serve. It can be something as simple as: 

give plateX to server (for Y gold)

And then when you ask that server wares, it costs the aforementioned Y gold to buy it. At least in Mhaldor, Esad's gets a lot more foot traffic from non-Logosian people (I think!) than basically any other shop, when it comes to consumables, and that's because the atmosphere makes it worth going there to hang out and chat. As opposed to running to some shop, buying something that's more expensive than NPC food, anyways, and then just eating it on the run or whatever. 

I know that factions love to have their own regional delicacies and stuff, but the menus haven't changed in RL years and it's a pain in the ass to add anything to NPC menus via patron requests and all that, so why not let certain people be able to stock servers with things people might be interested in buying? At least it can keep the menu moving. Would open up the door to more custom requests and all, too. I know I'd be happier to commission food, from a payer's perspective, if there was a higher chance people'd see it/eat it than if I just shoved it in a stockroom. 

Atalkez

I actually think the food bit is nearly inconsequential. If you’re hunting to 80 for that, and not the fact that you now get max health at 80, then idk what to tell you.

Jiraishin

Atalkez said:

I actually think the food bit is nearly inconsequential. If you’re hunting to 80 for that, and not the fact that you now get max health at 80, then idk what to tell you.

I hunted to 80 for that (granted, before the max health was a thing). Collapsing from hunger was frigging annoying. Not that I think removing the hunger cutoff at 80 is a solution to anything, especially while the Reinhold card is around.

Atalkez

Sure, before the change. I’m saying now the food part shouldn’t be a motivator at all. I’m obviously a bit biased since I have to sleep/eat all the time anyway from fighting all the time.

Lenn

Health is only really important to combat and hunting, there's a lot to do beside either of those which doesn't require health at all.