Low level bulk crafting

[Guardian 452]

I see many threads with requests for some things to be allowed to be made in larger quantities.

Most of which are low end items, clay, glass, barley... etc etc...


How about a request to make all items of a certain crafting level or lower (and this would be a failrly low Crafting Level) craftable in larger groups.

I'm talking things like glass ingots, clay molds, cloth patterns, bow strings, spools of thread.... Nothing that is an END PRODUCT.... just low end parts needed in End Products.




EDIT I dont see a problem with people getting those first few levels in any given trade rather quickly... much like players gain those first few character levels quickly.

I do have a problem with people doing in a month what has taken some 2 years + to acomplish....and I think the team is working to keep that in check....

But I dont think allowing low level item bulk craftng will affect this either.



Thoughts?

[Leanthar]

Its not 'low level items' that we are adjusting.  What we are doing is trying to make sure things can not be crafted in bulk by allowing certain items to be crafted more than 1 at a time.
  For instance, it take 3 hides to make a leather--so we adjusted it to 3 hides, from 1, that can be crafted.
  I don't have a problem with letting the first 3 or so crafting levels go quick, but that will take an XP adjustment (if done correctly) and not an adjustment to # of crafted items which later affect higher end items from time to time.
  So...the real thing, if that is your goal, is to adjust the xp up slightly for the first 3 crafting levels of any craft.

[Guardian 452]

nah I think progression is good now.. it juts takes more times accessing the workstation and more chances for tool breakage... which is not an issue for some one like Enzo or Xiao for example... but for a low level crafter and low level player all that tool breakage can and may turn them off CNR.

Thustly.. if the low end items  ... I dont know .... say CL 5 and under (maybe lower) can be made in larger batches... that would help offset the costly tools for low level folks.

[Talan Va'lash]

If tool breakage is the issue we could just adjust that.  I hear what G is saying about tool breakage.  When I was starting gem crafting as a new player and a low level character, breaking a tool was a big deal cost wise.  Now, if talan breaks his gem tools or his gem setting stick its just mildly annoying if I don't have any more on me because I have to go get another, not an economic setback.

What can hit higher level wealthier crafters is breakage in more expensive tools (greater smith's hammer, normal and greater gem crafting tools.)  I may be going off topic slightly, but if we want to have an amount of breakage that won't hit low levels a lot harder, and still impact higher level crafters, we should have more "greater" tools that are more expensive.  

Master tailor's needle.... is the only one I can think of right now.

We might also want to split some more crafts so that they have advanced benches so that advanced crafting badgers must be purchased.  Master tinkering, master tanning racks and curing pools, master armour dummy (leather), master alchemy bench, etc.

-TV

Guardian 452 - 1/5/2006  4:00 PM

nah I think progression is good now.. it juts takes more times accessing the workstation and more chances for tool breakage... which is not an issue for some one like Enzo or Xiao for example... but for a low level crafter and low level player all that tool breakage can and may turn them off CNR.

Thustly.. if the low end items  ... I dont know .... say CL 5 and under (maybe lower) can be made in larger batches... that would help offset the costly tools for low level folks.

[goldz8]

I like the suggestion of an XP adjustment for crafting. I recently read a message by someone about another persistent world (can't remember the name - selective memory I guess) and I went to have a look at their website. Obviously Layonara's website is far better and more sophisticated, but I was intruiged to read that characters got as much XP from crafting as for killing creatures. Why shouldn't a character get as much XP from making a bottle of cure serious wounds as they would for destroying a bodak for example?

Perhaps someone knows how other worlds work and we could get some ideas from them? For instance do all worlds have problems with their economy? If they do, how do they handle it?

Hmm, wouldn't it be nice if persistent worlds were linked so that charaters (possibly only high level ones) could travel from one to another? (Just an unrelated thought).

[Chrys Ellis]

Talan Va'lash - 1/5/2006 6:20 PM We might also want to split some more crafts so that they have advanced benches so that advanced crafting badgers must be purchased. Master tinkering, master tanning racks and curing pools, master armour dummy (leather), master alchemy bench, etc. -TV 

 If that's done, I pray that someone would also create some advanced recipe cards to go with all the advanced tables and benches.  That was one of my only unfulfilled Christmas wishes.

[Ar7]

I have not played since the update was implemented, so if things are not the way I picture them, please correct me.

I currently agree with G, I imagine it will be rather annoying to craft all the glass ingots one by one, when I need a hundred of them to craft 10 rods and make (depending on the craft level) let us say 4 finished and enchanted rods. It will be a useless waste of time, since  the glass ingot is trivial to make and has been since a very low level in crafting.

The same thing applies for molds, metal ingots (lesser ones), cloths and spools of thread in tailoring etc.

These items, that are not finished products by themselves and that are needed in large amounts to craft other items, should be craftable in an unlimited or a very large amount. This will not have a big effect on the craft advancement, as they become trivial to make after very little time.

Also taking such a step may actually keep crafting more under control rather than spawn many crafters that simply do it for no actual reason. Let me explain further. Let assume that there are 10 new players that join Layonara and they all begin crafting. They all pass the first level in, let us say tinkering, quickly and easily crafting a large amounts of molds. Yet in a couple of CNR levels these simple things become trivial and 8 out of 10 crafters will not want to continue as it is hard, time consuming, expensive and most importantly, they can't advance by crafting large amounts like they did before.

As such only two crafters remain, who in time become serious masters, that have worked hard and are able to define the right way to sell items without endangering the economy.

But with the current system of one item only, it is discouraging at the start for everyone, even to the people that might find it interesting later and annoying for high level crafters as it wastes their time.

[Dorganath]

Ar7 - 1/6/2006 9:21 AM
  But with the current system of one item only, it is discouraging at the start for everyone, even to the people that might find it interesting later and annoying for high level crafters as it wastes their time.

  On this point, the key thing to remember is one of realism.
  I don't care how good a crafter is... one can only make one weapon/bow/suit of armor/etc. at a time.  Think about the process...think about the effort involved.  It doesn't make any sense to dump a heap-load of CNR onto a table and in one singular effort get several finished products that don't normally lend themselves to batches (again bows, weapons, armor, etc).  Such unrestricted batch crafting contributes to people shooting up through levels, playing the crafting XP roulette wheel hoping for a big pay-off that gives them a bunch of XP at a lower level that shoots them past the next level or two.  Limiting finished items to one-at-a-time limits the speed of crafting, it limits the amount of items put into the economy, it makes more intuitive sense and it hopefully helps keep things more balanced.
  Now...regarding intermediate products.  There are some which are craftable in small batches...depending on the items it may range from batches of 2 to 8 items.  It's unlikely that there will be quantities any greater than this.  One example: Arrow/bolt shafts.  One attempt yields 20 shafts.  Shafts may be made in batches as large as 5, which would produce 100 shafts, or enough for 1 full stack of arrows/bolts.  Alchemical essences are nother example.  Cooking products are another.  Most items are still one at a time, though since the release we have been adjusting the maximum quantities for some items upward as we find it makes sense to do so.  Thread, sawdust, tanned/cured hides and several others have either been increased or are approved to be increased.
  It is very doubtful that any low-level items will be ever made unlimited for crafting, but they may (depending on the item) be increased to a point where they make sense.  Finished products, with a very few exceptions, will be limited to 1 for the foreseeable future.

[Rayenoir]

Is it possible to make just "trivial" items craftable in larger amounts?  Someone new to the craft would take longer to make one than it takes a more experienced crafter of that kind to make five, for example.

[miltonyorkcastle]

Actually, I find one advantage to keeping these items (such as clay molds) as they are.  This advantage is in 'job creation.'  The primary annoyance of crafting these items is the acquisition of the required materials (of which sand and clay are prime examples).  And with the items only producing one per raw good, rather than, say, 5 per, the crafter has to spend that much more time running out to get the raw goods.  The job creation, then, is when the 'serious crafter' hires someone to get the materials for him/her.  This really helps keep the 'economy' moving as well as help increase interaction (RP).  People that aren't serious crafters get into the loop and learn who current and upcoming crafters are as well as aquiring the means to buy the stuff the crafters make.  Of course, this leads to the discussion that low-level crafters can't afford to hire someone to get the items for them.  > I disagree. <  Saying that means you are looking at the job process simply as a trade of gold pieces.  However, we are truly in a setting where bartering is just as viable as if not moreso than the trade of gold.  There are numerous other ways in which a low-level crafter can pay for another's services.  The primary currencies of bartering are goods and services.  For instance, for the service of gathering, the crafter can pay their gatherer with another service of, say, acting as a scribe or chronicle writer for their gatherer's adventures.  The crafter could pay their gatherer with the service of a promise of lending their abilities in the gatherer's next venture.  There are hundreds of services that can be traded for the service of gathering.  And, of course, the crafter can always trade goods, usually from those they make.  Just some thoughts from someone who isn't a crafter.  (but has piddled with a few of the crafts to have enough of an idea what everyone is talking about =P)

[Dorganath]

Rayenoir - 1/6/2006 10:11 AM Is it possible to make just "trivial" items craftable in larger amounts? Someone new to the craft would take longer to make one than it takes a more experienced crafter of that kind to make five, for example.

  Currently, no.  In the future? I kind of doubt it.
  Eventually, some valuable items become trivial to mid- and upper-level crafters, and that's also something that can be artificially affected through buffs and items.  The issue is not only one of crafting XP but of a flooded marketplace and too much gold.
  Regardless of skill, artisans and crafters will still only make one bow/weapon/suit of armor/etc. at a time. 

[Leanthar]

Very good points Milton and I most certainly agree.

[Ar7]

Dorganath - 1/6/2006  7:36 AM  
  On this point, the key thing to remember is one of realism.
  I don't care how good a crafter is... one can only make one weapon/bow/suit of armor/etc. at a time.  Think about the process...think about the effort involved.  It doesn't make any sense to dump a heap-load of CNR onto a table and in one singular effort get several finished products that don't normally lend themselves to batches (again bows, weapons, armor, etc).  Such unrestricted batch crafting contributes to people shooting up through levels, playing the crafting XP roulette wheel hoping for a big pay-off that gives them a bunch of XP at a lower level that shoots them past the next level or two.  Limiting finished items to one-at-a-time limits the speed of crafting, it limits the amount of items put into the economy, it makes more intuitive sense and it hopefully helps keep things more balanced.

 

Ar7 - 1/6/2006  7:21 AM  These items, that are not finished products by themselves and that are needed in large amounts to craft other items, should be craftable in an unlimited or a very large amount. This will not have a big effect on the craft advancement, as they become trivial to make after very little time.  

 The above quote shows that I never spoke of swords/bows/armors/etc. I spoke of molds, glass ingots and metal ingots that are realistic to craft as a batch. In real life nobody puts only one mold into the oven or smelts small pieces of ore at a time. I am currently left to wonder why you can "cook" a large pot of an essence and then pour it into vials, but you can not make many molds at a time?   We also must remember that this is simply a game and we are here to have fun. For most of the crafters, I am not speaking about the advanced ones, I am speaking for anybody who has dedicated a few days to it, making molds (using as an example) will be trivial. Now I totally agree with finished products being crafted one at a time, but with the example of molds, people will simply waste their time by clicking the oven over and over again, causing annoyance and frustration.  As said in this thread, most of the time is spent to gather these trivial resources, but not directly crafting them. As such people will continue to hire others to make molds and glass. Making easy items craftable in batches will not affect this, as even before the new system was introduced people hired other to make these items.   I once again stress that I am NOT talking about finished products like swords/armors/jewelry/etc.

[Leanthar]

@AR7, we are making adjustments to items such as you are suggesting. It will just take time to find that magic number. So far, everything you mentioned above has been adjusted upwards (except for clothing).

[Dorganath]

Ar7, I wasn't implying you were talking about bows or other such final products...I was just giving my usual overly complete answer.
  But, later on down in the post you'll note that I wrote about intermediate items:
 

Now...regarding intermediate products.  There are some which are craftable in small batches...depending on the items it may range from batches of 2 to 8 items.  It's unlikely that there will be quantities any greater than this.  One example: Arrow/bolt shafts.  One attempt yields 20 shafts.  Shafts may be made in batches as large as 5, which would produce 100 shafts, or enough for 1 full stack of arrows/bolts.  Alchemical essences are nother example.  Cooking products are another.  Most items are still one at a time, though since the release we have been adjusting the maximum quantities for some items upward as we find it makes sense to do so.  Thread, sawdust, tanned/cured hides and several others have either been increased or are approved to be increased.

 And to add to this...we'll look at other items as they come up and increase/decrease them as it seems appropriate.  Intermediate items are the most likely candidates for crafting multiples at one time, though it's unlikely that the current caps will be lifted entirely for any recipes.
  As Leanthar stated, this is a tuning process, not a final state.  We're not trying to discourage crafting so much as slow it and try to avoid a persistently flooded market, as well as the abuses that have occured due to bulk crafting.

[Ar7]

Well I guess that was a rather unnecessery discussion then

I really need to get more practical experience with Layonara, rather than sticking to the theoretical level....damn RL!

[Stephen_Zuckerman]

As a suggestion for bulk crafting such as with molds, ingots, glass, and the like... Numbers like six, a dozen... Things that people use often enough, in real life. I make twenty-four muffins at a time, after all; I'd do the same thing if I were putting clay in there to bake.

Just a comment.

[Leanthar]

"...I make twenty-four muffins at a time, after all; I'd do the same thing if I were putting clay in there to bake...."
  Yeah I hear you. But you don't bake over and over and over and over (those 24 muffins) all within mere minutes of each other.  People do that in the game.  We have to find the balance.
  I will state again, and the entire GM and Project Team know this... I love CNR and I will also support crafters...I think it is a great thing that players like it so very much.
  However...we need to have a balance and we need to get control of the economy and CNR is a major culprit due to how it supported (and still does really) mass crafting.
  *shrugs* Sadly...there is only so much we can do here.

[Stranzini]

my 2 cents worth on the subject...

I think realism should come above everything else - things that could conceivably in real life be done in batches, should be the ONLY candidates to do in batches. This would be things like molds in the oven, baking bread, roasting barley, etc.

You cant tan hides, make bows, sew garments or forge swords in batches, not at the technology level of Layonara. So we shouldn't do it whether its convenient or not.

If for game balance/economy preservation reasons even some things that realistically could/would be done in batches (say, baking bread) need to be artificially ruled out - fair enough, do what you need to do to make the economy work out.

The low level crafter issues raised in some of the notes above don't seem particularly relevant to me based on my own experience (speaking as a fairly new player with a character - Sen the luthier - heavily oriented by design around crafting). Layonara already gives a LOT of experience for crafting, IMO. This experience is not necessarily equally distributed between the different crafting disciplines...Sen is getting a huge and surprising amount of experience from food crafting, even for useless things for which he can pick the sole ingredient right within the walls of Hlint and which he has made about a million times (hmmm what could that be?), and also from alchemy - that is, two crafts he pretty much just dabbles in when he picks up something useful in his travels. He makes almost no experience from the musical instruments he makes, to the point that I kind of think the effort/difficulty/experience payback are maybe not correctly aligned from one craft to another. You might want to try and review the relative overall payback in experience for people who are working on one craft vs another, try to equalize it a little better around time invested, scarcity and native hostility to getting the resources you need, etc. (And by the way, food crafting and alchemy, seemingly the two most generous crafts I've seen, don't either of them require expensive and oft-breaking tools...probably cost of tools should be balanced in this equation too.)

But overall, we already get enough experience from crafting on Layonara, I don't think that needs upping - if you do, you'll just get even more crafting going on and have even more of an economic problem as XP functions as a government incentive to overproduce. Sen gets an awful lot of his experience from crafting, I don't see it needing to be more. And I think crafting experience makes the biggest contribution when you are at low levels, its relative contribution goes down as you level up. 6 or 12 or 18 points means a lot to you when you're trying to get your first levels, and becomes almost irrelevant when you get past level six or so. (Unless you're abusing by crafting monster batches...which is why that needs limiting.)

Low level characters are not the ones who need or IMO use crafting in batches anyway. When my chance of success was not very high for a recipe, I was not crafting in batches because I do not want to bet a meager pile of ingredients I've painfully collected on a single throw of the dice...I do things one by one so I know I'll get at least something back - one batch can only all succeed or all fail. Once a recipe becomes trivial (either assured success or something in the 80/90 percent range), and especially if I am making simple inputs for something else, with resources that are no big deal to get my hands on, for example making sandpaper from 10 or 20 bags of sawdust derived from a session of working in the craft house - that's when batches are nice to have. They should be there to remove the drudge factor, nothing more, and they're really an issue for high level crafters and not for low level ones.

Possible solutions?

Only recipes that are trivial for the crafter in question could be done in batches. You get no experience anyway on trivial projects, so there is zero problem of creating an XP factory, and there is no impact one way or the other on people's progress in the craft.

Make only intermediate products, not end products, craftable in batches. That reduces the "factory" problem of crafters churning out finished goods and ruining the market. Doesnt eliminate it, because speeding up the production of the composants makes the mass producing crafter's life easier - but at least it balances the drudge factor for all the people who are crafting responsibly and just are getting tired of making sandpaper or corn meal a piece at a time.

The interesting low level character employment opportunity is not necessarily fetching resources - that's maybe nice for the fighter types who can defend themselves outside the walls and want to earn some cash, but not so helpful for all the other low level character types. A smart low level character who wants to become a good crafter some day sees that you can earn experience and advance in your craft by making paper or clay molds or smelting copper or cutting gems for a good crafter who's tired of doing that stuff for himself. He'll do the grunt work for almost nothing if somebody gives him the resources - because, other than maybe a little barley and a little cotton, he is resource-limited at the lower levels. He's in the same position as an apprentice in days gone by who did all the grunt work for his master just to learn from the master and advance in his craft.

Sending the low levels out to fetch resources for the high levels is a way to make sure the low levels stay low level and the high levels have fun - the low levels don't advance any craft or earn any experience digging clay and cutting wood. It would be better to figure out how we can encourage the high levels to delegate the simple tasks inside the craft to the low levels who want to craft - that way they can progress doing things the high levels are no longer earning experience for anyway.

Don't know how to encourage this particular division of labor - but I think it would make the world economy more functional if we could figure it out.

The problem is that once the high level guy has the resources, he doesn't want to see the low level guy waste them on failed attempts. So, he's disincented to offer this low level employment opportunity, and incented to restrict the low levels to just gathering resources - the cost of failure in that case is only the death of the low level character, the high level doesn't care about that. He does care about wasting resources once he has them, and at that point in the process his time is worth less to him than the resources are.