CLOK BBS

So, last time I played Drayla and carved my own arrows and things, I was getting well-carved and exquisite shafts all the time. I was also getting good quality staffs and bows because I had worked on making my own items for quite a while. I still couldn't carve hafts or hilts very well, but I was working on it.

Now, after I carved again for the first time since woodworking was updated, I'm getting crude and average shafts. I wouldn't really mind this too much if my skill were lower, but my woodworking skill is nearly 400. I've only managed to carve a single well-carved arrow shaft so far. What gives? I spent a few hours each day for a few weeks getting my skill up this high, and I'm barely at average now. I feel like I should at least be making well-carved, with an exquisite thrown in every now and then. By 400 or 500, I should be making exquisite quality shafts no problem.

I'm complaining because I used to be decent at carving, and suddenly I'm barely average, and it took me a long time to get to this point. And I know smithing was altered to make it more difficult as well, and I hear a few people always complaining about it over chat because they can't get anything but lumps.

New people join us all the time, and they want to craft things. But I'm afraid that this new system will turn people off to CLOK. If we have to spend hours and hours and hours of grinding just to go from horribly malformed to crude or average, that removes the fun of the game and strongly discourages RP if you ever want to create anything on your own. Drayla relies on bushcraft, and now I'm going to have to isolate her for a while to grind her skills up so she can actually survive again. I heard that this change was made due to masterful items showing up too often or sonething. Why not make them two or three times as rare, and leave everything else the same? I'd even be okay with having to reach 400 before I start getting exquisite. Whatever the solution is, this isn't it. Crafting was already tedious to grind up, and was really exciting once you started reaping the rewards. But now, it is just awful for anyone who didn't already have high skills, and I suspect that traders will be very rare now, and unable to keep up with everyone's requests. Plus, prices for player-made items could skyrocket now that higher quality items take much longer to create and are more rare. This is just all-around bad, and I would like to see it changed before it becomes a real problem with more people.

well for what it's worth, here's my two riln.

Clayton has much higher level of skill than Drayla but that's way beyond the point.
The bottom line is, this is only a game... something we all do for fun.
Sure the game exists largely on RP, but there are the occasional people, like myself, who enjoys the crafting system.
When I first joined, it was hard enough getting a skill to go up in a certain area.
There are more traders on now than there were before, but they probably won't go very far, since it now takes 100 times as long to produce a good-quality item than it use to.
People from all the other guilds want above average quality or better items, whether they be jewelry, furniture, armor, weapons, etc.

Let's just take the woodworking aspect, since that's what this thread is about.
Clayton currently has over 1200 skill in this area, and yet, the best he can do now, is exquisite. Once you make masterful items, that's it, you don't produce very many items of a lower quality. But now, because things were seriously altered, the best you can hope for, even at Clayton skill level, is exquisite.
I completely understand that you use to make masterful stuff at a far lower skill amount, and that perhaps needed to change, but not this much.
we've had an influx of new people in all the different guilds, but they aren't going to get anything decent if those who specialize in the professions have to basically slave over their craft 24 hours a day to get that skill high enough to produce anything worth selling to another player.
Then there's the price involved for all that manual labor. No new player is going to have 20 thousand riln on hand to pay for an item of even well-crafted quality, which is what's basically going to be required to pay for something at that level.

This is only a game, it's not suppose to be real. sure there needs to be an element or realism, but it doesn't have to parallel reality so closely as to make learning a craft worthless to pursue.

Masterful items should start appearing around 1000 skill for woodworking. I don't mean, every single item produce after one reaches 1000 has to be of masterful quality, but they sure show up more often than they do now.

Clayton

I thought Masterful item were supposed to be stupidly rare anyway? I'm fairly certain Rias said so and more than once.

Isiaa wrote:I thought Masterful item were supposed to be stupidly rare anyway? I'm fairly certain Rias said so and more than once.

I thought that too, I am pretty sure they made it even rarer a while back.

To be honest, I don't really give two craps about masterful items. I have my bow that is masterful quality, and that's probably the only thing I'll ever really care about what quality it is. I just want to be able to make myself some decent arrow shafts, especially since now I'll only ever knap average quality broadheads. I want to be able to make my own arrows at the highest quality possible, which for me means exquisite. If I got a masterful, then yay for me. I just want to be able to make better arrows than I could walk into any town and buy, and with nearly 400 skill points in woodworking, I don't think that request is unreasonable.

Woodworking challenges were adjusted to be on par with all the other professions. While it may seem like 400 skill is a lot, in the grand scheme of things, it's not. Regarding combat skills, nobody would think that 400 is still pretty new. And since it's

A lot of the professions had their challenges adjusted upward because there shouldn't be a culture in game of expecting that everybody have better than average gear. If this were the case, stores would see better than average gear. After all, the proprietors of those stores have likely been crafting all their lives. There also shouldn't be an expectation that anybody can casually pick up a craft and be better than average at it in a week or so. If you want really well crafted stuff, you're going to have to find somebody who has spent a lot of time at it. This is true of blacksmithing, cooking, woodworking, and all the other crafting professions.

Bottom line - the challenges were way too low initially, put in with no thought to the future in order to allow then current levels of skill to make nice stuff. I'm really not concerned with new people making nice stuff. It's just like combat - if you're new, you're going to spend a significant amount of time in merchants/carriers/the graveyard because you're bad. If you want to get better, it will take time and dedication.

Regarding masterful stuff, it's never going to be the case that you hit a level threshold and all of a sudden you see a significant increase in the probability of making a masterful item. Masterful is supposed to be super rare and super valuable. It's supposed to be a surprise, not the norm. And that will never change. That said, it's possible that the probability of making a masterful item (ceteris parabus) will increase when breakage goes live, but it wouldn't be that significant, and it still an if.