skill gain is going to bankrupt me!

[crystal2014]

As I am gaining skills in forging and carpentry, I am making a frightening discovery! There isn't a market for things like hilts and furniture. As for the hilts, I put those in the trash or in the town crate, but the furniture, I am leaving it in the warehouse. I also notice that purchasing six or more permits a day without producing anything I can sell is getting to be pretty costly! Add this to buying lessons, and being a trader is a very expensive occupation! I propose that the pawn shop iss allowed to purchase furniture, and perhaps the weapons shop keepers could possibly buy the hilts and blades and possibly even finished products. I love being a trader, but trying to keep riln to study is getting to be more expensive each day, or may be the trader's guild could be offered a 24 hour permit for the work yard? I am not sure what the answer is, but I ask that another look is taken where traders are concerned because building a trader is a very expensive, and time consuming undertaking.

[Rias]

I'm not the Laborer guru, but I agree there's an issue with not getting riln out of lot of the crafting skills. I can't see the pawnshop purchasing furniture, but we might be able to come up with some way of selling those elsewhere.

Are barrels made via carpentry? Maybe those should be sold at the market, or to breweries or something. Furniture could be sold to, uh ... yeah, coming up empty there. Maybe some kind of automated NPC purchase orders for stuff like that.

I can't see partial parts being a source of significant income (hilts, blades, axe heads), but the finished products should be sellable, I agree.

[preiman]

i agree something needs to be done, but can't you melt down metal stuff you can't sell? that should cut the costs down at least a little.
what about the carpentry shops? most towns have them, and there has to be people out there in desperate need of discount furniture. maybe they could by them for a small amount.

[Elystole]

i agree something needs to be done, but can't you melt down metal stuff you can't sell? that should cut the costs down at least a little.

The smelter eats some of the metal of everything you smelt that isn't an actual metal bar or ore. I imagine it is that way to keep you from just mining something once and forge, smelt, repeat forever. It also makes forging something out of rare metals that much more "exciting" since you pretty much get one shot.

That said: You can make money hand over fist with mining. One day of hard mining should provide you with more than enough riln for days and days of training.

[Lavi]

Some of it comes in with the lessons, because once your forging, mining, carpentry, or what have you hits over 300 it's 100 riln and abover for lessons, combine that with the permits per day, the fact that most people don't by trader weapons unless they are exquisite or better, and the fact that it takes a whole day to make a good return on mining until you get nutty skills, it's expensive to start out. I made 5000 riln in one day, and it went to tools for lapidary. so if you go through 4 mining lessons that's 400 riln, five permits, is 250, tools for the trade add up to about 9,000 if you include a wagon, 5,000 for a horse, then the weapon tasks where you are cycling riln out. it's very expensive until you can sell weapons off the bat. You make a lot of riln mining but you lose a lot too. not sure how to fix it though. maybe lessons for traders based on recognition or riln? that might be complicating though.

[jilliana]

A few suggestions:
* Mining: Elystole mentioned this. It's a good way to gain a craftman's skill and keeping the finds to yourself to save the riln for skillgains later.

* Tasks: Do tasks that don't require you to actually use a whole lot of skills so you can, again, save the riln for training.

* Selling: I suggest possibly having a craftsman store somewhere in Haiban where one could go and put their things on sale and they get a certain percentage. It's a win-win for all. Jill needs a weapon rack and Crystal has a few available so Jill goes to Haiban and buys it. Of course, this is also considering that not everything will be the best quality but I'm sure the menu will reflect it.

* PC run sales: Don't see why a bunch of you guys can't get together and run a craft event of some kind so you can sell your stuff. You could even trade with each other so everyone gets what they need to make items.

I've earned well over 15 k in one day just mining and taking the time to smelt the metals to squeeze as much riln as possible out of them. That 15 k paid for a lot of lessons.

[Lae]

I read it, and didn't see it mentioned, or I missed it..

You could also use your RP skills to get free training with other characters. You don't have to ask on ESP or just come out and mention it.

You can save a LOT of riln doing that.


:D

[crystal2014]

thanks for all the feedback! If it wasn't for the mine most of us wouldn't have much riln to speak of! I think you all are missing my point so let me see if I can explain this a bit more clearly. When a fighter goes to grind his sword skill, he isn't charged to enter the fighting grounds. However, when a trader goes to grind up her forging, we pay to enter the workyard So we are paying twice, once for the lesson and again for the area to grind the lesson! For all of you that don't have a trader char, our ability increases by 25 with each ability, and we get a more favorable roll! So we don't get to use an ability slot for forging general and start making nails Each forging round gives an skill increase of like .2 or something low like that. (I am sure that isn't exactly correct)! and it take about two minutes to forge one idem. Factor in rest breaks and you make about 20 forged idems per permit hour. For example, I didn't get misshapen nails until was at around 55, and I didn't get the next set of misshapen nails until I was at around 70 So factor in the lessons, the permits and the time mining, and perhaps you will understand why I take the time to explain, the troubles with the life of a trader. I have been working on this char for a couple months now, and for at least 6 to seven hours a day for at least four to five days each week. The skill gain for forging is too slow and the mark to make player acceptable idems is too high.! If I know how to forge general idem, why does my bladed weapons forging astartat zero?! Keeping the fact that this is a game in mind, and most players have other rl obligations, can other forging catagories receive an auto boost each time a 50 mark is reached on forging general or something? I love my trader, and I believe more people would play their traders more often, if the trader skills weren't so unreachable.

[Elystole]

I don't have a laborer character, but just to throw this out there - Forging: General: 438.32

I swear you're doing something wrong, and I don't say that to be mean but to point out an error in technique. First, like Jill said, on a day of good mining I make thousands of riln which is more than enough to pay for my other activities. I did that, banked a lot of riln, and had plenty of copper left over to start making nails. You get an increase of 0.08 every time you swing the hammer (and 0.03 general, 0.04 bladed when you practice that). It sucks at first when you're just making misshapen lumps, but once you get past that point at about 50 ranks you should be golden. One tiny copper bar worth 1 riln becomes 5 misshapen nails worth 12 riln each. That's 60 riln profit and you just paid for your permit with 10 riln to spare. I stockpiled my average or better nails to sell to players and made a good amount of riln the other night.

I need to experiment more with daggers, but I figure they are significantly harder to make than nails. Just about everything is harder to make than nails. I'm not sure how much of general forging applies to other types, but I guess around half because of how much of a general forging gain you get from making weapons. So either push through the suck with some riln in the bank from that day of mining (all of my forging ranks are from one big push), or keep grinding forging: general (you're going to need more than I have) until you can make a dagger with the cross-skill bonus. But maybe you need a minimum amount of blade forging before the general forging kicks in so the second option won't work.

As for carpentry, the mistake people are making is practicing with finished projects. Don't do that until someone wants to buy something. You grind carpentry by sawing planks and then selling the planks at market.

[crystal2014]

thanks for the tips, and I can see where your technique makes since, I didn't realize that the market would buy planks. I never had the opportunity to sell the nails I was making because they were all going in the upkeep of the mine, but now that I know that they can be sold, I will add those into my market trips! I don't pretend to understand all the workings of clok because I am far away from that, but sometimes it is hard to just get sound advice. thanks again, and good night to all!

[Rias]

Laborers have to pay for permits to practice a lot of their skills, true. People who fight don't have to buy permits to go practice fighting, but they do take severe injury/death risks by going out and practicing in battle, so I think it evens out. I think the majority of people who seriously practice with their weapons end up paying a lot of riln for infirmary bandaging over their careers, as well (or buying bandages from other players, or sinking their foraged herbs into poultices instead of selling them for riln).

All that said, I think Laborers need some severe changes to make them "good". Kudos to the people who stick to it - it's obvious you enjoy your character concept enough to, even though (in my opinion) the guild is pretty bad.

I was coming up with some deeeevious plans earlier today to make crafting, for Laborers in particular, feel like it's more worthwhile and appreciated. But! I'm not sharing those plans yet. It wouldn't have any affect on their current guild abilities or facilities, but would give them more avenues of putting their crafted goods to use.

[Elystole]

I think the majority of people who seriously practice with their weapons end up paying a lot of riln for infirmary bandaging over their careers, as well (or buying bandages from other players, or sinking their foraged herbs into poultices instead of selling them for riln).

I buy untreated bandages 50 or 100 at a time at two riln a piece and go through them pretty quickly. It does add up.

[Skah]

So, it's easy to find people willing to give out free training in the major professions. Also, as crazy as this sounds, training is not mandatory. If you don't make a lot of riln doing something, maybe you should consider not training in it. My two highest skills, woodworking and herbalism, were gotten without paying for training. There used to be a character, Stuhilly I think (where is he? he was awesome), who never trained anything as a trader, and he seemed to do alright.

Try selling hilts and such to players, possibly in bulk. Mascond would buy a hundred of each weapon hilt type to help with those bloody trader tasks, I'm sure others would too. Hell, do those tasks yourself as a way to make money forging, if you're a trader. As for carpentry, sell planks! It's actually good money/training. Not mining good, but very acceptable.

Crystal, as for the slowness of training forging, you may want to try a different approach, like Elystole said. The easiest way to train up fast is do it all in bulk. Collect two thousand nails worth of copper, chop it all into bars, and then go on a nailing binge (that sounded better in my head). Much faster than a hundred separate 20 nail sessions.

I also have issues with work permits, but they are more to do with convenience than cost. I'd love to pay 25,000 riln for a year long permit, or be able to stack a bunch of permits in a container and not think about them for a long while.

[merin]

Here's what you do, Crystal!

Go mine in shadgard for 24 pieces of copper ore. smelt them into 6 hefty bars. whack those down into tiny bars. get a lesson, get a permit, forge nails. all day.

Read a book, do something on the side, work on another project etcetera. Luckily, forging doesn't take a whole lot. I enjoy my trader, too, but it's an all day thing for me. He's quickly becoming one of my favorites, and I look forward to Rias' change to make us more than we are!

Once I get good, I have a few ideas and now that my character knows yours, and I know another trader, too, we can work this out. I'm thinking we set up something where we snag some plots of land and set up a sort of carivle with booths. We have someone who has a few good carpentry items and some planks to take orders with, someone with weapons on display, someone who has a produce market, someone who has some nice leather items...etcetera.

We can also rig up a stage or an area for the mummers to put on a show while everyone wanders around and what not. I haven't thought it through much, but the planning stage is there in my brain!

[Makkah]

Here's what you do, Crystal!

Go mine in shadgard for 24 pieces of copper ore. smelt them into 6 hefty bars. whack those down into tiny bars. get a lesson, get a permit, forge nails. all day.

Read a book, do something on the side, work on another project etcetera. Luckily, forging doesn't take a whole lot. I enjoy my trader, too, but it's an all day thing for me.

Gotta be really careful here... this is treading kind of close to AFK scripting/gaming.

[Jaster]

Here's what you do, Crystal!

Go mine in shadgard for 24 pieces of copper ore. smelt them into 6 hefty bars. whack those down into tiny bars. get a lesson, get a permit, forge nails. all day.

Read a book, do something on the side, work on another project etcetera. Luckily, forging doesn't take a whole lot. I enjoy my trader, too, but it's an all day thing for me.

Gotta be really careful here... this is treading kind of close to AFK scripting/gaming.

I like to do real blacksmithing while my character blacksmiths in CLOK. It helps me stay in character while also being AFK. It's a loophole.

[Makkah]