Patch change not working so well for me (vent post warning)

[Ysharros]

Actually, I just found a fascinating response from Silius over on VanguardCrafters, regarding the xp gained from doing work orders:

There is way more to process XP then what you are evaluating here, the numbers are not set in stone as your posted results imply. You need to post how many clicks you had per recipe, how many complications, how many clicks it took for you to finish the complication, and how many action points you had left. Your performance during a process factors into your potential XP it is not nearly as cut and dry as doing a few work orders and posting the final numbers.

(Original thread.)

This explains a number of things I saw yesterday when doing my marathon Work Order stint.

In the above-referenced thread, someone else states that the xp-distribution changes at amateur, so what I said above is probably only valid for novice stuff.

I'm reconciling myself to the idea that there's still a lot to discover about the crafting system - I had that attitude in beta and somehow lost it during the launch process, I think. That said, there has nonetheless been a weird "drop in fun" in the last week or so and I'd like to figure out why. I love being challenged, but I absolutely hate feeling I'm being persecuted by a random number generator - the sooner I can find out this isn't the case (and take steps to smack it back), the happier I'll be.

Not today, however. I have a headache from hell and I think that nice dark room next door (no, not the one with the padded walls - yet :-D) is calling my name.

[sorkvir]

Originally Posted by Ysharros

That said, there has nonetheless been a weird "drop in fun" in the last week or so and I'd like to figure out why. I love being challenged, but I absolutely hate feeling I'm being persecuted by a random number generator - the sooner I can find out this isn't the case (and take steps to smack it back), the happier I'll be.

My 'non-fun' actually stems from a couple of things. The first and foremost is that I'm a perfectionist and I hate 'settling' for C grade items when I WANT to make A grade. Knowing that I don't have a chance in hell to do that, makes me resigned. The second problem I have is just rotten luck. In the rare occasions when I'm on the road to a B item, I get a complication right at the end that kills it to a C grade (my monitor pales when that happens. I think sailors have cleaner mouths). And lastly, moderate WO's make me feel just vastly incompetant. Like I say, I cannot seem to get even C grades recently. I like challenges, but when not when the deck is stacked.

I feel that the difference between Easy and Moderate WO's is just too much. They need to increase the amount our skills play in Moderate WO's to balance it. I seriously think that'll make it a much more enjoyable experience.

As for a 'zillion' complications. That's not really true. I did keep track and I get only 2~3 complications on moderates. More on easy, but...they're easy

Oh, lastly...one thing I noticed is that the complications fudge the truth. They display a 'base' action cost. This throws the predictive gambling out the window since you cannot guess how many action point it'll really take. I've seen many, many, MANY, complications take more action points than the base. I would LOVE for the tooltips to correctly display the amount of action points so that we're not left in the dark.

Sorry for the ramble. I love crafting and I still do it. I'm an avid crafter. I just hate getting frustrated by a video game.

[Shinto]

Originally Posted by sorkvir

My 'non-fun' actually stems from a couple of things. The first and foremost is that I'm a perfectionist and I hate 'settling' for C grade items when I WANT to make A grade. Knowing that I don't have a chance in hell to do that, makes me resigned. [...]

This one killed me for a couple of days, too. When I started (before things became really difficult) I was able to make A on all but the most recent of my recipes, so i decided that I would only sell A grade products. Now, while I still do A's on many items, I am having to put B's on the exchange.

Originally Posted by sorkvir

I feel that the difference between Easy and Moderate WO's is just too much. They need to increase the amount our skills play in Moderate WO's to balance it. I seriously think that'll make it a much more enjoyable experience.

There is, if i understand correctly, a level range for each difficulty. Moderates cover 2 or 3 levels. The lowest of these can probably give you consistent results just below those of your highest Easies. The highest... Well, let's just say that the iron WOs that are now my mods are still DI. I think I'll avoid those for a level or two more, though. :)

Originally Posted by sorkvir

Oh, lastly...one thing I noticed is that the complications fudge the truth. They display a 'base' action cost. This throws the predictive gambling out the window since you cannot guess how many action point it'll really take. I've seen many, many, MANY, complications take more action points than the base. I would LOVE for the tooltips to correctly display the amount of action points so that we're not left in the dark.

The AP penalties are percentages. These apply to all actions, including comp fixes. I don't know how the stacking for multiple penalties works, but I think this is how the progression goes:
VL = 10%
L = 20%
M = 30%

[Galagah]

After hitting lvl 21 Tailor today i have to say that the bottom end of the Moderate WO i have listed are virtually impossible for me to complete , even with 2500 points .
These are WO's that have been moderate for 2 lvls now , and i've tried them every time i lvl up and still can't complete them .
I can't even get a Grade D out of them 25% of the time which makes them a complete waste of time doing .
I'm finding that the only way i can get XP / rewards to warrant me carrying on , is to do only Easy WO .
Surely theres something wrong here .

[Ysharros]

Galagh, I had the same problem when I hit 11 blacksmith, which has eased considerably after I hit 12 (and rejigged my station skills down and the other 2 up). I suspect many of the difficulties I'd been seeing stemmed at least in part from being at the very bottom of a tier - I noticed for instance that even when I was doing easy / low-moderate WOs (working with copper rather than tin), I was still getting moderate complications, which I hadn't before; which leads me to think that complications may be partly based on the crafter's tier, not the Work Order's tier.

I've read a lot of posts and done a fair bit of thinking in the last few days, not least of which has been realigning some of my expectations. Sigil wants Vanguard to be around for years, not months, and because of this any system they create has to stand up for longer than a few months; what seems amazingly difficult for us now may not be so hard for those who come after (as I and others have said elsewhere). Akin to that is the fact that if we could all make As and Bs all the time, there would be little point to having grades C and D - and most importantly, grade C would become the red-headed market stepchild. This is particularly evident in EQ2 for instance, where although there are multiple grades, since it's not difficult to achieve pristine once you know the system, pristine has become the de-facto standard - and that being the case, what's the point of any of the lower grades?

On the bright side, I've seen a lot of C-grade items on the broker and they're really not bad at all. Sure, a B is better and an A is great, but Cs have bonuses, decent stats, and are quite useable. This should hopefully create tiered prices as well as opening up a market for the not-A grade stuff, which was presumably the intent all along.

I'm not entirely sure how the system will hold up over time - it may well be that in a year, nobody wants to buy anything other than A grade anyway. But at least the devs have tried to build a little durability into the crafting system (not to mention in many other areas of the game).

Having also seen that the crafting devs consider 4-6 complications the norm (as Silius posted elsewhere), I adjusted my own opinion that 3-4 should be the norm. I'd prefer it, but it's not the case, it's not going to be the case, and they may have very good reasons for it that I just can't gauge - the obvious one I can gauge being that if 3-4 were the norm, B-grade would probably be the average result.

All that being said, I'm going to observe what happens when I craft, read other people's experiences, and try to keep learning more about a system which seems to be even more complex than we ever suspected. C-grade may be the norm, but I sure hope I can reach Bs and As with patience, perseverance, and skill (as, indeed, I can). The random element on comps still seems very high but again, that may just be because we don't have quite enough information (another post by Silius hinted at this - I can dig it up if required).

(PS - Shinto, just saw your sig - nice page! :-D)

[sherrjo]

I don't have nearly enough experience to comment on all your problems being a level 6 outfitter but from reading this there seems to be a way to know how much % you are through a level for me it's just a bar and I can say roughly is there a command to know exactly the precentage? Also how can you tell howmuch XP doing the task gives? Is there a chat interface like combat that shows my XP gain. The main window only says

you have gained crafting experience

Finally after reading the problems listed I can only presume this starts later on. I can produce and did produce a who set of V. Easy WO today and didn't have one complication. I did this on 4 single VE WO and 2 batch work orders one 3 and one 5 item. All my WO got to A and no complications did I run a vein of good luck I'll try again tonight and let you know.

PS My VE WO barely showed any XP gain so not worth the 10 clicks and 20 solvent it took to get each one two A grade which means a 5 item batch cost 100 solvent = 20c and i get 60C in return which is 40c per batch of 5 that's a ton of clicks for 40c and no XP :S

[Ysharros]

Very Easy work orders give almost no xp; I think my level 6 outfitter was getting 15xp per A-grade item when I did them the other day, which even at level 6 is very small potatoes. On the other hand, all but the highest Very Easies (those highest in the list) seem to cause no complications, so it's a risk v reward thing.

If you mouse over the progress and quality bars on the default UI, you'll see your progress in percentage form. Similarly I know there's a command to echo crafting xp to the chat window, but I don't know what it is. Instead, I use Drox's quite outstanding UI mod and am happy to shamelessly plug it. If it's not your visual style, there are several other mods out there which look different but probably provide the same info. (Note that these mods don't garner any illicit info - they just present what's there in a more accessible format.) The thing I like best about Drox's UI on the crafting side, is that the crafting interface has numerical counters for both progress and quality - no need to mouse over anything, which is nice.

EDIT - this thread has moved far away from the original venting (which is no bad thing). If a moderator sees this and is feeling generous, and these boards allow it, could we split it into a new thread from about post 23? There's some interesting info being shared that is only distantly related to my original need to blow off some steam.

[sorkvir]

There are a lot of variables that go into crafting.

I have to thank 2 people Ysharros and Shinto.

Ysharros said the obvious which once I grasped, the crafting process become less of a frustration and more of a challenge to squeak out a B grade item.

Shinto for (once again) pointing out the obvious. Your skills play a very important part of crafting. Once I slowed down and looked at where I was having problems and what skills they required. I started adjusting them and its made crafting 'easier'. Am I cranking out A's and B's? No, but I'm more confident with my skill sets and how they will affect my crafting.

Overall, I'm kinda getting pleased with crafting again. I think that I've grown to understand it more than just 'zillion complications OMGWTFBBQ'.

Now...if I can just get my gnome some more artificer recipes.....

[Ysharros]

Originally Posted by sorkvir

Overall, I'm kinda getting pleased with crafting again. I think that I've grown to understand it more than just 'zillion complications OMGWTFBBQ'.

HAH! My feelings exactly. Which is why I like communities like these - we can vent (politely) then discuss things and figure out what, if anything, is going wrong. I've learned a lot about crafting in the last 10 days, so in a way I'm glad I posted my frustrations, even if they were largely due to faulty expectations on my part.