Stop with the pay to win advanages for retainers, suggestions on fixes

[Tridus]

I've been wanting to get into crafting for a long time, but I find myself thinking I shouldn't.

Go for it. Crafting's fun. Even if you don't plan to corner the market or any such thing, you can meld and overmeld your own gear, you can make cool stuff for houses, you can repair your own gear anywhere, you can help out a friend when they need levelling gear in a pinch, etc. You don't have to go hardcore on crafting to see benefits or fun out of it.

This is how. I know it is rare to find people that only care about crafting, and so far I only know of Istaru, myself, maybe Tridus, and ..:

Nah, I care about things other than crafting. I do crafting mostly to decorate my house. The app itself doesn't affect me at all, but as a software developer I look at what they're doing and it's pretty concerning. The app structure in terms of currencies mirrors the standard P2W app structure. You get a daily allotment of stuff, a VIP package to boost that, and a premium currency to bypass it. That the only thing they're letting you spend it on is rather trivial right now is not a point that makes it okay. Rather, it raises the question of "why overcomplicate it this much if that's the only thing it'll be used for?"

SE is known to overcomplicate stuff, but I'm not buying that explanation here. If this takes off, I fully expect more paid features to appear in that app. It doesn't make any sense to build it this way and then not do anything with it.

(Also I dislike people claiming there's no pay for an advantage elements in the game when there clearly is. Maybe you consider them acceptable boosts, and that's fine, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.)

5 dollars a month is well worth the price only for a more streamlined UI where you can accept ventures and send off retainers with one click.

I wish SE could redesign the in game interface but I have doubts that will ever happen.

The retainer, inventory and ability to buy and sell are a bonus but are not going to change a lot for me.

This is exactly what's wrong with it. You should not have to pay extra for a non-terrible UI. Good UI is a basic expectation of proper development. Instead of building and charging for an app to do better what's clunky in game, how about they streamline the UI in the game that we're already paying for?

Creating a problem of inconvenience and then charging an extra fee to remove that problem is exactly what I'd expect from a P2W game, not a sub one.

(Although I don't find the venture UI all that bad. It does what it needs to do. There's certainly examples of worse UI in the game, like my inability to tend an entire garden patch with one command, or the giant pile of awful that is buying and augmenting tomestone weapons.)

No, it's hiding information so that people can not anticipate if there is an in-game way of gaining them.

No, it's hiding information, period. Why it's hidden is speculation at this point. But, they could say "coins obtainable in game" without explaining how and this entire issue would go away instead of a total lack of communication leading to the most obvious assumption: that as the currency used to bypass daily app limitations, it'll be a premium purchase just like every other phone app on the planet that follows this structure.

[Ceallach]

Go for it. Crafting's fun. Even if you don't plan to corner the market or any such thing, you can meld and overmeld your own gear, you can make cool stuff for houses, you can repair your own gear anywhere, you can help out a friend when they need levelling gear in a pinch, etc. You don't have to go hardcore on crafting to see benefits or fun out of it.

Awesome, thanks for that.

I'm not suitable for jobs that require a social aspect, so I was thinking of getting into programming as well. Assuming I can teach myself how to code, what would I look for, do you think?

[Tridus]

Awesome, thanks for that.

I'm not suitable for jobs that require a social aspect, so I was thinking of getting into programming as well. Assuming I can teach myself how to code, what would I look for, do you think?

Venturing a bit offtopic, but I'd point out that programming has a social aspect. At it's basic level, perhaps it doesn't, but that means all you're doing is getting a requirements document and coding it alone. While there are jobs like that, you'll usually be working in a team on a larger project, so you'll need to work together. If requirements are unclear, someone (maybe you) will be speaking to the client. QA and ops will be involved at points. In a small shop if something breaks and you're the only one there, guess who is alerting the client?

I don't tell you that to try and scare you off from it, because it's a great career! But it's not free of social interaction. The good news is that lots of programmers aren't the best at interaction so you can find sympathetic people in the field, and it's something that you get better at with practice.

As for teaching yourself to code, there are lots of ways to do it. There's tons of material online, helpful communities like Stack Overflow, and such. My approach is to find something you're interested in and try to build it. Do you like Discord? Start by making your own simple bot. Use a particular open source tool a lot? Take a look at how the code works. Always on your phone? Make a simple dice roller app. One of the early things I did as a young programmer was a WoW mod that turned guild bank repairs on/off for all ranks at once. That was inspired by my guildmaster, who would let the bank cover raid night repairs but not any other time, so he was constantly changing it for 6 ranks and complaining about how long it took. My mod added a /repairtoggle command to do it. That's it. Doesn't sound like much, but it solved a need, and that gave me motivation to work on it when I had no idea what I was doing.

Don't worry if your code sucks at first. It will. We all start there. If you can make it do what you want, then you're on the right track early on. Proper techniques come later. Feel free to hit me up on Discord if you are looking for anything else, so we don't clutter up the thread too much. Tridus#2642

(If you're in school, Computer Science or Software Engineering courses are great. I have a CS degree and while it doesn't teach a lot of "programming", it taught me a ton of underlying theory on how computers work and that makes advanced programming a lot easier.)

[Paladinleeds]

snip

Following on from this, I'd like to add that I've seen a gap on a certain site I'm part of, and I have peripherals from a manufacturer that can be programmed. I'm going to be building a solution on that. Think up of small projects (like the one I have, which is Chroma notifications for a site), and build up from there. Another pair of resources I would recommend if you're interested in C# are Microsoft Virtual Academy and Channel9. I have used both resources and they are great.