Problem: Items are Worthless

[moatcarp]

Actually thinking about this some more I think I'm aware of 4 solutions people have proposed roughly characterized as:
1 - Korean MMO style: NQ item synthed with % chance to break -> +1 synthed with % chance to break -> +2 ...
2 - Alternate take on 1: multiple NQ => +1.
3 - +1 mats = +1 finished product; HQ mats need to be rare.
4 - Some items require rare mats and can't be spammed for HQ; leave the rest as they are.

I think in different ways all three of them, at their root, are attempting to:
A - Limit the impact on the market of flooding NQs to obtain HQs.
B - Maintain HQ gear position as being "better than the norm" instead of "Oh, everyone has HQ everything".
C - Potentially also address the "gear never leaves the economy" issue.

I don't know all the ramifications of each approach but I think what I like best is a take on #3/#4 where you also make gear attune when durability drops below 100% the first time.

This would solve the gear never leaves the economy problem (it leaves as soon as someone uses it), maintains HQ as being not the norm due to rarity of HQ materials, throwing in #4 you get some gear that just doesn't HQ often because the HQ mat drops really rarely.

It also limits the amount of time I need to sit there as a crafter and spam synths to HQ junk components and prevents the disappointment of synthing all HQ mats and getting a NQ result.

On the down side it means that DoL need to spam harvesting to gather HQ mats and DoW need to spam NMs to obtain HQ mats. So, it's clearly not a perfect solution. I think I prefer it though. I haven't been able to fully think through all the ramifications though so maybe I'm missing a huge down side.

[Solipse]

I don't know all the ramifications of each approach but I think what I like best is a take on #3/#4 where you also make gear attune when durability drops below 100% the first time.

Some thoughts:

1) This would require one fundamental change that would throw the entire crafting system into disarray : you wouldn't be able to HQ an item off NQ mats. If that isn't changed, then this solution doesn't address any of the base issues, and you still need an addition of a process for gear to leave the economy.

2) If #1 is implemented AND HQ item rarity is increased, think of what that is going to do to DoL classes - if they have to gather 50 oak logs before they get an HQ log, you are placing an incredible burden on them in the form of time spent just to get a HQ *part*. If this took 2 hours on average per part, then making a +1 or +2 item would conceivably force 10 hours of gathering - is that fair? As posted, the jist I get is "I shouldn't have to sit there for hours making an HQ item, someone else should have to spend their time so I can do it faster." - not sure trading off effort in that way is a good thing.

3) This is a fairly complex solution; it is hard enough to be exact with the ramifications of even my proposed 1-shot solution in the OP. When you start adding in a 4, 5 or 6 variable equation, you end up with a chaos-theory like effect; you cannot tell if you've covered anything, and even one missed part of the equation can throw it all out of whack. Solutions should be simple in design and effect.

Take the Dodore Doublet, there's a reason they cost 15 million on my server three months after it was implemented.

The problem is, doublets are 5m on Figaro now. We have 7 or 8 linkshells capable of killing Dodore and he (and every other NM) is farmed 24/7. Buffalo horns are down to 500k. From what I've read, many of the NMs in 11 were *rare*. NMs in 14 are *not* rare, just the opposite. It's easy to get the ones you want, in many cases they will spawn in less than an hour's time.

The economy will never be fixed for anything currently in the game, that's all trash and it will stay that way. Drop rates and item sources need looking at before the rank cap is increased and I do hope the gold nugget recipe is not going to be 4x gold ore/sand or we'll have the market flooded with gold mats right from the start, unlike darksteel and ebony logs which were removed from the game and will be fresh when the cap is raised. I hope the gold recipe requires an additional mat that can only be obtained from grade 6 nodes.

It feels like this kind of solution is imposing a penalty on people for playing, though. If I have to spend 200h to do or make anything worthwhile, even once, then what is the point in playing at all? That is one of the major gripes with the game so far from all of those MMO sites, and I think they're absolutely correct.

Playing an MMO shouldn't be about 'I do nothing for 90% of the time', but rather should be about making small steps toward some goal. Playing solely out of the RNG waiting for a +3 item to drop from a node because a) That's the only way you can make NQ and b) That's the only thing that you can get that's worthwhile - that's not really fun, and that's not really progress.

For 14 to really catch on, it needs to be much more lighthearted in scope. Instead of filling up a player's time with 90% junk actions, I believe pretty strongly that the game needs to overwhelm the player with microscopically scoped things that can each become a building block toward some greater goal.

The original solution goes a very long way toward helping _every_ class.

For DoL and DoM/W classes, materials gained from killing monsters, any materials, will be worthwhile. It will be worth holding on to more than just your HQ items. If I can make 512 crab bows, and combine those into 64 likely-higher quality bows (64 synths of 8 bows), combine those into 8 even higher quality and combine THOSE into 1 final product, that will take a HUGE amount of materials. It will give DoW classes a reason to go out and spend hours farming megalocrabs and slugs. It will give DoL classes a reason to go out and farm iron ore and oak logs. All of those items will sell well, especially when, in order to do 512 total synths, I need 512 of each sub item.

For people thinking that allowing items combined in this fashion will simply overwhelm the market with HQ items and make them so common, really think about it for a second.

Right now, every crafter and their mother is pumping out HQ bows by gathering HQ materials and synthing as many in a row as they can. Right *NOW* HQ items are overwhelming the market; It will not be long before HQ items are just as worthless as NQ items ... and this is how the game is *now*. While they do this, however, they further destroy the market on almost every other material, including the gathered and killed for materials : Why bother buying NQ crab shells and red coral to make crab bows? I can buy an NQ crab bow for less than I can buy just those two mats, let alone iron, oak, sinews, etc. Is that a healthy economy? It's like charging 10x current value for the materials to build a home, but charging 10% of the current value for the home itself.

In the system I proposed, because you actually add an incentive to MAKE NQ items (as in, that's actually the goal), you ensure that the market itself stays healthy because those NQ sub items are continually being consumed. Further, look at what it takes to do the massive synthfest I linked above:

512 red coral, 512 green megalocrab shells, 471 iron nugget, 43 bronze wire, 43 bronze nugget, 1536 antelope sinew, 86 ahriman wings, 142 buffalo hide, 1024 aldgoat horns, 256 oak logs, 43 marmot pelts, 43 biast scales, 512 hippogryph sinews, 6144 earth shards, 512 wind crystals, 2009 wind shards, 86 fire crystals, 3072 lightning shards and whatever crystals the 512 synths of each bow require.

It is not as simple an operation as it sounds on paper. It's actually a lot of work - and will keep crafters busy assembling large amounts of mats to do these kinds of synths. That is a LOOOOTTTTT of materials. Consider for a moment how many different economies, classes and sub economies this will both fix and create.

1) Crystal prices become worthwhile again (good, because lots of crystals would be created by people mat farming - mat farming being something that does NOT really occur, now).
2) NQ item markets will increase.

3) +1 item markets will increase by a factor of 800+% (or more, due to saved time) over NQ markets.
4) +2 item markets will increase by a factor of 800+% (or more, due to saved time) over +1 markets.
5) +3 item markets will increase by a factor of 800+% (or more, due to saved time) over +2 markets.

Let me explain before I go further: If each +3 item you get from a monster/node is roughly worth 512 NQ item synths, then it will be worth much more than 512x an NQ item. Consider what I pasted above was required to make 512 crab bows. Many millions of gil and thousands of hours of combined energy. How much would you pay to NOT have to sink that much energy into making a +3 bow? If that item in NQ form normally sold for 10k, I don't think it would be unusual for the +3 version of it to sell for 1 million. Crafters will make a lot of money selling HQ items from this, and HQ prices will go through the roof, but gatherers and combat classes will make a lot of money selling HQ sub parts. All you have to do, then, to earn the 40-50m that a +3 crab bow would require, is farm some monster/node for sp that drops in-demand HQ parts. You earn SP, you get materials, you make oodles of money (remember that the NQ items are very valuable, too) selling to crafters, you buy your bow. THAT is a healthy economy. I do work, someone benefits from my work, I make money from that benefit, I find someone who has done work I will benefit from, I pay them with the money I made from doing my work. That's free market/capitalism at its finest.

6) You keep a constant churn on materials - that is, if I go out and farm iron ore for a full day, the thousands of NQ ore I get are not going to sit on my retainer for weeks. They will sell quickly, enabling me to go out and get more ore the next day. If you incentivize buying NQ materials to make HQ mats, then you incentivize people actually BUYING NQ materials. This is a real market repercussion. We're back to talking about supply and demand, here.

In other words, you accomplish what the game's point was in the first place with this crafter->gatherer->combat class setup: One group of classes produces goods that another group of classes needs, who in turns supplies them with the things they need. Right now, very few people need very few of the items that any one class produces. 90% of the materials that ANY class produces is utter junk and vendor fodder. That is not a healthy economy.

7) And finally, you don't need to introduce any artificial time sinks that will turn people off. Nothing above is mandatory. You don't have to participate in it if you don't want to. If you just want to make your NQ item and get to playing, you don't have to spend hours/days making it because materials are super rare. NQ materials would be commonly farmed and commonly available. You can buy them up, making your one synth and get going. Enough people would involve themselves in the 512->64->8->1 synth chain to support it (really, all it takes is a dozen crafters using it to make it economically worthwhile) that every single crafter isn't going to have to be involved with it.

In before TL;DR

[moatcarp]

...As posted, the jist I get is "I shouldn't have to sit there for hours making an HQ item, someone else should have to spend their time so I can do it faster." - not sure trading off effort in that way is a good thing...

I understand how you would get that from what I posted but that isn't really my intention. I did say:

...On the down side it means that DoL need to spam harvesting to gather HQ mats and DoW need to spam NMs to obtain HQ mats. So, it's clearly not a perfect solution...

Basically - in order to keep HQ goods rare someone needs to sit around forever doing something and no matter how you slice it it's not fair to someone. I prefer NQ mats = NQ goods and HQ mats = HQ goods because then it means something to a DoL / DoW when they get HQ mats and it means something to a DoH when they are able to acquire HQ mats.

In the proposed solution you are putting all the power into the hands of the DoH I think. There is no incentive to pay a premium to DoL/DoW to be able to make a HQ item. I don't think that seems really fair & balanced.

On the other hand my proposal balances the distribution of power at least a little bit. DoW/DoL can obtain HQ mats but can't do anything with them - they need the DoH. On the other hand DoH can't HQ without goods from DoW/DoL.

Re: "you could code this in under a day" - I'm not sure what your experience developing is but I work day to day with code bases that are several million lines of code written over 20+ years and something I can whip up in 20 minutes in Ruby or Java might take me the better part of a week in legacy C code once I get down to putting it under unit test to make sure I don't break anything and even finding the right place to put it and tracking down what invariably does break because the code is brittle and so on. I'm not sure if you were making a serious point with this or not but I figured I'd respond.

EDIT: a couple more thoughts - maybe crafting leves could reward HQ mats sometimes. This prevents crafters from being entirely beholden to DoL/DoW (and I *only* think this is appropriate because SE has already added non-DoH methods of obtaining gear; which I think was wrong of them).

Also, I'd have to spend a lot of time getting HQ mats farming because there is no DoL that can harvest what I need for my primary craft - leather. I already spend hours farming mats.

[Solipse]

Re: "you could code this in under a day" - I'm not sure what your experience developing is but I work day to day with code bases that are several million lines of code written over 20+ years and something I can whip up in 20 minutes in Ruby or Java might take me the better part of a week in legacy C code once I get down to putting it under unit test to make sure I don't break anything and even finding the right place to put it and tracking down what invariably does break because the code is brittle and so on. I'm not sure if you were making a serious point with this or not but I figured I'd respond.

I've been involved in development for 16 years now, and have done work with just about every programming language available - except for Ruby, haven't really had time to sit down and learn it.

Coding time != End to end development cycle

The coding for my solution is as easy as it comes, and I do feel pretty strongly that they could bang it out in under a day. The testing for a system like that, of course, will take much longer.

Basically - in order to keep HQ goods rare someone needs to sit around forever doing something and no matter how you slice it it's not fair to someone. I prefer NQ mats = NQ goods and HQ mats = HQ goods because then it means something to a DoL / DoW when they get HQ mats and it means something to a DoH when they are able to acquire HQ mats.

In the proposed solution you are putting all the power into the hands of the DoH I think. There is no incentive to pay a premium to DoL/DoW to be able to make a HQ item. I don't think that seems really fair & balanced.

Well, to be fair, that's what those classes are for.

If you want free materials, you are forced to do DoL.
If you want free repairs and free items, you are forced to do DoH.
If you want to be able to farm mobs and get HQ drops from them, you are forced to do DoW/M

Let me first state that my opinion on this comes decided from lack-of-self-interest and more from my sense of what's right and fair. If you notice, I have no DoL jobs above R21. If this was self-interest, I would say the opposite:

I cannot support or agree with any opinion or option that would allow a DoH to completely bypass having a DoL job from gathering mats, or from supporting people with DoL jobs. If you need a hundred oak logs, you should either have to get them yourself or pay someone to get them. Not enough people do DoL, currently, however, because the reward for doing so is so small. This would add incentive for doing so.

In practice, you are not putting all of the power in the hands of a DoL, though. It's supply and demand and market equilibrium in practice - right now you are free to charge whatever you want for whatever you want. I routinely see people selling iron chain +3 for 500k - nobody buys it. You can only get as much money for something as someone else is willing to pay. If all of the DoL classes price gouge on basic materials, DoH classes will just level DoL classes and the DoL people will never, ever be able to sell anything, as the people who would consume what they're selling can do it themselves.

Thus, again, there is still incentive for selling things at a fair price. Not only that, but goods final price will invariably based off of materials prices. If the price of oak logs went up 10x through this change, then the price of final items should ideally go up 10x as well. Again, if the price of lumber goes up, the price of housing goes up, too. Believing that things will work any differently is like believing that if the price of lumber goes up, the price of housing goes down.

Free roaming NMS is a throwback to what I consider bad game design and prevents your players from playing the game.

You do have a point - however, this is only the case if that is the only place where these high end gear materials come from, as they are currently. If you had instanced dungeon bosses, even if they were hard and required 15 man r50 groups, that dropped similar level gear, would go a long way to not FORCING people to deal with NMs.

I think it's a bit too early in the game's lifetime to base any long term decisions off the content (or lack thereof) that we have now. There should be multiple ways to obtain good gear. Hopefully they realize that; I would be surprised if they didn't.

[moatcarp]

...Let me first state that my opinion on this comes decided from lack-of-self-interest and more from my sense of what's right and fair. If you notice, I have no DoL jobs above R21...

I don't think you understood my point. In your proposed system DoL are basically worthless (HQ mats are completely meaningless and may as well be removed from the game). Your proposal completely favors DoH. DoH can just grind out a ton of NQ goods using NQ items and end up with super expensive HQ end results.

HQ mat = HQ result is more balanced between DoL and DoH than your solution.

For your solution they may as well completely remove HQ materials all together. The other solution allows HQ materials to remain worth while and removes the problems with just being able to spam NQ mats to get HQ goods anyway (right now).

EDIT: if you want to get into who has worse DoL I think my highest is fisher at rank 18 .

[Solipse]

Also, the code for this system would be something that could be added in under a day, something like in the combine function (written in PHP because I'm not sure what language 14 is written in, and PHP is the easiest one to illustrate the idea in):

$item_ids = array();
for($i=0; $i<8; $i++) if( $in_synthbox_item->id > 0 ) array_push($item_ids, $in_synthbox_item->id );
if(count($item_ids) < 2)
  $offer_item_combine=0
else
{
  $offer_item_combine=1
  for($i=1; $i<count($item_ids); $i++)
    if($item_ids[$i] != $item_ids[$i-1]) $offer_item_combine=0;
}

OR:

$total_combines=0;
$combine_test=0;
$offer_item_combine=1;

for($i=0; $i<8; $i++)
  if( ( $curid = $in_synthbox_item->id[$i] ) > 0 )
  {
    $total_combines++;
    if( $combine_test > 0 )
      $offer_item_combine = ( $offer_item_combine > 0 && $combine_test == $curid ? 1 : 0 );
    else
      $combine_test=$curid;
  }
if($total_combines < 2) $offer_item_combine=0;

At the end, if $offer_item_combine is 1, then the item ids of all items in the synth box are identical, and an additional recipe is added to the recipes list -> an "upgrade" to the items in the box. From there, everything else should work properly; that is to say, the qualities of the items added in this way are added up, multiplied by some factor, and averaged out.

An easy way to figure out the result is just to do an instant combine, sort of like hasty hand. On success you upgrade the average quality of the items by 1, on failure you've damaged the components of all of the items trying to pull them apart and end up with a bunch of junk.

Less items combined = higher failure chance since you have less items to take apart and less room for error, so:
Success chance = 32 + ( 8 * number of items ) - The highest success chance is 96%, there should always be a chance of failure.

The total quality level value is, for each item, add the following: 0 for NQ, 1 for +1, 2 for +2, 3 for +3 (Only viable if ancient items are added).
So for a synth with 6 +2 items and 2 +1 items, we would get a value of 1.75 for total quality level.

If the synth is a success, +1 is added to this number, bringing us up to 2.75.

If the result is a decimal, we figure out:
$quality_increase_chance = ( ( $total_quality - rounddown($total_quality) ) * 100 )

In this case:
$quality_increase_chance = ( ( 2.75 - 2 ) * 100 )
$quality_increase_chance = ( .75 * 100 )
$quality_increase_chance = 75

if ( random(100) <= $quality_increase_chance ) you increase the quality by 1 HQ tier. If not, you get the lower tier. So in the case above, we have a 75% chance to get a +3 item and a 25% chance to get a +2 item.

Again, this may seem easy to get a +3 weapon, but you'd have to do 512 synths (more +1's made lowers this number, but a failure in a higher tier combine would set you back a hundred or more synths).

[Rentahamster]

Again, this may seem easy to get a +3 weapon, but you'd have to do 512 synths (likely a bit less because of +1 items made) in order to get a +3 weapon.

That sounds about right.

[Solipse]

That sounds about right.

It may seem that this system and the current system are 6 in one hand and half a dozen in the other as far as work to get a +3 item, but there is a very fine point to be seen, there:

In another thread I went through and figured out that currently it takes about 12 million gil and over a thousand combines to have a mathematically good chance of getting a +3 iron plate. This is just for one part of one material of one item. You could spend a billion gil to get 30 of each +3 sub item for a thermal alembic and still not end up with a +3 alembic, currently.

So, this system would virtually guarantee that, with enough effort, you can make a +3 alembic, while still having all of the other positive downstream effects on the economy.

[Xenor]

In another thread I went through and figured out that currently it takes about 12 million gil and over a thousand combines to have a mathematically good chance of getting a +3 iron plate.

Or you could spend a few hours farming one from a mob... Do people seriously try to synth up Iron Plate +3s? I think I'll start farming them and listing them for 5mil each.

[Solipse]

You completely missed the point, but ok, you do that.