- Stanos
- Sep 22, 2009
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The best 57 in hockey.
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I don't know much about UO because I barely played it but lol @ the idea that EQ had crafting worth a poo poo for the majority of it. Outside of a few bursts of usefulness (Deity armor for Rallos worshippers, jewelry if you were an enchanter or could pester some poor sap to enchant hundreds of stacks of bars, earring of solstice, food later on and fletching overpowered bows during PoP) it's been mostly poo poo. I mean now there's some armor you can make that has aug slots from raids that might compete with other parts but I wouldn't exactly call it a raving success. Not to mention tradeskills are still massive money sinks and without a decent investment of AAs even more difficult and costly to make stuff. Now it's basically some okay weapons for fresh 100s and the crafted armor which is a massive pain in the rear end to finish but theoretically can get really busted with raid crafted augs that are also painful to make.
Take off the rose colored glasses, selling banded armor to lowbies after getting carpal tunnel wasn't exactly some robust crafting system.
EDIT: Here's an old rant by Tweety aka Sonya who used to work for DAoC about it:
quote:One of the reasons I got so pissed when Verant kicked me out of their sandbox was because of how fabulous my character was. She was a Master Smith, a Master Fisherman, and drat skippy close to being a Master Tailor as well. Why does this make me special? Because I had bothered to learn trade skills in EVERQUEST, which is like deciding to learn German while being surrounded by Martians.
Well, some trade skills have value. Everyone LOVES jewelcrafters. They're the ones who make the spiffy jewelry that everyone wears to increase their stats. Sure, it's expensive to learn (gosh, let's make a skill where if you fail you lose a rare jewel and your life savings in plat) and if you aren't an enchanter you just shouldn't bother (the saddest thing I ever saw was a human running a circuit from Freeport to SK begging for someone, ANYONE, to enchant his plat bars), but the joy at the end! You have a skill, in which you make stuff that players actually want to buy. Guildmates approach you with a gleam in their eyes, bearing jewels and polite requests to help them out. You produce something that people need.
Alchemists are doing much better these days as well, thanks to the repairs made to the skill that wasn't ever broken and don't you forget it, biotches. Two words - Sow Potions. And buff potions, and gate potions, and other little goodies. Sure, it's also a giant drain on your cash flow - I once dumped a thousand plat on my roommate just so he could increase his alchemy skill by six whole points - but at least you come out of it with something people want.
Baking? Strictly for the roleplayers. Everyone else goes to the vendor and buys food, or hangs around druids squeaking "Can I have your vegetables? They're really light." Oh, sorry, that might just be monks. Fishing? Ditto. It's something you do if you're a melee class and you've got ten minutes to kill before you can solo another low blue mob. Tailoring? Oh, yeah, there's a real market for that studded armor. Fletching? If you can stand the six months you spend making arrows about as effective as the ones with rubber suction cups, maybe someday you can make a magic arrow. Blacksmithing? Sure, I hear it's getting more useful, but I have one thing to say about that - four million metal bits. A Smithing Guide I found on the internet called it "Smithing - Click Your Way to Carpal Tunnel Syndrome."
You buy backpacks full of water and small pieces of ore. Then you stand in front of a forge, moving two pieces of ore and one flask of water (can't be summoned or foraged, it's gotta be the real deal) into the boxes. Click combine. Take the metal bit. Put it in your bag. Repeat. At five silver two copper per piece of ore and one silver per water (that's with a really ridiculous charisma stat, and warm fuzzy faction with the merchant), we're looking at the metal bit costing you over one piece of gold. Everything you need to get your skill to a lousy FORTY is made from metal bits, so make a thousand of them. Of course, even though you need metal bits for everything up to forty, your skill points stop rising after fifteen. Say hello to hours of tedium!
The next step up is a file. You need a flask of water, a metal bit, and a file mold. The file mold is only a silver, but here's the fun part. The only merchant who sells ore in Freeport is at Groflah's Forge in North Freeport. The only merchant who sells file molds is in EAST Freeport. Oh, and she's hidden. She's in the blue building next to the Trader's Holiday, in the corner away from the door. Named Jillian or something. And file molds don't stack. Best hope you top out this part fast, because there aren't any forges near the file mold lady. Or anywhere to buy water.
But once through this step, you can make studs! Take one file from your file making step, three metal bits, and the loving water, and combine them. If you win, you get two studs (which stack! This doesn't sound impressive until you realize that originally, when I was playing, you'd get a single metal stud which didn't stack). The metal bits cost you three gold to make, the file cost you a gold and some silver to make, and the resulting stud sells to the merchant for two gold. But hey! You get the file back, win or lose! Gosh golly gee!
It kinda blows through your metal bit collection, so back to making metal bits. And here's the BEST part. Although you can't get skill increases from metal bits, and you haven't gotten any increases in about six years, you will still get the message "You lacked the skills to fashion this item together." Four times in a row. Directly after getting the message "You can no longer advance your skill from making this item." Remember, I was a MASTER smith. Here I am, in front of a forge with forearms like a wrestler, and I've been making plate armor and other goodies for decades, but I can't make a loving metal BIT more than eight times in a row. Way to keep that roleplay environment immersive!
It wouldn't be such a colossal waste of time if your trade skill could give you experience points, if being something besides a Master Bator contributed to the overall power of your character. I guess coding something like "twenty skill points equals X experience" would be beyond the range of any programmer.
Did anyone notice the repeated comments about how expensive all the trades are to learn? Failure, especially at the higher levels, means the loss of serious chunks of change. I didn't even bother taking up a trade skill until I was a high level character with a fat bank account and a zillion practice points to dump into the skills. Please, someone tell me why we're supposed to take trade skills seriously in a game where you can't even begin to learn a trade until you're rich? Yeah, I can just see a shaman thinking, "Well, gently caress my level nine spells, I think I'll take the seven gold I earned from fighting frogs and put it all into ALCHEMY."
Hey! rear end in a top hat! The one in San Diego! These aren't trade skills, they're hobbies for aristocrats that don't have to go to work in the dungeons in the morning. That's what I'd say if I was a roleplayer, which I'm not, which significantly lowers the odds of me ever becoming a baker.
http://web.archive.org/web/20010426193335/http://tweety.bowlofmice.com/tweety/tradeskills.html
Stanos fucked around with this message at 03:43 on Sep 5, 2014
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Sep 5, 2014 03:40
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- DeathSandwich
- Apr 24, 2008
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I fucking hate puzzles.
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I don't know much about UO because I barely played it but lol @ the idea that EQ had crafting worth a poo poo for the majority of it. Outside of a few bursts of usefulness (Deity armor for Rallos worshippers, jewelry if you were an enchanter or could pester some poor sap to enchant hundreds of stacks of bars, earring of solstice, food later on and fletching overpowered bows during PoP) it's been mostly poo poo. I mean now there's some armor you can make that has aug slots from raids that might compete with other parts but I wouldn't exactly call it a raving success. Not to mention tradeskills are still massive money sinks and without a decent investment of AAs even more difficult and costly to make stuff. Now it's basically some okay weapons for fresh 100s and the crafted armor which is a massive pain in the rear end to finish but theoretically can get really busted with raid crafted augs that are also painful to make.
Take off the rose colored glasses, selling banded armor to lowbies after getting carpal tunnel wasn't exactly some robust crafting system.
EDIT: Here's an old rant by Tweety aka Sonya who used to work for DAoC about it:
http://web.archive.org/web/20010426193335/http://tweety.bowlofmice.com/tweety/tradeskills.html
Also this. Velious and beyond there was generally one thing that was useful from crafting per expansion. Velious had the Coldain shawl, which, while a useful item, was a horrendously grindy tradeskill quest that required you basically maxing out every tradeskill and still was a crapshoot of loosing materials and poo poo shows like that. Planes of power had the mid-tier craftable armor, who's patterns dropped from high end 6 mans and low-mid end raids of the time. I remember a lot of those patterns getting DKPed to people to gear out their fresh level 65 alts.
Grinding up blacksmithing was stupidly loving expensive too because there really was no consistent way to get ore in the time I played pre-LDON because nothing really dropped ore in any discernible quantities. The vast majority of the ore you needed was vendor bought and that poo poo got pricey so quick.
The one thing I give that game on it's tradeskills; there was something very zen about fishing. There tended to be enough downtime (when you were waiting for boats, waiting for people to get to you, waiting for a mob to pop, waiting for mana, ect, ect) that you usually had time to drop your pole, drink a beer, and play /gems until you were ready to go.
Edit: Fletching was also super useful too, especially for an aspiring ranger.
DeathSandwich fucked around with this message at 04:00 on Sep 5, 2014
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Sep 5, 2014 03:57
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Sep 5, 2014 03:40
