100520-is-this-really-how-you-wanted-your-customers-to-feel

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I was mining on my skymap when I saw this exchange in gchat. This is what your RNG crafting system does. It's not skill. It's not effort. It's luck. I don't know of any other game with a crafting system that's basically a slot machine. Put in the mats and pull the lever. 
 
Here's the reason why RNG crafting is so obnoxious: It's stacked against us. It's designed to make us fail. The best we can hope for is to have the item we want craft. That's it. All other outcomes are bad. We manage to make the item we want or we fail horribly. And most times we fail horribly. There's no joy in that, Carbine. All there is is resignation. "This is how it is, gotta deal with it." What is there to look forward to in crafting? Nothing. 
 
A better craft system would simply take more mats and have guaranteed outcomes. I mean, that's the crafting wheel all other games realize rolls best. You guys think the crafting wheel needs more corners. OK, fine. If you must keep RNG crafting, how about adding a chance for RNG to work in our favor some of the time? 
 
How about once in awhile we wind up crafting two items instead of one? How about if every additive had a very small chance to automatically land exactly where we clicked? Can you imagine? Trying to make some horribly difficult item, click on the first additive and ding dead center on the target, no other steps needed. Be like winning the lotto! You could do similar things with circuit board crafting. A very small chance for the random first attribute to be player selected, for example. Maybe rare, random power core upgrades when we add the core. Put in a rough core and it turns into a super duper core (whatever the name really is). 
 
These would be rare events but at least RNG could work in our favor once in awhile and not always against us. 
 
Please give it some thought. Crafting in the game could use some work. I can't believe you want players to feel like my guildie here. 	
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			To be fair, I did not see *prays to RNGesus* in the chat log. That could be what's causing these issues. :lol:	
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By the sounds of it he overcharged, that's why it failed, if you plan to do that it can fail.
 
That is how the system was made to be, if you want the best stuff in the game(or the best you can get through crafting) expect it to have a chance to fail. I've failed making the tier 2 healing shoulders twice, was I disappointed yeah but I didn't whine about it, because I was looking to get a set stat amount.	
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I was mining on my skymap when I saw this exchange in gchat. This is what your RNG crafting system does. It's not skill. It's not effort. It's luck. I don't know of any other game with a crafting system that's basically a slot machine. Put in the mats and pull the lever. 
 
Here's the reason why RNG crafting is so obnoxious: It's stacked against us. It's designed to make us fail. The best we can hope for is to have the item we want craft. That's it. All other outcomes are bad. We manage to make the item we want or we fail horribly. And most times we fail horribly. There's no joy in that, Carbine. All there is is resignation. "This is how it is, gotta deal with it." What is there to look forward to in crafting? Nothing. 
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			This is really the first mmo you play where expensive crafts have a chance of failing?	
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I think the devs might call the oft-castigated rune portion of the craft the rng working for you (yay! fire fusion slot!)
 
The only change I can see would be a salvage-like result or house decor on failures instead of just nanotech junk .
 
I'd be proud to showcase my twisted and mangled weaponsmith failures in my trophy cabinet; probably have to get some bigger trophy cabinets  :)	
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This is really the first mmo you play where expensive crafts have a chance of failing?
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This is... uh... working as intended.
Because cores are the last thing poor technologists can sell at all. If crafters who use cores don't use a ton of them, technologists will go bankrupt. :unsure:	
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This is... uh... working as intended.
Because cores are the last thing poor technologists can sell at all. If crafters who use cores don't use a ton of them, technologists will go bankrupt. :unsure:
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A 1p power core is probably a dual hybrid (or just dual in general) which isnt craftable.
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You can craft an item with no overcharge, in which case you will craft the item with zero risk.
 
Or you can overcharge it, in which case you KNOW the chances of crafting it.  Even at 1%, the item can fail, and when crafting the item, you take that into account.  Carbine could have made it so that you could not overcharge, limiting what you could make, but as it is you can and possibly get really good items.	
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I know, but people generally don't have the money to craft dozens of those anyway. :P
So I was talking about bulk craft cores, which require a large number of crafter failures to be viable merchandise.
I guess they could allow better RNG rolls for the very expensive, uncraftable cores though.
 
...also it was mostly a joke post. But with a grain of truth.
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			True, but the really crucial "RNG" part are the rune slots. And you have no influence on those. Everyone who knows what's up would pay twice the platinum for an item with better runeslots than the same item with 3% better stats.	
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			I want it and I want it now. So in 2 months I can complain there is nothing to work towards.	
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			He didn't have to overcharge.  He gambled and he lost.	
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He didn't have to overcharge.  He gambled and he lost.
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Maybe the discussion the OP wanted to start was if the very concept of overcharging in crafting was a bad design choice, and not lamenting someone taking a risk and coming out of it poorly? Just food for thought.
 
You see, the current design forces people to overcharge everything, since cheaply made overcharged gear will rival non-overcharged gear with expensive cores, making the last option useless. Ergo, overcharging becomes standard, i.e. it's meaningless RNG.	
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			well my complaint with additives is how they seems to just arbitrarily fail, i've head and additive dead on te target circle and off it fail left or right of target, that's really some very frustrating bs.	
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Maybe the discussion the OP wanted to start was if the very concept of overcharging in crafting was a bad design choice, and not lamenting someone taking a risk and coming out of it poorly? Just food for thought.
 
You see, the current design forces people to overcharge everything, since cheaply made overcharged gear will rival non-overcharged gear with expensive cores, making the last option useless. Ergo, overcharging becomes standard, i.e. it's meaningless RNG.
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well my complaint with additives is how they seems to just arbitrarily fail, i've head and additive dead on te target circle and off it fail left or right of target, that's really some very frustrating bs.
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And the market adjusts until risk is accounted for in the value of the item. Working as intended (and I think it's great).
 
BiS: high risk, high cost
Near BiS: low risk high cost, or, high risk low cost
Adequate: low risk low cost
 
^^ We get to make our own decisions. The OPs mate made thiers and came out second best. To be honest if they made that decision and couldn't afford it (ie. 1p was a lot of money to them) then they should have gone with a lower risk/cost option. Time and time again Carbine have stated that these kinds of decisions are what they want the players to be making. You want to eek out that 99th percentile? Best be prepared to sacrifice some value (time, plat, RL cash, whatever) for it.
 
I personally love this mindset; it makes the rewards when you get them all the more sweeter.
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Additives are definitely a different animal than circuit board crafting overcharge.
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This is hardly the first game where tradeskills have a chance to fail. EQ1 had a base 5% chance to fail no matter how high your skill was compared to the item you were crafting.
 
This IS the first game that I have seen that blatantly tells you in BIG RED TEXT what your chance for failure is. There is no reason to /cry when you are informed of the risks and choose to press the Craft button anyway. If it's that important, lower the charge until the big red text goes away.
 
Carbine apparently wants their customers to feel informed in this case - which I am happy for.	
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			RNG elements are a sign for a game to be prepared for F2P someday !	
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Crafting with a chance to fail is a bad design in general, nothing is more frustrating.
 
AION had it, it sucked
(i have never seen a worse crafting system ever,
you had to make a WHITE item with 10% chance it becomes GREEN, then uprage the GREEN to a better green with a 10% to get it BLUE, if you get the blue you can now upgrade it to a better blue with a 10% chance for golden)
 0,1% chance to get the item you want ........
And we better do not start talking about the Blood Stains.
 
TESO has it, it sucks (but you can increase your chance for sucess by adding more materials)
 
WoW does not have it, but crafting gear isn't that useful in most cases.(you need raid drops to craft raid gear)	
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Just 1p seems pretty cheap considering that with dailies, he'd be able to try to get a BIS once a day, every day depending on AH prices. (or every other day even)
 
I've failed probably...three, or four Dual-hybrid crafts. Maybe two or three Novacite-starshard ones. It's just bad luck. But that day I made a four slot shoulder piece, I knew I'd be keeping it for a really reaaally long time.
 
It's a harsh system, but comparing to another game - Final Fantasy 14. Not HQing an endgame item, could end up costing you close to 450,000 to 1 million gil in profit/mats. Thankfully in WS it's a drop in the bucket.	
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meh, while i agree it would be awsome to sometimes have a beneficial RNG element in crafting, overcharging is something you do yourself tbh. I had a guildie make me the T4 chest for tanking. Told him to go to 23% failure.. Cost me 3 dual cores but i finaly got it how i wanted it. I was however fully prepared to take the risk and had already brought 3 cores for him to work with :P
 
It WOULD be nice if overcharging had a positive RNG effect also tho. Like, if you overcharge 20%+ you have a 1-5% chance of one of the stats being 10% higher or getting an extra status effect on the item for instance.	
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Crafting with a chance to fail is a bad design in general, nothing is more frustrating.
 
AION had it, it sucked
(i have never seen a worse crafting system ever,
you had to make a WHITE item with 10% chance it becomes GREEN, then uprage the GREEN to a better green with a 10% to get it BLUE, if you get the blue you can now upgrade it to a better blue with a 10% chance for golden)
 0,1% chance to get the item you want ........
And we better do not start talking about the Blood Stains.
 
TESO has it, it sucks (but you can increase your chance for sucess by adding more materials)
 
WoW does not have it, but crafting gear isn't that useful in most cases.(you need raid drops to craft raid gear)
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And if you made starloom cloth as rare as the trigger fingers amp the market would adjust to that as well. That doesn't mean it's a good thing.
 
My point is that no one will want stuff that isn't overcharged, meaning that, effectively, gear crafting comes with an inherent 30% chance to fail. I don't really care about the unfortunate guy in the OP, he knew how it worked, but just because it's his own fault doesn't count as a plus for the current system.
 
Novacite-Starshard power core also only have like 10% higher charge than Refined, which likely means (if there's anywhere you can test-craft items on the web to find this out I'd be very interested btw) that a non-charged Novacite-Starshard is downright worse than a fully overcharged refined. Non-overcharged basically isn't a thing unless you're multi-crafting to salvage.
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But you are applyuing the old wow mindset where you need to min-max the bajesus out of your gear because a lot of the hard encounters are simply gear checks where you are rocking upwards of 80% dps uptime - therefore you NEED to min-max to win.
 
WS from what I understand of the design, and from what I have experienced (the latter being a long way from end game mind), is very much different. I have mainly healed in dungeons so hard to comment on dps/taking, but my uptime for brute HPS is very low, I spend most of the fight co-ordinating and dealing with fight mechanics.
 
This means that the min-max mindset of WoW is less relevant here. Yes that extra few stat points will give you an advantage on the target dummy, but it is heavily outweighed by player ability in real encounters and you don't need to overcharge.
 
TL;DR: In wow I would agree that this system would lead to inherent over-charging when crafting, but in WS min-maxing is less relevant and therefore it, to me, is not an inherent requirement.
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			Risk vs Reward.  This makes even the braindead act of crafting in this game HARDCORE! compared to "queue up 50 items, go smoke a bowl while they craft."	
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^ that's pretty much it, in a nutshell.
 
I think it's unfortunate the OP's buddy is frustrated, but you pays your money and you takes your chances.
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But you are applyuing the old wow mindset where you need to min-max the bajesus out of your gear because a lot of the hard encounters are simply gear checks where you are rocking upwards of 80% dps uptime - therefore you NEED to min-max to win.
 
WS from what I understand of the design, and from what I have experienced (the latter being a long way from end game mind), is very much different. I have mainly healed in dungeons so hard to comment on dps/taking, but my uptime for brute HPS is very low, I spend most of the fight co-ordinating and dealing with fight mechanics.
 
This means that the min-max mindset of WoW is less relevant here. Yes that extra few stat points will give you an advantage on the target dummy, but it is heavily outweighed by player ability in real encounters and you don't need to overcharge.
 
TL;DR: In wow I would agree that this system would lead to inherent over-charging when crafting, but in WS min-maxing is less relevant and therefore it, to me, is not an inherent requirement.
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This is really the first mmo you play where expensive crafts have a chance of failing?
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			I really hope we're not setting the bar for this game at "most Asian MMO Grinders" to beat. 	
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Yeah most Asian MMO Grinders love failing crafts that break the item or gives it a - if its +8 or whatever to begin with. (resets to 0!)
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I'm struggling to respond to this post because your ideas just seem so un-intuitive. Gear is the MAIN progress path for your character, OF COURSE you want to optimize your gear. It's watching little numbers go up, it's a basic part of human psychology games have abused for decades. The idea that because the upgrade is less noticeable somehow causes people to pick whatever and go 'eh close enough' is ludicrous. In fact, it'll probably make people even MORE inclined to dump as many stats into their gear as they can to see their numbers go up.
 
In fact, you can try an experiment. Try asking a spellslinger if they want
 
a ) Pants with 110 finesse, 12 moxie, 12 crit rating or,
b ) Pants with 125 fineese, 24 moxie, 20 crit rating
 
given they have the same amount of rune slots. Try noting down how many say 'eh whatever, either is fine'.
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			This kid should never do architect then. I've spent over 5 platinum in research alone just to get shit that only sells for 15 gold IF that.	
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stuff
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Yes, if you amend the scenario to serve your argument, your argument seems more rational, big surprise there. The problem with your amended argument is that the vast majority of items don't cost a whole lot to make. Those pants for example are based on the Skurgeborn Darkweave pants, which costs about 7-8g in mats. If you want good rune slots you'll probably craft half a hundred of these. If you are buying off the AH that is the step you pay for. The cost associated with the overcharge is negligible, taking the price per craft to about 10-11g. So what, I can sell the ones with bad rune slots for 50g. Over hundreds of crafts then it becomes a bearable but pointless overhead expense. I'm not risking anything. And that is the point.
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			To be honest, I can - kinda - see a purpose to overcharge if/when you get power cores that are much better than the current ones (40-50% more charge than the refined version) and are prohibitively expensive. And I also - kinda - can see a way to make overcharge work, somehow. But if you can farm enough money in 1 hour to make 10 crafts of whatever item, a 30% chance of failure isn't going to stop anyone from overcharging the hell out of it.	
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