f13.net

Crafting feels unfinished. 

Little makes sense except gathering resources. 

Cooks have to buy everything from a supplier in order to train up, and the ingredients cost way too much.  Farming - I don't know what that's good for except growing pipeweed so one can blow cool smoke rings (which is awesome and new but ......).  Apparently the things one can farm and the things one can cook do not converge enough.

My loremaster is now 13 and a scholar, which is a complete pain in the butt to level up, but making potions is useful.  Finding shattered pitchers which is the node for the raw materials required is tedious - since each location seems to be camped by 3 or more players.  Yawn.

My champion is 15 and an explorer, which is fun, but there is little use for the tailoring I have trained.  Nice money sucker though.  Would be completely broke were it not for selling ingots and wood stacks.

My advice to anyone who wants to make money crafting is, be an explorer and don't level tailoring - nobody will buy what you can make and you'll go broke training it up.  That appears to be largely the case with weaponsmiths as well.  I don't know about woodworkers or metalsmiths.

Agreed with node camping. It was tough finding resources in the week I played (granted, first preorder week was swamped, but it must be /really/ swamped now, no?).

However, all games must adopt the 'set it and forget it' way of making stacks of goods. After smelting ingots in LotRO, making a stack of food in EQ2 is arduous.

There does need to be an "all" option when setting how many of something I want to make (in LOTRO, I mean).  If there is one, I don't know what it is.

The major problem I had with the crafting was that everything cost the friggin' same to make, and usually cost a lot.  Gloves and boots and a tunic all cost the same amount of materials, and given that Tailoring ONLY ever has 1 Hide drop per mob (as opposed to 1-3 for nodes), I'd run out of materials quick.  Plus, the percentages of Copper to Tin veins seems to heavily favor tin.  I was always hauling around a huge amount of Tin compared to Copper, as I had to burn 3 Coppers for every 1 tin to make Bronze Bars.  Would have been better to make Tin only drop 1 per node, or be slightly rarer on the spawn tables.

I tried crafting but after getting spoiled by Vanguard's system I have little motivation for the "old way" of leveling crafting.  I don't want to spend an hour of my time looking for mining/forestry nodes just so that I can spend five minutes crafting.  Crafting isn't even the slightest bit interesting, it is just the WoW way of auto making as many items as you have components for.  There are far, far too few resource nodes, they need to either up the number of spawns ten times or make it so that the nodes are permanent and there is a 30 minute cooldown on when any one person can reuse it, that way people won't constantly be trying to ninja them.

And why the hell do so many MMOs only allow you to take one or two crafting professions?  You can just make alts to get around it anyways.  All of my characters are explorers so that I can just gather all the primary resources and decide what to do later.  Not that I'm sticking around past the point I actually have to pay for the game.

I found out the other day that if I click in the quantity field (next to the "Make" button) and type some huge number, like 99, it automatically sets the quantity I will make to the max that I have materials for. Sort of a poor man's "All" button. Not ideal, but it beats clicking the arrows.

They violated some UI rules (the further you move your mouse, the larger the target ought to be) with those arrows in the crafting HUD and copied a WoW 'feature' where any update to the info in the crafting info pane will wipe out your typed in "number to craft" (like when you equip the appropriate crafting widget).  But if you've crafted in any number of MMOs prior you'll have no issue figuring this interface out.  Why can't we equip all 3 crafting widgets at once?  What joy is there in stopping to tool-swap when things are trying to kill you or players ninja your node?  Speaking of players, why doesn't each client get their own node?  If I want to get into a resource denial gankfest I'll go play some other game. 

One may take issue with the 'forced' trade aspect, why can't I make my own boiled leather since I need that as a pre-req for everything I make as a metalworker?  And if I can't make my own, why don't vendors stock the junk other players sell that I might find useful (AH is there, but often inconviently located - I should be able to find raw materials on the frontier where they are being collected and processed goods in the city).

And, at the risk of spoiling my own supply, Copper Nodes grow on trees in the Shire.  Seems the Hobbitses are all focussed on farming and fruity hats and the mining nodes just sit there all day.  This, and figuring out the blue arrow on the minimap surround makes getting sufficient metal resource a piece of cake.  Now if only I hadn't gotten myself killed chasing Barrow-Iron nodes...

After doing scholar - where you "mine" those little shattered pitchers that spawn only in certain ruins, you can't see them on a mini-map, and get to compete with 3 other players trying to grab thm when they spawn - getting ore and wood is easy-peasy.

Not quite sure I understand the whys on scholar nodes being as they are.  Weeding out all but the most determined OCD masochistic players?

Started farming today.  It's strangely satisfying.

I'm liking farming a lot.  Plus I can do it without running out of resources or money, unlike the other crafts, since I make more seeds when I farm, and I can sell the pipeweed back to the vendor for a tidy profit at tier 3 (unintended by the devs?).

It's so cool that I can farm all day if I want to.  My dreams of being a retired MMO player just farming out in the country have come true.

So you get seeds, grow crops, and create food? That's actually pretty cool. Almost no other game I can think of goes that far, except of course ATiTD. The last time I tended a garden prior to that though was Ultima IV ;)

General question: is crafting cockblocked by level requirements at all like it is in WoW? Or could you seriously be a world-reknowned farmer at level 7?

IIRC, yes, you can....as long as you can get to the areas where the resources are located without dying.  That's how I understand it at least.

Same es EQ2 apparently. Yes I like that.

If all the crafts are like weaponsmith and tailor which I played with in closed beta eventually you have to do a quest to get to the next level. The tailor quest was doable at 5 or so but the one for weaponcrafter required I kill a low 20 mob iirc.

I think having to run across the world just so I can complete a quest to be able to access Mastery training was dumb.   Now, if it was like WoW, where I had to find a higher level trainer and could only train through that interface, OK.  But LotRO gave me the impression I'd be able to advance without roadblocks.

Well, it depends.

Farming is akin to gathering - you don't have to do anything in order to get to the next level, other than fill up your bar for this level.

Cooking, however, to get to the third tier, requires a run to the Lonelands.  It can be done at 15, although I don't know if one can solo it at 15 (my cook is only 11, and I haven't tried).

Further thoughts (or, they're nerfing my sweet galenas)...

My professions so far: 

***Explorer, which is prospector, forester and tailor. 

Nothing wrong with prospecting and foresting, except treating wood costs an insane amount for a tier 1 craft (48copper per).  One can boil hides for others though, forgoing the expense of treating wood completely. 

Tailoring, though, is really broken.  Skilling up takes a lot of light hides, which would be fine if the result was something worth using (but tier 1 has nothing worth using past 10).  I believe one piece of tier 1 armor takes about 24 light hides hides.  I forget how many pieces one must make to get to the next level (20 maybe?).  The problem is that tier 2 armor uses medium hides, which drops off lvl 13+ mobs, and can be used at level 10.  So a tailor cannot really use what he's making (also drops are as good and easier to get).  This has been a pretty common production craft woe in games I've played.

***Historian, which is scholar, farmer, and something I'm ignoring (weaponsmith maybe)

Scholar is tedious (extremely so).  Scholars make dyes and potions and scrolls.  In order to get the raw materials required, scholars must hang about ruins to pick up a shattered pitcher that spawns every 4 minutes.  Imagine doing this 200 times.  Now imagine 3 or 4 other people doing the same thing at the same place, so it's a race to the pitcher.

Some pieces drop off mobs, but not many.  Not enough.

Some scholars thinks this is a good thing, because it makes it "hard."  Not fun == hard in this mindset.  (I think those people confuse playing a game with having a job and should likely be playing Vanguard). 

***Yeoman, which is farming, cooking and something I'm ignoring (tailor maybe)

Farming is fun, if you like a different kind of mindless grinding.  Will appeal to the A Tale in the Desert types who like repetitive tasks.  Unfortunately, one can purchase vegetables from grocers for less than it costs to grow them.  This is going to change, apparently, but rather than lowering the cost of growing vegetables, I'm afraid the devs will just take the vegetables off the grocers.

Currently (until the next patch), one can sink about 200silver into farming to get to tier 3 pipeweed (Sweet Galenas), which one can grow and then vendor for about a 100silver/hour profit.  This is promised to change however, as people who like to farm mobs complained that people who like to farm pipeweed are cheating.  Many farmers were growing Galenas to raise their farming ability, since farming tier 4 and tier 5 crops is a massive money sink.

Cooking is broken almost completely.  Tier 1 foods cost more to grow than tier 2, and provide less benefit.  They require more ingredients and cost double or more than double.  Buying vegetables from a grocer is prohibitively expensive, yet cheaper than growing it oneself.

================

Crafting seems slapped together at this point, like it's still in an early stage of design.  My recommendation for anyone wishing to play is to be an explorer, sell your wood and ore and boiled hides to suckers who want to level their professions.  That way you don't have to pass by any resources without picking them up, either (something I hate doing, for some reason).



Why aren't there appearance crafts - like hairdresser, cosmetician, plastic surgeon, tailor/alterer/dyer?  It's such a no brainer as far as being needed in these games, when the armor looks similar, and players may tire of their appearance and want to change.  CoX's costume thingie is a big hit; I didn't play SWG long enough to know how popular hairdressing was, but I'd be surprised if it wasn't.  I'm surprised any mmo launches these days without this vital and popular feature.  I blame a lack of females on the dev teams.  Funny thing is, though, is that men seem to like that stuff in games as much as women.

On the appearance thing, I have gotten a few rare/uncommon drops from nodes with descriptions in them that talk about dyes. I wonder if these are the front end of future tailioring et al recipes.

Otherwise, thanks for the write-up Xanth. I pretty much felt the same way, but not because I have vast experience with crafting. It's that LoTRO is, basically, a standard class/drop-based diku. As such, the devs either are or eventually will be, through business reasons, compelled to drive players to mob drops. It's easier to control the collective power of a server when you have a good idea of how frequently to dispense new content.

This wasn't as important in SWG because the total point of that game was not a linear progression to raiding. But in the DAoEQCoXLoTROWoW sphere, relying on players to provide for the power of a server means ceding control over content consumption to players who, given the chance, will absolutely always progress faster than the devs believe they will. It's bad enough with just mob killing on gear those mobs provided. But add that to players being able to affect how powerful they are themselves with custom crafted gear and I think you'd find things would go even faster. And that means banging on endgame content well before the devs are able to release new stuff to do.

I would SO play a game that had all that intensive, customisable crafting.  Cooking, artisan, entertainer, image consultant, etc.  Those, the resource gathering and vendor system were what kept me in SWG for so long.  (and being in one of the best guilds ever)  I think I could do all that and nearly ignore PvE, possibly even PvP, for ages, if not forever.  I don't know why I want to be addicted to crafting and selling... I just do.  So far no other game has really grabbed me in that respect. 

One of the few things I liked about Horizons was the way resources spawned, when it worked properly, which wasn't often.   One problem was that some of it had to be done in very dangerous places that were beyond the level of the resource you needed.  They never fixed that, as far as I know.  I also liked the idea of applying your crafting specialty along with others to open up new bits of the game or achieve something big like finding a new race.  Note I said the "idea", not their implementation which was awful.  Different types of construction skills would make me very happy... in theory.

Dyes are already in the game (and dye recipes which scholars can learn to use).

I find myself spending more time wanting to make stuff or find resources than wanting to find a group to do an instance for uber loot.  Maybe it's because I've already slain millions of mobs in the ten or so years I've been playing dikus.  When I am playing WoW, I spend much of my time buying and selling or finding and crafting and selling.  Farming's fun in the Shire, but I'm not going to farm mobs just so I can afford to plant stuff.

One of the muds I used to play had a trade system, where a trader buys goods at one trade station and takes those goods to another trade station.  The price was partly determined by supply and demand (and was readjusted from time to time).  This was awesomely fun, and I could do it alone or with other people.  The mobs that spawned were adjusted according to how strong my party was - or the party just up the road from me, maybe, which led to some unpredictable situations.  (The mud also had weather, which added yet another risky dimension - my freight was carried off by a tornado more than once).

Had that system not been changed, I'd likely play it today (can't trade solo anymore, at least not on anything worthwhile - it's either way too easy or impossible).

I know people would pay to change their appearance, and it would stimulate trading between players (the kind of trading we want in game, not the kind we pay for with a credit card).  I just cannot figure out why it's not in any game but CoX (is it still in SWG?).

I have been playing my scholar a lot and I have a farmer who has been up in the tier 3 money zone for several weeks now.

And I have to say, that if you take the time to find a good spawn spot for scholar nodes, know how to search for near targets,  and dedicate yourself to pursuit of the craft instead of bunny hopping all over the ruins fighting mobs, that the money is comparable to farming and the clicking is far far less.

Advancement is much much slower then farming but I also believe the profit potential for dyes and potions is much greater. My scholar has funded almost completely the advancement of the farmer's cooking skills to Expert Mastery and still has plenty in the bank as he works on Tier 2 mastery.

A lot of folks would likely say the farming is way to grindy and repetitive and without a doubt, scholar is slower still. If you think its a mortal sin for your character to stand still in a video game for more the a minute or two, then this is definitely not for you.

But I have to say I am loving it as I get almost every node and watch the riddlin babies bunny hop by.

Word in OOC chat (yes, I keep it enabled because I am a chat masochist) is that they are nerfing the money payout of farming on Tuesday.  That sort of sucks because I was hoping to use it to fund my hobbit yeoman.  Cooking is pretty darn expensive to advance and food is pretty damn key to success, IMO.

I guess I should start learning how to play the economy side of these games, I guess.  I'm guessing that food with good benefits would sell well in the AH.

Farming is now broken.  Instead of a reasonable fix, some newbie to crafting dev came in and broke it but good.

Pick Explorer for a profession, and forget about tailoring until whatever patch they are fixing crafting comes in.  Nothing else is worthwhile at this point.

I have also found crafting in LOTRO to be a major pain-in-the-ass.  I have a dwarven armourer in Ered Luin.  Nodes are far and few between, I spent about 2 hours hunting nodes near Throrin's Gate.  I ended up with about 30 copper ore, and 15 tin ore..  Fighting over nodes constantly in the process.  I checked the broker to see if that may be a quicker way, 100 silver for a stack of 50 tin and about the same for Copper...definitely not worth it.

After two hours of harvesting, crafting bronze and tin bars took ohhhh about 2 minutes max.  I am not a fan of the WoW-esque automatic crafting either really.  So far though it seems some of the armoured items are at least decent low level stuff.

Erid Lun has been seriously gimped for mining since before release dispite many people complaining about it on the beta boards. They obviously never got around to seeding enough mining nodes. If you want to mine head to the shire or Bree-lands and go nuts. The shire used to be absolutely overflowing with veins but last time I played there were a lot more humans and dwarfs mining than halflings so I guess that's the end of the good times.

Crafting is so far my least favorite thing about LOTRO. I think it's confusing, with a lot of bad implementations. I like crafting a lot, and player economies are always interesting to watch, but LOTRO seems a big muddle so far on both points. I tried explorer on one character, and one of the little problems that struck me was that I had to switch off woodcutting and mining tools in my paper doll. I know, not that hard as long as long as I make a quickkey or something, but still, the game ought to just check that you have the appropriate tools in your inventory and let you extract the node. 

Really obvious things like automatic tool-switching not being implemented make me believe that crafting is not a priority for Turbine.  It seems like someone created a crafting system initially but since the initial design it's been ignored almost completely, except to break farming in order to ensure that people don't create bots who can make 100s/hour by farming, in the process breaking it completely.  (Kind of a silly thing to focus on now, considering how getting silver scales up as people level up). 

Sadly, this is not a game to play for the crafting system at this point.

It's just a money sink unless you gather and sell what you gather on the AH.

(obliquely on topic)

MMOGs would be well served to make crafting almost entirely cosmetic. A tailor could produce basic equipment, but they would have almost complete control over its appearance... and would gradually learn different styles of sleeve or shoulder or various rare textures and color schemes. Better still they could "tailor" high-end mob drops of the right type, adapting a limited number of their features to the players' whim.

Then give them the ability to sew, I dunno, "runes" or something... like WoW enchantments. They can put a modest number of these on equipment they've produced and a smaller number (including zero at the high end) on drops, because they're "already enchanted".

Ideally folks seek crafters for character customization... even when they only want to get the pants that just dropped dyed to match the rest of their outfit. Next thing you know it's: "For only six copper more I'll throw in a minor deflect rune," and the game's afoot.

And if they decide they want a different outfit, they'd still need their enchantments so they'd shell out for the same thing all over again, including enchantments.

I like the idea, of course, but there are technical difficulties of displaying and programing so much variation. I don't know specifics, since it's not my field, but every once in a while devs go on a rant about why such customization is nigh impossible from a rendering / bandwidth standpoint.

CoH would tend to imply otherwise.

Where I see trouble, just as it seems there is trouble in LotRO, is in how it balances economically with the non-crafted goodies. Among the many things WoW taught us: most folks don't mind dressing like hippies and hoboes if it gives the most plusses. All they demand is the opportunity to hide their helm and cloak so you can see their hair. Perhaps eliminating wearable equipment drops might be wise... turn it into a salvage game like GW, but with player rather than NPC crafters.

Dunno. I just think there are more options than "crafters make crappy versions of the stuff that they find on monsters while grinding for materials".

Well, the half-price grocer in the Bree Town Hall is actually going game-wide!

Apparently they're just nerfing his half-price repairs, not his half-price goods.  Pertinent quote....


Thread here (http://forums.lotro.com/showthread.php?&postid=665510#post665510).

While I'm glad to see the clarification, I'm not happy to see the manner in which it was made.  The original comment about how it was a bug for the Bree-town grocer to have those prices was made weeks ago, and would be fixed in an upcoming patch.  The current comment makes it sound as though its always been the plan to discount the other grocers' prices.  If that's the case, why has it taken weeks to be clarified?  If it's not the case, then the message should be something like, "After review, we've determined that the prices the Bree-town grocer charges are fair, and will be adjusting the others downward to match."

Either the CMs don't know what the devs are doing or the devs don't know what the devs are doing.  Or both.

More transparency please.  Less bs.

I want a reason to think that crafting is not slapped together, and that people are actually working on it to fix the problems, instead of bandaids being applied.  If the point of the crafting system is to be a money sink, fine, it's working.  If the point is to actually have a crafting system to feed the crafters' jones in a significant manner, then much more work needs to be done.  Otherwise, don't have one.

It could also be simply that a CM misspoke.  It does happen, what with being human and all.  I agree that crafting is hosed, but I just don't see the moustache-twirling intent here.

Patience posted in a thread that I believe has now been deleted


As many farmers pointed out, farming as a system will not work this way due to how crossbreeding works.  In other words, the seed yield has to be 3 seeds not 1 in order to crossbreed, which means in order to farm past Tier 3.

Either the CM was mistaken or a dev was mistaken or Turbine broke farming intentionally without copping to it.  Now I don't know but whatever happened, it was a fuckup and lessens my confidence not only in Turbine's crafting development competence but also in its community management. 

And that being only human shit only goes so far.  Being a CM is a profession.  Be professional.  That means, if you fuck up, admit it.  Have enough respect for the people who play your game to treat them honestly.

Here's the current test server patch notes....some are subject to change, I'm sure, but it looks like, at least for crossbreeding, seeds will be fixed again...


Full notes are here (http://forums.lotro.com/showthread.php?t=63576).

ETA -- I'm also glad that I've been obsessively hoarding the random food spawns....because they're coming off of vendors.

Some good changes. Wish they'd up the spawn rate of scholar nodes slightly. I still think the whole system is designed poorly enough that it needs more than a tweak.

It seemed to me at the time to be an absolute last minute ditch to stop people exploiting the fact that farming was a very, very good source of cash.  Certainly I know a few people who mastered farming as soon as possible and made a couple of gold from it before the patch went in.  I suspect that while the quick fix that was implemented essentially broke farming, the rationale behind it was that they knew (and they said this at the time) they were going to address issues with farming - i.e. increase seed yield for crops needed to crossbreed, lower resource requirements across the board, introduce brewing and decrease costs.

Now I agree that at the moment crafting feels very much like a tacked on but the extent of the changes that are coming up in this very first patch gives me hope for the future.  I do think that it will take a while for it to be meaningful and for professions like cooking and farming to be desirable but I think it will get there.

As for the CM info, I know that on the European forums, which are hosted by Codemasters, the CM staff are entirely from a third party company so I wouldn't expect them to get the messages from the Devs exactly right first time.  Don't know if that's the case with the US forums.

Wouldnt it be a lot easier if you have the bank space to store all the random drops to just buy a few stacks off the bree cheap vendor before the patch goes live? I like to have food on my chars when soloing but can barely afford it currently. Hopefully the changes to the pricing of cookable recipe stuff will go a long way to fixing that but also I'll need to hopefully find out from the test server what recipes can be made cheaply and easily. The whole campfire mess really annoys me though it's probably slightly better now. When I wanted to make trail food last time I did some cooking I could not find one person to make me a fire and as none of the outdoor fires at various camps I was basically fucked.

I use my campfires all the time w/ my hunter when I solo.  It appreciably ups the regen rate when I run out of food. 

The stuff you can buy off the cheap vendor will most likely stay on him, it's things like blue berries, green onions, taters and such that are needed for all but the most basic recipes that will be pulled off vendors.  After that happens you'll either have to grow them yourself, pick them up in wild or buy them on the AH.  Growing them yourself is an option for everyone with cooking but Tinkers I think but it's another craft skill to grind, harvesting them in the wild takes a lot of time and it's hard to find enough to actually level with.  That leaves buying them on the AH, maybe there will be enough people grinding farming to keep prices reasonable but I'm guessing most farming output will go directly into food and cheap produce will not be showing up in the AH.  I don't much mind since my main is a Yeoman and I actually enjoy the whole farming cooking hobby so the changes will be a net gain for me. 

Damn, gotta stock up on food with my tinker then to last me for a few months!

One thing to keep in mind with regard to dye ingredients, which sell pretty well at the AH - they won't spawn unless people pick up the other shit too, since they spawnshare with the food items.

Yeah, and giving farmers a node find function should ensure that the spawns get hoovered up more often than they are now.  I swear unless you turn floaty names on you'll miss about 75% of the spawns.  Probably more like 100% for strawberries.  I've only collected two since the game went live.

despite immersion is there any reason not to have floaty names on in the wilderness anyway? Sure beats walking into crowds of mobs unaware. Can someone remind me what key it was toggled by by default? I turned my toggle off but I strongly suspect my partner doesn't have it on because of how many mobs he wanders into agro range on.

That'd be the "N" key.  I always mess up and forget it.

Ya that's why I nuked the default binding for it. Was too close to M for map and I was always turning it off. I think I have it on shift-ctl N now or somewhere.

Nope, I usually turn it off in towns or in instances since all the PC and NPC/MOB names floating around gets to be a bit much.

Speaking of floating names, does anyone else have problems with the dark green color they used for party members? It seems to have horrible contrast and readability in every environment, indoors and out.

I am woorworker - now lvl 27 char. Woodworking at low levels wasnt possible due to money per Wax, now it's possible, but can't really do masteries because of enormous number of wood needed .. thus items I can barely craft are on Ah for 10s. Unless you can do some real nice items later on, or enjoy crafting as such, I don't see a point ..

Weapons, including bows, it seems pointless. I haven't looked but from what I've read you get better bows as drops or from quests tnan a woodworker can make. Maybe some of the crit recipes might be nice though, but that's another kettle of fish. I've been messing around with jewellry and I find I can make a small profit off lower level stuff, especially crit items which can be very nice. Jewellry is pretty hosed though with ore supply. silver,gold,etc spawns are way less than the iron that spawns with it. A 4-5 hr play session with stops to mine nodes I spot might bring in 10 silver ore and 30-40 iron.

If all you want to do is make money just be a gatherer. Forester or something like that is the ultimate farmer profession with wood, metal and leather all covered in one package.

Explorer.

Prospecting, Forester and Tailoring. Sell the ore/ingots/wood and boil hides. 

Skip tailoring unless you enjoy having a money sink.

Woodworker is fine so far for me.  I've actually upgraded from quest bows to crafted....they eventually get replaced, but that's fine by me.

I just can't find the damn NPC that gives the expert tier quest.  You'd think that it'd be the expert woodworker vendors, but apparently not.