Feedback Crafting 2.0 – Official Statement & Feedback needed

I still haven't gotten an exact figure on what lvl 50 items cost to craft, but based on what the lower level prices are, it appears to be doubled.

I do find it interesting that DSO has not made these numbers public here on the forums or social media. Perhaps they don't want everyone to be angry yet? Or perhaps they'll once again wait for the backlash, promise to fix it, then take months before any action is taken.

Given the fact that so many players were not using the craft features when prices were first introduced, it doesn't seem all that wise to double the price now.

Yes, 2.0 is considerably better than what we have now, but if you look at the few examples of great items along with 100K + gold it took to get there, this will probably cause more than a little complaining.

Those with better characters can farm gold quickly, but not everyone has that ability.

If the average player can farm 100 per hour, that will take a very long time to farm 100,000 in gold. And that is for just 1 or maybe 2 good items.

Of course maybe this is designed to get more people to pay with real money.

Fair enough, I'm not against getting people to spend money, but there is still way too much random in the mix for most to take that route. Maybe the heaviest pvp players, but that is a small percentage.

 

The feature is simply not final yet, it's in the testing phase, so it makes no sense to publish pricing information. After all, we have been asked what we think was a fair price...

The current state on the test server leaves prices unchanged for lvl 50 crafting up to Exo->Legendary, and introduces a price of 222 gold for crafting Legendary->Legendary.
Personally, given the new possibilities, I think that is kinda fair - given the fact that you can get 25-35% discount with premium.

 

I personally do not have an issue with the 222 gold price in and of itself, but I can farm gold pretty quickly. Given the amount of randomness still involved I would have preferred around 175 for the leg craft but the price isn't a deal breaker.

Given we will spend so much getting to the point where we have 4 good legs to craft, then crafting those legs into better legs, it is going to chew through a ton of gold.

For those players who can't farm quickly this is going to hurt.

 

BigPoint: "Then just buy premium."

In all seriousness, this is where premium and deluxe will get a big boost. With these, the price will be 167 or 144 per legendary craft. Premium will be able to craft 4 to your 3 (normal) or 3 to your 2 (deluxe).

 

In case you miss my feedback in this thread https://board-en.drakensang.com/threads/crafting-2-0.71408/#post-649170

copy/paste:

I like Crafting 2.0 very much.
I have spent excessive time testing it ... from what I have seen Crafting 2.0 is the real deal.

Crafting legendary items is pricey ... up to 200 gold would be acceptable ... keeping in mind that it would still be high price but fair.

I like the possibility to control the number of gem slots.

There should be a "lock button" or something (maybe confirmation) ... you can easily press "accept" by accident and destroy the ingredient items. I already destroyed two items with 79,7% and 78,2% weapon damage by accident

There is a bug when crafting items while your character has no equipped item ... i.e. if my weapon slot is empty and I am crafting weapon after accepting the crafted item it auto equips ... and message "you can't use that item on the workbench because it is already equipped" (or something like that) appears.

 

"We read your feedback and also looked at the outcomes of testing during the 1st testing of the new workbench and realized that the new workbench, albeit being very user friendly, it allows your character to become too powerful too easily and too quickly."

We all know where this "feedback" came from and like many features introduced to the game, the heaviest payers get their way.

The original idea was to allow players to have "some" control over what we get. If we took the time to farm for 4 items containing the stats that we wanted, the end result would have some of those stats. Not necessarily what we wanted exactly, but closer. If we didn't get what we wanted, we could revert, spend more gold and try and try again.

Then because a couple of people spent more than 100K in gold to show what could be made, certain paying players got all scared.

Of course all of this is directly linked to pvp. Those who are currently OP do not want others to become OP.

Could this be why there has been very little in the way of implementation for pvp balancing? Got to keep those big payers happy huh?

On the real servers, how many players have 100K in gold? How many have dozens of legs sitting in their inventory?

You gave some people on the test server just the right mix of gold and legs to make this fail, so you could implement the original idea of punishing players for trying to craft.

Now for the rest of us, we go out and farm and farm and farm and farm to find decent pieces of gear and how are we rewarded? We get to lose 2 of them. On top of that, we get the pleasure of paying you to take away those pieces.

Makes every day feel like Christmas.

During the past couple of twitches, the whole argument for crafting 2.0 was that players were not using the craft system and when they were, they were throwing junk into it.

I guess that particular idea didn't outweigh the opinions of the heaviest paying players.

 

Well, after today's changes the much awaited crafting 2.0 just got destroyed. Not only reverting costs gold/andermants, but it destroys two of the items as well. This makes the entire process meaningless. Who would farm enough items and gold to make four really good legendary items and then lose two of them over a single bad roll? It will take any casual player years to make one really good item. Gambling your gold/andermants to make one good item out of four items that maybe have 4-5 good stats each was more than enough, it already took thousands of gold to make one good legendary. Destroying two items every single time you are trying to make a better item, all while you get charged a significant amount of currency for both the craft and the revert, was a terrible idea and it makes the crafting bench just as useful as it is now - not at all.

It also was not what players were being promised for years and once again "last minute changes" turn a much-awaited feature sour.

I wonder whose "feedback" and with what kind of coherent arguement convinced the developer that reverting should cost extra money AND it should destroy items in the process. I saw nobody writing "this is too good of a feature, so go ahead and destroy its potential".

 

The new crafting system long awaited by us users just died. What beautiful twitch you did .... you should be ashamed, liars. I prefer that this crafting system does not arise never, would save anger, gold and time farm.
If the workbench eliminates 2 of 4 best items, we can use it only one time. stop. then we are left with only 2 items ... But the problem is that the items are ours and you must not touch them. The workbench had to guarantee us more possibilities, depending on the gold or Andermant possessed not only a chance every 4 items. The new crafting system is considerably worse than the old. Also it is a thief system.

 

Crafting 2.0 as it is now, is useless, what kind of feedback are Bigpoint expecting from people?

It's just nonsene, even worst than crafting 1.0: u are going to lose the gold and also two items, and basically there is the same exact randomness that was supposed to be taken out with the upgrade of the feature...

Congratulations, it's only like eight month that developers are working on it. Nice job!

Pvp is almost ruined for unbalance between classes (war have insane offensive stats with shield, and dwarf gameplay it's completely unfair), when u get an high rank or play in a gruop arena takes ages to start; Pve is fun and a little rewarding only when u can pay for bossruns and essences, Guild war is on pause since last year, and now u are changing the only one feature that could revive some interests in a constantly decreasing community of players (we all know it is, even if Haruki says that numbers ar just fine).

As I said before this is going to be another nail in the coffin of this game, maybe not the last, but we are getting there pretty fast.

 

Im playing this game since the land was ruled by wars and mags. long before rangers came in. back when herlad was allmighty.
And i pay. i pay for prem, i pay for delux prem, i buy anders twice a month (the big stack)
If craft 2.0 will become live with that outrageous 2 item lose i will be posing here a link to my youtube video so you can all enjoy an OP mage deleting his gear 1 by 1 until he is naked like on the day he was born.
Im really getting tired of bad decisions and fighting it. ill be better moving on.

 

It seems like crafting is a bigger (and more successful in making money) sister of jesters. Consider please the fact that actually player doesn't know what he'll receive from crafting. Even if he managed to collect 4 items with 4 the same kind of enchantment, he woudn't know what he would get and in consequence it could turn out that his effort (and money :>) was in vain by creating an item with worse stats than the ones he contributed.
So yeah, that's just like casino, but extremely expensive.
>Spend your time collecting 4 considerable good items.
>Pay big amount of virtual currency
>See what happens
>Be disappointed and obliged to let your 2 items vanish.
So in fact we're "punished" twice (I know it sounds weird but I can't find better word to decribe my feelings; it's not like players should be entitled to have everything they want of course). We lose our gold and it's quite big deal in my opinion. Then we need to get rid of 2 items. JUST FOR FUN PLAYING THIS VICIOUS KIND OF RAFFLE.

 

M doing same thing after this crap 2.0 is coming , deleting my 4.5 year old f2p war and posting a video
And worst thing in this system is that the stats in the crafting item cannot be more or less than the stats in ingredient items but are exact same copy of that stats.... so its more like crossover 2.0 and not crafting...

 

While I am not going to do something so dramatic, this last change had led me to the decision not to renew my premium membership that just expired. I have had a membership for years, not because I needed it but under the notion that the developers need support, and kept paying for it even I did not like the "grind fest" events and the horrible levels of gambling that were introduced during the past several months. This however was the drop the spilled the cup - I no longer feel that I should support something that I do not feel it deserves my support anymore.

 

Likewise... I'm not promising anything drastic, but if it goes live the way it is now, I will be thinking long and hard about a break while I decide if i want to support (with my time) a company that has time and time again shown that it does not have the players best interests in mind. Numerous time in the past, I've offered in depth analysis, recommendations, and feedback and 99% of it has gotten ignored. While it would be painful to abandon four years invested in this game, there comes a point where enough is enough. Here's hoping that BP can do another course correct before they cause a mass migration away from the game.

 

Last minute change to long awaited crafting 2.0 is an insane and Utopian. Very sad...
1 year's farming only gave me 2 items (maces) I was eager to craft, and I am yet to get another 2, possibly another year. The chances of crafting a worthy item on the fist attempt are plank scale, meaning I wasted 1.5-2 years in a blink of an eye.

Bigpoint has free analysis and expertise of people like _Baragain_, Trakilaki, Armando and others, whose calculations, and insights are truly amazing. These people should be getting paid by BP for their expertise, yet, I am in awe that the opinions of these players are totally ignored. I feel our pain, but it's hard to imagine the pain they are feeling.

 

I'd gladly accept a consultant fee of andermant... with the conversion of $US->Andermant, minimum wage in the US, and the time spent calculating how stupid they are, I'd gladly accept 200k for my time.

 

You are not the first and sadly you won't be the last to make this argument.

It is disappointing that once again DSO appears to be listening to a very vocal uninformed small group.

I'm not a fan of this crappy 2.0 and I believe it hurts more players than it pretends to help. However, even if they implement this latest version it will not be the worst thing that they have done to us. Remember R155?

If this is the last straw for anyone, I understand, we all have our limits on what we will put up with. Personally I survived the great nerfing and compared to that this isn't that bad.

The math has been proven, the facts presented, and now all we can do is wait.

 

That doesn't mean that we should stop proposing ideas. We all know that there is a snowball's chance of it going back to the last iteration, but it shouldn't stop us from making more recommendations. Lets assume for the sake of argument that the devs do read the forums. If we don't say something that jumps off the screen at them, and addresses what we can logically assume are their concerns while simultaneously addressing our concerns, then we deserve what we get. We are the best advocates for our game.


EDIT:
Well, time for me to turn my words into actions. Tell me what you think of this:

I recognize that getting all 4 items back is a big detractor with the devs, so I'd say no more than 3, but let people pick and then base the price off of that. Also, if an item (or items) have better stats, it should cost more. Rhysingstar pointed out that in the development of this system, we should keep an eye out for the little guy. This would allow a newer level 50 to craft items with good lines (maybe not the amazing gold lines) and make a new item that is a significant improvement while not paying as much as someone on the search for perfection. Personally, given the costs as is (items and currency), I wouldn't waste the gold for anything less than perfection, but if I know that I can make a reasonable improvement over my existing items for a moderate price, I may go for it while I'm still searching for perfection. I'm sure that many of the P2Ps/P2Ws would do likewise (to stay competitive) making this ideal for BP to make money off of by securing repeat business.

Now that I'm over my initial shock of the changes between the two versions of Crafting 2.0, I'm onto bargaining.

That makes me think of the 5 Stages of Grief/Loss:

1. Denial/Isolation: After the recent iteration came out, I was shocked that a nearly perfect system (from the player's PoV) had been so drastically nerfed and I didn't want to get on test server when I got home.

2. Anger: I was upset. I had spent time making my first guide. I had planned how this was going to impact my character. I felt betrayed by the dev team.

3. Bargaining: This is where I am now. I'm trying to offer up alternatives that might save me from progressing to stages 4 and 5, but if these fall on deaf ears or if they have already made up their minds...

4. Depression: I'll feel defeated, like all my hard work was for nothing. I'll likely have a hard time playing or even thinking about Drakensang.

5. Acceptance: At this point, I'll realize that it is over and I just have to deal with it. I'll have two choices. Keep playing after not being able to make a difference or leave the game. Time will tell if we ever get this far.

 

First of all, nice mockup!
I still don't think it's necessary to select the kept items (positions) freely, as I don't share Traki's belief that the enchantment pick is marked.
Anyway, it would only prevent "fraud" if we could choose the items kept AFTER crafting, at revert time.
I think I would also prefer this (paying for items kept a posteriori) rather than increasing the gambling cost (a priori).

In general, I still think that just increasing the cost is not the best mechanism to restrict excessive reverting.

On the other hand, my own desire to craft is yelling at me to like this a lot better than the current version "2.0.3", and limiting the refunded items to 3 is at least one step to emphasize farming over paying.

As some people already suggested before (by now I can't remember if here or only on the German forum) it would make sense to me if we would at least get out the glyphs of the destroyed items.

Increasing the Andermant to gold ratio for the crafting/revert costs might also help to reduce the P2W "danger".

 

I'm not convinced either (but it could certainly help put some conspiracy theories to rest), but this has a more intuitive feel, more obvious with graphical cues as opposed to just some text, and it allows for easier picking of how many items to save. It is a simple user interface that is easy to understand from a glance. I bet you had a decent understanding before you even read the text, and if it was live, the fact that you couldn't lock all 4 would clue you into the last detail you'd need to infer. A good UI should make a reasonable amount of sense, even without labels.

If I'm understanding you, you and I actually have diametrically opposed views on this. My thoughts are that you have the same chance at getting what you want in either case, but by paying in advance, you declare just how much your items are intrinsically worth to you. If you want to trust luck, you pick 0 or 1. If you want more of a safety net, you may pick 2 or 3. In this set up, you pay a price based on what you judge your items to be worth before you see the result. In your example, if you are lucky, your intent going in and the subjective value you assign to the items is irreverent because you get to see the result first.

Think of it like going into the final exam for a class. In my example, the teacher offers you an extra credit project worth up to a quarter of your grade that will take a long but reasonable amount of time, but you have to turn it in before you start the exam. To make the decision, you have to judge how you are doing in class and if you need it and maybe also consider how well you studied for the final. Maybe, you know you are doing so badly that no amount of extra credit will help. These are all thing to consider and weigh carefully due to the significant impact that it can have.
In your circumstances, it is nearly identical, except you get to see how you did on the exam before you decide if you want to take the extra credit and then you have that "long but reasonable amount of time" to finish the project. At that point, you are able to make a decision with knowledge of all pertinent facts. You stand to benefit with no risk.

And benefit without risk doesn't line up well with BigPoint's model of getting people to spend money. I think it is already a tough sell to get the developers' buy in with an idea like this, but if there is even a chance that they would consider offering 3 items back as opposed to just 2, I doubt that it would be without some sort of mechanism that benefits BigPoint in some way, and this does.