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Sir Ralph
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Long live teh Schwampel!
Dec 2001
time: 06:34
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Yes, some people do and it is sad that they have to. However, I know the same habit of having multiple accounts from other games also, and it doesn't really make a difference if its purpose is to create a trade mule, to have more character slots (Sony is usually generous with that), to have an attached buffer, insta-healer or nukebot or whatever.
By the way, if you have a second account, it gives you the opportunity to create a second forum handle, some kind of officially allowed DL if you want to call it so.  If you keep your mouth shut, you can be voice of reason and hyper-troll at the same time. This is a feature Apolyton sadly lacks. 
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Sir Ralph
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Long live teh Schwampel!
Dec 2001
time: 06:34
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A little update on this matter:
The next two live-updates will see a gradual introduction of an offline selling system. In the first step, you can put items in your house vault (2 slots, which can be multiplied using boxes) up for sales and go adventuring. This is nice, but still not offline. The next step will allow you to log out during sales, too, so items in your house vault can be sold while you're offline. It's not quite as convenient as Blizzards Auction house, but hey, I think it suffices.
This will reduce the amount of mule accounts and thus, cost Sony money. I wonder how many cancelled accounts it took to get them that far.
By the way, there are very promising changes in tradeskills coming. Tradeskills were the only aspects of the game I was unhappy with; besides lacking PvP, but oh well, I knew this beforehand.
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Sir Ralph
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Long live teh Schwampel!
Dec 2001
time: 06:34
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There's no part of this game undergoing more changes than tradeskills. And with changes I don't mean small tweaks, but substancial changes of game rules. This leads naturally to a quick change of the player attitude, too. I am trying to be a critical player and call a boring timesink a boring timesink, if I see one.
My priority for tradeskills is high. In all games I participated in, my characters were respectable members of the community of their particular city with honorable professions, not just mere thugs or mercenaries  . So my paladin in EQ2 is at the same time a pretty high weaponsmith. This is, by the way, a substantial reason, why I am leveling slower than others even though I spend a big amount of time.
While the adventuring and questing part of EQ2 felt very mature and well thought for its audience at launch, and is completed with new content on a weekly basis, the tradeskilling part felt like an early beta at best. The economy is approaching a stable and well-balanced status now, but the way was long and thorny.
I will try to break down a few of the core changes:
1) There were major flaws in the pricing system. At higher levels you could generate huge amounts of money selling simple combines like metal bars or liquids to NPCs. While combines in tier 1 (level 1-10) could yield only a few copper, combines in tier 5 (level 41-50) were rewarded with gold. The effort was the same in both cases, one combine is one combine. But the reward was vastly imbalanced. Sony balanced this by increasing fuel prices and dramatically dropping buyback prices. The core principle is now, you can make a minimal profit by selling to an NPC (20% of money invested for raws and fuel, or less), you can make a medium amount by doing city writs (about 50% and additional status, but less crafting experience), and you can make a nice profit by selling to other players. This should have been introduced since launch.
2) At launch, crafted items were designed to last forever. This quickly led to a saturation of the economy and a beginning deflation, because there were vastly more crafted items in the game than money could be generated to buy them at least at the lower levels, and than players needing them. Looted and quested items worsened the situation in addition, since they also lacked decay. This was addressed by making nearly all items of equipment (jewelry, armor, weapons) attuneable, meaning you can't hand them down or sell them to players anymore after you used them. You can, however, sell them back to NPCs for a small part of their initial value.
3) Sony had created a system of interdependencies between the nine professions, which was a good intent, but poorly executed. There were professions (alchemists and provisioners) nearly or completely exempt from this, and the alchemists exploited this by holding the whole crafting community hostage by price-gauging at hearts content. This was not an issue for me, because I have a pocket alchemist (alt), but for most people it was. This was addressed by partly lifting the interdependancy by introducing new skills. Now everyone can make the refined and intermediate combines he needs for his production, but he needs to spend more money on it, because he needs more fuel. For an example, a jeweler needs a metal spike to make a rune. He can forge the spike himself, but he needs 2 fuels for it, while a weaponsmith needs only one and thus, can make the spike cheaper. This effectively made gauging impossible, while interdependancy for fair prices still works.
4) Since 80 or 90% of players don't tradeskill but are pure adventurers, Sony spends more loving for them and keeps adding new monsters and attractive loot drops almost by the day. This however hurts the crafters. In particular, my weaponsmith made a good living in level 20-30, but now he is level 32 and in this level range superior weapons drop like sweat from a fighting ogre. Nothing to sell for the poor smith. Sony threw us a bone by introducing new recipes to create enchanted/imbued/procing weapons. This was introduced yesterday, I still can't comment if it's an improvement or not.
All these changes are very good and necessary. But they should have sorted these things out during the beta and launched the game with a well thought out tradeskilling system. Beta-testing on live content may be cheaper, but on the long run costs customers.
Tradeskilling in EQ2 and WoW are substantially different. WoW-combines are one-click, no fail. This may be fun for some, but is not very challenging to say the least. In EQ2, every combine is a mini-fight, where you have to push progress and prevent to lose durability by using tradeskill arts. If you lose too much durability, the quality of the item will drop. Of course, other players buy with minimal exceptions only pristine (best) items. You can build up a good reputation if you sell good stuff for reasonable prices. Or you can ruin it by doing the opposite.
Crafting is designed to be depending on skill and experience. This is by and large a very good concept, however the role of the RNG is still too big for my gusto. Also, the combines take way too long for me, between 30 seconds for trivial ones, up to several minutes. This generates a large timesink for the dedicated crafter. I prefer Sonys system over one-click-no-fail-and-ready bigtime, it's way more challenging and you can get really good by developing your own combinations of using tradeskill arts, but I would love it even more if the time needed for a combine would be reduced to about 10s minimum with a hard cap at 1 min for difficult combines. As it stands, it simply takes too much time.
Last edited by Sir Ralph on 22-03-2005 at 17:23
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16-03-2005 07:06
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