New Dye. No Recipes? Crafting Dead?

[hobbit1968]

So these new Dyes. It states they will be in the festivals, but will there be no Dye Recipes for scholars? Is this the norm now? Is crafting pretty much dead?

[groucho42]

It certainly looks like it. They dropped new shards with MT, promising recipes. They said that they'd move the guilds up from Westemnet. They said a lot of things. U18 had nothing.

[Urwendil]

No recipes for the new dyes.
Throwaway (single-use) recipes for essences.
Nothing for the guilds.

[miriadel]

the new dyes will be new rewards in festivals. From an early beta build it was said that in each festival, two of the new dyes will be available for festival currency, and two will be available for Mithril Coins. The dyes available for Mithril Coins this year will be available for festival currency next year, and vice versa. Dye vials, not recipes from what we know.

[Thundertrain]

Don't be silly! Only end-game crafting is dead!

Let's take stock of where things presently stand:

-When the level cap was at 95, we essentially had full crafting to support it. Then the level cap increased to 100 with Update 14, and the only thing we got level 100 recipes for was LI's. For everything else, regular recipes went to 90 and guild/single-use recipes were 95. Your only options for getting on-level gear for end-game were grinding out dailies or running group content / BB. It stayed that way for over a year, when...

-Update 17 arrived! A new crafting tier was added...finally. And all that hard work you put into maxing out your rep with your crafting guild amounted to...nothing. Because they didn't add any guild recipes at all. For those of us that prefer crafted gear to grinding out dailies and such, we were in for a lovely surprise. The only crafted armor and jewelry options were for essence-slotted pieces. Guess what you can only get by grinding? ESSENCES. No matter what, YOU WILL GRIND! (Or spend a ton of gold in the AH, I guess. That's still an option.) Not addressed in this new crafting tier were minstrel instruments (still at max of 90).

-Update 18 has now arrived. The level cap has been increased for the first time in almost 2 years to 105. Certainly, this should mean a serious update to the crafting professions, right? Maybe some non-slotted options for armor and jewelry? Certainly they'd look at minstrel instruments after all this time. And they couldn't possibly do another update without even so much as a single guild option for the top crafting tier, could they?

YES THEY COULD. Update 18 rolls out with not a single new recipe to be found. Zip. Zero. Crafting was 100% ignored in this update. Pulling a quote directly from the Dev Diary on crafting that came with Update 17:

"In future updates we will be adding more recipes to region reputation and guild barter, but not for U17. Any new crafting guild recipes that are released in the future will only require Westemnet Master of the Guild reputation; we have no plans to add another tier of required crafting guild reputation."

So they plan on fleshing out Tier 10 crafting...at some point. Just not sure when.

At this point, I can only draw one conclusion: The situation in the development of this game is pushing the staff to their limits. They only have enough people and resources to focus on the bare essentials. Between generating any kind of new content to keep players active and trying to work through the continuing disaster of the server move, there's no time or money for anything else. It's honestly not that I believe the devs aren't working hard, it's that I believe the game is under-funded and under-staffed. Crafting will continue to be pushed to the back burner (along with a lot of other things) for the foreseeable future.

[Macroscian]

When the level cap was at 95

So that would be three years with the same looted recipe scrolls? The rest effectively auto granted and rep grind? All about LIs?

[gripply]

I tend to judge how many "crafters" we have by how much food and dye there is in the AH. It takes time to make these things. Sometimes I see 5 dyes for sale, hinting at a guild recipe being used. It takes too much time for me to even make my alts Battle Lore, Superior Anorien food, and Westemnet Tokens, etc. So anyone who's doing that and selling it, isn't able to spend more than a couple of days a week playing, even if they do play obsessively for hours a day. Well, maybe they can, but then they are using the "speed crafting" which assumes they are richer than I am IRL.

I still see plenty of food at all levels, not just Anorien, and plenty of dyes, so we have a lot of people just hanging back in Galtrev, crafting and logging out. They're probably the same kind souls who make strangers LI's for free or a 10g tip if they have the symbols for it. I've done that myself, mostly before I got serious about leveling..

As much as I'd like to have lots more recipes, I want the server performance fixed first. It's been much better for me since U18, but now we have lag with task boards. At least we're not in danger of falling off a cliff while turning in tasks, but..

I did see ads on their site though... they are hiring. So that's all to the good. And I haven't seen so many people online in a while. I haven't had to compete for mobs like this in a long time. Not even MT/U17 was this busy. I hope this will lead to an improvement in crafting and soon. Probably one of the 18.n updates, I hope. It would be nice if they just said something about when they expect to release it.

[thalialotr]

I'm going to keep wishing for Wildflower Honey to be ground found as the other Drops are.

Farming for mats (and farming) is a fun part of the game for me. Previous replier had a cogent thought about the amount of dev time and where it is spent. Crafting is a low priority.

[gripply]

Honestly I think the "priority" of the developers is not set by any logic, but by assumptions laid down in ecommerce decades ago... new content faster = profits. But as gamers we know how annoying it is to hit the same "dead zones" in leveling and "dead zones" in crafting over and over again. If we were playing paper and pen, we'd have fixed the dead zones long ago with a house rule. Here it is out of our control. I suggest a new equation for gaming ecommerce: annoyance = loss of profits, a great game that makes sense all the time in every level range is better than one with a breakneck pace of new updates. For me anyway. I'm getting sick of the same old same old, oh look, shiny new update... oh, the update is broken anyway... it will now stay broken because we have to make a new update with new content... enough already.

[hobbit1968]

Its been some time since I started this thread. Since it has been a while since I asked, Is there any work being done now to update crafting in some form? would be nice to see some new higher level recipes. Or even add something small like housing furniture. Anything would be appreciated.

[YamydeAragon]

... Or even add something small like housing furniture. Anything would be appreciated.

Oh i like your idea! Here are my suggestions about how to implement it:

• One time use recipes that can be bough on store, for crafting station house decorations (will have the same cost as the currently available crafting stations):
• The recipes will be Anorien tier.
• The normal result of the recipe will have the same quality as a landscape superior crafting station.
• The critical success of the recipe will have a critical success bonus buff & material processing speed bonus buff.
• Ingredients to craft them will require a combination of the ingredients from the crafting abilities, that can use each station
• The crafting station will be made by proper crafting ability:
  
  1. crop farming patch made by farmer
  2. oven made by cooks
  3. workbench made by woodworker
  4. forge made by metalsmith.
  5. study made by scholars
• Each recipe will also require 2 shards & 1 special wild essence ingredients
• Each crafting station can have several alternate outputs styles:
  
  1. hobbit
  2. common human
  3. dwarven
  4. elvish
  5. rohirrim
  6. gondorian

The purpose of this recipes is to provide alternate appearances to the store bough crafting stations that can clash with the rest of the player furniture if the player have no interest in Gondorian styles. This will add cosmetic value to owning a crafting station. Also provide a incentive on store bough crafting station recipes if they have special buffs.

[Thundertrain]

Its been some time since I started this thread. Since it has been a while since I asked, Is there any work being done now to update crafting in some form? would be nice to see some new higher level recipes. Or even add something small like housing furniture. Anything would be appreciated.

We plan to continue to focus on the flora system short-term.

So...no. You may save your appreciation.