Backpacks on Test: Now Bigger

The solution is simple imo. Just do the following: Continue with the current plans to make bags/boxes the same size. Add 2 new carpenter items: Huge Mahogany Strongbox (42 slot) and Gigantic Mahogany Strongbox (44 slot).....but make them LORE!!!! That solves all the problems. People that dont want to change what they have now wont have to. Bags will still be the new preferred do to the wr. There will be a market (albiet smaller) for carpenters as most everyone, even mages, can use and will want the 2 larger containers on their toons. There will be an increased market for tailors, as everyone will likely prefer the bags over boxes for all their remaining slots. Even if both new boxes were 42 it wouild still leave a small market for the carpenters. All of the resulting bags/boxes can be switched out of bank/inventory. End result is everyone gets more space (YAY!) and both carpenters and tailors get a boost in their sales (YAY!). Everyone wins. Best of all this would seem to be a relatively minor fix to impliment, when compared to the majority of solutions. Just my 2cp

TheStepChylde wrote:

Actually that's not a bad idea.. except make a single massive box, "huge [rare] bankbox" (rare only), which has +4 or even +8 slots over the rare box/bag but make -that- one take an extra combine and an extra component (like an imbued strongbox) -and- give it massive penalties to all stats (except strength), all resists, and mitigation, add in penalty to critical hit, too, and it would only be used for storage in the bank or vault.
I would definately buy some for my shared bank at the very least.
The reason it shouldn't be lore IS because of alts. But if you make the getting of it hard enough, it becomes not the only thing used and so doesn't completely ruin the rest of the market.

DominoDev wrote:

Is this going to include the melee druid set for t9? Inq's and Pally's got the righteous set for t8 ( which needs to be back filled) while melee druids got nothing of the sort anywhere. I assume the stat consolidation modifies this question somewhat but there has been no word as to how that's going to work nor if it's even going to make it into the expansion so any official word as to how those will be resolvedwould be welcome.
When you say reducing the weight a bit, that doesn't read like parity. Is this a small change now while you decide on a large change for later?
Rijacki wrote:

I disagree with the suggestion. It doesn't really address the non-rare box, sounds more complex than it has to be and it squanders an opportunity to completely rethink strongboxes.

My suggestion is to add 2 recipes. There is nothing that complex about that. Forget the stat penalties/bank only/1000 wt stuff. Just keep it simple. As far as the non-rare box, that seems like a done deal. I cant see the devs scrapping it or completely redoing it. The 2 recipes addresses the biggest issue, which is the hit the carpenter market will take. My suggestion negates that hit somewhat.

Meirril wrote:

Just for some background, I am an 80 carpenter. Even if you are overburdeoned with weight you can still move. Yes it's slow, but not only can you go to the broker, but you can also use a bulletin board in your house/guildhall to put things up for sale.
Most importantly, you cannot become so overburdeoned that you absolutely cannot move.

I think this is an absolutely flawless, perfect solution. Especially because it would be easy to 'program'. The only hitch is helping people with strongboxes in their inventory swap over to backpacks, which could be solved with an exchange merchant of some kind.

*edit* Idea! rather than worrying about an exchange merchant to make the transition easier... just make backpack changes retroactive but do not make my suggested strongbox changes retroactive.

TheSpin wrote:

The "original designs" for many, many things have gone the way of the Qeynosian Dodo bird. They were terrible designs, mercifully hacked to bits by natural selection.
Hobbling the game and forcing enormous amounts of item moving between bank and inventory isn't entertaining. People just want to go have fun, not repeatedly putz about with bad design elements in the name of "earning it".
It feels a lot like being forced to look at a book during battle until you are 35 instead of ... being part of the game. Sure, sure, that was 500 years ago for us but why can't we leave bad ideas alone and stop resurrecting them by accident because the book is in our way?

Trellium wrote:

The idea that tailors make backpacks for you to carry and carpenters make boxes for you to store is NOT a bad idea though. I think it's a pretty dang good idea and it was just never implemented correctly.

Things are not all bad with the carpenter. At least the bag stands should be flying off the market anytime soon. Anyway, I do think that it is quite unfortunate that the move totally nerf the whole box idea and recipe. Yes, the carpenters have it better on the whole as compared to the tailors, but that should never be a reason to reduce one type of recipe redundant. As mentioned times and again, the rare wood boxes trade would be totally killed as no well-informed carpenter would even bothered using the rare wood to make extra boxes on the market. Not a good way to allow others to appreciate the diversity and the hardworking brains behind all the wonderful craft recipes. I am not an advocate for more complex things as well. I say, keep it simple. Don't penalise anyone with new implementations. Make both bags and boxes equal. Let both bags and boxes contain the same amount of items, and let them weight the same. That way, the trade of both boxes and bags would be under fair competition, and the market will sort itself out. More importantly, there should not be too much outrage from the gaming population, which might be daunted in the manual item moving from boxes to bags. As for carpenters making boxes exclusively for the market, I would advice them to visit the homeshow forum and look at the wondrous work carpenters could do to expand theirs and others gameplay experience in the game (beyond the endless pursuits of 1s and 0s).

Svetlanavera@Nagafen wrote:

QFE
These people are the ones who drive players away from the forums, everybody be happy, don't say anything negative because if you do it's bad. We went through this with the prior TS dev, some people thought he walked on water and shouted down anyone who didn't like what was happening, those people left, as did I, because it was just such a club of sycophants.
Everyone can speak and everyone does so because they love this game, not liking something or wanting a change to happen or not happen is an expression of the love of the game and that should be encouraged, not discouraged.
As for bags and boxes, if you are going to make one bigger then make them all increase in scale.
Maybe make a different stat decide how much we can carry instead of the same stat that affects melee classes more than mage/priest classes, it has always seemed odd to me that the same stat affected both, so why not just add a new stat to determine our ability to carry weight, something that is not related to adv stats.

Beghn had supporters? I must have missed that.

Deson wrote:

He might have had some of those thingies that keep your socks... aren't those called supporters?

DominoDev wrote:

So leave the current boxes alone and only have the effect on new boxes.
Of course that would only work if the new boxes were better in some other way - like being larger

Karrane1 wrote:

The idea is that boxes should remain larger than bags, but have a penalty for carrying them that is not as easilly overcome as the weight.
Then there would be a market for boxes as they have more space, and a market for bags as they do not have the penalty.
Currently tailors have a much smaller share of the container market than they were intended to have as many people just use boxes. Tailors also have fewer saleable products than carpenters which will be even worse if they lose adornments which is the plan. Some furniture sells well, and some of that is carpenter made.

RandomStream wrote:

I have a carpenter and a tailor. I don't know of any item the tailor sells that needs to be replaced every tier. If you mean the crafted armour, I don't even make full sets of it for my own toons. I get asked to make the PotP robes more often than a set of crafted armour. One guildy was considering getting a T7 set for a mage earlier this week, but decided to stick with the T4 stuff he has until T8. Then he got the fabled robe from Nest. We were doing the hat quest so that is 2 slots he won't want crafted stuff for.
Furniture sells much better than tailor crafted armour.
The things my tailor gets asked to make most often are adornments.

DominoDev wrote:

It was unfair. However, the armour revamp was largely cancelled out by the increase in levelling speed, such that only classes that depend on armour to do their job (i.e. fighters) need to bother about armour until the top tier, and the large number of quests that give better armour than the T8 mastercrafted (a lot of which is labelled treasured). The hex dolls change came after every one had switched to the better charms available from other sources (which are still better). I think I have had one request for a vest for appearance. They were good attempts, but my tailor sells less at 80 than he did at 70, and mostly what he gets asked for are adornments.
He does manage to sell bags whenever I can be bothered to make them. The few gold profit is insignificant for a level 80 adventurer, which he also is.

Terron@Splitpaw wrote:

The main reason RoK wasn't good for armor was the armor revamp came too late. When RoK hit, armor only had stats and with treasured gear having lower stats but +damage/heal and +crit it was obviously better despite the hit you took in stats, hp, and mitigation. Only fighters kept good EoF gear because they needed the mitigation to make it through fights. After the revamp the armor's bonuses outweighed the slight loss in mittigation. However, by then the boat had sailed and the majority of the market was already working on their 77 legendary armor (or better). People leveling up today do get the 72 armor on their way to 80.
In the 80-90 market, if the 82 armor is better than tier 1 shard armor, it will sell to the second wave. If its better than tier 3 shard armor...that is a huge power increase and we're all going to have to brace for another RoK-like shock as we adjust play styles again.
All in all, I don't anticipate a lot of sales early in SF, but as people outgrow SF and look towards the next expansion we'll start selling a healthy amount of 82 armor.
Now if something could be done about jewelery...

Terron@Splitpaw wrote:

If you're a fighter class soloing, you don't even need that. I've gotten around to making armor for my bruiser twice. I made her a gi from Deathfist Citadel, but more for appearance than any stats. I made her some T6 Mastercrafted and she was almost to 60 a couple play days later and now is almost 64 (I think in 5 play days since I made the T6 for her with some of the time spent crafting and harvesting). I might make her the T7 Mastercrafted, but only because I want the appearance, not because she needs to use it. Heck.. some of her gear is 40s stuff and she's still mowing down things. I might just wait until she's going to hit 72 'cause that gi is so similar to the T7 one you have to have them side by side to notice the shade difference and I might as well use -that- one for appearance as the other.. except I have T7 rare hides in abundance, just no where to use them.
The fact I have, as a level 80 mastered tailor, rare hides and rare roots for ALL tiers and don't bother to do diddly with them 'cause I know making them into armor is pretty pointless (sells for peanuts and my own characters, unless level locked, would out level them almost in less time than it takes to make them) says a bit.
Yes, tailors got some recipes back filled. Yes, they got some stats improved. Hex dolls, though, were about the only improvement that really mattered and about the only item that sells with any consistancy until T8. So maybe I was being a -little- unsolicitious.
BUT, as an example, a T3 carpenter item which can be made for a few silver (including buying the resources on the broker) can be sold for several gold. Same with any teir for carpentry. They don't need a corner on the whole container market. AND mages and some priests don't need to be penalised by not being a fighter or scout class.

Rijacki wrote:

I have both a tailor and a master carpenter, though the tailor is only in the 50s at present. The tailor can easily sell some of the broadcloth vests, sackcloth shoulders, and general mastercrafted cloth armor for quite a large profit ... if I had the time to keep these in stock I could be quite rich, even at level 50. So I think that claims that tailors are impoverished are not quite the case. The carpenter got so bored of making strong boxes for all my friends and guild that I long ago swore off ever making them to sell on the broker, and hasn't suffered in the slightest for it.

However, I think it is important to keep in mind though that sales vary a lot between servers. Carpenters on the roleplay servers can probably turn a much higher profit than on some others. Tailors may also have an advantage selling appearance items there. Any crafters on PvP servers seem to have a pricing advantage due to rarity of crafters. Etc. There are people in this thread and others who firmly believe that both (a) carpenters have a ridiculous advantage and make a fantastic profit, and (b) carpenters are utterly useless and have nothing that sells. Also, (c) tailors are very well off and have lots of desirable and profitable items, and (d) all tailor armor is utterly undesirable and nothing sells but hex dolls.

None of these people are necessarily wrong, they are all telling the truth about what they have observed. But there are both behavioural and environmental factors that can play a huge part in the performance of both classes (all crafting classes, in fact). Behavioural - obviously, knowing your market, knowing what sells on your particular server, and making the effort to keep it in stock; and environmental - what server you're on and what its market demands are. Simply making whatever you're levelling up on and slapping it on the broker is never going to optimize your profit, and there is no change we can reasonably make that will make this behaviour profitable. What we do hope is that both carpenters and tailors have a wide enough range of items that will appeal to different situations that any player on any server has the ability, if they put in the effort, to find items that sell well. This obviously isn't easy to do but I'm reasonably happy that both tailors and carpenters are in this situation and I don't believe the backpack changes are going to imbalance this. I could be wrong - and if I am, then we'll ponder plan B - but it won't be possible to know this until the changes go live.

Thanks again for all the input and opinions, which help very much to examine all sides of the issue before deciding the best solution.

I have been following this post for a few days and there are several great ideas here that could be expanded upon. Love them, hate them, but some make a lot of sense when you consider the amount of options carpenters and tailors have for storage. One that I would like to talk a little bit about is specialty bags.
The way I look at the current bag situation is that the weight reduction is the trade-off for having less slots in the bag. Now that the weight mechanic is all but useless in all but the extremely low levels and some mages, it would make more sense to replace or supplement the trade-off with another mechanic.
Adding new bags to the game that use the same idea as sales crates (generic sales crates have less slots than specialized ones) would help diversify the storage market by providing the user the ability to decide how to equip themselves and organize their equipment.
Additionally, an increase to the number of slots in generic bags would be necessary, since there is such a large difference between bags and strong boxes, but this increase would not need to be anywhere near the amount currently proposed.
I will use T7 crafted items as an example of how this system would work (feel free to tweak the numbers around too)

Horned Leather Bag
26 slots Currently 18 slots
Dragonhide Leather Bag
30 slots Currently 22 slots
Dragonhide Potion Satchel (Potions, Poisons)
40 slots
Dragonhide Book Bag (Spell Scrolls)
40 slots

Dragonhide Harvesting Bag (Raw Materials and Collectibles)
40 slots
Dragonhide (Instert Specialty Here) Bag
40 slots
Rosewood Strong Box
32 slots
Ebony Strong Box
36 slots
Ebony Salesman Crate
60 slots
Ebony Scroll Stand
80 slots

Each of the existing bags received an increase of 8 slots, bringing them closer to strong boxes, but not quite there (this is based on the assumption that weight reduction will still be present on bags as an incentive since not everyone is capable of carrying 6 strong boxes). Sales creates have an increase of 20 slots from the generic to the specialty versions. In the bag version, this increase was placed at 10 (since you are allowed to take the bags with you, unlike sales crates). This gives the specialty bags more slots than strong boxes, but you are limited to the type of items you place in them.
An added benefit to specialty bags would be a level of item sorting that players currently do not have. If you want to know where all your looted adepts are, they are in THIS bag, potions and poisons, in THIS bag. No more searching through your inventory and confusing "a skeleton arm" with "a cracked wood elf bone" or "large meaty bone".
Not everyone will buy the generic bags, not everyone will buy strong boxes, not everyone will buy the specialty bags. Thats the point. There are more options for the player to decide how to utilize their inventory space. We can create a system that allows players choose their space options based on practicality, rather than simply buying the cheapest item on the broker.

Arphenion@Crushbone wrote:

I especially like the idea of a potion bag, a fuel component tool box, a trinket bag for collections and or even a bag for all the quest's stuff for updates/what not’s. I have been thinking of something along that back when they decided to make charms slots but take it one step further and give it a actual slot for them instead of taking up any of the six we have
I do want to know if sales crates will eventually get bigger too with expansion too?
I also want to know if the evil eye HQ bag and collection reward bags will also get looked at too? I know this is not tradeskill related but maybe ask the right person who can say weather they will get looked at too for once this change goes live to the backpacks the desirability for them will go down even more so.