More CONTENT not more ZONES.

Hi. I'm Rotherian, and I'm a Carpenter. I used to sell a decent amount of furniture, but that market dried up well before the Marketplace arrived. One of the weaknesses inherent in the carpentry profession is that any item that I make and is used can then be re-sold by the person that purchased it from me later on. So somebody that decided to decorate in ironwood, for example, then shifted to eucalyptus, could sell the ironwood items that I sold them and compete against me for sales (with an item I made, no less). The same thing goes with strongboxes and salesman crates. Anything that I produce, as a carpenter, that is not consumable has this same problem. Additionally, every time new recipes are released, you usually only have a couple of days before the serious undercutters mass produce so many of an item that it isn't even funny and price them barely over fuel costs. Those two factors combined means that, as a carpenter, you have a very limited window of opportunity to make any sort of decent profit.

Your best bet is to have a fluid business plan that can take advantage of changes in the market. Notice that someone is buying up all the Black Star Sapphires under 50p? Grab about half of the ones you have in your personal harvest depot and throw them up on the broker. Notice that fulginate is selling for quite a bit more than you'd expect? Go out and harvest those nodes for a couple of hours. Throw the fulginate on the broker, put the rest of the stuff in your depot. People keeping the harvests overabundant, chances are that they aren't tracking the locations of all shinies.

Or, if you find you have time, can't sleep, and are bored, do city writs for status and harvest while you are out.

I guess that the point I'm trying to get at is that there are steps you can take to improve your personal financial position. - it just takes some work on your part.

It would be pretty nice if they added a bunch of high level rare mob spawns wandering around in older zones, with a chance of dropping items with unique stats/abilities.

Like an Epic x 2 Lv 95 Bee Queen in Enchanted Lands, a huge Lvl 98 Heroic Elephant in commonlands, etc. etc. etc...

That would give newbies a "omg, I can't wait to be able to kill that" experience the first time they see it (don't have them too close to quest NPCs and similar though...) and the older players a reason to back to the old zones every now and then.

Kind of like the Avatars but not so dangerous and rare.

I remember I was in the enchanted lands once when I was new to the game and around lvl 35 or so, and I saw a huge lvl 80 octopus in the water there. I even think it was epic. It gave me something to look forward to.

Never seen that octopus again though since that so I have no idea what it was all about...

Although I can't recall which game exactly I think there was a game at one time that gave the crafter of the item some type of benefit if/when someone either used or resold the item later. Maybe something could be done like a broker fee but call it a resell fee. Granted maybe only 1-5% but at least would be something. Although I do doubt something like that would come to EQ2 at this stage of the game.

EQ2 has gone more towards Mario and less towards Zork. That makes me sad.

Looks aren't everything. You're so caught up in appearances, you don't realize the items that can be crafted generally have more utility in decorating. Please have a look through the homeshow forum or your local leaderboards to see how people make use of the "ugly" stuff. Look at how they "take the brunt of it." Hundreds and thousands of items are made on a regular basis for people to explore their creativity. None of those people get stuck because they don't have cherry rosewood to use as a building block.

Prior to the release of reactant gear, armorers and weaponsmiths have always had a lack of utility. That's due to the items available from grouping and raiding, many of which have great appearances. There's also the fact that anything they make is only used once. Now that we have apprentice recipes, experimentation and refining, there's a little more for those classes to do.

It's like I noted in the post prior to yours: Marketplace items are generally luxury items with no effect on gameplay. If they didn't have the items there, you would never see most of them in-game. They're extra art assets that otherwise wouldn't be made because it wouldn't be cost effective.

Deveryn, I think the point people are trying to make is that while SC gear is basically fluff/appearance stuff, the mere fact that it exists as Marketplace items means that it isn't in player's recipe books, which means players lose out on being able to make and profit from them.
Also, think about it, when was the last player-crafted appearance gear introduced into the game? Thurgadin casual clothing with the release of DoV? Appearance clothing has always been made by Tailors as I remember, but even that has dried up as the Marketplace has gained momentum

Rotherian, seeing as we are on the same server and I dont have a high level Carpenter. May I suggest that you check the broker. I can not find many good salesman's crates, guild hall pedestals, or any of the statues that carpenters can make and I have been looking.

I have been working on my adorning level and noticed that there were 0 low level green adorns listed. It seems common to find whole areas that dont have anything listed on the broker. I can not count the times that I have gone looking and not been able to find something. I think a lot of it has to do with people not wanting to craft stuff that does not advance there level. I tend to look at it as areas where I can make a little extra $$

And my point is they're not missing out on anything. They could throw everything into recipe books and it wouldn't change the state of crafting and profit margins. You still have supply exceeding demand for goods because so many are self-sufficient since they can't / won't play the economy game right.

Deveryn, There is no economy game here. The items I can make are the exact same items any tailor can make. There is no creativity or input from the player beyond pushing 123456. This leads to a situation where

#1) people create and level crafters so they dont have to pay for it.
#2) Listings on the broker are a race to the bottom. Meaning, people make it and list it as the cheapest as there is nothing in it.

The only way I see them correcting it is to completely redesign the crafting system and allowing players to upload skins/art and designs for items. Thus making each item unique to the maker and giving them some value.

I disagree, they have begun to address those issues by a combination of researched recipes, mob dropped components, and experimentation.

It would be very difficult for you to produce the same items I may choose to create and sell. Quite likely you would be hard pressed not only to get the resources, but also the recipe, and then could you or would you experiment it the same way? Heck most of the time the experimentation choices that sell the best aren't actually the best choices.

I'll agree all crafting short of researched recipes that use truly uncommon items basically don't matter cause there are hundreds of people able to each make a nearly uncommitted supply, but I don't think that accurately describes all tradesklling, and certainly not the tradesdkilling that matters.

You're right. There is no economy game. It was already ruined and you outlined how that happened. #2 is the worst because people go below what they could get from selling to a vendor. Once upon a time, it didn't matter that you made the same items as any other tailor. It was the fact that there were fewer of your class that allowed for some kind of profit to be made. Leveling a tradeskiller wasn't always the easier route to take.

Giving players easy creative control over the appearance of items will do nothing to help what little remains of the crafting economy. It can't be done anyway. The items in this game can't simply be tinted like in EQ1. They basically have to copy / paste and recolor the asset. At this point, the only way to solve the undercutting / gouging problem is to have fixed broker sale prices for anything that hasn't been experimented on.

No, anyone can still get the researched recipes, but the mod dropped items on the broker, and copy the experimentation. A good example is the sootyfoot armor. It required a faction quests to get the recipe and special items from the sootyfoot merchant, it could only be made at the sootyfoot forge in Lavastorm. I made quite a bit of plat from it after I did the quests. I would make it and put it up on the broker at 6p a piece. It was not long before someone started making it at 1/2 the price. I lowered my price, they lowered theirs, 4 more people listed them and they price went through the floor.

Anything you can make any other person can make, it is the same item. If you can experiment on it, I can look at it and see what you did and make the exact same item.

Now, if for example you could design a sword and upload the design file to create a recipe, then upload textures to attach to the weapon to make it custom textured. Then the building system allowed you "imbune" (Best word I could think of) the weapon with it's abilities by forging it with special items. The system would have to provided 1000's of possibl drops to add to the sword, limited number per combined based on your level and skill. They could be used to bump the str, wis, etc. The drops broken into something like earth, fire, wind, water, and say ethereal where some work together and some dont (Dont mixt fire with water, etc) The list goes on, however the point begin that every craftier would have there own designs and textures as well as there own experimented combines to produce a given weapon. Making it unique to them and stopping the race to the bottom.

This thread is so far off topic now.

Never happen the current SC player studio has lots of hoops to jump through because of all the needed adjustments to the game to support those items. New textures and animations that must be added not just from your end but to every other players' client. Resolution of clipping issues and many other things. Then of course there is the issue of the guy who, in the scenario you suggest, one of unrestricted ability to just load a model and texture map, will say "I'm gonna make a sword that looks like a d***...heh heh heh". I dunno about you but I do not want to see that. Even in your scenario of "imbuning" , each item that could be added would have a set effect based on the level of the item and how many you could add based on your level. Functionally after a month of players documenting the stat changes I could look at what you did (to what would have to be a base model of a sword say) and alter mine in exactly the same way just like you can with experimentation. At that point your unique weapon is identical to mine in all but appearance.

No Deveryn is right the economy was not broken by marketplace items. TS have a hard time selling because so many people have their own stable of crafters. Hard to sell bread to a guy who owns a bakery after all.

Topic? TOPIC? We don't need no stinking topic!

It takes significant time to get all researched recipes, so for a reasonable period of time they aren't universally available. Sootyfoot is a fairly poor example, as the recipe and components were trivial. I would be quite surprised if you could readily make every SG recipe and also had the components to do so.

So true...an hour and a half of harvesting 2-3 times per week can easily rake in 1000 plat a week in rares and shinies. I do it all the time...of course I spend it like crazy too. Mostly cause I know where to find more.

I agree, with you on this Ahupu.

As to the other, without going into more technical detail there are ways to stop the issue of people making it look like that as well as textures with inappropriate stuff on them. I also agree that crow-baring it into EQ2 would not work as it is too drastic of a design change. However, Another MMO I play not only has that ability, you can do the build in-game with no extra software and upload the texture, for which they charge you a nominal amount per texture to upload and some items have 15+ textures in them.

(Warning: technical info, do not read if you are prone to headaches)
As to working out all the combinations, sure someone could spend the time to run through the combinations, however the numeric permutations of the combinations may make this unlikely. Especially if there are 1000's of drops and you are using say up to 7 per item. So if there is only 1000 drops that could be used, and up to 7 used per item, you are looking at a total number of permutations somewhere around 979,174,266,000,000,000,000 where the order is important. Include the permutations for player level and skill (1-95, and 0-475 for example) and you are looking at a number north of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. That is the number of permutations for a single sword build! All could be mathematically derived in the game without the need to specifically enumerate every possibility.
For fun you could overlaying the permutations on a mathematical fractal to identify working vs non-working combinations providing ones that fall outside the fractal parameters as non-working designs and thus cut the total ++'s by 1/2 or more on those. This means that not all combinations would work and the only way to be sure would be to try it. It also means that the design would require very little processing time, combinations could be discovered by player, and it would be difficult if not impossible to ID all combinations.

Man, I could have a lot of fun with that design.

The game Entropia Universe has a LOT of experience, dealing with online economy. And when it comes to crafting, that game has a really neat way to solve this problem.

In EQ2, the biggest issue is that there aren't very many RARE recipes. Tinkering recipes used to be very rare in the old days but then some yoloyoloswag attitude affected the game and they started to drop like crazy.

In Entropia Universe, everytime you craft an item you have an incredibly small chance to loot a blueprint/recipe. They are extremely rare to get, but it does occur. The fact that they are rare make them more unique and uncommon.

Imagine you are crafting 200 chairs one day, and suddenly you also discover a new or "new" recipe for a lvl 95 table that can't drop in any other way. That is how it works and it works incredibly well.

EQ2 could need a bit of that. Add some really rare recipes, carpentry or any other profession, both gained by crafting and killing mobs. That would spice up things a bit.

They did a nice effort with that with the New Combine crafting questline in Cobalt Scar, where you can buy blueprints for tokens you get while adventuring. This is the kind of thing the game needs more of.

As it is now, most people can make everything they want. Wish there was more Island of Mara-ish content for crafters.

Maybe time to add some more content to that zone?

Another thing Entropia Universe does really well is that some blueprints that drop are limited. Meaning they can only be used a certain amount of times and then they disappear. If recipes started dropping from mobs/crafting in EQ2 that could only be used a couple of times and then disappears, again it would create more rare items.

Fixed that for you. (read up on it a bit