Not Very Encouraging Tradeskill News

I finally received a PM from Omougi a few days ago, and what he had to say was not very assuring. Basically, he is working on other areas in addition to tradeskilling. So we do not have a full-time developer devoted to tradeskills any more.
I cannot stress enough that tradeskills NEED A FULL-TIME DEVELOPER. There are too many things that need fixing, and we need someone who is going to have enough time to come up with more things (quests, recipes) for us to do.
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Yes, it does need a full-time dev. I agree with a lot of your points 100%, and if they are able to hire someone I believe it should be done. However, that's probably not possible right now, and Omougi was handed a firestorm becoming PVP and TS dev. PVP was in shambles, and TS is almost a different game in itself. I feel like he did some nice work with swiftly introducing building blocks, and then maybe took a backseat (WL crafting line) to, I assume, work on PVP behind the scenes. Now that that's been revamped, it needs a bit more time and attention to make it perfect. He's only one man with two huge realms of responsibility, and maybe TS will have to wait its turn. We've got some older bugs and some requests we'd like handled, but who knows - we could be blown away by the crafting in the next expac!
TL;DR: Yes, but it's probably not possible right now.

Lizabethan wrote:

My initial PM was to ask if he was still our TS developer. My reply to his basically said that he has a lot of work cut out for him, since the WL tradeskill quest line was somewhat lacking.
I suggested putting the tinkered items that were recently added to the SC store in game as recipes for tinkerers, much like they did with the building blocks for carpenters. We need a lot more things to do (recipes, quests), and the fixes for the MC items messup from eight months ago.

While I completely agree that tradeskilling and the issues that go with need a lot of attention it also occurs to me that quoting what a dev PMs you is not going to encourage them to respond to us personally.

Filly67 wrote:

*shrug* He didn't respond for two months on the ts forums, so I don't expect to get much communication either way. I just felt that the tradeskill community deserved to know why tradeskills weren't addressed at all during that time, and exactly what to expect in the future.

Filly67 wrote:

What more can he say anyway?
In my opinion, that was a satisfactory response. I think people just need to have a little more patience. As it was pointed out, PvP needed a good shot in the arm first. Omougi probably wasn't the only one pulled away from something else. It's already come up in interviews that they want to do more for the tradeskills. With expansion time is coming up, I'm sure we'll hear some tradeskill news soon enough.
As far as SC items go, I think it's a bit early to ask for stuff like the tinkered set to show up in recipes. I think we got a respectable amount of items to craft. I say let them make their money to help keep things going. Getting the building blocks was a huge boost. There's been talk of putting SC items in recipes, but not much detail has been given yet.

The core of the matter is this: they are short handed and in an impossible situation at the moment. There is way more work than they can possibly get done. They have to chose between fixing the old and developing the new.
Add on that, the experienced tradeskill person left the company and they can't replace her, they can only "grow their own".
And sadly, he can't even concentrate on tradeskill matters. He has to work on other areas too.
We are frustrated, but I bet they are even more so. And we are directing our frustration at the wrong people. Upper management calls the shots. These guys are faced with trying to make it work.
Oh wait, I'm talking about where I work.
Yeah, many of us are in the same situation. Short-handed, no way to get the work done, and have bosses that don't even know enough to know what a mess they are creating looking down their noses at us thinking its our fault. If you are spread too thin there is no way you can do things well. You can do thousands of things poorly or hundreds of things well.
Quantity vs. quality, its a choice that upper management often doesn't care about. Many many places chose quantity and don't care what the results look like.

So, short summary is: misplaced anger, its the decisions that the high up people are making that is causing these problems.

Katz wrote:

Very well said.
Our biggest problem is that upper management doesn't seem to give a hang about fixing broken things, but cranking out more items for the SC store is a weekly feature. Smokejumper doesn't communicate much at all, and he is in charge (correct me if I am wrong on that part). People are sick and tired of getting the silent treatment, I think.

Raienya wrote:

These 2 quotes are where the issues are stemming from in EVERY aspect of the game. Crafting, PvP, raiding, itemisation, questing, you name it....there isn't an aspect of this game that isn't sorely lacking in time, attention, and quality EXCEPT for the $C marketplace items.
Funny how that works, isn't it?

Well, back when Skyshrine was released, Windstalker noted that they could not possible have full blown tradeskill time lines when this was exactly what we used to have for several years when Domino was in charge of tradeskills so...make of that what you will.

*Holds up sign that reads:*
Will work for tadeskills developement for free All Access Subscription.

*Looks to the left and sees more players holding up the same sign...*

/sigh

Noctew@Valor wrote:

Conditions change, time they are allotted to develop content etc shifts both ways. It's no different then managing a budget really when the funds get tight the less important things get cut out first.

What we really need is three things. First and foremost, we need the producers of the game (read: Smokejumper and Windstalker) to believe that Tradeskills are popular and that development time spent on these areas will result in playtime being spent on them. If people arn't going to increase the amount of time they put into the game with work done on tradeskills, then they are better off spending development resources on other areas like PvP, questing and raids.
Crafters have been begging for content for years. When we got some, we delighted in it. Now? We're getting less content and quite frankly we're dissapointed. Honestly, even when we were happy with the new content provided, we didn't use it as much as would be hoped and I'd blame the poor rewards (vs time spent) for that.
The second thing we need is for a content developer to get involved with Tradeskills. The "Tradeskill Dev" is a mechanics guy. Every Tradeskill Dev has been a mechanics person. What we need is someone that works on creating Quests to make content for Tradeskills. This lets the Tradeskill Dev work on fixing things instead of doing the kind of work they arn't use to doing. It would be faster for a content developer to make tradeskill quests than it would be for a mechanics dev to do the same work.
The third thing we really need is for there to be an effort to make the content for tradeskills a living process. You go out, you take orders, you make deliveries, you get paid, you have something to spend the payment on. Sleep, and repeat. We need rewards we can look forward to obtaining. We need content that keeps us engaged. We need a little variety. We need something that is rewarding and fun. And still involves crafting!

Katz wrote:

Just a mere month ago they introduced five new people (or not-so-new for a couple of them). Knowing that, I fail to believe that they are short-handed and am more inclined to believe that tradeskills got thrown under the bus.

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They could outsource to the chinese...

Normalizing the tradeskill sub-game was to be expected on a game that has made the shift to maintenance mode. They have to be able to just cut and paste forward 'new' tradeskill content going forward cause they can not afford to give it the attention of detail it had previously.
You can see this elsewhere in the game as they have little intention of adding any new 'features' that may require code, its just tweaking of what we have and more content that works just like the content we already have.
I read that to mean EQNext is less than 24 months away.

Atan@Unrest wrote:

That'd be nice. But the bitter, jaded part of my EverQuest soul is afraid that EQNext is vaporware. That, however, is due to the amazingly (inconceivably) good level of development security behind which EQNext is being produced. If it is being produced at all, of course.

And even if EQN goes live in the next 24 months, it probalby won't be playable for 36 months. You know, once the "paid testing" phase ends.

Yup, bitter and jaded today. Sorry, I'm sick IRL. Makes me cranky.

Atan@Unrest wrote:

Unfortunately they're not even cutting and pasting... not given the type of mistakes that were seen with the 91-92 lvl recipes and such....

http://eq2.zam.com/story.html?story=30381
Note Q7 and Q11.

I'm sorry, but I read that as, "yeah we'ld like to and its something we should do, we have no idea how we'll do it, when we'll do it, or what resource can get it done, but we like the idea of it being done".