Ok, there are too many threads, and I am spending too much time reading and responding right now (I know it will settle to a dull roar eventually, but right now it is overwhelming as I'm still trying to actually tweak and adjust things. Much as I tend to put in way more time than I fill in on my timecard, there are still only so many hours in a day, and I only have so many spoons.) So, instead of repeating parts of this in several threads and having the message lost, I'm making a fresh post and will sticky it for a few weeks, just so everyone has the same information. Yes, it is long, but there has been a lot of strong commentary and I want to address several points. Harvestables For normal harvesting - No, the tsavorite rate isn't broken. Neither is the deino hide. Amsonia roots, along with roots from the last couple xpacs are broken to being way too high and being fixed Dec. 7 (tomorrow). The overall numbers that all players have been pulling in have been checked, and all the other rare harvests are working as they should, and all nodes with single-rare types on them are showing the same ratios (i.e., tsavorite has the same rare rate as aligned ore and amboyna burl), and the double-rare nodes (dens and shrubs) are also at the right numbers, once you throw out the rare roots on the shrubs (which is also live on Test and will be patched tomorrow). For ponies and gardens only - Yes, there is an issue with tsavorite not showing up in pony loot or Obulus garden results. It is in QA's hands now, and if the poor guy isn't utterly overloaded, this fix may make it in for tomorrow. Otherwise, it will be in next week. VoV Missions - Tweaks Coin rewards have gone in for the daily and weekly VoV tradeskill missions, so you're no longer eating fuel costs. Amounts needed for the weekly have been adjusted downwards some. (from 60 or 90 of each to 48 or 75 of each.) I still need them to be a solid time investment, and the weekly requirements also have to cover whatever possible daily you might pick up at the same time, otherwise, many won't notice that the updates count for both, and there are math errors all over. Hopefully, however, the time investment will be down in the range where a weekly "should" be. Mission item rewards are being looked at. Yes, I've heard the complaints and arguments, repeatedly, including ones that have harassed me about it in DMs. That's all I can say for now. I want to tweak them, but it needs more than just me in the loop on the dev side, so I can make zero promises on what the final decision will be. The discussion will happen in the next day or two. The special Forlorn harvests are having the temporary tag removed with tomorrow's patch, and they will now fit in the harvestables bag. No, I will not be adjusting the missions to check your bags to see if you have leftovers from past harvesting runs. That would trivialize the "weekly" and "daily" aspect of things as players would just pre-harvest a bunch instead. The reason they were temporary in the first place was so that players couldn't do that accumulation, but also wouldn't have useless surplus filling up their bags. However, with the number of people who want to take the harvesting in small chunks and/or crash at the wrong time, the temporary bit has to go. There is no one good solution for this one, so brace for slowly filling harvestable bags over time, and clean them out as needed. VoV Missions - Reasoning First, this method of special nodes in a city zone, complete with illusion to prevent aggro was done so all level 125 crafters, regardless of their adventure level, had a safe spot to harvest, where I could speed up respawn rates considerably. Had I used normal nodes for the missions, yes, you would HAVE to go to the overland zones and do harvesting.in and around aggro with the more normal spawn times. There is no flex on that. I am not allowed to give players a zone to safely harvest normal VoV nodes. Normal nodes in Forlorn are a no-go. First it is a city zone, just like Shar Vahl, just with much, much aggro. Second, even if it was allowed for that, putting normal nodes in would mean the aggro free harvesting would have to be removed. So, this was a compromise. I know some absolutely dislike it, others love it. Sadly, this is going to be the case with every decision, and everyone and their cousin is going to have their own ideas of how it should be and for this expansion, at least, I decided to lean in favor of including the squishier crafters in things a bit more. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I know players are both excited and impatient, and I truly am listening. I won't be able to respond to every post individually and still get things done that need to be done. (And this is especially true when the same refrain is in multiple forum posts, and in Discord chat, and in DMs to me.) You are heard. On some things fixes are being implemented. In other situations, there is no one good solution that pleases everyone, and while I'll compromised as much as I am allowed, there comes a point when you may just get a firm "No" on something without an explanation, especially on things that have already been explained before - there just aren't enough hours in the day. ~Mum Jan 4 update: for NEXT WEEK'S PATCH, the special Forlorn Gist harvestables will be changed to stack to 800 so that they need to be cleared out of your bags less frequently. Also, the VoV TS weekly will allow you to choose your reward from a list of advanced recipe books.
You've done the absolutely best you can and I admire your patience. This seems to be the best plan for You AND for Us! Carry On! Peace!
Thank you so much for listening and responding to what we had to say. It is greatly appreciated and helps make the rewards or lack thereof more tolerable.
You've continued to show how much you care about the tradeskill community, and we truly appreciate it. Thank you for doing an awesome job in such difficult circumstances. =)
Thank you for the feed back. With the rates that are dropping they way there are, how does my have 85% rare chance increase equate to still super low rates. I would expect to get more than one in every 100 pulls though, no?
As Caith explained elsewhere, the rare chance stopped being a straight percentage chance a few xpacs ago. (With RoS, I believe). It is now a modifier of the base chance to harvest a rare. I don't know all the numbers involved as he handles the number-crunching and stats side of things, but I've seen the data he's pulled from players and the overall rates are where they should be. The issue, as always, is that any individual player is only seeing their tiny chunk of the RNG, and it takes hundreds of thousands of data points to actually get a valid RNG sample. I know, some folks loathe when devs bring up the RNG, but when we're looking at the overall numbers, not individual player experiences, things truly look a lot better on both the rares front and the recipe book drop rate front. That's why they're wanting me to wait a bit longer before the mission reward rates are reviewed for possible tweaking. The data from the first week looks good overall, but we want/need more data points. I am one of those people where certain alts of mine seem utterly cursed as to their luck, and other alts can seem to do no wrong. (One of my alts got a tsavorite on her first pull ever in Svarni, and got a second one 5 minutes later. Another of my alts spent 3 hours just trying to get a single deino hide) -- Bristlebane is a brat!! (Yes, there are other words I could use, but I was brought up with better manners than that!) I am also one of those people who will try and try and try for one thing, and not get it for ages and ages. Then, the moment I finally get one or no longer need it, it will drop like candy for me. So trust me, the RNG and I personally don't get along. Overall, though, I've seen enough of the numbers to know that it is doing what it should be doing, it is just really, really hard to see from the individual player perspective, which stinks, I know.
So is it a bug where your pony/goblin can no longer bring in harvests from zones you cant visit? My ponies and Goblins were working just fine in bringing in harvests from VoV (even though I dont have the xpac yet) and now today they are acting like the guild harvesters where they wont bring in harvests unless you have that specific expansion. Is it a bug or an update that I dont see anywhere?
I just want some way to be able to earn through questing or purchase with weekly/daily coins, my specific Adv. books. The supply vs demand is sooo out of whack. Thanks and good luck with your new job! I hope everyone treats you with patience and respectt!
First, I can't tell you how pleased I am to see the information being shared on a timely basis--regardless whether I personally like the outcome or not. It's so great to actually have a dedicated dev for TSing again. I'm confident things will smooth out at some point. ATM simply running dailies and weekly TSing to get a feel for how it's working. Like everyone else, some concerns about overall lack of recipe books dropping, which makes progressing awkward to say the least. However, I'm confident this will smooth out as well as the pace of things settles and people can actually move forward working on their toons.
There must still be a bug where the forlorn harvestables go poof. I was in the middle of harvesting and it kicked me out to select screen and when I came back in I didn't look in my bags and finished the quest. Only when I went to craft did it come up and saw I was missing most of the stuff I had just harvested. So something still ain't working right.
As a crafter I can tell you that I don't care how you Dev's think the rate of books drops looks because WE are not getting decent drops and are living that poor drop rate. Books are NOT dropping doing the daily's and rare drops on the weekly's and everyone is frustrated. I do not have 500million plat to buy them and THAT is what the market is asking for now because they are so rare. You did a great job on the signature line and placement of the nodes and I think everyone that post has said as much repeatedly. But someone in that group of Dev's need to understand that they, as a group, need to up the drop of the recipe books as the way it is now is beyond ridiculous. I am past frustrated and I know others are as well.
The argument of "time invested and non trivial" i do personally believe is a non issue, its sort of like saying "if you spend 20 minutes harvesting today, to craft for 5 minutes does NOT equal spending 40 minutes today to craft for 5 minutes today and 5 minutes tomorrow" ... The effort should - and ill wager it IS - the exact SAME weather i harvest 600 Items in one GO, or 60 daily for 10 days. the only - and i do mean this as ONLY - difference is that i have to spread my effort out over multiple sessions. Please do reconsider. Regarding drops rates, does the rate seen take into account the amount of crafting books that was in previous expansions injected into the system via the Overseer system ? as this time around (correct me if im wrong) we are not expecting an overseer level increase till the first GU, where last time ... it was at launch ? Please PLEASE consider putting in a merchant with the books, do away with the books on the RNG table, and allow us to purchase the books for a tradeskilling daily mission coin. This would reward effort vs the RNG that is in place, and is just horrible for some (as you so pointedly pointed out yourself) and great for others, make it an even playing field, if you put in the effort you harvest (pun intended) the rewards. Thank you
Thank you for confirming RHC is a worthless stat past RoS. This confirms what I have suspected all along. If you bust your butt to get 96% RHC, it should mean something. If a node has a 2% RHC and a player has a 96% RHC modifier then the node has just under 3% RHC, making the stat completely worthless compared to the work required to achieve said RHC.
I get that people are frustrated. I get that people disagree. I've said it is being looked into. There is no magic wand to make this process go faster, no matter how much I, or the community want it to speed up. They STILL need more data points than a little over a week of play to see the overall numbers before anything is changed much. There's nothing I can do before the next patch. (Other than to change the transmute stone chances to furniture chances, they need the rate of the books to stay the same for their number crunching to verify the rate is where it should be. When that happens you can start lots and lots of threads complaining about the "insulting" furniture drops instead of the transmute stones. ) Snarling at me, implying in a roundabout way that we're lying, or that there's some super secret plan to screw crafters over isn't going to speed up the process any. Snapping at me because the rare harvest chance process was changed 3 expacs ago isn't going to do much either. All it is going to do is make me flinch every time I unbury enough to check on the forums. And trust me, I am very, very buried right now trying to get writs (110 files had to be created JUST for a single round of TS writs) and various bug fixes in.
Hold on you saying you dontg WANT to get adv class books from overseer? or adornment books ? or that you never got any?? (in which case your full of it ... ) And sigfrida, i DO find it funny your ONLY comment on my post is trying to down play the fact that we get LOADS of craftbooks via Overseers ... doing my usuall batch atm i get about 3-4 A DAY. Now you might be right that the "quality" is lacking of the reciepes, but i do believe that we arent talking the quality here but the quantity (and i didnt even point out that we they where also dropping in solos/heroics) Now im aware youre a fan girl, but do be realistic? Thank you
I'm saying that they were happy to dole out nearly worthless recipe books by the dozens through the Overseer, but in the name of slowing progression, they're trying very hard to slow down how many people can make 300 Resolve Mastercrafted armor, jewelry and spells. This is not fangirling by any stretch of the imagination. The correct way to slow people down progress wise is to provide enough content to fill people's time over the next year until the next release, not artificially slowing progress by throttling access to better gear.
So what you where saying is that you dont approve of the throttling - and hence you agree - however you found alot of the books from overseer to be, shall we say .. sub-par compared to the few that where good... I dont disagree in the slightest, which brings us straight back to the fact that the TS dailies/weeklies loot table w RNG is ... lacking? So why didnt you just say that instead of coming across as if the overseer didnt matter... it was another avenue into the exact same loot tables etc. which is now ... not present. @denmum i know, the numbers are still being crunched etc etc. and i GET that, However to avoid the RNG could we pretty please with sugar on top, get a TS coin and a merchant w the books so we can ACTUALLY put some effort in to get what we would like instead of praying to Bristlebane the little ba$stard rarely listens, and he is even my Deity. Could we please be awarded for our efforts - which is a daily effort (far be it from me to compare it to chefs who prep and cook abundances from their prep (sorry couldnt resist)) and not be struck down by sheer LUCK. Thanks
It is being looked into as a possibility, but not in time for Tuesday's patch. When I have more of an answer, I will give it.
