Mildly Irritating: Aetolia's Pet Peeves

Xavin

Sanir said:

Xavin said:

Sanir said:

Air resonance turns it to steam or something, idk. When using the full rotation 2/3 of ascendril attacks deal fire damage and it's a little weird.

No, air resonance on frostblade is what gives frostwreath. Which is also cold damage when it procs. Lol. Firelash with water resonance is the steam hit. Windlance-fire is, oddly, cutting.

I'm 99% sure that this was stealth fixed in the last few days because a week or two ago I was bashing the daemons in the volcano and 2/3 of my attacks were hitting fire damage using the appropriate rotation. Which, of course, led to 2/3 of the attacks doing 0 damage.

Sanir

Doing Giovelli's Safari, got to Round 12 (would be rank 3 on the rankings) ... People managed to break it and enter while we were in there, completely reset our go without putting us on the rankings...

K, whatever, just continue since we're still in there... The ones who break it got eliminated long before Round 12. We end up getting to 17 before wiping... Now it says those two are the ones in the Rank1 position, because the game tracked it as being their turn.

Well that wasn't a waste of nearly 3 hours.

Czcienn

Seeing all these updates to village shops that don't actually address the biggest problem which is that cities are generally bleeding commodities outside of four very specific ones.

Czcienn

When you try to remove the viability of spamming one skill and introduce a more exciting rotation that forces you to use weaker skills to take full advantage of the strong skills and get told that it'd just lead to "spam x skill lol" and that because none of the people who you consulted with had the time/interest/knowledge of the skills to comment on the report you essentially get told to fuck off because everyone else rejected it.

When you are told that counterplay is more interesting than nerfs so you don't bother going after the mirror equiv of your skill that does 50% more damage and takes 40% as long to charge and instead try to make your skill different in a way and is just rejected because lol that's too strong.

When your skill was nerfed into the ground and was probably used less than 10 times in the last 3 months, with it actually being used successfully maybe thrice is considered "ok and balanced", when the "mirror" has skills that are much more debilitating.

What is even the point when there is no consistency and everything just happens for whatever reason.

Fezzix

Czcibor said:

When you try to remove the viability of spamming one skill and introduce a more exciting rotation that forces you to use weaker skills to take full advantage of the strong skills and get told that it'd just lead to "spam x skill lol" and that because none of the people who you consulted with had the time/interest/knowledge of the skills to comment on the report you essentially get told to unicorns off because everyone else rejected it. bY sUbMitTiNG a cLasSLeAd tHaT mAkES yOuR oThER sKiLLs jUsT aS bAd.

Ehtias

Calamity literally would have turned into a stack ascendril and win button for groups, so would fireball with the changes that were listed.

Czcienn

I know you aren't actually here for a discussion in good faith, but I'll bite anyway.

I asked to give resonance to Fireball-Fire for the sole reason of lowering its viability as a spam skill for single target damage. I added the torso damage because I couldn't think of a useless effect to go along with it so I gave it something that pretty much exists in another skill (firelash).

I asked for Fireball-Air to keep its current viability as an AoE skill. I know I said all enemies, but I admit that part may have been too strong. Sure, make it 3 targets like it currently is with Prism.

I asked for Hailstorm-Fire damage to be increased "slightly". The key word here is "slightly" because slightly more than something really low will still be low. The only reason I asked for this at all is because it really is at a level that isn't worth using at all right now.

I asked for a new air spell that does "some" lightning damage with loneliness as a single target effect for the aff route. Because I was told they don't like numbers when talking about damage I left this open with the word "some" for the AoE rotation. I was thinking it'd be on the lower end, like Coldsnap.

Together the idea was for a rotation of 3 AoE skills that did 1) a large amount of damage, 2) much less amount of damage + dizziness, 3) a moderate amount of damage + either disrupt or mana drain. This reduces the pure damage output of single target Fireball spam, while giving it a bit more power AoE-wise if the full rotation is used. With the general numbers I have in mind it'd actually be only slightly better than Prism-Fireball every few balances.

For Calamity, yes, it's meant to be usable in more situations than it currently is, and my intention was for it to be a buff because as I suggested, I would actually prefer to nerf Gravitation Collapse but shied away from it because of Keroc's comments about "counterplay" in the last round of reports. However, I don't think it's nearly as bad as you think it is. You still need to spend multiple balances to stack it, and there is still a very large window to react to it. My suggestion was to also disable the fulcrum for some time after using it, removing many of the tools available to the class entirely. To me, this was much more interesting than spend 1 balance to set off a ~20 timer to do 5k damage to everyone in the room.

I also don't buy the stack x class and win argument. Once you reach a critical mass of any class it becomes possible to kill people instantly. Heck, once you reach a critical mass of people in general you can just kill people instantly. We already see people stacking classes to great effect.

Sanir

Czcibor said:

I also don't buy the stack x class and win argument.

It's such a piss-poor argument anyway. Balancing around hypothetical "what if" scenarios--that aren't even that extreme to begin with-- is literally never going to work. It's not even remotely a 'good faith' argument, it's just an "I have no counterargument" one.

Ehtias said:

Calamity literally would have turned into a stack ascendril and win button for groups, so would fireball with the changes that were listed.

I don't know that there's many who'll drop 1200+ credits just to have a slightly higher chance at winning group fights, when their current classes work just as well. Especially if they don't actually like the class which, well, Ascendril definitely isn't for everyone.

Yedan

Poopy pants. Poopy pants are highly annoying.

Nisavi

Czcibor said:

When you try to remove the viability of spamming one skill and introduce a more exciting rotation that forces you to use weaker skills to take full advantage of the strong skills and get told that it'd just lead to "spam x skill lol" and that because none of the people who you consulted with had the time/interest/knowledge of the skills to comment on the report you essentially get told to unicorns off because everyone else rejected it.

When you are told that counterplay is more interesting than nerfs so you don't bother going after the mirror equiv of your skill that does 50% more damage and takes 40% as long to charge and instead try to make your skill different in a way and is just rejected because lol that's too strong.

When your skill was nerfed into the ground and was probably used less than 10 times in the last 3 months, with it actually being used successfully maybe thrice is considered "ok and balanced", when the "mirror" has skills that are much more debilitating.

What is even the point when there is no consistency and everything just happens for whatever reason.

Did a post on this in another thread on "Grass is Greener Syndrome". I get that you wanted to make Ascendril's AoE options more interesting, but you have to factor in that you'd be tipping the hand too much on the scales of the options that you class already has versus the capabilities of the Shadow mirror, in this case Sciomancer. To be more specific, from what I've seen Calamity does similar damage to Collapse, but requires the charge mechanic. I believe the trade off is that you can achieve max damage much quicker than I can (which is 25 or 28 seconds on Collapse, last I counted), albeit at greater risk since you have to remain with the fulcrum. You're also able to choose the damage type that is used for the Fulcrum based off of your Resonance. My Collapse is solely based off of Cold damage, though I don't think it really matters as the damage is based off of max health, but I could be wrong. I believe you can also continue to use Fireball outside of your Fulcrum even when Calamity'ing. I cannot Cannon while my Singularity is collapsing, so I'm forced to choose. Not to mention, Fireball works in conjunction with Prism whilst Spectre does not work in conjunction with Cannon. I'm fine with this disparity, personally. I also have zero issues with Calamity's buff that makes the first two stages faster. My only gripe with Calamity was that it was being stealth cast at different elevations with zero warning at all to those on other elevations, which Ehtias classleaded after it was figured out that this is what y'all were doing.

Your proposed buffs were asking for a bit much though. I'm personally in favour of less ranged combat and more encouragement of actually having to go into the room. Ranged attacks should just be damage and a token affliction, in my honest opinion.

Karhast

I hate that my priestly guild's holy book is older than some of the people playing this game.

Tekias

Karhast said:

I hate that my priestly guild's holy book is older than some of the people playing this game.

...holy crap, it -is-...

Axius

....can anyone else see why I'm mildly frustrated/annoyed? Maybe wishing for something of a limit of around 500 cotton processing at once at a time? (That's a limit that, with rank 3 facilities, with max workers working on it, limits the wait time to 87.8 hours rounded up. And I say at -once- at a time because it means that you won't have someone flooding it with 6 bundles of 500 cotton at a go, causing a similar traffic issue. This means everyone can get their stuff processed within reasonable wait times. )




Edit: And for those wondering how long that is: That's literally me not seeing MY stuff worked on until sometime in MID-JUNE.. I -HOPE- you can see why jamming this up with huge orders is a bit of an issue, I hope. Waiting 3.5 days? Sure. Waiting MONTH AND A HALF MAYBE?! ...yeah. I'mma be a little cheesed.

Rhyot

Honestly, that is more of an issue with the absurdly slow processing times of the facilities. We're going to run into the same bottlenecks once mining is released as well.

ESPECIALLY... when you think about the comm investment for each facility level. So what you're seeing is someone (likely) donating all their comms so that the city can upgrade a facility to the next level.

LEVEL 1: 5 million gold, 15000 leather, 10000 rope, 5000 coal
LEVEL 2: 7.5 million gold, 20000 leather, 15000 rope, 15000 iron, 7500 coal
LEVEL 3: 10 million gold, 25000 leather, 20000 rope, 20000 iron, 10000 coal


Using the information posted for each level, let's do some math.

Ultimate formula: (Comm/cycle)*TPI = MinTime/60 = HrTime/24 = DayTime

Level 3 clothier facility (3 apprentices) - TPI: 10m 32s or 11 min (we'll round up for easy math purposes)
The clothier will convert 3 hemp to 2 rope.

LEVEL 1: 10000 rope = ((10000/2)*TPI) = 916.67 hours = 38 days
LEVEL 2: 15000 rope = ((15000/2)*TPI) = 1,375 hours = 57.3 days
LEVEL 3: 20000 rope = ((20000/2)*TPI) = 1,833.33 hours = 76.4 days

Total time needed to get enough comms (FOR A SINGLE) production facility to max = 171 days


Level 3 tannery facility (3 apprentice) - TPI: 15m 52s or 16 min (we're going to round up for easy math purposes)
The tannery will convert 1 hide to 6 leather.


LEVEL 1: 15000 leather = ((15000/6)*TPI) = 666.66 hours = 27.8 days
LEVEL 2: 20000 leather = ((20000/6)*TPI) = 888.88 hours = 37 days
LEVEL 3: 25000 leather = ((25000/6)*TPI) = 1,111.11 hours = 46.3 days

Total time needed to get enough comms (FOR A SINGLE) production facility to max = 111.1 days



Ultimately, what this means is that you could get a single facility to max in roughly 171 days (barring no other queues are blocking your way). However, you need to do this 3 times. So it would take roughly 9 months to upgrade ALL facilities to level 3. Additionally, this is bottlenecked more by the fact that these numbers are from two different cities, as I wanted to get max time frames. So yes, there are going to be drastic bottlenecks with production because each city is trying to upgrade each facility to max. This is further bottlenecked by the fact that gold gain is difficult now as well, since curatives are expensive, fishing is locked behind a credit value, and hunting usually provides a net loss rather than net gain. Considering a single facility requires 22.5 million gold to max out and I don't think any city has 70 mil gold in their coffers. Additionally, this 171 day timeline is if -in fact- everyone is only ever giving to the city and not using their production queue for themselves. Otherwise, the production facilities will take significantly longer to upgrade.


So while I understand your frustration, here's another outlier that you might not be thinking of. Once all facilities are maxed out, do you really think people are going to continue growing farm upon farm of hemp? Cotton? Leather (maybe) for armor. Trees (probably) because vials, furniture, etc.

Tiur

So part of the problem is that we're gating comm production at the end. Like, we're assuming... the max people produce this comm, and we don't want more than X coming out per unit time, so that's where the timing comes from. One option is to increase the amount of farming to produce each commodity? It would feel a lot more grindy. Or maybe we go ahead and speed it up, making the comms pretty cheap. Thoughts?

Phoenecia

Tiur said:

So part of the problem is that we're gating comm production at the end. Like, we're assuming... the max people produce this comm, and we don't want more than X coming out per unit time, so that's where the timing comes from. One option is to increase the amount of farming to produce each commodity? It would feel a lot more grindy. Or maybe we go ahead and speed it up, making the comms pretty cheap. Thoughts?

As both a very active farmer and crafter, speeding up the queue would make a lot of people happy. While it'd mean you wouldn't be able to make as huge a profit in selling comms to cities, it'd make them more quickly accessible and cheaper for people to buy. As it stands, farming and production has been especially punishing for crafters as if you're not producing comms for yourself, buying them gets pricey very quickly, so a crafter would ultimately just end up not making anything. 

Zaila

@Rhyot

Your math is slightly off for the rope (in that it takes much longer than you're calculating here) I think you accidentally calculated the TPI to mean how long it takes to process 3 hemp into 2 rope. The TPI is instead how long it'll take to process a single hemp, so to create those 2 rope, it'll take 3 TPI rounds, whereas your calculation creates 2 rope every TPI round.

So, I just adjusted your formula to accommodate for the number of comms we need to process to get each quota and that gives us:


LEVEL 1: 10000 rope = ((15000hemp)*10.5min) = 2,625 hours = 109 days
LEVEL 2: 15000 rope = ((22500hemp)*10.5min) = 3,937.5 hours = 164 days
LEVEL 3: 20000 rope = ((30000hemp)*10.5min) = 5,250 hours = 218 days


Total time needed to get enough comms (FOR A SINGLE) production facility to max = 491 days

Xavin

Honestly? Speed it up and make the times cheaper. There is absolutely NO reason why some things should be as expensive as they are. As of right now there are many things that have hyper inflated costs because the comms take too long to produce or can't be produced at all.

Mjoll

Leave it how it is, imo. More grind is less fun and the system doesn't need to be an instant gratification machine.

Zaila

@Tiur

The payoff for farming is extremely slow. And the extreme delay in reward for your effort is a huge demotivator for a lot of people.

The actual "farm this thing and send it to the market" part - that's fun and easy and doesn't take too much time out of your day. But if you're farming for commodities (which most people are), here's a general sense of what you're doing waiting for your goods - lets use leather as an example here, because it's the most labor-intensive.

Start time:
- Spend daily time & effort going to every farm and feeding every calf. Do this for 20 days.
- Slaughter your cows, get your hides, put in shed to ship.
- Wait 10-14 days for the caravan to bring your bundles to your warehouse.
You generally don't know when this will come. You just wait. From my experience, there is usually only one of these per farmland every season or so (which is confusing because the HELP PRODUCTION file makes it sound like they come every 2-3 days; perhaps this is a flaw in BL management of the caravans? I don't know.)
- Hope against all hope that you happen to be logged in and available whenever your caravan arrives, because every 4 hours that your raw goods sit in there, you're charged a holding tax, steadily increasing your cost to produce each comm.
- Send your raw materials to the processing facility.
- Depending on your facility and the popularity, wait 10-60 days for your raw materials to become comms. (using Axius's example above, that's a 33 day wait for anyone new who would put something in to process).


So, a player is putting in 20 consecutive days of 5-20 minutes of work (depending on how efficient they are at their calf-caring) and then waiting around for another 20-70+ days for any return on their investment.

And this is not at all an exaggeration. Zaila tended a buttload of calf farms last IC fall/winter (that's about 60 days ago now that I started those herds). YESTERDAY the hides just finished processing into leather.

*edit to add:
I totally appreciate the point of not wanting instantaneous gratification results, but waiting 2+ real life months for a return on your time, effort and gold seems a bit too far in the other direction for me. Especially for anyone who isn't just SUPER INTO IT and just wants to be able to produce some comms for themselves.

Phoenecia

Previously I'd have recommended getting into Provisioning to help ease the strain on production facilities since I end up using most of my fields for provisions, but Provisioning is another huge can of worms. It costs credits to learn, and even GETTING orders to fill is next to impossible because there are so few, if any, that pop up for people to take. Literally the only reason I've been able to level Provisioning at all is because I jumped on it early, camped the boards, and complete larger orders now. And even if you do manage to find orders to complete, the rewards are negligible, and ultimately not worth putting in the effort for most, which is why hardly anyone even engages in Provisioning. 

Axius

Again, my issue with this falls into the "You have people gumming up the works with massive orders." And I kinda would like to see the limit made to 500 per. And maybe, if you want those large orders to be done, there be an esterport facility available to all that has an increased tax rate, but also is faster to process in turn. So instead of processing 3 hemp into 2 rope in 11 minutes (as per Rhyot's formula), you have it processed in 5 minutes, but at the cost of it being something like.. 400 gp-ish minimum per item, maybe with a formula of "depending on how busy it gets, the tax rate goes up/down to compensate for the amount of work/time the workers are being forced to put in to process your comms" Type of deal. Balancing it out of "oh, my stuff gets done faster here and with bulk-processing!" with "I'm also paying -more- than average than the cities charge me to process, AND it still might take a while because some jerk put in an 72k cotton order to process!"

This would alleviate some of the issues of people building up stacks of comms until they have absolutely monster amounts to process from city production, while also A. giving an upper cap on city production to help keep their production facilities 'competitive' despite having the 500 comm limit and the slower timer.

Mjoll

Axius said:

...So instead of processing 3 hemp into 2 rope in 11 minutes (as per Rhyot's formula), you have it processed in 5 minutes, but at the cost of it being something like.. 400 GP-ish minimum per item...

This would alleviate some of the issues of people building up stacks of comms until they have absolutely monster amounts to process from city production, while also A. giving an upper cap on city production to help keep their production facilities 'competitive' despite having the 500 comm limit and the slower timer.

That first part would put a hard limit on what cities can charge which is Not Good.

and it's not "building up stacks of comms" it's just farming and waiting for the once a season caravans that are carrying all of your stuff+everyone else's crap as well.

Further, if you enforce a limit on what you can process at a facility there becomes a holding pattern where your raw materials are trapped in a warehouse, charging you storage for IRL months as you wait for the queue to get to you, and finish your order so you can add more.

Iazamat

...and waiting for the once a season caravans that are carrying all of your stuff+everyone else's crap as well.

Speaking as an outside observer: the caravan change, along with the introduction of multiple farms per player, seem to be the biggest culprits behind why production facilities have been further backlogged. Either one alone likely wouldn't have caused these issues to the degree we're seeing, but in conjunction, they've caused a serious bottleneck.

Zaila

I have so much agreement with everything Mjoll's said up there!

And I know it's just a tertiary aspect to the example there, but, I can't stress enough how inaccurate the "processing 3 hemp into 2 rope in 11 minutes" is.

A maximum-efficiency clothier processes 1 hemp into 1/3 of a rope every 10.5 minutes. One rope takes (at this absolutely maximized speed and efficiency) 31.5 minutes to be created.

Czcienn

I've made a thread about this before, but basically the system is just very much off. It feels like it was designed so that there is a maximum number of people who can participate in the system. Not only is this bad because it means there is very much aggressive competition where there is a lot of risk for a low chance at a small amount of reward in some aspects (provisioning), but also because in other aspects the playerbase is reliant on it for commodity production. More people taking part generally means there is a bigger playerbase and demand for commodities.

This isn't even taking into account the fact that we can still only produce 4 commodities, with the expectation that we'll have to wait for the release of mining for this to be alleviated in any way. As far as I know no city can actually sustain the demand for some of their commodities. Silver is probably the most obvious one. I just find it very hard to enjoy the system when the default response to every problem is "wait for mining".

And please don't take this as an attack on the volunteers about mining. My point isn't that it's taking long at all. It's that we decided to go full steam into this new system when it's actually nowhere near complete. It doesn't make the "economy" any more fun for most people. It just makes new players who can't generate as much gold wonder why it takes so much gold to get the basics.

Rhyot

Czcibor said:

It doesn't make the "economy" any more fun for most people. It just makes new players who can't generate as much gold wonder why it takes so much gold to get the basics.

Honestly, equipment/curatives costs wouldn't be that bad if the gold gained from bashing wasn't nerfed to high hell. I had a thread a couple years back that went over the logistics from multiple people who lost more gold bashing than they gained. So you are absolutely correct that players have a difficult time getting what they need to fight/outfit themselves.

Quite honestly, I think that we should up the gold drops from bashing to the rates they were at BEFORE the gold nerfs. While some would say "That would break the economy"... it really wont. Because now we have more gold sinks (facility costs, provisioning, farming, mining (Soon TM), and mystery production (Soon TM))... that we can afford higher gold drops.

Aeryx

Yeah, the production building numbers have been off for the entire time I've dealt with them. We've all talked about this ad nauseam at this point, there really isn't much more that can be said. The decision to make drastic changes to the way commodities work, little by little, instead of having the entire system all at once was probably not the best one, in hindsight. It may have been fine if the other two Agriculture skills were released on a schedule, but since they aren't, the problem just continues to exacerbate itself over time. My suggestion on discord once was met with a bit of groaning, but I'll say it again, if you're going to have a system where the speed of the production buildings is increased by how many 'apprentices you have working there', I don't see why you couldn't have players also set themselves, in the physical buildings(they do exist as physical buildings, fyi), to work there as well, maybe with some channeled skill, or something, to help speed the queue along. Up to a certain cap, obviously.

There's many ways to fix this problem, it's just all on the Pools here to pick one and execute.

Czcienn

Aeryx said:

There's many ways to fix this problem, it's just all on the Pools here to pick one and execute.

My impression is that they actually either don't understand or acknowledge the scale of the problem, which is strange since it has been clearly explained by multiple people in the last few months. All we're getting are incremental changes that barely scratch the surface.

Seurimas

Czcibor said:

Aeryx said:

There's many ways to fix this problem, it's just all on the Pools here to pick one and execute.

My impression is that they actually either don't understand or acknowledge the scale of the problem, which is strange since it has been clearly explained by multiple people in the last few months. All we're getting are incremental changes that barely scratch the surface.

Game design is tricky, even if everyone agrees on the problem. Players would really like a good supply of commodities, while the Pools are trying to craft a player-driven economy for commodities, basically from scratch. Of course, with the latter, there will be shortages and supply issues, because there's no economy without the threat of scarcity. Scarcity isn't fun, but it doesn't mean the system is failing from their perspective.

Of course, I'm not a Farmer and haven't tuned in for many conversations of this sort, so I don't know what's been suggested. Just looking at everything here, it seems like there ought to be a shortcut to "completing" production, for people who don't want to wait, that doesn't interfere with commodity output goals. Maybe sell base materials to NPCs somehow? Is the just Provisioning? Help files are not helpful in this case.