That is a good point.

The materials system for forging definitely takes away some of the immersion, because I will only consider making all metal designs. I won't even look at the ones that have non-metals in them. (unless I'm mass producing newbie weapons.) And I think that hurts the game a bit as well.

I agree.

Me: I'll make you X weapon, it should take me 10 days to get to you, I'll charge you 20K. the price goes up if it takes longer than that.

me: (7 days later) I may not have it done in the those 10 days, if it takes longer than 10 days, its going to cost you 25K, and I'll have it for you in 15 days.

etc etc.

edit: OR sometimes they say: I want max speed and max precision. And I say, ok, that isn't possible, but if you give me 100 credits I'll work on it until it happens, or I'll give you 90 credits back if I doesn't work out after a while.

Also for a while, I was charging 50 gold per hammer strike. And I counted how many hammer strikes there was.

That worked well, except 50 gold per strike was too much for mid level chars, and I got tired of forging only when I had my system to count accurately for me.

Are those actual prices? If you're charging 5k for 5 hours work on one product, you might as well not be charging anything at all. Which is another of the issues with forging.

Or have a deposit policy. Where the customer gives you a flat amount up front with the understanding that they'll owe more at the end based upon how much time it took times however much you're charging per hour. If they decide they don't want to pay the total at the end, then you keep half the deposit and the weapon. You then sell the weapon to someone else.

No, those are not actual prices.

Keeping their money when they can't afford to pay the rest of the fee? How dare you steal from them? Thief! (Just pointing out that there will be complaints, and there really *is* no economic solution to the situation as-is, as demonstrated by the fact that it's still an issue after what, 3 years now?).

How long, on average, do you spend with weapons? You must remember that most people don't actually sit there while they're forging, because the more you forge the chances of getting a good weapon are just that much higher. If you just forge while you're actively playing you're probably charging too high as it is, unless you play for ridiculous amounts of time. The best weapons in the game usually have dozens, if not hundreds, of hours spent on them.



I think those prices are pretty high. Consider 50 hours of work on a weapon - that's 50k, plus the 10-30k in comms. Pretty expensive for someone just trying to get an acceptable weapon. And that's probably with a forging hammer.



When all is said and done, that's basically my point.

Arses, clicked the wrong button.

Well, sure there'll be complaints, but as long as you're up front with the policy, that's all they are. Complaints.

Not to really leap into the fray here but until you have been a smith and spent the time forging the extremely high quality weapons that are *necessary* to be successful as a warrior in PvP combat, please do not try to compare it to anything else or talk about just raising the price, or what have you.

We are talking days and weeks of forging. Where you are not doing anything else. You're not playing the game. You're not bashing. You can chat on channels and in tells and maybe in says if someone wants to come keep you company. Days and weeks of this. There is nothing that is even remotely comparable to this except bashing for demigod and bashing for demigod is hardly a necessity to be viable in combat. This is time spent for every single warrior who wants to be viable in combat. Most warriors simply cannot afford to pay how much this is worth. So it's a matter of them using substandard weapons that are no good for PvP until they can afford the higher quality ones or the smiths charging far less than what the weapons are actually worth.

What I do (when I actually forge for other people which is very rare these days given how tedious the process is) is charge per reforge. They get a masterweapon for their initial commodity costs plus the forging fee which isn't much. Then as they get gold, they can come back and I'll reforge it how ever many times they specify trying to get the stats they want. If they're lucky it's cheap. If they're not, they could be paying a lot for awhile.

I bashed to demigod in less time than it took me to forge all of my weapons. And I have a hammer. There is a problem here. Please stop trying to make it out like it's a perfectly fine system. Even if you can turn a profit it's not worth the pain of churning out any number of high quality masterweapons.

Just for the people saying warriors don't need weapons with good stats:
You are wrong.

For the rest: I am happy with not making money off of forging. Sure, sometimes someone who needed really good weapons came along, and whenever I decided to forge for them and set a price per hour, I felt bad when I got it. I rarely charged over 20 credits, even if I forged 40+ hours. Only time I took 50 creds (which was reallyyyy nice. ) was when I forged for like 4 days for Val. He got an awesome greatsword out of it, average damage, 515 or so prec and 160 (or a bit higher) speed.
So yes, you can make money off of that. But most of the time when I told people my prices, they said "Oh well, I'll go to Sojiro/Lisarel/dotdotdot instead, they forge far cheaper." So in the end I just dropped it and only forged for myself or friends. (Which I did for nothing, so nyah, I destroy economy too!)


Oh yes, an example of what forging takes:
My damage flails (180/100/183) took me...uhhh....4 weeks? of forging straight through. I usually did less damage than Bards/Mages.

Is it? Why? Slow down, calm down and think through it rationally. I can see a couple of holes in my reasoning, but neither you nor Reiha have really managed to pick them up.

I can't pithily move through your argument and raise my objections because of the scatter-gun approach you've taken to making it. However, without disclosing my old player identities too readily, I know what I'm talking about, though I am to some extent playing devil's advocate in this thread, because I regard constructive argument as a helpful thing, and I think it can be useful to spur it on.

As far as I know, the afk rules exist for the benefit of the playerbase. I do not believe bandwidth plays any part in it.

Tervic: I suppose the reason why the economic theory doesn't work smoothly is because there isn't a smooth transfer of labour between trade professions because of the lesson cost. In a more free flowing labour market, people like you would change professions when you grew dissatisfied, and the prices offered would climb or fall to a more steady equilibrium, so I accept that criticism to some extent.

Dude...even I know by now who you where, it's just too obvious. <.< (Even before you posted about the warriorstuff)

Fain edit: Speculate to your heart's content. You'll never know for sure!

I can never figure these things out.

And really, I don't know why everyone is making such a fuss about the afk-stuff. It always was like that. Normally, if you can afford to run a forging-system, you'll have access to your own or another's forgingmanse, and the occasional newbie will be satisfied with doing a few reforges in the city/communeforge, so really, no problem there. Never was.
And the dc/ing...yeah, that always happened too. So what, you lose 5 hours of forging when you come back from school or work sometimes. Just get the weapon out and go at it again.

This is an interesting idea. This is basically what they have done for statistics and everything else so that we can balance for both the average person and the extreme. It makes sense that it should work for weapons too.



Everyone keeps saying that nobody understands how long forging takes. I think you're missing the point - it doesn't matter how long it takes. The ponit is that people can only afford a certain amount. If you charge by the hour, then forging will not take as long; people will just deal with weapons that aren't as good.

You (and a few others) are also still blowing the balancing issue out of proportion. I think we can all agree that a skilled warrior with even mediocre weapons can still beat an unskilled warrior with top-of-the-line. People can function with mediocre weapons just like they can function without omnitrans. You can get into PVP and do just fine without having max speed/precision weapons.



That would be one reasonable possibility. In fact, that's how a lot of real-life businesses work. You pay a deposit, then pay the rest later. If you fail to pay the rest, they keep the deposit.


@Catarin I understand the frustration, but those are side points. Forging does not have to take that long. Those weapons are not really necessary, they are just very helpful. They are necessary right now only because everybody has them; they are considered the status quo. There is no reason that forgers couldn't start charging drastically more for weapons/armor. Warriors would just have to learn to deal with less than amazing. Combined with Daganev's suggestion to make the extreme outliers mean less, it seems like a perfectly reasonable solution where everyone (except people with max everything weapons who want to be amazing) is happy.

That's where you are wrong. Go at a Demigod or a high level player with mediocre weapons...and see how he regens the damage and applies away the wounds.

so yeah, I was giving out random numbers.

I have spent OOC weeks forging individual weapons. I still have a tiered pricing system, based on how much the person has to spend, how much time they are willing to wait and all those wonderful things.

I have sold master weapons between the prices of 20K gold and 100 credits. I've also been able to sell "hunting weapons" (270+ speed weapons) and stock up on them, and sell them in my store.

You can even get non master weapons up to 270 speed, and those are really profitable.