I've mentioned ideas like this before and been shot down but I'll bring it up again because I still like it better than the other proposals. You forge something and get a flat set of numbers that are always the same. (Or, there's a small amount of variation, with a constant total for the three values, but it's very close to a baseline.) Then you invest additional commodities to increase the values from there towards some maximum.

For example, scimitars are wounding weapons, so every scimitar comes out of the forege with damage 110, precision 200, speed 140 (around the middle fo the current range). You can increase the damage to a maximum of 130 by adding steel (3 points per bar), or increase precision to a maximum of 235 by adding platinum (3 points per bar), or increase speed to a maximum of 195 by adding silver (3 points per bar), but you can't increase any of them to a grand total of all three that's higher than 500.

Net result, you can have as good a weapon as you're willing to pay for, without the process punishing the forger. My only concern is the impact on the commodity market, but that's adjustable (the admins can simply increase production of those commodities slightly, or make the commodity quests a little more effective, or provide another source).

Better, but requiring more changes: every weapon's commodities costs are reduced by 25%, then all weapons come out of the forge with the lowest values. That way, forgers can make bad weapons cheap (e.g., for novices), and good weapons still cost the same. The process of adjusting the comms on all existing designs would be tricky, though, and the regular/masterweapon divide we already have can accomplish this.

The problem I see is with logistics, which will be hard to explain. For example: how does adding weight to a weapon by folding another bar of platinum into it increase the speed?

The problem I see is with logistics, which will be hard to explain. For example: how does adding weight to a weapon by folding another bar of platinum into it increase the speed?

It's just like tempering. You aren't increasing the weight, you're reforging it in a way that causes more slag and waste to be thrown away in the process.

With a stroke of your hammer, you reshape a furrikin moonstone scimitar, replacing some of the back with a harder steel to add heft and damage.
With a stroke of your hammer, you reshape a furrikin moonstone scimitar, replacing some of the tang with springier silver to speed the weapon's recoil.
With a stroke of your hammer, you reshape a furrikin moonstone scimitar, replacing some of the edge with a sharper platinum to hone the blade.

Stuff like that.

Increasing the comms in the design, though, has three problems. First, all the scores of existing designs are suddenly identical and all but worthless. Second, people can tell by looking at you what your weapon's stats are. Third, people will pad out the better weapons with gems or leather or salt; by using comms which are inescapably expensive and inescapably appropriate, I'm forcing good weapons to have a real cost. (It occurred to me after posting that we could do like how tailor and jeweler repair skills work, just use gold pieces, to avoid rebalancing the commodity market. Makes no sense, but then it doesn't when tailors and jewelers do it either.)

Or if you meant, determine which comms from the design would be the ones, I don't know how code could pick the most appropriate ones, and there's still the risk they'll be something cheap.

I've begun the process of making my fullplate to turn in to masterarmour (I finished my other hammer at about 6 AM EST today, so I have finished the process of making weapons - they both turned out very nicely)..

All I can say is I'm thankful forging armor is faster than forging weapons.

I came out with 89/87, which for now will be good enough. I'll masterarmour a 90/90, but that doesn't mean I can't mock up a decent set for now.

It would only be the metal comms in the design, not the designer comms like silk or gems. If the design is steel 50 silver 70 silk 5 sapphire 3, you would have to increase the steel and silver, because the purification would occur before the actual detailing of the blade.

But how does the software figure that out? Not all designs will even have three distinct metals in them. You either have to have someone go back and add to every design three fields for which metal to use, or come up with some algorithm to calculate it, either of which makes this process inordinately hard for a marginal gain. Just using fixed metals is a thousand times more implementable.

Actually I was thinking three fixed metals per type of weapon, which could vary from weapon to weapon. So for scimitars it's steel/silver/platinum, but for tahtos maybe it's wood/iron/gems or something. However, that won't answer the wooden katana objection.

Still, even if it was always steel/silver/platinum that would be a jillion times less arbitrary than a lot of similar things (like that tailors make clothing patches out of gold pieces) to which no one objects. So I think the three fixed metals approach is probably better as it makes balancing the commodity market more feasible.

But how does the software figure that out? Not all designs will even have three distinct metals in them. You either have to have someone go back and add to every design three fields for which metal to use, or come up with some algorithm to calculate it, either of which makes this process inordinately hard for a marginal gain. Just using fixed metals is a thousand times more implementable.

I don't think it should be that hard. I'm sure that rapture already has the ability to distinguish between metal comms and non-metal comms, so running a little script on them to pull out what metals you need to add should be easy, and you wouldn't need three different metals. You'd just need to increase everything overall and specify what you're purifying for: speed, damage or precision.

I don't think it should be that hard. I'm sure that rapture already has the ability to distinguish between metal comms and non-metal comms, so running a little script on them to pull out what metals you need to add should be easy, and you wouldn't need three different metals. You'd just need to increase everything overall and specify what you're purifying for: speed, damage or precision.

I like the three different metals approach better for various reasons: it seems more interesting, and it would be easier to keep this from screwing up the commodity market if we distribute the impact on several metals we pick instead of depending on the designs. And I don't see the benefit of what you're suggesting as an alternative really. But at least what you propose now is workable, as I understand it. Whatever metal is the most used in the design is the one you'd use (as a corollary, if there's no metal in the design, you can't refine it) for all three refinements. It's workable and implementable.