Tradeskills Fixes in the works

Greetings, fellow craftsmen and -women!

I know many of you are concerned about what is happening to the Tradeskills/RnB (resource and building) - I am writing this to inform you more about what we are doing and what is happening to tradeskills soon. I am also writing this in order to explain what has happened to the alchemy crash since todays patch.

Let me start with the bad stuff first.

First off - if you are an Alchemist, opening the tradeskill book by any means will crash your client since last patch. This will be fixed with thursdays patch.

This happened when we were re-arranging some of the potions for tradeskills - If you are an alchemist I'm sure you remember some of the potions would not do anything when created. These potions have been removed from the inventory and will make it back into the game at a later stage. Removing these had an unexpected effect and was unfortunately overlooked by us when patching out the latest patch. We are sorry about this.

Let me assure you - if you are getting the crash, you are not bugged. The recipe book is simply trying to find objects that are no longer available and we have programmers looking into a safeguard for the future so that this type of thing does not happen again.

That's quite enough of the bad stuff. Now I'll detail what we plan on doing with Tradeskills and Resource and Building. Unfortunately, I am unable to give you a timeframe for the fixes and changes below, but we hope to get them done very soon. "Very soon" in this case means expect a few of the changes below to come in as early as thursday. Most of these changes we aim to have ready within a few weeks.

Tradeskills

• We will soon have a system where you can unlearn tradeskills.

Alchemy

• We have added an item called "Alchemists Cache" to Mage/priest mobs. This item, when right-clicked, spawns a few random tradeskill resources for alchemists. These resources will include the 'missing' resources (for example Hyena meat and Icy Crocodile tears) so that alchemists are able to progress further than Tier1.
• As soon as possible we will patch out a new Resource and Building population consisting of spiders, hyenas, etc, that will drop the resource "proper". These mobs will be put into Lacheish Plains, Poitain and Purple Lotus Swamp. These mobs will have a typical droprate of between 10-50% droprate of these items.
• At a later stage (still to be determined), we are patching in vendor-bought recipes - these vendor-bought recipes will increase your magic damage. We are also looking into creating various other potions, but thats more hush-hush.

Architect

• Architects are undergoing a design-revamp - what exactly is included in this revamp I won't say, but it will allow architects to use their abilities for combat purposes as well as for building the cities.

Weaponsmithing

• Weaponsmiths will get a number of blue recipes in the future. These recipes can be obtained through vendors, world-drops and/or boss-kills. These recipes will be spread throughout the tiers of weaponsmithing and will cover all different weapons (but not ammo).

Armorsmithing

• As with Weaponsmiths, Armorsmiths will get a number of blue recipes that can be obtained through vendors, world-drops and/or boss-kills. These recipes will provide a more diverse look than what the game currently offers and at level 80, it will be possible to craft an entire set of armor (provided of course that you find the recipes for them).

Resource and Building Regions

• Traders and Trainers will spawn in the guild-cities. These traders and trainers will spawn depending on what building is built (for instance, a Trader will spawn at the Tradepost).
• City-life will start appearing in cities. The more buildings you build, the more NPC's will immigrate to your city.
• We are removing the randomly spawning mobs from the playfields. Instead, we are creating encampments that will dynamically spawn content on the attackers level.
• Quests - we are adding quests to the Resource and Building regions (Lacheish Plains, Poitain, Purple Lotus Swamp). These quests will not be repeatable.

Various other fixes are also being looked at, amongst others the socketing-bugs and the droprate of leather.

Greetings again!

The Resource and Building team have been working hard lately on a number of fixes to the tradeskills, resource playfields and massive pvp, and I thought it would be fair to give out a status update.

First off - we have been fixing a lot of the collision bugs inherent in the world and unfortunately that has taken a lot longer than we anticipated and that has been our first priority together with fixing various hand-in bugs for the resource gathering quests.

Now, as far as status goes, let me explain that any patch we get out of the production office is held on our testlive servers for a week of testing before it goes out and in order for testlive to work as intended, we patch to testlive once per week. Essentially this means that if a bug is fixed it takes two weeks until it reaches live.

I would also like to point to my first post, where I say "Most of these changes we aim to have ready within a few weeks.". While we did get the alchemists cache and a number of hand-in bugfixes done, a lot of you are certainly wondering when all the promised things are coming, and that's why I'm writing this, so here goes:

Rare resources seemingly not dropping
The rare resources that comes from harvesting (for instance Tin and
Feldspar) have a 1% droprate from the nodes. They also have a chance on dropping from the random encounters that interrupt harvesting. This won't change and it does work. I realize that the droprate seems low but datamining shows the droprate to be around what we expected it to be (not counting the random encounter drops)

Cannot hand in resource X
We have had a lot of these issues and we are working on fixing them continuously.

Skinning and Weaving being "useless"
There are plans to make these skills useful - timeconstraints forced us to get these out without the functionality implemented (otherwise it would have completely stopped other tradeskills from functioning).
Skinning and Weaving are intended to post-process the drops already existing. I can't give an exact time-estimate on this.

Blue Recipes progress (Weaponsmith/Armorsmith)
All the items have been created, as have the recipes. We are still working on getting the codesupport for correctly setting this up but hope to get it soon.

Unlearning tradeskills
I'm unable to give out any dates, but this is a crucial feature and we are pushing to get it done as soon as we can.

Traders and Trainers in Guildcities
Next patch going to testlive, traders and trainers will appear in guildcities.

City-life in cities
Guards will start patrolling your keeps next testlive-patch to keep intruders away - additional NPC's are soon to follow.

Alchemy drops
The alchemists cache that we patched in a while back was intended to contain resources so that alchemists could proceed with their craft. It has worked, but it was never intended to be the "end all" help for alchemists. New static camps in the resource and building regions are being worked on and hopefully we should have that on testlive next time we patch. Scorpion Oils, for instance, was always intended to actually drop from... well... scorpions.

Removing random spawns
What we are doing with the random spawns is that we will patch out the new resource and building populations (Lacheish, Poitain, Purple Lotus
Swamp) and at the same time remove these pesky things.

Architecture Revamp
I still can't give a time-estimate on this, but I can release a little more about what we are at least considering for it: Totems that produces team-buffs while in range, Waystones to teleport team-members and/or self, guild-city improvements such as statues, flags, etc.

Costs of tradeskills
The costs of tradeskills in general have been reduced further - alchemists are supposed to be able to make a small profit out of selling potions for instance. Also, the hand-in for tradeskillers have been altered - the tradeskill trainer will no longer keep your created items for themselves, but rather inspect them and hand them back to you.

Gemcutting
Many posts about gemcutting and 'nerfs'. Adjustments for the some of the gems will be out when the system design has been followed up and implemented. It will not affect all gems but there will be some changes in order to properly balance gems.



I'll try to get more updates to you as we progress with these things in the future.

Greetings,

Twicer.