Weaponsmith Archive

There has to be a reasonable alternative to the Grind. I believe that the experience gained from crafting components is it. Please here me out.

Before I begin, please inform me of any thread that addresses the UXP gained from crafted weapons (how'sit earned, for how long, etc.).

First, significantly increase the amount of UXP earned when a person (other than the crafter) uses the item. Powerups attached to a weapon should also gain the crafter UXP as well. The amount of UXP gained should be calculated for a week's time with, perhaps, a cap placed on an amount earned a day or until that item is destroyed. However, there should be absolutely NO limit on the UXP earned from multiple items used per day. It is absolutely crucial that the UXP gained be from HAND crafted items and not manufactured items.

Components of items should only earn UXP one time only for the crafter since it is consumed in the crafting of the object. So I think it's okay fora crafter to earn UXP from the use of manufactured components since it's only on a one time basis.

By making UXP a more attractive way to earn experience, you encourage a market that has more interesting items from crafters taking the time to know what making a scout pistol or Sword is all about.

But then what about the fact that novice weaponsmiths make garbage weapons to begin with. Well then, that's where Master Weaponsmiths come in. I propose an Apprenticeship feature where a Master Weaponsmith makes an Apprenticeship contract with two people maximum per month. In this relationship, both people benefit where the student earns a bonus to his crafting skills... specifically 1-2 experimentation points and/oran extra 100 weapon crafting points per WEAPON that is CRAFTED... no extra points for practice, no bonus points for crafting components but actual WEAPONS. Furthermore, these bonuses can be based on who your master is. A master who has tutored more students may provide more bonuses. For the novice apprentices, these bonuses last for a month and afterwards, the master has taught all that he knows to that student and that person can never learn from him again. This encourages the Master to work with other Novice weaponsmiths.

And what does the Master gain.. He gets PERMANENT bonuses to experimentation points. Which means at the end of a year he can get a maximum of 24 points. That should be the maximum ponits he should ever earn from taking apprentices. If the Master wants more, he should throw on experiment skill tapes from master tailors or something (I've always heard about them.. but never seen 'em.) 24 is too much, you say? 100% stats across the board gets kinda pointless especially when I dont care howDURABLE my (your weapon here) is., I agree. Well, what if the devs allowed percentages to rise above the maximum 100% based on the Master's Apprenticeship bonuses only... Ah.. I'm sure I have your attention now.

Ah.. but the novice weaponsmith is still making garbage components! Well... ask your master to make or sell you some. It's to his benefit that his students gets the most out of the experience.

So then after the novice creates a weapon he can then attempt to sell it. The smart weaponsmith looks at the market and sees what's out there... what's moving and not moving. Based on that he sells the weapons he knows that will move on the market. (One day, I hope the Devs raise the bazaar cap to perhaps 10k at the most.. or at least 7K) After a while that person makes a name for himself and opens up a shop and hopes for the best. The end.

Welp, that's it. As a novice weaponsmith, I've been doing some grinding and hustling where I grind to get the xp and hustle to buy the components to make a nice weapon that I know a master could just blow easily away with one of his poorer quality weapons that he created by mistake. All this grinding and hustling is frustrating because I want to enjoy the crafting game but I find myself grinding everywhere I go. Grinding while walking blindly in the swamps, while waiting at the starport while making transactions.. it's crazy. Grinding should be a CHOICE not a mandated way of playing the game asa serious crafter.

Please post your thoughts on this. Expand on it, if you will.

Anything involving doing something to get extra experiment points or other significant advantages will lead to large guilds powerleveling their crafters and small-time weaponsmiths being even more shafted than they are now.

It's near impossible to break into the market now because you don't have all the old resources. It'd be infinitely worse if you didn't have the old resources AND you only had half the experiment points of everyone else.

I've been a longtime proponent of the idea of cranking up UXP and giving masters incentive to help novices along. What I would suggest, though, is that rather than giving masters permanent skill enhancements, they should get a bonus to the actual act of crafting if they're being assisted by an apprentice (a crafter of lower skill level) in some way. This encourages a longer lasting master-apprentice relationship, rather than just grinding apprenticeship.

I'm quite confident that UXP could be fixed to prevent blatant powerleveling - just make sure it's based on actual, genuine usage, and that there'sa cap to how much experience you can ever get from craftinga single weapon or component, or perhaps a cap to how much you can get in a given span of real time. The cap is easy enough to balance. The rate at which you climb to that cap is a bit tougher - you need to make sure that there isn't some magical pattern of usage that gives the crafter significantly more experience than "normal" usage. Two ideas spring to mind:

1) Give the crafter a % of the relevant type of experience the user earns while using that crafter's item - scale the percentage so that the weapon's "cap" is reached within a weapon's normal usage lifetime, such as the amount of experience it might take for a marksman to outgrow a low-level weapon in favor of a better one.

2) Give the crafter experience as the item's condition deteriorates - this correlates to usage much like the experience thing does, but it's less likely to let high level combat classes powerlevel lower level crafters. It makes the "cap" much more natural - just design it so that your "cap" scales to the base durability of the item (giving crafters incentive to offer free repair warrantiesfor their weapons, or to make more durable weapons).

Even if that system ends up being exploitable in some way, I'd rather have people powerlevel by making real weapons and having their guildmates use them than powerlevel by having their guildmates give them 400k steel and then sit in a corner and grind rifle barrels up to master (with the current system, given the resources and a good macro, you could grind to master in a SINGLE DAY if you were willing to do nothing but click the mouse that entire day).

Nevertheless, I'm sure we could all agree that UXP should be adjusted. I just want to be better rewarded for actually hand crafting an item instead of popping it into a factory. Whether it gets exploited or not is not my concern. Give people enough time and they'll find a way to exploit anyting.

So far.. good ideas. I'd like to hear mre please.

I stopped to lament about UXP. I remember the times in beta, when you earned ONLY UXP from items.

The many incompetently morons have whining about it and the DEVs changed it to the system, used today.

I hate it, and i hate to grind to get master WS, but there is no escape.

I was wondering why you get no benefit for having people use your weapons aside from merchant exp (any notable benefit that is). Seems kind of useless that I spend huge amounts of time trying to find suitable materials to make up for my lack of experimentation skills so i can make a decent gun for once, only to have someone buy it and use it.....and help me get a new vendor?! Who cares about your shop when you have no skills to make anything worth selling? And when it comes to people using your items, it seems that a whole lot of other professions get a much larger benefit than weaponsmith. Take armorsmith for example. I believe there are either 7 or 9 pieces of armor in one suit. That means you get 7 or 9 times the amount of merchant exp in the same time as when someone is using your weapon. Seems a bit unbalanced. And there is nothing fun or anything about the way to weaponsmith right now, and the money factor seems a bit backwards.....it takes material to get exp to get skills to get better weapons to sell.....and yet you already had to make enourmous amounts of money to buy the materials to get the skills to make the weapons that are better to get.....money. Screwy?

How much merchant xp one earns from a sale is not too much of a concern. I have a shop in the middle of Timbuktu (read: nowhere) and I have very few visitors yet I earn Merchant XP on a regular basis just for having merchants out, it seems. Besides, i thought merchant exp was calculated based on the amount of the sale instead of the, say, complexity of the item. I don't want to get sidetracked so let's not focus too much on Merchant XP. A simple fact check is requested here.

Again, a weaponsmith should be rewarded for hand crafting items and having it used. Perhaps, it would be better to be rewarded UXP on long-term use as opposed to immediate use. That could stem exploitation a bit. For example, my original idea opened up the possibility of a guild of 133t d00dz picking up a novice weaponsmith's garbage scout pistols and use them to shoot scavengers every day for a week just to rake in the UXP. Well to help stem that... how about a timer that starts right after the user first equips a weaponsmith's brand new (but weak) scout pistols. This timer goes on for a maximum of 2 weeks. At the end of two weeks time, if that weapon is responsible for 50% or more of the xp earned during those 2 weeks, then the Weaponsmith picks up a certain amount of UXP based on exp earned with that weapon. With this setup.. the stupid pack of l33t d00dz could farm scavenger rats for 2 weeks but if, during that time, they find themselves earning weapon experience fighting much stronger creatures with different weapons, then they would end up NOT earning UXP for the Weaponsmith weak scout pistols. This way, the Weaponsmith gets rewarded for making something that turns out to be a weapon of choice for a particular user.

What about that?

I'd like to see the crafter get a handful of experience from a critical failure. Every one knows you learn more from failures than successes.