Minimum chance to fail a combine is dumb.

[Yammez]

I look at the fail rate = real life oopsies..
Regardless how good you are at something you are bound to mess up.

This can be applied to doing anything. Even the most skilled craftsman in real life mess up. You just dont see it cause they wont admit it. This is reflected in the game with the fail rate.

BINGO! It's about time someone stated this. A chance to fail at even a simple task is always there. I brew beer in RL and I once grabbed the wrong ingredient, brewed it, and it turned out, um, less than desirable. I was only fortunate that my Mother-in-Law liked it *snicker* Fact is, we all make mistakes and those *oopsies* are a nice little touch to tradeskilling in game. Frustrating when it happens? Darn toot'n. I say, leave the min fail in the game and keep it interesting. Otherwise, might as well introduce cheatcodes to appease the growing masses of players who do nothing but whine about how tough the game is. Just my 2cp worth....

[Phantron]

Ultimately everything related to success of tradeskills only exists to control the rate an item enters the world. If you don't have a 5% fail rate then everything will be 5% rarer. Using some randomly made up but representative numbers:

10 hours for 1 grand master scale
60% to make a GM BP so you need on average 5 scales (5 X 60% = 3).
5% chance to fail making the individual scales.
Total time making a GM BP - 10 X 5 /0.95 = 52.6 hours

Now let's say overnight we decide that you'll never fail (like say, WoW's tradeskill system). But, assuming the item designer hasn't changed, the same BP still takes 52.6 hours to make. Since you can no longer fail to make the BP or the subcombines, this means now each scale takes about 17 hours to get as opposed to 10.

Is this really any better? I often get the feeling people want tradeskilling, whether skilling up or making item, to be more like xping: if I have X combines it gives me X * Y tradeskill XP which guaranteeds Z skillups. For me, if I want to be totally sure I'll net some gain, I'd be xping instead.

[mewkus]

Not sure if this comment would de-rail this or not...
My 2cp
I look at the fail rate = real life oopsies..
...

Those real life oopsies are represented in game as the trivial point. The better you get at something, the more trivial it becomes, in both game and RL. The more trivial it becomes, the less oopsies you have. The problem here is that SOE has decided to add something else to the equation with the higher than normal minimum failure rate. The 5% minimum failure rate represent the dumb luck factor. For those combines that have an increased minimum failure rate, that's just SOE's way of saying that they want to give those who haven't done as much work in their tradeskilling the same chance as those who have put in a lot of work (both skilling and/or griding AAs).

I think SOE needs to at least go back and add more truth in their descriptions of the tradeskill masteries so that people wont go around thinking that spending points on them will actually reduce failure rates, but rather will only reduce their failure rates when they're skill is mid level.

[Mannwin Woobie]

Sorry, Bumkus, but I don't see how any of your 3 points even addresses the justification of these ridiculously high minimum fail rates. There is no reason why a 300+ tradeskiller with all Mastery AA's should not have a better chance at making a high-trivial item than a 250 skiller with no masteries.

All your other points are bringing us back to the fact that people missed out on skilling up before the latest nerfs. You know what? It's done with. I missed out on skilling up in Smithing before the Fine Plate nerf of years ago. Do I think that means I should have some "gift" added to my combines? Or do I think that means everyone else who got there before me should have been penalized in theirs? Nope. It happened, I dealt with it (as I am sure a lot of people did), and I moved on. I would hope others who are in a similar boat can find the strength to move past this one also.

[Bumkus]

Sorry, Bumkus, but I don't see how any of your 3 points even addresses the justification of these ridiculously high minimum fail rates. There is no reason why a 300+ tradeskiller with all Mastery AA's should not have a better chance at making a high-trivial item than a 250 skiller with no masteries.

All your other points are bringing us back to the fact that people missed out on skilling up before the latest nerfs. You know what? It's done with. I missed out on skilling up in Smithing before the Fine Plate nerf of years ago. Do I think that means I should have some "gift" added to my combines? Or do I think that means everyone else who got there before me should have been penalized in theirs? Nope. It happened, I dealt with it (as I am sure a lot of people did), and I moved on. I would hope others who are in a similar boat can find the strength to move past this one also.

And so we arrive at our dilema.

Influx of uberific gear, player-made gear devalues existing items. (You know the stuff you used to have to cross zone lines and, like, kill things to get.) Especially expert and master's level stuff, which people are using for skillups and likely destroying by the bucket load. (agreed?)

I don't think Sony wants to increase DoN armor production (agreed?)

So what seems to be the solution to this problem? Well what they seem to have done is:
1. Increase failure rates. Certainly on DoN and likely on other components
2. Limit drop rates on tradeskilling items, limiting skillup chances and limiting items coming into the ecomony.
3. Eliminate skillup paths, further limiting skillup chances.
4. Restructure skillup formulla, increasing number of combines required to hit 300 by 20%.

As you can see, that a hot steamer on everybody's doorstep. It doesn't matter if you are at the high end of tradeskilling, or just trying to get to the high end of tradeskilling. This is an honest to goodness, equal-opportunity poke in the eye.

I became vocal in this thread mainly to offet the initial wave of "Wait a minute, I'm 300 skill with all the aa's and my failure rate is too high. Where's that top-10 list?" That's because I feel that addressing any one set of needs without addressing the others is probably not in the best interest of the game.

So yea, tradeskills are pretty much getting everybody in a tizzy these days. But hey, next month we'll all get to play monsters. I just can't wait till they add race cars.

[Lothay]

I spoke earlier about the minimum fail chance being simply an additional means of controling the rate at which powerful items enter the game. Really. Nothing more. While it might be unpleasant, it is a valid mechanism.

It allows an additional control. It means that SoE doesn't have to make each drop for something incredibly rare to control the rate. It means items with a minimum fail chance can have a greater number of component drops. Which in turn means that those components can be used to skill up.

I'm thinking that point got lost somewhere.

[Mannwin Woobie]

I'm thinking that point got lost somewhere.

I don't think your point got lost. Just not everyone agrees with you

[Twistagain]

I spoke earlier about the minimum fail chance being simply an additional means of controling the rate at which powerful items enter the game. Really. Nothing more. While it might be unpleasant, it is a valid mechanism.

It allows an additional control. It means that SoE doesn't have to make each drop for something incredibly rare to control the rate. It means items with a minimum fail chance can have a greater number of component drops. Which in turn means that those components can be used to skill up.

I'm thinking that point got lost somewhere.

I'll agree that "in theory" that sounds like a very reasonable, rational explanation. That theory is shot all to pieces when you consider that the only recipes with this max rate require drops that are very rare to begin with. This is what we are supposed to skillup on?

The only people using these as a skillup method are uberguilds or ubertraders. They can afford to buy them from others. Most of us dread the thought of losing the components from a failure (as that represents a large amount of cash for us) and will not attempt them with a suboptimal skill...so we've ALREADY skilled up.

[Ngreth Thergn]

The only people using these as a skillup method are uberguilds or ubertraders. They can afford to buy them from others. Most of us dread the thought of losing the components from a failure (as that represents a large amount of cash for us) and will not attempt them with a suboptimal skill...so we've ALREADY skilled up.

But then how much MORE rare would they have been, and how much more difficult would it have been to get skillups, if there was no min fail rate?

What if they wanted an absolute cap on how often the item came in the game, to NEVER in crease... this means that even if they made it a 438 trivial so people with he 15% mod are at about the rate I have seen in another post here... they would NEVER again be able to raise the skill cap... *OR* if they raised the skill cap again, they would sudenly have to "mysteriously" raise the trivial on this items to keep them coming at the same rate.

so if they never want this item to come on to the market more often that it does now... You are saying you would seriously want the drop rate to be about twice as rare as it is now?

I strongly doubt they made the min fail chance just to poke in the eye people that make it to a 300 skill. I doubt they were out to get you. One thing they did do is make you items that are worth a good amount of cash in the bazaar. Most (yes not every single one) of the items with a min fail chance are among the highest selling value tradeskill items in the bazaar. If they became more common, mudflation would kill their value much faster.

[Bumkus]

The funny thing is, I DO have better items than I would have had from purely looting mobs pre-DoN. And the GM baz mules DO have more plat than they would have had pre-DoN. (And we aren't happy why? Was this a case of over- promise, under-deliver?)

As much as I love this thread (and I really do love it), I am thinking that I am ready to chalk the current state of affairs up to "game mechanics" and move on.

[Phantron]

You only need ~250 skill, mastery 3, and about 200K of money to be profitiable buying scales (enough to buy about 15 scales on Drinal) and then selling GM armor assuming you buy them at a good price. It's about the same as what I'd imagine it takes to start a casino. Between the guy who buys the scales for me we made about close to 2 million pp, so this seems like a reasonable investement. I don't think you have to be an ubertrader unless having 200K of capital is uber, but you do have to be pretty careful about when to buy scales (of course more capital allows you more room to work with to deal with slow days/bad streaks).

As for the rarity, it's all on a relative scale. Metallic Drake Scales may seem rare to you but if they get rid of the ~40% fail rate on GM BP/Legs they'll now be roughly twice as rare because some guy ultimately decides how often uber gear enters the world and while he may not care if a GM BP takes 50 or 51 hours to obtain, he's not going to change it from 50 to 25 without a good reason. If it is no longer possible to fail overnight, items would still enter the world at the exact same rate unless the itemization guy changes his mind. It'd simply mean that every component is now roughly 5%-100% rarer (at least 5% to compensate for the 5% fail rate).

[Bumkus]

Between the guy who buys the scales for me we made about close to 2 million pp

I dont think I would share this information on this board.

[Phantron]

Hmm? Last time I checked, it's not a secret that anyone with some plat can buy scales from the bazaar and turn it into GM armor to sell which in term leads to a profit.

[Bumkus]

My post was pretty curt, so it probably looked like I was being a jerk. Appologies for that. You are free certainly to share any information you'd like.

However, all it takes is one tailor or smith who is unhappy with the run up in cost on GDH's and MDS's (20k on Fennin), and who is further unhappy to know that millions of plat are being channeled into a handful of players as a result, to choose to maliciously attack your market by sitting in PoK with a bag o' Blessed Waters and patterns, spamming free GM combines.

I only mentioned that it is riskier to share your plat numbers on this board because people seem to be pretty emotional about the availibility of DoN ingrediants, and because you are going to get a higher percentage of tradeskillers, who are in a better position to impact your market should they so choose.

(And wow. are those not the worst run-on sentences you've ever seen? Ah well, it was for good reason that I did not become an English teacher.)

[Angelsyn]

Uh... as for the RL "oops" issues.

There are some things that are just plain hard. No matter how good you are, there's a chance (and often a noticable chance) that you will fail.

Of course, in RL "salvaging" and "stopping half-way" are much more common. If you've noticed that you're making a mistake, it's often fairly easy to stop and work to correct it in RL... something you can't do in EQ.

But even the best gemcutters in the world make mistakes... even the best chefs throw stuff out because it isn't up to par...
Even the best chefs hate working with certain foods... simply because it's so hard to prepare them.
Even RL blacksmiths mess up making Nails of all things sometimes!