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**Silound** · 07-16-2004, 03:34 AM

To break that down a bit in another view:

This correlates to the seeming widespread interest in making tradeskilled items useful enough so that people want to wear them. Obviously, things like fine plate aren't even looked at; for the cost of a single piece of fine plate you can easily grab something with stats in the bazaar.

However, I don't see any reason why tradeskills should be such a tremendous platinum sink either. It would make sense that you spend a small to moderate fortune to master a skill, but having to spend several large fortunes to master a skill is a bit out of alignment. The fact that 90% of the items people make for skillups aren't worth what a vendor will pay for it suggests that perhaps there should be more quests or returns from the grind of skilling a tradeskill.

Arguably, skillups should come faster at mid levels than at high end or early levels. In reality, to learn to smith you would take much time to learn the basics and techniques (low end), then you would craft small or simple items routinely (medium range) till you could craft a more complicated design(high end). Again, several large fortunes to get to a point where the best items you can possibly make won't be used by many people who can gather the components to make them. Sadly, many of those who can farm the items to make high end TS items probably won't use the items they can make, preferring to equip twinks or make some cash in hte bazaar.

Drops rates aren't bad on most bazaar items. In reality, it's part of the economy that EQ is a near perfect example of. If you can farm spider siks and get 30 p per silk, do so. That 30k you made off all those silks can be put into other skills to further enhance. In real life you have to work for money so you can spend it on other things you want, why not hte same for EQ? Obviously, if the price is absurdly high, the seller can chose to wait for an impatient rich person, or lower the price for a more moderate person. Competition can lower that price, but with large numbers of people with huge bank accounts, that tends to inflate prices because sellers can get away with it. Converse with your local tradeskillers, see if you aren't able to reach an agreement to buy quantities of items for less, or exclusive farming deals, or flat out convince other people not to pay 30p per silk.

I'm a periodically broke tradeskiller. As soon as I gather 4k, I do a run on somehting, usually whatever is lacking the most. I don't have EP access, I can't do high end TS without buying my supplies. But I'm quite sure that in the few hours every other day I spend online, I can manage to gather what I need for tradeskilling runs. Spend 3 hours farming something like the Hollowshade war will net me about 80-120 combines of shadowscream materials. Obviously, one can figure that on average I will get from 200-250 around, at worst, one skillup every 150 combines averaged (I've never personally seen or heard of worse than 80ish, but I'm sure it can happen), then I need to farm around 10 thousand or so combines. Roughly 125-85 hours of farm time. Assuming I play 4 days per week and do that 3 hours of farming (I like to spread an hour here and there when I'm on unless the drops are really smoking) that's 45-30 play days necessary to grandmaster smithing, and that's being pessimistic about everything except drop rate. So in two months, you could probably farm your way to 250 skill in smithing. Not too bad, since all you waste is time. Is your time better spent farming items to sell and buying your supplies for skillups? Your call.

However you look at it, Fletching, Tailorin, Smithing, Baking, Brewing, and Pottery are all relatively simple to raise via farming or straight vendor buying. JC takes a bit of cash, but I too it to 190 on 5k without enchanting my metals, so I'd bet you could get nearly 250 on 10k at the most. Time is the question.

How much are you willing to spend farming your skill sup to make those better items?

Good post imo, challenged me to think a bit how to respond to it in a way that should be both helpful and informative, while not being rude (I hope I wasn't, if I was I apologize here and now, I didn't mean to come off in such a way).

**Obina** · 07-16-2004, 04:47 AM

I'd like a few more consumable items outside of brewing and baking. Perhaps an all/all portstone with 10 charges that a potter can make up /shrug. (And why not store bought CE's *smile*)

My next comment may be disruptive, but I tend to think that the other suggestions conflict with each other because of the laws of supply and demand. The profit needs to come from players (or exploit people will ruin the game). So tradeskilling can not be easier to make money for the casual player, and easier to get supplies at the same time. If it is easier more will do it; if it is more profitable more will do it. Then supply of items increase, and prices drop.

Sould it be easier (and less profitable), or harder (and more profitable when you get there)? Can't be both. The new interface made it easier. There are more GM tradeskillers now I'm pretty sure. I think this now makes it about right.

**Aalar** · 07-16-2004, 06:42 AM

I have said in the past and this has been stated by a number of people

Faster skill ups = more plat
Slower skill ups = less plat

All things being equal.

If one does not mind farming for every component (this includes leveling alts for special combines/foraging/whatever) then the cost of skilling up can even be a profit. For example, smithing from 120-158 doing the ornate. One can buy the HQ ore required or one can farm places to get FS steel to convert to HQ ore. I farmed 100% of my HQ ore - didn't buy any. I made several thousand plat skilling up from 120-158. A lot of this came from other cash items while farming for the FS weapons. It did take me a lot more time to get thru those levels but I am inherently cheap so it worked for me.

And has been stated previously, an item will only have value if the making/obtaining of it is difficult. People are paying for the convenience of obtaining an item when buying it (and the idea of having it now rather than waiting). Anyone can eventually make Ceramic Incense Burners of Ro. The steps to be able to do this are rather long and involved (must be PoF flagged for one). If it was easy people would not pay tens of thousands of plat for this item. I mention that Item as I farm all the materials for it and make them (all the farmable materials that is).

I know it sucks skilling up but the potential rewards are there. You just have to figure out what will sell. I have made a lot more money off tradeskills then I have paid out. I like doing things cheaply so I am taking more time to skill up.

Aalar

**Pootle** · 07-16-2004, 07:07 AM

QUOTE---------------------------------------------------
The fact that 90% of the items people make for skillups aren't worth what a vendor will pay for it suggests that perhaps there should be more quests or returns from the grind of skilling a tradeskill. ----------------------------------------------------------

Most of these items that i think you are talking about were implemented in the early years of the game and a lot has changed since then.

I remember when i started tradeskilling, It was just after Kurnark release, and Banded Armor and Fine Plate would sell to players. I funded my early tradeskilling by selling banded armor to Barbarian players in Halas, they loved it.

Fine Plate, and Dyed Fine Plate was very popular, and many people wanted coloured sets making!

When Velious came out the tailored stuff was great, people made a huge amount of money (and there wasent many high level tailors then) from that stuff.

Moving on to Luclin, Rockhopper Hide gear, again a massive seller, I was exping on rockhoppers and the (one semi reliable acrylia source in the game) Tenubrous Mountains 'grimling cave'. The first few Studded cloaks went for close to 20k then the market dropped to around 9k for a while, which was huge cash those days, a 10wis cloak seemed an insane stat back then.

I made a lot of money on those cloaks and tunics, and then the reinforced rockhopper gear for monks. Great cash while i was skilling up.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

So most of these not-worth-selling-to-vendor items that you are skilling up on had a use in their own time.

**Elyssanda** · 07-16-2004, 11:04 AM

Following the armor by expansion comments... PoP had stuff that still sells.. but lets look at since then...
LoY.. only prismatic dyes.. nothing tailored, or smithed.
Ldon.. smithed plate and chain.. sell ok.. for twinking.. no one wants for their mains though...
Gates...well.. the souffles sell for 5-10pp to the high end guilds for the faction quests.. Nothing really plat making..

**KyrosKrane** · 07-16-2004, 02:00 PM

Originally posted by Elyssanda

LoY.. only prismatic dyes.. nothing tailored, or smithed.

Well, LoY did have the racial robes. Those sell moderately well in the bazaar, not to mention being a decent skillup option.

**Elyssanda** · 07-16-2004, 02:07 PM

Originally posted by KyrosKrane

Well, LoY did have the racial robes. Those sell moderately well in the bazaar, not to mention being a decent skillup option.

OOPS my bad.. forgot those.

**Mark** · 07-17-2004, 02:22 AM

Personal Trade skill items

I would like to see personal trade skill items that are NO DROP, but are comparable to EP items. I would like the items to be progressive (think who wants to be a millionaire, you have good money, but you can go for even better money... but if you do there is a chance you lose it all!). I would love to have armor that I have been working on for months and is really cool.

I don't see this as a balance issue either because there will be EP level items in ldon soon. The personal tradskiller items should take a long time to make, like gathering LDoN points does, but there will be no XP involved so it should take only about half as long. The idems could even be level based because they are no drop.

My nightmare is that they will implement this and only make it accessible to UBER PLAYERZ like they do with every other good trade skill quest.

My other dream: tradeskilling for XP...

**Narnar** · 07-17-2004, 03:55 AM

I'm sure they consider the trophies our personal no drop items

And that's all we'll get, ever, unless we're in an uber guild and have access to the quests

(Hopefully I'll be wrong on that

)

An item that grows as your tradeskills grow higher would be great though! One with all tradeskills at 250 would have an amazing item! It wouldn't surprise me if they limit that to ubahguilds too though, they always seem to do that! "Ye cannot get yer Orb of Magical Tradeskilling (That grows more powerful as you skillup in tradeskills) unless you slay Quarm! In under 30 seconds with a group of 6! Arrrrrrrrrrrrr......."

But when it comes down to it, they just don't seem to like casual tradeskillers, only EP + guilds can get the quests, and items, and those people charge bundles for the items when they sell to us casual tradeskillers. The people who can actually USE the items..

EQ2 will probably be more tradeskill involved, that's why you see tradeskill classes there. Could you imagine tradeskill classes in EQ? Smiths! Wield your hammers! Tailors! Ready your needles! ...... SLAY THE GNOLL!! *Eeeeeek it hit me! Retreat retreat!*

**Syanya** · 07-17-2004, 06:39 AM

little clarification

First and foremost, I do thank you all very much for your time and patience in answering this thread.

I know that some of my points might seem a little open ended and without examples, and I apologize for that once again.

Just a few examples of the thoughts that inspired this post.
First, farm time is simplest to explain and give an example of.
On a normal weekday I have 2-5 hours (modulated by RL duties, etc) and farming is minimal, and still must take second place to demands from my spouse to go hunt on (insert main or alts' name here). When I do get to farm, I usually go in one of two directions. I'll rather make a quick jaunt to Velks or Crystal Caverns to check on the status of the velium camps there or run over to hollowshade to check on the owlbears and tenebrous to check on sonic wolves. 2-3 hours of farming bears or wolves might yield 1/2 of a stack of substances, while the same 2-3 hours of farming velium might yield (depending on luck and drop rates that day) enough velium to make my mule wish I never put trader bags on him. Weekend comes and depending on which of these 2 paths I have been able to take, direction to rather go try to farm swirling shadows (in shadeweavers with an alt that can track, shadows in twilight still have an oppressively high rate of causing corpse runs) or run to rathe/dulak to get enough pp built up to waste money on EVB's or to smith LDoN armors (if I have been drug to enough of them to make a few stacks of temper).

Cost versus failure rate is also eating me alive. Even with geerloc in hand and decent stats, failures have left me with a net loss of about 35k pp in my smithing just since skill level 194, not to mention the majority of my time in the last 6 months spent farming.

I have never been on a raid, and have no wish to.
I don't see why the world of norrath has been pushed to the extreme it has been with people powerleveling their way to the end game, then complaining it is boring because it's the same old same old. It is a HUGE world with more places to explore and see (and try to find tradeskill ingredients in..) then I will see for quite some time.

Not trying to rant, please forgive me if it seems this way. Just hoping to gain some incite from the collective minds here and their infinite wisdom.

Thanks in advance,
Syanya
(seems the spell checker thought velium should be valium, sorry about that)

**Lickity** · 07-17-2004, 01:04 PM

I farmed 100% of my HQ ore - didn't buy any. I made several thousand plat skilling up from 120-158. A lot of this came from other cash items while farming for the FS weapons. It did take me a lot more time to get thru those levels but I am inherently cheap so it worked for me.

However, this "profit" was artificial. If you would have just sold the FS weapons straight to a vendor, and then bought ore with the proceeds, you would have made more money than breaking it down into ore. It is silly that this is the case, but a sad truth.

**Kieroth_whiteleaf** · 07-18-2004, 01:11 AM

Originally posted by Syanya

while the same 2-3 hours of farming valium might yield (depending on luck and drop rates that day)

****.. I wish we could farm valium...

sorry. I recognize it was just a typo, just happened to hit my funny bone.

SFG

**Silound** · 07-18-2004, 03:03 AM

However, this "profit" was artificial. If you would have just sold the FS weapons straight to a vendor, and then bought ore with the proceeds, you would have made more money than breaking it down into ore. It is silly that this is the case, but a sad truth.

I strongly disagree here. If you check Zeralenn's guide, there are several FS items whose "ore value" is higher than the cash value, thus making it more efficient to convert them. This does only apply to around 3 weapons though. The upside to farming it all yourself is that you don't need to restock the vendors though.

**Dulsin** · 07-20-2004, 09:22 AM

I wish EQ's trade skill system was half as good as DAoC.

Sadly that game is slowly dying off but they have the best trade skill system I have ever seen. All of the player made items are better than drops. All trade skill materials can be purchased from venders. All trash drops can be refined into trade materials more valuable than the sell back of the drops.

So every mob drop is a trade skill farm. Trade skillers can earn extra cash converting drops to trinkets that sell back to venders for nearly the full value of the goods.

Announcement

Personal dreams for tradeskills (that will never happen..)

Personal dreams for tradeskills (that will never happen..)

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