Effective Trivials of GM armor accounting for success caps

[Mannwin Woobie]

Frankly, the hidden caps are game-breaking for the tradeskiller. They devalue the extra time and effort the tradeskiller puts into his craft. The game already has two mechanisms to control item difficulty: drop rate and trivial. We don't need a third, hidden, secret one that blatantly disregards everything tradeskills have ever used as a benchmark of success.

Agree !!

[Denidil]

i would like to hear what ngreth thinks

*hint* *hint* :P

[Ngreth Thergn]

I think that It is not a decision I can make myself.

[Xulan]

Sorry if people get sick of me posting this, but I feel it is important to remember why the success caps exist in the first place.

Secrets of the Trade Skill Success Caps and why they exist:
http://mboards.eqtraders.com/eq/show...1&postcount=36


If a person wants the cap removed, they will need to find a solution that satisfies every point in that post, including future items and possible raised caps on the skills themselves.

[filobeto]

"Part of it was, keeping trivials at a level where skillups are better, yet still limiting how often the combine can succeed."

There are plenty of other ways to skill-up both tailoring and smithing. For some races, using Master combines is not an option, yet. At 25+ k per hide/scale, using GM components is one expensive way at skilling.

It is my understanding that successes give a better chance at skill-up? Why limit the success rate, thus reducing the skill-up rate on these items that are intended to be a method of skilling?

"putting skillup bonuses on these (and these do) means that if we ever increase the skill cap AGAIN... it becomes a skillup path that may not be desired."

And IF the max level is increased at a later date, I believe people will be extremely hard pressed to get groups to farm DoNs for hours to only get a couple of hides. Crystals have little value, and the farmers are slowly moving on to other content. By the time it is increased, if it's increased, DoN may be as popular as LDoN is currently.

"So it was decided that these would be good for skillups, but not good for combines. Not being good for combines means that high skill and AA's do mean little."

Adjust the trivial on these items, remove the success cap, and reward those that have the skill/aa's as intended. Limiting successes = limiting skill-ups?

"The other consideration is the rate these are desired to come in the world. Assuming drops are at the level they want (they are for the augs..., not the DoN Armor...) having the min fail controls the rate, while allowing more in the world for skillups."

Considering Hides/Scales are used for both the armor and augs, it's would be difficult to control the drop rate for both. I'll assume you mean that it is not at the right level for SILK armor. If so, I agree.

"Take the Holepoker as an example. With a 404 trivial, you need all 3 AA's and a 15% mod to get it to 95%. Without the AA's or a 15% mod it is Success chance = 48.5%"

This of course is assuming that a Tinker, attempting to create a Holepoker, has AA's that no other Tinker in Norath is offered.

Did I miss anything?

If you want to limit the success rate on an item, in the future, set the Trivial extremely high. Thus, giving those with the higher skill a better success; giving those with the higher skill + mod a better success; giving those with the highest skill + mod + AA's the best success.

Then determing the Trivial of the item as applied to max skill+mod+aa's. If the Trivial becomes 540 for it to limit the rate that the item enters the market, I think we could all live with that.

[Bobaten]

At 25+ k per hide/scale, using GM components is one expensive way at skilling.

If you are selling the final product in the bazaar it's a profitable way of skilling.

It is my understanding that successes give a better chance at skill-up? Why limit the success rate, thus reducing the skill-up rate on these items that are intended to be a method of skilling?

High stats mitigate the penalty for failure, particularly for smithing where 400 strength eliminates the penalty altogether. Regardless, in the 290-300 range, doing GM combines gives you up to 5 times the chance of getting a skill up. Even if you only have int/wis of 200 and suffer the full penalty, the 62.5% success cap reduces your skill up chance to around 10% (still 4 times base chance).

And IF the max level is increased at a later date, I believe people will be extremely hard pressed to get groups to farm DoNs for hours to only get a couple of hides. Crystals have little value, and the farmers are slowly moving on to other content. By the time it is increased, if it's increased, DoN may be as popular as LDoN is currently.

People are already 2 boxing creators to farm scales/hides, as long as the armor is desired, there will be a market for farmers.

Adjust the trivial on these items, remove the success cap, and reward those that have the skill/AA's as intended.

It may be what you want, but it's not what was intended.

If you want to limit the success rate on an item, in the future, set the Trivial extremely high. Thus, giving those with the higher skill a better success; giving those with the higher skill + mod a better success; giving those with the highest skill + mod + AA's the best success.

While I agree with this, remember that until the hole poker, a better skill mod has only ever been a benefit for someone with max skill in one case(alchemists making OoW augs), and that case was later corrected.

Then determine the Trivial of the item as applied to max skill+mod+AA's. If the Trivial becomes 540 for it to limit the rate that the item enters the market, I think we could all live with that.

I could certainly live with new items entering the world with high trivials. But I still don't agree with nerfing the current successes of people on existing combines.

[KyrosKrane]

If you are selling the final product in the bazaar it's a profitable way of skilling.

You're assuming successes, and that may not apply if the trivial is increased. If you're talking about the future, where the current cap of 300 may be raised, well ... I don't know, to be honest. I think that if even LDoN instances are limited to three people, DoN certainly won't be below that. If people can three-box missions, more power to them -- they can also three-box more-recent content to farm the item of the day.

High stats mitigate the penalty for failure, particularly for smithing where 400 strength eliminates the penalty altogether. Regardless, in the 290-300 range, doing GM combines gives you up to 5 times the chance of getting a skill up. Even if you only have int/wis of 200 and suffer the full penalty, the 62.5% success cap reduces your skill up chance to around 10% (still 4 times base chance).

While this is true, you have to consider another factor. The stated goal for tradeskills is that the difficulty to make is a balance for the power of the item, while the difficulty of obtaining souce materials is a balance for the skillup rate. This is taken directly from what Maddoc told me at the last Fan Faire. Given enough time, what he would have liked to do was rework ALL item trivials in ALL tradeskills, according to some formula, such that a more powerful item would have a higher trivial than a less powerful one. (This would change, say, the old cultural armors with 335 trivial to, say 100 or 150, and so on.) Then, the chance to skill up on any given piece would balance how hard the components are to get. Entirely storebought routes would have no bonus, while extremely difficult to obtain items would have a large bonus (like the GM armors). The bonus was specifically aimed to mitigate the increase in difficulty caused by reworking the skillup formula.

More and more, I'm starting to think the solution may lie not just in removing these caps (which is a short-term fix to the immediate problem), but possibly in reworking the success formula itself to something that has a smoother progression over time, particularly at the high end.

[Fonceur]

But I still don't agree with nerfing the current successes of people on existing combines.

You are missing the whole point of this thread... The point was to find currently which skill level + 5% (with or without AA's) makes you reach the artificial cap on GM armor, and from there to find the actual trivial that would give that EXACT same result at that minimal skill level, thus increasing the success rate of people with more than the strict minimum...

[Bobaten]

No, we alread know the minimum skill to get maximum success, its 250 + mastery 3(without mastery varies from piece to piece, but the hardest pieces need 300 skill). The proposal in this thread is to raise the trivials thus lowering the success rates for everyone between 250 and 300 skill. The idea being to add value to a higher skill by taking value away from lower skill.

[Mannwin Woobie]

I could certainly live with new items entering the world with high trivials. But I still don't agree with nerfing the current successes of people on existing combines.

The idea being to add value to a higher skill by taking value away from lower skill.

The proposal is not a nerf, it is a fix. It is taking away the value that exists to lower skills that shouldn't have been there in the first place.

Success caps go against everything we have learned and known about tradeskilling. If I have a skill level that is 50 points higher than another person's, then I SHOULD have a better success at making something that has a trivial that is higher than both of our skills. Plain and simple. It is a slap in the face to everyone who took the time, energy, and platinum to raise their skill above the 'minimum'. At 345 skill, I could live with a 60% success rate on something with a 500 trivial (example). But I should have better than that on these, and I should certainly have better than someone with a 250 skill.

[Fonceur]

The proposal in this thread is to raise the trivials thus lowering the success rates for everyone between 250 and 300 skill.

No it's not... The idea is to remove the artificial success cap and raise the trivial such that the person at 250 skill still have the exact SAME SUCCESS RATE, while everyone else over that strict minimum skills gets a better success, as it should... The only people that would suffer a nerf are the people with LESS than 250 skills that currently are taking the risk, since they know higher skills will not much matter much in the end...

[KyrosKrane]

Not quite. The idea is to change the trivial so that a person with 300 skill +12% would have the same success rates as the current cap. People with lower skill and with various masteries would have different success rates. The proposed trivials would mean that 250 skill + mastery 3 would have reduced rates compared to now, but not by too much. Unfortunately, it is impossible to balance the trivials such that a person at 250 + mastery 3 could keep the same success rate while still rewarding a higher-skilled person meaningfully AND keeping the amount of successes serverwide under control.

Edit: Actually, people at 250 skill, mastery 3, and an 8% skill mod would have about 20% less chance to succeed on the items. People at 300 + 12% would have the same chance. Those at 300 + Mastery 3 + 15% would have the best chance (about 15-20% better than the current cap).

[Bobaten]

To put some numbers on this, someone at 290-300 skill with no mastery but the 8% mod, making GM armor today is at the success cap. With the proposed changes the same person would only be able to make the armor at between 60% and 75% of the success rate they have now. That pretty much removes the value of the skill up mods on these items.

[Fonceur]

Ooops, sorry I guess I somehow missed the part about:

I propose removing the success rate caps and adjusting the trivials to match the effective trivials from 300+12%+M0

[Winenose]

Very interesting discussion. I myself have tailoring at 300+12% and AAs. My smithing is at 253+15% and AAs. And I can make GM armor and symbols with same success with both skills.

Right now I'm happy with it because I don't have to skill up smithing any more to get max success on GM stuff. I guess I should be mad at the same time because tailors with 250+AAs get same success rate for tailoring as I do... But I don't care much either way because the server is saturated with max skill traders and I mostly do combines for free anyway.

To actually contribute something to this discussion, I have to admit that I agree with raising the trivials. All the drops are rare eneough to limit the number of items entering world, without messing around with basic concepts.

Additionally, having to explain to (potential) customers that there is actually a capped success rate on these items is beyond absurd. What should I answer to a question "why?" ?