Charms and craftsmen.

[Threllin Drunckensmith]

Below taken from SOE's LoY site
http://everquest.station.sony.com/legacy/f_charms.jsp

And of course there are rumors that some of these charms only work with arms or armor created by the same weapon or armor smith, and that their magic grows stronger with every piece of the armor set the owner wears.

I'm looking everywhere and not finding a thing about any charm that might be linked to tradeskills, anybody else found anything?


Threllin Drunckensmith
Dwarven Myrmidon
Blacksmith (205)
Deliverers of Peace - Saryrn

[Kronepsis]

You're coming to the wrong conclusion.
Quoting the Denmother here.

*IF* charms are ever player-made, there will be something put up here, and plastered across the front page of the website. At this time, there's no such critter. It's not that we "haven't found it yet", it's that this spoken-of potential has not been implemented.

They've said that it may be possible at some point, but it's not in place now. Given that fact, I'm not going to put up yet another forum to babysit, just to have hundreds of folks go off on tangents, rants, rumor-fests, etc. over something that is not currently player-made.

[Eumerin]

Currently, there is no way for the item database to track the craftsman who created an item. Thus, I suspect that what was being referred to are armor sets. Quested armor sets often are "created" by a single individual, and some of the sample charms rewarded players for wearing armor of a specific type. Thus, warrior crafted armor, which is all "created" by two centaurs, might have an associated charm which gave bonuses when a warrior wore more of the armor.

[Fulmar]

Perhapse....

While it would currently be imposible to tell exactly what smith created the item, it would be posible to see if a player is wearing player made armour. I see no reason that there can't be a charm that increases with each piece of banded or fine plate or other player made armour types. When describing charms, Sony used the example "for each piece of cloth amour worn this charm gets stronger". Just because we haven't found a Fine Plate charm or a Wu's charm doesn't mean they don't exist. If they haven't been found in a few months though, I would give up hope.

Fulmar, 46th Barbarian Shaman
Brell Serilis
216 Potter, 200 Brewer, 192 Baker, 186 Jewler, 182 Smith, 182 Fletcher, 158 Tailor, 41 Alchemist

[Stilts Stonebender]

I would agree with the above and interpret it in a more "EQ" fashion... i.e. the "same smith = a_dwarven_smith*.* or an_elven_smith*.*"

So it would read:
"And of course there are rumors that some of these charms only work with arms or armor created by the same (race of) weapon or armor smith, and that their magic grows stronger with every piece of the armor set the owner wears."

So that if you wore an entire suit of Brellium Plate, you would get the bonus, but if you're doing the mix and match you wouldn't.

From what I've seen thus far of the charms currently in game (or at least the ones that have been found), the stats are rather lack luster. Even with Planar Power (stats >255) only marginal bonuses are gained. While it's stats that you previously didn't have, it's still nothing to write home about.

Additionally, due to the "dynamic" nature of most of the charms, they are nothing that you would count on for improving your stats in the long run. A toy at best, a curse at worst. The "better when carrying fewer containers" and "better when less people are in the zone" charms remind me of AD&D cursed items. Something nice, but something bad to go with it.

[Railina]

And of course there are rumors that some of these charms only work with arms or armor created by the same weapon or armor smith, and that their magic grows stronger with every piece of the armor set the owner wears.

I thought of it (and still do) as more something along the lines of adding a charm to existing armor sets. for (purely theoretical) instance:
--Deepwater Charm: Becomes more effective as you don deepwater armor.
--Charm of Forbidden Rites: Becomes more effective as you don more armor of Forbidden Rites
--Charm of the Shrine: Becomes more effective as you don more of your class's SkyShrine Armor
--Master Wu's Charm: Becomes more powerful when your equipment bears the name of the master.

Additionally, due to the "dynamic" nature of most of the charms, they are nothing that you would count on for improving your stats in the long run. A toy at best, a curse at worst. The "better when carrying fewer containers" and "better when less people are in the zone" charms remind me of AD&D cursed items. Something nice, but something bad to go with it.

I haven't seen anything to indicate that any of these get negative stats. at worst, they're useless, you can always unequip them.

[Eumerin]

There's one charm that is based off of the number of languages you know, and another that is based on your Emerald Warriors faction (wood elf warriors), so there are at least two charms out there that won't change based on whims of equipment and/or group members.
Charms are still being found, and off the top of my head, I can think of a quested charm that hasn't been completed yet (quest starts in Erudin, asks for three swords and a medallion, and *probably* results in a charm), so who knows what will turn up.
Also, someone over at Paladins of Norrath suggested that VI might have intentionally tweaked the charms to start out underpowered. Typically, equipment starts out too good, and gets nerfed. This time, VI might intentionally be doing things the other way around.

[Lonzrick]

Currently, there is no way for the item database to track the craftsman who created an item.

I would probably take issue with that. They have lied to us many many times about what the engine is capable of. We were once told that there wasn't room in the "zone database" (whatever it is) for more player pet images...then miraculously found room to put in Spectre-pets for Necromancers. Since then we have various caster pets, beastlord pets, Vah Shir player characters, and now Frogloks.

So while they don't currently track who made the item, and perhaps have no plans to (or are frightened of doing the actual work to implement good ideas...rather than nerf something else), they certain *can* track the craftsman who made an item.

Doing so would solve so many problems! For instance, imagine if the PoP armor was redone properly. Bob-the-non-smith collects the items to make his elemental armor. The combining process is no-fail---but only if you are a 250 Blacksmith! Oh no! What will Bob do? The answer: he finds a 250 Blacksmith and gives the blacksmith the components to make the armor. Let's say that Blacksmith's name is...Lonzrick.

The armor, however, has a new label---actually 2 new labels. One is a "crafted by". The other is similar to NO-DROP and NO-RENT but is called DROP-ONCE. As long as the crafted-by tag matches the name of the Blacksmith, it can be transferred out of his inventory to someone else (ie: the purchaser). Once it lands in the other player's inventory, it still says "Crafte by Lonzrick"...but it's not in Lonzrick's inventory any more, so it cannot be transferred again. NO-DROP.

Simple to conceive. Simple to implement.

Tradeskills would have a purpose other than a timesink. It would be worthwhile to spend the time doing Shadowscream for months on end for the points. The Blacksmith's time-spent is rewarded by the fee he charges for the combine. It makes sense for the final combine to be no-fail --- for a 250 Blacksmith; instead of (as it is now) no-fail for any Joe-Schmoe who gives the items to the NPC Blacksmith. Crafter names are "out there" on the items. The good items remain essentially NO-DROP, while putting the "power" of creating these items in the crafters' hands rather than UBER_MOB_2450.

[Lilosh]

--Charm of the Shrine: Becomes more effective as you don more of your class's SkyShrine Armor

That would be cool!! I like the idea, Even if I do think that there are only 3 or so pieces of Velious armor I want.


I still like the idea, though.


-Lilosh

[Eumerin]

Currently, there is no way for the item database to track the craftsman who created an item.

I would probably take issue with that. They have lied to us many many times about what the engine is capable of. We were once told that there wasn't room in the "zone database" (whatever it is) for more player pet images...then miraculously found room to put in Spectre-pets for Necromancers. Since then we have various caster pets, beastlord pets, Vah Shir player characters, and now Frogloks.

So while they don't currently track who made the item, and perhaps have no plans to (or are frightened of doing the actual work to implement good ideas...rather than nerf something else), they certain *can* track the craftsman who made an item.

Its pretty well known how the item database works. Magelo will give you a pretty good idea of it. The problem with your suggestion is that it opens the database up to literally an infinite number of new slots. EVERY player in the game can theoretically become a tradeskiller and make every last item that could have an owner tag, so there would need to be a horrendously huge number of database slots to accomodate the flow of product. Even if they had the spots in the database (and I don't believe they ever will, even if the game lasts for 100 years) I don't think they'd implement something like that. It would just be far too much work to handle for too little payoff. Every time you created a new item that you'd never created before, the database would have to reserve another slot for that item, even if you destroyed it ten seconds later.

And iirc, the primary objection to increasing the size of the universal graphics file (where things such as race and pet models are found) wasn't that VI was running out of space. Its that those models need to be loaded in everyones' computer all the time, and the fewer things there are in that file, the better YOUR computer will perform when running the game.
VI could put every last mob into that file, but load times would go through the roof.

[Hethral]

Actually they'd just need to add a single field to the items, not the global item table but the instance of the item in inventory, for the ID of the creator. Come to think of it it'd be neat if they added two fields, on for who if anyone created it, and a second for what dropped it. So when people asked where did you get that, you could just inspect it and tell them what the exact name of the creature that dropped it was.

[Eumerin]

I think I understand what you're saying, but I don't see how that wouldn't require a new slot in the item database for each new manufacturer of the item. AFAIK, EQ uses a simple item # code to track what's in each slot.
So all EQ knows is that I have item 22432 on my chest. It then looks at my character model, which is Male Erudite, and loads the appropriate plate chest overlay. It then looks at my character's chest slot, and realizes that I've set it to a shade of blue that matches Blue Fine Plate, and shades the chest piece that particular shade.
The problem is, how does the "Made by" tag work?
If you assign it to the item, you've essentially created a new item in the item database - and you have to create a new slot in the item database each time a craftsperson creates an item for the first time. My Blue FP Legs are no longer item 23152. They're now some other number, and that number is different from the Blue FP Legs created by you. I don't think arbitrarily assigning the name to the item code will work (i.e. making them 23152EumerinSR - SR for my server to differentiate me from anyone else named Eumerin on another server), because the reason the item database has arbitrary limits in size is because of the number of digits that are allowed to be used to ID the item. If SEO could arbitrarily add digits or take away digits, then they wouldn't have to worry about how big the item database is.
You can't do it the way dyes work because the tag needs to be attached to the item, not to a particular slot on a particular character. Some items can be used in multiple slots, after all, and people can bag an item that they don't need. Then there's the whole issue of trading items to different characters.

[Kieroth_whiteleaf]

ID numbers need to be numbers.

Adding alpha characters to ID tags makes a ton more work.

For the non-database geeks out there, here's the gist:

You can add a single bit to a number field, which doubles the number of possible items. Each time you do that, it makes the system work that much harder. Let's say that the database records 100,000 items (that's my rough estimate, but I could EASILY be very wrong.).

Adding JUST items that are created by me would double the number of possible items out there (the ones sony creates and the ones I create). Now, since I can't create EVERY item, it's not quite that simple, but it's a good ballpark. Which makes the size of the database jump up one bit for every item in the database (now 200,000 items) giving you a total of 200,000 extra bits (aka 25,000 bytes or 25MB).

Now, lets assume that every character has 4 alts (A lot of people have none, and several people have several characters on several servers). Given that Everquest has 400,000 players (probably less once you factor people with multiple accounts, but those accounts still count for that) and those 400,000 players have 5 characters (main and 4 alts) that gives you roughly 2 million characters. Adding support for 2 million characters would require 21 more bits in the database for each item, of which there would be 200,000,000,000 (200 Billion). Multiply that by the additional bits (21) and the database size grows by 4.2 Trillion bits. Which makes 525,000,000,000 (525 Billion) Bytes, or 525,000 MB (525 GB) in INCREASED index number data alone. That's not even talking about the item name/stat storage that would be required, because each of those 200 billion items has things like a name, attack value, nodrop/norent tags (hehe.. the nodrop/norent/magic item and lore tags would each consume an additional 25,000,000,000 bits [3,125 MB] for a total of rougly 13GB in extra flags alone).

PLUS (and this one is the fun part..) despite the fact that storage space is cheap, NO ONE wants to be sitting on a comp that's trying to process 200 billion records looking for a specific one.

Given today's huge storage capacities, the extra GB required COULD probably be arranged without breaking the bank. But at that point, every additional item you add would have the same requirement to have 2 million clones and that would eat up serious storage space. And even if you were willing to live with that, the RAM and processor time would be the real killer.

Small database changes aren't that big of a deal. A change like that *IS* a minor change. However, any minor change multiplied 2 million times becomes a big change. Given that, I think we should be THRILLED we got the armor dye thing, that was a major increase in database space, not to mention rendering constraints.

SFG
Anyone wanna guess what I do for a living? hehe..

[Kieroth_whiteleaf]

Addendum to previous:

Two logic flaws:

A player can't create every item, so you can probably divide 200,000,000 items down to 50,000,000 or so.

If an account was created, you have to make sure the database accomodates all character slots on all servers.. given 30 (or so) servers x 8 characters gives you 241 characters per account (Extra one is for FV) times the 400,000 accounts = 96,400,000 characters instead of my earlier assement of 2 million.

So multiply all my numbers by 48 and then round down by about 4 and things should line up in the ballpark. Not really accurate given how binary works, but still... it's roughly 12 times more than my earlier assements which were already in the realm of the pathologically insane.

SFG

[Aranar]

"Adding JUST items that are created by me would double the number of possible items out there (the ones sony creates and the ones I create). Now, since I can't create EVERY item, it's not quite that simple, but it's a good ballpark. Which makes the size of the database jump up one bit for every item in the database (now 200,000 items) giving you a total of 200,000 extra bits (aka 25,000 bytes or 25MB). "

First off, your flag for who made the item if the system is implemented properly (a dubious proposition at best), should have little to do with the actual item per se. That is, everywhere that there is a link to the item itself, would be a link to the "creator"... A piece of Fine Plate is still a piece of fine plate, regardless of the creator, you don't change anything really with the old system, you are adding on, you just have to add on a character flag for the creator. While this still represents a substantial increase in data stored per instant of the item, it's not as exceptional as I think you make it out to be.

The assumption here is that for every instance of a character, he has a pointer to a record of his inventory, which then has pointers to records of containers or items. For example, his characters record has a "head" pointer, which points to the item in the database that corresponds to the item on your head. To add the creator tag, you would add another pointer into a database of character flags, or just have the flag itself stored in the characters "head slot". Thus, you still have the minimum number of items represented by 1 of each type of item, but you do have a significant number of bits used up. So, let's assume that each character has what, 22 main armor slots, 8 * 10 potential inventory slots, 16 * 10 bank slots (for the LoY enabled), and assume that you use 32 bits (or 4 bytes) for the some odd 4 billion potential unique character flags (27 bits would account for your figure of 96 million with plenty of room to spare but I like even bytes)

With those figures, your looking at 80 + 160 + 22 + 24 for 286 potential flags per character (obviously, you won't need it for ALL items or all slots, but you will always use it all, 32 0's is the same as 32 1's.) so, 286 * 4 = 1144 bytes of extra storage per character, or 1kb per character if you wish to round, gives you 100,000,000 users at 1kb per character extra, is only 100 gb, which is very large, but not the 525+ gb you quoted. And that is really about the extent you would have to add.

Now while 100 gb is a VERY significant increase, the flexibility and capabilities it adds are so worth the 100 gigs that the cost of the space is almost negligble.

To note, DAoC already does this, and they have up to 5 potential crafters, maybe 6 per piece on some of the pieces (my DAoC crafter friend isn't sure if it displays all the spellcrafters). Now all this is worst case scenarios, if you put in more reasonable numbers of characters (since likely VI is smart enough to not assign ID's to characters that don't exist), you are a tad better off. However, this doesn't speak to characters that are created and then deleted, some method of reclamation would need to be devised, though I imagine this would be relatively trivial as well.

Aranar