Hello. Here are some thoughts:
There are two main reasons for the recipe changes we’ve made. Firstly it’s to make sure that all the items in the game have enough of a use and therefore a decent value. We don’t think it’s satisfying or fun to collect things in the game, but those things be worthless. Secondly it’s to ensure balance between different parts of the game and ensuring that everything is in equilibrium.
It is certainly not the intention to make the game harder or more “grindy”. We are currently focusing on how to reduce the mid-game slowness and I’ll post again about that next week. I do have sympathy with the argument that overall the recipe changes feel more negative than positive; however, we have made positive changes too, but they often get overlooked. For example large reductions in the costs to make brews, and the doubling of the durability of bombs to name two.
There are elements of chance throughout the game, as there are in most RPGs. Chance, and the ability to manage it, add interest to a mechanic and mean that players have to understand the system and actually “play” the game while forging. If the system was completely deterministic then you would read a wiki page something like “how to make an high level AoE hammer”, follow the steps exactly, and the result would be identical to everyone else’s result from the same guide. In my opinion that would be less interesting as you are following a series of pre-defined steps never having to think or adapt, and also would make a much narrower set of results.
In the broader world of games it can be very satisfying to play a pure strategy game, e.g. chess, but for it to fully work you need the interactions of an opponent to create the interesting situations that arise. A pure strategy single player game is in fact a puzzle, and will not produce endless interesting interactions. Contrast that with something like Backgammon (in my opinion one of the finest games of any type) where the synergy between luck and strategy create a sublime mix where sometimes a rookie can win a game against a master, and exciting things can happen to turn a game on its head, but sit and play for any length of time and the better player will come out on top.
Shimmering Orbs are one of the rarest drops in the game, and are needed for all the top level Forging ingredients, but not the low and mid ones. The idea being you can Forge happily without them, but to create the best items in the game you will need to source Shimmering Orbs.
Spitter Eyes can drop from Strong, Mighty and Elite spitters, they shouldn’t be easy to find, but shouldn’t be too hard either. On average only 10% of the Spitter Eyes that are gathered are used, so they are around.
What we’ve tried to achieve with the new Compound recipes is to change people’s relationship to them. We’ve realised that we made a mistake in the initial recipes and by making Pure Compounds so much easier to make than the others we made them the default option, and the other Compounds are barely being used. We believe it would be better to have people start with the Imperfect and Unstable Compounds, and add in the Pure ones at a higher level. It felt to us that just staring with Pures made for a slightly dull experience. So the change we were looking to make was to make the other Compounds easier to make, and the Pure ones harder. I stand by that intention, and we have achieved that for the Imperfect and Unstables; however, I do appreciate that the addition of an extra ingredient to the Pure Compounds is a bit of a blow.
On a more general point, I think our error in this regard is that we didn’t discuss this idea on the forums before we went ahead, we didn’t explain what we were trying to achieve, and we didn’t wait for feedback. We are juggling between fixing bugs, balancing the game, responding to feedback, and working on future features, and we’ve been pushing changes in without first fully assessing their impact on the community. This was ok during early access where the community were expecting rapid change and moving goalposts, but not so good now we are fully live with players expecting a more stable experience. We are currently tweaking our development processes to ensure we communicate these changes ahead of time, and fold in feedback before we make the changes rather than afterwards.
Forging is a mid and late game mechanic. That does beg the question when does the early game become the mid game, but our intention is that some players come to it as an alternative to material progression, whilst others come to it once they have got through most of the material progression. I believe this is the case at the moment, although I’d welcome feedback on it.