I am incredibly dissatisfied with the removal of experience bequeathed upon the crafting of stone from rock. I know many others are.
The developers are dissatisfied with players gathering a ton of rock, giving it to an alt, popping a pie with the alt, and leaving the game for a bit to log back in to a ton of levels gained for no effort spent on the part of that specific alt.
I agree that it’s too easy to do that at this moment. However, I don’t believe removing the XP reward from crafting rock is the right solution.
My solution: Crafters can only craft x amount of a specific item at a time. The maximum can possibly grow with level, or number of unique crafting skills chosen.
Example: I gather a ton of metamorphic rock. I give it to my alt. He can only do say… 10 mass crafts at a time of any specific item. He sets them crafting, pops a pie, and logs out. He logs in, and sets ten more crafting.
The very nature of the crafting and alternate character system allows this “exploit” to happen, and would be impossible to be rid of entirely without an entire crafting and alt overhaul. I believe limiting lower-level / non-crafter alts to x amount of a specific type of mass craft at a time would make this “exploit” much harder, more time consuming, and more expensive overall to do. (They’d need more pies to pull it off.)
If anyone has a better solution, feel free to share in the comments. I’d really like the community to try and help the developers come up with something better than simply removing stone experience gain.
@james you gave the thoughts of the developers earlier on another post. What do you think of this?
I can see where this might limit alts but what about those leveling for skill sets? They will be level 50 and not subject to any mass craft limits. I also do not feel we should be limiting the new player experience because experienced players are using pies to gain xp (levels). I am probably as dissatisfied as you are with the proposed changes. Hopefully we can find a balance that controls the developers concerns without favoring skill sets over alts and hurting the new player experience. I think this is one reason I am in favor of eliminating or changing the teaching foods. I think that levels the playing field the most.
It seems the biggest issue the developers currently have is not people powerleveling, but people powerleveling alts that didn’t work for it. So it would solve that main problem.
I think I understand but I think that is very fine distinction to draw between leveling for a second or third skill set and leveling for an alt. In both cases you get cubits and skill points for leveling and as the player, I did work for it in both cases.
Anyone here ever play MGS?? Remember when Revolver Ocelot straps you into the machine and tortures you by making you rapidly press the button over and over again to resist? In my experience, playing on PlayStation 4, mass cafting several thousand rocks is very much identical to this scenario, except with the button. Each crafting table was just a new round of torture:
People who actually sat there and did this for several hours straight are daft; (after eating a pie that I painstakingly gathered ingredients for and crafted myself, I’d do it for 10 minutes straight, maybe — the result of a few hours worth of mining rocks…) I felt like I was dying after doing mine. My arm would feel like I’d slept on it for three days straight by the time I woke up in the morning to collect my XP.
I worked for my XP; did the “auto-fire” scumbags work for theirs?
I was immensely surprised. Too many things in this game push you to passing stones around.
What new (or old) player has volume crafting in their miner build? It’s a game of alts and seems designed for hand off of materials and items between players for various stages of acquisition and processing. Retailing has separate skills as well.
I’ve been processing the output of my activities as efficiently as possible and now I feel like a noob who followed the objective to plot near a settlement and got a lecture about griefing.
>> My solution to the problem violates what you want to have happen. <<
Buff the exp gained by mining rock to compensate for the removal of rock to stone exp. As this would remove the potential to transfer it over to an alt and level up the alts
However a solution from me that doesn’t break your parameter, would be to make it such that pies do not effect crafting exp. That way rock to stone exp can remain, but in a less powerful format.
Rather or not my solution is „Better“ I don’t know. But I would prefer a solution that doesn’t cap the rate of crafting when the point of building more machines is to be able to craft more at the same time. allowing you to get the building blocks for large projects at a reasonable rate. A capped crafting rate might also be extra hard on Guild crafters who are dealing with the materials from multiple people.
Here’s my take:
The root causes for the stone xp nerf and how to make people happy while still nerfing it. Fix the reason people are using these “exploits”. There are more, if the causes aren’t fixed it’ll be a cat and mouse game until all crafting xp is removed.
XP gains from some activities is low and this was supplementing it. Normalise and maybe even buff everything a bit and there will be less complaints.
Teaching pie was abused, change it to quantitative rather than a timed buff. Make it not expire between logins though, I don’t see how that has abuse potential if it’s quantity based. Make it a bit higher than 20k too, 5 pies for a level is too much.
Make skillpages equal or better than alts, especially in the early game. After you pass lvl 20 you’re miles better off with an alt than a skillpage since you can get a fair number of skillpoints on an alt a lot faster than your existing character and the alt’s levels don’t make your main gain new points slower. Don’t draw skillpoints from the same pool between the pages. If they want to keep progression slower, make new skillpages have maybe 50% skillpoints of your first page always available to them
Plot gain will be slower. This is the most complicated one and there are multiple threads about it already. Space on planets is limited so there are legitimate concerns with ease of access to plots, griefing potential too but I think that’s less of an issue since you can already grief with just a single plot.
Some quick fixes that sound good:
Or separate plots from xp somehow, but that’s a bigger topic.
I’m not sure limiting the amount of items you can craft at once is the right direction either. For example you need 2000 something ancient vital essence to mass craft super enriched bonding agent. So i fill my extractors up and just let them go. Also alloys are something else that will take a lot of mixer space. You need ~360 i think to mass craft compact alloy.
Obviously we could break up the number of crafts we do for these at once but crafting is slow enough as it is.
This ultimately doesnt solve the rock>stone meta unless the buff expires on logout. But what is logout? Returning to sanctum or changing characters? If i cant return to sanctum then I basically can’t warp anywhere. If i can return to sanctum and the buff doesnt go away the timer also won’t go down unless they change sanctum mechanics as well
I guess the buff could expire after 30 minutes of that character not being played, but then would they need to apply that to all buffs for consistency sake.
I think the issue is, some buff foods are only meant to work for a certain amount of time (such as the teaching foods) and this somewhat conflicts with logging out for the night and returning the next day expecting your well fed buff to still be in effect.
I wonder if it would be worthwhile them having a subcategory of foods where any buffs they give will expire regardless of whether you’re logged in or not - which would play into players previous requests of allowing food buffs to stack, so you could essentially have the well fed buff and a persisting buff at the same time - it would certainly make mining less stop/start with having to eat basic non-buff foods all the time.
I guess my real question is, what is the purpose of teaching foods other than to level faster or get out of the death penalty faster? How can we say they are being abused, if players are using them to level? If they want to do something about it, eliminate the teaching foods and give them some other purpose. That reduces the xp gain from the rock meta by half.
True, but that would only work if they also changed how we collect xp. Because we would still be able to que the craft, leave the area and then just eat the pie before we go collect xp
I do not think this fixes it. I think it just moves where the players will go to get xp and level fast someplace else. I am all for the processing of wood to give you something when it is crafted, but not at the expense of rock.
Theyre gonna do that anyway ppl get rock only because they farm gems so its a no brainer rock is aplenty. People dont like to farm wood because drops are not worth the time effort to collect like rock.
button over and over again to resist? In my experience, playing on PlayStation 4, mass cafting several thousand rocks is very much identical to this scenario, except with the 
button. Each crafting table was just a new round of torture:
