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.
I would agree the teaching pies are being used in a way that was probably not as intended. I guess my question is, do teaching pies need to be active when you start the crafting or when you pick up the xp or both? because limiting the time it runs may not solve the problem.
Example - I load up the crafting tables go away from my build and logoff overnight. Then I logon in the morning eat the pie and go to my workshop to collect the xp. If the pie is only needed to pick it up then the exploit continues.
Example 2 - I eat the pie and queue up the machines. Logoff and come back in to collect the xp. If the pie only has to be active when I load the machines then the exploit continues.
Example 3 - I eat a pie, load the machines, go away from the workshop and log out. When I log back in I eat another pie and go back to the workshop and collect the xp. If you need the buff to start and pick up the xp then the exploit can still continue with the only change being it costs two pies versus 1.
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:
