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Lisimba

Repair quality loss variability

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I think the reason some people are commenting about this is not because they believe there is a conspiracy theory per se, but more because they invested lots of time to gain skill in repairing which now seems to have much less of an impact when imping their very cool moonmetal or other valuable stuff.

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I agree based on doing a rift yesterday repairing as usual that nothing's changed for regular items, just that the way it was explained in the patch notes makes it sound like a nerf.  Hey, it's not like we realized that they meant some timer that doesn't actually reflect the real timer, because you know, a two second repair timer still means it's actually a one second repair timer because that's just how timers work in wurm!

 

But the fix for moonmetal/vyn just brings a different issue to light that I tried mentioning in one of the other threads.  Why is the fix to cap timers?  Why can't you let timers go faster than the cap but all timers faster than two seconds act as if they are two seconds?  This way things that buff repair timers get to you know, actually have a buff still for people that already hit the cap without them.  Or maybe higher repair skill would be even more rewarding when you can repair your 0.05 damaged goods lightning fast. 

 

Or if we really want to get dangerous, detach the timer from it completely.  Ql loss is based on damage taken and skill.  Timer is based on skill, without an artificial cap.  woo!

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10 minutes ago, Fairyshine said:

I think the reason some people are commenting about this is not because they believe there is a conspiracy theory per se, but more because they invested lots of time to gain skill in repairing which now seems to have much less of an impact when imping their very cool moonmetal or other valuable stuff.

Repair skill is still important, moreso now. 

 

The things that made the impact was the vyn bonus and moonmetal bonus. 

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with it being capped to 2s, doesn't this mean the vyn bonus/moonmetal and steel+bronze does absolutely nothing if the timer is already 2 seconds, which majority of repairs are? wouldn't a 2.5/7.5/10% less ql lost repairing be a better buff?

Edited by Oblivionnreaver
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9 hours ago, Oblivionnreaver said:

with it being capped to 2s, doesn't this mean the vyn bonus/moonmetal and steel+bronze does absolutely nothing if the timer is already 2 seconds, which majority of repairs are? wouldn't a 2.5/7.5/10% less ql lost repairing be a better buff?

 

Well the special metal bonus - some of them anyway, like moonmetal and steel, they still reduce the damage taken on use. The Vynora bonus does become meaningless with a high enough repair skill, I feel that's an acceptable situation. There's other bonuses for being a follower of Vynora, so one perk isn't so bad.

 

We're not opposed to making tweaks to these things. The main reason for the replies in this thread is to get the focus off of what the problem is not and onto more constructive thoughts regarding what can be done to make moon metal and steel more appealing again - within reason of course.

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1 hour ago, Keenan said:

 

Well the special metal bonus - some of them anyway, like moonmetal and steel, they still reduce the damage taken on use. The Vynora bonus does become meaningless with a high enough repair skill, I feel that's an acceptable situation. There's other bonuses for being a follower of Vynora, so one perk isn't so bad.

 

We're not opposed to making tweaks to these things. The main reason for the replies in this thread is to get the focus off of what the problem is not and onto more constructive thoughts regarding what can be done to make moon metal and steel more appealing again - within reason of course.

 

It would be nice if the material bonus would also apply to quality decay. It'd mean Seryll would lose quality half as fast for example.

 

An issue is that moon metals are hard to get though, which makes imping them painful/costly. If it wasn't for that, it wouldn't matter so much that they lost quality over time.

 

Drake hide gets around that by being impable with regular leather. It's still hard to imp but you don't have to worry you can't even get the materials to do so.

 

What if moon metal tools could be imped with more regular materials? Not necessarily iron, but perhaps gold or silver. Or even electrum.

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28 minutes ago, Lisimba said:

What if moon metal tools could be imped with more regular materials? Not necessarily iron, but perhaps gold or silver. Or even electrum.

Steel had been my thought along the same lines. I'm not sure I'm 100% on board with it but I'm not sure I'm 100% on board with leather for scale either so it would at least be consistent and make mm tools less of a shelf/flex item.

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5 minutes ago, CreZ said:

Steel had been my thought along the same lines. I'm not sure I'm 100% on board with it but I'm not sure I'm 100% on board with leather for scale either so it would at least be consistent and make mm tools less of a shelf/flex item.

Scale and Drake are much more hard to come by than any of the moonmetals, especially now since we are able to buy them with marks. It hard to compare one with the other.

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4 minutes ago, Angelklaine said:

Scale and Drake are much more hard to come by than any of the moonmetals, especially now since we are able to buy them with marks. It hard to compare one with the other.

 

The general idea of it works though. Additional tuning could be used to try to get things to just the right spot.

 

For example, what if imping a moonmetal tool with moonmetal is regular difficulty, but imping with steel/silver/gold/whatever is also possible but with an additional penalty to difficulty? You might pick moonmetal if you happen to have enough of it or the tool just eats up a tiny amount on an imp, or if you *really* need the quality, or if you can't get hold of a good enough blacksmith. On the other hand you can use a regular metal if you can't get hold of enough moonmetal, or if you don't mind it taking longer, or that the quality you can reach isn't quite as high.

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1 hour ago, Angelklaine said:

Scale and Drake are much more hard to come by than any of the moonmetals, especially now since we are able to buy them with marks. It hard to compare one with the other.

Right now the best armor in the game a scale set can be improved with pretty much 1ql leather and uses PAS, a skill that is supposed to be tied ( in my understanding) to this broken metalurgy and coal making skills that are not needed in any way, not even leatherworking is needed. Drake at least needs LW and 1ql leather. You can try and make new account and see how easy is to provide leather, any ql. If you compare that to moonmetals now you either have to pay to win, hard. Or have no life outside of wurm if stuck on freedom only.

 

While i agree everything should take a damage and the change to moonmetal was  needed, it still need some balancing out and test out beyond  "oh, this is how the code works"

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I'm glad I stayed fairly neutral in regards to the repair change then lol. Part of me felt it seemed off but I didn't want to go all out in saying it since I couldn't tell if it was just me being tricked by seeing a 2s timer every single time.

Even at 99 repair my rare pickaxe is dropping QL very quickly, was 93ql but it's going down by .02ql every 15 damage maybe. For a normal pick I'd say that's maybe fine, borderline a bit too much loss. I'm a bit of a workhorse at times, and I don't have any blacksmithing skill. I'd be interested in seeing numbers tweaked to make repair a bit more forgiving now it's /fixed/ since I really don't see much benefit from my higher repair skill anymore.

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22 minutes ago, Tor said:

While i agree everything should take a damage and the change to moonmetal was  needed, it still need some balancing out and test out beyond  "oh, this is how the code works"

 

I've been reading this thread, and will poke some suggestions Samool's way. As I said, we're not opposed to making tweaks or changes. We just need to carefully weigh what we do. If anything, the ranting about iron being affected proves that even the smallest touch to this code can spark a huge outcry.

 

12 minutes ago, Madnath said:

I'd be interested in seeing numbers tweaked to make repair a bit more forgiving now it's /fixed/ since I really don't see much benefit from my higher repair skill anymore.

 

High repair skill affects the quality reduction, so there's still a benefit. I suppose it's just less obvious now that there's a minimum timer on all items. In fact after looking at the code, I'm going to mail you all my stuff to repair. O:)

 

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27 minutes ago, Keenan said:

I've been reading this thread, and will poke some suggestions Samool's way. As I said, we're not opposed to making tweaks or changes. We just need to carefully weigh what we do. If anything, the ranting about iron being affected proves that even the smallest touch to this code can spark a huge outcry.

 

High repair skill affects the quality reduction, so there's still a benefit. I suppose it's just less obvious now that there's a minimum timer on all items. In fact after looking at the code, I'm going to mail you all my stuff to repair. O:)

Eh, I think the best fix would have been to just fix the one second repair not doing any QL loss. We know already small changes can have a huge outcry, but making it look like the timer is double what it used to be at times is going to have a strong effect when the 1 second repair wasn't totally widely known to a lot of people before this change. I think it basically invited people to get upset, which is why I called it heavy handed before. Not because of what it touched, but how it was done.

 

But yeah absolutely feel free to mail things my way for repair anytime, once my exploding meditation rugs are fixed I plan on getting 100 repair still.

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Well, i personally actually never tought that this was going to affect anything but moonmetals and alloys, and i haven't noticed any difference that goes beyond RNG, but i still have a few questions:

- If the speed gets capped at 2s, and with high repair and frequent repairs that pretty much becomes 95% of the cases, are the metal's repair speed bonus and the vynora repair speed bonus completely useless in any scenario where speed would have been 2 seconds even without them?

- Even if the repair is longer than 2secs, and those bonuses actually work and reduce the "repair duration" by their 5-10% or whatever, is this speed reduction actually useful in making the item lose less quality? or does it just take away the same QL anyway, just doing that faster?

- Are you even considering that, even if this was a bug, being like that for 2 years is something that barely made some people consider starting to use steel/moonmetal tools, because it was a pretty huge bonus, and brining them back to reality so hard, nobody will probably even consider using them again? This means that the "legit" bonuses of steel / bronze / brass are so underwhelming that nobody would care about making steel or let alone brass/bronze (aka ridiculous materials) for that purpose? As i already said multiple times. you can't pretend this didn't happen, and the fact that the expectation for alloys/moonmetal usefulness is far beyond what the legit bonuses actually are right now.

Edited by Davih

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Some additional data for the experiment I posted about previously:

 

 

I made some more pickaxes and repeated what I did with pickaxe B (mine 100 shards, then repair once) to see how much the quality loss would vary.

 

The results:

From 6.73 quality, with 6.90 damage, to 6.66 quality, losing 0.07. (pickaxe B from the other post)
From 6.73 quality, with 6.90 damage, to 6.60 quality, losing 0.13.
From 6.73 quality, with 6.90 damage, to 6.62 quality, losing 0.11.
From 6.73 quality, with 6.92 damage, to 6.63 quality, losing 0.10.
From 6.73 quality, with 6.92 damage, to 6.60 quality, losing 0.13.
From 6.73 quality, with 6.90 damage, to 6.60 quality, losing 0.13.
From 6.73 quality, with 6.92 damage, to 6.61 quality, losing 0.12.
From 6.74 quality, with 6.92 damage, to 6.68 quality, losing 0.06.
From 6.74 quality, with 6.89 damage, to 6.66 quality, losing 0.08.
From 6.74 quality, with 6.92 damage, to 6.63 quality, losing 0.11.
From 6.74 quality, with 6.92 damage, to 6.65 quality, losing 0.09.
From 6.74 quality, with 6.89 damage, to 6.66 quality, losing 0.08.
From 6.74 quality, with 6.91 damage, to 6.65 quality, losing 0.09.

 

The average quality loss here is 0.10, varying between 0.06 and 0.13.

 

Pickaxe A (mine 100 shards but repair after each single shard) lost 0.11 quality in total, so the quality loss between case A and case B is indeed pretty much the same.

 

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6 hours ago, Davih said:

If the speed gets capped at 2s, and with high repair and frequent repairs that pretty much becomes 95% of the cases, are the metal's repair speed bonus and the vynora repair speed bonus completely useless in any scenario where speed would have been 2 seconds even without them?

 

Basically with a high enough repair skill, a special metal bonus, and being a Vynora follower, yes - you can reach a point where the bonuses do nothing to further reduce the timer. 2 seconds is the smallest it will ever get.

 

6 hours ago, Davih said:

Even if the repair is longer than 2secs, and those bonuses actually work and reduce the "repair duration" by their 5-10% or whatever, is this speed reduction actually useful in making the item lose less quality? or does it just take away the same QL anyway, just doing that faster?

 

Since the quality reduction is ticked on a per-second basis down to the last second (i.e. 2 seconds = 1 quality loss and then the damage removal) then the bonus does work here.

 

6 hours ago, Davih said:

Are you even considering that, even if this was a bug, being like that for 2 years is something that barely made some people consider starting to use steel/moonmetal tools, because it was a pretty huge bonus, and brining them back to reality so hard, nobody will probably even consider using them again? This means that the "legit" bonuses of steel / bronze / brass are so underwhelming that nobody would care about making steel or let alone brass/bronze (aka ridiculous materials) for that purpose? As i already said multiple times. you can't pretend this didn't happen, and the fact that the expectation for alloys/moonmetal usefulness is far beyond what the legit bonuses actually are right now.

 

We're not pretending anything. We totally understand that we snapped people back to reality and quite hard. Our biggest issue were people who erroneously said our fix affected *other* items, which it did not. We are actively seeking thoughts and ideas on how to address moon metal items and steel items to make them close to as viable as they were before without the bug in place that made them impervious to quality reduction. We may not get there by everyone's assumptions, but we can at least try to make changes that make sense to the majority of people.

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Alloys have two major problems:  they are difficult to make and their bonuses don't make up for that.  Fixing one problem makes the other problem acceptable--steel with its meager bonuses would be fine if steel wasn't awful to make, and steel that's difficult to make would be fine if the material's bonuses were incredible.  Personally, I'd gut simple item creation (or make alloy creation its own action so it can have its own mechanics) so that the resultant lumps had more reliably high quality, similar to farming's QLs.

 

I don't know if there's a good solution for moon metals.  It feels like they should've stayed on Epic.  Is it too late to just delete all of it and disable the forums for a few weeks?

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As a relative noob, I will doubtless be dismissed over lack of knowledge/experience but here goes nothing.

 

This was a bug.  A known bug, yeah.  A known bug left uncorrected, sure.  Many were exploiting the known bug for quite some time - fair enough.

 

BUT...  When the bug is eventually patched, IMO the appropriate response would be, "Oh, well.  It was good while it lasted." Along with that some appreciation of having benefited from it before the hole was filled, which would be a take-away positive.  Instead there seems to be a very strong sense of entitlement to the exploit and disgruntlement at the free-lunch running out.

 

The benefit derived from the bug masked a problem...

 

38 minutes ago, Noizhead said:

Alloys have two major problems:  they are difficult to make and their bonuses don't make up for that.

 

That's probably it in a nutshell.  This is the case now.  It probably wasn't worth users pushing for a fix to that dynamic while the bug could be exploited, so I would speculate that many simply took the bug exploit as compensation to offset the problems.  That was a gamble that paid off, but has now stopped paying off.  Instead of grabbing (non-alloy) torches and pitchforks over the loss of the exploit - which action, let's face it, is not going to get the bug put back - let the developers know that the dynamic needs to be fixed, either through easier production of alloys or beefing up of the bonuses for them. 

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I confess to have been a steel user since my early noob days. Even now, with modest progress (metallurgy slightly over 50, BS just slipped over 90, repairing bit over 60) I appreciate steel for a couple of tools, and for plate, and do not resent the periodic metallurgy campaigns (would love if hell scorp threw charcoal too). From all I have learnt out of these discussions, I have never ever the least been touched by that bug, bonus, side effect, whatever. And so far, I am more collecting than using MM (made a few gems for my priests to play enchanting etc.), waiting for future use.

 

What I can say about steel, the difference in mining concerning steel attrition is significant, so is the difference between my steel plate and my gold plate. I would not swap my high level picks for iron ones. Beneath that, the chain of dependencies between coal, metallurgy etc. towards high ql steel (I love electrum yet simply do not see any reasonable use for) is one I like in Wurm. This is what pokes you out of dumb optimization of a single skill towards other ways.

 

When the smelting pot nerf came, widely unrecognized (as the PvP kids were playing forum wars at the time) I was unhappy as it took away the convenient curve and in turn generated the need for grinding pottery, which until lately was the most awful skill in Wurm imho (still prolly is for non Vyn followers), but the chance to get decent compasses, and recycle the tons of junk metallurgy materials, makes it worth the pain. This demonstrates that useful changes can be made.

 

And I am sure so far the changes done were widely sensible. What is not sensible, is the attitude of the management, and to some extent the devs, towards the playerhood, the paying customers and the base for the existance of the game. Still, steam is a hope for a brighter future (I share), but the existant playerbase is the prerequisite for becoming it more than a pipedream.

 

There should be more awareness what could hurt the existing customers, and how either to mitigate or at least to explain in advance. The way the deity changes were introduced was a crass example for indifference and ruthlessness, the steel/MM changes were a minor one given the number of players affected (and maybe overlooked by the devs), and causing a disproportionate outcry, more a demonstration of confidence gone. The way of nerfing valrei missions, and even forgetting to mention, was another, maybe minor, but telling example. Guys, your customer orientation is abysmal.

 

Edit: That written, I would like to differ. That the devs are discussing with the community at all is a great thing, and not at all common in all of the gaming world, and thank you for. In mainstream games, well trained CS reps would at best give some slimy phrases.

Edited by Ekcin
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From where I'm standing, I don't think that the dev team has much time to play around with in regards to early warnings to the player base for upcoming changes. The goal is for a mid year steam launch. Mid year is only a few months away and this scant bit of time is all they have to correct anything major before the new server. 

 

Personally (and admittedly selfishly) I want them to make all of the high impact changes they deem necessary asap so that we don't carry over this baggage to the new continent. Removal of player gods, removal of RMT, imbalanced favor, and fixing of a long time defect that was obviously not intended? Those are all great changes that are needed for the future well being of the game. 

 

I hope they keep them coming.  

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11 hours ago, Keenan said:

 

We are actively seeking thoughts and ideas on how to address moon metal items and steel items to make them close to as viable as they were before without the bug in place that made them impervious to quality reduction. 

This is probably a wider-spectrum complex suggestion, but i'll leave it here anyway
 

 

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13 hours ago, Noizhead said:

Alloys have two major problems:  they are difficult to make and their bonuses don't make up for that.  Fixing one problem makes the other problem acceptable--steel with its meager bonuses would be fine if steel wasn't awful to make, and steel that's difficult to make would be fine if the material's bonuses were incredible.  Personally, I'd gut simple item creation (or make alloy creation its own action so it can have its own mechanics) so that the resultant lumps had more reliably high quality, similar to farming's QLs.

 

I don't know if there's a good solution for moon metals.  It feels like they should've stayed on Epic.  Is it too late to just delete all of it and disable the forums for a few weeks?

 

Personally I like how steel creation works now, it has a nice supply chain with a lot of skills that are really important for getting high ql steel. If it becomes too easy then it wouldn't be much different from iron effort wise and then iron wouldn't lose a lot of it's purpose. Making the materials bonuses better while keeping high ql steel creation at the current unreliable level sounds like the better alternative then. Perhaps doing the same for the moon metals (which would make more room to buff steel) would fix their issues as well.

Edited by Ecrir
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Yeah, is not "too hard" to make, unless you like... want to improve a large anvil to 99QL, it just has very little bonuses.

Also, making steel easier would just make iron plate armours (and basically all other non-moon materials) an even bigger joke than what they already are

Edited by Davih

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16 hours ago, Keenan said:

 

Basically with a high enough repair skill, a special metal bonus, and being a Vynora follower, yes - you can reach a point where the bonuses do nothing to further reduce the timer. 2 seconds is the smallest it will ever get.

 

 

Since the quality reduction is ticked on a per-second basis down to the last second (i.e. 2 seconds = 1 quality loss and then the damage removal) then the bonus does work here.

 


Since, based on what you said earlier, ql loss depends on how much damage is repaired:  is "speed bonus" a factor that helps with losing less QL on average? or it's just a faster repair that takes away the same amount of QL regardless, making it completely useless if not for saving a small amount of time(and skillticks?) while repairing "long timer" stuff?

I mean if it's faster, but has to repair the same amount of damage anyway, and QL loss il calculated on damage repaired, doesn't that just cause "less but bigger" ql drop ticks?

Edited by Davih

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18 hours ago, Davih said:


Since, based on what you said earlier, ql loss depends on how much damage is repaired:  is "speed bonus" a factor that helps with losing less QL on average? or it's just a faster repair that takes away the same amount of QL regardless, making it completely useless if not for saving a small amount of time(and skillticks?) while repairing "long timer" stuff?

I mean if it's faster, but has to repair the same amount of damage anyway, and QL loss il calculated on damage repaired, doesn't that just cause "less but bigger" ql drop ticks?

 

So let's say you have an average repair skill and no bonuses. One particular item is damaged enough that you get a 5 second timer (server-side, client will always show a number a bit off due to round-trip time and whatnot). That's going to be 4 QL reduction ticks and then the damage gets cleared. So if you have a metal bonus and Vynora bonus to drop it down to 4 seconds, that's one less QL hit. If you have high repair and/or bonuses that push the repair timer super low, then you bottom out at the 2 second limit where only a single tick happens.

 

Time only affects how much damage is ticked off during a QL reduction, it doesn't affect the amount of QL reduced by a tick. This way if you cancel the action, some damage would have been removed and some quality lost based on the number of ticks you allowed to pass before cancelling. (I missed that in my original explanation of how it works, it still sets the damage to 0 during the last second, so the final "tick" is basically a freebie - hence the bug).

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