Best Of

I've been that kind of person on other IREs who has to have every tradeskill. I've always loved designing items and by the same token I've also done building work both on IREs and other MU*s.

Being a designer/crafter on Starmourn was one of the things I was most looking forward to. I baked it into my character concept and had grand plans for it.

I'm not short on cash or credits; my character's sitting on enough to buy and trans a tradeskill right now, I have an Iron Elite membership, and I'm expecting a heap of retirement credits to come in once those are released.

However the problems with the system that have been outlined by others in this thread and elsewhere have led me to decide that being a crafter/designer on Starmourn just isn't worth it.

I'm not willing to pay 300+ credits just to get a tradeskill that will cost me even more in the long run, with a 50 limit on designs (no doubt due in future to be unlocked with yet more credits/fees), each costing 5k to submit (250k for all 50!), and then having to own multiple shops on the trade terminals just to hold the full range of items I want to sell and make them available to a wider audience. The shop layouts are not attractive, with no categories, and no physical presence in the gameworld that I could use to generate RP.

I'm massively, massively disappointed in staff's decision to not include beverages in the cuisine tradeskill, which they indicated would be the case in their dev posts prior to launch. I'm not going to take it just to have to then take beverages on top as a separate tradeskill, thereby locking myself into a second tradeskill choice, without even knowing what other tradeskills may be released at the same time and what the cap on our allotted tradeskills will be in future.

The devs said they want to facilitate the player economy, yet all of these features are prohibitive to doing so. Crafting and designing is not profitable in Starmourn and by the looks of things it doesn't appear intended to be. It's a massive gold sink for the designer, and comparatively much cheaper for anyone else to buy what they need from others putting in the hard work/credits.

A 1600 credits artifact to boost your shop front by 16% is also an absolute joke, when you could spent 16% more marks to do the exact same. It will never be worth the money, and who would spend that money just to make comparatively much less? It defeats the entire purpose of even wanting to boost your shop front in the first place.

Final gripe: I speak British English and I should be allowed to submit designs in British English. No one is confused by my use of a 'u' in colour. It doesn't create inconsistency in the game world. You know perfectly well what it says. It is not a spelling error. No player is going to be shocked and appalled by the existence of both British and American spellings in a multiplayer game.

And all of these factors are reasons why I have not purchased a tradeskill and will not in the foreseeable future, despite being able to afford it, despite having done so gladly and eagerly on every other IRE game I've played. I'm sorry but the system feels exploitative. Crafters and designers provide a massive service to these games and they pay for the privilege of doing so. The squeeze, shakedown and arbitrary limitations placed on them for being gullible enough to allow it is, as someone said above, gross.

I am not sure I see how it could be considered brutal when there are no consequences for losing. It isn't bashing, it's a puzzle. You should be failing fairly often or it isn't an actual challenge. It becomes just another mindless grind. We don't need more of that and we certainly don't need to make it easier to automate.

If you are struggling, you need to evaluate your strategy. For instance you don't have to kill everything you come across in a grid. I like that there is a learning curve for hacking as you actually have to adapt and learn rather than have it handed to you.

From an IC perspective, you are teaching yourself how to hack into secured locations... the fact that there aren't any consequences for that actually makes no sense.  The current quests often have your quest giver talking about having to cover your tracks after a fail. We don't actually have to do that nor do we have the capability.

Minion said:

As an American, I didn't get to gripe over being forced to use British spelling in every other IRE. That said, I am not sure I remember how to design WITHOUT British spelling.

My main IRE game before Starmourn was MKO, so yeah, I get to gripe. American spelling was enforced there too for the arbitrary reason that Feist (who wrote the Midkemia books) is American.

I think style-policing is a generally pretty shit practice for any game to adopt. If what's being written is correct and legible enough to be read without confusion, then who f-ing cares whether you write 'armour' with a 'u' or not. Other games shouldn't do it either and I said exactly the same thing on the Aetolia forums. As @kamyr said, two lefts don't make a right.

As for the problem with categorising things via terminals, for one thing, it's ugly. Speaking from the perspective of someone who really wanted to take Cuisine (I had Big Plans for it that I raved about here) and could easily afford to but decided it's just not worth my money, the idea of trying to open up a restaurant and having to put up each menu category (starters, main dishes, sides, desserts?!) as a different shop is daft. And since it's digital, the best I can offer is a delivery service, which largely defeats the purpose of buying food: facilitating RP. It's not like we eat on this game for sustenance; we do it to be social. We have NPC bars and clothing stores; why not player ones? Give us the option to choose. I'm sure that Trade Terminals would have an easier time selling most goods by virtue of convenience and being able to reach a wider audience, but many of us would rather have a physical shop we can manage and facilitate RP from, even if it means having less reach and making less marks. There's something fundamentally different about being able to play a watchmaker in a cluttered trinket store, a fashion designer in a colourful boutique, a bartender serving up beer, compared to having everything accessible with 0 interaction between the trader and customer. Some people might prefer that, but for others, give us a choice.

@Tecton, @Aurelius and team: I will never, ever pay 1600 credits to boost my shop front by 16% (which I don't have, because problems with the existing system dissuaded me from taking a tradeskill). But I would gladly pay 2000 credits for an artifact shop with a custom, subject-to-approval location (like auction shops from other games). In my case that would no doubt be the Litharge, Omni Station or Kovalar. I would gather people to RP there and host regular events that energise the playerbase: this is good for player-retention.