@Eusto and @Jeremy : Can we get an actual update on this, please?
<div>Message #2062 Sent By: (imperian) Received On: 1/20/2018/2:59</div><div>"Antioch has filed a bounty against you. Reason: Raiding Antioch and stealing Bina, being a right</div><div>ass, and not belonging anywhere near Antioch till he grows up."</div>
Hrm, not really sure on specifics of this, sorry. Eusto seems to be away for the holidays - we'll get some information out of him when he shows up again.
Ditch metalworking, woodworking and masonry. Create two new trade skills, Arms/Armour and for lack of a better word, Homewares. Give Arms/Armour all the layouts and everything from smithing except for the class specific stuff. Homewares gets all the furniture, vials, city building and for the sake of completeness, books and papermaking. Leave smithing with the knights until something viable is worked out in a few years.
But that'll never happen, because god forbid we could delete and consolidate skills for once.
I'd settle for being able to properly use layouts on a tradeshelf, the various have been hashed out before so I won't expand here. Also, tailoring needs a look, Nevore is wearing three seperate pieces of footwear right now. I don't care for books or paper but the idea to add them to woodworking seems reasonable.
This is going to be a really big post, so I'm spoilering as much as possible.
First: The primary code work will be complete in the next 24 hours. This includes all changes detailed below as well as the (really, really extensive) code required to copy and convert each of your designs to the new system. This is an accomplishment, and I'm happy that I'll be able to provide it to you soon.
Second: This is really late, and I'm aware of that. Since I joined Imperian's pantheon, it's been my primary goal to provide you with communication as open and direct as possible. In most way, I feel like I've succeeded. Lately, however, I've failed not just in keeping you apprised of my status but also in thoroughly why things have happened the way they have. I won't go into woe-is-me details, but it's as simple as this: the life of a volunteer requires that free work come after paid work. Like a number of my fellow Immortals and countless IRE players, the holiday season is my crunch time. I got to working two full-time jobs and I neglected to give you the heads up that I'd be delayed. It's my bad, and I'm sorry.
Third: While I do as much exhaustive personal testing as I can, those of you capable of and interested in participating in a brief beta test of this system should begin putting together a short application. Don't send it to me quite yet: details will hit the in-game Announce news when the time comes.
Without further ado, the changelog. This doesn't include every single change, nor is it likely to even include every change visible to you guys. I'll probably forget something and edit it in later. Don't judge me. As always, feel free to ask me questions below. I will be right here to answer them.
[spoiler]
- All design replicas (sketches, molds, etc) have been deleted and converted to their new paperless format. All relevant permissions and details are included.
- Design replicas for sale in shops have been replaced with the equivalent "writs of creation," which grant the bearer the ability to create that design.
- Designs for sale on crafter's shelves have been converted to their new format. Designs are now added to shelves with ADD <design#> to <shelf#>.
- Libations has been fully integrated into the new system. Many of the ways that you access and modify your Libations formulas have changed. For instance, the FORMULA verb no longer exists.
- Item creation now happens with the CRAFT command, regardless of tradeskill type. Crafting times in general have been shortened. Batch creation is now an option on certain items (vials, mainly.)
- Excepting masonry items and certain items of jewelry, crafted item decay times have been shortened by about 25%. Vials have had their decay times lowered to 60 months across-the-board.
- Rather than forcing you to manage a thousand short-decay vials, we've introduced vialbelts. Think of these like a big belt of flasks. You tie one vial to each elixir type on the belt and it automatically refills upon being drained. Refill your belt with a couple thousand sips and go on with your life. Vialbelts are a craftable item.
- Craftshelves and Libations bars now cost 100k gold, down from 250k.
- Tomes of the Crafter have been removed. Design preservation now works on a per-design basis. Pay 2cr and your design lives forever. Any design kept in a Tome pre-change will be automatically preserved as part of the conversion process. Unused spots in deleted Tomes have been credited to you as future Free Preservations.
- Artistry (the Bard skill) has been incorporated into the new Design system. Creation of custom journals, letters, books, tomes and scrolls will work through the normal design queue. For now, it is still Bard-only.
- Crafters may now grant their organizations access to create a design (one org per design) for things like "guild" designs.
- Crafters may now make their designs publicly available.
If so, could you make it possible to preserve a toxin directly into a vialbelt?
If not, could you make it so that they do?
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
- A major (non-coding) issue continues to be are the crazy number of crafting rules. Are these being revised?
- Is the appearance character limit increasing?
- "For now it is still Bard only" - is there a time line on AM/Demonic getting custom journals? As I recall, a classlead was rejected on the grounds that this was being addressed.
- I'd rather see a refund option on tomes than have stuff "auto-converted" and give crafters no choice in the matter. I have a couple of things in my tome, like this crazy doll I made for Kilikousu, that I don't particularly want to preserve forever - it's just in my tome because I have room.
- Do we get a warning that a design is going to expire? Are these items automatically deleted from the system if they expire without being renewed? For example, if I had a bunch of non-permanent designs and they expire while I'm on vacation, do they just instantly get deleted from the system?
- You've previously mentioned streamlining the approval system. Is this happening at a later date? If this is being loaded on the same time-frame as the crafting changes, what changes, if any, will crafters see?
Also:
- Re: vial changes/vialbelts. Are vialbelts essentially rendering flasks worthless unless you're a shop/stall owner? How much will each vialbelt hold of each concoction?
Flasks are a HUGE credit investment just to be able to sell elixirs and salves and toxins without forcing players to stock hundreds of vials, and without forcing players to buy hundreds of duplicate vials. I can walk into a shop in Caanae and find 1800cr tied up in flasks in a single shop. That's a level three artifact and change. Two entire professions. All tied up in flasks.
Flasks which, I might add, serve no purpose other than to sell ABSOLUTE NECESSITIES to the playerbase. It's not like these are luxury items being used to sell fine wines and liquor (those casks, I might add, come from the tradeskill system and/or NPC shops and cost SIGNIFICANTLY less than 40cr). No, those require only a moderate gold investment. Toxins and Concoctions, which produce things that are 100% absolutely required to play the game, require a 300 credit skill to be transed and then it requires you to sink ~380,000 gold into a flask PER INDIVIDUAL TYPE SOLD.
And again, this is just to supply the absolute basic adventuring necessities of the game. You can't play this game without something as simple as health elixir, and selling that effectively takes an investment of ~360,000 to 400,000 gold.
It's absolutely ridiculous and it needs to change.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
Further to Lalitana's point on preservation, if items that aren't preserved decay, it'd be awesome if they'd be stored gameside and unlockable upon paying the 2cr fee. I keep copies of most of my designs scattered across various txt files but resubmitting can be a pain.
How does this making of designs publicly available work? Some kind of list system like artifacts and fee payable to the crafter if I "buy" access to that moonstone necklace or whatever? Likewise with the guilds, will the guild shopkeeper have a list to work from? Will we be able to place designs in shops we don't own, like now?
- A major (non-coding) issue continues to be are the crazy number of crafting rules. Are these being revised?
Our wonderful craft head, Alend, proposed the idea of DESIGN TIPS to me: a searchable database that lets you find little nuggets of information about the crafting rules. We are still streamlining the process, and I think you'll find that it's a lot better.
- Is the appearance character limit increasing?
Yes.
- "For now it is still Bard only" - is there a time line on AM/Demonic getting custom journals? As I recall, a classlead was rejected on the grounds that this was being addressed.
No timeline currently. This remake simply lets us lay the groundwork for that future change so that it is much, much easier.
- I'd rather see a refund option on tomes than have stuff "auto-converted" and give crafters no choice in the matter. I have a couple of things in my tome, like this crazy doll I made for Kilikousu, that I don't particularly want to preserve forever - it's just in my tome because I have room.
I'll be honest, I'm not entirely sure what the objection is in this case. If it's in your Tome, it gets preserved. You're credited for any slots you don't use. If you don't really want it preserved, you' have time to get it out of there and get a free slot instead.
- Do we get a warning that a design is going to expire? Are these items automatically deleted from the system if they expire without being renewed? For example, if I had a bunch of non-permanent designs and they expire while I'm on vacation, do they just instantly get deleted from the system?
The current timeline, subject to change: When a design is approved, it gets an expiry time of 180 RL days. When a design is less than 60 days away from expiry, you'll have the option to REFRESH it for only the cost of submission. If your design expires, you go into expiry grace mode for 30 days. During this grace period, your design cannot be used for crafting and the fee for refreshing it goes up. If you finish the grace period (meaning, a total of 210 days) without refreshing, you reach the critical point. If there are any crafted items from this design still in existence, it becomes defunct, meaning you must resubmit it for approval before using it again. If there are NO crafted items in existence, or if they decay before you resubmit the design, it will be deleted. It is designed in a way that you should never, ever lose a design you care about.
- Re: vial changes/vialbelts. Are vialbelts essentially rendering flasks worthless unless you're a shop/stall owner? How much will each vialbelt hold of each concoction?
That is certainly one way to approach the matter. Frankly, I feel like returning flasks to their original intent (shopkeeping) in order to present a much more manageable alternative to their second use (vial upkeep) is a tradeoff I'm very comfortable with. Exact vialbelt capacity is up for debate currently, but I'd expect it to be quite large.
- I'd rather see a refund option on tomes than have stuff "auto-converted" and give crafters no choice in the matter. I have a couple of things in my tome, like this crazy doll I made for Kilikousu, that I don't particularly want to preserve forever - it's just in my tome because I have room.
I'll be honest, I'm not entirely sure what the objection is in this case. If it's in your Tome, it gets preserved. You're credited for any slots you don't use. If you don't really want it preserved, you' have time to get it out of there and get a free slot instead.
Well. Tomes are 100 credits, currently. A refund gives me 100cr. "Free" preservation slots get me... 50 preservation slots I may never use.
- Re: vial changes/vialbelts. Are vialbelts essentially rendering flasks worthless unless you're a shop/stall owner? How much will each vialbelt hold of each concoction?
That is certainly one way to approach the matter. Frankly, I feel like returning flasks to their original intent (shopkeeping) in order to present a much more manageable alternative to their second use (vial upkeep) is a tradeoff I'm very comfortable with. Exact vialbelt capacity is up for debate currently, but I'd expect it to be quite large.
As Khizan noted, flasks are incredibly expensive for what they are, especially given that with the existence of vialbelts it would be pretty stupid of me to waste the shelf space to stock vials full of concoctions. This change makes flasks an unreasonably large expense levied on shopkeepers who want to supply players with items that are absolutely essential to gameplay.
So currently I have some flasks (920 credits worth) in a shop and everything else I have is sold in vials. Will I now need to come up with another 920 credits just to be able to sell the rest of the toxins/elixirs for people to be able to buy refills into their vialbelts? Or will there be some sort of middle ground? As Khizan said, It's a -huge- investment and rather discouraging.
As Khizan noted, flasks are incredibly expensive for what they are, especially given that with the existence of vialbelts it would be pretty stupid of me to waste the shelf space to stock vials full of concoctions. This change makes flasks an unreasonably large expense levied on shopkeepers who want to supply players with items that are absolutely essential to gameplay.
Folks will still refill their vialbelts from concoctions, brewed by concoctionists, sold in shops. If we, as a staff, need to take a look at the delivery model (flasks) to make sure they're cost-effective, we will. At this time, it's not a factor for discussion in the Tradeskill Revamp.
Will designs currently located in crafter's shelves be converted to permanency as well? If not, how much are the new 'costs of submission' to renew a design going to run? I would hate to be hit with a massive amount of renewal fees all at once for every design I sell in my shop if the prices are outrageous.
Will designs currently located in crafter's shelves be converted to permanency as well? If not, how much are the new 'costs of submission' to renew a design going to run? I would hate to be hit with a massive amount of renewal fees all at once for every design I sell in my shop if the prices are outrageous.
Crafter's shelf designs won't automatically be permanent, but their presence on the shelf will ensure they can't be deleted permanently as long as the shop stands. Right now the maximum you can spend per design to renew is 500 gold, and that's only if it's defunct (210 RL days without refreshment). You should be fine.
- I'd rather see a refund option on tomes than have stuff "auto-converted" and give crafters no choice in the matter. I have a couple of things in my tome, like this crazy doll I made for Kilikousu, that I don't particularly want to preserve forever - it's just in my tome because I have room.
I'll be honest, I'm not entirely sure what the objection is in this case. If it's in your Tome, it gets preserved. You're credited for any slots you don't use. If you don't really want it preserved, you' have time to get it out of there and get a free slot instead.
Well. Tomes are 100 credits, currently. A refund gives me 100cr. "Free" preservation slots get me... 50 preservation slots I may never use.
- Re: vial changes/vialbelts. Are vialbelts essentially rendering flasks worthless unless you're a shop/stall owner? How much will each vialbelt hold of each concoction?
That is certainly one way to approach the matter. Frankly, I feel like returning flasks to their original intent (shopkeeping) in order to present a much more manageable alternative to their second use (vial upkeep) is a tradeoff I'm very comfortable with. Exact vialbelt capacity is up for debate currently, but I'd expect it to be quite large.
As Khizan noted, flasks are incredibly expensive for what they are, especially given that with the existence of vialbelts it would be pretty stupid of me to waste the shelf space to stock vials full of concoctions. This change makes flasks an unreasonably large expense levied on shopkeepers who want to supply players with items that are absolutely essential to gameplay.
I would also say I have an issue with tome items automaticallty being converted rather then a refund. To be quite honest, I am fairly done with designing and rarely design new things. I wouldn't overly be impressed if it was automatically converted without at least having a chance to trade it in as the 66 credits are worth a lot more to me (and assumably a lot of people) then 50 items perminent, especially considering I can mirror this by getting an extra crafter shelf in my shop and preserving them for 100k. This isn't just for myself, it's also for the people who may not log in within the next 24 hours to be able to convert, but miss their small window after.
How will refills into vialbelts, or refills from flasks work, if it uses 1 "refill" to fill the vialbelt, it could very well lower the price even further. Will their be a way to choose how many sips, and if so, will the prices of flasks change to cost per sip?
I'll be honest, I'm not entirely sure what the objection is in this case. If it's in your Tome, it gets preserved. You're credited for any slots you don't use. If you don't really want it preserved, you' have time to get it out of there and get a free slot instead.
Here's my objection.
Right now, the Tome of the Crafter is a 100cr purchase that allows me to prevent any 50 designs I want from decaying, but the 50 slots are not permanent. If I want to keep 10 designs for the Vindicators and 5 designs for the Flame cult from decaying, I can do that. And then, in the future, when I quit the Vindicators and Flame, I can take those designs back out and put a dozen designs for Ithaqua and 3 designs for Conquest in their place. And then I can leave again and put in 15 demonic designs.
The Tome is a convenience. It lets me keep whatever designs are important to me NOW without worries about them decaying.
With the system talked about in this change, those designs will use up 90cr in perms. Just flat out use them up. Where they'd have previously never accounted for more than 15 of 50 slots in a tome, they're now going to account for a full 90% of the cost of a tome in unrecoverable expenses. Years after I have left the Vindicators, I'm going to have 20cr tied up in useless patterns. If Samaos wants to change how the cult conducts business, I can't just say "Oh, I'll pull out the now useless ritual knife design and replace it with the Sacrificial MacGuffin we use now."
This change means that every design permed is a sunk cost. If you are going to do this as written, you should refund all the tomes fully AS CREDITS and allow the players to choose what they spend those credits on, because this is a huge change in functionality and there would be people who would not have purchased them had they instead just served to permanently flag 50 designs as non-decay
A better change to the system would allow you to pay 2cr for the ability to flag a design as permanent, with the ability to remove the flag from that design and flag another as permanent in its place. This would preserve the functionality as the Tome, as a way to ensure that designs you care about do not expire, while allowing you to change those designs out when you no longer care about them.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
I'd agree that there's a definite shift from "Well, I have the slots, so I might as well use them!" to an actual decision about the importance of a design before preserving it. I disagree that this is a bad thing. Here's the point you're missing: if you have more than 3 minutes to spend on design maintenance every six RL months, you're never going to lose a design. It's trivially easy to keep them active, and almost impossible to see them deleted entirely.
You have a week or two to take inventory of your designs, decide how much you care about them, and make appropriate decisions about the future of your Tome. You'll have plenty of time and warning before you need to take any action.
Yes, and that complete change in functionality is why they should get a refund, rather than 50 tokens of dubious value.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
Can we just refund flasks to people and get kegs from Lusternia?
<div>Message #2062 Sent By: (imperian) Received On: 1/20/2018/2:59</div><div>"Antioch has filed a bounty against you. Reason: Raiding Antioch and stealing Bina, being a right</div><div>ass, and not belonging anywhere near Antioch till he grows up."</div>
Yes, and that complete change in functionality is why they should get a refund, rather than 50 tokens of dubious value.
You've gotten your 100cr worth of value out of them up to this point. You have the time before the system goes in to trade them in for 66 credits.
There is no reason to refund the item in its entirety because of the described functionality change, just as I wouldn't expect a refund to my claymore when the change to battlecry changed how it is used.
I am the righteous one... the claims are stated - it's the world I've created
If a design is not in a crafter's shelf or in a tome, is it going to be lost completely in the conversion? If so, would it be possible for the shelf pricing to be lowered before the actual tome conversions take place? I have almost a whole tome of jewelry and one of furniture that I really don't want to make permanent because I am always finding designs that I want to improve on, especially if they are really old. I don't have the shelf space to store them nor 250K gold to buy a new shelf just so they won't be completely lost. I only bought the tomes to hold these designs because it was more cost effective with the lapidary and jigsaw to actually hand craft these items and put them in a regular shelf.
Also, previous standard of operation is that when an artifact is changed or altered or rendered obsolete in some way, a refund is offered. Please do not change this standard, as it is something that makes customers feel secure - their artifacts might lose value, but if the functionality is changed in some way drastically (like what you are proposing), do not force them along with the change if they just want the refund. You should just go with the Bonding Revamp road - in the Revamp, we were allowed to reclaim lessons from Hunter or Druid in its entirety to choose the other class.
What you should do is make a 1 or 2 week duration syntax that converts your tome in to either a full refund or a pile of permanent designs + permanence tokens. This lets people pick and choose which designs they actually want because they can just take the refund and spend a portion of it on making things permanent. Why is this so difficult to do?
Also, I'll repeat.. can we just do away with the overbearingly large shopkeep's tax (buying a shop already costs a massive amount of gold or tokens/credits, why force them to spend MORE?) in the form of flasks? Just refund their owners and give Woodworkers or Metalcrafters an ability to make kegs for shops, which serve the same purpose and (if you must) require a massive amount of commodities.
<div>Message #2062 Sent By: (imperian) Received On: 1/20/2018/2:59</div><div>"Antioch has filed a bounty against you. Reason: Raiding Antioch and stealing Bina, being a right</div><div>ass, and not belonging anywhere near Antioch till he grows up."</div>
right now, some characters have hundreds (Hundreds, I know I have at least two hundred fifty designs spread out over two shops right now, and fifty in my Tome. I'm a little concerned about how I think I'm reading the changes in the decay times. I'm not sure about this paperless system, I'm finding it somewhat difficult to follow, but what I THINK I'm hearing is that when a design decays, it takes all the created items with it? Or something about you needing to renew the design before you can use the item that is already out there? So someone creates a design, let's say, for boots, and I buy a pair, they let their design go and I have to go buy new boots, cause hte ones I have in my inventory can't be used? That's a lot of wasted items. When you times that by the two or three hundred odd, assuming noted designers like Amaris, Marisa, Kari, Miichelle and the like all have the same, we're talking potentially thousands of items around Imperian becoming completely useless every single day, creating a lot of code chaos, at the very least.
Further, there are those right now that aren't getting messages when a design in a shop, or elsewhere outside of the inventory, are decaying, causing lost designs, thousands of gold in redesigning (Two hundred for a sketch, two hundred for a pattern, two hundred fifty for a needle, plus two or three hundred in approval costs, times a hundred or so at a time). Am I to expect this to change?
If I can't necessarily afford the hundreds of thousands in gold not only to get the designs out of the crafter's guild, buy a shelf to store them, buy two credits at market prices (That's twenty thousand gold per design) to make permanent, and then store the designs until they're bought... We're talking a lot of gold put out to make them, comms not even included yet, and in the end, we'll have to raise prices, what with the gold drops, it makes a pair of trousers ridiculously expensive. You're looking at between one tenth and one fifth of a credit just to buy a hat? Or a pair of boots?
Vials, too, are an expensive investment. I know I myself have three hundred, and I know other people that do the same thing with their vials, to be sure they have enough of everything they need, not limited to toxicologists either. Evey sixty months, having three hundred vials decay, especailly the sorts that are custom-ordered, you're looking at two or three hundred gold per vials, for the high end stuff. Assuming you have a jewel-encrusted custom guild vial made from... whatever, you're looking at ninety thousand gold just to replace the vials, not to mention whatever might have been INSIDE The vials, such as elixers, toxins or venoms. This is all, of course, assuming you don't want to use vialbelts, which I have to ask... Will there be customization for them? What do you mean they'll refill themselves? Refill themselves from where? How will they refill themselves?
Some of these changes I don't understand. Others seem quite dubiously helpful, while still creating more of the same problems we were facing before, if I'm understanding them correctly.
Comments
Create two new trade skills, Arms/Armour and for lack of a better word, Homewares.
Give Arms/Armour all the layouts and everything from smithing except for the class specific stuff. Homewares gets all the furniture, vials, city building and for the sake of completeness, books and papermaking. Leave smithing with the knights until something viable is worked out in a few years.
But that'll never happen, because god forbid we could delete and consolidate skills for once.
I'd settle for being able to properly use layouts on a tradeshelf, the various have been hashed out before so I won't expand here. Also, tailoring needs a look, Nevore is wearing three seperate pieces of footwear right now. I don't care for books or paper but the idea to add them to woodworking seems reasonable.
Vialbelts will work with toxins, yes?
If so, could you make it possible to preserve a toxin directly into a vialbelt?
If not, could you make it so that they do?
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
Another thing:
Flasks are a HUGE credit investment just to be able to sell elixirs and salves and toxins without forcing players to stock hundreds of vials, and without forcing players to buy hundreds of duplicate vials. I can walk into a shop in Caanae and find 1800cr tied up in flasks in a single shop. That's a level three artifact and change. Two entire professions. All tied up in flasks.
Flasks which, I might add, serve no purpose other than to sell ABSOLUTE NECESSITIES to the playerbase. It's not like these are luxury items being used to sell fine wines and liquor (those casks, I might add, come from the tradeskill system and/or NPC shops and cost SIGNIFICANTLY less than 40cr). No, those require only a moderate gold investment. Toxins and Concoctions, which produce things that are 100% absolutely required to play the game, require a 300 credit skill to be transed and then it requires you to sink ~380,000 gold into a flask PER INDIVIDUAL TYPE SOLD.
And again, this is just to supply the absolute basic adventuring necessities of the game. You can't play this game without something as simple as health elixir, and selling that effectively takes an investment of ~360,000 to 400,000 gold.
It's absolutely ridiculous and it needs to change.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
How does this making of designs publicly available work? Some kind of list system like artifacts and fee payable to the crafter if I "buy" access to that moonstone necklace or whatever? Likewise with the guilds, will the guild shopkeeper have a list to work from? Will we be able to place designs in shops we don't own, like now?
No timeline currently. This remake simply lets us lay the groundwork for that future change so that it is much, much easier.
I'll be honest, I'm not entirely sure what the objection is in this case. If it's in your Tome, it gets preserved. You're credited for any slots you don't use. If you don't really want it preserved, you' have time to get it out of there and get a free slot instead.
The current timeline, subject to change: When a design is approved, it gets an expiry time of 180 RL days. When a design is less than 60 days away from expiry, you'll have the option to REFRESH it for only the cost of submission. If your design expires, you go into expiry grace mode for 30 days. During this grace period, your design cannot be used for crafting and the fee for refreshing it goes up. If you finish the grace period (meaning, a total of 210 days) without refreshing, you reach the critical point. If there are any crafted items from this design still in existence, it becomes defunct, meaning you must resubmit it for approval before using it again. If there are NO crafted items in existence, or if they decay before you resubmit the design, it will be deleted. It is designed in a way that you should never, ever lose a design you care about.
That is certainly one way to approach the matter. Frankly, I feel like returning flasks to their original intent (shopkeeping) in order to present a much more manageable alternative to their second use (vial upkeep) is a tradeoff I'm very comfortable with. Exact vialbelt capacity is up for debate currently, but I'd expect it to be quite large.
Folks will still refill their vialbelts from concoctions, brewed by concoctionists, sold in shops. If we, as a staff, need to take a look at the delivery model (flasks) to make sure they're cost-effective, we will. At this time, it's not a factor for discussion in the Tradeskill Revamp.
Will designs currently located in crafter's shelves be converted to permanency as well? If not, how much are the new 'costs of submission' to renew a design going to run? I would hate to be hit with a massive amount of renewal fees all at once for every design I sell in my shop if the prices are outrageous.
Crafter's shelf designs won't automatically be permanent, but their presence on the shelf will ensure they can't be deleted permanently as long as the shop stands. Right now the maximum you can spend per design to renew is 500 gold, and that's only if it's defunct (210 RL days without refreshment). You should be fine.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
There is no reason to refund the item in its entirety because of the described functionality change, just as I wouldn't expect a refund to my claymore when the change to battlecry changed how it is used.
the claims are stated - it's the world I've created
If a design is not in a crafter's shelf or in a tome, is it going to be lost completely in the conversion? If so, would it be possible for the shelf pricing to be lowered before the actual tome conversions take place? I have almost a whole tome of jewelry and one of furniture that I really don't want to make permanent because I am always finding designs that I want to improve on, especially if they are really old. I don't have the shelf space to store them nor 250K gold to buy a new shelf just so they won't be completely lost. I only bought the tomes to hold these designs because it was more cost effective with the lapidary and jigsaw to actually hand craft these items and put them in a regular shelf.
Of course not! You'll still have access to every single design that you do now.
What you should do is make a 1 or 2 week duration syntax that converts your tome in to either a full refund or a pile of permanent designs + permanence tokens. This lets people pick and choose which designs they actually want because they can just take the refund and spend a portion of it on making things permanent. Why is this so difficult to do?
Also, I'll repeat.. can we just do away with the overbearingly large shopkeep's tax (buying a shop already costs a massive amount of gold or tokens/credits, why force them to spend MORE?) in the form of flasks? Just refund their owners and give Woodworkers or Metalcrafters an ability to make kegs for shops, which serve the same purpose and (if you must) require a massive amount of commodities.
Further, there are those right now that aren't getting messages when a design in a shop, or elsewhere outside of the inventory, are decaying, causing lost designs, thousands of gold in redesigning (Two hundred for a sketch, two hundred for a pattern, two hundred fifty for a needle, plus two or three hundred in approval costs, times a hundred or so at a time). Am I to expect this to change?
If I can't necessarily afford the hundreds of thousands in gold not only to get the designs out of the crafter's guild, buy a shelf to store them, buy two credits at market prices (That's twenty thousand gold per design) to make permanent, and then store the designs until they're bought... We're talking a lot of gold put out to make them, comms not even included yet, and in the end, we'll have to raise prices, what with the gold drops, it makes a pair of trousers ridiculously expensive. You're looking at between one tenth and one fifth of a credit just to buy a hat? Or a pair of boots?
Vials, too, are an expensive investment. I know I myself have three hundred, and I know other people that do the same thing with their vials, to be sure they have enough of everything they need, not limited to toxicologists either. Evey sixty months, having three hundred vials decay, especailly the sorts that are custom-ordered, you're looking at two or three hundred gold per vials, for the high end stuff. Assuming you have a jewel-encrusted custom guild vial made from... whatever, you're looking at ninety thousand gold just to replace the vials, not to mention whatever might have been INSIDE The vials, such as elixers, toxins or venoms. This is all, of course, assuming you don't want to use vialbelts, which I have to ask... Will there be customization for them? What do you mean they'll refill themselves? Refill themselves from where? How will they refill themselves?
Some of these changes I don't understand. Others seem quite dubiously helpful, while still creating more of the same problems we were facing before, if I'm understanding them correctly.