DEVS
I know everyone wants you to read their posts. Please consider what I have to say as well; I'll try to be brief.
The whole point of adjusting the BOD system was to make rewards commiserate with the time and money a smith or tailor invested. You nicely increased the CHANCE at getting a nice reward when using a runic hammer. But you COMPLETELY screwed up high end rewards. I have been working hard to obtain my own Val hammer. It is now impossible. Let's do the math.
Now, only 20 ex val plate lbod can get a val runic.
Valorite bods: Let's say one spawns 1 in a 1000. This is WAY conservative. I've been running over 20 smiths in the last year and the number of val bods I've obtained is less than 10. I've gotten 3 ex val bods in past 18 months, only one was a plate bod. At any rate....
Let's say the chance at it being exceptional val bod and not normal is 1 in 3. Again, I think this is conservative. Normal seems MUCH more common.
There are 24 different types of smith items (6 are plate), so that is a 1 in 4 chance (assuming that all bods have an equal probability) that it is a plate val bod.
And now you have a 1 in 3 chance it is a 20, and not a 15 or 10.
Do the math.
.001 * .33 * .25 * .33 = .000027225
chance of getting a 20 ex valorite plate bod
For those of you who aren't good with numbers. That means one time in roughly 36,731 BODs will an ex val bod show up. AND THIS IS USING VERY CONSERVATIVE NUMBERS. This is if a val bod shows up every 1000 pulls. If I recall right, it is closer to 1 in 10,000 which means 1 20 ex val bod after every 360,731 bods.
Wow. And that isn't even including the LBOD. Now the question is, what do you charge for the rarest item in game knowing the chance that someone can ever get the other 5 is almost impossible. Then what do you do if, by some act of God, you do get a val runic? you have 15 charges, each worth what...10-20 mil each? Not because what you craft even will be that great, but because of the rarity. Try selling anything for that much. Even artifacts are dropping. And what do you do when you use a charge and it makes a piece of crap? Who do you shoot?
Verite and Valorite Bods WERE VERY hard to get. The only way to get them was with multiple accounts with lots of mules or lots and lots of gold. I spent probably close to a $1000 in cash and so much gold you can't believe it over the past 18 months to get a valorite hammer. I keep multiple accounts open just to get bods and i've never gotten a val hammer. You've now taken away any chance at a val hammer and most chances at a verite one.
Either
1) You were upset that you had to "fix" the runics so they stopped giving us crappy rewards that out of spite you made sure none of us could get above a gold runic.
By the way, dull copper, shadow, and copper hammers and ashes still aren't rewards. Ashes don't seem to have any affect on enhancing, and the very very very meager properties low hammer can create aren't worth anything. So that leaves bronze and gold that are even possible for most smiths.
2) Or you are freaked out because after you made UO item based, the influx of super items (artifacts) made several almost unkillable people, and you think somehow limiting the number of super items will help.
If you didn't know, Verite and Val runics WERE extremely hard to get and took a great deal of money (cash or gold) to get. Plus a lot of patience. LOTS. Look at who has them. The people on my shard who had them pay close to $100 a month to keep accounts open that are just mules. And what, currently you have maybe 5 existing val runics per shard? Maybe. They were VERY hard to get. I dropped 15 ex val plate lbod that took me three months to fill and pulled a verite. How many artifacts can you get in that time?
3) Finally, perhaps the reason for this is that no one in the dev team can do math. For the first time in my life, I'm hoping this is the case.
It's this simple. I'm not making threats or anything. I merely want a simple statement.
Either say, "This is something we've thought through and is how we want it." Or say, "We'll give this matter more consideration."
I know this isn't a big part of the game to everyone, but it is to me and several others. I know personally know of 100 accounts that will close on my shard as bod accounts deactivate, and I don't know a lot of people. Personally, as this was one of the few things left I enjoyed and had the time to do, I'll be closing all of my accounts if things remain as they are. This is not a threat, I just don't want to act on my decision until I am sure you are fully committed to yours.
Thank you for your time.