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1. Do you mainly do tailoring or blacksmithing BODs? (Why?)
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I have both Legendary Tailors and Legendary Blacksmiths and have done and still occasionally do the BODs for both. The overall concept of BoDs is still sound, it gives the craftsmen orientated players something
almost worthwhile to do since the general public no longer needs or wants our services.
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2. Which rewards are:
- too hard to get?
- too easy to get?
- are the most useful?
- are the least useful?
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The entire concept of our current available rewards needs a major overhaul.
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Smithing Rewards </u>
While sturdy shovels or sturdy pickaxes and are the easiest to obtain for smithing, and they come in very handy for mining up ore, most players end up tossing the majority of them in the trash or selling back to the npc because of storage issues. I have kept one entire vendor stocked with shovels and picks at a very low price and hardly ever sell one.
Gargoyle pickaxes are a joke. Most miners won't touch them with a ten foot pole. The last thing they want is to have a valorite elemental spawn on their head when they are out mining for ingots. A few fighters still enjoy using them, but the rewards for killing one are low compared to the other monsters available to fight. To add insult to injury, gargoyle pickaxes spawn as monster loot so any fighter that likes doing them has ample opportunity to obtain all the gargoyle pickaxes they wish from loot. The majority of blacksmith pickaxes are resold to the npc vendor or tossed on the ground.
One pair of Ring mining gloves is all any miner needs. They do not sell on vendors ever. I once put a few stacks of ring mining gloves around at several banks around the land. Not one person ever bothered to pick up a pair. I kept checking back till at last the just decayed. They can be resold back to the npc vendor, at an insulting low price to have been a reward.
Prospector Tools are actually handy enough to keep a few around. But again, they are rewarded way too often and players end up with leftover stacks that are unsellable on vendors or to the npcs.
Of the runic hammers, nobody wants or even uses the lower ones like dull copper, shadow and copper hammers. The modifiers available are just too random to actually be worthwhile trying to craft an upper level weapon or armor piece. The higher runics are just as bad
IF a player could actually acquire one. When the BoD system was originally introduced, it was necessary to make it random to keep the shard from being overrun by high end items. But now, alot of harder monsters have been added to the game that spawn higher weapons and armor than the crafter could make even if he or she was lucky enough to have a valorite hammer in hand.
Fortifying Powder is the one true reward that keeps the BOD system alive at all. It is a reward obtainable by all smiths and the rate of needed bods to obtain the powder is also acceptable. The powder is also the one reward that other non smith players can use so it actually has a resale value at a price most players can afford.
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Tailor Rewards </u>
The easiest reward of course is the tailor cloth, and it is a usable reward even if the amount recieved is too low. It rarely replaces the amount of cloth used to fill the bod that was turned in, and that is exactly what the majority of low and mid range colors are used for. The firecloth and white fabric is a bit too hard to recieve.
Stretched hides are a wasted reward since a non deed type artifact that people actually prefer can be stolen from doom. The majority of these rewards are tossed on the ground or into a trash can as soon as they are recieved.
Colored Sandles are ok, but they were a joke reward to start with. Sandles should always have been dyable, just as other footwear is dyable. The only reward sandles should have been firecloth yellow and white or to make them "special" they should have had at least one modifier perhaps LRC or nightsite or something else to make them truely usable by players.
Decorating items such as the tapistrys and rugs were the mainstay of the tailors for along time, but they have been around too long and the market has been saturated. They only sell now for a very low price, not worth the effort involved to fill the original LBOD to recieve one.
Runic sewing kits have the same problem that smith hammers have, the modifiers are too random to be able to craft usable items worth selling to the public. Spined and horned kits are practically useless, while the barbed is impossibly hard to obtain to start with.
As with smithing, only one reward, Clothing Bless Deeds, keeps the Tailor plugging away with the system. They are obtainable by all tailors and the necessary bods spawn at at slow but almost reasonable rate. These deeds are usable by the public so there is actually a market for resale.
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3. How many BODs do you collect and turn in each day?
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That is a loaded question. Currently, maybe once a month or every other month I will fill and turn in 50 to 100 bods on the off chance I will receive one small bod needed for tailoring, or a LBOD needed for smithing. It never happens, I always get duplicates of the ones I already have and toss them on a vendor at super cheap prices to get rid of them.
<u>Possible fixes to save the crafter from extinction</u>
The first suggestion is give the crafter some choices. Instead of offering the crafter only one job, give him a list of jobs to choose one from, like two or three differnt random small bods and two or three random large bods on one menu. Also equalize the rate of bods spawning somewhat. The days of keeping the bods from the valorite or barbed Lbods impossibly low have long passed. Keep the same system in place as is used now, when you fill a bod and turn it in you get the opportunity to accept another commission.
The next suggestion has been proposed many times and again centers around giving the crafter some choices. Get rid of the static "you fill this you get that" reward system. Instead, put it on a point system such as is used for the differnt collections or put it on a trade in system such as was used for the Tokuno Treasures event.
Revamp the rewards themselves. This doesn't mean just getting rid of the old rewards, keep them but add in new ones on the point or trade in systems as well. There are hundreds of unused graphics that could be turned into decorating rewards like knitting needles or easily changed graphics such as a red hot sword in the process of being forged.
Finally, change some of the existing rewards.
Runics - Allow craftsmen to choose the modifiers that are attached to the item they are crafting with runics. Certain resoursces could also be required to accomplish this but
ONLY if the said resources were easily obtainable by the craftsman using crafting skills. Requireing a craftsman to go face a peerless to get a resource is a slap in the face and resented by the crafting community. In fact, these resources could be part of the rewards recieved on the point or turn in systems.
Sandles - attach one random modifier to make them worth wearing over other footwear PER level of sandle. In effect it would turn into a type of runic sandle.
Reward cloth - allow craftsman to attach one modifier for items made from the cloth PER level of cloth. In effect it would turn into a type of runic cloth.
Sturdy Shoves, Prospector tools, pickaxes - for goodness sakes make them stackable if new and unused or include some type of tool box to hold them as a reward. The very least make them resalable to the NPC at a decient price to reflect the fact that they were a reward.
