Tradeskill Weekend

Most of my weekend was spent doing Tradeskills, in no small part because of the double experience offered on the English-language servers. With doubled experience on top of full vitality, a single rune (an upgrade for the scout archetype) was netting me 10 percent of a level.

The other reason to tradeskill was the unscheduled patches on Saturday. Our server came down twice, within an hour and a half of each other. There was precious little explanation, too.

My first thought was that the target was a plat-generating loop or exploit, since the only change was to buyback prices. Sitting behind the pretty screen on our local computers, and even behind the front-line servers is a giant database that tracks everything about each of the worlds, including how much of each item is in the world, how much money, how many upgrades, kills, and so on.

That's why we can see some basic stats for our characters on the web, and find out basic rankings. But this database allows SOE to manage the game using statistical tools. They don't really say what they do to manage the game, but any programmer worth his salt would be able to write monitoring scripts that would give the game managers (oddly, the GM's aren't the overall managers of the game.) up-to-the-minute data on what's going on, in a statistical sense.

So, I've got to wonder if they noticed money piling up at too rapid a rate, and jumped in with an emergency patch. But somehow, I think that this line in the update notes from 2/19 might be responsible, too.

Summoned items should no longer have any value to merchants.

Marr protect us! You could summon food and then sell it? Wow, this is an exploit, if ever there was. I can already envision the army of level 6 botted priests, summoning food and then selling it at a merchant. Yikes!

Between removing the achemist tradeskill monopoly, and making all items with stat increases attuneable, we should have seen some decline in prices. Yet we don't seem to have, at least not on my server. Maybe the effects of these changes is slow to take effect? After all, attunability doesn't affect me right now, the loss of wealth comes when I have to replace the item with a better one.

And as for the new tradeskills, in order to take advantage and make your own WORT, for example, you would have had to spend a fair amount of time training with Thaumaturgy. And if you are only making your own, there is less effect on the market price than if you were making it and selling it. Training on recipes that offer no experience. Which is my guess for why the double tradeskill experience was offered this weekend.