Research notes are really obnoxious

[AliamRationem.5172]

I'll just keep it short and simple.  I don't understand why you thought it would be a good idea to require crafting thousands of junk items just to salvage for this pointless item that we need to craft EoD gear and I also don't understand why you felt it necessary to require 25 seconds to salvage each stack of junk items to obtain them.  This is inexplicably tedious design.  Just...why?

[Mungo Zen.9364]

Yup. These were another big reason why I stepped back from playing. I like the combat system, and could care less for the crafting system. When they made a major feature of the expansion not combat but crafting based, I checked out immediately. Combined with fishing (gathering activities) and this is one of the least combat engaging releases yet. I guess that’s okay tho, considering how botched the professions are now. 

[AliamRationem.5172]

20 minutes ago, Mungo Zen.9364 said:

Yup. These were another big reason why I stepped back from playing. I like the combat system, and could care less for the crafting system. When they made a major feature of the expansion not combat but crafting based, I checked out immediately. Combined with fishing (gathering activities) and this is one of the least combat engaging releases yet. I guess that’s okay tho, considering how botched the professions are now. 

I know a lot of people like fishing, but it definitely isn't my thing.  However, I do appreciate having several crafted armor sets that come along with EoD.  I just wish they had found a better way to handle it than to introduce this unnecessary tedium.

[Labjax.2465]

Given what I've seen so far in how they've handled them, I suspect the "why" is about as clear as their recent balance notes. That is, some people are throwing stuff at the wall with systems they don't understand well. If they no longer have the economist they used to have (still not sure on that, thought someone said they didn't anymore, but never got verification?) it would explain a lot about this system getting put in the game and having no real explanation given for what and why it's designed the way it is. It feels like someone's idea of trying to manage economy like in the game's past, but without the practiced knowledge that went into such systems in the past. Like the expert left abruptly and the trainee was left with some notes before they were ever ready.

If I'm inadvertently insulting someone who does have experience, then sorry... not trying to be horrible. But this system should be better. People can conjecture that the point is to remove lower tier cheap mats from the economy and make them worth more or whatever, but that doesn't change the tedium of the process itself and how poorly hidden is the fact that it's just another gold sink.

[daninumbers.4036]

It's just another gold / mats sink. So that's why once they saw people were just crafting the very cheap coffee and it wasn't draining the economy as expected they simply made it drop nothing. Same removing several other cheap ones because besides you being able to craft them you could get them from other sources, chests or drops.

Oh and remember when you couldn't even salvage a stack, 250 clicks manually lol.

[SinisterSlay.6973]

I gave up on them.  Until they add a way to know what items can be turned into research notes, it's become an impossible process.  You can't google it, they have changed it silently so many times that any info you find online will be wrong.

 

This is a terrible system Anet and actively harms everything tied to them.

Edited July 17, 2022 by SinisterSlay.6973

[Mungo Zen.9364]

1 hour ago, AliamRationem.5172 said:

I know a lot of people like fishing, but it definitely isn't my thing.  However, I do appreciate having several crafted armor sets that come along with EoD.  I just wish they had found a better way to handle it than to introduce this unnecessary tedium.

I don’t mind crafted skins in general. But this expansion will have a legacy based around making legendary weapons and variant skins that require hours of time investment in acquiring and breaking down items for research notes.  
 

Consider how much disdain and vitriol has been shown for research notes and the application for them. Now consider that these are attached to the top items available from EoD.  I’m excited to see the comments three or four years from now from new players discovering this system for the first time when they want to craft their Aurene Legendary. 

[Teratus.2859]

I don't care for this either, but it's somewhat easy to get notes if you have some gold you're willing to part with anyway.

 

Just buy pearl exotic weapons from the trading post and salvage those.

Some weapon sets are exclusively crafted like Pearl weapons so they are easy research notes.

You can also go with rare quality Krait weapons as well which I think are also exclusively crafted.

[ProtoGunner.4953]

Anet doing this kitten since years: building the crafting system around the current economy and if the economy changes, they won't change the crafting system. 

[Taclism.2406]

I've thrown this idea in another thread and I'll say it again

Adding a reward for 500 notes in Kaineng Meta daily chest solves 2 problems with one stone :
- Alternative for notes where you can play instead of sitting in menus
- Revive a meta that's mostly dead and pointless rn

Edited July 18, 2022 by Taclism.2406

[AliamRationem.5172]

1 hour ago, Teratus.2859 said:

I don't care for this either, but it's somewhat easy to get notes if you have some gold you're willing to part with anyway.

 

Just buy pearl exotic weapons from the trading post and salvage those.

Some weapon sets are exclusively crafted like Pearl weapons so they are easy research notes.

You can also go with rare quality Krait weapons as well which I think are also exclusively crafted.

To be clear, my issue isn't the cost of research notes.  I spent a few hundred gold crafting several armor and weapon sets yesterday and consider that a bargain.  But even buying higher value items off the TP as you suggest I'd need to buy and salvage a couple hundred items.  Unfortunately, I didn't think to do that and ended up crafting and salvaging thousands of potions instead. 

In either case, the issue is this unnecessarily tedious step made even worse by the salvage time (seems to be about 25 seconds per stack.  Why?).  Couldn't they have just made a component we can craft directly like everything else?  This system seems designed to waste your time with mind-numbingly boring tasks.

[Teratus.2859]

Just now, AliamRationem.5172 said:

To be clear, my issue isn't the cost of research notes.  I spent a few hundred gold crafting several armor and weapon sets yesterday and consider that a bargain.  But even buying higher value items off the TP as you suggest I'd need to buy and salvage a couple hundred items.  Unfortunately, I didn't think to do that and ended up crafting and salvaging thousands of potions instead. 

In either case, the issue is this unnecessarily tedious step made even worse by the salvage time (seems to be about 25 seconds per stack.  Why?).  Couldn't they have just made a component we can craft directly like everything else?  This system seems designed to waste your time with mind-numbingly boring tasks.

Yea i'm pretty much in agreement with that.

It certainly does waste a lot of time if you need a lot of notes.

 

It would probably have been better to just make it a new salvage kit that salvages all armour and weapons for notes instead.

[Astralporing.1957]

11 hours ago, Labjax.2465 said:

If they no longer have the economist they used to have (still not sure on that, thought someone said they didn't anymore, but never got verification?) it would explain a lot about this system getting put in the game and having no real explanation given for what and why it's designed the way it is. It feels like someone's idea of trying to manage economy like in the game's past, but without the practiced knowledge that went into such systems in the past. Like the expert left abruptly and the trainee was left with some notes before they were ever ready.

Their original economist is indeed no longer part of Anet (and hasn't been for a long time), but that does not change anything really. His ideas about tweeking economy always revolved around spreadsheets and balancing supply and demand in a large scale, but never took fun factor in consideration. He even admitted at one point it's not something he usually considered, because he did not really understand what makes stuff fun for players and what does not.

At that time, the economy was being designed with the idea that it's players that should serve the economy, not the other way around.

So, i;m not really sure that having that economist work on this system nowadays would help things.

[Astralporing.1957]

3 minutes ago, AliamRationem.5172 said:

To be clear, my issue isn't the cost of research notes.  I spent a few hundred gold crafting several armor and weapon sets yesterday and consider that a bargain.  But even buying higher value items off the TP as you suggest I'd need to buy and salvage a couple hundred items.  Unfortunately, I didn't think to do that and ended up crafting and salvaging thousands of potions instead. 

In either case, the issue is this unnecessarily tedious step made even worse by the salvage time (seems to be about 25 seconds per stack.  Why?).  Couldn't they have just made a component we can craft directly like everything else?  This system seems designed to waste your time with mind-numbingly boring tasks.

It's actually going a step further from the idea of Provisioner tokens - but instead of changing the items for "stuff" at vendor, you need to salvage them, get intermediary stuff, and then click on it in order to get the final thing.

Except provisioner token system got simplified at some point, with other options getting added that made obtaining tokens simpler and more direct.

[Hotride.2187]

59 minutes ago, Taclism.2406 said:

I've thrown this idea in another thread and I'll say it again

Adding a reward for 500 notes in Kaineng Meta daily chest solves 2 problems with one stone :
- Alternative for notes where you can play instead of sitting in menus
- Revive a meta that's mostly dead and pointless rn

500 sounds excessive for a single chest, but even something as low as 25 (so 5 hydrocatalytic reagents) would be good for giving incentive to do the meta daily. And low numbers will stack over time, which is my preferred way of farming anything in this game.

Or just let the players buy the crap with gold, since apparently there is some intended minimum price per note... looking at how many cheap crafted items cannot be salvaged for notes...

Edited July 18, 2022 by Hotride.2187

[Hadi.2430]

12 hours ago, vanfrano.1325 said:

I think part of the team is trying to sabotage the game from the inside for some reason, with grouch's blessing. They seem to be succeeding with the mess that is EoD and what has been happening since its release.

So you think part of the team are secretly sabotaging the game with that design yet it should get confirmed by leads and directors? lol .. people and their brain nowadays 

Edited July 18, 2022 by sammokdadd.3602

[vanfrano.1325]

3 minutes ago, sammokdadd.3602 said:

So you think part of the team are secretly sabotaging the game with that design yet it should get confirmed by leads and directors? lol .. people and their brain nowadays 

People and their brain, indeed.

[Taclism.2406]

32 minutes ago, Hotride.2187 said:

500 sounds excessive for a single chest, but even something as low as 25 (so 5 hydrocatalytic reagents) would be good for giving incentive to do the meta daily. And low numbers will stack over time, which is my preferred way of farming anything in this game.

I dont think its that excessive. Maybe 250 top, but 25 is way too low to be an incentive, thats worth like 20-25silver, might as well grab the jade runestone then

 

33 minutes ago, Hotride.2187 said:

just let the players buy the crap with gold

I've also been arguing for that since coffee nerf tbh. The "kaineng solution" is just another option they might prefer, since it involves playing rather than admitting a core system of the expansion is garbage and give up on it

[Hotride.2187]

10 hours ago, SinisterSlay.6973 said:

I gave up on them.  Until they add a way to know what items can be turned into research notes, it's become an impossible process.  You can't google it, they have changed it silently so many times that any info you find online will be wrong.

This is a terrible system Anet and actively harms everything tied to them.

A checkbox in the crafting panel "can be researched" (or whatever short text) would actually be nice.

[Labjax.2465]

3 hours ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

Their original economist is indeed no longer part of Anet (and hasn't been for a long time), but that does not change anything really. His ideas about tweeking economy always revolved around spreadsheets and balancing supply and demand in a large scale, but never took fun factor in consideration. He even admitted at one point it's not something he usually considered, because he did not really understand what makes stuff fun for players and what does not.

At that time, the economy was being designed with the idea that it's players that should serve the economy, not the other way around.

So, i;m not really sure that having that economist work on this system nowadays would help things.

Fair enough. That sounds like a pretty awful philosophy for a game. I guess I must have had a bit of rose-colored glasses about the economy operations of old in this game.

[Freya.9075]

I don’t mind the cost of them. However the no “salvage all” option is the part preventing me from getting them at this point. So many are needed for some items you want to create and you feel like your poor mouse is screaming at the end of it in pain. As does my hand. I could install a clicker I guess but not sure if that’s allowed or not. And you shouldn’t have to do that. Adding salvage all is needed

[Astralporing.1957]

4 hours ago, Labjax.2465 said:

Fair enough. That sounds like a pretty awful philosophy for a game. I guess I must have had a bit of rose-colored glasses about the economy operations of old in this game.

Oh, it was not all bad. The fact that he managed to create a pretty much self-sustaining system that is relatively easy to maintain without significant risk of inflation is already a massive achievement as far as MMORPGs go. It's just i think he often kept forgetting that this is a game, not a virtual testbed for checking different economic theories.

[Labjax.2465]

17 minutes ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

Oh, it was not all bad. The fact that he managed to create a pretty much self-sustaining system that is relatively easy to maintain without significant risk of inflation is already a massive achievement as far as MMORPGs go. It's just i think he often kept forgetting that this is a game, not a virtual testbed for checking different economic theories.

Yeah, that's always been the main part I respect about GW2's system, is that it enables players to easily trade stuff they find with each other and without the usual rampant inflation. I came back to the game to find a lot of stuff is about the same it was worth when I was playing the game back in 2015. Some fluctuation and changes, for sure, but compared to a game like SWTOR where things that were worth 10mil credits a few years ago are now worth 100mil or whatever. Just night and day.

I think the rose-colored glasses part for me was w/ regards to gameplay and fun. I was maybe remembering that a bit more flattering than it was in practice and in that regard, I'm not sure research notes is as out of the ordinary as I first thought. I think it's a terrible system w/ regards to gameplay and fun, but that may be par for the course with this game's economy. When I compare to stuff like the mystic toilet though, I do think whoever dreamed up that had the right idea... in that, if there was going to be an odds-based way to flush stuff with the chance of better, it's a decently fun concept for it.

I might have found research notes fun if it was something you get from crafting itself, rather than from salvaging crafted items. Or if it was tied to crafting's discovery in some way. It's just so transparently this thing where you're making or buying stuff only to destroy it. You aren't even learning anything in terms of research in a gamified way. It's just a currency called research notes. It's like someone looked at the game's Luck system and said "what if we did that, but instead of naturally accumulating it over time through salvaging unwanted items, you have to go out of your way to craft or spend gold to get stuff you can break down for Luck and it's now something you can't also salvage the normal way."

[Harfang.1507]

9 hours ago, Taclism.2406 said:

I've thrown this idea in another thread and I'll say it again

Adding a reward for 500 notes in Kaineng Meta daily chest solves 2 problems with one stone :
- Alternative for notes where you can play instead of sitting in menus
- Revive a meta that's mostly dead and pointless rn

My favourite metas before EoD were Octovine, Palawadan, Dragon Fall and Drizzlewood Coast.

My favourite metas after EoD are still Octovine, Palawadan, Dragon Fall and Drizzlewood Coast.

Add a sizable Research Notes reward to EoD ones and I may be willing to revise that list. Nevertheless, unless they make major changes to the Dragon's End meta, I will not return there, no matter how many Research Notes you offer me. No meta has ever left such a bitter tase in my mouth.

[Super Hayes.6890]

At least we can salvage stacks now. Research notes remain a clunky system though.