The crafting mechanics have been getting a lot of attention by the Funcom developers as an anxious community has been waiting and asking for feedback on the coming changes and fixes for Age of Conan Hyborian Adventures. Today Glen "Famine" Swan posted an update from Twizer on the crafting mechanic fixes and adjustments we can expect to see in future updates.

Tradeskill and Resource Update

By: Twicer



Greetings again!



The Resource and Building team have been working hard lately on a number of fixes to the tradeskills, resource playfields and massive pvp, and I thought it would be fair to give out a status update.



First off - we have been fixing a lot of the collision bugs inherent in the world and unfortunately that has taken a lot longer than we anticipated and that has been our first priority together with fixing various hand-in bugs for the resource gathering quests.



Now, as far as status goes, let me explain that any patch we get out of the production office is held on our testlive servers for a week of testing before it goes out and in order for testlive to work as intended, we patch to testlive once per week. Essentially this means that if a bug is fixed it takes two weeks until it reaches live.



I would also like to point to my first post, where I say "Most of these changes we aim to have ready within a few weeks.". While we did get the alchemists cache and a number of hand-in bugfixes done, a lot of you are certainly wondering when all the promised things are coming, and that's why I'm writing this, so here goes:



Rare resources seemingly not dropping



The rare resources that comes from harvesting (for instance Tin and Feldspar) have a 1% droprate from the nodes. They also have a chance on dropping from the random encounters that interrupt harvesting. This won't change and it does work. I realize that the droprate seems low but datamining shows the droprate to be around what we expected it to be (not counting the random encounter drops)



Cannot hand in resource X



We have had a lot of these issues and we are working on fixing them continuously.



Skinning and Weaving being "useless"



There are plans to make these skills useful - timeconstraints forced us to get these out without the functionality implemented (otherwise it would have completely stopped other tradeskills from functioning). Skinning and Weaving are intended to post-process the drops already existing. I can't give an exact time-estimate on this.



Blue Recipes progress (Weaponsmith/Armorsmith)



All the items have been created, as have the recipes. We are still working on getting the codesupport for correctly setting this up but hope to get it soon.



Unlearning tradeskills



I'm unable to give out any dates, but this is a crucial feature and we are pushing to get it done as soon as we can.



Traders and Trainers in Guildcities



Next patch going to testlive, traders and trainers will appear in

guildcities.



City-life in cities



Guards will start patrolling your keeps next testlive-patch to keep intruders away - additional NPC's are soon to follow.



Alchemy drops



The alchemists cache that we patched in a while back was intended to contain resources so that alchemists could proceed with their craft. It has worked, but it was never intended to be the "end all" help for alchemists. New static camps in the resource and building regions are being worked on and hopefully we should have that on testlive next time we patch. Scorpion Oils, for instance, was always intended to actually drop from... well... scorpions.



Removing random spawns



What we are doing with the random spawns is that we will patch out the new resource and building populations (Lacheish, Poitain, Purple Lotus Swamp) and at the same time remove these pesky things.



Architecture Revamp



I still can't give a time-estimate on this, but I can release a little more about what we are at least considering for it: Totems that produces team-buffs while in range, Waystones to teleport team-members and/or self, guild-city improvements such as statues, flags, etc.



Costs of tradeskills



The costs of tradeskills in general have been reduced further -

alchemists are supposed to be able to make a small profit out of selling potions for instance. Also, the hand-in for tradeskillers have been altered - the tradeskill trainer will no longer keep your created items for themselves, but rather inspect them and hand them back to you.



Gemcutting



Many posts about gemcutting and 'nerfs'. Adjustments for the some of the gems will be out when the system design has been followed up and implemented. It will not affect all gems but there will be



I'll try to get more updates to you as we progress with these things in the future.

• You can read the official post here and discuss it here.
• Add your thoughts on our forums.