Suggestions

So it is, with the release of the first Ancient breed that Baldwin adds some new recipes. One of which requires a total of 6 purple sludge to create. Considering all the other recipes that require copious amounts of the stuff the stock that was once there is no more. Once again it is time to spend days of melting down useless junk waiting for enough purple sludge to produce the things that actually sell from the cauldron. Meanwhile the hoard fills with more and more green sludge, ooze, and goo than could ever be used as nothing that uses it does so in a quantity equal to its influx. This is true of most of the alchemy ingredients, it seems, as there is only a shortage of Purple sludge, Red, Yellow, and Blue Goo, None of the oozes seem to be in danger, Grey and Black Slime, and Copper and Gold Muck. The rest of the ingredients seem to pile up due to, either lack of use in recipes or the items they create not being worth trying to sell on auction. Now, understandably, any one item made for cauldron can't be guaranteed to sell, so could something be done to help manage common or underused materials? Either that or reduce the frequency of certain materials being needed for recipes?

Would allowing common ingredients to be combined into rarer ingredients mess with the market too much?

Should the recipes be looked at and re-balanced with more mind for the RNG of producing materials?

Should a potential re-balance just factor in how often a material is used?

===Discussion so far===

Could changing some of the ingredients from gathering and Coli items to common colors be viable?

Does Ooze seem to pile up more than Sludge or Goo?

Would an exchange system for transmuting bulk into rarer colors work out?

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding the whole point of why the various colors have different rarities? If the admins didn't intend some to be harder to get than others and needed in different recipes why bother giving different colors and rarities?

It's not like the admins can't check out prices in the AH.

From my understanding of Baldwin it's another item/treasure sink. If we didn't have common colors stacking up it wouldn't be doing its job because we'd have no real reason to endlessly melt down stuff to get the in-demand stuff. We could just melt a few things down to get an even spread of items to be used.

[quote name="Nightwind" date="2019-06-08 15:31:12" ] Perhaps I'm misunderstanding the whole point of why the various colors have different rarities? If the admins didn't intend some to be harder to get than others and needed in different recipes why bother giving different colors and rarities? It's not like the admins can't check out prices in the AH. From my understanding of Baldwin it's another item/treasure sink. If we didn't have common colors stacking up it wouldn't be doing its job because we'd have no real reason to endlessly melt down stuff to get the in-demand stuff. We could just melt a few things down to get an even spread of items to be used. [/quote] Yeah but there's little to no [i]use [/i]for the really common stuff at the same kind of of rate as it's produced. Baldwin is an item sink for [i]stuff[/i] but it's not anywhere near as effective for the transmutation material it churns out, you're mostly trading one item for another, and the bulk of those you can't use at the rate you are producing them. So it just builds up. At one point I tracked a full stack's worth of transmuting and I got ONE purple sludge out of 99 sludge-producing items (that might be an outlier in terms of frequency but even if it's usually a little more common that's still [b]a lot[/b] of transmuting to get one desired item), a that rate for the gene that QuaeUnther mentioned I might end up with up to [i]six stacks[/i] worth of mostly greens and yellows to get those purple's I'd need to make 1 Pinstripe for a Gaoler. Meanwhile there's very few recipes that would use up that excess. And when the rarest items are used in large quantities it just exacerbates the problems. It's not that the rare colors should be more common, it's that there needs to be more recipes -that people are going to want to make/use repeatedly- that use up the common stuff in larger amounts instead of always favoring the rare colors.

[quote name="PersimmonBird" date="2019-06-08 16:37:09" ] [quote name="Nightwind" date="2019-06-08 15:31:12" ] Perhaps I'm misunderstanding the whole point of why the various colors have different rarities? If the admins didn't intend some to be harder to get than others and needed in different recipes why bother giving different colors and rarities? It's not like the admins can't check out prices in the AH. From my understanding of Baldwin it's another item/treasure sink. If we didn't have common colors stacking up it wouldn't be doing its job because we'd have no real reason to endlessly melt down stuff to get the in-demand stuff. We could just melt a few things down to get an even spread of items to be used. [/quote] Yeah but there's little to no [i]use [/i]for the really common stuff at the same kind of of rate as it's produced. Baldwin is an item sink for [i]stuff[/i] but it's not anywhere near as effective for the transmutation material it churns out, you're mostly trading one item for another, and the bulk of those you can't use at the rate you are producing them. So it just builds up. At one point I tracked a full stack's worth of transmuting and I got ONE purple sludge out of 99 sludge-producing items (that might be an outlier in terms of frequency but even if it's usually a little more common that's still [b]a lot[/b] of transmuting to get one desired item), a that rate for the gene that QuaeUnther mentioned I might end up with up to [i]six stacks[/i] worth of mostly greens and yellows to get those purple's I'd need to make 1 Pinstripe for a Gaoler. Meanwhile there's very few recipes that would use up that excess. And when the rarest items are used in large quantities it just exacerbates the problems. It's not that the rare colors should be more common, it's that there needs to be more recipes -that people are going to want to make/use repeatedly- that use up the common stuff in larger amounts instead of always favoring the rare colors. [/quote] Correct, this is the core of the problem. Newer recipes at high level seem to mostly ignore common quality materials in favor of rare ones. The glut of commons serves no purpose, even in most low level recipes.

[quote name="QuaeUnther" date="2019-06-08 19:27:36" ] Newer recipes at high level seem to mostly ignore common quality materials in favor of rare ones. The glut of commons serves no purpose, even in most low level recipes. [/quote] Addressing this is the fix, if indeed there needs to be a fix, of this issue I support. I transmute near-constantly, or at least as often as I can get on desktop and use the item-selection menus. As a result, I also end up with unneeded stacks of the less-desirable colors. However, I'm not bothered because eventually, [b]something[/b] will call for those colors, and I'll be able to sell them then. Last year, I forget exactly what mats were needed for scattervials, but I had enough hoarded to brew them for the entire duration of the event and plenty left over to sell. Other issues with the scattervials aside, I turned a nice profit from that. Right now, orange sludge is more expensive than green, yellow, and red, which it probably wasn't yesterday - from people buying to brew copies of the anniversary familiar, I'd think, despite that not being as hotly demanded as the vials. I think [b]new[/b] recipes with these mats (as opposed to changing existing ones and throwing people's plans out of whack) are a good idea, but I think it's also something you can be reasonably confident [b]will[/b] happen eventually. But then, 'patiently hoard all the things because they'll be valuable someday' is my default playstyle anyway, so maybe I'm not the most objective on this topic...

It's true that right now some things are not overly needed but that's a short-term idea. Over time the admins have been adding recipes that include more common materials--at lower levels that are more accessible to newer players. By short-term I'm thinking 6 months.

Also, by using rare colors in quantity the admins are not only slowing the production of those recipes (keeping prices high) but also encouraging players to transmute more often in Baldwin--encouraging site interaction. It's another time gate.

[quote name="Nightwind" date="2019-06-08 19:54:54" ] Also, by using rare colors in quantity the admins are not only slowing the production of those recipes (keeping prices high) but also encouraging players to transmute more often in Baldwin--encouraging site interaction. It's another time gate. [/quote] But they could do a transmutation swap system, like it takes 6 greens and 2 hours to make a blue or 1 blue and 2 hours to make 3 greens (or whatever values they chose) and it would still be a time and item sink, just a less frustrating one. For me it doesn't really matter, as literally all I do with Baldwin is transmute materials unless there is something special, so I have hundreds of everything, but I could absolutely understand why others are frustrated. As so many of the higher recipes use fixed components like reinforced beakers, which use just a few colors of materials.

It would be an interesting addition to the current system. However, it does reduce the amount of time people are on site (longer brews = fewer visits).

I suppose it would depend on what sort of behavior the admins are trying to encourage.

It does kind of annoy me that I have so many greens and yellows sitting around collecting dust while other colors tend to get eaten up much more frequently.

I think a fair trade off would be to add creation of higher tier materials, in exchange for lower tier materials.

For example...

2 Greed Sludge to make 1 Yellow Sludge.
3 Yellow Sludge for 1 Orange Sludge.
4 Orange Sludge for 1 Red Sludge.
5 Red Sludge for 1 Purple Sludge
6 Purple Sludge for 1 Blue Sludge.

A single Blue Sludge from scratch would take 2880 Green Sludge to create. A SINGLE Blue Sludge. At least, if I did my math right... It might be off, lol. It was way off, more like 600 green sludge. But that's still a lot. It would still increase exponentially instead of additively, which would be fine for a good item sink, in my opinion.

And it by no means would be efficient, but if you have extra Greens and Yellows laying around that you don't need yet, then you might as well toss it into the boiler again to turn it into a higher level material.

I imagine slime and muck could follow a similar path.

15 Grey Slime for 1 Black OR 1 White Slime.

10 Copper Muck for 1 Silver Muck.
15 Silver Muck for 1 Gold Muck.

And so on.

This also ensures that all of the items would keep some sort of value on the AH for other players, because they can constantly be used in some manner.

Edit: Also, these could be kept to fairly short times to brew to keep people coming back, but could cost small increments in treasure to maintain, and have lower experience output compared to other items you can create as a sort of trade-off for being able to create targeted materials.

Example is that everything could take 30 minutes to brew, cost 1000 treasure, but only give 30 experience. It's only slightly better than melting things down experience wise, and takes the same amount of time to brew, but it costs 1000 treasure to do so.

[quote name="Nightwind" date="2019-06-08 20:17:34" ] It would be an interesting addition to the current system. However, it does reduce the amount of time people are on site (longer brews = fewer visits). [/quote] Not necessarily for something like that. As people would still have to transmute items to get the base materials to swap (it's not like they can queue to get the materials), and people can set up the slightly longer swap brews for when they are going to work/school/sleep and wouldn't be checking anyway.