Tencent is back in Discord today with continuing updates on everything it’s doing to make Tarisland more palatable for the western market, not that it’s expressly phrasing it that way. Today’s focus is all about crafting. Crafting, Tencent says, is complicated. And its loudest fans don’t like complicated, apparently.
“We have learned that some players find Crafting to be too complex and time-consuming, with low outputs, impacting both the in-game economy and player experience based on feedback from the last playtest,” the company says. To fix these perceived problems, Tencent will:
- “simplify” crafting gameplay by removing artisans, putting artisan outputs into other professions, reducing material requirements, deleting complex items, making recipes easier to get, and adjusting rep requirements;
- boost material acquisition and crafting output “to meet daily trading and usage needs,” making materials easier to get with less-specialized tools; and
- continue the process of moving more items out of crafting and into the PvE drop tables, which the team has previously talked about.
“As mentioned earlier, armor sets cannot be crafted but are exclusive to raids. On this basis, we will further limit the equipment quality and parts produced by Crafting to prioritize PVE gameplay. This ensures a fairer playing field, preventing players from gaining an unfair advantage through Crafting and trading.”
Player response from the dedicated fans on the game’s Discord is surprisingly mixed, perhaps because the fundamental philosophy of the game’s design has seemed to be constantly in flux while reinventing the MMORPG genre wheels over the last year; needless to say, this was probably never going to be the go-to game for hardcore crafters.
