Well, it's been a while, but I'm gonna give AC2 a shot again. I played in the beta and founded and created tumeroks.com, which is still around and technically owned by me, but I have hardly even visited it for over a year. Somehow, in spite of a deep involvement in the fan sites and everything, it was just never the experience that the original AC was for me.

Anyway, as I said it's been a good year - high time to give it another shot. I think I'm gonna buy a new account and start fresh. It would be too weird trying to get back into my old characters.

So... here goes! I'll keep you apprised of my progress.

Essentially, creators fall into three main groups - armor, weapons, and spellbinders. You have to take that further down the tree as well, there's a subgroup for each race, and a subgroup for martial vs exotic weapons.

Essentially, the creators take the resources and create a 'thing'. That thing is a weapon or armor, or in the case of spellbinding, an extraction. Spellbinders can take spells of of one thing, and put them on another, similar thing.

The nice thing about creators is that they can 'custom make' an item for you. If you're level 25, you can get a complete set of level 25 armor, and a level 25 weapon, rather than using something you had back at level 20. With the way the durability ratings work, that level 25 gear should last you till level 27 or so. (Durability is simply how long something lasts - the more you use it, or it gets hit, the more it wears out. The thing with durability is...it'll take a long time to wear it out. Longer than you'll need to use it.)

The main thing creators can do to raise their skills is to create practice items. These are just little trinkets (candlesticks, brushes, pocketknives) that can be converted to gold, or given away as gifts. The good thing is that creating them gives the creator experience for that skill, without creating armor or weapons that would just sit and wait for a customer. The bad thing is that creating them uses up the same traits that could be used in creating 'real' armor and weapons. So, a creator has some expenses in order to raise his skill to a point to be useful.

In fact, that will bring me to my next entry. Coming next: Crafting Summary: Economy

Ok, I'm going to try and summarize how the new crafting system works. I'm not going to compare it to the old one, except where necessary.

First, the crafting profession has been split. You essentially have gatherers and creators. Gathering consists of mining, butchering and refining. To mine, you also need to train up the surveying skill. By using the surveying skill, you can create maps to the various types of resources on the three continents. The higher the surveying skill, the better the mine will be. Once you create a map, you head to the starting point of the map (either by yourself, or using some of the new npcs that will portal you on your way). Once you arrive, you double click the map, move in a direction for a while, and double click the map again. Each time you move and double click the map, you'll get feedback as to how close you are to the mine, and (roughly) what direction it is from you...remember the 'hot/cold' game you played as a kid? or marco/polo? same kind of thing. It takes skill to zero in on a map's location - a real life skill, not a game skill. Some people can create a map and find its location within minutes. I think I average about 4 minutes. Once you locate the mine, it appears in front of you.

Then, to mine it, you equip a mining tool - one for each type of trait. The higher your mining skill, the higher your chances of hitting a 'critical', and doubling your yield. Also, the higher your mining skill, the better tool you can use, and the better tool you use, the more you can pull from the mine. You can only hit the mine at that location three times, before you have to move on. This can be an addictive process, where you find yourself saying 'Just one more mine'....and then you realize you've been mining for 3 hours :)

The second gatherer skill is butchery. Anybody and everybody should take this skill, but there are some that specialize in it. Raising your skill here allows you to use better hunting knives (you need one to butcher, regardless of your level in the skill), which in turn raise both the quantity of what you butcher, and your chances for getting a 'crit'. You can only butcher creatures that were killed by someone no more than 8 levels above the creature, and you can only butcher creatures if you have the rights to loot them. For solo players, this isn't much of an issue...for groups, if you have rotational looting going, you have to pay attention. This does prevent 'ninja butchering', though, so all in all, it's a good thing.

The third skill is refining. These people can convert the mined items into, well, refined items. A batch of stone and wood will refine into a batch of runewood, for example. These refined traits are needed for some of the higher level crafted items. The new thing about this portion (the old system had purification - taking a trait and raising it's quality...but this is different0, is that you MUST be near a refining workshop in one of the cities. Unlike the other two skills, you cannot craft 'in the field'. You don't get any bonus from being at a workshop...it's just a requirement. You do have to use a crucible, and the same thing holds true for this tool: higher skill allows higher tools creates more results (no crits for refining, that I know of).

What I've found is that mining is a good task to do, since all of the creators need mined traits. It's also a good thing that you can do in your 'spare time', i.e. waiting for quest timers. Get tired/bored of mining, and you can go to your usual hunting grounds, looking for loot, gaining xp, and you can butcher while you're out there. You can still find trophies from certain creatures, so there's another way a regular hunter can participate in the crafting system (trophies come into play with spellbinding, which is a creation task).

Coming next: Creators

Another new thing with the crafting system is the ability to butcher creatures for traits that can be used in crafting (hide, bone, sinew, etc). What Turbine got right was that for the most part, monsters can be butchered logically. You won't get hide from a wasp, for example, and some things can't be butchered...like wisps. What would you butcher from them, anyway? :)

In addition, there's a level floor - you can't butcher anything that you killed that's 8 levels or more lower than you. You mangle the corpse too badly, and this prevents the high levels from butchering creatures in the new player areas. Good idea!

The practice recipies only create trinkets. Normally, you just turn them into gold, tho next month they're going to be inscribable, so you could give them as gifts....and perhaps they'll add more trinkets. That could be fun.

If we had housing or storage, we could decorate with our trinkets...but we don't have that, and it's not on the radar. Maybe first quarter next year? Who knows at this point.

Well, the vocal minority complained long enough, and Turbine decided to cave. Tuesday's 'mid-month patch', in addition to fixing some bugs (some major, some minor), will deliver to the players another opportunity to reset their crafting skills.

Apparently, those that can't read, don't plan, don't think, or don't play, are being appeased. I can't think of a single reason why a reset can be justified. I received a tad over 550,000 experience points for the conversion from the old system to the new. I didn't put that into a single skill. I still have about 380,000 points left. I won't be using the reset, for two reasons: 1) I don't need it. 2) I protest. I worry that this might be a step in the wrong direction.

Got to do some more mining today....and tried a bit on Omishan. Unfortunately, the maps there drop you right in the middle of kingdom monsters - lots of them. The worst are the golems....and the golems of ac2 are not the same as the golems of ac1. I teleported to the starting point of searching for a mine, and landed smack dab in the middle of 3 of them. I went from 900 health to 19 before I could make it out. Never did find the mine.

Took a break from mining, and tried crafting. With the new system, they added 'practice recipies'. Essentially, you stand near a crafting forge, drag the appropriate components (in my case, hide) to the recipie window, and hit 'craft'. As the level of the item goes up, so does the cost (in components). I was able to make several level 1-4 training items (a horseshoe, a candlestick holder, a collectable figurine - I kid you not!), before I ran out of hide. In that time, making these little fluff items, I raised my skill from 1 to 15. I can see the point of practice items. Why waste traits and tools (they wear out, you know) to gain crafting experience, making something that you can't sell? So, they gave us practice items....we can gain experience without feeling like we've wasted our traits.

Did that till I ran out of hide, and then went back to mining. I plan to supply my allegiance with 5000 pieces of mined materials each week. I can then either stop and go play, or I can mine more and sell/trade it. Haven't completely decided on that.

Crafting. For me it means gathering 'traits', what we call mining. Traits are pieces of iron, stone, wood, crystal, and silver, that are used by crafters to...craft. In the old system, you could only mine 10 of each type a day. You then had to purify those items to get them to a specific quality, for a given crafted item (armor or weapon). So, the most you could make would be 10 things a day.

Now, the new system doesn't allow for such generalization. You're a armorsmith for a given race, a weaponsmith for a given type of weapon for a given race, a miner, etc. Because of the need for the traits for crafters, I've given up the crafting profession, and turned to mining. I'm not too thrilled about that, because I loved crafting stuff - even if it was basically unusable in the old system, because everyone had outgrown the highest quality stuff one could make. The new system has lots of potential growth in that regard, but...the need was there for a miner, so I took the job.

So now, my day is spent running around the countryside looking for mines, making maps to new mines, and running to the 'official cartomancers', so they can send me across the countryside to run around looking for mines. It's an endless cycle.

The economy's gotten so out of hand, people buying 1 piece of trait for 80 gold, and up. I saw a sale of 2000 iron pieces go for 200,000 gold! That's insane. I've change my original thinking - I'm not going to sell any of the traits I gather. I may trade them for other things the clan needs (like bone or hide - stuff I don't collect), but mostly, I'm going to hold it till it's needed. I wouldn't feel right selling my 'stuff' at the enormously high prices.

Ended up dropping out of the armorsmithing business, which I love, and dumped nearly all my conversion csp into surveying and mining. Lots of people complain about the new skills, but I think those are mainly the people that get lost in their parents' basement. The trick to surveying is: follow directions, or as I like to say, RTFM.

Anyway, spent 3.5 hours tonight mining just iron, running around Osteth. Mined a little over 5k of iron, which is what? 1400 an hour. So, decent, in my opinion. I'll keep working at it, and see what happens.

The main reason I went with mining is because the crafters of the clan needs traits. The economy is so warped right now, with traits costing between 80 and 100 times the actual value of the trait (ie - 1k trait going for 80k gold). One thing I'm going to try tomorrow is to try and sell at 5x per trait. So, sell 1000 trait for 5000 gold. I imagine people will get a bit irritated that I'm undercutting them, but don't know if I can force the economy down on my own. Probably not.

Didn't do a single hunt or quest tonight. Crafting has taken over everyone's focus for now, even mine...and I've got a lot left to do in this game!