Asherons Call: MANY New Answers to Tinkering Questions

[li]Dilvish of Harvestgain states: In the current letter to the players, its said that the Ust can only process materials of the same material at any one time, and speicifcally notes the process of goofing and having to remove items. Please make the Ust a little smarter?

Answer: The Ust actually won't allow you to put in more than one material type at a time.

[li] h_2_o asks: If I tinker an item successfully, will its value change?

Answer: The value will only change if you use one of the value-changing tinkering materials.

[li]ex-pinky asks: Will the value of salvage materials be a rounded number or will it have decimal places?

Answer: It displays to two decimal places.

[li]Chaynal of Frostfell asks: Are there varying degress of failure like in dyeing?

Answer: There are no levels of success or failure in tinkering -- if you succeed, the effect is applied; if you fail, the target is destroyed. At this point, the starting level of the property that you are affecting does not figure into the difficulty of the application -- but the workmanship of the target item does, and the workmanship correlates loosely to the overall level of the target's properties.

[li]Zorlin asks: A few days ago I found a priceless sapphire nabut set with 4 diamonds, 34k value. When I salvage this, will I get sapphire material along with diamond material? Does the # of gems an item is set with determine anything in the salvage process? Does the actual type (say for weapons) of weapon ie. nabut, staff, ua, etc..effect the types of salvage material or do the 2 identifiers, in this case sapphires and diamonds, in the description text signify the items that will be produced from the salvage attempt?

Answer: The gems that an item is set with do not affect salvaging at this point in time. So you can salvage sapphire from your priceless sapphire nabut, but not diamond. The type of weapon also has no effect on the salvaging operation.

[li]Turin-Turambar asks: Ideally when I go to actually Tink an item I would see a pop-up window that states something like: You have a XX percent chance of successfully tinkering this item. Do you wish to proceed?

Answer: There is a confirmation dialog when you go to apply a tinkering material to prevent .. accidents. It does not, however, display the difficulty of the application.

Taarna Blood[/b] asks: We can't tinker Robes, but are loot drop pants/shirts considered armor?

Answer: At this point, you cannot raise the armor level or elemental protections of clothing via tinkering.

[li]Lin Saijin asks: I am hoping you guys are making appraise magic item useable in the collection of raw materials even if nothing can be made from it for the coming patch. So those of us who would still want it can use magic item appraise to harness the materials even if we can't tinker with them for another month. Will it be so?

Answer: The tinker skill you have with the highest skill level is used for salvaging materials, and this does include magic item tinkering. So if you train magic item tinkering in July and spend experience to raise it higher than your other tinkering skills, then your magic item tinkering skill level will be used to determine how much material you salvage. Of course, since there are no materials that use magic item tinkering in their application yet, you will not be able to use magic item tinkering to enhance items with materials in July. Now, having said that, I will also give you some advice. (This isn't aimed at you directly, Lin_Saijin, but at anyone who is considering taking magic item tinkering.) If you think you might want to train magic item tinkering, but you're not sure, you should probably save your skill credits for a month and see exactly what magic item tinkering is going to end up looking like.

[li]Mage Lazerline asks: 1. Will we be provided a list of what material does what to what? 2. Will it be possible to tinker AL on clothes?

Answer: 1) Not by us. *grin* But each material tells you what it does when you ID it. 2) At this point, tinkering does not raise the AL or elemental protections on clothing.

[li]Talmarr Ki asks: Does each type of Tinkering i.e. armor/magic/item have a combined chance to fail? Say I Item tinker a plate Haulberk X2 to lower its value and was successful. Next I use armor tinkering. Is it automaticly a 3rd attempt or because im useing another form or tinkering its only considered my first attempt?

Answer: Third attempt. The count of number of times tinkered is cumulative across all types of tinkering. (There may be an exception to this general rule for imbuing -- that's not pinned down yet.)

[li]Turin-Turambar asks: Will gems be renderable and there for will rendered Ruby for example be a tinker material? Additionally, If I have a Flawless Gold Hauberk and a Flawless Gold Dagger will they each render the same amount of material or will the item with higher burden render more material? Is this more LP love since the higher qualities are only sing loot?

Answer: Yes, you can salvage gems to get materials. And, as stated in the letter to the players, your highest tinkering skill and the workmanship of the item you are salvaging are the two factors that affect how much quantity of material you can salvage. Basically, if you have a Gold Yumi of workmanship 10, you can salvage up to 10 "units" of gold from this yumi -- although you are likely to get less than that, depending on your skill.

[li]Alaren asks: If you have 50 salvage level 7 and 50 salvage level 8, what quality is the resultant stack of 100 ? i.e. how do you determine what combinations will yield?

Answer: Each material also keeps track of how many items were salvaged to create the material. The average workmanship is the average workmanship of all the items that went into creating the material. So if you have Salvaged Iron (50) made from 20 items with an average workmanship of 3.5 and a Salvaged Iron (50) made from 30 items with an average workmanship of 5.0, then the combined material is a Salvaged Iron (100) made from 50 items with an average workmanship of 4.4. ( (20 * 3.5) + (30 * 5.0) ) / (20 + 30) = 4.4 The number of items that went into the material and it's average workmanship display when you ID the material.

[li]Alaren asks: What happens if you try to salvage material from an item and your main pack is full?

Answer: The amount salvaged comes from the workmanship of the item you are salvaging and your skill. If your main pack is full, the salvage fails to happen -- you don't get a material, and the items your are salvaging are not destroyed.

[li]LongshankII asks: I understand that the hilt issue is still up in the air. My question is, with still being able to hilt, if we tinker a yoaji, dagger, or rapier to raise max dam ect. will we still be able to hilt it?

Answer: Nope. You can't tinker hilted weapons, and you can't hilt tinkered weapons.

[li]Kirill Huntersun asks: Is it going to be possible to Stack Tinker? Will the effect of using a given matieral for a speficified amount be static (always at 4% increase> or dynamic (increase of 2-6%)?
Answer: Yes, you can apply the same material (and thus the same effect) multiple times. And the material has a fixed effect (for instance, always 4% to a particular mod) every time you use it.

[li]Ke3 asks: So our tinkering skill does not affect the percentage increase (in this case, for an att mod), but only affects our chance at success?

Answer: That is correct. The tinker's skill level, the target's workmanship, and the material's workmanship affect only the success or failure of the enhancement, and not the magnitude of the enhancement. (You will probably want to know why next, because doing it the other way is cooler. So let me head you off and say that there just aren't enough hours in the day for me to rewrite the entire bloody craft system. *grin*)

[li]Creeker states: If there ever was a time for Turbine to implement a way to stop DUPLICATING existing items.....it is now. If an item has been TINKERED, give it a unique ID and then implement a database policy of removing any items with that ID past the origin date

Answer: Um, items already have unique IDs, guys. The problem is that we have no way of telling which of the two items was the "original". Since duping generally involves a server crash, by the time the server finds out about the dupe, it has no record of how it got there. (Note: there is a human-readable record in the log, of course, but the server's knowledge is limited to what's in memory -- which probably got wiped out in the crash that caused the dupe.) So our choices are to delete neither item, delete both items, or delete one item at random. Deleting one at random or deleting both leads to opportunities to grief innocent people (by trading the item before it gets deleted). So we decided a long time ago that we would go with the option that didn't grief innocent people -- delete neither item. That means that we have to be extra vigilant about tracking down dupers from the record left in the logs -- an activity that we have been generally successful at, although we tend not to advertise our sucesses. (regarding suggestions on how to manage the database better) Some of the schemes outlined here would probably work -- *IF* our data was stored in a database in a normal fashion. But it's not. We can generally only access our data through running server code. This is a limitation of our engine that we have to live with. Given this limitation, the server does not know about duplicated items until both of them enter the world at the same time, at which point we have no way to trace which is the legitimate item. Either of them -- or both -- may have been traded by then, or turned in for xp or what have you.

[li]Jhereg of HG asks: Will tinkering be able to use the full pack bug?

Answer: To answer your question -- although I wasn't specifically thinking of this at the time, I believe that the implementation of the tinkering interaction will prevent this bug from being useful in this situation.

[li]BroKos aks: (summarized) Please reconsider giving us the 5 points back needed to train a skill at inception.

Answer: Well, I didn't want to give away any trade secrets, but ... Because of the way our skill system works, we can never just award you skill points -- instead, we have to give you the experience you would need to buy your way to that skill level. When you train a skill at creation, we give you a small amount of special invisible experience in that skill that causes your skill level to go up the appropriate amount. I believe you get 526 xp for training (5 points) and 671 xp for spec'ing (10 points).

[li]zentropy aks: Can we tinker quest items?

Answer: At this point, you cannot tinker any quest items. And yes, item tinkering just refers to tinkering that you can do to most any item, including weapons and armor and things with magic on them. The type of tinkering skill you use doesn't specify what type of target you can work on so much as it does what type of effect you can apply.