First let me say that I am very happy with the current BoD system, the staff has done an amazing job in fixing the major blunders that have plagued OSI BoDs for years, the only issue I am noticing is with regards to smithing BoDs. It seems that much of the higher tier rewards are almost impossible to obtain, as of writing this post there is currently only one reward brazier, and after some searching zero phoenix armor pieces/standing armors. While I feel it is unfair to compare tailoring and smithing, I must commend the staff in how well the tailoring system is implemented, it is easy to get the lower level rewards, and the high level rewards are very difficult, albeit possible - I would love for smithing to follow the same philosophy. My suggestion is to allow players to join two smithing BoDs to make a smithing BoD one level of ore higher than the component BoDs. While this would make it significantly easier to get some colored bods, it would still be very difficult to get the high tier rewards, for instance in order to get a valorite bod from turning in only iron you would need to combine 256 iron BoDs. While trying to think of a fair way to allow players to combine the BoDs, I came up with two scenarios in which they could possibly given out. Due to the fact that there are no colored weapon BoDs, all the examples will revolve around armor. Scenario 1: Random BoD + Random BoD = Random BoD of higher ore: E.g. 15x Iron Exp Chainmail Coif + 15x Iron Exp Plate Gorget = 15x Dull Copper Exp Ringmail Tunic Or Scenario 2: Identical BoD + Identical BoD = Same BoD of higher ore: E.g. 20x Exp Shadow Ringmail Sleeves + 20x Exp Shadow Ringmail Sleeves = 20x Exp Copper Ringmail Sleeves Ideally, only the armor type will be the variable which is subject to change - that is to say that it should not be possible to join different sized BoDs (10/15/20x i.e. 10x Ringmail + 15x Ringmail would not work) or to mismatch exceptional/non-exceptional BoDs. The only reason I bring this to light is due to the fact GMing blacksmithing is a very slow and expensive process, while most players have 1-3 GM tailors it would be difficult to find more than a handful of GM smiths on the shard, combined with the fact that there are nine tiers of ingots, it makes it very difficult to obtain the necessary components for a high level reward.
This sounds like a great idea. Part of the difficulty with smith BODs is that there just aren't that many in circulation. So even if you luck into a few pieces of a premium reward, finding the last piece of the puzzle is going to be agonizing. With tailoring there's a lot more BODs out there, so trading for the last piece of a mask dye isn't so tough. A trade in program would help to alleviate this problem. Skill stats: 109 GM Tailors 29 GM Blacksmiths http://www.uorenaissance.com/?page=m_skillstats I suspect there will always be far more tailors than smiths. Tailoring is 1/10th the cost of smithing and tailoring has better rewards for the time invested.
Things will pick up as more players have time to train smiths and collect more BODs. One thing to keep in mind is that the tailor rewards are almost entirely cosmetic whereas the smithing rewards are very practical. We haven't seen a whole lot of them yet but I imagine runic hammers will always be a pretty high value item. I think the difficulty in obtaining smithing rewards will pay off as we start to see more of a bull market for them. If runic sewing kits were introduced, though, I think we'd need some heavy balancing to keep that from getting out of hand.
White it is true that tailoring is mostly cosmetic, the functioning blacksmithing rewards that are currently nigh-impossible to attain are the high end runic hammers (Only completable by full exp 20x platemail set), phoenix armor, standing armor and braziers, of those only the phoenix armor and runic hammers serve functions. Currently there have only been a handful of barbed armor BoDs handed out (To the best of my knowledge), I would estimate that less than 3-4 barbed/horned 20x Exp leather LBoDs have been completed, all the players I have talked to that have received the special mask dye have gotten it purely from spined BoDs. This means that if tailoring is comparable to blacksmithing that we wouldn't see any of these rewards even if we had three times as many blacksmiths. Additionally, I'd wager that collecting a full valorite platemail set is significantly harder than completing a full barbed armor set. Let's look at some numbers, based on some rough testing (Note: I'm not 100% these are ALL the tailoring/smithing bods but all the ones I could find): Leather Sets: Studded set- 5pc Footwear set - 4pc Fem. ar set - 6pc Leather ar set - 6pc Bone ar set - 5pc 26 total leather pieces * 4 (Types of leather) = 104 types of small leather bods (312 including sizes, 624 including exceptional/non exp) Cloth Sets: Feathered/Surcoat - 5pc Skullcap/Doublet - 4pc JesterHat/JesterSuit - 4pc Bandana/Shirt - 4pc Bonnet/Half Apron - 4pc FloppyHat/Full Apron - 4pc Wizard'sHat/Bodysash - 4pc Hat set - 4pc 43 total cloth pieces - 7 (Duplicates for boots/shoes etc) = 36 total small cloth bods (108 including sizes, 216 including exp/non exp) This brings us to a grand total of 140 tailoring bods (840 all sizes/exp/nonexp). Weapon Sets: Swords - 6pc Axes - 6pc Fencing - 5pc Polearms - 2pc Maces - 6pc 25 total weapon pieces (75 including all sizes, 150 including exp/nonexp) Armor Sets: Platemail set - 6pc Chain set - 3pc Ringmail set - 4pc 13 total armor pieces * 9 (types of metal) = 117 (351 including all sizes, 702 including exp/nonexp) Random armor: Norse Helm Bascinet Bronze Shield Metal Kite Shield Metal Shield Buckler Close Helmet Heater Shield Female Plate Tear Kite Shield Helmet 11 total random armor pieces * 9 (types of metal) = 99 (297 including all sizes, 594 including exp/non exp) Which brings us to a grand total of 241 smithing bods (1446 all sizes/nonexp/exp) So there are almost twice as many smithing bods as there are tailoring bods and less than a third of the amount of smiths, to me it just seems like someone would need the luck of the devil to actually complete these. As far as trading them goes, I have yet to see anything past gold metal on a vendor, and less than 20 pieces of horned/barbed armor combined. While you can obtain the best item in tailoring using up to only spined leather, the same cannot be said of smithing. While I think the tailoring reward system is perfect, I cannot help but mention that considering the amount of different materials/bods that the smithing reward matrix is about as close to perfect as we can get without hardcoding all the small bods to lesser rewards and the large bods to mid/high rewards. I have to agree, I'm seeing a nice amount of colored BoDs in the mix, it would just be nice if some of them were actually relevant/useful.
For anyone interested in running tests, the BOD timers on test center are currently set at 1 minute, the vendors will offer you a BOD also 100% of the time when selling an item. Note: Tailor/Blacksmith Only
I had some fun playing around with the BoDs on test, and decided to record the first 100 BoDs I got. While this is a relatively low sample size in the grand scheme of things, it still roughly equates to about a month's worth of time for a single blacksmith pulling 3 blacksmithing BoDs a day. Based off this sample there were only three things that I believe were interesting to note: 1) 28.57% of the small bods received from the blacksmith had no large counterpart (This includes shields, helmets and female plate) making them effectively useless if the small reward is not desired. 2) Weapon type LBoDs came up very frequently 43.75%, and completing the highest level weapon sets was about the equivalent to handing in a single 20x Exp Bronze sBoD sans the hassle of finding/gathering the 7 required Small/Large bods. 3) There is a large disparity in the size of the bods, on average 25% of the bods were 10x, 18% of the bods were 15x and 57% of the bods were 20x. Looking at small/large individually this gives us: Small 10x = 28.57% 15x = 14.29% 20x = 57.14% Large 10x = 6.25% 15x = 37.5% 20x = 56.25% I don't recall doing BoDs during UOR, however I had always thought that the distribution would be closer to 33%/33%/33%. I'd love to play around with a larger sample, but with 1bod a minute it almost took me a full day to get this up as I was unable to be attentive 24/7.
UOR BOD System I updated this post with the updated chances to obtain any specific BOD. For Smithing BOD's the chances to get a specific colored BOD are approximately 1/2 the chance to get the previous type of BOD. 50,25,12.5, etc. I adjusted it slightly in a previous patch to increase those chances on the top tier BOD's however the main problem most everyone experienced was the high chance that you were offered a weapon BOD vs a armor BOD.
Weapon bods wouldn't be that bad, If the turn in system worked like it was intended. If you turned in a completed bod it would make you eligible to receive a new bod. And with bods limited to accounts, it makes it even harder. So what if the delay was shorter say 3 hours? Or if the turn in worked to reset the bod timer. http://www.uoguide.com/Bulk_Order_Deed
Interesting find, any idea which patch this went in with? Regardless that's not a bad idea for re-setting the timers.
I was just being nosey and reading up on the BOD timers... The Blacksmithing BODs originally came in with Publish 14, introduced November 30, 2001. I looked up the closest Stratics page to that time that had BOD information which ended up being June 7, 2002 - http://web.archive.org/web/200206071106 ... ders.shtml This page's comment on the timers: "Once you receive a deed, you have to wait at least 6 hours before you are eligible to receive another large bulk order deed or at least one (0-50 skill) or two (50-70 skill) hours before you are eligible to receive another small bulk order deed." The change that Tater quoted was introduced with Publish 32, May 2, 2005 - http://www.uoguide.com/Publish_32 [Turning in a BOD removes the BOD timer based on BOD type (blacksmith/tailor) ]
The staff talked it over and give our customization of the system so far, this is something that would fit nicely into the design. I'll see what we can do to get this into patch 34.
Yeah gives some use to the pesky bods that no one feels like turning in, this way they will at least do them, or people will buy them if just to get a new timer.