Multi-Crafting Is a Good Idea -- But Design Flaws and Bugs Render It a Failure

Shadowshire

@ZOS_GinaBruno @ZOS_Wrobel

First, I daresay that you don't have time to read this, whether you want to. The Patch Notes 5.1.5 state:

You can now perform several actions in bulk at crafting stations and receive your items immediately! This includes refining, creation, deconstructing, and extracting, and applies to all crafting stations. Note that a multi-craft will only partially process if your inventory fills during it.

That disclosure is totally inadequate, insofar as it does not explain how to use any multi-crafting feature. So how do we know it is supposed to work? On the face of it, I suppose that the developers did not tell you -- whether they do know, and whether you asked. The last statement quoted above is indecipherable.

All that I have learned from experience is that the behavior of each UI feature is not the same for each of the Equipment crafting stations. Whether the Max/Min element is a button or an indicator, I do not know, as it seems that some knucklehead decided that it can be both, but it doesn't work very well as either.

(1) Quite clearly, the Refine feature is unacceptable for Blacksmithing, Woodworking, and Clothing. The Add function always loads everything that is in the Craft Bag (it always has). But regardless of what I do, all of the units are Refined in one action. Further, the quantity of the "tempers" and of the "style materials" which are produced are not nearly as much as would normally be produced by refining 10 units with each key-press.

There is also something wrong with the Refine function for Jewelry, in particular. Refining 100 Platinum Dust grains should NOT produce just one Iridium grain and 30 ounces of Platinum. However, at least with Jewelry, it has been possible to Refine only 10 Dust grains with each key-press, as we could originally do.

Regardless, there has not been any improvement at all in the amount of Quality grains that are produced. There is something wrong with the algorithim -- with the way that the Pseudorandom Number Generator is accessed, and/or in the content of and/or access to the table of possible outcomes. Multi-crafting makes this rather too clear for anyone's satisfaction.

(2) Of course, the UI for Alchemy, for Enchanting, and for Provisioning, respectively, is necessarily different according to the craft per se. What purpose the Max/Min element is supposed to serve nonetheless remains unclear. With respect to Furnishing, rather seldom does anyone who has a brain craft multiple copies of the same item -- the feature is prone to produce disastrous outcomes instead of being a useful tool.

(3) By no means are the problems which I described above the only ones that I have found. For example, I have yet to receive a Jewelry Master Crafting Writ that requires creating a Superior quality item. I've found problems that other players have reported, but others for which I have not seen a report. I expect to find more problems as I use more of the
features and functions than I commonly use.

In conclusion, it will require a lot of time and effort which I cannot spare in the foreseeable future to investigate the behavior of the UI for each of the seven crafts. So, what can I do?

Even worse, the changes to Combat & Gameplay, whatever their merits, are not necessarily implemented as described, either. But ZOS apparently does not want players to spend a lot of time and effort to investigate and report any problems, because ZOS evidently has very little interest whatsoever in correcting them. Ordinarily, little or nothing is
gained from reporting anything to PC Technical Support or to the Bug Report forums.

After playing TESO for almost five years, with the introduction of multi-crafting as it is, I am inclined to simply abandon the game. The developers cannot touch the Base Game without breaking things that were working before they tried to "improve" something, or to introduce some new feature. There is no Quality Assurance testing, and the Public Test Server is just used as a marketing promotion. There is seldom any evident effort to correct implementation errors and/or design flaws.

Playing TESO has increasingly become a waste of time and effort. There is just not much fun in playing as there was, despite the bugs. There are too many long delays in every aspect of play, which is especially important for Combat. Not that TESO does not have many very good features, but that neither the ZOS software nor the Bethesda mega-server performance does them justice.

In my experience, evidently ZOS is willing and able to produce only bugware. Oddly enough, the Crown Store has generally been error-free. I wonder why that is -- actually, I don't wonder why, because the Crown Store is "mission critical". Everything else about the game has no particular importance to the managers. If people will buy increasingly bad
bugware, then why develop the software to a higher standard?