Recipes that don't drop

HeroOfEvbof · December 2014

Since the post regarding the provisioning overhaul, I have diligently collected recipes. This is mostly a personal mission, related to some disappointment in the cooking of WoW.
I have learned every recipe except four.
Saltrice Slurry has been well known to not exist since launch.
But where are Enriched Grilled Frog Legs and Consummate Breton Stew?
I have never ever seen the two of these in a kiosk, and I check kiosks at least three times per week.
I have been in contact with four other recipe farmers and they have not seen these either any time since 1.4, although they may have existed before.
Are these recipes bugged like Saltrice Slurry?
I am also wondering if Consummate Imperial Stew is also missing from the drop tables.

Jagath · December 2014

Pretty sure those recipes don't drop anymore. Good luck getting an official response though.

Unknown_poster · December 2014

Well...I have Consummate Saltrice Slurry on my main provo character. Its a nice lvl 35 purple that I use while levelling alts. Can't remember when I got it though, could have been before 1.4

HeroOfEvbof · December 2014

I have Consummate Saltrice Slurry and Invigorated Saltrice Slurry. Those drop no problem. Green Saltrice Slurry has been missing since launch.
I am hoping that someone official can say "yes, we know three or four recipes don't drop"
Even if they don't plan to fix them before the overhaul, I can at least know that I can stop searching.
I have every single recipe except Saltrice Slurry, Enriched Grilled Frog Legs, Consummate Breton Stew and Consummate Imperial Stew.

Darkhorse1975 · December 2014

HeroOfEvbof, I really appreciate your posts on this issue. Now I can stop searching through hundreds of Green Recipes at Guild Traders, since I have them all by Green Saltrice Slurry and can now concentrate on Blue/Purple Recipes! I would also like to finish up my recipe collection, only a couple dozen to go! Hit me up in-game if you have any recipes to sell!

HeroOfEvbof · December 2014

I now have Consummate Imperial Stew, got it cheap (20,000g). My guess is someone popped it from a writ (in a small experiment, I used a lvl 12 cooking mule and popped a Consummate Beef Pasty on his second day of the experiement)
I have specced two toons to run the lvl 30/35 writ. One is lvl 12 the other lvl 6. I am curious if the loot table for writs is different from the loot table for desks/trunks. I will hit those writs everyday from now until overhaul to see if Saltrice Slurry, Enriched Grilled Frog Legs or Consummate Breton Stew pop out of them. All three are lvl 35.

Rubiin · December 2014

Don't hold your breath , for some reason ZOS refuse to do anything about these missing recipes as they have known about them from various posts and reports since launch. Apparently NPC facial animations are far more important than fixing an incomplete recipe list that has misnamed and recipes that are missing from the loot table. I know of no other mmo where this would be allowed to happen and is a case of amateur hour at it's worst.

HeroOfEvbof · December 2014

I'm not holding my breath - but I can always hold out hope.

I sure as heck never expect them to fix Invigorated Grilled Crawdad-Horker Etoufee and I know they won't fix the ingredients of Consummate Bervez Vitae and Enriched Bervez Vitae.

In fact - I am pretty sure it was the sudden error to those recipes in one of their patches that made them throw up their hands and decide to overhaul the damn system. I really think they have gotten to a point where they cannot fix the current code because no one knows all the little nooks and crannies of it. Touch any section of the provisioning code and something completely unrelated breaks.
3q

stefan.gustavsonb16_ESO · December 2014

The provisioning does seem to be a mess, but it's really all data, not code. Brittle code is very hard to fix, but data management should be a whole lot easier. I sometimes wonder if they decided to put everything into a big spreadsheet table and need to update stuff manually in a labor intensive and error-prone process.

The kind of errors that pop up indicate that they don't have enough information on what they are doing, and no means for checking for errors before they test the stuff live. Their apparent inability to fix both large and small errors in loot tables and recipes makes me wonder if they put any effort at all into making management tools for the server backend, and their unawareness of obvious bugs like the fact that nobody has a certain recipe makes me think they don't collect and analyze statistics on their servers in enough detail.

It is not rocket science to make sure all recipes drop and that all ingredients can be acquired in the proper zones. Still, they have failed to do it right in eight months. I sure hope the new system is done right and has better data management tools.

HeroOfEvbof · December 2014

I think you are correct in your assessment - what tool did they use to build their data tables?
I would swear they built their data tables the way I built mine when I was doing assembly programming or BASIC programming back on the Commodore 64 - in line code.
The way errors pop into this thing on all aspects of this software - consider this:
If you make a piece of clothing from one particular crafting site and then go to another crafting site, the clothing creation is still pointing to the previous crafting site but it is completely screwed up (can't access traits, other bugs as well). This process of jumping from site to site was working fine until update 5. How did it break? If they had any sort of data management tool whatsoever, any sort of baseline by which to work with, this would not happen without actually fiddling with the baseline tool. Its almost as if all their tables are built the same way addon developers build tables in lua, in-line.

stefan.gustavsonb16_ESO · December 2014

HeroOfEvbof wrote: »

Its almost as if all their tables are built the same way addon developers build tables in lua, in-line.

Aargh. It hurts my brain just to consider the possibility. That would be "coding like it's 1984". I wrote code like that in the 1980's on my home computer, but back then I had no formal education in computer science. I sincerely hope they did separate code and data and are just lost in the data management. Commingling data and code is beyond bad. It should be a punishable offense for programmers.

I can see how complicated armor effects need code or code-like snippets of conditions for when to trigger and what to do, but that code should be very strictly confined to using only a specific and limited API. For the provisioning subsystem, there is a fixed set of things that food and drink can do (raise basic stats and their regen rate for a set amount of time), and the ingredients are passive, so there is absolutely no need there to mix up data with code.

HeroOfEvbof · December 2014

I simply cannot account for certain bugs without accusing them of in-line data.
How did Consummate Bervez Vitae and its blue equivalent suddenly have their ingredient tables messed up - at the same time a completely different ingredient was getting a name change? (The Bervez Vitae recipes went screwy at the same time as the Piquant Jazbay Grapes change)
How did Enriched Grilled Frog Legs and Consummate Breton Stew fall out of the loot table during the hotfixes to containers?
How did they fix it so that veterans were picking up toon level primary ingredients but were unable to fix it such that veterans still picked up zone level secondary ingredients?
These things would all at first glance seem like they should be protected from wonkiness if the actual data tables were external to the code. And yet...