Cargo Disk Survey

[Justa Mirage]

Now I know why my reply got "Service unavailable" so many people responding at once.

What I originally typed back at 10:15am:

The one gripe I heard for many many years is that Tri Cuts and Food items need more than capacity of 1. Tarbash and flying disks seem to be the only disk that allows teleportation and only holds 1 item. This makes crafting and hauling the finished products through teleport rings hard when the disk you have won't do it.

I also like the option in the survey of "reducing" your speed instead of Capping it. This would give an advantage to classes that have speed buffs, passive abilities, potion drinkers, etc to be able to get around faster.

[GalemThawn]

The content restrictions would be more on the order of "only raw resources" or "only finished construction units", rather than limiting them to a single type of resource.

Yikes! That doesn't sound good at all.
1200 Iron ore --> Smelt ----> 600 Iron Bars.....
Umm, what do I do now? I can't move and my cargo disk won't except bars.

[Peaches]

Ok, I have a disk full of yew wood, ready to transmutate to thornwood. I need to also have essence for the transmutation process. So, now I got my disk full of wood, and my pack full of essence, I am suppose to use another disk for the final thornwood? How will I be able to do that since I am only allowed the single use of a disk at a given time?

[Rayth]

Beyond teched cargo disks to open up "services" (speed, recall, etc), I would say recall is the largest one I care, personally, about. I hate running with one attached, so I don't.

By "can't" I'm assuming you mean "difficult", meaning a revamp of some kind.

Because, honestly, this brings to light one of the biggest issues I have with crafting portion of this game. The generic feel and lack of variety. Die's are nice, but beyond that, most of it is just completely static.

If I make a sandstone cargo disk at level 100, it performs exactly as a level 20 tinkerers model. No speed differences, capacity changes, nothing to make it stand out more. If there was a random effect that removed the recall restriction, for example (rare to be sure) it would add value to the craft and people might actually try and make them. Disks with higher speed caps might be more in demand. Once you get one, there's no reason to ever get another.

That's a shame.

[LaughingOtter]

Yikes! That doesn't sound good at all.
1200 Iron ore --> Smelt ----> 600 Iron Bars.....
Umm, what do I do now? I can't move and my cargo disk won't except bars.

Aha! You've uncovered our fiendish plot!

You're right, that would be a bad situation. I should have said "raw or processed resources". Sorry for the confusion.

[GalemThawn]

You're right, that would be a bad situation. I should have said "raw or processed resources". Sorry for the confusion.

I still don't like it.
I have 1200 Mithil Bars on a 'raw or processed resources only' disk. I make Mithril Construction Sheeting. Now what? There's no way I'm going to carry 50-60 (or however many that would make) construction sheets in my personal inventory.

[AmonGwareth]

By "can't" I'm assuming you mean "difficult", meaning a revamp of some kind.

Not this time. This time it means "can't".

[Kepesk]

I love the idea to have the different lines be better for different purposes. In my opinion, cargo disks are way two generic. There's really only three basic "types": portal disks, non-portal disks, and flying portaling disks. The rest is just differences in the stack/bulk balance.

Getting more creative about the features of a cargo disk would make the system way more interesting! Maybe having a disk for flying, a disk for portaling, a disk for recalling, a fast disk, and combinations of those, all with stack/bulk drawback amounts that depend on what they can and cannot do, would make me put some thought into what I get out of my vault depending on what I need it for!

Option two absolutely has my vote!

-Your friendly neighborhood stripey dragon

[tjl]

I would like to ask the devs:

Forgive me if this is obvious, but why are cargo disks being considered for a revamp?

What are some of the specific reasons motivating this? I don't usually craft, but I do have 100 enchanter and I think they are pretty much fine as implemented now. Or at least fine enough to take a sideline to other more important 'revamps' that need addressing.

As they are implemented now... each one has it's own advantages and disadvantages right? some are faster, some carry more stacks, some can port, and so forth.

[Tcei]

Personaly one of my major wants with cargo disk is to have the speed reduction be based on a % or something and be able to modify it with speed techs (on armor) spells, potions, ect. It sucks to work so hard on crafting a set of speed scales only to have them be useuless most of the time because I focus mainly on crafting.

It would be nice to either be allowed to equip 2 disks, like one stationary at a workstation for the processed material and one to drag around for the raw stuff or
to have large bulk discs that hold 2 or 3 items

Agreed, doing things that require multiple reasources to be crafted can be a pain when there's no open silos with in a reasonable distance of where you're crafting. I also wouldnt mind there being a flying disk that allowed you to hold even two different things. I'd be willing to sacrafice some more speed with a disk loaded down with two items.

[starna]

Amon, I am going to guess that things that cannot be tech'ed also cannot be cog'ed? If a disk could be cogged, I could see a line of 'configurable' disks, based on the cog(s) loaded into them... but I expect you run into the same code issue as techs.

[GalemThawn]

I'm going to guess that Amon will so 'can't' again.
Cogged would have to be teched with 'cargo disk socket'. And since you can't tech it....

[Piira Laxdaela]

Just a suggestion or request.... before you do or plan a cargo disc revamp, can we get Level 100 Backpacks please? Thank you.

EDIT: Oh, and a Radiant Exceptional Holding Crystal?

[Ming]

Anyhow, I would like to see biped disks that look better. I'm sure a Gnomish disk would be just perfect? How about one in each racial style? The dwarven cargo disks look great but I hate the other ones. And it would help if the icons for them were more diverse so you could see right off what you had in storage.
The other thing I'd like to see is a bit more land speed. If we have to schlep them around it would be nice to have less time eaten up just dragging a disk.

Cixi Gnome Extraordinaire

[starna]

With an item like this, if the 'configurable' disk werent applied to old items, but was only on new from-this-point disks, they could give it an alternative system to handle the configuration seperate from the system used by tech's. It all depends on how much work it would be, and the risk down the line of having 2 different systems of configuration management going simultaneously becoming a headache. But I'd be all for a system of configurable disks, where we had to get hold of possibly rare bits, and let tinkers make an 'insert' to put into your disk to make it do various things...


Edit: Sure enough, hit post and think of something else. An alternative option, is to have 'retinker' recipes, which take, say, Zarby's Cargo Disk Mark 1 (the default one out of the box), and a bunch of rare bits, to make a Zarby's Cargo Disk Mark 2, 3, etc... so that you can have hard-coded stats for each, but the different Mark versions are somewhat different, and can be taken back to a Tinker to be changed into a DIFFERENT Mark version down the line.. Mark 2 might be more bulk storage, Mark 3 might be faster instead, etc.

We might start needing a new plot construction building though... a Cargo Garage for parking disks in... small footprinted building, something like 10 or so slots, bulk enough for 10 disks' size, and limited to cargo disks only...

[blackdog60]

Personally none of the options presented in the poll excite me, raising the number of different items I can dump on my flying disk would make my heart sing. It would make laircrafting a little more enjoyable. especially if you want to deal with T6 rooms.

[Amarie Ancalimon]

Forgive me if this is obvious, but why are cargo disks being considered for a revamp?

What are some of the specific reasons motivating this? I don't usually craft, but I do have 100 enchanter and I think they are pretty much fine as implemented now. Or at least fine enough to take a sideline to other more important 'revamps' that need addressing.

As they are implemented now... each one has it's own advantages and disadvantages right? some are faster, some carry more stacks, some can port, and so forth.

No reason to ask for forgiveness, tjl. It's a good question. So good, in fact, that I took it back to our lead designer and asked. Here's what he had to says:

The initial reason which prompted us to consider revamping cargo disks was a decision we made last summer as we took over the game again. We decided we wanted to look for ways to reduce the grind and improve the fun. We've done some of that and we're always looking for more ways.

So we took a look at cargo disks. And we thought "here's an area where we could adjust the speed cap and reduce the grind". but then we thought "well, maybe we should look at revamping some other aspects at the same time". That brought about a lot of discussion and disagreement about what to adjust, how, why, etc, etc.

Then someone brought up the suggestion that we bring the discussion to the players and let you all discuss it as well. Which bring us to today and this post and your questions.

So, there you have it. The devs want to make the game more fun for us normal people. I think I can live with that.

[Guaran]

I have to make a huge noise against both attuning disks (could no longer store them) as well as limiting the type of material they could contain.

There's a bug with silos and cargo disks, where when moving resources around, sometimes when trying to unequip a disk you get a message "you are too far from the structure". The work around is to put something (anything) from your inventory into the disk. Then it will unequip normally. Limiting item types placeable in the disk would only make this issue worse. I can't even fathom why that idea is being considered....

[Goriax]

It would be nice to either be allowed to equip 2 disks, like one stationary at a workstation for the processed material and one to drag around for the raw stuff

I like this. Better yet, introduce a new disk which reduces your speed to zero and can't be enhanced by roads or anything else. You can ground it though. Then allow people to equip any other disk PLUS this.

What this allows is for you to make a big pile of stuff somewhere while you're crafting. This sort of mimics real life where you could dump your extra stuff on the ground until you get around to it. It would be handy when you're juggling a lot of different kinds of things at once (such as assembling many of the materials required for laircrafting).

Another thing I'd really like is a different graphic, at least for the ground bound cargo disks. Perhaps a wagon or something. The current cargo disks have always seemed to me to be out of place in a fantasy setting. They'd be better in a sci-fi game. If you decide to introduce the huge stationary cargo disk, perhaps you could give it a graphic of a big pile of stuff on the ground.

Ok. Both ideas are pretty far out. But I figure it can't hurt to bring them up. The worst that will happen is nothing, which is what would happen if they were never brought up.

One other thing. Please don't take this in the wrong way and I'm not trying to restart the biped-dragon wars, but if you'll be introducing new disks craftable only by bipeds which dragons would want, could you also introduce a disk craftable by dragons which bipeds may want?

[GalemThawn]

Cargo Disk Dyes! ! !

Now there's an idea.
I'll take mine in Candy Apple Red with leather seats, please.