Dying Bundled Items

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Teri
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Re: Dying Bundled Items

Post by Teri »

For me personally I like dyeing the wool for knitting because it is less boring than selling all the same colours of knitted endlessly, and I can envision my character enjoying the colours of the yarns before sale. Would it give me less riln than selling the dye? Yep. might people not buy the consigned ones? Yep. I still consign a bit of each colour to see if anyone buys them (obsidian caps were oddly popular.) It's a bit of fun imagining someone checking the market and going ooh didn't know that colour was a thing, while I also ask what colours others would like to see knitted. I did all blue cloth one day, and am intending on doing all pink and yellow shades of knitted the next day.
As far as dyeing bundles of thread, it did allow a tailor to work with the customer to do a larger order than three or for items, or custom designing an outfit and have a bit of each thread on hand for future orders, an element of rp of let me check if I have that thread/cloth/dye in stock, and there is some fun rp of bartering for all three for me.
Edited to add, having the cloth and thread to be dyeable allowed one to customize future orders with some of the work done or hire someone to make the cloth, instead of starting from scratch when many dislike making cloth.
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Skjotur
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Re: Dying Bundled Items

Post by Skjotur »

Makes sense to allow for dyeing a bunch of cloth, just stick it all in a big cauldron.
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Frisbee
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Re: Dying Bundled Items

Post by Frisbee »

I'm so glad this has sparked up some discussion!

Re: Crafters VS consumers. I am no game developer, so forgive me if I've got this wrong. But I think it's important, apart from one's original perspective of anything they create, to sit back sometimes and observe how it develops. For example, as far as I've noticed during my time playing the game, it isn't uncommon for people to up to a leatherworker or tailor or weaver and ask them, "Hey! I want this sort of coloured armour." Or, "I would like these pieces to match!" And the crafter notes all of this down and makes a custom order. Once, I sat for a good hour in the Hearth and Home listening to a leatherworker and a potential customer discussing about a very specific outfit. So, I'd say, in this particular world, and with how things are right now, crafters are far more likely to pick up a bunch of dyes and plan out outfits and specific pieces. Not saying that it's unheard of that buyers just decide, "I don't like this colour, overwrite!" But I think that is so inefficient! And perhaps a little unrealistic. As is mentioned in the previous post, it makes a whole lot more sense to stick a bunch of cloth in a vat or caldron and dye it.
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Rias
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Re: Dying Bundled Items

Post by Rias »

Right - I'm not saying crafters shouldn't dye things if they're able to do so and a customer has requested it, or search for dyes that customers request. While it's not how I'd do it, I can see how some people might not want to bother with collecting or searching for dyes and so would prefer to have the crafter do it for them (good opportunity for the crafter to charge an extra fee). Crafters having a collection of dyes stocked up to have more ready offerings does make sense, despite my own misgivings about that making those dyes unavailable to others who might specifically want or use them for other things. And to clarify, I haven't ever considered preventing people from stocking up dyes for themselves in an effor to be the go-to for those colors they've stocked up as a sort of specialization or exclusive benefit to employing that individual. I don't personally love it, but that doesn't mean it isn't allowed or shouldn't be a thing that people can do. My own perspective is that of a consumer, not a crafter, and I recognize that there are going to be differing perspectives.

What I'm struggling to understand is the logic behind the idea of dyeing materials or items ahead of time, without having had a request for that specific color, just on the off chance some random customer might happen to want it. Isn't that crafter limiting their own potential for buyers ("I would like some socks, but not if they're lime-green like those you've got there") and thus risking using up a dye for something that nobody is going to want or buy? Why not just keep the dye vials on hand, and only use them once someone requests a particular color? One could include that in their pitch: "Tailored goods for sale. I've currently got a collection of (x, y, z) fashionable dyes avaliable, get them before someone else does!" And I can understand sometimes pre-dyeing with colors that are currently in fashion and highty sought after, like the black colors often seem to be, since they're likely to get buyers - though I still personally think it's a shame to risk using up that dye on item X when a buyer would instead want it for item Y, and so item X, while in a popular color, goes unpurchased because everyone's already got an item X they like and that valuable dye has essentially been wasted.

I apologise if I'm coming across as stubborn or obtuse - I promise I'm sincerely just trying to understand. Some of it seems to be just the feel and RP of it as stated by Teri, which is certainly a valid point.
Frisbee wrote: Fri Mar 11, 2022 3:30 am Not saying that it's unheard of that buyers just decide, "I don't like this colour, overwrite!" But I think that is so inefficient!
I agree, and that's why I'm wondering why people don't treat dyeing as a separate last step -after- producing or receiving the item, instead of a preemptive risky "maybe someone will want it, maybe nobody will want it" thing. Pre-arranged orders are of course an exception: If someone has specifically requested a color, then by all means dye it at whichever point is most efficient.
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Navi
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Re: Dying Bundled Items

Post by Navi »

The only time I can think of where dying things in advance without a buyer being a logical thing, outside of just wanting to provide a variety, is in the case of making armor for the market for consigning.
I could see someone offering uniquely colored armor at a higher price than market, and offer discounted repairs. If you dye tailored armor, you then need that same specific colored cloth to repair the armor if it gets damaged. However, you can still take the armor to an NPC for repairs. So really all that’s being lost here is some RP and convenience.

All this change does is mess with my sense of esthetics. I personally like having clothes with the same shades. Maybe not monochromatic, but if I’m wearing three different colors, I like them to be the same shades. It just helps my brain parse the image visually. As a consumer, if I know that I’m not likely to find exact shades for at the very least two pieces of clothing, I’m not likely to bother with it. I’d rather stick with the natural colors. That being said, as a consumer, I’d be willing to pay a higher price if it meant obtaining the same shade on multiple pieces of clothing. It’s just with how many different colors there are, finding the same hue is going to be extremely rare if it’s just one person looking.
I had a brief thought of how the dye cottage could accept dye donations for research on how to recreate them. With each dye donated, they get closer to being able to offer those dye colors as selections for people to dye their various pieces of clothing and armor. The price rates could be dependent on how many duplicate dyes are donated.
For example, Billy donates a viridian green dye, a week later Bob donates viridian green as well, and the following day Jimbo donates viridian green. Now the dye cottage offers viridian green dye as an option to dye any individual items for a fee of 1500 per item. Georgia finds a viridian green dye a couple weeks later and donates it to the cottage, and now the price drops from 1500 to 1400. If there are multiple cities with dye cottages with their own unique color options, it could lead to some interesting RP. Anyway, it’s just one of those split second thoughts I thought might spark some ideas.
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Maina
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Re: Dying Bundled Items

Post by Maina »

Ultimately, this is a player culture thing.

Personally, I don't like setting the cultural expectation that a crafter has a giant stockpile of dyes and provides this service for what they make while the consumer does not.

1. This consolidates the dyes in the hands of the few who have the time and money to do so.
2. This gives even greater economic power to those who are already established and have the playtime to gather up a huge collection.
3. This gives even greater disadvantage to new crafters who, even after grinding their skill up, cannot compete with the dye selection of more established characters.

I think this is an expectation and precedent for crafters that is poisonous to the game as a whole and in the future.

If, instead, the culture were for the consumer to dye their own purchases after the fact, it would be more encouraged to sell dyes to the market and let people buy what they want when they want it, or buy colors they like instead of feeling obligated to have a collection of every color. This would also reduce hoarding (since people would only keep a few colors they like instead of all colors) and reduce bloat, at least until the dye cabinet is implemented.

Ultimately, this is a culture thing. The question is what side-effects said culture has and whether they're worth the consequences.

That said, I do think this needs to be paired with the earlier comment regarding the ability to craft some basic colors so consumers can at least have the ability to procure enough dyes to make an outfit match. Whether via a crafting skill or crafter guild specialty. Perhaps the basic colors (red/green/blue/black/white/etc) could be craftable while more unnatural colors require arcane alchemic mixtures lost with the fall of Aetgard.
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Teri
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Re: Dying Bundled Items

Post by Teri »

Various people collect dye, not just crafters. Those who already have the larger collection of dyes tends to be those who are opening lockboxes. It really puts it those who have lockboxes vs those who don't, not in a crafter vs crafter, or crafter vs consumer. I don't consider the dyes to be the point of who is going to pick a crafter, where the quality of the crafter does make an impact. Which dyes anyone gets is always going to be dependent on rng, while yes someone with more riln can offer excessive riln for particular colours. No, I don't sell my dyes to the market because my character in general prefers to consign or barter, and the bartering leads to a lot of rp.

Crafters having a collection of dyes stocked up to have more ready offerings does make sense, despite my own misgivings about that making those dyes unavailable to others who might specifically want or use them for other things.
My dye collection was before I started crafting, and it was for reasons of it being neat to get out of lockboxes, and seeing the collection was good feels of yep, I found that lockbox and opened it for the shiny/pretty rare thing. Some of them my character barters, sometimes she is capitalistic scum and charges an arm and a leg, and/or looks out for exact dyes for other characters to make them happy, or gifts them if she likes them. My character could potentially give up crafting in total and will still have the dye collection that a potential crafter or consumer won't be able to use. I don't feel being able to dye bundles in advance or not is going to affect whether a character hoards the dye. I started crafting because of my collection to do something with it and enjoy putting different coloured items in the market from it and seeing characters in town wearing those exact colours.
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Lexx416
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Re: Dying Bundled Items

Post by Lexx416 »

So, I've been sitting on this for a few days, and personally I'm a big fan of this change. I think the relative rarity of "cool dyes" serves a few different, and I think very vital, functions that folks may not be entirely considering.

Keeping dyes limited is good for the economy. It ensures that it's a relatively finite resource in a game where, given the opportunity, folks would grind endlessly to get that item. Keeping the Cool Dyes in the domain of "random loot in lockboxes" helps maintain that resource scarcity by making it so folks can't just grind out viridian or jet black dye with ease.

As a result of that, it also means that the rarity of those dyes directly benefits adventurous PCs that get out into the world. That gives folks a more interesting avenue to approach making riln, which I think is pretty important to the game - I could spend all day using bushcraft to whittle wedges and pegs to make money, but that's so much less cool and interesting than exploring the world and finding a Cool Thing that I can then bring back to town to consign or sell directly to folks.

The more Cool Colors we have around, as well, the less cool they are. If someone finds a really rare dye out in the world and then proceeds to be able to make an entire outfit out of it from one vial of dye, that kind of sucks for folks that dyed a single finished end product. And while I would generally agree that "dumping cloth into a vat and dying it all at once" makes sense and follows a kind of realism logic, I think that line of logic is also dismissing two other "realistic" things: that by doing the "dump cloth into vat and dye all at once" thing would result in the dye being thinned out and weaker, which is something I don't think the game can easily account for; and that the realistic availability of colors we think of as "common" (black, for example) tends to be pretty rare. Anything that's dark is actually pretty tricky to achieve prior to certain advances in chemistry, and while we can "handwave" this away as "special Lost Lands" reagents or "vaguely mystical components", I think that actually does a disservice to the game itself.

Specifically, I think it does a disservice to the theme - the "common nice things" that folks enjoy in modern time wouldn't generally be super widely available in a regulated quarantine zone at the tech level that COGG operates at, and having people able to dye the Cool Colors freely without actually spending the resource it takes to dye those items is kind of bad for that theme. It's a rough, post-apocalyptic quarantine zone, and while that doesn't mean people wouldn't have Art and Pretty Things, it does mean that those pretty things should be more special, and if anyone is able to dye their entire outfit in Voidglass Black or Boysenberry or Ultramine at relatively little cost, that's pretty immersion breaking (and tends to lead to the "everyone wears crazy outfits all of the time" problem that WoW has with wild and fantastic Mega Pauldrons and Giant Serpent mounts) and antithetical to the theme of the game.
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Rias
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Re: Dying Bundled Items

Post by Rias »

Maina wrote: Fri Mar 11, 2022 12:27 pm I do think this needs to be paired with the earlier comment regarding the ability to craft some basic colors so consumers can at least have the ability to procure enough dyes to make an outfit match. Whether via a crafting skill or crafter guild specialty. Perhaps the basic colors (red/green/blue/black/white/etc) could be craftable while more unnatural colors require arcane alchemic mixtures lost with the fall of Aetgard.
This definitely has merit!
Teri wrote: Fri Mar 11, 2022 1:07 pm Various people collect dye, not just crafters.
Everything else you said is valid as well, though this especially is quite fair. My characters have their own little collections of dyes, even if it's just the ones they personally plan to use for themselves (and, I'll admit, the occasional "ooohh, that's pretty even if it's not my style"). Like Maina talked about, this is more a culture thing and I'm glad we're all talking about it. I also want to just assure once more that I'm not talking about this in an effort to feel out some kind of coded mechanic to limit how people collect dyes or anything like that. Just making extra sure nobody gets to that conclusion; I'm engaging in this particular thread of the discussion from a fellow player perspective who also likes certain dyes and colors and wants to have characters with the right color schemes going on. (The ability to potentially dye multiple things at once is a separate matter that we've somewhat wandered away from, though I am also pondering that and warming up to it in an appropriately limited form from a dev standpoint.)
My dye collection was before I started crafting, and it was for reasons of it being neat to get out of lockboxes, and seeing the collection was good feels of yep, I found that lockbox and opened it for the shiny/pretty rare thing. Some of them my character barters, sometimes she is capitalistic scum and charges an arm and a leg, and/or looks out for exact dyes for other characters to make them happy, or gifts them if she likes them. My character could potentially give up crafting in total and will still have the dye collection that a potential crafter or consumer won't be able to use. I don't feel being able to dye bundles in advance or not is going to affect whether a character hoards the dye. I started crafting because of my collection to do something with it and enjoy putting different coloured items in the market from it and seeing characters in town wearing those exact colours.
That all does sound perfectly reasonable, and I appreciate your patience with me as you take the time to explain your perspective. Sorry I've been frustratingly obtuse and difficult to get through to, but I'm glad you've kept at it!
Lexx416 wrote: Fri Mar 11, 2022 1:27 pm Specifically, I think it does a disservice to the theme - the "common nice things" that folks enjoy in modern time wouldn't generally be super widely available in a regulated quarantine zone at the tech level that COGG operates at, and having people able to dye the Cool Colors freely without actually spending the resource it takes to dye those items is kind of bad for that theme. It's a rough, post-apocalyptic quarantine zone, and while that doesn't mean people wouldn't have Art and Pretty Things, it does mean that those pretty things should be more special, and if anyone is able to dye their entire outfit in Voidglass Black or Boysenberry or Ultramine at relatively little cost, that's pretty immersion breaking (and tends to lead to the "everyone wears crazy outfits all of the time" problem that WoW has with wild and fantastic Mega Pauldrons and Giant Serpent mounts) and antithetical to the theme of the game.
Thank you for saying this. :orange_heart:
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Navi
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Re: Dying Bundled Items

Post by Navi »

I agree the change does make dyes more rare. I also agree that the rarity has positive benefits for certain character types. However, I still think it's reasonable to allow for more than one item to be dyed, as is possible currently when dying sheared wool, and then processing it into the clothing items in question.
It was mentioned that dying lots of something using the same amount of dye as you would for a single item would thin the color out, but this loses validity when you compare dying a cloak to a pair of socks or gloves. You can use one dye to color a cloak, but cannot use it to dye a pair of gloves and socks, even though the cloak has way more cloth material to be dyed.

I don't think anybody is saying they should be allowed to dye thousands and thousands of cloth with a single dye. However, allowing enough cloth for a few pieces of clothing to all be dyed would be a very agreeable compromise.
I don't really have a strong stance on this either way. I can understand the frustration is all.
wander without wanting, thrust into lands unknown. the shadows shift and change, and the worlds with them.
I'm not a soldier but I'm fighting
Can you hear me through the silence?
I won't give up 'cause there will be a day
We'll meet again
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