UO Second Age

For some time now, the percentages for successfully tailoring items has been skewed to lean toward failure. The most obvious item, which is nearly impossible to make, is the studded tunic. For the most part, upon having the ability to make a tailoring item, you have a around 50% chance to make the item of standard quality straight away. However, I have done some testing of the studded tunic, and then ran out of leather before I had enough tunics, let alone suits of armor, to stock my vendor. I started with approximately 2500 leather, and made 180 attempts. 66 standard quality tunics were made. 105 were outright failures, and a mere 9 were GM. The percentage chance is a slim 5% -/+1% to make a GM studded tunic at 100 skill. That's a 1/20 chance!

This percentage should be closer to 18% for exceptional. My only empirical evidence are the absence of patch notes regarding reduction in tailoring successes, and stratics http://uo.stratics.com/content/skills/tailoring.php . Since there were no patches in or beyond our era to reduce the ability to produce leather armor, it is reasonable to say that at least these percentages are accurate to our era. I had a tailor very close after this era, and these figures seem correct for that period.

With the most recent patch additionally, the percentages somehow further slid to the point where instead of a 64% approximate chance of a gm regular tunic, to a much worse 44% approximate chance. These were inadvertent I assume, since they were not mentioned in the patch notes. The change must have occurred within the last two weeks, since I had a fail rate of approximately 32% (not GM) success 68%. and the month prior, a 74% success rate, and 26% fail on tunics, and a steady 20% fail on leggings.
These anomalous discrepancies are the result of limited production run(27 attempts from run #1, and 29 from run #2) and account for the 2 extra gm tunics accrued from the first measured run. avg was 20 GM, 7-9 fails, and is now 13 Gm, 16 fails, which is double the avg of fails from 2 weeks ago.

To put it into perspective...If I were to purchase leather hides 1@3gp from an npc vendor and then produce those 9 studded tunics, the price to produce EACH ONE is a staggering 833 gold (277 leather from hides), which is probably the worth of the entire suit of armor when sold to other players. Clearly, if by no other means than reason, this is wrong. The other pieces are worth checking as well, I just do not have enough leather to run the tests, and cant turn a profit from making studded at the moment. As for now, I can't even turn a profit from regular leather anymore.

My profit margin was 158 gold per reg leather armor set, with bought raw materials, and 385 otherwise... I made the vendor as a solution to newer players to buy armor on the cheap, or for those who choose to use expendable equipment for obvious reasons, with an emphasis on volume of sales. It appears however that until this is fixed, that vendor will have to be retooled to another purpose. I would REALLY like to sell studded leather there too, but at 3000 gold or close to it, I don't think there will be many takers :/

I've noticed this with Smithing as well. It's much harder it seems to make a GM crafted plate item than it should be.

The link provided cements my point. The misunderstanding occurs when one tries to liken tailoring with other crafting skills. The modern stratics page also has a minimum of 95+ skill, however, in my previous post I pointed out that unlike most skills, you have a ~50% chance of making the items right away with tailoring. Furthermore, the profitability rating under the current system is certainly not 5.0, but more like -50! The modern stratics page has an identical 95+ minimum skill, and at GM, a rating of 18% exceptional, which matches the link demonstrated by kaivon. This is ironclad proof that the percentages are correct in the new tailoring page, and thus the success chance percentages are likewise accurate to our era. This should be fixed along with all the other leather items to reflect the rational and era proven statistics provided by stratics, and kaivons link. It is possible to extrapolate the approximate figures by comparing the leather items that are accurate (leather arms) with the profitability ratings by ratio as compared with studded armor. I shall do this and add another posting as soon as I am finished.

Ive done the conversions and ratio comparisons. The findings are very interesting!

kaivans link shows t2a profitability ratings:
Tunic(studded) 14 Hides 64(vendor sell price) 4.57(PR) 95.4(min skill)
Sleeves(leather) 4 Hides 40(vendor sell price) 10.00(PR) 59.0(min skill)

current prices are exactly the same on this shard, which makes ratio comparison very easy!

Having the exact data on tunic and sleeve production handy, is rather convenient because I can show the actuals for leather consumption.
180 attempts on tunics, 105 fails, 66 regular, and 9 gm. This gives us a ratio of .4 for success. So 14(leather) * 1.6(accounting for 60% fail) = 22.4 leather per studded tunic of standard quality or better.

Sleeves are nearly always gm(97%), and have no chance of failure, which makes it a great comparison.

tunics 22.4 leather actual non-gm by avg from 180 1@64gp, 64/22.4, or 2.58(PR)
arms 4 leather actual non-gm by avg from 100 1@40 gp, 40/4, or (10 PR)


Conclusions:
The arms are accurate to stratics, and show a profitability rating of 10, an exact match to our server. The studded tunics show an astounding difference 4.57 to 2.58 profitability rating. A difference of 1.99. This data shows that making a studded regular tunic was not a big deal. Certainly not 277 leather from hides each GM tunic! We should use the data from stratics to fix our tailoring system and make it era accurate.

Corbin wrote:I've noticed this with Smithing as well. It's much harder it seems to make a GM crafted plate item than it should be.

I tried to do some tests on test center with GM plate armor, I gave up after about 15 attempts and ending up with "a platemail tunic." Not even exceptional armor. =/

Some changes were made to tailoring, now active on test center.

Derrick, is smithing correct or does it need tweaked too? I burned through nearly 200 ingots trying to get a single GM plate tunic the other night... that was with smelting too. :\

Corbin wrote:Derrick, is smithing correct or does it need tweaked too? I burned through nearly 200 ingots trying to get a single GM plate tunic the other night... that was with smelting too. :\

Blacksmithy, in particular crafting player already got this same easement based on memory some time ago. The easement is from the default RunUO difficulty tables, as I have not been able to get precise statistics elsewhere. I am hoping tailoring is better, and I can spend some time trying to dig up better info on both crafts if it's warranted.

Making plate chests used to be a Lot worse.

Obviously not worthwhile data to add to the cause, but making exceptional plate chests was a pain in the ass as far as I remember it. More than a small part of my reasoning to never put full plate suits on a vendor. Too much work for not much of a return.

RainbowBeard wrote:Obviously not worthwhile data to add to the cause, but making exceptional plate chests was a pain in the ass as far as I remember it. More than a small part of my reasoning to never put full plate suits on a vendor. Too much work for not much of a return.

That's extremely worthwhile data, and in line with my recollection as well. Getting a GM valorite plate chest was quite a prize.

The changes to tailoring skill have been published to be effective at shard restart. Note that this change has little bearing on skill gain rate, as while the studded armor pieces will be slightly easier to make, the difficulty reduction offsets the skill gain opportunity.