Surprising how easy it was to get back into the swing of things in Tabula Rasa. I've picked up my dormant L43 Grenadier and am already L45. One of the first things I did on my return was cash in my big pile of Prestige Points (Gained for looting rare stuff and killing Bane during CP battles), and bought enough +50% XP Booster buffs to last me all the way to the end, in a game not noted for it's excessive grinding in the first place.

Its fun, and frustrating in approximately equal measure, but I'm confident of meeting my deadline in the time left. I'm sort of there on 'business' too though; an extended nitpicking tour, if you like, poking about the thing and trying to work out what didn't work. One thing I remember being especially bad from my previous sojourn was the crafting.

Originally, you had the option of upgrading weapons and armour with various buffs, much like those found on any 'magic' items in almost every other MMO; resistances, increased stats, more damage and so on. Many items came with this stuff on it already, but you could put more on too. To do this, you have to loot the right kind of schematics from dead enemies.

These themselves were quite limited, and very specific. A typical randomly dropped schematic might be only good for one specific buff, on a very specific target item, of a very narrow level range. This in itself was almost impossible to work with, making it very unlikely you'd ever come across a schematic that was of any use to you at all. I suppose the intention was that a rather optimistically large player base would all routinely make these available on the Military Surplus, so they'd get to whoever could use them. Unfortunately, most people ended up selling these to vendors, simply to free up room in the backpack crafting tab, largely to stop your character going 'I don't have room for that!' every time you run over a corpse.

Then you needed skills to be able to do the crafting. These came from the same pool and points that you also needed for actual combat skills. Another bad move, effectively forcing everyone to make a Crafting Alt as soon as they hit the first Clone point, or face spending valuable survival skill points on non-viability fluff. There was a account-shared bank-box though, so folks muddled by, passing the necessaries to the mules as needed.

Then, you had to find the right component to make up the buff from the schematic. You got these by dismantling existing, (and often perfectly good in their own right), items of equipment, which had a similar buff on it, to the one you wanted to put on the other item. With me so far? Again, rather complicated, and making it very hard work to get through the whole process, often for very little gain, when quests and monsters tended to shower you with enough loot that you'd probably find a better item with a close enough buff set on anyway.

Add to that the arcane and unexplained limits to how many buffs an item could hold, (a strange numerical balancing act between the [1], [2], [3] and [4] Power buffs and the item's intrinsic 'Green' 'Blue' 'Purple' rarity, and no ability to remove unwanted or useless existing buffs, and the whole thing dissolved in a great big mess of 'Can't Be Bothered' almost from day one.

There were also other schematics to let folks manufacture consumables; grenades, ammo, etc, but these usually required shop-bought materials which made the whole exercise not that much cheaper (and far more time consuming) than just buying the stuff ready made, from any vendor anywhere, and to be honest, I'd never worried about money in all my time in there anyway.

Clearly, Crafting V1 was Not Very Good; time consuming, unpredictable and certainly no where near robust enough for anyone to consider making a living in-game doing it. Possibly this put a particular subsection of potential players off the thing, and not just the Dedicated Types. Crafting fills a valuable niche as a Downtime Activity for all players; something to do between the CONSTANT ACTION!

A new and greatly revised system replaced the above, apparently in Deployment 13. Here's how it works now:

You kill stuff anyway, and a lot of it drops vendor-trash loot. Most of this can also be Salvaged, resulting in a new kind of resource called Mimeomech. All the trash and even unwanted useful equipment can be reduced to this single resource, which now acts as a kind of currency to power the rest of the new crafting system. Good move - consolidate the hundreds of possible crafting materials into one single universal resource.

Next, any item with a buff on it, can have that buff removed. The item loses the buff, but is otherwise unharmed, and you gain a module that represents that buff as well. This buff module can then be upgraded to be more powerful, placed in a different piece of equipment, giving that the buff, or replaced with a different (and potentially more useful to you) buff. The whole system now seems to work like Lego, and appears to be a great deal more versatile than any crafting I've seen elsewhere.

To keep it all in check and balance things a bit, all of the above operations now cost Mimeomech to do. Removing and upgrading modules seem to cost a negligible amount of the stuff, but adding module to an item seems to become increasingly costly to do, per overall buff pointage the item holds. For each [1] point you add, the cost of the next [1] addition doubles, eventually resulting in a massively over the top fee which will take a phenomenal amount of farming to find the gloop for. However, because the player now has complete control over what buffs are, and are not, on the item, it becomes quite a manageable and flexible system, and such vast costs become desirable certianly, but not required.

All of the above appears to happen with a 100% success rate, which is vital in any crafting system that doesn't have you learning anything (Crafting XP and levels) from failed attempts, and removing the fear of destroying a priceless functional item. It also requires no specific skills at all, meaning that everyone can do it, which given the almost entirely desolate state of the Military Surplus these days, is probably just as well.

I only get new armour every five levels, and have my L45 set now, so the above system lets me continue to upgrade my armour, but in more specific and focused ways. Almost reminds me of various 'Levelling Items' I've seen elsewhere; Anarchy Online had these, and I believe LotRO's new Legendary Weapons do similar. The main difference being that in TR, I have to manually 'level' the items, but in the direction I want, by finding useful donor items, hoiking the buffs out of those, and gradually increasing the power of my own Perfect Armour Set (which is almost certainly different to other classes and players), as more Mimeomech allows.

You know, with its empowering versatility and seamless streamlining, I think I'd actually call this Nifty! thinking about it, but like much else concerned with Tabula Rasa, its probably too little too late.

Clearly, "duff crafting" isn't the reason TR wasn't a winner from the word go, but all these little things add up. More poking about to come...