Crafting in The Division is about to get a lot harder

When an online, multiplayer game gets released, there are obviously some balancing issues that have to be rectified over time. This usually means changing the damage output of weapons, or making adjustments to special abilities. Well, The Division is about to go through some balancing changes next week, and it's got a lot of players upset.

In the game, you can loot crafting materials, or you can breakdown unneeded items to obtain them. Crafting components are classified by rarity, just like items. This means that you'll need the most rare types of components to craft the rarest guns and armor. Pretty simple stuff. Well, the only problem is that components are really easy to come by, and it's causing some issues. To combat this, Ubisoft is making the following changes:

Increased costs for converting crafting materials and crafting High-End items:

10 Standard (Green) materials instead of 5 to craft 1 Specialized (Blue) material

15 Specialized (Blue) materials instead of 5 to craft 1 High-End (Gold) material

10 High-End (Gold) materials instead of 8 to craft 1 lvl 31 High-End (Gold) item

Changed deconstruction yield of Standard (Green) and High-End (Gold) items:

Deconstructing a Standard (Green) item yields 1 Standard material instead of 2

Deconstructing a High-End (Gold) item yields 1 High-End material instead of 2

At first glance, it might not seem like that big of a change. However, the numbers add up. Originally, it would take 200 green crafting components in order to make one gold item. After the changes, it will now take 1500 green components to make that same gold item. To make them even harder to craft, you'll be getting half of the materials when you deconstruct green and gold items.

Balancing a game like this is no small task, so it's understandable that they need to make some changes. I'm surprised to see just how big of a change this is, after such a short time. You would have thought that they'd have gotten the balancing a little closer to the mark during the beta periods. Of course, with new modes like Incursions coming soon, they're probably wanting to tone down the emphasis on crafting, to make the loot from this mode seem a bit more valuable.

The new changes don't go live until April 12, so you have a few days to login and start crafting your high-end materials as fast as you can.

VIA: Polygon